On View

“What is needed now, and what is needed next?” 
This is one of the prompts offered by James McAnally, the founder and director of St. Louis’s recurring Counterpublic exhibition, in an op-ed published on this site in 2021. On McAnally’s mind at the time was the function of bi- and triennial art events like his, and how they might better realize the kind of meaningful communal impact to which they so often aspire. The second Counterpublic, he promised, would be a “singular civic platform meant to reimagine how art engages the contexts, textures, and futures of St. Louis.” 
Fast forward two years and Counterpublic 2023 is now open. It unfolds across 25 locations situated along a six-mile stretch of Jefferson Avenue—a street that spans numerous neighborhoods and socioeconomic spaces. As an orientative form, it also subverts St. Louis’s status as the “Gateway to the West”: a portal through which settlers once passed in the name of manifest destiny. “These neighborhoods are microcosms of the nation in so many ways,” McAnally said upon announcing the show last year. “They are truly dynamic and resistant to one another. They’re not a single experience.” 
The exhibition doesn’t offer a single experience either. For this year’s edition, McAnally’s brought on what he calls an “ensemble” of young curators—Allison Glenn, Risa Puleo, Katherine Simóne Reynolds, Diya Vij, and the artistic collective New Red Order—who were each tasked with organizing site-specific projects along the show’s route. Collectively, the group represents a range of academic interests and curatorial impulses. Those impulses don’t always align. 
As such, this year’s Counterpublic is an exhibition of fascinating contradictions. They give the show its thrust. At stake here, against the backdrop of the heartland and its history of industrial capitalism and land dispossession, is a broader consideration not just of how we can use art to incur change, but whether or not art can incur change at all.  
The curatorial ensemble for Counterpublic 2023. Clockwise from left: Allison Glenn, courtesy of Rana Young; Diya Vij; Katherine Reynolds; Risa Puleo, courtesy of Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez; James McAnally; New Red Order.
Launched in 2019, Counterpublic arrived amidst a group of similarly shaped bi- and triennials established in middle-American cities over the last 15 years—Open Spaces in Kansas City and FotoFocus in Cincinnati among them. At the core of many of these events is a similar mission: to revitalize a once prosperous American city through art. (Also at their core: regional philanthropists funding that mission.) 
The scope of these shows tends to be both local and national, though they’re often criticized for a lopsided emphasis on the latter. It’s a fair question to ask, why exhibitions like these are so often organized by people who don’t live in the city they seek to transform. Even the cyclical exhibition format itself seems too episodic to provoke meaningful change. Cynics might see the whole exercise as a form of cultural imperialism.
But to draw comparisons between this recurring exhibition and other events like it requires one to paint with broad strokes, and Counterpublic doesn’t do broad strokes. The name “Counterpublic,” McAnally explained, suggests multiple different civic groups that are collectively defined only by their opposition to the dominant culture. Recurring art events, like the cities and neighborhoods they occupy, require micro, not macro, engagement.   
Counterpublic takes place every three years, but its organizers don’t call it a triennial. (This year’s exhibition was delayed a year because of the pandemic.) Instead, they refer to it as a “civic exhibition” that aims to “reimagine civic infrastructures towards generational change.”  
The repetition of the word “civic” makes the point clear: this is a show that strives to reflect its home city. “I think a lot of times events like this have a very sort of abstract relationship to audience. They seem designed for the art world. They seem designed to get external attention,” McAnally said. “We are doing this for our neighbors first,” he continued. “If we can get it right for our neighbors, we believe we can get it right for the art world.” 
Anna Tsouhlarakis, The Native Guide Project: STL (2023). Photo: Chris Bauer. Courtesy of Counterpublic.
Back in 2021, McAnally’s team arranged meetings with community members and partnering organizations to hear what they hoped the next edition of Counterpublic would accomplish. What the locals wanted, McAnally recalled, was for homegrown stories to be told “in public and in a durational way.” The Osage Nation, a tribe displaced by St. Louis’s founding European colonizers, expressed a desire for visibility.  
At the same time, Counterpublic’s curators were wrestling with St. Louis’s own history of displacement. New Red Order endeavored, in its members’ own words, to “make erasure visible” and present work that didn’t “occupy.” Others sought to resist typical biennial fare, particularly large-scale public sculptures and monuments. Puleo said they wanted to avoid work that “just goes plop.” 
In other words, at the core of Counterpublic 2023 is a series of seemingly competing aims: visibility, but not occupation; durationality, but not permanence; accessibility, but with a rigorous historical consciousness. How the curators operated within this framework varied significantly; so did the projects they organized.  
