Exhibitions

For so many of us, the first week of December means a pilgrimage to Florida for Art Basel Miami Beach. But this year, a herd of 100 wooden elephants are joining the party, as the conservationist-minded “The Great Elephant Migration” has made its way to the sand.
The life-size sculptures are each modeled after an individual elephant, mostly from the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in South India. They are the handiwork of the Coexistence Collective, a group of 200 local Indigenous artisans. Designed by Shubhra Nayar, they are made from lantana camara, an invasive weed threatening to overtake the natural habitat of Indian elephants.
After kicking off their U.S. tour this summer in Newport, Rhode Island, where the elephants roamed along the coastal cliffs near Gilded Age mansions, the herd spent much of the fall in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, strolling the cobblestone streets. But they make an even more dramatic spectacle on the South Florida beach, set against the bright blue sky and sparkling teal waters.
“It’s so nice, people in bare feet with the herd,” Ruth Ganesh, the British animal rights activist behind the roving art project, told me. “And elephants are nature’s greatest masterpiece. They are like a Surrealist dream.”
“The Great Elephant Migration” in Miami Beach. Photo by Lee Smith.
So far, the reception has been enthusiastic—perhaps a little too enthusiastic. A breathless Page Six exclusive reported that a security guard caught a couple having sex on top of one of the elephants. There were no arrests made, but Miami Beach Police are now patrolling the installation, to ensure the thousands of visitors behave themselves.
“We knew that people would love them, but we didn’t think they’d take it that literally!” Ganesh said. “My question is how? They have very bony ridges on their backs!”
Ganesh launched the traveling art project as part of her work with the Real Elephant Collective, a nonprofit she started with elephant researcher and scientist Tarsh Thekaekara. All the elephant sculptures are for sale, with proceeds going to 22 partnering conservation non-governmental organizations, or NGOs—benefitting elephants, but also other species. The aim is to promote a mutually beneficial coexistence between humans and nature.
“The Great Elephant Migration” in Miami Beach. Photo by Lee Smith.
“I feel very proud of the indigenous creators for having captured Miami’s attention,” Ganesh said, noting that the collective is a well-paying job for a community that typically made low wages on nearby tea plantations. “Now there are 20 different villages with little workshops, and they’re all making elephants. And they know the elephants. These poor tribes actually know how to live with the elephants, and this rewards them for their ability to coexist.”
To date, 250 sculptures have already sold, staying behind as the herd has made its way down the East Coast. Prices range from $8,000 for a baby elephant to $22,000 for an adult males with tusks, which tops out at 15 feet tall. (Ganesh advises bringing the works indoors for the winter, but you can also cover them with a tarp.)
If you don’t have the space—indoor or out—for a life-size elephant, you can also support the cause by purchasing a bottle of the project’s signature scent. Coexistence, from Italian perfume house Xerjoff, costs €250 ($263) a bottle, with part of the proceeds going to the NGOs. The luxury brand is the sponsor for the Miami exhibition.
“The Great Elephant Migration” in Miami Beach. Photo by Lee Smith.
“The perfume has been made with flowers that you would find in an Indian elephant’s habitat, so you have notes of jasmine and damask rose,” Ganesh said.
(When I asked Sergio Momo, Xerjoff founder and creative director, if he was concerned that people might get confused and think that the perfume smelled like elephants, rather than their habitat, Momo told me King Charles made the same joke when the artwork was on view in London in 2021.)
In Miami, the elephants are also joined on the beach by a set of 46 3D-printed stars, laid out on the sand in a star-shaped formation. The artwork, titled Miami Reef Star, is the work of artist Carlos Betancourt and architect Alberto Latorre. It’s a prototype for an underwater sculpture that will be the first piece in the ReefLine, a seven-mile artificial reef and sculpture park planned for Miami Beach.
Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre, Miami Reef Star (2024), rendering. Image by Mateo Rembe, courtesy of the ReefLine.
When “The Great Elephant Migration” was planning its trip to Florida, the ReefLine, which looks to restore Miami Beach’s decimated coral reefs, was a natural partner.
“We are about the water. They are about the land. And we’re both about preservation. So we decided to join forces,” Ximena Caminos, founder and artistic director of the ReefLine, told me. (The overarching presentation, which also included a Daniel Buren regatta at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, is called “Star Compass.”)
