Art & Exhibitions

“If people say: ‘Whose eyes are those?’ I am good with that.”
Artist Sonya Clark was talking about her latest major project, a public artwork titled The Descendants of Monticello, that officially debuts today, June 24, at Declaration House, the Philadelphia landmark where Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
Clark, in partnership with nonprofit public art, history, and design studio Monument Lab, is shining a light on a lesser-known and discussed aspect of the historical narrative behind one of America’s founding documents. During that summer of 1776, Jefferson was accompanied by 14-year old Robert Hemmings, an enslaved valet that he brought with him from his plantation at Monticello, just outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Hemmings was also the half brother of Jefferson’s wife Martha Wayles Skelton.
Amid extensive research and a site visit to Monticello earlier this year, Clark realized that there are no known historical images of Hemmings. It became a driving force for the resulting art project: documenting the eyes of the descendants of the roughly 400 people enslaved at Monticello alone. The Descendants of Monticello encompasses a multichannel video installation facing the intersection of 7th and Market streets in Philadelphia.
Sonya Clark, The Descendants of Monticello (2024), on view at Declaration House, Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia, PA. Photo: Steve Weinik/Monument Lab.
Contemporary video portraits of the eyes of living descendants are juxtaposed with photographs of those in Monticello’s archives. It is visible to anyone walking or driving past the site.
The videos “play in each window, blinking, watching, and haunting the space,” Clark told me. “But I also think of it as being a lighthouse in a way. I think of it as a reclamation.” Her last word nods to the title of the book of the same name, written by her friend Gayle Jessup White, who is herself a descendant of Jefferson.
From the very start of the project, Clark knew she would be working with the facade of Declaration House and that it would be a public-facing artwork. “I think of the windows as being like the soul of the building—what allows you to see in and see out—aligned with the idea of eyes being the window of our souls. The soul of the nation necessarily is these Black descendants and their eyes.”
The building itself, which is overseen by the National Park Service, is currently closed. The original was demolished in 1883, before it was reconstructed by the NPS in 1975.
Sonya Clark at Declaration House, Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia, PA, 2024. Photo: Terrell Halsey/Monument Lab.
Clark said the windows are constantly in movement so viewers never see the same eye appear at the same time. “There is something really haunting about having a lot to singular eyes look at you. And you can tell there is so much information even in the reduction or cropping of the image.”
She worked directly with Jessup White, who also works at Monticello, and the Getting Word African American Oral History Project. Later the installation may travel to and be on display Monticello itself, where historians have recently uncovered new archival information about Hemmings such as samples of his handwriting.
In a previous project that was shown at the Fabric Workshop in 2019, titled Monumental Cloth, the Flag We Should Know, Clark delved into the history of a lesser-known flag in U.S. history, the one that was flown by the Confederacy during the Civil War and was used to surrender.
L to R: Paul Farber, director and co-founder of Monument Lab, author Gayle Jessup White, and artist Sonya Clark on a site visit to Monticello in connection with Getting Word, Declaration House, Charlottesville, VA, 2024. Photo: AJ Mitchell/Monument Lab.
The history of that flag of truce dates back to April 9, 1864, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee sent a rider forward waving it, putting an end to the long and deadly national conflict. Union General Ulysses S. Grant accepted the Confederacy’s surrender and cut the flag in half so that the rider, who had purchased the repurposed dishtowel just days before in Richmond, Virginia, could ensure safe passage back across Union lines. For that project, Clark teamed up with the Fabric Workshop to create 101 replicas of the cloth, including a massive one that was 100 times the size of the original.
As for Philadelphia and Declaration House, the official unveiling of the project today will be celebrated with a block party, as part of the city’s Welcome America festival, and 15,000 copies of a printed newspaper detailing the project and the significance of the Declaration of Independence will be distributed.
Sonya Clark, The Descendants of Monticello (2024), on view at Declaration House, Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia, PA. Photo: Steve Weinik/Monument Lab.
Like most artists, Clark does not want to be prescriptive about what viewers take away but said it’s fine if people “walk away with an open-ended question.” She added: “That will allow the work to do what I believe artwork does very well. I love the capaciousness and generosity of artwork to hold as many thoughts and ideas as possible.”
The Descendants of Monticello is on view at Declaration House, 700 Market St, Philadelphia, through September 8.
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“My aim is to make from my obsessions and ideas the strongest, most coherent visual statement possible,” artist Christina Ramberg once said, describing her process and intentions.
Closely affiliated with the Chicago Imagists, a loose group of artists formed in the mid-1960s who favored representation and bold aesthetics, Ramberg (1946–1995) produced a powerful body of work with a distinctive personal style during her comparatively short life and career.
Ramberg’s work is immediately recognizable, primarily focused on figural elements of the female form—such as hands, hairstyles, garments, and, most notably, torsos—and rendered in a graphic and highly stylized aesthetic. Tapping contrasting themes and ideas and embracing experimental modes of framing and cropping, Ramberg forged an intrepid path along the boundary between abstraction and representation.
