Art & Exhibitions

Earlier this year, a woman in Pennsylvania bought a nude charcoal sketch for $12 at a local art auction. Something about the depicted woman’s downward gaze, the hang of flesh around her waist seemed familiar, and so she got in touch with an appraiser. “Congratulations,” they responded—she’d snagged a Pierre-Auguste Renoir drawing. It may now be worth six figures.
The story of work by a celebrated artist being unwittingly rediscovered is hardly uncommon, but in the case of a Renoir drawing, it’s somewhat telling: it’s a part of his practice that’s been largely overlooked by collectors and curators alike. In fact, the last time a show dedicated to Renoir’s works on paper was staged, it was 1921 and the one-time Impressionist was only two years dead.
This fall, the Morgan Museum and Library is breaking the dry spell with “Renoir Drawings,” which as advertised will bring together more than 100 drawings, pastels, watercolors, and prints by the 19th- and 20th-century artist.
Auguste Renoir, View of a Park (1885 to 1890). Photo: Morgan Library and Museum.
One reason for the lack of attention paid to Renoir’s drawings may simply be the preponderance of his paintings. Renoir lived long and worked continuously; conservative estimates suggest he produced around 4,000 paintings, spanning his Impressionist forays alongside Monet et al, before enjoying various stints channeling Classicism, Rubens, Titian, florid 18th-century French art, and his own kind of modernism in later life experiments. There is, in short, much to pick through. A premise of the Morgan show is that the drawings can help us understand these phases—except, perhaps, that fabled decade when Renoir painted boats and bathers en plein air and without preliminary sketches.
“Unlike Degas or Cezanne, Renoir’s use of drawing was episodic and only quite recently has his corpus of works on paper been catalogued,” Colin Bailey, the show’s curator, said over email, noting that there may be as many of 1,000 works on paper, some of which have not yet been located. Renoir’s early innovation may have been to throw sense and intuition directly onto the canvas, but he would return to drawing in more measured times. “Having trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in the early 1860s, he always regarded drawing as foundational and we see this particularly in his return to drawing in the late 1870s and 1880s.”
Bailey, who is enjoying his tenth year as the Morgan’s director, has been working on Renoir for three decades and has seen the institution add to its collection of Renoir works on paper. Nonetheless, the show has necessitated major loans, including from the MFA Boston, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Vienna’s Albertina Museum, and most numerously from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, which has been a collaborative partner on the exhibition and will go on to stage “Renoir Drawings” from March to July in 2026.
Auguste Renoir, Study for The Judgement of Paris (1908). Photo: The Phillips Collection.
Auguste Renoir and Richard Guino, The Judgment of Paris (1914). Photo: Musée d’Orsay.
Organized thematically, the show will cover Renoir’s academic studies, sketches of modern life, and portraits, both formal and casual. At its most literal, the exhibition will reunite Renoir’s finished works with their preparatory drawings; here, the Musée d’Orsay provides two key works: Dance in the Country (1883) and The Judgment of Paris (1914). In the first, we see Renoir tiptoeing away from Impressionism in a style of greater clarity. The painting is accompanied by studies that see him testing out background details and just how joyful his female dancer should be. The second belongs to the sculptural works Renoir made alongside Richard Guino in the early 20th century. Accompanying chalk drawings show Renoir working over the choreography of the classical scene.
Auguste Renoir, Dancers (1883). Photo: Musée d’Orsay.
Auguste Renoir, Study for Dancers (1883). Photo: Yale University Art Gallery.
One highlight promises to be the presentation of The Great Bathers (1884–87), on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and placed alongside seven preparatory drawings. The work was a slog and saw Renoir trying to assimilate elements of sculpture, 18th-century French painting, and the modern treatment of water and greenery he was well-versed in. It was broadly panned by critics upon its unveiling and Renoir never again spent so long on a single painting.
Auguste Renoir, Study for The Great Bathers (1884 to 1887). Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum.
The painting is making its first appearance in New York and it was the accession of the large red-and-white chalk preparatory drawing in 2018 that provided the first spark for the exhibition. There’s the sense that Renoir’s drawings haven’t been given a chance, something Bailey explains by way of an anecdote.
“In 1886, Berthe Morisot was treated to a private viewing of Renoir’s drawings. She was most impressed and noted in her diary that it would be most desirable for the public, who thought the Impressionists worked with the greatest casualness, to see such drawings,” Bailey said. “In some ways, our exhibition is a response to her insight.” More

