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    ‘Lost’ Photos of Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana Go on View in London

    When he lived in New York in the 1960s, William John Kennedy may have made his living as an advertising and commercial photographer, but he also had a fine art practice. A new show highlights yet another dimension of his career: a previously unexhibited trove of photos showing two giants of Pop art, Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana, in unguarded moments in their studios, posing with some of their most recognizable works, and at the openings of New York exhibitions.
    Robert Indiana photographed in his studio by William John Kennedy.
    Kennedy’s central London residence is now a showcase for his photographs of the artists from 1963 and 1964, when they were both early in careers that would go on to help define contemporary art.
    Kennedy (who died in 2021) met Indiana at the opening of the latter’s first New York solo show, and soon began photographing him at his studio in the legendary Coenties Slip neighborhood. Indiana then connected Kennedy with Warhol at the “Americans 1963” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (in which Indiana was included).
    Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana, photographed by William John Kennedy.
    Kennedy would soon bring his camera to Warhol’s legendary Factory and photograph him and the people around him, including poet Gerard Malanga, “Superstar” Ultra Violet, and writer Taylor Mead. Kennedy had ideas like photographing Warhol standing in a field of flowers with his paintings of the same subject.
    Robert Indiana, photographed by William John Kennedy.
    Former Warhol Museum director Eric Shiner noted a special quality to the photos of the father of Pop. “The Kennedy photos are perhaps the most intimate portraits of Andy that I have ever seen,” he said. “They capture him at the point of his arrival as a true art star and yet he remains his humble, fun-loving, playful self in each frame. They humanize him in a way that few photos do, and if anything, they add to the mythology of Warhol as the benevolent, happy person that he truly was, and yet is rarely celebrated as.”
    Andy Warhol, photographed by William John Kennedy.
    One striking photo shows Warhol in his studio, holding up a piece of clear plastic printed with the image of Marilyn Monroe that would come to emblazon some of his most famous works.
    Another former Warhol Museum director, Patrick Moore, pointed out the poetic dimension of the photo: “In the image, Warhol stands in the Factory, sunlight flooding through the window, illuminating him as he holds aloft the acetate of Marilyn Monroe that would later make some of his most famous paintings. Here we see Warhol in a new way—young, triumphant, about to conquer the art world through transforming the images of movie stars that were his childhood refuge. We literally see Warhol through his art.”
    Robert Indiana, photographed by William John Kennedy.
    Kennedy seemed to have a special effect on Warhol, the photographer’s wife Marie told the Guardian in 2022, when some of the photographs were published in a book, William John Kennedy: The Lost Archive.
    “Andy, of course, was this strange bird,” she said. “When I was in his company, he was very shy, you had to draw him out. But he was much more relaxed with Bill. Bill came up with all these ideas for pictures—getting Andy to wear paintings like sandwich boards or pose behind the acetate for his Marilyn Monroe screen prints—and Andy always went along with him.” 
    Marie Kennedy told the Guardian that during a move from New York to Florida, Kennedy almost threw the photos away. 
    Robert Indiana, photographed by William John Kennedy.
    A photo of Indiana with his best-known work, Love, which has become one of the world’s most-reproduced artworks, resulted from a call that came in with no notice, the photographer recalls: “He said, ‘Bill, come on down I want to show you something.’ So I went down to the studio and there he was, holding his Love painting.”
    “When I look back on my involvement with the Pop artists, it all came off my initial involvement with Robert Indiana,” said Kennedy. “He was the linchpin.”
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    22 Rising Artists Designed Tarot Cards for This Copenhagen Show

    Although tarot and art have flirted over the past few centuries, a new show opening in Copenhagen on May 3 unveils their all-out affair. Danish artist Rose Eken has curated “The Fool’s Journey” for Eighteen Gallery in the Danish city. Some 22 artists of many backgrounds and bents encapsulated whichever one of the tarot’s Major Arcana cards Eken pulled for them. The curator herself drew the highly misunderstood Death.
    Eken’s relationship with tarot “began with my interest and study of the female artists connected to the surrealist movement; such as Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, or Ithell Colquhoun,” she said, “who all have worked a lot with the symbolism of tarot or even made their own tarot decks.”
    Rose Eken, Death (2024). Black mirror and glazed ceramic. Photo: Eighteen Gallery
    Interest in divination is exploding as global uncertainty intensifies, yet few fine artists—save for Hilma’s Ghost—have dared yet to design their own deck. “The Fool’s Journey” took shape years ago, as Eken and artist Albin Werle (also in the show) played with taking on the project themselves. They soon realized, as Eken recalled, that “even daring to attempt to render all 78 cards could take a lifetime!”
    Frederik Exner, The Devil (2024). Photo: Eighteen Gallery.
