Exhibitions

One of the city’s most unique cultural events is back for 2025, with architectural sites and cultural organizations welcoming the public for Open House New York, a weekend-long event running October 17 to 19.
Open House New York has been celebrating the city’s most beloved landmarks, as well as its forgotten corners, since 2003, offering free or low-cost access to spaces that aren’t normally open to the public. Want to check out the filtration system at the massive Astoria Pool, for instance? The Open House tour will mark the first chance in the modernist landmark’s 89-year history. Or you can go behind the scenes at the Goodwill in Downtown Brooklyn.
The offerings include a passive house in Harlem, a Department of Sanitation composting facility on Staten Island, and, if you’re willing to show up at 4 a.m., the Fulton Fish Market in the Bronx. There are also architecturally stunning landmarks, like the Beaux Arts Hall of Records designed by John Rochester Thomas and completed in 1907, or the Lever House, the groundbreaking 1952 International Style office building by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
There’s also plenty of museums to visit and art to see, such as four separate MTA Arts and Design subway tours, or a rare look at the flood mitigation system architect Renzo Piano installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art after Hurricane Sandy flooded the construction site. (There’s a reason we likened the building to Noah’s ark when it opened back in 2014.)
This year’s edition features 342 venues across all five boroughs, 164 of which are open for drop-in visits. The other 178 sites are ticketed, with timed reservations for just $7 a person which will be released on Friday, October 3, at 12 p.m. We’ve compiled a list of the most intriguing options for both ticketed and open-access venues. Enjoy!
DROP-IN VISITS
32 Avenue of the Americas Lobby
Hildreth Meière’s Continents Linked by the Telephone and Wireless ceiling mosaic for 32 Avenue of the Americas, the former AT&T Long Distance Building. Photo: courtesy of the International Hildreth Meière Association
Today, lobby art is easy to ignore, your eyes skipping past whatever bland, large-scale, painting is hanging on your way to the elevator bank. But the Art Deco muralist and mosaicist Hildreth Meière (1892–1961) was a master of incorporating artwork into public spaces, like the dazzling glass mosaic ceiling representing the connectivity of telephones she did for the former AT&T Long Distance Building. Stop by for a tour from members of the International Hildreth Meière Association, which is also offering ticketed Open House visits to see her stunning, landmarked Red Room at the new Printemps department store.
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New YorkOctober 17–19, 12 p.m.–4 p.m.
Morbid Anatomy Museum
The Morbid Anatomy Museum. Photo: courtesy of the Morbid Anatomy Museum, Brooklyn.
This quirky Brooklyn museum closed after just two-and-a-half years in business due to money issues, but it was revived at Greenwood Cemetery and most recently in Industry City. There will be free tarot readings for Open House New York, plus the opportunity to peruse the collection of all things related to death, medicine, anatomy, taxidermy, and much more.
Morbid Anatomy Museum, Industry City, 254 36th Street, Building 2, Floor 2, Suite C248, Brooklyn, New YorkOctober 17–19, 12 p.m.–4 p.m.
Materials for the Arts
Materials for the Arts. Photo: by Samantha Paradiso.
You may not know it, but this city keeps 6.1 million pounds of materials out of landfills thanks to this creative reuse center, which distributes to free materials to the NYC Department of Education and upwards of 7,000 arts and cultural organizations.
Materials for the Arts, 33-00 Northern Boulevard, Floor 3, Long Island City, New YorkOctober 19, 10 a.m.–6 p.m, last tour 5 p.m.
Allison Eden Studios
Allison Eden at her mosaic studio. Photo: by Gary Goldenstein.
Allison Eden has made glass mosaics for all 50 states, as well as abroad, including for private homes as well as bars, restaurants, casinos, and even cruise ships. Now you can get a glimpse into her art factory.
Allison Eden Studios, 164 Cook Street, Brooklyn, New YorkOctober 18–19, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.
M&S Schmalberg Flowers
M&S Schmalberg Flowers. Photo: John Ng.
M&S Schmalberg opened in the Garment District in 1916. Now it’s the city’s last-remaining fabric flower factory, stocked with vintage brass molds, hand-shaped petals, and century-old pressing irons.
M&S Schmalberg Flowers, 242 West 36th Street, Floor 7. New York, New YorkOctober 19, 9 a.m.–3 p.m, last tour 2:30

TICKETED TOURS
Harlem River Bridges, Parks and Landmarks Walking Tour
Photo: Nathan Kensinger, courtesy of Open House New York.
Led by Nathan Kensinger and Duane Bailey-Castro, who have photographed the Bronx shoreline for 15 years, the tour offers an artist’s view of the Harlem River, surfacing its rich history and ecology.
Highbridge, BronxOctober 18, 12:00 p.m.—2.30 p.m.
Cathedral of St. John the Divine
The stained glass windows at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York. Photo: by David Hogarty, courtesy of Open House New York.
If you’re not afraid of heights and want to climb 124 feet, up 12 flights of stairs, this is your chance to get up close and personal with the stained glass at St. John the Divine, the world’s largest Gothic cathedral. Tickets for the vertical tour are normally $27.50, so this is a great deal. (Note, however, that children under 12 are not allowed.) The architect Ralph Adams Cram insisted that the colorful panes be manufactured with medieval techniques, from pot-glass made of sand and metal ash. There are over 150 windows from different artists and eras—the church is still technically under construction—but the central rose window was designed by Boston’s Connick Studio, run by artist Charles Jay Connick, under Cram’s guidance.
Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Avenue, Morningside Heights, New York, New YorkOctober 18, 12 p.m.–1 p.m., 2 p.m.–3 p.m.
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
Artwork by Robert Rauschenberg at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Photo: courtesy of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
It’s Robert Rauschenberg’s centennial year, with major exhibitions in the city at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the City of New York. The artist turned this former religious orphanage into his home and studio in 1965; now it is home to his foundation and the current exhibition “Autobiography and Other Stories: Robert Rauschenberg in Words and Images.”
Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, 381 Lafayette St, New York, New YorkOctober 18–19, 12 p.m.–1 p.m., 1:30 p.m.–2:30 p.m., 3 p.m.–4 p.m.
