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      What I’m Looking at: Chryssa’s Sizzling Tribute to Times Square, the MyPillow Guy’s Office Paintings, and Other Things at the Edge of Art

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      “What I’m Looking at” is a monthly column where I digest art worth seeing, writings worth consuming, and other tidbits. Below, thoughts from the first weeks of July 2023.

      Chryssa Gets Her Day
      I only really knew the name of Greek-born sculptor Chryssa (1933-2013) before this big show dedicated to her New York output, currently at the Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea (co-created with the Menil Collection in Houston, and on view through July 22, 2023). What fun to get a full sense of her! In the 1950s and ’60s, Chryssa breathed in New York’s energy, and breathed it out as art. She took inspiration from material that evoked the swirling, information-dense urban environment: newspapers, typography, neon signs. Then she stripped away their information-conveying function, distilling and abstracting their forms into reliefs and sculptures that become mysterious, austere, transfixing.
      Her act of going by the mononymn “Chryssa” itself mirrors her procedure of subtraction and abstraction: adding to a signifier’s evocative power by stripping it down and making it mysterious. It also suggests a certain swagger. The sculpture that probably best incarnates this appetite is her magnum opus, on tour here from the Buffalo AKG Art Museum collection: a 10-by-10 hulk called The Gates to Times Square (1964–66). It is a glorious abstracted “A,” in sizzling blue neon. It wants to stun you as a distilled version of the grandeur of New York’s commercial center, while also conveying the mystery of an altar of secret texts held just out of reach.
      Chryssa, Five Variations on the Ampersand (1966) in “Chryssa and New York” at Dia. Photo by Ben Davis.
      Chryssa, Classified (1960). Photo by Ben Davis.
      Chryssa, Cycladic Movement (n.d.) and Letter “T” (1959). Photo by Ben Davis.

      The Berlin Scene
      The tightly packed one-room show dedicated to Warhol superstar Brigid Berlin does contain things you’d call art, ranging from Berlin’s raucous “tit prints” (made by dipping her breasts in paint and smooshing them on paper) to the needlepoints of lurid New York Post covers from her latter days. But “The Heaviest” at Vito Schnabel (on view through August 18), organized by Alison M. Gingeras, is really more akin to immersing yourself in a full “Brigid Berlin” exhibit at a museum of Downtown history.
      Along with the art, you get letters and pictures from her childhood as a rebellious heiress (her dad was CEO of the Hearst Corp.); newspaper articles about her as the flamboyant character that she still was in her post-Factory life; a video made with Warhol and Larry Poons documenting her breast-based art-making practice accompanied by her own gregarious, self-mocking commentary.
      It’s actually fitting that the show runs together Berlin’s art and material about her as a character, in a way. Berlin didn’t really seem to distinguish art-making from living an interesting life. This is probably best represented by her copious Polaroids of characters who lurked around the Factory, and in her recordings—which you can listen to at the gallery—of her constant phone calls with intimates and associates.
      The show’s a fascinating look at a life. As to the art as art, I’m of two minds, I guess. On the one hand, it does feel to me that Berlin’s output mainly depends on your interest in a certain form of micro-celebrity. But then this kind of self-mythologizing persona does feel very contemporary, with its indulgent eclecticism, its defensive bravado, and its melancholy undertones.
      Brigid Berlin material in “The Heaviest.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      Four of Brigid Berlin’s “Tit Prints” in “The Heaviest.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      A Brigid Berlin Polaroid of Dennis Hopper in “The Heaviest.” Photo by Ben Davis.
      Sampler by Brigid Berlin in “The Heaviest.” Photo by Ben Davis.

      Fun With Shirts
      I wandered, basically at random, into Fierman gallery to find a one-weekend-only display of Nora Griffin’s paint-on-vintage-tee-shirt art show. Griffin, a maker of wonky abstract paintings, deploys her groovy, whirling colors to various New York-themed vintage tees, all hailing from the pre-9/11 era, bringing a sense of a vanished era of the city into alignment with an approachable kind of thrift-shop creativity. The effect was to make you feel like you had time traveled momentarily to a simpler, sunnier, nicer scene, and one that you could walk away with a piece of.
      You missed the show, but the shirts have their own Instagram—so join the 1999 NYC Tee club while you can.
      Installation view of Nora Griffin’s “1999 NYC TEE” show at Fierman. Photo by Ben Davis.
      A Nora Griffin tee. Photo by Ben Davis.

