Art & Exhibitions

The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown is developing an immersive exhibition with Van Gogh Immersive creator Massimiliano Siccardi, debuting in 2026.
The experience will let visitors explore Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions and artworks through large-scale projections and interactive environments.
Produced by Brett Kerr and Andrea Bari, the project aims to merge art, technology, and storytelling, expanding the possibilities of immersive entertainment.

Dan Brown’s religious thriller The Da Vinci Code is getting the immersive exhibition treatment.
As first reported by the entertainment publication Deadline, Brown has teamed up with Massimiliano Siccardi, the mind behind the wildly successful Van Gogh Immersive experience, which has been staged in cities across Europe, Asia, and the U.S.
“The visceral power of immersive experiences has always fascinated and moved me,” Brown said in a statement. “I’m beyond excited to be developing this project with the legendary artist Massimiliano Siccardi.”
Brown’s bestselling book from 2003 follows Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu who become entangled in a murder investigation at the Louvre that brings them into contact with secret religious societies. The main conspiracy is that the early kings of France were descended from the bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. In 2008, a film adaptation of the book was released starring Tom Hanks, Audrey Tatou, and Ian McKellen. It grossed $800 million.
Exterior of Immersive Van Gogh at Pier 26. Photo by Ben Davis.
Although details of the venture’s creative partners and opening venues won’t be announced until early 2026, Siccardi has described the scope and intention of the project, calling it “a journey through the mind of Leonardo—his inventions, his obsessions, his brilliance—and the unveiling of Da Vinci works the world has never seen.” Expect to soar above the Tuscan hills in an ornithopter, roll through Paris in an armored tank, and come face-to-face with Leonardo’s mechanical lion, all while solving the greatest of ecclesiastical mysteries.
The Da Vinci Code immersive experience is being backed by U.S. film producers Brett Kerr and Andrea Bari. Kerr’s most recent feature was Waltzing with Brando, a drama starring Billy Zane as Marlon Brando who is trying to build an eco-retreat on an uninhabited island of Tahiti.
“We’re thrilled to help build a bridge between the genius of Da Vinci and the limitless possibilities of immersive art,” Bari and Kerr said in a statement. “This is about expanding how audiences experience wonder — and rewriting the boundaries between art, technology, and emotion.”
It’s not the first time the Renaissance master’s work has fueled an immersive experience. Last year, the Lume, in Melbourne, Australia, staged “Leonardo da Vinci – 500 Years of Genius.” The exhibition, created by the Australia-based entertainment company Grande Experiences, projected some of the artist’s most celebrated paintings, offered the world’s only exact 360-degree replica of Mona Lisa, and presented pages from the Codex Atlanticus, the 12-volume set of drawings and writings by Leonardo that is housed in Milan.
“Leonardo da Vinci – 500 Years of Genius” Installation View. Image courtesy of The Lume.
Fully immersive, multi-sensory experiences have rapidly grown in popularity in recent years, with some citing the appearance of the Immersive Van Gogh in the hit Netflix show Emily in Paris as a breakthrough moment. Investor money has poured in and today artists including David Hockney, Gustav Klimt, and Claude Monet have all seen their work turned into immersive experiences. More

People have believed in ghosts since time immemorial. Our enduring fascination with these spooky spectres has seen them haunt all manner of popular media, from folklore to film, and art. But, trapped between our earthly realm and whatever awaits, ghosts are often felt as an intangible presence. Only sometimes are sightings reported, so how best to represent the supernatural?
Ever inventive, artists have come up with different answers to this conceptual challenge over the centuries. “Ghosts: Visualizing the Supernatural,” a new survey at Kunstmuseum Basel, takes visitors on a 250-year journey from the 19th-century obsession with spiritualism, seance, and the occult, to modern-day apparitions. Among the 160 works and objects on display are conjurings by contemporary artists like Urs Fischer, Ryan Gander, Rachel Whiteread, Erwin Wurm, and Nicole Eisenman.
Erwin Wurm, Yikes (Substitutes) (2024). Photo: Markus Gradwohl. Courtesy of the artist and König Galerie. © 2025 ProLitteris, Zurich.
“Art and new forms of media share an interest in rendering things visible that are on the edges of our perception,” the exhibition’s curator Eva Reifert said. “Dealing with ghosts is an immensely creative undertaking, the imagination is liberated and the what ifs and how take it beyond the limits of materialistic reality.”
Depicting the Imperceptible
One reason for the rich variety of ghosts in art is the tantalizing impossibility of defining these entities. Are they benevolent or malevolent? “The idea that the past lives on is very powerful,” said Reifert, and “the idea that we can’t control [ghosts] appearances is, in turn, a very scary thought.” Their existence may resist and confound scientific rationality, but we can’t look away. After all, ghosts might be “figures of memory, of a person we loved, or, more probably, of violent and wrongful happenings in the past that have come to haunt the present.”
William Blair Bruce, The Phantom Hunter (1888). © Art Gallery of Hamilton.
Inevitably, we are left to wonder whether what we sense is real or a phantom of the imagination. Or, as goes the Emily Dickinson poem quoted in the show’s catalogue: “One need not be a chamber–to be haunted, One need not be a House–, The Brain has Corridors–, surpassing, Material Place–.”
The mystery of in-between beings is well captured by Canadian painter William Blair Bruce’s The Phantom Hunter (1888). A man cowers on a desolate, snowy plain, reaching out towards a strange, semi-translucent figure. “Is it the soul that leaves the body of the dying hunter?” Reifert asked. “Is it the phantom that leaves no traces in the snow but induces a ‘fear-chill like a shroud’?”
Meret Oppenheim, Ghost with Sheet (Spectre au drap), 1962. Courtesy of Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein, Vaduz. © 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich.
A filmy, loosely-rendered form is one way of evoking the “shift in atmosphere” associated with an invisible being. Another option is the loose white sheet, suggestive of a presence, or absence, beneath. The origins of this method can be traced back to the simple burial practice of wrapping the dead in a sheet in place of a coffin. “Many other aspects of ghostly appearances seem to be tied to the emergence of new media, like projection technologies or photography,” said Reifert. These can be used to “play with the theme of transparency, of blurred outlines, double or long exposure to indicate that the ghost is not fully of this world.”
Gillian Wearing, Me as a Ghost (2015). Courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London © The artist and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Limited.
Spiritualism and Spectacle
In challenging religion, the Enlightenment of the 18th century had promised a rational, controllable world, but one that paranormal activity threatened to upend. After all, novel uses of electricity began to power seemingly magical technologies, like the telegraph or the telephone, such that invisible forces suddenly felt real. In the late 19th century, many became fixated on the possibility of transcendence, whether by seeking channels of communication with new realms or probing inwards, toward previously unexplored layers of the psyche. No doubt, the spectacle and illusion of popular seances helped feed this appetite.
The medium Eva C. (aka Marthe Béraud) with a slipper-like teleplastic form on her head and a luminous apparition between her hands. © Institute for Border Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene, Freiburg im Breisgau.
Several mediums with a special “gift” were also artists, including Madge Gill, Augustin Lesage, and Georgiana Houghton, whose works are included in the Basel show. They saw themselves not as authors in the traditional sense but as being conducted by a higher power. Therefore, an intuitive “automatic” process was used by Houghton to produce her intricate, semi-abstracted spirit drawings. Though her aims were distinct from the modernists that would come later, many of her achievements appear to pre-empt their work.
Georgiana Houghton, The Spiritual Crown of Annie Mary Howitt Watts (1867). Photo: © Collection of Vivienne Roberts, London.
By the 20th-century, however, the avant-garde had inevitably put their own spin on the spiritual. Ghosts became “free-ranging agents of the irrational” and “metaphors for psychological extremes like trauma, anxiety or grief,” Reifert said. For the Surrealists, they were an avenue into the unconscious, appearing in the work of artists like Max Ernst, a pioneer of automatic painting techniques, and René Magritte.
René Magritte, The Comical Spirit (1928). Photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin, courtesy Sammlung Ulla und Heiner Pietzsch, Berlin © 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich.
“Ghosts: Visualizing the Supernatural” is on view through March 8, 2026 at Kunstmuseum Basel. More

