Art & Exhibitions

The San Domenico Museum in Forlì, Italy, is hosting a monumental exhibition, “Pre-Raphaelites: Modern Renaissance.” The show brings together 360 works of art, borrowed from major European, American, and British museums, as well as private collections, foregrounding Italian masterpieces spanning from Cimabue to Veronese. The first multi-disciplinary exhibition of its kind in Italy, the show delves into the profound influence of Italian Renaissance art on the British Pre-Raphaelite movement of the mid-19th to early 20th centuries.
Frederic Leighton, Greek Girls Picking up Pebbles by the Sea (1871). Collection Pérez Simón, Mexico.
“Never before has there been an opportunity to put so many British works from this period in conversation with the Italian forerunners,” said Peter Trippi, a co-curator of the show. This is largely because borrowing Italian Renaissance and medieval art out of Italy is incredibly complicated due to the expense as well as the fragility and rarity of the works, which are typically cherished by the churches and museums in which they reside.
Among the highlights are celebrated works by Italian masters such as Cimabue, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Titian, juxtaposed with major pieces by renowned British artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Morris. Notably, the exhibition spotlights often overlooked contributions of women artists like Evelyn De Morgan, Elizabeth Siddal, and Julia Margaret Cameron to the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
The installation was designed by Lucchi & Biserni. Photo: Emanuele Rambaldi.
Structured as a captivating visual dialogue across time, the exhibition traces three generations of Pre-Raphaelites, a group founded in 1848 with the the mission to rejuvenate British art during the industrial age. Determined to recapture the spirit of medieval and Renaissance Italian artists who worked before the death of Raphael in 1520, Pre-Raphaelites rejected the academic conventions of their time by re-envisioning styles and themes from the past in strikingly modern ways. They drew on a dynamic array of Italian precedents, embracing Venetian Gothic architecture, the “Primitive” paintings at London’s National Gallery, and the sophisticated sensuality of artists like Veronese and Titian.
The installation, designed by Lucchi & Biserni of Forlì, showcases an array of works by prominent Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Burne-Jones, Frederic Leighton, and John Ruskin. More than 50 design objects, including four tremendous Holy Grail tapestries by Morris & Co. and a grand piano adorned by Burne-Jones, enrich the display. Additionally, the exhibition features bronzes by leaders of the “New Sculpture” movement and proto-Decadent works by Charles Ricketts and Aubrey Beardsley.
Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and John Henry Dearle (designers), Holy Grail Tapestries: The Arming of the Knights (1890). Private collection.
Trippi describes the exhibition’s display of Burne-Jones’ work, set in the church’s dining room, as “magical.”
“You look up and see a gorgeous medieval painting of flowers and leaves on the church’s ceiling, and you look down ahead of you and see Burne-Jones’ 19th-century paintings of flowers and leaves,” he said. On one wall of the room, a painting by Mantegna and another by Bellini are on display. In a vitrine, a drawing by Michelangelo can be found. Between all these works, the Burne-Jones Pre-Raphaelite paintings hang, in flirtation with the works of the old Italian masters. “It’s a love affair, really,” he says.
A view of the Edward Burne-Jones room, described by co-curator Peter Trippi as “a love affair.” Photo: Emanuele Rambaldi
The grand finale of the exhibition offers a fresh perspective on the Pre-Raphaelite legacy through 19th- and early 20th-century paintings by Italian artists including Adolfo de Carolis, Giovanni Costa, Giulio Aristide Sartorio, and Filadelfo Simi.
“Pre-Raphaelites: Modern Renaissance” is organized by the Fondazione Cassa dei Risparmi di Forlì in collaboration with the Municipality of Forlì. The Italian catalogue is published by Dario Cimorelli Editore (Milan).
A view of the “Pre-Raphaelites: Modern Renaissance” exhibition at the Museo Civico San Domenico in Italy. photo: Emanuele Rambaldi.
“Pre-Raphaelites: Modern Renaissance” is on view at the San Domenico Museum in Forlì, Italy, through June 30, 2024.
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The artist behind the current exhibition at The Untitled Space exists only in theory. “SKYE CLEARY NEVER GETS OLD” (through March 29) presents 20 paintings, purportedly by one Skye Cleary, a character created by performance artist Lisa Levy and painter Sharilyn Neidhart, and who takes the form of a sex doll.
Levy has devised an in-depth origin story for Skye—her student artist days, daddy issues, and all—a tale animated by previous installations at Arcade Projects and SPRING/BREAK. Oversized Polaroid photos shot by photographer Meryl Meister, included in the new show, follow Skye on a night-out, fleshing out her existence. Levy told me that people passing by had thought Skye was a real person.
Skye Cleary “working” at famed Brooklyn strip club Pumps. Photo: Reven T.C. Wurman.