Socrates Sculpture Park and Mark di Suvero Studio
Spacetime, Mark di Suvero’s studio. Photo: courtesy of Socrates Sculpture Park.
In 1986, the great sculptor Mark di Suvero turned an illegal dumpsite on the Queens waterfront into a free sculpture park. But Open House New York is the only time you can visit Spacetime, his incredible studio next door. Richard Morales, director of public programs at Socrates; Shaun Leonardo, co-director at Socrates; and Ivana Mestrovic, director at Spacetime.
Spacetime and Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, Queens, New YorkOctober 18, 2 p.m.–3:30 p.m.
Jack Shainman Gallery
Jack Shainman Gallery. Photo: courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery.
This tour of Jack Shainman’s stunning new Tribeca space inside the landmarked New York Life Insurance Company Building includes special access to the gallery’s private spaces, including the former bank vault. The current exhibition is a massive Hank Willis Thomas show.
Jack Shainman Gallery, 46 Lafayette Street, New YorkOctober 17–19, 10:30 a.m.–12 p.m.; 1 p.m.–2:30 p.m.
Hispanic Society Museum & Library
Hispanic Society Museum & Library. Photo courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library.
Get a behind-the-scenes tour of the ongoing restoration work from Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners at the landmark Audubon Terrace cultural campus in Washington Heights.
Hispanic Society Museum & Library, Audubon Terrace, 3741 Broadway, New York, New YorkOctober 18, 11 a.m.–11:45 a.m.; 1 p.m.–1:45 p.m.
WTC Rebuilding Gallery & Artists Studios
Murals on the 79th floor of 3 World Trade Center. Photo: courtesy of Silverstein Properties.
The real estate firm Silverstein Properties has long given artists space at the World Trade Center, where it holds a 99-year lease. Artists can apply for a free-year-long residency on the 28th floor of 4 World Trade Center with Silver Art Projects, but the views are even better at 3 World Trade Center, where there’s an on-site resident artist program and mural collection on the 79th floor. The company is offering tours of the artist studios there, as well as its private art collection galleries up on 80.
3 World Trade Center, New York, New YorkOctober 17, 10 a.m.–10:45 a.m., 11 a.m.–11:45 a.m., 12 p.m.–12:45 p.m.
Colossal Media
The headquarters of hand-painted outdoor advertising company Colossal Media. Photo: courtesy of Colossal Media.
Hand-painted outdoor advertising company Colossal Media paints murals around the world. A tour of its Brooklyn warehouse—part paint store, part art studio, and part painted signage museum—will show what goes into the pre-production process, before the artists go on site and work their magic.
Colossal Media, exact address TBA, East Williamsburg, BrooklynFriday, 10 a.m.–11 a.m., 11 a.m.–12 p.m. More

Time has been kind to New York’s Guggenheim. Today, it’s considered Frank Lloyd Wright’s crowning statement and an unequivocal masterpiece of modern architecture, but upon opening in 1959, its revolutionary form drew comparisons to a washing machine, marshmallow, and a giant corkscrew.
The chairs Wright designed for the museum’s café were no less futuristic. Sleek and minimalist with a spun aluminum tulip base and an eye-shaped backrest, they seem to belong on the flight deck of a ship gliding through the solar system. They were never realized. Now, nearly seven decades later, the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) has commissioned a pair as part of a new exhibition that reframes Wright’s furniture within the Wisconsinite’s practice and American modernism more broadly.
Frank Lloyd Wright Café Chairs for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: courtesy MOWA/the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ.
To produce the café chairs, curators worked with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to uncover his drawings, before sharing them with a multigenerational metal-spinning company in Milwaukee. It’s an approach organizers have taken a further 10 times working with master artisans (including Wright’s great-grandson, S. Lloyd Natof) for “Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design.” Across 40 pieces, the show highlights five distinct periods between 1911 and 1959, years in which Wright drifted from the horizontal lines and design strictures of his Prairie School.
If there’s one thing a person with even a passing interest in Wright knows, it’s his concept of organic architecture, a vision in which every element, from the carpet to the planters to, yes, the chairs, forms part of a harmonious whole. And yet, Wright’s furniture has received little attention, with few scholarly books and even fewer exhibitions on the subject.
Frank Lloyd Wright in his studio at Taliesin, Wisconsin, 1957. Photo: Tony Vaccaro / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.
This absence caught the attention of Eric Vogel, scholar-in-residence at the Taliesin Institute, who began digging into the archives and networking, a journey that led him to MOWA, which was showing a collection of Wright chairs. In Thomas Szolwinski, the museum’s curator of architecture and design, Vogel found a partner.
“I’d long been interested in curating a chair exhibition,” Szolwinski said over email. “The central premise is that Wright’s homes and studios, Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and later Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, functioned as laboratories of creative experiment.”
Frank Lloyd Wright chair and table for the Tree Room. Photo: courtesy MOWA/the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ.
Wright would design around 200 chairs and enjoyed a fraught relationship with them—at once considering them key to a room’s integrity, while also calling sitting “an unfortunate necessity.”Here, the story begins with Wright rebuilding Taliesin East following major fires in 1914 and 1925. There, he combined a new architecture with unprecedented furniture forms (ones whose originality would, in time, be rejected by clients). MOWA has recreated Wright’s armchair, which is made from sandy cypress wood that matches the building’s color and horizontal gold leaf joints that echo the exterior’s window slats. Elsewhere, there’s the triangular chair and table for the complex’s tree room that chimes with elements of the ceiling and a chair for the Hillside dining room chair.
Frank Lloyd Wright “Mori” chair for the S. Mori Oriental Art Studio and Japanese Print Shop, Chicago. Photo: courtesy MOWA/the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ.
Out west, a highlight is the origami armchair Wright designed in 1946. It sees the designer looking back to his frequent visits to Japan in the 1910s with sides like well-creased paper and arms that unfold before the sitter. Its seat takes on the copper-red tone (known as Cherokee Red) that traced throughout the property. It’s a far heftier proposition than the slender oak chair he designed for a Chicago gallery of Japanese art in 1914, which arrives at MOWA on loan from the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust in Oak Park.
