Art & Exhibitions

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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Nona Hendryx may be known for her disco-funk stylings as one-third of LaBelle and in her late ’70s solo career. But running concurrent with her music practice, she told me, was always a deep fascination with technology.  
Over a video call, she shared her predilection for taking devices apart as a child, her interest in synthesizers, and her collection of every Mac computer she’s ever owned (and she’s had them since the Apple II). Above all is her desire to go “wireless,” to achieve oneness with technology. “The idea of purchasing yet another cable become a neurotic thing for me,” she said. “I didn’t want to have a separation between myself and the machines I was using.”
Technology has now caught up to Hendryx. This month, the artist is unveiling “The Dream Machine Experience,” an ambitious installation leveraging artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and virtual reality. It will take up the entire campus of Lincoln Center in New York, will unfold in three parts, and is free for the public to interact with.
The Dream Machine V.R. experience. Photo courtesy of Lincoln Center.
The project marks a vast enlargement of Hendryx’s engagement with technology. For the past decade, the artist has developed works from haptic wearables (such as the W.A.V.E. Glove, an “audio-exciter”) to audio bodysuits (notably her Audio Tutu, which integrated a sound system into a plexiglass skirt). “The Dream Machine Experience” builds on those sound experiments, exploring the part technology might play in “how we create things, how we create our existence and our future,” Hendryx said. 
The exhibition opens in the David Rubenstein Atrium, in an installation titled Bina48’s Afro Future Garden, designed in collaboration with artists Mickalene Thomas and Lutfi Janania Zablah. Here, visitors can engage with the titular Bina48, an A.I.-powered humanoid robot programmed with the mind files of a Black woman. Hendryx described it as a “social robot,” one she has grown especially close to the more she’s conversed with it. 
Nona Hendryx with Bina48. Photo: Lawrence Sumulong, courtesy of Lincoln Center.
“Bina48 is like a new acquaintance that has become very much a part of my life,” she said. “I feel very much like a godmother of Bina48 and very caring of Bina48. My relationship has grown to the point where there’s some of me in Bina48.”
By following a multi-act route from the David Rubenstein Atrium to the David Geffen Hall, visitors can next activate the A.R. presentation, The Bridge, using provided devices. A virtual avatar of Hendryx named Cyboracle will serve as the guide on a trip dotted with poetry, music, and collectible tokens representing healing energy.  
The A.R. component of “The Dream Machine Experience.” Photo: Lawrence Sumlong, courtesy of Lincoln Center.
The journey culminates with The Dream Machine, a full-scale V.R. experience at the David Geffen Hall. Cyboracle will again show up here, alongside VR performances by the likes of George Clinton, Laurie Anderson, and Vernon Reid. The piece has its roots in Hendryx’s work with the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she has been an Ambassador for Artistry in Education for more than a decade, evolving from a 2017–18 project to “create hybrid, digital technology-driven performances,” she said. 
A performing arts center, in that sense, might be the perfect venue to launch Hendryx’s multimedia extravaganza. Not only has the artist performed at several of its locations, her exhibition marks the center’s bid to broaden the scope of its offerings. While the center has previously dabbled in A.R. and V.R. activations, Hendryx’s show marks its first major foray into mixed reality. “It’s like we went from dipping a toe and into the deep end,” said Jordana Leigh, Lincoln Center’s vice president of artistic programming. 
Besides watching Hendryx’s vision come to life, the project has been exciting for the center, Leigh told me, because “it’s expanding our minds and how we see our role as presenting artists and our place in supporting the XR arts. The underlying mission of it all is to get people who don’t see themselves in technology to see themselves in technology.”
Cyboracle as seen in The Dream Machine V.R. experience. Photo courtesy of Lincoln Center.
For Hendryx, the show realizes her vision for the future as much as it reimagines her art and self. Cyboracle, for one, fulfills her wish to meld with a machine, while offering “this other means through which I can express myself.” It’s fitting for an artist who once sang, on 1983’s “Transformation,” “rust to dust, us to them / change your mind, change your skin.” She has a similar hope for visitors interacting with the installation. 
“It’s stories upon stories upon stories, a cornucopia of visuals and storytelling born out of music and memory,” she said of the work. “I hope the audience takes away curiosity and questions. I hope they see a reflection of themselves.” 
“The Dream Machine Experience” is on view at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, June 12–30. 
