On View

American artist Kerry James Marshall has produced his first-ever formal portrait, choosing to depict the renowned African American scholar and historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., often known as Skip. The work has been donated to Gates’s alma mater, the University of Cambridge, and is now on public view at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum.
The gift is a major coup for the regional museum—becoming only the second painting by Marshall to enter one of the U.K.’s public collections. Celebrated for his typically lively scenes in which Black people enjoy everyday pleasures like a backyard barbecue, a trip to the hair salon, or a day spent by the river, Marshall recently became the most expensive living Black artist.
Gates, a Harvard professor of African American studies and a prolific writer, met up with Marshall at the Fitzwilliam earlier this week to unveil the work. The pair, whose long-time admiration of each other has formed the basis for a fond friendship, were in a jocular mood as they recalled the circumstances that led up to the portrait.
Shortly after majoring in History summa cum laude at Yale in 1973, Gates was the first African American to receive a fellowship to study abroad from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Though he had been “raised to be a doctor,” he enrolled in English Literature at Clare College, Cambridge, eventually finding a passion for African and African American literature thanks to the mentorship of Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. “I owe this place quite a lot,” he said, reflecting on the encouragement he received to pursue academia. “I feel indebted.”
Kerry James Marshall, Henry Louis Gates Jr (2020). Photo courtesy of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
Nearly 50 years later, in 2020, the university offered Gates an honorary degree. The scholar offered to commission his own portrait for the college’s graduate common room, calling up his friend Marshall for a favor. Despite never having worked on a formal portrait, he “agreed right away,” and the painting was swiftly allocated to the Fitzwilliam instead. “Once they realized this was a Kerry James Marshall work of art, it could not be in a common room with a bunch of students spilling beer all over it,” joked Gates.
“It was a no brainer. This was not something you could say no to,” said Marshall. “Skip Gates is the W.E.B. DuBois of my generation. These are the people who made being a public intellectual something achievable.”
The sensitive portrayal of Gates shows him seated in an office, turning away from a pile of his own books to face the viewer. “I was interested in painting a picture that had a certain presence that gave Skip the authority he deserved for the stature he has achieved,” said Marshall.
And what of Marshall’s precedent for avoiding portraiture? “Of course, it’s not because I can’t,” he said. “I’ve been invested in making art that is based on ideas, art as a philosophical pursuit. And I make images of people who have a presence in history of which there are no images.”
“The reason I paint figures black is because the Black figure operates as a rhetorical figure,” said Marshall, referring to the unmixed, unadulterated shades of black that he uses for skin tones. “It’s always been stated that black is not a color and you should never use the black that comes out of a tube, but those blacks have a chromatic reality too,” he explained. “My mission was to make those black figures become as chromatic as every other color in the painting. Black is being treated as if it’s a complex color too.”
The shift to portraiture required a slightly different approach. “When it comes to making a painting of Skip, he did ask me, ‘what color am I gonna be?’” recalled Marshall with a laugh, to which Gates exclaimed, “I wanted to be black!”
“I didn’t do that, because to change people… to misrepresent somebody as a color they are not, is akin to blackface,” said Marshall, adding that he decided to make the portrait more true-to-life with naturalistic skin tones.
The pair also used the painting as a starting point to talk more generally about how race relations have changed in the U.S. over the course of their lifetimes. Gates spoke out against the Supreme Court’s recent 6-3 vote to reverse affirmative action, which was introduced in the 1960s. “I wouldn’t have gotten in to Yale without affirmative action,” he said. “The class of 1966 had six Black men graduating, the class that entered Yale with me in 1969 had 96 Black students, and we went on to integrate the power elite. Since 1970, the Black middle class has doubled.”
“The right is trying to end all that,” Gates added. “They’re saying, I don’t know how Kerry James Marshall is in the Met, and now the Fitzwilliam, but that’s over. They are in panic because they saw too much power, too quickly for Black people and they’re trying to roll back the clock.”
