Art & Exhibitions

Twice a day, the River Thames flows out towards the North Sea exposing miles of briny clay banks. During these windows of low tide, one of Britain’s largest archaeological site emerges and Londoners have long scoured the foreshore in search of all the city has lost, forgotten, or discarded.
The practice is called mudlarking, a term drawn from 18th and 19th-century mudlarks who eked out a living scavenging for scraps of metal, rope, coal, or anything else sellable. It was predominately the occupation of impoverished children and was grueling, hazardous work. Tides can shift suddenly and London’s factories pumped industrial detritus straight into the river.
Print of Peggy Jones, a well-known mudlark, produced in 1805. Photo: © London Museum.
Today, the tradition of mudlarking is continued by committed hobbyists who search for artifacts from London’s past, sometimes with the aid of a metal detector. Prehistoric hunter gathers relied on the river, so too did the Romans, Vikings, and Normans as the Thames served as Britain’s main thoroughfare from the Middle Ages through to the Industrial Revolution. There is, in short, much to uncover; the oxygen-free nature of the Thames foreshore makes it an excellent preservative.
Mudlarking taking place between Millennium Bridge and Southwark Bridge. Photo: © London Museum.
Modern mudlarking is a permitted affair. Mudlarks may dig (though scraping is preferable) no deeper than four feet and are required to report all finds more than 300 years old to a dedicated office at the London Museum, which then records and researches the items. This process will be explored at the museum as part of “Secrets of the Thames: Mudlarking London’s Lost Treasures,” the first major exhibition on the tradition, opening in 2025.
The exhibition builds on decades of collaboration between the museum and the mudlarking community, one that grew during 2020. “We have built a hugely significant collection that is held within the museum,” said curator Kate Sumnall, who has worked with mudlarks for almost 20 years. “We have tried to encapsulate the thrill of discovery, the meditative quality of the search, and the connection with the past that the Thames offers.”
It’s a roving exhibition that investigates miscellaneous moments in London’s history, one discovery at a time. Each object conjures a cultural moment in time and the specter of the person who once owned it.
Gold finger ring (mid 15th century) with an engraved band with inscription, “For Love I am Given.” Photo: © London Museum.
The earliest artifact is an early Bronze Age flint arrowhead which dates back 3,000 years. Another weapon on display is a 10th-century iron dagger known as a scramasax, from which the name Saxons is derived. It’s a finely worked thing, inlaid with silver, and marked with the owner’s name, Osmund. Later still, is a 16th century whistle used by a naval officer to communicate over the roar of wind and wave (the pitch could be altered). It’s made from pewter and features a lion whose tail curves into a convenient loop.
Bosun’s whistle (1550–1600). Photo: © London Museum.
Elsewhere, we encounter domestic discoveries. There’s a toy cauldron dating from the 15th or 16th century that is an exact copy of those placed over open fires to cook food. There’s a pair of late Medieval spectacles designed to bend snugly around the nose and served both short and long sightedness. There’s a set of early 18th-century false teeth made of carved ivory. They were bespoke and would have been remarkably expensive, the museum noted.
Tudor knitted woolen cap (ca. 1500–1600) found on the foreshore by mudlark Alessio Checconi. © Alessio Checconi.
Perhaps most remarkably, given its material and age, is a 500-year-old woolen Tudor cap. It’s an affordable imitation of velvet versions that were fashionable for upper-class women. Few such caps have survived.
“There are traces of everyday lives,” said Sumnall. “The food eaten, the clothes worn, their faith, skills and trade. These little insights all build up into the bigger picture of London.”
“Secrets of the Thames: Mudlarking London’s Lost Treasures” will be on view at the London Museum Docklands, 1 West India Quay, Hertsmere Road, London, April 4, 2025–March 1, 2026. More

“You can see the inside of the building outside” is how Olafur Eliasson described the sprawling facility that’s been housing the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA for more than four decades. It’s an apt observation as the interior of the structure—once a city warehouse, then a police car garage—is indeed reflected in its industrial exterior, forged with concrete, glass, and steel. But at his new exhibition within the space, Eliasson, as is his practice, is attempting a fresh way of experiencing the museum: by bringing its outside inside.
Now on view, “Olafur Eliasson: OPEN” takes over the entirety of MOCA Geffen with about a dozen site-specific installations commissioned by the institution, as well as other recent pieces. While individually distinct, the latest works all emerge from Eliasson’s ongoing inquiries into how color, light, and geometry in concert can reshape and reawaken perception and environmental awareness. The exhibition marks the Icelandic-Danish artist’s first major outing in Los Angeles, as part of the fourth edition of South California-wide Getty initiative, PST ART.
Olafur Eliasson, Kaleidoscope for beginning at the end (2024). Photo: Olafur Eliasson © 2024 Olafur Eliasson; Courtesy of the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; neugerriemschneider, Berlin © 2024 Olafur Eliasson.
“I’ve been very interested in slowness,” he said in opening remarks at the exhibition’s preview. “Slowing down is part of opening up. It’s in slowing down your attention that you suddenly see more than you thought you would see.”
The main gallery delivers on Eliasson’s promise. Centered here are a handful of observation towers, tapering up toward the ceiling, under which visitors are invited to glance skyward. What they’ll see are the artist’s signature kaleidoscopic sights, formed by light and mirrors, that conjure his speculative futures (a yellow-tinged solar future circulating with plastic garbage bags, say). Other towers offer glimpses out the museum’s skylights, reflected by mirrors and LED strips, which allow the works to shift with the weather and time of day.
Inside Olafur Eliasson’s Viewing machine for imagining oceanic futures (2024) at MOCA Geffen. Photo: Min Chen.
In another gallery stands a pair of nondescript triangular devices. But peer into their apertures and you’ll find complex spheres containing myriad other geometric forms, created once again with colored lights and mirrors. It’s a technique the artist has perfected over more than two decades. Even as you discover the optical trick, the kaleidoscopic effects still wow the eye.
Olafur Eliasson, Kaleidoscope for uncertainty and surprises (2024) at MOCA Geffen. Photo: Min Chen
A colorful sculpture of a rhombic triacontahedron hangs nearby, seemingly bringing those prismatic illusions into reality—its combination of polarizing filters and plastic amplifying the mind-boggling interaction between light and shapes. The work bears the apt title, Your changing atmosphere.
