Art & Exhibitions

Over the weekend, January 27 and 28, Casa Batlló in Barcelona was transformed with light, color, and motion. About 95,000 visitors turned up to watch the kinetic display, in which artist Sofia Crespo’s artificial intelligence-assisted scenes and textures were projected onto the Antoni Gaudí-designed monument. 
The Lisbon-based Crespo, best known for her use of technology to explore biological structures, is the Casa Batlló’s second artist-in-residence, a role created as part of its Heritage of Tomorrow program. Just as Refik Anadol before her, Crespo was invited to create new works referencing Gaudí’s design; the first of these, titled Structures of Being, was unveiled at the live projection mapping event (other installations from Crespo’s residency are forthcoming).
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Across 12 showings, Crespo’s art danced over the facade of the building. Her luminously hued organic forms—florals, coral reefs, butterflies, and other natural phenomena—rippled and morphed in tandem with music by British composer Robert M. Thomas. The images also played off Gaudi’s surreal architecture, itself inspired by the shapes of the sea and marine life. 
“The fact that he’s using architecture as a way of connecting with the natural world,” said Crespo about the Catalan designer in a video accompanying the event. “In a way, I see a big parallel with what I’m doing.” 
Rendering of Structures of Being by Sofia Crespo. Photo courtesy of the artist.
The work was created by Crespo in partnership with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, which provided the artist with data on the behavior of marine currents. With this, Crespo used A.I. to generate her projection, emphasizing the “active effort of creating datasets… of training… of directing where that output goes,” she said. Thomas’s score, too, was an algorithmically generated piece that was performed by local performers.  
“We wanted to have this sound that illustrates Gaudí’s transitions,” Crespo explained. “There’s a big part of Gaudí’s work that is largely alive because it’s constantly being interpreted by people and literally being built right now. We wanted to tell that story.” 
See more images from the event below. 
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
Sofia Crespo, Structures of Being (2024) at Casa Batlló. Photo: Claudia Maurino.
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For homosexuals and other queer folks, dry January can make the start of the year feel like staring into a gaping maw. Luckily, there is a slew of invigorating New York art shows catering to a broad spectrum of tastes and moods. Thank the goddess! From disrobed rebels to poetic and somber parables, the LGBTQ art squad really threw down. What links all of these exhibitions is a shared element of storytelling and myth-making. They’re all compelling in their own way—and each propose a disparate desire.
Karlheinz Weinberger, “Subsequent Icons,” at Situations Henry Street
Karlheinz Weinberger, Portrait, (c. mid 1960s). Courtesy of Situations Gallery and the Karlheinz Weinberger Foundation 
The Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger is best known for his 1950s and 1960s images of the “Halbstark” subculture of beatniks, motorcycle gangs, and the big-haired ladies with questionable taste in men who love them; even if you’re unfamiliar with the images, you’ve certainly seen many fashion shoots that have hijacked them note-for-note since the ’90s. But Weinberger was much more prodigious with his personal stash of revealing rough trade portraits, which he made in the makeshift studio in the apartment he shared with his mother. “Subsequent Icons” showcases a series of sequential images of men disrobing from workwear and construction gear to nothing.
Gallery owner Jackie Klempay curated the exhibition. “I wanted to show the serial nature of the photos and imagine his interaction with these people in his mother’s home,” she said. “You see little bits of motorcycle jackets, boots, or helmets even while they’re totally nude. You can see the crossover between his interests. They’re not like Bob Mizer physique shots where they have perfect bodies. They have character.”
As a bonus, there’s a selection of unframed, one-off, full-frontal prints for sale. At the heart of Weinberger’s work is a fascination with vagabonds and rebels. “He’s portraying outsiders and people that have unconventional lives,” Klempay said. “That’s always attractive.”
“Subsequent Icons” is on view until February 25 at Situations, 127 Henry Street, NY, NY.

Mark Flood, “Tommy Puett,” at Elliott Templeton Fine Arts 
Mark Flood, Body in Space (1998). Courtesy of Elliott Templeton Fine Arts
“Tommy Puett,” a dynamo of masc bro blond mullet machismo, is chilling a few doors down at Elliott Templeton Fine Arts. Posing in a revealing tank or sprawled on the hood of a pink Cadillac, he looks like a ripped and raring-to-go 1991 porn bottom, featuring in these vintage late ’90s Mark Flood works. Yet Puett’s claim to fame was really as an actor on Life Goes On, a treacly prime-time ABC soap where he played the best friend to lead character Corky, who had Down’s Syndrome (Puett’s character met his tragic end drunk driving).
The portraits are lifted from teenie-bopper magazines—the divide between a 13-year-old girl and an adult gay man can indeed be very narrow. The artwork embodies equal parts sex jams and adolescent scrapbook obsessions as well as a touch of the unhinged and foreboding.
“I can act out my sex addiction or stay home and make art,” Flood explained in the 2020 artist monologue Mark Flood in the Nineties. Puett would pop up as a motif in Flood’s work throughout those years like a sun-kissed Zelig. Though the actor retired from Hollywood decades ago, perhaps grudgingly, he forever stars in Flood’s art. But who is the voyeur? Is it Flood or the viewer? Or is Puett watching us? Is he omniscient?
“Tommy Puett” is on view until February 11 at Elliott Templeton Fine Arts, 105 Henry Street, store #6, NY, NY.

