Exhibitions

Art Basel, the art world’s premiere art fair, is once again upon us, returning to its namesake Swiss city from June 19 to 22, with VIP days on the June 17 and 18. While there’s plenty of art to see at the fair, we recommend getting out of the Messe and into the city for a bit. There, an abundance of top-tier exhibitions await, from a recently rediscovered nightlife scene by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at the Kunstmuseum Basel to a major survey of Vija Clemins’s work at the Fondation Beyeler.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at Kunstmuseum Basel
While in Basel, you must make a pilgrimage to see Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s long-lost Tanz im Varieté (1911). This work’s public reappearance after a century in private hands is a genuine art historical event. Acquired at Ketterer Kunst in June 2024 for €6.96 million (approx. $7.5 million) by the Im Obersteg Foundation, the painting was subsequently restored after surviving both wartime concealment and physical damage by occupying soldiers.
Kirchner, captivated by dance and drawn to Black models and performers, made dozens of sketches from nightlife scenes, which he later transformed into iconic works like Tanz im Varieté. A striking tribute to Berlin’s prewar cabaret scene, the work captures a so-called cakewalk performance between a Black male dancer and a white female partner, set against a dreamlike theater backdrop. It reflects Kirchner’s fascination with movement, modernity, and the expressive potential of the human body—particularly outside bourgeois norms.—Kate Brown
Medardo Rosso, “Inventing Modern Sculpture” at Kunstmuseum Basel 
Medardo Rosso, Enfant au soleil (1891–1892) featured in “Inventing Modern Sculpture” at Kunstmuseum Basel. Credit: Museo Medardo Rosso, Barzio. Photo: Max Ehrengruber.
French poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire called Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) “the greatest living sculptor” in 1918, yet the Turin-born artist has not received the same recognition as his contemporary Auguste Rodin. The Kunstmuseum Basel aims to change that with its exhibition “Inventing Modern Sculpture,” which features around 50 sculptures and 250 photographs and drawings. This retrospective explores Rosso’s pioneering artistic approach at the turn of the century and highlights his lasting influence on contemporary art by displaying works by over 60 artists alongside his own. This is Switzerland’s first major Rosso exhibition in 20 years, showcasing rarely seen works from outside Italy—a must-see for anyone visiting Basel. The exhibition runs through August 10. —Vivienne Chow
Maison Clearing
The pastoral home of Maison Clearing. Photo courtesy Clearing.
The Clearing gallery has taken part in the last three editions of Art Basel, but this time the New York and Los Angeles outfit has opted instead to set up shop in a capacious-looking house about 10 minutes from the Messeplatz, at Bannwartweg 39. (Mark it on your map now.) Works by more than 40 artists will be on offer in its many rooms—and its gardens, which measures an astonishing 10,000 square feet.
Notable names include Sebastian Black, Violet Dennison, Ryan Foerster, Tobias Kaspar, Zak Kitnick, and Anne Libby. Writer Olamiju Fajemisin, who recently joined the firm as its director of programming, will curate. Maison Clearing, as the project is titled, will include screenings in the residence’s attic and al fresco dining. A nice bonus: While a ticket to Art Basel runs 69 Swiss francs (about $84) this year, admission is free.—Andrew Russeth
Thomas Ott at Cartoonmuseum Basel
Thomas Ott at his solo show “From Scratch” (2025) at Cartoonmuseum Basel. © Cartoonmuseum Basel. Photo: Derek Li Wan Po.
A visit to Cartoonmuseum Basel may not be the first stop for the typical Art Basel crowd, but it’s well worth exploring. Located in Basel’s old town, the museum has been housed in a building renovated by Herzog and de Meuron and is featured in this year’s Art Basel VIP program.
During the fair week, the museum is presenting “From Scratch,” the first museum retrospective of award-winning artist and comic book creator Thomas Ott. Born in Zurich in 1966, Ott is celebrated in the German-speaking comics world, debuting with Tales of Error (1989). Known for his masterful scratchboarding and wordless storytelling, Ott creates dark, haunting worlds. He is also an animated filmmaker. The exhibition runs through June 21, and Ott will host two signing sessions at I Never Read, Art Book Fair Basel from June 18 to 21 at Kaserne Basel. —V.C.
Ser Serpas at Kunsthalle Basel
Ser Serpas in her studio. Courtesy de Pinault Collection. Photo : Florent Michel
In a recent New Yorker profile, Serpas was described as a trash-art assemblagist. Put another way, the Los Angeles native has developed an art practice centered on collecting found objects and reimagining them as readymades so transient they seem as if they could vanish as quickly as they appeared. Her recent show at Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Collection in Paris was haunting with its dreamlike arrangement of sculptures and paintings set in an attic-like space accompanied by an ambient soundtrack.
For her upcoming exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, “Of My Life,” Serpas will present both paintings and sculptures, along with a performative element developed in collaboration with the Margo Korableva Performance Theater from Tbilisi, where she once lived. The theater will reenact select works from its repertoire, engaging directly with Serpas’s sculptures. This show is likely to have particular depth, given that Kunsthalle Basel director Mohamed Almusibli and Serpas have a collaborative history; they co-founded the project space Cherish in Geneva, Switzerland.—K.B.
Irène Zurkinden at Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger
Irène Zurkinden. Courtesy Meredith Rosen and the Estate of Irène Zurkinden
This Swiss painter is finally receiving an overdue homecoming. While long recognized in Swiss art circles, Zurkinden’s work has been under-appreciated internationally, despite her significant contributions to 20th-century European modernism. That’s beginning to change, however. At last year’s At Art Basel, Meredith Rosen showcased five oil paintings and 12 drawings spanning 1930 to 1955. Now, this major institutional exhibition—the first of its kind in nearly 40 years—will offer fresh insights into her practice.
Born and based in Basel, Zurkinden spent formative years in Paris, like her friend Meret Oppenheim, where she absorbed the influences of French modernism and Surrealism. Her work often depicts women in solitary yet empowered positions, or in intimate domestic settings. A member of the Basler Künstlergruppe 33 and a close companion of the surrealist Meret Oppenheim, she painted the celebrated artist’s portrait several times.—K.B.