The ReefLine is being funded in part with a $5 million grant courtesy of Miami Beach taxpayers, who approved new arts and culture funding in 2022.
The first work, Concrete Coral by Leandro Erlich, is slated to be submerged 600 feet offshore, 20 feet below the waves, in spring 2025. The sculpture, of 22 cars, is a new take on the sandcastle traffic jam the artist created on the beach for Miami Art Week in 2019.
Leandro Erlich, Concrete Coral, rendering. Image courtesy of the ReefLine.
The individual arts of Miami Reef Star are designed to mimic the natural habitat of local fish, creating comforting nooks and crannies where they can relax, hidden from predators.
Both works will be made from CarbonXinc, a newly developed eco-friendly concrete, and will use Coral Lok technology, where lab-grown coral can be literally plugged into the art to kickstart the growth of the reef.
Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre, Miami Reef Star (2024), rendering. Image by Mateo Rembe, courtesy of the ReefLine.
“We’re going to start with soft corals that are called gorgonians; these are kind of like sea fans that sway with the waves. It’s the dominant type of marine life you find in the couple of patches where there are still near-shore reefs in Miami,” marine biologist Colin Foord, founder of Coral Morphologic, the Miami multimedia aquaculture studio and science lab that will grow the coral, told me.
After the party wraps up in Miami Beach, “The Great Elephant Migration” will be back on the road. It will head to Hermann Park in Houston, Texas, in April; Blackfeet Nation in Browning, Montana in May; Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in June; and wrap up its journey in July in Los Angeles.
“The Great Elephant Migration” is on view on the beach between 36th and 37th Streets, Miami Beach, Florida, December 2–8, 2024. More

As the art world began to descend upon Miami for the annual circus that is Art Basel Miami Beach, artists faced off with Olympic sailors on Biscayne Bay Monday afternoon, competing in a regatta-cum-performance art piece from French Conceptual artist Daniel Buren (1938–).
Titled Voile/Toile–Toile/Voile (Sail/Canvas–Canvas/Sail), the artwork, which features Buren’s signature colorful stripes on the boats’ sails, was originally performed in Berlin in 1975, and made its U.S. debut at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2018. The sails will be hung like paintings—Buren has called them “canvases that sail the wall”—in order of each color’s placement in the regatta at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.
The piece was restaged outside the PAMM off the Museum Park Baywalk in Biscayne Bay as part of “Star Compass,” a series of three large-scale Miami Art Week art activations.
The projects also include installations of “The Great Elephant Migration,” a herd of 100 life-size elephant sculptures made by Indigenous artisans in India, and a prototype of Miami Reef Star, a set of 46 3D-printed concrete stars by Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre set to become an artificial reef off the Miami Beach coast. It’s all curated by Ximena Caminos, the founder and artistic director of the ReefLine, the forthcoming underwater sculpture park, and Dodie Kazanjian, founder of Rhode Island nonprofit Art and Newport.
Daniel Buren, Voile/Toile–Toile/Voile (Sail/Canvas–Canvas/Sail), 1975/2024, regatta Miami Florida. Photo by Lee Smith.
“It’s a huge honor to have Daniel Buren in relation to Indigenous artists,” animal rights activist Ruth Ganesh, who founded “The Great Elephant Migration,” told me as we watched the sailboats tack across Biscayne Bay.
“The idea was that it’s migration and we’re on the beach, so let’s have something that moves,” she added. “It is also super joyful, like the herd!”
Daniel Buren, Voile/Toile–Toile/Voile (Sail/Canvas–Canvas/Sail), 1975/2024, regatta Miami Florida. Photo by Lee Smith.
A small crowd had gathered to watch the event, with Pucci artistic director Camille Miceli loudly cheering for the blue sail as the boats crisscrossed the bay.
To find sailors to race the boats for the artwork, the curators turned to local sculptor and furniture designer Emmett Moore of the Miami Yacht Club. Among the competitors were his wife, Sarah Newberry Moore, and Lara Dallman Weiss, who represented the U.S. at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games.
Daniel Buren, Voile/Toile–Toile/Voile (Sail/Canvas–Canvas/Sail), 1975/2024, regatta Miami Florida. Photo by Lee Smith.
