Art & Exhibitions

Italian artist and Arte Povera pioneer Michelangelo Pistoletto will stage new work at the Great Pyramids of Giza.
The 91-year-old artist has been announced as a headliner leading this year’s “Forever Is Now,” the annual outdoor exhibition that invites artists to create site-specific work using the ancient wonder of the world as a dramatic backdrop.
While full details of Pistoletto’s work are yet to be released, it has been described as a monumental installation that will bring together elements of ancient civilization with modern ideas by Art D’Egypte, the organization that stages “Forever is Now.”
“Having Michelangelo Pistoletto join Forever Is Now is a historic moment for Egypt and for global contemporary art,” Art D’Égypte’s founder Nadine Abdel Ghaffar said in a statement. “Bringing his voice to the Pyramids is not just symbolic, it’s visionary.”
JR, Greetings From Giza (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Forever Is Now. Photo: MO4NETWORK.
For decades, Pistoletto has incorporated social impact into his practice, a point emphasized by his Citadellearte foundation, which over the past 25 years has instructed professionals on the ways in which art can positively affect society. True to form, Citadellearte is involved in Pistoletto’s project at the pyramids. Artists living in Egypt are invited to apply for a fully-funded three-year bachelor course at the organization’s Unidee Academy in Biella, Pistoletto’s hometown in northern Italy, an initiative backed by the Italian Institute of Culture in Cairo and the foundation itself.
“Cittadellarte aims at making art as a bridge between peoples, across cultures and geographies,” Paolo Naldini, the director of Citadellearte, said in a statement. “I take the invitation from Art d’Egypte and the collaboration with Italian Institute of Culture as an opportunity to build a bridge across the Mediterranean Sea that connects Venice and Cairo.”
Born in 1933, Pistoletto began to receive international attention in the 1960s with his mirror paintings, which disrupted traditions of artistic perspective by integrating viewers into the artwork. Along with the likes of Giovanni Anselmo and Jannis Kounellis, Pistoletto was a protagonist in Arte Povera, a post-war movement that employed everyday materials to challenge the commercialization of the art world.
In 2003, Pistoletto penned Third Paradise, a manifesto that called for a balance between nature and artifice capable of leading to a “realistic utopia.” Its mark, an infinity symbol with three loops, has appeared across his work. Third Paradise is developed and championed by Citadellearte, which is set to hold an installation on the concept at the coming Venice Biennale.
Italian artist Lorenzo Quinn poses under his installation, entitled Together. Photo: courtesy Ammar Abd Rabbo/Art D’Egypte.
On the back of this work, Pistoletto was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in February of this year. The artist noted that the nomination carried a commitment to carry on his socially engaged work. “Art must take on a propulsive role for radical change, bringing about a shared, responsible concept of humanity.”
This year marks the fifth successive edition of “Forever Is Now”, which typically takes place in October and November. Previous highlights include photographer JR’s pyramid-shaped photo booth, Lorenzo Quinn’s giant pair of hands that broke out of the desert to touch one another, and Gisela Colón’s 30-foot-long bean of titanium that resembled a rising sun. More

A cup of coffee brewed with water freshly sourced from the Venetian lagoon has won a Golden Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The project, “Canal Café,” from U.S. architectural firm Diller Scofidio and Renfro (DS+R), was selected as the best piece in the biennale’s 19th international exhibition, titled “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.”
Billed as “part espresso bar, part laboratory” on the firm’s website, the project filters Venice’s notoriously polluted canals before biennale visitors’ very eyes. The murky water passes through a series of filters that mimic the natural cleansing effect of a tidal wetland. Once the water is made potable, it is used—with an assist from Michelin-starred chef Davide Oldani—to make a classic shot of Italian espresso.
“‘Canal Café’ reaches beneath the photogenic surface of the city by converting these brackish waters into the comforting scent and taste of espresso—the irreducible Italian pleasure,” the firm said. “The public will drink Venice.”
Venice, of course, is famous for its picturesque waterways, situated on a lagoon that not only protected it from invaders, but also facilitated trade, making it one of Europe’s most historically wealthy and powerful city states. But over the years, industrialization and tourism have taken a toll on the canals, contaminating the waters even as climate change has led to increased flooding, endangering the city.
Diller Scofidio and Renfro, “Canal Café” (2025) at the 2025 Venice Biennale for Architecture. Photo: by Iwan Baan, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
DS+R originally planned to stage “Canal Café” for the 2008 biennial, curated by critic Aaron Betsky, who was an advisor for the realized project. It was impossible to get the permits 17 years ago, but improved filtration made it possible to serve up canal coffee at this year’s event.
“Regulations and technology have come a far way, and part of the big difference now was that the methodology involved has been one that uses biological filtering rather than chemical filtering, so it’s more organic and natural,” Betsky told the New York Times.
The project is set up outside, with a transparent pipe drawing water directly from the Arsenal Canal. You can see the filter at work, removing sludge and toxins.
Half the water is filtered by salt-tolerant plants called halophytes that form a kind of natural membrane bioreactor, or “micro-wetland,” preserving minerals in the water. The rest is treated with artificial filtration, reverse osmosis, and UV disinfection, producing distilled water. The water is combined then steamed to make a high-concept espresso shot, available for sale for €1.20 ($1.36). (Any extra water is used to irrigate plants in the Arsenale.)
Diller Scofidio and Renfro, “Canal Café” (2025) at the 2025 Venice Biennale for Architecture. Photo: by Iwan Baan, courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
To design, test, and monitor the water purification system, DS+R enlisted the U.S. engineering firm Natural Systems Utilities, and the Italian firm SODAI. Oldani has selected the coffee blend and ground the beans to the perfect fineness to ensure the espresso meets Venetians’ exacting standards.
But this isn’t just about the perfect cup of joe. Developing new ways to keep water clean is a challenge of particular interest to the city of Venice, which has built a high-tech electromechanical flood protection system called the MOSE Project. Longterm, those barriers may be in near-constant effect, therefore requiring new technology to keep the lagoon’s waters clean.
“Canal Café is a symbol of how we can provide citizens with access to drinking water through innovative technologies that protect the world’s most precious resource,” Pietro Salini, CEO of Webuild, the project’s supporter, said in a statement.
Jurors Hans Ulrich Obrist, Paola Antonelli, and Mpho Matsipa chose “Canal Café” is the best of over 300 projects presented by an impressive 750 participants in the Arsenale, as well as across the grounds of the Giardini, where the central pavilion is currently closed for renovations.
The international exhibition was curated by the architect and engineer Carlo Ratti, a professor at the Politecnico di Milano and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, where he directs the MIT Senseable City Lab.
“‘Canal Café’ is a demonstration of how the city of Venice can be a laboratory to speculate how to live on the water, while offering a contribution to the public space of Venice. It also invites future speculation about the lagoon and other lagoons,” the jury said in a statement. “We also acknowledge the extraordinary persistence of the Canal Cafè project, which started almost 20 years ago. It’s an example that biennale can be a long duration project and go far beyond the event.”
“Heatwave,” Kingdom of Bahrain national pavilion at the 2025 Venice Biennale for Architecture. Photo: ©Andrea Avezzù, courtesy of the Venice Biennale.
The jury also awarded the Golden Lion for the best national participation to the Bahrain Pavilion, curated by architect Andrea Faraguna. The project, “Heatwave,” aims to employ shade and passive cooling to make places in extremely hot environments more livable.
The opening of the architecture biennale this weekend sadly coincided with news of the sudden and unexpected death of Koyo Kouoh, the curator for the organization’s upcoming 2026 art edition.
“La Biennale di Venezia Architettura 2025: Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective” is on view at the Giardini and the Arsenale, Sestiere Castello, Campo Della Tana 2169/f 30122 Venice, Italy, May 10–November 23, 2025. More