Even though art world sensation Matthew Wong tragically took his own life six years ago, the young painter evidently still has surprises in store. The Matthew Wong Foundation, based in Edmonton, Canada, is organizing an exhibition of Wong’s lesser-known physical and psychological interiors at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi in Venice, next May through November, concurrent with the 61st Venice Biennale.
“Matthew Wong: Interiors” will feature 35 previously unseen or rarely seen paintings and works on paper created from 2015 to 2019, during the height of Wong’s painting career. The show is curated by John Cheim, the co-founder of New York gallery Cheim and Read who mentored Wong early in his meteoric rise. Art historian and curator Nancy Spector will write the catalog.
“Deepening the public’s understanding of Matthew’s history and artistic output is one of the overarching goals of this exhibition,” Cheim told me over email. “There is still much to learn and discover about Matthew’s work and this important presentation will provide a more meaningful exploration of his life, his struggles, his influences, and ultimately, his contribution to the art-historical canon.”
Matthew Wong, Untitled (2016) Photo courtesy of the Matthew Wong Foundation © 2025 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photography by Alex Yudzon.
Wong’s entrance into that canon was rather unconventional. He was born in Toronto in 1984, but his family moved to Hong Kong when he was seven. They returned to Toronto eight years later, partially to secure better treatment for Wong’s Tourette’s syndrome, autism, and depression. After studying anthropology at the University of Michigan and photography at the City University of Hong Kong School of Creative Media, Wong famously started teaching himself how to paint in libraries and online in 2012.
In 2016, renowned curator Matthew Higgs gave Wong his big break, including him in a group show that Karma opened in Amagansett over Labor Day weekend. The following year, Karma sold one of his canvases to the Dallas Museum of Art during the Dallas Art Fair. In 2018, Wong’s debut New York solo show with Karma elicited rave reviews. The museum shows that have transpired since his death have earned similar acclaim.
“Many of Wong’s interiors have been exhibited in the past but they have never been isolated as a subject,” Cheim noted over email. “Wong has largely been associated with lush imaginary landscapes.” Meanwhile, the works slated to appear in “Matthew Wong: Interiors”, he said, “present a more isolated psychological view suggesting social struggle and sexual longing.”
Matthew Wong, Untitled (2016) Photo courtesy of the Matthew Wong Foundation © 2025 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photography by Alex Yudzon.
Indeed, Untitled (2016) depicts hands viscerally grasping towards a portal (seemingly a window, evoking Rothko’s color fields) that is otherwise shrouded in unyielding black. These interiors aren’t totally claustrophobic—many have escape hatches, whether windows out on the world, or doorways leaking promising light. A silhouetted figure stares over another such threshold in a different untitled work from 2016, perhaps watching someone wash up, or trying to remember why they walked over to that room in the first place. These works are ripe for sparking further contemplation of Wong’s inner landscape.
“Matthew Wong: Interiors” is the first exhibition organized by the Matthew Wong Foundation, which just christened its headquarters this Fall. In addition to housing the artist’s archive, fostering scholarship, and hosting an artist residency, the Foundation primarily aims to spark new awareness and appreciation for Wong’s work. Venice proves a fitting first venue. According to Wong’s mother, who chairs the Foundation’s board, Wong served as docent in the Hong Kong Pavilion at the 54th Biennale, in 2011, just before trying to paint for himself.
“Matthew Wong: Interiors” is on view at Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, San Polo 2774, Venice, Italy, May 9–November 1, 2026. More

From rediscovered Old Masters to living legends, Europe’s cultural capitals are bursting with blockbuster exhibitions this fall. Florence is celebrating its native son Fra Angelico while the Flemish Baroque painter Michaelina Wautier receives an overdue survey in Vienna. Milan is mounting the first major show to consider Nan Goldin as a filmmaker and, in Paris, the chameleonic Gerhard Richter is the subject of a sweeping survey just in time for Art Basel Paris.
Plus, it wouldn’t be spooky season without a touch of the supernatural, which the Kunstmuseum Basel serves in spades with a haunting show about ghosts. Here are our top picks of museum shows to see across the continent.
“Fra Angelico” at Palazzo Strozzi and Museo di San Marco, FlorenceThrough January 25, 2026
Fra Angelico, The Annunciation (c. 1440–1445). Image courtesy Museo di San Marco, Florence.
Where better to pay homage to the Dominican friar-turned-early Renaissance marvel Fra Angelico than in the city where he made his name? The devout painter’s serene, elegantly proportioned frescoes that depict classic religious scenes were originally intended for the contemplation of his fellow monks or wealthy patrons. Nearly six centuries later, they are world-famous masterpieces, celebrated for ushering in a new, transformative era of art-making in Western Europe.
Palazzo Strozzi’s once-in-a-lifetime blockbuster, the first major exhibition in Florence dedicated to Fra Angelico, contains more than 140 artworks. Many of these paintings, sculptures, drawings, and illuminated manuscripts have been loaned from 70 of the top institutions across the world. The exhibition is something of a citywide event, being jointly organized by the nearby Museo di San Marco, formerly the medieval Dominican convent where Fra Angelico lived. There, he painted frescoes to decorate the friars’ tiny cells as well as one of his best-known works, The Annunciation (c. 1440–1445). Other treats on a special trail that runs in and around the city include a recently restored Crucifixion fresco in a remote church in the hilltop town of Fiesole.
—Jo Lawson-Tancred

