Art & Exhibitions

Three decades ago, British artist and filmmaker Tacita Dean burst onto the scene as part of the Young British Artists. She’s since enjoyed long and successful career—but never, until now, a major U.S. museum show. That changed last month in Houston, where the Menil Collection opened “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly,” a striking new exhibition highlighting her impressive, if lesser-known, drawing practice.
“The way Tacita thinks about drawing is as a way of making and an analogy for her belief in and love of all things analog, which ties to film and the preservation of film, which is what she’s primarily known for,” Michelle White, the Menil’s senior curator, told me during a tour of the show. (The Menil, of course, has its own Drawing Institute celebrating the medium.)
“It’s very nice to do a show about the drawings,” Dean told me in a phone interview, calling from her studio in Berlin, noting that the two halves of her practice, film and drawing, have always coexisted. “Generally the museum shows I’ve done always have included drawings.
But of course, the films sort of become more prevalent, or dominate the spaces, because they take up so much room.”
At the Menil, however, the drawings have plenty of space to breathe, with four spacious galleries, compared to a single darkened theater down the hall where four different films will screen, rotating roughly every month and a half. The show’s opening room features a trio of monumental photographs of trees that the artist has painstakingly drawn on in colored pencil, lending them a painterly feel.
Tacita Dean, Beauty (2006). Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; purchase through a gift of Raoul Kennedy in memory of Patricia A. Kennedy. Photo by Tenari Tuatagaloa, ©Tacita Dean.
Dean began this body of work “a long time ago,” she said, first working in a much smaller scale on found postcards of trees with unusual shapes that she would isolate by painting around them. (A selection is also in the show.)
That led her to find the oldest oak tree in the U.K., which is in Kent’s Fredville Park, and nicknamed Majesty. Beauty, the 2006 work that opens the Menil show, features and is named after Majesty’s also-venerable neighbor.
Installation view of “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly” at the Menil Collection, Houston with Sakura (Totsube). Photo by Paul Hester.
The other two trees are a purple jacaranda tree from Los Angeles, titled Purgatory (3rd Cornice) and printed in negative so that its vibrant flowers appear green, and an ancient cherry tree from Japan, its blooming branches carefully propped up by crutches, titled Sakura (Totsube). The latter is a black-and-white photograph taken for the Menil show, the background painstakingly colored a pale pink, like the blossoms would have been.
“It’s this idea of human mark-making on the surface of time,” White said. “And she’s so interested in aging surfaces, surfaces with history, surfaces that bear this beauty of something that’s dying, something that’s ephemeral, something that will go away.”
Installation view of “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly” at the Menil Collection, Houston with Purgatory (3rd Cornice). Photo by Paul Hester.
But the works are also imbued with a certain sense of optimism, depicting these towering living beings that endure despite war, climate change, and all the other issues that plague our modern world.
“Hopeful is a good word. When this blossom comes out each year, that’s something that’s reliable in an unreliable world,” Dean said.
”The fact that they are so old and cared for
is a beautiful thing.”
But then again, at the same time she was working on Sakura, Dean was also making The Wreck of Hope, an even larger, 12-by-24-foot chalk-on-blackboard drawing in the next gallery that depicts a glacier collapsing.
Installation view of “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly” at the Menil Collection, Houston with Beauty and the artist’s monumental blackboard drawings seen through the doors in the next gallery. Photo by Paul Hester.
“It’s just the opposite—how this ice that had been accumulating for millennia was disappearing in an afternoon,” she said of the work, which is named after Caspar David Friedrich’s famed painting of an icy shipwreck.
The work itself is actually at risk of disappearing. To maintain the naturally dustiness of the surface, the artist has chosen not to apply any fixative to the delicately rendered landscape, one of four absolutely massive works in the space created in the medium. (Dean had to retouch the drawings, two of which are on loan from the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, for the installation.)
Tacita Dean, The Wreck of Hope (2022). Courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, NewYork/Paris/Los Angeles. ©Tacita Dean. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
“It’s this idea of the form and content coming together,” White said. “All the works are as precarious and fragile as what they depict. A fleeting celestial phenomenon. A melting iceberg. The clouds.”
Naturally, I had to ask Dean if the works were at all related to the famous blackboard paintings of Cy Twombly, who has been a major touchstone in her career and inspired a new suite of works at the Menil.
The answer was a resounding “no.”
Dean made her first chalk-on-blackboard works during her master’s studies at London’s Slade School of Fine Art from 1990 to ’92. She bought some Masonite because she was having difficulty hanging her drawings on the school’s Hessian weave walls, painted it black with paint she found at home and began drawing on it with white chalk.
Tacita Dean, Delfern Tondo (2024). Photo by Lauren Marek.
When she applied for “New Contemporaries,” the annual U.K. exhibition for emerging art students, in 1992, it was with her makeshift blackboard, with the idea of remaking the drawing for each of the show’s five venues.
“They weren’t actually related to Twombly at all.
And they’re not even very Twombly-like,” Dean said, noting that Twombly’s famed series doesn’t actually use chalk or blackboard, but wax crayon. “[My] blackboards came from a different place.”
But her connection to Twombly has been a touchstone since she first encountered his work at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1987, and decided to write her undergraduate thesis on him.
Tacita Dean, Edwin Parker (2011). Film still courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris/Los Angeles. ©Tacita Dean.
“He’s a hugely important artist in my life and I have filmed him,” Dean said. (Her 2011 piece Edwin Parker, taken from the artist’s given name—Cy was a family nickname—documents him at work in his studio, and will be the third film screened at the Menil.)