      Threadbare
      As to things to read… I guess the art world is embracing Threads, according to Annie Armstrong’s piece on the Whitney’s gushy foray into the new social media network. So we have to deal with Threads. And I’ll say that Kate Lindsay’s post about the Threads experiment for the Embedded newsletter about internet culture is the best thing I’ve read on it.
      Pungently titled “Threads Is a Mecca of Millennial Brain Rot,” it sums up my experience of Meta’s new social media platform, and of social media altogether right now—everything feels like different flavors of desperate:
      When I first opened the app, I expected to see an early-Twitter copycat. Instead, I was met with a feed of users parroting robotic and emoji-laden prompts, the same four jokes about being “unhinged,” and, of course, a car giveaway from Mr. Beast. Given the opportunity to build the social media culture we say we’ve been missing, we immediately resorted to posting the worst clichés from today’s internet. Is this post from a person, or a brand? Because they’re both employing the same hokey syntax to post empty engagement-bait. 
      This behavior says something about how we view social media now. It’s not for connection, but performance. It seems that many of the people who rushed to download this app did so to get in early on a rush for potential new followers, and in so doing, adopted digital personas that bear no resemblance to how a single human talks in real life. After years of being subliminally nudged towards this behavior through algorithm changes on other platforms, when given the opportunity to do something different on Threads, we came running back to the bland platitudes and low-hanging fruit we’ve been conditioned to rely on for engagement.
      I feel it would be better just to admit that this form of communication has failed than to try to get back to some imaginary “good” version of it. But that’s me, and that’s probably not going to happen.
      Screenshot of a Threads post from the Whitney Museum using Allen Frame, Cady Noland, phone booth, NYC (1981) as a meme.

      The MyPillow Guy’s Art
      Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, Inc.—known around the web as the “MyPillow Guy”—is selling off his company’s stuff on K-Bid Online Auctions to raise money, having wasted his empire’s actual and reputational capital on trying to overturn the 2020 election. So of course, I went to check if there was any art. And there is, sort of.
      It’s a lot of framed images of plants and green landscapes and such. If you have a suburban bathroom to decorate, you have a week to place your bids.
      I do love this still-life, below, presented with no info on what you are looking at but with the accompanying detail shot of the signature to show the authenticity of whatever that is. I’ve always wanted to own a… “ufiloojp[??]”
      It really is like owning a piece of history: Offering random, blurry details to prove something is real is kind of what Lindell is known for now.
      Screenshot of an artwork being sold in the “My Pillow Surplus Industrial Equipment” sale on K-Bid Online Auctions.
      Screenshot of an artwork being sold in the “My Pillow Surplus Industrial Equipment” sale on K-Bid Online Auctions.

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      An Illuminating New Show Celebrates the Life and Art of Brigid Berlin, Daughter of High Society and Friend of Andy Warhol

