Art & Exhibitions

An exceptionally rare 17th-century painting featuring a Black woman and a white woman side by side has gone on public display for the first time at Compton Verney, a historic manor in the English county of Warwickshire. The work is freshly cleaned following an 18-month conservation and research project, which revealed new information about how it reflects the cultural anxieties of its time, as well as deeply embedded racist and misogynistic beliefs.
“It’s an incredibly complicated and troubling painting,” said Jane Simpkiss, the display’s curator, during a walkthrough of the show, on display in the women’s library. “But it’s also unique in British art and allows us to widen our understanding of how people in the 17th century understood issues that are still important today.”
The allegorical painting, Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches, was made in around 1655, most likely for Roger Kenyon, a local politician from Lancashire, in northern England. It is not known why it was commissioned. The two women face each other in sumptuous dress and have their faces adorned with cosmetic patches. The Black woman wears white patches while the white woman wears black ones and appears heavily made up, with her cheeks and lips rouged and her skin likely whitened by ceruse.
Cosmetic patches were used to cover up facial scars and blemishes, perhaps from smallpox or venereal diseases. Often made of silk, satin, or leather, these patches were cut into shapes and applied using animal glue.
Francis Hawkins, Youths Behaviour, or Decency in Conversation Among Men (1663). Photo: Jamie Woodley, © Compton Verney.
The scolding, moralistic tone of the painting is established by the inscription above the women’s heads. It reads: “I black with white bespott: yu white wth blacke this Evill: proceeds from thy proud hart: then take her: Devill.” This strongly worded chastisement describes the use of cosmetic patches as an exercise of pride that will condemn the sinner to hell.
Although the use of cosmetic patches is a practice dating back to ancient times, mid-17th-century England was experiencing a moral panic over excessive female vanity. In 1649, parliament considered but eventually rejected a proposed ban of “the vice of painting and wearing black patches, and immodest dress of women.”
The display at Compton Verney includes two books that provide some context for the painting. One, published in 1663, is Francis Hawkins’s translation of a French conduct guide titled Youths Behaviour, or Decency in Conversation Among Men, which described the use of patches as an “unseemly” custom. It labels a very modestly dressed woman as virtuous while a woman in fashionable but revealing dress and styled hair wearing patches is labelled as “vice.”
Most notably, a very similar image to that in the portrait, again showing a white and a Black woman facing towards each other, appears on page 535 of John Bulwer’s Anthrometamorphosis: the man transform’d or, the artificiall changeling (1653), in which the author characterizes body art as a disfigurement of God’s creation. Opposite the painting’s possible source image, a text reads: “Painting and black-Patches are notoriously known to have been the primitive Invention of the barbarous Painter-stainers of India.”
John Bulwer, Anthrometamorphosis: the man transform’d or, the artificiall changeling (1653). Photo: Jamie Woodley, © Compton Verney.
These anxieties over perceived immorality and foreign influence erupted during a period of radical political and social upheaval in Britain following civil war, the execution of King Charles I in 1649, and Oliver Cromwell’s subsequent rise to power. The painting offers an insight into how those in power “tried to retain a sense of certainty and stability in an incredibly unstable time,” according to Simpkiss.
Initial contemporary readings of Two Women Wearing Cosmetic Patches had interpreted the two women as being of equal status, which would have been highly unusual since most English 17th-century portraits featured Black sitters only in the role of attendants. However, in reality, “the Black woman is supposed to amplify the sins and misdeeds of the white sitter by suggesting that not only are her uses of cosmetic patches vain but also undermining of her English identity by aligning her with the customs of other, non-European nations,” explained Simpkiss.
The unusual painting remained in the Kenyon family until 2021, when it was bought at auction by an overseas buyer. Due to its rarity and significance, the painting was placed under a temporary export bar in 2021, buying time for a U.K. institution to acquire the work for £300,000 ($380,000) and save it for the British public.
Compton Verney is an elegant 18th-century mansion housing a public art gallery with collections of Neapolitan art, Northern European medieval art, British portraiture, and British folk art. It also has a program of temporary exhibitions of historical and contemporary art. More

As 2024 comes to a close, the Artnet News team has taken a moment to reflect on the year in art. From gallery shows and museum exhibitions to biennials and art fairs, we’ve seen it all.
Amid the whirlwind of creativity, some works stood out—whether for their extraordinary craftsmanship, profound meaning, or undeniable artistic virtuosity. Here’s what captured our attention—and our hearts—in 2024.

Leonor Fini, 14 cats in a forest (1962) at Centre Pompidou, Paris
Leonor Fini’s 14 cats in a forest on view at Centre Pompidou’s Surrealism exhibition. Photo by Margaret Carrigan.
I am a childless cat lady and gladly so. Imagine my delight, then, when I came across 14 cats in a forest by fellow offspring-free feline enthusiast Leonor Fini at Centre Pompidou’s phenomenal Surrealism show.
I knew the Italian-Argentine surrealist had at one point kept 23 cats while she was living in Paris and palling around with Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst. Fur has even been found trapped in the paint on some of her canvases (any cat owner can sympathize). Yet this 1962 painting was a departure from the moody, affronting, erotically-tinged portraits of women for which I know Fini best. Instead, soft, impressionistic cat faces appeared like nebulae amid a cosmic-like expanse of riotous color exploding across the canvas. It was like a game trying to find all 14 in the chaos, a game I ended up losing.
I liked the painting well enough for the cat content but what made me love it was its sense of play—not only implied by the fact that Fini seemed to be having a laugh by painting some of her cats, but also in its invitation to the viewer to simply enjoy the act of looking. As someone who sees a lot of art, it’s amazing how often I forget to do that.
—Margaret Carrigan

“Andrea Chung: Between Too Late and Too Early” at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami
Andrea Chung, Sea Change (2017). Photo courtesy of the artist and Tyler Park Presents Gallery.
Miami Art Week is both the best and worst way to end each year, a mad dash to see as much art (and go to as many parties—and hopefully the beach) as you can during a market-fueled, increasingly corporate-sponsored circus. But my first-ever trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, to see Andrea Chung’s revelatory survey show “Between Too Late and Too Early,” was a reminder that the week can be an opportunity to see some truly amazing work by artists from around the world.
I was stopped in my tracks by the show’s opening gallery, where four walls are covered with a site-specific, monumental mural made from cyanotypes on watercolor paper. I have always loved this early form of photography, but here its beauty serves as a soft landing as you dive into Chung’s challenging themes of the history of colonialism and slavery in the Caribbean, as well as the present-day threat of climate change.
In both an apt metaphor for this ugly past as well as a warning for the future, the watery scene depicted in the work, titled Sea Change, is full of invasive lionfish that are devastating the region’s natural habitat. The wall text for another body of work references the first book of photography ever printed, of cyanotypes—but points out that the artist, Anna Atkins, was able to finance the project because her father-in-law and husbands owned plantations in Jamaica.
The show makes clear that Chung is a master of balancing beauty and pain, sorrow and hope. A sculpture of a circle of life-size hands, also in cobalt blue, seems to reach out from under the waves, suggesting drowning bodies. But the 2022 work, “If they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away” isn’t just referencing the kidnapped Africans thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. It is also about the modern Afrofuturist myth of Drexciya, where those who died on the journey actually forged their own underwater civilization—a theme that was also at the heart of my pick for best work in 2023.
—Sarah Cascone

