Art & Exhibitions

Time has been kind to New York’s Guggenheim. Today, it’s considered Frank Lloyd Wright’s crowning statement and an unequivocal masterpiece of modern architecture, but upon opening in 1959, its revolutionary form drew comparisons to a washing machine, marshmallow, and a giant corkscrew.
The chairs Wright designed for the museum’s café were no less futuristic. Sleek and minimalist with a spun aluminum tulip base and an eye-shaped backrest, they seem to belong on the flight deck of a ship gliding through the solar system. They were never realized. Now, nearly seven decades later, the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) has commissioned a pair as part of a new exhibition that reframes Wright’s furniture within the Wisconsinite’s practice and American modernism more broadly.
Frank Lloyd Wright Café Chairs for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photo: courtesy MOWA/the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ.
To produce the café chairs, curators worked with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to uncover his drawings, before sharing them with a multigenerational metal-spinning company in Milwaukee. It’s an approach organizers have taken a further 10 times working with master artisans (including Wright’s great-grandson, S. Lloyd Natof) for “Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design.” Across 40 pieces, the show highlights five distinct periods between 1911 and 1959, years in which Wright drifted from the horizontal lines and design strictures of his Prairie School.
If there’s one thing a person with even a passing interest in Wright knows, it’s his concept of organic architecture, a vision in which every element, from the carpet to the planters to, yes, the chairs, forms part of a harmonious whole. And yet, Wright’s furniture has received little attention, with few scholarly books and even fewer exhibitions on the subject.
Frank Lloyd Wright in his studio at Taliesin, Wisconsin, 1957. Photo: Tony Vaccaro / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.
This absence caught the attention of Eric Vogel, scholar-in-residence at the Taliesin Institute, who began digging into the archives and networking, a journey that led him to MOWA, which was showing a collection of Wright chairs. In Thomas Szolwinski, the museum’s curator of architecture and design, Vogel found a partner.
“I’d long been interested in curating a chair exhibition,” Szolwinski said over email. “The central premise is that Wright’s homes and studios, Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and later Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, functioned as laboratories of creative experiment.”
Frank Lloyd Wright chair and table for the Tree Room. Photo: courtesy MOWA/the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ.
Wright would design around 200 chairs and enjoyed a fraught relationship with them—at once considering them key to a room’s integrity, while also calling sitting “an unfortunate necessity.”Here, the story begins with Wright rebuilding Taliesin East following major fires in 1914 and 1925. There, he combined a new architecture with unprecedented furniture forms (ones whose originality would, in time, be rejected by clients). MOWA has recreated Wright’s armchair, which is made from sandy cypress wood that matches the building’s color and horizontal gold leaf joints that echo the exterior’s window slats. Elsewhere, there’s the triangular chair and table for the complex’s tree room that chimes with elements of the ceiling and a chair for the Hillside dining room chair.
Frank Lloyd Wright “Mori” chair for the S. Mori Oriental Art Studio and Japanese Print Shop, Chicago. Photo: courtesy MOWA/the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Scottsdale, AZ.
Out west, a highlight is the origami armchair Wright designed in 1946. It sees the designer looking back to his frequent visits to Japan in the 1910s with sides like well-creased paper and arms that unfold before the sitter. Its seat takes on the copper-red tone (known as Cherokee Red) that traced throughout the property. It’s a far heftier proposition than the slender oak chair he designed for a Chicago gallery of Japanese art in 1914, which arrives at MOWA on loan from the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust in Oak Park.
At a time when the lines between architecture, interior spaces, and product design are well and truly blurred, “Modern Chair Design” is a reminder of Wright’s prescience. “Time and again, Wright was ahead of what later became standardized or popularized techniques,” Szolwinski said. “We highlight these parallels and make comparisons to global trends, showing how Wright’s furniture fits into a larger narrative of modern design.”
“Frank Lloyd Wright: Modern Chair Design” is on view at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, 205 Veterans Ave, West Bend, Wisconsin, October 4, 2025–January 25, 2026. More

History’s great women artists have, in recent years, received glimmers of the institutional attention they’ve long deserved. While Hilma af Klint and Artemisia Gentileschi have broken through to the mainstream with major museum exhibitions, still many more influential and daring talents are waiting to be rediscovered by the wider public. Enthusiasm and momentum continue to grow for these stories, thankfully, and this year, a number of museums big and small have turned their attention to their work. Below, we’ve selected just a few of the solo exhibitions highlighting historic women artists worth seeking out this fall.

1. “Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch” at Spelman College, AtlantaThrough December 6, 2025
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet,​ Discontent (1929).​  Gift of Miss Eleanor Green and Miss Ellen D. Sharpe. Courtesy of Spelman College.
Born to a Narragansett father and a Black mother, sculptor Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890–1960) was the first woman of color to graduate from the acclaimed Rhode Island School of Design. Her career would take her to New York and Paris. Still, throughout her lifetime, the Afro-Indigenous artist navigated an often-hostile art world and struggled, at times, with extreme poverty. She nevertheless continued to produce sculptures of intense poignancy and precise technical skill. “I Will Not Bend an Inch,” co-curated by the RISD Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, now makes its third stop in Atlanta; the exhibition is the first museum presentation of Prophet’s works, many of which have, unfortunately, been lost or destroyed over the decades. Twenty rare works make up the exhibition, including nine portrait heads carved in hardwood, as well as marble carvings, reliefs, and works on paper. These works are a testament to a remarkable and unyielding artistic vision and one deserving of much wider scholarly attention.
2. “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” at Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WIThrough December 23, 2025
Toshiko Takaezu with works later combined in the “Star Series” (ca. 1994–2001), including (from left to right) Sahu, Nommo, Emme Ya, Unas, and Po Tolo (Dark Companion), 1998. Photo: Tom Grotta, © Family of Toshiko Takaezu, Courtesy browngrotta arts
Interest in American artist Toshiko Takaezu has ignited over the past few years, driven in part by this very exhibition, which originated at the Noguchi Museum in New York last spring. Takaezu, who was born in Hawai‘i of Okinawan heritage, is best known for her glazed “closed form” ceramic sculptures. These forms ranged in scale from the handheld to the monumental; she approached these vessels as her three-dimensional canvases painting onto their surfaces. Takaezu was known for arranging her works to create unique environments. Her practice also incorporated weaving and bronze-cast sculpture, also highlighted in the exhibition.  In some ways, this exhibition is a homecoming for Takaezu; the artist taught at UW-Madison from 1954 to 1955.