Vij helped virgil b/g taylor produce a series of zines (“Confluence Decree”) about St. Louis’s sewer system, and worked with Steffani Jemison, who created an installation and sound piece that were inspired by Josephine Baker, the first Black woman to star in a major motion picture. Reynolds, meanwhile, tapped the choreographer Will Rawls to create a stop motion film with four channels, each of which is screened at different Jefferson-adjacent sites. One is at a McDonald’s; another is at a costume store called Johnnie Brock’s Dungeon Party Warehouse.  
McAnally also curated several projects, most notably an immersive architectural and sonic installation by Torkwase Dyson. The work, which covers hundreds of square feet in St. Louis Place Park, takes the form of a constructed amphitheater, replete with benches, stools, and various apertures that reframe the surrounding neighborhood. From several embedded speakers plays a recording that mixes the music of ragtime pioneer—and St. Louis transplant—Scott Joplin with Dyson’s own interpretation of his signature mashup of classical piano and African polyrhythms. According to Counterpublic’s catalogue, Dyson wanted “to make direct correlations between syncopation and the body to explore the spatial impact of present-day climate migrations, displacement, and nomadicity.” 
Dyson’s work, called Bird and Lava (Scott Joplin), is huge, but not immutable. The structure’s modularity encourages different configurations and the whole thing is put together without nails or screws, making it adaptable to different environments. It’s a real achievement—the work of an artist in full control of her own visual language. 
Torkwase Dyson, Bird and Lava (Scott Joplin), 2023. Photo: Chris Bauer. Courtesy of Counterpublic.
Puleo, for her part, opted to pursue presentations that were subtle, ephemeral, and—in some cases—completely invisible. Among the projects organized by the curator are a reimagined state map painted by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith; an augmented reality piece by Cannupa Hanska Luger; and a performance by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ravon Chacon that subdivides the twelve-note Western musical scale into 13 divisions. 
Puleo worked near, but not on, Sugarloaf Mound, the last intact Native American mound and the oldest human-made structure in St. Louis. Upon joining Counterpublic 2023, the curator wrote to the Osage Nation, which owns the mound, asking permission to include it in the show. She and New Red Order are also working to have the rest of the mound’s land repatriated to the tribe. Looming over the site is a billboard that reads, in no uncertain terms: “Got land? Give it back!”  
Puleo also assisted artist jackie sumell in repatriating bricks that were produced in St. Louis, then later extracted from Black communities and sold down-river to build plantation-revival-style homes in New Orleans. “Think about all of the enslaved, fugitive people who made their way up to St. Louis, established a thriving black community in the early part of the century, then were systematically disenfranchised,” said Puleo. “Literally, the bricks from their houses were sold… along the same pathways through which they escaped confinement.” 
sumell buried the bricks somewhere in St. Louis, but she won’t reveal where. “It might not be seen, but I hope that it is felt,” Puleo said of the work. 
New Red Order, Give it Back: Stage Theory (2023). Courtesy of Counterpublic.
If Sugarloaf Mound represents one end of Counterpublic, the neighborhood of St. Louis Place represents the other. Located there is the Griot Museum of Black History, a cultural venue that bears little resemblance to those of the institutional art world. Dusty and drab (albeit charmingly so), the museum charts a subjective history of Black life in America, its many installations centered around life-sized wax figures of people like Miles Davis, Elizabeth Keckley, and Dred and Harriet Scott.  
The Griot will also soon be the site of something else: the first public artwork by David Adjaye. In the museum’s courtyard, the architect-cum-artist is working to erect a version of his “Asaase” series of sculptures, made up of curved, overlapping barriers inspired by the earth-based architecture of West Africa. Built from rammed earth, Adjaye’s work is big and physical; it will outlast anyone alive to see it made. Compared to Counterpublic’s other, more transitory projects, the sculpture is conventional in its material approach. But the power of the piece also comes through its permanence.  
Well, not all its power. More than his sculpture, what Adjaye has really given the Griot is his name. For the museum, a modest cultural destination that few outside of St. Louis have ever heard of, the association will have a truly transformative effect. For the museum, this is art that is needed now and next.
That fact wasn’t lost on Adjaye. “It’s a device,” he said of his sculpture during Counterpublic’s opening weekend. He was speaking with Glenn in a panel discussion held in the Griot’s stuffed, carpeted basement. (The building used to be an elementary school, and it shows.) “It’s a trojan horse to invite you to come and be here and engage with this community and engage with this place.” 