Also at the tiller were local artists Justin Long and Nicholas Harrington, and identical twin Olympic hopefuls Fynn Olsen and Pierce Olysen. The teen phenoms—who are part of the Olympic development program and hope to sail at the 2028 L.A. games—took first and second place, respectively, flying the pink and purple sails.
But with the breeze blowing and the warm sun shining, the prospect of a week-long, art-fueled celebration ahead, it briefly felt like all of us—the sailors, the curators, the collectors, the art journalists, and even the elephants—could be winners. More

Miami art week 2024 has officially kicked off, with visitors flocking to the Magic City for a dose of sunshine and stone crabs to round out the year. Alongside pop-up exhibitions, gallery shows, and of course a slew of mainstay art fairs, museums are showing off their wares with a spate of must-see exhibitions. Below, we’ve gathered six of the most exciting shows to see.

“Hurvin Anderson: Passenger Opportunity” at Perez Art Museum
Hurvin Anderson, Passenger Opportunity (1966). Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery.
In the departure lounge of Kingston Jamaica’s international airport, there’s a pair of large murals by Carl Abrahams. Considered a pillar of 20th-century Jamaican art, Abrahams is best known for his surreal religious work, though in the airport works he tells the country’s story. The paintings stayed with Hurvin Anderson, a British painter born to Jamaican parents of the Windrush Generation, who encountered them while traveling back and forth from the island in 2022.
Anderson’s response is Passenger Opportunity (2024), an ambitious 16-panel piece. Lush Caribbean landscapes have long been a hallmark of Anderson’s paintings; here, however, they are largely abstracted into washes of color, with characters appearing in black and white, as though ripped from the pages of a newspaper. The series offers the airport as an in-between space occupied by tourists, immigrants, and emigrants alike—is there any place more fitting for such thoughts than Miami?

“Jacqueline de Jong: Vicious Circles“ at NSU Art Museum
Installation view “Jacqueline de Jong: Vicious Circles” at NSU Art Museum, 2024.
Jacqueline de Jong, the Dutch artist whose genre-defying practice challenged conflict and capitalism for six decades, is receiving her first U.S. exhibition, and it’s about time.
Building off its nation-leading collection of works by the avant-garde movement CoBrA, (named for the cities of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam from which its members predominantly came), NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale introduces one of the group’s few female artists and shows how she adopted its radical tenets.
A painter, sculptor, and engraver with little formal training, de Jong joined the anti-capitalist group Situationist International in the late 1950s. She founded the periodical The Situationist Times, through which she platformed kindred artists (though she was eventually expelled by movement’s Guy Debord). Combining Dadaist, Abstract Expressionist, and Pop art elements, de Jong was forever channeling contemporary politics into her work. The paintings on show at “Vicious Circles” remain pressing, revealing that little has changed.

“Ulla von Brandenburg: In Dialogue“ at the Bass
Installation view of “Ulla von Brandenburg: In Dialogue” featuring Adnan’s mural on the left, 2024. Photo: The Bass.
Paris-based German artist Ulla von Brandenburg typically stages her exhibitions amongst site-specific installations. Her new show at South Beach’s preeminent art museum, however, grounds her wide-ranging practice in late Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan’s ceramic mural Untitled (2023), which the Bass recently acquired. According to the museum, Adnan’s mural “serves as both a protagonist and theatrical backdrop” for von Brandenburg’s presentation—even though they also elected to commission a site-specific work from her, for good measure.
Von Brandenburg famously folds painting, photography, film, performance, and sculpture into her multidisciplinary practice, on her quest to amass the ever-alluring gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art.) As such, “In Dialogue” presents a selection of the artist’s latest efforts in film, sculpture, and watercolors. This vivid lineup cloaks the Bass with a frenzy of color and form.
Indeed, these two accomplished creatives share a fascination with geometric abstraction. The cross-cultural, intergenerational conversation that ensues elucidates their belief that the genre can at once probe and provoke the social and spatial structures that subtly govern daily life.

Lucy Bull: The Garden of Forking Paths at ICA Miami
Lucy Bull, 3:13 (2023). Photo: courtesy ICA Miami/Fondation Louis Vuitton.
Often, the most compelling works of abstract painting float familiar forms in front of a viewer before subtly slipping them away. Lucy Bull’s oil-on-linen works are in this camp: expanses of warm color (some measuring more than 10 feet across) whose beguiling layering owes something to the frottage of Max Ernst.