At a time when the lines between architecture, interior spaces, and product design are well and truly blurred, “Modern Chair Design” is a reminder of Wright’s prescience. “Time and again, Wright was ahead of what later became standardized or popularized techniques,” Szolwinski said. “We highlight these parallels and make comparisons to global trends, showing how Wright’s furniture fits into a larger narrative of modern design.”
“Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design” is on view at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, 205 Veterans Ave, West Bend, Wisconsin, October 4, 2025–January 25, 2026. More

History’s great women artists have, in recent years, received glimmers of the institutional attention they’ve long deserved. While Hilma af Klint and Artemisia Gentileschi have broken through to the mainstream with major museum exhibitions, still many more influential and daring talents are waiting to be rediscovered by the wider public. Enthusiasm and momentum continue to grow for these stories, thankfully, and this year, a number of museums big and small have turned their attention to their work. Below, we’ve selected just a few of the solo exhibitions highlighting historic women artists worth seeking out this fall.

1. “Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch” at Spelman College, AtlantaThrough December 6, 2025
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet,​ Discontent (1929).​  Gift of Miss Eleanor Green and Miss Ellen D. Sharpe. Courtesy of Spelman College.
Born to a Narragansett father and a Black mother, sculptor Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890–1960) was the first woman of color to graduate from the acclaimed Rhode Island School of Design. Her career would take her to New York and Paris. Still, throughout her lifetime, the Afro-Indigenous artist navigated an often-hostile art world and struggled, at times, with extreme poverty. She nevertheless continued to produce sculptures of intense poignancy and precise technical skill. “I Will Not Bend an Inch,” co-curated by the RISD Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, now makes its third stop in Atlanta; the exhibition is the first museum presentation of Prophet’s works, many of which have, unfortunately, been lost or destroyed over the decades. Twenty rare works make up the exhibition, including nine portrait heads carved in hardwood, as well as marble carvings, reliefs, and works on paper. These works are a testament to a remarkable and unyielding artistic vision and one deserving of much wider scholarly attention.
2. “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” at Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WIThrough December 23, 2025
Toshiko Takaezu with works later combined in the “Star Series” (ca. 1994–2001), including (from left to right) Sahu, Nommo, Emme Ya, Unas, and Po Tolo (Dark Companion), 1998. Photo: Tom Grotta, © Family of Toshiko Takaezu, Courtesy browngrotta arts
Interest in American artist Toshiko Takaezu has ignited over the past few years, driven in part by this very exhibition, which originated at the Noguchi Museum in New York last spring. Takaezu, who was born in Hawai‘i of Okinawan heritage, is best known for her glazed “closed form” ceramic sculptures. These forms ranged in scale from the handheld to the monumental; she approached these vessels as her three-dimensional canvases painting onto their surfaces. Takaezu was known for arranging her works to create unique environments. Her practice also incorporated weaving and bronze-cast sculpture, also highlighted in the exhibition.  In some ways, this exhibition is a homecoming for Takaezu; the artist taught at UW-Madison from 1954 to 1955.
3. “Edmonia Lewis: Indelible Impressions” at the Cantor Arts Center, StanfordThrough January 4, 2026
Edmonia Lewis, Asleep, (1871). Photo: John Janca.
Sculptor Edmonia Lewis, a 19th-century woman of Black and Native American (Ojibwe) heritage, was internationally famous in her own time, celebrated for her stirring Neoclassical marble sculptures. Visitors to her studio included President Ulysses S. Grant, Pope Pius IX, and Frederick Douglass.
Born in upstate New York in 1844, Lewis briefly enrolled in Oberlin College (one of the few schools to accept Black women), before moving to Boston in 1863, where she began her career. By 1866, Lewis had set sail for Rome, where she studied alongside the most celebrated sculptors of her time.
In 1873, she visited the Bay Area, where she presented her sculptures, Asleep (1871),  Awake (1872), and Bust of Abraham Lincoln (1871), to great acclaim. These three sculptures are presented reunited for the first time in three decades in an intimate exhibition. The show marks an important moment of renewed interest in Lewis. Early next year, the Peabody Essex Museum will present “Said in Stone” which positions Lewis’s works alongside those of her contemporaries in an expansive 100-object exhibition.
4. “Lee Miller” at Tate Britain, LondonThrough February 15, 2026
Lee Miller, Model with lightbulb, Vogue Studio, London, England (ca.1943). © Lee Miller Archives, England 2024. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk
The mania for all things Lee Miller reaches its zenith. The surrealist photographer and war journalist has been everywhere in culture over the last few years, from the release of Lee, a biopic of her life starring Kate Winslet, an exhibition of her works at Gagosian New York, and the publication of a book of her correspondence with her husband, Arthur Penrose.
Now, Tate Britain has opened the most extensive retrospective of her photography in the U.K. to date. The exhibition includes approximately 250 vintage and modern prints, from her years in Paris’s Surrealist scene to her unflinching bravery as a war photographer documenting World War II. The exhibition also includes rarely seen works, such as a series of Egyptian landscapes taken in the 1930s. The highlights are her tender and unusual portraits of fellow artists.
5. “Michaelina Wautier, Painter,” at Kunsthistorisches Museum, ViennaThrough February 22, 2026
Michaelina Wautier, Der Triumph des Bacchus. Image Courtesy of © KHM-Museumsverband.
For centuries, Michaelina Wautier’s paintings were attributed to men, particularly her brother, the artist Carl Wautier. The Flemish Baroque painter, who lived from 1604 to 1689, worked across a dazzling range of genres, from portraits and history scenes to flower still lifes and religious tableaux. Historians doubted a woman would have had that ability. Wautier could have been lost to history if art historian Katlijne Van der Stighelen hadn’t found a painting by Wautier in a storage area of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum back in 1993. The discovery set Van der Stighelen on a decades-long mission to discover Wauter’s story. Now, in a fitting moment, the Kunsthistorisches Museum is hosting the largest exhibition of Wautier’s works to date, with 29 paintings, a drawing, and a print—the near entirety of her known work—on view.  The star of the exhibition is arguably her monumental Triumph of Bacchus (1655–59), which some historians believe includes a goddess-like (and provocative) depiction of the artist herself.