Vija Celmins at the Fondation Beyeler
Vija Celmins, Lamp #1, 1964. © Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery Photo: Aaron Wax
Vija Celmins exhibitions are exceedingly rare pleasures. So far this decade, the gimlet-eyed artist has had a grand total of two: one at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, where she is based, and the other at Glenstone in Potomac, Md. Now the Beyeler will stage a full survey that includes her tender and disarmingly realistic paintings of subjects like waves and star-filled skies, as well as her rare sculptural pairings, which set a found object (a small stone, say) alongside a copy of gobsmacking verisimilitude.
Viewing Celmins’s work can be humbling, as she invites you to look harder and harder, and then to grapple with your limits. (That great line from Sturtevant could have been said by her: “I create vertigo.”) Her 2018 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, curated by Gary Garrels and Ian Alteveer, remains one of the most satisfying, and beguiling, shows I have ever seen. Who knows when we will get another one?—A.R.
“History of Pharmacy” at the Pharmaziemuseum Basel
A display at the Pharmaziemuseum Basel. Photo courtesy Pharmaziemuseum Basel
Let’s wish a hearty happy birthday to the Pharmaziemuseum Basel, the Pharmacy Museum of the University of Basel, which turns 100 this year! The museum was founded in 1925 by a professor named Josef Anton Häfliger and has collections that may bring to mind the sculptures and installations of Damien Hirst and Mark Dion. Its delights include an alchemist’s workshop, an apothecary’s lab, and three historical pharmacies, one from Innsbruck, Austria, in 1755.
Even the building itself intrigues. Dating to at least the early 14th century, it has served variously as a public bath and the residence of a printer who hosted Erasmus from 1514 to 1516. Did I mention its vast holdings in pharmaceutical ceramics and its store of unusual remedies, like powdered mummies? There is something here to delight everyone. —A.R. More

Dark clouds and drizzle didn’t dampen the energy at this year’s London Gallery Weekend, which drew art enthusiasts into a three-day city-wide celebration from June 6 through 8. Even short a few trendy galleries, the event once again spotlighted the British capital’s expansive art scene, where cutting-edge performances, digital experiments, and bold textile art vied for attention across 126 participating spaces.
Now in its fifth edition, LGW has become a highlight of London’s annual art offerings. The appeal comes from a genuine sense of camaraderie between galleries big and small in what is one of the largest and most competitive art centers in the world. But can everyone expect their moment in the spotlight given the increasingly crowded London arts calendar?
Guests to Kate MacGarry gallery at London Gallery Weekend 2025. Photo: Linda Nylind.
To wit: A modest number of trendy, younger galleries from last year’s program chose not to participate this time around, including Union Pacific, Guts Gallery, The Sunday Painter, and Xxijra Hii. Word on the street is that an ever-busier events calendar, often not shared in advance, has led to scheduling conflicts that typically give priority to high-profile events organized by well-known galleries in more central locations.
Calendar Clash?
Speaking of high-profile events, this year’s gallery weekend overlapped with the debut London edition of South By Southwest (SXSW), the famed tech and arts conference out of Austin, Texas. Backed by Penske Media and the investment firm Panarae, the event marks an ambitious effort to globalize the SXSW brand and bring a new “experience economy” to the U.K. via talks, music, and film across 34 venues in east London. The inaugural edition brought in 20,505 pass-holders from 77 countries and over 50 different industries, among them King Charles III.
King Charles III views the immersive exhibition “Grounding” with artist Damien Roach on day four of SXSW London 2025 at the Truman Brewery on June 05, 2025 in London, England. Photo: Jack Taylor/Getty Images for SXSW London.
Visual art offerings included LDN LAB, a tech-forward show at Protein Studios curated by Alex Poots of New York’s The Shed, which featured works by Andy Warhol and Beeple, as well as an A.I.-generated audio installation from Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst‘s recent Serpentine show, “The Call.” Also included was a new video work, commissioned by Poots, featuring Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Marina Ambramović and the artist’s A.I. alter ego—and by conversation I mean all three entities awkwardly talking over and past each other, but never really to one another.
Meanwhile, 15 minutes away at Christchurch Spitalfields, “Beautiful Collisions”  highlighted artists of the Caribbean diaspora and, unlike LDN LAB, attracted the usual suspects of London’s art world on its opening night. Organized by curator and advisor Beth Greenacre, it featured works by Alberta Whittle, Denzil Forrester, Tavares Strachan, and commissioned stained glass works by Alvaro Barrington, among others.
Still, it seemed like there was little coordination between SXSW organizers and the LGW team despite the opportunity their coincidence presented to highlight London’s massive art scene—although there was talk of a hastily planned SXSW VIP gallery tour on Thursday, before LGW officially kicked off.
Small Galleries Deliver
Some teething issues are likely to continue as LGW strives to strike a balance between its community-minded ethos and an embarrassment of art riches scattered across London’s vast sprawl. The venture is certainly a worthy one as, even in the face of significant stresses post Brexit, the city’s young galleries remain resilient and deserve championing.
“Cell 72: The Cost of Confinement” performance at Harlesden High Street gallery during London Gallery Weekend 2025. Photo: Jo Lawson-Tancred.
The outer reaches of north-west London had no gallery scene to speak of until 2020, when Harlesden High Street set up shop. It remains relatively isolated but is very much preceded by its reputation so I’d long been meaning to visit by the time LGW provided a reason to swing by and catch the much-discussed endurance art performance piece “Cell 72: The Cost of Confinement.” While I peered through the glass storefront into a messy mock prison cell inhabited by Allen-Golder Carpenter, I felt self-conscious of my voyeurism. The artist, who appeared bored and despondent, was coming up to the end of his 72-hour sentence, devised by fellow American artist Emmanuel Massillon to draw attention to the humiliating, psychologically-punishing effects of incarceration. The installation remains on view through July 13.
Soon after a small group of collectors had pulled up in a car, a constantly-evolving cast of curious passersby began stopping outside the gallery to glimpse the artwork and confer about its possible meanings. At one point, ex-convict-turned-motivational speaker Leroy Smith turned up, moved by the show, and began handing out free copies of his memoir to interested onlookers. It was an unusual but convivial gathering unlike any I’ve witnessed on the streets of Mayfair.
Party at the Pavilion
Worry not, there were plenty of the usual faces in the usual places throughout the weekend. A veritable who’s who of the London art world descended on Kensington Gardens to celebrate the launch of LGW at this year’s Serpentine Pavilion commission, an impressive glass-walled, moveable structure by Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum. Only Hans Ulrich Obrist‘s voice streaming out from speakers across the lawn could bring a brief pause to champagne-fueled chatter.