Olafur Eliasson, Your changing atmosphere (2024) at MOCA Geffen. Photo: Min Chen.
The museum’s environs also fuel another work: Weather-drawing observatory for the future (2024), a giant drawing machine, its stylus equipped with ink, that creates marks based on meteorological data. A new drawing is created each day, its patterns determined by factors including temperature and solar radiation. When I visited, the machine had already produced a wonderfully detailed radial composition based on the day’s balmy weather. Drawings from past days will be hung around the gallery, in a display that will evolve as the exhibition progresses.
Olafur Eliasson, Weather-drawing observatory for the future (2024) at MOCA Geffen. Photo: Min Chen.
Typical of Eliasson’s productions, the throughline of audience engagement runs through his new pieces. Save for Weather-drawing, the bulk of his latest commissions invite visitors to interact with them, to see through their lenses, and to play. As Eliasson noted, with the exhibition, “we are trying to democratize the accessibility to art… This is like, ‘You are welcome.’”
Visitors gazing up at one of Olafur Eliasson’s observational towers at MOCA Geffen. Photo: Min Chen.
That’s most evident in Your sunset shadow, an installation, tucked at the rear of the exhibition space, which shines 11 color-filtered spotlights against a large white wall. When visitors pass through the beams of light, they cast gradated, dusk-tinged silhouettes, which change proportion and intensity depending on their position. The work evolves from Eliasson’s 2010 piece, Your uncertain shadow (which was recently featured, along with the artist, in Peggy Gou’s “1+1=11” music video). Like its predecessor, this iteration offers immersive, Instagram-ready fun.
A visitor interacting with Olafur Eliasson’s Your sunset shadow (2024) at MOCA Geffen. Photo: Min Chen.
Eliasson himself appears to not have sat out on the exploratory play. A wall in a gallery features his series of “Seeing Paintings,” the latest in his color experiments, which he began more than a decade ago. These new circular creations were made by ice melting in a pool of blank ink, leaving arbitrary stains and trails that spread out from the center toward an outer ring of colored paint. They’re a record of time as much as Eliasson’s own abiding embrace of unpredictability.
It’s an openness that the artist emphasized at the preview, as he ran through a manifesto-esque list that guided the exhibition (and is printed on tote bags available at the MOCA Geffen store). The show’s title, he noted, is purposeful.
“Am I open to my vulnerability? Am I open to other’s perspectives?” he said. “Am I open to sharing? This is why I am here today: I am very much in the spirit of wanting to share, [even] my uncertainty and inconclusiveness. [I want to] lean into that unknown-ness that might create space for your own story. The show is open to your interpretation, your own view, your own world.”
“Olafur Eliasson: OPEN” is on view at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 152 N Central Ave, Los Angeles, California, September 15, 2024–July 6, 2025. More

To call attention to the climate change crisis, New York’s American Museum of Natural History is teaming up with French artist JR on an installation of photographic portraits titled “Portraits on Climate and Health: Dreams We Carry.”
The project is part of the museum’s growing efforts to put science and art in conversation, Jacqueline Handy, the museum’s director of public programs, told me. “It’s connecting with folks and I think will reach people in a way that we haven’t before.”
JR’s “Inside Out Project” set up shop outside the museum in Theodore Roosevelt Park with its photo booth truck last week. Over the course of three days, the truck captured 736 black and white images—my infant son and I were among several mom and baby double portraits—each printed out on the spot for participants.
The project also recorded 175 testimonies, with sitters sharing their thoughts about climate change and the risks it poses to our planet and civilization.
A long line of people waiting to take their portrait with JR’s “Inside Out Project” photo booth truck for “Portraits on Climate and Health: Dreams We Carry” at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Photo by Alvaro Keding, ©AMNH.
“It’s just saying that we are all impacted by climate change and we can all be a part of the solution,” Handy said.
Many of the audio messages came from Indigenous filmmakers who are being featured in “The Wayfinders Film Series: Indigenous Wisdom Leading in the Climate Crisis,” another climate-themed event taking place at the museum for Climate Week NYC, taking place September 22–29.
The museum’s Climate Week events are also part of Canopy, an citizen art and science festival and network from Wellcome and Climate Group launching this month.
An installation of portraits taken by JR’s “Inside Out Project” photo booth truck for “Portraits on Climate and Health: Dreams We Carry” on view in the Ellen V. Futter Gallery at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Photo by Alvaro Keding, ©AMNH.
It was an upbeat atmosphere outside the truck when I visited the truck, the late afternoon sun filtering through the trees on a beautiful late summer day. There was a long line of people waiting to get their photo taken, but they were cheering excitedly each time someone stepped outside of the photo booth and picked up their portrait.
“It seems like we bribed to New York to give us the best days of the year for this—folks have been in good spirits and really just want to participate,” Handy said.
A woman getting her portrait taken by JR’s “Inside Out Project” photo booth truck for “Portraits on Climate and Health: Dreams We Carry” at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Photo by Daniel Kim, ©AMNH.
That’s often the case with the “Inside Out Project,” which JR launched in 2011 with his $100,000 winnings from the TED Prize. He wanted any community to be able to create their own versions of the large-scale black and white photographs he is known for wheat-pasting around the world.
To date, the project has held events in 152 different countries, taking over 560,000 portraits. Most of the time, a partnering organization takes the photos themselves, and JR’s team edits, prints, and ships them back. But there are also “Inside Out Project” trucks based in New York and Paris, which have traveled to 18 countries, taking over 270,000 portraits at 122 different events.
“The ‘Inside Out Project’ is really a platform for people to spread all sorts of messages. So there’s been actions about climate change, but also about diversity, feminism, human rights, and other issues” Camille Rousselet, the project coordinator, told me. “The goal is really to give the tools to people to create their own art installations and spread their voices.”
An installation of portraits taken by JR’s “Inside Out Project” photo booth truck for “Portraits on Climate and Health: Dreams We Carry” on view in the Ellen V. Futter Gallery at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Photo by Alvaro Keding, ©AMNH.