A decade after their debut, Paul Rucker’s Klan robes remain as shocking as ever, their pointed hoods reimagined in an array of bold and colorful fabrics with striking prints. A circle of nine of these menacing figures, surrounding three tiny toddler Klansmen, greet visitors to “Rewind Resurrection” in New York, the 10-year anniversary restaging of the artist’s traveling exhibition delving into the long history of racism in the U.S.
“They each symbolize some things. The pink robe is about how the Ku Klux Klan did not like gay people, just like the Nazis did not like gay people. The Kente cloth is about the Dutch wax fabric, which is a product of African colonization by the Dutch, and also about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Klan, who was also a millionaire slave trader, connecting Africa and the Ku Klux Klan,” Rucker told me.
“The signature piece of the show is the camouflage robe, which is about the stealth aspect of racism, how it hides in plain sight,” he added. “You don’t have to be in an outfit.”
It was the robes that led to the censoring of “Rewind” at York College of Pennsylvania in 2017, after a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville that year. The college closed the show to the public, only allowing students and faculty to visit. The show had traveled without issue before that. It debuted at the Creative Alliance in Baltimore and then the Baltimore Museum of Art before appearing in Seattle; Ellensburg, Wash.; and Ferguson, Mo. But this is its first outing since.
A case of KKK memorabilia collected by Paul Rucker on view in “Rewind Resurrection.” Photo: by Nehemiah A Prince, courtesy of the artist.
“I’ve gone where people have asked me to come and bring the work,” Rucker said. “I went to Eastern Washington because someone there was recruiting for the Klan, and the community invited me. I went to Ferguson
after Mike Brown’s killing because the community reached out.”
This is the artist’s first show in New York, and it’s entirely self-funded, in a rented Chelsea gallery. Rucker is hoping that an institution will acquire the exhibition, which he considers a collective installation, in its entirety.
The show may seem especially timely now, as President Donald Trump looks to ban museums and schools from acknowledging the destructive legacy of enslavement and racism as an underpinning of our society. But Rucker warns that his show is bigger than any single administration, and that Democrats are far from blameless.
“It’s about the general culture of our country, which went seamlessly from enslavement to incarceration,” he said.
Paul Rucker in 2015. Photo: by Mike Morgan, courtesy of the artist.
Part of the display is of shocking artifacts that Rucker has spent years collecting, such as racist books, Nazi armbands, a real KKK hood, and the physical restraints that kept enslaved people in bondage. (He is also building an art space, called Cary Forward, in Richmond, Virginia, to showcase similar objects.)
And then there are his own artworks, such as blankets he ordered online to reproduce historic lynching postcards and other found images on woven tapestries. (Despite the disturbing nature of the images, none of the business owners ever questioned these orders.) There are videos visualizing data of the shocking proliferation of prison facilities, and gorgeous wooden relief sculptures recalling the silhouette of string instruments, with f-holes, each paying tribute to a different victim of racial violence.
“These are people who may not be well known as the civil rights leaders that we talk about all the time Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. These are lesser-known people like the Scottsboro Boys, or Jesse Washington, who was burned alive in 1916, or James Bird Jr., who was killed in Jasper, Texas, in 1998.”
Paul Rucker, Proliferation, an animation of new facilities being built for the U.S. prison system. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
Rucker carries the weight of history on his shoulders, uncovering the tragic stories of all-but forgotten individuals and events, such as the Red Summer race massacres of 1919. And while art is a tool to keep the evils of the past of being forgotten—even as some are now seemingly being repeated—he is aware that it is not enough.
“Art by itself will inherently fail to get people to move. It will help bring awareness to these atrocities of the past, and it will make people feel something, but to have real action beyond that takes another step beyond art,” Rucker said. “Hitting a like button on Instagram is not enough. We have got to move beyond following the algorithms that make us feel good because we have someone that validates our feelings with a post.
It’s very dangerous right now to feel that we’re making progress by hitting a like button.”
“Rewind Resurrection” is on view at 545 West 23rd Street, New York, New York, July 1–23, 2025. More

Two major New York museums are celebrating the centennial of Robert Rauschenberg’s (1925–2008) birth this fall with exhibitions that spotlight lesser-known chapters of his wildly inventive career.
At the Guggenheim New York, the artist’s monumental silkscreen painting Barge (1962–63) is returning to New York in October for the first time in nearly a quarter century for a show highlighting the museum’s deep Rauschenberg holdings. Just a few blocks uptown, the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) will showcase his undersung work in photography, particularly how Rauschenberg turned his lens on New York City.
Interestingly, neither exhibition will showcase Rauschenberg’s “Combines,” the series of works incorporating everyday objects and taxidermy animals for which he is perhaps best known, focusing instead on other aspects of his wide-ranging practice.
“His career was so long and varied, and he was so prolific,” Joan Young, the Guggenheim’s senior director of curatorial affairs, told me. She has worked at the museum since Rauschenberg’s last major exhibition there, a 1997 exhibition so massive it filled not only the Fifth Avenue flagship, but two satellite spaces. “It was the largest, biggest exhibition that I’ve ever done.”
Robert Rauschenberg, Barge (1962–63). Collection of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. ©Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The Guggenheim’s new show, announced today, will take up just one gallery. Titled “Life Can’t Be Stopped,” it’s part of a major moment for both Rauschenberg and the Guggenheim, which was one of the first institutions to exhibit his work. The celebrations for the artist’s 100th birthday are being overseen by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, which is loaning several works to the Guggenheim and helping present a slew of other exhibitions around the world paying tribute to the centennial. The show is part of the museum’s new “Focus” series, launched last November, which aims to highlight its vast the collection.
Why ‘Barge’ Is Significant
Among the Guggenheim’s impressive holdings of Rauschenberg’s work is Barge, a striking black-and-white painting measuring 32 feet wide.
“It has this really panoramic and almost cinematic quality,” Young said. “You really have to move across the painting to be able to see it. You can’t absorb it all at once. And you really get a sense of Rauschenberg’s movement as he created paintings.” It was created in the early 1960s, when the artist was also engaged in performance, making sets and costumes for Merce Cunningham as well as his own performance work.”
Robert Rauschenberg exhibition at the Venice Biennale, 1964. Photo: Shunk-Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute.
The Guggenheim acquired Barge in 1997, to be owned jointly by the New York museum and its then-fledgling Bilbao outpost in Spain. But it hasn’t been on view in Manhattan since 2001, spending its time either in Bilbao or traveling to other exhibitions. The New York Guggenheim normally reserves its famed spiraling rotunda—and thus, the bulk of its galleries—for temporary exhibitions, leaving limited floor space to showcase its impressive holdings, especially one of such epic proportions. The Bilbao location, in contrast, has for years given over the entirety of its third floor to works from its collection, allowing Barge to take pride of place.
It is the largest example of the 79 silkscreen works Rauschenberg made between 1963 and ’65. His exploration of the medium—which he picked up around the same time as its most famous practitioner, Andy Warhol (1928–1987)—is at the heart of the Guggenheim presentation.
Art historians debate which of the two artists actually used silkscreen first. Young said it was probably Warhol, but he may have been inspired by Rauschenberg’s process of transfer drawing, which incorporated images from newspapers and magazines by a transfer process rather than collage.
“There’s a story of how Bob [Rauschenberg] visits Andy’s studio and they decide they want to make a trade,” Young said. “He asks Andy to share the source of who made his silkscreens, which are commercially produced. And in return, Warhol asked Bob for photographs that he could use in his paintings. And he actually did go on to create a number of works using these photographs that Bob had shared!”
Robert Rauschenberg, New York (1983). ©Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
How Rauschenberg Used Photography
As Rauschenberg’s practice developed, he moved from using found imagery to incorporating photos he took himself into the works. And those photos were also works unto themselves, as the MCNY exhibition aims to tease out.
“By incorporating photographs and everyday objects into his artworks, Robert Rauschenberg placed the realities of life at the center of his art, blurring traditionally held boundaries between the two and compelling us to look more closely at the world around us,” Sean Corcoran, the MCNY’s senior curator of prints and photographs, said in an email. “His work continues to resonate in an increasingly image-saturated world.”
“Even pre-internet, Rauschenberg was really responding to—and he talked about this too—the oversaturation of visual stimulation within mass media, television and film and advertising and such,” Young agreed. “It’ll be nice—the photographic image is going to have a very strong presence in our exhibition, and then just up the street, people will be able to go and see and appreciate his photographs as photographic medium and as a photographic practice too.”
Together, the two shows are the first Rauschenberg museum exhibitions in New York since the 2017 retrospective organized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern in London.
“Robert Rauschenberg: Life Can’t Be Stopped” will be on view October 10, 2025–April 5, 2026 at the Guggenheim New York, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 
“Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World” will be on view September 12, 2025–March 22, 2026 at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. More