When she began working with White to organize the current show, Dean immediately knew she wanted to make some work in response to the Menil’s dedicated Cy Twombly Gallery, installed to the artist’s specifications and celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2025.
“What always interested me was where your mind wanders when you’re sitting in front of somebody else’s artwork. It would be great to note those wanderings down and see where it takes you,” Dean said. “I went and I sat in there, but I
made myself too self-conscious. I was too aware of trying to trap those thoughts and therefore the thoughts weren’t real.”
Tacita Dean, Blind and dusty (2024). Courtesy of the artist. ©Tacita Dean.Photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
The solution, she decided, was to stage an artist residency in the gallery, staying overnight in the space. The Menil had never done anything like it, but the museum was game.
“They sort of locked me in for security,” Dean said.
”I didn’t sleep.
I was awake the whole time, just really experiencing the work and starting to be a bit more playful and trippy in a way,”
Photographs Dean took that night are being made into a new artist’s book, Why Cy, due out next year.
Tacita Dean, Found Cy, Houston (2024). Collection of the Menil Collection, Houston, gift of the artist. ©Tacita Dean.
And Twombly’s spirit is felt in the show in more ways than one. In preparation for the show, White accompanied Dean on a trip to a junk shop, where there was a folder of vintage postcards. Dean reached in, and out came a photo documenting the aftermath of a natural disaster. In the center, in handwriting remarkably like the artist’s own, was the word “Cyclone.”
“Twombly’s father was a Major League Baseball pitcher who had a very fierce pitch, so he was nicknamed Cy Twombly after Cy Young,” White said. “Cy Young was named Cy because his pitch was so forceful it was as fast as the cyclone—so, in fact, Twombly’s name derives from the word cyclone.”
The serendipitous postcard became a work in the show, Found Cy, Houston, that Dean has donated to the Menil.
Tacita Dean, Blind Folly (2024). Courtesy of the artist. ©Tacita Dean.Photo by Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
And in the hallway outside the exhibition are new works that Dean made in response to her gallery residence. The paintings are done on found slates that were painted green for use in classrooms, with Dean’s gestural mark-making adding richness to their aged surfaces.
“These became a way of conversing with Cy Twombly,” White said. “You get these kind of trailing passages. She’s using primarily her finger to smudge into the surface.”
The show’s title comes from one of these works. “Blind Folly” is a Britishism for foolishness, but here it’s a reference to how Dean listens to the medium as she works, leaving the results to chance rather than struggling to realize a predetermined vision.
Tacita Dean, The Sublunaries: Last Quarter (2024). Courtesy of the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris/Los Angeles; and Frith Street Gallery, London. Photo by Studio Tacita Dean/Simon Hanzer, ©Tacita Dean.
“Tacita often uses the term blind to describe how she begins a work of art without knowing where she’s going and letting the journey of the process lead her,” White said. “And that’s also about the materials themselves guiding how she approached the works.”
This interest in experimentation and unexpected material outcomes is why Dean is so committed to analogue film, rather than digital, with its predictable results. It’s also why she doesn’t like starting from scratch from a pristine, blank sheet of paper.
“It gives me performance anxiety sometimes. I’m really bad with any art paper, so I started to just work on things that were already dirty,” Dean said. “I seem to find more pleasure in surfaces that have a history.”
“Tacita Dean: Blind Folly” is on view at the Menil Collection, 1533 Sul Ross Street, Houston, Texas, October 11, 2024–April 19, 2025. More

Recent far-right riots in the U.K., fueled by misinformation and culminating in large anti-fascist marches this summer, have underscored the critical role of art in confronting narratives around immigration.
This fall, London hosts a powerful series of exhibitions that delve into the immigrant experience, countering the mainstream media’s often dehumanizing portrayal of refugees. These shows illuminate diverse stories and, collectively, offer a poignant, universal message—a stark contrast to the climate of hostility seen on the streets.
Last month, the Migration Museum inaugurated its new London location in Lewisham with “All Our Stories” (until December 2025), a survey of artworks like the sculpture Waiting II by Shorsh Saleh, a row of chairs sinking into the ground that evokes the uncertainty of sitting by while impersonal bureaucratic processes determine your future. Other educational installations include a tent inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the sounds and sights of a refugee camp in Calais, a major port connecting France with the U.K.
Lucky Star installation by Angela Hui at “All Our Stories” exhibition at the Migration Muesum in London. Photo: Elzbieta Piekacz.
Another installation by writer Angela Hui is modeled on Lucky Star, the Chinese takeaway restaurant that her parents ran after settling in Wales in 1988. When Hui was growing up she and her brothers helped out behind the counter, which has been faithfully recreated, taking orders over the phone in between finishing their homework. A T.V. in the corner plays a video of Hui’s mother making spring rolls while recounting her journey from China through Hong Kong to the U.K. By picking up the phone and dialling different numbers, visitors can also hear more stories from other second-generation immigrants who grew up in family-owned businesses.
“It was a surreal experience,” Hui said of installing the work, which she describes as “a love letter” to Chinese takeaways. “I would never have thought to see my story in a museum. I just wanted to document the almost thankless job of working in an immigrant-owned hospitality business.” These beloved local restaurants in rural white areas are “often people’s introduction to a different cuisine, the building blocks for their palates to explore new things,” Hui added. Yet, “we don’t often get to see them as having any cultural importance.”