For “Portraits on Climate and Health,” those voices will be heard in two places in the museum. The walls of the museum’s 77th entryway (named after longtime former president Ellen V. Futter) have been papered over with select portraits from the projects, for an exhibition that officially begins September 23.
The full selection of images will be shown in a projection in the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation—the cavernous new expansion that opened last year. And you can also check out all the portraits and the accompanying testimonials on the “Inside Out Project” website.
“Portraits on Climate and Health: Dreams We Carry” is on view at the American Museum of Natural History, 200 Central Park West, New York, New York, in the Ellen V. Futter Gallery, September 23–30, 2024; and in the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation September 23–27, 2024. More

A new installation by Cj Hendry brings together under one roof more flowers than you could find people in a massive football stadium. Such is the latest spectacle by the artist and Instagram sensation, who just unveiled Flower Market on New York’s Roosevelt Island, as the follow-up to her hallucinatory Public Pool project this past April.
Entering “Flower Market”. Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
Hendry has partnered with French skincare brand Clé de Peau to erect an elegant white tent at New York’s Four Freedoms State Park, on Roosevelt Island. Inside, Hendry revisits her fascination with flowers, which were the basis of a 2022 installation in London. Bins stuffed with 21 varieties of blooms line three long rows. Pull one out, though, and you’ll find they’re actually made of plush, with stiff stems that can stand in a vase. Hendry’s manufacturers put their own playful spin on nearly 40 different types of blooms, from familiar sunflowers and roses to more niche, alien-looking lilies and poppies.
Those were all winners. But Hendry scrapped nearly half of the prototypes presented to her for Flower Market. “There’s some flowers [that] didn’t go into production because they looked fucking ridiculous,” she told me over the phone. “Like the bird of paradise. It looked so heinous.”
The plush flowers. Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
Tickets to the installation’s three-day public run this weekend are free. What’s more, Hendry is letting every guest take one flower home free of charge. Want to round out a full bouquet? She’s selling subsequent flowers for just $5 a pop. There’s a counter in the tent where they’ll wrap your haul up in authentic floral paper, just like a real flower market.
A white wall at the back end of the tent glimmers with two rows of dramatically lit opalescent bottles suspended above a row of white plush flowers in vases. The setup is so pretty that it might take a second to realize they’re all Clé de Peau’s signature serum, which now features white lily concentrate.
Guests get their flowers wrapped at the checkout counter. Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
“We chat to brands a lot,” Hendry remarked of her team. “90 percent of the time, nothing ends up happening because it always just feels a bit wrong.” Hendry says she’s loved since Clé de Peau she was a teen, though—and the brand has shown that it is willing to go, as she put it, “pure art.”
On the other side of that wall, in an intimate space sequestered from the hubbub, Hendry is presenting her latest series of 12 drawings, all depicting specific flowers. As I entered this chamber lined with bins of white lilies at the VIP opening on Thursday night, I heard one woman remark to her group, “The man I was talking to thought these were photographs.” You really can’t blame him.
Martha Stewart chats near a display of Hendry’s drawings. Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
Lifelike as they might look, though, you would be hard-pressed to find actual botanical classifications for this installation’s 21 flowers. Hendry’s drawings are all named after supposedly floral-based skincare ingredients—sometimes accurately (squalene does, in fact, come from chamomile flowers) and sometimes not (in the case of benzoyl peroxide). Hendry has priced each of these unique drawings at $22,900, and they’re available only to her existing collectors. Most sold before the market opened, she said.
Fans craving a Flower Market memento beyond a bouquet—or hoping to get in on the action from afar—can purchase plush flowers and merch through Hendry’s website upon the installation’s conclusion on Sunday night. She’s also dropping some little floral editions—again, only for existing collectors of her work—that come in cute, colorful briefcases, for a cool $990 each. So it’s not hard to see how $5 for a flower might be a momentous draw.
Guests mingling and planning their bouquets.n Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
The real fun of Flower Market, though, is being there. At first, Hendry wanted to stage the installation in the new atrium at Williamsburg’s Domino Sugar Factory, but the site was fully booked for fashion week. Roosevelt Island, however, offered a dreamy location. By way of thanks, Hendry will donate the installation’s greenhouse for the park’s future use.
This weekend, however, wind off the river will ruffle the structure’s drapery while fans pluck plush bouquets that will never wilt. It has all the fun of a toy store meeting a meadow. Hendry’s work, ultimately, courts the inner child. Flower Market will make visitors feel freer than a 10-year-old roaming a Sephora store. More

Brat summer might be over, but Barbie summer is forever. And, although mid-century modern evokes Southern California more than England, three playful installations honoring Barbie’s DreamHouse have landed in Central London’s new Strand Aldwych pedestrian plaza, just in time for the 22nd annual London Design Festival.
London-based Danish designer Nina Tolstrup dreamt up these interactive public artworks, which mark Barbie’s 65th anniversary by celebrating the style that defines the doll’s DreamHouses. The presentation, titled “Pavilions of Wonder,” complements a major Barbie exhibition at London’s Design Museum, and follows by a year the live action blockbuster film directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie as Barbie herself.
The first Barbie DreamHouse. Courtesy of London Design Festival.
Barbie’s DreamHouses drew heavily from midcentury modern design in the decades following their 1962 rollout. By then, the Southern California city of Palm Springs had become an international hub for the style, which still appears across luxury resorts, celebrity homes, and public buildings, all envisioned by the era’s preeminent architects. (Toy company Mattel and Visit Greater Palm Springs sponsored the London installation.) In June, Tolstrup made her first trip to tour the buildings of Palm Springs in preparation for “Pavilions of Wonder.”
Coachella Valley Savings and Loan Bank, designed by E. Stewart Williams. Courtesy of London Design Festival.
“We are of course very familiar with midcentury modern architecture in Europe,” Tolstrup noted in an email interview. However, she was struck by how a desert setting can underscore such structures. “The climate, panoramic views of the surrounding mountains, and open structure housing with fluidity between the inside and the outside is incredibly special,” Tolstrup said.
“Dream – Infinity Garden”. Courtesy of London Design Festival.