“Ghosts. Visualizing the Supernatural” at Kunstmuseum BaselThrough March 8, 2026
Gillian Wearing, Me as a Ghost (2015). Courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. © The artist and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Limited.
Trick or treat? Just in time for Halloween, this spooky show brings together 160 works spanning 250 years to trace how spirits and the supernatural have inspired generations of artists, from historical figures like Eugène Delacroix, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst to contemporary makers such as Glenn Ligon, Gillian Wearing, and Rosemarie Trockel. Blending science, spiritualism, and popular culture, the exhibition explores how ghosts have served as eerie mediators between life and death, the visible and the invisible, while constantly haunting the edges of our collective imagination.
Not going to make it to Basel? At least take a moment to appreciate the website for the exhibition, which turns your mouse cursor into a ghoul floating around your screen.
—Margaret Carrigan

“Radical Harmony: Neo-Impressionists” at the National Gallery, LondonThrough February 8, 2026
Georges Seurat, Le Chahut (1888–89). Photo: © Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands.
In the late 19th century, a cohort of artists took the once-radical ideas of the Impressionists and innovated upon them, departing from their easy spontaneity to think more deeply about how the viewer perceives paint on canvas. The discoveries of the so-called Neo-Impressionists would become a vital reference for many leading modernists, including Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. A trove of their placid, pleasing masterpieces—predominantly made by Pointillist painters like Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, among lesser-known but important figures—is currently on display at the National Gallery in London. The standout is no doubt Seurat‘s notorious and, to this day, still surprising Le Chahut, an ambiguous but lively image of Parisian nightlife that has never previously been shown in the U.K.
The collection was amassed by one of the most notable women art patrons in history, Hélène Kröller-Müller, whose collection usually resides in an eponymous museum built on her former estate in the Netherlands. Widely credited as one of the first art collectors to seriously appreciate the talents of Vincent van Gogh, Radical Harmony also celebrates her discerning eye and lasting legacy.
—J.L-T.

Gerhard Richter at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, ParisOctober 17, 2025–March 2, 2026
Gerhard Richter, Gudrun (1987). Courtesy of Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. © Gerhard Richter 2025.
One of the most influential painters alive, Gerhard Richter has spent six decades defying categorization—and this sweeping retrospective aims to capture that restless spirit. Curated by former director of Kunst Museum Winterthur, Dieter Schwarz, and Sir Nicholas Serota, previously the director of Tate, the show brings together 270 works spanning Richter’s vast range of styles, from photo-based realism to luminous abstraction. Key loans from major institutions, alongside highlights from the Fondation’s own collection, offer an unprecedented look at the artist’s chameleonic career, era by era. It’s a must-see survey of a master who’s always refused to stand still.
—M.C.

“Michaelina Wautier” at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, ViennaThrough February 22, 2026
Michaelina Wautier, Self-portrait (ca. 1650). Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
As the craze for rediscovering long-overlooked women artists who found widespread acclaim in their day shows no signs of slowing, the Kunsthistorisches Museum has planned a tribute to the Flemish Baroque painter Michaelina Wautier. Active in Belgium in the 17th century, Wautier was largely forgotten because many of her paintings were wrongly attributed to male artists, including her brother Charles. Even her self-portrait was once attributed to the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. These errors have only been corrected in recent decades, and Wautier only got her first major museum show at Rubens House in Antwerp in 2017.
The few historical women painters who made it in a deeply patriarchal art world often were pushed towards softer subjects, like still life or genre painting, but Wautier confidently produced sizeable history paintings. Many of these ambitious, masterful canvases were collected by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, who bequeathed them to the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Experts tend to agree that Wautier‘s greatest masterpiece is the magnificent The Triumph of Bacchus (1650–56), which she painted in her mid-forties. It will take pride of place in this triumphant exhibition, which will tour to the Royal Academy in London in 2026.
—J.L-T.

Nan Goldin, “This Will Not End Well” at Pirelli HangarBicocca, MilanOctober 11, 2025–February 15, 2026
Nan Goldin, The paw, eclipse from You Never Did Anything Wrong (2024). © Nan Goldin.Courtesy of Gagosian.
This is Nan Goldin’s first major exhibition devoted to her filmmaking, and it features her iconic slideshows reimagined as immersive installations. The show spans six major works, including her magnum opus The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022); Memory Lost (2019–21), which highlights the agony of addiction and withdrawal; and The Other Side (1992–2021), a collective portrait of her trans friends whom she photographed between 1972 and 2010. Two new works, You Never Did Anything Wrong and Stendhal Syndrome, will also premiere, alongside a new sound installation. All of these are housed in architect Hala Wardé’s custom-built pavilions, creating intimate viewing spaces within the museum. It’s a raw, poetic, and deeply personal journey through memory, trauma, and intimacy, with a touch of Goldin‘s signature wry humor.
—M.C.

“Christian Marclay: The Clock” at Neue Nationalgalerie, BerlinNovember 29, 2025–January 18, 2026
Christian Marclay, The Clock (2010). © Christian Marclay. Photo: Ben Westoby, © White Cube.
Since winning the prestigious Golden Lion award at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, Christian Marclay‘s The Clock (2010) has been touring major institutions across the globe, including MoMA, Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. This fall, it comes to Berlin for the very first time.
Notoriously long, the looped 24-hour video work takes viewers on a journey through the history of cinema by stitching together clips featuring clocks or watches from a century of film into one rolling montage. The mammoth endeavor took some three years to make with the help of a research team and the support of White Cube. In each location, the film correlates to local time so that, as time passes, the subjects’ activities roughly correlate with those expected in a typical day. The video’s vast scope, which encompasses blockbusters and lesser-known pieces, drawing from a wide range of genres from thrillers to westerns, makes for a surprisingly exhilarating watch, and is a moving testament to the many expanding avenues of human creativity.
—J.L-T.
Jacques Louis-David at Louvre Museum, ParisOctober 15–January 26, 2026
Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii (1784-85). Photo: Michel Urtado, © GrandPalaisRmn (Musée du Louvre).
Our understanding of several key moments in French history has been formed through the lens of Jacques-Louis David, no matter how idealized his Neoclassical masterpieces may be. Though initially embraced by the ancien régime, the illustrious painter made his name in the late 18th century as a dedicated revolutionary who captured its triumphs, as in the Tennis Court Oath (1789), as well as its tranquilly rendered tragedies, like the Death of Marat (1793). By the early 19th century, he had instead become a prominent propagandist for Napoleon Bonaparte, valorizing the emperor with majestic portraits like Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass (1800–05). Where better, then, to celebrate David‘s achievements on the bicentenary of his death, in 1825, than in the very heart of Paris?
It is little surprise that some of the best paintings on view already belong to the Louvre, but visitors can still anticipate a whopping 100 loans. Among the star attractions is the original Death of Marat, which arrives from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels, and Death of Socrates (1787) from the Met. An unfinished Oath of the Tennis Court painting has also been temporarily retrieved from long-term loan at the Palace of Versailles.
—J.L-T. More