Brian Buczak, “Man Looks at the World” at Gordon-Robichaux and Ortuzar Projects 
Brian Buczak Male Painting [View 1], (c. 1980). Courtesy Gordon Robichaux and Ortuzar Projects New York
Brian Buczak, who died of AIDS at age 33 in 1987, is getting his first solo exhibition since 1989 with a concurrent joint show at Gordon Robichaux in the Flat Iron and Ortuzar Projects in Tribeca with “Man Looks at the World.” Most of the works displayed had been hidden away for decades at the townhouse and studio he shared with his partner, the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks who passed in 2018 (Alice Neel painted the duo, and Hendricks commissioned Phillip Glass to compose a requiem piece for Buczak).
Buczak wielded an arsenal of mediums and styles, but the Gordon Robichaux component focuses on his usage of symbology that incorporated Masonic imagery, corporate logos, Buddhist philosophy, porn mags, comics, phallic tower and silos, as well as breathtaking vistas. It was as if he was trying to simplify and make sense of the sensory overload of modern life and his place in it (as well as his destiny), juxtaposing visions of the westward-ho American dream and scenic buttes next to a hardcore cop three-way. In his spare time, he’d stencil his runic language on abandoned buildings.
“Man Looks at the World” runs until February 17, at Gordon Robichaux, 41 Union Square West, #925 and #907 New York, NY and at Ortuzar Projects, 9 White Street, NY, NY.

Linus Borgo, “Monstrum,” at Yossi Milo 
Linus Borgo, Narcissus at the Halsey Street Oasis, 2023 © Linus Borgo. Courtesy of the artist and Yossi Milo, New York.

In Chelsea, Linus Borgo’s enthralling debut solo show “Monstrum” is dense with mythos (both self-mythology and the ancient polytheistic sort). Borgo is a trans man who lost his hand in a near death experience his first year at RISD. The ramifications of this are rife in the work: Borgo deftly weaves between planes of existence, life, death, and the dream world in-between, piling up Renaissance master references and nods to the Greek pantheon next to glimpses of modernity. There is a gory element of soothsaying from reading animal entrails and a proud portrayal of the trans body clashing with scenes that correlate to societal vivisection.
Borgo himself makes frequent cameos, always staunchly depicting the reality of his hand—including multiple appearances as a merman—twice in the more classic sense, seemingly riffing off The Little Mermaid in the Copenhagen harbor whereas in another, he’s splayed out in a bathtub reminiscent of Darryl Hannah in Splash but with evident top surgery scars.
The work Narcissus at the Halsey Oasis depicts what looks like a late-night post-disco highway underpass revery—the subject is looking fly in his fur coat nightclub outfit and is looking at his reflection in a puddle. He doesn’t seem to see perfection in himself, but rather projects it onto the world and into this makeshift liquid mirror—the puddle is filled with flowers and lily pads instead of Brooklyn sludge.

“Monstrum” is on view until February 3 at Yossi Milo, 245 10th Avenue, NY, NY.

Richmond Barthé, Black Narcissus (1929) and Julius (1942). Courtesy of the estate of Dr. Samella Lewis and Ryan Lee Gallery.

Around the corner at Ryan Lee gallery, the 1929 sculpture Black Narcissus by Harlem Renaissance master Richmond Barthé (1901-1989) is a truly magnetic presence. (Barthé was the first Black artist to have work acquired by The Whitney). “In This Moisture Between Us Where the Guinep Peels Lay” is an intriguing dual show that pairs his sculptures with multimedia artist Christopher Udemezue, who was three when Barthé died.
“How he could make the Black male figure so strong, but so soft is something I thought about a lot,” said Udemezue, resplendent in a lace top and black cargo kilt, at last week’s opening. “I wanted to make the pictures have this kind of balance. How do we show Black men in this soft but very masculine way?” Both artists deal with Black figuration using very different methods of grace. Barthé’s work exudes spirituality; Udemezue channels and depicts it. “It makes sense on a spiritual level,” Udemezue said of the pairing.
Richmond Barthé and Christopher Udemezue: in this moisture between us where the guinep peels lay installed at RYAN LEE, 2024.