Installation view of “Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” (2024). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Heralding a resurgence of interest and critical attention to Ramberg’s singular oeuvre is the exhibition “Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective,” on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through August 11, 2024—the first comprehensive survey of her work in nearly three decades. Bringing together roughly 100 works from the Art Institute’s collection as well as from other public and private collections, the show traces her evolving style from early paintings that explored pattern and form through to her mature (and most recognizable) works that feature female torsos, lingerie, and restraints.
Marking this pivotal retrospective, we took a deep dive into Ramberg’s life and work, and below are (just) the essentials you should know about her practice.
Installation view of “Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” (2024). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Early Inspirations
Even while still a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Ramberg’s fixation with elements of the human body—namely hair, hands, and women’s garments—was evident in her work. Studying under some of the institution’s most historically influential teachers, including Ray Yoshida, a primary mentor of what would become the Chicago Imagists, Ramberg along with her classmates produced work that focused on what the present retrospective terms “furtive figuration.”
Christina Ramberg, Belle Rêve (1969). Photo: Jamie Stukenberg. © The Estate of Christina Ramberg. Collection of Michael J. Robertson and Christopher A. Slapak.
This approach to figuration first fully coalesced in a series of student exhibitions with SAIC as well as in two exhibitions, “False Image” and “False Image II,” organized by Ramberg and fellow students in 1968 and 1969 at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center. “We are interested in the effects gained by withholding information in a work,” Ramberg told the Chicago Daily News while describing the ethos of the work created by the False Image exhibition artists. And withhold her work did.
Christina Ramberg, Hair (1968). Photo: Kris Graves. © The Estate of Christina Ramberg. Collection of Joel Wachs, New York.
An isolated bustier, a cropped foot in a heeled shoe, or, most well-known from the period, depictions of women’s heads from behind, with only the details of their hairstyle shown, Ramberg’s early works were nearly as recognizable for what they showed as for what they didn’t. Within the context of Ramberg’s oeuvre, they foreshadow the artist’s creative trajectory and the themes and motifs that ultimately served as the foundation for her most important works.
Iconic Forms
The 1970s saw Ramberg produce her most iconic body of work. Continuing her exploration of isolated body parts and their configuration, which can be traced in her meticulous sketches and studies of hands, the feminine elements of her work took a turn to the risqué. Corsetry and black lace, brassieres and other lingerie coupled with suggestive poses as well as hands in contorted shapes with carmine-painted nails—and never featuring the subjects’ face—each of Ramberg’s compositions allude to the various ways women’s bodies can be shaped and fashioned.
Christina Ramberg, Probed Cinch (1971). Photo: Clements/Howcroft, Boston. © The estate of Christina Ramberg. Private Collection, New York.
Ramberg’s memories of watching her mother dress informed the works, with Ramberg describing “… I think that the paintings have a lot to do with this, with watching and realizing that a lot of these undergarments totally transform a woman’s body … I thought it was fascinating … in some ways, I thought it was awful.”
Operating along the line between “fascinating” and “awful,” Ramberg’s paintings are at once uncanny and sensually alluring, tapping into the language of fetishism.
Christina Ramberg, Black ‘N Blue Jacket (1981). Photo: Jamie Stukenberg. © The Estate of Christina Ramberg. Collection of Kathy and Chuck Harper, Chicago.
As her practice evolved, however, Ramberg’s figures became less erotic—and less human overall. Pieces from the late 1970s and early 1980s once again feature her signature cropped female torsos but they instead appear robotic, and even diagrammatic; the core elements of painting, such as color, line, shape, and more specifically their precision (a facet of work she had then become most well-known for) became as much the subject of her work as the figures depicted.
Artist as Collector
Although Ramberg is best known for her paintings, a consideration of her oeuvre would be incomplete without mentioning her penchant for collecting.
Ramberg was a prolific collector of objects that in turn served as potent sources of inspiration for her formal works. Frequenting thrift stores and garage sales, as well as the Maxwell Street Market by Chicago’s Southside, Ramberg sought what SAIC Professor Ray Yoshida dubbed “trash treasure,” a term used for one of the sections dedicated to her collecting within the retrospective.
An iteration of Christina Ramberg’s “Doll Wall” installed in her Chicago apartment (1972). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Of the myriad things she collected—from comic book pages to medical illustrations—Ramberg’s collection of dolls, which numbers into the hundreds, stands out the most. In several of the apartments Ramberg lived in throughout her life, she mounted many of these dolls on the wall as well as in exhibitions of her work, but never in the same arrangement twice. In the Art Institute’s retrospective, 155 of her dolls are on view in a manner similar to how she would have presented them. The collection of dolls speaks to her fascination with the body, and her collection ranged from relatively new, mass-produced pieces that reflected racial and gender stereotypes of the time to unique, handmade dolls that give insight into both the doll’s maker and its intended recipient.
Installation view of “Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” (2024). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Ramberg discussed her doll collection in a 1989 Chicago Tribune interview, saying, “I was interested only in the dolls that had been owned by someone. The ones where the face was worn off and redrawn in, or where something very strange had transpired. What I like about them is their sense of history. I’m interested in what is implied. And the simple fact that they had a life.”
