Art & Exhibitions

Long before Jackie O or Princess Diana, Marie Antoinette was the original socialite and style icon. France’s last queen was renowned for her fashion prowess and her huge influence over the country’s decorative arts and luxury trades. Amid revolutionary uprisings, however, Marie Antoinette’s lavish lifestyle came to symbolize the excesses of an old, enemy regime and the public’s fascination soon turned into scrutiny and outrage. She could not escape the guillotine.
In death, Marie Antoinette was reviled. Centuries later, her legacy has taken on a life of its own. The fallen royal remains a source of enduring inspiration for many of the world’s top designers, including Manolo Blahnik, John Galliano, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, and Vivienne Westwood.
The dramatic rise, fall, and stratospheric rise of Marie Antoinette is the subject of a new exhibition at the V&A Museum in London, on view through March 22, 2026. The first exhibition dedicated to the ill-fated queen in the U.K., the show boasts some 250 objects, including loans that have never before travelled outside Versailles.
Installation view of “Marie Antoinette Style” at V&A Museum, London, U.K. Photo courtesy of V&A Museum.
“I do not share the King’s tastes,” Marie Antoinette once confided to a family friend about life with Louis XVI, who she had married when she was just 14 years old. “He is only interested in hunting and in mechanical work.”
Much of the couple’s incompatibility came down to the Queen’s extravagant appetite for parties, gambling, clothes, sumptuous interiors, and the arts. She became an important patron, commissioning Jean-Démosthène Dugourc among others to redesign and furnish the Petit Trianon, her private chateau on the grounds of Versailles. So, the V&A asks, why do we still refer to the opulence of her era by using her husband’s name? Rather than “Louis XIV style,” it suggests, we might more accurately describe the most resplendent objects as “Marie Antoinette style.”
In that spirit, here are five of the show’s most spectacular examples of Marie Antoinette style.
Slippers
Slipper belonging to Marie Antoinette in beaded pink silk. Photo: CC0 Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris.
Though very few items from Marie Antoinette’s wardrobe survive, her shoes are among the most coveted items. At one time, she received four new pairs each week. These pink silk slippers decorated with very fine black beads were worn with the grand habit, the most formal type of court dress. Like many of her peers, the queen perfected the so-called “Versailles glide,” a particularly graceful way of walking that gives the impression of feet barely touching the ground.
Sèvres Cup
Sèvres Bol-sein ou Jatte-téton, bowl tripod support. Photo: Martine Beck-Coppola, © Grand Palais Rmn (Sèvres – Manufacture et musée nationaux).
Marie Antoinette’s famous bol-sein, or “breast bowl,” was part of a larger porcelain service of 108 pieces commissioned for her charming ceremonial dairy at Rambouillet, the King’s holiday getaway outside Paris. Though functional, the dairy was primarily intended for the Queen to indulge in the late 18th-century fashion for tasting dairy products.
The design is a much more realistic interpretation of a classical Greek “mastos” drinking vessel, similarly shaped like a woman’s breast. The Sèvres example’s greater naturalism has caused many to speculate that it was modeled on Marie Antoinette’s own breast. The bowl is supported by a tripod decorated with ram heads.
Domino
A domino in the style work by French courtiers at public balls and masquerades, 1765-70. Photo: Jo Lawson-Tancred.
As so few of Marie Antoinette’s clothes have survived, the V&A has provided suitable examples of items she is known to have worn in her lifetime. This majestically voluminous cloak, known as a “domino,” was typically worn by French courtiers to cover their outfits at masked balls. It has a hood and is fastened at the front by bows. Here it is styled with a black domino mask and a handheld fan. It is displayed alongside the reproduction of a black-and-white print of Marie Antoinette wearing a domino at a masquerade in Paris in 1782.
Armchair
Marie-Antoinette’s chair set. Photo: © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
This dainty, gilt walnut armchair with silk embroidered upholstery was part of a set of four. It was used in Marie Antoinette’s private dressing room during her last few summers at Château de Saint-Cloud, the getaway acquired by the queen in 1785. Like all of Marie Antoinette’s possessions, the piece of furniture prominently bears her monogram “MA” in a cresting medallion carved with roses and myrtle.
Pearl jewel
Marie Antoinette’s pearl jewels. Photo: © Sotheby’s, Bridgeman Images.
Marie Antoinette had an extensive collection of jewels from the very start of her reign. Some had been acquired using money from her mother, the Hapsburg empress Maria Theresa and others given to her by Louis XV upon her marriage to his son. By the time she became queen in 1774, Marie Antoinette had a private collection of diamonds and precious stones worth some 2.5 million livres, thus surpassing the riches of even most European queens. Of course, over her lifetime, Marie Antoinette’s wealth of shiny treasures only grew. One of the biggest changes to her collecting habits came with the rise of neoclassicism, which brought simpler styles of dress and accessories into fashion.
“Marie Antoinette Style” is on view at the V&A Museum, Cromwell Rd, London, through March 22, 2026.  More

“Photography is a great way to express your love for someone,” said Inez van Lamsweerde. “You fall in love with the person you photograph in two seconds.”
We’re standing in a gallery in New York, where van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, partners in art and life, were walking me through their new body of work. The group of photographs centers on a young couple, their 22-year-old son Charles and his girlfriend Natalie, captured in moments of tenderness against the backdrop of the Marfa desert. The young lovers’ intimacy is heightened by the sheer sweep of the natural landscape.
It’s a personal outing for the Dutch photography duo known professionally as Inez and Vinoodh, who have built their name on a surreal blend of fine art and fashion. But it was also a technical revelation: the images—popping with lush colors and acute in detail—were shot entirely on an Apple iPhone 17. “It’s just pure creativity,” said Matadin of his experience with the device’s camera; van Lamsweerde called it “a game-changer.”
Inez and Vinoodh, Think human (2025). Courtesy of the artists and Apple.
The project is emerging as part of “Joy, in 3 Parts,” a new exhibition spearheaded by the tech company and curated by Kathy Ryan. It encompasses iPhone-shot works by Inez and Vinoodh, as well as those by American contemporary artist Mickalene Thomas and Beijing-based photographer Trunk Xu, all of whom have responded to Ryan’s single prompt, “Joy.”
The photography couple’s contribution, Ryan told me, is unlike anything you’d find in a family album, a series that “celebrates the love story of their kid.”
Created over two days in Marfa, on the range of Virginia Lebermann, cofounder of Ballroom Marfa, the images unfold a narrative that alludes to the 1970 cult film Zabriskie Point, in which a man and woman meet and fall in love in the shadow of societal unrest. The photographers, however, offer something far more hopeful: “Instead of being expelled from paradise,” van Lamsweerde explained, “maybe they’re returning to paradise.”
Inez and Vinoodh, Think nature (2025). Photo courtesy of the artists and Apple.
The first picture depicts the lovers in a town setting running toward their sun, their hands joined and clutching a billowing red fabric. Another composition sees them share a kiss under the same veil, an empty road unraveling behind them. In a third, they stand on cacti-dotted terrain, recreating a pose seen in the Zabriskie Point film poster, with Natalie holding up and peering out from behind a deep red gel. The hue, said Van Lamsweerde, represents love as much as a stop sign, a red-flag warning of environmental fragility.
The triptych is bookended by two individual black-and-white photographs of Charles and Natalie. The portraits are “kind of another way of saying I love you,” said van Lamsweerde. That emotional undercurrent reflects her and Matadin’s focus on a sitter, she explained—fleeting yet charged, an exchange of energies not unlike the experience of love.
“It’s a very short, intense moment that you share with someone of extreme trust and vulnerability,” she said. “For us, that’s something very sacred.”