London Gallery Weekend 2025 launch party at the Serpentine Pavilion commission by Marina Tabassum. Photo: © Hydar Dewachi / Art Fund 2025.
When guests were ushered out, one group of artists, curators, and writers jumped into a fleet of taxis headed to an afterparty at Palmer Gallery near Edgware Road. There, raucous conversation evaded serious matters but attendees didn’t skip “Handful of Dust,” the impressive group show installed downstairs until June 14.
A.I. on Trend
Galleries are coming up with increasingly inventive ways to lure in visitors, as even the most well-intentioned will likely manage to see only a fraction of what they’d planned. Amid the bustle, themes have emerged. For one thing, technology is proving to be a tantalizing means for well-established artists to keep innovating a decades-old practice. For Thaddaeus Ropac, 72-year-old David Salle continued developing his experiments with A.I. to inform collaged compositions painted on a grand scale. It has, among other things, freed him from the rules of real life to achieve a weightlessness that had long proved elusive.
Installation view of “David Salle: Some Versions of Pastoral” at Thaddaeus Ropac London in April 2025. Photo: Eva Herzog, courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery.
“For decades, I had this idea of bodies in space that were not held to the laws of gravity,” he told me during a recent walkthrough.
Similarly, 84-year-old French conceptualist Bernar Venet is known for monumental steel structures of repeated lines, angles, or arcs created via the chance effects of an intentional, controlled collapse. For his latest series of computer-generated compositions, on view at Waddington Custot until July 19, the artist followed in the footsteps of generative artists like Vera Molnar by using carefully parametered code to invite new forms of randomness into flat, wall-hanging works, again without relying on gravity. Meanwhile, at South Parade, one of a growing cluster of galleries near Farringdon, Judith Dean has pivoted away from sculpture to make paintings that take as their starting point a word or idea used to search, or sift, through the glut of decontextualized imagery that makes up Wikimedia. Its form is echoed in Dean’s patchworking of seemingly unrelated found material into otherwise impossible compositions.
Simon Lehner, Echo Chamber (Iteration III) (2025). Photo: Tom Carter, courtesy Edel Assanti.
Darker ruminations on our digital world come courtesy of artist Simon Lehner at Edel Assanti, until August 22, who pulls viewers into his creepy interpretation of the manosphere. The star of the show is an incel hunched over a peep show as he delights in the bright, blinding attractions of Reddit forums and YouTube rabbit holes. Appearing in your peripheral vision, he has an uncannily human presence, but the rise and fall of his grey silicone chest is achieved by a sleep apnea machine.
The present moment isn’t all that much easier for women, if a sold-out performance by Nora Turato at the Institute of Contemporary Arts is to be believed. In a humorous, half hour monologue, the artist, bare foot in a loose white dress, was fearless in using her body—convulsing, wretching, hyperventilating, or teeth chattering—to communicate her growing existential dread. The frenzy is brought on by all manner of modern day evils, including noise cancelling headphones, meditation apps, smart watches, productivity, cloying therapy speak, and oversized accessories for infantilizing adults.
Nora Turato, pool7 (performance) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in June 2025. Photo: Christa Holka, courtesy the artist and ICA.
Textile Takeover
Another theme was an enduring appetite for ambitious textile work. Notable examples include four of Tau Lewis‘s magnificent masks produced from recycled strips of shimmering fabrics, on view at Sadie Coles in Bury Street until July 19. At Richard Saltoun, meanwhile, Anna Perach‘s towering feminized monsters made by the labor-intensive technique of tufting were activated on Friday afternoon by a performance in which they bow and gesture towards each other as though trapped in a bizarre, robotic courting ritual. Videos circulating online showed the artist Cecilia Fiona inhabiting a similarly elaborate, all-body costume to incorporate dance into her presentation of paintings at Niru Ratnam.
Tau Lewis, Angels covering the horizon like a garment (2025). Photo courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ.
The remaining must-see show is Derek Jarman‘s black paintings at Amanda Wilkinson, another Farringdon Gallery, until July 11. The artist is best known for his extensive filmography, culminating in the highly personal Blue (1993) about the latter stages of living with HIV/AIDS. The strange, angry assemblages at Amanda Wilkinson, filled with driftwood, metal trinkets, smashed glass, and crushed cans, are from around the time of his diagnosis, in 1986, but have an enduring immediacy. More

Yesterday was the first scorching day of summer, and Eden Deering, the director of P·P·O·W gallery, was putting the final touches on a new group exhibition inspired by Lana Del Rey. “Every artist in the show is united in their devotion to Lana,” she said. “Everyone is a Lana fan and is inspired in their work.” The show is also about a lot of other things—art and artifice, sincerity and spectacle. “A lot of the work in the show and a lot of the artists deal with things that are fake,” she continued. “But they’re completely genuine about it.”
Installation view of “Hope is a dangerous thing” P·P·O·W, New York, June 6 – July 12, 2025. Photo: JSP Art Photography. Courtesy of P·P·O·W, New York.
“Hope is a Dangerous Thing,” which opens today and runs through July 12, takes its title from the final track on Del Rey’s 2019 album Norman Fucking Rockwell! Del Rey embodies the contradictions at the heart of the exhibition—emotional sincerity wrapped in spectacle, and something seemingly disposable that still somehow sticks with you. Del Rey looms large as both herself and an avatar: an imperfect pop star who is both underground and mainstream, glamorous and girl next door, entirely concocted yet deeply DIY.
“I was fantasizing about my ultimate girl group, like my ultimate artist Spice Girls,” Deering said. “I wanted everyone to feel like they were their own pop personas, but also be able to see this as an ensemble.” She added, “I wanted to keep it to millennials, to kind of deal with millennial nostalgia—anyone who was coming of age in the aesthetics and pop culture of 2000s, in that era of Tony Blair, pop music, and then also into the Obama era—this hope and what we thought about what the millennium would be.” The Del Rey references in the show range from the explicit to the oblique.
Robin F. Williams, Siri Serving (2025). Courtesy of the artist and P·P·O·W.
“Obviously, Robin took it the most literally,” Deering said. While others engaged with pop and persona more abstractly, Robin F. Williams seemed to depict the singer mid-croon during that 2012 Saturday Night Live dud—a performance widely panned at the time and now seen as a turning point. The vivid painting, Siri Serving, also embodies a figureless A.I. voice, and fittingly, glows in the dark.