3. “Edmonia Lewis: Indelible Impressions” at the Cantor Arts Center, StanfordThrough January 4, 2026
Edmonia Lewis, Asleep, (1871). Photo: John Janca.
Sculptor Edmonia Lewis, a 19th-century woman of Black and Native American (Ojibwe) heritage, was internationally famous in her own time, celebrated for her stirring Neoclassical marble sculptures. Visitors to her studio included President Ulysses S. Grant, Pope Pius IX, and Frederick Douglass.
Born in upstate New York in 1844, Lewis briefly enrolled in Oberlin College (one of the few schools to accept Black women), before moving to Boston in 1863, where she began her career. By 1866, Lewis had set sail for Rome, where she studied alongside the most celebrated sculptors of her time.
In 1873, she visited the Bay Area, where she presented her sculptures, Asleep (1871),  Awake (1872), and Bust of Abraham Lincoln (1871), to great acclaim. These three sculptures are presented reunited for the first time in three decades in an intimate exhibition. The show marks an important moment of renewed interest in Lewis. Early next year, the Peabody Essex Museum will present “Said in Stone” which positions Lewis’s works alongside those of her contemporaries in an expansive 100-object exhibition.
4. “Lee Miller” at Tate Britain, LondonThrough February 15, 2026
Lee Miller, Model with lightbulb, Vogue Studio, London, England (ca.1943). © Lee Miller Archives, England 2024. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk
The mania for all things Lee Miller reaches its zenith. The surrealist photographer and war journalist has been everywhere in culture over the last few years, from the release of Lee, a biopic of her life starring Kate Winslet, an exhibition of her works at Gagosian New York, and the publication of a book of her correspondence with her husband, Arthur Penrose.
Now, Tate Britain has opened the most extensive retrospective of her photography in the U.K. to date. The exhibition includes approximately 250 vintage and modern prints, from her years in Paris’s Surrealist scene to her unflinching bravery as a war photographer documenting World War II. The exhibition also includes rarely seen works, such as a series of Egyptian landscapes taken in the 1930s. The highlights are her tender and unusual portraits of fellow artists.
5. “Michaelina Wautier, Painter,” at Kunsthistorisches Museum, ViennaThrough February 22, 2026
Michaelina Wautier, Der Triumph des Bacchus. Image Courtesy of © KHM-Museumsverband.
For centuries, Michaelina Wautier’s paintings were attributed to men, particularly her brother, the artist Carl Wautier. The Flemish Baroque painter, who lived from 1604 to 1689, worked across a dazzling range of genres, from portraits and history scenes to flower still lifes and religious tableaux. Historians doubted a woman would have had that ability. Wautier could have been lost to history if art historian Katlijne Van der Stighelen hadn’t found a painting by Wautier in a storage area of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum back in 1993. The discovery set Van der Stighelen on a decades-long mission to discover Wauter’s story. Now, in a fitting moment, the Kunsthistorisches Museum is hosting the largest exhibition of Wautier’s works to date, with 29 paintings, a drawing, and a print—the near entirety of her known work—on view.  The star of the exhibition is arguably her monumental Triumph of Bacchus (1655–59), which some historians believe includes a goddess-like (and provocative) depiction of the artist herself.
6. “Grace Hartigan: The Gift of Attention” at the Portland Museum of Art, OregonOctober 10, 2025–January 11, 2026
Grace Hartigan, Barbara Guest Archaics (1968) Grace Hartigan Estate © Grace Hartigan Estate Photo: Courtesy of the Estate of Grace Hartigan/ACA Galleries, New York
During the 1950s, Grace Hartigan was an artistic sensation who mingled with poets and writers, including Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, Daisy Aldan, and James Merrill. Hartigan was critically acclaimed for her works that freely danced between abstraction and figuration.  This major exhibition, which was organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art, brings together 40 of her works created between 1952 and 1968, which show her at the pinnacle of her powers, and the deep influence of poetry on her art-making, particularly her deep and at times fraught friendship with O’Hara.
7. “Ruth Asawa” at the Museum of Modern Art, New YorkOctober 19, 2025–February 7, 2026
Ruth Asawa at Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective View, San Francisco Museum of Art, 1973. Photograph by Laurence Cuneo. © 2024 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner.
California artist and educator Ruth Asawa devoted her over six-decade-long career to abstract explorations of form. Having studied at Black Mountain College, she developed a practice committed to making art every single day. Asawa is most celebrated for her undulating looped-wire sculptures that mirror organic shapes. “Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective,” co-organized by SFMoMA and MoMA, is now making its long-anticipated East Coast debut. The sweeping exhibition brings together over 300 artworks. And while her famed wire sculptures are here in all their graceful glory, so are lesser-known works in bronze casts, drawings, paintings, and prints that offer new dimensions to Asawa’s practice.
8. “Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.October 24, 2025–July 12, 2026
Grandma Moses, We Are Resting, 1951 2019.55, © Grandma Moses Properties Co., NY.
The artist Anna Mary Robertson Moses, or Grandma Moses (1860–1961), didn’t start painting in earnest until her late 70s.   Then, in 1940, at the age of 80, she was given her first gallery exhibition by the dealer Otto Kallir. She became an overnight popular sensation whose fame outstripped many other women artists of her time. Her folkloric paintings—often of rural landscapes—combined direct observation of nature with memories in idiosyncratic, distinctly American visions. Thirty-three artworks from the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s own collection, including many of her most beloved paintings, make up the core of this exhibition. More

Authenticity reigns supreme in the art world. It’s what separates million-dollar, museum-worthy masterpieces from clever fakes. And it’s what moves viewers to tears. But what if, theater artist Łukasz Twarkowski asks, a forgery could kindle in you the same emotions?
“Does it mean that the tears were fake because the painting was fake?” he asked me. “Or does it mean the fake artwork can reveal real emotions and real tears?”