    Instead, Eken focused on the most iconic cards—tarot’s Major Arcana, which begins with the Fool (symbolizing a fresh start and total innocence), and ends with the World (symbolizing completion). Each of the 20 sequential archetypes in between illustrate “the fool’s journey,” or the character’s ascension from naivety to knowing. Eken asked her gallery of 10 years whether it would let her host the show to accommodate the “tight white cube hang” she envisioned. Then, she amassed 21 artists and pulled cards to determine their assignments.
    Nina Harman, Justice (2024) Encaustic medium, pigment and inkjet print on wood panel. Photo: Eighteen Gallery
    In addition to requesting that all contributions measure ​​around 28 by 18 inches for continuity, Eken also asked her artists for entirely new works. Every single result is surprising, but some are more straightforward. Nina Hartman’s Justice, for example, embodies balance through printed scales and the work’s sculptural, triangular form. Frederik Exner’s mixed-media relief of The Devil features Satan’s throne and perfunctory dark overtones.
    Anna Stahn, Strength (Tribute to us all) (2024). Photo: Eighteen Gallery.
    By contrast, Anna Stahn’s patinated bronze evokes the minor arcana’s Three of Cups card more than the assignment she actually got, but while “the tarot card of Strength resembles a woman alone with a lion,” Stahn said, “I feel the most strength in groups of friends.” Siri Elfhag’s decision to envision The Magician as an octopus reminds viewers that poltergeists don’t make the tarot function—the cards simply harness semiotics to access a reader’s innate ESP.
    And although Caroline Absher was at work finishing her solo booth for the Independent art fair with New York gallery Fredericks & Freiser, she channeled the full rainbow—and what looks like a self-portrait—into The World. “I learned that I enjoy working from a conceptual prompt,” she said. “It helps that The World is one of the most positive and encouraging cards.” Her work will join its cohorts in a tarot book to be made commemorating the show.
    “The Fools Journey” will be on view at Eighteen Gallery, Slagtehusgade 18c, 1711 Copenhagen, Denmark, May 3–31. On-site tarot readings will be available to book through the gallery’s website.
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    Why Swizz Beatz Is Welcoming A.I. in Art-Making

    Beyond the sensory overload of the national pavilions in the Giardini della Biennale, there’s another trippy garden in Venice.
    This enclave nestled inside a 16th-century church is the brainchild of the Belgian artist Arne Quinze and the U.S. producer, musician, and art collector, Swizz Beatz. Their exhibition titled “Are We The Aliens_” showcases Quinze’s bold exploration into glass, ceramics, and bronze alongside A.I.-generated visuals. At its core is a collaborative sonic installation: an immersive aluminum sanctuary, inviting visitors to recline and absorb its dynamic soundscape.
    We caught up with the artist and musician to hear more about their collaboration, marrying sound to art, and taking a leap with the next generation of creators.
    Arne Quinze and Swizz Beatz, Sonic Levitation. Photo by Dave Bruel for Arne Quinze. Courtesy of Konig Galerie.
    Arne Quinze: We finished installing a half hour ago. The experience is fresh—we just came down from sitting in our garden. Even after making this piece, I’m still discovering. I’m still enjoying. I’m still traveling, I’m still in wonder at what we did.
    Swizz Beatz: The collaboration came about because we have a brother in between us but we’ve been a fan of each other’s work for many years.
    AQ: The first time I came here was two, three years ago, to check the location, because it’s difficult to find the right location in Venice. After I found it, I started to make the molds and I flew to San Diego and I showed him the model, and we were sitting around the model and talking.
    SB: His model, it’s still on the table where he left it. It’s a model of the sculpture that I was looking at while I was doing the music, vibing, listening to music in the speakers and just asking: How would the sound look coming out of the sculpture? How would you feel?
    AQ: The concept of the exhibition title “Are We The Aliens_” came up because we have the same view on the world, from the discussions that we had. The theme is actually questioning ourselves. We need to learn to approach again our planet with beauty and with our art and to communicate and to embrace and to live in harmony. That’s the message. Because on this planet, there’s just one race, one species as humans, we are all the same.
    Photo by Dave Bruel for Arne Quinze. Courtesy of Konig Galerie.
    SB: This is my first, I like to call it sonic installation score, to this amazing sculpture masterpiece. I’m usually scoring for a movie or doing music-production for a song. This was different because the medium was different. The energy is different. His vision is different. So, it was a pure collaboration. I went through it, like, three or four times and then a last time because we’re still learning each other. Usually, if I’m producing something I’m taking the lead, but you know, he’s the main producer as the artist for his vision, I had to kind of like walk side-by-side, see if this works, right? And then eventually I was like, “Okay, we can jibe from here and then we got to a masterful place together.”
    AQ: I think we are here to bring beauty and I think through beauty we try to communicate and bring us all back together. When you see a white, flower field, you need to embrace that and to learn to see that again and that will bring the music and the art back into our lives—and that will reunite us. I think this is important.
    SB: We also want people to be a little uncomfortable. Because when you create intensity, when it smooths out, you can actually feel everything else happening. If we had it just with garden sounds, you wouldn’t really notice the change—it’s a blackout in your mind. So, this is designed to test all your senses.