A Turn to Textiles
While Ramberg had long engaged with quilting as a pastime, it wasn’t until the early 1980s that it became a central aspect of her formal artistic practice, allowing her to step back from painting for several years. Beginning in 1983, her quilts were exhibited in gallery and museum shows, with each highlighting the experimental, explorative nature of her work—and harkening back to her penchant for collecting. Though Ramberg relied on traditional quilting techniques and construction, she frequently employed unusual color schemes and patterns as well as fabrics, which were sourced on her travels as well as “trash treasure” missions.
Christina Ramberg, Japanese Showcase (1984). Photo: Jamie Stukenberg. © The Estate of Christina Ramberg. Courtesy of the Estate of Ray Yoshida and Corbett vs. Dempsey.
Just as her habit of collecting provided creative inspiration, her time spent focused on quilting ultimately fostered new ideas and approaches to painting, which she returned to in the mid-1980s with her “satellite paintings.” These new works were markedly different from her previous paintings in both style and material; where previously she favored acrylic on Masonite and applied delicate layers of paint and used careful brushstrokes, she now worked entirely in oil on canvas with impasto paint application, intense scumbling, and visible underpainting.
Christina Ramberg, Untitled #123 (1986). Photo: Jamie Stukenberg. © The Estate of Christina Ramberg. Courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey.
Ramberg’s compositions too were a departure from her usual subject matter. The sketch-like geometry and lines, surely inspired by the grids and repetition of quilt patterns, are evocative of a satellite or transmission tower, and their inscrutability evokes the air of abstraction.
Installation view of “Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective” (2024). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Despite a return to painting, Ramberg never ceased quilting. The year before her diagnosis with Prick’s disease—also known as frontotemporal dementia, a rare neurodegenerative disease, which would take her life at the age of 49—she created some of the most innovative and dynamic quilts of her career. Synthesizing material from her archive of collected materials and compositional elements from her earlier paintings, she numbered these late quilted works starting with the Roman numeral “I,” as opposed to her other works of the period which were already numbered into the hundreds, indicating she saw these pieces as a fresh start and new horizon even at the twilight of her life.
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Over her brief but dazzling life, Frida Kahlo was photographed by some of the greatest talents of her generation, from her lover Nickolas Muray to Edward Weston to her dear friend the Swiss artist Lucienne Bloch.  
Nickolas Muray, Frida Kahlo with Magenta Rebozo “Classic” (1939). Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art.
In the decades since her death in 1954 at the age of 47, Kahlo’s image has seemingly become an extension of her painting practice in a way unlike really any other artist. Her iconic brow and black coils of braided hair burned into popular consciousness, along with her self-adornment in indigenous dress and Aztec jewels. 
A new exhibition “Frida Kahlo: Forever Yours” at New York’s Throckmorton Fine Art makes the case that these photographic portraits of Kahlo are, in fact, a unique expression of the Mexican artist’s creative persona. 
The dazzling exhibition (through September 7) presents 50 high-quality photographs of Kahlo dating from 1929 to 1951, including iconic portraits, tender moments with her husband, the artist Diego Rivera, and playful, as well as irreverent moments with friends (Kahlo with a lampshade on her head? You bet.) The images represent just a small fraction of “Frida photographs” from the collection of dealer Spencer Throckmorton who started collecting photographs of the artist in 1977. 
Guillermo Kahlo, Portrait of Frida Kahlo, Oct 16, 1932. Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art.
“I have photographs of Frida since she was four years old,” he said in a phone interview earlier this month (you can see a video of the dealer discussing the show here). For Throckmorton, the show charts both the artist’s maturation over the decades but also her finesse and dexterity in engaging with the medium of photography. “Through these photographs see her become a totally self-assured and mature painter, believing in herself as she grows,” he said, “We see that the photographs are beautiful and beautifully posed—Frida had worked for her father who was a photographer when she was very young and he taught her how to pose for the camera.”  
A portrait of Kahlo by her father, Guillermo Kahlo, appears in the show—a piercing image that shows the young artist staring out from the camera with penetrating intensity. The portrait was taken when Kahlo returned to Mexico by train from New York following her mother’s death in 1932.  
The poignancy of these photographs is often rooted in Kahlo’s intimate connections to the photographers themselves. Several brilliantly colorful photographs of Kahlo taken by her lover Nickolas Muray appear in the exhibition, including the iconic image Frida Kahlo with Magenta Rebozo “Classic”. In several of these portraits, Kahlo adopts classical stances seemingly plucked out of Rennaissance paintings—an artful positioning Throckmorton says reflects their relationship.
Lucienne Bloch, Frida, and Diego, with Colleagues, Viewing a Solar Eclipse on the DIA roof (1932). Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art.
“Nickolas Muray came along and taught her classical poses. She was a natural because she was studying art history. A lot of the poses he took of Frida were based on Renaissance and 17th- and 18th-century paintings,” Throckmorton explained.  
Other photographs by the artist Lucienne Bloch are delightfully informal. “Lucienne was a friend of hers so Frida lets her hair down. One photographer shows Frida with a doily on her head—another one with a bottle of wine. There’s the one of her with a lampshade on her head!”
