On View

Entering Sarah Meyohas’s new show at Marianne Boesky Gallery, you might be forgiven for thinking the artist has simply installed a number of pitch-black glass panes across the gallery. Step in front of these mirrored panels, though, and they reveal mesmeric three-dimensional images—a cluster of plants here, a fragment of a naked female form there—all tinged with iridescent hues. No, it’s not digital trickery, but the result of Meyohas’s continued adventures into holographic technology.
These new works are the “Rolls Royce version” of holograms, as Meyohas put it, technically known as diffraction gratings, devices with multi-lined or grooved surfaces that split light into its different wavelengths or colors. The resulting vibrant tones seen by the human eye are known as structural color, an occurrence that Meyohas has lately found “religiously appealing.” 
“Essentially, any color that changes based on your angle of viewing is structural color,” she told Artnet News. “The idea that a regular shape or form at nanoscale can refract and create light and color on the visible spectrum, and the fact that light is dependent on your position just felt so beautiful to me.”
Sarah Meyohas, Interference #17 (2023) . Photo: Lance Brewer. © Sarah Meyohas. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen.
Her diffraction gratings, making up her ongoing “Interferences” series (2021–present), have been created by machine-etching millions of microscopic lines onto glass at a depth of 600 nanometers. So meticulous is this operation—emerging from “our desire to encode more and more information in smaller and smaller spots,” Meyohas said—that in effect, “we can create structural color that is more precise than what nature creates.” 
It is fitting, then, that the artist’s gratings have been etched from her film photographs of unearthly flora, offering a head-on collision between nature and technology. (Meyohas also considered water droplets and spiderwebs as subjects, except the former was difficult to execute and she did not want to raise spiders for the latter.) 
Sarah Meyohas, Interference #19 (2023). Photo: Lance Brewer. © Sarah Meyohas. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen.
“I didn’t want to put in a pattern. I didn’t want to put in something that could be repeated,” she explained. “It’s more about seeing the texture of life and living matter, and focusing on that up close.” 
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a 14-foot long, multi-panel diffraction grating, titled Interference #18 (2023). The 30 trapezoid glass panes variously carry visuals of plant matter and snatches of a naked female body, with the entanglement between the biotic and technologic taking an abstract, sensual turn. 
Sarah Meyohas, Interference #18 (2023). Photo: Lance Brewer. © Sarah Meyohas. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen.
Meyohas’s newfound interest in anatomy is also captured in Diffraction #1 (2023), a sculptural form that’s part of a new series. Across the work’s conjoined glass windows can be glimpsed three-breasted female torsos—a surreal vision that emerges from Meyohas’s observation that “you really don’t see nude forms anymore,” whether in galleries or Hollywood movies. “I like putting bodies in spaces they’re not supposed to be,” she added. 
These new pieces trail Meyohas’s other experiments with high-end tech, whether with the blockchain or A.I. But hers have never been idle pursuits of technology; instead, they are attempts to lift the lid on the true nature and ramifications of such innovations—what it might mean to financialize art (as in 2015’s Bitchcoin), or algorithmize beauty (as in 2017’s “Cloud of Petals“). This has entailed turning to “a different type of engagement with technology,” she said. 
Sarah Meyohas, detail of Interference #18 (2023). Photo: Lance Brewer. © Sarah Meyohas. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen.
With her latest diffraction gratings, she sought to create “pieces that are fundamentally optical, requiring your physical presence,” she noted, as opposed to work that could be “absorbed” by trending discussions of virtuality or generative A.I. 
And Meyohas’s own engagement with holographic tech runs far deeper than those finely etched surfaces. While discussing the works, she excitedly detailed the technique of turning every pixel of her photographs into a value for the machine gratings, and the dilemma of whether or not to laminate the glass panes. “I get off on that,” she said of the rather nerdy process. 
“I hope people will see the difference, but I’m not entirely sure that they will,” she added of her upscale holograms. “They’ll be like, ‘oh, it changes color, fun,’ you know? But it’s okay if they don’t because I just had to make it.”  
“Sarah Meyohas” is on view at Marianne Boesky, 509 West 24th Street, New York, through June 30. 
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Remember “the dress” from 2015? For a few weeks that year, a low-res image of a random frock fomented a seemingly inescapable internet debate over whether its colors were blue and black or white and gold.  
It all seemed like a bit of fun. Taylor Swift weighed in; so did every uncle with a Facebook account. Studies and peer-reviewed papers eventually got to the bottom of the science behind the split in interpretations, but by that point, most people were tired of talking about it. In the end, we were left with a simple fact: people can look at the same object and see different things. 
