Art & Exhibitions

Even among Italy’s many artistic splendors, Palazzo Te stands out for the unique scale and spectacle of its long suites filled with decorative frescoes. Conceived and executed by Raphael’s protégé Giulio Romano between 1525 and 1535, this palatial villa is celebrating 500 years as an exemplar of the ostentatious but playful flair that characterizes the Mannerist style. It is marking the occasion with the commission of a new, time-bending epic by acclaimed British filmmaker Isaac Julien.
Directly inspired by the theme of metamorphosis that was so central to Romano’s design—the Renaissance painter drew heavily from the verses of Ovid—Julien’s film takes our timeless fascination with eternal transformation and updates it with a futuristic, sci-fi twist. In this way, he reactivates the 16th-century palazzo, revealing its richly-layered, mythological sagas as ripe for reinterpretation.
The ten-screen installation All That Changes You. Metamorphosis debuts in the palazzo’s newly renovated “Fruttiere” wing on October 3, on view through February 1, 2026. Viewers are guided on a philosophical journey by two space traveling goddesses, played by British actors Gwendoline Christie, best known for Game of Thrones, Wednesday, and Severance; and Sheila Atim, a lead in the 2023 indie All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt.
Gwendoline Christie on the set of Issac Julien, All That Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025) at Palazzo Te. Photo: © Isaac Julien.
On Julien’s first trip to Palazzo Te, which was originally intended as a pleasure palace for for Federico II Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua, it was immediately apparent how the artwork might translate to the big screen. He felt particularly enthralled by a room containing The Fall of the Giants, in which scenes of chaos and destruction wrap around the walls and draw the eye up, over the domed ceiling. “I thought, my god, it’s like cinema,” the artist recalled over lunch at a London hotel. “It’s just huge.” It was obvious where he would set the film’s triumphant finale.
Julien has remained tight-lipped about the film’s plot, but the auteur has promised “some surprising elements” and one final “philosophical revelation.” We do know that the divine protagonists’s journey takes them between Palazzo Te and two other extraordinary architectural feats, each representing different temporalities. One of these is Charles Jencks’s unique postmodernist marvel, The Cosmic House in London, and the other is a futuristic spaceship especially designed by Richard Found. As they traverse time and place, the goddesses will also experience shifting identities.
Central to Julien’s story are issues of climate crisis and social inequality that have been on his mind since fires devastated Los Angeles at the start of this year. Rather than indulge a straightforwardly apocalyptic narrative, however, the director uses science fiction to imagine a more hopeful, post-anthropocentric future that considers the stake of non-human sentient lifeforms.
Isaac Julien and Gwendoline Christie on the set of Issac Julien, All That Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025) at Palazzo Te. Photo: © Isaac Julien.
The film’s digressive, non-linear approach will be familiar to fans of Julien’s previous films, many of which had a similarly liberal attitude towards warping time. Julien’s 1989 breakthrough Looking for Langston was an instant classic of queer cinema that pulls viewers into the imagined private world of the playwright Langston Hughes and his fellow Black artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Though it was set in the 1920s, the artist has explained that it was really about the AIDS crisis.
The most obvious comparison for All That Changes You. Metamorphosis is Julien’s Baltimore (2003), which is similarly set in a series of cultural institutions–Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum,  Walters Art Museum, and the Great Blacks in Wax Museum–and features masterpieces of Italian Renaissance art. For Julien, there is always something new to be gained from looking to the past.
“We’ve tried to say that your teachers are all around you” said Julien, who owes this impulse to the fact that he himself is a professor at U.C. Santa Cruz and is passionate about supporting younger generations. “It’s so important to realize that historically, we’ve been in very complicated, politically ambivalent moments.” This is what drove him to revisit the lives of several key historical figures, including Langston, Frederick Douglass and the Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi.
Sheila Atim on the set of Issac Julien, All That Changes You. Metamorphosis (2025) at Palazzo Te. Photo: © Isaac Julien.
The Renaissance, a cultural and intellectual “rebirth,” and the Enlightenment, which privileged reason and scientific thought over traditional authorities like monarchies or religious institutions, were both periods of upheaval that brought about significant societal change. Julien has suggested that we too may have arrived “at a particular post-Enlightenment time, with crises and wars, where ideas of universalism are being challenged.” Old systems that once offered reassurance now feel at risk, suggesting that we may need to prepare for a similar break with the past.
For this bold new venture that looks not only at the present through the lens of the past but also into the future, Julien has channeled the influence of several science fiction heroines, including Donna Haraway, Naomi Mitchison, and Octavia Butler, who previously inspired Julien’s film Paradise Omeros (2002). “They were the writers influencing our conversations that have seeped into the work,” he said, reflecting on the process of writing a script for All That Changes You. Metamorphosis with his partner and longtime collaborator Mark Nash.
In a project of staggering scope, the ideas of these pioneering 20th-century eco-feminists are reimagined against the dramatic backdrop of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as brought to life by the brush of Renaissance master Giulio Romano. Much like the dramatic fall of the Giants, the stakes of Julien’s inquiry into our precarious ecological future feel terrifyingly high, yet if anything can inspire hope, it is surely this swirl of spectacular art and philosophical revelation. More

At 85, Larry Bell—one of the original figureheads of Southern California’s Light and Space movement—hardly projects the aura of a sage-like guru. At the preview for his new exhibition in Madison Square Park yesterday morning, he wore a tactical vest over a checked shirt, dark trousers, and his signature fedora. He looked more like a field operative than a mystic of light. It was a beautiful fall day, clear and bright.
“I hope you enjoy the work,” he told the assembled crowd, “and I recommend finding an interesting place that’s comfortable to sit in the presence of any of the works here because they’ll constantly be changing as the clouds and the sun move. The animation that is within the pieces tells a different story by the minute. The pieces have changed since I started talking. The changes are subtle, but they’re profound.”
Larry Bell with his work. © Larry Bell. Photo: Chris Grunder. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley.
That sense of continual transformation anchors “Improvisations in the Park,” Bell’s first outdoor public installation in New York and the largest public project of his seven-decade career. Commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy, the exhibition features six monumental glass works—including two made specifically for the occasion—that refract, absorb, and transmit light in endlessly shifting patterns. Installed across the park’s lawns, they converse with the turning trees, the passing shadows, and the skyscrapers looming just beyond the branches.
“They’re active pieces,” said Denise Markonish, the Conservancy’s chief curator. “They feel like they’re alive as sculptures because they’re constantly shifting and changing across the day.”
Installation view of Larry Bell’s Frankly Purple, 2022, in Improvisations in the Park. Photo: Timothy Schenck. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley.
The result is both jarring and restorative: crystalline minimalism at odds with the messy seasonal churn of the park, yet somehow in harmony with it—offering order, revelation, and reflection. It is a welcome respite from the damning daily news cycle. This park was always a tonic; now, Bell’s works offer something closer to an escape from the mortal coil. There are passages of violet and crimson, sheets of semitransparent glass that lock into one another with a rare sense of perfection and order.