This is one of the provocations at the heart of the Polish director’s new production ROHTKO, which is opening at London’s Barbican Centre on October 2. The multimedia extravaganza unfolds across four hours with onstage performances, two video screens, and a soundtrack of techno beats to interrogate the value—and increasingly blurred outlines—of authenticity in art.
ROHTKO, directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, text and dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. Photo: Artūrs Pavlovs.
As indicated by its title, Mark Rothko serves as a throughline—or more specifically, the fake Rothkos that were sold by New York art gallery Knoedler & Co. from 1994 to 2011. In those years, the dealer moved dozens of paintings forged in the style of Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Rothko. The scandal, later recounted in the 2020 Netflix documentary Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art, sparked an FBI investigation and the closure of the century-old gallery.
Twarkowski’s take on the fraud, however, is far more oblique. He takes as his starting point Shanzhai, a Chinese term meaning “mountain fort” that now stands for the phenomenon of clever counterfeit goods. It’s the world that’s given us Dolce & Banana and Samsing, among other bootlegs. A subculture and aesthetic, Shanzhai invests artistic merit in these knockoffs, seeing them as playful riffs on the real thing and deconstructions of established brands.
Łukasz Twarkowski. Photo: Beatrice Borgers.
For Twarkowski, who had boned up on the 2017 book Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, this shadow economy doubled as a philosophical prism through which to view authenticity. “We are seeing these two visions of the world: one which is never-ending and changing and the another, which is marked by the beginning and the end. If you don’t have the beginning, you don’t have the originality,” he explained, alluding to the Western art world’s prized provenance.
Bringing ROHTKO to the Stage
Now, Shanzhai has given us ROHTKO, the Shanzhai-esque twist on the painter’s name wholly deliberate. The work was in gestation for more than a year, Twarkowski told me, during which he and his longtime collaborator Anka Herbut researched areas from Rothko’s biography to the Knoedler trial. They then worked with actors over a period of improvisation to develop scenes: “We inspire them, they inspire us,” he said. Staging took up another six weeks.
ROHTKO had its premiere at the Dailes Theatre in Riga, Latvia, in 2022. Its Barbican run is happening as part of U.K./Poland Season 2025, a collaborative program between the British Council, the Polish Cultural Institute, and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.
ROHTKO, directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, text and dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. Photo: Artūrs Pavlovs.
The work is centered at a Chinese restaurant—a knockoff of Mr. Chow, a hub for the New York art world—at which various characters from sleek gallerists to destitute actors gather, interact, and converse. The narrative takes us from the 1960s, during the final years of Rothko’s life, to the era of digital art, when the idea of value has only grown woolier with the rise of NFTs. While the performance transpires onstage, camera operators film the action and players, with a live feed projected on two screens.
What subtly unfolds are layers upon layers of shifting reality. The Chinese restaurant itself represents what Twarkowski called a “no-man’s land,” the concept having been so widely replicated across Western cities as to almost seem hollow (the Knoedler forger, notably, was a Chinese man living in Queens, New York). The video feed offers a whole other frame of reference: “The truth of the screen becomes another reality, which is stronger than the reality of the stage,” the director said.
ROHTKO, directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, text and dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. Photo: Artūrs Pavlovs.
Even theater as a medium, being performative and illusory, loosens the grip of authenticity—Twarkowski deemed it a “strange form of art, which has repetition inscribed in its DNA.”
“Is it really happening anew every day, or is it the same thing that is happening?” he said. “We were asking ourselves: when you do international co-productions, what does it mean when there is a second premiere in another country? How many premieres can you have? Is the second premiere a fake premiere, because the first one was the original one?”
Beyond the Myth
This multimedia approach to exploring the hazy lines between reality and illusion has been a hallmark of Twarkowski’s innovative performances. Where 2023’s The Employees examined the nature of human consciousness, his most recent work, Oracle, probed artificial intelligence through the lens of Alan Turing’s life story. However heady these brews, Twarkowski has not lost sight of the humans and human feeling at the center of these performances.
ROHTKO, directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, text and dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. Photo: Artūrs Pavlovs.
In ROHTKO, for instance, a performer recounts the tale of a Latvian artist who had planned to sit in front of Rothko’s work, cry, and collect her tears for a video sculpture. She killed herself before realizing the project. The performer reflects that were she to collect such tears from a viewing of Rothko’s paintings, she would save them for a possible future where people might feel nothing looking at an artwork.
It’s a moment that captures Twarkowski and Herbut’s deeper aim to stir something in the viewer that exists beyond the performance. What is happening on stage is not the most important thing, he explained, “but what it evokes in the spectator. It is the same with the artwork. Is it about the art, or it is the relation between the art and the viewer?”
The heart of the piece, of course, belongs to Rothko. The artist is regarded as a hero in his native Latvia, and Twarkowski has been captivated by the guy since he laid eyes on Rothko’s Seagram Murals at the Tate Modern. He recalled “the silence that appears once you get in and how speechless you are being there between these paintings”—a reverence he also felt at the 2023 Rothko retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
ROHTKO, directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, text and dramaturgy by Anka Herbut, produced by Dailes Theatre. Photo: Artūrs Pavlovs.
But digging into Rothko’s life, Twarkowski admitted, left him disillusioned. He received a distinct view of the painter’s strained relationships with his wives and children, as well as his suicide, which the director described as “more an act of cowardice than any romanticized heroism.” ROHTKO brings forth these demons, but not before, it seems, its director glimpsed the real man behind the constructed myth.
“More often, with such big figures of art, when you start digging into their personal life, you’re usually more disappointed than appreciative of them,” he conceded. “Knowing him more as a person really took off some of the magic.”
ROHTKO is on view at the Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, October 2–5.  More

Even among Italy’s many artistic splendors, Palazzo Te stands out for the unique scale and spectacle of its long suites filled with decorative frescoes. Conceived and executed by Raphael’s protégé Giulio Romano between 1525 and 1535, this palatial villa is celebrating 500 years as an exemplar of the ostentatious but playful flair that characterizes the Mannerist style. It is marking the occasion with the commission of a new, time-bending epic by acclaimed British filmmaker Isaac Julien.
Directly inspired by the theme of metamorphosis that was so central to Romano’s design—the Renaissance painter drew heavily from the verses of Ovid—Julien’s film takes our timeless fascination with eternal transformation and updates it with a futuristic, sci-fi twist. In this way, he reactivates the 16th-century palazzo, revealing its richly-layered, mythological sagas as ripe for reinterpretation.