Counterpublic 2023 is on view in St. Louis through July 15.
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A wondrous new universe is emerging inside of an ancient church—courtesy of the artists Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano. The duo has rendered an entire hybrid animal kingdom in a menagerie of sculptures—just one component of the new installation that was unveiled today in Venice, Italy.
The Saint Lorenzo church is the locale for Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas, a speculative ecosystem that blends art with mythology, sci-fi, and history. This grandiose piece, which is an entire multimedia sensory experience, is up until November 3, and the artists have packed many narratives (and genres!) within.
Installation view of ‘Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas.’ Courtesy of the artists, TBA21—Academy and Audemars Piguet.
On one side of the church, a majestic and serene egg hangs suspended, seemingly floating above, presiding like a celestial body. A world of fantastical animals is here too, with 30 sculptures that embody aquatic, terrestrial, and avian qualities. These creatures’ metallic surfaces reflect light, pulling in the sublime interior of the deconsecrated house of worship. Each artwork also doubles as a musical instrument—human interaction triggers music boxes and other aural mechanisms.
Installation view of ‘Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas.’ Courtesy of the artists, TBA21—Academy and Audemars Piguet.
The Berlin-based pair Halilaj and Urbano are a couple but rarely work together. The work explores the space between realities and societal norms, as well as raising many environmental concerns. The Spanish traditional song “Ay mi pescadito” was the jump-off for their creation. They explained in an artist’s statement: “The work blurs our binary sense of the world. An egg-shaped moon, aquatic creatures becoming terrestrial and aerial, an orchestra playing a symphony that emerges from the waters and syncs with the moon cycles; these and more stories guide our show at Ocean Space. The installation echoes a children’s song, where young fish go to school at the bottom of the sea in order to study forms of resistance.”
Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano. Courtesy of the artists.
Throughout the piece’s installation, various musicians and performers will be on hand to activate the sculptures’ musical potential. There will also be seagull costumes to let the attendees become animals and merge with the piece. The artists will don the gull costumes at two performances.
The installation is on view with free admission and is one of two works that comprise “Thus waves come in pairs,” Ocean Space’s 2023 exhibition. “Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas” is a co-commission between TBA21–Academy and Audemars Piguet Contemporary.
Lunar Ensemble for Uprising Seas is on view Wednesday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m. at Ocean Space Chiesa di San Lorenzo Castello 5069 30122 Venice

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LGDR, the powerhouse gallery jointly formed by dealers Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, Amalia Dayan, and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn in late 2021, has thrown open the doors of a stunning new flagship gallery on East 64th street.
The sprawling six-floor Beaux-Arts-style townhouse was built in the early 1930s and in addition to being one of the oldest gallery buildings in New York, was also the longtime headquarters of the Wildenstein art dealing dynasty.
The inaugural show, “Rear View,” is sure to make a splash. It includes dozens of artworks spanning two floors by a dynamic mix of blue-chip artists ranging from established masters such as Rene Magritte and Francis Bacon, to later stars such as Eric Fischl, Barkley Hendricks, and Yoko Ono, to contemporary stars including Urs Fischer, Jenna Gribbon, Jenny Saville, and Issy Wood. All of the works explore representation of the human figure as seen from behind, including no shortage of depictions of buttocks.
Installation view of “Rear View” at LGDR with work by Jenny Saville Juncture (1994) (top) and Domenico Gnoli Back View (1968) (bottom). Photo: Jason Schmidt. Courtesy LGDR.
Author Dieter Roelstraete, who wrote an essay about the show for an accompanying zine, opened his remarks at the preview on April 17 by acknowledging the often “humorous” nature of the exhibition. And in his essay, he wrote: “Backs and behinds: it is cause for some mirth that leafing through the checklist for ‘Rear View’ made me realize that in all my long years of looking at and thinking about [Caspar David] Friedrich’s Rückenfiguren, I had never seriously considered these pictures of people seen from the back to be pictures of backsides as well.”
Another author, Alison Gingeras, also contributed an essay appropriately titled “Bad Asses.” It swings from an in-depth look at Felix Valloton’s seminal Étude de fesses (c. 1884), chosen as the feature image for the show, to butt-related jokes made by Chris Rock (“Show your ass!” he urged anyone seeking attention) in his recent stand-up comedy Netflix show, to Kim Kardashian’s famous “moneymaker.”
