Art & Exhibitions

In 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe, the first aircraft to fly through the sun’s upper atmosphere. It’s still up there, orbiting the sun, moving closer and closer, facing—as NASA’s website dramatically puts it—“brutal heat and radiation to provide humanity with unprecedented observations, visiting the only star we can study up close.”
A five-minute video of the rocket launching into the heavens is the first thing you see when you enter “Solid Gold,” the new exhibit that runs through July 6 at the Brooklyn Museum. This found footage sets the tone for an expansive, trippy show dedicated to the precious metal the Incas poetically called “the tears of the sun.” A pair of blindingly shiny outfits by the Belgian designer Walter Van Beirendonck stand nearby like sentries; they’re from his 2023 “Icarus” collection, named after the figure in Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun.
teamLab. Gold Waves, (2017). © teamLab, courtesy Pace Gallery.
About half of the show’s 500 objects come from the museum’s collection: ancient coins, Renaissance altar pieces, Japanese screens, shimmering couture dresses. The millennia-spanning exhibition commemorates the museum’s 200th birthday, a showcase for its vast holdings. “The idea came up about doing a show about one medium in the collection for its anniversary,” senior curator Matthew Yokobosky said during a preview last week. “And we had 4,000 works that are gold or have a gold element to them.”
But this isn’t some straightforward survey exhibition. It’s freewheeling, discursive, dizzying: jammed with many ideas and twinkling trinkets. “It is like looking at the sun,” Yokobosky mused. “Gold is always going to have some primordial attraction for us. We might not be able to verbalize why it is so dazzling, but it’s in there somewhere.” “Solid Gold” considers the subject in all its permutations: as an element, material, color, and symbol—of beauty, spirituality, wealth, and power, but also greed, hubris, and excess.
Installation view, “Solid Gold. Brooklyn Museum, November 16, 2024- July 6, 2025. Photo: Paula Abreu Pita.
The story—as the Brooklyn Museum presents it, using and forgoing chronology per its discretion—starts a long, long time ago: when ancient peoples discovered these shiny yellow flecks in river beds and streams. It took thousands of years of water eroding the rock to produce these gold particles, but to its earliest fans, it must have seemed like magic.
The ancient Egyptians believed it to be the “flesh of the gods.” The bulk of the exhibit’s first gallery centers around Egypt’s gold obsession, spanning both genuine artifacts, like a coffin adorned with gold chains, as well as contemporary homages. I liked jeweler Gabby Elan’s golden grillz from the 2000s, but John Galliano’s draggy lamé-and-lurex Egyptomania costumes that he designed for Christian Dior in 2004 now read as cheesy (even compared with the ridiculous necklaces Elizabeth Taylor wore in the 1963 biopic Cleopatra). A 2020 Balenciaga number resembles a crumpled Ferrero Rocher wrapper.
Installation view, “Solid Gold. Brooklyn Museum, November 16, 2024- July 6, 2025. Photo: Paula Abreu Pita.
The next room instructs viewers where gold comes from, the various (lucrative, often exploitative, and environmentally hazardous) ways we extract it, and how goldsmiths and artisans work with it. “You can do a lot with a little gold,” Yokobosky said. “It lasts forever. It doesn’t tarnish. It doesn’t rust. You can pound it and it doesn’t get brittle. It’s malleable. And it has so many meanings.”
Still, the metal never really shed its divine associations. Hindus crafted sculptures of their deities in gold. Muslims adorned their mosques and religious artifacts with it. Christians were initially skeptical of the stuff but then used gold leaf to give their altar pieces and holy pictures a heavenly glow. Some Catholic priests wore vestments woven from gold thread, to signal their godly status. There’s a stunning embroidered example from the mid-18th century; in the church’s dark candlelight it would have made its wearer glisten. In the dark ages, gold did provide sparkle and entertainment. Gleaming chalices, glimmering altarpieces, and illuminated prayer books made going to church a hell of a lot more interesting.
Nardo di Cione. Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Zenobius, John the Baptist, Reparata and John the Evangelist (mid-14th century). Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.
Gold “tinkles, it’s not static,” Yokobosky said. In a darkened chapel, “by the flickering of candlelight, it would have been like an early movie.”
Contemporary artists have played with gold’s religious associations in profound, sometimes subversive ways. The painter Titus Kaphar, for example, uses gold leaf for his luminous portraits of incarcerated Black men, painting them like Byzantine Christian icons. One of his diptychs is presented in “Solid Gold,” hanging in a dark room full of ground-gold religious paintings from Renaissance Italy. Later, past several rooms devoted to gold in fashion, in a spare white gallery, Marc Quinn’s 28-karat gold sculpture of Kate Moss in a pretzel-shaped yoga pose (Siren) sits among a smattering of Buddha sculptures—a new icon for our increasingly celebrity-worshiping culture.
Installation view, “Solid Gold. Brooklyn Museum, November 16, 2024- July 6, 2025. Photo: Paula Abreu Pita.
So much gold, however, can veer into bad taste. Among the oodles of jewelry and fashions, I couldn’t help but think of Trump’s gaudy gilded temples to greed and excess, of prankster Maurizio Cattelan’s golden toilet (entitled America), of the chemicals factories use to produce cheap sequins for mass-produced clothes and costumes. That’s the fascinating thing about gold. On one hand, it’s rare, precious, beautiful, everlasting. On the other, it’s kind of tacky. “Solid Gold” features some transcendent works of art and some ersatz trash. But that’s okay, even correct.