In marathon sessions, Bull stamps, splays, and stretches the brush across the surface of her works. It’s a personal, idiosyncratic process that has turned the thirty-something into one of the most in-demand artists on the market. “I want to draw the viewer in and create something that hopefully they can get lost in,” Bull told Artnet earlier this year. Across the 16 paintings at “The Garden of Forking Paths,” visitors can do just that.

Andrea Chung: Between Too Late and Too Early at Contemporary Art Museum North Miami 
Installation view, “Andrea Chung: Between Too Late and Too Early” at Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami.
For decades now, Andrea Chung has simultaneously critiqued Western notions of paradise while celebrating the Caribbean islands’ innate beauty. The Newark-born, San Diego-based artist’s survey of works from 2008 through today carries that mantle forth across engrossing installations, powerful films, and decadent collages. The show is serious and playful, celebratory and grieving. Hence the show’s title, which evokes Chung’s power to hold conflicting truths.
The spectacle opens with an immersive gallery of cyanotypes, a medium Chung returns to often. Collages guide guests to each of the exhibition’s following chambers—first, a series made with paper from Taschen’s book on cyanotypes, then her most iconic collage series celebrating Black women through impeccably arranged flowers, archival photographs, ink, and glimmering beads.
Installation works, however, prove the show’s true focal point—from protruding hands to a site-specific piece titled The Wailing Room, where hanging bottles crafted from the historically loaded commodity of sugar each bear imagined messages from a mother who was forced to sacrifice her child for his safety. These vessels have been decomposing since the show opened, falling and melting into rich puddles on the floor.

Fighters for Freedom: William H. Johnson Picturing Justice at Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum
William H. Johnson, Harriet Tubman (ca. 1945). Courtesy of the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum.
As the story goes, the entire oeuvre of the Black American art star William H. Johnson almost ended up in the trash after his death. Fortunately, a friend saved it. Johnson’s folk art has since received several acclaimed outings, featuring most recently amongst the National Gallery of Art’s “Afro-Atlantic Histories” show in 2022 and the Met’s acclaimed Harlem Renaissance exhibition earlier this year. His full “Fighters For Freedom” series, meanwhile, has been on tour since 2022, marking only its third showcase in 75 years. This edition in Miami is the exhibition’s third to last stop.
Johnson produced these works of oil on paperboard throughout the early 1940s, at the height of his output. Using imagery sourced from newspapers, Life and Ebony magazine, and the New York Public Library’s archives, he amassed a pantheon of freedom fighters old and new, Black and white, like Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, Indian emancipator Mohandas Gandhi, and legendary singer Marian Anderson. Each of the 27 paintings on view pays its dues in Johnson’s signature style. Flat, colorful depictions give rise to complex compositions that use symbols to convey each figure’s complex story, and sometimes, how they all worked together. More

The Museum of Modern Art opened its first exhibition, “Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh,” just weeks after the stock market crash that would lead to the Great Depression. On November 16, 1929, George Cutler, a produce executive, leapt from a seventh-floor window in the Munson Building, on Wall Street. The next night, in MoMA’s inaugural space on 730 Fifth Avenue, people gathered around Paul Gauguin’s bafflingly strange 1889 Portrait of Meijer de Haan and Cezanne’s somewhat unfinished-seeming The Bather from 1885. Both paintings are on view right now at MoMA, in “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” an exhibition focusing on Bliss, one of the museum’s three founders. Her art-historical impact is exemplified by these 40 major Modernist paintings—all but one, Van Gogh’s iconic Starry Night (1889), having been part of her collection.
Installation view of “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from November 17, 2024, through March 29, 2025. Photo: Emile Askey.
Van Gogh was undeniably a brilliant painter, but perhaps because this painting has become such gift shop merch fodder—printed on scarves, umbrellas, and socks—Starry Night didn’t hit the way I thought it would when seeing it displayed. It’s an exception in “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” which runs until March 29, 2025. Not just because it’s safely behind velvet ropes, like the star we’ve been told it is, but because it’s the only work included that Bliss didn’t actually own. Curators Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn chose it as a stand-in for all the colossal work MoMA purchased through sales from Bliss’s collection. Temkin explained: “Bliss never had a Van Gogh in her collection, and it’s said that she always hoped to add one.”