Installation view of Larry Bell’s Fourth of July in Venice Fog, 2018 (left), and Cantaloupe but Honeydew, 2025 (right), in Improvisations in the Park. Photo: Timothy Schenck. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley. Commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Bell has long insisted that spontaneity and intuition are his true studio tools, as much as glass and vacuum coating. He first tested those instincts in New York in the mid-1960s, during his brief tenure in the city, where he met Donald Judd, Frank Stella, and even Marcel Duchamp. Judd would become both a friend and early collector of Bell’s work. One of Bell’s early cubes remains installed on the fourth floor of the Judd Foundation in SoHo, which was once the artist’s residence.
“I’ve known Larry all my life,” said Flavin Judd, Donald’s son, who serves as artistic director of the Judd Foundation, which is presenting the show. “I let Larry do whatever he wants.”
That bond resurfaces now in Bell’s other New York exhibition, “Irresponsible Iridescence” at Judd Foundation’s 101 Spring Street, which opened the same day and runs through January 31, 2026. If the park show presents monumental glass improvisations in dialogue with nature and skyline, the Judd exhibition pares things down to a more intimate scale—narrative “Solar Study” works created with new processes, alive with iridescent surfaces that carry the same spirit of chance and trust. Some look like lovely oil splotches languidly floating atop water, others like shattered futuristic visions.
Installation view of “Irresponsible Iridescence,” September 29, 2025–January 31, 2026, 101 Spring Street, Judd Foundation, New York. Photo: Timothy Doyon © Judd Foundation. Art © Larry Bell.
Bell is so indelibly associated with his cubes and glass sculptures that it can be easy to forget how strong he is in two dimensions. These new works, shimmering with layered surfaces, remind us of that—they recast his rhythmic sensibility in a flat format without losing any of the perceptual richness. I think in these one finds a different kind of zen and letting go, both for the viewer and the maker.
“Sometimes when I’m lucky the work creates itself,” Bell has said. “I am only responsible for turning on the equipment and turning it off. The results of the use of the equipment become autonomic. In other words, I can find a narrative interpretation in the order of arrangement of the surfaces created.”
Together, “Improvisations in the Park” and “Irresponsible Iridescence” reveal Bell working on twin registers: vast public sculptures that shift and mirror the seasons, and intimate studies of dynamism harnessed in shimmering whirls.

“Improvisations in the Park” is on view at Madison Square Park, Madison Avenue at East 23rd Street, New York, through January 31, 2026.
“Irresponsible Iridescence” is on view at Judd Foundation, 101 Spring Street, New York, through January 31, 2026. More

At an undisclosed location somewhere in the Midwest lie the archives of Virgil Abloh, the late American designer whose imprint on the worlds of high fashion and pop culture endures.
Abloh wore many hats—painter, furniture designer, costume artist, architect, DJ—and his archives reflect this omnivorous approach. He seldom threw anything away and across a 20,000-strong collection there are two decades of sketches, skateboards, sneaker prototypes, advertising mockups, vinyl records, mixtapes, magazine cutouts, and more besides. Everything, in short, was potential source material.
Virgil Abloh. Photo: Tyrone Lebon.
More than 700 of these items have traveled to the Grand Palais in Paris where they combine to not only spotlight one of the 21st century’s most influential designers, but share how Abloh thought about creativity. “Virgil Abloh: The Codes” arrives on what would have been the designer’s 45th birthday and runs the length of Paris Fashion Week.
The timing is hardly coincidental: from 2018 on, Abloh spent considerable time in the city as the director for Louis Vuitton Menswear, and four years on from his death, the 10-day show serves as reunion of sorts for friends, collaborators, and fans. Mahfuz Sultan, the co-director of the Virgil Abloh Archives, who met the designer in a MoMA elevator in the mid-2010s, called the show “a love letter to the city that inspired him most.”
Installation view of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes.” Photo: Thomas Razzano / BFA.com.
The love letter is certainly more show than tell with Abloh’s “codes” discernible by experiencing the eclectic range of his work, rather than following a set of hard and fast rules. “His codes were a methodology,” Chloe Sultan, co-director of the archives, said over email, “to open-source his methods and allow for learning, education, and mentorship, creating a type of transparency and accessibility that worked to democratize fashion.”
Installation view of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes.” Photo: Thomas Razzano / BFA.com.
It’s a greatly expanded edition of a project that opened in Miami in 2022 and here spreads across 13,350 square feet of the Grand Palais.
Visitors enter the exhibition via the gift store. It’s a witty back-to-front approach and perhaps a nod to hype the that has surrounded the merch at earlier Abloh shows. The store in question is Colette, Abloh’s favorite Parisian concept store, which is fittingly filled with offerings. This includes the first Abloh-designed T-shirt carried by the boutique in the late 2000s, scented candles, his Braun alarm clock, and crossover products with the likes of Been Trill, Cactus Plant Flea Market, and Travis Scott.
Installation view of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes.” Photo: Thomas Razzano / BFA.com.
The point is an immediate blurring of the lines between art and commerce. And it’s one that continues inside with an exhibition that is something like a very contemporary cabinet of curiosities that belonged to a generational tastemaker.
A stand will place a traffic cone alongside piles of folded T-shirts, wire mesh chairs, and luxury handbags. There’s an array of more than 200 Nike sneakers (many never released). Examples of his collaborations with Ikea, Vitra, Evian, and Baccarat are dispersed among ceiling-high shelves. The invitation is for visitors to create their own links and inferences, and they can do just that at the Nike Media Lab, a phalanx of computers loaded up with a terabyte of Abloh’s files.
Installation view of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes.” Photo: Thomas Razzano / BFA.com.
Upstairs, Abloh’s Pont Neuf studio is faithfully recreated, laying piles of papers and project samples on a vibrant orange table. Racks of tightly packed clothes hang nearby and set of speakers and DJ decks he designed sit at the ready.
“Virgil strongly believed in making art and creativity accessible and available to everyone,” Sultan said. “That’s why this exhibition is fully open to the public. We want to create a space where people can engage with his legacy, be inspired by it, and build upon it.”
Installation view of “Virgil Abloh: The Codes.” Photo: Thomas Razzano / BFA.com.
“Virgil Abloh: The Codes” is on view at the Grand Palais, Paris, through October 9. More

For over 25 years, Minnie Evans (1892–1987) welcomed visitors to Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina, earning 16 cents an hour selling tickets at the entrance. Her post at the gatehouse became a studio and gallery for the prolific self-taught African American artist. She would make as many as seven drawings a day featuring her signature blend of florals, animals, and abstraction, hanging them outside to offer for sale to visitors hailing from around the country.
This uniquely public-facing practice eventually became the unlikely gateway to art world fame, culminating in a 1975 retrospective for Evans at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art—a career milestone that any artist would be thrilled to reach, let alone one who often used discarded garden maintenance supplies to make her art. And while her name has faded from prominence in the decades since her death, Evans now seems poised on the brink of a major resurgence, with a touring exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a much larger one that opens this November at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and will travel to the Whitney next summer.