The ten-screen installation All That Changes You. Metamorphosis debuts in the palazzo’s newly renovated “Fruttiere” wing on October 3, on view through February 1, 2026. Viewers are guided on a philosophical journey by two space traveling goddesses, played by British actors Gwendoline Christie, best known for Game of Thrones, Wednesday, and Severance; and Sheila Atim, a lead in the 2023 indie All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.
Gwendoline Christie on the set of Issac Julien, All That Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025) at Palazzo Te. Photo: © Isaac Julien.
On Julien’s first trip to Palazzo Te, which was originally intended as a pleasure palace for for Federico II Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua, it was immediately apparent how the artwork might translate to the big screen. He felt particularly enthralled by a room containing The Fall of the Giants, in which scenes of chaos and destruction wrap around the walls and draw the eye up, over the domed ceiling. “I thought, my god, it’s like cinema,” the artist recalled over lunch at a London hotel. “It’s just huge.” It was obvious where he would set the film’s triumphant finale.
Julien has remained tight-lipped about the film’s plot, but the auteur has promised “some surprising elements” and one final “philosophical revelation.” We do know that the divine protagonists’s journey takes them between Palazzo Te and two other extraordinary architectural feats, each representing different temporalities. One of these is Charles Jencks’s unique postmodernist marvel, The Cosmic House in London, and the other is a futuristic spaceship especially designed by Richard Found. As they traverse time and place, the goddesses will also experience shifting identities.
Central to Julien’s story are issues of climate crisis and social inequality that have been on his mind since fires devastated Los Angeles at the start of this year. Rather than indulge a straightforwardly apocalyptic narrative, however, the director uses science fiction to imagine a more hopeful, post-anthropocentric future that considers the stake of non-human sentient lifeforms.
Isaac Julien and Gwendoline Christie on the set of Issac Julien, All That Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025) at Palazzo Te. Photo: © Isaac Julien.
The film’s digressive, non-linear approach will be familiar to fans of Julien’s previous films, many of which had a similarly liberal attitude towards warping time. Julien’s 1989 breakthrough Looking for Langston was an instant classic of queer cinema that pulls viewers into the imagined private world of the playwright Langston Hughes and his fellow Black artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Though it was set in the 1920s, the artist has explained that it was really about the AIDS crisis.
The most obvious comparison for All That Changes You. Metamorphosis is Julien’s Baltimore (2003), which is similarly set in a series of cultural institutions–Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum,  Walters Art Museum, and the Great Blacks in Wax Museum–and features masterpieces of Italian Renaissance art. For Julien, there is always something new to be gained from looking to the past.
“We’ve tried to say that your teachers are all around you” said Julien, who owes this impulse to the fact that he himself is a professor at U.C. Santa Cruz and is passionate about supporting younger generations. “It’s so important to realize that historically, we’ve been in very complicated, politically ambivalent moments.” This is what drove him to revisit the lives of several key historical figures, including Langston, Frederick Douglass and the Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi.
Sheila Atim on the set of Issac Julien, All That Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025) at Palazzo Te. Photo: © Isaac Julien.
The Renaissance, a cultural and intellectual “rebirth,” and the Enlightenment, which privileged reason and scientific thought over traditional authorities like monarchies or religious institutions, were both periods of upheaval that brought about significant societal change. Julien has suggested that we too may have arrived “at a particular post-Enlightenment time, with crises and wars, where ideas of universalism are being challenged.” Old systems that once offered reassurance now feel at risk, suggesting that we may need to prepare for a similar break with the past.
For this bold new venture that looks not only at the present through the lens of the past but also into the future, Julien has channeled the influence of several science fiction heroines, including Donna Haraway, Naomi Mitchison, and Octavia Butler, who previously inspired Julien’s film Paradise Omeros (2002). “They were the writers influencing our conversations that have seeped into the work,” he said, reflecting on the process of writing a script for All That Changes You. Metamorphosis with his partner and longtime collaborator Mark Nash.
In a project of staggering scope, the ideas of these pioneering 20th-century eco-feminists are reimagined against the dramatic backdrop of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as brought to life by the brush of Renaissance master Giulio Romano. Much like the dramatic fall of the Giants, the stakes of Julien’s inquiry into our precarious ecological future feel terrifyingly high, yet if anything can inspire hope, it is surely this swirl of spectacular art and philosophical revelation. More

At 85, Larry Bell—one of the original figureheads of Southern California’s Light and Space movement—hardly projects the aura of a sage-like guru. At the preview for his new exhibition in Madison Square Park yesterday morning, he wore a tactical vest over a checked shirt, dark trousers, and his signature fedora. He looked more like a field operative than a mystic of light. It was a beautiful fall day, clear and bright.
“I hope you enjoy the work,” he told the assembled crowd, “and I recommend finding an interesting place that’s comfortable to sit in the presence of any of the works here because they’ll constantly be changing as the clouds and the sun move. The animation that is within the pieces tells a different story by the minute. The pieces have changed since I started talking. The changes are subtle, but they’re profound.”
Larry Bell with his work. © Larry Bell. Photo: Chris Grunder. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley.
That sense of continual transformation anchors “Improvisations in the Park,” Bell’s first outdoor public installation in New York and the largest public project of his seven-decade career. Commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy, the exhibition features six monumental glass works—including two made specifically for the occasion—that refract, absorb, and transmit light in endlessly shifting patterns. Installed across the park’s lawns, they converse with the turning trees, the passing shadows, and the skyscrapers looming just beyond the branches.
“They’re active pieces,” said Denise Markonish, the Conservancy’s chief curator. “They feel like they’re alive as sculptures because they’re constantly shifting and changing across the day.”
Installation view of Larry Bell’s Frankly Purple, 2022, in Improvisations in the Park. Photo: Timothy Schenck. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley.
The result is both jarring and restorative: crystalline minimalism at odds with the messy seasonal churn of the park, yet somehow in harmony with it—offering order, revelation, and reflection. It is a welcome respite from the damning daily news cycle. This park was always a tonic; now, Bell’s works offer something closer to an escape from the mortal coil. There are passages of violet and crimson, sheets of semitransparent glass that lock into one another with a rare sense of perfection and order.
