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      The Met’s 2024 Costume Institute Show Will Go High-Tech to ‘Reawaken’ the Sensory Experience of Fashion

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      Next year on the first Monday of May, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will celebrate “Sleeping Beauties” at its always anticipated, star-studded Met Gala, a benefit for the Costume Institute.
      The theme is tied to the institute’s spring 2024 exhibition, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” which is not about fairy tales, but about using technology and conservation to revitalize old garments.
      Expect high fashion, yes—some 250 of the collection’s garments and accessories, to be precise—but also augmented reality, artificial intelligence, computer-generated imagery, x-rays, video animation, and light projection. There will even be soundscapes, recreating the subtle rustling of fabrics while being worn.
      “The Met’s innovative spring 2024 Costume Institute exhibition will push the boundaries of our imagination and invite us to experience the multisensory facets of a garment, many of which get lost when entering a museum collection as an object,” Met director Max Hollein said in a statement. “‘Sleeping Beauties’ will heighten our engagement with these masterpieces of fashion by evoking how they feel, move, sound, smell, and interact when being worn, ultimately offering a deeper appreciation of the integrity, beauty, and artistic brilliance of the works on display.”
      Charles James, “Butterfly” ball gown, (ca. 1955). Purchase, Friends of The Costume Institute Gifts, 2013. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, BFA.com/Hippolyte Petit.
      Of course, continuing to use historically significant clothing can be a controversial proposition, as the Met learned all too well when Kim Kardashian arrived at the institution’s 2022 gala clad in the infamous nude gown in which Marilyn Monroe serenaded President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in 1962.
      Kardashian’s red carpet arrival made headlines, but also outraged many in the fashion conservator and curatorial community, even prompting a condemnation from the International Council of Museums, which created a new a new clothing preservation committee in response to the uproar. (The reality star is believed to have damaged the delicate dress, although the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum in Orlando, which owns the piece, has denied it.)
      The upcoming show, therefore, won’t be about wearing these old looks—indeed some are so fragile they can’t even be placed on a mannequin form. (Those are the titular “Sleeping Beauties,” and will be displayed in glass coffins.)
      Loewe, Jonathan Anderson, fall/winter 2023–24 dress. Nina Ricci, Evening ensemble. Jules-François Crahay, dress (ca. 1958), gift of Jacqueline Watkins Slifka. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, BFA.com/Hippolyte Petit.
      “When an item of clothing enters our collection, its status is changed irrevocably. What was once a vital part of a person’s lived experience is now a motionless ‘artwork’ that can no longer be worn or heard, touched, or smelled,” Costume Institute curator Andrew Bolton said. “The exhibition endeavors to reanimate these artworks by re-awakening their sensory capacities through a diverse range of technologies, affording visitors sensorial ‘access’ to rare historical garments and rarefied contemporary fashions.”
      The annual fashion exhibition is a reliable blockbuster for the Met—so much so that last month, the museum announced plans to turn its Great Hall gift shop into a new gallery space for the Costume Institute. That $50 million project is slated to be completed in 2026.
      The Met has yet to announce the hosts for the exhibition’s accompany ball, but the show is being sponsored by TikTok and luxury fashion house Loewe, which is led by designer Jonathan Anderson.
      “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000, 5th Avenue, New York, New York, May 10–September 2, 2024.

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      The Essentials: How a New Show on Native Photography Centers Its Enduring Resonance Through 4 Key Works

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      Most of the pieces on view in the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s (MIA) new “In Our Hands” survey of Native photography from 1890 to now were lent directly by the artists who made them. That’s rare for museum shows like this one, which tend to rely on loans from public and private collections. Here, the condition speaks to a truth that goes beyond MIA: few institutions, if any, have a substantial collection of this kind of work. 
      “In Our Hands” is not the first exhibition of Native photography, of course. Even if the show could somehow lay claim to such a title, it wouldn’t, explained Jaida Grey Eagle, an Oglala Lakota photographer who guest-organized the presentation alongside MIA’s in-house curators Ahlberg Yohe and Casey Riley. 
      “I don’t look at this as a beginning,” Grey Eagle said, alluding to the colonialist logic of racing to be the first to put a name on something. “I look at it as an acknowledgment. There have been many people who have dedicated their lives to this medium and I don’t ever want to erase their work.” The show, she went on, is about “honoring the knowledge that has been there and that museums have failed to support.” 
      View of the exhibition “In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, October 22, 2023 – January 14, 2024. Courtesy of MIA.
      If the exhibition’s lack of loans speaks to a broader issue, it also underlines one of its central themes: community. Early one, Ahlberg Yohe, Grey Eagle, and Riley assembled a Curatorial Council of 14 artists and academics, most of Native heritage, who developed the list of participating artists and weighed in on the language used to describe their work.  
      The group also shaped the show’s three sections, each conceived with an emphasis on the present tense, regardless of the historical work included. “A World of Relations” looks at Native cultures’ holistic—not anthropocentric—view of living things; “Always Leaders” recognizes longstanding indigenous efforts around issues such as human rights, sustainability, and land preservation; and “Always Present” celebrates Native photographers who have used their medium to convey the vitality of their cultures.  
      “’In Our Hands’ was structured through conversations with Indigenous artists and scholars from its inception, so there never were ‘outside’ voices. This was a project that grew organically from our conversations with the folks who became our Curatorial Council,” Riley explained in an email. 
      “Our reasons for this were simple: we knew that centering their voices would be paramount in correcting historical narratives that erased Native people’s expertise. This project is built upon the work of people who came before us, who have been doing this work for a long time and should be the focus of scholarship from here on.” 
      Nadya Kwandibens, Tee Lyn Duke (née Copenace) Toronto, ON, March (2010). Courtesy of the artist and Red Works Photography.
      Advisory committees like this have become increasingly common in recent years as museum workers grapple with the question of how to communicate cultural experiences beyond their own. That same question is what first drew Grey Eagle to photography as a reservation kid in South Dakota; it’s what pushed her to help develop the MIA show too. 
      “Growing up, I experienced a lot of journalists coming in,” she said, referring to her home community in South Dakota. “These were journalists flying across oceans to tell our story. As I got older, I started to notice that the articles that were coming out about my home community failed to encompass the entire story. They were always coming in to talk about strife. They never seemed to talk about why.” 
      To introduce readers to “In Our Hands,” Grey Eagle picked out several representative works to highlight. 

