On View

Is it possible that the secret to successful public art is commissioning artists who don’t ordinarily make it?
That can roughly be described as the philosophy of Jacob King, the art advisor at the center of a new dual presentation of works by Charles Ray and Christopher Wool at the eight-acre commercial complex Manhattan West, owned and developed by Brookfield Properties.
“My whole pitch to Brookfield from the beginning was that if you’re going to be doing commissions with artists for public places, I think it’s really important to work with artists that don’t do a lot of these,” King told Artnet News. “There’s a lot of great artists that do a lot of work in lobbies but when you put an artist in a lobby that people expect to see there, they often just ignore it. I think it’s much more challenging, but also much more rewarding, to try to work with artists who haven’t done works in this context before.”
On June 5, the sculptor Charles Ray unveiled two stainless-steel, larger-than-life figures, titled Adam and Eve (2023), on the steps outside of the Manhattan West site. Hanging in the adjacent lobby is painter Christopher Wool’s monumental 28-by-39-foot mosaic made of Venetian stone and glass, which is visible from the street through large glass windows.
Detail of Charles Ray, Adam and Eve (2023) at Manhattan West. Photo by Timothy Schenck.
King, who has advised Brookfield on art for the past seven years, said that he thought Ray and Wool, stars of the contemporary art world, would be long shots for the commissions. But when he approached Ray a few years ago, the artist immediately agreed.
Ray said that the pandemic affected his approach to the sculpture, as did his own injuries, including a broken neck sustained during a recent car accident.
“At the same time, I was reading the Lost Books of Eden and a history of Adam and Eve,” Ray told Artnet News during an unveiling celebration. “As I was reading and thinking about it at the the height of the pandemic, older people were dying and it was horrible.”
The resulting work depicts an elderly man and woman, rendered in the artist’s signature stainless steel in a larger-than-life scale. “I’m very interested in this location and the civic quality,” Ray said. “I know they have to interact with the vitality. They had to look out, but not compete with the buildings, and hold their own.”
Installation view of Christopher Wool, Crosstown Traffic (2023). Photo by Timothy Schenck.
Wool’s mosaic, the aptly titled Crosstown Traffic (2023), marks the first time the artist has accepted a public commission. “It was such an exciting idea, to be invited and considered,” Wool said at the event.
It also marks the first time the artist—best known for his wry black-and-white text paintings and abstract canvases—has worked in the medium. “The challenge was the scale,” he said. “I had worked with silkscreen, which has allowed me to enlarge images, and right away I started thinking about different ways of blowing something up. Mosaic seemed perfect.”
Wool based the mosaic, with its swirls of red and black lines against a dark, cloud-like abstraction, on a drawing. “The drawing took a day and figuring out the mosaic took a month,” he said, plus another four months to fabricate it. (Artisan Fabrizio Travisanutto in Spilimbergo, Italy, just north of Venice, took “what little I said and went with it.”)
The finished work is comprised of 140 32-square-foot panels, interlocking pieces that were put together on scaffolding.
Artist Charles Ray at the unveiling of Adam and Eve (2023) at Manhattan West. Photo by Eileen Kinsella.
Sabrina Kanner, head of development, design, and construction for Brookfield Properties, said that the company saw the Manhattan West site as an “ideal place” for art.
“If you look at the topography of the site, the way the grade sort of falls away as you’re going downtown, the grade of the plaza and this public areas created sort of a perch where you could easily see art as you’re driving down Ninth Avenue or as you’re coming across from Moynihan station,” Kanner told Artnet News.
L to R: Artist Christopher Wool, Sabrina Kanner and Jacob King at the unveiling of Crosstown Traffic (2023) at Manhattan West. Photo by Eileen Kinsella.
“So while we had not at that point identified what the work would be,  we had committed to having a major piece of work there.”
“I give Brookfield so much credit,” added King. “They’re will to take risks. If you’re not willing to take a bit of a risk, you’re never going to end up with a really great artwork.”
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Something radical is taking place at the Noguchi Museum in Queens. Gallery attendants, curators, project managers, handlers, educators, and registrars have taken over to stage an onsite exhibition of staff artworks. What’s more, they’re getting paid to do so.
To say the more than two dozen works on show at “A Living Mechanism,” ranging from paintings to experimental installations to intricate sculptures, are good seems a disservice, as if to ignore the well-known reality that American museums are staffed full of jobbing, hopeful artists (indeed, most everyone on display here holds an arts MFA). But yes, the works are strong and as diverse in scope and subject as the individuals who make the Noguchi tick.
It’s certainly a show art institution laborers deserve. Amid the George Floyd Protests of 2020 with many museums enduring lockdowns, institutions affixed socially conscious statements to their websites and beamed out Zoom seminars on matters of inclusivity and equity. Change was coming. Gatekeepers, it seemed, might loosen their grip.
Not that “A Living Mechanism” is some good will gesture from on high. It was negotiated and fought for by the museum’s Anti-Oppression Committee, a process co-curator Orlando Lacro said proved shockingly successful. “I have never heard of a museum paying participants to do a staff show,” Lacro told Artnet News. “It’s not a performative gesture by the museum; it was a gallery attendant project, fought for by gallery attendants. We were handed a budget with no strings attached, full creative and logistical control. It’s an example of how the staff makes the museum what it is.”
The show’s name not only speaks to the collaborative manner in which it was conceived and executed, but also the spirit in which Isamu Noguchi worked. From Greenwich Village to the hamlet of Mure in Shikoku, Japan, Noguchi was forever in search of collaborators—indeed, the museum held a focused exhibition on the subject in 2010. Shamysia Waterman, the show’s co-curator, said Noguchi’s ability to connect with a wide range of people explains the diversity of the art and its appeal.
“’A Living Mechanism’ harnesses Noguchi’s ethos of relying on every part of space in order to create a harmonious environment,” Waterman said. “His essence lives on.”
Here are five artists on display at the Noguchi Museum.