Hanging, France or Italy (circa 17th century). Silk, gilt metal, silver, and linen. Brooklyn Museum
There were two pieces in the show that wonderfully illustrated this tension between gold’s loftiness and its baseness. One was Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mixed-media sculpture Golden Venus of the Rags, from the late 1960s—featuring, yes, a golden statue of the goddess facing a pile of discarded clothing. The other was a draped silk ensemble by Canadian designer Claudio Cina, featuring a digitally printed collage of classical sculptures set against a background inspired by the swimming pool tiles of the famously overly-ostentatious Hearst Castle.
Yokobosky agreed: “When I saw that, I was like, ‘This is perfect!’” More

Lost artworks exert an almost ghostly power over the art historical imagination. One need only call to mind the dramatically empty frames hanging in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum or the penetrating gaze of lost Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man,  known today only through reproduction, to have a sense of this spectral power.
Adrian Ghenie, Auferstehung (2024). Courtesy of Infinitart Foundation.
Now, an evocative new exhibition “Adrian Ghenie—Shadow Paintings” at the Albertina in Vienna, dives deep into the psychological complexities of lost art (on view through March 2, 2025). For the exhibition, the Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie offers his visceral, often brutal responses to three lost masterworks by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele, works known as his “shadow paintings.” All three paintings are double self-portraits by the artist, which went missing during World War II and have remained missing for nearly 80 years. These paintings are now only known through grainy black-and-white photographs reproduced in a 1911 publication. Still, the might of these paintings has been powerful through their very absence, which Ghenie here examined.
The genesis for this exhibition was conceived by the collector and philanthropist Ciprian Adrian Barsan, who is known as C.A.B. The collector was moved by Ghenie’s masterpiece The Crucifixion on view at the Chiesa della Madonna della Mazza in Palermo and proposed the exhibition to the museum. “He used it as a conceptual anchor to conceive the idea of lost shadow paintings as a rebellious answer against fixed, regulated, plagiarized images embedded within our ghosts of perception, trapped in the paralyzed mimesis of the past that they seek to express,” explained a representative of the museum in an email.
Egon Schiele, Auferstehung. As seen in Albert Paris Gütersloh’s Egon Schiele. Versuch einer Vorrede, Wien, (1911) Photo © Kallir Research Institute.
The paintings on view are not homages to Schiele as much as Ghenie’s adaptation and response to the ways Schiele contorted and transformed depictions of the self in turn-of-the-century Vienna. In the painting Self-Seer (1910) for instance, Schiele presents two sinewy visions of himself, nude, kneeling, one behind the other. The figures are desexed and androgynous while remaining, as was always the case with Schiele, sexually provocative. This painting, in particular, is often interpreted as the struggle between the artist and depiction of the self.
Adrian Ghenie, Studie Nach Die Selbstseher (2024). Courtesy of Infinitart Foundation.
Ghenie was given no confines in how he chose to respond to Schiele’s “shadow paintings” and was asked only to evoke a “presence of absence.” There are parallels between the artists, however. “Ghenie and Schiele share an intense examination of the human body through a raw, disturbing, beautiful aesthetic. Both artists broke away from the imitation of real forms and anatomical accuracy, striving for an authentic, independent visual language,” the museum added.
Egon Schiele, Die Selbstseher. As seen in Albert Paris Gütersloh’s Egon Schiele. Versuch einer Vorrede, Wien, (1911) Photo © Kallir Research Institute.
In his own way, Ghenie captures the psychological and existential torque and even chaos that Schiele metabolized into his daring images; just as Schiele contorts and twists his likeness in these shadow paintings, here Ghenie morphs Schiele’s language so that the human figure becomes alien, surrounded by objects of our contemporary moment. These are wholly new images.
Adrian Ghenie, Niender Maennlicher akt mit Erhobenen Haendenr(2024). Courtesy of Infinitart Foundation.
Even so, Ghenie’s paintings remain psychologically shadowed by Schiele’s works through their very absence. The tension between these works can, as the museum said, “create a mirror in which we confront not only the conflicts arising from the fixation on imitation but also the confrontation with the shadows within our own ghost.” In this way, Ghenie builds on the spirit of rebellion that defined Schiele, refusing to imitate while acknowledging their spectral presence.
Egon Schiele, Die Weltwehmut. As seen in Albert Paris Gütersloh’s Egon Schiele. Versuch einer Vorrede, Wien, (1911) Photo © Kallir Research Institute.
Adrian Ghenie, Weltwehmut (2024). Courtesy of Infinitart Foundation. More

If pushed to name three Renaissance artists (or three Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael are probably most people’s picks (sorry, Donatello). The three giants of the Renaissance are coming together in a new show at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, which examines their relationships with one another both personally and professionally during their shared lifetimes at the turn of the 16th century.
Leonardo was the eldest of the masters, born in Florence in 1452. He was a month off 23 when Michelangelo was born in Tuscany and 31 by the time Raphael came along in Urbino. There would only be 36 years where all three coincided on this planet, and just 20 years when all three were in adulthood.
Install shot of “Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael” (2024). Photo: © David Parry / Royal Academy of Arts.
Their relationships were laden with competition, as all were vying for commissions by powerful Florentine and Roman patrons. Michelangelo and Leonardo competed for the attention of the powerful Medici family, and after Raphael emerged on the scene he and Michelangelo fought for commissions from Pope Julius II. Michelangelo belittled the achievements of his younger rival after his early death, claiming, “everything he learned he learned from me.”