6. “Grace Hartigan: The Gift of Attention” at the Portland Museum of Art, OregonOctober 10, 2025–January 11, 2026
Grace Hartigan, Barbara Guest Archaics (1968) Grace Hartigan Estate © Grace Hartigan Estate Photo: Courtesy of the Estate of Grace Hartigan/ACA Galleries, New York
During the 1950s, Grace Hartigan was an artistic sensation who mingled with poets and writers, including Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Daisy Aldan, and James Merrill. Hartigan was critically acclaimed for her works that freely danced between abstraction and figuration.  This major exhibition, which was organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art, brings together 40 of her works created between 1952 and 1968, which show her at the pinnacle of her powers, and the deep influence of poetry on her art-making, particularly her deep and at times fraught friendship with O’Hara.
7. “Ruth Asawa” at the Museum of Modern Art, New YorkOctober 19, 2025–February 7, 2026
Ruth Asawa at Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective View, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1973. Photograph by Laurence Cuneo. © 2024 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner.
California artist and educator Ruth Asawa devoted her over six-decade-long career to abstract explorations of form. Having studied at Black Mountain College, she developed a practice committed to making art every single day. Asawa is most celebrated for her undulating looped-wire sculptures that mirror organic shapes. “Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective,” co-organized by SFMoMA and MoMA, is now making its long-anticipated East Coast debut. The sweeping exhibition brings together over 300 artworks. And while her famed wire sculptures are here in all their graceful glory, so are lesser-known works in bronze casts, drawings, paintings, and prints that offer new dimensions to Asawa’s practice.
8. “Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.October 24, 2025–July 12, 2026
Grandma Moses, We Are Resting, 1951 2019.55, © Grandma Moses Properties Co., NY.
The artist Anna Mary Robertson Moses, or Grandma Moses (1860–1961), didn’t start painting in earnest until her late 70s.   Then, in 1940, at the age of 80, she was given her first gallery exhibition by the dealer Otto Kallir. She became an overnight popular sensation whose fame outstripped many other women artists of her time. Her folkloric paintings—often of rural landscapes—combined direct observation of nature with memories in idiosyncratic, distinctly American visions. Thirty-three artworks from the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s own collection, including many of her most beloved paintings, make up the core of this exhibition. More

Authenticity reigns supreme in the art world. It’s what separates million-dollar, museum-worthy masterpieces from clever fakes. And it’s what moves viewers to tears. But what if, theater artist Łukasz Twarkowski asks, a forgery could kindle in you the same emotions?
“Does it mean that the tears were fake because the painting was fake?” he asked me. “Or does it mean the fake artwork can reveal real emotions and real tears?”
This is one of the provocations at the heart of the Polish director’s new production ROHTKO, which is opening at London’s Barbican Centre on October 2. The multimedia extravaganza unfolds across four hours with onstage performances, two video screens, and a soundtrack of techno beats to interrogate the value—and increasingly blurred outlines—of authenticity in art.
ROHTKO, directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, text and dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. Photo: Artūrs Pavlovs.
As indicated by its title, Mark Rothko serves as a throughline—or more specifically, the fake Rothkos that were sold by New York art gallery Knoedler & Co. from 1994 to 2011. In those years, the dealer moved dozens of paintings forged in the style of Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Rothko. The scandal, later recounted in the 2020 Netflix documentary Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art, sparked an FBI investigation and the closure of the century-old gallery.
Twarkowski’s take on the fraud, however, is far more oblique. He takes as his starting point Shanzhai, a Chinese term meaning “mountain fort” that now stands for the phenomenon of clever counterfeit goods. It’s the world that’s given us Dolce & Banana and Samsing, among other bootlegs. A subculture and aesthetic, Shanzhai invests artistic merit in these knockoffs, seeing them as playful riffs on the real thing and deconstructions of established brands.
Łukasz Twarkowski. Photo: Beatrice Borgers.
For Twarkowski, who had boned up on the 2017 book Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, this shadow economy doubled as a philosophical prism through which to view authenticity. “We are seeing these two visions of the world: one which is never-ending and changing and the another, which is marked by the beginning and the end. If you don’t have the beginning, you don’t have the originality,” he explained, alluding to the Western art world’s prized provenance.
Bringing ROHTKO to the Stage
Now, Shanzhai has given us ROHTKO, the Shanzhai-esque twist on the painter’s name wholly deliberate. The work was in gestation for more than a year, Twarkowski told me, during which he and his longtime collaborator Anka Herbut researched areas from Rothko’s biography to the Knoedler trial. They then worked with actors over a period of improvisation to develop scenes: “We inspire them, they inspire us,” he said. Staging took up another six weeks.
ROHTKO had its premiere at the Dailes Theatre in Riga, Latvia, in 2022. Its Barbican run is happening as part of U.K./Poland Season 2025, a collaborative program between the British Council, the Polish Cultural Institute, and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
ROHTKO, directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, text and dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. Photo: Artūrs Pavlovs.
The work is centered at a Chinese restaurant—a knockoff of Mr. Chow, a hub for the New York art world—at which various characters from sleek gallerists to destitute actors gather, interact, and converse. The narrative takes us from the 1960s, during the final years of Rothko’s life, to the era of digital art, when the idea of value has only grown woolier with the rise of NFTs. While the performance transpires onstage, camera operators film the action and players, with a live feed projected on two screens.
What subtly unfolds are layers upon layers of shifting reality. The Chinese restaurant itself represents what Twarkowski called a “no-man’s land,” the concept having been so widely replicated across Western cities as to almost seem hollow (the Knoedler forger, notably, was a Chinese man living in Queens, New York). The video feed offers a whole other frame of reference: “The truth of the screen becomes another reality, which is stronger than the reality of the stage,” the director said.
ROHTKO, directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, text and dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. Photo: Artūrs Pavlovs.
Even theater as a medium, being performative and illusory, loosens the grip of authenticity—Twarkowski deemed it a “strange form of art, which has repetition inscribed in its DNA.”