Given Bob Dylan’s reticent public persona, his art has long seemed the closest one can get to standing in the songwriter’s shoes.
Much of the octogenarian’s work may be done on the road, in moments Dylan himself says help to “relax and refocus a restless mind,” but it is most certainly not a whimsical hobby. His easy sense of line is too assured and his eye too keen for any such condescension.
In recent years, the art world seems to have reached this consensus culminating with a major retrospective of Dylan’s work staged across three continents in the early 2020s. It brought together decades of expressive landscapes, intimate portraits, and Americana-filled sculptural works that showed Dylan’s insight on America endures irrespective of medium.
One organization that boarded the Dylan train long ago is London’s Halcyon Gallery. It has worked with the artist for nearly 18 years and has seen, first hand, how public perceptions towards Dylan’s art has changed. “It has been an extraordinary experience,” the gallery’s founder Paul Green said in a statement. “To watch this cultural icon develop into such a critically revered and important visual artist.”
Installation view of “Point Blank” at Halcyon Gallery. Photo: Halcyon Gallery.
Dylan’s latest show, “Point Blank” opens on May 9 and offers nearly 100 original paintings on paper that are looser and more intimate than his previous work. As with an earlier Dylan show, “Drawn Blank,” the paintings began as sketches before being worked over with color.
“The idea was not only to observe the human condition,” Dylan said, “but to throw myself into it with great urgency.” They’re hazy, snapshot things and with Dylan remaining noncommittal as to which derive from reality and which from his imagination, the viewer is encourage to partake in a little storytelling of their own.
Four painting from Dylan’s latest show “Point Blank”. Photo: courtesy Halcyon Gallery.
We meet a cluster of three pale-faced men all holding books: one solemn, as if weighed down by the words in front of them, another appears performatively pensive, the third reads aloud with interest, his sleeves suitably rolled back. Elsewhere, there are portraits of devoted couples, some romantic, others platonic. They appear pulled from mantelpiece picture frames (or perhaps exuberant social media posts). Case in point: the well-dressed young couple that is locked in an amorous embrace, as though posing before prom night.
There is a grouping of nudes that seem to draw from European traditions of portraiture in the genre (minus the one with a dog) as well as brightly colored interiors of empty living rooms and bedrooms. All the same, the nods to mid-century Americana remain in the bucolic scene of a turquoise station wagon idling on a lawn, the pout of topless boxers, and the young man (shirt tucked-in) fixing his hair with a comb.
Painting from Dylan’s latest show “Point Blank”. Photo: courtesy Halcyon Gallery.
Dylan has reworked some of these as blue, red, and monochromatic studies for which he is inviting association with Picasso’s turn-of-the-century Blue Period. This might be something of a stretch, but there is without doubt a quiet discomfort and a heavy dose of isolation.
“People who attend the exhibition will discover that they provoke stories from our imagination,” the gallery’s creative director Kate Brown said. “These works on paper feel like memories, intangible windows into the life and imagination on of one of the greatest storytellers who ever lived.”
“Bob Dylan: Point Blank” is on view at Halcyon Gallery, 148 New Bond Street, London, through July 6. More

British artist Thomas J Price probably could have counted on some controversy when he erected a sculpture of a Black woman in New York’s Times Square. Unveiled on April 29, the 12-foot-high bronze Grounded in the Stars shows an unidealized woman in everyday clothes, standing with hands on hips, gazing into the distance with a contemplative look. Per a description of the work by the presenter, Times Square Arts, Price’s practice “confronts preconceived notions of identity and representation.”
And controversy he got, despite a subtle degree of aggrandizement; Price’s figure stands in a pose that nods to Michelangelo’s David, and Jean Cooney, director of Times Square Arts, was drawn to the artist’s work “because of the novel ways in which he imparts a sense of reverence for people’s everyday humanity,” she told Artnet News in February.
But she’s being greeted in some quarters online as an unflattering representation, one with an “attitude,” one who looks stereotypically angry.
Times Square Arts’s own Instagram post of the work has generated dozens of comments, with plenty of love-eyes, flexing muscles, and fire emojis. But they run the gamut, including bessieblount16’s terse “Trash” and Ms_izzie_bee’s “I h8yte your statue as it’s not an accurate representation of Black American Women. We come in all shapes and sizes and you have her plainly dressed looking angry. You’re British and know nothing of Black American Women. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Thomas J Price, Grounded in the Stars (2025). Photo: Michael Hull. Courtesy Times Square Arts.
“This is some leftist nonsense just to piss off white people,” contributes JayeF121212. “And based on the comments, blacks dont like it either.”
Predictably, aesthetic conservatives use President Donald Trump’s slogan to denigrate the work; one meme juxtaposes it with Antonín Pavel Wagner’s classicizing 19th-century Hercules and Cerberus, in which the mythical Greek hero sports abs for days, under the heading “make statues great again.”