After decades on the margins, fiber and textile art is finally receiving the critical and institutional attention it deserves. Museums are mounting major shows that reconsider the medium’s history and contemporary potential, while the market is beginning to take it seriously. When future art historians and critics reflect on this shift, the contributions of artists like American artist Liz Collins will stand out. Collins, who has long pushed the boundaries of textile practice, is now having a major moment of recognition.
In Providence at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, the sweeping survey “Liz Collins: Motherlode” traces the artist’s multi-decade career, the first dedicated to the artist in the United States. Curated by Kate Irvin of the RISD Museum’s Costume and Textiles Department, the show brings together an unparalleled range of work from across Collins’ career.
Collins’s landmark survey marks a pivotal moment in the rising institutional and critical recognition of fiber and textile art, tracing her multifaceted career from fashion to fine art and recent cross disciplinary experimentation. As the medium gains renewed interest, Collins emerges as a vital figure whose experimental, boundary-defying practice challenges conventional divisions between design, craft, and contemporary art—offering a model of possibility and evolution for the field at large.
Liz Collins. Photo: Joe Kramm.
Institutional Recognition
“Motherlode” coincides with Collins’ inclusion in the groundbreaking traveling group show “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” in its final stop at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, solidifying her place within the canon of medium. The show premiered at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in late 2023 and was subsequently shown at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, making it one of the largest and most attended exhibitions dedicated to medium.
“’Woven Histories’ has really helped establish my contributions to a particular lineage of making and working that I feel very happy about now because it took a while,” Collins said.
Liz Collins, Cosmic Explosion (2008–18). Photo: 4 Scotts Photography. Courtesy of Tyler and Stacey Smith.
With “Motherlode,” however, visitors are offered a deep dive into Collins’ work and practice to date as it brings to light the comprehensive arc of Collins’ career, and offers a glimpse at what’s to come. Collins, who lives and works in Brooklyn, is a double RISD graduate, receiving her BFA from the school in 1991 and MFA in 1999—with her MFA thesis project being a knitwear clothing line that launched her fashion label, which she ran through 2004.
As well as studying at RISD, between 2003 and 2013, she was a professor of textiles at RISD and has intermittently worked with the school or museum on various bases since. Collins’s longstanding and formative relationship with both institutions makes the present exhibition feel like a homecoming—perhaps even a triumph
“This survey show came out of my connection to these two institutions, the museum and the school,” Collins described on a video call. “I think it would be a different show somewhere else. The reason it’s called ‘Mother Lode’ is because these two institutions were part of what formed me as a creative person. I didn’t become the creative person I am now in a vacuum—I had a lot of influences, I was exposed to a lot, and while not all of it came from RISD, some very important moments of epiphanies and mentorship came from this place.”

Selections from knit-focused collections (1993–2003) by Liz Collins. Courtesy of the artist.
Broad Strokes
Curating an exhibition on such a diverse career was no easy feat, with Collins describing initially approaching the project in “broad strokes,” matching the spaces of the museum with largely categorical bodies of work. Plans for the show began roughly three years ago, but already there was an organizing element, one that balanced creative trajectory with medium or project. “It’s a lot of different categories coming together to represent the breadth of my work,” Collins said.
One such category is dedicated to the artist’s early work in fashion—which, despite it being the reason she initially found a place on many people’s radar, is largely unknown to those who discovered her work through more traditional art-centric spaces. Despite looming large in her career history and creative development, now that roughly two decades have passed, the period Collins devoted to fashion is comparatively dwarfed by her subsequent pursuit of visual art.
Liz Collins, Illuminated Vein Dress (2006). Courtesy of the artist.
Collins described looking back at this time in her career as both generative and revelatory. “It was over 20 years ago that I was doing my fashion label,” said Collins. “It stands out to me as this time when I was doing some amazing work. I’m looking at it with fresh eyes as something really incredible. It was a very special time, but it was not a long period of time.”
Situated within the context of her greater oeuvre, the show highlights less a break from fashion so much as an evolution. Fashion, of course, leverages the vocabulary of textiles, fibers, and other materials in many of the same ways as visual art. Looking at pieces like the otherworldly Illuminated Vein Dress (2006), created for an exhibition at the Museum of Art and Design, visual and textural parallels can be seen with works such as Veins-Darkness (2022); her fashion practice did not cease so much as transform, while retaining much of the same lexicon.
Liz Collins, Veins-Darkness (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
A Collaborative Gesture
At both the physical and metaphoric heart of the show, in the RISD Museum’s Skylight Gallery (perennially underused as it also houses a stairwell), is a facet of the exhibition collaboratively conceived of and curated by a class taught by Collins during the 2025 spring semester for the occasion. Here, the gallery was devised as a moment of respite, “a queer social space” in the tradition Collins has established with other earlier installations she’s created.
A show within a show, the title of this gallery space is entitled “Homecoming,” a reference to both individual returns made to home, family, or community, but also an invitation to those who may not be able to return home based on their identity. Featured are dozens of works made by queer-identifying RISD students, staff, faculty, and alumni, which are complemented by a selection of works drawn from the RISD Museum collection.
The class that undertook “Homecoming” was comprised of six students, who when Collins first proposed the idea had no way of knowing who they would be, necessitating a lack of expectation and a focus on collaboration. The group that ultimately came together—Callie Coccia, Farnaz Dastranj, Xiao Guo, Cindy Li, Kati Lowe, and Mary Mitchell—brought with them a diverse range of skills and interests; all Collins described as being driven, dynamic, and dedicated to the project.