“Is it really happening anew every day, or is it the same thing that is happening?” he said. “We were asking ourselves: when you do international co-productions, what does it mean when there is a second premiere in another country? How many premieres can you have? Is the second premiere a fake premiere, because the first one was the original one?”
Beyond the Myth
This multimedia approach to exploring the hazy lines between reality and illusion has been a hallmark of Twarkowski’s innovative performances. Where 2023’s The Employees examined the nature of human consciousness, his most recent work, Oracle, probed artificial intelligence through the lens of Alan Turing’s life story. However heady these brews, Twarkowski has not lost sight of the humans and human feeling at the center of these performances.
ROHTKO, directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, text and dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. Photo: Artūrs Pavlovs.
In ROHTKO, for instance, a performer recounts the tale of a Latvian artist who had planned to sit in front of Rothko’s work, cry, and collect her tears for a video sculpture. She killed herself before realizing the project. The performer reflects that were she to collect such tears from a viewing of Rothko’s paintings, she would save them for a possible future where people might feel nothing looking at an artwork.
It’s a moment that captures Twarkowski and Herbut’s deeper aim to stir something in the viewer that exists beyond the performance. What is happening on stage is not the most important thing, he explained, “but what it evokes in the spectator. It is the same with the artwork. Is it about the art, or it is the relation between the art and the viewer?”
The heart of the piece, of course, belongs to Rothko. The artist is regarded as a hero in his native Latvia, and Twarkowski has been captivated by the guy since he laid eyes on Rothko’s Seagram Murals at the Tate Modern. He recalled “the silence that appears once you get in and how speechless you are being there between these paintings”—a reverence he also felt at the 2023 Rothko retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
ROHTKO, directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, text and dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. Photo: Artūrs Pavlovs.
But digging into Rothko’s life, Twarkowski admitted, left him disillusioned. He received a distinct view of the painter’s strained relationships with his wives and children, as well as his suicide, which the director described as “more an act of cowardice than any romanticized heroism.” ROHTKO brings forth these demons, but not before, it seems, its director glimpsed the real man behind the constructed myth.
“More often, with such big figures of art, when you start digging into their personal life, you’re usually more disappointed than appreciative of them,” he conceded. “Knowing him more as a person really took off some of the magic.”
ROHTKO is on view at the Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, October 2–5.  More

Even among Italy’s many artistic splendors, Palazzo Te stands out for the unique scale and spectacle of its long suites filled with decorative frescoes. Conceived and executed by Raphael’s protégé Giulio Romano between 1525 and 1535, this palatial villa is celebrating 500 years as an exemplar of the ostentatious but playful flair that characterizes the Mannerist style. It is marking the occasion with the commission of a new, time-bending epic by acclaimed British filmmaker Isaac Julien.
Directly inspired by the theme of metamorphosis that was so central to Romano’s design—the Renaissance painter drew heavily from the verses of Ovid—Julien’s film takes our timeless fascination with eternal transformation and updates it with a futuristic, sci-fi twist. In this way, he reactivates the 16th-century palazzo, revealing its richly-layered, mythological sagas as ripe for reinterpretation.
The ten-screen installation All That Changes You. Metamorphosis debuts in the palazzo’s newly renovated “Fruttiere” wing on October 3, on view through February 1, 2026. Viewers are guided on a philosophical journey by two space traveling goddesses, played by British actors Gwendoline Christie, best known for Game of Thrones, Wednesday, and Severance; and Sheila Atim, a lead in the 2023 indie All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.
Gwendoline Christie on the set of Issac Julien, All That Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025) at Palazzo Te. Photo: © Isaac Julien.
On Julien’s first trip to Palazzo Te, which was originally intended as a pleasure palace for for Federico II Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua, it was immediately apparent how the artwork might translate to the big screen. He felt particularly enthralled by a room containing The Fall of the Giants, in which scenes of chaos and destruction wrap around the walls and draw the eye up, over the domed ceiling. “I thought, my god, it’s like cinema,” the artist recalled over lunch at a London hotel. “It’s just huge.” It was obvious where he would set the film’s triumphant finale.
Julien has remained tight-lipped about the film’s plot, but the auteur has promised “some surprising elements” and one final “philosophical revelation.” We do know that the divine protagonists’s journey takes them between Palazzo Te and two other extraordinary architectural feats, each representing different temporalities. One of these is Charles Jencks’s unique postmodernist marvel, The Cosmic House in London, and the other is a futuristic spaceship especially designed by Richard Found. As they traverse time and place, the goddesses will also experience shifting identities.
Central to Julien’s story are issues of climate crisis and social inequality that have been on his mind since fires devastated Los Angeles at the start of this year. Rather than indulge a straightforwardly apocalyptic narrative, however, the director uses science fiction to imagine a more hopeful, post-anthropocentric future that considers the stake of non-human sentient lifeforms.
Isaac Julien and Gwendoline Christie on the set of Issac Julien, All That Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025) at Palazzo Te. Photo: © Isaac Julien.
The film’s digressive, non-linear approach will be familiar to fans of Julien’s previous films, many of which had a similarly liberal attitude towards warping time. Julien’s 1989 breakthrough Looking for Langston was an instant classic of queer cinema that pulls viewers into the imagined private world of the playwright Langston Hughes and his fellow Black artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Though it was set in the 1920s, the artist has explained that it was really about the AIDS crisis.
The most obvious comparison for All That Changes You. Metamorphosis is Julien’s Baltimore (2003), which is similarly set in a series of cultural institutions–Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum,  Walters Art Museum, and the Great Blacks in Wax Museum–and features masterpieces of Italian Renaissance art. For Julien, there is always something new to be gained from looking to the past.
“We’ve tried to say that your teachers are all around you” said Julien, who owes this impulse to the fact that he himself is a professor at U.C. Santa Cruz and is passionate about supporting younger generations. “It’s so important to realize that historically, we’ve been in very complicated, politically ambivalent moments.” This is what drove him to revisit the lives of several key historical figures, including Langston, Frederick Douglass and the Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi.
Sheila Atim on the set of Issac Julien, All That Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025) at Palazzo Te. Photo: © Isaac Julien.