Rembrandt is best known for his shadowy paintings. His 1642 canvas The Night Watch is a masterclass in dynamic composition, while the self-portraits he made throughout his life chart his aging likeness alongside his developing aesthetic. Yet it’s the artist’s smaller scale, black-and white etchings that highlight the exactitude of Rembrandt’s visions, and reveal how he constructed shadow, mark by individual mark. 
For the first time, a trove of the artist’s etchings are going on view in the United States, in a traveling showcase organized by the American Federation of Arts (AFA) and Amsterdam’s Rembrandt House Museum. Emphasizing the Dutch master’s groundbreaking printmaking process, “Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White—Prints from the Rembrandt House Museum” has opened at Charleston’s Gibbes Museum of Art with works that encourage slow looking in the age of the quick digital scroll.
Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait, Wearing a Flat Cap (c. 1642). Photo courtesy of Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam.
“While we expect many visitors to the exhibition to arrive with some degree of familiarity with Rembrandt,” H. Alexander Rich, president and CEO of the Gibbes Museum, said in a statement, “the show—with its focus on his etchings—offers fresh, unexpected, and exciting insight into aspects of Rembrandt’s life, career, and creative output that we may think about less often.”
Etching was a relatively new form of printmaking in Rembrandt’s time. The process required the artist to draw on wax applied atop copper plates, drop them in acid, coat them in ink, then press them to paper on which the print would appear. He often combined the technique with drypoint, working directly on the metal and forgoing the acid step in order to create softer lines. The artist’s commingling of the forms produced marks that were both durable and delicate, a contrast that paralleled Rembrandt’s handling of shadow and light.
Rembrandt van Rijn, View of Haarlem and Bloemendaal (1651). Photo courtesy of Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam.
The etchings on view in “Masterpieces in Black and White” range in subject matter from self-portraits to Biblical studies and bucolic Dutch landscapes that contributed to what Rich called “that now-collective vision of the Netherlands.”
Rembrandt’s 1641 print Windmill, for example, features the titular apparatus in precise detail. The artist captured every bar on the sails’ lattice framework, every rung on the ladders leading up to the entryways. Dense crosshatchings place one side of the windmill in deep shadow, and two dark windows look like architectural eyes; under Rembrandt’s hand, the windmill becomes anthropomorphized, given as much personality as any of his self-portraits. Exhibition curator Epco Runia, head of collections at the Rembrandt House Museum, noted in press materials how “each of Rembrandt’s prints is a work of art in its own right.”
Rembrandt van Rijn, The Windmill (1641). Photo courtsy of Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam.
The exhibition includes other objects and artworks to allow for greater scrutiny and deeper context. Two copperplates appear alongside the etchings they helped produce. Magnifying glasses are available “for audiences to study each and every etched mark and decision Rembrandt made to produce these prints,” Rich said. Fourteen works by 19th- and 20th-century artists, including Pablo Picasso and James McNeil Whistler, suggest Rembrandt’s crucial influence on later generations. 
Towards the end of his life, according to the exhibition brochure, Rembrandt “began experimenting with freer lines and dark shadows on different types of paper, and explored working the plates extensively to create night scenes.” The artist, then, approached darkness and finality with the same open, omnivorous spirit and capacity for metaphor that characterize his entire oeuvre. As the artist’s body declined, etching preserved every last trace. 
Rembrandt van Rijn, A Scholar in His Study (“Faust”) (1652). Photo courtesy of Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam.
The show marks the Rembrandt House Museum’s first collaboration with both the AFA and the Gibbes Museum of Art. Following its stop in Charleston, the exhibition is set to travel to the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, in February 2026, then the Naples Art Institute in Florida in October 2026.
The AFA’s partnerships with these museums, the organization’s director and CEO Pauline Forlenza said in a statement, “will allow us to bring these momentous etchings out of the Netherlands for the first time as a collection, for the benefit of audiences in the United States so that they can experience Rembrandt’s work directly.”
“Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White—Prints from the Rembrandt House Museum” is on view at the Gibbes Museum of Art, 135 Meeting St, Charleston, South Carolina, October 24, 2025–January 11, 2026. More