Because she’s made of silicone, Skye Cleary will literally never get old—but, in Levy’s saga, she does age. Skye, now 28, has finished her MFA. This is her first exhibition centered on her artwork alone. Each series that Levy and Neidhardt paint through Skye is structured like an ad campaign, drawing on Levy’s years in the industry. Neidhart paints the scenes, and Levy devises the text.
“They’re much bigger, more formal paintings,” Levy said of their latest works. “My text has gotten a lot better, much more emotional.” Still, there’s little to no subtlety on view—just a lot of skin, attitude, and hustling.
Skye Cleary, The Patrons (2022). Courtesy of Lisa Levy
Legend has it that Skye grew up in rural Pennsylvania and moved to New York in 2016 to study at SVA, where she started stripping. “I could earn three times the money as an exotic dancer than I could working at a retail or art job,” Skye’s statement for this show explained. “That gave me what I wanted most, more studio time.”
Levy told me that, thus far, Skye has felt obligated to keep her side gig separate from her art career, but Skye’s statement claims these works critique such self-censorship. “It’s funny when you point out the obvious,” her statement concluded.
Skye Cleary, My Body My Choice (2023). Courtesy of Lisa Levy
Levy received the physical Skye in 2018 from Danielle Knafo, a psychoanalyst and renowned expert in men who date sex dolls. Levy first embraced her interest in psychology in 2001, when she became a quasi-analyst and started taking clients on stage at live improv comedy shows. Just a few years before acquiring Skye, Levy staged a performance where she mocked Marina Abramović by sitting on a toilet in an art gallery for two days. “It really bothered me that Marina Abramović put herself in a godlike position,” Levy said. “It’s so symbolic of what’s wrong with the art world, that artists are somehow more divine.”
Not long after, Levy found herself contemplating the sexual currency that young women hold. She wants girls today to seize their power, because she didn’t. “My best friend would be sleeping with the creative director and I’d be [working] all night,” Levy recounted of her days in the advertising industry. “A lot of women would be manipulating men and I was frustrated that I couldn’t do it, or that I wasn’t attractive enough. And I don’t even think looks have that much to do with it.”
After exchanging emails, Knafo offered Levy a doll she had on hand, and Levy set out for Long Island to get Skye.
Skye Cleary, Price Available Upon Request (2023). Courtesy of Lisa Levy
While stars from Mae West to Meghan Thee Stallion have built careers around playing men for money, wider society still has a hard time facing its oldest profession. Levy—and Skye—believe that’s because awareness would leave young women with lots of power, which society currently controls through shame. Women “need to own it, and use it how they want to use it,” Levy reflected.
Levy is reclaiming her own power through Skye, who’s using her body to get men to “empty their pockets,” as Levy puts it—and also as an avenue to have fun for herself and enjoy life. Levy foresees more photoshoots in Skye’s future. She hired the Spa Man Global art collective to party with Skye in a private room at Bushwick hotspot House of Yes while Meisler snapped the photos in this show. Much like Levy, the young actors started treating Skye like a real being. As artificial intelligence encourages the art world to ask what an artist actually is, Levy and Neidhardt are helping a truly objectified women find her voice.
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Chalk up another landmark in the growing recognition of the great Surrealist artist Remedios Varo. She will soon have her first New York exhibition in decades, at the same moment that her works are entering new museum collections.
“A Visionary Line: Remedios Varo Drawings” will be not only her first New York solo show in nearly 40 years, but also the first exhibition devoted to her work in the medium. The show is part of a series of “offsite” exhibitions that San Francisco dealer Wendi Norris has staged, and will take place at Adler Beatty Gallery, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
The show coincides with the acquisition of the artist’s works by two major museums, the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; in each case, they are the first examples by Varo to enter their collections. Scotland will add Encounter (1959), which is also the first Varo painting to enter a European museum’s holdings, while the D.C. museum has acquired Banqueros en acción (Bankers in action) (1962), and a preparatory drawing. Varo completed only about 100 paintings in her lifetime, and most of them are off the market, now hanging in the museums of her adopted homeland of Mexico. 
Remedios Varo, study for Armonía (ca. 1956). Courtesy Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.
“I often use the word ‘indelible’ to describe the work of Remedios Varo—indelible because of her narrative imaginary and indelible because of her mastery,” Norris said. “Varo’s drawings reveal the intimacies behind this imaginary and mastery of hers.
“I can think of no greater testament to Varo’s legacy than to have a masterful oil and its preparatory drawing in the collection of one of the most frequented museums in the world—the National Gallery of Art in D.C.!” she said. “The National Galleries of Scotland has built one of the most important collections and archives of Surrealism, and they are proudly on the forefront of ensuring that female artists are rightfully taking their place alongside their modern male peers.”