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      Brigid Berlin was a debutante, a rebel, an artist, a muse.
      She is not a familiar name to many, even today, but in the downtown demimonde of the 1960s and ‘70s, Berlin became a cult figure, famed as Andy Warhol’s rollicking Factory sidekick, his muse, and the star of his 1966 experimental film Chelsea Girls. She was also an intriguing artist in her own right, who many say picked up the Polaroid before Warhol himself, and was a collaborator with a number of the leading artistic names of her era. Berlin, who died in New York City in 2020 at the age of 80, was in many ways a consummate contradiction, and the scope of her heady, and at times fraught, life and legacy are still coming into focus. 
      Now, “The Heaviest,” a new exhibition at Vito Schnabel’s downtown space, curated by Alison M. Gingeras, is putting the spotlight on Berlin as an artist with a complex, ahead-of-her-time practice, and introducing her provocative legacy to a new generation. The exhibition is a dizzyingly intense portrait of a creative force, and follows from Berlin’s childhood as a daughter of New York high society, through her famed years in Warhol’s Factory circle, to her independent artistic career and exhibitions, and well into the latter years of her life when she returned to the monied circles of her childhood. This full-circle presentation brings together Berlin’s work in Polaroids, audio recordings, and even needlepoint. 
      Brigid Berlin, Mr. and Mrs. Brigid Pork. © Vincent Fremont/Vincent Fremont Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.
      Much of the work included in the show is on view for the first time; Gingeras spent several years planning the exhibition, tracking down materials in artist archives and through Berlin’s estate. The idea for the exhibition first sparked while Gingeras was writing an essay for the 2019 catalog Warhol’s Women. “I was researching these women who were major agents of creative exchange in Warhol’s life, and I realized how much of Brigid’s own contributions as an artist have been read through the lens of Warhol. It rubbed me the wrong way,” she explained. “This exhibition really became an opportunity to look at her in a holistic way both in a biographical sense and as a deeper dive into her relationships and her position in the art world especially in the 1970s.”  
      Berlin was born in 1939 the daughter of sought-after socialite Muriel “Honey” Johnson and Richard E. Berlin, the chairman of Hearst’s media empire for over three decades. Her father’s powerful position placed the family at the height of upper-crust society—Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, and the Windsors were all family friends who sought his counsel. But Berlin’s want-for-nothing childhood was anything but idyllic. The exhibition begins with staged saccharine childhood photographs and Christmas cards of Berlin and her sister. These perfected images are juxtaposed with vitrines of letters exchanged between Berlin, at boarding school, and her mother; often wrenching, the letters document her mother’s merciless scolding of Berlin over her weight (her mother infamously fed Berlin amphetamines as a child in an attempt to control her figure), but also hint at Berlin’s rebellious nature. One letter from Berlin’s schoolmaster details a night of drinking gone awry in sordid and comical detail.
      Brigid Berlin, Untitled (Tit Print) (1996). © Vincent Fremont/Vincent Fremont Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.
      “Her family’s shaming around her body was the catalyst that catapulted her into the so-called rebellion that brought her to the doorstep of the Factory,” Gingeras said, walking through the exhibition.
      The Factory and Warhol, the father of Pop, are certainly present in “The Heaviest” but here Warhol is pictured through the eyes of Berlin, rather than the other way around. A selection of Berlin’s many thematically compiled photo books of Polaroids is on view, including one with “Mr & Mrs. Brigid Pork” embossed on its cover, a reference to the pet names the friends kept for each other. In this book, Berlin and Warhol are presented in photographs side by side, a creative dyad rather than an artist and muse.
      But while the Factory can certainly be felt, it’s Berlin as an autonomous artist who is the exhibition’s primary focus. Perhaps the birthright of her high-society background, Berlin, the exhibition makes clear, had a way of permeating many worlds. While Warhol might have been her most famed companion, she was embraced by the hard-drinking macho “heavies” of the art world and counted Willem de Kooning, John Chamberlain, Larry Rivers, Donald Judd, Richard Serra, James Rosenquist, and Brice Marden among her friends. These artists, too, all appear in her Polaroid photo books, and their friendships are detailed in exchanged letters, postcards, as well as in portraits of Berlin herself, including one by Ray Johnson, on view in the show. 
      Cassette tapes from Brigid Berlin Audio Archive. © Rob Vaczy and Pat Hackett. All rights reserved.
      Though Berlin often focused her lens outward, when she looked toward herself her work feels especially satisfying. Among the most evocative works in the exhibition are Berlin’s so-called “tit prints,” which, as the name would suggest, are colorful prints the artist created using her breasts. For a figure who was so often judged, these prints feel wonderfully embodied. “Body positivity did not exist then and she really brazenly embraced her body as a creative tool,” Gingeras explained in conversation.
      Berlin’s fascination with the body expanded beyond her own, however, and certainly the most irreverent work, and outright funny work in the exhibition is her infamous “Cock Book.” Made between 1968 and 1974, Berlin carried around a notebook embossed with “Topical Bible” on the cover, and asked mainly male artists to depict their penises in its pages. Filled with drawings, photographs, and collages, the book’s numerous contributors include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dennis Hopper, Cy Twombly, James Rosenquist, Ray Johnson, Cecil Beaton, and Robert Smithson, among dozens of other familiar names. 
      Installation view of “Brigid Berlin: The Heaviest,” curated by Alison M. Gingeras. Photo: Argenis Apolinario. Courtesy Vito Schnabel Gallery.
      While the ephemera of these friendships function to locate Berlin at the heart of the artistic scene of the era, the exhibition is right to point out that her recognition as a bonafide artist came from dealers, as well. In 1970, Berlin was the subject of a solo exhibition at the famed Heiner Friedrich Gallery in Cologne, Germany—her first solo and one that showcased her audio tapes and Polaroid photographs. “The Heaviest” is remarkably the first exhibition since that seminal show to present these recordings, which encompass calls and conversations between Berlin and those close to her. The recordings are startlingly transportive. In one, Berlin’s mother lambasts her for her association with the Factory milieu, accusing Berlin of using drugs. In another, Warhol pleads with Berlin, when she says she’s torn up her Polaroids, and he offers to pay her a penny a piece for them (and then, when she hesitates, three pennies). These tidbits are oddly prescient of our contemporary fixation on reality entertainment, and wholly absorbing.  
      Brigid Berlin, Untitled (Jasper Johns Flag) (ca. 2002). © Vincent Fremont/Vincent Fremont Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved. Collection of Vincent and Shelly Fremont, New York.
      Perhaps what makes Berlin so intriguing as a creative force is her simultaneous adherence to and transcendence of the norms of her time. While she eschewed her conservative childhood, she sought the approval of male artists, what Berlin calls her “internalized misogyny.” Her political views could be anything but polite. Later in her life, Berlin fully abandoned the downtown sphere, moving into an uptown apartment. A bright coral wallpaper lines the walls of the gallery—it’s a custom recreation of the same wallpaper that decorated Berlin’s home—and hints at a country club conservatism that is garish in its own unique way.
      In these later decades, Berlin didn’t give up art-making entirely. Among the highlights of the show are several needlepoint pillowcases she made in the early 2000s—some recreating New York Post covers, covers which Berlin said reminded her of her father; another mixes Jasper Johns’s Flags with jingoistic language that can feel as American as a can of Campbell’s soup—the darker side of the American dream. The exhibition closes with a collection of artistic tributes to Berlin, from Kate Simon’s striking 2008 portrait of the artist to a recent painting by Elisabetta Zangrandi—the interpretations are varied and appear like offerings left at the reliquary of a mythic creative life. 
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      A Fixation With Non-Conforming Bodies Is Pervading Contemporary Art. Here’s How Two Shows in London Capture the Trend