“Her work is extremely kaleidoscopic and vibrant, using symmetry, exploring natural motifs and often incorporating human faces or eyes into the landscape,” Colton Klein, who guest curated the show for the MFA, told me. “It’s mostly work on paper and crayon, using
scrap paper and affordable materials. She talked about her friends and family and visitors at Airlie Gardens bringing her materials.”
He has centered the exhibition around the garden, including an installation that recreates the tiny floor plan of the gatehouse—around nine by nine-and-a-half feet—complete with the original admission sign, charging $1. Klein also contributed historic postcards of Airlie Gardens from his own personal collection to the display to help illustrate how Wilmington’s verdant landscape is reflected in Evans’s lush drawings.
Installation view of “The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, featuring a large-scale reproduction of a photo of her gatehouse at Airlie Gardens in Wilmington, North Carolina. Photo: ©Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Who Was Minnie Evans? 
“She was really studying and living and working amongst the flowers, the live oak trees, and other plants that are native to that part of the country and really celebrating and exploring that in her work,” Klein said. “The flora and fauna of North Carolina are very beautiful and inspiring.”
A native of the state born in a rural log cabin, Evans was descended from enslaved Africans forced to come to this country by way of Trinidad. Her only education was through the sixth grade, and she got married at just 16, having three sons.
Minnie Evans, My Very First (1935). Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, gift of Dorothea M. and Isadore Silverman.
No one taught Evans to draw, but she had visions from her childhood—visions she was finally moved to begin putting to paper in her 40s. The Whitney owns the first two drawings Evans ever made, sketchy geometric doodles in black pen, created on Good Friday and Holy Saturday in 1930. But she didn’t continue making art until five years later, when she came across those early experiments (which may explain why they are dated 1935).
After a few years of art-marking, Evans one day heard a voice in her head: “Why don’t you draw or die?”
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Face With Aura and Angels), 1968. Collection of Wendy Williams, New York. Photo: by Christopher Burke, courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
It was a moment that changed Evans’s life. From that point on, art poured out from her, thousands of works, mostly drawings but eventually also collages and oil paintings. Inspired in part by a spiritual reverence for the natural world, Evans—a devout Baptist—also incorporated imagery from her Christian faith, such as angels, as well as symbols from mythology, into dense compositions that were almost mandala-like.
”I love people, to a certain extent,” Evans told Newsweek in 1969. ”But sometimes I want to get off in the garden to talk with God. I have the blooms, and when the blooms are gone, I love to watch the green. God dressed the world in green.”
Jack Loughlin, Airlie Oak at Airlie Gardens (ca. 1950), postcard. Collection of Colton Klein.
Evans’s husband, Julius Caesar Evans, was a coachman and property supervisor for a wealthy Wilmington couple, Pembroke and Sarah Jones. Following her marriage in 1908, Evans became a domestic worker at the Joneses’ hunting estate, known as Pembroke Park, living on the grounds.
The Joneses also owned the adjacent property, which Pembroke christened Airlie after his ancestral home in Scotland, and which Sarah transformed into a lush and sprawling 67-acre garden.
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Statuary, Stars, and Flora), 1965. Collection of Wendy Williams, New York. Photo: by Christopher Burke, courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
After the Joneses died, Walter Corbett purchased Airlie Gardens in 1948 and opened it to the public, hiring Evans to work the front gate. (He also supported and even collected her art.)
Evans became a fixture of the garden—even featured in the brochure, as seen in a copy from the 1970s on view at the MFA—until her retirement in 1974 at 82 years old. (Today, the garden honors Evans’s long service there with the Minnie Evans Sculpture Garden, featuring a Bottle Chapel built in tribute to her by local artist Virginia Wright-Frierson in 2004.)
A vintage Airlie Gardens brochure highlighting the work of gatekeeper Minnie Evans.
A Source of Inspiration—and a Window to the World
“Being enveloped in this garden space, she was surrounded by artistic inspiration,” Klein said. “And then she has this stream of visitors coming from from Wilmington, who are this built-in network of potential potential clients who might come in and buy a work of art. And that’s how her notoriety begins to spread.”
Evans believed in her work, and she was eager to share it with new audiences. The show includes a pair of 1963 letters to a collector who she probably met at Airlie, in which she keeps him apprised of her work: “I am doing a lot of religious paintings… and some more modern arts.”
Jack Dermid, Minnie Evans seated on wooden chair, wearing a knit hat and coat, and working on a painting (1969).
“When she started working at Airlie, she began to use it as a way to supplement her income. She would hang up the drawings that she was making outside the gatehouse and people would buy them, initially very cheaply for 50 cents to a dollar,” Klein said. “It was still quite personal, but she was starting to think about the ways that she’s marketing her work. And once Nina gets involved, it really takes off. ”
Nina would be the art historian Nina Howell Starr, who learned of Evans in the early 1960s through a friend who had visited Airlie. Starr would become Evans’s publicist and representative, arranging exhibitions such as one at New York’s Church of Epiphany in 1966, and, most notably, at the Whitney.
Klein, currently an art history PhD student at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, has been interested in Evans for well over a decade, since first learning of her at a summer internship at the Cameron during his undergrad studies. Evans later became the subject of Klein’s masters thesis, and, most recently, an article for the American Art Journal, published by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Four Figures Collage), 1961, 1967. Collection of John Jerit. Photo: courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
At the MFA, Klein offers a unique interpretation of the works with faces or eyes that seem to peer out of the foliage. He traces them back to a traumatic historical event from Evans’s childhood, the Wilmington massacre, a white supremacist coup that took place in 1898, overthrowing a biracial government and burning Black-owned businesses. (Though Evans was only five years old, she spoke of the event in interviews later in life, noting that she remembered it.)
“There are contemporaneous news accounts of the Black population in Wilmington fleeing the city to the woods. There are stories about people seeing the eyes of people hiding in the trees for upwards of two weeks after that event,” Klein said. “So many of her works have these human faces or eyes kind of blossoming out of flowers
or from behind trees or plants. I want to encourage people to think about the experience that Evans would have had during this very traumatic incident of political violence.”
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Face surrounded by flora and eyes over forest scene), 1963. Collection of Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina, gift of William Banks Hinshaw, Jr. ©Estate of Minnie Jones Evans. Photo: courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Will Institutional Interest Lead to a Market Explosion?
Because Evans was so prolific, and because her work was so affordable, it’s hard to say how many surviving examples are out there, and if they might make their way to auction. Some people who purchased works at Airlie used them as postcards, mailing them home to friends as a memento from their time in North Carolina.
“There are stories of people in Wilmington who find her work in their attic,” Klein said. “She definitely has a big collector base there, and that’s spreading now.”