But what if this basic physiological phenomenon could be weaponized against us in the name of spycraft or commerce? (The dress debate proved to be good business for social media platforms and media outlets—Buzzfeed even based its editorial strategy around it.)  
For Trevor Paglen, an artist who has made a career of looking at the sly ways in which technology has shaped our view of the world around us, this is a question of when, not if.  
“In the extremely near future,” the artist said, “you and I will watch what is ostensibly the same show on Netflix, but we will each see a different movie.” The streaming platform, he explained, “will be generating a different movie for us based on, one, the things we want to see; and two, what it thinks will be the most effective way to extract some kind of value from us.”   
Trevor Paglen, UNKNOWN #85237 (Unclassified object near The Eastern Veil) (2023). © Trevor Paglen. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
The dress anecdote may seem like an odd place to start an article about Paglen’s new show at Pace Gallery, which has nothing to do with clothes or Netflix and is instead about a wide range of heady political topics like electronic warfare and the effects of military influence operations on American culture. But we begin here because, if there’s one central theme that ties this otherwise disparate exhibition together, it is, in Paglen’s words, that “perception is malleable.” 
“You’ve Just Been F*cked by PSYOPS” is the name of the show. Its title is taken from a phrase frequently found on challenge coins, which are small tokens made to commemorate special military and police units who use unconventional tactics of persuasion to achieve a particular objective—also known as psychological operations, or psy-ops. (Taking the form of currency, these mementos also make eerie metaphors for the military-industrial complex writ large.)
If you’ve heard about psy-ops, chances are it was in the context of science fiction or conspiracy theory. But the phrase is about to become much more common in our collective lexicon, Paglen said. If the last decade was defined by “surveillance capitalism”—a term coined by scholar Shoshana Zuboff to connote the practice of corporations harvesting and selling our personal data—then we’re about to enter what Paglen calls the era of “psy-ops capitalism.” 
Trevor Paglen, (PALLADIUM Variation #4) 2023. © Trevor Paglen. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Sure enough, a scary character features prominently in Paglen’s own version of a challenge coin, which is a centerpiece of the show. The sculpture, which is roughly 50 times the size of a coin, is made from steel, bullets, and resin; in the middle is a menacing skull with glowing red features. (Real challenge coins are inscribed with their units’ insignia—typically symbols of patriotism or violence. Skeletons and dragons are popular choices, Paglen pointed out.)
Elsewhere in the show are several large-scale photographs of “unids,” or unidentified objects floating in orbit around the earth, which the artist imaged using infrared telescopes in remote locations. It can be hard to spot these unids, though. Paglen’s prints are also packed with stellar remnants, stars, and gaseous clouds. So much so, in fact, that the pictures could just as easily be read as musings on the vast mysteries of outer space.
To Paglen, they kind of are. “I think that space itself as a concept is kind of a psy-op,” he said, only half joking. Because of its radical unknowability, space becomes a backdrop onto which we project our fantasies, he said.
Trevor Paglen, UNKNOWN #90007 (Classified object near Dreyer’s Nebula) (2023). © Trevor Paglen. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Think about this idea in the gallery and you’ll begin to wonder: Can I trust anything on view, or is the artist employing the same techniques that he’s exploring? Am I seeing deception or am I being deceived?
This question gets even knottier with the one video piece, Doty (2023). The 66-minute film features interviews with Richard Doty, a former member of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, who discusses his work recruiting spies, running surveillance operations, and spreading false information within UFO communities to cover up secret work conducted at New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force base, where he was stationed.  
Whether or not Doty is a reliable narrator is never quite clear; nor is his agenda. For every moment when it feels like he’s whispering state secrets into our ears, there are others that feel like he’s spinning yarns that are just a little too neat to be true—a magician’s assistant distracting from the trick.
Trevor Paglen, Doty (2023). © Trevor Paglen. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Suspended above the gallery is the artist’s other sculpture in the show, the kite-like PALLADIUM Variation #4 (2023). It’s based on satellites designed by military and intelligence agencies to confuse enemy radars, but unlike those objects, which are ultra-sophisticated pieces of deception technology, Paglen’s imitation is primitive—just steel and foil. More than a weapon, it invokes the work of the mid-century minimalists, say, or Light and Space artists like Larry Bell. 