      Benjamin Alfred Haldane, Self-portrait in Studio in Metlakatla (c. 1919–20) 
      Benjamin A. Haldane, Self-portrait in Studio in Metlakatla (c. 1919–20). Courtesy of MIA.
      Just the Facts: A foundational figure among Native and First Nation photographers, Benjamin Alfred Haldane made studio portraits of members of his Tsimshian community in Alaska at the turn of the 20th century. He often filled the frame with props that represented his subjects—an approach that imbued his work with a semiotic charge. He took the same tact for this expertly composed self-portrait from 1919 or 1920. 
      Expert Insights: “He uses all of these props to represent himself—to say, ‘This is what I do in the community,’” said Grey Eagle. “But on his arm, he has propped up a model totem pole, which is his clan crest—the wolf clan. The intentionality of choosing to connect his body to his heritage is so powerful to me. It’s such a rooted statement of who he is as a Tsimshian man.”  

      Faye HeavyShield, Clan (2020)  
      Installation view of Faye HeavyShield’s Clan (2020). Courtesy of MIA.
      Just the Facts: One of the exhibition’s best-known artists, Faye HeavyShield makes sculptures, installations, and other artworks that are minimal in design, but broad in valence. At the core of what she does is the interrogation of the relationship—physical, spiritual—between land and body. HeavyShield was inspired to create Clan upon discovering a 1920s portrait of her grandmother. The work comprises a set of inkjet portraits, as well as a series of hanging canvas dresses. 
      Expert Insights: “She wanted to create this connection between her grandmother and her daughters and granddaughters that was beyond stories and memories,” Grey Eagle said, in reference to the portrait that inspired the artist. “I love Faye’s work because it’s sculptural, but it moves. There’s a lot of tactility within the show…It’s a way that I see Native photographers using [the medium] in this really incredible new way.” 
       
      Eve-Lauryn LaFountain, You Are on Native Land (2020)  
      Eve-Lauryn LaFountain, You Are on Native Land: Niibidoon (Weave) (2020). Courtesy of the artist and MIA.
      Just the Facts: As part of a recent series, Eve-Lauryn LaFountain scratched the phrase “You Are on Native Land” across strips of found film that she had woven together. The artist then sent her creations to collaborator Cody Edison, who in turn printed them as contact sheets. Now, these images are available for purchase as postcards, which are, according to the artists, meant to “act not as souvenirs of places from the sender, but rather as a reminder to the receiver that America was founded on the genocide and stolen lands of the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.” Proceeds from the project have been put toward supporting activists who were arrested in 2020 during a protest for the return of the Black Hills to the Lakota people. Three postcards hang in the “Always Leaders” section of the show. 
      Expert Insights: For LaFountain, You Are on Native Land extends beyond the postcards, Grey Eagle pointed out: “[LaFountain] would research the indigenous histories of each recipient’s address and write about the land that the postcards were going to.” The examples in the exhibition acknowledge the Dakota people, original caretakers of the land on which MIA sits, the curator added. 
       
      Jeremy Dennis, Door Prop (2018)  
      Jeremy Dennis, Door Prop (2018). Courtesy of the artist.
      Just the Facts: In this moody photograph, a white woman cowers before an encroaching group of Native men, all dressed in stereotypic garb. The shot belongs to Dennis’s “Rise” series, which appropriates horror movie motifs as a way of reframing America’s colonization, displacement, and genocide of Native peoples.  
      Expert Insights: With Door Prop, Dennis reanimates “classic zombie movie aesthetics but replaces zombies with Native Americans,” Grey Eagle said. “He does that to frame white people’s fear of Native American people as this manifestation of [their own] wrongdoing. In his imagined uprising, Native people cannot be ignored. Their presence has to be acknowledged.” 
      Fittingly, Dennis’s artwork lives in “Always Present,” the exhibition’s last section. “I love that we leave on that,” Grey Eagle added. “When people talk about Native people, they always use past tense language. I hate that we have to say, ‘We’re still here,’ because we’ve always been here and we’re always going to be here.” 
      “In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now” is on view through January 14, 2024 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. 

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      Anish Kapoor’s Controversial Vantablack Works Finally Make Their U.S. Debut. See Them Here

