On View

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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Every Easter for four centuries, 13 priests would gather in the Vatican Apostolic Palace to have their feet washed by the pope. The ceremony became one of the most important symbolic rituals of Holy Week and took place under the gaze of Jesus, as portrayed in a 16th-century tapestry depicting Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1495–98).
That tapestry is now one of the key highlights of In Leonardo’s Shadow,” a new exhibition at the Palace of Venaria that explores the Holy Thursday ritual at the papal court. It is is joined by the woven papal throne canopy of Pope Clement VII, created by renowned Flemish tapestry weaver Pieter Van Aelst and, like the Leonardo-esque tapestry, on loan from the Vatican Museums. More

Will humanity know when singularity has arrived? This is a central question propelling the ascent of young Spanish-Croatian artist Filip Custic.
His works in response have focused on the human body as a canvas, lavishing it with color, layering it with 20th-century motifs of art and psychoanalysis, and fragmenting it with mirrors and screens. Often, the results appear like fantastical scenes composed for high-end fashion magazines and not by accident: the 30-year-old began in marketing working with the likes of Vogue, Esquire, and GQ, and remains, perhaps surprisingly, un-jaded by the creative potential of the commercial world.
Filip Custic, virtualhypermetasuperultramegaconnected. Photo: Filip Custic, courtesy Onkaos.
Fitting, then, that one of Custic’s first solo shows has opened inside a luxury shopping mall, Tokyo’s Parco Museum. The exhibition, “Human Product,” stages many of the Madrid-based artist’s founding works that present the body, most often his own, as a site for tweaking and upgrading, just like an operating system, as the artist puts it. Three new sculptural works place Custic within the context of collectible doll culture. Again, Custic believes presenting such works in Japan, the main developer of collectible dolls, makes Parco an ideal location.
“In the show, I basically want people to experience new paradigms, new situations, so we can think out ‘human programming,’” Custic told Artnet News. “I would like to open a conversation focused on how consumerist culture attempts to turn us into ‘commodities.’”
In zzz (2023) and human product (2023), new works in which Custic recasts himself as miniaturized dolls, he calls attention to the somnolent qualities of technologies, but not as you might expect. “I want to express the possibility of being able to sleep in the system and then wake up,” Custic said. “It is a big pressure to be a human being and we must look for moments of relaxation of our consciousness.”
This line of thinking applies to the overall exhibition. In his “Bolso de Pantalla” series (2021), a collection of handbags with incorporated screens that play his own branded messaging, he highlights the idea that carrying a handbag turns a human into a walking advertisement, but not to revolutionary ends.
“Consumerist culture turns us into commodities,” Custic said. “Our existence is more valid if it can be monetized.” A far-cry from calls to reclaim our digital identities.
Installation view of “Human Product” at Parco Museum, Tokyo. Photo courtesy Onkaos and Filip Custic.
Custic’s arrival in Japan marks the latest in a series of commercial breakthroughs for the artist. In 2018, he provided the visual thematics for Catalan pop star Rosalía’s sophomore album El mal querer. In a series of moving digital sculptures, Custic portrayed Rosalía as a divine figure immersed in worlds of modern spiritualism—think golden crucifixes, moon cycles, and energy circles all cast in scenes of flashing radiance. He later created work to accompany music projects for Julia Stone and Lil Nas X.
These projects stayed true to Custic’s glossy aesthetic, repeating much-used symbols such as cracked mirrors and the fragmented body, but left behind technological considerations. There’s little evidence of Custic making such a turn in his own work.
“It’s difficult to separate the role of technology in my artistic practice and in my life,” he said. “Technology is the only innovative element of our era. I think we will look super-bionic in the future and we will ask, ‘at what point did all this happen?’” Some would argue that moment has already arrived.
See more images of the exhibition below.
Installation view of “Human Product” at Parco Museum, Tokyo. Photo courtesy Onkaos and Filip Custic.
Filip Custic, “Bolso de pantalla” (2021). Photo: Filip Custic, courtesy of Onkaos.
Installation view of “Human Product” at Parco Museum, Tokyo. Photo courtesy Onkaos and Filip Custic.
“Human Product” is on view at Parco Museum, 15-1 Udagawa-cho, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, through April 24.
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Now that the highly-anticipated “Afrofuturism” show is open at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., we caught up with curator Kevin Strait to talk about the years-long planning, the final result, and some of his favorite objects in the show.
For starters, Strait described Afrofuturism as an evolving concept. The term itself was coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993, and was initially conceived though his discussions with authors Samuel Delany and Greg Tate, and sociologist Tricia Rose, said Strait. A few years later, researcher Alondra Nelson and others created a listserv (functionally, an email list) to gather voices and ideas about this relatively new scholarly term. 
“In the early days of the internet, this listserv functioned as the virtual community for scholars, musicians, artists, and other like-minded individuals to discuss and develop the language of this conceptual model that looked at the ways that race, technology, and fantasy blend together in the creative works and radical expression of African Americans and Black people across the diaspora,” said Strait.