In “Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael,” the Royal Academy is showcasing some of the finest examples of Italian Renaissance drawing in the world. The exhibition has been organized in partnership with London’s National Gallery and the Royal Collection Trust, whose current exhibition “Drawing the Italian Renaissance” also features work by the three masters.
More than 40 works by Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo are on display in London, and we took a deeper look at three works, one by each of the Renaissance rivals, all three unfinished and each a depiction of the Virgin Mary with Jesus and the Infant Saint John the Baptist.
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John (The “Taddei Tondo”), c. 1504–05
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John (The “Taddei Tondo”), c. 1504–05. Courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
The Taddei Tondo—nicknamed after Taddeo Taddei, the wealthy cloth merchant who commissioned it—is the focal point of “Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael,” and the key artwork in the narrative of the exhibition’s accompanying book. The carving shows the infant Saint John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, offering his young relative a bird, designed as a symbol of the Passion of Christ and a foreshadowing of Jesus’ crucifixion. The tondo (a round artwork) is incomplete, likely because of a new commission which saw Michelangelo travel to Rome to create the tomb for Pope Julius II.
In Lives of the Artists, Vasari’s groundbreaking biographical art history (1550), the author mentions how the Taddei Tondo and a second marble tondo intended for patron Bartolomeo Pitti were both “roughed out but left unfinished.” The fact that Taddei’s commission hung in his house (and remained there until the early 19th century) despite being unfinished was testament to the quality of the piece, made by a 31-year-old Michelangelo at the height of his fame.
Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist (“The Burlington House Cartoon”), c. 1506–08
Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Infant St John the Baptist (“The Burlington House Cartoon”), c. 1506–08. Courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Held in the collection of London’s National Gallery since 1791, the Burlington House Cartoon is the focus of the central gallery of the show. (Its name refers to the address of the Royal Academy itself, at Burlington House in central London.) Cartoons—full-size drawings created in preparation for paintings of frescos—would typically feature evidence of having been traced over or pin-pricked as part of the process of transferring the design from a sheet of paper to a wall, but the Burlington House Cartoon shows no such marks.
This suggests that the drawing was designed as a final artwork itself, and it highlights the importance of drawing in Renaissance artistic practices. The only evidence of manipulation shown on the drawing is that the cartoon is made up of several smaller sheets of paper glued together, due simply to the fact that sheets this large (about 56 inches high) were not available in the early 16th century. In the drawing, Mary, Jesus, and John are joined by Saint Anne, Mary’s mother. Certain areas are left unfinished, including Saint Anne’s arm, but the faces are completed in great detail using charcoal and chalk, with a softening sfumato technique (derived from the Italian word sfumare, meaning “to tone down” or “evaporate like smoke”), which is mostly closely associated with Leonardo and his followers.
Raphael, The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist (‘The Esterhazy Madonna’), c. 1508
Raphael, The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist (“The Esterhazy Madonna”), c. 1508. Courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
The Esterhazy Madonna is testimony to an exciting point in Raphael’s life and career. It was begun in 1508, when the young artist was living in Florence, and was completed in Rome after Raphael was asked to travel there by Pope Julius II. The natural landscape is typically Florentine, but ancient Roman ruins have been added into the background. Art historians see this work as a marker of the end of Raphael’s Florentine period, and the beginning of his work in Rome, which was more adventurous when it came to stepping away from 15th-century standards of compositional harmony.
On loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, the painting was previously in the collection of 18th-century Prince Esterházy, who gave the work its nickname. The Esterhazy Madonna is also evidence of the exchange of ideas between Renaissance masters, with the Virgin Mary’s pose taking direct inspiration from a work by Leonardo, itself made after an ancient sculpture.
“Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael” is on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, London through 16 February 2025. More

An expansive, hypnotic exhibition of American multidisciplinary artist Harmony Korine is on view in Paris, presented by the French fashion designer agnès b.—who owns the largest collection of Korine’s work in the world.
Korine (b. 1973) is best known for his independent films, particularly his directorial debut feature film 1997’s Gummo and 2012’s Spring Breakers starring James Franco and Selena Gomez. His first major cinematic milestone was writing the screenplay for Larry Clark’s cult classic Kids (1995) after meeting Clark while skateboarding in Washington Square Park. He is also an experienced fine artist, having had recent solo shows with both Hauser and Wirth and Gagosian. His approach welcomes humor, erraticism, experimentation, and improvisation, and he has called his art “mistakist.”
Harmony Korine, Zion’s Lament (2023). © Harmony Korine.
Agnès b. (b. 1941) was born Agnès Andrée Marguerite Troublé and opened her first fashion boutique in 1975 after a stint working for Elle after being headhunted for her fashion sense in a Paris flea market in her early 20s. In 1982 she opened her first international store in New York and demonstrated her love for art more broadly by displaying vintage movie posters throughout the store. That commitment to supporting artistic creation continues to this day.
La Fab, the designer’s library and gallery located inside a social housing project on the Place Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, is the headquarters for agnès b.’s endowment fund and has held public exhibitions, concerts, and screenings since February 2020. She spoke to Artnet News about her art collection when La Fab first opened, saying, “I made the collection by acquiring pieces by young, unknown artists—I never bought a Jeff Koons for $3 million…When I bought [a] Basquiat drawing it wasn’t expensive at all; I got it from his studio at the time, because of one piece I had seen in Paris. That’s why I wanted to know more about him, and we met later.”
