Art & Exhibitions

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

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., is planning an unlikely pairing of two blockbuster-worthy names: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Banksy. A display of a pair of related works by the two artists will go on view later this month, kicking off a year-long exhibition of the two paintings.
Basquiat, of course, was a talented but troubled African American painter who died at the age of just 27 in 1988. He left behind a critically acclaimed body of Neo-expressionist work that blends abstraction, figuration, and the written word. It’s an oeuvre that has spawned an entire commercial industry with everything from Barbie dolls to designer handbags bearing his recognizable mark.
Banksy is an anonymous British artist known for the humorous, often bitingly critical stenciled artworks he has been creating since the late 1990s. He also directed the 2010 Oscar-nominated documentary film Exit Through the Gift Shop,
Both men often use the public sphere as their canvas—Basquiat started out as one half of the graffiti duo SAMO, and Banksy’s guerrilla paintings generate headlines around the world wherever they appear, often on otherwise nondescript city streets.
Banksy, Banksquiat. Boy and Dog in Stop and Search (2018). Courtesy of Phillips.
“Positioning Basquiat with Banksy brings into focus elements of Basquiat’s legacy, notably the movement of street art tropes into museums through his studio practice,” Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu said in a statement.
Both artists have also become market darlings.
Basquiat’s $110.5 million record at auction was set at Sotheby’s for an untitled 1982 skull painting in 2017, and he is the most expensive American artist of all time. In 2018, Banksy infamously sold a Balloon Girl print that was set to self-destruct after the hammer came down on the final bid for a then-record £1 million ($1.4 million) sale. The half-shredded version—rechristened Love Is in the Bin—sold for £18.6 million ($25.4 million) in 2021, setting his current auction high.
The Basquiat work in the show is his 1982 painting Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump.
The Barbican placed a protective sheeting over a mural by street artist Banksy of his version of a work by the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, created on the occasion of the late artist’s 2017 solo show at the London museum. Artist Danny Minnick then added his own drawing to the piece, titled Banksquiat. Boy and Dog in Stop and Search. Photo by Rune Hellestad – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images.
Hedge-fund manager Ken Griffin reportedly bought the work in 2020 for more than $100 million in a private sale. The museum hasn’t identified Griffin as the owner, but noted that the exhibition has the “generous philanthropic support of Kenneth C. Griffin.”
The painting previously belonged to noted Basquiat collector Peter Brant, who included it in a 2019 solo show of the artist inaugurating the East Village branch of the Brant Foundation private museum. (It also was exhibited last year at the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland.)
At the Hirshhorn, it will go on view alongside Banksy’s version of the painting, where Basquiat’s skeleton-like figure is joined by a pair of stenciled police officers who pat him down. The British artist created the work as a means of drawing attention to Basquiat’s beginnings as a street artist on the occasion of the late artist’s solo show, “Basquiat: Boom for Real,” at London’s Barbican Centre.
Banksy made a pair of guerrilla works outside the museum, pointing out on Instagram the irony of Basquiat showing at “a place that is normally very keen to clean any graffiti from its walls.” (The exhibition ultimately drew 216,389 visitors, the most the museum had seen for a single show in 35 years.)
A member of the public takes a photograph a woman wearing a foil crown next to a new work by street artist Banksy on a wall by the Barbican Center in London, England. The two new Banksy murals which have appeared mark the opening of an exhibition by the late American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat at the museum. Photo by Jack Taylor/Getty Images.
The Barbican opted to leave the illicit Banksy works in situ, covered by a protective sheet of acrylic. (The second piece likened the exhibition to a carnival, with a stencil of a crowd queueing to buy tickets for a ferris wheel with Basquiat’s signature crown in place of the carts.)
Banksy also made a wood panel version of his version of Boy and Dog, which he titled Banksquiat. Boy and Dog in Stop and Search. The 2018 work sold for $7.1 million (or $9.7 million after fees) at Phillips New York’s 20th-century and contemporary art evening auction in May 2023.
The Hirshhorn show will also include 20 small Basquiat works on paper and wood from the collection of Larry Warsh, as well as a gallery screening Downtown 81, the Glenn O’Brien-produced film starring Basquiat in a semi-autobiographical turn as a young artist and musician struggling to get by in the East Village.
“Basquiat × Banksy” will be on view at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Independence Ave SW &, 7th St SW, Washington, D.C., September 29, 2024–October 26, 2025. More

Times are tough. Whether it’s the economy, politics, social issues, or the environment, news headlines are consistently grim but nevertheless, life must carry on. “How do we live with the level of anxiety we have right now?” asked Carrie Moyer from within the midst of Alexander Gray Associates where her newest show was being installed earlier this month. “Maybe from a space that’s quiet, joyful, or self-mocking, that maybe pokes fun a little bit at our anxieties.”