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      What does a human body look like, and how is it meant to feel? This question serves as the lynchpin for two exhibitions currently on show in London—”Support Structures” at Gathering (until July 21) and “Unruly Bodies” at Goldsmiths CCA (until September 3)—both of which celebrate contemporary artists that look far beyond conventional understandings of our flesh.
      At Gathering, the show’s title serves as an umbrella for ideas of nurturing and care, as well as the physical sensation of being in our bodies.
      The show opens with a sculpture by Berenice Olmedo, a Mexican artist whose practice is informed by her work at a Mexico City children’s hospital. Isabela (2020) is named after the child who once wore the leg brace that forms the majority of the piece. The medical equipment is suspended as if a pair of human legs occupy it, in a ghostly balance of fragility and utilitarianism. Lilac-colored straps and a polka-dotted pattern soften and gender the object, something that Olmedo compounds by adding a pair of pointe ballet shoes—surely the most unnatural manifestation of beauty.
      Berenice Olmedo, Isabela(2020). Courtesy the artist and Jan Kaps, Cologne Photography Sprengel Museum.
      Physical aids are also prominent in several prints by Louise Bourgeois. A crutch is seen holding up the bent and falling branches of a tree, and again supporting a faceless amputee. These etchings allude not only to memories of her sister’s physical impairments, but the complexities of the artist’s relationship with her family, which caused considerable mental anxiety.
      Alina Szapocznikow also grapples with the existential challenges of sickness in her photographs of the sinewy, elastic remnants of chewed gum. These works were made soon after the artist was diagnosed with breast cancer and convey the inextricable nature of our physical and mental self, something that is often compartmentalized within medical care.
      Redefining what a body actually means naturally leads to the boundless possibilities of science fiction. An early work by Nam June Paik conceives of a “robot brain” formed from an old diary and a rudimentary computer, while an enormous—and rather chilling— sculpture by Ivana Bašic presents a vaguely humanoid figure with a yolk of blown glass for a head. The piece is reminiscent of HR Geiger’s xenomorphs, with a body that is held in a foetal state, as if it could animate at any moment. The title, I will lull and rock my ailing light in my marble arms, is sensual and caring, seemingly at odds with this nightmarish vision. Perhaps this figure isn’t so horrifying after all?
      Installation view, “Support Structures,” Gathering, June 22 – July 22, 2023. Photo © Gathering (Grey Hutton).
      At Goldsmiths CCA, the tenets of sci-fi serve as equally vital source material. The principle of the show explores “monstrous” visions of the body, as symbols of resistance and non-conformity, where our physical selves are not defined by a smooth, conventional exterior.
      An entire room is given over to Giulia Cenci’s eerie sculptural creatures, which exist as featureless heads attached to dead tree roots, old tubes and moulds of human bones. Presented in a blacked-out interior, with each ‘figure’ housed in a cell formed from reclaimed shower cubicles, this is a chilling vision that speaks to the shadows of trauma and the power of our own dark imagination.
      Camille Henrot’s bronze Mon Corps de Femme (2019) is another standout piece. She manipulates a material historically used to render the hard, imposing symbols of masculine dominance, yet here it conveys the fleshy folds of a postpartum body, where recognizable elements of a belly give way to an empty cavity. The entire piece is shot through with an electrical cable, in an allusion to the currents of our nervous system, not to mention the medicalization of birth.
      Installation view, “Unruly Bodies,” Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (June 30 – September 3, 2023). Courtesy Goldsmiths CCA. Photo by Rob Harris.
      Elsewhere, the idea of ritual performance and literally “embodying” folklore and myth is explored in Anna Perach’s surreal, tufted costumes. These wearable sculptures extend and confuse conventional proportions, blurring the lines between interior and exterior flesh through enormously tactile and joyfully adorned textural surfaces. These pieces are designed to be worn for performances, but they are just as alluring as inanimate objects.
      The notion of clothing the body is also a central concern for Paloma Proudfoot, whose background in pattern-cutting informs her new ceramic commission for this exhibition, The Mannequins Reply (2023). Each piece of this incredible tableau fits together like an articulated doll, complete with golden pins. These figures upend the symbol of the shop dummy, which is defined by unrealistic proportions and a rigid passivity, in favor of a sinister and sensual agency. Both a hairy torso and a flayed, muscular back are rendered gorgeous through glossy glazes, as well as full breasts and a belly that have broken the threads of their body suit.
      The presence of enormous sewing needles, complete with a rope of red thread, might be tinged with violence, but it ultimately alludes to a space of corporeal care, repair and collaboration. In this work, the words of the academic Susan Stryker that inspired this exhibition feel fully realized: “I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself.”
      “Unruly Bodies” is on view at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London, through September 3, 2023.
      “Support Structures” is on view at Gathering, London, through July 22.
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      Doug Aitken’s New Video Work Visits a Middle American Oil Town and Delivers a Searing Comment on Climate Change