Harumi Ori, I am Here @ Green St & Spring St, New York, NY (2021)
Harumi Ori, I Am Here at Green St and Spring St New York NY (2021). Photo courtesy the Noguchi Museum.
In New York, orange is the color of steam cones, a portion of the city flag, a dubious slice of pizza. But in Japan, the color is sacred and for the past two decades, Ori has been playing with this contrast. In sparse yet detailed works, she repurposes orange industrial mesh to capture single moments on New York streets. “The connections between individuals and groups, and the landscapes they pass through and share are revealed,” Ori said. “It is the beauty of these relationships that I wish to express.”

Shinsuke Aso, Getting out of a rut (2023)
Shinsuke Aso, Getting out of a rut (2023). Photo courtesy the Noguchi Museum.
Aso has an eye for photographing the humorous side of everyday objects. His collage works are equally playful and bring together discarded objects in pieces that ask viewers “open-ended questions.” Getting out of a rut places a watch, an oversized playing card, and a plastic hanger on sections of acrylic paper—objects all found onsite at the museum, where the Japan-born artist works as a shop associate.

Jared Friedman, Withdrawal (Automated Teller Machine 1) (2023)
Jared Friedman, Withdrawal Automated Teller Machine I (2023). Photo courtesy The Noguchi Museum.
Forget the city’s postcard architectures; Friedman focuses on the curious shapes of the small, the overlooked, the boringly familiar. On canvas, rug, and astroturf he paints ubiquitous toilet cubicles, white cardboard takeaway boxes, four leaf tile vents. The hope, he said, is to question our sentimentality. It’s easy to picture the bodega street corner onto which his grotty ATM machine is fixed, its blue screen light luring, its stickers illegible.

Johnathan Glass, Jim Ridl Trio at Deer Head Inn (2022)
Jonathan Glass, Jim Ridl Trio at Deer Head Inn (2022). Photo courtesy The Noguchi Museum.
Glass is a particular sort of jazz aficionado. He knows his way around the club circuit (Village Vanguard is his favorite) and boasts a tasteful collection of records, but what he loves best are the frenetic pen and ink drawings he sketches in real time at shows. For Glass, capturing sound means mimicking the movements of the musicians themselves. It’s all there, the straggles of hair, the concerted expressions, the eye contact, the wobbling strings. Here, he shows two works: Robert Glasper’s Dinner Party and Jim Ridl Trio at Deer Head Inn.