Right-wing media also found a way to place the work in a context they are obsessed with.
“Who is this woman?” asked Fox News host Jesse Watters on Thursday. “What did she do to get a statue? A nice one, too!”
In answer to his own question, he concludes, “Nothing. This isn’t a real person. It’s a DEI statue.”
Price is aware of the debate. On May 9, he reposted to Instagram a slideshow from the popular real_toons account, whose first slide sums up the positions: two Black women flank the sculpture, one saying “I love this!” and the other saying, “Wow, I hate this.” More Black people join in the conversation in succeeding slides, one asking, “What’s next, pajamas and a bonnet?” while another pipes up to say “We are so deep in European beauty standards that the idea of a plus-size Black woman being honored is somehow disrespectful?”
Price did not immediately answer a request to weigh in on the debate, sent via Times Square Arts.
The Times Square installation coincides with Price’s exhibition, “Resilience of Scale,” at Hauser and Wirth’s SoHo showroom. His first major show with the gallery in New York, it presents five similarly towering bronze figures depicting everyday Black people. In Time Unfolding (2023), a woman consults her phone; As Sound Turns to Noise (2023) shows a woman in athletic wear; Within the Folds (Dialogue 1) (2025) shows a man in sneakers and a sweatsuit.
Thomas J Price, Grounded in the Stars (2025). Photo: Michael Hull. Courtesy Times Square Arts.
Price’s Times Square installation also takes place in the same city at the same moment as many Black women (and men) are enshrined in their everyday glory in Amy Sherald’s acclaimed Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition “American Sublime,” where the artist shows Black people as stylish and confident. Prominent Black artists are in the spotlight at the Guggenheim museum as well, with a Rashid Johnson retrospective, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with a rooftop installation by Jennie C. Jones.
Other Black artists have also used Times Square as a place to comment on representation of Black people. Price’s midtown installation comes a few years after artist Kehinde Wiley, known for painting young men of color in settings and poses inspired by art historical portraiture, erected a sculpture, 29 feet high and also in bronze, of a Black man in everyday clothing—Nike sneakers and a sweatshirt—but astride a horse, riffing on monuments immortalizing Confederate leaders in the American South.
“Thomas J. Price:Grounded in the Stars” is on view at Broadway and 46th Street April 29–June 17, 2025. More