The delicate, woven wire sculptures of Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) are having a major moment at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where the late Bay Area artist’s first posthumous retrospective just touched down after a wildly popular run at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
“What I registered in my numerous visits to the exhibition was just this extraordinary outpouring of love and respect,” Cara Manes, MoMA’s associate curator of painting and sculpture, told me at the exhibition press preview. She co-curated the show with SFMOMA chief curator and curator of painting and sculpture, Janet Bishop.
San Francisco, of course, was Asawa’s home for many decades, from 1949 until her death in 2013. The artist’s profile—and the market for her work—has risen considerably since her passing, but the Bay Area has always had a great appreciation for her work, in no small part due to her many public sculptures in the region. Those works meant the SFMOMA exhibition—which welcomed 285,000 visitors and saw August attendance to the museum rise to pre-2020 numbers for the first time—effectively extended beyond the galleries and into the streets of San Francisco.
Here in New York, where we aren’t lucky enough to have a cityscape populated with the likes of Asawa’s beloved Ghirardelli Square and Embarcadero fountains, the MoMA exhibition stands poised to introduce her wide-ranging practice to a whole new audience. Altogether, there are 398 objects on view, making the exhibition the museum’s largest ever to be dedicated to a woman artist. (The show’s MoMA iteration also adds additional archival material about Asawa’s public commissions to better set the scene.)
Ruth Asawa with hanging wire sculpture (1951). Photo: ©Imogen Cunningham Trust Artwork, ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy of David Zwirner.
Staying in the Loop
The artist’s signature is her airy, looped-wire sculptures, intricately interlaced into ornate lobes and cones designed to hang from the ceiling. Suggesting organic forms such as cocoons, plants, or even the womb, the hollow constructions cast lacy shadows on their surroundings, adding an extra layer of beauty to the display. Asawa developed this practice following a 1947 trip to Toluca, Mexico, where she learned looped-wire basketry.
She described her sculptures as “a continuous form within a form” and “a shape that was inside and outside at the same time,” where “everything is connected, continuous.”
Installation view of “Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective” on view at the Museum of Modern Art. Artwork ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy of David Zwirner. Photo: by Jonathan Dorado, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. ©2025 MoMA.
MoMA gives these incredible works space to breathe, with 16,000 square feet of exhibition space on the museum’s sixth floor. It also showcases Asawa’s incredible artistic range, with work in many other mediums.
Asawa sculpted in wood, clay, bronze, and even folded paper, creased to stunningly architectural effect. She also experimented with electroplating, a process that involves electric currents and acid baths. And then there are her tied wire sculptures, which Asawa began making in the 1960s. They use the same thin wire as her famous looping works, but with as many as 1,000 individual pieces radiating out from a central stem, creating tree-like shapes that branch out like dendrites.
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.390, Hanging Tied-Wire, Double-Sided, Center-Tied, Multi-Branched Form with Curly Ends) (1963). Collection of the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, gift of Rita Newman. Photo: ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy of David Zwirner.
“The thing that is maybe most surprising is just how radically broad and diverse but also how interconnected her entire practice was,” Manes said.
Asawa’s drawings, in recent years the subject of an excellent show at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and Houston’s Menil Collection, are a particularly striking example of how the artist translated her mastery of line and form from sculpture to the page. Many of these works are incredibly, surprisingly vibrant, like watercolors of bright blue and purple hydrangeas, and an ink drawing of ripe green watermelons that seem to pop off the page.
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (WC.187, Two Watermelons), (ca. 1960s). Collection of the Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. Artwork ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy of David Zwirner. Photo: by James Paonessa
“Across the board, she’s such a colorist, even in the wire sculptures,” Manes said, adding that on clear days, when the skylight is open, the hanging works shimmer in the sunlight, accentuating Asawa’s subtle color palette with shades of green and warm browns and golds. “The palette of those works—it’s a rainbow actually!”
An especially revelatory (and colorful) room of the show is dedicated to the single year Asawa spent working in lithography, quickly mastering the new-to-her technique during an eight-week residency at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1965.
Ruth Asawa, Poppy (1965). Publisher and printer: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles. Edition: proof outside the edition of 20. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Kleiner, Bell & Co., 1967. Artwork ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy of David Zwirner.
A Woman Who Did It All
Taken in its entirety, the show presents a stunning amount of work, reflective of Asawa’s seemingly preternatural productivity—she was said to sleep just four hours a night. This dedication to her craft is all the more remarkable considering the details of Asawa’s biography. Born on a farm in Norwalk, California (then outside Los Angeles), Asawa was a teenager when World War II broke out, and her family was forced to relocate to an internment camp.
The artist was able to leave the camps to study at Milwaukee State Teachers College. But anti-Japanese sentiment continued to impact Asawa’s life. Ostensibly out of concern for her safety, the school refused to give her a field placement to complete her degree. Instead, Asawa enrolled at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, studying under Josef Albers (1888–1976) and Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983).
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (BMC.145, BMC Laundry Stamp), ca. 1948–49. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired through the generosity of Joshua and Filipa Fink, 2018. Artwork ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy of David Zwirner.
It proved a pivotal moment in Asawa’s life, both personally and professionally. In addition to setting her on the creative path that would guide all her future endeavors—there are early student works in the exhibition, including clever prints made from repeated imprints of the stamp from the school laundry room, spiraling or in rows—she also met her husband, architect Albert Lanier (1927–2008), at the school.
California legalized interracial marriage in 1948, and the young couple moved back to Asawa’s home state the following year. They had six children, two of whom were adopted, and built a loving household centered around creativity. (The show includes an orange glazed ceramic plate made by the couple, and beaded clay necklaces sculpted by Asawa and fired by their son Paul Lanier, a ceramicist, in a beachside fire pit.)
The living room of Ruth Asawa’s home in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco in 1969. Photo: ©Rondal Partridge Archive/RondalPartridge.com.
Learning about Asawa’s life, it seems as though everything she touched turned to art. A tireless advocate for arts education, she helped open an art school in San Francisco that has been named in her honor, and she even engaged children to help her make some of her public monuments. Asawa taught them to craft relief sculptures from a simple baker’s clay made of flour, water, and salt. Cast in bronze, some of these collaborative works became monuments like the San Francisco Fountain at the city’s Hyatt Hotel and the Japanese American Internment Memorial down in San Jose.
The SFMOMA presentation included a restaging of Asawa’s home, with comfy brown leather beanbag chairs sitting before a large-scale black and white photograph of her living room. The art was everywhere, with finished wire works suspended from the ceiling and a table full of children’s sculptures.
Ruth Asawa’s masks and one of her looped wire sculptures on display on the façade of her Noe Valley, San Francisco, home. Photo: by Laurence Cuneo, ©Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; courtesy of David Zwirner.
The cedar-shingled exterior of the home was decorated in clay sculptures made from plaster casts of the faces of the family and their visitors. A selection of these unique ceramics, of which the artist made hundreds, hangs in the exhibition next to the home’s former redwood doors, hand-carved by Asawa. (Much of the series belongs to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. where 233 of them are on longterm view.)
Another fascinating slice of Asawa’s personal life comes in the form of her wedding ring, a striking design by Fuller with a large, smooth, round, black river rock. The sterling silver setting forms a trio of interlocking A’s, for the vowels in her last name.
Ruth Asawa’s wedding ring designed by Buckminster Fuller, fabricated by Mary Jo Slick (Godfrey) (1949). Photo: © Laurence Cuneo
An Artist Long Overdue for Widespread Success
During her lifetime, Asawa did find some recognition, with a trio of solo shows during the 1950s at Louis Pollack’s Peridot Gallery in New York and an SFMOMA mid-career survey in 1973. One of her sculptures even made the pages of Vogue in 1952. But with so many small children at home, the artist chose not to continue working with Pollack, essentially hitting the pause button on her career as a commercial artist.
Four of Asawa’s five surviving children made the trip to New York for the opening. “Many of the grandchildren and some of the great grandchildren are here, including the newest one, who is only two months old,” said Vivian Tong, the arts manager and archivist of the artist’s estate, Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. “At the San Francisco presentation of the retrospective, when they walked in, they started tearing up, and it was very sweet.”
Installation view of “Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective” on view at the Museum of Modern Art. Artwork ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy of David Zwirner. Photo: by Jonathan Dorado, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. ©2025 MoMA.
The retrospective is an emotional experience for the family, seeing the full body of Asawa’s work finally given the scholarly reappraisal it has long deserved. For too long, her art was dismissed as domestic, a form of craft that didn’t rise to the level of fine art—“They are beautiful if primarily only decorative objects in space,” wrote the New York Times of her “chain mail” technique in 1956. The Guggenheim Fellowship rejected the artist’s application no fewer than four times.
The tide only began to turn in the last five years of Asawa’s life, when the family called Christie’s specialist Jonathan Laib. They wanted to sell an Albers painting to help pay for 24-hour health care for Asawa, who was suffering from lupus.
Ruth Asawa at Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective View, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1973. Photograph by Laurence Cuneo. ©2024 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: courtesy of David Zwirner.
Laib ended up flying out to San Francisco to see Asawa’s sculptures, and put a looped wire piece in a 2010 sale. It went for $578,500, smashing her existing auction record of just $98,500 and opening up the doors for market success that continues to this day. Just months before her death, Laib curated Asawa’s first New York solo show in over 50 years, at the auction house, and would go on to become executor of the estate.
Then, leading dealer David Zwirner began representing Asawa in 2017 (and Laib came on board as a gallery director). The artist’s current auction record stands at $5.3 million, set at Christie’s New York in 2020, according to the Artnet Price Database.
Installation view of “Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective” on view at the Museum of Modern Art.Artwork ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., courtesy of David Zwirner. Photo: by Jonathan Dorado, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. ©2025 MoMA.
In 2019, Asawa was the subject of a Google Doodle. In 2020, the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of Asawa stamps. In 2022, she made her Venice Biennale debut in Cecilia Alemani’s exhibition “The Milk of Dreams.” And in 2024, President Joe Biden posthumously awarded her the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor. (She also got a crater named after her on Mercury)
The retrospective builds on this incredible momentum, presenting the full arc of her career and its many facets. And Asawa’s moment looks to continue as the exhibition tours internationally, to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland. Don’t miss it.
“Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective” was on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, California, April 4–September 2, 2025. It will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, New York, October 19, 2025–February 7, 2026; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Abandoibarra Etorb., 2, Abando, 48009 Bilbo, Bizkaia, Spain, March 20–September 13, 2026; and Fondation Beyeler, Baselstrasse 101, 4125 Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, October 18, 2026–January 24, 2027. More