Minnie Evans, Untitled (1968). The drawing set an auction record for the artist with a $63,000 sale at the Outsider art auction at Christie’s New York in March 2024. Photo: courtesy of Christie’s New York.
Evans set a new auction record last year, with a $63,000 sale at the “Outsider Art” sale at Christie’s New York in March, according to the Artnet Price Database. But you can still get her work for remarkably low prices.
Last month, two works sold at Bonhams New York for $7,040 and $4,864. This month, a pair of drawings fetched $8,500 and and $5,000 at  Leland Little Auctions in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Five other lots this year have gone for $10,000 or under, with a sixth lot topping out at $35,000 at Leland, for her third-highest result on the block.
Minnie Evans, Untitled (Paisley Design), ca. 1950s. Collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, bequest of Harvie and Charles Abney. Photo: courtesy of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
But there could soon be a boom in market activity thanks to the institutional attention Evans is currently getting.
The MFA exhibition, organized by Art Bridges, is drawn from the holdings of the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, which has the world’s largest collection of Evans’s work. (It is also home to her archives, at the Minnie Evans Study Center.)
Installation view of “The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: ©Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
It’s the first museum solo show for the artist since “Minnie Evans: Artist” at New York’s Museum of American Folk Art in 1995, a full 30 years ago. Titled “The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans,” it originated at the Gund Museum at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and only features 16 works—a kind of enticing amuse-bouche ahead of “The Lost World: The Art of Minnie Evans” at the High and the Whitney, which will bring together more than 100 of her drawings.
The artist is also the subject of a new documentary, Minnie Evans: Draw or Die, from North Carolina filmmaker Linda Royal and Lighthouse Films, due out this fall. The MFA holding a screening of the film next month. More

One afternoon last week, Mary Boone stood on the checkerboard marble floor in front of a grid of Andy Warhol portraits at Lévy Gorvy Dayan. She wore a crisp white shirt with a cravat and a double-breasted velvet black coat-dress that echoed the sleek fall of her long jet-black hair. Diminutive in stature but still radiating the presence that made her one of the most powerful women in the 1980s art world, she very well could be part of the tableau.
The nine canvases comprise a who’s who of the titans of 1980s art. On this wall are portraits of Peter Halley, Francesco Clemente, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Keith Haring (with his partner Juan Dubose)—all part of Boone’s orbit. She also showed Eric Fischl, David Salle, Ross Bleckner, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Julian Schnabel, who helped launch Boone’s gallery and whose career she in turn ignited, should be represented here, too—though his portrait, at more than eight feet wide, proved too large to hang, leaving a gap in the lineup, though one of his signature “plate paintings” is down the hall.
An installation view of Andy Warhol’s portraits of artists of the 1980s on display at “Uptown/Downtown New York in the 1980s.” Courtesy of Levy Gorvy Dayan.
All of these artists, and many others, are part of “Downtown/Uptown: New York in the Eighties,” which runs until December 13 at the decidedly uptown Upper East Side gallery. The show was co-curated by Boone and co-founder Brett Gorvy. “It really wasn’t the ‘money’ decade. It was a time for ideas and invention,” Boone said. “I just felt that then you could see that there were all kinds of possibilities.”
The exhibition fills two floors of the Beaux-Arts townhouse with more than 60 works, ranging from Basquiat’s raw downtown canvases to Fischl’s narrative figuration to Barbara Kruger’s text pieces. Guerrilla Girls posters, Mapplethorpe photographs, Cindy Sherman photo fantasias, and a hallucinatory Kenny Scharf canvas—Fred Flintstone ecstatic as a volcano belches nuclear energy—round out the picture of a decade when Neo-Expressionism, street art, appropriation, and political critique collided, making New York the center of the art world. “Mary added so much to the show—the authority of her voice,” Gorvy said. “That she was in the room when most of this happened was really important. We had an incredible dialogue, but it was also her access points—because I didn’t have them.”
Installation view of “Uptown/Downtown: New York in the Eighties” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York (2025). Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
Warhol looms large over the show, as indeed he did over the decade. There is the regal portrait of Basquiat, segmented in contrapposto and wearing only a jockstrap, and upstairs a monumental Dollar Sign from the series once dismissed as superficial but now read as attuned to the culture of the time. “It was very much about bringing this group together to represent the energy of the time,” said Gorvy. “Warhol was ultimately a kind of father figure, or mentor, to this group. And it was as much about promotion—his Factory became an incredibly important place where the artists would meet. But he wasn’t the Warhol we know today.”
Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1982). Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
By the early 1980s, Warhol was no longer the hip figure of the Silver Factory ’60s. His reputation lagged, and it was this coterie of young upstarts who gave him renewed vitality. Boone put it plainly: “He identified much more with the outsiderness of the ’80s and he felt much more connected to these artists. In some ways, his own generation, he didn’t feel as connected or as embraced. It has a lot to do with the dealer. Leo loved Jasper Johns and Bob Rauschenberg. Those two artists are Leo and Ileana’s kind of main find. I don’t think that Leo ever really understood Andy.”
Kenny Scharf, Andy Warhol, and Keith Haring at Elizabeth Saltzman’s birthday party at Il Cantinori. June 16, 1986. (Photo by Patrick McMullan/Getty Images)
Boone was summoned to meet Warhol one day after he read an article in which dealers were asked how they celebrated big sales. “My answer was fast and simple,” she recalled. “I said, ‘I buy a new pair of shoes.’ Because I love shoes. And they’re great because, you just buy them and slip them on and walk out the door with them. There are no alterations or anything necessary.”
Their friendship evolved over the years, and they’d planned on doing a show together of towering Rorschach paintings. “I felt comfortable with him,” she said. “I was of course very flattered because I thought he was a genius.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Mary Boone) (1984–85). Courtesy of Levy Gorvy Dayan.
Around the corner from this Warhol sanctum hangs Basquiat’s painted punching bag. In emerald block letters it reads “Mary Boone,” topped off with his signature crown insignia. “Jean-Michel was a Dennis the Menace type of character,” she said. “He was very funny. He did a number of paintings and objects that my name was in. Dealers and artists can develop very close relationships. You have the crown on for protection… maybe recognizing that people picked on me.”
She remembered the devastating day Schnabel decamped Mary Boone Gallery for Pace: “Jean-Michel came in right after I got the news, and I was sitting in my little office crying, and he puts his arms around me and he says, ‘Don’t worry, Mary, I’ll make you more famous than Julian ever would. I’ll bring you more happiness.’ For him, the gallery was a family.”
Besides her expertise, Boone also brought the dramatic narrative that the art world loves: the comeback. The Basquiat punching bag could signal that he always knew she was a fighter. “Downtown/Uptown” is Boone’s first client-facing curatorial endeavor since serving time for tax evasion, a return that adds another layer of mythology to an exhibition already steeped in the lore of the 1980s.