The exterior of her pavilion “Dream: Infinity Garden” specifically draws on the tapered colonnade of E. Stewart Williams’s Coachella Valley Savings and Loan Bank. Although Tolstrup cited Danish architect Arne Jacobsen among her influences, in this work, she’s evidently channeling Yayoi Kusama. The mirrored interior of “Infinity Garden” transforms its ring of succulents into an infinite desert landscape. Outside, the pavilion gives the illusion of floating, evoking both mirages and the pools featured in most DreamHouses.
2018 Barbie DreamHouse. Courtesy of London Design Festival.
Meanwhile, Tolstrup’s curvilinear “Discover: Design Stories” honors the distinctive waterslides on the most recent Barbie DreamHouses. Here, visitors gaze through eight peepholes upon charming vignettes that also compare DreamHouses with the styles of Palm Springs.
Passersby enjoying “Discover – Design Stories.” Courtesy of London Design Festival.
The project’s third installation, “Reflect: Playful Pauses,” presents a geometric grid design that riffs equally off Modernist architect Albert Frey’s 1952 Palm Springs City Hall and the 2023 Barbie DreamHouse.
Albert Frey, Palm Springs City Hall, 1952. Courtesy of London Design Festival.
This pavilion creates space for visitors to find calm atop a pink perch beneath a mirrored ceiling, surrounded on two sides by mesmerizing magenta walls, which also resemble Palms Springs’ signature breezeblocks—functional yet decorative permeable fences which filter sun and wind while offering a degree of privacy. After sunset, “Playful Pauses” comes alive with lights.
Tolstrup inside “Reflect – Playful Pauses.” Courtesy of London Design Festival.
Overall, Tolstrup says the full trio plays nicely with the geometric simplicity of the plaza’s existing architecture, offering “colour and vibrancy in sympathy with the Strand’s beautiful light grey Portland stones.”
“Pavilions of Wonder” will be open free of charge to the public throughout the fest’s run. Additional highlights from this year’s edition include a suspended, immersive sculpture by Turkish artist Melek Zeynep Bulut at the Old Royal Naval College, and a rhythmic performance around the act of making West African fufu at the V&A. More

When the Brooklyn Museum decided to showcase the breadth of creativity across the borough, it didn’t land on an exhibition of 30 or 80 artists, not even 150 artists. Rather, “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” will array the works of more than 200 creatives working in the vibrant enclave today.
“For years artists have been asking us to organize a big Brooklyn artists exhibition, and now we’ve done it!” raved Anne Pasternak, the museum’s director, in a statement.
The show’s line-up is an absolute bonanza. It encompasses established names such as Nicole Eisenman, Avram Finkelstein, Narcissister, and Nancy Grossman, and rising art stars including Qualeasha Wood, as well as artists working in myriad mediums. There’s sculptor Josiah McElheny, installation artists Heather Hart and E. V. Day, painters Scherezade García and Laurena Finéus, photographer An-My Lê, and multimedia artist Chitra Ganesh, among heaps others.
Jasmine Clarke, Olivia (2022). © Jasmine Clarke. Courtesy of the artist.
In between them, these artists have tackled subjects that range from the local (memory, identity) to the global (migration, cultural exchange, collective memory)—a scope that the exhibition hopes will illustrate Brooklyn’s artistic output over the past five years.
“The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” has been organized by Jeffrey Gibson, Vik Muniz, Mickalene Thomas, and Fred Tomaselli, all of them Brooklyn Museum Artist Trustees. The four also make up the Artist Committee that handpicked the 200-plus creatives included in the show, following invitations and an open call that received up to 4,000 applications.
Brad Kahlhamer, Survival Chandelier (2019). © Brad Kahlhamer. Courtesy of the artist andVenus Over Manhattan, New York.
This is, of course, far from the first time that the institution has platformed the neighborhood’s wealth of creative talent, as Sharon Matt Atkins, the museum’s deputy director for art, pointed out. Its annual Fence Art Show, which ran from 1966 through the late ’70s, showcased and awarded prizes to artists from Brooklyn and other boroughs. In the 1980s, its “Working From Brooklyn” exhibition series featured hundreds of Brooklyn artists, many of them at the start of their career; the series was revived in the mid-’90s and ran through 2004.
“Our commitment to supporting Brooklyn’s artists stretches back decades, and this exhibition is a continuation of that legacy,” said Atkins in a statement. “With ‘The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition,’ we’re proud to carry forward that tradition, celebrating the borough’s artistic diversity and honoring the creative voices that make Brooklyn such a vital cultural hub.”
Chitra Ganesh, All the Farewells (2023). © Chitra Ganesh. Courtesy of the artist and Hales Gallery, London and New York. Photo: JSP Art Photography.
The exhibition also has a key backer in UOVO, the art storage specialists with whom the museum has been presenting the UOVO Prize to emerging Brooklyn-based creatives since 2020. The award—which comprises a $25,000 grant as well as a solo exhibition at the museum and an art installation at UOVO’s Bushwick facility—has been conferred on John Edmonds, Baseera Khan, and, most recently, Suneil Sanzgiri.
The prize, said UOVO founder Steven Guttman, was a way for the company to back the museum’s long-running engagement with the Brooklyn artistic community. “Our support of this commemorative exhibition,” he added, “is a continuation of a shared commitment to amplify the narrative of this vibrant arts community.”
Amaryllis R. Flowers, The Girl Has Teeth and the Teeth Are Tired (2022). © Amaryllis R. Flowers. Courtesy of the artist and Hilda C. Esmonde.
The exhibition will kick off the Brooklyn Museum’s yearlong 200th anniversary celebrations, anchored by a significant rehang of its American Art galleries, spearheaded by curator Stephanie Sparling Williams; an immersive exhibition on the historical footprint of gold; and a score of performances and activities across the locale, including its inaugural Museum on Wheels.
“Brooklyn has more artists than anywhere,” said Pasternak, “and we are thrilled to expand the ways we support the excellence of our incredible borough.”
Here’s the full list of the 216 artists participating in “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition.”
