On View

It’s the season for glistening, metallic flowers to bloom in Brooklyn. Come to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for the majesty of nature (and 12,000 different plants), stay for the French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel’s sublime floral sculpture exhibition.
“The Flowers of Hypnosis” opened last month and runs until October 22. It consists of six site-specific pieces and took Othoniel a year to produce. Using his signature strands of hammered steel spheres, Othoniel conjured visions of lotus blossoms and a shiny rose. As per the title, it is meant to be a heady, thought-provoking experience, as well as a journey into Zen.
Jean-Michel Othoniel’s “The Flowers of Hypnosis” at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Photo: Michelle Huynh. Courtesy of Dior.
“Nature can be a source of inspiration, contemplation, and beauty,” the artist said in an audio introduction to the show. “It’s very important now as a goal to survive the world to escape reality or to build yourself strong enough to face reality—that’s the power of gardens. In general, my sculptures are here to enchant and to push this feeling of contemplation in a stronger way.”
The enormity and materiality of the flora adds a surreal tinge to the paradisical surroundings, but at the heart of the project seems to be the artist’s goal to service his surroundings and pay homage to the ecology.
Jean-Michel Othoniel’s sculpture Mirror Lotus in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Lily Pool Terrace. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. © Jean-Michel Othoniel / ADAGP, Paris & ARS, New York 2023.
“Jean-Michel has a passion for gardens, flowers, and the natural world that reveals itself in his works for ‘The Flowers of Hypnosis,’ which respond to and enhance their garden settings,” said Adrian Benepe, president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
“The Flowers of Hypnosis” is sponsored by Dior as part of its Cultural Gardens initiative, which was formed to “maintain the intense links between creativity and the living world that forged the house’s identity.” A new Othoniel art piece created for the brand will be unveiled at a Dior-hosted event at the gardens on September 7.
The artist Jean-Michel Othoniel. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Othoniel’s art style might be familiar from his iconic Palais-Royale metro station in Paris. He had a 2012 survey that stopped at the Centre Pompidou, Brooklyn Museum, and other institutions. He has a permanent installation at the Château de Versailles, a dramatic serpentine fountain emerging in the palace’s lush garden.
The artist continues to be drawn to the natural world. “Gardens leave a great deal of space for the irrational, the inexplicable, the extravagant,” Othoniel said. “They are places of mystery, magic, and secrecy.”
Three sculptures in Jean-Michel Othoniel’s “Gold Lotus” series in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Japanese Hill and Pond Garden. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. © Jean-Michel Othoniel / ADAGP, Paris & ARS, New York 2023.
“The Flowers of Hypnosis” is on view at the Japanese Hill and Pond Garden, Fragrance Garden, and Lily Pool Terrace sections of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
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Towards the end of last year, the Wellcome Collection in London decided to close its 15-year-old “Medicine Man” display because it “perpetuate[d] a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist, and ableist theories and language.” The museum, which predominantly displays medical artifacts, many of which were collected by 19th-century pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome, added that it was in the process of reconsidering “the point of museums.”
With its new exhibition, “Genetic Automata,” the Wellcome Collection appears to be putting forward an alternative proposition for the role of the museum. The presentation features four recent films by the British-Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong and his long-time collaborator David Blandy, another British artist who is white. Together, the pair explore the legacy of scientific racism and how its ideas still resurface in contemporary culture, technology, and healthcare.
Installation view of “Genetic Automata” at the Wellcome Collection. Photo: Steve Pocock.
The latest film in the series, _GOD_MODE_ (2023), was co-commissioned by the museum and the Black Cultural Archives (BCA). Its first half is a direct riposte to the disturbing ideas of Victorian scientist Francis Galton, who established eugenics as a scientific discipline at University College London. The second half, created using Unity, a 3D platform for video games, and littered with references to modern gaming culture, makes an analogy between the myth of genetic superiority and the use of cheat codes to play a video game in the invincible “God mode,” highlighting the comparative lack of agency of “non-player characters.”
A display of related objects includes death masks used by the phrenologist Robert Noel to analyze the different skull measurements of criminals and intellectuals, a “pocket registrator” invented by Galton to secretly categorize people according to five types, and an eye color gauge used in the 1920s for an antisemitic study on the intelligence of Russian and Jewish school children living in London’s East End.
Installation view of “Genetic Automata” at the Wellcome Collection. Photo: Steve Pocock.
These items offer useful historical context to _GOD_MODE_, but the film in turn also gives a new and necessary context to these objects, pulling them out from the past in order to examine their influence on the present.
A particularly successful film, A lament for power (2020), imagines the perspective of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who unwittingly became the source for the very first immortalized human cell line, known as HeLa, when her cancer cells were stored after a treatment in 1951. The cells were successfully cloned and sent out to researchers across the globe and have since contributed to many medical breakthroughs, including the development of a polio vaccine. Lacks’s family has objected to the non-consensual harvesting of her cells.