“To have this space that is a gesture that students got to create with me … That makes me feel incredibly happy,” said Collins. “I wouldn’t have wanted to do the show without it, to be honest. I love all the textile work that I make and can keep making, but an important and meaningful part of my practice that I can’t abandon is creating social space. I need this to be part of my work.”
On the walls is a wallpaper designed by Collins with a pattern that has undergone several iterations. Made by a Zurich-based company that the artist has collaborated with for years, the first version was created in 2018 inspired in part by the natural landscape of Saratoga Springs where she undertook a residency at Yaddo coupled with a pattern drawn from a chart published by The New York Times that illustrated the change in temperature of the Earth over the course of a century. Originally titled Acid Rain Floral (later going by a different manufacturer’s name when it was put on the market), the evolving pattern has become a type of throughline in Collins’s practice, with various iterations being used in other solo shows such as her retrospective “Mischief” at Touchstones Rochdale in England in 2022.
Liz Collins, Zagreb Mountain Rug (2022). Courtesy of Liz Collins Studio.
Career in High Gear
The largest gallery space, rightfully, focuses on Collins’ diverse work with textiles and simultaneously her ability to deftly move from one style and methodology of work to another. On the gallery floor is the hand-knotted Zagreb Mountain Rug (2022). Behind it hangs the multimedia tapestry Cosmic Explosion (2008/2018), composed of mohair, acrylic, lurex, glass, crystal, and wood. Nearby are the opulent embroidery work Pressure (2024) and the monumental woven textile Rainbow Mountain Weather (2024).
Liz Collins, Rainbow Mountain: Weather (2024). Courtesy of Liz Collins Studio and Candice Madey, New York.

The shifts between material and format in her work speak to an unburdened experimentalism, and disregard for traditional classifications of art-making. To fully grasp Collins’s practice, one must let go of fixed boundaries—between design, art, and craft, as well as between materials and methods. Whether she’s working with weaving or embroidery, wool, or crystals, Collins treats them all as part of a unified visual language.
Despite “Motherlode” heralding a career highpoint and reflecting decades of prodigious output, it by no means indicates Collins is slowing down, and she could still very much be described as explosive an artist as she was in her early days as a fashion designer keeping up with the onslaught of new seasons. What has become apparent is a sleekening of her process, allowing her to undertake more ambitious projects.
Liz Collins, Pressure (2024). Photo: Kunning Huang. Courtesy of the artist and Candice Madey, New York.
“I just love to make work and find ways to do it and to keep working as much as possible,” she noted, “but also some of the means that I use now don’t mirror what I was doing then.”
For instance, Collins now regularly works with industrial textile mills as fabricators, allowing for her to achieve larger scales efficiently. It also offers her the ability to more quickly revisit, revise, or experiment with myriad patterns and designs, resulting in new work that pushes the farthest boundaries of abstraction.
Considered holistically, “Motherlode” not only delves into Collins’s past and recent bodies of work but offers an invaluable idea: possibility. “A takeaway for other creative people is the realm of the possible, and the evolution of work over time … there’s something of the interconnectivity of a creative person through different contexts. For people who already understand textiles, they can discern differences and methodologies. And it exposes those who don’t to a huge assortment of ways of making things that are different but can be interrelated.”
Liz Collins ‘Motherlode’ is on view until January 11, 2026 More