The city was in full spring bloom during the public days of Gallery Weekend Berlin—but ChertLüdde‘s Alvaro Urbano show “September and Lions” was a sharp contrast that, in some ways, fit the underlying atmosphere of the city. The installation of end-of-season park foliage, cigarette butts, delicately crafted from metal, was rooted in melancholic introspection. It would be a lie to say things have been easy breezy in Berlin in recent months. Quite the opposite: There were deep cuts to the cultural sector, and politics have been causing divisions in the art world. Plus, there’s a new, more right-leaning government and cultural minister to reckon with.
Guests, fresh from Cyprien Gaillard’s video installation “Retinal Rivalry,” dumped their 3D glasses in a bin and gathered at the garden apéro at Sprüth Magers, sipping wine and discussing the sudden resignation of Joe Chialo, Berlin’s culture minister. His exit followed a cascade of public missteps and was made worse by the announcement that €130 million in cultural funding was to be cut from the city’s budget. While this doesn’t directly impact the gallery space, the ripple effect is undeniable. Institutions are rattled, and uncertainty—never great for business—hangs in the air, especially in austerity-minded Germany.
But no matter. Gallery Weekend Berlin buzzed anyway, infused with a mood of resilience, even defiance. We dance on.
Alvaro Urbano, September and the Lions, installation view at ChertLüdde, Berlin, 2025, Photos by Marjorie Brunet Plaza, Courtesy of the Artist and ChertLüdde
In an unusual twist, the event kicked off on May Day, a national bank holiday for International Workers’ Day. For the art industry, “working” meant oysters and air kissing on the patio of KaDeWe, the historic multistory department store usually teeming with tourists bent over perfume vitrines. The large arcade windows of the building were taken over by galleries. Pamela Rosenkranz’s water bottles, filled with flesh-toned silicone and acrylic paint, stood on plinths where Etro resort wear might normally be displayed—at comparable price points.
24/7 exhibition in the window front of KaDeWe from April 22 to May 10, 2025. Photo: Ludger Paffrath
Now in her second year, Antonia Ruder seems to have found her stride at the helm of Gallery Weekend, after taking over last year after the departure Maike Cruse, who headed to Art Basel in Switzerland. Ruder inherited a platform of 55 galleries and a rocky market. “The global art market has become much more competitive,” she said in a recent interview with the German press. “Berlin remains a major player thanks to its unique art scene, but staying relevant means continuously taking action.” Her updates to the format this year were well received: Alongside the 24-hour window project at KaDeWe was a series of artist talks at the Neue Nationalgalerie, a podcast lifting the veil on studio practices, helmed Financial Times columnist Enuma Okoro, and expanded public tours.
Katharina Grosse and Klaus Biesenbach at Gallery Weekend’s annual dinner. Photo: David von Becker
Things will seem normal, but there will be signs. First, the normal: Everyone I spoke to, from dealers to artists and collectors, noted that the event felt international again after a post-lockdown lull and competition for attention with the Venice Biennale last year. We even had an A-list celebrity: Usher, who collects art, was seen in a Berlin-looking trench coat enjoying seasonal asparagus at the Gallery Weekend dinner—hosted within LAS Art Foundation‘s exhibition of Laure Prouvost—though the star allegedly had to leave before dessert (understandable given that he had to perform at the Met Gala on Monday evening). An internationally established blue-chip gallery was scrambling to get its star artist on the guest list of Berghain for Saturday night. Collector Frédéric de Goldschmidt said an invite to artist Zuzanna Czebatul‘s after-party at Berghain, hosted by her gallery Dittrich & Schlechtriem had “sealed the deal” on deciding to come. Some things don’t change.
But there are signs that the before times are no more. Gone are the days when Gallery Weekend was dominated by painting-only shows by the most established rostered artists working on canvas; many exhibitions instead favored experimentation. In these uncertain times, all directions are favorable. At Galerie Neu, a cheekily opaque show prompted some visiting children to throw around colorful bits of SoiL Thornton‘s pom-pom installation and some even pocketed them. This later seemed ominous when I learned that each pom-pom in the exhibition represented one year of the artist’s life.
Installation view “Toy” by Sebastian Jefford at Noah Klink. Photo courtesy Noah Klink
“You have to be flexible, but you can also be more playful,” said Noah Klink, a dealer in his third Gallery Weekend. He was showing a suite of ink drawings by Sebastian Jefford, plus ochre roof material custom-fitted to the interior walls of his gallery, on which moonlike faces gazed out. Berlin has yet to recover the “brand” it had during the apex of post-internet art in the late 2010s (some of those artists reappeared in a brief revival in 2022). But the city’s lack of a unified scene may now be its strength. It is diverse, varied, and allows space for experimentation in a place that remains an incubator for artists.
Gallery Weekend Berlin’s annual dinner at LAS Foundation, with Laure Prouvost’s installation visible above. Photo: David von Becker
There were some key posthumous discoveries on this front. Many recommended David Medalla‘s “Luftbrücke” at Mountains, a show with more institutional muscle and ideas than it could fit on the walls. The gallery expanded into a nearby space, a former apothecary, to show the breadth of an artist who worked for a time in West Berlin. The kinetic art pioneer, who died in 2020, left a vast oeuvre that includes paintings, neon sculpture, and delicate collages. His ethereal bubbling sculpture, called Cloud Canyons, pours over itself at Julia Stoschek Collection‘s post-image group exhibition; a cascade that signaled to me a needed return to what one might call poetic artists’s art. Similarly, Klaus Biesenbach and Lisa Botti brought the ephemeral, playful, and profound fog sculptures of Fujiko Nakaya to the Neue Nationalgalerie‘s historic sculpture garden.
Fog sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya in the sculpture garden of Neue Nationalgalerie, © Neue Nationalgalerie – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / David von Becker
Beyond the official program, new formats proliferated that brought together sharp curation and business-oriented projects. Noah Klink hosted a group show “Soggiorno” at Tanya Leighton. At a historic church in Mitte, collector, curator, and now art advisor Tiffany Zabludowicz and curator and advisor Anneli Botz launched their debut exhibition under the banner of their new platform Tyger Tyger; the large group show “I Sought my Soul” brought together works by artists including Jacolby Satterwhite, Jean-Marie Appriou, and Mire Lee. Optimism for the current age was the operative word—and the exhibition included an immersive breathwork session during Gallery Weekend. The first in a series, the multihyphenate enterprise to help private collectors and institutions curate and build their collections. “Why not be hybridized, as long as it is additive to the art world?” said Zabludowicz.
Also choosing Berlin: American Art Projects presented “America Unframed,” a tightly curated selling exhibition of well-selected artists from overlapping scenes between L.A., New York, and other American hubs. Organizers Benno Tubbesing (of Ruttkowski 68), Matthieu von Matt, and William Croghan (of Deitch) said they plan to continue the series, spotlighting a new generation of American artists who’ve been underexposed outside of the U.S. Artists like painters Tristan Unrau, who recently gained representation from David Kordanksy, and Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., who had a solo show at Deitch in New York that closed this January, hung together as a visual lexicon of Americana, drawing on Pop Art, realism, vernacular signage, cinema, and online visual culture.
“America Unframed” courtesy American Art Projects
New models are also taking shape on the institutional front. The most visible sign may be the Chanel-backed commission at Hamburger Bahnhof, launched with a monumental work by Klára Hosnedlová. The 12 percent cut to Berlin’s cultural funding likely accelerated the need for an increase in these partnerships. German museums will now be asked to reconsider not only how they fund—but what they fund.
Across Europe, art sales are down 8 percent year over year, and sales are vital—no one disputes that. Institutions partnering with private patrons; selling exhibitions framed as such but with curatorial depth; all this no longer feels un-Berlin; nor does a heterogeneous set of artists pushing past genre toward a poetics of presence. We are seeing some sort of paradigm shift—one still hazy at the edges, but unmistakably underway. Perhaps, taken together, it will someday read as a slow, accumulative response to political inertia, market fatigue, and evolving social priorities.
Things can be much more imaginative, provisional, and porous, and more poetic than polished, too. At KW Institute on Sunday morning, artist Matt Copson and critic Dean Kissick hosted a panel styled after Art Basel’s Conversations series with three nine-year-old guests; together they earnestly discussed the meaning of art. The kids and the two adults on stage spoke, with startling directness, about what art meant to them; a reminder of what an individual and immediate experience art viewing can be. One European collector, singularly rattled by this, demanded to know what the event was supposed to be. But Copson had already turned that question to his panelists, asking the children whether the conversation itself could be an artwork. There was no firm consensus. And that, perhaps, is the point. Maybe uncertain times have taught us something that was always true—that all directions, all interpretations, are favorable. More