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      “What should the future look like?” is a central question occupying the minds of scientists, economists, artists, and politicians debating in important forums daily. However, another set of questions loom, which are just as important, and which often determine the first: “Who gets asked?” The other one, which folds into it: “Who gets to decide?”
      Rarely are such questions about the future put to citizens of small rural communities, even though they may be in some cases most affected by climate change and economic and industrial shifts. This seems to be on the mind of the conceptual California-based artist Doug Aitken when he took his camera inland to an unnamed U.S. oil town and started filming his conversations with the locals.
      In their arid dust-bowl of a town, huge pump jacks dot the horizon, pulsing in and out of a bone dry desert landscape to extract oil, which seems to be the main source of income of the town and also its raison d’etre. The new video, called HOWL, premiered in his solo exhibition at Eva Presenhuber, Zurich last month (it is on view through July 22), and it juxtaposes these rhythmic, unforgiving fracking machines against the voices from the people who coexist among them. The short film and adjacent exhibition that shares its title propose an unsettling view of a climate emergency punctuating our present, and offers a strong dose of angst about the future.
      Doug Aitken, HOWL (film still) (2023). © Doug Aitken.
      “We wanted to give a voice to the people that were there and allow their expression to become the narrative of the work,” Aitken told Artnet News. “It wasn’t a piece that I had a plan for. I did not have a script or a thesis. The work made itself over the time.”
      In HOWL, juxtaposition of the two groups of main protagonists, humans on the one hand, and these massive rhythmic machines on the other, has been formed into a 15-minute narrative across three channels in a darkened room in the gallery. The work, though drawn from real footage filmed across a year, is far from a documentary. Instead, the mood is surreal, with fragmentary glimpses into a polyphony of realities and viewpoints that constitute this anonymous place, which Aitken sees as an allegory for many places in the world that are suffering due to post-industrialism and climate change.
      A woman living in her car in a parking lot speaks about utopia and her ideals for the future, for example. In an abuse shelter, another woman speaks in subtle shifts about physical, emotional, and climate abuse. A group of beauty pageant contestants don oil-black costumes, and all of it is intercut with shots of boarded-up strip malls and empty parking lots. There is a moment of a town brass band parade, which seems to reach to the ghost of some former glory such places once had.
      “At first, I was drawn to this hallucinatory landscape of fracking and drilling and crushing and looking at this activity as the arteries and veins of the body, and this activity as the extraction of the blood from landscape,” Aitken said. “As the journey of creating it progressed, it became equal parts that and a conversation with the people inhabiting the space.”
      Elsewhere in the gallery are individual wall sculptures with single words drawn out from the themes of the film: “howl,” “contact,” “drama,” and “unreal.” These pictographic-like pieces, layered on top of wallpapers of landscapes, and mirror works that cut up your reflection as you pass by, create an immersive space that is as uncanny is the film, except one is a constructed reality and one is tragically real.
      See a clip of the film below.