After six years, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) is finally shining a spotlight on the transformative gift of over 3,000 African American quilts it received from the late collector Eli Leon in 2019.
“I wanted to think deeply about the role of quilts as portable objects,” exhibition curator Elaine Yau told me. “When quiltmakers are migrating and leaving the South, quiltmaking as a
set of craft skills and technical skills is moving with them.”
There are more than 100 quilts from the collection now on view in the show “Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California“, representing the work of approximately 80 named artists. Roughly a quarter are from the South, made prior to 1950. The rest were made in the Bay Area.
Far more than a celebration of craft, the exhibition explores how African American quiltmaking traditions migrated from the South to the West during the mid-20th century, carried by women whose textiles were both sources of warmth and acts of self-expression. The exhibition also represents years of work for BAMPFA, which overnight became the nation’s largest repository of African American quilts following Leon’s bequest—a gift that came with the immense responsibility of preserving and presenting these works, and explaining to audiences how the histories of art, labor, and movement are stitched together.
Eli Leon with his quilt collection. Photo: Randi Malkin Steinberger. Courtesy of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Who Was Eli Leon? 
A psychologist and a gay white man who lived in Oakland, Eli Leon (1935–2018) was a unique figure. Described in his New York Times obituary as “a highly discriminating hoarder,” Leon was a  passionate collector of knick knacks and antiques, such as the 30 meat grinders displayed in his kitchen.
He began collecting African American quilts, largely in the improvisational style—that is to say, created without a pattern in mind—in the 1970s. At the time, it was easy to find second-hand quilts at flea markets and thrift stores. Eventually, Leon amassed so many that he built a two-story climate-controlled annex to store his quilts, with the overflow stacked in piles up to two-feet high in the living room.
In 1989, Leon won a Guggenheim Fellowship to fund his quilt research, and bought a Winnebago to drive across the South, meeting with African American quiltmakers and taking meticulous notes about their work. He was dedicated to sharing this undersung textile art with the world, starting with the exhibition “Who’d a Thought It: Improvisation in African American Quiltmaking.” It debuted at the now-shuttered San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum in 1987 and toured to 25 institutions across the country.
Lee Wanda Jones at Berkeley Flea Market, 1988. Eli Leon Archive, BAMPFA. Photo: by Eli Leon.
Leon didn’t just collect historical quilts, but also the work of living quiltmakers, sometimes buying from them directly over a period of many years.
“In some cases, a patron and artist relationship would develop such that a quiltmaker would understand
the kind of taste that he had. And so there’s an interesting dimension to his story where the quiltmaking is shifting because of his collecting,” Yau said. “Some of the quilts in the collection may not have been used functionally and certainly had a thread—no pun intended—of art making entwined in them because of his role as a collector.”
Leon was the most invested in the work of Rosie Lee Tompkins (1936–2006), a pseudonym he bestowed on the shy Effie Mae Howard, whom he met at an Oakland flea market in 1985. Over the next two decades, Leon bought every quilt she would sell him—more than 500 in total—sometimes even going into debt to pay for her latest masterpiece. In 2020, BAMPFA’s first show based on the Leon collection was the critically acclaimed “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective.”
Eli Leon interviewing quiltmaker Joanna Smiley (right) with her daughter in Sulphur Springs, Texas (1989). Eli Leon Archive, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Photo: by Helen Wallis.
It was a piece by Tompkins in a 1996 exhibition of black-and-white quilts from Leon’s collection at the Richmond Art Center, north of Berkeley, that first caught the attention of Lawrence Rinder, a BAMPFA curator who would go on to become the institution’s director, retiring in 2019.
Rinder curated Tompkins’s first museum exhibition for BAMPFA in 1997. He also included her in the 2002 Whitney Biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. But despite Rinder’s prominent role in promoting Tompkins, Leon never let on that he was planning to leave everything to BAMPFA.
Rebecca Smith and Bettie Chaffold, Untitled (Shadow Star). Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust. Photo: Daria Lugina. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
A Gift With Strings Attached
Leon’s gift added a brand new dimension to the BAMPFA collection while increasing it by more than 15 percent. (The quilts are now nearly a fifth of the total holdings.) While it was thrilling to be the unexpected recipient of such largess, the collection was also nothing short of daunting.
The museum secured a $500,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation creating a curatorial position specifically to work with the new quilt collection. Yau, who was already a postdoc fellow at BAMPFA studying for her PhD in art history at UC Berkeley, was the perfect candidate. (She co-curated the Tompkins show and was promoted to associate curator and academic liaison in 2024.)
Pieced by Sherry Ann Byrd, quilted by Irene Bankhead, Cultural Merger at Crossroads, USA (1990). Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Courtesy of Sherry Ann Byrd. Photo: Kevin Candland. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
The first step was assessing the quilts’ condition: though there were few structural issues, there were some signs of mold and insect damage. Each and every quilt needed to undergo conservation treatment before entering storage. Each piece must be sealed in carbon dioxide chambers for five to seven weeks, vacuumed, and sanitized—an extensive process costing over $1.6 million. The effort was jeopardized in May when a $40,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant for the project was suddenly revoked due to federal budget cuts. (The non-profit quilt research organization the Quilt Index was similarly impacted.)
In an even bigger blow, the museum also lost $220,000 in unspent funds from the Institute for Museum and Library Services earmarked for the quilts’ conservation when the agency was essentially shut down earlier this year. BAMPFA has appealed the grants’ termination, and is fundraising to try and make up the shortfall. It also rejects the government’s claim that preserving the quilts “no longer serves the interest of the United States.”
Eli Leon’s quilt collection preparing to undergo anoxia treatment in an enclosed tent as part of conservation work being carried out by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Photo courtesy of BAMPFA.
“The quilts are in fact the heritage and representative of the rich cultural resources of this country,” Yau said. “What you have is the artistic production of everyday ordinary Americans, and the kinds of storytelling, community care, and creative ingenuity that the quilts represent are all values that a lot of people would would rally around.”
The goal is to finish conservation by 2028, but even after that, the quilts will require considerable care and resources.
Refolding the quilts every two years is ideal to prevent deep creases, according to Yau, but with their size and quantity, the task would require four staffers working some 533 hours—or about 76 days—making it a major undertaking. BAMPFA is assessing whether this is feasible given current staffing. Storage is also a challenge: unlike Leon’s compact home setup, museum standards require quilts to be folded with acid-free tissue and stored in boxes, which will necessitate renting additional space beyond BAMPFA’s existing facilities.
“Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Photo courtesy of BAMPFA.
Unearthing a Story of Migration
Researching the collection has been a massive, at times overwhelming effort, as Leon never formally catalogued it. While inventorying the quilts in 2021, curator Yau identified around 500 makers and selected standout pieces for initial conservation and exhibition.