Installation view of Larry Bell’s Fourth of July in Venice Fog, 2018 (left), and Cantaloupe but Honeydew, 2025 (right), in Improvisations in the Park. Photo: Timothy Schenck. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley. Commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Bell has long insisted that spontaneity and intuition are his true studio tools, as much as glass and vacuum coating. He first tested those instincts in New York in the mid-1960s, during his brief tenure in the city, where he met Donald Judd, Frank Stella, and even Marcel Duchamp. Judd would become both a friend and early collector of Bell’s work. One of Bell’s early cubes remains installed on the fourth floor of the Judd Foundation in SoHo, which was once the artist’s residence.
“I’ve known Larry all my life,” said Flavin Judd, Donald’s son, who serves as artistic director of the Judd Foundation, which is presenting the show. “I let Larry do whatever he wants.”
That bond resurfaces now in Bell’s other New York exhibition, “Irresponsible Iridescence” at Judd Foundation’s 101 Spring Street, which opened the same day and runs through January 31, 2026. If the park show presents monumental glass improvisations in dialogue with nature and skyline, the Judd exhibition pares things down to a more intimate scale—narrative “Solar Study” works created with new processes, alive with iridescent surfaces that carry the same spirit of chance and trust. Some look like lovely oil splotches languidly floating atop water, others like shattered futuristic visions.
Installation view of “Irresponsible Iridescence,” September 29, 2025–January 31, 2026, 101 Spring Street, Judd Foundation, New York. Photo: Timothy Doyon © Judd Foundation. Art © Larry Bell.
Bell is so indelibly associated with his cubes and glass sculptures that it can be easy to forget how strong he is in two dimensions. These new works, shimmering with layered surfaces, remind us of that—they recast his rhythmic sensibility in a flat format without losing any of the perceptual richness. I think in these one finds a different kind of zen and letting go, both for the viewer and the maker.
“Sometimes when I’m lucky the work creates itself,” Bell has said. “I am only responsible for turning on the equipment and turning it off. The results of the use of the equipment become autonomic. In other words, I can find a narrative interpretation in the order of arrangement of the surfaces created.”
Together, “Improvisations in the Park” and “Irresponsible Iridescence” reveal Bell working on twin registers: vast public sculptures that shift and mirror the seasons, and intimate studies of dynamism harnessed in shimmering whirls.

“Improvisations in the Park” is on view at Madison Square Park, Madison Avenue at East 23rd Street, New York, through January 31, 2026.
“Irresponsible Iridescence” is on view at Judd Foundation, 101 Spring Street, New York, through January 31, 2026. More

At an undisclosed location somewhere in the Midwest lie the archives of Virgil Abloh, the late American designer whose imprint on the worlds of high fashion and pop culture endures.
Abloh wore many hats—painter, furniture designer, costume artist, architect, DJ—and his archives reflect this omnivorous approach. He seldom threw anything away and across a 20,000-strong collection there are two decades of sketches, skateboards, sneaker prototypes, advertising mockups, vinyl records, mixtapes, magazine cutouts, and more besides. Everything, in short, was potential source material.
Virgil Abloh. Photo: Tyrone Lebon.
More than 700 of these items have traveled to the Grand Palais in Paris where they combine to not only spotlight one of the 21st century’s most influential designers, but share how Abloh thought about creativity. “Virgil Abloh: The Codes” arrives on what would have been the designer’s 45th birthday and runs the length of Paris Fashion Week.
The timing is hardly coincidental: from 2018 on, Abloh spent considerable time in the city as the director for Louis Vuitton Menswear, and four years on from his death, the 10-day show serves as reunion of sorts for friends, collaborators, and fans. Mahfuz Sultan, the co-director of the Virgil Abloh Archives, who met the designer in a MoMA elevator in the mid-2010s, called the show “a love letter to the city that inspired him most.”
Installation view of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes.” Photo: Thomas Razzano / BFA.com.
The love letter is certainly more show than tell with Abloh’s “codes” discernible by experiencing the eclectic range of his work, rather than following a set of hard and fast rules. “His codes were a methodology,” Chloe Sultan, co-director of the archives, said over email, “to open-source his methods and allow for learning, education, and mentorship, creating a type of transparency and accessibility that worked to democratize fashion.”
Installation view of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes.” Photo: Thomas Razzano / BFA.com.
It’s a greatly expanded edition of a project that opened in Miami in 2022 and here spreads across 13,350 square feet of the Grand Palais.
Visitors enter the exhibition via the gift store. It’s a witty back-to-front approach and perhaps a nod to hype the that has surrounded the merch at earlier Abloh shows. The store in question is Colette, Abloh’s favorite Parisian concept store, which is fittingly filled with offerings. This includes the first Abloh-designed T-shirt carried by the boutique in the late 2000s, scented candles, his Braun alarm clock, and crossover products with the likes of Been Trill, Cactus Plant Flea Market, and Travis Scott.
Installation view of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes.” Photo: Thomas Razzano / BFA.com.
The point is an immediate blurring of the lines between art and commerce. And it’s one that continues inside with an exhibition that is something like a very contemporary cabinet of curiosities that belonged to a generational tastemaker.
A stand will place a traffic cone alongside piles of folded T-shirts, wire mesh chairs, and luxury handbags. There’s an array of more than 200 Nike sneakers (many never released). Examples of his collaborations with Ikea, Vitra, Evian, and Baccarat are dispersed among ceiling-high shelves. The invitation is for visitors to create their own links and inferences, and they can do just that at the Nike Media Lab, a phalanx of computers loaded up with a terabyte of Abloh’s files.
Installation view of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes.” Photo: Thomas Razzano / BFA.com.
Upstairs, Abloh’s Pont Neuf studio is faithfully recreated, laying piles of papers and project samples on a vibrant orange table. Racks of tightly packed clothes hang nearby and set of speakers and DJ decks he designed sit at the ready.
“Virgil strongly believed in making art and creativity accessible and available to everyone,” Sultan said. “That’s why this exhibition is fully open to the public. We want to create a space where people can engage with his legacy, be inspired by it, and build upon it.”
Installation view of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes.” Photo: Thomas Razzano / BFA.com.