Agnès b. and Korine first met in 1999 at the Venice Film Festival when the designer came to see Korine’s latest film, the experimental drama Julien Donkey Boy, after having been a fan of Gummo. The pair collaborated for the first time that same year when Korine was invited to contribute to issue #12 of agnès b.’s Point d’Ironie, a periodical she co-created with Swiss curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist and French sculptor and photographer Christian Boltanski.
Harmony Korine, Untitled n°2, from Trash Humpers, (2009) © Harmony Korine © Rebecca Fanuele.
The two struck up a lasting professional relationship and close personal friendship. “There is something between us, we become children together. It’s not about support, it’s about friendship”, agnès b. told The Independent in 2003. The feeling was mutual—”I liked her immediately,” said Korine, “She’s like a kindred spirit or something.”
It was at agnès b.’s Galerie du Jour on Rue du Jour in Paris—founded by the designer in 1984—where Korine had his first solo show, titled “The Sigil of the Cloven Hoof Marks Thy Path,” with a second show—featuring screenplay drafts alongside drawings and photographs—taking place in 2003. Galerie du Jour built its reputation on exhibitions of graffiti artists including Futura 2000, A-one, and Les Tétines Noires.
Harmony Korine, Untitled (Trouble Follows Me Always) (2010). © Harmony Korine © Rebecca Fanuele.
Korine’s fourth feature, Trash Humpers (2009), was co-produced by agnès b. through their joint production company O’Salvation. Speaking to the Independent about the foundation of O’Salvation, Korine said, “I didn’t want a movie production company because I’m just as interested in writing books or art shows, stuff like that. She understood that I wanted to go off in different directions. I needed something that whatever I wanted to do I could do and get it out there.”
The new show, “Harmony Korine in the agnès b. Collection Since 1997” is the first solo show of agnès b.’s collection to be hosted at La Fab. It features paintings, photographs, and prints by Korine, highlighting his artistic endeavors which have often been overshadowed by his reputation as a filmmaker. The exhibition is a celebration of the “artistic complicity” between the two, and a testament to their professional and personal relationship which has bolstered each other’s practices for a quarter of a century.
Harmony Korine, Revelator Maximus (2023).© Harmony Korine.
“Harmony Korine in Agnès B. Collection Since 1997” is on view at La Fab, Place Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris from November 22 to March 23 2025. More

One of the world’s only green dinosaur fossils will soon go on view in a new wing of the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles.
“It’s pretty green. It’s not neon green. But it has a distinct green color… which is truly unique,” Luis M. Chiappe, the curator of the museum’s Dinosaur Institute, said in a phone interview. “There is no other dinosaur like that in the world.”
Gnatalie, measuring 75-feet long, is described as Diplodocus-like dinosaur—a typical dinosaur species in the same group as the famed Brontosaurus. It came from what the team calls the Gnatalie Quarry in southeastern Utah, not far from a town called Bluff. Chiappe said he believes Gnatalie is a new species, yet to be publicly named. “But the official name in the study has not been published,” he said. “So, at the moment, we’re just saying it is Diplodocus-like and leaving it at that.”
Gnatalie is seen mounted inside of a new wing at L.A.’s Natural History Museum. Photo courtesy of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
The skeleton appears to be a mix between two well-known diplodocids, a family of dinosaurs in the sauropod group. In this case, the green dinosaur appears to be a mix between Barosaurus and Diplodocus.
“The neck is much more like Barosaurus, and the hip and the tail are more like Diplodocus,” Chiappe said. “So, we’re naming a new species.”
The specimens used in the Gnatalie mount were discovered in 2007, buried in what was a riverbed in Utah about 150 million years ago, during the late Jurassic period. Other specimens from other dinosaur species were also found at the site, in digs led by Chiappe.
Preparators are seen working on Gnatalie. Photo courtesy of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County
To maximize the real bone in the skeletal mount, the paleontologists combined five or six specimens from the same species—but the bulk of the green dinosaur’s composition comes from two more-complete specimens. The Frankenstein-ed fossils all have a unique green color caused by the mineral celadonite infilling the bone during the fossilization process.
“By doing that, we end up with a mount that’s made of about 80 percent real bone. Otherwise, we would have had maybe 30 percent of a single individual of this species,” Chiappe said. “It’s what we call a composite and that’s something very typical of many dinosaur mounts around the world. Dinosaurs are very rarely found complete, particularly the big ones.”
He added that the Natural History Museum believes in authenticity and wants to show museum-goers the real thing, rather than replicated parts. Still, there’s about 20 percent of replica bones in the mount because the team didn’t have the pieces needed to complete it.
Gnatalie’s feet are seen at their arrival and installation. Photo courtesy of Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County
And though the name Gnatalie implies the dinosaur is female, Chiappe said “there’s no way to tell” its actual gender, especially since multiple specimens were used in its composition.
Before its display, Gnatalie’s specimens were packed and shipped to Ontario, Canada, for armature and “mount” fabrication. Over the summer, Los Angeles residents voted to keep the nickname long used by the dig team, which was plagued by “stinging gnats that pestered its excavators during the digs.”
NHM Commons exterior. Photo courtesy of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County © Benny Chan.
Gnatalie is considered one of the “star attractions” for the opening of the new $75 million NHM Commons wing and community hub on the southwest side of the museum’s campus on November 17. The massive new facility and its grounds will allow the museum to expand programming while offering open spaces for community use.
