Exhibitions

A true head scratcher of an exhibition has touched down at Chicago’s Renaissance Society. Curated by artist Shahryar Nashat and critic Bruce Hainley, the show has no title and no press release—just a photo of actor Robert Pattinson in sunglasses and a cap, dining at a restaurant, accompanied by a cryptic explanation.
“We met for lunch to continue our conversation, soon noticing the celebrity, incognito, taking a meeting nearby, and such serendipity prompted a reaction: Use this strange presence as a device to work through the current moment in relation to how bodies, whether living currency or undead, circulate, distort, unalive, and, yet, love,” Hainley wrote on the show’s website.
That lunch was about a year ago, in a restaurant parking lot in Los Angeles, and Hainley and Nashat had met to discuss the possibility of curating an exhibition to coincide with the latter’s upcoming solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s become something of a tradition for contemporary artists to have simultaneous outings at both museums, but instead of a second solo show, Nashat was interested in collaborating with Hainley.
“We started talking about the idea of a muse or a mascot, and we were like, ‘Maybe we should find this entity or person and see how things come together under that.’ By total coincidence, Robert Pattinson was having lunch at the same restaurant,” Nashat told Cultured. “I took a snapshot of him. Bruce and I looked at each other and were like, ‘There you go. He’s here. There has to be a reason.’”

The British actor, who has been both a matinee idol—attracting legions of fans for his roles in the Twilight and Harry Potter film series—and an indie sensation, seemed to have the right kind of energy to build a show around. “Robert Pattinson is really a star rather than a celebrity,” Hainley said.
The exhibition features work by contemporary artists Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), Karen Kilimnik, and Larry Johnson. The curators have also secured a loan from the Art Institute of an oil painting by the French painter Marie Laurencin, who lived from 1883 to 1956. It’s been in the museum’s collection since 1986, but this is the first time it’s ever been displayed.
Marie Laurencin, Head of a Young Woman (1926). Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, bequest of Maribel G. Blum.
None of the artwork features Pattinson—but the Renaissance Society has exclusively promoted the show with photos of the actor (plus one of fans running their hands through the hair of his wax double at a Madame Tussauds).
That idea of fan consumption of celebrity, even their physical body somehow beyond their control, is something that ties the works in the show together.
But if you want to understand what’s going on in the exhibition, you had best get yourself to Chicago to see it in person.
Installation view of the Robert Pattinson-inspired exhibition at the the Renaissance Society, Chicago, curated by Shahryar Nashat and Bruce Hainley. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman, courtesy of Shahryar Nashat, Bruce Hainley, and the Renaissance Society, Chicago.
“People are so used to getting a show title, a press release, a list of names, or a description that they probably don’t ever read,” Nashat said. “As soon as you don’t conform to the ways information is usually circulated for reasons that just feel natural, you create mystery, but our intention is not to be mysterious. We want to let the things that matter come first—that’s what’s in the show. You have to be in the space, and then the thinking arranges around it.”
The exhibition is on view at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Cobb Hall, 4th Floor, Chicago, Illinois, May 13–July 2, 2023.
“Shahryar Nashat: Raw Is the Red” is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, 159 East Monroe Street, Chicago, Illinois, October 6, 2022–September 11, 2023.
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“Prescient” is a word often overused in art speak, but when it comes to the work of Josh Kline, the adjective is actually accurate.
Time and again over the last decade or so, the now 43-year-old artist has portended the ways in which nascent technologies and growing corporations would come to oppress the people whose lives they purported to improve. He’s turned Teletubbies into symbols of state surveillance; wrapped white-collar workers in plastic trash bags; and employed early deepfake techniques to make George W. Bush cop to war crimes, effectively using the former president’s penchant for historical revisionism against him. 
These pieces and many others make up “Project for a New American Century,” the first U.S. museum survey of Kline’s work, on view now at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It’s a virtuosic presentation from one of the world’s most timely artists—one that captures the anxieties of our current moment even when it looks ahead.  
Josh Kline, In Stock (Walmart Worker’s Arms) (2018), detail. Courtesy of the Whitney.
Included, for instance, is Kline’s film Adaptation (2019–22), which envisions, in a not-so-distant future, a group of essential workers commuting to their jobs by boat in a flooded Manhattan. There’s also his 2014 sculptures No Sick Days and Packing for Peanuts, in which 3D-printed limbs scanned from FedEx employees are imprinted with the company’s logo—an almost comical literalization of corporate exploitation.   