Once more in the style of a video game, large, cell-like forms balloon out from buildings within a eerily dystopian setting. Against this backdrop, we hear Lacks’s imagined voice speak out: “Growing in labs, spliced, injected, and infected for the good of mankind. Your body, swollen to gargantuan form, pulsing, mutating, and splitting, again, and again, and again, as others’ hands manipulate and inspect you,” she says. “Powerless to end this zombie life of your flesh living way past your soul.”
Still from Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, A lament for power (2020). Photo: © the Artists Commissioned by Art Exchange.
“A fortune made of you, and your family has seen nothing, knew nothing for decades. And their genes, through yours, are now visible to all,” she continues. “These riches built on your back. The soil of your cells owned, leased out, and licensed by white men in suits. A legacy for their families. Medicines are made thanks to your body that are then denied to your brothers and sisters for the want of a few notes.”
The final two films are A Terrible Fiction (2019), which tells the little known history of Darwin’s taxidermy teacher John Edmonstone, who was a freed slave, and Dust to Data (2021), which compares the colonial history of archaeology with the modern day practice of mining data to, once again, define people according to categories.
As each film develops, it delves further into the wider social and cultural implications of scientific and medical injustices. The exhibition suggests that “the point of museums” like the Wellcome Collection may no longer be as custodians of a fixed past, confined within glass cases, but as facilitators of an ever-evolving conversation that welcomes new voices.
“Genetic Automata” is on view at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London, through 11 February, 2024.
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Summer may be coming to an end, but the Hamptons season is far from over—at least for the art scene. Women’s voices and narratives are stronger than ever out East, with several powerful shows curated by women artists and collectors which are spotlighting both overlooked makers and up-and-coming talents. Discover a multitude of inspiring and powerful perspectives with these six must-see shows, spanning photography, craft, furniture, sculpture, and more.  
 
“Renée Cox: A Proof of Being”Guild Hall, through September 4 
Installation image, ‘Renée Cox: A Proof of Being’, courtesy Guild Hall of East Hampton. Photo by Gary Mamay.
Guild Hall is closing out its summer roster with a commanding retrospective of Jamaican-American artist Renée Cox. Over her 30-year career, she has become best known for her performative self-portraits and photographic tableaux in which Black women and men pose, reclaiming predominantly white art historical scenes. “The dramatic use of scale in Cox’s images is powerful, drawing you in or staring you down. A surprising, lesser-known narrative we encourage people to learn more about after seeing the exhibition is the series that depicts ‘Queen Nanny of the Maroons,’ the 18th-century female Jamaican national hero who defeated the British using guerilla warfare,” Andrea Grover, Guild Hall’s executive director, told Artnet News. 
Another highlight is a new video installation, Soul Culture (2022). Grover says this piece represents a “new direction” for Cox. “The room features moving patterns of sacred geometry collaged from the arms, legs, and bodies of Cox’s models. The artist says it’s meant to stop you from thinking and ‘keep you in the moment,’” added Grover.  
“Supernatural Beauty”Onna House, through September 5 
Installation view “Supernatural Beauty” at Onna House, 2023. Photography by Memry Anderson / BFA.
Last year, fashion designer and collector Lisa Perry opened Onna House, a restored modernist home in East Hampton, featuring a rotating mix of art and objects by female makers. “We reinvent ourselves with every show,” the multihyphenate tells Artnet News. This summer Onna House is showcasing six talents working across media ranging from fiber textiles to metal sculpture in a group show called “Supernatural Beauty.”  
“LA-based artist Lisa Eisner turns jewelry into art, and Spanish artist Adriana Meunié uses materials she sources in Mallorca to create artistic clothing and art,” said Perry who aspires for the exhibition to expand the meaning of art. “I love the idea of bringing together six women artists from multiple disciplines and backgrounds to find in essence they all speak a similar language with the common goal of seeking beauty in the ordinary and the extraordinary.” 
 
“Women Choose Women”Exhibition The Barn, through September 9 
Installation view “Women Choose Women” 2023. Photography by Eric Striffler.
In Bridgehampton, three powerhouse women have teamed up to present the work of female artists and designers spanning the 1950s to today. Christine Berry and Martha Campbell, co-founders of Berry Campbell (a gallery known for its promotion of overlooked artists, particularly women of Abstract Expressionism) have joined Elena Frampton, principal of Frampton Co. at the designer’s gallery space, Exhibition The Barn. “Set within a converted 1910 barn turned gallery, ‘Women Choose Women’ presents historical and contemporary paintings, sculpture, collectible design, and our own furniture line, all within an unconventional living room setting,” said Frampton. 
“Women Choose Women” is named after the landmark exhibition held at the New York Cultural Center in 1973, which was also curated by a committee of women artists. Fifty years later, Frampton, Berry, and Campbell believe more progress needs to be made, and have, thus, brought together works, ranging from a rare work on paper by Elaine de Kooning to contemporary sculpture and furniture by Swiss-born, Los Angeles-based Carmen D’Apollonio, presented in collaboration with Friedman Benda. 