A Shared Brain
Inez and Vinoodh’s shared practice began with their own love story. The couple met in 1986 as students at the Vogue Academy of Fashion Design in their native Amsterdam, when she was commissioned to photograph his clothing line Lawina. The label would shutter, but their relationship blossomed. In the ’90s, they decamped for New York, on the heels of van Lamsweerde’s residency at PS1. There, they married and built a joint career on the back of their electric, kinetic compositions.
The pair’s early pictures showed up in the pages of fashion magazines, notably The Face, and it wasn’t long before fashion houses from Chanel to Calvin Klein came calling. They would go on to direct music videos for the likes of Rihanna and Lady Gaga, forge a long-running partnership with Björk, and continue creating fine art photography that saw them variously experimenting with collage and developing floral still lifes.
Installation view of works by Inez and Vinoodh at Gagosian Beverly Hills, 2013. Photo courtesy of the artists.
The duo, represented by Gagosian and Ravestijn, have gone on to show internationally, in institutions from Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum to New York’s Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art. A 2010 survey, “PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING 1985–2010” toured cities including Sao Paolo, Stockholm, and Dallas.
An Inez and Vinoodh image has come to be immediately recognizable for its drama and immediacy, for harboring unlikely, even unreal elements. See, for instance, their 2019 image of fellow photographer Cindy Sherman, in which she shows up in an elaborate mask and luxurious outfit while dining out on a bag of chips. Or their cover art for Anohni’s 2016 album Hopelessness, where the musician’s face is eerily composited with that of model Liya Kebede.
During the walkthrough, Ryan and the couple recalled a 2004 shoot with Bill Murray at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. The actor arrived flagrantly late to the session, where van Lamsweerde proposed sticking flowers in his beard for the photos. His response? “Does anybody ever ask why?” Van Lamsweerde said no; Murray allowed flowers to be stuck in his beard.
Inez and Vinoodh, Think love (2025). Courtesy of the artists and Apple.
That aesthetic emerges from the duo’s background in fashion as much as an upbringing that saw them immersed in art history. Matadin told me about visiting Amsterdam museums as a child, taking in “all the Rembrandts, all the Vermeers—it’s all in our brain.” Van Lamsweerde herself can see how the “frontal view” of their images, how their images are framed, takes cues from the Dutch art. Their photo of Charles and Natalie kissing, they said, nods to Gustav Klimt’s 1907–08 masterpiece The Kiss.
Otherwise, the pair told me, their creative methods and processes have evolved out of pure instinct and spontaneity. Their set usually sees van Lamsweerde shooting from a fixed point, while Matadin wanders around with a camera, capturing different angles. But not before she directs the sitter, an undertaking she described as “massaging, hypnotizing someone into a certain shape.”
“There’s never a stolen moment,” Matadin said.
“A lot of people say it’s like watching choreography,” van Lamsweerde added of their process. “We just feel it and at this point, we have the same brain.”
A Self-Portrait
Their in-the-moment practice has found an unexpectedly fitting companion in the iPhone camera. The duo raved about its flexibility and how it’s allowed them to capture intimacy, the iPhone being less intimidating than an actual camera. The advanced settings of the latest model also means that they’ve been able to navigate complex lighting and exposures. “It all happens in the camera,” said van Lamsweerde.
A section of the exhibition is occupied by a HDR (High Dynamic Range) gallery, where the photographs are displayed on screens in stunning resolution with technology developed by Apple. Here, the colors emerge bright, with textures and skin tones rendered with supreme detail—”the shadows not too dark, the highlights not too bright,” van Lamsweerde noted. In one image, Matadin pointed out a shadowy figure reflected in a piece of Natalie’s jewelry: “You can see us here in her ring.”
Behind the scenes of Inez and Vinoodh’s “Joy” shoot. Photo: Kathy Ryan.
It’s far from the only Inez and Vinoodh self-portrait in the gallery. In fact, as Matadin contends: “Every picture we take is a self-portrait. The more we put our energy on a person, the more you will see of us.”
“It’s a complete projection of our own self and ideas about everything,” van Lamsweerde said. “Then one thing comes back through the other person.”
Their art, then, is as revealing of their sitters as it is of the photographers. In their “Joy” series, for one, can be read their parental love and unparalleled eye as much as their innate feel for technology (it’s worth noting that the duo was early to adopt Quantel Paintbox, a Photoshop precursor). “It’s us,” Matadin put it plainly.
Behind the scenes of Inez and Vinoodh’s “Joy” shoot. Photo: Kathy Ryan.
Charles and Natalie’s images also echo Inez and Vinoodh’s own body of actual self-portraits, in which the couple have photographed themselves laughing, embracing, and of course, kissing over the years. It’s a throughline that fittingly arrives as the pair are planning a major retrospective at the Kunstmuseum in the Hague, Netherlands, set to open in the spring of 2026. The show has the provocative title of “Can Love Be a Photograph,” with their four-decade practice offering the clearest response.
“We’re always looking for something new,” Matadin said. “That’s what keeps us going.”
“We always say you can take a good picture of anyone because there’s something amazing in everyone,” van Lamsweerde added. “There’s always a new person in front of you.”
“Joy, in 3 Parts” is on view September 19–21 at 456 West 18th Street, New York. The exhibition is open 12 p.m.–6 p.m. on Friday, and 9 a.m.–6 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. More

No one does photography quite like Cindy Sherman (b. 1954). Since before the release of her acclaimed series “Untitled Film Stills” (1977–1980), the artist has made incisive images about gender, identity, and society that nearly all use herself as the model—but never as the subject.
“Of course, in all of the photographs it’s her, but it’s also never her, because it’s always a character that she is portraying,” Tanya Barson, the senior curatorial director at international gallery Hauser & Wirth, told me.
Barson is the curator of “Cindy Sherman. The Women,” an exhibition currently on view at the gallery’s Menorca, Spain, location. It features work from eight different series from across the artist’s career, from early student work, shot in black and white, to colorful large-format photographs from the last decade.
Over nearly 50 years, Sherman has been the consummate chameleon, losing herself in a wide range of assumed identities while skewering our societal expectations about how women are supposed to behave and present themselves to the world. Her work is a performance—but so too, she argues, are our own lives, informed by and responding to the way the world looks at women.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #24 (1979), “Untitled Film Still” series. Photo: ©Cindy Sherman, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
“I wanted to focus on something that’s quite core to Cindy Sherman’s work, which is the depiction of women, of femininity,” Barson added. She’s titled the show after Clare Boothe Luce’s influential 1936 play The Women, which featured an all-female cast (and inspired film versions in 1939 and 2008).
“Clare Boothe Luce was a person who had multiple identities, roles within her life. She was a society hostess, she was a diplomat, she was an ambassador, she was a politician, she was a journalist, she was a playwright,” Barson said. “These kinds of multiple identities that women play within their lives are absolutely relevant to Cindy Sherman’s work.”
We spoke with the curator about the eight different photography series featured in the exhibition, and how Sherman has helped deconstruct our ideas about gender, aging, wealth, and privilege.
“Bus Riders” (1976)
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #389 (1976/2000), “Bus Riders” series. Photo: ©Cindy Sherman, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
The show includes some of Sherman’s earliest work, including small-format prints of photographs based on people she encountered on the bus, taken when she was still studying at Buffalo State University.
“There are three different series that we’re showing from that early moment in her
career where she is dressing up and adopting different characters,” Barson said. “She’s already become a master of observation and characterization. It is her doing the costumes and the makeup, but it’s also the mannerisms in each of the 
images—she adopts the poses of each person, the 
body language is the character.”