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      The first headlines came way back in 2014. British Indian artist Anish Kapoor was experimenting with Vantablack, a newly invented material said to be the blackest black ever made.
      “This material is the blackest material in the universe. Blacker than a black hole. It absorbs 99.8 percent of all light,” Kapoor wrote in an email. (Artist Diemut Strebe actually created a blacker, 99.995 percent absorbent black with MIT scientists in 2019.)
      A highly-advanced scientific discovery featuring a super dense field of carbon nano tubes grown in a lab and heated to super-high temperatures in a reactor, Vantablack was invented by the U.K. firm Surrey NanoSystems with military purposes in mind. But Kapoor believed in its artistic potential right from the get-go. So much so, that he signed a contract securing the exclusive rights to the new material’s use in painting and sculpture.
      The move was immediately controversial, kicking off an art supply feud with an artist named Stuart Semple who has since dedicated himself to creating the blackest paints he can, as well as “the pinkest pink” and “the glitteriest glitter”, all available for anyone except Kapoor to use.
      “Anish Kapoor,” featuring the U.S. debut of the artist’s Vantablack works, installation view at Lisson Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York.
      But Kapoor has long maintained that his agreement with Surrey was a necessary step in developing artistic applications for Vantablack. (It is exceedingly delicate and complicated to produce, and could initially only be made in tiny amounts.)
      “This material was made for the defense industry, so I had to gently persuade the company to work with me,” Kapoor said. “It has now been over 10 years since we started our project. This material is highly technical in its application—it is not a paint.”
      It wasn’t until 2022, during the Venice Biennale, that Kapoor finally unveiled the fruits of his labor, showing his first Vantablack works at a dual-venue show at the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia and Palazzo Manfrin.
      “Anish Kapoor,” featuring the U.S. debut of the artist’s Vantablack works, installation view at Lisson Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York.
      Now—on the heels of the release of Semple’s Black 4.0 paint, which claims to be just as light-absorbent as Vantablack—these works are making their U.S. debut, in a show at New York’s Lisson Gallery. Kapoor did not answer questions about Semple, or whether he would ever consider allowing other artists to get their hands on Vantablack now that he’s mastered it.
      We tried to get Kapoor to share some details about the long period of trial and error that made his Vantablack sculptures possible, but he was frustratingly tightlipped about the process. He ignored our questions about failed experiments with the material, and about whether collectors need to ensure any special conditions to properly care for Vantablack paintings or sculptures—the prices of which have not yet been disclosed.
      When asked how he applied Vantablack to his work, and if the process differs from work to work, Kapoor said only that “the reactor used takes the process to very high temperatures so the objects need to be made appropriately.”
      “Anish Kapoor,” featuring the U.S. debut of the artist’s Vantablack works, installation view at Lisson Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York.
      What attracted the artist to Vantablack was his fascination with the void, and his efforts to create the illusion of bottomless depth.
      “In the Renaissance, there were two great discoveries: perspective and the fold. The fold is a representation of being as we know. If I put this material [Vantablack] on a fold, it would not be seen,” he wrote. “The fold becomes invisible—like Malevich, I claim that this takes the object into a four-dimensional space and time, and beyond being.”
      Kapoor, of course, is perhaps best known for the beloved Chicago public sculpture Cloud Gate, popularly called “The Bean,” which has a wonderful mirrored surface that creates warped reflections of the viewer and the city, which shift as you walk around it. One could argue that you haven’t really been to a proper art fair unless you have seen one of his mirrored disk sculptures and marveled at the way your reflection flips and reverses as you approach.
      “Anish Kapoor,” featuring the U.S. debut of the artist’s Vantablack works, installation view at Lisson Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Lisson Gallery, New York.
      The artist’s dual interests in reflectivity and light absorbency, and their opposite effects in a work of art, seem to be working in opposition, as well as being two sides of the same coin. (We asked Kapoor if it was one or the other, and he simply responded “yes.”)
      “The mirror works are concave and are hollow spaces full of mirror; the black works are filled with darkness,” he said. “They are opposite and equal.”
      “Anish Kapoor” is on view at Lisson Gallery, 504 and 508 West 24th Street, New York, New York, November 2–December 16, 2023.
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      Visitors Take a Big Bite Out of Performance Artist Bobby Baker’s Edible Installation at Tate Britain

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      Strolling through the door of a what appears to be a typical East London apartment, which has been transported onto the grounds of Tate Britain, visitors are met with a familiar domestic scene. A teenage daughter is lying on her bed listening to music, while her brother takes a bath. In the living room, their father is slumped in front of the television next to a baby resting in its cot, while their mother hovers near the kitchen. If anything is amiss, it could only be that the entire family is made out of meringue, cookies, and cake… and visitors are welcome to have a slice.
      No, this is not an episode of The Great British Bake Off. It is a recreation of An Edible Family in a Mobile Home, originally done in 1976 by the performance artist Bobby Baker. Like many women artists of her generation, Baker decided to lift the curtain on everyday life within the domestic sphere, but as always through a playful lens.
      Documentation of preparation by Bobby Baker of An Edible Family in a Mobile Home (1976). Photo: Andrew Whittuck.
      Using her own home in the working-class neighborhood of Stepney, Baker recreated a typical family using fruitcake for the father, coconut cake for the baby, garibaldi biscuits for the son sprawled in a murky bathwater of chocolate cake, and meringues to make the daughter. The mother, meanwhile, was represented by a pink dressmaker’s mannequin with an elegantly feminine silhouette but a teapot in the place of her head. Her abdomen was hollowed out to make compartments containing snacks. Locals were welcomed to come in and eat slices of the cake family while Baker politely served cups of tea.
      Son in the bath from Bobby Baker, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home (1976). Photo: Andrew Whittuck.
      Aged 25 at the time that she made the original, Baker was inspired by works like The Store (1961), by Claes Oldenburg and his then-wife Patty Mucha. Instead of selling through the gallery system, the couple made a mock storefront offering painted plaster sculptures of pastries and other food items. As for Baker’s use of real cake? Since 1973, she had been hand-piping her Meringue Ladies World Tour, a band of women characters who perform and dance with Baker before meeting an untimely end. “It was my own language,” she recently recalled in an interview with curator Gemma Lloyd. “It was humble, and pathetic, and it got destroyed. It felt subversive and anarchic.”
      The exterior of Bobby Baker’s An Edible Family in a Mobile Home (1976). Photo: Andrew Whittuck.
      Portrait of Bobby Baker with An Edible Family in a Mobile Home recreated in 2023 at Tate Britain. Photo: Madeleine Buddo, © Tate.
      Feeling like an outsider would in some ways be liberating for Baker. “I’d abandoned the traditional art world because I found it elitist, sexist, and had discovered performance art where I was welcomed and free to do what I wanted,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to make work that people see in and around their own environments. I was living in an area surrounded by families and young children that I wanted to acknowledge.”
      Inside Bobby Baker, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home recreated in 2023 at Tate Britain. Photo: Madeleine Buddo, © Tate.
      Though Baker’s original was made single-handedly over the course of a month, a big team came together to recreate the work for Tate Britain, using cake from the bespoke bakery Lili Vanilli. Just like in the original, the walls are pasted with newspapers, teen magazines, and comic books from the year 1976, and these were covered in line-drawings made with hand-piped icing. Over the course of each of the exhibit’s two runs, this fall and next spring, visitors are invited to eat their way through the cake family, after which the mother will continue to provide pre-packaged snacks.
      Baker’s edible family home accompanies Tate Britain’s new exhibition “Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the U.K. 1970–1990,” which opened November 8 and runs through April 7. A riotous celebration of second-wave feminism as expressed through painting, photography, writing, posters, and film, it also spotlights how many artists made visible the experiences of women of color, queer, and trans women, and campaigned for equal rights.
      Inside Bobby Baker, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home recreated in 2023 at Tate Britain. Photo: Madeleine Buddo, © Tate.
      Installed on Tate Britain’s South Lawn, Baker’s edible family is free to visit and is open to the public for the first four weeks of the exhibition (through December 3) and again for the final four weeks (March 8–April 7, 2024). After this, the work will be given to Idle Women, an arts, environment, and social justice collaboration based in Lancashire, northern England, which will repurpose the structure. “I didn’t want it to end up in a sculpture park,” Baker explained, “it’s got to be used for women living now.”