 
“(Mostly) Women (Mostly) Abstract”Eric Firestone Gallery, through September 17 
Judy Pfaff, Great Glasses (1988). Courtesy of Eric Firestone Gallery.
This August Eric Firestone Gallery is presenting a two-part exhibition across its East Hampton and New York City locations. The Hamptons iteration of “(Mostly) Women (Mostly) Abstract” features a cross-generational group of 22 experimental post-war artists, often on the fringes of the mainstream art world. “The show delves into the works of contemporary artists and their predecessors, who practiced abstract art and explored otherness in this genre—themes such as ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual orientation, which are as relevant now as ever,” gallerist and curator Eric Firestone told Artnet News. Though the artists are separated by time and experiences, their “intensely graphic work and saturated colors” form a cohesive narrative.  
Firestone says a can’t-miss work is American artist Judy Pfaff’s kaleidoscopic 1988 sculpture, Great Glasses. “Her work is highly fresh and relevant…you’ll want to explore the sculpture’s many facets and the story it tells,” he added. Among the other artists featured are Kennedy Yanko, best known for shaping paint skin into sculpture, and Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award recipient, Nina Yankowitz, whose sculpture, often made using handicraft techniques, challenges the notion of “women’s work.”  
 
“Change Agents: Women Collectors Shaping the Art World”Southampton Art Center, through September 30 
Installation view “Change Agents: Women Collectors Shaping the Art World” 2023. Courtesy of Southhampton Arts Center.
In celebration of its 10th anniversary, the Southampton Arts Center has staged a pioneering show bringing together 14 women collectors, as prestigious as Agnes Gund, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Lisa Perry, and Mickalene Thomas. SAC’s Executive Director, Christina Mossaides Strassfield, says it was founding board co-chair Simone Levinson who came up with the concept, which had surprisingly never been explored to this extent. “Historically and today, female collectors make a huge difference in the art world through their philanthropy and support of artists,” said Mossaides Strassfield, calling to mind Abigail Rockefeller, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Peggy Guggenheim. “The women whose collections are featured in ‘Change Agents’ continue to carry that torch.” 
Rather than be divided into sections by collectors, the works are interspersed, so that the “presentation lets each work speak for itself,” added Mossaides Strassfield. “The synergy among the results creates a beautiful dialogue that helps one to rethink the art historical cannon.” Artists in the exhibition range from heavy hitters, including Andy Warhol, Mark Bradford, and Lorna Simpson, to quickly rising talents, such as Michaela Yearwood Dan, Tala Madani, and Becky Suss. 
 
“Two Pieces in the Shape of a Pear: A Group Exhibition Curated by Pat Steir” Hauser & Wirth, through September 30 
Angel Otero, Splintered (2019)© Angel Otero. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Matthew Herrmann
Southampton’s most invigorating exhibition this summer has been curated by none other than Pat Steir, who has paired works across medium and genre. “Something magical often comes from inviting a great artist to curate a show of works by other artists they admire…Pat Steir approached the assignment as a way to reveal some surprising affinities between eight wonderful artists across several generations—people we might otherwise never have imagined together in the same way,” Madeline Warren, senior director at Hauser & Wirth, told Artnet News. “It took a painter to recognize the shared gestures, forms, and methods, the connections that lie within and underneath the contrasts. The show is full of delights because Pat’s provocative pairings tease out these sorts of unexpected connections.” 
For the show, Steir paired one of her electric drip paintings from 1993 with Rashid Johnson’s Surrender Painting “Pouring” (2023), a chromatically subdued, yet haunting iteration of his “Anxious Men” works. The other pairings include Cindy Sherman and Mickalene Thomas, Rita Ackermann and Avery Singer, and Mary Heilmann and Martha Tuttle. 
Also while visiting Hauser & Wirth’s Southampton gallery, don’t miss “Jane Yang: D’Haene / earthbound,” presenting the Brooklyn-based artist’s experimental, highly textured ceramics, inspired by her South Korean heritage and Moon Jars. 
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Knowingly or not, every artist references the history of their craft eventually. Some do it to situate their own work in the lineage of greats, others to question the monolithic canon.  
Recently opened at the Princeton University Art Museum’s gallery Art on Hulfish is an exhibition of lens-based artists who look to Leonardo, Van Eyck, and other Old Masters for material. Their strategies and intents vary but ultimately lead to the same comforting truth.  
If this sounds like homework, it’s not. The show, like the last gasps of summer vacation alongside which it arrives, is light and warm. The art historical easter eggs are there for the nerds, but so is Vik Muniz’s charming 1999 photograph of the Mona Lisa recreated, in Warholian fashion, with peanut butter and jelly. You don’t need a PhD to appreciate what the artist is doing with that picture.  
Vik Muniz, Double Mona Lisa (Peanut Butter and Jelly) (1999). © Vik Muniz.