Sherman shot the “Bus Riders” series in the studio against a blank white wall, posing as various men or women traveling on public transit. Her straphangers are raising their arms aloft or sitting through their ride, clutching their belongings as they go about their day. But already, Sherman disappears into the work, adopting these alternate personas through thrifted costumes and props, makeup, and her poses and facial expressions. The seeds of her great career were planted here.
“There’s just the germ of almost everything that she then refines and perfects and explores,” Barson added. “And there is already those layers of media and observations in her work.”
“Murder Mystery” (1976)
Cindy Sherman, Untitled (the actress at the murder scene), 1976/2000, “Murder Mystery” series. Photo: ©Cindy Sherman, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Also shot during Sherman’s university days, with the same plain backdrop, is her “Murder Mystery” series. If “Bus Riders” was about the quotidian and the everyday, the people you encounter on the streets, “Murder Mystery” was Sherman dipping her toe into the fictional stock characters that would help make her name.
Where “Untitled Film Stills” mined film noir and B movies for feminine clichés, Sherman turned to Agatha Christie and the murder mystery genre to create the various personas in this early series. The Hauser & Wirth exhibition features the female roles from this sequence of 255 images, which includes the maid, the daughter, the drunken wife, and an actress, who meets her grim fate courtesy of a shadowy figure.
“They’re highly stylized 
archetypes,” Barson said. And they relate to themes that would become touchstones across Sherman’s career.
The actress, for instance, with her peroxide blonde hair and long satin evening gown, is echoed in the most recent work in the exhibition, Sherman’s “Flappers” series—and of course ties in directly to her breakthrough “Untitled Film Stills.”
“Line Up” (1977)
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #508 (1977/2011), “Line Up” series. Photo: ©Cindy Sherman, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
This early Sherman series stands somewhat apart from her student work in that the photos do not seem to have any narrative framework. Again, she’s used herself as the model, photographed in the studio in a variety of different costumes. But it’s much harder to place these over-the-top characters, with their carnival-esque face masks and dramatic outfits.
“They’re almost like images out of German Expressionist cinema. They’re quite extreme costumes and makeup, like kind of early 20th century avant-garde,” Barson said.
The black-and-white works show the young artist embracing theatricality, pushing her characters to the extreme, before she would reel it back in for the “Untitled Film Stills.” But Sherman would revisit this experimentation later in her career, allowing the women in her photographs to become more garishly outlandish, subverting expectations about femininity and the portrayal of women in art.
“Untitled Film Stills” (1977–1980)
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #6 (1977), “Untitled Film Still” series. Photo: ©Cindy Sherman, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
The heart of the exhibition, of course, is Sherman’s famed “Untitled Film Stills,” black-and-white images, shot on location, of the artist posed to resemble a Hollywood starlet on set and in character. Much has been written about this groundbreaking series, which earned Sherman a place in the history of photography.
“Each one is utterly convincing as a potential film still, and yet they’re not,” Barson said. “There’s a real kind of attempt to evoke cinematic mise-en-scène with these photographs as well as characterization through the figure, their expression, their makeup, and their costume and posture.”
By co-opting the movie industry’s visual language, Sherman was able to construct visual narratives that connected with viewers on a deep level—even though these aren’t from films that exist, they are inherently familiar. And faced with that familiarity, one stops to reconsider the stereotypes that inform each image, how such depictions of women help shape our own worldview, and what deeper truths hide behind these carefully crafted presentations of women.
“Society Portraits” (2008)
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #473 (2008). Photo: ©Cindy Sherman, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Here, the show jumps ahead a few decades, to the large-scale color photographs Sherman has produced in more recent years. Barson has added a piece from the artist’s informally christened society portraits series, displayed in a large, ornate gold frame.
Here, the subject is heavily made up, wrapped in furs, and trying, unsuccessfully, to seem younger than she is. The artist is confronting the specter of aging head-on, taking on the persona of a wealthy woman of a certain age—beautiful, but unable to hide the effects of aging, despite the many resources at her disposal.
“When I look at the society portraits, I see Cindy adopting these identities so carefully, and with such a degree of observation. There is a kind of identification and a sympathy for these women here,” Barson said. “There are so many things going on in these works. There’s some cruelty, there’s some comedy, there’s some really acute observation, but there’s also a wider critique of society that comes through these photographs.”
The pictures pose the question: if the struggle to accept aging is just vanity, or is the pressure that the fashion industry places on women to look a certain way, to hang on to their youthful appearance, to conform to the expectations of a society that doesn’t value them, just too great?
“Ominous Landscape” (2010)
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #550 (2010/2012), “Ominous Landscape” series. Photo: ©Cindy Sherman, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Shot for an editorial assignment for Pop magazine, the “Ominous Landscape” series saw Sherman expanding the field of view, superimposing her characters against dramatic island backdrops that she digitally edited to look like paintings, in a nod to the long history of landscape painting.
Combining the artist’s interest in fashion and cinema, Sherman posed in Chanel clothing drawn from the company’s historic archives, from an original 1925 design by Coco Chanel herself, to looks of more recent vintage by Karl Lagerfeld. And, each of the landscapes has previously been featured in films.
“It’s Shelter Island, it’s Capri, it’s Stromboli, and I think Iceland is there as well—I thought that island connection was a really nice place to start since the gallery on Menorca is on an island,” Barson said. “But there’s so much going on that you have to unpack when one looks at her work to understand quite how complex and constructed and layered it is.”
Harper’s Bazaar (2016/2018)
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #589 (2016/2018), part of a series done for Harper’s Bazaar. Photo: ©Cindy Sherman, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Sherman has had various collaborations with the fashion industry throughout her career, shooting ads for Balenciaga, Marc Jacobs, and Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons. But these weren’t typical fashion photoshoots, making a beautiful image to help sell high-end clothes. Instead, Sherman took these opportunities to critique consumer culture and skewer accepted beauty standards with unflattering portrayals of herself in various guises.
From this area of her practice, Barson selected images that grew out of a 2016 cover shoot with Harper’s Bazaar. Taking on the role of a fashion-obsessed socialite, Sherman photographed herself in outfits by contemporary designers, including Jacobs.
“These are not intended to be read as fashion models, but as society women who are the consumers of high fashion,” Barson said. “And again, you get a sense of how women of wealth
 are engaging in the construction of certain personas, but they’re also somehow victims of a culture in which the image is everything.”
“Flappers” (2016–2018)
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #568 (2016), “Flappers” series. Photo: ©Cindy Sherman, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
The newest work in the show is Sherman’s “Flappers” series, inspired by 1920s- and ’30s-era Hollywood publicity photos. The young women of the era were considered rebellious, with their bobbed hair and short skirts, and rejection of conservative societal norms about sex and alcohol.
But Sherman revisits those archetypes decades later, again addressing how women deal with the loss of their youth.
“There’s this theme of the aging beauty, the aging starlet from the golden age of Hollywood cinema,” Barson said, noting that Sherman was specifically inspired by the character of past-her-prime movie star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson, herself a former silent film actress) in the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard.
Sherman’s characters conform, but at what cost? The artist herself, however, never does.
“Cindy Sherman. The Women” is on view at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, Illa del Rei, Mahon, Menorca, Balearic Islands, Spain, June 23–October 26, 2025.  More

Six years ago, things looked bleak for the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa, California. The organization had announced plans to deaccession the 1,600 works in its holdings—the world’s foremost collection of Post-war Northern California art—sparking an outcry from the arts community. But last month, the di Rosa kicked off an exciting new chapter in its history with the opening of a new art space in downtown San Francisco, with an exhibition celebrating its once-imperiled holdings.