      Doug Aitken, HOWL (2023). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / Vienna © Doug Aitken.

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      A New Immersive Experience Celebrating Hip-Hop’s 50th Anniversary Is Headed to New York’s Hall des Lumières

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      A new immersive exhibit will take over the 30,000-square-foot Hall des Lumières in New York City to celebrate 50 years of hip-hop culture with never-before-seen and archival footage of the genre’s most prominent figures.
      The exhibit “Hip Hop Til Infinity” was developed to “recontextualize” how people look at culture and music, and to highlight the genre’s development in a nontraditional way, according to Jon Colclough, vice president of creative strategy at Mass Appeal, which is producing the show.
      “We wanted to raise the profile around the culture and to place it in a place like Hall des Lumières showcases how far hip-hop has come in 50 years,” Colclough told Artnet News.
      Colclough described the experience as a “visual mixtape” in tribute to the genre that will be educational for casual followers, but filled with “easter eggs” for die-hard fans. It will include unreleased images shot by photographers like Joe Conzo, once described by The New York Times as “the man who took hip-hop’s baby pictures,” as well as unreleased footage from Sony’s archives.
      “We hope that this appeals to everyone, not just hip-hop purists. But if you’re just a casual fan, you’ll walk away with some educational knowledge,” he said.
      The Hall des Lumieres in New York City. Photo courtesy of Alexander Paterson-Jones for Hall des Lumières.
      Hip-hop developed as a musical genre and culture after a birthday party DJ Kool Herc threw in the Bronx borough of New York City in August 1973. Mass Appeal has spent the past five years developing a platform called Hip Hop 50 to celebrate the genre’s legacy.
      “Hip Hop Til Infinity” is just the first version that Mass Appeal intends to take elsewhere and focuses “more on domestic storytelling around hip-hop in the United States,” said Colclough.
      “You wouldn’t expect to see hip-hop in a place like Hall des Lumieres,” he added. “I don’t think people understand that hip-hop is a global phenomenon and not just music.”
      Colclough said the visuals in the show last about an hour, while noting that 50 years is a lot to cover in that time. The producers of the exhibition worked with DJ Clark K on the musical score, with physical objects set to complement the visual images.
      He added that the benefit of having an immersive exhibit—typically reserved for the likes of Vincent Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt—is the ability to “transform people across time and space.”
      “We can take them to the West Coast. We can show them the 1970s and what was going on at the birth of hip-hop to how people collaborate now to make music,” he said. “It’s an amazing medium. It’s a little bit of a choose-your-own-adventure. This is not meant to be a historical look back.”
      “There is something beautiful and irreplaceable about being able to recreate how a person heard their favorite song for the first time,” said Caitlin Jackson, the marketing director at Hall des Lumières. She added that tickets will be timed every half hour, though guests are welcome to stay as long as they like.
      “We hope people are here at 9 a.m. dancing through the space, taking everything in and moving through it,” she said. “If you linger in one area, you’re going to miss the beautiful content and photography throughout the space.”
      Mass Appeal has also partnered with Sotheby’s to auction a diamond and ruby ring designed by rap legend Tupac Shakur, which is expected to fetch at least $200,000.
      “Hip Hop Til Infinity” is on view at Hall des Lumières, 49 Chambers St, New York, July 26–September 16. Tickets are now on sale.