Haegue Yang, Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun (2024), at Hayward Gallery, London
Installation view of Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun (2024) at “Haegue Yang: Leap Year.” Photo by Mark Blower, courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
In his atrocious review of Haegue Yang’s survey show “Leap Year,” the Guardian‘s critic Jonathan Jones complained that the South Korean artist’s art does not “express human pain or longing.” Reading his jarring comments after seeing the artist’s first U.K. survey show at London’s Hayward Gallery, I questioned my own senses for a moment. Was I hallucinating when I felt overwhelming pain and longing sitting in front of the colossal venetian blinds installation Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun, the new commission featured at the exhibition? As I watched shadows cast by the blinds moving hypnotically, illuminated by two spotlights on both sides dancing but out-of-sync to a haunting classical score, my skin prickled with goosebumps, my heart felt heavy. I had the urge to rush over to read the wall text and Google who “Yun” was.
Only later did I learn that Yun refers to the Korean-born composer and political dissident Isang Yun, and the piece of classical music was his 1977 work Double Concerto, inspired by a Korean folktale about two star-crossed lovers condemned to eternal separation, reunited only once a year across the galaxy. The themes of excruciating pain of separation and longing for a reunion, aren’t they universal and highly relevant to the very divided world we are living in today, that the prospect of unity, politically and metaphorically, is beyond our reach? Of course, I was fortunate enough to have Yang explaining to me the background and the research she did behind the work. But even without that, shouldn’t we be at least curious about an artwork, ask questions, and draw our own interpretations?
My encounter with Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun was the most memorable art viewing experience of the year. Yes, the slats of venetian blinds (almost) made me cry, and I liked it that I was able to feel my feelings.
—Vivienne Chow

“Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala” at Asia Society, New York
Noŋgirrŋa Marawili, Baratjala (2018) and Baratjala (2018) in “Maḏayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala” at Asia Society. Photo by Ben Davis.
A historic, fantastic gift of an exhibition, with 74 canvasses ranging across the 20th century right up to the present. Each of these works, painted on rugged eucalyptus bark and shown in vertical panels, has the same restricted palette of colors, all dense black and white and rust colors, the pigments made from earth and painted with delicate human-hair brushes.
They are, in one way, about preserving tradition. In another, they are not just modern but modernist, the practice dating from less than a century ago in the tiny community of Yirrkala, in the north of Australia. Then, traditional sacred tattoo designs began to be transposed into physical objects, the artists of Yirrkala innovating new ways to communicate, preserve, and relate to the world through art.
And when you stuck with these images, you found a lot of individual personality within the densely patterned designs. Within the vocabulary of bark art, you see a great flexibility and lots of flourish. You found proof that you can preserve a world and build a new world at the same time, or maybe proof that these needn’t be opposed.
—Ben Davis

Caroline Amond, Incognito Tab (2024), at ChaShaMa open studios, New York
Caroline Amond. Incognito Tab (2024). Photo courtesy of Caroline Amond
In October, I was invited to the Brooklyn Army Terminal for an open studios event with ChaShaMa, a nonprofit organization that aims to provide affordable workspaces to visual artists. (For disclosure, I was invited by the young artist Caroline Amond who I attended school with at Brooklyn College—where she graduated in May with her MFA.) I had seen her work previously in school but was seriously impressed with how she scaled up the size of her work and started exploring more with the paint on her canvases with her first real studio space.
Her work is unique. Amond is trained as a medical illustrator, which appears as a motif in her personal work. Her photorealistic eyes gaze straight at the viewer from highlighter-yellow backgrounds. The eyes stand in stark contrast to the other simple forms in the work, reminiscent of the Microsoft Office virtual assistant Clippy, an anthropomorphic paper clip. Recently, Amond has been experimenting more with having the eyes not look directly at the viewer—but one of her best pieces uses the eyes to give off a very Olympia-like quality. It features one of her eyed-characters seemingly reclining against the yellow backdrop while holding an electric toothbrush beside a pile of empty Mountain Dew cans.
—Adam Schrader

Srijon Chowdhury, Eye (Birth), 2022, at P.P.O.W., New York
Srijon Chowdhury, Eye (Birth) (2022). Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W.
Earlier this fall, while rushing to an interview, I was stopped in my tracks by a painting hanging in P.P.O.W.’s storefront window on Broadway. The painting, titled Eye (Birth) (2022), and by artist Srijon Chowdhury, is a visceral, momentous depiction of childbirth. A mother appears, naked in a birthing, her face in ecstatic pain as the baby emerges. Two figures, a midwife, and perhaps the father, flank her like saints or angels.
This sublimely intense scene, meanwhile, is painted, tondo-like, in the iris of a massive eye, which occupies the rest of the canvas. This push and pull of scale and place, viewer, and subject, somehow capturing the out-of-body experience of witnessing new life. Chowdhury, who is based in Portland, Oregon, paints with sinewy, prismatic gestures and in saturated jewel tones that his paintings often take on this metaphysical beauty.
Eye (Birth) was on view at P.P.O.W. in “Tapestry” the Bangladeshi-American artist’s debut with the gallery, earlier this fall, and it a remarkable exhibition of painting and sculptures, weaving together moments from the artist’s life, philosophy, religion, plant life, architecture and art history. Chowdhury has a way for conveying both the bloody and beautiful parts of life with a magical potency that I felt at times like I was walking within the pages of an illuminated manuscript.
—Katie White 

Thomas Houseago, Sunrise (2024)  at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York
Artist Thomas Houseago leads a tour of his show “Night Sea Journey” at Levy Gorvy Dayan, September 2024. Photo by Eileen Kinsella
I knew before attending an early September walkthrough of Thomas Houseago’s show at Levy Gorvy Dayan on the Upper East Side, that the artist had not had a show in ten years. He has been extremely open in interviews, including in an extensive 2021 interview with Artnet’s Kate Brown, about his mental health struggles and efforts to heal from trauma sustained at an early age.
The show, and hearing Houseago speak about his work, was a true revelation and inspiration. The new works include raw, massive sculptures made of a variety of materials ranging from bronze, wood, rebar, brass, and plaster, that reference archetypes and mythology and are beyond intriguing to look at and move around. The artist led a large group walkthrough of this massive, multi-floor sprawling show all while talking about how art-making and intense therapy and the support of his late friend Danny Smith helped him survive, when it was anything but ensured.
The layout from first floor to the top, which is taken over by a giant room-filling mural, mirrors Houseago’s odyssey from darkness to light, the artist explained. The gorgeous tapestry painting that took over the skylit top floor—with deep magenta moons and swirling fiery suns— marks the culmination of the show. He explained it was painted en plein air on the Malibu oceanfront and symbolizes his long journey to healing.
—Eileen Kinsella