    The hardest thing with scoring this was actually: How do you keep changing the direction, and keep it interesting to keep playing after this period of time? I started with soundscape that would put you to sleep. Then I started to get a little experimental, put the rough ends on it, and then started formatting it so we go, low, high, low, high, high, low, low, high, low—and it’s almost not calculated. Because you think, “Oh, here comes a big sound.” You think it’s that and it just goes into a drum and it’s playing with your senses.
    Arne Quinze, Ceramorphia. Photo by Dave Bruel for Arne Quinze. Courtesy of Konig Galerie.
    AQ: I think the thing that we did together is not 2D, it’s not 3D. I think it’s beyond 4D. And that is all the layers that you will see. It’s a magic garden when you dive in. I’ve been working in installation for 30 years now, I have a lot of experience. What I really like with this one, I’m always in places, like somewhere in the middle of the jungle or in the desert or far away and making big monumental installations. This is a very intimate garden. You come in our secret garden.
    We used many things to put it together, and we asked artificial intelligence to be as artificially intelligent as possible. Because I’m questioning, are we the humans and they are the aliens—or are we the aliens and they’re the humans? Because artificial intelligence is maybe the first new species on this planet. And it’s everywhere, it’s in your microphone, it’s in your telephone, and we have to learn to live with it. Still, I think artificial intelligence is far off being able to produce the emotions that we did here.
    SB: Well, for me, I’m not bothered by using A.I. in many ways. You can use it for speeding up processes. But the thing is when you don’t have talent and you use it, it’s a disaster. But if you do have talent and you have a plan to enhance something that’s already great but that would have taken you probably like six months, it could take you four hours. My son has been writing this animation movie for eight years and the hardest thing was him finding the designer for his characters. Now, he has almost all of his characters done in one month, when this would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, in these ways it’s good but I think that it should be in the right hands.
    Arne Quinze, Impact Glass. Photo by Dave Bruel for Arne Quinze. Courtesy of Konig Galerie.
    AQ: I think artificial intelligence will also challenge us to take the next step. I’m not afraid of that, not afraid. It’s a new generation. I think we need to dive into that, to use that.
    SB: The world is a smaller place now because of technology. I think the creators are now getting more confident, of stepping outside and not being afraid, which is going to push the art little further to even like what you have seen from us. And I’m seeing artists, who would have normally tried to put their hands behind their back for the perfect curator or the perfect gallery or the perfect museum to notice them. But now, I’m seeing more of the art world, they’re like, “Listen, if I get in a museum, I’m cool with that. If not, I had fun doing the piece.” And this is how you keep art alive, is by taking the risk. And I love that I see people around the world taking the risk now and I hear all type of stories of people telling me their new ideas. This is good.
    AQ: Yeah, and you see also our kids, the next generation, they have possibilities that we never had. They are diving into a new world—I’m so encouraged to see what they will produce.
    SB: Yeah. Because you can’t really produce for the hype; you have to produce for the passion. It’s a disaster when I see artists producing for the hype, and getting misled and their market is ran up and then one bad sale and you don’t hear from these people again—and nobody’s helping them get back on their feet. And so, I encourage all artists to take their time and really do the passion and don’t worry about the hype. Worry about the longevity and what you can change in that period. The hype, that’s going to come and go.
    I apply that to myself as well, because being in the music industry is a big hype business, so naturally you bring that with you anyway. With art, when I first started, I collected for the wrong reasons. I was collecting for the hype so I was just going for the big names, just to impress people coming to the house. And then I was like, “I don’t need all this.” I need to be able to meet the artists, treat them as family, you know, not be so transactional. Most people are very transactional when they’re talking to the artist. What’s in their mind is “how can I get a piece?” instead of “is this artist at peace?” Emotionally, spiritually, physically, all of these things.
    AQ: But you also worked here as an artist. It’s really not just as a composer or as a musician—a musician is an artist but this is different. You are touching material, we are sculpting together. That is how I see it.
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    LG OLED Returns Kim Whanki to New York with Luminous Abstractions at Frieze

    Five digital expressions of legendary late Korean abstractionist Kim Whanki’s iconic paintings are casting a glow over the LG OLED Lounge at Frieze New York.
    In the spirit of LG’s initiative at the Guggenheim and its involvement in Britain’s Venice Biennale pavilion, LG OLED has invited a group of Korean multimedia artists to reimagine a select few Kim masterpieces on screens, setting new standards for digital art display.
    The showcase, titled “We Meet Again In New York,” coincides with “Whanki in New York,” a new show on view through June 13 at the Korean Cultural Center New York (KCCNY), presented in collaboration with Seoul’s Whanki Museum and LG OLED. Together, they mark Kim’s first extensive posthumous exhibitions in the city.
