Art & Exhibitions

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

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

Jim Jarmusch is known for his deadpan films that feature oddball characters and ask big existential questions. Among his best-known works in this vein are Stranger than Paradise (1984), a black-and-white minimalist comedy with a cult following, and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), the tale of a principled hitman and pigeon keeper who finds himself marked by the mafia. His cinematography also often employs surreal storytelling devices, such as the trail of pink objects in Broken Flowers (2005) that reveals important character-defining clues throughout the movie but offers little in the way of plot resolution.
Given the quiet absurdism of many of his films, it comes as no surprise that the American director has a long-standing affinity for Surrealism. “The beauty of Surrealism is looking at things in a different way,” Jarmusch said. “It’s about juxtaposing the mundane and fantastical.”
Jim Jarmusch. Photo: Laurent KOFFEL/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.
As a teenager, Surrealism was a “revelation” to the burgeoning director, first in its visual forms and then its literary ones. In his early twenties, it drew him to Paris, “where I repeatedly used [André] Breton’s “Nadja” as a kind of walking map through the mysterious nocturnal streets of the city,” he said.
Jarmusch returns to Paris this week for Paris Photo, where he has curated a selection of 34 photos at the fair to celebrate the centenary of the Surrealism movement. His picks, Jarmusch added, are not purely Surrealist, but “reflect its tenets of the transformation of the ordinary into the dreamlike, and at times vice-versa.”
Peter Hujar, Catacomb Palermo (1963). ©Peter Hujar Archive, LLC; Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Courtesy Stephen Daiter
There are plenty of recognizable works among Jarmusch’s highlights, from David Hockney’s 1970s swimming pool photos, brought by Equinox Gallery, to Peter Hujar’s eerie catacomb images at Stephen Daiter’s booth.
Robert Frank’s portrait of Jack Kerouac at Pace is part of a fair-wide dedication to the late Swiss-American photographer and documentary filmmaker in honor of his 100th birthday; Jarmusch was a close friend of Frank and credits him as an influence in his own work.
Robert Frank, Jack Kerouac–NYC (1965). © The June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation. Courtesy Pace Gallery
Several works foreground outsider figures, akin to the characters that Jarmusch tends to feature in his films. Japanese photographer Kenshichi Heshiki’s scenes of mid-century Okinawa and those living on its margins stun at Ibasho’s booth. Lisetta Carmi’s subversive images of Genoa’s trans community in the 1960s, brought by Martini and Ronchetti, are both gritty and joyful.
Lisetta Carmi, I travestiti, la Sissi (1965) Courtesy Martini & Ronchetti.
More contemporary inclusions range from Zanele Muholi’s explorations of race, as seen in her portrait OwakheX, Sheraton, Brooklyn, New York (2019), at Yancey Richardson to Dawoud Bey’s ominously dusky shot of an all-American house ringed by a white picket fence at Stephen Daiter.
Dawoud Bey, Untitled #1 (From Night Coming Tenderly, Black), 2018. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Daiter.
Of course, there are classic Surrealist works grounding Jarmusch’s curatorial strategy, 10 of which can be found at Edwynn Houk’s booth, where an entire wall has been given over to Surrealism. Among the highlights are Dora Maar’s Photo Mode II (1931) and several photos by Man Ray.
Dora Maar, Photo Mode II (1931). Courtesy Edwynn Houk.
The evening before the photo fair opened to VIPs, Jarmusch also hosted a preview of Le Retour à la raison, a compendium of four short silent films made by Man Ray in the 1920s that have been restored and scored to post-rock music by SQÜRL, Jarmusch’s experimental guitar band with Carter Logan.
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“I love how Man Ray experimented with photography and film, and treated the camera as a toy,” Jarmusch said before the screening, adding that he had been playing improvisational music to these films for over a decade. The resulting score, guided by Jarmusch’s feedback-heavy guitar and Logan’s synthesizer and occasional drumbeat, feels perfectly in sync with the 100-year-old film. SQÜRL recorded it at Centre Pompidou, which is currently hosting a blockbuster Surrealism exhibition.
Alongside his cinematic work, Jarmusch is also a practicing visual artist specializing in photography and collage. He has an upcoming exhibition with James Fuentes Gallery in Los Angeles next year.
Paris Photo runs through Sunday, November 10, at the Grand Palais, Paris. More

As far as artistic collaborations go, the 1920 debut of Pulcinella was one for the ages. Ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev pulled the strings with Léonide Massine providing choreography, Igor Stravinsky the music, and Pablo Picasso the costumes and sets.
For Picasso and Stravinsky, it sparked a friendship that lasted a lifetime. Almost exact contemporaries, both had sought out Paris’s febrile energy and were fast becoming master craftsmen who shared an affinity for experimenting with style and form. In later years, they wrote letters to one another, exchanging news, doodles, and musical riffs.