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      Artists to Watch This Month: 10 Solo Gallery Exhibitions in New York to Have on Your Radar in November

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      Though the approach of Daylight Savings might mean dark days, galleries are lighting up New York with a torrent of new shows this month. Parsing through the hundreds of exhibitions that have recently—or are soon to be—opened, we’ve rounded up 10 artists taking the spotlight this month in solo shows across the city.
      From an artist who uses their practice as a research vehicle to explore the profound implications of biomedical technology to a painter who uses fabric as their primary material, these 10 artists are expanding what their mediums are capable of and the scope of artistic inquiry.

      Kirsten Deirup, “Ex Voto In Silico”Hesse Flatow, through December 2
      Kirsten Deirup. Photo: Pietro Gatto. Courtesy of the artist and Hesse Flatow, New York.
      For her second solo show with Hesse Flatow, Hudson Valley-based artist Kirsten Deirup presents a series of paintings and works on paper in “Ex Voto In Silico.” The title of the show is a play on Latin, with the term “voto” meaning votive or offering, and the term “in silico” an invented Latin term referring to when an object has been put through a computer program. Echoing 20th-century discussions around the essence of art in the face of mechanical reproduction, Deirup’s work confronts the boundary between creation by human hand and artificial intelligence.
      Incongruities abound in each composition; plants blossom into dazzling gems, a tree is hung with tennis balls instead of fruit, and plastic spray bottles, a slice of bread, or a computer keyboard appear in otherwise classical-inspired settings. Backgrounds are obfuscated and pervasive shadows lend the otherwise aesthetically pristine vignettes a deep, unshakable sense of the uncanny. Here, the idea of artificial intelligence as it is understood in the realm of art is turned on its head, and Deirup captures the zeitgeist of today as we face the unknown.
      Kirsten Deirup, Ex Voto In Silico (2023). Photo: Jenny Gorman. Courtesy of the artist and Hesse Flatow, New York.