The expansion will also feature Barbara Carrasco’s once-censored mural L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective, which is woven with vignettes from the city’s history, with an emphasis on the perspectives of marginalized communities.
Judith Perlstein Welcome Center. Photo courtesy of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County © Benny Chan.
The day after opening, the museum will debut the film T.Rex 3D to share its latest research into the notorious terrible lizard, narrated by Sam Neill of Jurassic Park fame, followed by a new show featuring prehistoric and contemporary sea creature puppets on November 23.
“The Commons is a community space that allows us also to showcase some of our work that has been very community-based,” Chiappe said. “Hundreds of people over the years went to collect Gnatalie. The Carrasco mural also engaged lots of artists. So, the Commons is really a reflection of the community-based work that the museum does.” More

In 1954, experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger unleashed Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. What his 38-minute opus lacked in narrative, it more than made up for with a flamboyance of style. And though made in the heart of Hollywood, the short film was far removed from the movie-making glamour and machinery of Los Angeles. In fact, Pleasure Dome, which loosely unfolds a fete hosted by the Great Beast itself, unpacked an alternative L.A., one steeped in the avant-garde, the occult, and the magickal.
This history and vision of the city—running concurrent if not underground of its leading industry—fills “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation,” an exhibition at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries in L.A. Co-curated by Alexis Bard Johnson, Kelly Filreis, and Quetzal Arevalo, the show explores how the occult, queer, and science fiction scenes mixed, mingled, and shaped visual culture in the metropolis between the 1930s and ’60s.
Installation view of “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation” at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Photo: Min Chen.
“While the exhibition is physically divided into ‘occult’ and ‘sci-fi’ rooms, we wanted to emphasize that the figures involved in these communities were deeply intertwined and inspired each other,” the curators told me in a joint interview over email, “whether that is directly within their shared social networks, or indirectly through the production and circulation of films, magazines, photographs, and artworks.”
Pleasure Dome offers a prime nexus: the film emerged from Anger’s occult leanings—particularly his interest in Aleister Crowley’s esoteric philosophy Thelema—and featured a cast of characters who were active in L.A.’s underground. Amongside them was Samson de Brier, the queer actor and occultist in whose home the movie was filmed; Curtis Harrington, filmmaker and a queer cinema pioneer; and Renate Druks, painter of the supernatural.
Renate Druks, Self-portrait (state of mind) (1967). Courtesy of The Ranch, Montauk.
Within a deep red gallery, “Queer L.A.” unearths Harrington’s early experimental films and Druks’s enchantingly surreal paintings, as well as Crowley’s Thoth Tarot deck, created by artist Frieda Harris in the 1930s (it’s still in print). They lead into a deeper space in which are arrayed relics from the Scottish Rite Temple—a Masonic house of worship on Wilshire Boulevard, now the Marciano Art Foundation—including the recreation of a massive painted backdrop originally made by the same artists who worked on 1939’s The Wizard of Oz.
Viewed together, these objects bring to life a society joined by philosophy as much as creative expression, making it an especially tolerant venue, the curators said, for queer folk and avant-gardists with unconventional lifestyles.
“Directly challenging social and religious institutions, the occult provides queer people opportunities for self-determination, the reinvention of identity through nicknames and alter-egos, costuming and ritual performance,” they added. “They are both based around processes of inner transformation and self-discovery.”
Installation view of “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation” at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Photo: Min Chen.
The era’s sci-fi fandom also provided such an outlet. In researching the exhibition some five years ago, Johnson and ONE Archives director Joseph Hawkins were mystified to find that the archives, amassed by writer and gay rights historian Jim Kepner, contained “so many science fiction materials in [an] otherwise primarily LGBTQ+ collection.” The curators would later discover Kepner’s intersecting interests in activism and science fiction: he was a member of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS), collected a host of sci-fi ephemera, and edited Toward Tomorrow, a leftist sci-fi magazine.
Kepner’s sci-fi bona fides touch off the sci-fi segment of “Queer L.A.,” which untangles the many threads of the fandom through costumes, fanzines, paintings, and other historic artifacts. Margaret Brundage’s original artworks for the 1930s covers of Weird Tales paint her heroines in fearless and sapphic light; Morris Dollens’s photomontages juxtapose his photographs of the male form against otherworldly landscapes; while a pair of garments made and worn by science fiction fans Forrest J Ackerman and Myrtle Douglas to a 1939 convention represent what the curators call the earliest cosplays in recorded history.
Margaret Brundage, A Rival from the Grave (1936). Courtesy of New Britain Museum of American Art.
The sci-fi fandom, the organizers emphasized, was not an innately queer space, but like occult communities, it “became for some a place where members could be more freely ‘out.’” They added: “This led to the rich visual culture explored throughout the exhibition that embraced hidden codes and rituals, inside jokes, and aesthetics that were intentionally difficult to assimilate into larger society.”
Morris Scott Dollens, The Forest and the Far Land. Courtesy of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Los Angeles.
Again, the sci-fi and occult realms were often not discrete. The curators highlight the life and work of writer and songwriter Lisa Ben, whose papers are held in the ONE Archives. Ben was behind Vice Versa, the first known lesbian magazine in the U.S., that ran from 1947–48, and was active in science fiction communities, where she was known as Tigrina the Devil Doll. Her songs and poems further embraced the occult (1941’s “Hymn to Satan,” for one) in defiance of her Christian roots.