Five years ago, nonprofit public art studio Monument Lab teamed up with Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania to ask important questions such as: What stories are missing from Bryn Mawr? How can and should the school reckon with its histories of systemic exclusion? Under the initiative Art Remediating Campus Histories, a series of symposia, lectures, student group consultations, and conversations with alumnae and community leaders followed, before culminating in a public call for proposals.
That’s when multimedia Washington, D.C.-based artist Nekisha Durrett entered the picture. Late last month, Bryn Mawr officially unveiled Don’t Forget to Remember (Me), a permanent public artwork for which custom pavers created pathways in the school’s iconic Cloisters courtyard.
From an aerial view, the intertwined paths are laid out in “the shape of a knot that cannot be undone, symbolizing interconnectivity, and making visual that Bryn Mawr is reexamining its history to tell all of its stories,” said Durrett in a statement. Two hundred and fifty of the 9,000 pavers are engraved with the names of Black staff whose work was critical to building and operating Bryn Mawr, particularly in its early years. Yet their contributions went unrecognized. In all, the project involves 26 pallets of brick, 211 tons of stone, 18 tons of sand, and 285 tons of soil.
Nekisha Durret, Dont Forget to Remember me lighting test, Bryn Mawr College, January 10, 2025. Photo: Steve Weinik
Perhaps it was not surprising that, after the request for proposals went out, Durrett’s inbox was flooded with suggestions from fans and friends familiar with her inquiries into historical narratives and monuments, encouraging her to pursue the Bryn Mawr project.
“I was fortunate enough to be chosen as a finalist,” the artist told me. “I’d been wanting to work with Monument Lab for years. Just the fact that they knew who I was, was really exciting.”
Even before she arrived on campus, Durrett learned in her preliminary research that there was a collection of ephemera related to Black life on campus that was contained in a random kitchen drawer. When she arrived on campus and saw it in person, she discovered “index cards that were burned around the edges. They were very fragile so I asked what they were.”
Nekisha Durrett, current students, and alumni collect soil from Perry House, ARCH Project, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, 2023 (Maya Estrara).
Durrett learned that they were time cards of servants who worked at the college from roughly 1900 to 1930. The cards nearly burned in a fire that happened decades later, around 1960. “Someone had the good sense to rescue them from the fire,” she said. Now, some of those names are engraved into the stones on the new pathway.
Durrett also joined a special student-led tour, known as Black at Bryn Mawr, part of which is a walk under the Cloisters to see the underground “servant” tunnel. “These tunnels made a lot of the work that Black staff were performing on campus invisible,” she said.
In her research, she also learned a lot about Enid Cook, the first Black graduate of Bryn Mawr, in 1931. Although Cook was accepted to study at the college, she wasn’t allowed to reside on campus, at the decree of M. Carey Thomas, the college’s former president and trustee who had “a very powerful and persuasive voice at the college,” said Durrett. Cook ended up living off campus with a professor and walking roughly a mile to and from school each day.
Don’ t Forget to Remember (Me) lighting test, Bryn Mawr College, January 10, 2025. PhotoSteve Weinik
Upon learning this, Durrett printed out a map of the campus and the surrounding area so that she could trace the path Cook would have taken to get to school each day.
“I just started thinking about pathways, and also thinking about those hidden tunnels under the Cloisters, and I’m thinking about M. Carey Thomas, this woman whose whose presence and influence on the college, caused pain and exclusion for many,” she said.
Thomas’s ashes are contained in the Cloisters, which Durrett visited on her Bryn Mawr tour with two students of color. “We were standing there and I already felt this gloom, this kind of heaviness of the space. They described to me how they felt being in the space and how many students of color, or any students, did not feel comfortable participating in events that took place in the Cloisters.”
Durrett said she “knew at that moment that that needed to be the site of this project. Whatever it was going to be, it needed to be there. That space needed to be reclaimed.”
Her choice of a braid motif, she added, was inspired by one of the students she spent time with while touring the campus. “They came to me as this really powerful symbol, thinking about hair braids as a protective hairstyle. It’s called a protective hairstyle because all of those braids are stronger together than they are apart. I was also thinking about the Transatlantic slave trade and all of the mythology around hair related to the middle passage.”
Nekisha Durrett inpainting stamped names with a custom glaze made from the soil of the Perry House, a former affinity house forBlack students on Bryn Mawrs campus. Photo by Steve Weinik.
The names in the pavers are further filled with soil that was collected from the site of Perry House, the former Black Cultural Center on Campus, Durrett noted. There were a number of sites that had been selected as possible project sites, “but I felt that Perry House was a little bit removed from the center of the campus,” including having to cross a busy road. “What I decided to do instead of placing the artwork there was to bring a piece of Perry House to the Cloisters,” she explained.
The results of Durrett’s years-long, thoughtful approach speak for themselves. At the April 24 unveiling, she described the sense of reaffirmation sparked by the project and how it’s beginning to “heal this community… I heard it come out of the mouths of alumni who were there, and had tears in their eyes. They felt like there was a healing that was happening on campus. It’s been very reaffirming for me particularly in the times we’re going through now, witnessing these very blatant attempts to erase history and to alter the past.”
With the artwork’s unveiling, she added: “It feels like it’s the official turning over of this piece to the community.” More