The Renaissance, a cultural and intellectual “rebirth,” and the Enlightenment, which privileged reason and scientific thought over traditional authorities like monarchies or religious institutions, were both periods of upheaval that brought about significant societal change. Julien has suggested that we too may have arrived “at a particular post-Enlightenment time, with crises and wars, where ideas of universalism are being challenged.” Old systems that once offered reassurance now feel at risk, suggesting that we may need to prepare for a similar break with the past.
For this bold new venture that looks not only at the present through the lens of the past but also into the future, Julien has channeled the influence of several science fiction heroines, including Donna Haraway, Naomi Mitchison, and Octavia Butler, who previously inspired Julien’s film Paradise Omeros (2002). “They were the writers influencing our conversations that have seeped into the work,” he said, reflecting on the process of writing a script for All That Changes You. Metamorphosis with his partner and longtime collaborator Mark Nash.
In a project of staggering scope, the ideas of these pioneering 20th-century eco-feminists are reimagined against the dramatic backdrop of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as brought to life by the brush of Renaissance master Giulio Romano. Much like the dramatic fall of the Giants, the stakes of Julien’s inquiry into our precarious ecological future feel terrifyingly high, yet if anything can inspire hope, it is surely this swirl of spectacular art and philosophical revelation. More

At 85, Larry Bell—one of the original figureheads of Southern California’s Light and Space movement—hardly projects the aura of a sage-like guru. At the preview for his new exhibition in Madison Square Park yesterday morning, he wore a tactical vest over a checked shirt, dark trousers, and his signature fedora. He looked more like a field operative than a mystic of light. It was a beautiful fall day, clear and bright.
“I hope you enjoy the work,” he told the assembled crowd, “and I recommend finding an interesting place that’s comfortable to sit in the presence of any of the works here because they’ll constantly be changing as the clouds and the sun move. The animation that is within the pieces tells a different story by the minute. The pieces have changed since I started talking. The changes are subtle, but they’re profound.”
Larry Bell with his work. © Larry Bell. Photo: Chris Grunder. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley.
That sense of continual transformation anchors “Improvisations in the Park,” Bell’s first outdoor public installation in New York and the largest public project of his seven-decade career. Commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy, the exhibition features six monumental glass works—including two made specifically for the occasion—that refract, absorb, and transmit light in endlessly shifting patterns. Installed across the park’s lawns, they converse with the turning trees, the passing shadows, and the skyscrapers looming just beyond the branches.
“They’re active pieces,” said Denise Markonish, the Conservancy’s chief curator. “They feel like they’re alive as sculptures because they’re constantly shifting and changing across the day.”
Installation view of Larry Bell’s Frankly Purple, 2022, in Improvisations in the Park. Photo: Timothy Schenck. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley.
The result is both jarring and restorative: crystalline minimalism at odds with the messy seasonal churn of the park, yet somehow in harmony with it—offering order, revelation, and reflection. It is a welcome respite from the damning daily news cycle. This park was always a tonic; now, Bell’s works offer something closer to an escape from the mortal coil. There are passages of violet and crimson, sheets of semitransparent glass that lock into one another with a rare sense of perfection and order.
Installation view of Larry Bell’s Fourth of July in Venice Fog, 2018 (left), and Cantaloupe but Honeydew, 2025 (right), in Improvisations in the Park. Photo: Timothy Schenck. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley. Commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Bell has long insisted that spontaneity and intuition are his true studio tools, as much as glass and vacuum coating. He first tested those instincts in New York in the mid-1960s, during his brief tenure in the city, where he met Donald Judd, Frank Stella, and even Marcel Duchamp. Judd would become both a friend and early collector of Bell’s work. One of Bell’s early cubes remains installed on the fourth floor of the Judd Foundation in SoHo, which was once the artist’s residence.
“I’ve known Larry all my life,” said Flavin Judd, Donald’s son, who serves as artistic director of the Judd Foundation, which is presenting the show. “I let Larry do whatever he wants.”
That bond resurfaces now in Bell’s other New York exhibition, “Irresponsible Iridescence” at Judd Foundation’s 101 Spring Street, which opened the same day and runs through January 31, 2026. If the park show presents monumental glass improvisations in dialogue with nature and skyline, the Judd exhibition pares things down to a more intimate scale—narrative “Solar Study” works created with new processes, alive with iridescent surfaces that carry the same spirit of chance and trust. Some look like lovely oil splotches languidly floating atop water, others like shattered futuristic visions.
Installation view of “Irresponsible Iridescence,” September 29, 2025–January 31, 2026, 101 Spring Street, Judd Foundation, New York. Photo: Timothy Doyon © Judd Foundation. Art © Larry Bell.
Bell is so indelibly associated with his cubes and glass sculptures that it can be easy to forget how strong he is in two dimensions. These new works, shimmering with layered surfaces, remind us of that—they recast his rhythmic sensibility in a flat format without losing any of the perceptual richness. I think in these one finds a different kind of zen and letting go, both for the viewer and the maker.
“Sometimes when I’m lucky the work creates itself,” Bell has said. “I am only responsible for turning on the equipment and turning it off. The results of the use of the equipment become autonomic. In other words, I can find a narrative interpretation in the order of arrangement of the surfaces created.”
Together, “Improvisations in the Park” and “Irresponsible Iridescence” reveal Bell working on twin registers: vast public sculptures that shift and mirror the seasons, and intimate studies of dynamism harnessed in shimmering whirls.

“Improvisations in the Park” is on view at Madison Square Park, Madison Avenue at East 23rd Street, New York, through January 31, 2026.
“Irresponsible Iridescence” is on view at Judd Foundation, 101 Spring Street, New York, through January 31, 2026. More

At an undisclosed location somewhere in the Midwest lie the archives of Virgil Abloh, the late American designer whose imprint on the worlds of high fashion and pop culture endures.
Abloh wore many hats—painter, furniture designer, costume artist, architect, DJ—and his archives reflect this omnivorous approach. He seldom threw anything away and across a 20,000-strong collection there are two decades of sketches, skateboards, sneaker prototypes, advertising mockups, vinyl records, mixtapes, magazine cutouts, and more besides. Everything, in short, was potential source material.