The Smithsonian exhibition traces this history by beginning with the cultural roots of Afrofuturism and its African legacies, before moving to the narrative works of the enslaved and into the 20th century with the words and visual data produced by African American sociologist and theorist W.E.B. Du Bois.
“After historically grounding the concept, the exhibit explores Afrofuturism’s reach into the 20th and 21st centuries, exposing the evolving worlds of science fiction writing, fashion, visual culture, film, and activism,” Strait explained. “We also explore music’s central role as a primary mouthpiece of Afrofuturist expression in art and take a close look at its evolution beginning with Sun Ra, and carrying forward with artists as diverse as Lee Scratch Perry, Outkast, Janelle Monae, Herbie Hancock, and so many more.”
Installation view of “Afrofuturism” at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Asked how and when he first conceived of the show, Strait told Artnet News he began writing the script for the exhibition in 2018 and working with the museum on the project in 2019.
“But I started thinking about Afrofuturism in relation to material culture after our museum collected the Parliament-Funkadelic Mothership in 2011,” he added. “That object carries so much history, and alongside its legacy as an iconic stage prop, it also embodies deep symbolic meaning as a figurative vessel, designed to liberate the minds of audiences. From these objects, we can see how themes of freedom and agency are inherently woven into their history. After our doors opened in 2016, we’ve been developing multiple exhibitions that take a deeper dive into various subjects that examine the cultural history of the African American experience.”
Asked about the challenges of organizing the show and why the concept is particularly resonant at the moment, Strait pointed to “the inherent complexity that comes with any exhibition that focuses on identity, representation, and contextualizing the African American experience through a cultural lens.”
While there is a wide-ranging scope to Afrofuturism that covers generations and of course, looks to the future, he said that that challenge also presented an opportunity for the museum to examine a large variety of objects in its collection, connecting stories across multiple genres and disciplines from the past and present.
“As the term and concept become more noticeable and part of our daily lives, we see more examples of its impact and influence in our culture. That’s the power of social media and our connected lives, where previously siloed academic terms like Afrofuturism have now entered our national discourse,” Strait said. “I think the success of films like Black Panther have helped to cement the ideas of Afrofuturism in our culture. That film’s success is due, in part, to more audiences knowing about Afrofuturism and a more public demand for stories with Black characters, Black settings, and Black worlds that are developed by Black creators.”
Asked what he considers among the crowning achievements of the show, Strait told Artnet News: “I’m happy that we’ve developed a narrative that explores Afrofuturism’s broad history of expression and one that connects its story to real people.” For instance, the exhibition explores how Nichelle Nichols’s portrayal of Uhura on Star Trek impacted Black recruitment in NASA, as well as how Trayvon Martin’s dreams of working in aviation connect the themes of Afrofuturism to real people.
“We also want the exhibition to connect with and add another layer of understanding to our museum’s central narrative of ‘making a way out of no way,’ by exploring these new concepts and spaces of identity for African Americans that emerge over time.”
Here are some of the highlights of the show, some picked by Strait.
Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil by W.E.B. Du Bois (1920). Strait called Du Bois’s The Comet “a wonderful example of speculative fiction that provides an allegory about race in America.” Photo courtesy Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Octavia Butler typewriter, once owned and used by the writer in the mid to late 1970s. On loan from Anacostia Community Museum.
Costume worn by Bernie Worell of Parliament-Funkadelic, “who crafted their space-age sound with his innovative use of synthesizers in popular music” (c. 1966). Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Gift of Judie Worrell and Bassl Worrell.
ESP custom electric guitar owned by Vernon Reid, “used in the recording and video for [Living Color’s] breakthrough song, ‘Cult of Personality’” (1985-86). Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Donated by Vernon Reid.
Costume worn by Nona Hendryx of Labelle (1975). Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Gift of Nona Hendryx of Labelle.
Cape and jumpsuit worn by André De Shields as the Wizard in The Wiz—the “super soul musical”—on Broadway (1975). Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Cape: gift of the Black Museum founded by Lois K. Alexander-Lane. Jumpsuit and accessories: Gift of André De Shields.
[The Georgia Negro] Occupations of Negroes and whites in Georgia ca. 1890. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.“Afrofuturism” is on view at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, 1400 Constitution Ave NW, Washington, D.C. through March 24, 2024.
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Bollywood cinema is known for its elaborately choreographed song-and-dance numbers—a phenomenon that reflects the importance of dance in the art of Southeast Asia, South Asia, and the Himalayas for millennia.
That’s the thesis of a new exhibition at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum celebrating 2,000 years of the visual language of dance—and its historical, spiritual, and political impact across a broad geographic region that includes India, Pakistan, Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia.
“What we’re trying to pull out is how really important dance is in the religion and mythology and court culture and everyday life of all of those places,” exhibition co-curator Forrest McGill, the museum’s senior curator of South and Southeast Asian art, told Artnet News.