“All these things are possible,” said Marshall. “They were possible for [Gates], they’ve been possible for me. I don’t see how they are not possible for anybody who doesn’t take the opportunity and do the work that’s required. That’s how I see the world,” he added. “And in terms of progress that needs to be made, because of the position I have now, I’ve been able to dramatically change the lives of a lot of people. That’s all I can do so that’s where I focus my attention.”

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The pandemic-induced craze for “immersive Van Gogh” experiences has waned, forcing one leading provider to file for bankruptcy earlier this year. Now, for its new exhibition dedicated to the beloved Post-Impressionist, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris is trying out an even more high-tech approach—involving virtual reality, A.I., and NFTs—to try and reignite some of that same enthusiasm.
The show, “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: The Final Months,” which opens today and runs through February 4, 2024, will feature some 40 works produced during the last two months of the painter’s life, in 1890, shortly after his year-long stint at the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy. During this time, Van Gogh made more than 74 paintings, some of which are among his most renowned.
Toward the end of the traditional exhibition, the power of A.I. allows visitors to interact with Van Gogh, whose digital manifestation appears via video screen and takes questions from his audience in French. The artist’s insights are gathered from the many letters he wrote in his lifetime, which were used as input data to inform his A.I. reincarnation. It appears that no subjects are off limits, including Van Gogh’s mental health struggles and his decision to cut off part of his left ear, about which various news reports suggest he has received an exhausting number of inquiries.
“While I did face mental health struggles, my move to Auvers-sur Oise was not motivated by a desire to end my life,” he at one point reassured visitors, according to AFP. He also declared on no uncertain terms that his favorite color is yellow.
Still from Le Palette de Van Gogh. Image: © Lucid Realities – TSVP – Musée d_Orsay – VIVE Arts.
Elsewhere, visitors are invited to explore “La Palette de Van Gogh (Van Gogh’s Palette),” the museum’s first V.R. offering. The exhibit plays to Van Gogh’s legacy as one of art history’s most vibrant colorists by using his final palette from his time living in Auvers as a portal to transport visitors out of the gallery and into a palette-inspired landscape, developed thanks to ultra-high-resolution scans of the object’s surface. Traversing the painterly daubs of color that remain stuck to the board over 130 years since Van Gogh’s death, visitors are shown how these vivid hues match up to those present in some of the artist’s masterpieces. In more surreal scenes, isolated brushstrokes leap from the palette and flutter through the air like confetti or a flock of tiny birds before landing on a canvas in perfect formation to make a finished painting.
“Artist tools can often fall to the wayside of art historical discourse but have the capacity to offer a rich insight into the artist’s work and process,” said Celina Yeh, executive director of VIVE Arts, which produced the V.R. experience, in an email. “A high-resolution scan of the palette forms the basis of an imagined virtual landscape inspired by the painter’s world and use of colour, allowing visitors to have a uniquely interactive and sensory experience of the artist’s major works from this period.”
Still from Le Palette de Van Gogh. Image: © Lucid Realities – TSVP – Musée d_Orsay – VIVE Arts.
The journey through Van Gogh’s unique visual language is narrated by Marguerite, a daughter of Van Gogh’s homeopathic doctor Paul Gachet, who Van Gogh painted twice in 1890. The Gachets’ sitting room, where Marguerite posed, has been recreated for the V.R. experience with the help of Van Gogh expert Wouter van der Veen. Though she was just 19 when they met, Marguerite had the foresight to hold onto Van Gogh’s last palette, which she donated to the French state in 1951 before it was given to the Musée d’Orsay.
“The imagined perspective of Marguerite Gachet, further invites the viewer to consider what Van Gogh’s life would have been like in his final days, the places and people he would have encountered and that feature in some of these paintings,” according to Yeh. VIVE Arts made the experience in collaboration with the Paris-based production companies Lucid Realities and Tournez s’il vous plaît. An extended version with a wider range of works by Van Gogh is being prepared for global release in 2024.