Jim Kepner, cover of Toward Tomorrow no. 2 (June 1944). Courtesy of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Los Angeles.
“Kepner and Ben,” said the curators, “are great examples of how the imaginative possibilities of science fiction allowed its fans to think more expansively about their own lives and beliefs.”
That such expressions flourished in a postwar L.A., too, was significant as the period saw virulent censorship and surveillance targeting art or individuals deemed even remotely subversive by the city’s vice squad (circumstances that the nation is once again facing down). The secrecy necessitated by this work posed a stark contrast to the self-discovery it represented—a tension woven through “Queer L.A.”
Installation view of “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation” at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Photo: Min Chen.
But perhaps what’s at the heart of the exhibition is a wall printed with a vast “name map” that links its major figures together. Fashioned like a family tree, it locates connections between sci-fi fan Ackerman and Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard via the LASFS; between Kepner and author Ray Bradbury via the zine Voice of Imagi-Nation; and between chemist Jack Parsons and Crowley via Thelema. Pleasure Dome produces no less than six branches.
The Hollywood Walk of Fame it is not. But this network is more resonant for capturing the breadth of artistic output fueled by “the search for identity, belonging, and alternative forms of knowledge,” in the curators’ words. That search, as the map illustrates, unearthed a community.
“Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation” is on view at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, 909 W Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, California, through November 23. More

Last year the Hispanic Society Museum & Library (HSM&L) in Washington Heights reopened after a six-year, $20-million renovation. In 2024, as the jewel-box institution celebrates its 100th anniversary, the treasures amongst its trove of 750,000-plus objects continue to reveal themselves. Its compelling new exhibition is the first of its kind to examine the estrado, a multipurpose domestic space where elite households across the Spanish-speaking world displayed their finest objects. While the estrado’s origins are difficult to trace (it likely dates to the late Middle Ages in Al-Andalus, the Muslim-ruled territory of the Iberian Peninsula), by the 15th century, the space became almost exclusively gendered.
A Room of Her Own: The Estrados of Viceregal Spain runs through March 2, 2025, and offers a fascinating glimpse into a lesser known side of the museum’s permanent collection (though its famed Goya portrait of the Duchess of Alba does make an appearance). In addition to paintings, decorative objects, rare books, and engravings comprise the exhibition, exploring these wondrous domicile museums.
An installation view of “A Room of Her Own: The Estrados of Viceregal Spain.” Photo: Alfonso Lozano. Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York.
“I was really interested in researching the lived experiences of women, not just the objects, but female agency and collecting practices,” said Alexandra Frantischek Rodriguez-Jack, the show’s curator at last week’s opening. “The estrado is extremely prevalent in texts from the golden age of Spanish literature, like Don Quixote, as a metaphor for feminine extravagance and impracticality in the Hispanic world, so it’s shocking to me that it has essentially become all but forgotten.” Rodriguez-Jack explains that today the Spanish word “estrado” typically refers to a witness stand or a political platform, further masking its earlier meaning as a domestic space.
The show’s curator Alexandra Frantischek Rodriguez-Jack. Photo: Alfonso Lozano. Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York.
In addition to fictional accounts of how the estrado was perceived and the myriad ways it could be adorned, Rodriguez-Jack made sure every object within A Room of Her Own was grounded in research, whether post-mortem inventories, dowries, traveler’s texts, or Inquisition records. Through their consistent descriptions of resplendent interiors and the location of them within their residents’ homes, it is clear that one’s most valuable possessions were often reserved for the estrado as a means to display taste, wealth, status, and particularly in terms of the gendered estrado, a woman’s virtue.
Sewing Box, Mexico, Michoacán, Pátzcuaro (1800). Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York.
Although explicit references to the estrado are harder to come by in the visual arts, Rodriguez-Jack shares that Peruvian engravings (a prime example of which is on view in the exhibition) and Mexican casta paintings occasionally depict estrado scenes. For the curator, it was paramount to examine and exhibit non-European perspectives, so often “overlooked;” for women of European, Indigenous American and West African descent all designed estrados.
In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, for example, Inca women were among its earliest adopters. “I think something that people do not realize about the Hispanic world, especially in the Spanish Americas, was the amount of material wealth that there was [largely a result of the exploitive silver mining industry]. Naturally, there was an explosion of material goods.”
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Duchess of Alba (1797). Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York.
To showcase the estrado’s regional variations, Rodriguez-Jack organized the exhibition primarily in geographical sections within the Hispanic Society’s Main Court, a venue whose ornate terracotta Renaissance-style architecture is the perfect complement for the dazzling pieces on view. Providing more visual context is a hybrid interior-like vignette featuring several quintessential objects, such as elaborate writing desks, the “crème-de-la-crème of estrado furnishings.” Textiles, whether lace or needlework (both common pastimes for Hispanic women to pursue in the estrado), or luxurious pillows and carpets, were abundant. Cushioned seating and textile-driven interiors directly derived from Islamic influences, which also come through in ivory-inlaid objects, such as an intricate 16th-century Spanish chest nearby, and other Moorish-inspired designs.
Alcora, Snuff box with metal mount (1775). Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York.
Globalization via expanding trade routes, such as the Manila galleon, brings additional inspiration into estrado furnishings. Imported goods, especially Japanese and Chinese screens, become “distinctive markers of the estrado in New Spain,” says Rodriguez-Jack, while around the globe, local craftsmen would copy international designs, mixing, for example, Flemish engravings or Asian lacquer with indigenous motifs. Smaller objects ranged from silver frames and reliquary jewels to porcelain cups and carved-stone figures, rendering the estrado a veritable cabinet of curiosities.