Titled “Far Out: Northern California Art,” the show features important artists from the region such as Enrique Chagoya (b. 1953), Peter Saul (b. 1934), Viola Frey (1933–2004), Roy De Forest (1930–2007), and Jay DeFeo (1929–1989). It is an eclectic mix of work bound together by a radical and progressive ethos that characterized Northern California counterculture throughout the 20th century—at San Francisco’s first museum dedicated to the region’s art.
“Visitors have cried and said ‘it feels like seeing old friends again,’” Twyla Ruby, the di Rosa’s curator of exhibitions and programs, told me during a tour of the show. “People really seem to be emotionally affected by seeing this collection together again in this way, and it’s been really beautiful.
And it’s a rebirth not only for the di Rosa, but also for the space it has taken over at the Minnesota Street Project in Dogpatch. The galleries there—owned by local arts patrons Deborah and Andy Rappaport—have sat empty since 2023, with the closure of the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, which for six years staged excellent contemporary art exhibitions there drawn from the collection of Nion McEvoy. Where the Bay Area once seemed at risk of losing two beloved institutions, one has come roaring back against the odds.
Jock McDonald,  Rene & Gorilla (1988), a portrait of Rene di Rosa. Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California. Gift of Jock McDonald.
Who Was Rene di Rosa?
The di Rosa’s founder was the eccentric winemaker-turned-art collector Rene di Rosa. In 1960, long before Napa became a famous wine region, he purchased 465 acres of land there, and enrolled in viticulture classes at UC Davis, outside Sacramento. What he learned at school helped di Rosa rehabilitate the rundown vineyard on his property. (He named it Winery Lake Vineyards, after a small pond on the property that he had enlarged, and eventually sold grapes to more than 50 wineries.)
But di Rosa also caught the art collecting bug at school, where the instructors included the likes of Manuel Neri (b. 1930), Robert Arneson (1930–1992), and William T. Wiley (1937–2021)—three important area artists included in the current exhibition.
Bruce Conner, CRUCIFIXION (1960). Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California. Photo: courtesy of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California.
“Most of the courses in viticulture were so beyond me I would end up going to the art department to hang out,” di Rosa told Coast News. The first piece he ever bought was by Bruce Conner (1933–2008).
Di Rosa and his wife, the artist Veronica di Rosa (1934–1991) became key Bay Area arts patrons, befriending artists and serving on the board of trustees at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Art Institute.
Sandow Birk, The Triumph of ‘The San Francisco’ (1998). Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California. Photo: courtesy of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California.
In 1983, the couple established the Rene and Veronica di Rosa Foundation. With the profits from the reportedly $8-to-$10-million sale of the vineyards to Seagrams in 1986, they worked to turn their remaining 217-acre property into an art park. Veronica died in a tragic hiking accident in 1991, but the di Rosa Preserve: Art and Nature, as it was originally known, opened to the public in 1997, a hidden gem with galleries and an impressive sculpture meadow overseen by a towering Mark di Suvero (b. 1933).
Di Rosa called his collection “the incorrect museum,” priding himself on operating outside the stuffy confines of the mainstream art world to capture something of Northern California’s rebellious counterculture. And while some critics may have dismissed his holdings as merely a display of wacky Bay Area aesthetics, di Rosa’s collection could also be quite serious, works with political gravitas created by artists with a distinct anti-capitalist vein.
A view of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa with Mark di Suvero’s sculpture For Veronica. Photo by Grace Hendricks, courtesy of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa.
A New Path Forward 
Trouble started with the 2008 recession, which wiped out nearly a quarter of the nonprofit’s endowment, forcing layoffs. Two years later, di Rosa died at age 91. Without him, the art center struggled to make its way, and to care for the expansive collection he had left behind. The 2017 wildfires, which caused damage on the property, including a storage barn, raised further concerns about the di Rosa’s long-term future.
Under director Robert Sain, appointed in 2015, the center made the difficult decision to break up the collection. There simply wasn’t enough money in the budget, he said, to host exhibitions and programming as well as covering maintenance costs for the historic artworks, especially with so many large-scale installations and outdoor sculptures.
Enrique Chagoya, When Paradise Arrived (1988). Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California. Photo: courtesy of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California.
That could have been the end of the story—but the dark days of deaccessioning came to an end in 2021. The people’s voice was heard, and Kate Eilertsen, who had been appointed as Sain’s successor the previous summer, promised a renewed commitment to the collection.
Under her leadership, the di Rosa has made every effort to bring its art to the people, opening a small satellite space, di Rosa Downtown, in the heart of Napa in late 2024. The di Rosa has even begun collecting again, picking up the story of the region’s contemporary art scene where its founder left off.
“We really want to make this into the world’s foremost collection of Northern California,” Ruby said.
Clayton Bailey, Burping Bowl with Lurching Monster (1972). Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California. Photo: by Sarah Cascone.
Recent acquisitions include 10 works each by Clayton Bailey (1939–2020) and his wife Betty Bailey (1939–2019), the subject of a joint show that closed this past weekend at di Rosa Downtown in Napa. He is known for his fantastical sculptures depicting monsters and other creatures—and his alter ego, Dr. Gladstone, who would help children excavate their so-called remains—while she created works on paper and ceramics.
The expansion to San Francisco is the next step in the di Rosa’s revitalization, which also looks to bring an increased revenue source by hosting weddings and other events on the center’s picturesque grounds. And the hope is that the space in the city will introduce new audiences to the di Rosa, and encourage them to make the trip to Napa to learn more.
“The board felt strongly that the first exhibition should really be a showcase of the collection, but in the future, the collection will serve as a jumping-off point for more novel, scholarly, and focused curatorial presentations,” Ruby said.
Installation view of “Far Out: Northern California Art from the di Rosa Collection.” Photo: courtesy of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California.
A Celebration of the Incorrect
“Far Out” is kind of a greatest hits of the di Rosa collection: Funk, Conceptual art, ceramics from the California Clay movement, assemblage, and even figurative painting.
“We wanted to spark dialogue about the art history that’s in the collection,” Ruby said.
She and Eilertsen have broken up the exhibition into three sections: “Material Worlds,” exploring California artists’ embrace of different mediums as a means of expression; “Tricksters, Scavengers, and Scamps,” which looks the use of second identities and unconventional, sometimes salvaged materials; and “Piracy and Protest,” featuring works that critique American culture and politics through the appropriation of corporate mottos and logos. Mickey Mouse, for instance, is a recurring image.
“It’s either a weird fetish on Rene di Rosa’s part, or, more likely, it’s because Mickey represented a capitalistic order that Northern California artists were poking fun at and subverting,” Ruby added, pointing to a lithograph by Wiley of the Disney character with a cryogenic tank that accompanied a performance series by the artist about the urban legend that Walt Disney had his remains cryogenically frozen.
Joan Brown, Woman Preparing for a Shower (1975). Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California; © Estate of Joan Brown; photo: courtesy Venus Over Manhattan, New York.
Other highlights range from Conceptual artist Paul Kos’s (b. 1942) sculpture Equilibre III, a coat hanger with bells on each end, precariously balanced atop a broomstick, to Joan Brown’s (1938–1990), Woman Preparing for a Shower (1975), a vibrant painting of a woman in a robe and shower cap and her little dog posed against the bright turquoise of the bathroom tiles. (She had a critically acclaimed traveling retrospective that opened at SFMOMA in 2022.)