After a year making its way across the country, “The Great Elephant Migration” has reached its final destination, touching down in Beverly Hills in Los Angeles County.
The environmentally minded public art show, which has traveled 5,000 miles, features 100 life-size elephants crafted by Indigenous artisans of the Coexistence Collective, in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in south India—most of which are portraits of actual elephants who live there. (A couple of African elephants from the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya have also snuck into the parade.)
Each piece is made from lantana camara, an invasive weed that has proliferated across India, sculpted onto a steel rebar frame. The project removes the lantana camara and converts what isn’t used for the art into a fertilizing product called biochar. That means the project is actively working to improve elephant habitats, while also raising money for 22 conservation non-governmental organizations, or NGOs.
The elephant artworks have been for sale along the route, with the artisan collective crafting new versions of each of the purchased pieces to prevent the thinning of the herd. With works priced between $8,000 for the babies (five feet tall) and $22,000 for a 15-foot-tall adult male with tusks, sales have totaled over $3 million to date.
“The Great Elephant Migration” in Beverly Hills. Photo: by Alex Berliner.
A Cross Country Trek Concludes
The hit public art show has been on the move since last July, when the herd appeared on the seaside cliffs of Newport, R.I.
It’s made for quite the nationwide spectacle in every stop on its expedition west: taking to the cobblestone streets of New York’s Meatpacking District; the sands of Miami Beach during Art Basel; the green lawns of Houston’s Hermann Park; overlooking the majestic Grand Tetons at Jackson Hole’s National Museum of Wildlife Art; and along the Rocky Mountain Front in Browning, Montana.
“The Great Elephant Migration” in Jackson Hole, in front of the Grand Tetons. Photo by Ami Vitale)
The trip’s last stop is Beverly Gardens Park, across from the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts—fitting, as the center’s namesake is also funding the new Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, a vegetated overpass designed to help animals safely cross the city’s 101 freeway.
First designed in 2015, the nearly one-acre bridge—the largest in the world—is being constructed by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), and is expected to open next year. There won’t be any real elephants crossing, but species who use it are expected to include mountain lions, bobcats, gray foxes, coyotes, and mule deer.
“The Great Elephant Migration” traversing the Annenberg Wildlife Crossing. Photo: courtesy of Caltrans.
Art transportation is an expensive and complicated proposition even on the best of days—like when you’re not moving 100 full-scale elephants—and the organizers knew they wanted to stage the show in the most environmentally friendly way possible. So the elephants made the trip down the East Coast and cross country to California via a fleet of electric trucks.
In a festive touch that doubled as nod to the artworks’ origins, the trucks were decorated with traditional Indian lorry art.
“The Great Elephant Migration” arriving in Beverly Hills on an electric truck decorated with traditional Indian lorry art. Photo: by Elisa Ferrari.
The Woman Behind the Stampede
“The Great Elephant Migration” is a project with an impressive scale, dreamed up by Ruth Ganesh as part of her work fighting to protect Asian elephants as a trustee of the U.K. NGO Elephant Family. She founded the Real Elephant Collective nonprofit, which oversees the artisan collective, with scientist and elephant researcher Tarsh Thekaekara, whose wife, Shubhra Nayar, designed each individualized sculpture.
The artists actually live in harmony with the elephants they are representing in these artworks—a message Ganesh hopes has resonated with audiences as the sculptures have made their way across the country.
Ruth Ganesh with one of the sculptures of “The Great Elephant Migration.” Photo: by Vince Bucci.
“It is a symbolic journey on behalf of all wildlife that is currently navigating a very human-dominated world—crossing roads, navigating train tracks, agricultural plantations, and towns and cities,” Ganesh told the Beverly Press.
The project was originally launched overseas, at India’s Kochi Biennale in 2019. Other international outings followed in London in 2021, and at the Lalbagh Botanical Garden in Bangalore, India, in 2024. But to bring the herd to the U.S., Ganesh enlisted Dodie Kazanjian, founder of Rhode Island nonprofit Art and Newport, as the curator.
A child with one of the sculptures of “The Great Elephant Migration.” Photo: by Vince Bucci.
What’s With the Blankets?
There’s an added fundraising element in the exhibition’s final stop, with an auction on Artsy of 70 bespoke blankets created by both high-fashion designers and Indigenous communities around the world. The initiative is called “Wrapped in History,” and was unveiled in a ceremony draping the blankets over the herd upon its arrival in California. The protective gesture is deeply rooted in tradition.÷
“In many cultures around the world, we honor wisdom and genius, if you will, with blankets,” Cristina Mormorunni, co-founder and director of conservationist group Indigenous Led, told the Beverly Hills Courier. “This blanketing ceremony is really special because it’s bringing together Indigenous artistry and culture and ceremony with some of the most incredible fashion houses on the planet.”
“Wrapped in History,” an installation of textile art at “The Great Elephant Migration.” Photo: byVictor Arriola for BFA.
Indian designer Vikram Goyal curated the selection of blankets, including contributing a work of his own that translates his favored technique, hammered repoussé metalwork, into textile form. The piece is based on one of his gilded wall sculptures, which was in turn inspired by a 17th-century Rajput manuscript called The Book of Dreams that features traditional Indian symbols of elephants, according to Vogue.
“Blankets are vessels of protection, identity, and story,” Goyal, said in a statement. “In this context, each one becomes a monumental gesture, a way of honoring the past while materially supporting a more compassionate, interdependent future.”
“The Great Elephant Migration” make its journey by electric truck. Photo: by Kirsten Glover.
Some of the other blankets are by Ralph Lauren, Diane von Furstenberg, the Navajo Nation, and the Chanakya School of Craft, a nonprofit that teaches traditional embroidery techniques to women in India. The online “Wrapped in History” benefit auction runs July 1 through August 1.
“The Great Elephant Migration” is on view at Beverly Gardens Park, 9439 Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, California, July 1–August 1, 2025.  More