The sculpture’s inutility leaves its meaning unclear. That’s the case with many of the artworks on view in the exhibition. Straightforward and spare—a printed photograph, a single-channel video—they exude none of the complexities of the systems they invoke. How they all fit together remains a mystery. The whole thing is fraught with ambiguity. 
This, according to the artist, is intentional. The show asks viewers: “What is this ambiguity? How are we susceptible to being taken advantage of in these moments?”
“Our impulse is to try to resolve that ambiguity, to make sense of it,” he went on. But for Paglen, the show is meant to remind us that our “inability to live with ambiguity might be a means by which we can be manipulated.” 
“Trevor Paglen: You’ve Just Been F*cked by PSYOPS” is on view now through July 22 at Pace in New York. 
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On the makeshift dance floor inside Chase Contemporary gallery, the ’80s are in full swing. Gloria Gaynor is blasting out of the DJ booth, producing hip gyrations reminiscent of a time when a Soho party meant something altogether different. Someone is draped in a boa, to what degree of irony it’s hard to tell.
The gathering is here to celebrate the latest installment of Angel Ortiz’s comeback, “Ode 2 NYC,” a collection of new works on show through June 18. And in case any young stragglers are unaware of whose party they’re crashing, it’s proclaimed in a giant black-and-white photo that hangs over the champagne bar: Ortiz (aka LA II) stood alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf. “You’re in the presence of New York street art royalty,” goes the message.
Angel Ortiz, Shazbot (2023). Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
Ortiz is hunched over a folding table by the door, tagging posters, t-shirts, hats, and quite frankly anything he can work a fat marker into. He shoulders a tattered backpack the almost entire time, as though at any moment he might scurry off and find something more interesting to do. This appears unlikely. He’s surrounded by longtime friends and fans, seemingly enjoying his reemergence into the spotlight. But then again, it wouldn’t be entirely out of character given Ortiz’s line of work.
Ortiz was barely a teenager when he broke onto the city’s street art scene in a much-worked over legend that goes something like this: the Lower East Side native and his graffiti crew, the Non Stoppers, had been spray-painting the area for years when Ortiz’s densely packed lines caught the attention of Keith Haring, then a School of Visual Arts student. Haring was relentless in his search of the LA II tag creator, eventually finding “Little Angel” and beginning a long-lasting collaborative partnership. It was mutually beneficial, with Haring granted local street access and acceptability, and Ortiz thrust into an international art market that was developing a sudden taste for street art.
Keith Haring and Angel Ortiz standing in front of a work they collaborated on. Photo courtesy of the artist.
The narrative of Ortiz’s success is so entwined with Haring that it would be understandable if, 40 years on, the Puerto Rican felt frustrated by the tie, as though it diminishes the merits of his own art. Not so. Ortiz remains glowing about his relationship with Haring. He’s also clear-eyed that it was Haring who approached him and asked for help (and, it seems, took inspiration from LA II’s bold line work).
“My relationship with Keith has always been about friendship first and the artistic aspect was and will always be secondary,” Ortiz told Artnet News. “Keith sought my guidance on how to accentuate his isolated figures and make them have a more complex environment to come to life visually. The collaborations artistically were magical and will never be duplicated.”
Angel Ortiz, Hudson (2023). Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
Ortiz’s latest collection follows a sold-out show at London’s D’Stassi Gallery in 2022 and sees him continue to transfer his distinctive tags, symbols, and icons from the city’s surface onto canvas. To view Ortiz’s current work is to enter a maze of arrows, lines to nowhere, half-formed letters, calligraphic flourishes, bold outlines, and negative spaces. Oftentimes, Ortiz orients his works around his formative motifs: the heart, the crown, the cat, the taxi cab (a nod, perhaps, to Ortiz’s first collaboration with Haring on a taxi hood), and the spray can, which, onsite in Soho, grows arm and legs that extend onto the gallery wall.
In “Ode 2 NYC,” as in London, Ortiz also reaches more often for the paintbrush than the spray can. “I feel differently depending on which medium I use and feel most artistically free when I have a spray can in my hand,” Ortiz said. “When I use a paintbrush on canvas, it is artistically the most unforgiving of all my weapons of choice.”
Ortiz’s expertise with a marker compensates for any lingering uncertainty he may have with more traditional artistic tools. In works like Big Apple (2023) and Gotham (2023), the movement of thick and thin lines create the context in which painted symbols sits.
Angel Ortiz at the opening of “Ode 2 NYC”. Photo: courtesy Chase Contemporary.