The Ballets Russes performing Pulcinella in 1924. Photo by Sasha Hulton/Getty Images.
One such notation, a fleeting clarinet concerto that Stravinsky titled Pour Pablo, will be brought to life as part of “Picasso Symphony,” a concert experience that tells the story of the artist’s life by pairing artwork with period music played by a live orchestra. When Pour Pablo arrives as a three-minute intermezzo, it’s accompanied by Picasso’s portraits featuring musical instruments.
“Picasso Symphony,” which will open at La Seine Musical in Paris in March 2025 ahead of an international tour is the brainchild of Jason Michael Paul, a producer and musical entrepreneur who has seen success producing video game concerts with titles such as Zelda and Final Fantasy.
Igor Stravinsky, Pour Pablo. Photo courtesy of JMP Entertainment.
The inspiration for his latest outing arrived from another project that has taken an iconic artist beyond the white walls of a museum: Immersive Van Gogh. Upon visiting it, Paul found the event offered audiences an immersive experience of light and sound, something he believed was replicable in a concert hall.
After negotiating the rights to the artwork with Succession Picasso, which manages the artist’s image rights, Paul worked with music director Kevin Zakresky to trace the contours of Picasso’s life chronologically through music. “There’s an emotional mirroring or matching of the music to the art’s mood,” Paul told me via email. “The aim was to create a cohesive and insightful journey through Picasso’s world.”
A musical work Picasso sent Stravinsky. Photo courtesy JMP Entertainment.
What this amounts to is somber cello playing to his Blue Period paintings or lively acoustic guitar for the early Spanish works. Elsewhere, atonal works accompany Picasso’s abstract experiments and neoclassical pieces tie in with the more traditional phases of his career. For good measure, Paul and Zakresky have included music by some of Picasso’s favorite composers, like Eric Satie (a close friend whom he painted), Gustave Holst, Benjamin Britten, and Sergei Prokofiev.
“Music was central to Picasso’s life, in Spain and in France, music was in the air,” Paul said. “Think of the cafes, the bars, the street performers. It was part of his daily existence and he painted musicians repeatedly and he also painted portraits of composers.”
Portrait of Stravinsky by Pablo Picasso (1917). Photo courtesy JMP Entertainment.
One of these portraits, naturally, is of Stravinsky. The composer sits in a chair that seems to bend around him, the lines are thin and exact, his gaze is fixed and expectant, as though searching for some brilliant idea in the far beyond.
“Picasso Symphony” debuts at La Seine Musicale, La Seine Musicale, Île Seguin, Boulogne-Billancourt, France, March 1, 2025, before traveling to the Will Rogers Memorial Auditorium, 3401 W Lancaster Ave, Fort Worth, Texas, on May 10, 2025. More

Shanghai’s dual art fairs, ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair and West Bund Art and Design, are about to open this week and so are a slew of exhibitions as museums mount all-star shows for the city’s art week.
The pinnacle of China’s art calendar, this week in Shanghai offers an unmatched opportunity to connect with nearly everyone in the Chinese art world. While the excitement is palpable, many say that the fairs’ offerings seem “quieter” this year and attendees are coming mostly from mainland China, as the presence of international visitors remains limited for now.
Outside of the fairs, however, it’s a different story. International artists are headlining some of the biggest venues in the city, among them Marina Abramović, whose work continues to make waves at the Modern Art Museum Shanghai. The Chi K11 Art Museum Shanghai is hosting French artist César Piette’s first museum show in China while the Rockbund Art Museum showcases American artist and poet Rindon Johnson in his most comprehensive museum exhibition to date and his first in the Asia-Pacific region.
Meanwhile, homegrown talents are getting top billing at some of the city’s museums. At the Start Museum, a trio of shows opening simultaneously spotlight young Chinese artists while at Fotografiska Shanghai, Chinese artists Li Weiyi and Chen Wei are both getting the solo-show treatment. At the state-backed, Jean Nouvel-designed Museum of Art Pudong, “Cao Fei: Tidal Flux” has now been extended through February due to popular demand, alongside a captivating exhibition on JMW Turner, the museum’s latest collaboration with Tate.
But that’s just the start. Here are five other must-see shows opening this week.
“Yin Xiuzhen: Piercing the Sky”  
Power Station of Art
Yin Xiuzhen, Flying Machine (2008). Shanghai Art Museum. Courtesy of the artist.
Curated by the acclaimed art historian and critic Wu Hung, sculptor and installation artist Yin Xiuzhen is presenting a major retrospective at the Power Station of Art (PSA). It’s overdue for the artist who, at 61, is one of China’s most influential female artists. Spanning the entire first floor, the exhibition opens with the monumental Piercing the Sky, a 15-meter-long, rocket-like metal sculpture with a base reminiscent of a trombone. Sharing its name with the exhibition, this powerful piece symbolizes the courage to strive beyond earthly limitations. Featuring approximately 20 monumental works that utilize diverse materials and approaches, the highlights Yin’s signature pieces alongside her more recent creations, all of which tease out the dichotomies of heaven and earth, human and divine, and the inner self and the outside world. The show runs through February 16, 2025.