Swedish artist Lap-See Lam grew up in her family’s restaurant Bamboo Garden in Stockholm, and the Chinese restaurant’s position in the Western imagination has long been a subject of interest to her. For her current show at Studio Voltaire in Clapham (until December 15), she presents a film inspired by the Sea Palace, a three-story floating Chinese restaurant that was eventually abandoned and became a spooky attraction at a Swedish amusement park, where it was known as “a ship from the Orient with a thousand year curse”. For Lam, who is representing Sweden at the 60th Venice Biennale, it is a site to explore displacement and loss as well as well as to imagine new Cantonese mythologies.
Installation view of Lap-See Lam, Floating Sea Palace at Studio Voltaire in London, 2024. Photo: Andy Keate, courtesy of the artist and Studio Voltaire.
Inaugurating the new Reflections Room at the London Museum Docklands is Exodus, a sculpture by British-Trinidadian artist Zak Ové, launching November 29 (until May 2025). A wooden table top crammed with toy figurines of cars, trucks, humans, and wild animals all apparently in gridlock rests on Castrol oil drums. Nearby walls will be covered in maps documenting historic networks of trade, tourism, and migration between 1500 and 2005, leaving the viewer to infer how these sweeping global movements relate to each other.
“The history of mankind demonstrates a knowledge of humans walking freely around the Earth, often leaving in large numbers,” said Ové in a press statement. He added that this work is “about the movement of people from African countries, which is symbolic of all people who find themselves in exodus. All vehicles and dolls face the same way as there is only one way out, one way to leave, and only one hope of a future elsewhere.”
The artist’s rarely exhibited snapshots of London’s Black communities will also be included in Tate Modern’s “The 80s: Photographing Britain,” opening November 21 through May 5, 2025.
Over at the Wellcome Collection in Euston, the survey show “Hard Graft” (until April 27, 2025) examines how different forms of labor impact our physical and mental health. A newly commissioned sonic work, Care Chains, by Vietnamese artist Moi Tran, was produced in collaboration with The Voice of Domestic Workers. This U.K.-based support group advocates for the thousands of migrants, predominantly women, who arrive each year from countries like Kenya and the Philippines to work for private households. The artwork uses percussive movements like claps, stomps, and clicks, in an expressive, joyous choreography that centers the body as an instrument—one that feels the toll of providing urgent, arduous, and often invisible care work.
Installation view of Moi Tran, Care Chains (2024) in the exhibition “Hard Graft” at the Wellcome Collection in London. Photo: Wellcome Collection/ Steven Pocock, 2024.
Some institutions in London are preserving untold histories of migration that reveal how its influence on Britain is nothing new. 19 Princelet Street, a house in Spitalfields, was built in the early 18th century for a Huguenot silk merchant who had emigrated from France due to religious persecution. It later became a synagogue, with a basement used for antifascist meetings in the 1930s. Following conservation work, 19 Princelet Street is set to open to the public as a record of the ways in which so many waves of immigration have shaped the East End.
A singular story is spotlighted in “Belongings” (until November 8) by Susan Aldworth at The Arcade, Bush House in the West End. “What does it feel like to leave your home forever?” the exhibition asks, considering the case of Aldworth’s Italian grandmother Luigia Berni who, at the age of just 23 in 1924, moved to London with her young baby. The artist has imagined the contents of the small suitcase in which she carried essentials and vestiges of her old life, embroidering family photographs and stories onto 35 pieces of antique clothing.
Just a stone’s throw away from Bush House, at St Mary le Strand church, renowned stage designer Es Devlin presented Congregation from October 4-9, in partnership with the U.N. Refugee Agency, The Courtauld, and King’s College. The animated installation emerged from a months-long project that saw Devlin welcome 50 Londoners into her studio, all of whom have at some time in their lives been refugees. Each is the subject of a chalk and charcoal portrait.
Installation view of Es Devlin, Congregation at St Mary le Strand church in London in October 2024. Photo: Daniel Devlin.
Participants came from all over the world, including Myanmar, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ukraine, and some chose to recount their stories (their voices filled the cosy chapel). Maya Ghazal, for example, sought asylum in the U.K. from the Syrian civil war and is now training to become a commercial pilot. Dame Stephanie Shirley arrived to the U.K. via the Kindertransport in the late 1930s and, discovering in herself a great love of computers, became a leading businesswoman in the I.T. sector.
Speaking to Artnet News while in the midst of the project in May, Devlin said the portraits are mainly about “porosity between ourselves and others.” She revealed that she is working with The Policy Institute at King’s College in the hope of supporting “systemic change” that might reduce the great peril that refugees subject themselves to, for example when journeying across the English Channel on small boats. “That [mission] is ambitious, but that’s what the work has got to be about.”
For those who missed the brief window to see “Congregation”, Devlin is presenting the same installation and new works from the project as part of “Face to Face: 50 Encounters with Strangers,” a free exhibition opening at Somerset House on November 23 until January 12, 2025. Concurrently, The Policy Institute will hold public discussions with leading researchers on asylum and migration policy as part of its season “Lost & Found: Stories of sanctuary and belonging.” More

Gerard Malanga spent most of the 1960s working with Andy Warhol at his New York Factory. He worked together with the Pop artist on his silkscreens, shot and starred in his films, and danced with the Velvet Underground, undertaking both administrative and Superstar duties. As a photographer, Malanga also kept his camera running, capturing the creative and at times playful scene that surrounded Warhol.
“I just felt it was important to at least document the milieu that I was a part of,” he recalled in 2009, “because what was happening was important.”
Gerard Malanga. Photo: © Gerard Malanga. Courtesy The Waverly Press.