David Best (b. 1945), known for his ornate, ephemeral Burning Man temples, is represented here with a large, 3-D cut-paper collage titled Triangle Factory Fire (2000) that the artist once estimated took 900 hours to make. Made from appropriated 19th-century magazine illustrations, it depicts the deadly 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a tragedy that led to reform in factory working conditions.
“This one really reflects the labor politics that courses through the collection in ways that people don’t always think about,” Ruby said.
Ester Hernandez, Sun Mad (1982). Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa.
Striking a related note is Sun Mad, a 1982 screenprint by Ester Hernández (b. 1944) that offers a play on the well-known Sun Maid raisins logo. The artist has replaced the young woman holding the overflowing basket of grapes with a skeleton, in a condemnation of the dangerous pesticides used to grow the fruit, and the health risks such chemicals pose for farmworkers.
There are also artists in the show who even Ruby is still learning more about, like Nancy Youdelman, who was one of the students who made work for “Womanhouse,” the landmark feminist art installation created by Judy Chicago (b. 1939) and Miriam Schapiro’s (1923–2015) groundbreaking CalArts Feminist Art Program in Los Angeles. She turned a second-hand dress into a mixed media sculpture, Love’s Armor (2000), adorning it with found beads and other jewelry, turning the soft and feminine into a protective sheath.
Nancy Youdelman, Love’s Armor (2000). Collection of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California. Photo: by Sarah Cascone.
And then there are works that had fallen into disrepair over the decades. A pair of model ships by Sandow Birk (b. 1962), sails emblazoned with the IBM and American Express logos, had gotten lost in a di Rosa storage barn, but have now been restored.
The two works are being shown for the first time alongside his post-apocalyptic seascape, The Triumph of ‘The San Francisco,’ in which galleons attack a massive battleship on which is perched the SFMOMA, representing corporate interests attacking the museum. (Painted in 1998, it notably predates the arrival of the Fisher Collection, from the founders of the Gap clothing empire.)
Sandow Birk’s The Triumph of ‘The San Francisco’ (1998) and Untitled (Galleon (IBM)) in “Far Out: Northern California Art from the di Rosa Collection.” Photo: courtesy of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California.
There’s also one piece on view that is not currently in the collection—the curators have actually included one of the deaccessioned artworks, amid discussions to potentially bring the work back into the fold. Titled Stack (2002), it’s a heaping mound of scissors, corkscrews, matchbooks, and other objects confiscated by the fledgling Transportation Security Administration at San Francisco International Airport in the wake of the 2001 September 11 attacks.
The artist, Michele Pred (b. 1966), made the drive up to Napa from Oakland to collect the deaccessioned work on Valentine’s Day in 2017. The bins it had been stored in were cracked and spilling onto the floor after years of neglect. When she made the work, Pred had been working as a limo driver. She was inspired by picking up passengers who complained about the new travel restrictions and the things taken by TSA. It took months of negotiating, and signing a release of liability waiver, but eventually Pred convinced the airport to let her have some of the seized belongings.
“I realized how emotional and how frightening this experience was. So I started thinking about freedoms being taken away, surveillance culture, and this sort of security theater,” Pred, who staged a performance at the exhibition on September 11, told me. “It’s really a time capsule of our history then, but it’s still very timely, with not just items, but people being taken away now and being sent out of the country.”
Michele Pred in costume as a TSA agent with her piece Stack, made from personal belongings confiscated from passengers leaving San Francisco International Airport in the months following the 9/11 attacks of 2001, in “Far Out: Northern California Art from the di Rosa Collection.” Photo: courtesy of the artist.
Pred had met di Rosa while studying at the California College of Arts and Crafts, and the two became friends. The acquisition of Stack was a major career milestone for Pred as an emerging artist. When she got a letter from the di Rosa in late 2016, telling her to pick up her piece or it would be thrown away, it was nothing short of heartbreaking—and to have the di Rosa embrace the piece once more is particularly meaningful.
“They’ve welcomed me back with open arms,” Pred said. “They recognize how important Rene and his artist friends were to the whole culture of the di Rosa, and they are carrying forward the excitement and the passion that Rene had for this collection.”
“Far Out: Northern California Art From the di Rosa Collection” is on view at the Incorrect Museum, the di Rosa SF, 1150 25th Street, San Francisco, California, August 2–October 4, 2025. Michele Pred will stage a performance in character as a TSA agent on Thursday, September 11, from 5–7 p.m.
“Betty and Clayton Bailey” was on view at the di Rosa Downtown, 1300 First Street, Suite 251, Napa, California, June 7–September 7, 2025. More

How did a rare 16th-century Renaissance tapestry, currently housed at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, come to be the unlikely centerpiece of a fascinating performance running in downtown Manhattan?
Honor is the brainchild of artist Suzanne Bocanegra, who has used the monumental weaving as a springboard to create a piece that is part lecture, part performance, part historical deep dive. Also titled Honor, it’s brought to life by a vivid mixture of spoken word threaded with the artist’s insightful cultural commentary and personal reflections, colorful supporting visuals that play on a large screen, and a seamless performance by actor Lili Taylor.
If it sounds like there’s a lot to unpack here, that’s because there is. But trust me, it’s worth it.
For starters, Honor, is “a key example of Renaissance weaving,” according to Elizabeth Cleland, curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Met. “It was originally the central hanging in a nine-piece tapestry series, known collectively as ‘The Honors,’ that is often perceived as the most important tapestry series of the first quarter of the sixteenth century,” she told me over email.
Honor from the series “The Honors.” Design attributed to Bernard van Orley and workshop, with collaborators. Designed before 1520, woven between 1525 and 1532. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The first edition of “The Honors” was made for Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and remains in the Spanish Patrimonio Nacional collection. Meanwhile, the Met’s tapestry “was part of the second (and only other surviving) edition, made some time between 1525 and 1532 for Charles’s trusted advisor, Cardinal Erard de la Marck, Prince-Bishop of Liege and one of the most powerful men of his generation.” The Met was fortunate enough to acquire the work in 2015.
The subject matter is also key; the series as a whole was commissioned and designed to present “a great allegorical guide to the qualities a successful ruler should espouse,” said Cleland. Seven tapestries were meant to capture the themes of Faith, Virtue, Prudence, Justice, Fame, Nobility, and Honor, with two additional works dedicated to Fortune and Infamy.
Bocanegra Takes on Honor
Bocanegra first became fascinated by tapestry-making via the art of Anni Albers, particularly some of the Bauhaus artist’s 1920s weavings that she studied “and drew over and over again,” she told me in a phone interview.
This particular angle of her multidisciplinary practice eventually led to an introduction to the Met’s tapestry experts, including Cleland, who were interested in commissioning a related performance or lecture. The Met eventually commissioned and hosted the piece a few years ago. One of the producers on the current run is actor Frances McDormand who previously collaborated with Bocanegra on a Shaker Museum show and performance last fall. Bocanegra told me her initial tapestry research and work efforts were interrupted in 2020, giving her plenty of initial time to think about her technique and approach.
Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor, in performance at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium on February 19, 2022. Photo: Stephanie Berger.
However, Bocanegra has packed the lecture with so many insightful connections and detail, mining not just on her personal but ancient and social history.
Part of it reads: “I wanted to make pieces, complicated and busy-like Renaissance tapestries, but also simple and plain. There are exceptions—but historically Men weave for profit, the men who wove the Honor tapestry were paid professionals, working in strictly regulated crafts guilds. It was Illegal for women to belong to the guild. Women weave cloth at home—for their family’s use. Unpaid.”
This thread leads on to personal reflections about how the artist resisted her mother’s urging to take home economics class in high school, and how she later found a library book on the history of home economics, randomly. “It was created by Ellen Swallow Richards a chemist specializing in sanitation and the first woman to graduate from MIT. Home economics was Richards’s attempt to bring honor to the work that women did in the home.”