Yali Romagoza, Pain of Cuba, Body I am (2022)
Yali Romagoza, Pain of Cuba Body I am (2022). Photo courtesy Noguchi Museum.
The Cuban-born interdisciplinary artist Yali Romagoza has an alter-ego and at the Noguchi Museum, it’s laying on a bed of sand staring at the ceiling. Above it, the sounds of lapsing water and poetry accompany a video projection of a restless body awash on a darkened shore. It’s Romagoza’s response to the disorientation she has experienced since moving the U.S. in 2011 and the enduring longing she feels for home.
“A Living Mechanism: The Noguchi Museum Staff Exhibition” is on view at the Noguchi Museum, 9-01 33rd Road, Queens, New York, through June 15.
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In an era when one faction of America’s political establishment claims socialists control the entertainment and media industries, it’s worth noting the plain obvious: America has been here before.
As Cold War battle lines hardened and America flexed its might across the globe in the 1940s, inwardly it began scouring industries for communist infiltrators. The House on Un-American Activities Committee led the charge and in 1947 put Hollywood on trial before Congress. One outcome was the jailing of recalcitrant industry figures, the infamous Hollywood Ten; another was a secret meeting at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel at which politicians forced studio heads to persecute those with Communist Party ties.
A telegram invitation to this Waldorf Conference is among the more than 100 objects presented at Los Angeles’s Skirball Cultural Center in an exhibition that tells the story of how America’s film industry abandoned civil liberties under corporate and political pressure. On show through September 3, “Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare” is a collision of film and civic history that leads visitors to contemplate the lives ruined, the movies never made, and the ominous echoes in today’s polarized world.
“‘Blacklist’ highlights issues of persecution, loss of civil liberties, as well as the dangers of propaganda,” Cate Thurston, the exhibition’s curator told Artnet News, noting the show has particular resonance in the context of the writer’s strike. “Dynamic history exhibitions like ‘Blacklist’ are built to facilitate critical thinking about contemporary issues through nuanced explorations of the past.”
First produced by the Jewish Museum Milwaukee, the Los Angeles exhibition is twice the size of the original and fittingly teems with Hollywood artifacts sourced from the Writers Guild of America West archives and the Margaret Herrick Library.
Dalton Trumbo features prominently. Trumbo was one of the best-paid screenwriters in the 1940s before being blacklisted for Communist Party affiliations and forced to write under pseudonyms. He did so with remarkable prolificacy. “Blacklist” displays his screenplay for Spartacus (1960) as well as the Oscar statuettes he received for Roman Holiday (1953) and The Brave One (1956), neither of which he was able to collect without compromising his identity.
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo served 11 months in the federal penitentiary in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1950. While incarcerated, Trumbo stored some of his personal belongings in typewriter ribbon tins. The items he kept included a calendar and notes from his children. Photo courtesy of Mitzi Trumbo.
Given the prominent position Jewish people occupied in Hollywood, many of the exhibits speak to the conflicting way Jews both patrolled and disproportionally suffered in the climate of red panic. The aforementioned telegram was addressed to Louis B. Mayer, co-founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, the so-called King of Hollywood, whose studio would go on to rigorously enforce the government line. On the opposing side were First Amendment advocates, many of whom focused on the civil injustices dealt to Hollywood Ten—one lobbyist was Lauren Bacall (neé Betty Joan Perske) whose costume for How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) is on show.
“Many of the creatives and executives affected by the blacklist were Jewish,” Thurston said, “Antisemitism is an explicit theme throughout the exhibition and many of the artifacts the Skirball added demonstrate how antisemitism shaped the Hollywood Blacklist.” For Thurston, curating the show had a personal resonance given Red Scare politics impacted several members of her family: some fled to Europe, others scraped by writing magazine articles under invented names.
Lauren Bacall’s costume for her role as Schatze Page in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), designed by William Travilla. Courtesy of Larry McQueen Film Costume Collection.
As with previous Skirball exhibitions, such as a look at Star Trek’s impact on visual culture and the legacy of master puppeteer Jim Henson, “Blacklist” is shadowed by a summer-long film program. The season begins with the 2007 documentary Trumbo in which the writer tells his own story, and goes on to screen classics penned by blacklisted writers including High Noon (1952) and The Breaking Point (1950), as well as The Way We Were (1973) that is based off Arthur Laurents’s experiences with the House Un-American Activities Committee.
“Skirball welcomes opportunities to honor memory and facilitate dialogue about how collective historic memories influence contemporary American attitudes,” Thurston said. “My hope is that visitors come to the exhibition and make connections for themselves.”
See more images from the exhibition below.
Installation view of “Blacklist” at the Skirball Cultural Center. Photo courtesy Skirball Cultural Center.
Dalton Trumbo’s Academy Award for Best Original Story for The Brave One, awarded to the fictious Robert Rich (1956), Courtesy of Molly Trumbo Gringas.
Booklet, Committee on Un-American Activities, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C. (revised 12/1/1950). Courtesy of the Jewish Museum Milwaukee collections.
Installation view of “Blacklist” at the Skirball Cultural Center. Photo courtesy Skirball Cultural Center.
Union flyer promoting the opening of Salt of the Earth (1954). Courtesy of the Herbert Biberman and Gale Sondergaard Papers, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
Installation view of “Blacklist” at the Skirball Cultural Center. Photo courtesy Skirball Cultural Center.
Alfred L. Levitt’s Writers Guild of America membership cards from 1965 to 1982 list both his real name and his front, Tom August. On loan from the Screen Writers Guild Records, Writers Guild Foundation Library and Archive
“Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare” is on view at Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd, Los Angeles, through September 3.
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From its punny title on down, the Brooklyn Museum’s new exhibition “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” was designed to start a conversation. Love it or hate it, it’s hard to deny that the show, which looks at the artist’s complicated legacy through the eyes of Gadsby, an Australian comedian best known for the Netflix special Nanette, has succeeded in that regard. 
Even before it even opened, the show elicited the kind of fervent takedowns you rarely see from art critics these days. Then, just as quickly, the backlash brought on its own backlash. Only three days out from the opening it already feels like we’re in the third or fourth wave of “takes.” (Which in itself is a little funny, because both sides of the debate have accused the other of indulging in the kind of rapid, vapid opinions that dominate Twitter discourses, not legitimate art-historical ones.)
“There’s little to see. There’s no catalogue to read. The ambitions here are at GIF level, though perhaps that is the point,” wrote New York Times critic at large Jason Farago of the exhibition in a review last week. The show, he argued, “backs away from close looking for the affirmative comforts of social-justice-themed pop culture.” 