Before her death at 66 in 1931, Bliss bequeathed a significant portion of her collection to MoMA, contingent on the museum’s ability to prove itself financially stable within three years. Her will allowed works from her donated collection to be sold by MoMA so it could acquire new, equally radical works. Starry Night was one of the first works the museum purchased with these funds, along with Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Constantin Brancusi’s The Newborn (1920). This gift came after Bliss co-founded the institution together with Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Mary Quinn Sullivan, believing New York needed a permanent home for Modern art. In 1934, MoMA staged the memorial exhibition “The Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934.” The current show is a redux of sorts, and follows the book, Inventing the Modern, which features Bliss and honors the under-sung female arts professionals and patrons who helped build and foster the New York institution over decades.
Installation view of the exhibition “The Lillie P. Bliss Collection, 1934.” May 14, 1934–September 12, 1934. The Museum of Modern Art Archives.
Nearly a century later, as figurative painting stages its 10th comeback in the past two and a half decades, much of the work shown in galleries downtown is clearly indebted to Modernist painting. Cezanne’s Still Life with Ginger Jar, Sugar Bowl, and Oranges (1902–06), however, demonstrates that it’s not enough to just paint a still life. Cezanne was so good that his work will never look old. It could be said that he solved the problem of painting, and that anyone working after him is surfing in his wake. Nobody puts orange next to green the way he did, and his handling of small daubs of white paint is almost occultish. This modest still life overpowers the famous Van Gogh, and the mystery of that makes the show exciting. 
Genuine mystery also exists regarding Bliss herself. As the wall text explains, little is known of the prescient collector, largely because she demanded her personal papers be destroyed upon her death. Bliss moved out of the family home into her own apartment for the first time at age 60, then became aggressively philanthropic. A faint figure from history of whom very little is known about other than her serious undertaking helping to establish a world-class museum who then gave away her fortune and sought to be erased is tantalizingly mysterious. As to why she avoided posthumous notoriety, Silver-Kohn can only speculate: “She did have a life filled with many interesting people, and artists, and we can speculate that there were many romantic affairs, or just things she wanted to keep private.”
The music room in Bliss’s apartment, 1001 Park Avenue, c. 1929–1931. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
In an age where art collecting can seem very much like personal aggrandizement, with names emblazoned on the wings of museums and champagne-drenched private views at Art Basel, there’s something aspirationally noble about Bliss’s aversion to the spotlight. 
Beneath a different spotlight is Georges Seurat, who Bliss focused on collecting toward the end of her life. That I’d never paid him much attention I now see was foolish. Pointillism always seemed like a quirky gimmick, one that Roy Lichtenstein took to its logical conclusion. Admittedly, I’d mostly seen Seurats in reproduction, and wasn’t prepared for Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor (1888), which is almost aggressively modern. A one-inch border around the edge of the painting, made of small daubs of colors complimentary to the ones in the central image, is sensual and ornamental in a way I wasn’t expecting. Another stand out is his twelve-by-nine-inch conté drawing A Woman Fishing, from 1884. Strange and poetic, it could have been a New Order album cover. It offers nothing but the foggy view of a well-dressed woman waiting for a fish to bite. This is how women from the late 19th-century have mostly been depicted, as idle, attractive, and strapped inside tight corsets. 
Installation view of “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from November 17, 2024, through March 29, 2025. Photo: Emile Askey.
Almost all of the paintings in this exhibition are by men who, of course, have dominated a certain version of art history for a very long time. But three women are the reason MoMA exists, and the almost paranormally good taste of Lillie Bliss is the real star of the show. In organizing the exhibition, Temkin saw, as I did, how the collection demonstrates “the unity of one person’s eye.” More

Sofia Coppola’s seminal film “Lost In Translation” (2003) begins with a 33-second shot of Scarlett Johansson’s butt. And it is an iconic image—pulled directly from contemporary art. “It was based on a John Kacere painting,” Coppola told Rolling Stone. “His work all looks like that.”
Indeed, the Lexington, Kentucky-born Kacere became a star in the 1970s, collected by the likes of Sylvester Stallone. He was known for painting scantily clad bums of thin white women before photorealism had penetrated contemporary art. His work reads like the male gaze counterpart to late Chicago artist Christina Ramberg, simplified to focus on supple flesh and fabric.