Bocanegra also manages to weave in memories of her favorite childhood fairy tales, such as Hansel and Gretel (a “gruesome story about starvation and killing your family” but also one with “a house made of candy”). There are also deep dives into the brutality of religious persecution via the Spanish Inquisition and the honor conferred to young girls via the medals and insignia of the Girl Scouts, of which Bocanegra was an avid member during her youth.
Taylor Takes on Honor
“Suzanne follows things she respects,” actor Lili Taylor told me in a phone interview. “She makes connections and she keeps following things. She’s always making meaning, and I think it’s an important outlook for everyone, not just artists.”
Taylor has now been working with Bocanegra for over a decade, including on previous performances such as When A Priest Marries a Witch, Bodycast, and Farmhouse/Whorehouse, which appeared at various venues across the U.S.
Honor, an Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Lili Taylor, in performance at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium on February 19, 2022. Photo: Stephanie Berger.
Previous one- or two- night performances of Honor took place at the Met post-pandemic, but this two-week run at the the Performing Garage in Soho (ending Sunday, September 14) marks the longest continuous run to date.
Taylor, who is soon heading to Germany to commence multi-month filming of the Hunger Games prequel told me that performing Honor every night “is actually kind of fun. Suzanne is loving it, because she understands what happens when you settle into a run. You don’t have to keep stressing out.”
Their shared ability to roll with the punches was more than obvious on opening night on September 3, when Taylor walked onstage with an air cast and a cane. In very meta-fashion, she said, “Lili will be performing with a broken ankle tonight. She tripped over her dog Oreo in the middle of the night. This is Oreo.” A large image of her Shih Tzu-Chihuahua flashed on a screen to laughter and “awws” from the packed theater.
When I asked Bocanegra about the set-up of enlisting Taylor to read (she wears an earpiece and receives the text as spoken from the artist), she explained: “I’m not an actor and I have seen so many artist and art historian lectures over the years where, even if the information is fascinating, of course they’re not trained. I don’t know how to entertain.”
Cleland, for her part, has enjoyed watching Bocanegra engage with the tapestry.
“She immediately grasped the performative character of the scene and the series,” she said. “So many modern-day observers would either dismiss or revere this as a precious but anachronistic relic of a totally distant society; conversely, Suzanne treats the tapestry and its message as a fresh and absorbing springboard for her own artistic ingenuity… Honor is a work of art, provocative, funny, multi-layered and clever, and I love witnessing this 16th-century art and 21st-century artist collide!”
Honor is on view at Peforming Garage, 33 Wooster Street, New York, through September 14. More

Europe’s answer to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Peggy Guggenheim, Helene Kröller-Müller’s influential tastes and expertise, as much as her wealth, saw her establish a new template for art philanthropy and personal legacy-building in the 20th century. She is best-known as one of the very first collectors to recognize the significance of Vincent van Gogh’s unusual painting style. Built over just three decades, she amassed a magnificent collection of some 11,500 objects, featuring luminaries of Neo-Impressionist and Modern art, including Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, and Piet Mondrian.
For more than eight decades, the coveted collection has been on public display at the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands. Now, the trailblazing collector’s vision is traveling to London with the opening of “Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists,” a new loan exhibition at the U.K.’s National Gallery that runs until February 8, 2026.
Press view of Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists. Photo: © The National Gallery, London.
Taking as its focus the late 19th-century, the show will reveal how a new generation of experimental artists took the baton from the Impressionists and became the oft-cited forefathers of Modern art. In the spotlight are leading figures like Van Gogh, Paul Signac, Camille Pissaro, and Seurat—whose infamous Le Chahut (Cancan Dancers) (1889-90) is being shown in the U.K. for the first time—as well as lesser-known but important painters whose careers Kröller-Müller helped establish, like Jan Toorop, Théo van Rysselberghe, Henri-Edmond Cross, and Maximilien Luce. The cast is completed with some choice loans from private collections, including works by the notable woman painter Anna Boch.
How did a German heiress with no background in art come to build such an era-defining collection? Born in 1869 to a wealthy industrialist, Kröller-Müller was only 19 when she married her father’s most promising employee, the Dutch entrepreneur Anton Kröller. While he was busy turning Müller & Co. into a highly profitable international powerhouse, Helene had four children before the age of 30. It was only some years later, in 1905, that she was able to dedicate her leisure hours to developing a nascent interest in art.
Anna Boch, During the Ascension (1893). MuZEE Collection – City of Ostend Collection. Image: © Bridgeman Images.
Soon enough, Kröller-Müller’s beloved teacher Hendricus Petrus Bremmer had become something of a proto-art advisor, visiting studios, galleries, and auction houses on Kröller-Müller’s behalf to help her source new work. By 1913, she had already established a private museum in her name in the Hague, the first dedicated to modern art in the Netherlands.
But as her collection grew rapidly, Kröller-Müller was recognized for much more than merely writing cheques. Long before he became one of art history’s most prized artists, she amassed the largest private Van Gogh collection in the world at no fewer than 91 paintings and 180 works on paper. Her interest in the impact of Neo-Impressionists, like Van Gogh, on the artistic developments of her day even saw her publish the 1925 book, Considerations regarding problems in the development of Modern painting, in which Kröller-Müller proposed two dominant strands in Modern art: realism and idealism.
Helene Kröller-Müller. © Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands.
Kröller-Müller was even a pioneer of the classic “white cube” modern art gallery aesthetic, which she first considered with the prominent De Stijl designer Bart van der Leck in 1916 for the art room in her new villa. Though that plan was eventually abandoned as too radical, the look was later adopted after Kröller-Müller bequeathed her collection to the Dutch nation and oversaw designs for a new museum by the Belgian architect Henry van der Velde. Since opening in 1938, a year before Kröller-Müller’s death, her museum has been housed on Helene and Anton’s formerly private estate, Hoge Veluwe National Park, now a national park in Otterlo.
Here are five standout works going on view at the National Gallery in London.
Vincent van Gogh’s The Sower (1888)
Vincent van Gogh, The Sower (1888). Photo: Rik Klein Gotink, © Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands.
Kröller-Müller’s collecting journey began with Van Gogh and she became so enamored with the Dutch artist that, in 1912, she went on a “hunt for all the best Van Goghs” with Bremmer in Paris. When she gave him the spacious front room of her first museum a year later, it was a statement in support of a then overlooked artist. She described the effect of his paintings as “powerful, dramatic & heavy, like hammer blows” bar a few exceptional works that were conversely “delicate or very calm.”
As well as her very first Van Goghs acquired in 1907–Four sunflowers gone to seed (1887) and Edge of a Wood (1883)–the National Gallery exhibition will include The Sower (1888), made after a 1850 painting of the same name by Jean-François Millet. The figure of the agricultural laborer scattering seeds in the warm glow of dusk would become a common theme but, in this instance, most of our attention is on the heavily textured earth of recently ploughed land.
Georges Seurat’s Le Chahut (1889-90)
Georges Seurat, Le Chahut (1888-89). Photo: © Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands.
In developing Pointillism, a painting technique in which a composition is made up of small dots of pure color, Seurat was one of the artists who most boldly developed, and departed from, the ideas of the Impressionists. Unlike their harmonies of similar color, Seurat and his peers positioned contrasting hues beside each other according to scientific color theory, so that they could vibrate and merge in the viewer’s eye. These optical effects were initially met with resistance by critics but at least one Belgian journalist, writing in L’Art Moderne in 1887, appreciated how they achieved “a higher and sublimated reality.”