Indeed, subtlety is not a quality for which Kline is known. Viewers won’t walk out of the Whitney show wondering what he “meant.” But this legibility is a feature, not a bug; the urgency of the artist’s themes calls for action, not equivocation. And it’s intentional: “You shouldn’t need four years of study of Lacan and Deleuze and Adorno and whoever to understand art,” Kline told the New York Times earlier this year. “I want to create an art that’s accessible to the FedEx delivery worker or a doctor who doesn’t have that specific education but is interested in the society they live in.” 
See more images from Kline’s survey below: 
Still from Josh Kline’s Adaptation (2019–22). Courtesy of the Whitney.
Josh Kline, Make-Believe (2017).
Josh Kline, Desperation Dilation (2016). Courtesy of the Whitney
Installation View of “Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023. Courtesy of the Whitney.
Josh Kline, Energy Drip (2013). Courtesy of the Whitney.
Installation View of “Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023. Courtesy of the Whitney.
Josh Kline, Creative Hands (2011). Courtesy of the Whitney.
“Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century” is on view now through August 13 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. 
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Léon Monet was born in 1836, four years before his younger, more famous brother Claude, and he took a very different path in life. After studying to become a chemist, he moved to Rouen where he specialized in the production of synthetic pigments to be used as dyes, eventually becoming a founding member of the Rouen Industrial Society.
Luckily for Claude, this growing industry was well paid and Léon was able to offer his brother some financial support long before he gained widespread recognition, even introducing him to a few of his rich friends. Taking his interest in Claude’s work a step further, Léon began attending exhibitions in Paris and Rouen and collected paintings by other Impressionists including Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro.
Etienne-Carjat & Cie, Portrait of Léon Monet. Photo courtesy of Musée du Luxembourg.
The exhibition, “Léon Monet, artist’s brother and collector”, which runs until July 16 at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, sheds new light on Léon’s little known role as a supporter of the Impressionist movement as well as his relationship with his brother, which may have been more creative than most would assume.
“Léon was a chemist of synthetic colors, and these became increasingly common in painting at the end of the 19th century,” the show’s curator Géraldine Lefebvre told Artnet News. “I think he played a key role in this new way of painting and pushed his brother to use new colors.”
Though the pair were close for many decades, they had sadly fell out by the time of Léon’s death in 1917. Check out a tour of some of the artworks and objects that he collected over his lifetime below.
First notebook of drawings by Monet from 1856, acquired by Léon in 1893. Photo: © François Doury.
Never before seen by the public, one of the most exciting works included in the show is one of Claude’s earliest sketch books, which he started in 1856 at the young age of 15. Léon acquired the book at auction many years later in 1893 and one page bears a personal inscription by Claude written in 1895.
Around this time, Claude also produced caricatures to sell for pocket money. One image of a bourgeois figure with an exaggerated moustache and bowtie and fancy striped pants was originally bought by Léon’s close friend Ernest Billecocq.
Claude Monet, Anglais à moustache (c.1857). Photo courtesy of Musée du Luxembourg.
An 1864 view of the seaside in Le Havre, Normandy, where the two brothers grew up, is one of the most important early masterpieces by Claude from Léon’s collection.
Claude Monet, La plage à Sainte Adresse (1864). Photo: © Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts.
Léon also bought this sensitive portrayal of Claude’s first wife, Camille Doncieux, in a state of meditative rest. A reference to the considerable influence of Japonisme on the artist’s works can be found in the fan resting on the mantlepiece, showing a floral design that carries on to the other fabrics in the room. “I think Léon was interested in this painting because of that pattern,” speculated Lefebvre.
Léon presented the work at a local exhibition in Rouen in 1872, proudly putting his name in the catalogue to introduce himself as a collector.
Claude Monet, Méditation, Madame Monet au canapé (vers 1871). Photo: © Rmn – Grand Palais / Gérard Blot.
A year later, in 1875, Léon attended an auction of Impressionist works where he bought the first lot, his brother’s painting of the river Seine. He also encountered some of Claude’s peers, including Sisley and Renoir, whose painting of Paris below he also acquired at the sale.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir,Paris, l’Institut au Quai Malaquais (1872). Photo: © Courtesy of the painting’s owner.
Léon also bought a wintry snowscape by Sisley according to old photographs of his collections. Though the specific work is in a private collection, it would have looked similar to the painting below, which is included in the exhibition.
Alfred Sisley, Route de Louveciennes, effet de neige (1874). Photo: © Hasso Plattner Collection.
When Pissarro visited Rouen for the first time in 1883, he stopped by Léon’s house for dinner. The men had been friends since 1872 thank to the connection made by Claude, and Léon became an early collector of Pissarro’s. “It was important for an artist to go to places where they know they can find a collector who will buy their paintings,” explained Lefebvre.