Nickolas Muray, Frida with Olmeca Figurine, Coyoacán (20/30) (1939). Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art.
Other images highlight Kahlo’s considered and passionate engagement with fashion and the ways dress and jewelry became her embodied mode of celebrating indigenous culture and Aztec heritage. “In 1929, Frida started to wear Mexican indigenous clothing from the Indians of the coast of Mexico and Tijuana with long skirts. She loved jewelry and a lot of her jewelry was made by William Spratling, an American. It was a very specific way of presenting herself,” he explained.  
Edward Weston, Frida Kahlo Side Pose / Abstract drawing by Frida on verso (1931). Courtesy of Throckmorton Fine Art.
In other ways, the photographs influenced Kahlo’s painting practice directly. One portrait in the show by Leon DeVos shows Kahlo with a downward gaze—it is an image Kahlo would later base a self-portrait. “She used the photograph as a model to paint her Self-Portrait with Jade Necklace, 1933. It’s almost identical to the pose of the photograph,” said Throckmorton, “I talked to Solomon Greenberg [the leading expert on Kahlo] and he says a lot of the photographs relate to her paintings.”  
Other highlights in the show include three photographs from 1931 taken in San Francisco by Edward Weston each of which Kahlo doodled on the back of. Another gem: a print of Kahlo and Rivera on the roof of the Detroit Institute of Art, watching the solar eclipse with a crowd—it’s the only vintage print none to exist.  
For painting devotees, the exhibition also includes the Kahlo painting La Risa, which features a Mexican folk mask used in indigenous dances in festivals, as well as two drawings, which Frida made after she came back from Paris in 1939, made in purple crayon.
The exhibition, Throckmorton says is a chance to glimpse, “just how fabulous and intelligent Frida really was.”

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In an unprecedented collaboration, the Stedelijk Museum and Van Gogh Museum are teaming up to host a sprawling exhibition on Anselm Kiefer. Opening in 2025, the show will be presented as a diptych across both Amsterdam institutions, with each part tracing key aspects of the German artist’s oeuvre and creative influences through his past and new works. 
The show, “Anselm Kiefer: Sag mir wo die Blumen sind,” is headlined by a new spatial work that the artist is unveiling at the Stedelijk. Still being completed by Kiefer, the 24-meter-long installation is set to occupy the space around the venue’s historic staircase. Its title, also the exhibition’s, is borrowed from Pete Seeger’s seminal 1955 folk song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” later made famous by Marlene Dietrich, and points to the flowers—specifically, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers—that inspired the artist’s most recent landscapes. 
At the Stedelijk exhibition, Sag mir wo die Blumen sind, as well as another new installation, will join Kiefer’s earlier works that are emerging from the museum’s collection. The Stedelijk boasts a long relationship with the artist, marked by its hosting of his 1986 solo show and acquisition of his paintings including Innenraum (1981) and Märkischer Sand (1982). This latest exhibition will display all the Kiefer pieces the museum holds, offering a rare survey of the artist’s decades-spanning career.
Anselm Kiefer, Innenraum (1981). Photo courtesy of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
“It will be truly remarkable to see these [new] installations shortly amid several of his iconic works from the 1980s,” Rein Wolfs, the Stedelijk’s director, said in a statement. “In this way, Kiefer looks back at the past and towards the future.’ 
Born in Donaueschingen in 1945, Kiefer is best known for his unflinching works that confront the myth-making, grief, and silence of a postwar Germany. “Ruins, for me, are the beginning,” he once said. His materials have ranged from lead and concrete to shellac and impasto; his tools acid baths and blowtorches. Somber and totemic, his paintings and sculptures are held in museum collections around the world and have earned him a prime spot in Europe’s Contemporary canon.
Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows (1890). Van Gogh Museum collection (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). Photo courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum.
Throughout Kiefer’s long career, poet Paul Celan and German Romanticism have been guiding lights, as has Vincent Van Gogh. In his early years, the artist traced the Dutch painter’s journey from the Netherlands to Arles, France, where the 17-year-old Kiefer spent three weeks on a farm creating a body of drawings. Speaking to an audience at the Tate Britain in 2019, he explained he was not drawn to the emotional content of Van Gogh’s work, but rather his “workmanlike clarity.” 
“What impressed me even then was the rational structure, the confident construction of his pictures—in a life that was increasingly slipping out of his control,” he said.
Anselm Kiefer, The Starry Night (2019) © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Georges Poncet.
The exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum unpacks the Impressionist’s deep influence on Kiefer. It will bring the Dutchman’s key masterpieces together with the German artist’s new paintings, with the most notable pairings highlighting how sunflowers have served as motifs in both Van Gogh’s and Kiefer’s bodies of work—as in the former’s La Berceuse (1889) and the latter’s Tournesols (1996).
“Anselm Kiefer has been engaged with Van Gogh’s work from his early years. His recent work—displayed here for the first time—shows how Van Gogh continues to make his mark on Kiefer’s work today,” said Emilie Gordenker, director of the Van Gogh Museum. 