Estrados could be a room, or a space, sometimes demarcated on a platform, or tarima, within a room. There are also instances where a home had more than one estrado, such as one for a formal reception area, and another private space near the bedroom. During the 17th and 18th centuries when specialized furniture became commonplace, the estrado would house muebles ratones, or “mouse furniture,” which were petite versions of the latest chairs or other furnished forms, presumably used by men, further promoting a gender binary.
An installation view of “A Room of Her Own: The Estrados of Viceregal Spain.” Photo: Alfonso Lozano. Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York.
Rodriguez-Jack shares that in addition to educating children, estrados were used as all-day “hangouts” to socialize and dine with friends. “Women could barely leave their homes — the outside was considered unsafe, and staying home was seen as protecting their virtue,” she explains. “However, the estrado was a place where women could exercise their independence within the confines of their home by being artistic patrons and displaying their collection, giving them a semblance of agency that’s rare compared to other women in Europe during this period.”
This paradox comes through poignantly in Novelas Ejemplares y Amorosas, a collection of novellas written by Spanish feminist author, María de Zayas y Sotomayor, in 1637 (a fact that is in itself astounding for the time; likewise, A Room of Her Own also includes an 18th-century framed headboard with a painting by María Villamor to further honor women who defied social norms). The estrado, writes, de Zayas: “was to be a throne, seat, and refuge for the beautiful Lisis [the novel’s protagonist], who, as a sick woman, was able to enjoy this privilege: it was similarly of green brocade, with golden fringe and tassels of gold. As she [Lisis] was so devoid of hope on the inside, she wished to appear hopeful on the outside.”
José Campeche y Jordán, Doña María Catalina De Urrutia (1788). Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York.
According to Rodriguez-Jack, the female protagonist goes on to lament the injustices and double standards women face simply due to their sex. It’s these kinds of frustrations that drove some women and their servants to practice witchcraft, reinforcing the notion of the estrado as a space of subversion. Often, this came in the form of food. Drinking hot chocolate was a common social ritual in the estrado (as several specialized cups and objects in the exhibition attest).
“Chocolate was frequently gendered, as it was considered an indulgent feminine weakness, in part because it wasn’t cheap,” says the curator, who in her research, particularly in 17th-century Mexican records, came across instances where women combined chocolate with unsavory mix-ins, like menstrual bed, to spite a man who wronged them.
The final section of the exhibition illustrates the 19th-century decline of the estrado, as England and France were producing more comfortable furniture, and the drawing room rose to international prominence. Nevertheless, with its intercultural aesthetic and array of uses, from female artistic patronage to witchcraft, the estrado is certainly a worthy subject for further investigation. More

She was a promising young artist whose luminous and gestural abstractions earned the attention of the New York art world in the 1940s and 1950s. But Rosemarie Beck’s fall into the marginalia of art history has its own twist.
In many ways, Beck had been celebrated by the establishment. In the 1950s, her works were exhibited, and collected by, the Whitney Museum of American Art. Robert Motherwell, a titan of Abstract Expressionism, took her on as a protege. She even earned the attention of Eleanor Ward, the legendary dealer who championed Louise Bourgeois and Robert Rauschenberg; Ward exhibited Beck’s work at her esteemed Stable Gallery.
Today, Beck (b. 1923) is little known, barely a footnote—that’s because in 1958, just as her career was rising, the artist decisively abandoned abstraction, feeling a call to a radiant style of figuration. For more than 40 years, until her death in 2003, she stayed true to her vision, painting dynamic mythological and literary themes, filled with rebellious women. “The ore in my abstract veins had thinned. I thought I would nourish my abstract painting by painting subjects. Then I couldn’t go back. I must have been a secret realist all along because I had never stopped drawing from life,” Beck recalled of this transition.
Her figurative works would garner attention for a time, with shows at Peridot Gallery and acquisitions by the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran, and the Hirshhorn. But Beck’s fame had crested and by the time of her death in 2003, she was little known even in curatorial circles.
Rosemarie Beck, Studio in Venice (1964). Courtesy of Van Doren Waxter.
But a moment of reappraisal for the artist has finally arrived. This week, “Rosemarie Beck: Earthly Paradise” opened at Van Doren Waxter in New York, a show that offers a tantalizing introduction to Beck and her rarely seen figurative works, through paintings, works on paper, embroideries, as well as photographs, sketches, writing, and correspondence.
“I was completely transfixed by the figuration,” said Elizabeth Sadeghi, partner at the gallery, recalling her first visit to the artist’s foundation over a year ago. Doria Hughes, the artist’s granddaughter, who runs  Beck’s foundation, had introduced herself to Sadeghi at Independent 20th Century art fair, a few years back. The gallery had presented the work of Hedda Sterne, a daring woman Abstract Expressionist, and Hughes took note.
Rosemarie Beck, painting in her studio.
“Twenty years ago, when I started archiving my grandmother’s work, I felt her art was neglected,” said Hughes. “I kept seeing shows of her male peers, people that she had taught with, worked with—Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Bradley Walker Tomlin. She was close with these people and they respected her and her work during her lifetime. I just kept thinking there have to be people out there who will recognize this treasure of art here.”