Times Square is about to get a sugar rush. Yvette Mayorga, the artist best known for her pink-hued, frosted confections, is unveiling her largest public artwork at the New York plaza—one that’s equal parts dreamy fairy tale and pointed social critique.
Come October, you won’t miss the maximalist Magic Grasshopper. The 30-feet sculpture is anchored by a pink Baroque carriage, its wheels tricked out with gold rims, being drawn by four carousel horses sporting Hello Kitty backpacks. A flag wearing a smiley face is planted on top of the vehicle. As with any Mayorga creation, the devil’s in the details: the work’s surfaces bear her elaborate faux frosting, created by piping acrylic through pastry bags.
For the Chicago-based artist, the sculpture mirrors the sheer scale and spectacle of New York’s hottest tourist destination. It’s a site of “overwhelming visual opulence, abundance, and commercial fantasy,” she told me, as much as a “transit space for everyday New Yorkers.”
“I want Magic Grasshopper to function at both of those levels: to catch the eye of a tourist with its scale and excess, but also to offer a moment of recognition, curiosity, or even joy for someone just passing by,” she said over email.
But Magic Grasshopper demands even closer inspection. A child of Mexican immigrants, Mayorga has long woven the Latinx experience with 18th-century Rococo aesthetics into a visual style she’s dubbed “Latinxcoco.” It’s a meeting that draws out colonial histories and invisible, often feminized, labor. Her signature piped frosting, for one, calls back to the labor of her mother, who worked as a baker in a departmental store in the 1970s after moving to the U.S.
Yvette Mayorga, The Procession (After 17th Century Vanitas) In loving memory of MM (2020). Courtesy of the artist.
Mayorga’s horse-drawn carriage, then, invokes more than one kind of journey—not just one undertaken by fairy-tale princesses, but by immigrants in pursuit of the American Dream. Its low-sitting wheels nod to the low-rider culture that emerged from Chicago’s Mexican-American communities, while its body carried painted depictions of migration. Not for nothing does Mayorga describe the work as “both a time machine and a dream machine.”
The design of the coach itself also echoes the royal carriage of the Second Mexican Empire, which was modeled Louis XIV’s coronation coach and is currently housed at the Chapultepec Castle in Mexico. The Nahuatl word for Chapultepec, chapoltepēc, which translates to “hill of the grasshopper,” gives Mayorga’s sculpture its title.
“I reimagine that history as a form of futurist Indigenous resistance,” she explained, “and a pink carriage as a fantastical, border-crossing vessel.”
Installation view of “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy of the Aldrich.
Bubblegum pink, fantasy, dreams, and other flights of fancy, in fact, have been apt channels for Mayorga to unpack deeper meanings and themes. She describes them as “powerful tools,” appealing on the surface yet layered below.
“Everyone can identify beauty; it’s universal. I use that to create a seductive, sugar-coated invitation into a much deeper conversation,” she said. “Beneath the excess is always a story—one about beauty, survival, joy, migration, and memory. It’s about making space for those stories in places where they’re not always told.”
The work marks the newest commission from Times Square Arts, which has previously invited the likes of Thomas J Price, Laurie Simmons, and Marco Brambilla to leave their mark on the crossroads of the world. Mayorga’s mesmerizing entry, said the organization’s director Jean Cooney, isn’t just made for the place, but for the present.
Laurie Simmons’ Autofiction: Moving Pictures, Waiting and Looking Up. Photo: Michael Hull. Courtesy of Times Square Arts.
“Her work is so well-positioned for public consumption—an alluring sugary exterior and a tactility that immediately draws people in, as well as an unending depth and complexity for those who are willing to peel back the layers,” she told me over email. “The themes of immigration and colonial histories that Mayorga addresses in Magic Grasshopper have an enduring relevance, but are incredibly timely for this specific moment.”
Indeed, at a time when anti-immigration policies are roiling the country, Mayorga hopes migrants viewing the installation might see “a monument made with them in mind.”
“And for those who don’t share that experience, I hope Magic Grasshopper still opens a door into a layered narrative,” she said. “In a space like Times Square, where spectacle is the norm, I wanted to create a different kind of spectacle—one grounded in care, imagination, and power.”
“Yvette Mayorga: Magic Grasshopper” is on view October 15–December 2, 2025 at Times Square, Broadway Plaza between West 46th and 47th Streets, New York City. More

This century’s latest digital and generative tools have opened frontiers for artists, ushering in novel mediums and methods, while fast-tracking the rise of algorithmic art. But, as a new show is arguing, code-based creations have roots way back, long before the advent of the digital age.
At Toledo Museum of Art, “Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms” is retracing the history of code-based art, exploring how the geometric abstraction and rule-based systems of the early 1960s have made way for the generative code and digital methodologies of today. The 24 artists featured here span time periods, but their practices collectively reveal how computational strategies could shape creative expression. Their gathering here raises a new question: what does it mean to make art in the age of automation?
“Generative art has risen to prominence in recent years thanks, in part, to innovations introduced by blockchain technologies as well as generative A.I.,” said curator Julia Kaganskiy in a statement. “This exhibition considers the long lineage of generative and algorithmic strategies in art-making, as well as the shifting definition of generative practice and how artists work with rules, chance, emergence, and automation.”
Quayola, Jardins d’Été (2017). Courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art.
In subject, “Infinite Images” joins past landmark shows such as “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018” at the Whitney Museum of American Art and “Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art that explore how artists use systems and technology to challenge creativity. The Toledo Museum’s outing, though, widens the scope to highlight how the blockchain and generative systems have minted new approaches.
The exhibition opens on the 1960s, when pioneers of conceptual and abstract artists were venturing art by way of systems. Sol LeWitt was embarking on an instruction-based approach to his wall drawings (what we today might call “prompts”); Josef Albers was implementing rules for his color-rich paintings of squares; and Vera Molnár was producing her first computer artworks with an analog algorithmic process and a plotter. The exhibition brings together some of their significant rules-guided works—from Molnár intricate generative series “Interruptions” (1968–69) to an example of LeWitt’s printed instructions from 1977.
Entangled Others, Sediment Nodes #1 (2022–23). Courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art.
The bulk of “Infinite Images” is given to the explosion of creativity in the digital age. Generative, on-chain art dominates, represented by Larva Labs’ CryptoPunks (2017) and Autoglyphs (2019), Snowfro‘s Chromie Squiggles (2020), and Dmitri Cherniak’s Ringers (2021). But the show also spotlights how randomness and chance, simulation and interactivity are playing roles in contemporary art practices. Cases in point: 0xDEAFBEEF‘s Glitchbox (2021/2025), an audiovisual sculpture that can be “played” according to set parameters and Sarah Meyohas‘s Infinite Petals (2019), which intersects natural and manmade systems.
Notably, the exhibition marks the institutional debut of a number of digital creatives, among them Operator, the artist duo that’s been lending a conceptual lens to the blockchain, and Emily Xie, whose generative artworks have reimagined traditional crafts.
Operator, from the series “Human Unreadable” (2022). Courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art.
A number of these digital pieces are emerging from the collection of Alan Howard, the hedge fund manager who—besides owning a $43 million Monet that once belonged to Imelda Marcos—began amassing generative artworks during the NFT boom. To him, these digital works represent a “natural evolution” of artistic expression: where creatives once wielded oils and paintbrushes, they now have new media to hand.
“Digital art continues this lineage, not in competition with traditional media, but in dialogue with it,” he noted in a statement. “This exhibition serves as an opportunity to experience firsthand how digital art resonates within the broader continuum of artistic expression.”
“Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms” is on view at the Toledo Museum of Art, 2445 Monroe Street, Toledo, Ohio, July 12–November 30. More