The Stedelijk showcase is overseen by curator Leontine Coelewij and the Van Gogh Museum exhibition by curator Edwin Becker. Visitors need only purchase one ticket to access both shows at the museums. 
“Anselm Kiefer: Sag mir wo die Blumen sind” will be on view at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Museumplein 10, Amsterdam, Netherlands, and the Van Gogh Museum, Museumplein 6, Amsterdam, Netherlands, March 7–June 9, 2025. 
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Duke Riley has long been captivated by the sea. When I reached the Brooklyn-based artist over the phone, he was sailing off Rhode Island on his boat, on which he lives for months out of the year. He attempted to boil his feelings for seafaring and maritime history down into a neat one-liner—and failed. “It’s the kind of thing that I could write a thesis on,” he told me. 
Not long ago, while reading up on Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, a group of 16 battleships the U.S. president sent on a 1907–09 world tour to showcase the nation’s military might, he stumbled on a curious fact. In the early 1900s, the USS Vermont was once home to a goat named Skellig Mór, which lived on the battleship as a sort of mascot. Just as intriguing was the creature’s back story and its fate, now long forgotten.
The legend of Skellig Mór has since sent Riley on a quest to locate the animal’s remains. Over the past month, he has plastered missing posters on the street, placed an ad in the Boston Globe, and set up a hotline to receive tips about its whereabouts. He told me the search has not yet yielded any good leads, but he’s been in touch with folks from Boston College who are volunteering their help. 
Duke Riley’s missing poster for Skellig Mór in the Boston Globe. Photo: @dukerileystudio on Instagram.
And what might Riley want with the remains of Skellig Mór? The point is to return the goat to its home in Ireland, but more deeply, the hunt itself—which headlines his new solo show, “The Repatriation of King Skellig Mór,” at Praise Shadows Art Gallery in Brookline, Massachusetts—enacts a form of remembrance.
“Just the very fact that this goat had significance in one place and now, nobody even seems to know where it is,” he said, “is a pretty good argument for why certain things should be repatriated.”
Skellig Mór made its first public appearance at the 1905 Puck Fair, an annual street festival, in Killorglin in County Kerry, where it was exhibited and crowned king. The following year, the Knights of St. Brendan society, deciding Boston should have its own Puck Fair, bought and imported the goat to the U.S. for such a purpose. But an internal fight split the organization, and, in a highly publicized dispute, its various factions spent years quarreling over the rightful ownership of Skellig Mór.
Ultimately, it took the courts to decide that the goat should be donated to the U.S. Navy. Skellig Mór was brought aboard the Vermont, where it briefly served as a sort of mascot until it died in 1909. Its body was then reportedly stuffed and displayed in the Boston Museum of Natural History, now known as the Museum of Science. The institution, however, no longer holds those remains. 
Duke Riley, No. 418 of the Poly S. Tyrene Memorial Maritime Museum (2024), on view at Praise Shadows Art Gallery. Photo: Dan Watkins.
At the heart of Riley’s latest exhibition is a scrimshaw, titled No. 418 of the Poly S. Tyrene Memorial Maritime Museum (2024), commemorating Skellig Mór. But unlike traditional scrimshaw, which sailors etched into bone or ivory, the artist’s work is drawn on a detergent bottle he recovered from the waters of the U.S. eastern seaboard. The container has been treated to mimic the grain of whale bone, while its face depicts a naval officer weeping by the goat’s tombstone. 
The work is Riley’s way of not just memorializing the goat, but recognizing its service to the U.S. Navy. “It didn’t willingly enlist,” he noted. “But then again, most humans don’t willingly enlist in the military either. So, there’s some questions about how we separate ourselves from the natural world.”
A group of Duke Riley’s scrimshaw cassettes. Photo: Robert Bredvad.
For some two decades now, Riley’s practice has sought to unpack how individual and institutional forces have left indelible marks on our natural landscapes and waterfronts. Notably, he’s done so in his celebrated scrimshaw and mosaics crafted out of scavenged materials, recently showcased at his 2022 solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. 
“These objects were designed to be appealing to us so that we’ll keep buying them,” he explained of his salvaged hoard. “There’s no reason why you can’t make beautiful objects out of something that was already designed to be beautiful.” 
Duke Riley, Five Boston Battleships and Their Accompanying Mascots (2024) (detail). Photo: Robert Bredvad.
At Praise Shadows, Riley is also showing a clutch of “ruby glass” bottles, which reimagine the Victorian souvenir in single-use plastic, as well as more scrimshaw, lovingly hand-drawn as befits a tattoo artist, made of canisters and cassette tapes. His brand of humor and mischief is on display, too: on one scrimshaw tape is rendered a bemused-looking fish with the caption “All That You Have Is Your Sole.” 
The exhibition is dominated by his latest sailor’s valentine (a shellcraft memento sailors used to gift their sweethearts), an eight-by-eight-foot assemblage made of shells and plastic detritus including disposable lighters, tampon applicators, and syringes. Riley is betting it’s the world’s largest sailor’s valentine: “I don’t think anybody is stupid enough to do something that big.” 