Virgil Abloh. Photo: Tyrone Lebon.
More than 700 of these items have traveled to the Grand Palais in Paris where they combine to not only spotlight one of the 21st century’s most influential designers, but share how Abloh thought about creativity. “Virgil Abloh: The Codes” arrives on what would have been the designer’s 45th birthday and runs the length of Paris Fashion Week.
The timing is hardly coincidental: from 2018 on, Abloh spent considerable time in the city as the director for Louis Vuitton Menswear, and four years on from his death, the 10-day show serves as reunion of sorts for friends, collaborators, and fans. Mahfuz Sultan, the co-director of the Virgil Abloh Archives, who met the designer in a MoMA elevator in the mid-2010s, called the show “a love letter to the city that inspired him most.”
Installation view of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes.” Photo: Thomas Razzano / BFA.com.
The love letter is certainly more show than tell with Abloh’s “codes” discernible by experiencing the eclectic range of his work, rather than following a set of hard and fast rules. “His codes were a methodology,” Chloe Sultan, co-director of the archives, said over email, “to open-source his methods and allow for learning, education, and mentorship, creating a type of transparency and accessibility that worked to democratize fashion.”
Installation view of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes.” Photo: Thomas Razzano / BFA.com.
It’s a greatly expanded edition of a project that opened in Miami in 2022 and here spreads across 13,350 square feet of the Grand Palais.
Visitors enter the exhibition via the gift store. It’s a witty back-to-front approach and perhaps a nod to hype the that has surrounded the merch at earlier Abloh shows. The store in question is Colette, Abloh’s favorite Parisian concept store, which is fittingly filled with offerings. This includes the first Abloh-designed T-shirt carried by the boutique in the late 2000s, scented candles, his Braun alarm clock, and crossover products with the likes of Been Trill, Cactus Plant Flea Market, and Travis Scott.
Installation view of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes.” Photo: Thomas Razzano / BFA.com.
The point is an immediate blurring of the lines between art and commerce. And it’s one that continues inside with an exhibition that is something like a very contemporary cabinet of curiosities that belonged to a generational tastemaker.
A stand will place a traffic cone alongside piles of folded T-shirts, wire mesh chairs, and luxury handbags. There’s an array of more than 200 Nike sneakers (many never released). Examples of his collaborations with Ikea, Vitra, Evian, and Baccarat are dispersed among ceiling-high shelves. The invitation is for visitors to create their own links and inferences, and they can do just that at the Nike Media Lab, a phalanx of computers loaded up with a terabyte of Abloh’s files.
Installation view of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes.” Photo: Thomas Razzano / BFA.com.
Upstairs, Abloh’s Pont Neuf studio is faithfully recreated, laying piles of papers and project samples on a vibrant orange table. Racks of tightly packed clothes hang nearby and set of speakers and DJ decks he designed sit at the ready.
“Virgil strongly believed in making art and creativity accessible and available to everyone,” Sultan said. “That’s why this exhibition is fully open to the public. We want to create a space where people can engage with his legacy, be inspired by it, and build upon it.”
Installation view of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes.” Photo: Thomas Razzano / BFA.com.
“Virgil Abloh: The Codes” is on view at the Grand Palais, Paris, through October 9. More

For over 25 years, Minnie Evans (1892–1987) welcomed visitors to Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina, earning 16 cents an hour selling tickets at the entrance. Her post at the gatehouse became a studio and gallery for the prolific self-taught African American artist. She would make as many as seven drawings a day featuring her signature blend of florals, animals, and abstraction, hanging them outside to offer for sale to visitors hailing from around the country.
This uniquely public-facing practice eventually became the unlikely gateway to art world fame, culminating in a 1975 retrospective for Evans at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art—a career milestone that any artist would be thrilled to reach, let alone one who often used discarded garden maintenance supplies to make her art. And while her name has faded from prominence in the decades since her death, Evans now seems poised on the brink of a major resurgence, with a touring exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a much larger one that opens this November at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and will travel to the Whitney next summer.
“Her work is extremely kaleidoscopic and vibrant, using symmetry, exploring natural motifs and often incorporating human faces or eyes into the landscape,” Colton Klein, who guest curated the show for the MFA, told me. “It’s mostly work on paper and crayon, using
scrap paper and affordable materials. She talked about her friends and family and visitors at Airlie Gardens bringing her materials.”
He has centered the exhibition around the garden, including an installation that recreates the tiny floor plan of the gatehouse—around nine by nine-and-a-half feet—complete with the original admission sign, charging $1. Klein also contributed historic postcards of Airlie Gardens from his own personal collection to the display to help illustrate how Wilmington’s verdant landscape is reflected in Evans’s lush drawings.
Installation view of “The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, featuring a large-scale reproduction of a photo of her gatehouse at Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina. Photo: ©Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Who Was Minnie Evans? 
“She was really studying and living and working amongst the flowers, the live oak trees, and other plants that are native to that part of the country and really celebrating and exploring that in her work,” Klein said. “The flora and fauna of North Carolina are very beautiful and inspiring.”
A native of the state born in a rural log cabin, Evans was descended from enslaved Africans forced to come to this country by way of Trinidad. Her only education was through the sixth grade, and she got married at just 16, having three sons.
Minnie Evans, My Very First (1935). Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, gift of Dorothea M. and Isadore Silverman.
No one taught Evans to draw, but she had visions from her childhood—visions she was finally moved to begin putting to paper in her 40s. The Whitney owns the first two drawings Evans ever made, sketchy geometric doodles in black pen, created on Good Friday and Holy Saturday in 1930. But she didn’t continue making art until five years later, when she came across those early experiments (which may explain why they are dated 1935).
After a few years of art-marking, Evans one day heard a voice in her head: “Why don’t you draw or die?”
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Face With Aura and Angels), 1968. Collection of Wendy Williams, New York. Photo: by Christopher Burke, courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
It was a moment that changed Evans’s life. From that point on, art poured out from her, thousands of works, mostly drawings but eventually also collages and oil paintings. Inspired in part by a spiritual reverence for the natural world, Evans—a devout Baptist—also incorporated imagery from her Christian faith, such as angels, as well as symbols from mythology, into dense compositions that were almost mandala-like.