During the visit, Pissarro became inspired by his new surroundings and dashed of the below sketch of the town and its surrounding hills. Léon immediately snapped up both this and another depiction of Rouen the very same day they were painted.
Camille Pissarro, Environs de Rouen (1883). Photo: © Courtesy of Sotheby’s, Inc.
Léon also bought a work of the beach at Les Petits-Dalles in Normany by Claude’s step-daughter Blanche Hoschedé Monet, the daughter of his second wife Alice who followed in his footsteps to become an Impressionist painter.
Blanche Hoschedé Monet, Les Petites-Dalles (1885-1890). Photo courtesy of Musée du Luxembourg.
Finally, Léon was also interested in works by the lesser-known painter Charles Frechon, a native of Rouen who also notably worked as a draughtsman for the dye industry. “To earn a living these artists made patterns for fabric manufacturers,” explained Lefebvre.
The painting below is not the same autumnal sketch that the collector is known to have acquired, but it spotlights the unique style of the artist.
Charles Frechon, Fenaison, Rouen depuis la rive gauche (1891-1895).
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Raffia skirts, rosebud hair knots, abstracted, eyeless faces, and the Black female body are the elemental components of American artist Simone Leigh’s (b. 1967) distinct visual language, a language the artist has crafted to fluency over the past two decades of her career.
Over the years, Leigh’s artworks have earned widespread critical and public acclaim with solo exhibitions at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art, the High Line, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Perez Art Museum in Miami. Last summer, in a career-crowning achievement, Leigh represented the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Her presentation, “Sovereignty,” filled the pavilion’s Neoclassical structure with a striking set of new sculptures made of age-old materials of bronze and ceramic, merging architectural structures with the female body, in powerful statements on Black women’s labor, cultural transmission, and hierarchies of power. The stunning presentation won Leigh the Golden Lion, the biennale’s highest honor.
Now, the American public will have the chance to see many of these works in the U.S. for the first time. The ICA Boston recently opened the much-anticipated exhibition “Simone Leigh,” curated by Eva Respini, deputy director of curatorial affairs, and Anni A. Pullagura, curatorial assistant. Here, 10 works from Venice form the nucleus of an expanded survey of 35 works across ceramic, bronze, and video.
“It’s a privilege to be able to go to Venice. A very small number of people can do that and so we felt it was important to bring the works here, to have U.S. audiences be able to enjoy it. And while the show is certainly a celebratory homecoming, we’ve also created a context for those works within a broader context of her career,” said Respini in a conversation. Following ICA Boston, the exhibition will travel to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles for a joint presentation with LACMA and the California African American Museum. 
If you’re new to Simone Leigh’s work or simply curious about the exhibition, we’ve chosen what we consider to be 5 essential artworks in the exhibition, which unlock insights into Leigh’s larger practice. Read below to find out more.
Satellite (2022)
Installation view of Simone Leigh’s Satellite (2022) at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh.
Just the Facts: Before visitors even reach the ICA, they are met by the monumental bronze, Satellite, which towers 24 feet tall, installed outside the museum. Satellite is particularly representative of the ways Leigh explores and combines materials and cultural histories; the figure is inspired by a D’mba, a wooden headdress with a female bust belonging to the Baga people of the Guinea Coast. These headdresses were traditionally worn ceremonially as a conduit between the living and the dead. In Leigh’s sculpture, the head is replaced by a large bronze satellite dish. 
Expert Insights: “Simone’s works are always hybrids in many ways of the cultural and material histories of the African diaspora, the African continent, the Caribbean as well the U.S. Here, she has taken this idea of the headdress, and blown it up to a monumental scale, but in place of a head has cast a satellite dish that is 10 feet across, bringing in a very modern and contemporary conduit. Satellite dishes are built for both receiving and broadcasting. And so that satellite dish, in a way becomes a beacon that not only broadcasts outwards but also receives all of those who come to the show,” said curator Eva Respini. 
Bonus Material: In Venice, Satellite stood majestically at the center of the U.S. pavilion’s courtyard. In this installation, the sculpture, marked by its beautiful black patina, is installed along the Boston Harbor and can be seen from several blocks away, welcoming visitors to the museum.

Overburdened with Significance (2011)
Simone Leigh, Overburdened with Significance (2011). Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh.
Just the Facts: Simone Leigh first rose to acclaim for her busts and heads, which reinterpret the classical motif. Overburdened with Significance is among the earliest heads Leigh created, here defined by an elongated hairstyle composed of glazed rosettes in white, gray, and tan. The figure’s abstracted face will be recognizable to those familiar with Leigh’s work–and is eyeless, as is also common to her works. Such depictions have at times been interpreted as a refusal of a gaze or an inward look, but also speak to Leigh’s interest in the abstraction of the body. 