Installation view of “The Repatriation of King Skellig Mór” at Praise Shadows Art Gallery. Photo: Dan Watkins.
Besides Skellig Mór, another animal is getting its due at Riley’s show. One scrimshaw bottle, No. 424 of the Poly S. Tyrene Memorial Maritime Museum (2024), is dedicated to Hoover, a harbor seal housed at Boston’s New England Aquarium in the 1980s. Hoover was beloved for its apparent ability to mimic human speech—and in a Boston accent, no less. But like Skellig Mór, Hoover’s story has been lost to history, save for Riley’s posthumous tribute. 
“We have a very short concept of time in our own self-obsessiveness,” he said. “It’s a reflection of our culture that something that was once deemed important has been completely forgotten.” 
With that, Riley informed me he had urgent boat business to tend to, namely fishing out some shaving equipment he had accidentally dropped down a toilet. “I have some exciting nautical stuff ahead of me,” he joked. I let him return to the sea. 
“The Repatriation of King Skellig Mór” is on view at Praise Shadows Art Gallery, 313A Harvard Street, Brookline, Massachusetts, through June 30.
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Artists’ books offer a solitary, intimate experience of a creator’s work, one that unfolds across the time it takes the reader to turn the pages, and one that typically comes a lot cheaper than works that hang on the wall. So said two longtime New York dealers, John Post Lee of BravinLee Programs and Adam Boxer of Ubu Gallery, in a video chat on Wednesday that also provided a preview of a show of dozens of these precious objects, now on view at BravinLee.
The books range as far back as 1931, with European practitioners like Hans Bellmer, Unica Zürn, and the duo of Paul Éluard and Man Ray, along with contemporary artists, some who focus on the medium, like New York’s Scott Teplin, and some less known for their engagement with it, like Alexis Rockman (whose first publication, in 1991, was printed by John Post Lee Gallery).
The name of the show, “Artists’ Book Month II The World is a Scandal,” is based on an oft-quoted line from Bellmer: “If the origin of my work is scandalous, it is because, for me, the world is a scandal.”
Hans Ballmer, La Poupée (1934). Courtesy Ubu Gallery.
The German artist contributes two of the highlights of the show. He started forming mannequin parts into unsettling sculptures, which he called “an artificial girl with multiple anatomical possibilities,” in Berlin in 1933. His book The Doll (printed in German as Die Puppe in 1934, and in French as La Poupée in 1936) contains photos of his dolls in various stages of assembly. The show includes a German printing from an extremely small, unknown edition size, priced at $250,000, as well as a French example from an edition of 100 for $100,000.
It was Bellmer who brought the two dealers together, in fact, when, 15 or so years ago, Lee had a copy of the Bellmer book he was trying to sell, and asked for help from Boxer, who invited him over and generously shared his knowledge of the artist and the book market. The show combines historical material from Ubu, which shows 20th-century avant-garde art with an emphasis on Dada, Surrealism, and Constructivism, with BravinLee’s contemporary program. 
George Cochrane, Inferno: Geryon Edition (2018–20). Courtesy BravinLee Programs.
While the historical and aesthetic merits of these works are easy to see, Boxer said, even when museums are eager to add examples to their collections, they run up against a problem. They may not be able to get support to acquire the works because of one simple question: How will we display it? While vitrines can provide a good showcase, they deprive the viewer of the experience of the book as it’s meant to be. 
The most ambitious project from BravinLee’s side of the aisle is George Cochrane’s lushly hand-colored copy of Dante’s Inferno, published by Thornwillow Press to mark the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death. It’s illuminated using pigments dating from the author’s day and sourced from Italy, and, for the right buyer, could go for $50,000.
Martin Wilner, Journal of Evidence Weekly Vol. 172 (2016). Courtesy BravinLee Programs.
Martin Wilner’s Journal of Evidence Weekly Vol. 172 (2016), meantime, is priced at $20,000. The artist, who has been showing since 1997, appears in museum collections from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.
But many of the contemporary artists come at much more modest prices, and offer aesthetic delights aplenty. 
Iranian-American artist Anahita Bagheri contribtues a gorgeous acrylic and crayon on papier-mâché book which also made an appearance in a 2020 video installation, and lists at $2,500.
Andrea Burgay, Science Fiction Stories (2024). Courtesy BravinLee Programs.
Andrea Burgay’s altered found books, such as Science Fiction Stories (2024), exploit the graphic covers and the pathos of the objects’ past lives. They are tagged at just $800. 
For those on an even tighter budget, there’s Cochrane’s graphic novel Long Time Gone: Chapter One, “Bird Gets the Worm,” created with his young daughter Fiamma, that’s just $20. 
“It’s an honor to be able to show these young artists alongside these masterpieces of the book arts, in a head space that is more rarified,” Lee said.
Of the partnership between the two gallerists, he added, “Dealers often aren’t given credit for how nicely they can play together.”