New York’s Upstate Art Weekend has grown in leaps and bounds since its founding by Helen Toomer in 2020. The sixth edition, running July 17 through July 21, features 158 participating art organizations—up from just 23 that first year—scattered across the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson Valley. It’s also the perfect excuse to escape the city and see some art this weekend. You can tour the offering via Google Maps, but we’ve also put together a list of the shows we’re most excited about. Enjoy!

“Kishio Suga” at Dia BeaconOpening July 19
Kishio Suga installing Out of Multiple Surroundings (1988) at Kaneko Art G1, Tokyo, 1988. Courtesy of Dia Beacon.
Dia Beacon branches out from Minimalism to the related Mono-ha (School of Things) movement, with this solo show of one of its leading practitioners, Japanese sculptor and installation artist Kishio Suga. The 81-year-old artist called his works—made with industrial materials such as motor oil, concrete, and paraffin wax—“situations.” Unlike traditional sculptures, these were often ephemeral arrangements, with a precarious and unstable nature. The exhibition features four major pieces from the Dia collection, as well as significant loans. —S.C.
Dia Beacon is located at 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, N.Y.

“Sonia Gomes: Ó Abre Alas!” at Storm King Art CenterMay7–November 10
Sonia Gomes, Ó Abre Alas! (2025) at Storm King Art Center. Photo: Jacob Vitale. Courtesy of Storm King Art Center.
Afro-Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes’s Ó Abre Alas! (Or Open Your Wings!) is her first outdoor installation in the U.S., in which sculptures crafted from durable materials like paracord, fishing nets, and nautical ropes hang from a massive tree. The brightly hued materials recall a Carnival parade, a site of celebration. “My work has a lot to do with nature, with trees, with the movement of trunks, with branches,” said the artist. “I like that my work has this conversation with nature.” In the galleries, a selection of works spans her career. —B.B.
Storm King is located at 1 Museum Road, New Windsor, N.Y. 

“Presence” at UpbringingJune 6–July 21
“Presence” at Upbringing. Photo: Jurate Veceraite. Courtesy of Upbringing.
Serving as the headquarters of this week’s Upstate Art Weekend is Toomer’s new project space, which she describes not as a gallery but “a place to raise ideas.” (It’s hosting a Friday-night dance party upstairs.) The summer exhibition features seven women artists—Zoë Buckman, Tamar Ettun, Qiana Mestrich, Cheryl Mukherji, Rebecca Reeve, Keisha Scarville, and the great Nona Faustine, who died suddenly in March—with works dealing with themes of nostalgia, motherhood, and ancestry. —S.C.
Upbringing is located at 236 Wall Street, Room 103, Kingston, N.Y.

“Tomokazu Matsuyama: Morning Sun” at the Edward Hopper House Museum and Study CenterJune 20–October 5
Installation view of “Tomokazu Matsuyama: Morning Sun” at the Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center, 2025. Courtesy of Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center.
Tomokazu Matsuyama’s joyously colored works, layered with a sense of stillness and solitude, make him a compelling artist to pay tribute Hopper, the master of the isolated figure. Here, Hopper’s 1952 masterpiece Morning Sun takes the spotlight, as does Matsuyama’s meditative response, titled Morning Sun Dance, a large, densely detailed painting that captures a contemporary form of introspection. Process drawings and smaller paintings included in the show further show how the Japanese artist has engaged with Hopper’s treatment of light, space, and figuration—a quality, said Matsuyama, that “continues to influence my own thinking about isolation as well as my approach to painting.” —M.C.
The Edward Hopper House is located at 82 North Broadway, Nyack, N.Y.

“On Trees: Georgia O’Keeffe and Thomas Cole” at the Thomas Cole National Historic SiteJune 21–December 14
Georgia O’Keeffe, Dead Tree Bar Lake Taos (1929). Courtesy of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site.
More than a century separates Thomas Cole and Georgia O’Keeffe’s careers, but, as this exhibition argues, their practices blossomed on similar ground. Specifically, they imbued their paintings of trees and natural forms with deep, allegorical meaning. The show is anchored by two key paintings: Cole’s Hunters in a Landscape (1824–25), created after his transformative visit to the Catskills in 1825, and O’Keeffe’s Dead Tree Bear Lake Taos (1929), painted upon her first visit to New Mexico. Set in dialogue, the works on view—including other paintings and drawings by Cole—surface intriguing parallels between how the Hudson River School icon and 20th-century modernist regarded and reflected nature. (The museum is also hosting an exhibition featuring Cole’s daughter, the little-known china painter Emily Cole.) —M.C.
The Thomas Cole National Historic Site is located at 218 Spring Street, Catskill, N.Y.