Despite the complete nosedive of interest in NFTs, the museum will also be offering collectibles made by digital artists who have been inspired by the show as part of its first foray into Web3. This endeavor launches a year-long partnership with the Tezos Foundation.
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Queens, New York has hosted the World’s Fair twice: once in 1939, and then again in 1964. Now the borough is home to something else: “The World’s UnFair,” a feverish carnival of attractions that evoke the look of those old 20th-century expos—but not their nationalistic aims. New Red Order, the group of Native artists behind the public art project, has an altogether different agenda in mind: the return of all Indigenous land.  
The Creative Time-presented exhibition opened this month in a raw, half-block lot that is owned by a developer, but not yet developed. In theory, that sense of provisionality teases the possibility that the site could be restituted. For now, it feels like it’s been hijacked. Wheatpaste posters styled like men’s magazine ads tote “rematriation services” on the lot’s walls. So do sandwich boards inside. Tribal flags are staked in Home Depot buckets and strung like banners at a car lot. A film, pitched like a corporate commercial, reminds us to “Never Settle.” It plays inside a sculpture that is half cheval de frise, half white picket fence, while an animatronic beaver and tree chat about settler colonialism nearby. 
This is a body of work that is not afraid to hit you over the head with what it has to say, even if that means mocking pockets of its audience along the way. But the cumulative effect is powerful. It’s the most essential show in New York right now. 
New Red Order, Dexter and Sinister (2023). Courtesy of New Red Order and Creative Time.
New Red Order defines itself as a “public secret society composed of networks of informants and accomplices dedicated to rechanneling desires for indigeneity towards the expansion of Indigenous futures.” If that description sounds elaborate, it’s because it was designed that way. “We don’t want to be contained to just being an art collective,” New Red Order said in a recent interview. (The three founding founders interviewed for this article—Adam and Zack Khalil, both of the Ojibway, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and Jackson Polys, of Tlingit heritage—prefer to be identified under the collective banner of the group.)  
The language of the mission statement is also coded with New Red Order’s argot. By “informants,” it means people who share knowledge of their own communities and cultures. “Accomplices” are those who support informants. The shadowy tone of it all echoes, with knowing irony, the group’s namesake, a 19th-century white fraternity called the “Improved Order of Red Men.” (The organization, which once counted Presidents Warren Harding and Franklin Roosevelt as members, often used Native designs and rituals.) 
But not all of New Red Order’s messaging is that complicated. The group’s central refrain—and the title of its main, ongoing body of work—leaves little room for misinterpretation: “Give it back.” It is both a provocation and a demand: Give back all land to the peoples who were forcibly displaced from it by colonialists. Give it back now.  
Installation view of “New Red Order: The World’s UnFair,” September 15 October 15, 2023. Courtesy of New Red Order and Creative Time.
Throughout “The World’s UnFair,” you’ll find variations of that message presented through the visual language of agitprop, infographics, recruitment videos, real estate placards, and other pieces of media that, in their ordinary states, are used to sell the idea of a better life. Many of these works also feature the same recurring character, played by veteran actor—and frequent New Red Order collaborator—Jim Fletcher. He is the apparent ringmaster of this weird pageant, but also something of a mascot. The group first met the white actor after he donned Native American garb in a 2014 stage Wooster Group play called “CRY, TROJANS!” The incident stoked backlash among Native communities. 
Regretful of the decision, Fletcher—who now identifies as an “accomplice” and a “Native American impersonator”—has since given himself over to a number of New Red Order projects. For a 2017 Artists Space performance conceived by the group, he stripped naked, put on a department store “Indian” costume, and apologized for his role in “CRY, TROJANS!” Even when the joke is on him, Fletcher, to his credit, is game. 