The British artist Marianna Simnett also wields A.I., using it alongside her full arsenal of folklore, performance, and body horror in her video Leda Was a Swan. She reframes the myth of Leda and Zeus by casting herself as both victim and aggressor through a hand-painted puppet. The five-minute film was shot and then entirely reprocessed using A.I., shifting through what Deering called “different vibe iterations.” As Deering put it, “She’s talking about power and control, but also the power dynamic between A.I. and the artist.”
Marianna Simnett, Leda Was a Swan, 2024. Video Still, Courtesy: Marianna Simnett and Société, Berlin.
The show is rounded out by a diverse range of artists including Kyle Dunn and Kayode Ojo. Ojo’s standout shimmering sculpture—suspended from silver chains—resembles both a glamorous snowflake and a severe, ominous fractal. It is composed from chandeliers bought online. “It’s all stuff you can purchase on Amazon that are supposed to look like luxury,” Deering explained, “but it’s all basically plastic. It’s also about our relationship to fast fashion.”
Raque Ford, who had an installation at the Whitney last year, has three pieces in the show, including a large multi-section acrylic half circle, In the Ocean, In Da Club, and In My Dreams. Words and images have been carved out of the plastic sheets. “She found it all at the dump and then puts this kind of failed try at erotic fan fiction between Rihanna and Beyoncé on it,” Deering said. “The quote, ‘People think I look just like Beyoncé,’ comes from Real Housewives. It’s like clip art.”
Diane Severin Nguyen was across the room in an N95 mask finalizing Thirst for Love, which is a barrier emerging from the ground with a vivid image of what looks like a shattered space egg. Nguyen was spraying some sort of treatment atop it to give it a velvety kind of flocking. “I was trying to make it look a little bit frozen,” she said. “I don’t talk about my work like, ‘oh, it’s this or that.’ It’s just more like looking and maybe registering some familiarity and something non-familiar.”
Diane Severin Nguyen, Thirst for Love (2024). Courtesy of the artist and P·P·O·W.
In November, Nguyen will headline the Performa Biennial (the other two featured artists are Camille Henrot and Aria Dean). “We’re putting a band together and making a meta pop concert,” she said. Nguyen’s Del Rey connection runs deeper than pop. “I’m a Lana fan,” she said. “One of my goals is to be able to be indie and mainstream at the same time. Lana is the only artist, especially as a woman, who can do that.” She then relates this to her practice—some of Nguyen’s striking, otherworldly visuals are depictions of tiny sculptures she makes that could fit into her hand. “There’s something very minor, detailed, macro—you know, the smallest possible unit—and then something that’s much bigger, historical. It’s putting minor things together and wanting them to be understood on this more grandiose level.”
The artist Paul Kopkau was also attracted to Del Rey’s dichotomous role in the pop universe—sure, she’ll get the number one album, but you won’t hear her in every Uber you jump in. “We’re living in a contemporary time where there’s a lot of artifice surrounding us,” he said. “Lana does this kind of thing that a lot of pop stars don’t… There’s a detachment—she knows she’s dealing with this larger pop culture thing, but then is using that as a medium. And that feels very postmodern.” Kopkau wields simplicity with symbolic force, presenting a minimal yellow disk (Artificial Light, 2024) and a fragile shrine to consumer electronics (Media Studies, 2025) made from Aqua-Resin, acrylic, and recycled butcher paper. The former evokes a synthetic sun; the latter, a makeshift media center assembled from the detritus of contemporary life.
Paul Kopkau, Media Studies (2025). Courtesy of the artist and P·P·O·W.
The show can also be read as something of a self-portrait of Deering—but not only because she cast it from her inner circle. Her mother, Wendy Olsoff, is one of the P·P·O·W co-founders, and David Wojnarowicz and Martin Wong were among its stable. That history echoes quietly in the show’s emotional core. “I spent so much of my life growing up in Provincetown with survivors of AIDS,” Deering said. “There’s a camp side and everything’s kind of funny in here—and it is funny—but there’s also the serious side of being at Tea Dance and everyone singing pop music together. That feels powerful. Hope is a dangerous thing, but we’re still doing it. That’s a really amazing thing about the human spirit.” She paused. “So there’s a really funny, campy, subconscious side of the show. And then another completely emotionally genuine belief in pop—and letting that be in a fine art space in a serious way.”
She added, “A perfect pop song like Lana can transform someone’s spirit in an instant. And the dream of art is to live up to that power that a pop song can have. The futility of that is obvious—as a static object—but I like the idea of reaching for it.”
“Hope is a Dangerous Thing” is on view at P·P·O·W Gallery, 392 Broadway, New York, through July 12. More

Visitors to the Venice Biennale probably aren’t thinking about who designed the Giardini’s national pavilions, where countries around the world present their exhibitions each year. But the Swiss pavilion at the 19th architecture biennale is a celebration of the late architect Lisbeth Sachs (1914–2002), who didn’t design her nation’s pavilion—until this year, that is.
In fact, not a single building in the Giardini is credited to a woman architect. (That will soon change with the completion of the new Qatar pavilion, set to be designed by Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh.) So the Swiss pavilion has changed that, temporarily, by resurrecting one of Sachs’s designs inside the building designed by her contemporary, Bruno Giacometti (1907–2012).
“The Giardini is a no-woman’s land,” Axelle Stiefel, one of the five-person all-woman curatorial team, told me. An artist, she joined forces with Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, and Myriam Uzor—the four members of architecture group Annexe—in conceiving a pavilion that presents an alternative history where women had contributed more visibly to our built environment.
“If we think of the necessity of inclusivity for a more sustainable future, we have to give more people a say in the construction and the building practice of the future, and have the voices of women being heard and being present physically,” Stiefel said.
Installation view of “Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt,” the Swiss Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale Architettura curated by Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, Axelle Stiefel, and Myriam Uzor, recreating a 1958 building by Lisbeth Sachs. Photo: ©Keystone-SDA/Gaëtan Bally.
Sachs was one of Switzerland’s first licensed women architects, graduating from architecture school in Zürich in 1939, long before Swiss women had the right to vote or open a bank account. (A referendum granted women’s suffrage in 1971; banking for women followed in 1985.) But when Sachs won an architecture competition in 1939, it jump-started her career.