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      For Her First U.S. Museum Show, Artist Wynnie Mynerva Has Reimagined the Creation Myth as an Act of Rebellion Against the Patriarchy

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      There is a patriarchal bent to many creation myths. In Christian teaching, for instance, God made Adam from dust and Eve from Adam’s rib; the woman is both a product of the man and the cause of his downfall—the purveyor of the forbidden fruit. In Judaic and Mesopotamian lore, Adam was created alongside Lilith, but after refusing to submit to sex, she is banished from Eden and damned to life as a demon. 
      On view now at the New Museum is 65-foot-long panoramic painting—the largest ever displayed at the institution—that offers a different account of life’s origins. The Original Riot (2023), made by Peruvian artist Wynnie Mynerva, reimagines the myth as a syncretic story of rebellion wherein Eve and Lilith team up in an alliance against Adam. 
      The canvas’ climactic scene shows Eve giving her lowest rib—commonly called the “Adam’s rib”—to Lilith as a symbol of their pact. The work, Mynerva told Artnet News, proposes a “first necessary rebellion—a riot that challenges the control of bodies by higher powers that are always male.”
      But for the 31-year-old artist, the token exchanged between the women is more than just a metaphor. Mynerva’s own Adam’s rib, recently removed in a surgical procedure, is also on display in the museum. 
      “My body, as a descendant of Eve, breaks the myth and removes Adam’s body from my own body,” they said of the artwork, Remnant of the first cut (2023). 
      An installation view of Wynnie Mynerva’s The Original Riot (2023) at the New Museum in New York. Courtesy of the New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
      The exhibition, also called “The Original Riot,” is Mynerva’s first solo museum outing in the U.S. It’s a helpful introduction to their practice—a world of gender fluidity and sexual expression, of visceral paintings and radical body modifications. The artist has shown paintings the size and shape of half-pipes, and presented people copulating in latex bags. They once sutured their vagina shut to “open different possibilities of existing.” 
      Often, Mynerva’s work evokes religious themes—a relic of their youth growing up on the outskirts of Lima, where Catholicism is predominant. They have since distanced themselves from religion, but the iconography still looms large. 
      “The first time I prayed I had terrifying nightmares with God,” Mynerva recalled. “Somehow his presence overwhelmed me and made me feel a lot of guilt. Since then, I have always lived with those images. For me, they became fantastic characters: gods, goddesses, anti-heroes.” 
      Their paintings, like The Original Riot, tend to be extraordinarily large. The scale feels like a pointed gesture unto itself—a defiant reclaiming of space. By design, many are simply too big to buy.  
      “My paintings seek a scenic, theatrical, panoramic quality,” they said. “I intend to offer more than just consumer objects. The paintings are an experience for a community and not just for private pleasure. They are not easy to acquire by individuals, but are designed for public exhibition.” 
      “Wynnie Mynerva: The Original Riot” is on view at the New Museum in New York through September 17.
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      It’s a Spike Lee Joint: A Major Show at Brooklyn Museum Will Exhibit the Acclaimed Filmmaker’s Collection of Art and Objects

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      Spike Lee’s ties with Brooklyn are storied. The filmmaker grew up in Fort Greene, where he also established his production offices, while his movies have centered neighborhoods from Bed-Stuy to Red Hook, all filmed on location. And there’s his famed 2014 broadside against the scourge of gentrification, which, among other things, revealed his deep love for the borough. “You have to come with respect,” he said. “There’s a code. There’s people.” 
      For all his deep roots in Brooklyn, though, the borough has yet to host a major exhibition on Lee. But that’s about to change when “Spike Lee: Creative Sources” opens at the Brooklyn Museum on October 6 (through February 4, 2024).  
      The show promises an immersive journey through the director’s creative process and sources of inspiration that have kindled his four-decade film career. More than 300 objects will be featured, not limited to paintings, props, musical instruments, photographs, album covers, and movie posters pulled from Lee’s personal collection (which was previously on view at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in 2021).
      The exhibition, said Kimberli Gant, the museum’s Modern and Contemporary art curator who co-organized it, will offer “a fresh perspective on a cultural icon, focusing on the individuals and influences that have shaped Spike Lee’s body of work, which is so well known today.” 
      “Creative Sources” will be divided into seven segments. Lee’s beloved borough aside, it will delve into Black history and culture, sports, music, cinema history, family, and politics—motifs that have fueled his cinematic storytelling across films from Do the Right Thing (1989) to Malcolm X (1992) to BlacKkKlansman (2018). 
      Each section will feature a clip from one of Lee’s films, with the installation drawing out its thematic underpinnings. His 2020 war drama, Da 5 Bloods, for instance, is paired with propaganda posters from World War II and the Vietnam War featuring cruel stereotypes of Black American soldiers. Lee’s 2000 satire, Bamboozled, which caustically critiqued minstrelsy, will also be shown with its original inspiration, Michael Ray Charles’s potent work Forever Free (Bamboozled) (1997). 
      Other objects speak to Lee’s embrace of Black excellence. There’s Prince’s iconic “Love Symbol” guitar, a commissioned painting by Kehinde Wiley centered on Jackie Robinson, and images of Black creatives such as actress Lena Horne and writer James Baldwin whose work encompassed the fight for civil rights.  
      Not least, Brooklyn is represented here as a locale that has shaped Lee and in turn, been shaped by Lee. The exhibition revisits set designs for his Brooklyn-centric films, including Do the Right Thing and She’s Gotta Have It (1986), rounded out with photographs by Tseng Kwong Chi and David Lee, Spike’s younger brother. 
      “By making Lee’s collection accessible to the public,” said Gant, “this showcase celebrates his legacy while honoring his deep connection to Brooklyn, a place that has been an integral part of his storytelling.” 
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      A Bay Area Show Is Serving Up Artworks Inspired by Cheetos’s Bestselling Flamin’ Hot Flavor. See the Spicy Takes Here