John Kacere, Pascale (1987). Image: Gratin.
Kacere died in 1999, at 79, having produced 115 paintings. Those limited quantities, paired with backlash around his subject matter, have rendered it rare to witness Kacere’s work in person. (For his part, Kacere maintained that he made art about sexuality—not sex.) Louis K. Meisel staged a survey in 2020, but as Gratin gallery founder Talal Abillama told me, Meisel’s crowded SoHo, New York dealership doesn’t offer a traditional viewing experience. So, Abillama set out to organize an exhibition of Kacere’s work at his ascendant East Village gallery.
His exhibition, titled “Butt Can You Feel It?” features six large-scale works of oil on canvas, two smaller photos Kacere used as source imagery, and a sketch.
“Before I did the show, I would ask my friends, specifically girls, ‘what’s a painter or a painting that you like?’” Abillama recounted over the phone. Several mentioned Kacere. When Abillama finally got in front of a painting himself, he said, “it shook me.”
Every piece, except the film, is named after a sitter. Abillama said Kacere usually worked with models. He also did commissioned portraits—though not without incident.
John Kacere, Red Bikini (1975). Image: Gratin.
In 1972, for instance, Louisville’s Speed Art Museum acquired “Purple Panties” (ca. 1969). “Buying this painting was considered revolutionary,” Curator Miranda Lash later told Louisville Public Media. “They were so proud that they were able to, sort of, break past the traditional societal mores of being ‘prudish’ about sexuality.”
“Purple Panties” became a local icon. The Speed sold it on posters and matchbooks. But, controversy broke out in 2004. The work’s model, Eleanor Browning Coke—daughter of photographer Van Deren Coke—sued her father’s estate for forcing her to disrobe so Kacere, his friend, could paint her. Browning Coke was 24 at the time. Still, the conversation around consent’s relation to power dynamics persisted. Rather than shying away from the issue, Lash put “Purple Panties” back on view in 2018, with an enhanced wall label to add context.
John Kacere, Kristina (1991). Image: Gratin.
Such debates have not stymied demand for Kacere’s work. One of his paintings even appeared on a Supreme shirt in 2022. Abillama told me the admiration was palpable last Friday night as fashion folk, families, and fans descended on “Butt Can You Feel It?”
“Time is the best friend of great art,” he said.
Given Kacere’s limited oeuvre, Abillama had to chase a chain of collectors from New York to Paris to Tokyo, plying them to put their pieces on view or up for sale. Most of these artworks have never hung in the same room. The guy who consigned the show’s biggest work even considered taking it back after seeing it installed. Abillama convinced him otherwise by raising the price. Several works here cost six figures. By the time of writing, some have already sold.
John Kacere’s “Butt Can You Feel It?” is on view at Gratin Gallery until December 20, 2024. More

Over the past four decades, Marc Jacobs has introduced grunge to the catwalk, legitimized street art at Louis Vuitton, and plucked rising fine artists mid-ascent for collaborations with his eponymous line.
To celebrate his fashion house’s 40th anniversary, Jacobs has partnered with Tribeca-based agency ICNCLST to drop reimagined designs by some of those fabled talents. A survey of works by the artists who have collaborated with Marc by Marc Jacobs and the house’s new Gen Z-coded Heaven collection is also newly opened in Los Angeles.
Installation view. Image: ofstudio, courtesy of Control Gallery.
“Like many, the first time that I learned of Takashi Murakami, it was not through a gallery but rather through his iconic collaboration with Marc,” ICNCLST Founder Sky Gellalty,—who co-curated the forthcoming exhibition, titled “Just Like Heaven,” with the Heaven by Marc Jacobs team—remarked in press materials. “Marc essentially set the blueprint for all that I, and so many of my friends, do as a career.” Over the phone, Gellalty added that he met Jacobs on the board of youth empowerment organization Free Arts, and was impressed to learn that Jacobs is as good of a person as he a designer.
“Just Like Heaven” opened on November 22 and remains on view through January 18 at Control Gallery, which Gellalty co-founded with Beyond The Streets creator Roger Gastman.
Artworks surrounding Alake Shilling’s Big Bossy Bear (2023) atop a cinderblock plinth. Image: ofstudio, courtesy of Control Gallery.