“It’s Jim Fletcher playing Jim Fletcher,” New Red Order said of the layers to the actor’s performance in “The World’s UnFair,” referring to him as a proxy. “If we say ‘Give it Back,’ I worry that it gets dismissed by many people. But if a successful middle-aged non-Native performance artist says it, maybe it has a chance of making it out of the echo chamber.” 
Installation view of “New Red Order: The World’s UnFair,” September 15 October 15, 2023. Courtesy of New Red Order and Creative Time.
With its puppets and punny riffs of self-help speak and jingoistic lingo, “The World’s UnFair” is very funny (one banner reads “Mission Accomplice,” referencing the infamous George W. Bush proclamation). The tone is a welcome twist on the solemnity that typically categorizes projects about indigeneity or repatriation, though it has its risks as well.  
“At times, humor has been a roadblock for some people to engage, because they don’t want to be made fun of,” said the group. “We find it’s a necessary way to engage, to crack open really uncomfortable conversations in ways that don’t lead to the expected places, to keep people on their toes… so they can’t easily categorize it in ways that they already understand.” 
But in putting together “The World’s UnFair,” New Red Order’s members also found themselves drawn to an earnestness that hasn’t always been present in their past work. Playing on several screens throughout the show are examples from their ongoing Give It Back series of documentary-style films highlighting people who have voluntarily repatriated land to Indigenous communities, tribes, or non-profits. Surrounded by works barbed with wit, these clips have a refreshing sincerity. 
“We found a need to [lean] a little bit more toward sincerity and transparency,” New Red Order explained. “That way, the real, powerful actions that real people are taking to address settler colonialization and the ongoing occupation of Indigenous land isn’t disregarded as a fantasy or as a joke, but seen as something real.” 
“New Red Order: The World’s UnFair” is on view now through October 15, 2023 at 24-17 Jackson Ave. in Long Island City, Queens.
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Hold onto your cowboy hats. This is no ordinary Western art show.
The simply titled “Cowboy” opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver on September 29 and it’s sure to garner major attention in the Western U.S. and beyond.
The show, organized by curators Nora Burnett Abrams and Miranda Lash, takes aim at the mythic figure, which they describe as “one of the most fraught and persistent figures in contemporary American culture.” The show raises questions such as how the myth of the cowboy exists today and how this archetype of masculinity shaped how we think about gender now. It further delves into cowboys’ relationship to the land through a series of broad perspectives and aims to debunk the homogenous concept of the cowboy as a white male.
Karl Haendel, Rodeo 11 (2023). Image courtesy the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles, Mitchell- Innes & Nash, New York, and Wentrup Gallery, Berlin
“There is no mythic figure who is more grand and complicated than the cowboy,” said Burnett Abrams in a phone interview. Originally, she said, she was looking into the history of the Black cowboy, but over the course of years of conversations, the concept was broadened.
“We approached it from all angles,” said Lash, including very much from the side of satire and critique, but also from the perspective of “homage,” with artists incorporating the stories of their own family members. “The stories range from the deconstructive impulse to the very personal. Cowboys are just so much more diverse than what gets depicted in the mainstream media.”
While the show starts with some classic blue-chip names and works like a John Baldessari (The Space Between Hat Rock and Shadow), Richard Prince’s famous Marlboro Man photo, and Andy Warhol’s film of a horse, it quickly delves into the contemporary and ultra-contemporary realm with 27 artists spanning 70 works.
Stephanie Syjuco, Set Up (The Broncho Buster 2) (2022). Image courtesy the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; RYAN LEE Gallery, NewYork; and Silverlens, Manila.
Take for instance Stephanie Syjuco’s photographs of Frederic Remington’s famous bronze sculptures of bucking broncos in the Amon Carter collection that depict them being measured with tape and alluding to the popularity of—and poking fun at—the sculptures and replicas on CEO desks across the country as symbols of bravura. “She jokes about how it’s such a popular bronze on the desks of corporate executives because it connects so deeply with this idea of the rugged individual, the entrepreneur, the man who sets his own terms,” said Lash.