“It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” at the Brooklyn Museum gives the audience permission to ignore what challenges them, and to ennoble a preference for comfort and kitsch, @jsf, our art critic, writes.https://t.co/22PVtnTBaq
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 2, 2023

Gadsby is after a revisionist history with the show, which is one of 50 international exhibitions presented on the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death. The comedian aims to redress Picasso’s legacy with a consideration of his fattened ego and misogynistic tendencies, his documented abuse of women and colonialist imagery.  
But the gesture extends beyond show’s titular artist too. For Gadsby, Picasso represents Modernism writ large; he’s the male “genius” in a decades-long movement of male geniuses, many anointed at the expense of equally talented women artists. 
In response, Gadsby has paired a selection of (mostly minor) Picasso pieces with works by pioneering women artists of the 20th and 21st centuries— Nina Chanel Abney, Dara Birnbaum, Käthe Kollwitz, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, and so on. These creators may be also geniuses in their own right, but their works’ connection to Picasso has been seen as tenuous at best.    

The Brooklyn Museum has dismissed negative reviews of “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” which opened to the public today after being panned in ARTnews and the New York Times. https://t.co/Od6ef1lR6q
— ARTnews (@artnews) June 2, 2023

“The function of a public museum (or at least it should be) is to present to all of us these women’s full aesthetic achievements,” Farago wrote, before offering an alternative location for Gadsby’s presentation: “There is also room for story hour, in the children’s wing. 
That “Pablo-matic” engages in a skin-deep, pseudo-historical investigation of its chosen topic is an opinion shared by other critics too. Artnews’s Alex Greenberger wrote in a review of the “disastrous” show that its “problem—Pablo-m, if you will—is not its revisionary mindset, which justly sets it apart from all the other celebratory Picasso shows being staged this year to mark the 50th anniversary of his death… It is, instead, the show’s disregard for art history,” he wrote, noting that Gadsby studied art history in college only to abandon it out of frustration “with its patriarchal roots.” 