The link between the two artists is Jamaica, which they both see as a place of healing and queer rebirth. Barthé decamped there in the wake of a nervous breakdown and stayed for decades. Udemezue’s family hails from the island nation, and he is also founder of RAGGA NYC, a platform connecting queer Caribbean artists.
The second room segues into a solo Udemezue outing and is where the artist really hits his stride, with his feet on the ground connecting narratively to the past while reaching for the cosmos. A wall is painted black and overlaid with a ghostly apparition of his family’s countryside house, a constellation of family photos hovers above. An assemblage of foliage and rocks is placed in the foreground. Orbiting the room are stylized images of a Technicolor queer utopian Jamaican fantasia, complete with pointed ear demigods and starry skied bliss.
“in this moisture between us where the guinep peels lay” is on view until March 9, at Ryan Lee, 515 West 26th Street, 3rd floor, NY, NY

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A press release for Cindy Sherman’s new self-titled show at Hauser & Wirth’s Wooster Street location goes out of its way to draw a connection to the artist’s past. This exhibition, the description explains, “marks Sherman’s return to the historic SoHo district where, in the late 1970s, she debuted her now iconic Untitled Film Stills at the non-profit Artists Space.” 
We probably didn’t need the reminder. For a long time now, it’s been hard not to have the Film Stills in the back of one’s mind when taking in newer examples of the artist’s work. That early series—for which the artist photographed herself as a housewife, femme fatale, and other stock characters of old black-and-white films—has taken on a lot of weight in the 40-plus years since it debuted, and its achievements have only come into sharper focus as her pictures have grown weirder and more complex in the decades since.  
Installation view of “Cindy Sherman” at Hauser & Wirth New York. © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer.
The layered pictures that make up her current Hauser & Wirth exhibition definitely fall into the “weird” category, but they’re not weighed down by the past. Each comprises an amalgam of the artist’s own facial features collaged—Mr. Potato Head-style—atop studio portraits of herself caked in makeup and wearing various wigs. 
Who Sherman is trying to evoke isn’t totally clear, certainly not to the extent of past series, where she assumed the identities of specific historical figures (the aristocrats of Old Master paintings, say) or archetypes (socialites, “men“). But as with those efforts, there is an element of self-portraiture in the mix of these new pictures, too. No matter how many elaborate disguises Sherman puts on, she is, to some extent, always photographing herself. 
Even so, the veil of performance is particularly thin here. No one will mistake the show’s many Frankenstein-ed faces for the artist’s own, but the parts of Sherman we see in snippets are tender, vulnerable. On view—plainly, and in rich digital detail—is the 70-year-old artist’s aging skin, her pores, her creases.  
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #646 (2023). © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
“I’m not going to go into this aging process silently or happily,” she said in a New York Times profile published this week. “I feel like I’m preparing myself for it… This is what you’re going to get, so get used to it. It’s coming. It’s hanging over all of our heads.” 
The get-ups and collages turn the subjects of Sherman’s new portraits into caricatures, but she knows that time has a way of doing that too, turning us all into distorted, fractured reflections of our past selves. Sherman may no longer look like the ingenue from the Film Stills, but she is every bit the artist she was back then—and a lot more. 
See more images from Sherman’s new body of work below.
Installation view of “Cindy Sherman” at Hauser & Wirth New York. © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #650 (2023). © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Cindy Sherman, Untitled #632 (2010/2023). © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Installation view of “Cindy Sherman” at Hauser & Wirth New York. © Cindy Sherman. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer.
“Cindy Sherman” is on view at Hauser & Wirth, 134 Wooster Street, New York, through March 16.

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Josephine Baker made her debut as “Black Venus” in Berlin in 1926, performing the Charleston at the Nelson Theater on Kurfürstendamm. “Berlin feels great!,” she later enthused. “A pure triumph. They carry me aloft. In no other city have I received so many love letters, so many flowers and gifts.”
Almost a century later, a new exhibition is spotlighting her life and legacy at the German capital’s Neue Nationalgalerie. Photos, drawings, books, programs, record covers, and other archival documents elucidate not only Baker’s accomplishments in the realm of music, film, and dance, but also her work as a resistance fighter and civil rights activist.
Her output is shown side-by-side with the work of contemporary artists like Simone Leigh, Faith Ringgold, and Carrie Mae Weems, who have cited her as an enduring cultural influence.
Born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri in 1906, Baker was a natural entertainer from a young age and started dancing in New York at 13. On her first world tour with the musical show La Revue Nègre, she arrived in Paris in 1925. At this time, European countries were still expanding colonial rule and racial segregation was common practice across the continent. Against this context, audiences nonetheless fell for Baker’s natural charms and she introduced them to African-American music and dance.
Though she became a movie star and a muse, Baker was also consistently Othered and hypersexualized. She often had to play to racist stereotypes, for example by wearing the banana skirt that she made iconic, or mimic popular minstrel caricatures in order to win the audience’s favor.
By the time she was 20, Baker had already endured two failed marriages with men who were significantly older. After this time, she had two more significant relationships before marrying the French composer Jo Bouillon in 1947. With him, she would continue to travel the globe, eventually adopting 11 children of different ethnicities that she referred to as her “Rainbow Tribe.”
During World War II, Baker became a spy for the Free France Committee and was sent on undercover missions, including transporting top secret information written in invisible ink on her scores across borders. Baker was also a champion of desegregation, which she insisted upon during her performances, and after the war became a delegate of the International Association Against Racism and Anti-Semitism.
In 1963, Baker was invited by Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at the March on Washington. “I am not a young woman now, friends,” she told the crowd. “There is not too much fire burning inside me. And before it goes out, I want you to use what is left to light that fire in you—so that you can carry on, and so that you can do those things that I have done.”
“Josephine Baker: Icon in Motion” is on view at Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Str. 50, Berlin, Germany, through April 28. Check out more images from the exhibition below.
George Hoyningen-Huene, Josephine Baker (1929). Photo: © George Hoyningen-Huene Estate Archives.
Josephine Baker, Paris 1927. Photo: © James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters, Yale University.
Baker, Josephine. Photo: © From the Collection: Hughes, Langston, 1902-1967 / Photographs of Prominent African Americans. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Simone Leigh, Slipcover (2022–23). Photo: © Simone Leigh, courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