Tightly focused, “A Visionary Line” consists of just nine works on paper, all coming from the collection of her doctor. It includes studies for works that now reside in museums around the globe, from El Flautista in the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City to Tailleur pour Dames (1957), from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Remedios Varo, Encounter (1959). Photo: Nick Mailer. Courtesy National Galleries of Scotland.
The artist has truly come into her own in recent years as historians and museums have plumbed the contributions to the Surrealist movement of women such as Varo and Leonora Carrington. She had a prominent place in the 59th Venice Biennale exhibition, “The Milk of Dreams” in 2022, and she was the subject of the major exhibition, “Remedios Varo: Science Fictions,” at the Art Institute of Chicago last year, when Tribune critic Lori Waxman called her “the most extraordinary Surrealist you’ve never even heard of.”
International audiences are also getting a chance to see Varo’s work, which is featured in the touring exhibition, “IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism.” That show recently opened at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and travels to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
“A Visionary Line: Remedios Varo Drawings” will be on view at Gallery Wendi Norris in collaboration with Adler Beatty, 34 E 69th St, New York, from May 8 through June 1.
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The 20 or so images now featured in Daniel Arsham’s first photography exhibition were never meant for our eyes. The sculptor had shot these photos purely for pleasure—amassing thousands upon thousands of them over three decades—never intending to put them on view. “I never thought about showing my photography,” he told me. “It was just what I was drawn to.” 
We’re walking through “Phases” at Fotografiska New York, for which Arsham has disgorged his extensive archive, now numbering about 200,000 images across negatives and hard drives. “I had some crazy stuff that I had forgotten about,” he said. The mostly black-and-white photos in the show are thematically grouped: cityscapes in one section, portraits in another, and close-ups of birds in yet another.
Installation view of “Daniel Arsham: Phases” at Fotografiska New York. Photo: Min Chen.
On one wall hangs a series of long exposures of the night sky, their stars crystal clear. Arsham explained that he shot some of these with the digital Leica M9 until a software update curtailed the shutter speed on bulb mode (he even fired off an email to the company about the issue). “So, I have now gone back to analog for that,” he told me, pointing to one photograph. “I think this exposure is, like, three minutes. You can even see the stars moving.” 
This meticulously technical, almost geeky, approach to photography is long nurtured. Arsham received his first camera, a Pentax K1000, at age 11, a gift from his grandfather, who also taught him the basics of focus, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. It launched a steady, lifelong pursuit that has run alongside his sculptural practice, built on his signature “eroded” forms.
Installation view of “Daniel Arsham: Phases” at Fotografiska New York. Photo: Min Chen.
But while a handful of Arsham’s sculptures are dotted throughout the exhibition, he sees his photography work as separate. “It feels so different,” he said. “When I’m in the studio, I’m often working towards an exhibition and I’m creating a body of work with an intention around the full experience of the show. In this case [of photography], it’s more just playing.” 
Still, the motifs in Arsham’s photographs do echo elements of his sculptures. One can see how his knack for dramatic framing and his eye for negative space might come into play in his studio. There’s even a smattering of photographs of sculptures, including one of the Winged Victory of Samothrace installed at the Louvre in Paris, each of them framed to emphasize their scale or textures.
Installation view of “Daniel Arsham: Phases” at Fotografiska New York. Photo: Min Chen.
The exhibition is accompanied by the hardcover volume Daniel Arsham: Photographer—Arsham’s first photography book—its vast contents spanning street scenes, self-portraits, nature shots, casual snaps, and far more than is included in the show. Flipping through it, he points out various images: one of a sunrise as seen through some fog in Battery Park City where he once resided, a darkly silhouetted portrait of A$AP Rocky, and a perspective view of the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto, Japan.
Viewed as a body of work, one gets the sense that photography is as much a creative outlet as it is a personal project for Arsham. The book is dedicated to his late grandfather and its introduction, penned by the artist, discusses “using a camera to both document and understand life.” 
Installation view of “Daniel Arsham: Phases” at Fotografiska New York, with wall text handwritten by Daniel Arsham. Photo: Min Chen.
As he does in the book’s introduction, Arsham told me about receiving his first camera and turning it on the Miami suburb he grew up in. “The houses were basically the same, but the landscaping was different. People would paint their doors different colors and they had different door knockers,” he said. “So, I took photos of all the doors in the neighborhood—they’re all the same but they’re all different.” 
He lost those images when Hurricane Andrew struck the neighborhood, wrecking his family’s home. What remained, however, was a photograph of a young Arsham posing alongside his beloved Pentax.
“It’s cool,” he said, showing me the image on the last page of Photographer. “I never thought that I would ever get to do an exhibition like this.”
“Phases” is on view at Fotografiska, 281 Park Ave South, New York, through June 14. 
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Chiara Camoni believes that there are two kinds of artists. There are “those who do not touch matter,” she says, “and those who cannot do without it.”