“Virgil Abloh: The Codes” is on view at the Grand Palais, Paris, through October 9. More

For over 25 years, Minnie Evans (1892–1987) welcomed visitors to Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina, earning 16 cents an hour selling tickets at the entrance. Her post at the gatehouse became a studio and gallery for the prolific self-taught African American artist. She would make as many as seven drawings a day featuring her signature blend of florals, animals, and abstraction, hanging them outside to offer for sale to visitors hailing from around the country.
This uniquely public-facing practice eventually became the unlikely gateway to art world fame, culminating in a 1975 retrospective for Evans at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art—a career milestone that any artist would be thrilled to reach, let alone one who often used discarded garden maintenance supplies to make her art. And while her name has faded from prominence in the decades since her death, Evans now seems poised on the brink of a major resurgence, with a touring exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a much larger one that opens this November at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and will travel to the Whitney next summer.
“Her work is extremely kaleidoscopic and vibrant, using symmetry, exploring natural motifs and often incorporating human faces or eyes into the landscape,” Colton Klein, who guest curated the show for the MFA, told me. “It’s mostly work on paper and crayon, using
scrap paper and affordable materials. She talked about her friends and family and visitors at Airlie Gardens bringing her materials.”
He has centered the exhibition around the garden, including an installation that recreates the tiny floor plan of the gatehouse—around nine by nine-and-a-half feet—complete with the original admission sign, charging $1. Klein also contributed historic postcards of Airlie Gardens from his own personal collection to the display to help illustrate how Wilmington’s verdant landscape is reflected in Evans’s lush drawings.
Installation view of “The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, featuring a large-scale reproduction of a photo of her gatehouse at Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina. Photo: ©Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Who Was Minnie Evans? 
“She was really studying and living and working amongst the flowers, the live oak trees, and other plants that are native to that part of the country and really celebrating and exploring that in her work,” Klein said. “The flora and fauna of North Carolina are very beautiful and inspiring.”
A native of the state born in a rural log cabin, Evans was descended from enslaved Africans forced to come to this country by way of Trinidad. Her only education was through the sixth grade, and she got married at just 16, having three sons.
Minnie Evans, My Very First (1935). Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, gift of Dorothea M. and Isadore Silverman.
No one taught Evans to draw, but she had visions from her childhood—visions she was finally moved to begin putting to paper in her 40s. The Whitney owns the first two drawings Evans ever made, sketchy geometric doodles in black pen, created on Good Friday and Holy Saturday in 1930. But she didn’t continue making art until five years later, when she came across those early experiments (which may explain why they are dated 1935).
After a few years of art-marking, Evans one day heard a voice in her head: “Why don’t you draw or die?”
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Face With Aura and Angels), 1968. Collection of Wendy Williams, New York. Photo: by Christopher Burke, courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
It was a moment that changed Evans’s life. From that point on, art poured out from her, thousands of works, mostly drawings but eventually also collages and oil paintings. Inspired in part by a spiritual reverence for the natural world, Evans—a devout Baptist—also incorporated imagery from her Christian faith, such as angels, as well as symbols from mythology, into dense compositions that were almost mandala-like.
”I love people, to a certain extent,” Evans told Newsweek in 1969. ”But sometimes I want to get off in the garden to talk with God. I have the blooms, and when the blooms are gone, I love to watch the green. God dressed the world in green.”
Jack Loughlin, Airlie Oak at Airlie Gardens (ca. 1950), postcard. Collection of Colton Klein.
Evans’s husband, Julius Caesar Evans, was a coachman and property supervisor for a wealthy Wilmington couple, Pembroke and Sarah Jones. Following her marriage in 1908, Evans became a domestic worker at the Joneses’ hunting estate, known as Pembroke Park, living on the grounds.
The Joneses also owned the adjacent property, which Pembroke christened Airlie after his ancestral home in Scotland, and which Sarah transformed into a lush and sprawling 67-acre garden.
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Statuary, Stars, and Flora), 1965. Collection of Wendy Williams, New York. Photo: by Christopher Burke, courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
After the Joneses died, Walter Corbett purchased Airlie Gardens in 1948 and opened it to the public, hiring Evans to work the front gate. (He also supported and even collected her art.)
Evans became a fixture of the garden—even featured in the brochure, as seen in a copy from the 1970s on view at the MFA—until her retirement in 1974 at 82 years old. (Today, the garden honors Evans’s long service there with the Minnie Evans Sculpture Garden, featuring a Bottle Chapel built in tribute to her by local artist Virginia Wright-Frierson in 2004.)
A vintage Airlie Gardens brochure highlighting the work of gatekeeper Minnie Evans.
A Source of Inspiration—and a Window to the World
“Being enveloped in this garden space, she was surrounded by artistic inspiration,” Klein said. “And then she has this stream of visitors coming from from Wilmington, who are this built-in network of potential potential clients who might come in and buy a work of art. And that’s how her notoriety begins to spread.”
Evans believed in her work, and she was eager to share it with new audiences. The show includes a pair of 1963 letters to a collector who she probably met at Airlie, in which she keeps him apprised of her work: “I am doing a lot of religious paintings… and some more modern arts.”
Jack Dermid, Minnie Evans seated on wooden chair, wearing a knit hat and coat, and working on a painting (1969).
“When she started working at Airlie, she began to use it as a way to supplement her income. She would hang up the drawings that she was making outside the gatehouse and people would buy them, initially very cheaply for 50 cents to a dollar,” Klein said. “It was still quite personal, but she was starting to think about the ways that she’s marketing her work. And once Nina gets involved, it really takes off. ”
Nina would be the art historian Nina Howell Starr, who learned of Evans in the early 1960s through a friend who had visited Airlie. Starr would become Evans’s publicist and representative, arranging exhibitions such as one at New York’s Church of Epiphany in 1966, and, most notably, at the Whitney.
Klein, currently an art history PhD student at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has been interested in Evans for well over a decade, since first learning of her at a summer internship at the Cameron during his undergrad studies. Evans later became the subject of Klein’s masters thesis, and, most recently, an article for the American Art Journal, published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Four Figures Collage), 1961, 1967. Collection of John Jerit. Photo: courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
At the MFA, Klein offers a unique interpretation of the works with faces or eyes that seem to peer out of the foliage. He traces them back to a traumatic historical event from Evans’s childhood, the Wilmington massacre, a white supremacist coup that took place in 1898, overthrowing a biracial government and burning Black-owned businesses. (Though Evans was only five years old, she spoke of the event in interviews later in life, noting that she remembered it.)