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One of the first dresses that Yves Saint Laurent designed for the house of Dior, the 1955 “Soirée de Paris” is a form-fitting number, masterfully crafted in black silk velvet and cinched at the waist by a long satin bow in contrasting beige. The historic garment is now on view at “Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style,” the newly opened exhibition at de Young Museum in San Francisco. It cuts an elegant figure on a mannequin. Might it look as good on you? Well, you don’t have to pull the dress off the display platform to find out. 
In a room just downstairs from the exhibition is an installation that allows you to “try on” said outfit using Snap’s augmented reality technology. The space is loosely divided into three segments, each fitted with a huge screen that Snap terms a mirror. Stepping in front of each of these mirrors, you can glimpse yourself draped in the Saint Laurent dress or two other ensembles, one by Versace and another by Bay Area designer Kaisik Wong.
Of course, Snap’s A.R. doesn’t just slap the outfit onto an image of you and call it a day. Move and the virtual clothing moves with you; twirl and it spins along. When you first step into frame, the piece even fades in on your physical body, with tiny animated sparkles to project Cinderella-esque magic. I was particularly taken with how the Saint Laurent dress flowed and the Versace gown conveyed heft, despite their obvious virtuality. 
“When you walk into a museum, you’re looking at the piece of art on the wall or the dress on the mannequin,” Rajni Jacques, Snap’s global head of fashion and beauty, told me in a walk-through. “But with augmented reality, you’re engaging with it, which remixes the storytelling and experience of going to a museum.” 
The A.R. try-on experience by Snap accompanying “Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style” at de Young Museum. Photo: Gary Sexton, courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
This installation represents the first time that Snap’s A.R. mirrors have appeared in a cultural institution in the U.S. More often, the technology can be found in commercial or retail contexts. Its appearance at de Young, said museum director Thomas P. Campbell, serves both engagement and educational purposes (in the same way the museum’s 2022 Ramses exhibition leveraged virtual reality). 
“Our digital team had the idea of democratizing the exhibition by letting our visitors try on the clothes,” he told me. “It allows people to visualize themselves in these garments and helps them understand these dresses in a different way.” 
The A.R. activation is also aptly pegged to the museum’s latest exhibition, he added. After all, it’s not every day the museum brings these historic, often delicate garments to light—much less into the future with a high-tech boost. The show, in fact, marks the first time in more than three decades that de Young has presented its enviable costume collection, which it began building in 1895. 
Installation view of “Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style” at de Young Museum. Photo: Gary Sexton, courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
For “Fashioning San Francisco,” the museum is displaying 100 pieces—by the likes of Alexander McQueen, Issey Miyake, Pierre Balmain, Christian Lacroix, Comme des Garçons, and more—from its storied collection in a bid to trace the city’s history through fashion. It’s an expansive remit but one within which the show’s curator, Laura L. Camerlengo, sees a clear throughline.  
“We’re looking at about 100 years of fashion, considering the great 1906 earthquake in the city as a starting point,” she told me during a sneak preview of the exhibition. “Fashion becomes a way of showing resiliency in the wake of disaster, and it connects to the importance of philanthropy in the city.” 
Installation view of “Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style” at de Young Museum. Photo: Gary Sexton, courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
That philanthropic spirit was evident during the rebuilding and redevelopment of San Francisco write large—but also in FAMSF’s own textile collection, which has benefitted from the largesse of the city’s residents. Many local women have donated pieces to the museum’s holdings through the decades, from socialite Denise Hale to entrepreneur Ruth Quigley to author Christine Suppes, who has gifted a whopping 500 ensembles to FAMSF to date. 
Their gifts are dotted throughout the exhibition, which is split into themes such as the “Little Black Dress,” “Well-Suited,” and “Avant-Garde.” To better weave in the San Francisco motif, the designs are stood up against backdrops reminiscent of the city’s iconic architectural gems, like the Palace of Fine Arts and the Cathedral of St. Mary.  
Installation view of “Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style” at de Young Museum. Photo: Gary Sexton, courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Among the show’s highlights is “After the Ball,” a section devoted to a slew of extravagant gowns. At its center is a pair of diaphanous couture creations. The two dresses, Camerlengo explained, emerged from San Francisco manufacturers’ joint postwar bid to rejuvenate the city’s fashion industry. Following a trade agreement, France sent two Dior designs out to the West Coast for a publicity tour by the luxury department store I. Magnin & Company. 
“Then the company gave them to the museum, noting their importance in preservation for future generations ” Camerlengo continued. “They said they considered them the pinnacle of fashion and creativity.” 
Camerlengo also pointed out a 1985 design by Kaisik Wong, a sheer printed ensemble embellished with Chinese-inspired elements and paired with a highly structured lamé coat. The museum is home to the late artist’s archive, a trove of clothing, photographs, and ephemera acquired directly from his family with donor funds (the gift was exhibited at de Young’s 1995 retrospective, “True Couture: The Wearable Art of Kaisik Wong”). 
That Wong’s outfit was selected as one of the A.R. try-ons is down to the “considerations of the technology,” Camerlengo said, which called for pieces that covered most of the wearer’s body. But more so, “he was a San Francisco designer,” she added, “so it’s a nice way to showcase what we preserve here as well.” 