Five years in the making, “Beyond Bollywood: 2,000 Years of Dance in Art” brings together 120 artworks from 25 museums and private collections. Originally conceived of by Laura Weinstein, the curator of South Asian and Islamic Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, it became a collaboration between the Asian Art Museum and the Cincinnati Art Museum when the Boston museum had to pull out for scheduling reasons.
Classical Khmer dancer Prumsodun Ok. Photo by Nobuyuki Arai.
Bollywood movies, of course, draw inspiration from Hollywood musicals. But some of the early Bollywood films recounted traditional stories from Indian mythology, and the exhibition pairs a number of objects with short movie clips related to the subjects of the artworks.
“The big idea for this exhibition is dance is power,” McGill said. “I think people are going to be surprised to see how often deities are dancing, and in different contexts they’re dancing… dancing seems to symbolize the energy and the power of the deities.”
The show opens with a bold expression of that power: a statue of a dancing Shiva from 800 or 900 years ago.
Installation view of “Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in Art” at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, with a statue of Shiva displayed against a backdrop of NASA footage of solar flares. Photo courtesy of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.
“It’s surrounded by projected video of NASA footage of solar flares,” McGill said. “This is meant to suggest how Shiva’s dance is really happening out in the cosmos. It has implications of cosmic destruction and cosmic recreation.”
“In the Indian and Hindu and Buddhist worldview, time is cyclical,” he added. “The cycle of destruction and recreation is happening endlessly, over and over and over for billions of years. There’s no first beginning or final end.”
Other memorable depictions of deities in the show include a mischievous statue of the Hindu god Krishna as a child dancing for joy—”full of the sense of an impish little boy,” McGill said—and an adult Krishna dancing in victory on the head of a vanquished serpent.
Krishna overcoming the serpent Kaliya (ca. 975–1025). India; Tamil Nadu state. Copper alloy. Collection of the Asia Society, New York: Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection.
Dance also appears as a form of seduction—a distraction tactic that usually failed when employed against the gods.
The earliest work in the show, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is a 2,000-year-old plaque from northern India, of a woman dancing to an accompanying harpist.
“The harp didn’t survive as a musical instrument in India, interestingly,” McGill said. “But the position of the dancer, the way she holds her arms and legs, could absolutely come out of a dance performance today!”
The final work in the show is a three-channel 2016 video by Sarah Choo Jing titled Art of the Rehearsal.
Installation view of “Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in Art” at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, with Sarah Choo Jing, Art of the Rehearsal (2016). Photo courtesy of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.
“The piece fills a whole room, projected on three walls. It’s the back streets of Singapore with people practicing their dance,” McGill said. “It’s very striking.”
“The exhibition makes the point that these traditions—the importance of dance, the significance of dance, the variety of powerful things that dance can do,” he added, “That continues right up to today.”
See more works from the show below.
Comb with depiction of dancing woman (ca. 1600–1700). Sri Lanka; former kingdom of Kandy. Ivory with traces of pigment. Collection of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Avery Brundage Collection. Photo ©Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
The Buddhist deity Vajravarahi (ca. 1300–1400). Tibet. Bronze with gilding and inlaid turquoise. Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund.
Attributed to Pandit Seu, Dancing villagers (ca. 1730). Indian. Opaque watercolors on paper. Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, from the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase.
Dancing Ganesha (ca. 1500–1700), India, Karnataka state. Copper alloy. Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Harry and Yvonne Lenart.
Maharaja Sher Singh and companions watching a dance performance (ca. 1850). Pakistan; Lahore. Opaque watercolors and gold on paper. Collection of the San Diego Museum of Art, Edwin Binney 3rd Collection.
Dancing Hevajra surrounded by dancing yoginis (ca. 1050–1100). Northeastern Thailand; former kingdom of Angkor. Bronze. Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of Maxeen and John Flower in honor of Stanislaw Czuma.
Mythical bird-man and bird-woman dancing (ca. 1857–1885), Myanmar (Burma). Wood with lacquer, gold leaf, and inlaid glass. Burma Art Collection at Northern Illinois University, gift of Konrad and Sarah Bekker.
Mythical bird-man and bird-woman dancing (ca. 1857–1885), Myanmar (Burma). Wood with lacquer, gold leaf, and inlaid glass. Burma Art Collection at Northern Illinois University, gift of Konrad and Sarah Bekker.
Armlet with Krishna overcoming the serpent Kaliya (ca. 1850–1900). India; Chennai, Tamil Nadu state. Gold, opalescent glass, and topaz. Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase.
Pushpamala N., Still image from Indrajaala/Seduction (2012) (Indian, b. 1956). Courtesy of the artist.
The Lords of the Cremation Ground dancing (ca. 1400–1500), Tibet. Gift of Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation.
“Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in Art” is on view at the Asian Art Museum, Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture, 200 Larkin Street, San Francisco, California, March 31–July 10, 2023. 
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