      Heather Dewey-Hagborg, “Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera“Fridman Gallery, through December 13
      Heather Dewey-Hagborg. Ana Brígida for The New York Times. Courtesy of the artist and Fridman Gallery, New York.
      The first genetically engineered pig heart transplant occurred in January of 2022 following decades of research and experimentation. The relationship between pigs and humans, spanning some 10 millennia from their first domestication, lays at the core of artist Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s newest exhibition, “Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera,” her third solo with Fridman Gallery. Featuring sculptural works, animations, and a film narrated by the artist and set to an original score by composer Bethany Barrett, questions around our very existence—down to our DNA—are explored within the scope of humanity’s long-standing relationship with pigs.
      Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg received her Ph.D. in electronic arts from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, is an affiliate of Data and Society and a founding board member of the European Research Council-funded project Digital DNA that explores the relationships between new technologies, DNA, and empirical evidence. Combining expertise with creative expression, Dewey-Hagborg offers a cogent look at the wide-ranging implications of interspecies relationships and new technologies.
      Heather Dewey-Hagborg, film still from Future Pigs, Plural (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Fridman Gallery, New York.
      Shilpa GuptaTanya Bonakdar Gallery, through December 16
      Shilpa Gupta. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.
      For her debut self-titled solo exhibition with Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta continues her interrogations of language, cultural identity, and ideas around otherness and power—and its myriad effects and consequences. Paring down both ideas and means to their most essential, Gupta poetically captures the collective essence of experience, transcending time and place.
      A new sound installation, Listening Air (2023), is a central work in the exhibition. Shown in a darkened gallery space, suspended microphones counterbalanced by dimmed light fixtures move through the air. Rather than take sound, however, the microphones have been turned into speakers which emit spoken words. Leveraging the power of language as a form of resilience and resistance, the work is both haunting and beautiful, a testament to the pervasive desire to speak and be heard.
      Concurrent to the present exhibition, Gupta is the subject of a solo exhibition curated by Ruth Estévez at the Amant Art Center, Brooklyn, on view through April 28, 2024.
      Shilpa Gupta, Listening Air (2022–23). Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles.
      Jessie Makinson, “Bad sleeper”Lyles and King, through December 16
      Jessie Makinson. Courtesy of Lyles and King, New York.
      Marking a decisive moment in and evolution of the artist’s practice, Jessie Makinson created “Bad sleeper” at Lyles and King, an experimental, site-specific exhibition that melds her painting practice with the architecture of the gallery space, bringing it into the third dimension. Mining art history, literature, and cinema, Makinson presents viewers with a window into an otherworldly, fantastical realm filled with visual references and allusions to influential works by the likes of Italian writer Italo Calvino, Georgian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, and Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk. Narrative without being didactic, the scenes and vignettes portrayed elude easy reconciliation; almost human figures and alien-like landscapes beg questions but don’t offer easy answers, providing fertile ground for imaginative interpretations and conclusions.
      The immersive project is made up of a hand-painted mural, patterned wallpaper, and plush purple carpet—together the antithesis of a sterile white cube—as well as paintings on canvas and a detailed wooden screen. Inverting common notions of how and where painting is displayed, “Bad sleeper” instead “makes a world for the paintings to live in.”
      Jessie Makinson, Tiny Pyre (2023). Courtesy of Lyles and King, New York.
      Eric N. MackPaula Cooper Gallery, through December 16
      Eric N. Mack, 2021. © Eric N. Mack. Photo: Daniel King. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
      Working at the intersection of art, fashion, and architecture, Eric N. Mack creates intricate compositions comprised of fabric and found objects that defy easy categorization. A self-described painter working in the medium of fabric, each assembled work operates as an archive, recording not only the arrangements and juxtapositions of materials chosen by Mack, but the collection of fabrics themselves—whether it be fine silk, deadstock prints, or heavyweight suiting wools. How the materials interact with each other, as well as with the overall composition, and beyond the space the work occupies, invites considerations of the whole as well as the parts simultaneously. A hanging construction is the centerpiece of Mack’s eponymous exhibition, evoking Modern kinetic art and underscoring his ability to dialogue with surrounding architecture through carefully considered assemblages.
      “Eric N. Mack” follows the announcement of his representation by Paul Cooper Gallery last year. In recent years, Mack has completed several high-profile residencies, including at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, and the American Academy in Rome.
      Installation view of “Eric N. Mack” (2023). Photo: Steven Probert. © 2023 Eric N. Mack. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
      Andy Dixon, “Joy”The Hole, through December 17
      Andy Dixon. Courtesy of the artist and The Hole, New York / Los Angeles.
      Artist and musician Andy Dixon started his career in Vancouver’s punk scene before pivoting to visual art, though his past endeavors continue to influence his practice. Using a process of appropriating old masterwork motifs and compositions—which Dixon compares to music sampling—these elements are then given the “Andy Dixon treatment,” transforming them by simplifying the forms and using a vibrant pastel palette that, together, evokes everything from Disney’s Fantasia (1940) to the oeuvre of Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
      In his solo “Joy,” playfulness and joie de vivre abound. “The world could use a bit of happiness and celebration right now,” said Dixon. In Yolo 🙂 (2023) multicolor cherubs drawn from different paintings circle each other in the air, and in Yolo 🙁 (2023) a collection of skulls from various memento mori gaze haphazardly against what appears to be a Dutch landscape. Rounding out the exhibition is a collection of the artist’s outrageously oversized shirts, branded Hermes, Moschino, and Versace, offering a witty look into the sometimes dubious sometimes absurd relationship between retail, fine art, and luxury goods.
      Andy Dixon, Pressed Pill (2023). Courtesy of the artist and The Hole, New York / Los Angeles.
      Asif Mian, “The Village Bites Itself”Management, November 8–December 17
      Asif Mian. Photo: William Jess Laird. Courtesy of Management, New York.
      The recipient of the 2019–2020 Queens Museum-Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Award, Asif Mian was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Queens Museum in 2021, which focused on the artist’s multi-part project RAF. Mian’s exhibition with Management, “The Village Bites Itself,” marks his first solo exhibition with a commercial gallery in the city, and sees Mian continue his exploration of how violence and the perception of violence affect both personal and collective memory, psychology, and behavior.
      Mian’s multidisciplinary practice blends autobiographical and universal experience with the aim of responding to and reflecting on the theme of violence; deconstructing and reassembling elements of raw or readymade materials, such as aluminum sheeting or Afghan tribal rugs, the breaking down and rearranging of medium evokes a liminal psychological space, one detached from the quotidian where the “ghosts” of violent acts and the mental processing of violence reside.
      Asif Mian, The village bites itself, leaving a 6-foot scar from head to toe (2023). Courtesy of Management, New York.
      Raqib Shaw, “Space Between Dreams”Pace, November 10–December 22
      Raqib Shaw. Courtesy of Raqib Shaw Studio.
      In his first presentation with Pace in New York since 2019, Raqib Shaw’s “Space Between Dreams” will see 16 works brought together. Shaw has garnered widespread recognition for his meticulous and intricate compositions that convey a diverse range of influences—from Japanese lacquerware and Persian carpets to early modern painting. Frequently conceived of as a series inspired by literature, art history, and mysticism, the works within the show synthesize real and imagined places and spaces, inspired by Shaw’s memories of Kashmir, where he is originally from, cityscapes and vignettes from his garden in London, where he is currently based, as well as vignettes reminiscent of New York, Paris, and Venice. Uniquely beguiling, each of Shaw’s works invites the mind’s eye to wander and explore.
      Simultaneous to his showing with Pace, Shaw’s first traveling museum retrospective is on view at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, “Ballads of East and West,” through December 21 before traveling to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, in February 2024.
      Raqib Shaw, Space Between Dreams – The Mourning Mendicant (2022–23). © Raqib Shaw / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
      Arghavan Khosravi, “True to Self”Rachel Uffner, November 11, 2023–January 6, 2024
      Arghavan Khosravi. Photo: Hossein Fatemi. Courtesy Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York.
      Nine recent wall-mounted and freestanding sculptural paintings are included in Arghavan Khosravi’s second solo exhibition with Rachel Uffner, following on the heels of her solo exhibition at the Rose Art Museum, Waltham. “True to Self” illustrates Khosravi’s ongoing exploration of ideas and histories around identity, agency, and womanhood, and further provides insight into the evolution of her practice in light of Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom), a global movement in solidarity with Iranian women and girls who peacefully demonstrate for their fundamental human rights.
      Born in Iran in the years following the Islamic Revolution, Khosravi’s work shows the influence of the three decades she lived there, largely living dichotomously: following strict Islamic law in public while fostering freedom of thought and action in private. Themes of resilience, perseverance, and strength in the face of oppression are found throughout Khosravi’s oeuvre, as well as references to traditional architectural forms, Persian miniature paintings, and canonic artworks and stories ranging from tales of the Iranian hero Prince Siyavush to Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina. Commingling elements of sculpture with painting, Khosravi expresses the dynamism and complexity of lived experiences both conceptually and materially.
      Arghavan Khosravi, The Battleground (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York.
      Pipilotti Rist “Prickling Goosebumps & A Humming Horizon”At Hauser and Wirth, November 9, 2023–January 13, 2024At Luhring Augustine, November 18, 2023–February 3, 2024
      Pipilotti Rist (2022). Photo: Joël Hunn. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
      Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist is widely recognized for experimental video art and site-specific installations, as well as for maintaining a distinct surrealist bent in her work. This month, Rist is the subject of a major two-part exhibition staged between Hauser and Wirth’s West 22nd Street building and Luhring Augustine on West 24th Street. The complementary shows invite viewers on a multisensory journey through Rist’s imaginative and immersive world that spans both locations’ interior and exterior spaces, beginning with each of the gallery’s greeting visitors with an “artistic gesture” on their facades, Textile Simultaneity at Luhring Augustine and Innocent Collection at Hauser and Wirth.
      Employing a wide range of media, including painting, video sculpture, projections, and more, each presentation will include works debuting for the first time, including new iterations of previous work such as occasion-specific videos that will be shown in the windows of Neighbors Without Fences (2020), a full-scale clapboard house facade. Playful and enchanting, across each presentation visitors will be enveloped in Rist’s singular artistic vision.
      Pipilotti Rist, twin concept pictures (2023). © Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser and Wirth and Luhring Augustine / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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      The First Museum Retrospective on A.I. Artist Alexander Reben Explores His Playfully Conceptual Creations