Additionally, for the fashion aficionados out there, PSA is also hosting “Gabrielle Chanel: Fashion Manifesto“, the first retrospective devoted to the work of Gabrielle Chanel in China. Supported exclusively by the French fashion label, the exhibition is open through November 24. 

“Distance of the Moon”
Prada Rong Zhai
Shuang Li, Our Lady of Sorrows (2024). Courtesy the artist, Peres Projects, and Antenna Space.
In Italo Calvino’s “Distance of the Moon,” Earth and Moon once shared a close gravitational pull, allowing people to climb between the two to collect “moon milk.” But a sudden shift in gravity leaves some stranded on the Moon, separated from those on Earth. Artist Li Shuang (b. 1990) found solace in this tale during lockdown, as she remained in Europe, cut off from family in China. This sense of isolation became central to her artistic practice, translating her disconnection into new works that explore alienation, distance, and attempts at connection.
Now based between Berlin and Geneva, Li will transform Shanghai’s historic Prada Rong Zhai into a reflective, autobiographical house. The exhibition, which runs through January 16, 2025, will feature light and sound installations, videos, and resin objects she created during the pandemic, each piece invoking themes of solitude and fragmented communication. A standout element, a “telegraph-coded letter,” is embedded within the show for viewers to decipher, inviting them to engage directly with her narrative of personal distance and the challenge of bridging separations across space and time.

“Daniel Crews-Chubb: Immortals”
Long Museum
Daniel Crews-Chubb in his studio. Photo: Tim Craig
The London-based painter Daniel Crews-Chubb (b. 1984) makes his first major museum solo debut at the Long Museum in Shanghai, which will feature more than 30 works from two pivotal series that delve into the evolution of figurative representation across history. Known for his dynamic and vibrant compositions, Crews-Chubb creates chimerical figures through a complex, intuitive process involving painting, drawing, and collage. He employs spontaneous methods of applying paint—such as spilling, throwing, and spraying ink and pigment—to create a lively base that brings his figures to life.
On view through January 5, 2025, the exhibition features “Immortals” (2022–24), a series that explores the age-old human endeavor of creating art as a gesture toward immortality. This series considers how representations of figures, from cave drawings to classical statues, achieve a sense of timelessness. His latest series, “Out of Chaos” (2024), takes a broader perspective, reflecting on the interconnectedness of all life and cosmic entities, using the human figure as a central theme to unify a plethora of spontaneous marks. The series’ title, inspired by the ancient Greek concept of chaos as the origin of the universe, underscores the thematic depth of Crews-Chubb’s work, presenting a narrative of creation and interconnectedness.

“Another Avant-Garde. Photography 1970–2000”
West Bund Museum 
Sandy Skoglund, Radioactive Cats, (Chats radioactifs) (1980). Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Service de la documentation photographique du MNAM/Dist. GrandPalaisRmn
As part of the notable collaboration between Centre Pompidou and West Bund Museum, “Another Avant-garde: Photography 1970–2000” delves into of the French museum’s rich photography collection. This exhibition, running through February 16, 2025, marks the first time in decades that key photographic works from 1970 to 2000 are showcased together, juxtaposing a diverse array of works—from modest conceptual pieces to expansive tableaux, and from singular photographs to experimental video pieces. The show not only reflects on photography’s multifaceted role as sculpture, performance, moving image, and its intersections with painting but also emphasizes its significance across varied artistic contexts. Special attention is given to works from China, featuring several loans that foster a dialogue between distinct avant-garde histories, enhancing the narrative of global photographic practices during this transformative period.
The museum is also hosting “A Cloud in Trousers: Painting Today,” co-organized with Pond Society, a non-profit founded by collector Xue Bing, that features works by 23 artists from diverse generations and backgrounds, providing a look to see the breadth of contemporary Chinese painting. 

“Issy Wood: What I Eat In A Day” 
“Pictures of the Post-80s Generation —Generational Leap”
Tank Shanghai
Issy Wood, Self portrait 60 (2024). © Issy Wood 2024, courtesy the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London. Photo: Damian Griffiths.
Issy Wood will present her first large-scale exhibition of small-scale works at Tank Shanghai, an ambitious institution founded by mega collector Qiao Zhibing. Unlike conventional sketches, Wood’s pieces are intimate glimpses into her daily life, each acting like a diary entry or a snippet from her internet search history, reflecting even her dietary habits. These deeply personal works, which Wood treasures, have evolved into a key part of her daily routine and a playground for visual experimentation. The show runs through January 19, 2025.