“What’s Missing” at the Olana State Historic SiteJune 14–November 2
Ellen Harvey, Winter in the Summer House (2025). Courtesy of Ellen Harvey studio.
The historic home of Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church hosts immersive, site-specific works by New York artists Ellen Harvey and Gabriela Salazar that reflect on history, loss, ice, and climate change. Church himself famously sailed to treacherous waters to observe icebergs and paint them; those works partly inspired Harvey and Salazar’s new projects, as did some mysterious structures from the artist’s son’s blueprint for the estate. Harvey’s Winter in the Summer House reimagines Church’s long-lost summer house, with her own engraved panels of a glacial landscape, while Salazar’s A Measure of Comfort (Cake and Cord) explores humankind’s relationship with ice in a warming world. —B.B.
Olana is located at 5720 NY-9G, Hudson, N.Y.

“So It Goes” at Wassaic ProjectsMay 17–September 13
Rosabel Rosalind, Tabernacle (2025). Photo: Josh Simpson. Courtesy Wassaic Project.
This show’s title echoes a refrain from Kurt Vonnegut’s classic 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five to study the ways we cope with recurring horrors—a slumber from which some 43 artists hope to arouse us. John Brendan Guinan shows sculptures inspired by his Catholic anarchist upbringing. Yomi Orimoloye’s portraits explore the gulf between our identities and our identifying documents. Saberah Malik’s tapestries show aerial views of megafloods in Pakistan in 2022. Rosabel Rosalind depicts the San Fernando Valley as the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. May we all wake up. —B.B.
Wassaic Projects is located at 37 Furnace Bank Road, Wassaic, N.Y.

“General Conditions” at the School: Jack Shainman GalleryMay 17–November 29
Installation view of “General Conditions” at The School | Jack Shainman Gallery. Photo: Dan Bradica Studio. Courtesy of the artists and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
A group show at Jack Shainman’s Kinderhook outpost sees more than two dozen artists reflecting on the current social and political climate, and how we respond—both collectively and as individuals. The concept of general conditions, as noted by exhibition artist Alisa Tenser, “resonates on multiple registers, all sinister but vague.” But there’s more than one way of approaching both general crises and conditions, as the artists in the show demonstrate. They include El Anatsui, Diedrick Brackens, Jesse Krimes, Gordon Parks, Rose B. Simpson, Becky Suss, and Elizabeth Zvonar. —E.K.
The School is located at 25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, N.Y.

“Stan Douglas: Ghostlight” at the Hessell Museum of Art at Bard CollegeJune 21–November 30
Stan Douglas, Horschamps (1992). © Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro and David Zwirner
This marks the first survey of multimedia artist Stan Douglas in the U.S. in over two decades and will trace his influence and innovation across 40 works from the 1990s to the present. It will include the premiere of an immersive, multi-channel video installation that revisits D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation with a selection of works that explore issues ranging from colonialism in the Americas and the legacies of transatlantic slavery, to modern movements for liberation in Africa and Europe. Douglas’s deep research provides an a comprehensive view of the present, helping us understand the moments of breakdown and chaos that attend societies in upheaval. —E.K.
The Hessell Museum is located at 33 Garden Rd, Annandale-On-Hudson, N.Y.

“Harold Stevenson: Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy” at Art OmiJune 28–October 26
Installation view of “Harold Stevenson: Less Real Than My Routine Fantasy” at Art Omi, Ghent, New York. Photo: Olympia Shannon.
Art Omi, the 120-acre sculpture and architecture park located in Ghent, N.Y., is hosting a exhibition dedicated to the work of Harold Stevenson at its Newmark Gallery. This marks the first institutional solo show in New York for the artist, covering four decades of his exploration of the human body in paintings, drawings and writing. Stevenson’s embrace of the male nude, in the pre-Stonewall era no less, led to challenges including a 1962 jail sentence for his gallerist Iris Clert and, in 1963, removal of one of his works from New York’s Guggenheim Museum. —E.K.
Art Omi is located at 1405 County Route 22, Ghent, N.Y.

“Arlene Schechet” at Catskill Art SpaceJuly 5–August 23
Arlene Shechet, Portal (2023). ©Arlene Shechet.
Hot off her major presentation at Storm King Art Center, sculptor Arlene Shechet is turning inward for this new show. On view here are intimate creations that bear out her explorations of material and geometry, her otherworldly forms—crafted with diverse elements such as clay, wood, and steel—surfacing a complex interiority. Wall works will be joined by her new series, “Pleat Seats,” made up of carved marble seating originally developed for Storm King, as well as her rarely exhibited textiles. The sculptor has even recreated a wall of her studio with plywood and shelving housing various wood and ceramic objects, making visible her intuitive approach to sketching in three dimensions. —M.C.
Catskill Art Space is located at 48 Main Street, Livingston Manor, N.Y.

“Repair” at Shadow WallsJuly 17–27
Portia Munson, Redstart. Courtesy of the artist.
Artist Anna Cone founded Shadow Walls last year, with the goal of revitalizing an old family resort, Eva’s Farm, as a bed-and-breakfast and artist residency. Anne-Laure Lemaitre has curated an intriguing, experimental group show for the space’s second Upstate Art Weekend outing, with works by artists including Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels, Kat Chamberlin, Raul De Nieves, Joiri Minaya, and Portia Munson installed both in the property’s stately Victorian home, and across the grounds. —S.C.
Shadow Walls is located at 413 Silver Spur Road West, Purling, N.Y.

“Maria Lai. A Journey to America” at Magazzino Italian ArtNovember 15, 2024–July 21, 2025
“Maria Lai. A Journey to America” at Magazzino Italian Art. Photo: Marco Anelli/Tommaso Sacconi. ©Archivio Maria Lai, by SIAE 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
Collectors and Magazzino cofounders Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu have long been champions of Maria Lai, an under-sung Italian artist known for incorporating the weaving traditions of her native Sardinia into her practice. Her first North American museum show ranges from early paintings to three-dimensional “Telai” or “loom” works to documentation of her pioneering relational art projects exploring the relationships between people and nature through interactive performances. —S.C.
Magazzino is located at 2700 Route 9, Cold Spring, N.Y.  More