But there’s a contradiction at play here. Although Ortiz’s lines and motifs echo the era in which they were born, such is the intricacy, polish, and arrangement of his works that are conveniently presented on canvas that they lose urgency, that connection with the surface of the city. And this is fine: artists are forever evolving, retooling, reframing. It just feels more jarring in the context of graffiti.
It’s a shift Ortiz himself acknowledges. “The 1980s graffiti was free of social media and the thought of building a brand,” he said. “Today’s graffiti is not bad; it is just different. It is like comparing professional sports in the 80’s to now. Same sport fundamentally, just a completely different game.”
See more images of the show below.
Angel Ortiz at opening of “Ode 2 NYC.” Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
Installation view of “Ode 2 NYC.” Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
Angel Ortiz, Walter (2023). Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
Angel Ortiz, Untitled (2023). Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
Installation view of “Ode 2 NYC.” Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
Angel Ortiz, Subway (2023). Photo courtesy Chase Contemporary.
“Ode 2 NYC” is on view at Chase Contemporary, 413-415 West Broadway, New York, through June 18.
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Step into Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s new installation at the Toledo Museum of Art and you’ll be greeted by a chorus of bird calls: trills, chirps, and warbles, ebbing and flowing into each other. The hitch? Not every tweet is real; rather, a good portion of that birdsong is the product of artificial intelligence. 
The work, titled Machine Auguries: Toledo, marks Ginsberg’s U.S. debut and represents her continued exploration into how the dawn chorus, the daily call and response performed by birds in the spring and summer, has been impacted by modern civilization.  
Over decades, bird populations have greatly dwindled, not just due to habitat loss, but the effects of human-made noise and light pollution. So much so that birds have had to sing louder and at a higher pitch, if they even know when to sing. 
Installation view of “Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Machine Auguries: Toledo” at Toledo Museum of Art, 2023. © the artist. Photo: Madhouse.
“I wanted to consider the effects of our behaviors on other species, and as a human I can’t help but ask how their adaptation, or lack of it, then affects us,” Ginsberg told Artnet News. “What will there be without birds?” 
To that end, Ginsberg gamed out an immersive sound installation wherein a natural dawn chorus gradually gives way to one filled with A.I.-generated calls, set against a backdrop of an artificial sky. The first iteration of Machine Auguries was installed at the Somerset House in London in 2019, with the latest edition, presented in partnership with Superblue, offering what Ginsberg considers a fuller realization of the work.  
Where the natural chorus in the first installation was populated with British birds, the Toledo version has been aptly localized to feature 25 species, from the northern cardinal to the black-capped chickadee. These were selected by the artist with help from birding experts and locals such as the Black Swamp Bird Observatory.  
“We chose the most iconic species to the local chorus—the birds that define the soundscape of the local dawn,” explained Ginsberg. 
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Northern Cardinal (2023), one of several digital paintings generated by the artist using DALL-E 2 and included in a field guide accompanying the exhibition. Photo courtesy of the artist and Toledo Museum of Art.
The generative adversarial network that powers the artificial chorus has also had a significant upgrade, having been built on a fresh dataset of some 100,000 field recordings from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Ginsberg recalled that the technology in 2019 could only make one-second clips; now, though, it can make complete four-second passages.
And all that in such a way that “we can no longer tell what is real or not,” according to Ginsberg, who tested out the artificial calls on the bird I.D. app, Merlin, and with local birding expert, Kenn Kaufman. The feedback from both was that the machine-generated calls were “indiscernible” from the real ones.  
“That’s the highest praise imaginable for a technological project,” said Ginsberg, “but also the saddest outcome of creating an imperfect copy of an un-replicable, complex world.” 
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. Photo: © Nathalie Théry.
Which gets to the heart of Ginsberg’s practice, which has long probed “the conflicted relationship we have with nature and with technology, depleting one to prioritize the other.” In her pieces—such as 2018’s The Substitute, which virtualized the last male northern white rhinoceros, and Pollinator Pathmaker (2022), an algorithmic tool that explores the impact of human-designed gardens on insects—the tension between nature and technology is evident in both medium and message. 
In Toledo Museum’s vast Canaday Gallery, Ginsberg has thus installed a lighting array that mimics the colors of a sunrise. As the hues shift from a grayish blue to a warm orange, an American robin sings, only to receive an A.I.-generated response. More birds join in as the day artificially dawns and the bird orchestra builds with deep machine calls emitted by 24 speakers.  
In the end, under the bright light of the gallery, the viewer is left “in the absence of nature,” said Ginsberg, “taking time to listen to an unnatural reconstruction of the life outside.”  