    Installation image of Whanki x LG OLED showcase “We Meet Again In New York” at Frieze New York. Courtesy LG OLED and © Whanki Foundation. Whanki Museum
    Stunning Displays
    The concurrent showcases highlight Kim’s last decade as a working artist, which he spent in New York. Amidst the rising art capital’s thriving abstract expressionist scene, Kim’s practice of painting Korean cultural icons through international new styles developed into his now-legendary “all-over dots” paintings, which have since sold for millions. Each mark is entirely organic, rather than mechanically perfect, encapsulating the artist’s hand while creating a mesmerizing viewing experience, which is only emphasized by their new translation to LG OLED screens at Frieze.
    They portray his paintings with startling clarity and even greater color precision than the 50-year-old artworks themselves. Some of the originals have faded and others aren’t suited to public display, due in part to their fragility or ownership by private collectors in Korea.
    Kim Whanki, Duet 22-IV-74 #331 (1974). Digital Expression of Whanki’s painting, 2023. © Whanki Foundation.Whanki Museum
    The five works across the presentation were translated by Seoul National University professor Je Baak, media art creator group Verseday, Ahn Graphics CEO Mano Ahnand, and BESIGN CEO Jason Kim. Each artist added touches of their own style to compliment the works.
    7-VI-69 #65 (1969), animated by Ahn, radiates while layering the composition’s geometric elements piece by piece, to assemble the whole painting. Kim made the lines of 7-VII-74 (1974) dissipate and reemerge amongst the newly swirling and fading textures surrounding them.
    The show’s centerpiece beams on a massive LG OLED screen featuring Kim’s scarlet, sun-themed 14-III-72 #223 (1972). At intervals, Verseday has made its sunspots and brushstrokes shimmer, accenting their textures. The animations emphasize Kim’s interest in creating a time-based viewing experience.
    Kim Whanki’s masterpieces digitally expressed by LG Signature OLED M. © Whanki Foundation.Whanki Museum
    An International Artist Drawn to New York
    Though Kim was born in Korea and helped found the country’s pioneering Dansaekhwa movement, he also carried elements of Korean culture as he moved around the globe.
    As an art student in Tokyo during the 1930s, Kim was drawn to Matisse and Picasso and started translating Korean motifs through modern styles. He returned to Korea and co-founded the influential New Realism Group. Decades later in the 1950s, Kim moved to Paris to tackle the canon. Despite his association with Korean lyricism and meditative abstraction, he sought a seamless integration of Eastern and Western aesthetics. He then traveled on to New York in 1963, thanks to a grant from the Asia Society.
    Kim immediately fell in with the city’s expanding art scene, where he befriended Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. He also inspired Nam June Paik. “Many people, even his most devoted fans, might not know that Kim Whanki, despite his achievements and comfortable life in Korea, moved to New York at the age of 50, where he passed away,” noted KCCNY curator Hee Sung Cho.
    At the same time, he retained traditional imagery like moon jars in his work, balancing his cultural origins with the eye of an international artist. “By becoming a foreigner in a new city, he turned to his inner voice and created his own new world of art,” observed Park Mee-Jung, director of the Whanki Museum.
    Installation view of “Whanki in New York” at the Korean Cultural Center New York (KCCNY), presented in collaboration with the Whanki Museum and LG OLED. Courtesy KCCNY and LG OLED.
    Celebrating Kim’s Legacy
    KCCNY and LG OLED Art shared the vision of reintroducing Kim Whanki to New York audiences through the Frieze display and the Whanki exhibition currently unfolding across KCCNY’s new seven-story home near Koreatown in Manhattan. “This collaboration was envisioned to create a unique showcase that combined cultural depth with cutting-edge technology,” said Hee Sung Cho, who helped make the partnership possible.
    The KCCNY exhibition features loans from private collectors, including the famed sculptor John Pai, as well as numerous works provided by The Whanki Museum. Describing Kim’s legacy, the museum’s director, Park Mee-Jung, said: “​​His work, and the inspiring narrative of his life and artistic evolution across Korea, Brazil, Paris, and New York, has led to an ever-increasing global recognition of his art and impact on the history of Korean art.”
    Kate Oh, Vice President of the Brand Communication Division at LG, emphasized the importance of the collaboration: “With this incredible presentation of digital expressions of Whanki’s artworks at Frieze New York, and our partner exhibition at the Korean Cultural Center New York, we hope to contribute to Whanki’s lasting legacy in New York City.”
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    A Disney Resort Will Show George W. Bush’s Portraits of Veterans

    In time for National Military Appreciation Month in June, EPCOT’s American Adventure Pavilion, at the company’s Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, is mounting an exhibition of former president George W. Bush’s paintings of surviving military veterans. “Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors” includes more than 60 portraits, each accompanied by “the inspiring story of the veteran depicted” as written by Bush. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the George W. Bush Institute.
    “Celebrating those who give so much to our country has been part of the fabric of The Walt Disney Company throughout our 100-year history,” said Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Experiences. “We’re grateful to the Bush Institute for allowing us to feature this special collection and share it with our guests.”