The Snap A.R. try-on activation at “Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style,” featuring models in designs [from left] by Kasik Wong, Versace, and Yves Saint Laurent. Photos courtesy of Snap Inc.According to Campbell, the show’s A.R. installation was some six months in-the-making, after the museum’s digital team landed on Snap. “They were impressed by the company for two reasons: their three-dimensional rendition of the garments and motion-responsiveness,” he explained. 
The Snap and de Young teams then worked closely to create 3D versions of the chosen outfits. These were animated and loaded into the A.R. mirrors, which were custom designed for the museum environment.  
“When it comes to building experiential moments, everything that we do is from the ground up. It’s never cut-and-paste,” Snap’s Jacques explained. “We want to talk to the people behind the scenes about their vision and how can Snap A.R. bring that vision to life.”
The A.R. try-on experience by Snap accompanying “Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style” at de Young Museum. Photo: Gary Sexton, courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
This is not Snap’s first rodeo within the museum or art space either. It has partnered with the L.A. County Museum of Art for its multi-part Monumental Perspectives project, and more recently, with the Louvre for its Egypt Augmented program. The company’s Snap A.R. Lens has likewise been leveraged by artists including Damien Hirst and Alex Israel. 
Jacques won’t discuss the cost of building out an A.R. experience such as the one at “Fashioning San Francisco,” emphasizing instead the “synergy” between art and tech partners, and something way more valuable: cultural relevance. “We’re always seeking that,” she said.  
In turn, fitting for a technology that powers a social media app, Snap’s A.R. has injected an element of play into what could be a static showcase. Audiences leave with the experience of participation and if not, the ultimate memento: a selfie, which they can snap as they pose in the virtual fashions. 
“We want to create that experience so that when you leave the building, there’s an emotion attached to it. We want people to have fun and explore and just be, like, wow, I never even thought this could happen,” said Jacques. “I feel like people forget about the fun part.”
“Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style” is on view at de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, through August 11.
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The unicorn may be a mythical beast, but centuries’ worth of art and literature have made it quite real. An endless parade of Medieval tapestries, ancient Greek texts, Renaissance paintings, Bronze-Age seals, and fantasy novels has celebrated the horse-like animal with a single horn, seemingly willing it into being, compounding the creature’s ongoing mystique. “No place is more enchanted,” as Peter S. Beagle wrote in his 1968 book The Last Unicorn, “than one where a unicorn has been born.” 
Soon, the unicorn will be casting its spell at Scotland’s new Perth Museum, which will open “Unicorn” in March. The show is the first U.K. exhibition to survey the cultural history of the unicorn—also the national symbol of Scotland—from antiquity to present day. The animal’s footprint will be traced through illustrations, manuscripts, coins, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries, some of them historical loans and others objects of significance to the local community. 
“With a long, complex, and often contradictory history, the unicorn has been a popular subject for contemporary artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and activists,” said JP Reid, senior new projects officer at Culture Perth & Kinross, the trust that co-manages the museum. “It is a symbol through which ideas like authenticity, belief, gender, and nationalism can be explored.”  
Illustrated page from the Book of Hours by Grote Geert (1480–90), Delft, Netherlands. © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Some of the stars in the show include late-Renaissance painter Luca Longi’s Lady and the Unicorn (1534–40), on loan from the Museo Nazionale di Castel Sant’Angelo and on view in the U.K. for the first time, as well as John Duncan’s dreamy 1920 canvas The Unicorns, loaned from the Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection. 
A 19th-century ceremonial rod topped with a silver unicorn, which was featured in the coronation of King Charles III, is included here, alongside an Elizabethan pendant, crafted with narwhal tusk, once believed to come from unicorns.
“The Danny Jewel” pendant, England (ca. 1550). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
“Unicorn” will also delve into the contemporary resonance of the legendary beast in artifacts including toys, video games, and films. Its final section further explores how the unicorn has emerged as an icon of the LGBTQI+ community through six newly commissioned works by artists Alex Hayward, Ciaran Cannon, David Hutchison, GainAgain, Francis Macleod, and Kathryn Hanna. 
The exhibition inaugurates the Perth Museum, which is opening following a £26.5 million ($34.2 million) redevelopment of the former City Hall, an Edwardian building that once hosted events from concerts to political conferences. Upon launch, the museum will also permanently house the Stone of Destiny, one of the U.K.’s most significant relics that is returning to Perthshire for the first time in seven centuries. 
“The unicorn is an enduring symbol of Scotland’s enchanting history, culture, and landscape,” said Malcolm Offord, the U.K government minister for Scotland, in a statement, “so it is fitting that Perth Museum has chosen this as the theme of its first exhibition.” 
See more works in the exhibition below. 
Gold coin of James IV, King of Scots, Edinburgh (1488–1505). © National Museums Scotland.
John Duncan, The Unicorns (1920). © Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection.
Carved oak panel. © National Museums Scotland.
Carved narwhal tusk, England (ca. 1125–1150). © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Detail of a gilded and enameled unicorn holding a shield with the lion rampant, atop a silver baton, part of the regalia of the Usher of the White Rod. © By Permission of the Trustees and Factor and Commissioner of the Walker Trust. Photo: National Museums Scotland.
“Unicorn” is on view at Perth Museum, Perth Museum, St John’s Place, Perth, Scotland, March 30 through September 22. 