Installation view of “Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Machine Auguries: Toledo” at Toledo Museum of Art, 2023. © the artist. Photo: Madhouse.
To the artist, this growing overlap between the real and unreal gets to the matter of A.I. at large. The advances in the technology, even during the six months it took to build out this project, have shifted the conversation between the first Machine Auguries and this latest iteration, surfacing, for Ginsberg, questions of authorship and what we choose to value. 
But more so, it has sharpened her augury of losing the real to the unreal. 
“Why are we in an A.I. arms race as we increasingly shut out the world around us that allows us to exist? The artificial robin may sound like a robin to even the keenest human—and A.I.—ears. But does it sound like a robin to a robin?” she said. “The A.I. has learned from what already exists; imagination still has a role in finding new questions. 
“Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Machine Auguries: Toledo” is on view at the Toledo Museum of Art, 2445 Monroe Street, Toledo, Ohio, through November 26. 
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“I was a liberated woman long before there was a name for it,” art doyenne Peggy Guggenheim once remarked. Indeed, the trailblazing collector and socialite bucked the conventions of her time, living a bohemian lifestyle (including a brief and fiery marriage to Max Ernst), while championing women artists in an age when most female creatives were sidelined to roles of wife and muse. 
This week, New York art-lovers will have the rare and fleeting chance to see the work of the women artists Guggenheim heralded in the very 57th Street space that was once her Art of This Century Gallery. This time-traveling experience is the work of Tony Award-winning producer Jenna Segal who has revived Guggenheim’s pivotal “Exhibition of 31 Women”—the first-of-its-kind in 1943 to showcase only women artists—to mark its 80th anniversary. Segal’s show will run for a total of 31 hours, spread out over a week.
Meret Oppenheim, Untitled, (Helene Mayer) (1936). Photograph courtesy of the 31 Women Collection.
Guggenheim originally organized the exhibition at the suggestion of her dear friend Marcel Duchamp. The sweeping exhibition brought together works by today’s art-historical heroines including Frida Kahlo, Louise Nevelson, and Méret Oppenheim, as well as myriad others who have since fallen into obscurity such as the hauntingly poetic French artist Valentine Hugo and Swiss-born American abstract artist Sonja Sekula.
The works on view are all from Segal’s personal collection and represent a larger passion project for the producer, who has long admired Guggenheim’s ethos. 
Berenice Abbott, Peggy Guggenheim (1926). Collection of Jenna Segal.
Segal—who is the founder of Segal NYC, a production company focused on highlighting women creatives—first became interested in the famed art world patron when she visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice while backpacking through Europe in college. Captivated by the collector’s vision, Segal then devoured Guggenheim’s fascinating autobiography and learned of her heroic efforts to protect artists in Europe at the dawn of World War II.
“I bought her autobiography and read it on the train as we were continuing to travel and it really struck me that here was this American woman who I had never been taught about [and who] had done so much,” she said. A seed of inspiration had been planted. “I tucked her in my heart,” Segal explained of her affection for Guggenheim, knowing, on some level, she would return to her story later.
Leonor Fini, Femme En Armure I (Woman in Armor I) (1938) Photograph courtesy of the 31 Women Collection.
Then, in 2020, deep in quarantine, Segal happened to return to Guggenheim’s autobiography. She’d long considered “31 Women” a pivotal, and tragically unknown, moment in women’s history. With the itch to produce, Segal’s thoughts coalesced around the possibility of bringing together the works of all the artists included in the exhibition in one place.
“At first I just wanted to see if I could find all these women,” Segal noted. Since no known photographs of “31 Women” exist and many works included were listed simply as “untitled,” Segal decided she would try to feature at least one work by each of the 31 artists, rather than try to recreate the exact show itself.
She soon immersed herself in a crash course on art history and collecting, taking to online auction houses, eBay, and dozens of other sources to assemble her collection. She decided she would focus on works made as close to the exhibition date as possible. “Through self-education, I began to see the differences in what these artists were making in the ’30s and ’40s and what they were doing in the ’50s and ’60s.” Amid a moment of global uncertainty, she found these earlier works resonated with her. 
Valentine Hugo, Portrait d’Arthur Rimbaud (1936). Collection of Jenna Segal.
This immersion was an eye-opening experience filled with rich stories that touched Segal personally: “I could go on and on about any of these artists.”
In the friendship between Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, two artists included in the collection, for example, she found a corollary. Having met in Paris in 1938, the two began a long-lasting and intimate correspondence in exile from their homelands. Their exchanges ranged from deeply felt memories to artistic considerations. “It reminds me of an email correspondence I have with a friend of mine, a woman writer in London,” Segal noted.