Installation view of “Rear View” at LGDR, with Urs Fischer, Divine Interventions (2023). Photo: Jason Schmidt. Courtesy LGDR.
The show also features a so-called “pendant” presentation in a single room, titled “Full Frontal” that features more explicit front-facing works by artists including Miriam Cahn, Gribbon, and Hendricks. “As the idiom of the title suggests, debates around moral propriety and censorship in art and popular culture often ascribe a confrontational value to front-facing nudes,” according to a statement accompanying the show.
All four founding partners were on hand to inaugurate the show, with Lévy seeming to address many of “mission” questions that have swirled around the partnership since it was first announced in late 2021.
Noting that they have been flooded with questions and rumors on what the partnership is about, she said they were previously “a bit homeless,” running separate gallery spaces including Lévy Gorvy’s former home at 909 Madison. There’s also the massive uptown space overhauled by Rohatyn for Salon 94 Design and opened in spring 2021, which just debuted LGDR’s much-buzzed-about show of Marilyn Minter’s work.
René Magritte, Sans famille (1958). Photo by Andreas Zimmermann. Image courtesy of LGDR.
Lévy said it was important to the four of them to “create a home” and further to choose a space that has history, as the 64th Street building does, noting that it was originally built as a gallery in 1932. Moving forward, following the Minter exhibition, all LGDR projects will be hosted at this new space, while Rohatyn will run her separate projects at Salon 94 Design.
Of the new exhibition, Lévy said it reflects “the togetherness of what we can do when we want to,” adding that exhibition-making is their passion. In terms of deciding on which works to include, she said, “it’s not about liking or not liking. It’s a conversation about what does it stir in terms of emotion and critical thinking.”
Installation view of “Rear View” at LGDR. Aristide Malliol, Flore drapée (avec guirlande de fleurs) (1911) and Fernando Botero The Bathroom (1989). Photo Jason Schmidt. Courtesy LGDR.
In addition to exhibition-making, she also re-emphasized some of the initial activities that LGDR had highlighted around the time of its formation, including offering strategic services to collectors, artists, institutions, philanthropic organizations, and private companies, including family offices.
“Rear View” is on view at LGDR, 19 East 64th Street, New York, through June 1.
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One glance at Lauren Halsey’s monumental rooftop commission at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and you’ll begin to understand why the exhibition was bumped back by a year due to logistics.
Using 750 glass-fiber-reinforced concrete tiles, the 35-year-old artist has managed to construct a 22-foot-tall structure that resembles an Egyptian-style temple. Four large-scale sphinx statues—their faces portraits of Halsey’s immediate family members and her life partner—serve as guardians, standing watch outside the open-sided space, which visitors can walk through.
Like the pyramids, the piece is designed with permanence in mind, and it will transported across the country following the run of the show, to a new home in Halsey’s native South Central Los Angeles, where she lives and works. The artist hopes the sculpture will become a civic monument at her Summaeverythang community center, as well as a record of the place in the face of increasingly encroaching forces of gentrification.
Delaying the show which was first announced last March meant that “it became more ambitious, more meaningful, more important,” according to Met director Max Hollein, speaking at the exhibition press preview. The off-white cube and its surrounding free-standing columns loom over Central Park in an atmospheric mist. (Last summer was the first time since 2013 the Met did not host a rooftop commission.)
Lauren Halsey. Photo by Russell Hamilton. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York.
The walls of the cube are decorated with carved imagery pulled from Black-owned businesses, graffiti tags, and other street signage from Halsey’s home in South Central Los Angles. The references may stem from California, but they resonate from their perch overlooking the urban jungle of New York City. There are protest signs, advertisements for Black hair styles, as well as images pulled from objects in the Met collection that mesh the ancient with the present-day.
“It’s a dense collage of phrases and images all drawn from a local vernacular,” said Abraham Thomas, the curator of Modern architecture, design, and decorative arts. He described the piece, titled the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), as “an Afrofuturistic, ancient, funkified space ship that’s just landed here at the Met.”
Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022). Installation view at the Roof Garden Commission. © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
This otherworldly vessel’s tiles recall the graffiti scrawled on the Met’s Temple of Dendur, but it also serves as a present-day archive of her own time and place, elevating the history of her local Black community and celebrating the neighborhood’s vitality.
“My installation for the Met’s Roof Garden reflects my interest in conflating narratives from contemporary South Central Los Angeles with those evoked in ancient pharaonic architecture,” Halsey said in a statement. “My hope is that viewers in New York feel the connections intuitively.”