Van Doren Waxter became that place of recognition. Last year, the gallery showcased Beck’s work at Independent 20th Century. Soon after, it announced representation of her estate. “Earthly Paradise” marks the first exhibition of her work at the gallery.
More than 25 works made from 1959 to 2000 are on view and chart her varied interests and influences, from Paul Cézanne to William Shakespeare. “Hers is a story that needs to be told,” said Hughes, “There’s a lot of inspiration and hope in her story and now is the time when we really need inspiration.”
Rosemarie Beck, Concert in Tuscany (circa 1989). Courtesy Van Doren Waxter.
That story begins with her childhood.
Beck was born in New Rochelle, New York, just north of New York City, to Hungarian-Jewish immigrants. She frequently traveled down to the city and grew up in a cultured milieu (Beck played the violin in addition to painting). After attending Oberlin College and earning a degree in art history, she would commit herself to painting, studying at Columbia University, the Art Students League in New York, and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She and her husband, the writer and publisher Robert Phelps, moved to Woodstock, N.Y. soon after their wedding in 1945. Up in the wooded Catskill Mountains, she became close friends with Guston and Tomlin. During these early years of her career, she was regarded as a second-generation Abstract Expressionist. Her abstractions, which could appear like dappled sunlight, would ultimately be championed by artists including Kurt Seligmann and Robert Motherwell.
But a desire for the narrative pulled Beck back into figuration. Indeed, she may have been a “secret realist” all along. As the exhibition reveals, Beck kept her embroidery practice private throughout her adult life. Even at the height of her abstract career, her embroideries, several of which are included in the exhibition, had always been figurative, and her themes were often rooted in mythology, an unexpected union of “domestic craft” and the grand-scale themes of art history.
Installation view “Rosemarie Beck: Earthly Paradise” at Van Doren Waxter, 2024. Photography by Charles Benton. Courtesy Van Doren Waxter.
“For a woman during that time, it’s pretty extraordinary. Beck signed a lot of them, too. She meant them to be pieces that she put in the world,” added Sadeghi. Her paintings, meanwhile, subtly hint at her own dynamic, unabashed personality. One of the most evocative works in the exhibition, Studio in Venice (1964), is a self-portrait Beck made while in the Italian city (the canals are visible beyond her studio window).
“She went to Venice, Italy, and had an extended trip there. She took a studio. Being exposed to all that incredible history of figurative art and churches and frescoes emboldened her to listen to her calling and really move back into figuration,” said Sadeghi.
In this painting, Beck places herself in the lineage of male artists captured behind the easel, from Diego Velasquez to Vincent Van Gogh, along with women artists who had claimed their stake such as Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana. A thread of self-portraiture runs through her work, part of which was born of necessity; she was often trying to make do financially and her face was her most affordable model. Still, her own personality emerges.
“Her paintings have these visual breadcrumbs for you to pick up. Sometimes she looks out from the painting and makes bold eye contact and asserts herself as the artist,” said Hughes. “She was unashamed. Not demure. That was never her.”
Critic Martica Sawin described Beck as “one of the few painters of our time to treat grand themes in ambitious multi-figure compositions while satisfying a need both for abstract structure and for an execution that embodies energy without being gratuitous.” This approach has sometimes been linked to the influence of Cézanne. Her 1985 painting Bathers, included in the show, seems a direct response to Cézanne’s 1894 Bathers, only Beck has replaced his standing men with women.
Rosemarie Beck, Untitled (1986). Courtesy of Van Doren Waxter.
Often her paintings include imagery of women who are defiant and powerful. The work Apollo and Daphne (1982) imagines Daphne the moment before she is transformed into a laurel tree, a metaphor for sexual violence. In another work, Diana and Actaeon (1985), she depicts the hunter Actaeon surprising the bathing goddess just before she splashes him with water and turns him into a deer. While Hughes wouldn’t define Beck as a proto-feminist, she added: “As a woman painter, she just painted it as she saw it.”
Theater also emerges as a key theme in her work. In an essay for the exhibition catalogue, art historian Jessica Holmes notes “[Beck’s] penchant for theatrical mise-en-scène.” Her Bathers painting was part of a larger cycle of paintings inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The artist spent a good five years working through a series centered on the play. Her earliest interludes with art came through the lens of theater, in fact. While still in high school, she was given free rein to the school’s backstage, painting stage sets, doing makeup, and acting. In college, she was part of the Oberlin Dramatic Association.
Rosemarie Beck, Study, Two in a Room (1967). Courtesy of Van Doren Waxter.
When it came to The Tempest, Beck identified with Prospero. “It’s clear from her journals that she thought the way Prospero could wield his magic wand was analogous to her as a painter wielding her brush—a brush of wand or the brush of paint that you can use to change reality.”
Throughout decades of her life, Beck struggled with her outsider status. “She could be a bit obstreperous and she wrote a lot in her journals about her private frustrations and feeling overlooked,” said Hughes, “The bottom line is that she needed to paint these paintings.”
For many years, Beck channeled her energies into teaching. Over the decades, she taught at Queens College of New York, Vassar College, Middlebury College, the Vermont Studio Center, and Parsons School of Design. She was on the faculty of New York Studio School until shortly before her death. Even in her last moments, Hughes recalled, students were coming by to show her their work.
“She forged a reality for herself and forged that path and possibility for people afterward, too, through teaching,” said Hughes. In some ways, she is still teaching: the Rosemarie Beck Foundation, which is based in the Lower East Side, hosts an artist residency. “She was Prospero” Hughes added. “She was her own magician.” More