Francesco Clemente, Name (1983). Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
Crossing the Divide
In many ways, “Downtown/Uptown”also tells the story of Mary Boone, a dealer who once bridged downtown energy and uptown polish. The arc from SoHo lofts to uptown townhouses was hers, too. She opened her first gallery at 420 West Broadway in 1977, and by the middle of the decade had planted her flag uptown on 57th Street—mirroring the trajectory her artists were making from the gritty downtown scene to the uptown establishment. Boone was hailed as the “queen of downtown” and soon after became an uptown power broker, moving fluidly between both worlds. The works here connect directly to her—she was deeply intertwined with the artists, the art shaped by those relationships—so the exhibition doubles as a personal narrative.
Boone, however, rejects the idea that the show is in any way autobiographical. “I don’t know what that means,” she said. “It’s all about the art.”
Installation view of “Uptown/Downtown: New York in the Eighties” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York (2025). Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
Upstairs, two powerful Jeff Koons works mark the bookends of her short but impactful tenure with the artist. First off is a glowing double-decker display of vacuum cleaners sealed in plexiglass, equal parts banal and sci-fi. “When you see the vacuums, you are confronted with something that’s a kind of ready-made but also Minimal, even anthropomorphic,” Gorvy said. “There’s something about the fluorescent light—the way he displays them. They become monoliths, iconic, untouchable. That’s really the genius of Jeff: taking something from the everyday and giving it a sacred presence.” Two Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985), in which basketballs float eerily suspended in water, is now iconic. Together they capture both the decade’s fascination with consumer detritus and its hunger for impossible perfection.
“In the two years Jeff and I worked together, I only sold two pieces,” Boone said. “And then he left and went to Anina [Nosei]. I think she sold two pieces, too. It is true that every artist has their time. You can work hard and really believe in an artist and it just doesn’t translate into sales. And then hopefully someday it does. After being with me and being with Anina, in 1990 he did the ‘Made in Heaven’ show. And that’s when it really clicked. With a lot of artists—particularly the better the artist—the longer it takes for the world to kind of realize their message.”
Peter Halley, Yellow Cell with Conduit (1982). Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan
Basking in the glow of the vacuum display is Halley’s Yellow Cell with Conduit (1982), its textured surface radiating fluorescent orange and lemon. The canvas came from the artist’s own collection, and Boone sees it as a touchstone. “That’s the most relevant time of an artist’s career,” she said. “When they first find their inspiration, when they’re really investigating things.”
Down a side gallery, the atmosphere sharpens into what feels like a danger room. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ and Mapplethorpe’s Man in a Polyester Suit hang nearby—works that ignited mass hysteria in the 1980s and remain startling in their intensity. In contrast to the milquetoast targets of today’s culture skirmishes, these images still bristle with provocation.
Downstairs hangs Eric Fischl’s The Old Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog (1982), a remarkable canvas—sinister yet magnetic—in which a family sprawls in varying states of tanning and undress, one in a life preserver, as a spry Dalmatian bounds across. They’re surrounded by dark, unsettled seas. Boone remembered first encountering the work at a group show:
Eric Fischl, The Old Man’s Boat and the Old Man’s Dog (1982). Courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan
“I was showing Julian Schnabel and David Salle. I wasn’t showing Eric Fischl. But I went to Sidney Janis, and there was a Fischl painting that just changed my mind. Sometimes you just have to have that one moment. I went to a payphone, called David Salle and said, ‘David, you gotta give me Eric Fischl’s phone number.’ I called Eric right away. He said, ‘Okay, you can come over.’ And this was the painting he was working on when I came over to the studio. I told him immediately that I wanted to do a big show.”
First shown at Gagosian in Los Angeles before passing into the collection of S. I. Newhouse, the painting went on to set Fischl’s auction record when it sold at Christie’s New York in 2022 for $4.14 million, according to the Artnet Price Database.
Taken together, the works define an era. They are unmistakably of the 1980s, yet remarkably, they don’t look dated. The debates they ignited, the imagery they introduced, and the tensions they embodied still feel urgent.
And for Boone herself, the future remains open-ended. Stepping back into curating after years away has cracked a door: whether it signals a full return, a one-off, or the beginning of something new, this latest show suggests Boone is still willing to surprise—not least herself. “I don’t know,” she said. “At 73, I don’t really plan ahead in the same way that I did when I was young. I just wanna do what’s fun for me.”

“Uptown/Downtown: New York in the Eighties” is on view at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, 19 East 64th Street, New York, through December 13, 2025. More

A deftly woven net of red string envelopes viewers at Chiharu Shiota’s first New York museum show, at the Japan Society. The site-specific installation, which is studded with sheets of loose papers replicating excerpts from the diaries of Japanese soldiers from World War II, is one of two pieces the institution commissioned for “Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries.”
It’s titled Diary (2025), and it commemorates the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. Shiota mined the holdings of the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, to create the artwork. It also features original diary pages written by German soldiers who fought in the conflict, reflecting the immigrant artist’s own dual identity, as a Japanese woman who for nearly three decades has called Berlin home.
“There’s a play between tangible memory, and then documents that have become digitized,” Naomi Kuromiya, the Japan Society’s senior research associate, told me.
For the second commission, for the museum’s performing arts department, the artist also designed the sets for Yukio Mishima’s Kinkakuji, in her North American stage design debut. The production is a one-man play starring Major Curda and directed by Leon Ingulsrud, adapted from Mishima’s 1956 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion in honor of what would have been his 100th birthday. It is based on a true story about a Zen Buddhist priest’s arson attack that destroyed Kyoto’s most famous temple, in the form of a monologue delving into his troubled psyche.
Major Curda in Yukio Mishima’s Kinkakuji, adapted from the novel Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavillion) for the stage by Leon Ingulsrud and Major Curda at the Japan Society, New York. Stage design by Chiharu Shiota. Photo: by Richard Termine.
Why Does Shiota Work With Red Thread?
Shiota is known for her signature use of thread, spun into all manner of webs, often in large-scale, ephemeral installations. But before she began experimenting with cord, Shiota was an abstract painter, majoring in painting at Kyoto Seika University. She still sees her work through that framework, describing her practice as “painting in the air.”
“The canvas was quite limiting for her artistically, and she felt like anything she did two dimensionally as an oil painter was just something that had been done before,” Kuromiya said.
Shiota and her team arrived in New York two weeks ahead of the opening, working tirelessly to build the dense, intricate netting. Over the years, she’s perfected her system, working down from the ceiling, letting the work fall into place. The resulting works take over entire galleries, consuming the space and drawing in the viewer.
Chiharu Shiota with one of her installations in 2024. Photo: by Sunhi Mang.
When she first moved beyond the canvas, Shiota used black cord, to mimic lines of graphite in pencil drawings. The color red, of course, evokes blood, and the many threads recall a network of life-giving vessels and veins. Shiota was also alluding to the East Asian concept of the “red thread of fate,” an invisible string that is believed to bind together people who are destined to meet.
Objects we take for granted become powerful totems in Shiota’s work. Making art that incorporates people’s belongings, such as their historic wartime diaries, is a deeply personal exercise for Shiota.