Carrie Moyer. Photo: Taylor Miller. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
Though Moyer has worked with gallerist Alexander Gray for more than two decades, her solo show “Timber!” marks her first with the gallery. Comprised of new paintings and works on paper, the exhibition considers lived reality within the context of social and environmental instability and everything in between.
“I’m one of those painters who wants to please the viewer, so I’m always thinking about pleasure. But I’m thinking about pleasure in terms of politics, in terms of a bodily experience,” Moyer explained. “My wife helps me a lot with titles, so we had many discussions about this, and we were thinking about ‘timber’ like from comics—this is what you’d say when you’re telling everyone to take cover. It has a kind of Pop inflection because it’s not really something you’d say, but you might see it in a comic book.”
Installation view of “Carrie Moyer: Timber!” (2024). Photo: Dan Bradica. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
While Moyer describes the speech-balloon-inspired “Timber!” as encapsulating how she’s been feeling, in other words, like everything is falling apart (something surely felt by many), the show is far from pessimistic. Instead, vibrant, mixed-media compositions offer a playfully abstract macro exploration of movements and processes from the natural world—whether the churning of magma and shifting of tectonic plates or planetary orbits and atmospheric currents.
In Tears on My Pillow (2024), the majority of the composition is overtaken by large swathes of color evoking elements of a landscape and draping tendrils, large black teardrop shapes rendered in sharp focus draw the eye. They reappear in larger number within Crying – Waiting – Hoping (2024) as well.
“They’re big drops that look like tears, they’re cartoonish, crazy, huge. They’re drops of paint, but they’re almost like an emoji,” said Moyer. The layered meanings or interpretations of the motif—as drops of paint both symbolically and literally, or as tears—speaks to Moyer’s preoccupation with modes of legibility. “In my work I often mix these kinds of graphic things that seem extremely readable with things that are very process oriented as a way of confounding both ways of reading, melding them together,” Moyer said.
Carrie Moyer, Tears on My Pillow (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
It also brings to the fore Moyer’s penchant for experimenting with material and tapping its inherent origins and associations; apropos for a show that contemplates the end of the world, earthquakes, glacial shifts, and other doomsday paradigms. Paint pigments are frequently sourced from the earth like ochre or iron oxide, adding another layer of readability. In this new body of work, Moyer incorporates textural materials to her compositions, such as pumice in Tears on My Pillow, and powdered minerals from semi-precious stones, metal, and graphite in Etna’s Folly (2024). In a series of works on paper, salt has been delicately sprinkled over the piece, affecting the flow of watercolors and adding a distinctive texture to the surfaces.
Installation view of “Carrie Moyer: Timber!” (2024). Photo: Dan Bradica. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
The addition of unexpected materials is not something new to Moyer’s practice. Since the late 1990s, she has regularly added glitter to her paintings with the aim of complicating the effects of abstraction as well as a means of exploring themes around gay identity. This early material experimentation was also deeply engaged with art history and traditional ideas of what made a painting “good.”
“I don’t think this affects younger painters in the way that it did when I was younger, but it used to be that if you were painting acrylic paint, it needed to be flat. You couldn’t show a brush stroke. There were all these weird constraints and conventions that went along with the material itself,” the artist noted. Moyer’s present paintings continue to toy with these notions, including sealing textural materials under layers of paint, so the shadows cast from the disrupted flatness become physical, “contaminating” the formal elements.
Carrie Moyer, Crying – Waiting – Hoping (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
Citing a longstanding interest in the legacy of color field painting, which contrary to immaculate flatness instead sought to physically saturate the canvas, Moyer’s paintings frequently vacillate between sections of impenetrable opacity and sheer veils of poured paint—but, ultimately, this is only an illusion. Though many of the passages are poured, the paint doesn’t sit on raw canvas, there is gesso priming the canvas before it even touches the surface. The addition of three dimensional medium like fiber paste, which has a texture similar to paper, allows the surface to be built up, as can be seen in the oblong shapes dotting Crying – Waiting – Hoping, where the paint at times seamlessly envelopes masses and at others appears to drip off its ends. In a manner of speaking, the combination of elements results in a type of “painting joke.”
“I grew up as a painter in this transition between the death of Modernism and Post-Modernism, so part of me has some set of conventions about what ‘real’ painting is and what painting does intellectually, physically, optically, but then also I’m like ‘Oh my god, listen to yourself!’ No one in good conscience could be strict about any of this anymore or take it too seriously.”