    Bush’s painting hobby first came to light when a Romanian hacker released photos of Dubya’s daubings in February 2013 (later earning a four-year jail sentence for the act). The paintings were also the basis of a 2017 book by the same name, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller. In 2019, he set out to follow up with a book of portraits of immigrants; as Artnet News’s Taylor Dafoe dryly commented when it was published a year later, referring to a notorious press conference at which W. landed on an aircraft carrier and prematurely declared victory in the Iraq War, “Well, mission accomplished.”
    George W. Bush, Army Sgt. 1st Class Michael R. Rodriguez. Courtesy of Grant Miller/George W. Bush Presidential Center via Crown Publishing.
    The exhibition will stay on view for a year. In addition to displaying the portraits, it will serve as a place for veterans to access information about free, high-quality mental and brain health care via a program called Check-In. Thousands of veterans of the post-9/11 wars are homeless; many suffered traumatic brain injuries as a result of the improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that were used to attack them as they patrolled Iraqi cities.
    Bush’s paintings of veterans were widely derided as hypocritical when they emerged; in the New Yorker, Peter Schjehldahl wrote, “Having obliviously made murderous errors, Bush now obliviously atones for them. What do you do with someone like that?” By the accounts of his painting instructors, Bush takes the activity seriously; he counts Lucian Freud, Wayne Thiebaud, Jamie Wyeth, Ray Turner, Fairfield Porter, and Joaquín Sorolla as influences.
    The United States military operation in Iraq began in 2003, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, an armed conflict that spanned eight years. About 7,000 U.S. service members died in post-9/11 war operations according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, which also notes more than 30,000 suicides among service members and veterans of the post-9/11 wars. While it’s difficult to know exactly how many Iraqis died, the organization Iraq Body Count records some 113,728 civilian deaths. Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that the conflict ran up a bill of $6.4 trillion.
    “Portraits of Courage” has been touring the U.S. since 2017, opening at the George W. Bush Presidential Center on the SMU campus in Dallas, Texas, before traveling to venues including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, and the Museum of the Southwest in Texas. Speaking to CNN at the launch of the exhibition, Bush said of his painting practice: “It keeps me active, so I’m not on the couch chewing potato chips all the time. It’s one of the great learning experiences.”
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    Two Visionary Women Photographers Collide in Unexpected Museum Showcase

    The work of photographer Francesca Woodman is having a moment, being the subject of both an exhibition at Gagosian in New York and a must-see museum show at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Though her name is reaching new heights of world renown, the young New York photographer has been a critical darling for decades and her works, produced before her tragically early death in 1981 at the age of just 22, have an enduring sense of style and experimental daring.
    This timeless appeal is inevitably foregrounded throughout the impressively original London exhibition, which weaves her works with those of another celebrated historical photographer active a whole century earlier, Julia Margaret Cameron. A careful curatorial eye brings to the fore striking comparisons in which a similar subject matter is approached with mastery, mystery, and invention by the artist, while still very much bearing the essence of their respective eras. Each of these unique talents could, of course, have easily merited an exhibition of their own, yet this pairing does not constrain them.
    Born in Calcutta in 1815, Cameron enjoyed a privileged Victorian upbringing due to her father’s involvement with the colonial East India Company. She and her sisters were known to be outspoken and unconventional, but it wasn’t until Cameron moved to London with her husband in 1845 that she became a member of artistic circles.
    From left to right: Julia Margaret Cameron, The Dream (Mary Hillier) (1869). Courtesy of the Wilson Centre for Photography. Francesca Woodman, Untitled (1979). Courtesy of the Woodman Family Foundation, © Woodman Family Foundation/DACS London.
    Cameron learned about the invention of photography in 1839, while still in her twenties, and first saw a daguerreotype in 1842. Yet she didn’t take up the practice herself until the age of 48, having been given a camera as a present by her daughter. In the last 12 years of Cameron’s life, until her death in 1879, she produced some 900 photographs that evince a highly exploratory approach to the fledgling art form.
    Fast forward 100 years and photography had exploded in popularity, replacing writing as the most ubiquitous means of documenting of daily life. Like Cameron, Woodman received her first camera as a gift from her father. She trained formally at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) with stints spent in Rome before moving to New York in 1979 to make it as a photographer. Woodman was highly ambitious and quickly became devastated by what she perceived as a lack of immediate success.
    From left to right: Julia Margaret Cameron, The South West Wind (1864). © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Francesca Woodman, House #3 (1976).Courtesy of the Woodman Family Foundation, © Woodman Family Foundation/DACS London.
    The works of both photographers are roughly grouped according to themes of portraiture, otherworldly or dreamlike states, classical references, mythology, and the natural world, all of which reveal interesting affinities and departures in terms of staging, costume, focus, and style. Each artist has such clarity of vision that any differences in what could be achieved technically in their respective centuries feel mostly irrelevant.