In addition to Wood’s show, the museum is hosting a group exhibition featuring works from 35 Chinese artists of the 1980s generation, through May 4, 2025. Curated by Sun Dongdong, it aims to address pressing contemporary issues. Sun describes it as a reflection of the connection between modern Chinese society and the evolving global landscape. He hopes to encourage viewers to dig deeper into the narratives presented, engaging with the complexities of our times while inspiring a renewed sense of hope for the future.  More

A couple of years ago, Egyptian archaeologists excavating a necropolis south of Cairo discovered a papyrus marked with ancient Greek. Analysis eventually showed it bore Euripides’s Ino and Polyidos, two lost works, previously known only by hazy plot summaries and quoted snippets. Of the 5th-century B.C.E. playwright’s estimated 90 works only 19 survive, making the discovery among the most considerable contributions to Greek literature in half a century.
The achievement will be dwarfed if progress continues to be made on the Herculaneum scrolls, a collection of 1,800 texts that were carbonized into lumps by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in in 79 C.E. It’s a potential gold mine of writings currently absent from the classical canon and a Silicon Valley-backed competition is pushing machine learning and computer vision enthusiasts to train their focus on virtually unwrapping the texts.
The thrill, in both cases, is of a past rendered ever-so-slightly richer by the discovery of things believed lost. But what of the countless other lost, disappeared, and abandoned books? What might literature (and the world perhaps) be like if it included Homer’s lost comedy Margites or the Bible still contained the Book of the Battles of Yahweh? What might it be like to stand in a room of these books? These are among the historical counterfactuals explored in an upcoming exhibition at New York’s Grolier Club, America’s oldest society for bibliophiles.
George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron. Byron’s Memoirs. Unpublished manuscript. Photo: Reid Byers/Grolier Club.
Set to run from December through February 2025, club member Reid Byers has been handed the curatorial keys for “Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished, and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books.” It’s the grand extension of a thought experiment Byers has been toying with for some time and arrives courtesy of thorough collaborations with printers, bookbinders, artists, and calligraphers.
Byers has given life to more than 100 books and will spread them around the Grolier’s cozy second floor gallery. It is, the organizers admit, part conceptual art project and part literary indulgence. Visitors are asked to judge works entirely by their covers and, in so doing, dream up the stories and characters that these the unknowable books might hold inside. In turn, we find ourselves considering the first words and keystrokes for the books we know and love.
Abdul Al-Hazred, Necronomicon. In Vinegia: Appresso Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari et Fratelli, 1541. Anthropegal grimoire. Photo: Reid Byers/Grolier Club.
“An encounter with an imaginary book brings us forcibly to a liminal moment, confronted with an object that we know does not exist, but then it leaves us suspended in this strange space,” Byers said in a statement. “Every book in the world was an imaginary book when it was first begun to be written.”
Byers has devised three broad criteria for “Imaginary Books.” The first, Lost Books, counts among its number William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Won, the vanished complement to Love’s Labour’s Lost; Ernest Hemmingway’s first novel that was stolen from his wife (along with its carbon copies) in Paris; and Lord Byron’s tell-all memoir that was deemed worthy of burning by his publisher in 1824.
Sylvia Plath, Double Exposure (1962). London: Heineman, 1964. Manuscript disappeared c. 1970. Photo courtesy of the Grolier Club.
The second, Unfinished Books, presents works that were started but never finished or published. This includes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opium inspired reverie Kubla Khan, Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical Double Exposure that Ted Hughes allegedly prevented being published, and Raymond Chandler’s Shakespeare in Baby Talk.
Last are Byers’ Fictive Books, which emerge from the pages of fiction to find physical form at the Grolier Club. Chief among which is The Necronomicon the toxic, forbidden tome from H.P. Lovecraft’s writings. As is canon, it appeared locked away in a heavy-set safe. You can look and speculate but, as Byers said, “the book is not to be touched.” More

Mary Sully (1896–1963) is enjoying, perhaps, the most unlikely museum solo show debut in all of art history. A self-taught, 20th-century Dakota Sioux woman artist whose entire life’s work sat forgotten in the family home for decades, Sully is now the subject of a fascinating posthumous exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently acquired a suite of 19 of her works.
“This is a reclamation project,” Sylvia Yount, the Met’s American wing curator, said in a tour of the show, which also included 10 works on loan from the Mary Sully Foundation. “We are inserting Mary Sully into the canon of American art.”
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” follows the 2019 book Becoming Mary Sully, by Sully’s grandnephew, Phillip J. Deloria, a historian and Harvard professor who inherited the artist’s work, packed away in a suitcase under the stairs. Miraculously, he not only recognized its worth, but made it his mission to ensure that others did as well.
“Nobody ever took her seriously as an artist—no one in the family. They thought she was the crazy woman who just doodled up in her room,” Deloria said. “I think of her as the Indian Emily Dickinson.”
Mary Sully, Babe Ruth (ca. 1920s–40s). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund and funds from various donors, 2023.