Le Chahut, or the Cancan Dancers, was one of Seurat’s most divisive paintings when it was first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1890. Pointillism was dynamized by the complex interplay of lines–in the dancers’ lifted legs, the neck of a musical instrument, and the conductor’s baton–and the composition was widely read as a condemnation of the seedy decadence of the time. Some critics compared its formal language to that of advertisements for popular entertainments. The sense that the image is a contrived depiction rather than a realistic interpretation of events was amplified by the painting of a blue border around the edge of the canvas.
Henri-Edmond Cross’s Bullfight (1891-92)
Henri-Edmond Cross, Bullfight (1891-92). Photo: © photo courtesy the owner.
After Van Gogh and Seurat, the French painter Henri-Edmond Cross is one of the best represented artists in Kröller-Müller’s collection. He was cherished perhaps most for his placid, abstracted landscapes, which, in the collector’s words, capture a sense of “the unchanging pure reality behind the changeable forms of nature.”
One of his most striking works included in “Radical Harmony,” however, is a bullfight seen from the bleachers. This vantage point becomes a study of the act of looking–a significant portion of the action is concealed by the back of another spectator’s head. Elsewhere, another viewer peers through binoculars. Pointillism is used to capture both large masses in the foreground and each individual audience member on the outer edge of the ring. Cross was cited as a major influence on Henri Matisse’s development of Fauvism at the start of the 20th century.
Jan Toorop’s Evening (before the Strike) (ca. 1888-89)
Jan Toorop, Evening (before the Strike) (1888-89). Photo: © photo courtesy the owner.
Dutch artist Jan Toorop was a central member of the Belgian avant-garde artistic society Les XX (The Twenty), which played a prominent role in developing Neo-Impressionism. He is notable for his interest in working-class subjects: often young couples who have found a moment of privacy behind a tree in a rural setting, as in Glimmer of the Setting Sun or Seduction (c. 1888-1889).
Two of his most moving works on view at the National Gallery are Evening (before the Strike) (c. 1888-89) and Morning (after the Strike) (1888-89), a pair of paintings that pull us into a precarious and impoverished, yet tenderly depicted, world of striking laborers. In the first image, a mother nursing a baby and a father, barefoot and clutching his face in exaggerated despair, crouch in anticipation of violent retribution for having stepped out of line. In the second, their worst suspicions are confirmed as a family are forced to carry away the slumped corpse of a young man. The works were inspired by the poor treatment of strikers in Charleroi.
Théo van Rysselberghe’s Anna Boch (1892)
Théo van Rysselberghe, In July, before noon (1890). Photo: © Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands.
Another key member of Les XX, the Belgian painter Théo van Rysselberghe is the author of the very last Neo-Impressionist artwork even acquired by Kröller-Müller: In July, before Noon, a charming, summery Pointillist composition featuring five women at rest from 1890. Another notable female subject by the painter is fellow Les XX member Anna Boch (1892), in which she appears as though ready to recommence work on the painting before her, wearing a blue smock with her palette in hand.
Like many of her peers, Boch was drawn to everyday subjects and dreamy landscapes. In During the Ascension (pictured above), she tenderly portrays the congregation outside a church in the humble Belgian fishing village where she lived. We get the sense of her familiarity with the local community from the care taken to capture each individual posture, even in figures seen from behind. The artist was recently the subject of a long overdue exhibition “Anna Boch: An Impressionist Journey” in Ostend and Pont-Aven in 2023.
“Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists” is on view at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London, U.K., September 13–February 8, 2026. More

There is a lot to think about in a one-room exhibition at the nonprofit Brooklyn art venue Recess, where the Gaza Biennale has touched down for its first North American outing. Including 25 Palestinian artists, “From Gaza to the World” is what the organizers are calling the New York pavilion of a roving exhibition they have termed (after some debate) a biennale, launched in 2024 and since then developed by the Forbidden Museum of Jabal Al Risan. 
Seeing this show is an exercise in feeling powerless, and I’m afraid anything I say in the face of these works will be hopelessly banal. But it is essential viewing. Set against the context of the ongoing Israel-Gaza War, the exhibition bears witness to life under bombardment, famine, and displacement. Artists keep creating work, desperate to express themselves, to be heard, to be remembered, to live.
Malaka Abu Owda, When the Body Became a Message (2024). Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale.
Many of the artists in the Biennale continue to make work in Gaza, while some are displaced. The organizers of the Gaza Biennale said that the show “makes evident the challenges that Palestinian artists face in presenting their work globally, raising questions such as: how do you exhibit art that’s inaccessible while under siege, yet endures despite a genocide?”
Israel launched its war in Gaza in 2023 with the stated goal of eliminating the threat from the militant group Hamas, which attacked a music festival on October 7, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 people hostage, many of whom have yet to be released. The resulting military action in the Gaza Strip has seen its infrastructure destroyed, with nearly 90 percent of its population displaced. Gaza’s Health Ministry estimates the death toll at more than 64,000, about half of them women and children. The World Health Organization and a UN-backed panel have declared a famine in the territory and Amnesty International, the United Nations special rapporteur, and some countries have alleged Israel is committing a genocide. Israel denies the claim, calling the war an act of self-defense.
Mohammed Moghari, Tent (2025). Courtesy the artist and the Gaza Biennale.
Since it is difficult for people and artworks to escape Gaza in the current conditions, many of the objects on view are documentation of the art being produced there: printouts of paintings, a facsimile of an artist’s notebook, and the like, with wall labels specifying the materials of the original pieces. Many of the works are straightforward, offering documentary presentations of life in displaced persons camps, and mournful renditions of death and destruction. Extensive wall labels include heartbreaking quotes from the artists and plentiful biographical information.
Greeting visitors near the entry is a small tapestry by Firas Thabet, Gaznica (2025), which adapts Picasso’s famous antiwar painting Guernica; a tearful woman in a keffiyeh overlooks a scene of wailing women, with Palestinian flags waving. A wall text notes that Guernica, too, was reproduced as a tapestry, in which form it hangs in the United Nations headquarters, just a few miles away.
Fatima Ali Abu Owdah, How Alone You Were (2025). Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale.
Some of the most powerful words in the show came from the artist Fatema Abu Owda, accompanying printouts of sand-hued ink drawings with text from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s book In Praise of the High Shadow. “No one survives here,” she says, “they just slowly decay. I search for peace among the remains of those who are gone.” 
Emad Badwan’s docudrama Live Broadcast (2024) shows two journalists in the West Deir al-Balah refugee camp, helmeted, in flak jackets emblazoned with the word “press,” trying to broadcast from a rooftop overlooking endless tents. “Guys, can anyone hear us?” one asks, noting that there’s no signal to be had. It’s an effective metaphor. The camera studies children playing hopscotch, building sand castles. Voices complain of missile strikes on civilians. A lot of the action takes place as one of the journalists waits in an interminable bathroom line.
Emad Badwan, film still from Live Broadcast, (2024).  Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale
A painting of a destroyed city by Motaz Naim could be an allover abstraction; it has the misfortune here of being reproduced only in a projection, so we have no idea of its scale or texture. But it does effectively echo photos of whole neighborhoods reduced to rubble, and reminds the viewer that landscape painting can be profoundly political.
Murad Al-Assar has four paintings on view, in a faux-naive style, one showing a girl who had her leg amputated; another shows four children, a bomb over each one’s head; another shows a child trying to block their ears from the noise of war as bombs drop in the distance. Text nearby relates the artist’s experience of trying to distract his children from terror on a winter night among the noise of war. The painting of the amputee is based on a rendition of the girl by his 13-year-old daughter, who said that she “should appear strong.”