“I belong to this second group,” Camoni adds. That feels apparent when looking at her highly sensual works, rich organic matter mixes with tactile ceramics. Her carefully conceived sculptures explore the meeting point between domestic design and the natural world: vibrant flowers, colorful vegetation, and anthromorphized forms meet in energetic installations, which are created via her instinctive gestures.
The Italian artist also draws and makes vegetable prints; she has previously worked on expansive films. Much of this range is on view in “Call and gather. Sisters. Moths and flame twisters. Lioness bones, snakes and stones,” her new exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, the largest body of work ever shown by the artist.
The exhibition’s radial floor design is inspired by Italy’s late Renaissance gardens and ancient amphitheaters, inviting viewers to wander through its various pathways or linger for a moment among individual works.
Photo: Arthur Pequin
“When I entered the Shed space at Pirelli HangarBicocca, I immediately felt the need to seek its center, then to open the doors to let the light in,” Camoni tells me in an interview. “At that point, I began to relate to the space in its entirety. Without raising walls, I drew corridors, rooms, environments. Images of archaeological sites and gardens came in, and we know that weeds, shrubs, and wild vegetation happily grow where there are ruins.”
Her Butterfly Vases (2020–22) challenge the imagined line between art and craft and are made using foraged plants. They are glazed with sand collected from local rivers and the iridescent ashes of flowers, reimagining Egyptian canopic jars, ancient food storage earthenware, and antique decorative vases.
The show also features the artist’s human-sized Sisters (2017–23), which change form through the duration of an exhibition. Some, for example, are made of wax which gradually melts, creating a constantly evolving form.
Chiara Camoni’s Sister, (2022). Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2024. Produced by Biennale Gherdëina. Courtesy the artist; SpazioA, Pistoia, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio
“I work by addressing monumentality not in terms of size, but rather in poignancy, density, reiteration of gestures, temporal duration,” Camoni says. “The Sisters are monumental figures, although they are on a human scale. They are sculptures that live in change, filled with themselves, composed of thousands of small pieces of hand-molded terracotta. They configure themselves differently each time: they come, they show off, and then they are ready to disappear again!”
Camoni’s ceramics mirror the inherently individual nature of her organic matter. They are rustic, asymmetrical, and carry the various marks and scars left by the artist’s hand. “I believe they come from an unconscious, emotional zone and do not follow the linear progression of rational thought,” she adds.
Chiara Camoni’s “Call and gather. Sisters. Moths and flame twisters. Lioness bones, snakes and stones.” Exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, (2024). Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio
Camoni has a highly collaborative process with nature, but also with friends and family who take part in creative workshops. “Much of my work originates at home or in the garden, conditioned by the weather and climate, as well as the surrounding sounds and voices,” she says. “I experience the wonder, the encounter with the artwork, which I consider a subject in its own right, that demands an active relationship.”
She began working together with her grandmother, Ines Bassanetti, early in her artistic practice in 2002. Bassanetti went on to become her assistant, leading to an unusually close familial artistic bond. Her grandmother created a body of plant and animal drawings with Camoni, part of La Grande Madre series. More recently, the artist invited friends and collaborators to choose books and memorabilia for Carrozzone (2021), an installation taking the form of a traditional wagon.
Chiara Camoni’s “Call and gather. Sisters. Moths and flame twisters. Lioness bones, snakes and stones.” Exhibition view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, (2024). Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, MilanPhoto Agostino Osio
“I believe that authorship can be opened to other people,” she notes. “I like to bypass a certain technical competence, to welcome unexpected deviations. I also feel that around the artworks in the before and after—in the creative moment that precedes them and in the fruition and activation that follows—moments of intensity, little epiphanies coagulate. If I am not alone, if there is someone with me who sees and feels all this, then they really exist.”
Many of the items used in the artist’s work—from plants to ashes, sand, and soil—are collected from her surroundings. It is important to her that they come from her everyday experience, and she often transforms original materials in radical ways, sometimes burning or combining, modeling or sorting them. While she roots her practice within ancestral and archaic traditions, she also references a sense of collapsing time with her materials.
Chiara Camoni’s Dogs (Bruno and Tre), (2024). Installation view at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2024. Produced by Pirelli HangarBicocca. Courtesy the artist; SpazioA, Pistoia, and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. Photo: Agostino Osio
“Ceramics, stone, or wood are as contemporary to us as a smartphone,” she says. “It all starts with a walk, which can also take place in a city; I collect flowers, leaves, wild herbs and, thanks to the juices they release on the fabric, these figures ‘arrive.’ I consider them to be spirits hidden behind the first level of reality, as we see it.”