Evelyn AdamsDestinie AdélakunSeongmin AhnScott AlbrechtDanielle AlhassidJonathan AllenKadine AnckleKate BaeFelipe BaezaMichael BallouYevgeniya BarasSarah BedfordHannah BeermanAisha Tandiwe BellJane BensonDamien Olsen BerdichevskyMagda BiernatSamantha BittmanLucas BlalockSebastiaan BremerJohanna BurkeStephen BurksKimberly BushPaul CampbellMary CarlsonJazmine CatasúsGeoffrey ChadseyHenry Hung ChangRuby ChishtiJasmine ClarkeJennifer CoatesWendy CohenKaren CunninghamJennifer DaltonLisa Corinne DavisIsis Davis-MarksE. V. DayLeah DeVunLisa di DonatoNicole EisenmanRodney EwingSean FaderMohammed Iman FayazKeltie FerrisAlanna FieldsJane FineLeo FineLaurena FinéusAvram FinkelsteinTatiana FlorivalAmaryllis R. FlowersFrance FrançoisRonen GamilTeri Gandy-RichardsonChitra GaneshScherezade GarcíaPrajwal GodseAnthony GoicoleaShosh GollerTamara GonzalesIsamar GonzalezGarry GrantStanley GreenbergKatya GrokhovskyNancy GrossmanHaoua HabréGeorge HagenRichard HainingSusan HamburgerIlana Harris-BabouHeather HartElana HerzogEric HibitHonorrollerJackie HovingSumin HwangJames HydeSarra Hussein IdrisMichelle ImMadjeen IsaacYoko IwanagaKatherine JacksonSwati JainLutfi JananiaGaël Jean-LouisRuichao JiangKhari Johnson-RicksBo JosephMelissa JosephYaz JosiahBrad KahlhamerSophia KarwowskiNina KatchadourianNathan KensingerJon KesslerJarrett KeyKyung Tae KimYongjae KimMatthew KirkSonomi KobayashiTamara KostianovskyFay KuAlison KuoGabrielle LansnerAthena LaTochaAn-My LêEmilie LemakisSujin LimEmily LoughlinLisa LudwigSylvia MaierEmily ManwaringGuadalupe MaravillaKaren MargolisChris MartinRachel MartinMario MartinezIngrid MathurinEsperanza MayobreJosiah McElhenyFrederick MershimerSam MesserCaleb MillerSteven MontgomeryJaye MoonT. Dylan MooreLivia MourãoDonna MoylanCherly MukherjiLoren MunkTimothy Paul MyersMayumi NakaoRita NanniniMartha Naranjo SandovalNarcissisterSusan NewmarkDanielle NoelDynasty OgunSoull OgunClayton OkalyOzodi OnyeaborAllison Michael OrensteinLaura OrtmanYaw OwusuTinuade OyelowoChristian PadronSamora PinderhughesNorm ParisQuiana ParksCate PasquarelliRhesa PaulLindsay PerrymanJamaal PetermanAmanda PhingbodhipakkiyaNaudline PierreLin QiqingColin RadcliffeErika RaneeRobert RaphaelMark ReigelmanNaomi ReisResurrect Studio LLCVernando ReubenErin M. RileyPema RinzinIlisa Katz RissmanMatthew RitchieLeslie RobertsAlex Dolores SalernoGwyneth ScallyHiba SchahbazRick SecenMichelle SegreLauren SeidenJonathan SeligerDavid ShawBobby SilvermanKuldeep SinghTuesday SmillieJane SouthSusan ŠpiranovićSharon SprungMonica SrivastavaJosh SucherTakura SuzukiAssane SyCatherine TafurHidemi TakagiAlison Elizabeth TaylorLeo TecoskyDannielle TegederMary TempleDarryl DeAngelo TerrellJade ThackerZac ThompsonJim TorokA. R. TranJanaina TschäpeJuan Pablo UribeWilliam VillalongoSophia WallaceCyle WarnerKit WarrenChris WellerMichelle WenTabitha WhitleyTracie Dawn WilliamsOliver WilsonQualeasha WoodKenny WuAkiko YamamotoJason Bard YarmoskyBetty YuHalley ZienBrenda ZlamanyBalint Zsako
“The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Pkwy, Brooklyn, New York, October 4, 2024–January 26, 2025. More

Experiments in pluralistic authorship, including grappling with related practical and conceptual challenges, is one way to advocate for less hierarchical ways of working and displaying art. At the 60th Venice Biennale this year, there were many powerful instances of this kind of collaboration.
Each of the pavilions that undertook blurred authorship or large-scale group shows defined different parameters and unique artistic processes. At their best, they offer a hopeful outlook, rather than striving to smooth out differences and make a single, united oeuvre that recognizes that even jumbled, messy mixtures of opinions and peoples can be powerful forces of creation, and certainly giant steps toward positive directions.
Many of these artists shared a tendency to critique the traditional Western solo exhibition model, with its habit of narrowly recognizing and over-cherishing individual stardom.

The Belgian Pavilion
Picnic party at Lago di Resia, Petticoat Government, Belgian Pavilion for La Biennale di Venezia, 9 March 2024. Courtesy Petticoat government (Denicolai & Provoost · Antoinette Jattiot · Nord · Speculoos) Image Lola Pertsowsky.
The Petticoat Government is one of several larger groups or collectives exhibiting at national pavilions in this year’s Venice Biennale. In March, an unlikely picnic gathered atop Italy’s frozen Lake Resia in the Alps. A collective of artists, architects, designers, and a curator, who collectively call themselves the Petticoat Government, were joined by giant, folkloric puppets. The townspeople from around Europe who had made them, along with their friends and families, were also there, standing on the frozen lake which borders Austria and Switzerland—it had been formed by a dam in 1950 to supply electricity to a local power plant, flooding an entire village in the process, and leaving a 14th-century campanile poking out from the water.
Local lore says its bells can sometimes be heard chiming in the wind. The event and art performance, which included drumming and feasting on the ice, was a symbolically charged stop along the Petticoat Government’s journey to Venice, where they are exhibiting the “giants,” as the puppets are called, in the Biennale’s Belgian pavilion before heading elsewhere. Giants are part of a living, Medieval European cultural tradition, designed to celebrate real and legendary figures from local communities who have been making and parading these “soft monuments” through the streets for centuries. Worn and hoisted over the shoulders of individuals who control them from the inside, they are also fragile, made from light wicker and wood. When the giants stepped on the ice, some uncertainty still loomed about how their gaggle would hold up on one of the last days in spring; the melt was faster than usual this year.