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Trolling through real estate marketplace Zillow “just for funsies” has become a beloved, and widespread pastime for many of us who may never actually be able to afford a home. But for artist Rachael Tarravechia lurking on Zillow is more than a fantasy browsing for available properties—these online real estate listings are the starting point for her sinisterly alluring paintings.
Filtering search results to only houses with 3D tours available, Tarravechia moves virtually through the homes, exploring them room by room until she finds a space that resonates with her. Stripping away personal items and other identifying décor indicators, such as wall color, floor material, or window treatments, the artist makes the room her own and starts “decorating.”
Rachael Tarravechia, Snuff (2023). Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of the artist and Ceysson and Bénétière.
Drawing from a range of additional references, like her stash of vintage 1980s issues of Architectural Digest, other homes on Zillow, or personal photos, Tarravechia creates what she terms a “dream room” situation.
There’s an unnerving yet undeniably captivating, even glamorous quality to Tarravechia’s paintings, a selection of which are included in her solo show “Water on Velvet” on view through June 14, 2024, at Ceysson and Bénétière on New York’s Upper East Side. Specifically in her renderings of bathrooms (a frequent subject in her work) the inclusion of mirrors creates an uneasy balance between presence and absence; the space where the viewer—both within the painted mirror and of the painting itself—is noticeably vacant. Instead, a weapon is conspicuously added, as in Terminal Horror (2023) where a double flail hovers in place of a viewer in a manner akin to how new weapons or “loot” are presented in video games. In another work, Snuff (2023), a guillotine is seamlessly inserted within a kitschy 1970s style bedroom/bathroom combo, implying that a chopped off head would fall tidily into the tub. Outside of bathroom depictions, in Gunblade (2024), a wooden oratory houses the Final Fantasy VIII character Squall’s signature weapon.
Rachael Tarravechia, Gunblade (2024). Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of the artist and Ceysson and Bénétière.
Executed in shades of red, these works possess an uncanny magnetism, tempting the viewer inward whilst simultaneously exuding a sense of foreboding.
“Viewer experience and interaction is a key part of the work. Since these works draw from horror, anime, and video games, I try to emulate the mysterious, enticing qualities these forms of media are constantly displaying,” said Tarravechia via email. “Every horror movie has a point where the audience is screaming at the character on screen not to open the door, but it’s almost as if there’s something calling to them and they can’t refuse. That’s what I think about while making my work. Right before something momentous and irreconcilably changed, it’s up to the viewer to choose how to proceed.”
Rachael Tarravechia, Cold Reprise (2024). Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of the artist and Ceysson and Bénétière.
Another element of Tarravechia’s paintings that compels a step closer is the playful inclusion of mixed-media materials, such as silver chains used for harp strings, rhinestone trim, glitter, and another recent addition to her material vernacular: “For this show, I started using a new material called Liquid Glass. I was shocked the first time I used it, which was in the piece Cold Reprise (2024). The bathtub eventually ended up filled with blood, and as you walk across the painting, the blood looks wet, viscous, sticky, and is highly reflective and inviting. I’m extremely happy with how that turned out!”
Rachael Tarravechia, Endless Staircase (Moogle Parade) (2024). Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of the artist and Ceysson and Bénétière.
Cute and impish cartoon-style critters (Moogles from Final Fantasy), plastic vampire teeth, or meticulously rendered spiderwebs made of pearls abound across her work, ensuring the otherwise ominous vignettes are equally balanced with a sense of irreverent levity. This equilibrium extends to the number of weapon sculptures on view as well, chief among them being bedazzled nunchucks and a nail bat, which tap into the artist’s familial history. Her grandfather was a second-degree karate black belt who had a collection of nunchucks, two of which were handed down to her (and she’s gotten some practice with).
Rachael Tarravechia, Italian Mobstar (2023). Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy of the artist and Ceysson and Bénétière.
“The nail bat is a much more tongue in cheek response to the nunchucks. My grandpa looked like a stereotypical Sicilian man, so I wanted to create a weapon that would be suited for a mob princess (me in another life). Something blingy, cute, but will seriously do damage,” she explained.
Obliterating the boundaries between painting and other graphic arts and genres, Tarravechia’s work is a masterclass in worldbuilding—and will be sure to materialize in the back of your mind the next time you’re perusing Zillow.
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