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On a frigid day last week, Tony Cox, the pro-skater turned artist turned curator behind Club Rhubarb—the sixth floor, shoes-off, cozy speakeasy of a Lower East Side art gallery with no website—was giving a tour of his new endeavor a few blocks down the street—a still intimate project with a grander scope. Cox has assembled “I Was Only Dreaming,” a group exhibition that serves as a truncated autobiography, a requiem for lost friends, and an art-world riff on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.
It’s the debut show at 1 Ludlow, a compact 19th-century four-story trapezoid corner building set in the thick of Dimes Square, which is ironic as most of the artists come from the creative class who hung out in the area long before the restaurant Dimes started slinging salads.
An installation view of “I Was Only Dreaming.” Courtesy of Club Rhubarb.
“It’s a family vibe. It’s the nineties, it’s downtown,” Cox said of the show as he mounted the stairs to the second floor where it begins. “It’s my coming to New York and landing at Max Fish and Alleged Gallery. I’m the common denominator between all these people. But everyone has a story and is connected. It’s not just random, like I’m just putting all my cool friends in the show. These people are serious about what they’re doing, have a real practice, and it all makes sense together.”
Cox assembled 70 artists and nearly 100 works (paintings, sculpture, design pieces, furniture) in the homey space. It’s a joyful assemblage, and one that resonates more knowing how from-the-heart the curation is. There is a red thread running through all of the artists, stitched through the neighborhood and connected to loved ones here and gone.
Lola Montes, Artichoke Candleholder Italy (2023). Courtesy of Club Rhubarb.
We ascend to what Cox has dubbed the “Renaissance Room.” “I wanted to have a serious room with ceramics,” he said. “The things I normally show are like ‘Tony World.’ So, I curated this whole room around this table by Lola Montes,” a compelling and intricate baroque tableau. The next floor is the “Play Room.” Felix Beaudry’s knitted nude grotesquerie The Glob Mother and Lazy Boy on Bed is accentuated by K8 Hardy’s painted maxi-pads, displayed on a yoga mat on the floor. Cox stops in front of a wall and explains the narrative he shaped with the artwork, eagerly pointing at it piece by piece like an over-enthused weatherman in front of a map.
“So, this is driving in,” he says beginning with a Quentin Debrey photo of the city skyline seen through a passenger side window and ending with works by Raina Hamner and Reza Shafahi. “Now, it’s getting trippy. This is the blotter paper. This is the acid. This is boots turning into vagina boots and then into the sweet potato vagina tree.” (Hamner’s intricate colored pencil drawings have the depth and feel of oil paintings). The narratives overlap and pile up on the various levels.
Raina Hamner, Limbo Bimbo (2021). Courtesy of Club Rhubarb.
Cox lived in Club Rhubard, over on Canal Street as well, until his landlord got wise a few months ago and tore down the sleeping loft (he’s since decamped to an apartment down the street). 1 Ludlow is operating on a similarly DL, need-to-know basis; potential visitors and collectors email or text him to book a visit. So far, it’s operating temporarily and is scheduled to run until January 28. Cox was able to launch his pop-up gallery after Adam Woodward, a passionate Lower East Side preservationist, donated the space to Cox temporarily after purchasing the building (it’s unclear what it’s going to become next but Cox said it will continue as a gallery or stay in the arts continuum, possibly as a residency).
In 1999 or 2000 (the exact year was lost in the subsequent ether), Woodward hosted a proto-show at his Bleecker Street apartment that was the round-about jump-off point for “I Was Only Dreaming” and Cox’s art forays.
No one remembers the title, either, but it was curated by Athena Currey, the best friend, model, and muse of the late fashion designer Ben Cho who passed in 2017. “It was, like, Ben Cho, Brian Degraw, Leo Fitzpatrick, Ian and Marc Hundley, Tara Sims,” Cox recalled. “Years later, I asked her why did you do that? And she said, ‘I wasn’t confident enough to be an artist myself, but I was surrounded by really talented artists, so putting on a show was a way I could participate.’ All this stuff subconsciously sunk in. We had to take our shoes off because the neighbors complained we were too loud. These things that I never even thought about, but went into Club Rhubarb. Showing art in a context where it’s more natural, you could actually see being around it or living with it.”
Michael Hambouz, Stop! Sign (2023). Courtesy of Club Rhubarb.