Drawn on paper from the late 1920s to the early ’40s, Sully’s multi-panel compositions feature carefully composed, often symmetrical designs that employ pattern and geometry. The top panel is typically the most figurative, with Modernist-inspired abstractions of this imagery in the center page, and more overtly Native American designs on the bottom sheet.
Many of these kaleidoscopic colored pencil works, of which roughly 200 are known to exist, were what the artist called “personality prints,” inspired by the celebrities of the day, from Gertrude Stein to Babe Ruth to Fiorello La Guardia. Upon close examination, each one contains figurative elements that relate to their subject’s life, like a baseball diamond for Ruth—although the imagery, while beautiful, can be hard to parse.
Mary Sully, JT (Julia) (ca. 1920s–40s). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund and funds from various donors, 2023.
That these pieces are now in the collection of the nation’s foremost art institution, which is showing no less than 25 of her drawings, would have been a dream come true for Sully.
Suffering from social anxiety and mental illness that was never formally diagnosed, she had struggled to find her way as an adult, with an unsuccessful stint as a shop owner after failing to complete her college education. Sully lived with and relied financially on her sister, Ella Deloria, an ethnographer who, like Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston, trained under the noted anthropologist Franz Boas.
Though the family may not have appreciated them, her drawings were something that Sully excelled at, and gave purpose and meaning to her life.
Mary Sully, Fiorello La Guardia (ca. 1920s–40s). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of the Mary Sully Foundation, 2023.
“Her being isolated in her room, spending hours—years really—drawing, that’s actually now something that’s really encouraged in regards to self-care,” Patricia Marroquin Norby, the Met’s associate curator of Native American art, said. “Now we have all the adult coloring books for people.”
Sully took up her art with a unique vision, exacting detail, and a determined dedication, creating her own personal style and visual language. She was informed both by her Native heritage—techniques such as quillwork, beadwork, and quilting—and the prevailing trends of the day, including commercial design and fashion, as well as mainstream pop culture.
In this, Sully was unique among other Indigenous artists working at the time, who typically hewed more closely to traditional Native subject matter.
Mary Sully, Eugene Field (ca. 1920s–40s). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, Morris K. Jesup Fund and funds from various donors, 2023.
Despite her lack of formal training, Sully saw art as her birthright. Her great-grandfather was Thomas Sully (1783–1872), one of the most famous and successful early American painters.
Thomas Sully’s son, Alfred Sully (1820–1879), was also an artist—as well as a military man, rising to the level of a brigadier general in the Army. Alfred’s service brought him out West, where he commanded U.S. forces in the 1863 Whitestone Hill Massacre, killing as many as 300 Native Americans.
But before that, he had an intimate relationship with a Dakota woman named Susan Pehandutawin, who gave him a pair of beaded moccasins that he sent back East—and, more importantly, bore him a daughter, also named Mary Sully.
It’s not clear if Alfred ever knew Pehandutawin had given birth to his child, but his daughter and grandchildren knew the artistic lineage from which they were descended. And when Sully began making her art, she eschewed her birth name, Susan Mabel Deloria, in favor of her mother’s name, which reflected this ancestry.
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Paul Lachenauer, ©the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York.
Just as Thomas Sully painted portraits of the leading citizens of Early America, his great-granddaughter looked to celebrities—some of whom have long since been consigned to obscurity—for inspiration. Her “Personality Prints,” Deloria said, “are really a portrait of America in the 1930s,” and reflect the artist’s engagement with literature, theater, and popular music.
Sully was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, but spent her life between two worlds, Native and non-Native. Her father, Philip J. Deloria, was a leader of the Sioux Episcopal Church. Ella Deloria’s work took the sisters across the country, with Sully serving as driver, and the sisters even lived for a time in New York.
But in her only brush with fame, as the subject of one of Paramount Pictures’s “Unusual Occupations” shorts in 1944, Sully was exoticized. Shooting her drawing in the desert in a stereotypical “Indian Princess” outfit, the film identifies her as a member of New Mexico’s Zuni tribe.
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Paul Lachenauer, ©the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York.
“Obviously cultural and historical accuracy were not of concern. There was more for entertainment value,” Marroquin Norby, who is herself a Purépecha Indian woman, said of the footage, which is included in the show. “It’s just such a quirky, fun video.”
Some of Sully’s drawings delve into the complex question of Native American identity, like the Three Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present, and Indian Church.
The former wrestles with the sad trajectory of Native life under colonial rule, her people shown trod beneath the foot of the white man and forced off their land into reservations. (Sully conveys this masterfully in four vertical layers.) The latter depicts a Native congregation gathered before an altar in front of the cross, but inside a tipi, illustrating the ways in which Indigenous communities blended their own traditions with settler culture.