The two curators said the tagline for the show could be: “This is not your grandfather’s Remington.”
Another topic that the show tackles is the “very problematic binary of the cowboy versus Indian, which is just an invention,” said Burnett Abrams.
Grace Kennison, I Remember Being Alone (2023). Image courtesy the artist.
One of the artists included in the show is Oklahoma native Nathan Young, whose art delves into his family history with parents who are of the Pawnee and Delaware Tribe. The multi-disciplinary artist delves into Pawnee rodeo culture in this series of work in the show.
And four contemporary artists, including Rafa Esparza, Young, and Colorado-based artists R. Alan Brooks and Gregg Deal were commissioned to make work for the show.
“There are those who are Native American or are of Native American descent who actively participate in cowboy culture,” said Lash. “There is not that distinction or binary.”
Burnett Abrams said: “Our ambition is to expand the story and I think that for those who are ready to be a part of that, it’s going to be amazing.”
“Cowboy” is on view at MCA Denver, 1485 Delgany Street, Denver, through February 18, 2024.

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When the animal kingdom met the artistic imagination, the result was a whole zoo full of fantastical creatures from dragons to unicorns, phoenixes to sphinxes. These strange mythological beasts haven usually taken on symbolic significance, and reappeared time and again in art made by different cultures across time, as shown by an ambitious new survey of more than 250 objects opening this fall at the Louvre-Lens.
This wide-ranging, whistle-stop tour starts off in the Bronze Age. The oldest surviving fragments of cave art are proof enough that humans have long been driven to depict the wonders of the natural world, but it wasn’t long before we started taking a bit of creative license. One of the show’s earliest exhibits, a Mesopotamian seal cylinder that dates back to 3300–3000 B.C.E., features a lion-headed eagle.
As pagan beliefs died out in favor of modern religion, biblical tales still kept audiences in awe by having their brave saints slay the same dragons that had once been popularized by ancient Greek mythology. Majestic, make-believe beasts were not always our adversaries, however, but often had magical powers of healing or protection.
The exhibition won’t leave visitors in the dark ages, but instead goes on to explore how mythological creatures have continued to enthrall new audiences. It turns out that the wild visions of Romantic artists like Henry Fuseli and the Pre-Raphelite painter Edward Burne-Jones have plenty in common with the science fiction and comic books that are so popular today.
“Fantastic Animals” is on view at Louvre-Lens, 99 Rue Paul Bert, 62300 Lens, France, from September 27, 2023 through January 15, 2024.
Preview artworks from the exhibition below.
Jean Gargot, Big Ghoul (1677). Photo: Christian Vignaud, © Musée de Poitiers.
Nicolas Buffe, Peau de Licorne (2011) Photo: © Cité internationale de la tapisserie, Aubusson, © Nicolas Buffe.
Jean-Auguste-Dominqiue Ingres, Roger freeing Angelica (1819). Photo: Franck Raux, © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre).
Figurine of the demon Pazuzu (911-604 B.C.E.). Photo: Thierry Olivier, © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais.
Will Cotton, Roping (2019–20). Photo courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris-Bruxelles-New York, © Will Cotton © ADAGP, Paris 2023.
Henry Fuseli, Thor fighting the serpent of Midgard (1790). Photo: © akg-images, Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Molding of a relief depicting a mythological scene, (c. 1200-1100 B.C.E.). Photo: Raphaël Chipault, © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais.
Paolo Uccello, Saint George Fighting the Dragon (c. 1440). Photo: Agence Bulloz, © RMN-Grand Palais.
Thomas Grünfeld, Misfit (flamingo-pig) (2005). Photo: © Galerie Jousse Lothar Schnepf © ADAGP, Paris, 2023.
Gustave Moreau, The traveler or Oedipus the traveler (1888). Photo: René-Gabriel Ojeda, © RMN Grand Palais.