Expert Insights: “The narrative of labor is very prominent throughout Simone’s work, specifically the idea of anonymous and unrecognized labor, specifically the labor of Black women’s intellectual labor, as well as creative or domestic labor. And so, for me, the rosettes of Overburdened with Significance are not only a motif that she has come back to again and again, but I feel like I can see her making them and I look at the work, that they embody the act of making and very tactile and haptic. Of course, people shouldn’t touch! But this work has the kind of texture and tactility that is what makes her work so resonant,” said Respini.
Bonus Material: Leigh handcrafts each and every rosette, rolling clay between her fingers to form each petal. 
Breakdown (2011)
Liz Magic Laser and Simone Leigh, in collaboration with Alicia Hall Moran, Breakdown (2011). Courtesy of the artists and Matthew Marks Gallery.
Just the Facts: Though not as widely familiar as her sculptures, Leigh has frequently collaborated with other artists in creating video works. The ICA exhibition features three of these video works, including Breakdown (2011) made with artist Liz Magic Laser with composer and musical artist Alicia Hall Moran. The 9-minute single-channel color video features Moran, a mezzo-soprano, singing a libretto of a “hysterical” breakdown, the language culled from fictional scenes of women crying in both television shows and movies. The results film is a moving, tragicomic mediation on psychology, race, and gender.
Expert Insights: “We put ‘hysterical’ in quotes here because it’s really about the roles that women are forced to play and the stereotypes that women have been pushed into. Hysteria in this 19th-century sense is perceived as performative and in this work, Alicia does a beautiful performance that’s very expressive and intense. The volume of her voice and the cadence of it really sort of embodies the libretto and reverberates through the rafters of the Harlem church where this was filmed. Breakdown really underscores the many different arenas, Simone is drawing from and her interest in pushing forward the work of other creators,” said Respini. 
Bonus Material: Moran’s character’s breakdown is spurred by a quite mundane inconvenience: she doesn’t want to attend a ballgame. 

Last Garment (2022)
Simone Leigh, Last Garment (2022). Installation view at “Simone Leigh,” the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery. Photo by Timothy Schenck. © Simone Leigh.
Just the Facts: This bronze sculpture (measuring approximately 4.5 by 5 feet) has a concrete inspiration—a 19th-century souvenir photograph that depicts an anonymous Jamaican laundress, bent washing clothes in a river. Such souvenir photographs were used by tourism bureaus to attract visitors to the British West Indies and in this case Jamaica. Last Garment reflects upon these visual histories of labor, specifically, the anonymous labor of Black women, giving permanence to this figure. 
Expert Insights: “Simone has intervened and rethought the laundress’s anonymity by giving her a grand scale through this larger-than-life representation made in beautiful and durable bronze. What’s most captivating to me is the incredible attention to detail Leigh brings to this sculpture, in particular the figure’s hair, which is made of almost 800 individual rosettes. Even working at this scale, Leigh brings details to the fore, giving the sculpture an incredible impact in person,” said Anni Pullagura.
Bonus Material: The sculpture is meant to be presented with a reflecting pool, as it was in Venice. Here in the ICA installation, a new, larger reflecting pool has been created for Last Garment, one that is situated breathtakingly along the sightline of Boston Harbor outside.
Cupboard IX (2019) 
Simone Leigh, Cupboard IX (2019). Courtesy of the artist. © Simone Leigh.
Just the Facts: In Leigh’s more recent large-scale ceramic sculptures, bodily elements often fuse with familiar household domestic storage objects, in this case, a cupboard. Cupboard IX, a towering sculpture, which measures 6.5 feet tall, presents a faceless head atop a woman’s torso, whose arms are outstretched in a gesture of welcoming. This upper body is ceramic and fired with a luminous green tea glaze. The head is in the shape of a pot—a vessel we might imagine collecting water or as storage for grain. Still yet, one might picture a woman walking with a pot on top of her head. All these allusions lead back to one of Leigh’s more central symbols: woman as nourisher. This upper torso is affixed to a steel armature overlaid with a raffia skirt. Raffia skirts appear in many of Leigh’s works, signaling motherhood and femininity, along with architecture and Sub-Saharan dwellings. In this way, Cupboard IX brings together many of the motifs that reconfigure throughout her oeuvre. Leigh has said that she creates for an audience of Black women and femmes, and through works like Cupboard IX she speaks to their community roles, as providers and protectors. 