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      A finger-licking exhibition dedicated to Cheetos’s beloved Flamin’ Hot flavor has debuted at Gallery 1202 in the Bay Area, just as a new biopic about the snack’s purported inventor hits streaming platform Hulu.
      Ruben Dario Villa, a 35-year-old former graphic designer for Apple and Google, curated the show, simply titled “Flamin’ Hot,” about a product he said carries such strong sentiments of nostalgia that it brings people together in a time of increased divisiveness in the United States.
      “I think nostalgic connection points are things that we can all have in common,” he told Artnet News.
      Dario Villa said the inspiration for the exhibition loosely came from thinking about the first time he tried Flamin’ Hot Cheetos when he was nine-years-old.
      “My mom was a health and recycling nut before that was a thing and tasked me with bringing some tortillas from the grocery store,” he said. “I thought, ‘ooh, I’m going to be slick, and buy some Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and some tortillas in two separate transactions.’”
      Dario Villa, laughing, added that he forgot to purchase the snacks separately and began eating the Cheetos on the way home from the store. “I thought I could scratch the Hot Cheetos off the receipt with my Cheeto-dusted fingers but my mom, worried I was taking too long to come home, walks towards the supermarket and catches me literally red-handed.”
      Dario Villa said he built the exhibition around that experience, expressing it in what he called a “Chicano-style interpretation of pop culture to tap into that source of malaise we have as a collective.” He had already been working on a piece inspired by his youth and using Flamin’ Hot Cheetos dust when he was invited by the gallery to curate the show, an offer that coincided with the release of the Hulu film, Flamin’ Hot.
      Installation view of “Flamin’ Hot” at Gallery 1202. Photo courtesy of Rubén Dario Villa.
      “I’m first-generation, my parents are immigrants from Mexico, and I kind of sit at the intersection of American culture,” he said. “So, it’s like an insider-outsider perspective that’s very much informed by the historical art context of like Andy Warhol.”
      Dario Villa said he’s inspired by artists that “have a sense of humor” and did an open call for the show on social media because he didn’t want to exhibit artists that are “too established” for his fun-themed show.
      Ultimately, more than 50 artists submitted with around 26 selected for the show with a mixture of mediums—ranging from Lorena Cortez’s sculpture of a Cheetos bag being tantalizingly emptied into a bowl, to Hey Ruca’s painted reimagining of Cheetos’s mascot Chester Cheetah, to Hortencia Martín’s skate deck carrying telltale signs of Cheetos dust,
      “There’s a still life of Hot Cheetos that’s just so beautiful,” Dario Villa said.
      The artist said the show opened with a street fair vibe, not the “traditional charcuterie and wine vibe,” with food trucks and plant vendors. At the end of the day, he hopes that Richard Montañez—the purported creator of the spicy snack—will make it out for the closing of the show on August 12.
      See more images from the show below.
      Princessa Xicana, Hot & Hashi (2023). Photo courtesy of Gallery 1202.
      Berenice Hernandez-Baltazar, hot Cheeto fingers (2023). Photo courtesy of Gallery 1202
      Pete Dimas, Flaming Lips (2023). Photo courtesy of Gallery 1202.
      Installation view of Rubén Dario Villa’s Hot Ass (2023) at “Flamin’ Hot.” Photo courtesy of Rubén Dario Villa.
      “Flamin’ Hot” is on view at Gallery 1202, 7363 Monterey Street, Gilroy, California, through August 12.
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