But while these and other biting reviews circulated online, some pointed out that they came mostly from male critics. “So many angry, hysterical reviews from male art critics must mean that Pablo-matic @brooklynmuseum is saying something really important,‘” wrote the feminist collective Guerrilla Girls, which has a piece in the show, in an Instagram post. 
Meanwhile, Lisa Small, a Brooklyn Museum curator who, along with colleague Catherine Morris, helped Gadsby organize the exhibition, posted a picture of herself laughing with the comedian. Its caption read: “that feeling when / It’s Pablo-matic / gets (male) art critics’ knickers in a twist.” (Morris reposted it with the caption “An @nytimes columnist got VERY EMOTIONAL about our show.”)
Australian author Kaz Cooke summed up the sentiment in a Twitter post of her own: “So far male reviewers of @Hannahgadsby’s co-curated Brooklyn Museum Picasso show have slagged it for being about Picasso, not being enough about Picasso, not being funny enough, not being serious enough, having the wrong paintings by women, & having paintings by the wrong women,” she wrote. 

Shortly after the show opened, Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak weighed in, too. “To those who question whether Gadsby’s voice belongs in this exhibit, I would simply ask: Whose interests are threatened by including it? Or, who benefits from excluding it?” She wrote in an op-ed for the Art Newspaper. 
“[‘It’s Pablo-matic’] is not about cancelling Picasso. Quite the opposite,” Pasternak continued. “Cancelling means refusing to engage. Refusing to have the conversation. Refusing complexity. Ours is an exhibition that invites complexity. And I’m confident Picasso can handle a little complexity. In fact, he invited it.” 
“I’m also confident that our audiences can handle complexity, too.”
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Keith Haring’s linework has graced subterranean tunnels and art’s loftiest exhibition halls. This month, however, marks his first museum retrospective in Los Angeles. “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” animates 10 galleries at the Broad, the culmination of a decade of effort first started by the museum’s namesake founder Eli Broad—the late businessman who got his start as a collector buying the work of Haring and his downtown friends in the 1980s.
Despite the commercial successes of Haring’s approach to accessible art—like his 1986 Pop Shop—“Art Is For Everybody” honors Haring’s political activism. The show features more than 120 artworks and relics that offer shocks of topical vigor, both on and off the canvas, from paintings to experimental videos, ephemera and more. In addition to drawing from its own holdings, the Broad has secured 67 loans from the Keith Haring Foundation and 42 from private collectors.
“The exhibition offers the opportunity to see work from the full arc of the artist’s career,” curator and exhibitions manager Sarah Loyer told Artnet News. This includes work Haring made as a student at the School of Visual Arts, through to his passing at age 31 from AIDS-related illness.
“Art Is for Everybody” opens with a striped room highlighting Haring’s Day-Glo paintings. Music culled from his mixtapes transports viewers to Tony Shafrazi Gallery circa 1982. After exploring Haring’s affinity for the graffiti scene’s many moving parts, like hip-hop and breakdancing, the show illustrates how his work grew more fervent with time.
“He addressed topics from nuclear disarmament during the Cold War Era to religion at a time when the Christian right promoted abstinence-only education despite the growing AIDS epidemic, as well as police brutality, racism, patriarchy, and capitalism,” Loyer said.
The show closes with Haring’s AIDS activism, then presents a spread of work by downtown art stars like George Condo and Jean Michel Basquiat, who collaborated with the force that was Keith Haring.
In organizing the show, Loyer came to appreciate that Haring worked with the “confident line” as his primary medium. “If you look closely, you can see it change over time, from the earliest spray-painted works to intricate compositions filling massive unstretched tarpaulins,” she said. Though “Art Is for Everybody” offers universal delights, like a crown Haring helped create for Grace Jones and the pink leather suit Madonna wore to his 1984 birthday party, the show chiefly demonstrates Haring’s ability to blend criticism with optimism through many resounding lines.
After its showing at The Broad, “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada. Take a peek below.