Carrie Moyer, Mommy Long Legs (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Gray Associates, New York.
Is the world ending? Maybe. Is contemporary lived reality overwhelming and anxiety inducing? Certainly. But continue we must. And it is at this juncture that Moyer finds a bit of humor in the situation. Collapsing the distance between human and cosmic scale, “Timber!” confronts a range of serious topics—from art historical canon to natural disaster—with a playfulness and repose that viewers can take a step back and take stock of the magnitude of their and the world’s situation, but perhaps too even have a small laugh at themselves. More

Before the GoPro and the cell phone camera, there was the handheld video recorder, and for the DIY world of skateboarding, it was a revelation.
By the late 1980s, video recorders were smaller and more affordable than ever before, and the VHS-format videos they produced were at once artful projections of a burgeoning subculture (long before its 2020 debut in the Summer Olympics) and how-to guides for aspiring skaters. Freely circulated among participants and sold in skate shops, these wobbly, roughly cut, fisheye-lens videos defined the stylings of a generation.
For the first time, the cultural, technical, and historical importance of these tapes has been placed at the center of an exhibition, taking place at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. “Recording the Ride: The Rise of Street-Style Videos” brings together seminal examples from the late ’80s and ’90s alongside objects that tell the story.
Keenan Milton and Aaron Meza at work in 1999. Photo: courtesy Blabacphoto.
It might seem counterintuitive to gather artifacts of a cultural movement that was spontaneous and chaotic and whose proponents probably never envisioned being catalogued in a museum. But there’s plenty on offer: skateboards (affixed to the ceiling, no less), Polaroid photos shot by acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Spike Jonze, video recorders, period notes on paper scraps, and, of course, a load of tapes.
R.B. Umali and Danny Supa, 1997. Photo: Sammy Glucksman.
Such resourcefulness is, in part, due to the well-connected pair that pitched the show: Jacob Rosenberg, a West Coast filmmaker who shot video for the influential skateboarding company Plan B, and Michaela Ternasky-Holland, the daughter of Plan B founder Mike Ternasky. The hope was to curate a show around the 30th anniversary of Ternasky’s death, but the museum saw an opportunity to go bigger.
“The impact of skate videos extends beyond the skateboard community to art, fashion, sports, music, film, and more,” said Barbara Miller, the museum’s deputy director for curatorial affairs, in press materials. “With our expansive view of the moving image as a reflection and building block of vernacular culture, MoMI is the ideal cultural institution to look at the origins of this essential genre.”
Filming The Questionable Video (1992). Photo courtesy Sean Sheffey and Jacob Rosenberg.
While “Recording the Ride” features footage from a range of skateboarding groups including H-Street, World Industries, Birdhouse, 411, and Zoo York, those of Plan B feature prominently. There’s behind-the-scenes footage from Video Days (1991) and a wealth of artifacts connected to The Questionable Video (1992) and Virtual Reality (1993), which are considered formative for the genre.
One highlight is The Questionable Video, the first film Ternasky made after leaving skateboard brand H-Street. It shows some of the era’s most celebrated figures, including Rodney Mullen, Mike Carroll, and Danny Way, skating to music by the Beastie Boys, Louis Armstrong, and the Doors. As the opening montage wryly put it: “You have no idea what’s going to happen.”
“Recording the Ride: The Rise of Street-Style Videos” is on view at the Museum of the Moving Image, Queens, New York, through January 26, 2025. More

A week after experiencing the artist Jihyun Jung’s latest piece, I am still sore.
At the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, Jung has installed a nearly 50-foot-tall rock-climbing wall and titled it Kaeru (2024), “frog” in Japanese. Red climbing holds zig-zag up the installation in two parallel paths, and a safety rope hangs from an auto belay up above. From noon to 5 p.m., Friday through Sunday, visitors can strap on a helmet, harness, and climbing shoes and attempt to scale it.
During an opening reception last week, I gave it a try and found it to be… very difficult. Moving slowly, painfully slowly, I made it maybe 30 percent of the way up before slipping. Viewers down below nevertheless applauded, which helped my wounded pride. “At the opening, only one person from the general audience made it to the top,” Jung told me later, making me feel a little better.
Kaeru is part of a superb and surprising show called “Dream Screen” that artist Rirkrit Tiravanija has curated as part of the Leeum’s biannual “Art Spectrum” series, which is devoted to young artists.
Preparing to grapple with the artwork. Photo by Sun A Moon.