One artist, French painter Valentine Hugo, Segal finds herself acquiring again and again. “Valentine Hugo haunts me, I say” Segal laughed.
“As I was building this collection, I painted one wall in my office with magnetic paint so I could move around images of works by these artists to see it all in one space,” she explained. “I left one day and I come in and somehow in the night, the Hugo image had moved up to the ceiling. She was reminding me of her.” For Segal, the uncanny experience speaks to the mysteries artists are able to both capture and evoke.
If Hugo has haunted Segal, another artist has eluded her: Gypsy Rose Lee. Gypsy Rose Lee was an iconic 20th-century American burlesque entertainer who was also an artist and playwright. While Segal has managed to acquire works by all other 30 women, she remains on the hunt for a work by Lee.
Unknown Photographer, Gypsy Rose Lee with artwork likely to be the one included in the original “Exhibition of 31 Women” in 1943. Photograph printed from original 35 mm negative. Photo: The 31 Women Collection.
“She was the Kim Kardashian of her time,” enthused Segal. “It’s shocking that people don’t know her today and that I can’t find a single work by here. It’s like if in 80 years, there were not a pair of Skims to be found!”
Today, Segal’s office is in what was once Guggenheim’s famed 57th Street gallery. Asked how this came about, Segal laughed. “I went to the door and knocked,” she said, noting a producer’s instinct. “I figured I’d just go see for myself.” After some cajoling, Segal secured the space, which had fallen into drab disrepair. Segal enlisted oopsa creative studio and agency, led by architects Eric Moed and Penelope Phylactopoulos, to invigorate the space with aspects of the gallery’s original design by Austrian American architect Frederick Kiesler.
While Segal is happy the exhibition is garnering attention, she hopes it will be a call to historians and a springboard for the future.
“I am not a historian. I am not a museum. I don’t claim to be an expert,” she said. “Peggy said, ‘I listened and I became my own expert,’ and that’s what I would say I am. But in the annals of art history, there are people who know a lot more than me. I hope they’ll come in and feel as inspired as I do and we’ll get some great scholarship.”
“The 31 Women Collection” is on view at 30 W 57th St, New York through May 21. Reservations for free, timed-entry admission can be made here.
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With Frieze week upon us, art amateurs and cognoscenti alike will be looking to see what styles and concepts are emanating from the New York City art scene. Historically, the fairs have been a reliable barometer; this time around, they match what’s on at major Manhattan institutions—and diversity in all senses is the name of the game.
Four women artists currently have major museum shows—Wangechi Mutu at the New Museum, Sarah Sze at the Guggenheim, Georgia O’Keeffe at MoMa, and Cecily Brown at the Met—a showcase of identity, ideology, and practice that has been historically sidelined in the art world. The gloriously diverse visions of two of the four, Mutu and Sze, set a tone for the city at large, working, as they do, in surrealism, science fiction, futurism, spirituality, ritual, hapticality, and temporality. From this swath of modes, we can tease out a cluster of related themes that is presently bouncing all over the New York scene: celebration of craft and hapticality, spirituality and a return to ritual, and new mythologies and world-building. This overview of gallery shows and fair presentations articulates a picture of the New York City art scene in this moment.
ektor garcia, crochet copper wire mesh (2021, detail right), which will be on offer at NADA New York. Photo: Robert Divers Herrick, courtesy of the artist and Rebecca Camacho Presents.
Across the city, craft objects of all kinds—ceramics, textile, sculpture, assemblage—tell stories of touch and tradition, engaging in practices largely sidelined in art history. At NADA New York (May 18–21), Rebecca Camacho Presents will show delicately rendered copper-wire sculptures in the form of butterflies and chains by ektor garcia, and Maria Herwald Hermann’s boldly colored, impeccably hewn ceramic sculptures that reframe our relationship to domestic objects and everyday life. “There is a tactile, mark-of-hand thread that connects all the work,” Camacho says of all six artists in her presentation for NADA.
Jeremy Frey, Loon (2015), Permanence, (2023), and Aura (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Karma.