“The Roof Garden Commission: Lauren Halsey” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, April 18–October 22, 2023. See more photos of the installation below. 
Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022). Installation view at the Roof Garden Commission. © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022). Installation view at the Roof Garden Commission. © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022). Installation view at the Roof Garden Commission. © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022). Installation view at the Roof Garden Commission. © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022). Installation view at the Roof Garden Commission. © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022). Installation view at the Roof Garden Commission. © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022). Installation view at the Roof Garden Commission. © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022). Installation view at the Roof Garden Commission. © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022). Installation view at the Roof Garden Commission. © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022). Installation view at the Roof Garden Commission. © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022). Installation view at the Roof Garden Commission. © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022). Installation view at the Roof Garden Commission. © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I) (2022). Installation view at the Roof Garden Commission. © Lauren Halsey. Courtesy of the artist; David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles/New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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For a show designed to spotlight its latest hardware, Google’s new exhibition at Salone del Mobile Milano takes as its starting point a natural, fluid element. 
“Shaped by Water,” which opens April 18 at Garage 21, is a multi-room immersive installation that dives deep into our connection with water. Co-created by Google Design Studio in collaboration with light and water artist Lachlan Turczan, the show invites viewers to experience water in all its optical and sonic qualities within a highly sensorial environment.
“We wanted to give guests a first-of-its-kind experience that reveals the hidden qualities of water when acted upon by sound and light,” Ivy Ross, Google’s vice president of hardware design, told Artnet News. “Water is easily recognized in its various forms, yet it has distinct and unique qualities that are not always evident—qualities that we caught glimpses of during our design process.”
Installation view of “Shaped by Water” at Garage 21. Photo courtesy of Google.
It’s apt, then, that Google found a fellow traveler in Turczan, whose mediums for a decade have been water, light, and sound. Across his dynamic fountains and public sculptures, the L.A.-based artist has aimed to capture the “kinetic expression” of water as much as sculpt it with cymatics, a vibrational phenomenon. 
“My goal for ‘Shaped by Water’ was to create novel experiences of water that challenge our understanding of this ubiquitous medium,” he told Artnet News. “Oftentimes, water is understood only in relation to its surroundings, but for this exhibition, I wanted to celebrate the unique materiality of water itself.”
To do so, Turczan and the Google team relied on what he called a “natural algorithm,” which goes: “Sound shapes water. Water shapes light. Light shapes perception.” 
One of Turczan’s artworks at the exhibition, Sympathetic Resonance (2023), features shallow mirrored bowls holding pools of water. These shimmering sculptures emit a hum in response to a viewer’s proximity—thus illustrating the link between water and humans—which further creates wave patterns across the pools.  
Another piece, titled Wavespace (2023), emerges from Turczan’s “long-held dream.” It invites audiences to recline on bespoke furniture, created by Google’s designers, and have their field of vision filled with water reflections. “The overall result is an integrated artwork,” he said, “where every element contributes to a cohesive experience—including scent! 
Lachlan Turczan, Wavespace (2023), installed at “Shaped by Water” at Garage 21. Photo courtesy of Google.
Throughout the exhibition, viewers will also learn how water inspired the latest Google hardware designs, said Ross. “This includes videos that show how a drop of water served as the inspiration for the shape of our watch. Along with the focus on form, the products can be viewed through an array of flowers that reflect the seven color stories used across the hardware assortment,” she added. 
“Shaped by Water” marks Google’s third exhibition at the Milan fair, following 2018’s “Softwear” and 2019’s “A Space for Being.” It’s all part of an effort to emphasize the design-first approach of Google’s hardware offerings—much like how the tech company has leaned into the arts to showcase its software.  
“Because Google Hardware is a relatively new business, Salone gives us a chance to show up as thought leaders in design and share critical aspects of our creative process,” said Ross. “Through ‘Shaped by Water,’ we continue to share what’s on our mind by expanding on something we appreciate as designers—that the power of the natural world, whether easily seen or hidden below the surface, offers fresh ways to feed our imagination.” 
For Turczan, the hope is that viewers, immersed as they are by the exhibition’s sound and light, might be similarly awakened to the presence and power of water. 
“Much like the experience of staring into a fire or gazing up at the clouds, the natural phenomena of sound through water provides a visual stimulus that invites viewers to project themselves into the experience,” he said. “This is my favorite aspect of this work—creating opportunities that invite audiences to engage with their imaginations or to dream with open eyes.”