The show will feature about 20 original artworks from stars like Sofia Coppola, Damien Hirst, and Marilyn Minter—alongside younger names like photographer Petra Collins, tattoo artist Keegan Dakkar, and painter Alake Shilling.
“I think it is a rare opportunity for all of the artists, because without someone like Marc,” Gellalty told me, “they might not have a venue to exhibit together.”
The pieces on view will span several decades. Some will be original artworks that were later turned into designs. The eventual fashions themselves may also appear. A few participants—like graffiti writer Futura 2000, sketch artist Eri Wakiyama, and Pharell-approved creative Cactus Plant Flea Market (aka Cynthia Lu)—are contributing pieces made just for the show. Others, like musician Bladee (who appears on Charli XCX’s ‘Brat’ re-release) are even offering works in unfamiliar mediums. And, in true Beyond The Streets style, there will be t-shirts and prints available in the exhibition’s gift shop.
A wall with three works by Futura 2000 in the center, and Damien Hirst’s Mickey (2012) on the right. Image: ofstudio, courtesy of Control Gallery.
Art and fashion have historically intertwined. Elsa Schiaparelli, whose avant-garde maximalism unseated Coco Chanel’s austere allure as the leading aesthetic after WWI, famously worked with Salvador Dali to devise her Lobster dress. Nonetheless, as Jacobs remarked in a recent conversation with Jerry Saltz filmed by Vogue, art has long been adamant about separating itself from craft. “When a fashion designer says ‘fashion is art,’ they are pretentious, arrogant” Jacobs remarked. “Like, ‘how dare you’ think you are a great artist? You work in cloth and you make fashion.’”
“I think that’s a shortcoming on the part of my world, that it tries to keep every other world at an arm’s length,” Saltz responded.
Gellalty hopes “Just Like Heaven” will inspire a larger institution to stage a retrospective of Jacobs’s pioneering efforts at this intersection somewhere down the line. More

Stainless steel, pandan leaves, and patent leather belts are some of the unexpected materials challenging the dominant legacy and traditional format of tapestries in Salon 94’s group exhibition “The Lady and the Unicorn: New Tapestry” (through December 21, 2024). The show borrows its name from a celebrated 16th-century Flemish tapestry cycle, taking the works’ subject, technique, and lingering mysteries as points of departure. Expansive in both material and geographical scope, the featured works defy the looming legacy of the vaunted tapestry cycle to chart new futures for the medium.
The Mysteries of The Lady and the Unicorn
Housed in a special climate-controlled room at the Musée du Cluny in Paris, the Lady and the Unicorn is composed of six tapestries in the mille fleurs (“thousand flowers”) style. Showcasing a striking red background brimming with more than 40 different types of cultivated and wildflowers, each panel features a svelte and bejeweled woman flanked by domesticated, feral, and mythological animals. The tapestries were originally woven around 1500 in Flanders for the Le Vistes, a French family that held various political and administrative appointments at court. Rediscovered in the mid-19th century, the works were swiftly memorialized by acclaimed writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and George Sand.
A woman admires the newly restored “The Lady and the Unicorn” tapestries at the Cluny museum in Paris. Photo: Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images.
Five of the six panels in the cycle are allegories on the senses. The subject of the sixth—featuring a woman inspecting jewelry—is still debated to this day. Fueling the mystery is an inscription reading À mon seul désir (“To my only desire”) woven into the background tent. Scholars have alternately interpreted the phrase as either a celebration of free will or a clandestine message hiding the initials of lovers. Both its secrets and its superlative craftsmanship have contributed to the tapestries’ continued historical relevance through the centuries, including their revival by William Morris for textile and wallpaper designs.
The Lady and the Unicorn found in the collection of Musée de Cluny. Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images.
However, some more recent experts have argued that celebrating the unicorn cycle as the apogee of tapestry arts crowds out the importance of other textile traditions across the globe. In her 1965 treatise “On Weaving,” the late artist Anni Albers lauded the unicorn tapestries as “great works of art” but also advocated for a simultaneous and equal appreciation of Andean textiles. Similarly, Fabienne Stephan, the curator of the show at Salon 94, notes that “works in the exhibition may not all have the scale of 16th century tapestries, yet they are proof that centuries after its creation, the medium of weaving can be used to tell new epic stories and inspire an ideal future.”