Motaz Naim, The Mural in the Silence of Destruction, from the series “Gaza and Its Destroyed Cities” (2024-25). Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale.
The show gives rise to some thoughts. It’s seemingly an article of faith among many people in my circles that art is “impotent and frivolous,” as Art in America’s Emily Watlington recently put it, and that feeling is easy to understand in a context where the market drives much of the conversation, and art is often positioned as a luxury. 
Murad Al-Assar, Noise of Death (2025). Courtesy of the artist and the Gaza Biennale.
Their lives under constant threat, these artists continue to make work in an open-air prison at best, an open-air mass grave at worst. Are they foolish to believe in art’s efficacy? “Poetry is not a luxury,” wrote Audre Lorde. “It is a vital necessity of our existence.” So, too, is art for these artists in Gaza, and therein is its power.
“From Gaza to the World” is on view through September 14 at Recess, 46 Washington Street, Brooklyn, New York. An abbreviated version will be on view September 18–December 20. Other iterations of the Biennale are soon to be on view in Walla Walla, Washington; Istanbul; Athens; Valencia, Spain; Sarajevo; and Berlin. Other pavilions appeared previously at other European sites, and future exhibitions are planned internationally. More

If you spend much time in New York, you are probably among the the six million or so who ride one of the world’s largest and oldest subway systems each day. You may have the New Yorker’s classic love-hate relationship with the system, which can take you practically anywhere for a few bucks, but is notoriously underfunded and run-down. And if so, artist Chloë Bass’s latest project may just speak to you. Literally.
If you hear something, free something is the New York native’s first sound art project, and it is the first-ever takeover by an artist of the sound system in Gotham’s labyrinthine subway complex. Waiting on selected mezzanines, riders hear a deep, attention-getting tone (designed in collaboration with artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste), followed by one of 24 announcements—though the voices may challenge the definition of that last word, as what you’ll hear isn’t always strictly informational, but rather evocative.
An audience gathered to hear a performance organized by Creative Time for Chloë Bass’s new sound project, at the Fulton Street Center. Photo: Ally Caple, Courtesy Creative Time
Last week, in the first moments of the New York fall season, dozens of observers gathered at the massive Fulton Street Center to see a group of 10 performers, scattered throughout the atrium, deliver a performance of the texts, composed by Bass.
“What we hear changes how we feel,” says a voice in one recording. “How we feel changes what we do. And what we do changes the world around us, even if just for a moment.”
Another is a dialogue between two voices. “Remember when Aretha Franklin died and people were singing her songs together on crowded train cars?” asks one. “It was amazing. Everyone was sad, and everyone was smiling,” responds the second. “It was a moment when I wanted to say to the city, ‘You see? That’s how you are,’” says voice one, to which voice two responds, “All these little private worlds coinciding out in public.” 
Each announcement—they will play in English, Spanish, Arabic, Bangla, Haitian Kreyòl, and Mandarin—is followed by the title of the project, which recalls the ubiquitous exhortation “If you see something, say something,” urging riders to protect each other from danger—or, if you like, surveil one another. Ticker displays transmit a brief explanatory text penned by the artist. Posters in the stations will also clue straphangers in to the project, but it may just be that some will hear the announcements while not seeing the posters, and go on about their day with a bit of mystery. 
Sounding Off About Sound
Sound is one of the things that drive subway riders crazy, I pointed out in a phone interview with the artist. Announcements from conductors often come over the speakers in a garbled mess, and riders look around at one another, incredulous, hoping it’s not life-saving information being conveyed. Some stations are also so loud as to be potentially damaging to the human ear.
“Complaining about sound in the subway is a New Yorker’s birthright,” acknowledged Bass, who noted that generations of her family have lived here. “We’re being given information of different forms, and sometimes it’s decipherable and sometimes it’s indecipherable. But recently it’s been mostly about ways that we should make sure to keep ourselves and others safe.”
Chloë Bass. Photo: Naima Green.
“I support the idea of public safety,” she added, “but the announcements are all about monitoring your behavior and the behavior of people around you, and we already know about ways to keep safe, even without thinking about them. There are other ways to use public address to ground these forms of safety that we practice together.”
New York public art presenter Creative Time approached Bass with the same question it poses to the artists it solicits: What’s your dream public project? Having created a mosaic that combines found photographic imagery and her poetic texts at a Brooklyn subway stop in 2023, the artist was already thinking about the subways, and jumped at the chance to have the nonprofit support a project that would go wider. Over the years, Creative Time has presented numerous high-profile projects, including Tribute in Light (2002), which recreates the Twin Towers in light annually on the site where they stood, and Kara Walker’s massive sugar sphinx, A Subtlety… (2014). It also organizes a much-anticipated annual convening, the Creative Time Summit.
“If you hear something, free something engages the largest transit system in the Western Hemisphere, a place where an incredible complexity of public life unfolds,” said Creative Time curator Diya Vij in press materials. “The MTA serves millions of New York City residents daily, spanning every single neighborhood and social boundary. It is where every denomination of New York City meets. For this truly public art work, Bass offers a monumental but fleeting gesture that seeks to change the way we relate to each other in public life and public space. She asks us to consider, if we change what we hear, can we change how we feel, and in turn, will we be better neighbors?”
Public Input on Public Interventions
Bass maintains a multifarious practice; Creative Time describes her as “a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, conversation, situation, publication, and installation.” The new work continues a thread that has been present in past works by the artist, which have also constituted an intervention in systems of public communication. One past project I saw dealt with visual signage; in 2020, the Studio Museum in Harlem presented her show “Wayfinding,” in a Harlem park, just as society was beginning to reopen after pandemic shutdowns. Three billboards throughout the park asked the questions: “How much of care is patience? How much of life is coping? How much of love is attention?”
A performer reads a script in a performance launching Chloë Bass’s Creative Time project If you hear something, free something (2025). Photo: Ally Caple, Courtesy Creative Time
In addition to the Studio Museum project, Bass has had recent solo projects at upstate New York’s Buffalo AKG Art Museum; California African American Museum at Art + Practice, in Los Angeles; Skirball Cultural Center, also in L.A.; and the Pulitzer Art Foundation in St. Louis. She also recently had her first solo commercial exhibition, “Chloë Bass: Twice Seen,” at New York gallery Alexander Gray Associates. That show was billed as “a multifaceted investigation into the nature of representation, positioning racial and cultural hybridity as foundational to American identity.”
The public was involved with If you hear something even before a sound was ever recorded. The artist conducted four preparatory focus groups, one with teenagers through East Harlem arts nonprofit Artistic Noise, one with straphangers, one with transit advocacy groups, and one with Metropolitan Transit Authority workers; all were paid for their time, but, said Bass, even those required to be there for work brought “real sentiment and thoughtfulness.”
That was encouraging, Bass said, “because this is a scary project. New Yorkers have a lot of opinions, and not everything is ideal for everyone—ever.”
If you hear something, free something is at the following subway stations through October 5, courtesy of Creative Time:
Bronx: Westchester Square (6) and 167 Street (B,D)
Queens: Court Square (7,G), 74th Street – Broadway (7), and Mets Willets Point (7)
Brooklyn: Clinton-Washington Avenues (G), Fort Hamilton Parkway Brooklyn (F,G), York Street (F), and Atlantic Avenue / Barclays Center (2,3,4,5).
Manhattan: Grand Central (S), 5th Avenue Bryant Park (7), Fulton Street (4,5), 163 Street Manhattan (A,C), and Union Square (4,5,6). More