Now, three films by Malanga, some long unseen, have been revisited and restored under the auspices of Waverly Press. The project coincides with the making of a forthcoming monograph, Gerard Malanga: Secret Cinema, authored by the Trust’s director of galleries and public art, Anastasia James. In a presentation by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust on December 14, the 16mm works, newly transferred to 4K, will have their world premiere at the Harris Theater in Pittsburgh, Warhol’s birthplace.
Collaborating with Malanga for more than a decade, James told me over email, “has underscored the urgency of preserving these films, which capture the raw energy and complexity of the 1960s avant-garde. I can’t understate how integral Gerard’s films are to a fuller understanding of Warhol’s legacy and restoring them and presenting them ensures that they are accessible to both scholars and a new generation of viewers.”
Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol. Photo: © Gerard Malanga. Courtesy The Waverly Press.
Malanga joined Warhol’s studio in 1963, where he would become instrumental as the artist developed works including Triple Elvis (1963), his “Flowers” series (1964), and his collection of Screen Tests, which featured famous names and faces. Though often remembered as Warhol’s “assistant,” his actual role in the Factory bled beyond that. “His influence,” James stressed, “was indispensable in shaping the Factory’s aesthetic and intellectual ethos.”
Evidence is in the three newly restored films, which chronicle Malanga’s work at the studio. Among them, Film Notebooks, 1964–1970, previously presented at the 2005 Vienna International Film Festival, compiles a trove of footage that offers a behind-the-scenes peek at the Factory goings-on. It includes views of a performance by the Velvet Underground at Paraphernalia, Edie Sedgwick applying makeup, Warhol filming Sedgwick applying said makeup, and Bob Dylan and Salvador Dalí sitting for their Screen Tests.
Gerard Malanga, Film Notebooks, 1964–1970. Photo: © Gerard Malanga. Courtesy The Waverly Press.
The Filmmaker Records a Portion of His Life in the Month of August, 1968 taps that same vein of documentary. As it says on the tin, the 15-minute film serves as Malanga’s visual diary, which he recorded using an 8mm Keystone camera gifted to him by artist and filmmaker Marie Menken. Warhol shows up, as do New York avant-gardists including Marian Zazeela and La Monte Young.
Perhaps the most remarkable of the trio of films is Andy Warhol: Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man (1964), in which the Pop artist himself becomes subject of a Screen Test. Over 20 minutes, Warhol is filmed in close-up, under various lighting experiments, with and without his trademark sunglasses, his vulnerability on rare display.
“I made this series of film portraits of Andy Warhol at the Silver Factory in 1964 and 1965 as seven individual three-minute sequences, on different days,” Malanga said in a statement about Portraits. “It’s basically mimicking the Screen Tests that we were doing at the time.”
To James, this particular film is unique for its unprecedented view of a famously elusive character: “Here, Warhol slips in and out of a constructed persona, revealing the delicate dance between presence and image, artist and icon.” She describes it as “among the most revealing and intimate documents of the artist I have ever seen.”
Gerard Malanga. Photo: © Gerard Malanga. Courtesy The Waverly Press.
According to James, Malanga’s films are scattered across personal and institutional collections, with some of them remaining in his own archive. Yet more reels were unearthed during the research process for the Malanga monograph.
Over many months, experts from “one of the best film labs in the U.S.,” said James, worked to preserve the films, making sure to retain their original textures and material aspects. The entire process was further supervised by analog film specialists, who were on hand to tackle issues from degradation to color correction.
Gerard Malanga, The Filmmaker Records a Portion of His Life in the Month of August, 1968. Photo: © Gerard Malanga. Courtesy The Waverly Press.
Malanga’s films will be presented at the theater in conjunction with “Roger Jacoby: Pittsburgh Stories,” an exhibition and film program highlighting the late experimental filmmaker. Beginning in the 1970s, Jacoby’s work evidenced both inventive techniques and personal themes; he also ran in similar circles to Malanga, who introduced him to the Factory (Jacoby’s long-time partner was Warhol Superstar Ondine). Jacoby produced eight films before his untimely death at 41 in 1985.
James’s research has uncovered further and deeper ties between Jacoby and Malanga. For her, their connection bears out the Factory as a lively place of artistic production and experimentation as much as “social and creative exchange”—a moment that Malanga duly captured.
“They are a testament to Malanga’s role as a connector and collaborator,” she added of his films, “highlighting his influence on the artists who would define the era, while also showcasing the social dynamics that Warhol’s camera, often focused on the artist himself, might otherwise have missed.”
“Gerard Malanga: Secret Cinema” is on view at the Harris Theater, 803 Liberty Avenue, Pittsburgh, on December 14. More

Typewriters from the storied collection of actor Tom Hanks will start the new year in Sag Harbor, as Barneys creative director, author, and Shelter Island resident Simon Doonan brings to life “Some of Tom’s Typewriters.” The show opens January 11, 2025, at the Church Sag Harbor, established by artists April Gornik and Eric Fischl, marking the latest installment in their community art center’s fascination with “the life of things,” a release stated, following whimsical shows around “material culture” exploring objects like bikes and guitars.
Fischl reached out to Hanks—with whom he shares friends—about staging a show after seeing the actor’s 2016 film California Typewriter, the Church’s executive director Sheri Pasquarella told me over email. Hanks has selected 35 specimens spanning the typewriter’s existence which Doonan will arrange into an installation. “Simon was initially sought because of his amazing and iconic way of bringing life to objects through ingenious, often low-fi, techniques that are resonant with our own approach,” Pasquarella said.