Beyond the Loom
Installation view, from left to right: Porfirio Gutiérrez, Paquimé, (2024); Gutiérrez, Trails of Tears (2024); Margaret Rarru Garrawurra, Dhomala (Sail), (2024). Courtesy of Salon 94.
Several works in “The Lady and the Unicorn: New Tapestry” underscore the importance of inherited Indigenous knowledge in weaving and textile arts. The California-based Zapotec artist Porfirio Gutierrez uses materials ranging from pecans to pomegranates to dye his fibers, transforming the flora of the mille fleurs from a background decision into a foundational element of the entire work. The senior Yolngu artist and master weaver Margaret Rarru Garrawurra used parts of the pandan tree (also known as the screw pine) to dye and weave a towering sail, emphasizing her practice’s position at the juncture between ancestral knowledge and quotidian goods.
Other artists in the exhibition tackle the industrialized process of tapestry creation itself. Kyoto-based Mitsuko Asakura’s sculptures, which resemble half-finished tapestries on bamboo looms, address the region’s long historical tradition of dying and weaving kimonos. In some cases, Asakura weaves the wooden supports themselves into her works, unraveling the hierarchy of production.
Installation view of Sagarika Sundaram, Night Creeper (2024) and Sight Unseen (2024). Courtesy of Salon 94.
Sagarika Sundaram’s wool sculptures bypass weaving altogether. Describing her work as a combination between papermaking, collage, and sculpture, she creates pressed felt “blind,” building a backwards palimpsest of pigments on wool obtained from locations as various as Oaxaca and the lower Himalayas. She notes that her broad sourcing of materials echoes that of classical European tapestry producers, as indigo and many of the other materials commonly used to dye have their own wide “geographical footprint.”
“My process mirrors the complexity, ferocity, and savagery that exists both in nature and in our human nature,” Sundaram tells Artnet News. Comparing the wound-like openings in her sculptures to eyelids, she says their “visceral quality” ensures “they feel like membranes, they feel like skin and bones,” while their overall “edible quality” means the work “hits the register of the mouth.” Here, the senses serve as connection points between the tapestry cycle and her sculptures: compressed, embodied, and exhumed.
Weaving Desire
Installation view of Adeline Halot, Sankai (2024). Courtesy of Salon 94.
Multiple artists in “The Lady and the Unicorn: New Tapestry” interrogate the yearning inherent in the unicorn tapestries—including the yearning for money and power that has shaped the history of the medium. For instance, during the French Revolution tapestries and furnishings in the royal collection were burnt for their gold and silver threads to help finance the state amid the turmoil.  Using stainless steel and flax linen, Adeline Halot creates gleaming metallic sculptures whose gold and silver tones allude to the destructive potential of material desire. Of Halot’s materials, Stephan says “it is rare to see an artist developing a craft that is her own, based on history and looking into the future. In a moment when we are constantly shown AI-powered, illusionary images, Halot’s work glitches reality by weaving and sculpting metal thread with linen.”
Qualeasha Wood, bed rot (2024). Courtesy of Salon 94 and the artist.
Qualeasha Wood directly engages with the accelerated pace of desire in the contemporary digital world. Referring to textiles “as a bridge between the analog and the digital,” she has woven the pieces in this exhibition from a computerized loom, then further transformed them through hand embroidery and beading—a process that combines impersonal precision with, in her words, “the intimacy and imperfection of handcraft.” Endemic to her approach is an acknowledgment of weaving’s central yet underappreciated role in technological innovation; the jacquard loom, for instance, is widely considered a predecessor of early computers due to its interchangeable punch card system.
“I am interested in how platforms and technologies thrive on desire: the desire for interaction, affirmation, and escape, but also the darker, voyeuristic desire tied to surveillance and control,” Wood says. Her tapestries center her identity among these digital fragments to critique how “Black women’s bodies are often surveilled, consumed, and commodified, both online and offline.” Her digitally mediated threads also offer a contemporary update to Albers’s claim that “threads were the earliest transmitters of meaning.” Ultimately, Salon 94’s exhibition shows that textiles and weaving remain essential media for communication, whether they are untangling the allegorical and technical mysteries of The Lady and the Unicorn or expressing other personal and cultural histories that deserve to be seen just as clearly. More