Keith Haring, Untitled (1982). Private collection. © Keith Haring Foundation
Installation view of “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” at the Broad, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com. Courtesy of the Broad.
Installation view of “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” at the Broad, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com. Courtesy of the Broad.
Keith Haring, Untitled (1988). © Keith Haring Foundation
Keith Haring with LA II (Angel Ortiz), 3 Piece Leather Suit (1983), leather and paint. © Keith Haring Foundation
Installation view of “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” at the Broad, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com. Courtesy of the Broad.
Keith Haring, National Coming Out Day (1988), poster. © Keith Haring Foundation
Installation view of “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” at the Broad, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com. Courtesy of the Broad.
Keith Haring, Untitled (1985). © Keith Haring Foundation, The Broad Art Foundation
Keith Haring, Reagan’s Death Cops Hunt Pope (1980). © Keith Haring Foundation.
Installation view of “Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” at the Broad, Los Angeles. Photo: Joshua White/JWPictures.com. Courtesy of the Broad.
“Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody” is on view at The Broad, 221 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles, through October 8.
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For the past two decades, Katherine Bernhardt’s schtick has been throwing everyday stuff onto the canvas in exuberant, messy, color-pop paintings. Ketchup, hamburger, toilet roll, toothbrush, cigarette—to scan a gallery of Bernhardts is to see an artist who works instinctively, one who eyes something near-at-hand and then makes it massive, flat, and drowning in a sea of color.
Most recently, that thing within reach has been Pokémon cards. Bernhardt’s son began collecting the cards during the pandemic and soon she too was a fan. Bernhardt captures the fun, vibrant escapism of the Pokémon universe in her new show at David Zwirner Hong Kong—deep breath—“Dummy doll jealous eyes ditto pikachu beefy mimikyu rough play Galarian rapid dash libra horn HP 270 Vmax full art,” set to run through August 20.
Installation view of “Katherine Bernhardt: Dummy doll jealous eyes ditto pikachu beefy mimikyu rough play Galarian rapid dash libra horn HP 270 Vmax full art” at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, 2023. Photo courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
Most of the paintings on display in her first solo venture in Hong Kong replicate the formal components of a Pokémon trading card: a rectangular portrait with a delineated border and inscribed with the Pokémon’s Hit Points (HP), energy type, and skill moves, written in both English and Japanese.
As ever, Bernhardt is not one for pompous titles. Surfing Pikachu (2021) is as expected: a gleeful Pikachu racing through a sea of swirls on a pink surfboard. Chansey (2021) is typically affable, clutching her lucky egg that appears like a golden acorn, and labelled “#113” as per her Pokédex number.
The difference is in the execution. With Pokémon cards, which Nintendo released under the art direction of Ken Sugimori in 1996, the image appears glossy and computer-enhanced, the layout balancing artwork and gameplay information. Bernhardt’s “cards” have no such constraint. Colors collide and merge, and her creatures dominate the canvas, poking through borders in striking gestures that echo signature movements known from Nintendo’s video games.
Installation view, Katherine Bernhardt, Pikachu Pikaball and Ditto VMax Ju Ju (2021). Photo courtesy David Zwirner.
This blurred, bold effect is a product of the frenetic pace at which Bernhardt works. In a process she has followed for much of her career, outlines are first hashed out in spray-paint, next she lays the canvas on the floor and layers on watered down acrylic paint, hence the bleeding of colors. Oftentimes, Bernhardt attacks multiple paintings simultaneously.
The rough repurposing of pop culture subjects is something of a Bernhardt staple. She’s previously painted Darth Vader, Pink Panther, Garfield, E.T., typically on hot tropical backgrounds. The show notes proclaim the St. Louis born artist is challenging “high-low dichotomies of contemporary painting” and by extension questioning art world value systems.
But she might just as readily be making Pokémon paintings because they’re fun.