For the Swiss pavilion, commissioned by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, the curators have resurrected the kunsthalle that Sachs built for the 1958 Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (SAFFA) in Zürich, organized by the Federation of Swiss Women’s Associations. But today there is almost no trace left of the lakeshore village built for the two-month event celebrating women’s work and their invisible labor, women’s creativity and capacity for avant-garde—and calling for equal rights for women.
The Kunsthalle at the the 1958 Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (SAFFA) in Zurich, designed by Lisbeth Sachs. Photo: courtesy of gta Archiv/ETH Zurich.
“It was situated in a park in Zürich, and Lisbeth’s idea was to bring the landscape inside the exhibition space,” Stiefel said.
At the biennale, Sachs’s design is now nested inside Giacometti’s building, which was built in 1952, just a few years before SAFFA. There are three open, circular structures that intersect with the exterior of the existing pavilion—but the walls Sachs built weren’t curved. Instead, there are multiple straight walls on which to display artwork, extending out from each circle.
“The word is radiating,” Stiefel said. “The walls are never frontal, so it’s a more dynamic relationship. I don’t see any equivalent building that shows art that is as interesting and innovative and special.”
The Kunsthalle at the the 1958 Swiss Exhibition for Women’s Work (SAFFA) in Zurich, designed by Lisbeth Sachs. Photo: courtesy of gta Archiv/ETH Zurich.
In the Venice recreation, those walls are built with wood, instead of the original concrete. There are fabric curtains, fluttering in the breeze, and a reimagining of Sachs’s translucent membrane roofs.
The curators have also added an audio element, with speakers integrated into Sachs’s design for the lighting, playing sound recorded during the building of the reimagined pavilion. That includes the ambient noises of the pavilion as construction site, but also the conversations of the curatorial team, from small talk to important moments of decision making. The audio component functions as a spatial memory, a record of the act of building a structure that is itself echoing back to a building long lost to the sands of time.
Axelle Stiefel making a field recording for this year’s Swiss pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo: courtesy of Pro Helvetia / KEYSTONE / Gaetan Bally.
So while the project is about integrating the forgotten voice of a woman architect into a historic space, it also quite literally incorporates the voices of the contemporary women who brought Sachs’s design back to life. In addition, the audio serves to recreate a missing element of Sachs’s design.
“We have drawings. We have plans, maybe a few writings and photographs. But we don’t have the intangible of the experience of being an architect in the ’50s or about her direct experience on site,” Stiefel said. “The act of reinterpretation would only be half achieved if there was not also the attempt to be in the present and think about our experience and what we leave once we have to dismantle, once again, this kunsthalle.”
Installation view of “Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt,” the Swiss Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale Architettura curated by Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, Axelle Stiefel, and Myriam Uzor, recreating a 1958 building by Lisbeth Sachs. Photo: ©Keystone-SDA / Gaëtan Bally.
Of course, there was no way the curators could build a completely faithful reconstruction of Sachs’s original design. But a handwritten note by the architect on one of her drawings provided reassurance—as well as the exhibition title.
It read, “Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt,” or “Final form will be defined by the architect on site,” a message allowing for the evolution of the design process in response to the conditions of the site.
Installation view of “Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt,” the Swiss Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale Architettura curated by Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, Axelle Stiefel, and Myriam Uzor, recreating a 1958 building by Lisbeth Sachs. Photo: ©Keystone-SDA/Gaëtan Bally.
It’s an ethos that the curators hope will extend to the way that visitors experience the exhibition.
“You need to be led by your own force of curiosity to wander about that space, like a labyrinth, and find out for yourself,” Stiefel said.
“Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt” is on view at the Venice Biennale, Giardini della Biennale, Swiss Pavilion, Calle Giazzo, 30122 Venezia VE, Italy, May 8–November 23, 2025. More

Opening today is the American debut of “Constellation,” the largest exhibition to date of the revolutionary photographer Diane Arbus. This Park Avenue Armory presentation is especially poignant, as Arbus was a New York local and did much of her work here, sourcing her subjects from every stratum of the city’s society—many heretofore ignored by the mainstream. The exhibition offers new perspectives into Arbus’s universe of humanity.
Curated by Matthieu Humery, “Constellation” runs through August 17 and features more than 450 prints—many of which have never been published. The show debuted at France’s LUMA Arles in 2023 and arrives in the U.S. with its original immersive format intact. It’s like wandering a labyrinth filled with uncanny strangers. The other visitors can be seen perusing this spatial grid-like scaffolding, becoming faces in the crowd and part of the show. There is no order, no timeline, no narrative. Does life really have one? Arbus is known for her subject matter: a cosmogony of the unseen.
Diane Arbus: Constellation, 2025, Park Avenue Armory. All artworks © The Estate of Diane Arbus Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation Photo: Nicholas Knight
She specialized in turning her lens on those pushed to the fringes: circus performers, drag queens, nudists, and the institutionalized. But she also photographed celebrities—James Brown, Roy Lichtenstein, Susan Sontag, and Mae West, who appears curled in bed with her pet monkey. There was no separation between the marginalized and the celebrated. Everyone received equal framing and equal empathy.
In the application for her 1966 Guggenheim award, Arbus wrote, “I have learned to get past the door, from the outside to the inside. One milieu leads to another… a certain group of young nihilists, a variety of menages, a retirement town in the Southwest, a new kind of Messiah, a particular Utopian cult who plan to establish themselves on a nearby island, Beauties of different ethnic groups, certain criminal types, a minority elite.”
Diane Arbus, Peace marchers, N.J. 1962. © The Estate of Diane Arbus.
“Sometimes it would be someone that she would see on the street, and she’d just walk up to them and say, ‘I love your hat. May I take your picture?’” said Neil Selkirk, a former student and collaborator, at yesterday’s preview. “She used the camera as what she called a ‘passport.’ You can’t go up to someone and say, ‘Hey, I want to come home with you and see how you live.’ But you could say, ‘I wanna take your picture.’”
He continued, “She was incredibly smart. She was seductive because she was interested in you. I felt it myself as I watched her talking to other people. She wanted to know, and she was really interested. It’s just a huge compliment to have someone like that asking you interesting questions about yourself. They just totally accepted her instantly.”