Over at Karma in the East Village, Jeremy Frey’s handwoven baskets (on view in the solo “Out of the Woods” through June 17) also engage an intimate and culturally rich handiwork, drawing on indigenous traditions local to the Wabanaki of the northeastern United States. In its first presentation at Frieze New York, which bows at the Shed May 18–21, is welcoming first-time participants including, Silverlens of New York and Manila, which will showcase work by Carlos Villa (1936––2013), a Filipino-American artist, activist, and beloved professor whose feathered coats and dynamic, swirling drawings draw on a diverse roster of non-Western ethnic traditions references such as Aboriginal feathered sandals and the patterns of Tapa cloth. 
Carlos Villa, My Roots (1970–71). From the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Neysa McMein Purchase Award 72.21. Courtesy of the Estate of Carlos Villa, the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), and Silverlens (Manila and New York).
This turn towards craft is akin to another kind of return: to ritual and spiritual modes of problem-solving. “There’s a lot of interest out there in spirituality, the occult, and astronomy—I think because we’ve just run out of solutions for the world ending,” says independent curator Ksenia M. Soboleva. Spiritual investigation and mystical play abound in “Schema: World as Diagram” at Marlborough Gallery, which opened last week in Chelsea and runs through August 15. Organized by Raphael Rubinstein and Heather Bause Rubinstein, this survey explores diagrammatic ways of thinking in visual art. Over 50 artists are sourced from a number of eras, many of whose work feels extraordinarily in line with their peers of today.
Alan Davie, The Studio No. 37 (1975). © The Estate of Alan Davie, courtesy of Taylor | Graham, New York.
Alan Davie’s brightly hued The Studio No. 37 from (1975) borrows symbols from a multitude of religions and cultures, such as the mandala and the ankh, to conjure “mysterious and spiritual forces normally beyond our apprehension.” The collective Hilma’s Ghost work to extend Hilma af Klint’s spiritual vision into the 21st century by creating drawings, a Tarot deck, prints, and here, a geometric painting that celebrate the artist through feminist and mystical ritual. Two incredibly detailed Nineties 1990s works by Paul Laffoley mix science, Christian iconography, Buddhist mandalas, and William Blake, all recasting reality through the artist’s visionary lens.
Paul Laffoley, Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth (1990). © The Estate of Paul Laffoley, courtesy of Kent Fine Art, featured in “Schema: World as Diagram” at Marlborough New York.
Further downtown in Tribeca, Bortolami has unveiled a presentation of Joe Ray—one of the few Black practitioners from the Light and Space movement—explores the cosmos in his show “Inside Out” (on view through June 17). His “Nebula” paintings, an ongoing series of intergalactic landscapes that he started in the 1970s, composed of aerosol and resin, suggest a melding of inner and outer space, as well as Afrofuturist possibilities. 
Joe Ray, Mildred Ann (2023). Photo: ofstudio, © Joe Ray, courtesy of Bortolami.
Futurism and new worlds and mythologies also seems to be on top of the mind fors of young artists, many of whom are working in an almost narrative mode, creating new mythologies and building new worlds. As part of Frieze New York, David Kordansky will present works relating to Lauren Halsey’s current installation  on the Met Museum’s rooftop, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I). The stone face of the monument, which references the museum’s Temple of Dendur and Egyptian wing, is replete with images of the Watts Towers, graffiti, protest slogans, and other signs of Black urban life and Afrofuturism. Halsey opts for a new suite of digital collages and gypsum-based engravings for Frieze. 
Lauren Halsey, Untitled (2023). Photo: Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.
As is evident across the city, artists are creating new universes for us to live in, says Lubov gallery owner Francisco Correo Cordeo. “There’s a lot of imagining what the future is going to look like,” he says, “as well as the different versions of the future that can happen depending on what we do right now.” 
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A true head scratcher of an exhibition has touched down at Chicago’s Renaissance Society. Curated by artist Shahryar Nashat and critic Bruce Hainley, the show has no title and no press release—just a photo of actor Robert Pattinson in sunglasses and a cap, dining at a restaurant, accompanied by a cryptic explanation.
“We met for lunch to continue our conversation, soon noticing the celebrity, incognito, taking a meeting nearby, and such serendipity prompted a reaction: Use this strange presence as a device to work through the current moment in relation to how bodies, whether living currency or undead, circulate, distort, unalive, and, yet, love,” Hainley wrote on the show’s website.
That lunch was about a year ago, in a restaurant parking lot in Los Angeles, and Hainley and Nashat had met to discuss the possibility of curating an exhibition to coincide with the latter’s upcoming solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s become something of a tradition for contemporary artists to have simultaneous outings at both museums, but instead of a second solo show, Nashat was interested in collaborating with Hainley.