Walter Andrea, Dragon-serpent on Ishtar Gate (1902). Photo: Andres Kilger, © BPK, Berlin, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais.
Cylinder seal depicting lions and an eagle (3300-3000 BEC). Photo: Franck Raux, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre).
Edward Burne-Jones, The Doom Fulfilled (1884-1885). Photo: Paul Carter – Bridgeman Images, © Southampton City Art Gallery.
An acquamanile (vessel). Photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre).
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A new series of presidential portraits by Kehinde Wiley just went on view in Paris—but you won’t find Barack Obama’s face among them. On view, instead, are ornate paintings of Macky Sall, Nana Akufo-Addo, and other African heads of state. 
These make up Wiley’s “A Maze of Power” series, which the artist has quietly been working on since 2012—years before he was tapped by President Obama. The new artworks are, in Wiley’s words, an effort to look at the African presidencies through the lens of Western European art history. 
“What happens when we use the language of aesthetic domination in the context of Africa in the 21st century?” the artist said in a short film he made to accompany the project. “Is it possible to use the language of empire, as it related to painting, in an African context, and arrive on the other side with something completely new? This body of work supposes that there is.” 

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The portraits debuted today in a Galerie Templon-sponsored exhibition at Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Among those depicted in the show are Olusegun Obasanjo, the former President of Nigeria; Hery Rajaonarimampianina, the former leader of Madagascar; and Félix Tshisekedi, the current President of Democratic Republic of Congo.  
Wiley, who initially set out to paint all 54 African presidents, visited each of his subjects on their own turf, in sites of their choosing. He brought with him a book of aristocratic, noble, and military portraits from the 17th to 19th centuries, introducing what he called a “vocabulary of power that each one of the presidents could choose to work with, or choose to ignore.” 
Installation view of “Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power” at The Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac museum in Paris, 2023. Photo: Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images.
The “Maze of Power” referred to in the show’s title is one that exists between Wiley and his subjects, the artist explained. “‘The Maze of Power’ is the maze that’s being run by me the artist, but also by the sitter—the sitter deciding how they want to be seen, me responding to their set of decisions,” Wiley said in his film. “Each one of us are responding to a received history of image-making, power, and the ways in which art function within that dynamic.” 
Portrait of Denis Sassou Nguesso, President of the Congo’s Republic (2023) on view at “Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power” at The Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac museum in Paris, 2023. Photo: Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images.
In producing his series, Wiley made a point not to talk politics, just pictures. The series, he explained, is not a “celebration of individual leaders,” but a “look at the presidency itself.”  
“The very act of creating a set of portraits in Europe, and now using that language in Africa, creates an… interesting provocation,” the artist went on. “This is an invitation for the viewer to expand the possibilities of what it means to look at art in Africa, about Africa, and about power.” 
“Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power” is on view at Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, 37 Quai Jacques Chirac, Paris, France, through January 14, 2024.

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The title of Carmen Winant’s new exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, “The last safe abortion,” does not really describe the thousands of archival photographs that line its walls.  
Set in women’s health clinics, Winant’s pictures don’t depict the procedure, but the behind-the-scenes work that makes it possible. Shown are staffers answering phones, filing paperwork, scheduling appointments. Far from the sensationalized propaganda peddled by right-wingers, these images are, by design, downright banal. 
In compiling the photos, which she culled from clinics, universities, and local historical societies throughout the Midwest, Winant said she was thinking about the “visuality of abortion care” and “what it would mean to countermand right-wing efforts to traumatize.”  
“For me,” she explained, “that meant meeting it with images of care, however ‘unphotographic’ they may be.” 
A photograph on view in Carmen Winant’s “The last safe abortion” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Courtesy of Iowa Women’s Archive, University of Iowa.