A Robotron typewriter in Tom Hanks’s collection. Photo courtesy of the Collection of Tom Hanks / The Church, Sag Harbor.
“The exquisite edit of the Tom Hanks typewriter collection will delight visitors of all ages,” Doonan, whose mother was a typist, reads the release. “These machines—strange, complex but also ridiculously simple—have so much to teach us about history and culture. This is why I leapt at the chance to design this installation. My goal is to spotlight the charm, engineering majesty, and social/historical [meaning] of these fascinating artifacts. After all, the soundtrack of the 20th century is the magical clacking and pinging of a typewriter. Clack, clack, clack… ping!”
A Remington typewriter in Tom Hanks’s collection. Photo courtesy of the Collection of Tom Hanks / The Church, Sag Harbor.
As the story goes, Hanks received his first typewriter from a friend who had upgraded to a newer model. When Hanks took that typewriter to get serviced in 1978, the Cleveland repair shop associate told him not to bother.
“He explained to me that I was in possession of a toy,” Hanks recalled in one interview. “It was a thing that looked like a typewriter but it was made of plastic. It was a hunk of junk. It was badly designed, and poorly manufactured.” Hanks left with a new model—and perspective. “That guy altered my concept of the place a typewriter can hold in your life,” the actor told NPR.
A Cole Steel typewriter in Tom Hanks’s collection. Photo courtesy of the Collection of Tom Hanks / The Church, Sag Harbor.
Hanks uses typewriters for thank you notes and to-do lists. In 2017, he wrote a book of short stories centered on these analog appliances, and he has been known to make room in his collection by sending pieces of it to unwitting, delighted strangers. In 2012, a podcast got Hanks to appear by sending him a spiffy 1934 Corona Smith. In 2018, Hanks even responded to a high schooler who wrote to him upon reading his book by sending her a typewriter—and a hand-typed letter wishing her the best while using it.
Although further specifics about “Some of Tom’s Typewriters” are still in the works, Pasquarella promised that “a bold emphasis on color and the role of the typewriter in advertising, popular culture, and film [will] all figure heavily into the design of the show and exhibition space.” More

It was a crisp night in early October when Project for Empty Space (PES) unveiled its new expansion to Ironside Newark. The 2,500-square-foot space in the redeveloped warehouse had been transformed into a gallery displaying colorful still life paintings, photographs, and other works by New York artist Azikiwe Mohammed.
“Most of these I did with no brushes,” Mohammed confided in me. Instead, he uses a variety of different paint markers, delighting in the unexpected chemical reactions that occur when he combines different brands, such as alcohol-based ink and acrylics that start to bubble when used together.
The show represents the fruits of the first year of his 2023–2025 stint as an artist in residence at PES, which specializes in artists whose work hopes to have a social impact.
It’s been a busy year for the Newark nonprofit, run by Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Pauline Jampol. It also reopened its flagship at 800 Broad Street in September, following a yearlong renovation funded by a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, plus assistance from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority’s Activation, Revitalization, and Transformation program.
Project for Empty Space’s renovated flagship. Photo courtesy of Project for Empty Space, Newark.
At the same time, the directors were also launching “Body Freedom for Every(Body),” a mobile exhibition promoting trans and reproductive rights currently crisscrossing the country in a 27-foot-long box truck. (The last stop will be at Art Basel Miami Beach in December.)
The new Ironside space is just down the block from PES’s main location, creating a new campus. It is part of what the city has dubbed Newark Grounds, an initiative meant to connect 75 of the city’s public artworks and arts and culture spaces through a walkable cultural corridor.
And while PES Ironside is technically on the second floor, the back of the building opens onto a plaza, letting visitors enter directly into the exhibition space.
“Azikiwe Mohammed: Trains, Buses, and the Four C’s” at Project for Empty Space Ironside, Newark. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“It’s this amazing thing where we can present art to folks who are not searching for art,” Jampol told me.
“Azikiwe Mohammed: Trains, Buses, and the Four C’s” is a particularly eye-catching show with which to inaugurate the space. The walls are painted in vibrant shades of orange, teal, and robin’s egg blue. The paintings are displayed in a charmingly mismatched array of thrifted frames, and the space is invitingly scattered with couches and chairs, some of which are painted sculptures by the artist.
For the opening, Mohammed had carefully planned out every detail of the evening, from the mason jar mugs he had hand-painted for each place setting to the tablecloths, featuring his photographs, which he planned to donate to a thrift store once the night was done. (The leftover food, meanwhile, Mohammed would offer to unhoused people in the neighborhood.)
Azikiwe Mohammed designed the tablescapes for the opening reception for his show at Project for Empty Space Ironside. Photo courtesy of Project for Empty Space, Newark.
He had enlisted a local restaurant owner, Kai Campbell, to prepare the dinner, with a menu that included lasagna and Jamaican rasta pasta. For dessert, artist Paul John, head of community at New Inc., and Elizabeth Cocco, the head of VIP relations for NADA, had brought a cooler full of their homemade vegan ice cream. (It was fantastic.) To serve it, Mohammed even thrifted porcelain bowls to match the colors of the saffron- and passionfruit-flavored treats.
I am embarrassed to admit that I initially mistook Mohammed for part of the event’s catering staff, dressed as he was in an apron and chef’s hat. But the apron featured more of the artist’s photography, and he was in character as Leroy, the proprietor of Leroy’s Luncheon, a project he’s staged at 1-54 art fair and Canada gallery, both in New York last year.