Selkirk is the only person ever authorized by the Diane Arbus Estate (she died in 1971 by her own hand at age 48) to print from her negatives. In 2011, LUMA Arles founder Maja Hoffmann acquired his complete set of printer’s proofs—which now comprise this sweeping and unconventional retrospective.
Diane Arbus: Constellation, 2025, Park Avenue Armory. All artworks © The Estate of Diane Arbus Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation Photo: Nicholas Knight
At the show, Selkirk paused before A young Brooklyn family going for an outing (1966), in which a mother with Cleopatra eyeliner and a bouffant hairstyle clutches a leopard-print coat and a baby, flanked by her nonplussed husband and a grimacing son crossing his eyes. “She saw her on the subway and loved the fact that she was obviously trying to look like Elizabeth Taylor,” Selkirk said. “She then made the appointment and went to the house and spent time with them.”
Arbus shot two images of Eddie Carmel, a sideshow performer with gigantism known as “The Jewish Giant” and “The World’s Biggest Cowboy,” in his living room with his parents, a decade apart.
She began her career in fashion, as part of a duo with her husband Allan Arbus, styling his shoots for magazines. “I think she found it absolutely unbearable,” Selkirk said. “They just were just artifice. Her whole thing was the opposite of artifice.”
“She was amazingly consistent and non-judgmental in what she was doing,” Selkirk said. “She emerged out of the era of magazine photojournalism, where there was a presumption that if you showed enough awful things, the world would stop being awful. There was a political intention behind the act of photographing. You were showing the world the way it is. And if the world needed to be improved, people would. That was obviously complete nonsense. The point of the 1967 ‘New Documents’ show at the Museum of Modern Art—with Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, and Arbus—was that they were just observing the world. They weren’t judging it. They were amused by it, in different ways.”
The seminal MoMA show was Arbus’s first major institutional exhibition. “She just wanted to know what made humanity tick,” Selkirk said.
Diane Arbus: Constellation, 2025, Park Avenue Armory. All artworks © The Estate of Diane Arbus Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation Photo: Nicholas Knight
Arbus didn’t find it hard to develop subject matter. She kept meticulous notebooks of people she wanted to photograph. “She compiled lists and then started making phone calls,” Selkirk said. “She scrutinized the want ads in the newspapers to look for events where she might go because something interesting might happen.”
During her lifetime, Arbus’s images were shocking. The world still hasn’t fully caught up to her unflinching, empathetic gaze. There is a striking representation of queer people in the images. But Selkirk demurs that this was just a component of her broader vision.
“She was just as interested in people who fenced or people who did ballroom dancing,” he said. “She said, ‘There are these worlds, and the worlds have rules, and they have gatherings, and they do things together.’ It was this fascination with how people choose to hang together. It wasn’t an obsession with gay or trans people. It’s recognition that they all became—whatever it is they are—however they became it, they became it. And that’s who they are. It’s mutual respect across the board, and that’s all that matters.”
Selkirk’s own entry into Arbus’s orbit was circuitous. In 1968, he was working as one of Richard Avedon’s assistants. One day, the assignment took him to the London home of director John Huston to photograph his wife, Anjelica Huston, and her brother.
Diane Arbus: Constellation, 2025, Park Avenue Armory. All artworks © The Estate of Diane Arbus Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation Photo: Nicholas Knight
“We’re setting up in their living room—it was full of stuff he’d collected from all over the world: voodoo dolls, strange things,” Selkirk recalled. There was one framed image: A family one evening in a nudist camp, Pa. (1965), which showed a trio sprawled in a field—part heartland, part wasteland—as a blurry silo loomed in the background. Their inscrutable gazes challenge the viewer.
“I was left alone for a couple of hours in this room with this picture,” Selkirk continued. “It drove me insane. I had no idea who’d taken it. I just wanted to run out screaming. I didn’t know I shared Earth with people  like that. This is what’s so weird about my being involved in it to this day. It’s the only work of art ever that has had that effect on me. I was devastated by what it was telling me or what it was showing me. I just couldn’t comprehend it. My life was different from that moment on.”
Later, he encountered the same image again—this time propped against a wall in the Dakota apartment of the photographer Hiro. “I said, ‘I’ve seen that photograph before.’ And he said, ‘It’s by a woman called Diane Arbus. You’ll probably meet her.’ A few weeks later, she showed up at the studio. I had first been stupefied by this photograph in a way that I’ve never been since. Now I walk past it every evening on my way to bed.”
“Diane Arbus: Constellation” is on view at the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Ave, New York, through August 17. More

Fans of the Moomins have reason to rejoice this summer, as the children’s book characters created by Finnish artist Tove Jansson will alight at the Brooklyn Public Library in “Tove Jansson and the Moomins: The Door Is Always Open,” marking the first-ever exhibition dedicated to the artist and the beloved Moomins. Opening June 28, the show—which is free and open to the public—coincides with a milestone year for Moomin, which kicked off with a monumental exhibition at the Helsinki Art Museum and a full series of events staged around Finland.
First official Moomin dolls made by Atelier Fauni (ca. 1950s). © Moomin Characters.
“It’s been a huge pleasure working on this with the Brooklyn Public Library, and it’s been a long time coming,” said Thomas Zambra, head of business development at Moomin Characters Ltd., and part of the third generation of the Jansson family. “We are celebrating the 80th anniversary of Moomin, so it’s a fantastic time to be able to have such an exhibition, and it is really the centerpiece of our celebrations in the United States this year.”
Written and illustrated by Jansson, the first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, was published in 1945 and ultimately became the bedrock for an entire creative world. In the story, the earliest cast of characters—Moominpapa, Moominmama, Snif, the Hattifatteners, and more—are first introduced, and it tells the tale of the long and arduous journey they take to find Moominvalley, where they ultimately make their home. Moominvalley and later Moominhouse are the symbolic heart of the subsequent stories, a site of play and adventure as well as life lessons.
First Swedish edition of the first Moomin story, The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945). © Moomin Characters.
While the story takes place in a fantastical, fictional time and place, the themes presented in this first book and throughout subsequent tales are very applicable to the real world, particularly today. Community, migration, empathy, and family (both biological and found) are just some of the premises that are explored throughout the adventures of Moomin and company, and ones that are reflected too in the Brooklyn Public Library’s ethos.
“Moominvalley and the Moominhouse are the central pieces of the Moomin universe, and they are this place of safe haven, a place where people are welcome regardless of who they are and what they look like,” said Zambra. “The library has this same role within the community. It’s a place where all types of people are welcome. It has this role as a safe space for the community, which ties beautifully with the idea of the anniversary year.”