Camoni hopes her works create an embodied experience for the viewer, which goes beyond the visual. “This exhibition is informed with energy, which I hope will be felt,” she notes. “There is a vibration running through it all, moving in the snakes slithering low to the ground, rising in the more vertical figures, winding up and down. There are so many eyes, looking everywhere, crossing the audience’s gazes but also looking at each other…”

“Call and gather. Sisters. Moths and flame twisters. Lioness bones, snakes and stones” is on view at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, through July 21, 2024.

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Qatar’s cultural landscape is progressing at a dizzying speed. The office leading the diminutive Gulf country’s cultural development, Qatar Museums, is investing heavily in the effort, allocating billions  to erect world-class museums, restore important heritage sites, and stage public art installations, many of them in far-flung patches of the desert. Barely the size of Jamaica, Qatar has opened no fewer than five major museums in the last 15 years, as well as numerous stadiums—as many as eight—in advance of the World Cup in 2022, the first Arab nation to host the international sporting event.
A new biennial, Design Doha, is the latest arrow in Qatar Museums’ quiver, and the newest initiative from its chairperson, Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family. She is also a leading collector, known for acquiring major works from Paul Cézanne to Mark Rothko, on Qatar’s behalf.
Design Doha continues Qatar’s bid to transform the peninsula’s capital city into a global center of art and design. This year, its inaugural edition, the platform featured over 100 designers from the Middle East and North African (MENA), working in a range of disciplines, from architecture, urbanism, and landscape design to graphic design, textiles, woodwork, glass, and ceramics.
Richard Yasmine’s After Ago Collection, a tribute to Beirut’s architectural history.
Attending the opening week of Design Doha followed a dizzying pace, too, hustling between a head-spinning line-up of events, exhibitions, popups, and activations—each one bursting with top-notch craftsmanship and novel ingenuity. The sentiment was shared by the platform’s artistic director Glenn Adamson. The New York-based art and design historian said he was taken with the “explosive energy and creativity” of the Arab design scene. “As a newcomer to the region myself, I didn’t appreciate just how much talent there was,” he continued, “and it’s been inspiring to see the energy and commitment that participants brought to the event.”
The central showcase, “Arab Design Now” (through August 5), is said to be the first museum-level survey of contemporary Arab design. It consists of 74 works by MENA designers spread across several floors of M7, a creative hive centrally located in the modern, bustling neighborhood of Msheireb. The exhibition, curated by Rana Beiruti (founder of Amman Design Week in Jordan) reflects how “the Arab world is a diverse place,” she told me, “full of people from different walks of life and cultures. I wanted to celebrate that and show that Arab design is not disconnected from the global condition of design. Arab designers face and respond to the same challenges for our collective future.”
Installation view of “Arab Design Now” with Salima Naji’s clay dwellings on the right. © Edmund Sumner. Courtesy of Qatar Museums.
“I also wanted to highlight,” she added, “the importance of looking at craft as an extension of the land, and the way designers in the Arab world respond to the unique geography of the region with innovation in material and attentiveness to sustainability.”
In one work, Sharing the Earth (Spatial Interiorities) (2023), architect Salima Naji mined her decades of research into vernacular building in Morocco, constructing a two-part cylindrical dwelling out of clay, straw, wool, and palm trunks sourced from a farm in Qatar, with traditional oculi at the top to allow for air flow. In another work, Tiamat (2023), designer AAU ANASTAS created a structure in self-supporting stone, its undulating shape informed by computational analysis of sand dunes as well as the Gothic-inspired pointed arches found across Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon.
AAU ANASTAS, Tiamat (2023). © Edmund Sumner. Courtesy of Qatar Museums.
Another observation from Design Doha is how carefully the designers have struck a balance between traditional craft sensibilities and contemporary aesthetics. “This is clearly a region that is currently enjoying the best of both worlds,” said Adamson. “Like Japan, Italy and Scandinavia in the 1950s and 1960s—geographies that reshaped global design at the time—you have a basis of continuous artisanship combined with newly emerging experimental practice.”
Installation view of “100 Arabic Posters.” © Jochen Braun. Courtesy of Qatar Museums.
Elsewhere in M7, an exhibition of 100 Arabic posters presented the vibrancy of graphic design in the region while another looked back on a century of architecture in Doha, tracing the history of the city’s built environment through a variety of interpreted styles such as Arabic Deco, Doha Classicism, and Qatar’s take on Brutalism.
Upstairs in a dimly lit, contemplative space, we took in “Weaving Poems,” showcasing the talent of Afghan-born, Amman-based designer Maryam Omar, who was commissioned to create a series of hand-woven abstract carpets inspired by the poetry and oral heritage of women weavers in Afghanistan, with whom she co-created the carpets. The exhibition is a product of Turquoise Mountain, a nonprofit founded by King Charles in 2006 to support artists across Afghanistan, Myanmar, and the Middle East.