Feeding people, it turns out, is part and parcel of his practice. You see, Mohammed is a problem solver, and he sees art not as a vessel for his own artistic vision, but as part of his tool kit as an activist.
Azikiwe Mohammed’s New Davonhaime Food Bank fed 200 people at an event held at Project for Empty Space in Newark as part of the artist’s residency there. Photo courtesy of Project for Empty Space, Newark.
“I don’t believe in inspiration. It’s for lazy people,” Mohammed told me. “What’s the problem? Solve the problem. Nobody got no damn foods? Make paintings of food. Sell them. Buy food with the money from your fake food and then give it to people so they can have real food.”
Since 2019, the Tribeca native has run his own downtown food pantry, the New Davonhaime Food Bank, feeding the hungry through a combination of restaurant donations and food he buys in large part with the proceeds of his art career. (The name is a portmanteau of New Orleans, Detroit, Jackson, Birmingham, and Savannah—the five U.S. cities with the highest-density African-American populations.)
Its headquarters are the Black Painters Academy, Mohammed’s free art school that he opened in Chinatown in 2021, but the artist organizes food distributions across the city as his resources permit. And in June, for New Jersey’s North to Shore Festival, the food bank came to PES, operating for one day out of the new Broad Street galleries.
A painting by Azikiwe Mohammed. Photo courtesy of Project for Empty Space, Newark.
“It is one of the most impactful programs that we have ever done. To invite homeless people into our space even before it opened, give them an art show and a warm meal—it was a little eye-opening to me,” Jampol said. “We fed 200 people and sent them home with groceries.”
For Mohammed, it was all part of his mission as an artist—and his life’s work.
“People are hungry, and I can make up money where it doesn’t exist. Look, I just made a Jell-O cake,” he said, pointing behind me to a still life of the jiggly red dessert hanging on the wall. “I can go ‘magic wand,’ make that into real Jell-O. That’s crazy. It’d be irresponsible to not do something with that.”
“Azikiwe Mohammed: Trains, Buses, and the Four C’s” is on view at Project for Empty Space Ironside, 110 Edison Place, Newark, New Jersey, October 11, 2024– January 25, 2025. More

Several prominent French art critics have lambasted the Musée d’Orsay’s blockbuster exhibition on the Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte, titled “Painting Men.”
The show (on view until January 19, 2025) is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see a large body of the artist’s oeuvre, thanks to exceptional loans. Despite praise, some critics from across the political spectrum argue that the exhibit places too much emphasis on a gendered interpretation of Caillebotte’s work, suggesting he was gay—a point for which there’s little supporting evidence, and arguably, one that shouldn’t matter. These critics also largely attribute this interpretive approach to American perspectives on art.
“The Musée d’Orsay, under the influence of its American partner coproducers, chose to study the painter’s ‘masculinity,’” writes Le Figaro’s Eric Biétry-Rivierre, leading the charge against the gender-themed exhibit in an early review. The show will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Art Institute of Chicago (A.I.C.), and was jointly organized by a leading curator from each institution: Paul Perrin at the Musée d’Orsay, Scott Allan at the Getty, and Gloria Groom at the A.I.C.
More recently, a writer at the leftist Libération exclaimed that American-developed gender studies in art history have “crossed the Atlantic and landed,” at the Paris institution. Joined by a third critic at Le Monde, they agreed with Le Figaro, that curators took a “biased” view of the artist’s practice, focusing on his more numerous depictions of men over that of women as further evidence that Caillebotte was gay. This, critics point out, is supported by “suggestive” wall texts throughout the show, featuring some 140 artworks.
In his searing review, Le Monde’s Harry Bellet notes the absence of Caillebotte’s later paintings of flowers. Their “pistils”—the female organs of the flower—”were surely not suggestive enough, or would, on the contrary, contradict the curators’ argument,” he writes. Philippe Lancon, of Liberation, holds little back when he states, “Contrary to what the wall labels heavily insinuate, nothing proves that Caillebotte, who lived with a woman, was gay, and to be honest, it doesn’t matter.”
Gustave Caillebotte Nu au divan (c. 1880) oil on canvas. 129.5 x 195.6 cm. Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of art, The John R. Van Derlip Fund, 67.67 Image Courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art
Indeed, no information exists about the artist’s sexual orientation, and the curators have repeatedly said no conclusive information was found on the topic. Nevertheless, the ensuing, rather jumbled debate has brought the question further to the fore, suggesting that to some degree, it does appear to matter after all.
The exhibition’s introductory texts state that the artist made unusual depictions of men for his time, often bachelors captured in domestic, intimate settings typically reserved for the “women’s sphere” in the 19th century. “It is these subjects and that ‘gender trouble’ (as the philosopher Judith Butler put it), that give the artist’s work much of its vital tension and subversive power, which this exhibition and its catalogue seek to explore,” reads the show’s press release.
In interviews, the catalogue, and wall texts, curators vacillate between asserting that we know nothing about his sexual orientation; questioning potentially homoerotic desires on Caillebotte’s part; and stating that he was simply painting his surroundings, which happened to include a lot of men.
The Art Institute of Chicago’s Groom rejected both the notion that the Americans had influenced the French in the show’s making, and that it implied Caillebotte was gay. After reading those accusations in the Figaro review, she told me, “I was amused, because he was saying the Americans inflicted their wokeness on Paris.” In fact, “the idea for this exhibition came from Paris.”