“Some of the art is serious. But I hope people come and laugh,” said Ronni Baer, the Princeton curator who organized the show. For her and the museum, the show checks several boxes. It’s historical but also contemporary, educational but enjoyable. It’s legible, and it also serves to remind visitors of the museum’s programming while its main building is being reconstructed on campus.  
(David Adjaye, the Ghanaian/British architect recently accused of sexual harassment and assault, designed the new Princeton University Art Museum. Though Adjaye has stepped away from numerous projects in light of the allegations, Princeton has said that the museum is too deep into construction for the school to distance itself from him now. The new museum is expected to open in 2025.) 
Ori Gersht, Pomegranate (Off Balance) (2006). Courtesy of the artist.
The exhibition, Baer said, points to the past but feels like the present. “The idea of searching for identity is something embedded in a lot of this work—and it’s as relevant then as today,” she said, referring to works like Yasumasa Morimura’s Daughter of Art History (Princess A) (1990), for which the older male artist recast himself as the young female subject of Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of the Infanta Margarita Aged Five (1956), and Nina Katchadourian’s “Flemish Style” self-portraits made in an airplane bathroom.  
As with these stately Renaissance portraits, the still-life is a popular point of departure in the show. Included are pictures of bouquets by Sharon Core, who painstakingly grows her own horticultural specimens, and Bas Meeuws, who pulls examples from his personal library of floral photographs and reassembles them digitally.  
A 2006 video by Ori Gersht recreates Juan Sánchez Cotán’s Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber (circa 1600) with pomegranate substituted in—a symbol of the violence that defined the artist’s childhood in Tel Aviv. (In Hebrew, the word for “pomegranate” also means “grenade.”) Gersht also layers on a reference to Harold Edgerton as a slow-motion bullet pierces the pomegranate halfway through.
Jeanette May, NY Tech Vanitas: Dot Matrix (2018). Courtesy of the artist.
Nearby, Jeanette May’s NY Tech Vanitas: Dot Matrix (2018) nods to the eponymous genre of still-life paintings popularized by the Dutch in the 17th century, which employed objects of pleasure to remind viewers that our time on this mortal coil is limited and shouldn’t be wasted on indulgences. But instead of the decadent snacks and emptied wine carafes favored by Golden Agers like Willem Claesz Heda, May has filled her frame with pieces of outmoded, obsolescent tech: flip-phones, a CD-ROM, a printer that uses—gasp—perforated paper. 
“All of it adds up to nothing, both then and now,” Baer said, somewhat jokingly, before putting a bead on the central idea of the show. “These themes,” she went on, “are centuries old. They’re human concerns about identity and the fleetingness of life and about how we choose to live.” 
“Art about Art: Contemporary Photographers Look at Old Master Paintings” is on view August 19 through November 5, 2023, at the Princeton University Art Museum’s Art on Hulfish gallery. 
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There are no naked bodies in “The Big Nudes,” Heji Shin’s new show at 52 Walker—at least not the kind implied by the title. Instead, what you’ll find are giant pictures of pigs, shot against a studio backdrop, and MRI scans of the artist’s own brain. Both subjects are technically bare, but this is not exactly the stuff of late-night sexts.
For some, Shin inspires “emperor’s new clothes” doubts. Her irreverent, provocative pictures have found fans in bleeding-edge fashion brands and art institutions, but for others, they flummox and inflame. There’s a good chance “The Big Nudes” will generate the same range of reactions.   
“I’m not that subtle,” the artist and editorial photographer said, deadpan, during a recent Zoom interview. She was sitting in an old farmhouse in the Hudson Valley, which she recently purchased and is trying to fix up. Born in South Korea, raised in Germany, and now mostly based in New York, Shin exudes a cosmopolitan cool that makes it hard to picture her doing housework in the sticks. “I don’t claim any intellectual approach in my art practice,” she went on. “I never wanted to be avant-garde.” 
Heji Shin, 2023. © Heji Shin. Courtesy of the artist and 52 Walker.
As with her 2020 exhibition “Big Cocks,” which exclusively featured photos of roosters, Shin uses the title of her new show as bait. “The Big Nudes” also nods to a 1981 portfolio of the same name by the late fashion icon Helmut Newton (which does feature a lot of naked bodies). Tellingly, Shin is an avowed admirer.
Critics of Newton’s work point to its objectification of female bodies. Susan Sontag once called him a “misogynist” who “humiliates women.” But others see genuine affection: “The true subject of his photographs, as rooted as they were in male fantasy, was the awesomeness of feminine power,” Variety critic Owen Gleiberman wrote in 2020, echoing a common—if somewhat flimsy—pro-Newton rebuttal.
Shin shares Newton’s wit and sense of style, and she similarly revels in the thrill of the gaze, even—or especially—if that gaze is a little prurient. But it’s not the space of “male fantasy” that her pictures explore. What she’s interested in is difficult to put a finger on, but it has something to do with the economy of images in the 21st century, where news and products and porn all blur together in the fight for real estate on our screens. 
That’s the space where Shin’s work lives. She photographs farm animals like pinup models and lovers like documentary subjects. Her photos twinkle with a commercial polish, but what they’re selling isn’t clear.  