Mary Sully, Three Stages of Indian History: Pre-Columbian Freedom, Reservation Fetters, the Bewildering Present (ca. 1920s–40s). Courtesy of the Mary Sully Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Despite some efforts to attract collectors, Sully never sold her work. And she appears to have only exhibited three times, at two Indian schools and at the Milwaukee Women’s Club. But Deloria’s book opened new doors for the late artist, as scholars and academics began to discover her extraordinary art.
In 2019, a trio of Sully’s works appeared in “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists,” which opened at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), and traveled to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville; the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.; and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa. (The Met show was originally going to be organized in partnership with Mia, which has also acquired several Sully drawings; instead, a separate exhibition will open there in March.)
Mary Sully, Indian Church, top panel (ca. 1920s–40s). Courtesy of the Mary Sully Foundation.
At the Met, the drawings are shown exactly as Sully intended—thankfully, they were carefully packed away in neat groups, still with the tape she used to present them as vertical triptychs during her lifetime. Otherwise, it might have been quite a challenge to match the corresponding panels together.
“When my wife and I saw them on the wall, we just kind of burst into tears,” Deloria recalled. “To see Mary Sully’s works now hung on the walls of major museums, it’s just this amazing thing. But she’s wholly and completely deserving of it.”
“Mary Sully: Native Modern” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, July 18, 2024–January 12, 2025. More

With a record number of countries holding elections in 2024—including the U.S., where Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are battling it out for the White House this week—the future of democracy feels more at stake than ever. At the National Gallery of Greece in Athens, the so-called birthplace of democracy, a sweeping show looks at the history of the government system that is meant to bring power to the people. It is also a roadmap for navigating our present political moment.
Staged to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the restoration of democracy in Greece, “Democracy” is an ambitious exhibition that is billed as the first to examine how artists captured the quest for democratic rule in Greece, Spain, and Portugal during the 1960s and ’70s. The result of two years of research by Syrago Tsiara, the curator and director of the National Gallery of Greece, the show highlights 140 works by 55 artists. But it is more than just a historical exhibition looking into the evolution of political art, according to Tsiara.
Installation view of “Democracy,” “Facing the Enemy” chapter, featuring Yannis Gaitis’s sculpture Five or Six. Photo credit Stavros Psiroukis © National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum.
Instead, the exhibition “helps us to realize, understand, and decode the experiences that we live in nowadays [so that] we can become critical citizens and critical thinkers,” she said, noting that extremist voices have been on the rise around the world while voter turnout in many countries has declined amid the public’s growing skepticism of institutional credibility. “[This show] serves as a poignant reminder of the ongoing need to defend democracy.”
Another mission of the exhibition and her role, noted Tsiara, is to propagate what is known as “sentimental education,” a term some literature aficionados might recognize from Gustave Flaubert’s 1869 novel of the same name. The phrase refers to developing a refined understanding of emotions, ethics, and aesthetics—an “education of the heart” that goes beyond emotional intelligence.
Giorgos Ioannou, Protest at the polytechnic … Athens 17/11/73 B (1973). Photo: Thanos Kartsoglou/Giorgos Ioannou Collection Archive.
For Tsiara, it’s about cultivating a deeper, more nuanced way of seeing and valuing the world so that we can see ourselves and our current struggles as part of something larger. “Sentiments have history, too,” she explained. “The way they have been expressed is very interesting for us to explore, because we don’t know how to deal with our feelings, how to express them.”
Many of the works in “Democracy” respond to a specific series of events that transpired between July 20 and July 24 in 1974, when the Turkish invasion of Cyprus led to the fall of the military junta that had placed Greece under dictatorship rule for seven years. Former prime minister Konstantinos Karamanlis then ended his self-imposed exile and returned to Athens afterwards, leading the country to transition to democracy. The same year also saw the bloodless coup that ended the 40-year long Estado Novo fascist dictatorship rule in Portugal. Spain also began its transition to democracy the following year after the death of Francisco Franco, the military dictator who ruled the country as a dictator from 1939 to 1975.
Reflecting on this powerful political moment in Europe, the show brings together historical works from institutions such as Spain’s Reina Sofia, Museu d’Art Contemporarni de Barcelona, Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, Centro de Estudos Multidisciplinares Ernesto de Sousa, as well as private collections in Greece and Portugal. Together, the artworks map the emergence of artistic movements and art forms utilized by artists to illustrate social upheaval, such as critical realism and abstract art as well as performance and conceptual art.
Giorgos Sikeliotis, Angel Warrior (1976). © National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos MuseumPhoto Credit: Stavros Psiroukis
The exhibition is organized to chart the emotional journey many experienced in the pursuit of civil liberties and democratic rule. These feelings are categorized into four themes: “Facing the Enemy,” “Resistance,” “Uprising,” and “Arousal.” While the joy of being able to gather and express opinions freely following the collapse of the military regime was apparent in the era in the second half of the 1970s, the trauma of dictatorship was still haunting Greek society, a sentiment that was difficult to express, Tsiara noted.