“We started talking about the idea of a muse or a mascot, and we were like, ‘Maybe we should find this entity or person and see how things come together under that.’ By total coincidence, Robert Pattinson was having lunch at the same restaurant,” Nashat told Cultured. “I took a snapshot of him. Bruce and I looked at each other and were like, ‘There you go. He’s here. There has to be a reason.’”

The British actor, who has been both a matinee idol—attracting legions of fans for his roles in the Twilight and Harry Potter film series—and an indie sensation, seemed to have the right kind of energy to build a show around. “Robert Pattinson is really a star rather than a celebrity,” Hainley said.
The exhibition features work by contemporary artists Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), Karen Kilimnik, and Larry Johnson. The curators have also secured a loan from the Art Institute of an oil painting by the French painter Marie Laurencin, who lived from 1883 to 1956. It’s been in the museum’s collection since 1986, but this is the first time it’s ever been displayed.
Marie Laurencin, Head of a Young Woman (1926). Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, bequest of Maribel G. Blum.
None of the artwork features Pattinson—but the Renaissance Society has exclusively promoted the show with photos of the actor (plus one of fans running their hands through the hair of his wax double at a Madame Tussauds).
That idea of fan consumption of celebrity, even their physical body somehow beyond their control, is something that ties the works in the show together.
But if you want to understand what’s going on in the exhibition, you had best get yourself to Chicago to see it in person.
Installation view of the Robert Pattinson-inspired exhibition at the the Renaissance Society, Chicago, curated by Shahryar Nashat and Bruce Hainley. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman, courtesy of Shahryar Nashat, Bruce Hainley, and the Renaissance Society, Chicago.
“People are so used to getting a show title, a press release, a list of names, or a description that they probably don’t ever read,” Nashat said. “As soon as you don’t conform to the ways information is usually circulated for reasons that just feel natural, you create mystery, but our intention is not to be mysterious. We want to let the things that matter come first—that’s what’s in the show. You have to be in the space, and then the thinking arranges around it.”
The exhibition is on view at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Cobb Hall, 4th Floor, Chicago, Illinois, May 13–July 2, 2023.
“Shahryar Nashat: Raw Is the Red” is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, 159 East Monroe Street, Chicago, Illinois, October 6, 2022–September 11, 2023.
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“Prescient” is a word often overused in art speak, but when it comes to the work of Josh Kline, the adjective is actually accurate.
Time and again over the last decade or so, the now 43-year-old artist has portended the ways in which nascent technologies and growing corporations would come to oppress the people whose lives they purported to improve. He’s turned Teletubbies into symbols of state surveillance; wrapped white-collar workers in plastic trash bags; and employed early deepfake techniques to make George W. Bush cop to war crimes, effectively using the former president’s penchant for historical revisionism against him. 
These pieces and many others make up “Project for a New American Century,” the first U.S. museum survey of Kline’s work, on view now at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It’s a virtuosic presentation from one of the world’s most timely artists—one that captures the anxieties of our current moment even when it looks ahead.  
Josh Kline, In Stock (Walmart Worker’s Arms) (2018), detail. Courtesy of the Whitney.
Included, for instance, is Kline’s film Adaptation (2019–22), which envisions, in a not-so-distant future, a group of essential workers commuting to their jobs by boat in a flooded Manhattan. There’s also his 2014 sculptures No Sick Days and Packing for Peanuts, in which 3D-printed limbs scanned from FedEx employees are imprinted with the company’s logo—an almost comical literalization of corporate exploitation.   
Indeed, subtlety is not a quality for which Kline is known. Viewers won’t walk out of the Whitney show wondering what he “meant.” But this legibility is a feature, not a bug; the urgency of the artist’s themes calls for action, not equivocation. And it’s intentional: “You shouldn’t need four years of study of Lacan and Deleuze and Adorno and whoever to understand art,” Kline told the New York Times earlier this year. “I want to create an art that’s accessible to the FedEx delivery worker or a doctor who doesn’t have that specific education but is interested in the society they live in.” 
See more images from Kline’s survey below: 
Still from Josh Kline’s Adaptation (2019–22). Courtesy of the Whitney.
Josh Kline, Make-Believe (2017).
Josh Kline, Desperation Dilation (2016). Courtesy of the Whitney
Installation View of “Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023. Courtesy of the Whitney.
Josh Kline, Energy Drip (2013). Courtesy of the Whitney.
Installation View of “Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2023. Courtesy of the Whitney.
Josh Kline, Creative Hands (2011). Courtesy of the Whitney.
“Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century” is on view now through August 13 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. 
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