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      Artist Alexander Reben is getting his first major retrospective at the Crocker Art Museum, on the heels of becoming the first resident artist at OpenAI, the company behind image generator DALL-E and chatbot ChatGPT.
      “AI Am I? Artificial Intelligence as Generated by Alexander Reben” at the California museum brings together deeply conceptual works from across Reben’s practice, which, since about 2012, has seen him co-create alongside A.I. More so, the show aims to unpack what it means to collaborate with algorithms, following the artist’s lead in exploring how human-machine symbioses might lead to creative breakthroughs.
      “I let the conceptual idea drive the direction of [the work],” Reben said. “Even if new technology comes out, it might not be the best tool for a particular idea. But when I see new things come out, I tend to come up with new ideas as well, so they tend to come in parallel.”
      Reben, who has a background in robotics and math, added he can “digest and interface” with the newest technologies at a programming level, something that gives him control over the outcome that other artists without that background might not achieve.
      Take for instance, The Sentinel of Memory in the Valley of Vulnerability (2023), a bronze sculpture that’s a centerpiece of the show. Reben created the work by prompting an A.I. model to describe “a sculpture” before feeding the visual description into DALL-E, allowing the image generator to conjure up the work. He then commissioned an anatomy professor to translate that image into a 3D file which he took to a foundry to 3D print. That form was then cast in bronze.
      “It looks like a classic male bust but as you circle around the sculpture, you can see the different elements come to life from the A.I. generated image,” said Francesca Wilmott, the museum’s associate curator. “That work encapsulated so many of the ideas in the show, the back and forth with A.I. as well as his interest in the history of technology.”
      The museum has acquired the piece, making it the first A.I.-generated work in its collection.
      Alexander Reben, The Sentinel of Memory in the Valley of Vulnerability (2023) Crocker Art Museum, Gift of the Artist and OpenAI
      For Reben, another highlight of the show is an interactive piece that invites the public to co-create with him and the A.I. The piece, titled Speak Art Into Life, invites visitors to talk into a microphone, which causes an image to be generated from whatever was spoken. The image compounds with what others have generated into what Reben likened to “an A.I. exquisite corpse.” Visitors will further receive a paper receipt with a QR code that allows them to view the generated image from home later.
      Speak Art Into Life also happens to utilize every type of A.I. technology offered by OpenAI, where Reben’s residency is likely to last three months. The artist had been using these OpenAI products since they entered beta testing in 2020, according to the company’s Natalie Summers, and has had significant input into the company’s offerings.
      Reben hopes he can help steer the residency program in a way he finds “interesting” and beneficial for future artists. Summer, in turn, praised Reben for being able to address concerns surrounding A.I. in an educational way.
      “Artists do much more than advocate on behalf of other artists. They really do make sense of the world around you. Artists help stand in for humanity as a whole I think no other real field does,” Summers said.
      “With ultra-contemporary art like A.I. and generative art, it changes continuously,” Reben added. “From a cultural standpoint, this art form is starting to become more mature and accepted. In a meta way, that’s what this show is doing.”
      And how should visitors approach his works on view?
      “The most important thing: come with an open mind,” he said. “The show has more questions than answers, which is good. I think there’s a lot of assumptions made by A.I. and creativity. I think this subverts some of that.”
      See more images from the show below.
      Alexander Reben, The Mechanical Swarm (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
      Alexander Reben, A Short History of Plungers and Other Things That Go Plunge in the Night (2020). Courtesy of the artist
      Installation view of “AI Am I? Artificial Intelligence as Generated by Alexander Reben” at the Crocker Art Museum. Photo courtesy of Crocker Art Museum.
      “AI Am I? Artificial Intelligence as Generated by Alexander Reben” is on view at the Crocker Art Museum, 216 O Street, Sacramento, California, through April 28, 2024.
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      ‘More From the Heart And the Brain Than for the Eye’: Legendary Songwriter Bernie Taupin on His Soho Painting Show