Sanya Kantarovsky, Secret Channels (2023), at Frieze New York/Michael Werner Gallery
Sanya Kantarovsky, Secret Channels , 2023. © The Artist. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery and Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris.
It is infrequent that I will encounter a sublime experience of art at an art fair—usually my time in the halls of various Friezes and Basels is spent too harried and overstimulated to really see anything. However, at Frieze New York this past Spring, a painting at Michael Werner’s booth was so powerfully engaging that it surpassed the hyper-commercial and over-crowded context it was shown in: Sanya Kantarovsky’s Secret Channels. 
The painting reminded me of a cliche in movies, I believe it’s called the “Kubrick stare.” Some of the most haunting stills from his classics like Clockwork Orange and The Shining see the protagonist staring straight into the camera, tilting their face down, and grinning. The swirling, cloaked figure in Kantarovsky’s painting seems like she’s teeing up a particularly threatening smile by twisting her own face with her hands to show extra teeth.
The painting has a real narrative to it: Who is this figure serving such a maniacal smile to? How is a flower coming out of her head? It’s confusing, macabre, and highly alluring. Enough to make a stressed fair reporter take a few moments to recover from beholding it.
—Annie Armstrong

Heecheon Kim, Studies (2024), at the Atelier Hermès, Seoul
Heecheon Kim’s two-channel video Studies. © Photo Sangtae KIM / Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
Student wrestlers have gone missing, and an investigation is underway, as rumors fills the air. That’s the basic plot of Studies (2024), an enigmatic, genuinely frightening two-channel short film by Heecheon Kim, who is one of South Korea’s best video artists, 35 this year. In the past, Kim has drawn on video games and face-altering apps to produce gimlet-eyed, bracingly contemporary work. In Studies, he toys with the conventions of a far older cultural form, the horror movie, mulling how to shoot a convincing one in an era of ultra-high-res cameras and omnipresent technology. Discussing his approach here would spoil it, but let’s just say this: You watch awful things unfold, even as you can’t quite understand them, and the dread just keeps building.
—Andrew Russeth

Dod Procter, Black and White (c.1932) at Pallant House, Chichester
Dod Procter, Black and White installed in “The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain” at Pallant House in Chichester, England. The painting was loaned from Southampton City Art Gallery. Photo: Jo Lawson-Tancred.
I came across this painting in the exhibition “The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain” at Pallant House in Chichester, England. I love Dutch still lifes, where you can really luxuriate in every textural detail of the shiny shellfish, bulbous grapes, aged cheese, dripping melons, drooping flowers, and the odd errant insect. Modern still lifes with just a few old apples and a vase fail to impress in quite the same way, so I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the Pallant House show.
In the interests of not paying extortionate fees for iCloud, I have tried to be more sparing when it comes to photographing art but there have been a few canvases that I could not stop myself capturing as a keepsake. I remember leaving the gallery that contained this painting Black and White by Dod Procter and then returning to look at it again. I think the artist, better known for her rather languid female figures, deserves more admiration.
Whereas most still lifes speak to grand existential themes like our inevitable mortality, this chicly monochromatic arrangement of glove, silk scarf, and muff tossed onto a side table speaks only to a moment of fleeting fabulosity. It makes me imagine stepping out of the crisply cold air into a Christmas party and throwing off my accessories as I manoeuvre towards the bar for a vodka martini. Carefree, elegant, with a touch of Cruella de Vil. What more could you want? Instead of yet another dreary memento mori, I would prefer to hang on my wall this reminder to live glamorously while we still can.
—Jo Lawson-Tancred

“Arte Povera” at Bourse de Commerce, Paris
Installation view of the exhibition “Arte Povera,” Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2024. ©Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo by Florent Michel/11h45/Pinault Collection.
Since I included Francois Pinault’s two shows in Venice in our “Worst of 2024” list, it’s only fair to give the billionaire collector credit where credit is due: Pinault’s survey of Arte Povera at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.
I visited the show during the Art Basel week and found it riveting. It succeeded precisely where the shows at Palazzo Grassi and Punta de la Dogana failed. Curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev leaned into the building’s grand minimalism. Displayed against this backdrop, Arte Povera’s “poor” materials created an exquisite tension and echoes. The rotunda installation made me gasp. Each room was a discovery, even when some works were familiar.
Like the two Venetian venues, the Bourse is a historic building. It dates back five centuries. At one point it was an open-air wheat exchange; in 1812 it was covered with a spectacular metal and glass dome. In the late 20th century, it housed the Paris chamber of commerce. The Bourse was also renovated by Tadao Ando, a master of mixing the minimal with the grand.
Christov-Bakargiev selected 50 major works from Pinault’s Arte Povera trove of 150 objects. It’s a lot to take in, but the show is clearly laid out, giving generous space to each of the 13 key artists.
We encounter works made with “poor” materials such as potatoes and coal, piles of coffee grains and clothing. There are trees and condensation and neons. It’s radical and elegant in equal measure—the chord Italians know how to strike consistently and effortlessly.
—Katya Kazakina More