“For the writer of fiction,” Flannery O’Connor once reflected, “everything has its testing point in the eye.” Writing, to her, didn’t just call on emotion and thought; it required “sense-impression” on the part of the author—on what and how she sees. It begins with the eye, “an organ,” she said, “that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it.”
From O’Connor’s own eye would issue her deeply observed fiction, written from the late 1940s through early ’60s, now a fixture in the Southern Gothic canon. Underpinning it, though, was the writer’s little-known visual art practice—the cartoons, drawings, and paintings that summoned her perceptive powers. For years, scholars only had inklings of these artworks; a rediscovery, however, is changing that.
Flannery O’Connor’s painting of the family home at Andalusia Farm with her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor, in the foreground. Photo: Anna Gay Leavitt, courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
For the first time, dozens of artworks by the Southern writer are seeing the light of day at “Hidden Treasures” at Andalusia Farm, O’Connor’s former homestead in Milledgeville, Georgia. Marking the centennial of her birth, the exhibition brings together her childhood drawings, cartoons, paintings on wood, and even a stuffed red-faced doll she had created, complete with plaid shirt and a large cape. At its heart is a 1952 self-portrait, in which O’Connor painted herself gazing out from under a wide sun hat, while flanked by a pheasant.
“The self-portrait was the first painting that arrived in our custody,” Andalusia curator Cassie Munnell told me over a phone call. “I knew that there was one out there, but I’d only ever seen black-and-white photos of it. To see it in person, to see it in color and the vibrancy of it, was just so exciting.”
Flannery O’Connor standing next to her 1952 self portrait. Photo: Alpha Historica / Alamy Stock Photo.
The entire collection had been stowed away for decades until it was recently unearthed—some works came from a storage unit behind a fast-food restaurant, others from the attic of the Milledgeville townhouse of Louise Florencourt, O’Connor’s cousin and co-executor of her estate. It was in the latter 19th-century building where O’Connor spent her teenage years, squirreling herself away in the top story to create art.
(Before she died in 2023, Florencourt bequeathed the property to the Flannery O’Connor Institute for the Humanities at Georgia College and State University, the writer’s alma mater, which also preserves her library and the Andalusia compound, now a National Historic Landmark. Some of the artworks have also been gifted to the school by the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust.)
Installation view of “Hidden Treasures” at the Andalusia Interpretive Center. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
Few eyes had seen the extent of the archive, which was fiercely guarded by Florencourt (one rare visitor to the storage unit, author Damian Ference, recalled it packed “wall-to-wall” with O’Connor artifacts). A worry of the early trustees, explained Farrell O’Gorman, who recently joined the trust, was that “the paintings might somehow distract from her achievements as a writer.”
Not so, said Munnell. The artworks “complement and expand” what we know about O’Connor, she noted. “You can see the ways that her ideas and the way she described people carried over. Her fiction is often quite dramatic and her characters are often described in these big, bold ways. This carries over in how she painted.”
Flannery O’Connor, c. 1950s. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
Born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, O’Connor came to visual art before fiction writing. At five, she was creating caricatures and sketches, which blossomed into her joyous, witty linoleum prints (compiled in 2012’s Flannery O’Connor: The Cartoons). She submitted her illustrations to her high school and college publications; others, she compiled into small books. She paused her visual art when she entered the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1945.
It was in Iowa that O’Connor began her first novel, Wise Blood (1952), and a run of beguiling short stories shot through with pathos, dark humor, and keen perception. In them are characters wrangling with faith and self in the heart of the American South (which O’Connor, a devout Catholic, deemed “Christ-haunted”), threaded throughout with potent descriptions of desolate farms, of eyes “the color of pecan shells,” of a peacock with a “tail full of suns,” and of forest-lined roads, some leading straight to the sky. One senses the cartoonist in these deft strokes.
Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
In 1952, following a diagnosis of lupus, O’Connor returned to Andalusia Farm to live under her mother’s care. The homestead, purchased by O’Connor’s uncle in 1931, was where she would spend the last years of her life before her death at age 39. Despite her prognosis, she maintained a disciplined writing schedule—completing the now-classic The Violent Bear It Away (1960), for one—when not attending church, giving lectures, and painting her surrounds.
These rural scenes are dotted throughout “Hidden Treasures.” There are images of the farm’s horse barn, pictured amid stark tree branches; of a lake, surrounded by a verdant hill and captured with an Impressionistic hand; and of O’Connor’s beloved peafowl, which she avidly raised in Andalusia. “It’s all very grounded in the Southern farm experience, in this area, and our natural landscapes,” said Munnell.
Flannery O’Connor’s painting of fowl. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
But O’Connor also turned her hand to portraits: the show includes depictions of a green-clad female, believed to be her mother, and an African American woman in mid-crochet, likely a farm worker. There’s, of course, her self-portrait as well.
These later works follow her earlier caricatures—colorful portrayals of a wrinkled woman with a pointed nose and a cross-eyed man in a bowler hat, among others—that offer a highly comic counterpoint to her dramatic fiction. They might be juvenilia, but to Munnell, they hold stylistic hallmarks that carried over into O’Connor’s mature paintings such as “the ways that motion is displayed and details like facial features.”
Installation view of “Hidden Treasures” at the Andalusia Interpretive Center. Photo courtesy of Georgia College & State University.
And even in these simple drawings one can read O’Connor’s eye for mining meaning out of gesture and expression, and her knack for drawing from life, if not imagination. Drawing, in fact, might be the best medium to accompany fiction writing, she once stressed. “Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look” is essential, she said. “The writer should never be ashamed of staring.”
“Hidden Treasures” is on view at the Andalusia Interpretive Center, 2628 N. Columbia Street, Milledgeville, Georgia, throughout the summer. More

As the New York art world prepares for another busy art fair week, here’s our list of Frieze must-see shows at museums to galleries across the city. Whether you like emerging artists, rediscovered figures, or famous names from art history, we have you covered. See how many of these you can squeeze into your fair week agenda, and over the coming weeks.

“Kennedy Yanko: Retro Future” at Salon 94 and “Kennedy Yanko: Epithets” at James CohanApril 5–May 17 and April 5–May 10, 2025
“Kennedy Yanko: Retro Future” at Salon 94. Photo: courtesy of Salon 94, New York.
This duo of shows features Kennedy Yanko’s delightfully contorted abstract sculptures, made from salvaged scraps of metal combined with folded sheets of dried layers of paint. The artist has taken over all three floors of Salon 94’s Upper East Side mansion for her largest show to date—with a bonus group exhibition Kennedy has curated, “Metal and Memory,” featuring abstract works by the likes of John Chamberlain, Leonardo Drew, and Frank Stella. Downtown at James Cohan, Yanko has adopted a more somber palette for wall-mounted works with smaller, intricate details that she has described as inspired by “the dark place within me.”
Salon 94 is located at 3 East 89th Street, New York, New York. James Cohan Gallery is located at 48, 52 Walker Street, 2nd Floor, New York, New York.