“It was moving to see all these people that are politically and ideologically sometimes opposed working towards the same direction to make this improbable event on a frozen lake become a reality,” said artist Ivo Provoost, speaking in an interview. Provoost is also among the seven founders of the Petticoat Government, which is representing Belgium this year at the 60th international biennale (on view until November).
The collective’s project, resonating with this year’s Biennale theme, “Foreigners Everywhere,” addresses the arbitrariness of changing national borders and the poetics of bringing together far-flung individuals to eat and dance, even if on the precarious surface of thinning ice. It is a notion that also illustrates the spirit of the Belgian pavilion’s pluralistic structure, itself “a critique of institutions and relationships to power,” per a statement. The name Petticoat Government refers to alternative, women-led forms of governance, but the group says they are not an actual government and were conceived for the Biennale.
“It was possible to organize all these things that were completely crazy on different levels … because we were working as this team,” said the collective’s Antoinette Jattiot, a curator at the Brussels art center La Loge.

The Dutch Pavilion
Ced’art Tamasala (CATPC), Matthieu Kasiama (CATPC), Renzo Martens, Hicham Khalidi, Mbuku Kimpala (CATPC). ©Koos_Breukel, 2023
“We don’t have to overcome differences. We can have difference play a part, and we can work across differences,” said curator Hicham Khalidi, selected for the Netherlands pavilion with artist Renzo Martens.
In one of the more radical and complicated examples of multi-person authorship, Martens, in discussion with Khalidi, opted to hand over the Dutch pavilion to a group of 30 to 35 artists from the Congo’s Pende community of plantation workers, who are called Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (Congolese Plantation Workers Art League, or CATPC). Martens helped found the CATPC in 2014 and has been working closely with them.
The CATPC, located in Lusanga, DRC, creates clay sculptures from earth in local old-growth forests, which they cast into cacao and palm fat and sell internationally. Examples are currently on view in the Dutch pavilion. With the proceeds, they have bought back 200 hectares of land once belonging to the British-Dutch multinational corporation Unilever and its subsidiaries, and have been cultivating these parcels to regenerate forests that provide food and medicine for locals, in a process they call the “post plantation.”
In the same vein, CATPC has built an “intentionally atemporal, ahistorical modernist” White Cube in Lusanga to exhibit their sculptures, “conceived as a joint initiative with Martens,” designed by Rem Koolhaas’s architecture firm OMA. The White Cube, states the Dutch pavilion’s text, “was intended to ‘repatriate’ some of the social, economic, and cultural capital indebted to the community,” as a form of “reverse gentrification” of the wealth gained via the plantation economy, which has helped finance the white cubes of the art world.
The CATPC’s White Cube juts out of Lusanga’s forested landscape, imposing a harsh, minimalist architecture in angles of warped, cubical perspective. It also holds the second half of the Venice exhibit and hosts a contested ancestral Kwilu Pende wooden sculpture on loan from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), which is live-streamed into the Dutch pavilion. Known as the “Balot” sculpture, it represents an abusive colonizer who was killed during the Pende Revolt against Belgian colonial rule in 1931.
“The International Celebration of Blasphemy and the Sacred,” CATPC, Renzo Martens, Hicham Khalidi, 2024. Photo by Peter Tijhuis.
After inviting the CATPC to exhibit at the Dutch pavilion, Martens formally stepped back from his more prominent role within the group, becoming a CATPC collaborator. “After long deliberation, members of the collective, along with Martens and Khalidi, have decided that CATPC’s project for self-determination cannot be realized without autonomy from Martens’ original vision,” the statement says.
Indeed, Martens’s role as a facilitator, co-founder, and now collaborator of the CATPC is weighted by his being an outsider acting as a self-acknowledged symbol of the white man who has historically exploited the Congo. His project with the CATPC has puzzled, to the point of “intellectual paralysis,” established art-world thinkers, per an essay by Artforum’s Claire Bishop. To further confuse matters, in past presentations of the CATPC’s work, it appeared as though Martens’ driving role was masked, as The New Yorker reported.
Nevertheless, the Dutch pavilion, along with the CATPC, seems to have entered a new phase in its self-identification. Khalidi said all parties have been addressing questions around authorship, for which he also serves as a kind of “mediator.” “Renzo is the stand-in for the West. He’s the white man, who [was] putting himself in the forefront, in order to make this project happen for them, and at the same time, that symbolizes the system of the West that is exploiting the colonial areas,” said Khalidi. “My question to Renzo has always been, ‘who is making the work?’” It became clear that, for the Dutch pavilion, the “responsible” move was “to speak in the words of the collective … to make sure that they are heard.”
And increasingly, they are. “We’ve acquired our autonomy, and we work on it every day,” said the CATPC in an email. “With the revenue from this art that is our ‘gateway’ in the world, we can plant … sacred forests from which our communities can feed … or care for themselves (natural, traditional medicine), all of which is free thanks to the agro-forestry initiative we have initiated, and which we will continue to implant in Lusanga in order to have a real impact on our communities and region.” It must also be mentioned that at the Biennale opening, one member of the CATPC, Blaise Mandefu Ayawo, 55, fell ill and died soon afterward, on April 29.
While the collective said they have now “separated from the former alliance with a few partners, (including Renzo),” the CATPC said they are also open to working with anyone who wishes to collaborate, “without any distinctions.”
This, Khalidi clarifies, does not mean Martens is no longer working with the artists. For one, the CATPC could not show at the Dutch pavilion without him, and they are otherwise connected to the artist via his Institute of Human Activities. Martens, [who was not available for comment] “is part of the project … When you look at the entanglement between the West and the non-West, there’s no way you can disentangle [them],” said Khalidi. They rely on each other. “The West can fend for itself, only because there is a non-West.”

The Hãhãwpuá Pavilion
Glicéria Tupinambá. Photo courtesy of the São Paulo Biennial Foundation
Attempting to embrace cultural entanglement forms the running thread through many of the collaborative art projects at the Venice Biennale this year. The Brazilian Pavilion, renamed the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion in reference to the Indigenous Pataxó people’s word for the region, the selected artist and activist Glicéria Tupinambá opted to work in collaboration with the Tupinambá Community, on a series of capes. Meanwhile, artists Olinda Tupinambá and Ziel Karapotó also made contributions.