One of the earliest mentions of Thrace appears in The Iliad with King Rhesos arriving to fight for Troy. His armor is “a wonder to behold,” his horses are a dazzling white, and the accompanying chariot is wrought with silver and gold.
Though Rhesos’s cameo is short-lived—he is promptly defeated along with his men by Odysseus and Diomedes—contained within Homer’s lines are characteristics that will define the Thracians for the next two millennia.
First off, Thrace’s wealth. Homer was writing in the 8th-century B.C.E. and already its abundant minerals and skill in horse-breeding were well-known. Second, the bravery of its soldiers. Third, the region’s delicate position between empires of West and East (Troy, being a satellite of the Hittite empire). Just how Thrace navigated this tricky geography (and was changed by it) is the focus of an exhibition at the Getty Villa Museum in Los Angeles.
Installation view of “Ancient Thrace and the Classical World” at the Getty Villa Museum. Photo: © 2024 J. Paul Getty Trust.
It’s the third show in a series from the museum aiming to place the classical world in context (Egypt and Persia came first). As the museum’s director Timothy Potts rightly noted, many visitors will be meeting the Thracians for the first time. So, big picture: who were they? In short, tribes made up of skilled horsemen, metalworkers, and warriors who had migrated from the Eurasian Steppe and settled the Balkan area from roughly 1700 B.C.E to 300 C.E.
hree-Part Vessel from 1500 to 1000 B.C.E. Photo: Todor Dimitrov.
The key, curators Jens Daehner and Sara E. Cole said, is to think of Thrace as a region that was inhabited by a range of groups or tribes, who were uniformly labelled as “Thracian” by Greeks. Continued contact with Greek settlers began in the 600s B.C.E. through trading posts set up to handle the region’s metals. While Thracians did develop a written language, it hasn’t been deciphered, which means much of what we known of Thrace derives from Greek sources. We know what the Greeks thought of the Thracians, Cole noted, but piecing together Thracian history is a challenge: “how would the Thracians have defined themselves and their own culture?”
Female Bust, Possibly a Thracian Mother Goddess (200–100 B.C.E.). Photo: Todor Dimitrov.
Thankfully the archaeological record is rich and the exhibition, which has drawn from 14 Bulgarian institutions in addition to Greek and Romanian loans, features treasures from some of the region’s greatest finds in the 20th-century. There are terracotta jugs with galloping Thracians, carved marble reliefs, gilded shell containers, gaudy golden drinking vessels shaped like Athena’s head, and more besides.
Seismic change arrived in the region when the Persian Empire moved into Thrace in 513 B.C.E., eventually using it as a springboard to launch their ill-fated invasion of Greece. In addition to subjugating some tribes and conscripting workers to build the capital of Persepolis, Thracian peoples fought for the Persians in the Peloponnesian War. The political vacuum that was created by Xerxes’s defeat and retreat was filled by the Odrysians, which heralded two centuries of relative unity.
Portrait of King Seuthes III who reigned 310 – 300 B.C.E. that was found in the Golyama Kosmatka burial mound. Photo: Todor Dimitrov.
The Persians might have departed but their fondness for crafting gold and silver objects lingered. This is shown through the lavish goods found in burial mounds from the 5th to the 3rd centuries B.C.E. Most notable, perhaps, is the burial chamber of Seuthes III, a sprawling necropolis that excavated in 2004 and brought forth bronze and silver armors and a rich assembly of luxury objects.
Goods like these are what remain most pressingly from the territory in the eastern Mediterranean—they offer a “sense of awe,” Daehner said, “at the sheer beauty of luxury metalwork coming out of Thrace.”
“Ancient Thrace and the Classical World: Treasures from Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece” is on view at the Getty Villa Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades, California, through March 3, 2025. More

Basquiat. After astronomical auction prices and endless sneaker collaborations, the artist’s name most readily evokes SoHo streets and Palladium parties. For those truly in the know, though, that name can also elicit Engadin alpines.
Hauser and Wirth’s latest St. Moritz exhibition “Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin” joins recent attempts to highlight Basquiats lesser-known periods in locales like Los Angeles and Modena.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, See (Lake) (1983). Photo: Jon Etter, © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York, Courtesy Private Collection.
In addition to foregrounding Basquiat’s Swiss affinity for the first time, however, “Engadin” also asserts that this idyll became an imposing force within his work. “Engadin” features more than a dozen paintings, works on paper, and even a nine-panel assemblage all created by the artist in the region. Many works are on loan from private collectors.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, To Repel Ghosts (1986). Photo: Reto Pedrini Photography, © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York, Nicola Erni Collection.
Basquiat visited Switzerland 13 times, courtesy of his art dealer, Bruno Bischofberger. The artist made his first trip out in September 1982, just one year after his first New York show, to attend the reception for his debut at Bischofberger’s Männedorf, Switzerland gallery—“only to discover that no opening had been scheduled,” Christie’s recalled.
“Instead, Bischofberger took the artist on a field trip to his birthplace, a mountain village called Appenzell,” Christie’s continued. “Basquiat even painted a piece about the trip, Bruno in Appenzell (1982).”
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Skifahrer (1983). Photo: Thomas Hennocque, © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York Collection Carmignac.
That same year, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever participate in Documenta. “From then on, Jean-Michel Basquiat often visited me in Switzerland, where he particularly liked it,” Bischofberger, who contributed to the exhibition’s catalog, remarked in its release. “About half a dozen times in Zurich and exactly seven times in St. Moritz, four of them in the summer.”
Installation view of “Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin” at Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich, © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.
There, preeminent Basquiat scholar Dieter Buchart mused, “the contrast between the pulsating life, the clubs, the street noise, and the breakneck speed of the metropolis New York and the ‘discovery of slowness” likely spurred Basquiat’s fondness for the Engadin—even if his experiences were not always serene.”
Apparently, Basquiat was so eager to paint that he mucked up a custom mattress that Bischofberger’s wife had bought, just because it was in the garage he was using as a studio. But, despite occasional spats with his dealer, Basquiat also made an entire series of slightly unsettling paintings as Christmas presents for the couple.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, X-mas Painting for Bruno (1984). Photo: © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York Bischofberger Collection, Männedorf-Zurich.
Other tensions also surface throughout “Engadin.” In Bull Show Two (1983), the artist appears to unpack complicated feelings around the local Toggenburg Bull Show. Big Snow (1984) references Jesse Owens, the American track and field champion whose gold medal was withheld due to the color of his skin during the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Big Snow (1984). Photo: © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York, Private Collection.
Moments of definite levity appear throughout the exhibition, too, in works like See (Lake) (1983) and Skifaher (1983). Basquiat made both for a dinner with collectors at the Bischofbergers’ hunting lodge.
It was here, too, that Bischofberger proposed Basquiat’s collaborative artworks with Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente, after Bischofberger watched the artist make a drawing for his daughter. One such work appears in “Engadin,” offering the most compelling point in Hauser and Wirth’s argument that Switzerland offered Basquiat more than just a relaxing change of pace.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Francesco Clemente, In Bianco (1984). Photo: © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York© Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz Picasso —FABA —2024.
“Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin” is on view at Hauser and Wirth, Via Serlas 22, 7500 St. Moritz, Switzerland, through March 29, 2025. More