Heji Shin, You’ve come a long way, baby! (2023) © Heji Shin. Courtesy of the artist and 52 Walker.
If punny titles are one of Shin’s signatures, so are odd pairings. She’s shown appropriated images of the Kardashians next to illustrations of A.I.-generated avatars breastfeeding and pictures of monkeys next to shots of role players recreating war scenes. As with those combos, the ties between the swine and brains of “The Big Nudes” are not obvious. (The MRI scans were generated specifically for this show and did not come from a health scare, Shin pointed out.)  
It’s easier to map these new pictures as coordinates in the broader constellation of Shin’s work, where, say, the “Big Nudes” birds relate to the “Big Cocks” pigs, which in turn point to the NYPD officers penetrating each other in her 2018 exhibition “Men Photographing Men.” “I think [they exist in] the same cosmos,” she said. “When you’re interested in certain archetypes, then one leads to another, one references the other.” 
Heji Shin, Big Nude II (2023). © Heji Shin. Courtesy of the artist and 52 Walker.
Shin’s current exhibition isn’t going to inspire the backlash that some her previous efforts have. The “Men Photographing Men” pictures made headlines, as did her 2017 Eckhaus Latta campaign, for which she shot real couples mid-coitus. The 2019 Whitney Biennial featured her two most infamous series: “Baby” (2016), which captured shriveled newborns emerging from their mothers, and “Kanye” (2018), for which she documented the eponymous rapper at the height of controversy and on a monumental scale.  
In past interviews, Shin deflected questions about taste. “I thought people would have more humor,” she once said of audience responses to her 2018 Kunsthalle Zurich show, which featured the “Kanye” portraits. “They could really only see one layer of the work.” 
Whether or not she agreed with the taboos others identified in her work, it’s clear Shin knew what she was doing. “There used to be a time when a certain kind of outrage would give meaning, in a certain context, to a work,” she said. But more recently, the artist has grown bored of provocation. “Maybe I’ve just changed,” she explained. “Back then, I think it was more interesting to see certain kinds of reactions. Now I don’t think it’s interesting.”  
Installation view, “Heji Shin: The Big Nudes,” July 21–October 7, 2023, at 52 Walker. Courtesy of 52 Walker.
Shin paused, eyes to the sky. “I think you choose your battles,” she continued. “I think that my battle is definitely more about doing art that interests me than going into a dialogue with people that I’m not interested in.” 
If the artist is in dialogue with anybody in “The Big Nudes,” it might be herself. At the center of the show is a freestanding glass pyramid, inside of which floats a 3D hologram of her brain, imaged from the MRI scans. It’s a work unlike any Shin has shown before, and yet it ties everything around it together. The real pleasure of “The Big Nudes,” it turns out, is seeing an artist trust her vision enough to indulge her singular impulses. Literally and figuratively, her mind is on display.  
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Its been a long time since art was restricted to walls and pedestals, but artists at the cutting-edge of immersive experiences are still finding new ways to create layered encounters with sound, movement, and touch. These elements have made Atmospheric Memory by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer an international hit with audiences.
The Mexican-Canadian artist invites visitors to step into a physical concept that was once just an idea in the mind of 19th century British philosopher and inventor Charles Babbage. “The air itself is one vast library on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered,” wrote Babbage, marveling at how the atmosphere around us captures our every gesture and utterance, however small or mumbled. He even believed that air molecules stored this information, and that they could be the key to rewind the passage of time and experience these moments again.
Inspired by how this “vast library” might work in reality, Lozano-Hemmer has brought together a collection of interactive installations that each make use of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics. One is Cloud Display, a screen made of 1,600 ultrasonic atomizers that uses water vapor to write any word spoken into its voice recognition system. Another, Atmosphonia, is a sound environment that plays waves of familiar sounds like wind, fire, water, birdsong, and bells while visualizing these tonal changes with LED lights.
Lozano-Hemmer is known for his “anti-monument” to victims of Covid-19 and a light show over the U.S.-Mexico border, but he believes that this work may be his most ambitious. “Atmospheric Memory explores [Babbage’s] idea today, when the dream of perfect recollection is one of the defining conditions of our digital life, and the air that we breathe has become a battleground for the future of our planet,” he said.
The work debuted in the U.K. at Manchester International Festival in 2019 and has since traveled to the Carolina Performing Arts theatre in the U.S. The latest stop on its global tour is Australia, where it is headlining the Sydney Science Festival at the Powerhouse Museum until August 20.
See more images from the installation below.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Atmospheric Memory (2019). Photo: Zan Wimberley.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Atmospheric Memory (2019). Photo: Zan Wimberley.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Atmospheric Memory (2019). Photo: Zan Wimberley.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Atmospheric Memory (2019). Photo: Zan Wimberley.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Atmospheric Memory (2019). Photo: Zan Wimberley.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Atmospheric Memory (2019). Photo: Zan Wimberley.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Atmospheric Memory (2019). Photo: Zan Wimberley.