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Next week, the art world is poised to descend on the shores of the Rhine River for Art Basel’s flagship fair, which will unfold alongside a slew of satellite events including Liste, Photo Basel, Basel Social Club, Volta, and June Art Fair. Beyond these selling events, however, there is a slew of institutional exhibitions to take in. From Dan Flavin’s “Dedications in Light” to an all-encompassing Summer Show at the Fondation Beyeler, plus artist spotlights on Mika Rottenberg and Toyin Ojih Odutola, Basel is a veritable hotspot for art lovers this season.

“Mika Rottenberg. Antimatter Factory” at Museum TinguelyThrough November 3, 2024 
Mika Rottenberg, still from Untitled Ceiling Projection (2018). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
At the Tinguely Museum, Argentinian artist Mika Rottenberg’s wonderfully chaotic, absurd, and clever video works address ideas of hard and soft power vis-a-vis capitalism, gender dominance, and the natural world. Like Jean Tinguely, Rottenberg satirizes the state of production across a range of materials, in works like Spaghetti Blockchain (2019) and NoNoseKnows (2015), sending up real-life situations like the facilitation of monetary transactions and industrial pearl production in humorous and surreal videos and sculptures.

“Cloud Chronicles” at Fondation BeyelerThrough August 11, 2024 
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 2024: Philippe Parreno, Membrane (2023). Courtesy of the artist © Philippe Parreno; Fujiko Nakaya, Untitled (2024). Courtesy of the artist, © Fujiko Nakaya. Photo: Mark Niedermann.
For its summer show, the Fondation Beyeler has for the first time transformed its entire museum and outdoor park into an experimental environment featuring works by leading contemporary artists. Termed a “living organism,” the show features works by artists working at the edge of traditional mediums, including Ian Cheng, Precious Okoyomon, Philippe Parreno, Rachel Rose, Tino Sehgal, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Adrián Villar Rojas. A highlight is the inclusion of Carsten Höller and Adam Haar’s Dream Hotel Room 1: Dreaming of Flying with Flying Fly Agarics (2024). The animatronic bed moves based on sensors detected by a shifting body on the mattress, with the course of falling asleep and waking corresponding to a blooming mushroom suspended above the sleeper’s pillow. Visitors can book a 60-minute session to sleep in the bed during museum hours.

“Dan Flavin: Dedications in Lights” at Kunstmuseum BaselThrough August 18, 2024 
Dan Flavin, untitled (to Barnett Newman) one (1971). Collection Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes © Stephen Flavin / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich, Courtesy David Zwirner.
In the early 1960s, Minimalist pioneer Dan Flavin embarked on a series of artworks dedicated to fellow artists, cultural and political events, and other major touchstones of history, both personal and public. Although he decried the “Minimalist” moniker, Flavin undoubtedly adhered to the principles of the movement, employing industrial objects like store-bought fluorescent tube lights to dictate the bounds of his work. His ongoing fascination with light is obvious in the “Dedications,” which features 58 artworks, many making their debut in Switzerland. With nods to Donald Judd, Barnett Newman, and even his beloved golden retriever Airily, Flavin manages to transform commercially available products—constrained by size and color—into deeply personal tributes.

“Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse” at Vitra Design MuseumThrough May 11, 2025 
Installation view of “Science Fiction Design: From Space Age to Metaverse.” © Vitra Design Museum. Photo by Mark Niedermann.
The idea of the “future” has long captivated humans, who have channeled that fascination into movies and books within the realm of science fiction. Flying cars, sentient robot overlords, and trips to far-flung planets have all become fodder for the artists and set designers behind the imagined worlds of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1962) and Blade Runner (1982). Just the chairs included in this exhibition range from Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s 19th century Argyle Chair to Joris Laarman’s Aluminum Gradient Chair (2013), the first 3D-printed metal chair, to the more recent Hortensia Chair (2018) designed by Andrés Reisinger and offered both as an NFT and a functional object. “From the Space Age to the Metaverse” provides a historical primer on the history of futuristic design, and offers a glimpse into untold possibilities.

“Toyin Ojih Odutola: Ilé Oriaku” at Kunsthalle BaselThrough September 1, 2024
Toyin Ojih Odutola, Don’t Be Afraid; Use What I Gave You (2023). © Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
If you missed Toyin Ojih Odutola’s spare and striking charcoal drawings on view at the Venice Biennale, you have another opportunity at Basel’s premiere institution with the show “Ilé Oriaku,” which translates to “House of Abundance.” In the Nigerian-born artist’s first comprehensive outing in Switzerland, a wealth of new drawings demonstrates the artist’s work to bring fictional familial stories to life in charcoal, pastel, and pencil. “The work is not about a mythology or a presumption about African-ness” the artist said in Paris Review. “The viewer is immersed in the narrative, an alternative reality.”
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Jennifer Rochlin’s large, hand-formed terracotta vessels seemingly compel viewers to get up close and personal and take a closer look—a phenomenon no more apparent than in her current solo show, “Paintings on Clay,” at Hauser and Wirth in New York, on view through July 14, 2024. Presented across a range of pedestals and plinths, the exhibition invites visitors to move between, circumvent, and even peer inside the various pots, exploring their painted and etched patterns, vignettes, and, most intriguingly, storylines.