The mighty Alhambra on the outskirts of Granada in southern Spain is a monument to the possibilities of merging artistic traditions. Its sprawling complex of buildings, accumulated over the centuries according to whoever was in power, belongs to both Islamic and Christian architectural styles. A relatively late addition was the magnificent 16th-century Palace of Charles V, of which the central courtyard is a particularly exquisite example of the achievements of the Italian Renaissance.
In an exciting tribute to the unceasingly generative potential of juxtaposing the past with modern and contemporary art, the palace is currently housing the exhibition “Reflections: Picasso/Koons at the Alhambra” until March 16, 2025. This unusual, one-off installation of just five works—three by Koons and two by Picasso—is the first in a new exhibition series titled “Reflections” that was organized by the Picasso Museum Málaga. It will take place at historically significant sites across the Spanish artist’s native region of Andalusia.
The surprising, even brazen, choice to inaugurate the series by pairing Picasso with ever-divisive celebrity artist Jeff Koons feels like a declaration of intent to go big. It is justified by the fact that both artists were inspired by some of the same ancient motifs, in particular that of the Three Graces.
Installation of Jeff Koons, Three Graces (2016-22) in “Reflections: Picasso / Koons at the Alhambra.” Photo courtesy of Museo Picasso Málaga.
And I must admit, being a Koons skeptic, that I left more convinced than I had arrived. This is primarily thanks to the exhibition’s centerpiece: a fantastically gaudy version of the Three Graces based on a Meissen porcelain figurine. It is placed in one of the courtyard’s empty niches by happy accident since it was too hefty to fit through the windows of the unremarkable and confined gallery space for which it was originally intended.
At the show’s opening earlier this month, as he saw the work installed for the first time, Koons said: “It really felt like the courtyard was collecting all the energy of the universe, just bringing everything in, and functioned like a jet engine so that it just comes out so much more powerful.”
This is a classic example of how Koons claims to perceive things. I didn’t feel unusually swept up by cosmic energies, but I did find the interruption of such a refined classical setting of spare ornamentation and orderly harmony by a glistening piece of aggrandized tat to be excitingly perverse. And hard not to love.
I see it all as a part of Koons’s plan to brashly demolish hierarchies that insist one kind of art is more “fine” than another. Over the years, he has certainly succeeded in offending sophisticated sensibilities, if not big wallets, with his infamous balloon animals. In 2019, the $91.9 million Rabbit set a record for the highest-selling work by a living artist.
Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Standing Woman) (2014) in “Reflections: Picasso / Koons at the Alhambra.” Photo courtesy of Museo Picasso Málaga.
The second part of the show sees the remaining works exhibited inside the Museum of Fine Arts of Granada’s gallery dedicated to art from the late Gothic to Baroque period. Once again, Koons steals the show.
His Gazing Ball (Standing Woman) (2014) cuts a striking figure against the polychromatic wood statue behind. It was based on a plaster cast of a copy of a Roman sculpture once owned by Picasso but with a sly Koonsian twist: the classical figure balances a blue gazing ball on one shoulder. These kitsch ornaments muddle clear delineations between high and low culture: in medieval Italy they were produced by skilled craftsmen and highly coveted, but nowadays, they typically decorate suburban backyards.
Although, as Koons acknowledged, his practice of playing with copies of existing objects to subvert our expectations is more in the Duchampian tradition, he has also linked the tendency to Picasso’s use of everyday discarded materials like newspaper clippings or a piece of old rope to make collages. He praised “this acceptance of the world around us.”
“I work with things that preexist as a way of practicing acceptance,” he said. “If we look at everything as being perfect in its own being, everything is available to us, absolutely everything. If we segregate, if we make judgments, we limit the opportunities.”
Installation of Pablo Picasso, The Three Graces (1923) and Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Standing Woman) (2014) in “Reflections: Picasso / Koons at the Alhambra.” Photo courtesy of Museo Picasso Málaga.
Though unfailingly friendly and polite, Koons is essentially inscrutable. As he gazed into the middle distance and gave a rousing speech about the spiritual or emotional effects of his work, it was not hard to imagine him excelling as a cult leader.
His use of pre-existing objects in art is, apparently, ultimately about “trying to communicate also that people understand that it’s about themselves, that they’re perfect in their own being. Everything’s about this moment, moving forward and transcending. When we learn to accept ourselves, then we’re able to accept other people.”
Hanging nearby, Picasso’s The Three Graces (1923) is not one of his standouts but, with its draped female figures posed in a listless contrapposto, it makes a suitable comparison with Koons’s work. Both artists were inspired by the same Raphael painting of the Three Graces.
“I feel this communal sense of gathering,” said Koons of the Picasso work. “We want to gather around it, not just one viewer, but as a community. You can feel that we’re all invited. It represents coming in.”
The final two works in the exhibition are Koons’s Gazing Ball (David Intervention of the Sabine Women) (2015–16), a copy of French painter Jacques-Louis David’s celebrated 1799 painting but with another blue gazing ball planted in the midst of the main action, and Picasso’s Head of a Warrior (1933). They are paired because the sculpture echoes the painting’s depiction of Romulus’s face in profile wearing a Spartan-style helmet.
Installation of Pablo Picasso, Head of a Warrior (1933) and Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (David Intervention of the Sabine Women) (2015-16) in “Reflections: Picasso / Koons at the Alhambra.” Photo courtesy of Museo Picasso Málaga.
Koons has produced many versions of his “Gazing Ball” idea using famous paintings from art history, including the Mona Lisa and one by Picasso. He believes that the reflective balls introduce an infinite new dimension, greatly enhancing the dimensionality already achieved by Renaissance painters, thanks to their adoption of three-point perspective. After all, those Old Masters probably never imagined that one day the viewer could actually enter the picture plane.
“I see the gazing balls as really representing everything,” Koons explained. “At first you look at it and it affirms you, the viewer. But [then] you notice the painting is also affirmed because it’s reflected into the ball.” In this way, you celebrate the artist and “all the things the artist enjoyed, loved, and celebrated. I’m able to give homage to the artist and at the same time Leonardo can be giving it up to [Paolo] Uccello and all the artists that he enjoyed.”
How we are influenced by what we see—and in turn influence others—is brought to the fore by this show, and brings Koons towards some more philosophical musings. “All culture is really a graffiti of some form,” he suggested. “Of us absorbing culture, being changed by whatever that culture is, and experiencing synapses in our brain, developing and becoming a slightly different human being, having some form of transcendence, and then having an effect on the world.”
Koons insisted several times that we are transcending and, though he didn’t quite specify what, his work pulls the centuries-long accumulative creative effort that is the Alhambra into the 21st century. The overall effect is, indeed, a little transcendent.
“Reflections: Picasso/Koons at the Alhambra” is on view at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain through March 16. More

Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, has been thinking about that banana recently. You know, the one that was bought from a fruit seller outside Sotheby’s, duct taped to a wall, flogged for $6.2 million, and devoured before the press in Hong Kong.
The last time the eccentricities of the art world grabbed mainstream attention, Beeple was to thank, his Everydays: the First 5000 Days (2021) prompting that tired and essential question: what is art? This hasn’t happened with Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, Winkelmann said. Yes, the work is absurd and grossly expensive, but no one’s saying it’s not art. Nor has it escaped his attention that Justin Sun, the banana’s gleeful owner, was Everydays’s under bidder.
“A hundred years ago, we decided you could turn over a toilet and call it art, but I draw pictures every day on the computer with the sole purpose of them being art and people say it’s not art. How could that possibly be?”
To be clear, this is bafflement, not bitterness, speaking. On the afternoon that we meet via video call to “walk through” his full U.S. debut exhibition at the Gibbes Museum of Art, Winkelmann is expansive and earnest, like a nerdy teacher leading an afterschool robotics program, albeit with spicier vocabulary.
At the Gibbes, he’s on adopted home turf, having moved to Charleston, South Carolina, seven years ago to forever forget Wisconsin winters. The 1905 Beaux Arts building certainly makes for an old-world backdrop, an “extremely compelling juxtaposition,” said Angela Mack, the museum’s president. Two of Winkelmann’s three sculptures are housed inside the rotunda gallery, whose Tiffany-style glass dome and pink and white porcelain tiling seem more accustomed to hosting southern weddings than discussions of social discord and our technological future.
Look past the gawky pop culture characters (Jabba the Hutt, Pepe the Frog, et al.) and the irreverence (phallic humor, gore) and you remember that these are Beeple’s themes. In his vitrine-like cubes, which glow on all sides with screens, Winkelmann seems to have found a medium to carry his concerns into the physical world. Unlike traditional sculpture, however, these are flat and rotate. The reason is simple: Winkelmann dislikes walking, he wants to “sit down and zoom in,” which makes sense for an artist who doesn’t pace and hunch, chisel in hand, but clicks, scans, and squints.
Beeple, S.2122 (2023). Photo: courtesy Mike Winkelmann.
And there’s much to squint at. As with his Everydays, the kinetic sculptures are created using Cinema 4D, a video game and special effects software. You don’t look, you watch. Take S.2122 (2023), which conjures a colony in the ocean a century into the future. It’s a thing of perpetual motion. Drones glide by, workers march across platforms, vegetation sways, the day’s light shifts imperceptibly (spoiler alert: it runs on three one-minute loops).
As with all the sculptures, it’s an editable work-in-progress. Every five years S.2122’s water level will rise, leading the submerged sections and their inhabitants to adapt via new technologies. Is this optimism? No, more a nuanced view of the future based on the present, Winkelmann said. “I don’t think the future is going to necessarily good or bad, but it is going to be very weird.”
Beeple, Exponential Growth (2023). Photo: courtesy Mike Winkelmann.
The work was bought for $9 million at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2023 by the Deji Art Museum, a new institution in Nanjing, China, which boasts Hans Ulrich Obrist as a senior advisor. In November, the museum hosted the world’s first major Beeple show, which opened with Winkelmann executing his 6406th Everyday image live. Deji also commissioned a sculpture that riffed on “Nothing Still About Still Lifes,” a show that brought together three centuries of Chinese and European flower paintings.
The result is Exponential Growth (2023), on loan at the Gibbes, a hyper-dense column of ever-changing flowers. Though they appear drawn from life, Winkelmann played god, inventing some 30 species by selecting for bulb size and petal count. Just as plants bloom and decay, these grow and recede, creating a tableau that never looks the same.
Beeple, Tree of Knowledge (2023). Photo: courtesy Mike Winkelmann.
It’s a state of flux carried on in Tree of Knowledge, the exhibition’s third piece. Here, though, the input isn’t flower dimensions, but our news cycle. Nearby, there’s a control panel featuring a dial and a red button under lock. Turn up the dial and live information (news feeds, stock ticker, crypto price) gradually overwhelms the screens before breaking into fits of glitch. Press the button and it burns to cinders, a violence only Tree’s owner can initiate. Each destruction is registered on the blockchain and after 666 times, it remains forever charred and dystopic.
The control panel from Beeple’s work, Tree of Knowledge. Photo: Gibbes Museum of Art/ MCG Photography.
As a creature of the internet, speed has long been essential to Beeple’s practice. Everydays are spat out in roughly 40 minutes, meaning he stirs debate on the latest spasm of the zeitgeist in real time. Tree recreates something of this experience for the gallery. When Winkelmann turns up the dial during our conversation, Bernie Sanders holds forth, Malibu burns, and Taylor Swift invites Caitlin Clark to a football game. This interactivity is the future of digital art, Winkelmann said, who anticipates humans coming together to watch the machine “do things.”
Tree’s more immediate point is that we can choose how far we want the chaos and stress of media to be our reality. We each have our own dial, Winkelmann noted. Is this a creed the artist lives by? “I could do a better job of putting the phone down,” he said with a smile. “This is an analogy that I need just as much as everybody else.”
“Beeple” is on view at the Gibbes Museum of Art, 135 Meeting St, Charleston, South Carolina, through April 27, 2025. More

At Buckingham Palace’s King’s Gallery, is a show of Italian Renaissance royalty. “Drawing the Italian Renaissance” is filled with masterpieces from the epoch by some of the most famous artists who have ever lived.
The exhibition, containing around 160 works made between 1450 and 1600 (more than 30 of which are making their public exhibition debut), aims to reframe the significance of drawing for Renaissance masters. Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian are on view in a show that exemplifies the exquisite and layered history of drawing during the Italian Renaissance. The artworks all come from the Royal Collection, belonging to the British crown, which has one of the world’s largest collections of Renaissance drawings.
Long believed to simply be part of the drafting process, the curators at the King’s Gallery are now highlighting the importance of drawings as finished artworks in their own right, showcasing their individual beauty.
Here is the backstory behind five key Renaissance masterpieces now on display at Buckingham Palace.

Raphael, The Three Graces, c. 1517-18
Raphael, The Three Graces, c.1517–18. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust.
Raphael created The Three Graces as a preparatory chalk study for a fresco in Rome’s Villa Farnesina, the suburban villa built in 1506 for Agostino Chigi, the banker of Pope Julius II. The study shows one model in three poses, and Raphael was one of very few artists of his day to work directly with a nude female model. The fresco, the Wedding Feast of Cupid and Psyche, shows the marriage festivities of the Roman god of love and goddess of the soul. In attendance are the Graces—three daughters of the king of the gods, Jupiter—Euphrosyne, Aglaia, and Thalia. While the fresco (one of two) was executed by the artist’s assistants (the works were met with criticism following their sloppy execution), this preparatory study was done by the artist’s own hand. Offsets, images created by transferring a pre-existing image onto a new canvas or page, were made of many of the drawings Raphael prepared for the Villa Farnesina frescoes, and damage is visible to the upper right-hand corner where damp paper was applied to the chalk.

Michelangelo, The Virgin and Child with the Young St John, c. 1532
Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Virgin and Child with the young Baptist, c.1532. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust.
No one is entirely certain about the reason why Michelangelo created this black chalk drawing as it does not directly correlate to another sculpted or painted project completed by the master. This may suggest that the drawing was designed as a completed work in its own right, and it is done in delicate detail. Perhaps it formed part of Michelangelo’s private religious practice. There is pentimenti, evidence of earlier marks which the artist has drawn over and re-shaped, as well as evidence of the time and dedication Michelangelo took to end up with his final design. On the reverse of the drawing is another design, this time of a single figure, but it is not believed to have been created by Michelangelo. It has been speculated that Michelangelo created the drawing for another artist to use it as a model for a sculptural group.