Moominhouse created by created by Tove Jansson, Tuulikki Pietilä and Pentti Eistola. © Linus-Lindholm / Moomin Characters.
Linda E. Johnson, president and CEO of the Brooklyn Public Library, echoed this sentiment in a statement: “Coinciding with summer at the library and Pride month, this imaginative and joyful exhibition invites visitors of all ages to explore the world of Tove Jansson. Jansson’s work aligns closely with our mission to foster understanding, curiosity, and a sense of belonging through storytelling. Rooted in themes of openness, exploration, and inclusion, her work reflects the library’s commitment to providing free and welcoming access to ideas, culture, and community.”
Tove Jansson in her studio. © Eva Konikoff / Tove Jansson Estate.
Zambra also noted that just a couple of decades ago, there was a fissure between considerations of Jansson and the Moomins, and exhibitions or writing would typically home in on one or the other. This separation can, in part, be traced to the artist’s identity as woman artist hailing from a far-flung Nordic country, and one who identified as queer. “The Door Is Always Open” takes a more cohesive, comprehensive approach, wherein the author and illustrator’s life story and perspective are recognized as the informing force behind the Moomin universe.
Swedish edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, illustrated by Tove Jansson (1966). © Tove Jansson Estate.
While the Moomins began as just a few storybooks, today they are part of an entire ecosystem of children’s literature, toys, and films that have experienced a growing following in the decades since the Moomins’ inception. Through immersive installations, archival materials, multilingual editions of the books, and film screenings, the exhibition is a prime opportunity for those new to the work to explore both the world of Moomin as well as Jansson’s other work—such as her illustrations of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—and for longtime fans a chance to get to know the characters and the creator behind them better.
Zambra concluded, “I hope that there is something enjoyable for people who are completely new to the Moomins and to Tove, that they find something interesting, something beautiful, and that they’re inspired by the way of life of the Moomins and can integrate something of that into their own life.”
“Tove Jansson and the Moomins: The Door Is Always Open” will be on view at the Brooklyn Public Library, Central Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, New York, June 28–September 30, 2025. More

New York’s American Museum of Natural History is unveiling a project billions of years in the making—the new film at the Hayden Planetarium narrated by Pedro Pascal that maps our sun’s place among the stars, not only today, but over the course of the history of the universe.
To bring this stunning view of our galaxy to life, the museum enlisted a team of astronomers, artists, educators, and experts in science visualization—plus a little bit of Hollywood star power (pun intended). The result is Encounters in the Milky Way, opening June 9, a film that is both educational and visually striking, transporting viewers across the cosmos.
“I want to call AMNH science Pixar,” Jackie Faherty, the museum’s senior scientist for astrophysics and senior education manager, said at the press preview for the film.
“This is the story of our sun and solar system, traveling through the Milky Way,” Vivian Trakinski, the museum’s director of science visualization, added. “Then we’re doing research to find the best data sets that can support this story. And we’re hiring artists from out in the world, artists that work on feature films and commercials, to come in and visualize the data.”

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No less than 20 academic institutions contributed to the project, which is sponsored by Van Cleef and Arpels. That includes the University of Surrey in the U.K.; NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute, the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and the Smithsonian; Technische Universität Berlin, Institute of Science and Technology Austria; and the European Space Agency.
To bring visitors on this otherworldly journey across time and space, the film employs a score by composer Robert Miller, a script by the museum’s Laura Moustakerski (read by Pascal with direction by museum trustee Shawn Levy, a filmmaker and executive producer of Stranger Things), and, of course, plenty of incredible visuals.
Watching the 30-minute film inside the Hayden Planetarium sphere is an awe-inspiring experience that spotlights the vastness of our universe, our planet incomprehensibly small amid a sea of darkness punctuated by stars that extends in every direction.
“It’s a combination of artistry and a foundation in science,” Carter Emmar, the museum’s director of astrovisualization, said. “It makes me emotional. Hopefully it makes you emotional too!”
The museum’s director of astrovisualization Carter Emmart made this hand-drawn sketch for the production for Encounters in the Milky Way. It shows our solar system’s entry to the “Local Bubble,” an area of the Milky Way galaxy cleared of gas and dust by supernova explosions. ©AMNH.
“This is a vast story,” he added.
As Encounters explains, we know more than ever about just how unimaginably long those distances between the stars are, thanks to the European Space Agency’s space observatory, Gaia. Launched in 2013 and powered down in March of this year, Gaia has observed the stars with unprecedented precision. The observatory’s mission has revolutionized astrometry, a branch of astronomy that measures the positions, distances, and movements of the stars and other celestial objects.
Before Gaia, astronomers had only measured the distances between 116,000 stars. Now, thanks to Gaia, we have mapped 1.7 billion of them, allowing us to create a map of the universe, and to better comprehend the place of the Milky Way, our solar system, and our planet in the skies.
“This is the map of your cosmos—this is humanity’s map,” Faherty said. “And the data is available for everybody. Look at where these stars are. Look at where they are going. You can make discoveries. So much science to be had.”
The opening of Encounters marks the 25th anniversary of the opening of the museum’s Rose Center for Earth and Space. The planetarium’s inaugural film, narrated by Tom Hanks, was updated in 2017. The other productions have been voiced by Harrison Ford in 2002, Robert Redford in 2006, Whoopi Goldberg in 2009, Neil deGrasse Tyson (the Hayden Planetarium’s director) in 2013, and Lupita Nyong’o in 2020.
The Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History’s Rose Center for Earth and Space, which opened in 2000. Photo: by Alvaro Keding, ©AMNH.
That makes Encounters the seventh space show created for the planetarium’s high-tech digital dome projection system. And, for the first time, the museum made a discovery during the production process, as it worked to render a detailed visualization of the Oort cloud, the far-flung field of comets and other icy bodies at the fringes of our Solar System, extending one-and-a-half light years from the sun.
The museum tapped David Nesvorný, a scientist at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, to provide a simulation of the millions of particles in the Oort cloud, based on the data from scientific observations. But the rendering wasn’t what anyone expected: it showed a spiral-like formation in the Oort cloud, similar to the dramatic shapes that you can see in galaxies.
“No one has ever seen the Oort cloud structure like that before,” Faherty said.