“Salman Toor: Wish Maker” at Luhring AugustineMay 2–June 21, 2025
Salman Toor, Oh Father (2025). Courtesy of Luhring Augustine, New York.
After months of lockdown, one of the first new shows at the Whitney in 2020 was a star-making turn for Salman Toor, the Pakistani artist known for his green-tinted paintings exploring the imagined lives of queer South Asian men living in diaspora. This two-part exhibition—paintings in Chelsea, and drawings down in Tribeca—is Toor’s first solo show in the city since that break out, following an appearance at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Often celebrating private and intimate moments, these are artworks that capture a powerful viewpoint, informed by Toor’s own experiences living in New York City.
Luhring Augustine is located at 531 West 24th Street, and 17 White Street, New York, New York.

“Picasso: Tête-à-tête” at Gagosian and “Pablo Picasso: Still Life” at Almine RechApril 18–July 3, 2025 and May 1–July 18, 2025
Pablo Picasso, Femme au Béret Bleu Assise dans un Fauteuil Gris, Manches Rouges (Marie-Thérèse), 1937. Photo: by Sandra Pointet, courtesy Gagosian ©2025 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Pablo Picasso’s estate provided many of the works in this career-spanning show, with over fifty rarely seen paintings, sculptures, and drawings for this swan song for Gagosian’s Madison Avenue location. And just a block away, Almine Rech has brought together over 40 of Picasso’s still life paintings, an important part of his career that has often taken a backseat to figurative works that illustrate his complicated and increasingly controversial love life. Both shows have a family connection to Picasso. Gagosian’s is presented in partnership with the artist’s daughter Paloma Picasso, while the Almine Rech show is a collaboration with the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, run by the dealer and her husband, Picasso’s grandson Bernard Ruiz-Picasso.
Gagosian is located at 980 Madison Avenue, New York, New York. Almine Rech is located at 39 East 78th Street, Floor 2, New York, New York.

“Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim MuseumApril 18, 2025–January 18, 2026
Rashid Johnson, Antoine’s Organ (detail) (2016). Photo: Stefan Altenburger, courtesy of the artist.
Palm trees and other plants are suspended from the ceiling of the Guggenheim, transforming Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda into a verdant greenhouse for Rashid Johnson‘s thought-provoking survey. There are also his ceramic mosaics, works made from African black soap and melted wax, and an installation with more plants and a piano that will be activated for musical performances.
The Guggenheim is located at 1071 Fifth Avenue New York, New York. 

“Mary Heilmann: Long Line” at the Whitney Museum of American ArtApril 9, 2025–January 19, 2026
Installation view of “Mary Heilmann: Long Line” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, On wall: Long Line (2025). On floor: Monochrome Chairs (2015). Photo: by Tiffany Sage/BFA.com. ©BFA 2025.
The Whitney Museum is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its Meatpacking flagship with a tribute to perhaps the most memorable show from its opening, “Mary Heilmann: Sunset.” The exhibition’s functional installation of Heilmann’s signature brightly colored chairs on the fifth floor terrace provided the perfect place for visitors to take in the institution’s new downtown digs. This time around, she’s created a new indoor site-specific installation overlooking the Hudson River that again offers a welcoming opportunity for rest and relaxation.
The Whitney is located at 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, New York.

“Hiba Schahbaz: Magical Creatures” at Adler BeattyApril 24–June 20, 2025
Hiba Schahbaz, Book of Magical Creatures (2025). Photo: courtesy of Adler Beatty, New York.
Hiba Schahbaz has brought her delicate watercolors, informed by her training Indo-Persian miniature painting, to Adler Beatty, with a large site-specific wall installation of life-size cut-out paper works of dreamy mermaids and colorful vegetation. But the show also pairs historic European illuminated manuscripts from the 14th to 19th centuries, on loan from private collections and New York’s Les Enluminures, with Schahbaz’s own delicately hand-painted books featuring her feminine take on mythological creatures.
Adler Beatty is located at 34 East 69th Street, New York, New York. 

“Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe” at the Museum of Art and DesignApril 12–September 7, 2025
Saya Woolfalk, Lovescape (2004) installed in “Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe” at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Photo: by Jenna Bascom, courtesy the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.
It’s the first retrospective for 45-year-old Saya Woolfalk, whose career isn’t just about making beautiful, meaningful artwork. She’s also a masterful world-builder, crafting a dense scientific universe about a hybrid plant people called Empathics who live in sisterhood with the earth. Woolfalk has transformed the museum’s fifth floor into the Empathics’ world, with a dense and colorful installation of animated videos, paper collages, and life-size figurative sculptures wearing her textile works—which also serve as costumes. (If you don’t make it during Frieze Week, save the date September 7 for a live performance from the Alvin Ailey-Fordham dance program featuring the garments.)
MAD is located at 2 Columbus Circle, New York, New York.

“The Book of Esther in the Age of Rembrandt” at the Jewish Museum March 7–August 10, 2025
Rembrandt van Rijn, A Jewish Heroine from the Hebrew Bible (1632–1633). Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.
A trio of paintings and six etchings by Rembrandt van Rijn star in this collection of paintings, prints, drawings, and decorative arts all inspired by the Jewish heroine Esther. The queen, whose story is told in the bible’s Book of Esther, is perhaps a surprising source of inspiration for the people of 17th-century Netherlands (although there are also artworks and devotional objects created by and for Amsterdam’s Jewish minority). The exhibition argues that the Dutch people saw a parallel between their fight for independence from Spain and how Esther saved the Jews of Persia by revealing her hidden faith to her husband, the king.
The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York.

“Toyin Ojih Odutola: Ilé Oriaku” at Jack ShainmanMay 6–July 18, 2025
Toyin Ojih Odutola, Congregation. Courtesy of Jack Shainman, New York.
Toyin Ojih Odutola, who was included in the Nigerian Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, has created a series of paintings honoring her late grandmother and uncle. The works are set inside an imagined Mbari house, a traditional sacred space for the Owerri Igbo people of Nigeria used to celebrate both deities and members of the community. Ojih Odutola, who first became known for her series of portraits of a fictional aristocratic Nigerian family, is here telling a more personal story about processing grief, and of spiritual community.
Jack Shainman is located at 46 Lafayette Street, New York, New York.