Jung was born in 1986 and started climbing a few years ago. “I’ve always been fascinated by artificial climbing walls inspired by nature,” he said. “This particular piece is motivated by speed climbing, the sport that started in nature but evolved into something quite different.” The height of his creation is set to the international standard, and the current record in the event is, astonishingly, just under five seconds.
The brave climbers who make it to the top of Jung’s creation are able to see, close up, two metal sculptures of frogs like those at the Okitama Shrine in Ise, Japan, where they are regarded as symbols of good fortune. The pair are “wishing for double the speed and double the luck,” Jung said.
Rock climbing in art is unusual, but it is not without its precedents. Matthew Barney was known to scale gallery walls (nude) with climbing equipment early in his career, and Andra Ursuta offered up some not-safe-for-work climbing walls at the New Museum in 2016, while Baseera Khan made climbing holds out of casts of her body parts for a 2017 display at Participant Inc. in New York.
Right before I fell. Photo by Sun A Moon
Jung has taken an almost-straightforward but slightly sly approach to the climbing-art genre, which is very much in keeping with his practice. His sculptures tend to look familiar at first, but they get stranger the longer you look at them. In a recent solo outing at the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, he presented a disassembled billboard and objects that he 3D-printed from iPhone scans of automobile scraps. Here at Leeum, he’s using store-bought climbing equipment, but he’s doubled everything and added those frogs. A certain eerie, uncanny feeling lingers.
It’s an artwork about tough journeys and split-second decisions, and it’s an artwork that offers challenges: Are you willing to climb in front of an audience? Can you make it to the top? The vast majority of people will not be able to, and so it also poses fun, fruitful questions about how to make sense of—and how to evaluate—an artwork that you cannot fully experience.
But even for those who decide not to put on a harness and make an attempt at the summit, there is a lot of pleasure to be had. “Climbing is both a sport and an art form, combining sculptural beauty and performative elements,” Jung told me. “It’s fascinating to watch people solve the route in their own way as they climb. I love the atmosphere—the cheers and applause from the audience, the dynamic poses of people falling, and the sense of accomplishment when someone finally reaches the top.” More

Since 1995, the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto has surveyed society through shoes, from the legacy of men in high heels to footwear’s role in forensics. Next month, the institution is highlighting the growing relationship between art and sneakers—with a focus on recent artist collaborations that bridge star-studded drops with deeper cuts.
MSCHF BWD (2023). Photo by Kailee Mandel.
Coming up at the Bata Shoe Museum is “Art/Wear: Sneakers x Artists,” offering a deep dive into the growing trend, through the lens of 48 legendary artist-driven sneaker designs hailing from the museum’s own collection and new acquisitions alongside outside loans, some from the artists who made them.
Bryant Giles x New Balance 2002R (2022) Photo by Kailee Mandel.
“Art/Wear” will play out across the museum’s third floor, in thematic, chronological sections, mapping “the history of how sneakers came to be a focus for artists,” as the museum’s executive director and curator Elizabeth Semmelhack told me over email.
Peter Max x Randy’s Shoes (1968) Photo by Kailee Mandel.
“It starts with a look at the mass production of both canvas sneakers and ballpoint pens and markers to discuss the origins of drawing on sneakers with teen girls in the 1950s and 1960s,” Semmelhack, who’s penned numerous sneaker books, continued. The first known artist sneaker collab, which dates to the 1960s, will appear here: a pair of high top tennis shoes by acclaimed psychedelic artist Peter Max, for Randy’s shoes.
Cey Adams x adidas Adicolor Hi BI2 (2006). Photo by Kailee Mandel.
Next, “Art/Wear” will explore how graffiti writers like Stash, Futura, and Cey Adams further pioneered the link between art and kicks. Five pairs of KAWS sneakers will anchor this section, in addition to two complete KAWS x Sacai outfits, as Semmelhack noted, “to explore the complete embodiment of art.”
KAWS x DC shoes (2001). Photo by Brad Bridgers.
The show final section will devote itself to sneakers by fine artists like Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, and Daniel Arsham. Packaging features most heavily here, demonstrating how “how sneakers and also their boxes and tissue paper give consumers access to artists’ work,” Semmelhack said. She likens the very limited editions of these shoes to fine art prints. A skate deck triptych by Murakami will enliven this space, too.
Takashi Murakami x BLACKPINK Ohana Full-Bloom Slides (2024). Photo by Kailee Mandel.
Sometimes, sneakers can feel like a very male dominated space. “Art/Wear” expands beyond this stereotype, including sneakers from about half a dozen female artists, including Shantell Martin, Vicky Vuong, and Kate Knudsen, the widow of Doobie Brothers drummer Keith Knudsen.