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      Talk about a week of honors. Legendary songwriter and longtime Elton John writing partner Bernie Taupin is in New York this week for his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame at Barclays Center, alongside other superstars such as Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow, and Missy Elliot.
      However, amid those career-capping festivities, Taupin also found the time to add another accolade to his busy schedule: the opening last night in Soho of his solo art show at Chase Contemporary. The show, titled “Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory,” features a selection of compositions centering on the American flag, a motif that emerges from his reflections on family history—his father fought in WWII—and patriotism (“you would be hard pressed to find one having a more far-reaching effect on the psyche of the world than our own Stars and Stripes,” he writes in the press release.) 
      This is not the first time Taupin has shown such works. Previously, his flag-inspired canvasses were featured in a show called “American Anthem” at the Museum of Biblical Art in Dallas. And, while painting is not what he is best known for, it has been a lifelong passion for Taupin. “My inspiration for the visual arts started at a very young age looking through picture books with my mother of works by J.M.W. Turner—especially the heroic battle scenes—and the works of Van Gogh,” he explained via email.
      Installation view of “Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory” at Chase Contemporary in Soho. Image courtesy the artist and Chase Contemporary.
      He first began painting in earnest at his ranch some 20 years ago. While Taupin says that there is not a real relationship between his songwriting and his visual art, they are connected in at least one way: It was the international success he had with Elton John that allowed him to have the exposure to art that inspired him to paint.
      “During our travels in the music world, I frequented most of the major museums, refining my eye and my taste,” Taupin said. “On our first trip to America in 1970, I had the opportunity to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York where I discovered and was amazed by the Abstract Expressionists, particularly De Kooning and Hans Hoffman.”
      Other figures that impressed Taupin include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Wassily Kandinsky, Anselm Kiefer, and Robert Rauschenberg. Some of these influences you see in canvasses featuring guitars stuck to the surface, vibrant colors, and scrawled text. He appreciates art, he said, that is “more from the heart and the brain than for the eye.”
      Installation view of “Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory” at Chase Contemporary in Soho. Image courtesy the artist and Chase Contemporary.
      Taupin said that he appreciated that the audience would probably come to “Ragged Glory” based on his celebrity—he is literally in the pantheon of Rock and Roll now, after all—but hoped they would find something deeper in the paintings. “I suspect most visitors to the exhibition may arrive with our songs and even with Elton’s melodies playing in their heads,” he wrote. “I hope people will experience another form of expression—a most personal statement from me.”
      “Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory” is on view at Chase Contemporary, 413 West Broadway, New York, through November 19, 2023.
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      How Paris’s Once-in-a-Lifetime Mark Rothko Exhibition Changes the Way We See His Revered Paintings

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      Plenty of people can tell you what a Mark Rothko painting looks like. Posters of the Abstract Expressionist’s seductive fields of color are a fixture on dorm room walls. Fewer people can tell you what it feels like to stand in front of a Rothko painting in person. And until now, I’m not sure anyone could tell you what it felt like to be in the presence of 115 Rothkos all at once—but this transcendent experience is open to a whole lot more people after the Fondation Louis Vuitton opened its stunning encyclopedic winter blockbuster in Paris, “Mark Rothko.”
      Most museums would dream of staging a show like this. But these days the massive expenses of shipping, insuring, and loan agreements mean it could only be pulled off by a deep-pocketed private institution. Backed by the billionaire art collector and LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, the exhibition includes major groups of works lent from the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. and the Tate in London, as well as private lenders including the artist’s children Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, the Taiwanese collector Pierre Chen, U.S. collectors Adriana and Robert Mnuchin, Elie and Sarah Hirschfeld, and the Nahmad family.
      It’s a huge moment for Paris, as the foundation’s curator Suzanne Pagé, who has co-organized this exhibition with Rothko’s son Christopher, can attest.
      “Nobody in four generations has had the possibility to see Rothko in Paris,” Pagé told me. While there are two Rothkos in the Pompidou’s collection, the last time the artist had a retrospective in France was 1999—a show Pagé herself curated at the the Musée d’Art Moderne. “A lot of young people have posters, but it is a great betrayal to enter into the emotional painting of Rothko that way. What is essential in the painting of Rothko are the vibrations, which are totally reduced in a poster,” Pagé explained. “You have to stop, look, and be captive with your body, with your soul, with everything in you, and you are hypnotized.”
      “Mark Rothko” at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris on October 17, 2023 in Paris, France. (Photo by Luc Castel/GettyImages)
      The exhibition offers plenty of discoveries, from Rothko’s early figurative work to a re-evaluation of his later, darker paintings. It does a fair amount of work to undo how the macabre facts of Rothko’s biography—including his death by suicide aged 66—have colored the interpretation of these late works. A popular myth, which the curators deem reductive, has it that Rothko’s late-career turn from his classic, brightly-colored paintings towards a darker palette of rusty reds, purples, and blackish hues reflected his declining mental state.
      “A retrospective by definition needs to tell the whole career. And of course it needs to tell the whole life,” Christopher Rothko told me as we stood in front of some of these murky late works. “I think for me the most important thing is for people to experience the career, see the trajectory of the painting, and not start with the idea of suicide and then view the career backwards—because that’s a distortion. Nobody lives their lives backwards.”
      The show takes a basically chronological approach, beginning in a dimly lit subterranean gallery with Rothko’s early works. Painted in New York in the 1930s, where Rothko settled as an adult after emigrating to the U.S. from Russia as a child, these lonely and claustrophobic figurative paintings convey the spirit of the Depression era. His muted “subway paintings” concentrate on oppressive architectural features, corridors, staircases, and rails. A pair of unsettling, brassy nudes with faraway eyes might surprise those unfamiliar with this early period, as might the artist’s lone self-portrait, a dense painting from 1936, where Rothko cuts an inscrutable figure, his gaze obscured behind dark glasses.
      Left to right : Mark Rothko, Sacrifice of Iphigenia (1942), Tiresias (1944), Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1944). Installation view, gallery 1, level -1, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
      From the beginning of the 1940s, there’s a marked shift in style as Rothko grapples with expressing the barbarism of World War II through his brush, as well as his own childhood memories of religious persecution as a Russian Jew. A set of aesthetically troubling paintings veer from realism and draw instead on both mythology and Surrealist techniques for accessing the unconscious mind.
      This “neo-Surrealist” period where Rothko repeatedly splits, twists, dissects, and reconstructs the human figure comes to a peak in 1946, when we finally get to Rothko’s abstract turn. The next room hits visitors like a blast of wind, intensified by a Mozart opera reverberating through the galleries. In these scrubbed-out, pared-back canvases, we first begin to see the fields of color, amoeba-like, spring forth inside the painter’s mind as he realizes the impossibility of expressing what he sought to through the human figure. These “multi-form” paintings attempt to capture something of inner human realities, grasping into the abyss and tapping into that realm of experience beyond the measurable, the kind of experience that the Romantic poets called “the sublime.”
      A quote on the wall situates you with what was going on in Rothko’s mind: “A painting is not a picture of an experience. It is an Experience,” he wrote.
      Left to right : Mark Rothko, No. 8 (1949), Untitled (Blue, Yellow, Green on Red) (1954), No. 7 (1951), No. 11 / No. 20 (1949), No. 21 (Untitled) (1949). Installation view, gallery 2, level -1, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
      After that point, the galleries shift gears into the “classic” Rothkos, his best-known rectangular Abstract Expressionist fields of color from the late 1940 and onwards. The largest portion of the exhibition, it includes 70 works, awash with chromatic harmonies of saturated yellows and reds, but also pinks, purples, and blues. Their bright colors have often led observers to misconstrue these ethereal and beautiful works as serene or cheerful. Coming upon them here, having passed through the context of his earlier work, makes palpable how they are just as perforated with existential angst.
      Left to right: Mark Rothko, Ochre and Red on Red (1954), Orange and Red on Red (1957) Installation view, Mark Rothko, gallery 7, level 1, the “Rothko Room” from the Phillips Collection, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.