    Illusionistic effects that push photography beyond the status of a mere record are employed by both, as in the ghostly apparitions that haunt Cameron’s The South West Wind (1864) and Woodman’s House #3 (1976). Both artists seemed to have an instinct for capturing a partial truth and letting ambiguity and the viewer’s imagination fill in the bigger picture.
    From left to right: Julia Margaret Cameron, I Wait (Rachel Gurney) (1872). Photo: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Francesca Woodman, Untitled from the “Angels” series (1977). Courtesy of the Woodman Family Foundation, © Woodman Family Foundation/DACS London.
    Cameron often photographed close friends and family while Woodman, with a more modern notion of the artist available to her, usually made art using her own body. Either way, each took as a subject what was immediately available to her but imbued it with greater resonance, playing with fantastical elements or mythological allegories. In one nearly supernatural Untitled work from Woodman’s “Angel” series, the artist could almost be said to levitate.
    As the National Portrait Gallery’s wall texts point out, angels have long been seen as able “to move between spiritual and earthly realms, the conscious and unconscious, and are often encountered in dreams or visions.”
    Cameron’s great-niece Rachel was once instructed to adopt poses inspired by the putti from Renaissance paintings. She later called having “a pair of heavy swan’s wings fastened to her narrow shoulders[…] No wonder those old photographs of us, leaning over imaginary ramparts of heaven, look anxious and wistful. This is how we felt, for we never knew what Aunt Julia was going to do next.”
    From left to right: Julia Margaret Cameron, The Astronomer (Sir John Frederick William Herschel) (1867). Courtesy of the RISD Museum, Providence, R.I. Francesca Woodman, These People Live in That Door (1976-77). Courtesy of the Woodman Family Foundation, © Woodman Family Foundation/DACS London.
    Sometimes, both Cameron and Woodman made straightforward portraits of the people in their lives. Woodman’s close friend Sloan Rankin and a one-time boyfriend, Benjamin Moore, appear in many photographs from the late 1970s. Alongside fond Pre-Raphaelite studies of muses and friends like Julia Jackson, Cameron turned her lens on some of the most important luminaries of her age like the scientist Charles Darwin, astronomer John Frederick William Herschel, the poet Alfred Tennyson, and the writer William Michael Rossetti. These animated character studies feel astonishingly ahead of their time.
    Thinking back on the many double-act shows that had more ambition than bite, rarely does this curatorial conceit deserve to be as self-satisfied as here. How can a kinship be found in the oeuvres of two artists who evolved from such starkly different contexts? Rather than getting too caught up in a specific time or place—Victorian-era London or 1970s New York—the comparison pushes us instead towards more expansive interpretations that show already well-defined practices in a new light.
    “Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In” is on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London until June 16, 2024. 
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    ‘Fear and Loathing’ Illustrator Ralph Steadman Kicks Off a Marathon Touring Retrospective

    There’s a call atop Ralph Steadman’s X account to “Enter the Steadmanverse.” Click the link and you travel to a Discord server comprised of two dozen or so sleepy channels. It’s a holdover of Steadman’s flirtation with NFTs that came at a time when web3 was seemingly imminent and inevitable.
    The move spoke of an octogenarian who remains curious, an artist whose instantly recognizable works of spidery lines and grotesque subjects have remained both relevant and in-demand. Case in point, Harley-Davidson and Supreme recently dropped apparel splashed with Steadman ink. But for enduring popularity, look no further than college campuses where Steadman’s status as the irreverent illustrator-in-chief of ‘70s counter-culture has made his work a dorm wall staple.
    Fitting then, that U.S. universities are set to play host to a comprehensive retrospective of Steadman’s varied and long-lasting career. Postponed in 2020, “Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing” makes amends with a marathon tour that begins at American University Museum in Washington, D.C. in September, and will run on-and-off through the fall of 2027.
    Ralph Steadman, In the Beginning from Animal Farm (1994). Photo: courtesy Ralph Steadman.
    As shown by the topical drawings he posts almost daily on social media—recent examples include bat day, scream day, St. George’s Day, world water day—Steadman remains prolific and engaged. The exhibition starts by presenting a young art student with a rather different palate. While studying at London’s East Ham Technical College in the ‘50s, Steadman dabbled with abstraction, creating geometric watercolors that echo the likes of Joan Miró and Wassily Kandinsky. Early sketchbooks and writings tell the tale.
    Steadman’s caustic wit and social conscience, however, were not going to be contained by artfully arranged squares and circles. He began as a cartoonist at Kemsley Newspaper and by the early sixties his biting drawings began gracing outsider magazines such as Punch and Private Eye. He critiqued imperialism, class inequity, and political greed. All of British society, in other words.
    Ralph Steadman, Fear and Loathing in Elko for Rolling Stone Magazine (1991). Photo courtesy Ralph Steadman.