Cox hopes to stage a Cho retrospective at 1 Ludlow. “He was a mentor and a jack of all trades that could do anything,” he said. “He inspired so many people on so many different levels. He changed the way that I saw everyday materials in terms of my own art practice. When I used to work for him, one time he sat down and he handed me 250 keys and goes, ‘I want you to make a keygle, an eagle that’s made out of keys.’ What in the hell are you talking about? Of course, I couldn’t do his vision. But this thing did get made. Ben sat down and produced an eagle that lays on your chest and goes around your neck. He was basically everyone’s life force at one point. He was DJ-ing, doing stick-and-poke tattoos, and super realistic drawings. On top of it, his clothes were way ahead of the time.”
Cho appears in images that adorn the walls of the exhibition and is seen throughout Leo Fitpatrick’s very personal contribution to the show, Record/Album, which consists of more than 600 personal images arranged in drugstore photo albums. It’s a remarkable and touching document of the scene and era. “It was the height of debauchery for everybody,” Cox says. “So many people are dead or sober in them now.” Cho is pictured tattooing Dan Colen while he eats a sandwich. A few pages later, fat rails of cocaine spell out “Titanic” in front of a toy boat.
Erik Foss, Toys R Us (2023) and Joe Roberts, WTC (2022). Courtesy of Club Rhubarb.
The top floor, “Future Freak,” was inspired by Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and Cox shifts the artworks around from day to day. We are sitting on Marc Hundley’s contribution; he made a lounge area (a sofa, bench and coffee table) for the show which has become a gathering place.
We flip through Fitzpatrick’s albums. Everyone looks pretty modern except for the skinny scarves. “No one was doing anything,” Cox said. “People then didn’t have a real art practice. They were just like, ‘I hang out and do cocaine and I’m young and cute.’ It was an amazing time, but it’s also what  ruined all these like kids. Except Ryan McGinley. Even back then he was a workaholic and worked his ass off.” A lot of It girls and It boys have come and gone. Travis Graves, a pro-skater who released wonderful and obscure music under the moniker Mt. Egypt is in many images. The show is co-dedicated him.
“He was one of my best friends,” Cox said. “He kind of gave up and disappeared and he died at the end of August from alcoholism. These are his ashes.” With that, he pushed a small bottle across the table with a label inscribed “Live well to benefit all and harm none, this time, this earth, this life.”
Alain Levitt, Untitled [Alanna Gabin and Patrick O’Dell] (2000). Courtesy of Club Rhubarb.
“That quote came from Nathan Maddox, who was in Gang Gang Dance. He wrote them on a job application at a health food store three days before he got struck by lightning on a rooftop on Broome Street and passed away. Leo interviewed Travis about 12 years ago and asked what would you want written on your tombstone?  And he said this quote from Nathan. So, each bottle of ashes has this quote.” The exhibition is also dedicated and inspired by agent and photo producer Alanna Gabin who died in 2021.
“She was a big part in starting people’s careers,” Cox said. “She was the one that said, ‘You’re an artist, you need to do exhibitions.’ At the same time, Alanna was a photographer who always put people in front of her instead of herself.” Gabin appears in multiple photos in the show.
Matthew Ronay, Doorbell (2019), Mamali Shafahi, Flocked Mask (2023), and Paul Kopkau, Post labor (2023). Courtesy of Club Rhubarb.
The top floor was formerly a photographer’s studio and has floor-to-ceiling slanted windows with a majestic northward view of the city. Joe Roberts’s WTC works two-fold—it depicts a cockpit aiming toward the Twin Towers as well as the Virgin Mary (depending on the viewer). It’s a heady experience in this neighborhood where one could see the towers fall and it became part of the barricaded zone afterwards. This subtext permeates a lot of this group of artists’ narrative.
A standout piece hangs on the red brick wall above the staircase. Ruminative and moving, it depicts two abstract amorphous shapes mid-embrace and it’s by Cox. Armed in Arms, hand-sewn from ponyskin, lambskin, and cording, is one of the last pieces he made before a 2019 sabbatical due to illness. He took a step back right as fiber art started to trend and is about to make a return.
Tony Cox’s Armed in Arms (2019) hangs above the stairwell in “I Was Only Dreaming.” Photo: Angela Kelley.
In 2025 the Kentucky Museum of Arts and Crafts will host a solo Cox exhibition of new and old work (Cox originally hails from Louisville; it’s a full-circle return). He will also curate the remainder of the space with Club Rhubarb artists. He said, “I have tons of ideas.”
“I Was Only Dreaming” is on view at 1 Ludlow Street (enter at 144 Division Street), through January 28, Thursday through Sunday, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. For booking, email [email protected].