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The long, unsung history of so-called “Women’s Work” takes center stage at the New-York Historical Society in a new show organized by the institution’s Center for Women’s History.
A selection of 45 objects drawn from the museum’s collection showcase the various roles—both paid and unpaid—women have served in New York City society over the centuries, and how a wide range of different activities have been considered “women’s work” during different periods of time.
“We wanted to look at at our collections and find and tell the stories and histories of diverse women,” Anna Danziger Halperin, the exhibition’s co-curator and the associate director of the Center for Women’s History, told Artnet News. “But the show’s title, ‘Women’s Work,’ is kind of a provocative one.”
“On one hand, we are looking at these historical examples of women’s labor of women’s work,” she said. “But then we’re also playing with the idea of women’s work as a stereotype of what people imagine is appropriate within cultural norms for women to do. It’s about the public sphere versus the private sphere, or men’s work versus women’s work, and really blurring those distinctions and showing how women have always worked.”
We spoke with Danziger Halperin about five key objects in the show and what they can teach us about how women’s work has evolved in New York City over the last 300 years. Here is what she had to say.

19th-Century Mahogany Cradle
Mahogany cradle (ca. 1820–30). Collection of the New-York Historical Society, gift of Mrs. Willis Reese.
This is one of the objects that make the biggest impact when you walk into the gallery, and it’s the biggest one physically in the exhibition. It’s a really gorgeous mahogany cradle from 1820 to 1830, with a wide arch over where the infant would have been rocked, draped with a prop veil—it’s very dramatic-looking.
It was really important for us to show examples of care work near the beginning of the exhibition, because that’s often what people think of when they hear the words “women’s work.” Yes, women are considered to be natural caregivers because female bodies can have babies, but caregiving is work whether it’s paid or unpaid, performed by mothers or other kinds of caregivers.
This cradle belonged to a family named the Gallatin who were wealthy and well-connected, very politically influential. [The donors were descendants of Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and founder of New York University.]
The infants who were cared for in this cradle were likely tended to by Black nurses in the 1820s. Because of the history of gradual emancipation in both New York and Pennsylvania, where the family lived, we believe that they were most likely indentured, rather than enslaved. And although that means that they were legally free, women laboring under indentures had to work for many years without wages or salaries. So, it’s a different kind of unfree labor.

National Welfare Rights Organization Pin
National Welfare Rights Organization pin-back button (ca. 1966–75). Collection of the New-York Historical Society, gift of Jim Lodge.
This a pin back button from the National Welfare Rights Organization. This is 100 and 50 years later, and I think there’s some really interesting connections. The organization was active from the late 1960s to the early ’70s. It was a movement that was really coming together at the intersection of the civil rights movement and women’s liberation and antipoverty activism.
Most of the leaders of the movement were single women of color, and they were pushing against social policies that were forcing recipients of different benefits to work in the pay market place rather than taking care of their own families.
The leading activist of the organization, Johnnie Tillmon, wrote an amazing essay for the inaugural issue of Ms magazine [in 1972], “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue.” We included this great quote on the label that in some ways, speaks to the exhibition as a whole: “If I were president, I would solve this so-called welfare crisis… I’d just issue a proclamation that ‘women’s’ work is real work.”
In the ’60s and ’70s, there were different competing kinds of cultural messages about women in the workplace. There were ideas that if you were a middle class or elite white woman, you were expected to stay home, but Black women and women of color were often forced to work for elite, wealthy white families.
There was a movement of feminists starting to say, “we shouldn’t be forced to stay home,” but then you had activists who were Black women saying, “yes, but we also shouldn’t be forced to go out to work. We should be able to be seen as respectable mothers and have our care work recognized as work. And our work of caring for our own babies is just as valuable to society as our work caring for white babies.”

Haudenosaunee Beaded Cushion
Unidentified Native American artist, Haudenosaunee beaded pincushion (ca. 1890–1910. Collection of the New-York Historical Society, gift of Arnold and Dora Stern.
This kind of beadwork work was often associated with women’s work in Indigenous groups. In the later half of the 19th century, when white settlers were really pushing them out of their historic lands, a really sophisticated kind of business model began to spring up, adapting this traditional bead work for a new souvenir market place.
This pin cushion is an example of that, made for white tourists coming to visit Niagara Falls, for example. It has a bird holding two American flags in its wings, and beaded fringe and leaves. It’s this sort of Americana decoration, like something that you would get at a gift shop for a presidential library.
It really shows this traditionally feminine form of craft being used in an entrepreneurial and creative kind of way. They are adapting because they can’t survive off of hunting and fishing and trapping in their homelands, and they need income. Indigenous women would sort of set up an assembly line within their home, and different family members would contribute.
But these things were sold as trinkets, little souvenirs. They were not very valuable. One of the points that we wanted to make is that often when work is identified as something that women do, its wages become depressed, and the professions that women were thought to pursue were more and more lowly paid.