“When she’s going through these papers, she feels that she’s connected to that person,” Kuromiya said. “And so, while we’re moving into the installation, it’s like we’re surrounded by thousands of people who aren’t with us anymore. It amplifies that idea of strangers being representative of human connection and relationships.”
Installation view of Diary in “Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries” at the Japan Society, New York, 2025. Photo: by Go Sugimoto, courtesy of the Japan Society, New York.
Another gallery recreates part of the staging for Kinkakuji, where the minimalist set was a hanging grid of Shiota’s red and white cords. A video shows how Curda moved through the space, the cords coming to life in response to his frenetic motion, and through the use of stage lighting that underscores the character’s mental deterioration.
“The set is very flexible,” Kuromiya said. “At times it becomes part of the scenery, or evocative of what he’s thinking.”
The show also includes Shiota’s behind-the-scenes sketches for the productions, and projections that activate the long white cords.
Major Curda in Yukio Mishima’s Kinkakuji, adapted from the novel Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavillion) for the stage by Leon Ingulsrud and Major Curda at the Japan Society, New York. Stage design by Chiharu Shiota. Photo: by Richard Termine.
Using Thread to Make Waves
It’s been a big year for the artist, who also has a current solo show “Chiharu Shiota: Between Worlds,” at Istanbul Modern. She just closed her largest-ever U.S. museum exhibition, “Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art Watershed in Boston, and is wrapping up “Chiharu Shiota: My House Is Your House” at Azkuna Zentroa, Alhóndiga Bilbao and “Chiharu Shiota: Silent Emptiness” at Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing.
Before that, there was an appearance at the Grand Palais in Paris for “Shiota Chiharu: The Soul Trembles,” a retrospective organized by Tokyo’s Mori Museum featuring seven large-scale installations. The show has been touring to acclaim since 2019, and Skira published an accompanying monograph earlier this year. It will travel next month to the Museo d’Arte Orientale in Turin.
Chiharu Shiota, Metamorphosis of Consciousness at the Red Brick Museum, Beijing. Photo: by Sunhi Mang.
And the Japan Society show will be accompanied by a gallery show in Chelsea at Templon. Shioa’s installation Echoes Between will feature furniture surrounded by luminous fiber optic threads, creating the effect of a glowing cloud.
Shiota has also had high-profile biennial appearances, including the 2019 Honolulu Biennial and the Japanese pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. For the latter exhibition, she collected 50,000 used keys from around the world and wove them into a crisscrossing installation suspended above two weathered boats, embedding the red web with intimate yet universal memories of home and everyday life.
Chiharu Shiota, Key in Hand (2015), detail. Installation for the Japanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Photo: by Sunhi Mang, ©ADAGP, Paris, 2024, and the artist.
These monumental immersive installations are awesome to behold in person, and tend to draw large crowds. At the Mori, Shiota’s retrospective drew over 660,000 guests, the second-most visited exhibition in the museum’s history.
In anticipation of audience demand, the Japan Society expanded its hours, and is now open six days a week instead of four, including on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. (It is closed until September 30 due to restricted access during the United Nations General Assembly.)
Installation view of Chiharu Shiota’s Home Less Home (2025) at the Institute of Contemporary Art Watershed in Boston. Photo: by Timothy Schenck, courtesy of the ICA Boston.
Life, Death, and Everything in Between
As commanding as the presence of her installations are, Shiota’s work is in some ways as much about the emptiness of spaces in between the thread.
“She will say her work is about the presence of absence and the absence of presence,” Kuromiya said. “She wants the installation to live on in your memory, but not to be something you can actually keep.”
The cords in Shiota’s work are about connection, between bodies, but also across time and space, linking one another through shared experiences, and memories. But there is also a darkness that runs through the work, a preoccupation with death and illness informed by the artist’s having twice survived ovarian cancer.
Chiharu Shiota, Wall (2010), video still. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
Wall, a haunting 2010 video on view at the Japan Society, shows the artist in a white, brightly lit room, lying naked on the floor. She is surrounded by clear thin tubes that appear to be pulsing with blood, as if Shiota’s cardiovascular system has been removed from her body.
Shiota made another video, Earth and Blood (2013), after suffering a miscarriage. It’s a six-channel video installation that cuts between footage of the artist’s body and shots of earth and mud, sometimes with puddles of what looks like blood, bringing to mind the “Silueta” series of “earth-body” works by Ana Mendieta (1948–1985).
Chiharu Shiota, Earth and Blood (2013), video still. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
The most recent works are a series of cell-like sculptures, formed from glass and fabric, that are inspired by cancerous growths. Shiota’s take on our fragile internal organs speaks to grief, but also resilience and the possibility of healing.
At the entrance to the show, Shiota has suspended her sculpture Beyond My Body (2025) above the atrium’s water feature. It’s made of sheets of red suede into which the artist has cut a series of small holes to create a delicate, skin-like netting. It’s a membrane that is strong despite its wounds, undergoing regrowth.
Installation view of Beyond My Body in “Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries” at the Japan Society, New York, 2025. Photo: by Go Sugimoto, courtesy of the Japan Society, New York.
A Story That Spans Continents
Two sculptures of large metal house frames, their interiors filled with glittery webs of red thread, are shown here in a new configuration. A headless, abstracted female form sits in the center, her torso made up of what look like blood vessels, spilling forth like the train of an elaborate gown.
The two houses represent Germany and Japan, and the central figure only connects to one of them, illustrating the disconnect Shiota feels from one of her two countries whenever she is in the other. It’s about coexistence, and the complex emotions that arise out of the sense of belonging to more than one place at once.
The work calls to mind The Two Fridas, Frida Kahlo’s famous double self portrait, a blood vessel connecting a Frida in a European gown to her double in traditional Tehuana dress.
Installation view of “Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries” at the Japan Society, New York, 2025. Photo: by Go Sugimoto, courtesy of the Japan Society, New York.
It’s a reminder that while “Two Home Countries” is very much informed by Shiota’s own personal experience, her story is also a universal one, transcending national borders.
In Boston, Shiota sought out that connection with local residents, inviting them to contribute to her installation Home Less Home by writing down their own musings about the meaning of home. The work became a repository of some 6,000 documents—including surprisingly personal handwritten stories—that catch your eye as you move through the pathway between a collective 100 miles of red and black polyester cord that hang down from the ceiling, surrounding paper memories fluttering above home furniture.
Installation view of Chiharu Shiota’s Home Less Home (2025) at the Institute of Contemporary Art Watershed in Boston. Photo: by Timothy Schenck, courtesy of the ICA Boston.
The exhibition, part of the Boston Public Art Triennial, also included a new iteration of Accumulation – Searching for the Destination (2014/2025), a piece inspired by the solitary suitcase Shiota brought with her when she moved from Japan to Berlin in 1996. She suspended dozens of vintage suitcases inside a field of long red ropes, in a moving tribute to migration.