“There are contemporaneous news accounts of the Black population in Wilmington fleeing the city to the woods. There are stories about people seeing the eyes of people hiding in the trees for upwards of two weeks after that event,” Klein said. “So many of her works have these human faces or eyes kind of blossoming out of flowers
or from behind trees or plants. I want to encourage people to think about the experience that Evans would have had during this very traumatic incident of political violence.”
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Face surrounded by flora and eyes over forest scene), 1963. Collection of Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina, gift of William Banks Hinshaw, Jr. ©Estate of Minnie Jones Evans. Photo: courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Will Institutional Interest Lead to a Market Explosion?
Because Evans was so prolific, and because her work was so affordable, it’s hard to say how many surviving examples are out there, and if they might make their way to auction. Some people who purchased works at Airlie used them as postcards, mailing them home to friends as a memento from their time in North Carolina.
“There are stories of people in Wilmington who find her work in their attic,” Klein said. “She definitely has a big collector base there, and that’s spreading now.”
Minnie Evans, Untitled (1968). The drawing set an auction record for the artist with a $63,000 sale at the Outsider art auction at Christie’s New York in March 2024. Photo: courtesy of Christie’s New York.
Evans set a new auction record last year, with a $63,000 sale at the “Outsider Art” sale at Christie’s New York in March, according to the Artnet Price Database. But you can still get her work for remarkably low prices.
Last month, two works sold at Bonhams New York for $7,040 and $4,864. This month, a pair of drawings fetched $8,500 and and $5,000 at  Leland Little Auctions in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Five other lots this year have gone for $10,000 or under, with a sixth lot topping out at $35,000 at Leland, for her third-highest result on the block.
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Paisley Design), ca. 1950s. Collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, bequest of Harvie and Charles Abney. Photo: courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
But there could soon be a boom in market activity thanks to the institutional attention Evans is currently getting.
The MFA exhibition, organized by Art Bridges, is drawn from the holdings of the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, which has the world’s largest collection of Evans’s work. (It is also home to her archives, at the Minnie Evans Study Center.)
Installation view of “The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: ©Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
It’s the first museum solo show for the artist since “Minnie Evans: Artist” at New York’s Museum of American Folk Art in 1995, a full 30 years ago. Titled “The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans,” it originated at the Gund Museum at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and only features 16 works—a kind of enticing amuse-bouche ahead of “The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans” at the High and the Whitney, which will bring together more than 100 of her drawings.
The artist is also the subject of a new documentary, Minnie Evans: Draw or Die, from North Carolina filmmaker Linda Royal and Lighthouse Films, due out this fall. The MFA holding a screening of the film next month. More

One afternoon last week, Mary Boone stood on the checkerboard marble floor in front of a grid of Andy Warhol portraits at Lévy Gorvy Dayan. She wore a crisp white shirt with a cravat and a double-breasted velvet black coat-dress that echoed the sleek fall of her long jet-black hair. Diminutive in stature but still radiating the presence that made her one of the most powerful women in the 1980s art world, she very well could be part of the tableau.
The nine canvases comprise a who’s who of the titans of 1980s art. On this wall are portraits of Peter Halley, Francesco Clemente, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Keith Haring (with his partner Juan Dubose)—all part of Boone’s orbit. She also showed Eric Fischl, David Salle, Ross Bleckner, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Julian Schnabel, who helped launch Boone’s gallery and whose career she in turn ignited, should be represented here, too—though his portrait, at more than eight feet wide, proved too large to hang, leaving a gap in the lineup, though one of his signature “plate paintings” is down the hall.
An installation view of Andy Warhol’s portraits of artists of the 1980s on display at “Uptown/Downtown New York in the 1980s.” Courtesy of Levy Gorvy Dayan.
All of these artists, and many others, are part of “Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties,” which runs until December 13 at the decidedly uptown Upper East Side gallery. The show was co-curated by Boone and co-founder Brett Gorvy. “It really wasn’t the ‘money’ decade. It was a time for ideas and invention,” Boone said. “I just felt that then you could see that there were all kinds of possibilities.”
The exhibition fills two floors of the Beaux-Arts townhouse with more than 60 works, ranging from Basquiat’s raw downtown canvases to Fischl’s narrative figuration to Barbara Kruger’s text pieces. Guerrilla Girls posters, Mapplethorpe photographs, Cindy Sherman photo fantasias, and a hallucinatory Kenny Scharf canvas—Fred Flintstone ecstatic as a volcano belches nuclear energy—round out the picture of a decade when Neo-Expressionism, street art, appropriation, and political critique collided, making New York the center of the art world. “Mary added so much to the show—the authority of her voice,” Gorvy said. “That she was in the room when most of this happened was really important. We had an incredible dialogue, but it was also her access points—because I didn’t have them.”
Installation view of “Uptown/Downtown: New York in the Eighties” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York (2025). Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
Warhol looms large over the show, as indeed he did over the decade. There is the regal portrait of Basquiat, segmented in contrapposto and wearing only a jockstrap, and upstairs a monumental Dollar Sign from the series once dismissed as superficial but now read as attuned to the culture of the time. “It was very much about bringing this group together to represent the energy of the time,” said Gorvy. “Warhol was ultimately a kind of father figure, or mentor, to this group. And it was as much about promotion—his Factory became an incredibly important place where the artists would meet. But he wasn’t the Warhol we know today.”
Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1982). Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
By the early 1980s, Warhol was no longer the hip figure of the Silver Factory ’60s. His reputation lagged, and it was this coterie of young upstarts who gave him renewed vitality. Boone put it plainly: “He identified much more with the outsiderness of the ’80s and he felt much more connected to these artists. In some ways, his own generation, he didn’t feel as connected or as embraced. It has a lot to do with the dealer. Leo loved Jasper Johns and Bob Rauschenberg. Those two artists are Leo and Ileana’s kind of main find. I don’t think that Leo ever really understood Andy.”