And there’s connections here too to the work women were doing for the garment industry at the same time. We also have on display a hat that has silk flowers. Flower-making was something that women would often do at home with their children, as a way to get around, various labor laws and child labor laws.

Jessie Tarbox Beals, Portrait of Ann Haviland
Jessie Tarbox Beals, Portrait of Ann Haviland, perfumer, (ca. 1915–28). Collection of the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society.
I love this photograph because we use it to tell both the story of two different professional women who were doing really interesting, creative work: Jessie Tarbox Beals, a photographer, and Ann Haviland, a professional perfumer. We might think of them as the new woman of the late-19th century, early-20th century, entering the professional world in new ways. And both of these women are artistic.
Ann is posed in the photograph surrounded by all the different tools of her profession. It really looks like she’s a chemist. So it’s really emphasizing the scientific expertise she had to have to create perfumes.
An early example of a professional perfumer, Ann ran a mainstream fragrance business at the early stages of the beauty industry—this new field where something that was seen as feminine was now being sold to a mass audience. She also marketed herself in really clever ways, by partnering with early film actresses and writing advice columns in fashion magazines. She was putting herself out there as the expert.
And Jessie Tarbox Beals was a professional photojournalist at the time that photography was really taking off. Beals bought her first camera from selling magazine subscriptions. She took a lot of photographs of different people at work, not just women, but men as well. We have a lot of those images in our collection, and several on display because they are so amazing.
In the exhibition labels, we quote from something that Beals wrote in 1904, that “all a woman needed to succeed as a photographer was her health and strength, a fair photographic outfit, and the ability to hustle.”

Mary Dickson’s Tavern license
Tavern license of New York City inn owner Mary Dickson (1784). Collection of the Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society.
This is a license that dates to 1784 that was held by a woman named Mary Dixon for a tavern on Moore Street in the South Ward. She was an innkeeper, and she was officially licensed to serve food and drink as well. Women are traditionally housekeepers. So, in some ways it’s an extension of work that would have fallen under women’s purview. It was seen as acceptable for women to be cooking.
Another one of the examples of women business owners that we have is a page of fabric swatches from an account book that was held by a woman merchant named Mary Alexander from the 1740s. Two women who had their own businesses in the 18th century!
We wanted to subvert what people would have expected from the time period about women in public-facing roles. Although under the British laws that would have governed the New York as a British colony, women were the property of either their fathers or their husbands, there was also a legacy of Dutch law that treated spouses as more equal economic partners. So there were women who worked within family businesses, as well as other women who supported themselves.
We included this license to show that women are not just making a clear, linear march towards progress and equality across the 300 years that we cover in the exhibition. It’s really much more complicated than that. But it shows that women’s work is everywhere, and underpins New York society and American society.
“Women’s Work” is on view at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West at Richard Gilder Way (West 77th Street), New York, New York, through August 18, 2024.
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You might not know the name Dorothy Liebes (1897–1972), but the American textile designer and weaver was a hugely influential figure, with her work in fashion, film, transportation, and interior and industrial design helping define 20th-century taste in the U.S.
Now, she’s back in the spotlight with her first posthumous solo show—her first in more than 50 years—at New York’s Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. The exhibition, titled “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes,” is a celebration of the artist’s many accomplishments, her skills as a designer, and her considerable business acumen.
“Her career was so vast,” Susan Brown, associate curator and acting head of textiles at Cooper Hewitt, who co-curated the show with Alexa Griffith Winton, the museum’s manager of content and curriculum, told Artnet News. “She did so many different things, from being a Californian hand weaver, to her very prestigious commissions with important architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, to her work with fashion designers and on film sets.”
Born in Santa Rosa, California, Liebes got her start in textiles with a two-week stint at Chicago’s Hull House in the summer of 1920, taking weaving and dyeing classes. Three years later, she graduated from University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor of arts in decorative art, architecture, and applied and textile design. (She already had a degree in art education from the State Teachers College at San Jose.)
Dorothy Liebes in her Powell Street studio, San Francisco, California (1938). Photo by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, courtesy of the Dorothy Liebes Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, ©Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.
By 1928, Liebes had a commission to design draperies for the San Francisco Stock Exchange, and by 1930 she had opened the Dorothy Liebes Studio in San Francisco. Although she collaborated on major architectural projects, including designing the drapery and upholstery for the 1938 New York World’s Fair, the designer also felt it was important that the average person could experience the “Liebes Look,” as her bold blends of vibrant colors accented with shiny metallic thread came to be known.
“She was very acutely aware that her textiles were extraordinarily expensive and could only be afforded by the one percent of the one percent, and she wanted to make them more widely available,” Brown said.
To that end, Liebes forged industry partnerships with companies like Goodall, DuPont, and Dobeckmun. (The latter were the the makers of Lurex, a synthetic metallic yarn that became a Liebes signature and that she helped expand to a wide range of colors beyond the typical gold and silver, including black and pastels.) She worked closely with manufacturers to replicate the results of her hand-weaving techniques on machine looms, helping bring her designs to the masses.