      Through that lens, Rothko’s shift toward his darker hued palette from around 1957 does not feel so much like a break as a natural evolution. Among the examples in the exhibition is Tate Modern’s entire Rothko Room—nine deep red paintings donated by the artist in 1959, originally destined for a restaurant at the Seagram building in New York. Working on a public installation prompted Rothko to change his interaction with the viewer. “He’s no longer trying to grab your attention as you walk by in a museum,” Christopher Rothko said. “He knows that you will be with him for an hour or two, or more, so instead of trying to overwhelm you in a moment with color and emotion, he reduces the tone. He reduces the speed of interaction and lets the painting seep into you.”
      After the end of the Seagram commission, Rothko retained this strategy, going even darker for the “black form” paintings, a number of which grace the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. A number of these sonorous works, which at a glance appear monochromatic but hum with just as many colors as the bright paintings, stole the show for me. Rothko was particular about the way he wanted these works to be experienced: not hung like a monument or trophy on the wall, but mounted low, so that you can look at them directly. In the low-lit setting of the gallery, as your eyes adjust to the lighting conditions, the miraculous paintings almost seemed to hover off the walls.
      Left to right: Mark Rothko Untitled (1964). No. 8 (1964) Installation view, Mark Rothko, gallery 6, level 1, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. © 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
      Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher knew Rothko while he was alive—the gallery has represented the estate since 1977—and has always been fond of these later, under-appreciated works, devoting a gallery show to them in 2017.
      Speaking over the phone, Glimcher recalled Rothko telling him a story about a “magnificent” dark painting, now in the dealer’s possession. It had been rejected by a collector who had been invited to the studio, but said she would prefer a “happy” painting in the palette for which the painter was most famous. Rothko recounted his reply: “Red, yellow, orange—aren’t those the colors of an inferno?”
      Glimcher credited an introduction by Louise Nevelson—who bonded with Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottleib over their shared refugee experience—for entree into a friendship with the notoriously reclusive painter. His 69th Street studio also just happened to be directly across from Glimcher’s apartment.
      “Mark let me come to his studio quite often,” Glimcher recalled. “Sometimes, in the winter, it got dark and I’d be coming home from work because I lived across the street, and there would be a light on. I would knock on the door and he would let me come in and sit and talk and show me the paintings that he had been working on.”
      Because of those encounters, the dealer has rare insight into the artist’s feelings about some of the later works, including smaller canvasses and works on paper which he made after a heart attack in 1968 meant he needed to work on a less physically strenuous scale. “He liked the feeling of the brush on the paper, how it slid more easily against the paper than against the canvas,” Glimcher said.
      Left to right: Mark Rothko, Untitled (1969-1970), Untitled (1969), Untitled (1969), Untitled (1969), Untitled (1969). Sculptures : Alberto Giacometti, L’Homme qui marche I (1960), Grande Femme III (1960). Installation view, Mark Rothko, gallery 10, level 2, on view through 2 April 2024 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. ©1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko – Adagp, Paris, 2023.
      As skeptical as I probably should be about a dealer trying to make a market for less in demand works, I am still persuaded by these sepulchral beauties. The exhibition’s final gallery offers up a number of Rothko’s late black and gray paintings alongside sculptures by Giacometti, as Rothko had originally intended for them to be shown in a never realized commission for UNESCO. The curators position these works, so simple but filled with incredibly rich and beautiful brushwork, as a springboard towards Minimalism. You can certainly see how an artist like Brice Marden might have looked at such works and taken inspiration.
      Viewed this way, Rothko’s darker works are rightfully seen as a progression: the artist uses reduced means, and a different chromatic scale, but is still after the same fundamental truths as the earlier works. Through this lens, they could be read as allegorical, with their deepening colors representing Rothko ongoing quest to convey pure human emotion, rather than simply expressing his own feelings. Yet lurking behind the great seduction of the colors in the “classic” Rothko paintings is the same drama: That of the human condition.
      “Rothko was always interested in Greek tragedy, and he felt that was what he was attaining and searching for in his paintings: The edge of perception, and taking us forward to someplace else,” Glimcher told me.
      With everything going on in the world right now, viewers might find catharsis in these paintings. I certainly did.
      “Mark Rothko” is on view at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris through April 2, 2024.
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