Att. Titian, Ostrich, c.1550
Attributed to Titian, An ostrich, c.1550. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust.
Native to Africa, it would have been rare for an Italian to have seen a living ostrich. However, the detail and convincingness of the proportions of this drawing, attributed to Titian, suggest that it was drawn from life, or certainly based on real exposure to the flightless bird. Ostriches had been imported to the Italian port of Venice—one of the most powerful trading cities in the world at that time where Titian spent the majority of his life, dying there in 1576. The drawing was cut down to reduce its borders so that the depiction could be transferred, although the location of the final artwork which was the result of this process—and whether it survives at all—is unknown. The Flemish baroque Anthony van Dyck made a copy of the drawing in his “Italian Sketchbook” which he made while visiting Italy in the 1620s.
Alessandro Allori, Fortitude, Prudence and Vigilance, c. 1578
Alessandro Allori, A design for an overdoor with Virtues, c.1578. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust.
Allori, a painter who was born in Florence in 1535, created this study for a commission by Francesco de’ Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The design, painted as a fresco at the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano, shows three of the embodiments of the virtues: Fortitude, defeating a dragon and holding a lion by its head; Prudence, who sits upon a world globe with a mirror and serpent; and Vigilance, who stands on top of a set of military trophies holding a small sun above her head. These motifs were chosen to symbolize the power of the Medici, a powerful banking and military family who ruled Florence for almost 300 years between the 15th and 18th centuries. The fresco for the Salone di Leo X was Allori’s largest secular project, and this drawing was a study for an overdoor. The decoration of the Salone was abandoned in 1521 just a year after it began, after Pope Leo X died unexpectedly from pneumonia, and 57 years later Allori was commissioned to finally complete it.

Leonardo, A Costume Study for a Masque, c. 1580
Leonardo da Vinci, A costume study for a masque, c.1517–18. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust.
In 1516 Leonardo moved to France aged 64 to live and work in the French court of King Francis I. While there, one of his duties was to design costumes for festivals and events, and this study shows his skill at intricate design and capturing the effects of draped fabric in his drawings. This study is completed in such detail that it was likely given directly to royal seamstresses to create the final costumes from it. Several costume drawings made by the Renaissance polymath survive from the end of his career. Masques—entertainment popular with the aristocracy in France and England during the 16th century—involved song, dance, and the performance of plays, with party-goers wearing disguises. Not designed to be practical, this young man holds a lance and wears bearly-there breeches.
 “Drawing the Italian Renaissance” is on view at the King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace until March 9, 2025. More