Suitcases don’t just carry our physical things. They carry our hopes and dreams, our anxieties and fears, our memories of home and our visions for the future—our very identity. The effect is a journey frozen in time, suggesting new beginnings, but also raising questions about who this baggage belongs to, where it is headed, and why it has been abandoned.
Installation view of Chiharu Shiota’s Accumulation – Searching for the Destination (2014/2025) at the Institute of Contemporary Art Watershed in Boston. Photo: by Timothy Schenck, courtesy of the ICA Boston.
Diary was inspired in part by literary scholar Donald Keene’s (1922–2019) memoir, Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan. Born in America, Keene became a leading Japanese scholar at New York’s Columbia University, eventually moving to Japan permanently. During World War II, he served in the Navy, stationed in Hawaii, where he was tasked with translating diaries left behind by Japanese soldiers.
But many of the diaries ended with an English message, requesting that the volume be returned to their families. As a memorial, the work responds to loss and historical trauma, but imbues our collective memory of the conflict with an undeniable beauty that ties us all together. It’s a moving vision that invites reflection as we reckon with present-day challenges, on both a global and personal scale.
Installation view of Diary in “Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries” at the Japan Society, New York, 2025. Photo: by Go Sugimoto, courtesy of the Japan Society, New York.
“Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries” is on view at the Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street New York, New York, September 12, 2025–January 11, 2026. Yukio Mishima’s Kinkakuji ran September 15–20, 2025. 
“Chiharu Shiota: Echoes Between” will be on view at Templon, 293 Tenth Avenue, New York, New York, at November 6, 2025–January 22, 2026.
“Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles” will be on view at the Museo d’Arte Orientale, Via San Domenico, 11 10122, Turin, Italy, October 22, 2025–June 28, 2026. It was most recently on view at the Grand Palais, Square Jean Perrin, 17 Avenue du Général Eisenhower, 75008 Paris, France, December 11, 2024–March 19, 2025.
“Chiharu Shiota: My House Is Your House” is on view at the Azkuna Zentroa, Alhóndiga Bilbao, Arriquíbar Plaza, 4, Abando, 48010 Bilbao, Bizkaia, Spain, May 27–September 28, 2025.
“Chiharu Shiota: Silent Emptiness” is on view at the Red Brick Art Museum, 2GR2+V5 Chaoyang, Beijing, China, March 23–October 8, 2025.
“Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home” was on view at the ICA Boston Watershed, 256 Marginal Street, Boston, Massachusetts, May 22–September 1, 2025. More

The third and latest edition of Chicago Exhibition Weekend (CXW) was a lively, citywide event that included gallery and institutional exhibition openings, panel discussions, private collection visits, and festive communal dinners hosting crowds of VIPs, curators, and collectors during its September 19–21 run.
This time around, the platform got an extra shot of energy and attention, as it coincided with the opening of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, another citywide initiative, under whose auspices came the Friday opening of “Shift,” a major show at the Chicago Cultural Center. Another anchor show, “Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City (1984-2015),” was spearheaded by Abby Pucker, the dynamo organizer who is founder and CEO of Gertie, the civic and cultural agency that produces exhibition weekend. “Over My Head” was curated by Chicago-based art critic and historian Gareth Kaye along with Iris Colburn, a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA).
Abby Pucker at the Chicago Exhibition Weekend (CXW) kickoff dinner, hosted by Gertie. Photo: Matthew Reeves/BFA.com ©BFA 2025
“This year felt like it’s starting to be what I imagined, which is that people, galleries, and institutions plan to do openings and events during this time,” because of the attentive crowd in town, Pucker told me. “That’s what I’ve always wanted: us creating the infrastructure and other people can really activate it.”
There was plenty going on, starting on Thursday, with Pucker and her team hosting the opening reception of “Over My Head,” followed by a dinner for hundreds in a tent at the the main hub at 400 N Peoria, in the city’s Fulton Market District.
Installation view of “Sara MacKillop: The Cutaway View,” at Good Weather, in Chicago. Photo: Eileen Kinsella
Friday held a full day of gallery and collection visits, followed by another sprawling dinner at the warehouse outside of Douglas Park that houses Good Weather gallery, where British artist Sara McKillop has a fascinating show, “The Cutaway View.” And that was just by Friday, before the weekend proper even got underway.
Opening reception for “Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City, 1984–2015
.” Photo: Bob (Robert Heishman + Robert Salazar)
Amid a flood of gloomy art world news, including gallery closures, art fair cancellations and postponements, and a pronounced market contraction, the vibrancy of the Chicago art scene felt like a much-needed bright spot.
The Right Recipe
What’s the secret formula for Chicago’s success? For starters, measured, organic growth by dealers in a city with relatively low overhead.
“Collectors are supportive of the galleries at all levels,” Gray Gallery director Valerie Carberry told me as we strolled through a show of Alex Katz‘s latest paintings at the gallery’s main space in West Town. And indeed, collectors came out in force. Just some of those in attendance were Heiji Black, Ellen-Blair Chube, Larry Fields, Helyn Goldenberg and Michael Alper, Rachel Kohler, Nancy Lerner and David Frej, Sundeep Mullangi, and Ilan Shalit. Collectors like Murat Ahmed and Helen Zell hosted visitors.
“We have such great institutions here,” said Carberry, noting not only the Art Institute of Chicago and the MCA but also university museums such as the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern and the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. There are also numerous great art schools, which, Carberry said, “creates a great ecosystem. So many artists are able to come here for school and remain and practice here.” That’s partly down to reasonable studio costs, she said.
“Shift: Architecture in Times of Radical Change,” part of the Chicago Architectural Biennial at the Chicago Cultural Center. Photo: Eileen Kinsella
“There’s a real sense of stability here, rooted in the city’s collective care and focus on itself,” said Mariane Ibrahim Gallery director Emma McKee. “Chicagoans share a profound love for Chicago, and during difficult times the community tends to turn inward. What Abby is fostering through Chicago Exhibition Weekend and EarlyWork exemplifies this—initiatives designed to forge sustainable pathways and to focus on longevity.” Run by Gertie’s head of programming and audience development Chanelle Lacy, EarlyWork is a membership network focused on art and culture in the city.
Veteran Chicago gallery owners John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, of Corbett vs. Dempsey, who recently celebrated 20 years, agree that the CXW platform is an idea whose time has come, particularly after earlier attempts failed to coalesce.
“The galleries can’t just do it on their own. They need an outside force,” said Dempsey. “And Gertie is a force that can create platforms for things to happen. It’s essential to putting a framework around a  moment in a great city, but you need the right cooks to come up with that recipe.”
Installation view of “Nick Drnaso: Ghost Works,” at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago. Photo: Bob (Robert Heishman + Robert Salazar). Courtesy Corbett vs. Dempsey.