She described the experience of walking into the storage space and seeing the work of so many under-recognized makers for the first time as “sacred,” because “the quilts that you’re seeing are the surviving remnants and connections to a life and a name that we might not otherwise know about.” (The catalogue includes photographs and biographies of the show’s quiltmakers.)
Pieced by Laverne Brackens, quilted by Willia Ette Graham and Johnnie Wade, Untitled (Star put-together), 1994. Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Courtesy of Laverne Brackens. Photo: Kevin Candland. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
Migration soon emerged as a unifying factor among many of the quiltmakers, who had moved to the Bay Area from the South in the mid 20th century.
Yau was able to track down three living quiltmakers in “Routed West,” and is prioritizing identifying the relatives of other artists now represented in the museum’s collection. She was especially thrilled to bring together three generations of quiltmakers at the opening of the show, which featured works by Laverne Brackens, her daughter Sherry Byrd and granddaughter Bara Byrd-Stewart, as well as Brackens’s late mother, Gladys Durham-Henry.
Pieced by Arbie Williams, quilted by Irene Bankhead, Untitled (Overalls quilt) (1993). Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
Yau also connected with, Ophenia Parker, the granddaughter of the late Arbie Williams, one of the artists in Leon’s collection, and now a local quiltmaker herself who loaned a work to the show.
The museum has partnered with the African American Quilt Documentation Study Group Archive and Database, a nonprofit led by A’Donna Richardson that is documenting and preserving African American quilt history, to host days for the community to bring in their family quilts for study. Similar work is being done by groups like the Quilt Alliance and Quilt American Study Group, but Richardson saw a need to focus specifically on African American quilts.
“So much of the racial inequities and segregation of this country were replicated in the quilt world. And so A’Donna talks very eloquently about why her organization
is really stepping in to fill that need,” Yau said. “In the quilt world, these racialized lines still need to be reckoned with for the work to move forward.”
Are Quilts Art? 
Though there is a long history of quiltmaking in the U.S., dating back to the colonial era, quilts have been often been seen only as functional objects—as cherished family heirlooms, as historical artifacts, as women’s work, or as home decor, not art. Increasingly, however, many art museums and galleries are foregrounding the artistic merits of the textile practice.
The best-known example is probably the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, a community of Black Alabama women that has become known for its vibrant geometric quilts. (A stunning display was among the highlights at New York’s Armory Show last month; the Whitney had a big show back in 2002, the same year Tompkins was in the biennial.)
Quilts were historically made by women, often during social gatherings where experienced quiltmakers would pass along their skills to the next generation. Quiltmaking has long been a form of creative reuse, an often communal practice fueled by thriftiness. It is also linked to the history of enslavement, quilts made out of salvaged scraps by a community with few resources at its disposal.
Gerstine Scott, Untitled (Necktie quilt), 1989. Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Photo: Kevin Candland. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
A quilt typically has three layers; the top layer with the piece-worked pattern, the insulated middle layer, and the back layer, quilted together with lines of decorative stitching. Leon would also collect finished top layers and hire other quiltmakers to complete them, such as Johnnie Wade, Willia Ette Graham, and Irene Bankhead, who finished hundreds of quilts by other artists for him.
The show illustrates a wide range of quilting techniques, like the neat layered concentric squares of the folded log cabin; the simple grid of the pinwheel, made from repeated half-square triangles, and, in the most show-stopping moment, the interlocking hoops of the double wedding ring, with an entire 1970s-era bedroom installation Leon purchased from Oakland quiltmaker Isiadore Whitehead.
Isiadore Whitehead, Double Wedding Ring Room installed in “Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Photo: Daria Lugina. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
While there’s lots of cotton, you’ll also spot velvet, corduroy, wool, flannel polyester, and rayon, among other fabrics. There is a simple design that Louise Hicks likely made from flour sacks around the year 1939 to Gerstine Scott’s maximalist 1989 quilt made entirely from men’s neckties, a recreation of one of her grandmother Laura Hall’s creations. (Some of the labels include small touchable samples replicating different textures, in acknowledgment of the perfectly understandable desire to interact with the quilts on a tactile level.)
Another highlight is a blue and white puff quilt, pieced from tobacco sacks sewn in puffy rectangles by Annie Crawford in Call, Texas, in the 1930s.
Annie Crawford, Untitled (Puff quilt with tobacco sacks), 1933–1940, detail. Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
“There’s so much wisdom in how patchwork quilts come together, and I think people are really responding to these themes of creative reuse, of wanting to connect with their ancestry, and of being able to have a creative practice,” Yau said.
The show almost seems to vibrate with creative energy, these handmade textiles still infused with the love and care of their makers decades after their creation. The author Alice Walker once owned of the quilts in the show, pieced by Tompkins and quilted by Bankhead.
“I get under that quilt and I just feel real snazzy,” she is quoted in the museum wall label. “I can’t be depressed but so long, lying under that.”
Pieced by Rosie Lee Tompkins, quilted by Irene Bankhead, Untitled (Half-Square Triangles, Nine Patch) (1986/87). Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
A Living History
“Routed West,” with its stunning quilts made in the Bay Area, raises the question of how many other thriving Black quiltmaking communities across the country remain unrecognized.
“I don’t think the research has really been done, in terms of having a methodical or scholarly approach to trying to document the presence and concentration of African American-made quilts in other places,” Yau said.
”And because the nature of quiltmaking as a family-based, community-based practice in both the making and in the circulation of quilts, it’s harder to track than say, the presence of abstract painters.”
Florine Taylor, Untitled (One Patch with borders) 1987. Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Photo: by Kevin Candland. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
“There’s a larger story and larger history of African American people coming together to make quilts that is yet to be fully made known,” she added.
BAMPFA plans to tour “Routed West” with the Art Bridges Foundation, and hopes to work with other museums more broadly.
The stories told in “Routed West” are also ongoing. There are still thriving communities of quiltmakers around the country, many of them active in African American quilt guilds or organizations like artist Carolyn Mazloomi’s Women of Color Quilters Network.
Elizabeth Munn, Untitled (Roman Stripe Medallion), ca. 1951–52. Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), bequest of the Eli Leon Living Trust, BAMPFA. Courtesy of the Elizabeth Munn Family. Photo: by Kevin Candland. Courtesy of BAMPFA.
The show also includes quilts from outside the collection made after 1980, on loan from local quiltmakers from the African American Quilt Guild of Oakland, to celebrate how the quiltmaking tradition is still going strong.
“Quiltmaking really is a living tradition,” Yau said. “People can begin learning right now.”
“Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California” is on view through November 30, 2025 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center Street Berkeley, California. A quilt documentation day with the African American Quilt Documentation Study Group Archive and Database is scheduled for November 23, 2025. More