Ruohan Wang x Nike Air Force 1 Flyleather (2020). Photo by Kailee Mandel.
This show doesn’t shirk drama, either. After careful deliberation, Semmelhack included a pair of Tom Sachs’s Nikes in “Art/Wear,” even though the Olympian outfitter dropped Sachs amidst controversy last spring. Semmelhack said she opted to keep Sachs’s work “because it has been central to the history of artists and brand collaborations.”
Javier Calleja x Vault by Vans “You Have No Choice” slip ons (2022) Photo by Kailee Mandel.
Global commerce has enabled the artist patronage system to open up, as artists translate their work onto an ever widening array of products, and reach new audiences around the world. Compared with scarves, jewelry, or clothes, what makes sneakers so alluring?
Damien Hirst x Vans and Palms Casino Resort polka dot slip on (2019). Photo by Adrienne Naval.
First of all, sneakers offer a stronger structure, which allows an artist’s designs to shine without the fatigue of holding the body any one way. Furthermore, the packaging and related ephemera surrounding sneaker drops generate a particular kind of excitement.
Daniel Arsham x adidas Originals FUTURECRAFT 4D (2018). Photo by Adrienne Naval.
“I think it is important to note that sneakers are not blank canvases,” Semmelhack added. “The storied histories embedded in classic silhouettes, the cultural significance of specific brands, and the longstanding importance of sneakers in the creation of cultural and personal identity are all at play in artist collabs.”
As the exhibition will show, these sneakers prove that art has power beyond the gallery.
Mache ‘Blank Canvas’ Runner Customs (date unknown) Photo by Kailee Mandel.
“Art/Wear: Sneakers x Art” will be on view at Bata Show Museum, 327 Bloor St W, Toronto, October 3, 2024–March 26, 2025. More

Shantell Martin’s style is so appealing that she’s had to battle wine and fashion companies alike for pilfering it. It has also placed her in international demand and created a hectic schedule: this month alone, the London-born artist is celebrating new murals at Rockefeller Center with the Art Production Fund and a limited edition mini-bike with Brompton.
But she will aim to slow things down a bit on October 1, when she unveils her first-ever walking path, a 160-foot-long labyrinth that will create space for meditation amid the madness of Times Square.
“I attended several 10-day silent meditation retreats,” Martin told me via email, recalling when she took up the practice while living in Japan in the 2000s. “I haven’t participated in one of those over the past few years, partly because I’ve found that walking and drawing provide a similar sense of mindfulness and space.”
The artist previously worked with the presenter of the new project, Times Square Arts, in 2020, as part of the nonprofit’s “Midnight Moment” digital art program. Her forthcoming maze, The Path: A Meditation of Lines, will lead viewers on a winding journey through the notoriously frenetic Manhattan hub. Martin’s design, which she’s conceptualized in her stream-of-consciousness style, bears trademarks of the artist’s look, like looping lines, smiling faces, and neat text. More and more visual elements become clear the longer one looks, including mountains, sailboats, and stick figures.
Of course, it will be hard to divine the larger composition uniting these intertwining, disparate elements in person. That will be part of the fun for those who traverse The Path. Martin’s maze will center on two crisscrossing primary routes, one white, one black. Dotted lines diverge from both, like little roads to nowhere. Playful characters and accents offer unexpected shortcuts along the way, surrounded by words that reappear throughout Martin’s practice, like “breathe,” “someday,” and “are you you,” all formulating different phrases depending on the approach one takes. The work’s only fixed, complete sentence will appear in its upper right-hand corner, for viewers to make out on their way from 47th Street to 48th Street along Broadway: “You are in the right place at the right time.”
A preview of the walking path. Courtesy of Shantell Martin.
The maze will be sanctioned off from the rest of Times Square only during activations, such as daily guided meditations and musical performances. Otherwise, participants will have to navigate the winding paths and the crowds all at once. Fortunately, the work is intentionally painted “on a relatively quiet plaza rather than in the center of all the Times Square action,” Times Square Arts director Jean Cooney said in an email. Furthermore, Martin herself has recorded an audio guide, and seating will allow for sustained pauses.
“Walking, much like drawing, can empower you and move you forward—both metaphorically and physically,” Martin remarks in the project’s description. “Putting one foot in front of the other is a simple yet powerful act, and I hope that this message and activity can be translated through this project.”
The local Times Square community—including theater staff and sanitation workers—will benefit from their own dedicated walking sessions. Otherwise, The Path will remain accessible to the public all day, every day, through November 20. More

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