Installation view of “Weaving Poems.” © Julián Velásquez. Courtesy of Qatar Museums.
Another highlight is Moroccan artist Amine al Gotaibi’s astonishing work Desert installed at the Ned. “The combination of his soulful work in copper and wool with David Chipperfield’s sublime reimagination of an existing building (the former Ministry of the Interior) is just perfection,” said Adamson.
No cultural excursion to Doha would be complete without outings to the I.M. Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art, an instant landmark when it launched in 2008; the National Library, created by Rem Koolhaas/OMA (who’s also designing the Qatar Auto Museum, to be completed later this year), said to house a million rare books, manuscripts, and other materials stacked in a single open-space plan; and the striking new National Museum, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel to resemble massive discs of “desert rose” crystal formations, the kind that occur naturally in the Arabian Desert.
The National Museum of Qatar, designed by Jean Nouvel. Photo: Lee Carter.
Two more major museums are planned before the decade is out. Opening in 2029, the Lusail Museum—designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron—will hold one of the world’s most extensive collections of art, much of it from Qatar Museums’ holdings of European painters depicting the Arab world. And, in 2030, the Art Mill Museum will arrive, housed in a historic flour mill and designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena. The museum will incorporate the mill’s signature towering silos in its design.)
Then there’s Richard Serra’s East-West/West-East (2014) near the village of Zekreet on the western shore of the peninsula (about an hour’s drive from Doha on the east coast). Its four monumental Cor-Ten plates jut out of the sand like relics of a future civilization, in keeping with the cryptic austerity of the surrounding terrain.
Richard Serra, East-West/West-East (2014). Photo: Lee Carter.
There’s no question this is an optimistic moment for Qatar’s art and design scene, bolstered by the royal family’s largesse, a long history of fine craftsmanship, and a newly outward-looking perspective.
“Now that we have this success behind us and people know what Design Doha is,” reflected Adamson, “I think it will be possible to do something still more ambitious… I think the Arab region is now positioned to assume not just a more active, but in fact a leadership role in the global design conversation.”
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Rare treasures from the life of literary legend Anaïs Nin went on view in Santa Monica this week. The famed diarist was born in France, raised in New York, and returned to Paris before moving to America permanently in the 1930s. She spent a significant amount of time in LA along the way. Her ashes were scattered in Santa Monica Bay.
Elizabeth Banks’s Brownstone Productions collaborated with the Anaïs Nin Foundation on “Celebrating a Renegade,” a multigenerational exhibition that shares ephemera, artworks Nin made, paintings made of her, and pieces from five contemporary artists inspired by her legacy. The Georgian Hotel’s creative director Amber Arbucci curated the show, which remains on view at the landmark hotel’s Gallery 33 through March 22.
An installation featuring Nin’s typewriter, and three portraits pulled from her Silver Lake home—two of which are by John Maynard. Photo: Dashiell King, courtesy of The Georgian Hotel
Exhibition producer Brandon Milbradt told me she pitched this concept to the Georgian while developing a TV series around Nin. “Anaïs deeply admired artists, was a champion of other creators,” Milbrandt wrote. “I thought, why not showcase Anaïs with artists inspired by Nin herself?” Throughout her life, Nin produced four novels, four works of nonfiction, five collections of short stories, and kept a diary for 63 years that detailed her poetic introspections and many torrid affairs. Never-before-seen watercolors that famed author Henry Miller painted for Nin appear in “Celebrating a Renegade.”
Henry Miller, Childhood Dream (1973). Photo: Dashiell King, courtesy of The Georgian Hotel
“Anaïs was a dangerous writer in her time, and, for better or worse, is just as relevant today,” Milbradt said. In the 47 years since Nin’s death, she’s been called a monster (because she terminated a pregnancy), a narcissist (because she liked ostentatious outfits), and a bigamist (because she was.) But, as Nin’s diary noted, “no one has ever loved an adventurous woman as they have loved adventurous men.”
Anaïs Nin. Courtesy of the Anaïs Nin Foundation
Nin was born in 1903 to two musicians. Nin’s mother moved her and her two brothers to New York after her father absconded with his mistress. Nin’s diary began as a letter entreating her father to return on that very voyage, at age 11. She dropped out of high school to work as an artist’s model and met her first husband, banker Hugh Guiler, in Havana at 20. Guiler elected to be omitted from the seven volumes of Nin’s diary that she edited and published from 1966 through 1977, but they stayed together throughout Nin’s life. Guiler’s money helped support the bohemians she knew.
Anaïs Nin, Circle of Friends, New York. Photo by Dashiell King. courtesy of The Georgian Hotel
“You are always asked to solve problems, to help, to be selfless,” Miller is recorded as telling Nin in a 1932 diary entry. “Meanwhile there is your writing, deeper and better than anybody’s, which nobody gives a damn about and nobody helps you to do.” Readers did give a damn about Nin’s writing though, ever since her diary debuted at the height of feminism’s second wave—and despite a period of repudiation when her ex-husband published her unedited diaries and extensive erotica.