“Facing the Enemy” highlights works that capture the impression of figures representative of the authoritarian regimes, such as Colombian artist Fernando Botero’s depiction of a bloated Franco (1986). Murdering Freedom or The Colonels (1968), a canvas work by Greek artist Yannis Gaitis, depicts a group with nearly identical faces dressed in military uniforms pointing their guns at a pigeon, a symbol of freedom, illustrating not only what the country was going through at the time, but also the mechanism of control and dehumanization under an authoritarian regime. Jannis Psychopedis, also from Greece and a key figure of the critical realism movement, portrayed political figures in his monotone oil canvases.
Fernando Botero, Franco (1986). @Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Photo: Joaquín Cortés / Román Lores.
The “suffering body” plays a part in the subsequent section, “Resistance,” as a metaphor for the dictatorship experience of torture and repression. Wood cut work on paper In Memory of Che Guevara. The Dead (1968) by Greek printmaker Tassos (Anastasios Alevizos), for example, depicts Guevara, the Cuban revolution leader who was executed in 1967.
“Resistance is an attitude,” Tsiara noted. “Here, Guevara is depicted as the body of the dead Christ. The iconography of the church becomes political art, and martyrs of the dictatorship become the new saint.” Photography works capturing the environment of the Athens-born performance artist, Maria Karavela, whose performance exhibitions depicting bodies tormented by teh regime were censored and shut down.
Marios Vatzias, National Technical University of Athens (1975) © National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum. Photo Credit: Stavros Psiroukis
“Uprising” features Revolução, a key video work by Portuguese artist and writer Ana Hatherly who captured the streetscape of Lisbon full of graffiti and posters with a Super 8 camera following the Carnation Revolution, which ended the 50 years of dictatorship in Portugal in 1974. Tsiara said the element of sound plays an important role in not just Hatherly’s work but also in the works chronicling the political struggles throughout this period. The work was first exhibited in Portugal’s participation of Venice Biennale in 1975, a remarkable gesture to illustrate its importance as “a national representation of the country,” she added.
This opposes Marios Vatzias’s complex painting and Manolis Tzobanakis’s sculpture, which reflect on the events 1973 Athens Polytechnic uprising, the student-led protest against the Greek military junta that ended up with very different outcome. The crackdown saw the junta’s tank crushing the gate of the campus killing those inside. It also caused the death of 24 civilians outside the campus and hundreds injured. “We have all this anger, all this pain for the lost bodies, the pain for the students and those who lost their lives in the uprising,” the Tsiara said.
Yannis Gaïtis, The Bird (1971). © Irene Panagopoulos. Photo: Thanos Kartsoglou.
The exhibition concludes with “Arousal,” featuring works that deal with the underlying trauma and grief that coexist with the joy of liberties and the reclamation of the lost voice brought by democratization, such as Pop works by Portuguese painter Nikias Skapinakis, and the surrealist drawings of Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego.
This politically-charged exhibition also poses questions about the nature of political art and the artistic value of creative expresses conceived in response to socio-political challenges. So, what makes good political art?
“There is good and bad political art, just like good and bad performance or oil painting,” Tsiara said. “It’s not just about one work or one project. To me, it is important that an artist does not work in isolation, following and searching only for his or her own existential anxieties. Art is a social practice, so it is political.”
“Democracy” runs through February 2, 2025, at the National Gallery of Greece, Athens.  More

Halloween at the Brooklyn Museum, dear reader, is a riot. The museum is a polling place, and when I visited, early voters streamed through, poll workers letting out a round of applause every time a first-time voter cast their ballot. School groups abounded, and education department staffers were reportedly giving school tours upstairs in costumes based on works in the institution’s collection. 
Also in the mix, just a few feet from where the voters stood on line in the lobby, is Trailer (1998–2000), a resonant artwork by American artist Liza Lou that plumbs Hollywood images of crime and violence, toxic masculinity and communal femininity, fine and decorative art, and the American obsession with guns and hunting—all packed into one 35-foot-long 1949 Spartan Royal Mansion mobile trailer. It’s on public view for the first time in a decade.
Liza Lou, Trailer (1998-2000). Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. © Liza Lou. Photo: Danny Perez.
Step up into a little space for one person at a time to survey the interior, and you’re transported in the dimly lit black-and-white world, whose interior, save for the quilted fabric black ceiling, is covered with millions of black and white beads, from the linoleum-tiled floor to the top of the (faux?) wood-paneled walls. The compact space is packed with the owner’s possessions. The curtains are all drawn, lending an air of secrecy or even malice.
Whoever it was loved their guns; a shotgun is propped against the wall by the door, while another hangs above the couch. A lamp is propped on a pile of three books: Proud Guns, Shooter’s Bible, and How to Hunt Deer. (The latter two, at least, show up online as real books.) A copy of Guns magazine (“Be a pistol champ”) sits on a coffee table along with a hunting knife, a pack of Marlboros, and a whisky bottle. A pornographic magazine resting on the floor nearby points to much darker territory.