Groom defended the exhibit’s gendered lens, claiming that Caillebotte broke from other Impressionists who regularly painted women (a subject that was easier to sell) and instead showed the male-dominated world around him. His subjects were depicted with stark honesty, whether bathing, rowing boats, lounging on a sofa, or defecating. This was an exceptional, modern approach, deserving of attention, she argued. “His subject matter is very radical during the time, because men were not supposed to stare at men, and he’s staring at men,” she said. “It’s the elephant in the room. It’s what makes him so different.”
She added that several works are “definitely sensuous, [there’s] definitely a gaze, and definitely an appreciation of the male body and the male sportsman, and things that make males male … you can say that. But is that homosexuality? I think that’s a bridge too far,” she said. “He’s looking for a way to come up with a modern form of masculinity.”
Gustave Caillebotte, Raboteurs de parquets (The Floor Scrapers) (1875). Photo © musée d’Orsay, dits. RMN – Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt
“The exhibit affirms nothing concerning the artist’s sexuality,” the Orsay’s curator Perrin told me. “However, it does not forbid itself from asking the question: ‘What is the gaze of one man on another man about?’ [and] ‘What is eroticism when applied to the masculine body?’”
Perrin notes that one section of the exhibition features three major nudes, including a large painting of a woman and another of a man drying himself after a bath, which was inspired by Degas’ depictions of bathing women. In Caillebotte’s unusual rendering, the toned buttocks of the almost life-sized man become the focal point. With this 1884 painting, Man at His Bath, “we evoke that question because the artwork asks us to […] or to put it differently, the question of desire in painting,” Perrin added. “Caillebotte may not have had a sexual preference that he recognized during his life, but it might also not prevent him from having a kind of gaze, in which there is a bit of desire,” he said.
The French curator also felt the Le Figaro article had unfairly put the exhibit on “trial” for referencing gender studies. The discipline “clearly scares a lot of people, because there’s an impression art is being used for ideological purposes, which is not the case here. [Gender studies] is just a tool for modern art historians, which allows us to better understand the artworks.”
He confirmed the exhibit was not influenced by his American collaborators, and that the Paris museum chose the theme, before it was further elaborated upon by the trio of curators from all three institutions. Still, he observed that American art historians have been more interested in the question of gender and sexuality than French counterparts. “I wouldn’t deny that there is an Anglo-Saxon art historic influence on ways of looking at painting […] but the United States did not impose anything on this exhibit,” he said.
The show organizers had also strived to offer a fresh take on Caillebotte, who is celebrated for his groundbreaking, almost photographic framing, combined with unusual perspective. But if his framing and composition is so critical, shouldn’t we look at his subjects of choice, asks Perrin? “We’re not here to endlessly repeat the same saintly history of Impressionism. It’s the role of museums to also question artworks and place them in relation to current interrogations, without ever falling into an anachronism,” he said.
Gustave Caillebotte, Le Pont de l’Europe (1876). Oil on canvas. 125 x 180 cm. Geneva Association des amis du Petit Palais, 111 © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Some of the exhibition interpretation does go way out on a limb when describing imagined narratives in some of the paintings. For instance, in the iconic painting showing one of Paris’ new, industrial bridges, Le Pont de l’Europe [The Europe Bridge] (1876) a man walks towards the viewer, said to be a self-portrait of the artist. He turns back slightly to a woman walking just behind and to his left, but he simultaneously glances at a man in front of him, who is leaning over the bridge railing, admiring the view. “Has the man just accosted a sex worker?” the show’s label asks, apparently in reference the woman in the painting. “Is he not, in fact, more interested in the worker towards whom his gaze seems to be directed …?”
Such questions are scattered throughout, adding confusion to the compelling thesis the curators have expressed in interviews and in the catalogue. Namely, that Caillebotte painted men differently than his contemporaries did, just as he painted women differently, for that matter, with an extraordinary, and unmatched modern lens. One that strove at all costs to convey with honesty the life he experienced around him.
Gusave Caillebotte, Boating party also called Rower in a Top Hat (Canotier en chapeau haut de forme) (1877) Private collection Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images.
It was a vision that considered men in all states and forms, including what would be considered flattering at the time, or not at all, making for an unlikely subject of a painting. It was also a risk Caillebotte could take. Born into wealth, he did not need to sell his paintings to make a living. Thus, male subjects can be found lounging and reading literature on sofas, in what are considered more “feminine” activities for the time, per the exhibit, or as more “manly” men: rowing boats, or else as soldiers bored or relieving themselves.
These men are also painted right up close, as in the Boating Party (ca. 1877-78) acquired by the Musée d’Orsay in 2022, where the viewer is positioned near enough to smell the sweat of the handsome man across from them wielding the oars. Caillebotte radically recoded painting genres of his time, and that seems to be the central takeaway the Musée d’Orsay hopes to convey. Unfortunately, it ultimately stumbles in its efforts. More

British diver Tom Daley has made headlines at the Olympics for 16 years now, not just for the five medals he’s won, but also for his penchant for knitting in the stands, creating some pretty fabulous sweaters while cheering on his fellow competitors. Now, his handiwork is being honored with an exhibition at Tokyo’s Parco Museum.
Tokyo, of course, was where the world first learned of the famed athlete’s prowess with the knitting needle. Daley, hard at work at a handmade sweater, was quite the sight in the stands. The result was an impressive white cardigan, with the Olympic rings and “Team GB” on the back.
“I’d been knitting since March 2020, but no one really cared until they saw me do it at the Olympics,” Daley, now age 30, told the Guardian. “I think some people thought I didn’t care about the Olympics, that I was just knitting. Some people thought it was brave to be knitting in public, and some thought: ‘What the hell is he doing?’”