“Shaped by Water” is on view at Garage 21, Via Archimede, 26, Milan, Italy, from April 18–23. 
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Scholars of Islamic art have accused New York’s Asia Society and Museum of censorship over a virtual tour of its exhibition that blurred out two artworks featuring depictions of Muhammad. The museum has called that decision a mistake, and announced a plan to restore the artworks to the online version of the show.
“The virtual tour was created by an outside contractor without sufficient oversight,” Asia Society interim vice president for global arts and culture Peggy Loar told the New York Times. “Our goal with this exhibition has always been to display these historic works fully while also including necessary context and information. The images should not have been blurred, and we take responsibility for this error, but this was not an active choice to censor and is being corrected.”
The society’s website now states that “the virtual tour is currently being updated and will be reposted soon.”
Many Muslims believe that to create a depiction of Muhammad is idolatrous—although there is no prohibition against doing so in the Koran. Though figurative Islamic art is quite rare today, there is also a well-documented tradition of devotional art featuring Muhammad, and many museums hold examples of this work in their collection.
“Day of Judgment,” a folio from a manuscript of the Falnama or Book of Omens (ca. 1555). Collection of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Two of those pieces are on loan to the Asia Society for “Comparative Hell: Arts of Asian Underworlds,” the first exhibition to offer a comprehensive view of depictions of hell in Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, and Islamic faiths.
One, from the David Collection in Copenhagen, shows Muhammad ascending into heaven, the gates of hell behind him filled with burning flames. The other, on loan from the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at the Harvard Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shows Muhammad on the Day of Judgement, kneeling to advocate for mercy for the deceased. His face is obscured with a white veil.
In the Asia Society galleries, there is wall text warning viewers ahead of time, in case they do not wish to see the artworks. The written descriptions contextualize these images, noting that “they were created at a time when such images were acceptable within the realms they were made,” and signs ask that visitors not photograph those pieces.
The Prophet Muhammad at the Gates of Hell from a manuscript copy of al-Sara’i’s Nahj al-Faradis or Paths of Paradise (ca. 1465). Collection of the David Collection, Copenhagen.
But such warnings are not always enough to prevent offense. In December, Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, declined to renew the contract of an adjunct professor who showed two images of Muhammad in an online art history class, describing the lesson in a university-wide email as “Islamophobic.” Students were told ahead of time and given the opportunity to turn off their display, but one still filed a complaint with the school.
The university’s decision made national news, attracting widespread censure as a breach of academic freedom. Its president, Fayneese Miller announced her retirement last month, and the professor, Erika López Prater, is suing the university for religious discrimination and defamation.
The Asia Society exhibition opened in February, in the wake of the Hamline controversy, so it makes sense that its organizers would be sensitive to the potentially offensive nature of the depictions of Muhammad on loan to the museum.
The David Collection director, Kjeld von Folsach, told the Times that his museum had not been told that the artwork would be blurred in the virtual tour, and that he was surprised by the decision. So was Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan who was an advisor on the Asia Society show—and helped publicize the Hamline University incident.
She had told the Times that blurring the artworks was “a breach of ethics” but is glad the Asia Society is now changing course.
“Besides the fact that these paintings are freely available online, they also should be shown and taught in an integral and contextually accurate manner,” Gruber wrote in an email to Artnet News. “Additionally, since these paintings represent the creative output of Muslim patrons and artists in premodern Sunni Turkic Central Asia and Shi’i Iran, it is critical that they not be visually excised from the historical corpus, which cannot and must not be retroactively altered to fit the view of some individuals. If such artworks are omitted or censored, Islamic art—in all its richness and diversity—will be flattened into but a mere Colonialist-Orientalist cliché.”
“Comparative Hell: Arts of Asian Underworlds” is on view at the Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue, New York, February 28–May 7, 2023.

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“When you’re sad and when you’re lonely and you haven’t got a friend / just remember that death is not the end,” Bob Dylan sang in 1988, offering listeners a comforting reminder that mystery awaits us after our time on Earth. 
Fittingly, the Rubin Museum of Art’s new exhibition shares the song’s title—and its central message.
On view now through January of next year, “Death Is Not the End” looks at depictions of the afterlife across the art of both Tibetan Buddhism (the museum’s thematic focus) and Christianity. It’s an idea with which the two religions share a fascination, even if they otherwise differ in many respects.
“I wanted to show the universality of this topic,” the show’s curator, Elena Pakhoutova, told Artnet News. “My intention was to pair the most familiar cultural framework in the United States, Christianity, with a lesser known, Tibetan Buddhism, so that visitors could see the consistent inquiry of these themes across cultures and time periods—the willingness to continue to exist and refute the permanence of death with the belief that there is something after.”