Kenny Scharf, Andy Warhol, and Keith Haring at Elizabeth Saltzman’s birthday party at Il Cantinori. June 16, 1986. (Photo by Patrick McMullan/Getty Images)
Boone was summoned to meet Warhol one day after he read an article in which dealers were asked how they celebrated big sales. “My answer was fast and simple,” she recalled. “I said, ‘I buy a new pair of shoes.’ Because I love shoes. And they’re great because, you just buy them and slip them on and walk out the door with them. There are no alterations or anything necessary.”
Their friendship evolved over the years, and they’d planned on doing a show together of towering Rorschach paintings. “I felt comfortable with him,” she said. “I was of course very flattered because I thought he was a genius.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Mary Boone) (1984–85). Courtesy of Levy Gorvy Dayan.
Around the corner from this Warhol sanctum hangs Basquiat’s painted punching bag. In emerald block letters it reads “Mary Boone,” topped off with his signature crown insignia. “Jean-Michel was a Dennis the Menace type of character,” she said. “He was very funny. He did a number of paintings and objects that my name was in. Dealers and artists can develop very close relationships. You have the crown on for protection… maybe recognizing that people picked on me.”
She remembered the devastating day Schnabel decamped Mary Boone Gallery for Pace: “Jean-Michel came in right after I got the news, and I was sitting in my little office crying, and he puts his arms around me and he says, ‘Don’t worry, Mary, I’ll make you more famous than Julian ever would. I’ll bring you more happiness.’ For him, the gallery was a family.”
Besides her expertise, Boone also brought the dramatic narrative that the art world loves: the comeback. The Basquiat punching bag could signal that he always knew she was a fighter. “Downtown/Uptown” is Boone’s first client-facing curatorial endeavor since serving time for tax evasion, a return that adds another layer of mythology to an exhibition already steeped in the lore of the 1980s.
Francesco Clemente, Name (1983). Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
Crossing the Divide
In many ways, “Downtown/Uptown”also tells the story of Mary Boone, a dealer who once bridged downtown energy and uptown polish. The arc from SoHo lofts to uptown townhouses was hers, too. She opened her first gallery at 420 West Broadway in 1977, and by the middle of the decade had planted her flag uptown on 57th Street—mirroring the trajectory her artists were making from the gritty downtown scene to the uptown establishment. Boone was hailed as the “queen of downtown” and soon after became an uptown power broker, moving fluidly between both worlds. The works here connect directly to her—she was deeply intertwined with the artists, the art shaped by those relationships—so the exhibition doubles as a personal narrative.
Boone, however, rejects the idea that the show is in any way autobiographical. “I don’t know what that means,” she said. “It’s all about the art.”
Installation view of “Uptown/Downtown: New York in the Eighties” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York (2025). Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
Upstairs, two powerful Jeff Koons works mark the bookends of her short but impactful tenure with the artist. First off is a glowing double-decker display of vacuum cleaners sealed in plexiglass, equal parts banal and sci-fi. “When you see the vacuums, you are confronted with something that’s a kind of ready-made but also Minimal, even anthropomorphic,” Gorvy said. “There’s something about the fluorescent light—the way he displays them. They become monoliths, iconic, untouchable. That’s really the genius of Jeff: taking something from the everyday and giving it a sacred presence.” Two Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985), in which basketballs float eerily suspended in water, is now iconic. Together they capture both the decade’s fascination with consumer detritus and its hunger for impossible perfection.
“In the two years Jeff and I worked together, I only sold two pieces,” Boone said. “And then he left and went to Anina [Nosei]. I think she sold two pieces, too. It is true that every artist has their time. You can work hard and really believe in an artist and it just doesn’t translate into sales. And then hopefully someday it does. After being with me and being with Anina, in 1990 he did the ‘Made in Heaven’ show. And that’s when it really clicked. With a lot of artists—particularly the better the artist—the longer it takes for the world to kind of realize their message.”
Peter Halley, Yellow Cell with Conduit (1982). Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan
Basking in the glow of the vacuum display is Halley’s Yellow Cell with Conduit (1982), its textured surface radiating fluorescent orange and lemon. The canvas came from the artist’s own collection, and Boone sees it as a touchstone. “That’s the most relevant time of an artist’s career,” she said. “When they first find their inspiration, when they’re really investigating things.”
Down a side gallery, the atmosphere sharpens into what feels like a danger room. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ and Mapplethorpe’s Man in a Polyester Suit hang nearby—works that ignited mass hysteria in the 1980s and remain startling in their intensity. In contrast to the milquetoast targets of today’s culture skirmishes, these images still bristle with provocation.
Downstairs hangs Eric Fischl’s The Old Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog (1982), a remarkable canvas—sinister yet magnetic—in which a family sprawls in varying states of tanning and undress, one in a life preserver, as a spry Dalmatian bounds across. They’re surrounded by dark, unsettled seas. Boone remembered first encountering the work at a group show:
Eric Fischl, The Old Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog (1982). Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan
“I was showing Julian Schnabel and David Salle. I wasn’t showing Eric Fischl. But I went to Sidney Janis, and there was a Fischl painting that just changed my mind. Sometimes you just have to have that one moment. I went to a payphone, called David Salle and said, ‘David, you gotta give me Eric Fischl’s phone number.’ I called Eric right away. He said, ‘Okay, you can come over.’ And this was the painting he was working on when I came over to the studio. I told him immediately that I wanted to do a big show.”
First shown at Gagosian in Los Angeles before passing into the collection of S. I. Newhouse, the painting went on to set Fischl’s auction record when it sold at Christie’s New York in 2022 for $4.14 million, according to the Artnet Price Database.
Taken together, the works define an era. They are unmistakably of the 1980s, yet remarkably, they don’t look dated. The debates they ignited, the imagery they introduced, and the tensions they embodied still feel urgent.
And for Boone herself, the future remains open-ended. Stepping back into curating after years away has cracked a door: whether it signals a full return, a one-off, or the beginning of something new, this latest show suggests Boone is still willing to surprise—not least herself. “I don’t know,” she said. “At 73, I don’t really plan ahead in the same way that I did when I was young. I just wanna do what’s fun for me.”

“Uptown/Downtown: New York in the Eighties” is on view at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, 19 East 64th Street, New York, through December 13, 2025. More