Great Britain’s Tom Daley knitting as he watches the Women’s Synchronised 3m Springboard Final at the Aquatics Centre on the first day of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games in France. Photo by Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images.
Daley had already been a star since bursting onto the Olympic scene at the 2008 Beijing games, after winning European diving gold at the age of just 13. But his knitting won Daley legions of new fans, who were delighted to see him back at it at this year’s Paris Olympics.
He now has a dedicated knitting Instagram account, @madewithlovebytomdaley, with 1.4 million followers (his main account has another 4 million), a clothing line of the same name, and a book, Made With Love, compiling 30 of his knitting and crochet patterns.  A bona fide museum show will only help further spread the word of his artistic activities.
Tom Daley at the new exhibition in Tokyo, 2024. Photo: Richard A. Brooks / AFP via Getty Images.
“Over a year in the making, I’m proud to share my knitting journey back where it all began!” Daley wrote on Instagram, noting that the show would feature “some of my favorite creations.”
“If there was an Olympic gold for knitting,” the official Instagram account of Olympics responded approvingly.

There may not be a knitting event at the games yet, but Daley has done remarkably well in his chosen sport.
Over five games, he has taken home two individual bronzes in the 10 meter platform event, plus a medal in each color for synchronized platform diving, most recently a bronze in Paris. (The lone gold was in Tokyo, with Matty Lee.)
Tom Daley of Team Great Britain is seen knitting during the Men’s Synchronized 3m Springboard Final on day seven of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)
In Paris, Daley completed a fetching blue jumper with his last name written across the back, and a bottom border of alternating French and British flags. He announced his retirement the day after the closing ceremony.
His passion for his crafty hobby is keeping Daley busy now that his diving career has come to an end. He is in Tokyo for the opening, teaching a live knitting workshop at the museum.

“Knitting is an important part of my life and it’s what calms me,” Daley told British craft and entertainment magazine Prima. “Through this exhibition, I would like to share with as many people as possible the joy of making things and the comfort that knitting brings to the heart.”
“Made with Love by Tom Daley” is on view at the Parco Museum Tokyo, Shibuya, Japan, 〒150-0042 Tokyo, Shibuya City, Udagawacho, 15−1 渋谷パルコ 4F, November 8–25, 2025. More

Pomellato founder Pino Rabolini hailed from a long line of goldsmiths. In 1967, however, he broke from tradition to test his hypothesis that a playful pret-a-porter approach and avant-garde eye could shake up the stodgy fine art jewelry sphere. Rabolini’s hunch proved correct.
For six decades now, his Milanese house has adorned cultural icons with inventive designs setting colorful gems set amongst Pomellato’s signature, rich rose gold. Their Nudo ring in particular has become a cult classic. Helmut Newton shot Pomellato’s early black and white campaigns, but today the house experiments with advancements like artificial intelligence. Still, Pomellato remains true to Rabolini’s daring vision by periodically returning to their most legendary silhouettes.
The exhibition’s outdoor entryway. Image: Pomellato.
The luxury jeweler is now ready for its first retrospective, which just opened at Shanghai’s Fosun Art Foundation this past weekend. The exhibition, “Art & Jewelry: Pomellato’s Legacy of Creativity and Craftsmanship, From 1967 to Today,” showcases over 100 mesmerizing jewels alongside rarely-displayed archival campaigns shot by Lord Snowdon, Peter Lindbergh and more over the years. Alba Cappellieri, head of jewelry design at the Polytechnic University of Milan, curated this ultra-luxe showcase.
A photo from Michel Comte’s 1994-95 Pomellato campaign features here to the left amongst the exhibition. Image: Pomellato.
The exhibition opened to the public on November 3, and kicked off with a glitzy gala the night before. Acclaimed pianist Wu Muye and the Shanghai Theater Academy both performed. Star-studded attendees included Hong Kong actress Janice Man, Winter Olympics champion Yang Yang, and fashion columnist Teresa Cheung.
A hallway within the show leading towards a glamor shot from one campaign circa 1970. Image: Pomellato.
Italian photographer Gian Paolo Barbieri’s 1971 shot of actress Lilly Bistrattin wearing Pomellato’s iconic Wave Collection greets guests entering into the show’s red lacquered exterior portal. The spectacle begins with an ode to Milan, before immersing viewers in the aesthetics of each decade in Pomellato’s existence. The 1970s area highlights “bold and highly creative chains that epitomize the era’s free-spirited aesthetic,” Pomellato’s press release explains. The 1980s installment embodies the period’s “audacious spirit” through vivid hues. The 1990s-themed area remembers third wave feminism “through generous, sculptural volumes in jewelry design.”
“Art & Jewelry” concludes with an eye towards the future. Chinese artist Chen Man, who has photographed the likes of Grimes, encapsulates society’s more expansive ideas about femininity through Pomellato’s latest Iconica line. Alberto Maria Colombo—the talent behind their AI ad campaign last year—has joined fellow Milanese artist Anna Paladini in crafting “an artistic experience” intent on “underscoring AI-generated portraits encompassing the multifaceted nature of Pomellato’s timeless women.”
Chen Man’s contribution to the show, shot this year. © Chen Man.
“We are thrilled to share our passion, craftsmanship, and joyful spirit through this beautifully curated exhibition, inspiring a new audience to embrace our jewels as empowering statements of personal style,” Pomellato group CEO Sabina Belli remarked in the release.

“Art & Jewelry: Pomellato’s Legacy of Creativity and Craftsmanship, From 1967 to Today” remains on view through November 24. More