Installation view of “Death Is Not the End,” at the Rubin Museum of Art. Photo: David de Armas. Courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Art.
Included in Pakhoutova’s presentation are paintings, prints, illuminated manuscripts, ritual objects, and dozens of other objects that collectively span 12 centuries. They’re organized into three themes: “The Human Condition,” “States In-Between,” and “(After)life.” 
As an experience, the curator explained, the show is both heavy and hopeful. 
“The themes of the show, death and the afterlife, can be difficult to think about, emotionally as well as intellectually, Pakhoutova said. “Among the emotions that I imagine visitors would feel could be grief, fear, uncertainty, surprise, curiosity.” 
But, she went on, “as they move through the space, I hope that they feel lighter, and hopeful when they leave, because so much of the show is also about life, about living a good and aware life.”
Installation view of “Death Is Not the End,” at the Rubin Museum of Art. Photo: David de Armas. Courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Art.
That sentiment is echoed in the design of the show, too. At the beginning is a box of sand where visitors are encourage to write something that they’ve lost, then rake it away. From there, the gallery walls progressively lighten in hue, and near the end of the show is a partition made of only fabric. 
The latter structure implies “that there is something beyond the veil,” the curator noted. “The two portals it creates indicate a transitional space, indicating it is not the final destination.”
Pakhoutova didn’t bring up Dylan’s song, but she did mention a related quote—one so universal that it’s been attributed (erroneously, in most cases) to figures as varied as John Lennon, Oscar Wilde, and Fernando Sabino. (Where the quote actually came from remains the subject of debate.)
“Ideally, when [visitors] leave the exhibition, I want them to think along these famous lines: “In the end it’s going to be okay. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end,’” Pakhoutova said. “We could have used this as an unofficial subtitle of the exhibition.“
See more images from “Death Is Not the End” below.
Lords of the Charnel Ground, Tibet (18th century). Photo: David De Armas, courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Art.
Peaceful and Wrathful Deities of the Bardo, Tibet (18th-19th century). Photo: David de Armas, courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Art.
The Wheel of Life, Tibet or Mongolia (19th century). Photo courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Art.
Installation view of “Death Is Not the End,” at the Rubin Museum of Art. Photo: David de Armas, courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Art.
Memento mori prayer bead, Germany or the Netherlands (c. 1500–50). Photo courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Art.
Installation view of “Death Is Not the End,” at the Rubin Museum of Art. Photo: David de Armas, courtesy of the Rubin Museum of Art.
“Death Is Not the End” is on view at the Rubin Museum of Art, 150 W 17th St, New York, through January 14, 2024.
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It’s an art nerd’s favorite fun fact: paintings that hang in the Guggenheim aren’t actually level with the museum’s canted walls and floor. In truth, they’re mounted at odd angles that merely give gallery-goers the appearance of squareness. 
A similar irony pervades Sarah Sze’s new solo show at the museum, “Timelapse.” Everywhere in the artist’s installations are various instruments of measurement that we rely on for order in an otherwise orderless world: rulers, clocks, metronomes. But in Sze’s hands, they serve an opposite purpose, reminding us only of their own futility.
“Measuring tools” is just one of the many classes of material in the work of Sze, who brings an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to art, erecting elaborate sculptures from the most forgettable of materials: wires and rocks and lamps and clamps. Hers is an art of stuff.
In walking through the show, I found myself unconsciously cataloging all these little quotidian objects the artist has employed. Entire pages of my notebook are filled with passages like this: “Mirrors, salt, toothpicks, iPhone chargers, over-the-counter pills.”
The impulse came from a desire to break down Sze’s ultra-complicated installations and identify, in their constituent parts, hidden layers of symbolic value. Why did she choose that empty bottle of water? What does that jar of mayonnaise mean?
In what ways is this pile of junk art? 
Sarah Sze, Slice (2023), installation view. Photo: David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Founda1on, New York.
Sze, 54, is among the most successful artists of her generation. A graduate of Yale University, then New York’s School of Visual Arts, she entered the art world a young star. Her work was included in the 1999 Carnegie International and the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Three years later, she was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. In 2013 she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. (Sze declined to be interviewed for this article.) 