”I love people, to a certain extent,” Evans told Newsweek in 1969. ”But sometimes I want to get off in the garden to talk with God. I have the blooms, and when the blooms are gone, I love to watch the green. God dressed the world in green.”
Jack Loughlin, Airlie Oak at Airlie Gardens (ca. 1950), postcard. Collection of Colton Klein.
Evans’s husband, Julius Caesar Evans, was a coachman and property supervisor for a wealthy Wilmington couple, Pembroke and Sarah Jones. Following her marriage in 1908, Evans became a domestic worker at the Joneses’ hunting estate, known as Pembroke Park, living on the grounds.
The Joneses also owned the adjacent property, which Pembroke christened Airlie after his ancestral home in Scotland, and which Sarah transformed into a lush and sprawling 67-acre garden.
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Statuary, Stars, and Flora), 1965. Collection of Wendy Williams, New York. Photo: by Christopher Burke, courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
After the Joneses died, Walter Corbett purchased Airlie Gardens in 1948 and opened it to the public, hiring Evans to work the front gate. (He also supported and even collected her art.)
Evans became a fixture of the garden—even featured in the brochure, as seen in a copy from the 1970s on view at the MFA—until her retirement in 1974 at 82 years old. (Today, the garden honors Evans’s long service there with the Minnie Evans Sculpture Garden, featuring a Bottle Chapel built in tribute to her by local artist Virginia Wright-Frierson in 2004.)
A vintage Airlie Gardens brochure highlighting the work of gatekeeper Minnie Evans.
A Source of Inspiration—and a Window to the World
“Being enveloped in this garden space, she was surrounded by artistic inspiration,” Klein said. “And then she has this stream of visitors coming from from Wilmington, who are this built-in network of potential potential clients who might come in and buy a work of art. And that’s how her notoriety begins to spread.”
Evans believed in her work, and she was eager to share it with new audiences. The show includes a pair of 1963 letters to a collector who she probably met at Airlie, in which she keeps him apprised of her work: “I am doing a lot of religious paintings… and some more modern arts.”
Jack Dermid, Minnie Evans seated on wooden chair, wearing a knit hat and coat, and working on a painting (1969).
“When she started working at Airlie, she began to use it as a way to supplement her income. She would hang up the drawings that she was making outside the gatehouse and people would buy them, initially very cheaply for 50 cents to a dollar,” Klein said. “It was still quite personal, but she was starting to think about the ways that she’s marketing her work. And once Nina gets involved, it really takes off. ”
Nina would be the art historian Nina Howell Starr, who learned of Evans in the early 1960s through a friend who had visited Airlie. Starr would become Evans’s publicist and representative, arranging exhibitions such as one at New York’s Church of Epiphany in 1966, and, most notably, at the Whitney.
Klein, currently an art history PhD student at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has been interested in Evans for well over a decade, since first learning of her at a summer internship at the Cameron during his undergrad studies. Evans later became the subject of Klein’s masters thesis, and, most recently, an article for the American Art Journal, published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Four Figures Collage), 1961, 1967. Collection of John Jerit. Photo: courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
At the MFA, Klein offers a unique interpretation of the works with faces or eyes that seem to peer out of the foliage. He traces them back to a traumatic historical event from Evans’s childhood, the Wilmington massacre, a white supremacist coup that took place in 1898, overthrowing a biracial government and burning Black-owned businesses. (Though Evans was only five years old, she spoke of the event in interviews later in life, noting that she remembered it.)
“There are contemporaneous news accounts of the Black population in Wilmington fleeing the city to the woods. There are stories about people seeing the eyes of people hiding in the trees for upwards of two weeks after that event,” Klein said. “So many of her works have these human faces or eyes kind of blossoming out of flowers
or from behind trees or plants. I want to encourage people to think about the experience that Evans would have had during this very traumatic incident of political violence.”
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Face surrounded by flora and eyes over forest scene), 1963. Collection of Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina, gift of William Banks Hinshaw, Jr. ©Estate of Minnie Jones Evans. Photo: courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Will Institutional Interest Lead to a Market Explosion?
Because Evans was so prolific, and because her work was so affordable, it’s hard to say how many surviving examples are out there, and if they might make their way to auction. Some people who purchased works at Airlie used them as postcards, mailing them home to friends as a memento from their time in North Carolina.
“There are stories of people in Wilmington who find her work in their attic,” Klein said. “She definitely has a big collector base there, and that’s spreading now.”
Minnie Evans, Untitled (1968). The drawing set an auction record for the artist with a $63,000 sale at the Outsider art auction at Christie’s New York in March 2024. Photo: courtesy of Christie’s New York.
Evans set a new auction record last year, with a $63,000 sale at the “Outsider Art” sale at Christie’s New York in March, according to the Artnet Price Database. But you can still get her work for remarkably low prices.
Last month, two works sold at Bonhams New York for $7,040 and $4,864. This month, a pair of drawings fetched $8,500 and and $5,000 at  Leland Little Auctions in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Five other lots this year have gone for $10,000 or under, with a sixth lot topping out at $35,000 at Leland, for her third-highest result on the block.
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Paisley Design), ca. 1950s. Collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, bequest of Harvie and Charles Abney. Photo: courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
But there could soon be a boom in market activity thanks to the institutional attention Evans is currently getting.
The MFA exhibition, organized by Art Bridges, is drawn from the holdings of the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, which has the world’s largest collection of Evans’s work. (It is also home to her archives, at the Minnie Evans Study Center.)
Installation view of “The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: ©Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
It’s the first museum solo show for the artist since “Minnie Evans: Artist” at New York’s Museum of American Folk Art in 1995, a full 30 years ago. Titled “The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans,” it originated at the Gund Museum at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and only features 16 works—a kind of enticing amuse-bouche ahead of “The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans” at the High and the Whitney, which will bring together more than 100 of her drawings.
The artist is also the subject of a new documentary, Minnie Evans: Draw or Die, from North Carolina filmmaker Linda Royal and Lighthouse Films, due out this fall. The MFA holding a screening of the film next month. More