While fine-tuning a simulation of the Oort cloud, a vast expanse of ice material left over from the birth of our Sun, the Encounters in the Milky Way production team noticed a very clear shape: a structure made of billions of comets and shaped like a spiral-armed galaxy, seen here in a scene from the final Space Show (curving, dusty S-shape behind the Sun). ©AMNH.
The team behind the film has published these findings in the Astrophysical Journal, hypothesizing that the spiral is shaped by the so-called galactic tide, the gravitational force of the larger Milky Way on our Solar System.
The discovery speaks to the power of the combined forces of science and art. When the museum works with artists and filmmakers to bring stories of science and the natural world to life, creatives can sometimes get carried away, imagining spectacular visuals that aren’t rooted in the real data. But here, those hard numbers made it possible to spot a truth about the Oort Cloud that had not yet occurred to even the most inventive artist.
“The math was all there. We just needed the visuals,” Faherty said.
In about 1.3 million years, the star system Gliese 710 is set to pass directly through our Oort Cloud, an event visualized in a dramatic scene in Encounters in the Milky Way. During its flyby, our systems will swap icy comets, flinging some out on new paths. ©AMNH.
Of course, your average museum goer won’t recognize the significance of that spiral. But there are other undeniably dramatic moments in the film, such as the rendering of the star Gliese 710 passing through the Oort Cloud some 1.3 million years from now, triggering firework-like explosions. Or the shot of our galactic “local bubble,” presented in a colorful infrared view.
“It looks like these beautiful paintings that are unfolding for you as these gas clouds are getting shock waved out with the blue, beautiful stars. And then we highlight some of the other ionized parts of the galaxy with some pink in there, too. Color-wise, it’s just gorgeous. Resolution wise, you’re catching all these shapes forming, coming together and then dissipating. You can think of that as pretty, but that’s also new stars being born right there,” Faherty said. “It’s a visually appealing scene, and then it’s really scientifically rich.”
This visualization shows the “local bubble,” a clearing within dense clouds of gas and dust that our solar system entered about 5 million years ago, around the time that early human ancestors were beginning to walk upright. ©AMNH.
And while the film uses the latest technological advances to render these galactic scenes in such gorgeous detail, Encounters is just the latest chapter in the museum’s long history of using art to help viewers get invested in and to understand complicated stories about science and our natural world. (That dates back to the museum’s first habitat dioramas in the early 1900s, transporting viewers across the world before there was internet, television, or color photography, and international travel was expensive and rare.)
“If this museum is testament to anything, it’s a testament to wonder,” Emmar said. “But the art is important, because art is the way to the soul. And that is the key and the testament to what this museum does. It’s not just the collections; it’s the presentation of it that really fires the imagination.”
Encounters in the Milky Way is on view at the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, 200 Central Park West, New York, New York, from June 9, 2025. More

By the 1960s, Charles and Ray Eames had chalked up decades’ worth of designs that revolutionized modern living. The husband-and-wife team reimagined the storage unit as a modular system in eye-popping color, reenvisioned the humble table, and, of course, created chairs upon chairs—in wire, plastic, molded plywood, and curved fiberglass. It was work that ranked them among the midcentury’s most sought-after industrial designers, ones who dared to fuse function with experimentation.
What’s lesser known, though, is the couple’s last 10 years of collaboration. From 1968 to 1978, they set out to refine their previous designs to meet new production realities and ergonomic demands. This refreshing of their oeuvre to align with contemporary tastes echoes the Eames ethos. “Most people aren’t trained to face the process of re-understanding a subject they already know,” Charles once reflected. “One must obtain not just literacy, but deep involvement and re-understanding.”
Installation view of “Past as Prologue” at the Transamerica Pyramid Center. Photo courtesy of the Eames Institute.
The Eameses’ final decade is now under the spotlight at “Past as Prologue: The Last Decade of Furniture Design by Ray and Charles Eames,” an exhibition opening on June 7 at the Transamerica Pyramid Center during San Francisco Design Week.
The show surfaces key objects from the collection of the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity. On view are some of the Eameses’ most recognizable inventions—from their side chair and executive chair to their chess stool and chaise—as well as other rarely seen designs. They’re joined by models and materials that shed light on the couple’s design processes.
Installation view of “Past as Prologue” at the Transamerica Pyramid Center. Photo courtesy of the Eames Institute.
“As an often-overlooked era of my grandparents’ designs, it felt imperative to uncover some ephemera that isn’t always highlighted hence [our] choosing some of their lesser-known pieces,” Llisa Demetrios, the Institute’s chief curator and the Eameses’ granddaughter, said in a statement. “It was exhilarating bringing out pieces that were created within my lifetime.”
Charles and Ray Eames met in the 1940s at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, where he was a teacher and she a student. While both had carved individual creative paths—Charles in architecture and Ray in abstract art—they found kindred spirits in each other. By 1950, their Los Angeles-based company, the Eames Office, had unveiled its earliest design, the molded Fiberglass Chair, on which it would make its name. (The couple would also go on to leave their mark on architecture, graphic design, and film.)
Shell of the Fiberglass Chair by Charles and Ray Eames. Photo courtesy of the Eames Institute.
The Eameses’ creations, however, never sat still. Changing tastes, new materials, and shifts in production methods drove them to revisit their designs, even decades on. The Fiberglass Chair, for one, was created at a time of postwar shortage—hence the choice of fiberglass over the designers’ initial proposal of a stamped metal shell. The material would eventually be supplanted by injection-molded plastics and polyurethane.
Similarly, as manufacturers Herman Miller and Vitra increasingly turned their focus to office markets, the Eameses adapted their home icons for use in professional environments by rethinking their durability, modularity, and ergonomics. Eames work chairs are now available in myriad shapes and sizes, from the soft-padded executive chair to simple task chair (yet another reimagining of the Fiberglass Chair, this time with a four-star base).
Installation view of “Past as Prologue” at the Transamerica Pyramid Center. Photo courtesy of the Eames Institute.
“Past as Prologue” marks the Eames Institute’s first public outing beyond the Eames Archives. The organization, which was formed to preserve and steward the couple’s legacy, has hosted a series of online exhibitions on the Eameses and most recently found itself a permanent home in Richmond, California.
“Past as Prologue” is on view at the Transamerica Pyramid Center, 600 Montgomery St, San Francisco, California, June 7–July 7. More