    Still, the going was tough. “I don’t make a lot of money,” he told an interviewer in 1965. This reality, paired with the country’s narrow publishing industry saw Steadman begin traveling back-and-forth to the U.S. in the early ‘70s. There, of course, he was introduced to Hunter S. Thompson and his anarchic vein of reporting, Gonzo journalism.
    Naturally, “And Another Thing” traces this most raucous of relationships, one that rumbled on-and-off for 35 years until Thompson’s death in 2005. But it also delivers a fuller picture of Steadman’s prolific output over the past six decades. Yes, there are nearly 150 original works, but personal photographs, notes, and miscellaneous ephemera help out too.
    “Steadman’s art challenges us, teaches us, and alters how we see the world,” said Andrea Lee Harris, the exhibition’s co-curator. “He has given us all a great gift and raised the bar for the generations following in his footsteps. The exhibition will delight diehard fans and uninitiated audiences eager to learn more.”
    Ralph Steadman, Soldiers in Stripes from Alice Through the Looking Glass (1971). Photo: courtesy Ralph Steadman.
    In contrast to the blood and bones drawings for which Steadman is best-known are his charming illustrations for children’s literature. These predate his work with Thompson and bear names such The Big Squirrel and Little Rhinoceros that offer Steadman working at an altogether different temperature.
    There’s a cluster of political cartoons—the likes of Bill Clinton, Ronald Regan, and Richard Nixon, all savaged in pen and ink—but a balance between Steadman’s extremes typically comes in his illustrations for literature.
    Chief among these is Steadman’s take on Alice in Wonderland in which he lowered characters he had observed around London into Lewis Carroll’s work. White Rabbit is a frazzled commuter, the Cheshire Cat appears looming and leering as though on top of a billboard, the playing cards are burly laborers complete with union numbers. It’s a frazzled world of chaos and corruption. A Steadmanverse, in other words.
    “Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing” will be on view at the American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, D.C., September 7–December 8.
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    ‘I See Color When I Sing’: Billboard Star Jewel on Her Turn to Painting

    While she may be better known for her music career, Jewel has been a visual artist for just as long as she has been singing and writing songs. Now, 30 years after her meteoric rise on the Billboard charts, she is leveraging her love of art for the next phase of her unique career. 
    “As a kid, drawing and words always came together for me,” the four-time Grammy-nominee told me in a video call in March, explaining how she began pursuing art around the same time that she started writing songs, between 15 and 16. For Jewel, who has synesthesia, these activities are closely related.  
    “I see color when I sing” she said, noting that art has helped “make sense of the world around me.”  
    As a precocious teen at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, she delved into philosophy, and was specifically influenced by the writings of French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, who suggested that an understanding of shape developmentally precedes any understanding of language. 
    “We can relate to the idea of a circle before we ever know the word ‘circle,’” she explained, adding that this foundational recognition of form “really stuck” and laid the bedrock for her lifelong artistic practice.
    Jewel was on a partial scholarship, having raised the remaining school tuition with funds won from yodeling, a skill she picked up performing with her father at hotels, honky tonks, and bars in rural Alaska, where she spent her childhood. Still, she needed a job to support herself, so she applied to be a model for the sculpting class, which was how she was introduced to marble carving—her first formal foray into fine art. Fascinated by what the teacher was explaining about plane changes, Jewel said she kept interrupting to ask questions.  
    Left: Jewel in sculpting class at Interlochen Arts Academy, circa 1990. Courtesy of Jewel. Right: The singer is pictured with one of her paintings in 1997, just before her first Lilith Fair tour. Photo: West Kennerly. Courtesy of Jewel.
    “Eventually [the teacher] told me I needed to stop modeling and just join the class,” she laughed.  
    This early experience with sculpture—both as a model and as a maker—may explain why one of her favorite artists is Amedeo Modigliani. “I was just very struck by how sculptural his painting was, and obviously his sculptures, too,” she said. “His nudes still give me chills when I look at them, they’re gorgeous.” 
    Taking chisel to stone proved a helpful creative outlet for the budding artist to tease out how shape “speaks to the collective subconscious” and helped her be a better songwriter, she said, adding that melody, like sculpture, “is all about form and structure.”  
    Carving out something beautiful from something hard was perhaps nothing new for Jewel, whose mother left when she was eight. To cope with the demands of being a single parent and his own PTSD, a product of the Vietnam War as well as his own abusive upbringing, her father turned to alcohol. At 15, Jewel decided to move out on her own as an emancipated minor with the offer of Interlochen on the horizon, a decision she details in her 2015 memoir, Never Broken. 
    “I knew that statistically, it wouldn’t go well for me,” she said. “Few leave an abusive house and make it on their own at 15, and so for me to feel like I could have a possible better outcome, I knew that I had to be very strategic. I needed to have a strategy for mental health, although mental health wasn’t a word then.” It was through music, poetry, and art that she was able to define a new “emotional language” to express herself more fully and change her patterns of behavior from negative to generative ones. 