Tucked away on a quiet residential street in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, inside a stately 19th-century townhouse, you can catch the work of Helen Evans Ramsaran, in her solo show of new works at Welancora Gallery.
Chances are, you haven’t heard of Ramsaran, an 81-year-old Black sculptor who casts her bronze sculpture at the Modern Art Factory in Queens—something that gallery owner Ivy Jones is hoping to help change for the New York artist, who has been dedicated to her practice for over five decades.
“At this point in Helen’s career, the focus is to get more institutions interested in acquiring the work, and reinserting her into the narrative about women artists, about sculptors, about women artists of color,” Jones, who began showing Ramsaran’s work in 2016, told me.
When people think of a Black woman sculptor of a certain age, she added, they tend to think of Barbara Chase-Riboud, just four years Ramsaran’s senior and the subject of a current solo show at the Louvre in Paris.
Helen Evans Ramsaran, Elephants and Birds. Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
“It would be great if there were enough room for another woman too,” Jones said.
But bronze sculpture—which few women artists are working in today—is not the easiest medium to live with. It’s heavy and can take up lots of space. And then there’s Ramsaran’s subject matter: graceful organic forms drawn from the world of botanicals, rather than figuration, and imbued with difficult themes of racial violence and the dark realities of the lived African American experience.
“The work is not sexy. It’s not of the body. It’s very cerebral,” Jones added.
The exhibition is titled “Strange Fruit,” an allusion, of course, to Billie Holiday’s haunting song protesting the lynching of African Americans. But it is also a literal description of some of Ramsaran’s sculptures, which often suggest otherworldly plants.
Helen Evans Ramsaran, Smashed and Broken (2024). Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
In the center of the room on a white platform lies Smashed and Broken (2024), a piece inspired by the death of George Floyd. It looks like a fallen branch, with a shattered seed pod lying at an awkward angle, lifeless and sad.
“It’s about the brokenness of the African American experience, but then also the fruitfulness that has come out of that experience,” Jones said.
in 2021, the New York Times’s Holland Cotter dubbed Ramsaran “unaccountably under-recognized,” something that remains true despite Jones’s best efforts, with showings at major art fairs including Art Basel Miami Beach, Frieze Los Angeles, and the Armory Show in New York.
Ramsaran has had several museum solo shows over the years, at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1994; and New York’s American Museum of Natural History in 2002.
But she seems to have “just missed the wave” that has given widespread recognition and market success to other African American artists, Jones said.
On the occasion of the current exhibition, I spoke with Ramsaran about her work, her inspirations, and her hopes for the future after decades of toiling in relative obscurity.
Helen Evans Ramsaran, Fragments in Flames. Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
How did you come to specialize in bronze, which is such a classic medium, but is not very commonly used by today’s artists?
Bronze is challenging to work with.
But I get lots of assistance at the foundry. I became interested in bronze when I was a graduate student, and I learned about the people of Benin in West Africa. They had cast bronze pieces in the 1700s and 1800s.
Even with all the modern technology, bronze is still quite challenging. So
I was really surprised that they were able to do that quality of work back then. They had a whole palace, you know, and they had bronze figures and bronze wall reliefs, and it was just mesmerizing to see all of this.
How did you feel about the recent movement to repatriate the Benin bronzes?
I thought they were mainly there in England. I didn’t realize that they had been scattered all over the place, in private collections too. It’s going to be difficult to get them all back.
But I’m happy that there are young people now who are insisting that those pieces belong in Africa. African children need to know about them. African people need to know about them, and when I go to Africa, I would like to go to museums to see them.
That would be amazing. And what is your process like, working in bronze?
I’ve enjoyed the versatility of bronze. I used to make drawings, then make the work in clay, and then take a plaster mold. That’s a long, long process, so I decided that I would cut out some of those steps. Now I work directly in the wax.
I make a hollow piece,
I take that to the foundry, and get it cast. Or
I do it in solid wax or wax with cardboard inside. The cardboard burns away when you put the wax inside the mold, and put that in a kiln. Then you just pour the hot bronze, between 1,700 and 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s what is called lost wax method.
“Helen Evans Ramsaran: Strange Fruit,” installation view. Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
And how do you come up with your designs?
I have a lot of different interests. I have always been interested in archaeology and evolution and so forth—not only human evolution but also plant and biological evolution and botany. As a young artist, I wanted to try to mold all of that into a single vision.
I wanted my work to be kind of distinct from everyone else’s. And this is why I still continue to work at bronze because bronze is such a versatile material. Sometimes it was difficult to communicate what I was trying to do, but I think over the years I have succeeded.
During the pandemic, there were a lot of shootings of young Black men and also Breonna Taylor. I wanted to do something to remember that.
As I was making this work, I was also remembering the trauma that Black people have always gone through. I was born in Bryan, Texas, and I remember in my neighborhood seeing people on chain gangs.
We lived just inside the city limits,
so our neighborhood was almost like a village in the countryside. And the police would come late at night, just disrupting the neighborhood supposedly looking for criminals. It was terrifying to me as a child.
I also did 30 sculptures for the exhibition, called Seeds of Struggle, as a memorial for all the children who have lost their lives to gun violence. And that’s really a sore spot with me, that we have these guns in our society and laws that allow people to carry them on the streets. They’re so easily available. You can get parts of them through the mail—I think that’s outrageous.
The sculptures are inspired by seeds and I have them on these plaques, these relief forms that are broken. I got the idea from scribes in ancient Egypt and the Middle East who wrote their records on clay tablets. Clay, as you know, is vulnerable to breaking once it’s dried. I got the idea for seeds because seeds are the very beginnings of plant life.
In fact, all of the sculptures in this exhibition have something to do with plants and plant parts, because plants have a certain amount of resiliency. They start from something as small.
But it’s not easy for seeds to take root to grow. They have to find the right conditions to grow in, and sometimes they don’t.
Some of them don’t make it—that’s why I called it Seeds of Struggle. Eventually, there will be fifty of those tablets. That’s what I’m working on now, finishing that memorial.
Helen Evans Ramsaran, Seeds of Struggle No. 6 (2024). Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
Wow, that’s beautiful. I’m wondering if, as a young artist, you were ever discouraged from making work that was influenced by African art history? Because I think you were a bit ahead of your time, looking in that direction.
I went to Ohio State in the ’60s, and I did my master’s there as well. It’s not that they discouraged me.
It’s just that they didn’t teach us anything at all about Africa.
And so when I got to graduate school, I realized that all the things I was interested in with African art, I didn’t know anything about them.
I went to the Anthropology Department, and they didn’t quite know what to do with me. I told them there was one professor who had told us that the human species started in Africa. It was very empowering to hear that.
And so I went back to him as a graduate student.
He said, “I don’t know anything at all about art, but I can tell you more about Africa.” He told me I had to write a paper every month about something in Africa that I was interested in doing with my work.
I was also interested in other indigenous groups like the Native Americans in the northwest and the southwest, and down in Mexico and Central America. And so I did papers on them as well, and also the indigenous people of Japan—lots of people don’t know that there were indigenous people in Japan. So I acquired a portfolio of things that interested me that I could draw on in my sculptures. And so that’s how I molded my unique vision.
I have been all over the place.
I was a college professor for 38 years, teaching sculpture and ceramics. Now
I’m retired.
A sculpture by Helen Evans Ramsaran. Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
Have you found that people have become more receptive to these themes in your work as you’ve gotten older?
Black people always responded quite positively to my work.
But when I tried to present that work to galleries in the ’70s and ’80s, it was quite foreign to them.  They were not used to looking at or listening to these kinds of ideas about Africa.
But I insisted. In fact, I was on a panel once, I think in 1995, at Paul Kasmin Gallery. They asked us what did we think the art world was going to be like
10 to 20 years from now. I said, “Africa is going to become more prominent”—and Africa certainly is more prominent in the art world. So I was way ahead of my time with that too!
Helen Evans Ramsaran, Nightmare (2024). Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
And for you, what do you see as your hopes for your legacy and perhaps more widespread recognition of your work now that the themes you’ve always been engaged with are getting traction more widely?
I would love to have my work at least shown in museums because I have done this work for more than five decades. Unfortunately, I still have a lot of it, so I would like for this work to get more widely known and shown in museums.
When I left graduate school, one of the things that I wanted was to have my sculpture in parks, in outdoor spaces where children could climb on them and enjoy them, and so forth. Only now are young people getting those kinds of opportunities—those were not available to me, even though I tried.
I was really quite disappointed that I was not given opportunities to make large-scale sculptures and put them outside. That was my big dream.
I think of those Greek bronzes that were shipwrecked and have been in the sea for so many years. They were dropped to the bottom of the sea, and they brought them back up and cleaned them up, and they’re still beautiful. Bronze can withstand almost anything, you know. The wind, the rain, tornadoes—everything. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to be able to put my pieces outside and never have to worry about them.
There were just not many opportunities out there for you if you were Black, and if you were a woman.
That’s just been the story over and over again. But things have been changing, and I hope that you’ll get to see some of that change for yourself as well.
Right, I hope so. But it’s still hard. You know, I’m 81 years old now, so nobody takes my work seriously that much anymore.
Well, you’re right on track for what the Guerrilla Girls said, that for women artists “your career might pick up after you’re 80.”
Right, right. And that’s that’s terrible because it gives you what, four to five years to enjoy being an artist, to be recognized as an artist?
Otherwise, it’s a real struggle.
“Helen Evans Ramsaran: Strange Fruit,” installation view, with Stranglehold. Photo courtesy of Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn.
I’m sure. How did you keep going and keep working on these beautiful works for all these years without more widespread recognition?
You have to be an artist. You have to be single-minded about everything.
And so I was single-minded about things.
I just wanted to do art and that was it. I wanted my whole life to be about art and in that much, I succeeded.
Also, I succeeded in traveling around the world to finish my education. I was grateful to the anthropology professor who gave me so much, but I felt like I needed more. So I traveled everywhere. I went to China. I spent the summer in Japan just making handmade paper. I’ve been to Africa about seven or eight times. I spent a year in Ghana and a year in Zimbabwe, and traveled all over, South Africa and other places.
I had to do a lot of the traveling on my own. I had to pay for it.
I tried to get the Fulbright and all kinds of fellowships. And you know, I didn’t get those, but that didn’t stop me. I went anyway. And it was thrilling.
And now, in Ivy, you have a dealer who’s really advocating for you.
Yes, she’s been taking my work all over the place. And I’m really impressed with all she’s done.
But it’s been difficult for me to exhibit outside of the gallery. My work is not included in these big museum shows about women and Black women.
It’s just not.
I don’t know why.
“Strange Fruit: Helen Evans Ramsaran” is on view at Welancora Gallery, 33 Herkimer Street, Brooklyn, New York, October 10, 2024–January 4, 2025.   More