“Elizabeth Colomba” at Venus Over ManhattanApril 15–May 17, 2025
Elizabeth Colomba, The Magician (2025). Courtesy of Venus Over Manhattan.
For her first show with Venus Over Manhattan, Elizabeth Colomba is showcasing her take on Old Master paintings. Her flawlessly executed canvases largely depict ornate, familiar-looking period rooms—but these works are starring richly attired Black women who normally would have been excluded from those masterworks. Her figures are regal and powerful, depicted here with symbols of the occult, creating a missing chapter of art history.
Venus Over Manhattan is located at 39 Great Jones Street, New York, New York. 
“Leonor Fini: Small Faces” at NagasApril 7–May 24, 2025
Leonor Fini, Face II. Photo: courtesy of Nagas, New York.
Surrealist painter Leonor Fini (1907–1996) has enjoyed a long-overdue surge of attention in recent years for her sensual, otherworldly paintings of women. But you probably haven’t seen many of her drawings, a selection of which, featuring women’s faces, are the subject of this intimate outing. The artist’s delicate line work captures the simplicity of form in dreamy fashion.
Nagas is located at 47 West 28th Street, Floor 2, New York, New York. 

“Francis Picabia: Eternal Beginning” at Hauser & WirthMay 1–August 1, 2025
Francis Picabia, La terre est ronde (The Earth Is Round), 1951. Photo: courtesy Mercatorfonds, Belgium,and Comité Picabia Geier Family Collection, ©2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
This Francis Picabia show from the Comité Picabia and co-curated by its president, Beverley Calté, and art historian Arnauld Pierre, comes to New York by way of Hauser & Wirth Paris—that’s right, a museum-caliber gallery exhibition so buzzy, it traveled. If you caught the artist’s 2017 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, you’ll be aware that he developed new and totally distinct styles every few years, exploring Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Dadaism. Here, the focus is on the twilight of Picabia’s career, from 1945 to 1952, the year before his death—a period that saw him create yet another new style by seeking to bridge the movements of Surrealism and abstraction.
Hauser & Wirth is located at 47 West 28th Street, Floor 2, New York, New York. 

“Tanya Aguiñiga: Weighted” at Albertz BendaMay 8–June 21, 2025
Tanya Aguiñiga, Seven Sisters. Photo: by Julian Calero, courtesy of the artist and Albertz Benda, New York and Los Angeles.
Raised on the border of Mexico and California, Tanya Aguiñiga creates art inspired by her experiences with communities in both countries. In the Los Angeles artist, activist, and educator’s first New York solo show, Aguiñiga looks to expand on her work using art as a tool to empower her community, and celebrate their physical strength. Drawing on traditional craft practices, she uses cotton, flax, copper, stone, and clay to make abstract woven and braided textile works that represent marginalized bodies. Some of the works use red dye secreted from cochineal insects native to Mexico and the Southeast U.S.—but only the females of the species—that became a valuable trading commodity during colonial times.
Albertz Benda is located at 515 West 26th Street, New York, New York.

“Ching Ho Cheng: Tracing Infinity” at BankMay 1–June 14, 2025
Ching Ho Cheng, Untitled (1982). Photo: Gustavo Murill, courtesy of Bank and the Ching Ho Cheng Estate.
A long-time resident of legendary New York artist haven the Chelsea Hotel, the late Ching Ho Cheng is known for his psychedelic canvases. The second New York show for Shanghai’s Bank gallery will feature archival photographs documenting his place in the downtown scene of the ’60s and ’70s, as well as some of Cheng’s never-before-displayed gouache windows works. Each one is a carefully observed painting of sunlight as it passed through the windows of his apartment and studio, rendered in thin layers of pigment applied with an airbrush in a technique Cheng developed himself. This effort to capture the ever-changing light of the sun ties into the Buddhist principle of impermanence, which is inescapable, and defines our own lives.
Bank is located at 127 Elizabeth Street, New York, New York. 

“Teruko Yokoi: NohTheater” at Hollis TaggartMay 1–June 14, 2025
Teruko Yokoi, Untitled (1987). Courtesy of Hollis Taggart, New York.
Another former denizen of the Chelsea Hotel, the late Japanese artist Teruko Yokoi, is getting a restaurant at the building named in her honor later this month. But first, Hollis Taggart is opening a show of 20 works dating from the 1950s to year 2000. Yokoi trained in traditional Japanese painting before moving to the U.S. in 1953 and studying at the California School of Fine Arts and under Hans Hoffman in New York. Though she was one of the few women in the Abstract Expressionist scene, Yokoi remained deeply influenced by her native country. This show is focusing on her embrace of Japan’s traditional Noh theater in her work and artistic philosophy.
Hollis Taggart is located at 521 West 26th Street, 1st Floor, New York, New York.

“Mary Ann Unger: Across the Bering Strait” at Berry CampbellApril 17–May 17, 2025
Mary Ann Unger, Across the Bering Strait (1992–94). Photo: ©the artist courtesy of Berry Campbell, New York.
Don’t miss the late sculptor Mary Ann Unger‘s monumental installation of abstract sculpture, Across the Bering Strait, being shown in New York City in its entirety for the first time. A feminist artist and curator—and member of the Guerrilla Girls—Unger suffered from cancer the last 14 years of her life, and is only now gaining more recognition for her work thanks to the efforts of her daughter, artist Eve Biddle, and widower, photographer Geoffrey Biddle. Convinced of Unger’s art historical importance, her family saved her large-scale works, including the most monumental of the all, Across the Bering Strait, a series of 34 large gray modular forms that recall bones and body parts. It’s a piece of great weight, both physically and philosophically, inspired by migration and the bodily suffering it can cause.
Berry Campbell is located at 524 West 26th Street, New York, New York. More