Expert Insights: “The dome shape form reads as a skirt, but it also reads as a structure. It could be a reference to Muskoka architecture or Sub-Saharan architecture. You could think of it as a hut, perhaps, but also as a place of refuge. The idea of hiding under your mother’s skirts, comes to mind. The femme body appears here as a place of gathering, a place of safety and welcoming, which is echoed again in the gesture of outstretched arms,” said Respini. 
Bonus Material: Raffia comes from a palm tree native to Madagascar and is used in many contexts within the African continent including housing and basket weaving. It can be found all throughout the Global South, however, in the Caribbean, and in East Asia.
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The very name “artificial intelligence” tends to position these technological developments in opposition to the natural world. Offering a fresh perspective, the French London-based artist Marguerite Humeau has reimagined A.I. as a type of collective intelligence like the one shared by ants, termites, or bees.
Humeau has tested out the idea by collaborating with A.I. to help create the video work Collective Effervescence (2023) and a ceramic mural for “meys,” her solo exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey in south London, which runs until May 14.
The show is inspired by eusocial insects, which manage to pull-off incredible feats of engineering comparative to their size and individual ability thanks to their instinct for cooperation. Each of these strange but sophisticated artworks are, in some way, the result of the “hive mind.” They prompt viewers to consider what we humans might hope to learn from these seemingly insignificant pests.
“There are forms of life that will survive us, how can we take them as our guides or companions to understand how to navigate our own futures?” Humeau has asked.
In the exhibition’s first room, we see Humeau resurrect and build on intelligence from the past, in this case that of the Polish artist Adam Kossowski who made a large mosaic for the Peckham Civic Centre, also in south London, in 1965. His work, The History of the Old Kent Road, is now scheduled for demolition, but Humeau has decided to give it an update with an A.I. twist by enlisting the help of the GPT3 algorithm to create a new, post-apocalyptic vision of the city. This is displayed in a series of hand-sculpted tiles or “fragments.”

Marguerite Humeau, The History of Old Kent Road (Post-Kossowski) Fragments I–V (2023). Photo courtesy of White Cube.
Marguerite Humeau, The History of Old Kent Road (Post-Kossowski) Fragment XI (2023). Photo courtesy of White Cube.
In Kossowski’s original mural, a single Camberwell Beauty butterfly can be spotted by the more attentive viewers. In Humeau’s version, this insect appears in a large swarm, reminding us that the end of the world for humans may offer other populations the opportunity to regenerate.
The film Collective Effervescence is a study of the harmoniously choreographed behavior of termites living within a mound, capturing the excitement of their shared vitality. Just as humans farm, these insects must create and cultivate a fungus garden as a communal source of food. Once again, Humeau has used OpenAI’s popular A.I. text-to-image generator DALL-E to generate images that fantasize about this process as a ritualistic dance.

Marguerite Humeau, Collective Effervescence (2023). The artist generated this image in part with DALL-E, OpenAI’s image-generation model. Photo: © Marguerite Humeau.
Marguerite Humeau, Collective Effervescence (2023). The artist generated this image in part with DALL-E, OpenAI’s image-generation model. Photo: © Marguerite Humeau.
Marguerite Humeau, Collective Effervescence (2023). The artist generated this image in part with DALL-E, OpenAI’s image-generation model. Photo: © Marguerite Humeau.

Elsewhere in the show, Humeau explores more traditional forms of collaboration and interdependence by working with collectives of craftspeople with a complementary variety of skills. Each specializing in a different kind of material—including, glass, terracotta, wax, and wood—they have worked together on a series of highly intricate sculptures with forms that were clearly inspired by the organic world. These fantastical “totems” or “Guardians,” staged within a dimly lit gallery space, bring to mind the layered branches of coral, the repeat grooves of a mushroom or the porous surface of honeycomb.
Check out some of these works below.
Installation view of Marguerite Humeau’s exhibition “meys” at White Cube Bermondsey. Photo: Ollie Hammick, © White Cube.
Installation view of Marguerite Humeau’s exhibition “meys” at White Cube Bermondsey. Photo: Ollie Hammick, © White Cube.
Installation view of Marguerite Humeau’s exhibition “meys” at White Cube Bermondsey. Photo: Ollie Hammick, © White Cube.
Installation view of Marguerite Humeau’s exhibition “meys” at White Cube Bermondsey. Photo: Ollie Hammick, © White Cube.
Installation view of Marguerite Humeau’s exhibition “meys” at White Cube Bermondsey. Photo: Ollie Hammick, © White Cube.
“meys” is on view at White Cube Bermondsey, 144-152 Bermondsey St, London, through May 14.

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