Dorothy Liebes, Mexican Plaid textile (ca. 1938). Collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, gift of the estate of Dorothy Liebes Morin. Photo by Matt Flynn ©Smithsonian Institution.
As a result, in the Postwar period, Liebes was able to move beyond high-profile commissions, which typically required a more restrained, subtle color palette to meet the client’s specifications, Winton said, and finally embrace “the virtuoso use of color that she was famous for.”
“The ‘Liebes Look,’ which was very frequently expressed in public spaces like nightclubs, restaurants, ballrooms, and luxury passenger liners, combined very saturated colors, often in unusual sophisticated combinations,” Brown said. “It had this textured, handwoven look with an abundant use of metallics.”
Dorothy Liebes, Sample card (ca. 1953). Collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, gift of the estate of Dorothy Liebes Morin. Photo by Matt Flynn, courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.
It was an aesthetic that continues to influence 21st-century design choices to this day—Liebes was a major proponent of decorative pillows, and of livening up a room with an unexpected pop of color.
During her lifetime, Liebes was widely recognized in the press, and exhibited her work at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA), New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, which hosted her career retrospective in 1942. But, like so many women artists, her achievements quickly faded into obscurity, with the Liebes studio shuttering soon after her death, and no children to try and keep her memory alive.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Most of what was written about Liebes was in craft and women’s publications, which haven’t been widely digitized—and even when they have, photography rarely does justice to her gifted sense of color. And some of her most high-profile projects, like the New York interiors such as the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel, the Marco Polo Club at the Waldorf Astoria, and the Usonian Exhibition House, are now almost solely associated with their male architects (Henry Dreyfuss, Donald Deskey, and Wright, respectively).
Another part of the issue was that Liebes’s relatively fragile textiles were meant to be lived with. Drapes faded in the sunlight, and upholstered furniture got damaged by cigarette smoke. Very few objects are still with us today in good condition.
Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel, New York City (1950). Interior design by Henry Dreyfuss; drapes laced with tiny electric lightbulbs designed by Dorothy Liebes. Photo courtesy of the Henry Dreyfuss Archive, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.
Fortunately, the Cooper Hewitt is one of a number of U.S. museums blessed with a collection of showroom samples and exhibition pieces gifted by the Liebes studio after her death. And when Brown and Griffith were organizing this exhibition, they were able to turn to the recently digitized archives of the Liebes papers—which include over 40,000 items—at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
The two believe the show—which features over 175 photographs, documents, and textiles, including clothing, furniture, and samples—has the power to reestablish Liebes’s legacy, restoring her to the pantheon of U.S. design history.
“This exhibition changes what you thought you knew about mid-century design,” Brown said. “There’s been so many monographs written about all of Dorothy Liebes’s major collaborators—Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Dreyfuss, and Samuel Marx. Now, hopefully people will realize there’s been a very important story missing all along. Her work was very impactful and broad-reaching, and touches on so many different aspects of 20th-century design.”
See more photos of the exhibition and the works on view below.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Installation photo of “A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” at the Cooper Hewitt, New York. Photo by Elliot Goldstein, ©Smithsonian Institution.
Dorothy Liebes, Sample card, Chinese Ribbons (ca. 1947). Collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, gift of Mrs. Morris D.C. Crawford. Photo by Matt Flynn ©Smithsonian Institution.
Dorothy Liebes, Handwoven panel for the Observation Lounge of the SS United States (1952). Collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, gift of the estate of Dorothy Liebes Morin. Photo by Matt Flynn ©Smithsonian Institution.
Dorothy Liebes, Sample card (ca. 1945). Collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, gift of the estate of Dorothy Liebes Morin. Photo by Matt Flynn ©Smithsonian Institution.
Dorothy Liebes, Sample card for Eagle Ottawa Leather Corp. (1958). Collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, gift of the estate of Dorothy Liebes Morin. Photo by Matt Flynn ©Smithsonian Institution.
Dorothy Liebes, Sample card (1945). Collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, gift of the estate of Dorothy Liebes Morin. Photo by Matt Flynn ©Smithsonian Institution.
Loom with shuttles at the Dorothy Liebes Studio (ca. 1947). Photo courtesy of the Dorothy Liebes Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Dorothy Liebes Studio, New York City, as photographed for House Beautiful, October 1966. Photo courtesy of the Dorothy Liebes Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Dorothy Liebes, sample for a window blind (1955). Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Dorothy Liebes Design, Inc. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource New York.
Donald Deskey, armchair, (1938). Manufactured by Royal Metal Manufacturing Company; Upholstery designed by Dorothy Liebes. Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Florene M. Schoenborn. Photo courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York.
Dorothy Liebes, Power­-loomed drapery fabric for the Persian Room, Plaza Hotel, New York City (ca. 1960). Collection of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Photo by Jacklyn Nash.
“A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes” is on view at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street, New York, New York, July 7–February 4, 2024.
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