Henry Miller, For Anaïs from Henry (1979). Photo by Dashiell King. courtesy of The Georgian Hotel
No amount of moralizing ever extinguished Nin’s impact. Social media and sex positivity have reinstated her accolades.
“Celebrating a Renegade” hangs Nin’s rarely-seen Circle of Friends drawings next to a contemporary collage with her face at center by Colette Standish, who produced an entire series of treated mirrors and lightboxes titled “Anaïs Through the Looking Glass and Other Stories.” The nudes of Michelle Magdalena Maddox’s sensual black-and-white photographs evoke Nin in more ways than one. Javiera Estrada’s technicolor free love photography also appears, alongside an intimate bathtub scene painted by Chloe Strang. Elsewhere, fragments from Amanda Maciel Antunes’s Trapeze Project foreground Nin’s relics.
An installation featuring Anaïs Nin’s diaries, old photos, and a handwritten note from Henry Miller on vintage Barbizon Hotel stationary. Photo by Dashiell King. courtesy of The Georgian Hotel
“From the little girl with a diary who migrated with her single mother as a child to begin a life in a new country, to the woman of many deaths and rebirths whose complexity of life challenged the dominant gender paradigms of our times,” Maciel Antunes said, “I want to remember her as a woman who removed obstacles to create her own freedom and did not wait for it to be given to her.” Nin’s handwritten journals sit nearby in a glass case. Animated by the artworks of our time, you can all but hear her voice floating off the bay, encouraging everyone who passes through “Celebrating a Renegade” to seize their liberty too.
“Celebrating a Renegade” is on view at Gallery 33, 1415 Ocean Ave, Santa Monica, California, through March 22.
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“I was drinking like eight coffees a day trying to figure this out,” Terence Koh was telling me last month, knelt over a portable burner in an empty micro gallery that would become his installation called KOHFEE. “Thinking about my move to L.A. and all these things, thinking about what the world needs right now… I don’t think the world needs another coffee shop.” I totally agree, and yet, was he on a journey to make one?
A trail of handwritten pencil notes, transmitted as jpegs via text, had led me to this meeting with the inscrutable Xennial artist. They were sent by Koh with his signature flourishes like “2morrow” and a doodle of an eye in the place of the word “I.” For those who don’t know, Koh was one of the highest profile artists in New York City in the aughts—alongside other Lower East Side royals like Dash Snow, Ryan McGinley, and Dan Colen. That was before he began to pull away from the spotlight, a move roughly timed to the ascent of Instagram.
Artist Terence Koh outside his installation. Image courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photographer: Nice Day Photo
Now on view through March 29 at Make Room, a commercial gallery tucked away on predominantly residential Waring Avenue between Hollywood and Hancock Park, “KOHFEE” offers an experience very different from the oppressively neutral aesthetics of cafes clad in cedar or Moroccan tiles and abuzz with loneliness.
KOHFEE smells different, too: over the past month or so, Koh has transformed the alcove project space into a cave for coffee rituals whose floors, walls, and ceilings are held together by a mixture of raw earth and cow dung. The glaring daylight visible from the only window onto the space feels centuries away when you are kneeling under the earthen dome on the far side of the little room, huddled around Koh’s tiny campfire where he boils his brew.
Artist Terrence Koh. Image courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photographer: Nice Day Photo
“It seemed ridiculous at first to do a coffee shop, but then, after I thought about how it’s a part of L.A. culture— like [the] sun and everything and how everybody seems like, ‘You know what? Let’s go grab a cup of coffee’—it’s a very positive thing for most people to come and gather,” Koh continued. “People let their guard down very quickly when I tell them it’s just like a simple coffee shop instead of an installation. I’m always joking that it’s almost like a serious art installation hidden inside a coffee shop.”
The last time I interviewed Koh about his work was in 2016, when he was exhibiting an installation called Bee Chapel in galleries on both U.S. coasts—the work consisted of a domed room of proportions similar to the KOHFEE, with an infrastructure that allowed proximity to the thousands of bees Koh had begun beekeeping since leaving Manhattan for the Catskills.
An interior view of KOHFEE. Image courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photographer: Nice Day Photo
Since then he has had a handful of shows in the U.S. and Europe, including one at Office Baroque in Antwerp that incorporated larger features of this current project—an earth-covered room and campfire. More recently, he had a show at Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York last year, whose press release was a handwritten decree similar in style to the texts I received, promising:

for 
the next 
few 
ears 
eye 
will 
dedicate my life too a single body of work 
no piece will bee larder than the size of the 
human heart 
—signed and dated, “24 dec ’22, lost angels.”