“My work is inspired by the ones who came before me: my ancestors,” said Glicéria Tupinambá in an e-mail. “My aunts, grandmothers, the elders in my community… My research comes from immersing myself in the references I gather from them, which sometimes are in museums, sometimes are in a kitting point or a knot. I seek out their remnants as they are the foundation upon which I am built.”
About the pavilion’s intuitively collaborative process, its curators Arissan Pataxó, Denilson Baniwa, and Gustavo Caboco Wapichana, said. “For someone of Indigenous origins, the decision to work collectively within the community is so natural that there is no debate about whether it’s the right approach … Each person naturally takes part in what they identify with the most and begins to work so that the final project is accomplished without erasing their identity imprint from the process.”
Curators Denilson Baniwa, Arissana Pataxo, and Gustavo Caboco Wapichana. Photo: Cabrel. Courtesy of the São Paulo Biennial Foundation
Indeed, “to do things differently would be strange; to do things individually, in isolation, would mean that we weren’t Indigenous,” they added. “The artists act more as catalysts of action rather than executors; this is a distinctive trait among Indigenous artists in Brazil,” the curators explained. “The artwork functions as a bridge between the community, the artists, and the outside world—not a display piece, but a catalyst for tensions, whether related to territory, repatriation, or historical reparations.”
Asked why a group presentation at Venice was important, they were categorical: “This question shouldn’t even be asked. The community should always come first, without the need to discuss whether or not it should be individual or collective. It should be natural for everyone who occupies any space to bring many more people with them. But then we’d be talking about stripping away the white ego, and unfortunately, the Indigenous peoples haven’t yet managed to teach this to the West.”

The Nigerian Pavilion
Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Monument to the Restitution of the Mind and Soul, 2023. Installation view, Nigeria Imaginary at the Nigeria Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia. Image: Marco Cappelleti Studio. Courtesy: Museum of West African Art (MOWAA)
Elsewhere, at the Nigerian pavilion, Aindrea Emelife, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA), selected eight artists to respond to the theme of the “Nigeria Imaginary.” The exhibit title was inspired by the Mbari Club school of thinkers in the early 1960s, when Nigeria became independent, and the group’s explorations into utopian fantasy and colonial experiences. Contemporary artists who made commissioned, site-specific works for the pavilion include Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Ndidi Dike, Oneyka Igwe, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Abraham Oghobase, Precious Okoyomon, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, and Fatimah Tuggar. The Nigerian public also contributed via answers to questions such as, “What does Nigeria taste like?” that played on audio.
“I think that no one person, and not even eight artists can represent the collective imaginary of a country. So it was really important to bring community voices into it, and have real-life sitting at the heart of the exhibition,” said Emelife. For its second participation in the Biennale, the curator wanted to “introduce the diversity” of the country. “The richness of the ‘Nigeria Imaginary’ is in these many layers and these many perspectives… Each artist’s work becomes like a point in the manifesto,” she added.
Emelife said she is also responding to misconceptions she hopes to dispel about Nigerian art, particularly concerning “innovation” and form. “I tried to make as diverse a list as possible to eschew this stereotype that African art is very much figurative painting, which I think people still assume,” she said, pointing out works in the show that range from installation, film, and painting, among others.
“African art has been quite entangled with the market – as people see it,” she said. “It almost insinuates that innovation hasn’t reached here yet, and that is obviously not true and is a damaging set of ideas.”
“That’s why I’m really excited for people to see what’s in the exhibition.”
The Nigerian pavilion is also a kind of smaller prequel to an inaugural exhibit at the new MOWAA “campus museum” opening in Benin City. The MOWAA too, is designed with a more collective thinking. It is being built as “a series of buildings, as opposed to one single” monument, said its director, Phillip Ilhenacho. The idea is to “make it more welcoming, and more integrated with the community around us,” with garden and event spaces, punctuated by the first, and largest “engine room” of the campus museum, the 4,500-square-meter MOA Institute, opening in November.
“Innovation,” Emelife said, “is happening in Africa.” More

It’s unusual for an art weekend to begin with a narrowly averted terrorist attack and end with a basketball shootout, but that was what happened at this year’s Various Others, Munich’s response to the city-wide gallery weekend trend.
At the gala dinner, which was in a basketball stadium (more on that later), Michael Buhrs, Various Others board member and head of the Museum Villa Stuck, an institution dedicated to the symbolist Franz von Stuck, expressed heartfelt solidarity with the staff of the Nazi Documentation Center, an arts and education institution on the grounds of the former Brown House, the ex-Nazi headquarters. Amid what should have been a bright couple of days for the center, which is a participant in the annual event (the museum is exhibiting work by sculptor and performance artist Naneci Yurdagül), for two days, the center had remained closed.
On Thursday, an 18-year-old Austrian had fired two gunshots at the institution, hitting the building’s glass façade and its main entrance. The man went on to shoot at the nearby Israeli consulate before he was killed by police gunfire. According to authorities, the date of the attack may have been a motivation for the shooter: Thursday was the anniversary of the 1972 Munich Olympics attack, when a Palestinian terrorist group killed 11 Israeli Olympic team members and a German police officer.
Michael Buhrs speaks at the Various Others dinner. Photo: Pablo Lauf
What happened last week prompts a question: what are we doing? I find myself winded by the ever-more-terrifying political strife and violence, wondering what chasing down art in towns and cities around Europe means, or whether it is doing any good. And, thankfully, every time, I do get my breath back. One need not look so far.
Critical reflections on the present and the past can be crucial. Last year, artist Tony Cokes presented a critically acclaimed exhibition across two institutions in the city, at Kunstverein Munich and at Haus der Kunst, that looked at the cultural propaganda strategies Germany used post-war to try to brighten its self-image for the 1972 Munich Olympics, an event that ultimately became murderous. This fall at Haus der Kunst, the same bunker under the museum was the site of a brash yet information-packed Pussy Riot retrospective, chronicling the dissident group’s activities diaristically. Despite long-term planning, the museum announced the show the day before it opened due to security concerns.