More than a photographer, Winant is an accumulator. For works like My Birth (2018) and Pictures of Women Working (2016–22), she amasses huge troves of found images and other printed material, then displays them without adornment or manipulation. Only occasionally does she include her own photos, and even then she doesn’t draw attention to them. Preservation is a fundamental facet of her practice; so is the simple gesture of showing events and people that we know but rarely consider. 
Both imperatives are at the heart of “The last safe abortion.” So is an undeniable sense of urgency: the show arrives at a time when access to abortion and other reproductive services is rapidly being curbed throughout the country following the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade last year. Health facilities were shuttering even as the artist visited them. 
The name of the exhibition reflects that precarity. It came from Winant’s conversations with clinic physicians and directors who offered—“almost verbatim,” she noted—the same shared pledge: “We will provide the last safe abortion.”       
“It really struck me as so powerful. It felt at once so resilient, so resolute and determined, but also, at the same time, so elegiac.” For these facilities, she pointed out, “it was not a question of if, but when.”  
Installation view of Carmen Winant’s “The last safe abortion” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2023. Courtesy of MIA.
Move close to museum’s walls and you’ll begin to pick out recurring faces and places and rituals. Beyond the logistical work, we also see clinicians mingling, drinking, sharing smiles and slices of cake at staff birthday parties. Quickly it becomes clear that what’s at stake in a reversed-Roe world is not just access to abortion, but also the livelihoods of the people that enable it. 
In another artist’s hands, you might wonder if the use of so many pictures undermines these subjects’ individual stories. Does the quantity of the work depersonalize it? Would a few good pictures make for a more potent portrait of the issue at hand than thousands of them?  
Winant, to her credit, doesn’t sacrifice intimacy through scale; she uses scale to embody intimacy. You can walk into her installation, let it surround and hug you. Ultimately, what’s on view is not a portrait of individuals, but of communities, coalitions, and groups united in a fight.  
A photograph on view in Carmen Winant’s “The last safe abortion” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Courtesy of Special Collections, Cleveland State University.
Volume is not just an artistic strategy for Winant. It’s also a political one.  
“I have thought so much about what it takes to build social alliances,” she said, noting a long-held interest in the history of radical movements and the tried-and-true grassroots formula of disseminating information as widely as possible. “That’s what it takes. Much like working in an abortion clinic and answering the phone, there’s something that’s so unglamorous about it,” she added.
“If you’ve ever done any work in organizing, you know it’s endless spreadsheets and meetings. That’s how shit gets done.”
“The last safe abortion” is on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2400 3rd Ave S, Minneapolis, through December 31.

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It was two years ago that curator and writer Antwaun Sargent first floated the idea of a show on Barkley Hendricks when he and Frick research associate Aimee Ng were discussing a good contemporary artist candidate for a show at the museum’s temporary home on Madison Avenue in the famous Breuer building.
“It was not an artist that I knew very well,” admitted Ng. “I’m a specialist in Italian Renaissance painting,” she said during their opening remarks at the packed press preview for “Barkley Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick” that opened yesterday (September 20).
In the two years that ensued, leading up to the show, Ng, Sargent and other staffers learned plenty about the pioneering Black artist, including the influence of Old Masters on his own painting and the extensive time he spent in front of these works during his travels in Europe and of course at one of his favorite museums, the Frick. The result is the series of vivid portraits that he became famous for, ranging from family and friends to random people he encountered and photographed on the street. The show also marks the first-ever exhibition the Frick has dedicated to a Black artist.
The show of just over a dozen stunning portraits is hung on the Frick’s fourth floor galleries, surrounded by historic portraits by James McNeill Whistler and Joshua Reynolds. Visitors stepping off the elevator on the fourth floor are greeted by a 1969 Hendricks portrait, Lawdy Mama, of his relative Kathy Williams that was inspired by Byzantine and Italian Renaissance paintings. Like those painters before him, Hendricks taught himself the painstaking process of applying gold leaf after a trip to Europe in 1966. Meanwhile the title was inspired by the lyrics of Nina Simone. Lawdy Mama sets the tone for the show, with the striking painting flanked by 18th-century white marble busts.