“There was some criticism, like, ‘Oh, great choice of subject matter to paint.’ Like, what do you want me to paint? War zones and people dying and kids being killed? There’s enough of that on TV and in the real world,” she told the South China Morning Post.

“The art, for me, it’s more like an escape. And a world you can go into that’s colorful and good.”

See more images from the show below.
Installation view of “Katherine Bernhardt: Dummy doll jealous eyes ditto pikachu beefy mimikyu rough play Galarian rapid dash libra horn HP 270 Vmax full art” at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, 2023. Photo courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
Katherine Bernhardt, Chansey (2021). Photo courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
Katherine Bernhardt, Gengar and Mimikyu Tag Team GX Poltergeist Horror House (2021). Photo courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
Katherine Bernhardt, Galarian Rapid Dash (2023). Photo courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
Katherine Bernhardt in her studio, St. Louis, 2023. Photo: Whitten Sabbatini.
“Katherine Bernhardt: Dummy doll jealous eyes ditto pikachu beefy mimikyu rough play Galarian rapid dash libra horn HP 270 Vmax full art” is on view at David Zwirner, 5–6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong, through August 20.
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In 1966, Ernest Cole fled his native South Africa, never to return. The nation’s first Black freelance photographer, he carried with him a secret cache of images documenting the evils of apartheid—photos he knew that could never be published in the county of his birth.
Instead, he went to New York City, where Magnum Photos and Random House published his House of Bondage, exposing South Africa’s horrific apartheid system to the world. The groundbreaking book became international news, helping fuel the anti-apartheid movement.
In 1968, Cole wrote in Ebony that he wanted his photography book “to show the world what the white South African had done to the Black.”
“I knew that if an informer would learn what I was doing I would be reported and end up in jail,” he continued. “I knew that I could be killed merely for gathering that material for such a book and I knew that when I finished, I would have to leave my country in order to have the book published. And I knew that once the book was published, I could never go home again.”
Ernest Cole, from House of Bondage. Handcuffed blacks were arrested for being in a white area illegally. Photo ©Ernest Cole, courtesy of Magnum Photos.
But Cole‘s fame was short-lived. He gave up photography in the 1970s, and died destitute, at just 49 years old, in 1990. His original negatives were believed to have been lost.
Until a few years ago, that is. In 2018, Cole’s heirs found 60,000 negatives in a Stockholm bank vault. Now, the first exhibition featuring works from Cole’s rediscovered archive is on view at at FOAM, the Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam.
“Ernest Cole: House of Bondage” showcases Cole’s pioneering work, and the obstacles he overcame in order to capture the groundbreaking images of oppression.
Born in 1940, Cole started taking photographs at just eight years old. South African authorities greatly restricted the movement of Black people, but Cole was able to change his registration to the less constrained category of “colored.” (One of the tests was whether or not a pencil would get stuck in your hair.)
This relative freedom of movement gave Cole the ability to photograph shocking scenes of South Africa life.
He went to the mines, where men lined up to be processed for grueling manual labor, living in harsh barracks far from home. He went to schools where Bantu children worked on the floor due to lack of desks. He visited Black servants working for white families, their living quarters furnished with milk crates and newspaper carpeting.
Ernest Cole, from House of Bondage. Students kneel on the floor to write. The government did not always provide schools for black children. Photo ©Ernest Cole, courtesy of Magnum Photos.
Other photos show Black men handcuffed and young boys behind bars, arrested for being caught in a white neighborhood. There are packed segregated trains, the Black passengers clinging precariously to the outside of the cars in order to travel during rush hour, and overcrowded hospitals with Black patients in desperate need of treatment.
When Cole finally published House of Bondage in 1967, the images shocked the world—as the artist knew they would. Ahead of the FOAM exhibition, Aperture reissued the book, introducing this first-person account of the everyday violence under apartheid to 21st-century audiences.
See more photos from the exhibition below.
Ernest Cole, from House of Bondage. It is against the law for black servants to live under the same roof as their employers. In a private home, servants would have a separate little room in the backyard. She lives on the edge of opulence, while her own world is bare. Newspapers are her carpet, fruit crates her chairs and table. Photo ©Ernest Cole, courtesy of Magnum Photos.
Ernest Cole, from House of Bondage. Servants are not forbidden to love. The woman holding this child said: “I love this child, though she’ll grow up to treat me just like her mother does. Now she is innocent.” Photo ©Ernest Cole, courtesy of Magnum Photos.
Ernest Cole, from House of Bondage. Acres of identical four-room houses on nameless streets. Many were hours by train from city jobs. Photo ©Ernest Cole, courtesy of Magnum Photos.