Installation view of “Jennifer Rochlin: Paintings on Clay” (2024). Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
While the tradition of ceramics may call to mind visions of highly polished and evenly proportioned pots and containers, Rochlin relishes in the idiosyncrasies of intuitive form and shape as it directly reflects the hand of the artist and provides a unique starting point for her subsequent paintings and drawings.
“I did once make a very perfect pot” said Rochlin on a video call from her home in Altadena, California. “I just found it boring, I was like, ‘where’s my way in here’? When I was going to paint and draw, it was just so perfect that I wasn’t interested in it. I think the slumps and the lumps and the molding and the disfigurement, that to me is something that I find aesthetically interesting.”
Installation view of “Jennifer Rochlin: Paintings on Clay” (2024). Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
Rochlin came to ceramics nearly two decades ago, and the medium ultimately became the artist’s “canvas” of choice for her paintings. The shape of each vessel is arrived at intuitively, shaping and fashioning the clay in a manner that its structural integrity stays true but doesn’t adhere to a prescribed form. It is only once the pot is finished that Rochhlin considers what will go on it, with the shape typically informing the rest of the design of the piece.
The images Rochlin chooses to adorn each vessel with are arrived at in a similar manner: intuitively and based on her present thoughts or emotions. Echoing Surrealist automatism, wherein the artist attempts to let the unconscious come to the fore over conscious control, Rochlin’s memories and imaginings can be traced across the surface of each work.
Jennifer Rochlin, Trans-Siberian Railway (2023). Photo: Keith Lubow. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
A highlight of the show, Trans-Siberian Railway (2023), features a spiraling train surrounded by larger-than-life irises, drawn from Rochlin’s memory of travelling along the Trans-Siberian Railroad in Russia, which she captured on Super 8 film, with the composition alluding to the way in which a roll of film unravels. By one illustrated train car, a man has picked some of the irises and offers them to a woman in one of the train’s windows. In reality, it was a scene of two strangers, within Rochlin’s depiction, the woman is a self-portrait of the artist herself.
“What’s funny is when I was drawing it, it was completely unconscious that [the subject] became me—it wasn’t,” Rochlin described. “I was in my mind drawing the image that I had from the Super 8 film, which I haven’t looked at in I don’t even know how long. It was a memory of that Super 8. I think it was because I was feeling this longing for a romance at the time that I made the work. I wanted to do this quintessential romantic gesture. The idea that the flowers be thrown up, then the train takes off, and they never see each other again.”
Jennifer Rochlin, Honey Pot (2024). Photo: Keith Lubow. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
Another central work in the show highlights Rochlin’s penchant for collaboration and sharing the experience of making her vessels, Honey Pot (2024). Across its surface are drawings of female genitalia by 22 women artists. Some of the drawings were done very spur of the moment, as Rochlin notably loaded the piece in the back of her car, double parked outside of a gallery opening, and invited several artists out to make their contribution. Others made their additions on studio visits or sent digital drawings to be transferred on.
Rochlin said, “When I started having artists draw on the pots with the collaborative pieces, then I have all these kind of random drawings—how am I unifying them? I like that it’s like a community, and I love how the act of just scratching into the clay is so pleasurable, I want to share that with people.”
Jennifer Rochlin, Green Tapestry with Poppies and Bites (2024). Photo: Keith Lubow. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
Other pieces on view, such as Green Tapestry with Poppies and Bites (2024), shows another hallmark form of Rochlin’s collaboration, as visitors to the studio have been given the opportunity to physically bite into the clay leaving teeth marks as unique as fingerprints. It also further taps into the process of remembering, as the tapestries and poppies, untethered from a narrative or landscape, float across the surface like fragmented memories. Although every work is rooted into Rochlin’s own deeply personal life and history, throughout is an undercurrent of universality and collective experience.
“I think since my work is unfiltered and honest, and you can feel the emotion through the mark making, I think that people can relate to it and have it brings up memories for them and they can have a shared memory of a lost love, or your children growing up, or in time passing. That’s what I’m hoping that viewers are experiencing and it’s going to connect with them on a deep level of their own.”
Jennifer Rochlin, Ladies at the Norton Simon Museum (2023). Photo: Keith Lubow. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser and Wirth.
Beyond the psychological rawness of Rochlin’s work, the rawness of the base material itself too is stark. When looking closely at each vessel, the imperfect edges and unpainted clay peeking out imbues each piece with an air of the ancient, even primordial, a glimpse at what an artifact from today might look like far into the future. Recalling Athenian narrative pottery in the arrangement of scenes and decorative elements, both the collaborative works and pieces completed by Rochlin alone speak to collective experiences as well as the deeply individual and personal.
“I’m working in a tradition that has such a long lineage of storytelling and I really love getting to be an active participant and continue this tradition. Making and telling a story on a vessel started thousands of years ago, and that’s still relevant in our day and age. With A.I. and Instagram and all the phones and everything, I think the more handmade the better. The more you get to see something that is just made of dirt, water, and fire, it just stands the test of time. And I’m happy that people are interested in that still.”

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