A curious garden has sprouted under the glass dome in the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Collection.
For its new “Minimal” exhibition, five large, geometric forms by the 81-year-old artist Meg Webster, each made from a single natural material, sit spaced apart in the building’s central nucleus. Sculpted as though made from giant sand-toy molds, there’s a low, smooth mound of yellow ochre clay in a perfect circle; an arc-shaped wall of pungent, textured beeswax; an open, walk-in wreath of fragrant, mixed foliage; a bulbous half-sphere of cracking Mars-red soil; and a giant, shimmering cone of salt crystals pointing upward at the rotunda. On closer inspection, their sharp edges and sleek surfaces appear fragile, held together lightly. Dig your finger in—as is tempting to do—and they would deliciously crumble.
Conceived from 1988 to 2025 and made of locally sourced materials, these works are the exhibition’s centerpieces. Curated by Jessica Morgan, “Minimal” traces the global evolution of Minimalist practices since the 1960s, highlighting how artists across Asia, Europe, and the Americas challenged traditional display and compositional conventions.
View of the exhibition “Lygia Pape. Weaving Space”, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection.
With an economy of means and pared-down aesthetics, these creators invited viewers into a more direct, bodily engagement with the work, integrating space, material, and perception. From Japan’s Mono-ha and Brazil’s Neo-Concretism to Europe’s Zero and Arte Povera movements, and the U.S. Minimalists, the exhibition shows how geographically diverse approaches shared a common drive: to rethink the relationship between artwork, audience, and environment, expanding Minimalism beyond an American-dominated narrative.
For Webster, her works inspire a return to an imagined, primal state of things. They also question our relationship with the Earth. With titles like Mound (1988) and Mother Mound (1990), they share a common quest for something essential, sensual, and ultimately profound.
But the term “minimal” can be confusing. “Initially, the word ‘minimal’ was negative,” Morgan told me. While that perception has changed, even today, with figurative art making a comeback, some still bristle at the mention of the Bourse’s focus on minimalist art. Some see it as too stark, too non-narrative. Yet even Minimalist skeptics would do well to give Morgan’s vision a closer look. The Dia director is expanding whatever limited views surround these practices, maximizing them to include a variety of forms, geographies, and artists whose works resonate today.
View of the exhibition “Minimal”, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection.
Maximalist Minimalism
The show is organized loosely by themes: Light, Mono-ha, Balance, Surface, Grid, Monochrome, and Materialism. More than 100 artworks by over 50 creators are often accompanied by sound pieces. Previously unsung artists of color, creatives from outside the U.S., and women are brought into the canon. They include Webster, who was taught by Richard Serra and Donald Judd. There is also work by Senga Nengudi, Merrill Wagner, long overshadowed by her husband, Robert Ryman, as well as Mary Corse, Michelle Stuart, Jackie Winsor, and Chryssa, among others.
Though not a cohesive, global movement due to differing geographic contexts, these creators tended to experiment with objects taken off the wall and placed directly on the floor, without pedestals. They sometimes left gestural marks with their hands or experimented with multiple mixed colors or monochrome. Many were obsessive about intricate detail. They also looked closely at the edges of things—the thin line where a form begins to emerge or slips back into nothingness, depending on a person’s perspective, the light, even the air in the room. The artists dug at the core of what an art object might be and why it can resonate with the slightest formal adjustment. To experience these nuances, the works must be seen in person, away from—and perhaps as a counteraction to—the chaotic frenzy of daily life.
View of the exhibition “Minimal”, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection.
“Minimal is a way to make something so essential and simple, but with material and form … that embraces your experience in a non-contact way. It doesn’t talk to you. It talks to many things and allows you to almost be non-verbal,” said Webster, 81, at the show opening. Her pieces encourage visitors to move in and around them, much like a garden landscape. It’s possible to stop and smell a work or explore the interior of another.
Nancy Holt’s captivating Locators with Loci (1972) also depends on our bodily presence. The work uses four differently angled steel pipes, each pointing to a black dot on the wall—three ellipses and one circle. Slight movements while looking through the pipes reveal a thin slit of light forming a circumference around a black void. The circle flickers in and out depending on the viewer’s stillness.
Lygia Pape Divisor , 1968. Performance at Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro – Brazil (1990) © Projeto Lygia Pape. Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape
Lygia Pape, the Brazilian artist who lived from 1927 to 2004 and a key figure in Neo-Concretism, has her own dedicated exhibition space. It includes performance art videos, a paper cut-out creation myth in solid geometric colors, woodcut prints, and her famous threaded filament installations. One installation, made of transparent, parallel strings woven in a corner like a spiderweb, is almost invisible. It emerges only when you move, and reflected light travels along the tightly strung threads. In another room, there is a monumental version of this same Ttéias series. Parallel ribbons of golden, copper wires stretch from floor to ceiling, traversing the gallery like beams of light breaking through storm clouds. Spot-lit in parts, they appear and disappear, floating in midair depending on where you stand.
To many of these artists, “encouraging you to train yourself to look with a greater sense of critical perception” was a political act, one that could extend to the world around them, explained Morgan, who hopes to revive that lost reading. It’s a compelling argument for an age when careful, slow examination can seem almost foreign. Perhaps it is time to exercise it.
“Minimal” is on view at the Bourse de Commerce until January 19, 2026. More