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A solo show at the Whitney is a major achievement for any artist, but in the case of Natalie Ball, whose exhibition “Bilwi naats Ga’niipci” currently occupies the museum’s first-floor gallery, the feat is extra impressive.  
Just over a year ago, Ball wasn’t making art at all. The 44-year-old artist—whose assemblages of Native relics and quotidian objects have earned her numerous grants, solo exhibitions, and an MFA. degree from Yale—was in the middle of a year-and-a-half hiatus from her studio, a break she took to focus on her duties as a newly-elected official on the Klamath Tribal Council in southern Oregon. The hiatus wasn’t necessarily planned, nor was the pivot to politics.
“I love my tribe, I love the spirit of our people, but I never saw myself being an elected official,” Ball explained with a giggle, as if still amused by the title. The charming artist laughs a lot, often at her own quirks, but there’s an edge to her humor that seems at odds with the starchy, buttoned-up vibe of most politicians.
Ball’s 2022 bid for the Tribal Council was inspired by her two youngest children, who had started to grow curious about aspects of territory life that once seemed like incontrovertible truths. “They had questions about why our resources were being taken, why our water was so sick,” Ball recalled. “And I was like, well, shit, I don’t have answers for them. Let me go find [them].” 
Suddenly, art was less urgent. “I just felt like there was an immediacy to council because of how connected we are to our territory, to our water and animals… It was more important,” she said. 
Installation view of “Natalie Ball: bilwi naats Ga’niipci” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Ron Amstutz.
Written in maqlaqsyals, the traditional language of the Klamath and Modoc peoples, “Bilwi naats Ga’niipci” translates to “We smell like the outside.” The title is a variation of a phrase popular in Ball’s corner of Oregon, where the piney aromas of the mountain air always seem to follow one indoors. But at the Whitney, she has a different meaning in mind.  
The artist identifies as Black and Native, but owning both ethnicities has, at times, left her feeling alienated from the communities of each. “To claim my blackness is also to compromise my indigeneity. I’m expected to feel that way, but I’m not doing that. I don’t do that in my life, and I don’t do that in my work,” she said. “I don’t walk that way.”  
The exhibition’s title, she explained, is a “gesture toward accepting and belonging and acknowledging”: you smell like the outside, but you’re welcome to come in. “Because you can’t tell me who I am. I’ll tell you who I am.” 
Natalie Ball, Sponge Bobby & The Fork-ed Horn Dancers (2023). Photo: by Ron Amstutz.
Ball’s sculptures are deeply personal, each a mishmash of found objects that are uniquely meaningful to her. Some materials speak to the artist’s Native or Black heritage; others to her home and family. In Sponge Bobby & The Fork-ed Horn Dancers (2023), for instance, artificial braids adorned with bone beads are tied to strips of elk rawhide and a pair of very stereotypical “Indian” action figures. It’s all mounted atop a dresser once used by her kids. 
The artist, who self-describes as a “hoarder,” is drawn to objects for any number of reasons—their aesthetic characteristics certainly, but also their texture, their history, their smell. For her, no material is off-limits‚ not even the pieces of cultural or sentimental value. Previous works have featured her father’s moccasins, her late auntie’s quilt tops. In the Whitney exhibition’s Dance Me Outside (2023), Ball’s own clothes are stitched to 19th-century newspaper clippings of the Modoc War—a violent fight against the U.S. army that saw hundreds of tribal members displaced from their homelands to Oklahoma. The casualness with which Ball cut up these old and fragile pieces of paper only sharpens her message. 
“Everything is sacred, but nothing is really sacred in the studio,” she explained. “Everything can be cut up and destroyed. Nothing is babied in there.”  
Natalie Ball, Dance Me Outside (2009/2023). Photo: by Ron Amstutz.
The union of Ball’s found items isn’t always elegant either. At the Whitney, materials are stacked and draped, held together with visible twist ties, clamps, or rope. This sense of tenuousness animates her arrangements, but makes them feel tender too, as if the mix of cultural experiences that define the artist are only tethered by a thin thread. 
Nothing about Ball comes off as tenuous. She is strong-willed and confident, wholly comfortable with who she is. But she has learned the importance of showing the seams in her work. “In quilting,” she said, “you’re taught to hide your stitches. But I think that’s where the beauty is—all the stitches and the space and the labor of it. I’m not trying to hide anything. I want you to see how hard I worked!” 
Ball returned to the studio in earnest last year, partly because she had to prepare for the Whitney exhibition and others, but also because her ongoing experience with the Tribal Council motivated her to do so. “Art is faster than an MOU. It can work harder and faster than any meeting where you’re shaking hands,” she said. “I have a lot more respect for my studio and my practice now. I just feel like I honor it a bit more.” 
Ball’s search for answers led her to politics, but politics reopened her to the power of the personal in her work. “I just know that I have to say things louder and harder,” she said. “It’s important that I just get straight to point. I feel like my work is needed. I feel like it’s important. I don’t really know if I understood that before.” 
“Natalie Ball: Bilwi naats Ga’niipci” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, through February 19.

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