The gallery hosted a concert, wine tasting, and book launch on Saturday after opening two shows. One, an exhibition of new sculptures, paintings, and collages by Aaron Curry, “Raw Dog,” marked the artist’s first solo show in Chicago. Also intriguing is “Ghost Works,” by Nick Drnaso, who is best known as a graphic novelist. In typical adventurous Corbett vs. Dempsey fashion, after a friend connected them to Drnaso and they visited his studio, they offered him his first-ever gallery show.
“The weekend felt triumphant,” said Corbett. “Abby did a fantastic job wrangling a lot of disparate threads into a wonderful overall weekend. Our Saturday events were packed and exciting, mixing music and art and viniculture in a seamless way. A total blast. We loved the whole weekend and can’t wait until next year.”
Art x Tennis Anyone?
Other spontaneous spins on the art-centric theme included a “tennis mixer” that Document gallery founder Aron Gent hosted for the third consecutive year with Gray gallery that drew 50 people to fill up a local court. “Momentum has been building,” Gent told me. “Many people who are art enthusiasts really love tennis. It’s kind of like the art sport.”
Installation view of Kiah Celeste and Gordon Hall, “Artifact Unidentified,” at Document Chicago. Courtesy the gallery.
“We had great traffic on Saturday, with good people coming through,” he added. Visitors were greeted with “Artifact/Unidentified,” presenting works by Kiah Celeste and Gordon Hall.
The son of artists, Gent moved to Chicago two decades ago after studying photography. He had a studio practice and was working for a small print studio and curating shows for friends’ spaces when he founded Document, primarily as a print studio and later a project space.
He eventually brought on Sibylle Friche as gallery director because of her extensive experience. “I’d never actually worked at a gallery before, which is kind of hilarious,” Gent told me. Fairs including Expo Chicago, NADA in New York and Miami, and FIAC in Paris broadened the gallery’s exposure. This year, he is participating in Art Basel fairs in both Paris and in Miami Beach. He also recently opened a branch in Lisbon, Portugal.
Document gallery directors Aron Gent and Sibylle Friche. Photo by Davide Corona.
“Things are very affordable here compared to other cities, so it allows us to be more free,” he said. The print shop is also crucial in meeting expenses.
In addition to lower costs, Gent says the scene is “not as competitive” as some other art hubs. “All of the galleries get along. We’re all super cordial, hang out, and see each other regularly.”
Gray’s Carberry agrees. “I think that’s what keeps things really healthy in Chicago. The galleries are really collaborative with one another and there are so many collegial relationships. Our scene isn’t as big as New York so I think it serves us to play well together and get along.”
Tam Ochiai, United Colors of Benetton (circa 1993). Courtesy Hans Goodrich.
Daisy Sanchez is co-founder, with Peter Anastos, of Hans Goodrich Gallery in the Pilsen neighborhood. Sanchez proudly told me the gallery had been open “one year and two days,” and that the space was “mobbed” during its Saturday opening. It also sold several works on view in “Shopping Bag,” by Tam Ochiai.
Comparatively low rent in Pilsen combined with “doing everything ourselves,” often including transporting artworks, has allowed the gallery to thrive, Sanchez said. The gallery has organized six exhibitions and participated in the Basel Social Club satellite fair.
This year, Hans Goodrich is participating in the Paris satellite fair known as Place des Vosges, thanks to an earlier gallery visit and then an invitation from organizer and dealer Chris Sharp. Sanchez said she and Anastos are “over the moon” about the upcoming fair, which she said is relatively affordable even if it constitutes a heavy lift for the young gallery.
“I visited the first edition of Place des Vosges last year, and I remember calling Peter and saying, ‘This is so beautiful, and perfectly scaled and intimate. I would love it if we could get invited to do this fair in five years.’ We’re so grateful that what we’re doing is resonating with people in and outside of Chicago, and so lucky to be able to do what we love and not be stressed up to our eyeballs about money, do the shows we’re excited about, and work with people that we love.” More

In wrestling lingo, a “house show” refers to a non-televised pro-wrestling event. It’s a dress rehearsal of sorts, used by organizers to test out match-ups and by wrestlers to experiment on lines and moves still being developed. For die-hard fans, it’s a chance to see the stars up close and away from the pressure of cameras.
The term has provided the title for the first comprehensive art exhibition in the U.S. dedicated to pro-wrestling. The house in question is the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, which in the Fall of 2027 will present “House Show: Power, Spectacle, and Pro Wrestling,” a show promising to take visitors inside the idiosyncratic world of wrestling.
Wrestling as a performing art may trace its roots to the touring European carnivals of the 19th century, but its modern counterpart is a quintessentially American affair: bombastic spectacle filled with larger-than-life characters and presented to audiences with the slickest of television production values. Its popularity boomed in the post-war years launching the so-called First Golden Age of professional wrestling in the U.S.
Thekla Kaischauri, Untitled (Women at the Garden) (2024). Photo: courtesy MFA St. Petersburg.
This is the starting point for “House Show” which continues up to the present (i.e. the Second Golden Age) through more than 50 works of painting, sculpture, video, photography, and performance. Pro-wrestling is a lens, the show’s curators Katherine Pill and Adam Abdalla told me, for investigating gender, sexuality, and the aesthetics of violence.
“The concept for this exhibition grew from an obsession with two seemingly disparate worlds: contemporary art and pro wrestling. It is a passion project brought to life,” Pill, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, said over email. “It features works from artists with in-ring experience and those who are more distanced from the pro-wrestling arena, both harnessing wrestling’s supercharged energy.”
Key to understanding the spectacle—and the exhibition—is the concept of kayfabe, a word of unclear origin that expresses the tacit agreement between the performers and their audience to treat the scripted as authentic. It’s a timely concept to consider in an era when authenticity seems fraught across social media, personal identity, and politics.
Florida’s Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg. Photo by Rosie Betancourt/Jeff Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.
Fittingly, MFA St. Petersburg has tapped some real-life wrestlers for help. Lee Moriarty, Danny Havoc, and Thekla Kaischauri all offer up their artistic impressions of time spent inside the ring. Ahead of the exhibition, the museum has acquired Kaischauri’s Untitled (Women at the Garden) (2024), a chaotic blur of two women grappling mid-match. Besides being an AEW professional wrestler, Kaischauri boasts an MFA from the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Untitled blends Viennese Expressionism with manga from Japan, a country she lived in for several years.
Elsewhere, the museum will bring together work by artists including Jeremy Deller, Shaun Leonardo, Jenna Gribbon, and Rosalyn Drexler, who have previously explored professional wrestling through art.
For the show’s other curator, Abdalla, wrestling has shifted from a personal obsession to a professional focus. He launched Orange Crush in 2020, a magazine that sits at the crossover of visual art and professional wrestling, and has seen its influence grow.
“The magazine was an editorial project about a subculture that many felt was niche and juxtapositional to art. Now, wrestling is so pervasive in culture,” Abdalla said over email. “Things come full circle. This art form is both absurd yet so oddly reflective of American life.”
“House Show” will be complemented by programming including live events and talks from both the art and wrestling communities. More