Various Others, which is a co-production between Munich’s prestigious institutions and its rich cluster of commercial galleries, offers a multitude of proposals for art, as a salve for the times and also a rebuttal, and just about everything between. Truly: artists were sleeping in the project space n.n. all weekend on narrow bunk beds, for one thing. They put their bedding away each day, placing their art back on their top sheets, and were having a late breakfast when I stopped by to see their live-in.
“Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia” Installation view. Haus der Kunst 2024. Photo: Maximilian Geuter
The city-wide art event hopes to bring attention to the art-steeped, collector-rich area, which has, like much of the rest of the art world, been experiencing tougher times (Blue-chip gallery Thomas claimed bankruptcy this summer.) For their part, galleries present new artistic positions by inviting a non-Munich gallery to exhibit with them in their space. The brief can be taken quite liberally, which is fine, because there is nothing worse than trying to wedge too many ideas into a small venue for the sake of it, and real estate is costly in Munich.
At Museum Villa Stuck, a bullet hole in a second-floor window of their space became an uncanny reminder given the recent incident. Tania Bruguera had installed it within her exhibition “The Condition of No,” which considers facets of propaganda and censorship, focusing on the dictatorship in her home country of Cuba. Bullet hole notwithstanding, this show touches another nerve within the recent German political discourse: The artist and activist had had her performance at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin cut off by protesters in February. It was a dark spot within a wider storm taking place in the country’s cultural arena, where rising censorship has become a major concern since the Israel-Gaza war broke out last October.
Tania Bruguera. Photo: ©ozntrkylmz
Given Bruguera’s experience in Cuba (the artist and activist has been arrested more than once), she has a sharp view on this. While that perspective does not always translate as fluently in her art installations, there was a wealth of information to be gained from tear-away sheets available around the exhibition. As part of the show, between January and March 2025, there will be a series of talks that sound needed and promising, looking at boycotts, censorship, and cancel culture. It’s a program that reflects on the vexing present and recent past, asking, refreshingly, a new question: How can we do things differently?
Installation view of Flaka Haliti’s “Partly Cloudy or Partly Sunny” at Deborah Schamoni, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Deborah Schamoni. Photo: Uli Gebert
War and geopolitics are considerations that Kosovo-native Flaka Haliti has folded into her practice convincingly. In the ambivalently titled “Partly Cloudy or Partly Sunny” at Deborah Schamoni, Haliti creates new readings of military materials by detangling them from their ideologies by gentle but persuasive juxtapositioning. Heavy bulletproof glass intercuts a large cloud that is suspended delicately within a thick cargo netting. On the wall, Haliti has repurposed bullet-shot glass to both obscure and draw attention to chalk drawings of policy animals. I appreciate her cautious process, which avoids mirroring or repeating the military aesthetics, but rather defangs them via a smart abstraction—it is something that woefully happens too rarely with other artists, for whom fascist references or militaristic imagery can unwittingly become an accent pillow within their work.
‘Transferring Domain’ Gathering hosted by Nir Altman, Munich. Photography: Blythe Thea Williams. Courtesy of the artists, Gathering and Nir Altman
But, as I said before, there is the rebuttal and there is the salve. Galerie Meyer Rigger exhibited three works by Sheila Hicks at Rüdiger Schottle that are sublime to look at, their deeply layered threads conjuring a cosmos of depth and color. At Nir Altman, London’s Gathering presented evocative works on paper by Berlinde Brucke and an engraved bench by Jenny Holzer (in unusually colorful marble), which lent further gravitas to the paintings of Emanuel de Carvalho and the work of James Lewis. At Jahn und Jahn, the gallery collaborated with the estate of the formidably talented conceptualist Heidi Bucher; itself a well-thought retrospective worthy of an institution.
At Paulina Caspari, the dealer worked together with New York-based Andrew Dubrow to assemble a meticulous group show, which sees a heterogenous cohort of contemporary painters engaged with symbolism and mythology become anchored within the legacy of the early 20th-century artist Franz von Stuck, “the last prince of art of Munich’s great days.” The foundational stone of the show is a loaned canvas by von Stuck, Centaur and Cupid from 1902; its presence conjures a ghostly, dark ground of spirit that lingers between his easels, which the curators also loaned from von Stuck’s foundation. On these easels are new proposals, and a trance-like mood emerges between Adam Alessi’s gazing untitled figure and the heavy chiaroscuro of Sara Knowland’s two darkened landscapes, largely overwhelmed with the frenetic movement of goats. Vasyl Tkachenko Untitled, 2024, which depicts a figure emerging from a wash of light behind a dark curtain, recalls the heavy contrast in von Stuck’s 1893 portrait The Sin—Tkachenko holds a similar evocative candor and watchful desire, but is untangled from moralism.
“I Would Not Think To Touch The Sky With Two Arms.” Courtesy the artists and Paulina Caspari, Munich. Photo: Produktion Pitz
On Saturday, collectors, dealers, artists, and representatives from institutions all gathered in the FC Bayern’s Basketball club. Somewhat miraculously, the Various Others cohort had managed to upload 400 gigabytes of visuals to the team’s LED, touch-sensitive floor. It was a work of art unto itself, in a way, and it heightened the cartoonish fun of the evening. (There were even popcorn boxes emblazoned with Various Others designs on them at the start and soft-serve ice cream later.) Perhaps buoyed by the much-needed levity of the environment, after dinner finished, the entire Munich art world began shooting hoops while music by ’90s rap legend Skee-Lo played.
Haus der Kunst director Andrea Lissoni stood out among the pack with his not infrequent three-pointers and casually perfect lay-ups.  Other art-world players were huffing a little harder; word traveled around the court that Lissoni was once a professional basketball player in Italy.
Various Others dinner. Photo: Pablo Lauf
On one of Bruguera’s tear-away sheets was a line that stuck with me: “Art is not only a statement of the present, it is also a call for a different future, a better one … it is a right not only to enjoy art, but to be able to create it.” This was stated at a 2012 panel on artistic freedom held at the U.N. in Geneva so, in all seriousness, it is good to remember that joy can and must be a part of art’s methodology and, with a good score, a part of the outcome. More