Born in Beijing and raised in Mississauga, Canada, Koh came up in post-9/11 New York as the pseudonymic asianpunkboy, publishing an eponymous zine which is now on view in the Brooklyn Museum’s Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines exhibition, through March 31.  
As asianpunkboy, he began exhibiting his work at Peres Projects’s original Los Angeles location in 2003. By 2007, his art career (and market) had feverish momentum and the media had begun to canonize him as a deity of sublime excess—a characterization that found some congruence with the content of his work. His first American solo museum show, which opened as part of the Whitney Biennial that winter, was a blinding 4000-watt lamp that turned on a black orb, set in an otherwise empty and all-white gallery on the ground floor of the Breuer Building.
A few months prior to that, Koh had moved into a three-story party palace at 45 Canal Street—in what is now the heart of Dimes Square, standing between Cervo’s and Dimes cafe—where he opened his own art gallery called ASS (Asia Song Society). By Art Basel Miami Beach of that year, he famously declared “I am the Naomi Campbell of Art” and also claimed that he intended to retire from art in the coming year.
Terence Koh in 2010 in New York City. Photo: Marie Havens/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
Nevertheless, his art career continued to evolve and so did his fame. By 2010, he was not only an art star, but he was also in the headlines for things like helping Oprah coax a distraught Lady Gaga out of her dressing room at the Met Gala. That year he collaborated with Gaga on performances at the Grammy’s, an Amfar Gala, and a charity event in Tokyo. Then, in 2014, Koh left New York City. The mythologizing of how Koh quit the art world began.
“You are the first person drinking coffee,” Koh told me, grinning. “I just realized you are the first customer in this place, and it is gonna be so different because it’s such a mess right now, but I think that’s the fun part.”
Some artists seem practiced in pantomiming childlike excitement about their work for their audiences, but in Koh’s case it feels completely sincere. The fact that this project is more humble in scale than many of the outrageous creations that precede it seems irrelevant. “The next few weeks I’m really trying different oils and things that will go well together with herbs to make a coffee that’s very… very simple but also earthy… we might have milk options outside in pitchers,” he tells me before seeming to change his mind. “Or maybe no options of creamers. It’s a coffee shop, but there’s only one choice, and we don’t give you the option, and it’s free.”
Terence Koh’s KOHFEE. Image courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photographer: Nice Day Photo
On the day of the opening in February, a small line of patrons hugged the wall outside the door to the cave. Koh escorted groups of three or four of them at a time into the chamber; the event was a marathon of small coffee ceremonies where, each time, Koh held a heavy blackened pot over a small flame and grated and stirred various ingredients into the mixture. Once each batch was ready, he haphazardly poured it over a cluster of Dixie cups, spilling plenty of what was sparse to begin with. At one point, he mentioned something to the effect that spilling is an aspect of Chinese hospitality. (Outside the rush of the opening, during the project’s regular hours, coffee is served in ceramic cups Koh made himself.)
Personally, I was into the hippie brutalism of the experience. Everything about this project revolves around smallness and quiet: an anti-spectacle where nothing is for sale. I liked sitting on dirt and I enjoyed the taste and texture of a weird coffee-based potion with traces of plant sediment in it. I didn’t see God, but it was simple and special. Three women dressed like art collectors were conspicuously positive about how amazing they found the coffee to be. Someone told me they saw one of them sip theirs and then throw the rest on the street before saying how much she loved it. While Koh certainly has said nothing to suggest that his cafe is a social experiment, part of me wonders if it is in some way some kind of game.
Terence Koh’s handmade tea cups. Image courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles. Photographer: Nice Day Photo
Koh’s original talent was always weaving enigmas, and I don’t believe he has much control over the fact that he’s a pop star, but this circumstance gives him superhuman license to blur the lines between art and life. When stars retreat from public life, they remain stars and, in fact “retreating from public life” is something only a star can do. It would be disingenuous to say that KOHFEE is an art world comeback for Koh. For one thing, there’s no way out of the pantheon once you’re in it—as evidenced by the routine reports of his comings and goings from retirement (like Cher), despite the fact he has actually maintained a studio practice consistently since the start.
As I waited for my first cup back in February, Koh rejoiced suddenly—”Nice, it kind of works…yay!”—as the water tossed into the pot loudly sizzled. “Loneliness and solitude are two different things. Solitude is a beautiful thing. I’m starting to learn that and appreciate that you can have solitude in L.A., and then go and be social when you want. But I think I miss [how] when you step out onto the street in New York City, you bang right onto humanity and human vibration,” he said while simultaneously adding that he was not moving back to New York. “We do innately need that, to connect with humans physically and not through the screen. And in L.A. people are lonely, and they connect through coffee shops.”
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