Liza Lou, Trailer (1998-2000). Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. © Liza Lou. Photo: Danny Perez.
The piece prompted me to think Lou was ahead of the game in thinking about so-called toxic masculinity, but a quick Google revealed that the term was coined during the men’s movement of the 1980s, and thus likely on the artist’s mind as she conceived the piece. 
Liza Lou, Trailer (1998-2000). Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. © Liza Lou. Photo: Danny Perez.
Keep looking around, and you see a typewriter perched on the table in the kitchenette. Next to it is a sheet of paper with the words “Keep your eyes on the road to liberty,” a reference to an unsolved 1937 attempt on the life of Los Angeles District Attorney Buron Fitts. Those words were mailed to Fitts just hours before he was shot at and slightly wounded, possibly connected to a strike at a Douglas Aircraft Factory, according to a March 8 New York Times item. Are we in the home of a would-be assassin?
Liza Lou, Trailer (1998-2000). Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. © Liza Lou. Photo: Danny Perez.
A television appears to play just out of sight in the bedroom; we see flashing lights and hear dialogue from what sounds like a classic film noir, where hardened gangsters discuss a numbers-running operation. What’s more, a leg is stretched out on the floor, visible only up to the ankle. A dead body? A woman’s? It inevitably recalls the feet of the Wicked Witch of the East poking out from under Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz. (Perhaps incidentally, the film dates from 1939, just two years after the attempt on Fitts’s life.)
“The work is labor-intensive but also meditative,” said Catherine Futter, the museum’s senior curator of decorative arts, who joined me for a while. “She’s looking at the big issues of life but it’s also internal.” Part of Trailer’s inspiration, she revealed, was not just Hollywood film noir in general but in particular Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), one of the greats of the genre, in which the darkness is leavened by a liberal sprinkling of irony and black humor, which Futter sees in Lou’s piece as well.
Actor Charlton Heston with director and screenwriter Orson Welles on the set of his movie Touch of Evil (1958). Photo: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images.
The obsession with firearms in the piece comes across, Futter pointed out, a bit more nostalgically now than it might have a quarter-century ago. Indeed, the revolvers and shotguns in Trailer, if the piece were done today, might be more likely to be assault-style rifles and automatic weapons. Guns tragically remain the leading cause of death for children and teens, and disproportionately affect people of color, according to a recent report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. 
A group of seventh-graders, polled by this reporter, eagerly posed questions—why did he have so many guns? Is that a dead body?—before sharing their TikTok handles, presumably in hopes of boosting their follower counts. (Can’t knock the hustle!)

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An educational video playing nearby sates visitors’ curiosity with interviews with the artist and conservators who worked on the piece. “What would sexy maleness be?” asks Lou, recounting one of the subjects she felt compelled to address.
Conservators discuss some of the challenges of putting a work on show that had long sat outdoors at the sculpture park created by collectors Sherry and Joel Mallin, who recently donated the piece. Some 10 conservators worked on it for six weeks, cleaning it and removing individual beads that had fallen off in transit or during handling, and clearing up evidence of incursions by mice and squirrels. You’d never guess—inside, the trailer smells fresh and clean. Such a large piece also presented installation challenges; the museum had to remove three of the glass doors on its facade to be able—barely—to fit it inside. 
Liza Lou, Trailer (1998–2000). Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. © Liza Lou. Photo: Danny Perez.
Just about a half-hour away via the 2 or 3 subway train is the Whitney Museum of American Art, which owns Lou’s installation Kitchen (1991–96), finished two years before she began work on Trailer. That piece (not on view, alas) could serve as a pendant to this one, depicting a feminine-coded locale, and created not in black and white but in a veritable party of colored beads.
Liza Lou, Kitchen (1991-96). Photo: Tom Powel Imaging. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London.
Where Trailer has revolvers, whisky bottles, and Marlboros, Kitchen has Lay’s potato chips and a six-pack of Budweiser, a box of Tide laundry detergent (“the washing miracle”), Cap’n Crunch, and Frosted Flakes. The wallpaper carries messages of domestic labor like an iron, and a passage from an Emily Dickinson poem that runs “She rose to His Requirement, dropped the playthings of her life to take the honorable work of woman and of wife.” The work, Lou has said, “argues for the dignity of labor,” presumably both of the fictitious woman occupying the beaded kitchen as well as of the artist. 
Liza Lou, Kitchen (1991-96), detail. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.
So if you’re in the city, head to the Brooklyn Museum and spend some time contemplating America, gender, firearms, and all the other dimensions of this rich piece. Or, if you’re anxious because of the heightened drama of our current moment as the voters stream in and out, and you need a more meditative experience, maybe just count the beads, one by one.
“Liza Lou: Trailer” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York. More