Barkley L. Hendricks, APB’s (Afro-Parisian Brothers) (1978). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund. Artwork: © Barkley L. Hendricks; courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
The artist “was a voracious museum-goer with a keen eye for historical techniques, styles, and solutions, and he transformed his borrowings and emulations into something utterly new,” wrote Ng in the catalogue accompanying the show. “Hendricks showed a way to productively engage with the complex legacies of historical European art while honoring people largely excluded from its visual record.”
Barkley Hendricks, Misc. Tyrone (Tyrone Smith) (1976). The George Economou Collection. Artwork: © Barkley L. Hendricks; courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
The 1976 painting Misc. Tyrone, wrote Sargent, is a prime example of the unique portraits that resulted from Hendricks roaming the streets armed with his camera. The inspiration was the “street session” with Tyrone Smith, who was decked out in what Sargent calls “farmer chic,” a crisp white collared shirt under blue jean overalls, who struck a series of dramatic poses. The final portrait sports “a baby-pink background replaces the urban vista,” wrote Sargent in the catalogue. The artist “seems to have developed this strategy of using flat, pared-down backgrounds of vibrant solid color—like Manet and Courbet before him—to counter the over-politicization of his subjects.”
Though Hendricks’s star in the art world is still on the rise and his work is being exposed to a wider audience, the artist has already proved to be a major influence on a younger generation of artists. In addition to Thelma Golden, the current director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, who was one of the first curators to put Hendricks’s work in a major show when she included him in the seminal 1994 Whitney Museum show “Black Male” and penned the introductory essay to the catalogue, artists including Derrick Adams, Nick Cave, Awol Erizku, Rashid Johnson, Fahama Pecou, Mickalene Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley contributed to the catalogue.
Gallery view of “Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick.” Photo by George Koelle.
Major works have been loaned by the Chrysler Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Harvard’s Fogg Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Whitney, and several private collections.
In remarks at the press preview, Frick director Ian Wardropper said the exhibition shows us what Hendricks “learned from the Frick, and how he challenged what he was looking at. This, too, is a show that challenges us as an institution.”
The Hendricks show builds on the museum’s continued embrace of contemporary “interventions” rather than adding contemporary art to the historic collection. For example, under an initiative labeled “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters,” the museum invited contemporary artists who identify as queer to respond to works in its collection. Over the course of a year, sought-after artists including Doron Langberg, Salman Toor, Jenna Gribbon, and Toyin Ojih Odutola created paintings responding individually to works by Holbein, Vermeer, and Rembrandt. The resulting works were displayed near the originals.
The Frick’s move to its temporary home at the Breuer building, while the original Fifth Avenue mansion at 70th Street is under extensive renovation, allowed it to obtain a special dispensation where some works could be loaned to other institutions, as it did for the blockbuster Vermeer show at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam this past summer.
Gallery view of “Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick.” Photo by George Koelle.
This past spring, the Frick announced it will be closing the Breuer space on March 3, 2024. It will spend the next several months winding down operations and preparing to return its Old Master art collection and operations to the mansion. Though no exact date has been specified yet, museum leaders revealed for the first time to Artnet News that they will reopen the mansion to the public in late 2024. The Hendricks portrait show will be one of the last to take place at the Breuer outpost.
Barkley L. Hendricks, Ma Petite Kumquat (1983). Collection of Ben and Jen Silverman. Artwork: © Barkley L. Hendricks; courtesy of theEstate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
“That the Frick was one of [Hendricks’s] favorite museums is perhaps unsurprising, given the strength of its portraits,” Wardropper wrote in the catalogue. “Fifty years on, representation of individuals and issues of race remain a critical concern, particularly to Black artists, for whom Hendricks is today a shining example.”

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