Because of these bona fides, and because of her penchant for transforming odd spaces into kaleidoscopic spectacles, the artist’s solo show at the Guggenheim arrived with much anticipation. It also arrived late. The exhibition was supposed to open in October of 2020, but was postponed because of the pandemic. Sze made good use of the extra time, though, periodically visiting the museum for research while it was closed.  
Sarah Sze, Things Caused to Happen (Oculus) (2023), installation view. Photo: David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Founda1on, New York.
I expected Sze’s artwork to overtake the Guggenheim the way artists like Matthew Barney, Maurizio Cattelan, and James Turrell have in the past. But “Timelapse” is a more modest presentation. It’s largely contained to the museum’s top floor, and even there only some of the bays are really filled. Instead, most of the artist’s accretions appear to grow out from the Guggenheim’s walls, like barnacles clinging to a boat. The relationship feels parasitic. (A retrospective dedicated to the Venezuelan artist Gego takes up the rest of the museum.) 
Some of Sze’s sculptures, such as the towering scaffold of sticks and photos called Slice (2023), take up a great deal of space, though it’s often a presence that’s illusory. In works like these, everything is hollow and tenuous, literally held together by glue and string. Part of you wants to blow on them just to see if they’ll topple. 
Sze didn’t arrive at the museum with these artworks preassembled. Rather, she put them together onsite ahead of the opening—an iterative process that took weeks.
“Many of the decisions were made during the installation,” said the Guggenheim’s Kyung An, who curated the show. It was during that stage, she added, that a “lot of the elements came alive.” 
Sarah Sze, Times Zero (2023), installation view. Photo: David Heald. © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
Sze’s sculptures are broken up by several large-scale paintings, all of which include collaged elements. In Times Zero (2023), for instance, a sunset scene is all but obscured by a whorl of photographs affixed to its surface, while even more printed scraps spill out onto the floor. At the center of the swirling composition is a low-res image of a fire pit, alternately inviting and threatening—a source of warmth, perhaps, or a portal to hell.  
Another painting, called Last Impression (2023), does something similar, but its own attendant photos are suspended before it on string. Sze has cut holes in some of these pictures, creating little apertures through which the painting is constantly being cropped and reframed as one walks by. “As the exhibition came together, during installation, we realized that each bay functions almost as an image-making system of its own,” An explained. 
Tying these systems—and indeed the whole show—together is River of Images (2023), a series of roving digital pictures and videos that are projected onto artworks, walls, gallery-goers, and even the Guggenheim’s façade. Some, like photos of hands and birds, you’ll recognize from elsewhere in the show; others move by too quickly to register. 
This, An said, is “our current reality. We’re just trying to put these things together, all these different, disparate fragmented forms. Sarah talks a lot about how, in our digital world, there’s always a sense of longing that is left behind.” 
Sarah Sze, Timekeeper (2016). © Sarah Sze. Courtesy of the artist.
The show concludes in a darkened gallery at the end of the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp, where Sze’s work finally takes over to satisfaction. Presented there is Timekeeper (2016), a sprawling, multisensory installation of flashing lights, stuttering gadgets, and other sundries—the aforementioned mayonnaise among them. “Apple, carabiner, Pellegrino, tin foil, egg,” reads my notebook page from this stage of the walkthrough. 
Pictures hang, in printed-out form, from just about every surface, while projectors throw others around the room. Most have to do with the very act of image-making and its history. There’s Harold Edgerton’s Milk-Drop Coronet Splash (1936), an early example of photography’s ability to capture imperceptible movement, and a shot of a cheetah mid-stride, which evokes Eadweard Muybridge’s Horse in Motion (1878). (Muybridge’s famed footage, a precursor to motion picture technology, appears throughout the show as well.) 
Of all Sze’s works in the show, Timekeeper is the most thrilling. Not coincidentally, it is also the “junkiest” of the bunch. It’s the moment when the artist’s motley objects transcend their own miscellany and coalesce to overwhelm the viewer with their own excess.  
Like Sze’s best works, Timekeeper captures something profound, or profoundly sad, about it what it feels like to be alive in these the head-spinning days of late capitalism, inundated by images, ads, and commercial solutions that leave us feeling full, but not fulfilled. Standing before it is like that moment—we’ve all had it—when you come-to on the sixth page of a dissociative Amazon search, a full shopping cart the only evidence of how you got there, and suddenly become hyperaware of how little time you have left on Earth. 
Sarah Sze, Timekeeper (2016), detail. © Sarah Sze. Courtesy of the artist.
“Sarah Sze: Timelapse” is on view now through September 10, 2023 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. 
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