    Jewel sings at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Photo: Philip Thomas. Courtesy of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
    At 19, Jewel was living out of her car in San Diego, where she was playing her songs in coffeehouses, when her music career took off in the 1990s with her debut album “Pieces of You.” Her introspective lyrics and folk-infused acoustic melodies made her a best-selling artist and a fixture on the counterculture Lilith Fair scene—and provided an indelible score to my own moody early teen years.
    But fame, a constant stream of multi-platinum albums, acting gigs, and a grueling tour schedule proved “toxic.” So Jewel made the decision to take a break from music in 2014, following a divorce from her husband of eight years, Ty Murray, a Texas-based world-champion bull rider and professional rodeo cowboy. 
    I asked her if she was able to keep making art, even amid burnout. “Yes, although I would go months without writing songs, and that would scare me,” she said. It was, after all, her livelihood. “But I also realized that, within that same time, I was always drawing.”   
    Using art as a rehabilitation and mental wellness tool is at the center of “The Portal: An Art Experience by Jewel,” opening on May 4 at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. It’s less of an exhibition and more of a 90-minute accessible immersion into art therapy that museumgoers can choose to take advantage of.
    Jewel and the Crystal Bridges team pictured with Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation by Julie Mehretu in the Contemporary Gallery at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Photo: Tom McFetridge. Courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
    Nestled on 120 acres of forest in the scenic Ozarks, Crystal Bridges “felt like the perfect partner” for the project, Jewel explained, noting that she approached the museum with the idea for a “takeover” back in 2022. “It’s beautiful, and there’s a real connection between art and nature there.”
    Undergirding the “Portal” experience are the “three spheres,” Jewel’s take on the mind-body-spirit connection that she has developed while working with the two mental health initiatives she cofounded: the Inspiring Children Foundation, which offers mentorship and support for at-risk youths and underprivileged families, and Innerworld, a virtual member-driven mental wellness community and therapy “toolkit” of sorts. 
    Jewel outlines the spheres for me, noting that she believes all three need to be in harmony to find mental and emotional balance. The “inner” world is your inner life. “It’s your psychology. It’s your emotional life. It’s your heart’s desire,” she said. Then there is the “outer” or “seen” world, that includes your family, your job, nature, cities, “whatever makes up your daily environment.”  
    Lastly, there is the “unseen” world, which is comprised of that which exists but cannot be empirically known. “I think some people see the unseen as, ‘That’s easy, it’s Jesus,’” Jewel said. “Other people just know they get goosebumps when they see images from the Hubble telescope, or something like that. To me, the unseen sphere is just represented by awe, wonder, and inspiration.” 
    Museum visitors stand in front of Fred Eversley’s Big Red Sphere, a keystone work in Jewel’s “Portal” experience. Photo: Philip Thomas. Courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
    “Portal” offers what is essentially a meditative art walk, narrated by Jewel (she even wrote the wall labels), through the museum’s contemporary wing, during which she prompts you to reflect on your relationship to the inner, outer, and unseen spheres in front of key works she selected from within the collection. Among these are paintings by Ruth Asawa, Julie Mehretu, Mickalene Thomas, and Sam Gilliam. For Jewel, Fred Eversley’s Big Red Sphere (1985) sculpture appropriately unites things. 
    Additionally, a hologram of the singer will greet visitors at the start of the experience and a choreographed 200-piece drone light show will happen nightly over the museum’s outdoor pond, during which visitors will be invited to wear headphones to listen to a conceptual song, also written and recorded by Jewel. (The drone show culminates in a large red heart, reminiscent of her iconic “Queen of Hearts” costume on the sixth season of The Masked Singer.)
    Technology, she says, is just another tool for storytelling, just like music or painting. “If I had to sum up my artistic practice in one word, it would be ‘storyteller,’” she said. “Art is whatever I can use to tell a story.”
    Left: Jewel shows the Crystal Bridges team the portrait she painted of her son Kase. Photo: Jared Sorrells. Courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Right: The portrait, titled Double Helix, is on view as part of “Portal.” Courtesy of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
    Two of her own visual art creations are also on view: a portrait of her and Murray’s son, Kase, now 12, that she made after taking a two-week oil painting class in Rome last year, and a 30-inch lucite sculpture titled Chill, which depicts a person meditating and is filled with various pills and medications.
    “For me, it is a conversation about wellness, culture, and the longevity of life versus the quality of life, about what it means to find balance,” the artist said of the sculpture, noting that medication can be lifesaving as much as it can be dangerous. “There really is so much hysteria and judgment around medication, and how we use it.”
    I asked the singer-songwriter, actor, author, poet, activist, and now artist, who turns 50 this year, if she is finding a new level of harmony between her three spheres as she makes her museum debut and takes her visual art practice public. 
    “I think this is the most inspired I’ve ever been,” she said, “as if I’m back at the very beginning of my career.” 
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