Ernest Cole, from House of Bondage. Africans throng Johannesburg station platform during late afternoon rush hour. The train accelerates with its load of clinging passengers. They ride like this through rain and cold, some for the entire journey. Photo ©Ernest Cole, courtesy of Magnum Photos.
Ernest Cole, from House of Bondage. With no room inside the train, some ride between cars. Which black train to take is a matter of guesswork. They have no destination signs and no announcement of arrivals is made. Head car may be numbered to show its route, but the number is often wrong. In confusion, passengers sometimes jump across tracks and some are killed by express trains. Whistle has sounded, train is moving, but people are still trying to get on. Photo ©Ernest Cole, courtesy of Magnum Photos.
Ernest Cole, from House of Bondage. These boys were caught trespassing in a white area. Photo ©Ernest Cole, courtesy of Magnum Photos.
“Ernest Cole: House of Bondage” is on view at FOAM, Keizersgracht 609, 1017 DS Amsterdam, Netherlands, January 26–June 14, 2023. 
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It’s been 30 years since Ethel Schwabacher had a proper solo show in New York City. But in the 1950s, she was at the forefront of the Abstract Expressionist movement, showing vibrant canvases with bold colors, fluid brushstrokes, and even snippets of poems at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York.
“Ethel was a poet as well, so she would put lines of her poetry in her paintings—which for the 1950s was way ahead of its time,” Christine Berry, cofounder of New York’s Berry Campbell Gallery, told Artnet News.
Now, the late artist—who has work in the collections of institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—is having enjoying a well-deserved revival at Berry Campbell.
At the Chelsea gallery, a nearly sold-out exhibition is on view through this weekend. The works, priced at $165,000 to $400,000—far above the artist’s auction record of $56,250, set in 2020, according to the Artnet Price Database—focuses on the artist’s works from the 1950s.
Ethel Schwabacher, Seasons and Days: July (1955). Courtesy of Berry Campbell, New York.
For decades, the Schwabacher estate was represented by Anita Shapolsky Gallery, an elderly dealer on the Upper East Side who stages about three shows a year out of her townhouse.
The past few years have been a moment of rediscovery for many other women of the Ab Ex movement, with the acclaimed Mary Gabriel book Ninth Street Women, and in the landmark 2016 Denver Art Museum show “Women of Abstract Expressionism.” But it seemed as though Schwabacher—one of the 12 artists in the Denver show—might be left behind.
Enter Berry Campbell, which also represents the estates of Judith Godwin and Perle Fine, two of the other women in the Denver show.
When the dealers got in touch with the artist’s son, lawyer Christopher Schwabacher (who for years represented Parsons), they were shocked if delighted to discover hundreds of paintings, not seen for decades, carefully packed away in storage. That included the show’s centerpiece, Prometheus, a 1959 canvas that had to be unrolled and stretched for the occasion.
Ethel Schwabacher, Prometheus (1959). Courtesy of Berry Campbell, New York.
“These all have Betty Parsons labels on the back,” Berry said. “It’s incredible.”
The artist continued painting until her death in 1984, and the dealers hope to build an appreciation of Schwabacher’s oeuvre with a series of shows spanning her entire career.
“Originally, we thought we would have to do a retrospective since no one knew who she was—but the paintings were so strong,” gallery cofounder Martha Campbell added.
When Artnet News visited “Ethel Schwabacher: Woman in Nature (Paintings from the 1950s),” it was a busy afternoon.
Ethel Schwabacher (ca. 1955). Courtesy of Berry Campbell, New York.
Christopher Schwabacher and his wife, Hannelore, had stopped by to visit, and there were repair men in the space—a construction project next door had dropped an anvil on the gallery skylight, causing pane of glass to shatter. Thankfully, no one was hurt, and the paintings were not damaged.
Christopher Schwabacher, now age 81, was unfazed by the incident, and happy to share childhood memories of his mother painting—a widow, she would put on classical music to drown out the noise of him playing with his sister, Brenda Webster, while she worked. The living room was pressed into service as an art studio.
“I’ve never seen so many paint tubes of paint. As kids we were fascinated by them,” Christopher Schwabacher told Artnet News. “When we could sort of let loose and not be so careful was when she would bring her brushes out to the faucet in the pantry to wash them.”
Decades later, the artist’s son is hopeful the time is ripe for a reappraisal of Schwabacher’s career—and he sees the skylight incident as a good omen: “We have a smashing success right here!”
See more paintings from the show below.
Ethel Schwabacher, Origins I (1958). Courtesy Berry Campbell, New York.
Ethel Schwabacher, Pennington: Return and Departure of Birds (1957). Courtesy of Berry Campbell, New York.
Ethel Schwabacher, Return No. 3 (1957). Courtesy of Berry Campbell, New York.
Ethel Schwabacher, Steps of the Sun (1957). Courtesy of Berry Campbell, New York.
Ethel Schwabacher, Return and Departure (1956). Courtesy of Berry Campbell, New York.
“Ethel Schwabacher: Woman in Nature (Paintings from the 1950s)” is on view at Berry Campbell, 524 West 26th Street, New York, New York, April 20–May 26, 2023.
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