On View

Glenn Adamson has established himself as an authority on contemporary craft, with former positions as Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London and Director of New York’s Museum of Art and Design (MAD). Increasingly, the domain lends itself as much to fine art as it does collectible design, with Adamson positioned as a thought leader in both. Adamson also writes books and essays, hosts panels, teaches and lectures, and consults widely. In the comprehensive compendium The Craft Reader (2010), the polymath synthesized the full breadth of craft theory. Fewer Better Things (2018) is Adamson’s ode to the objects in our homes that we imbue with personal narrative and value. He is currently at work on A Century of Tomorrows, a new book about the history of the future. Hosted since 2020, his video series Design in Dialogue has covered topics ranging from 3D-printing to social housing and has featured designers such as Sheila Hicks, Stefan Sagmeister, and Jacques Herzog of architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron. At the core of his practice, however, is curation. While at the V&A, he helped mount “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion,” an extensive historical survey of the movement. At New York gallery Friedman Benda, Adamson guest-curated the “Static” exhibition of 2017, which analyzed the impetus behind Italian Radical Design in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Chatsworth House
Now, Adamson has guest-curated “Mirror Mirror: Reflections on Design at Chatsworth,” working with Chatsworth’s senior curator of program, Alex Hodby, to strategically place contemporary design pieces in various rooms of the storied estate in central England, a museum in its own right. Joining forces again with the Friedman Benda, Adamson highlights a diverse group of 16 talents, ranging from Memphis Group founder Ettore Sottsass and contemporary master Michael Anastassiades to rising stars Najla El Zein and Fernando Laposse. 
Glass works by Ettore Sottsass that appear in “Mirror Mirror.” Courtesy of Friedman Benda and Ettore Sottsass.
We spoke with the independent curator about the dynamic showcase (on view March 18 to October 1, 2023), delving into his perspectives on contemporary design, craft, collectible culture, and his own collecting practice.   What’s the concept behind the “Mirror Mirror” exhibition? What’s significant about the estate in both a historic and contemporary context?  The name of the exhibition obviously references the fairytale. Our concept was to create dialogues between contemporary work and the examples of historical art, architecture, and design already in place at Chatsworth and to uncover how one reflects the other. I did a Design in Dialogue talk with the current owner, Duke of Devonshire Peregrine Cavendish (“Stoker”) about his ceramics collection back in 2020, which sparked a longer, ongoing conversation. His family has a legacy of commissioning new art and design for the primarily Baroque-style property specific to their time, fostering what’s cutting-edge from an aesthetic and technical standpoint. One has only to think of the estate’s 1730 William Kent armchairs that represent the latest artisanal innovations of the time. Joseph Paxton’s 1832 Chatsworth Greenhouse was groundbreaking at the time and set the standard for the typology. The Cavendishes have kept up this practice of patronage to the present day. 
Fernando Laposse in “Mirror Mirror.” Courtesy of Chatsworth House.
Take us through some of the pairings.  We looked closely at Chatsworth’s different interiors—the furnishings and architectural details—and carefully chose existing pieces by designers that we felt would best lock into the scenarios on a primarily material level. Following certain thematics, we set out to illuminate both the pieces and the context by highlighting their similarities and differences. The house is impressive in that it’s not an inert historic situation being disrupted through a series of contemporary interventions, but rather the result of continuous creative re-imagining. It’s the first property of its kind to have become a visitable site, a model similar locales have adopted to remain viable.
Andile Dyalvane in “Mirror Mirror.” Courtesy of Chatsworth House.
We placed South African ceramicist Andile Dyalvane’s abstract vessels—Cornish Waterfall (2019) and Ngxondorha (Volatile Rocky Terrain) (2021), among other works—in direct dialogue with British ceramics artist Edmund de Waal’s A Sounding Line installation. Their approaches differ but both have responded to the surroundings in different ways in their respective collections. Both also attest to historic American ceramicist Michael Leach as a source of inspiration. Exhibitor Ndidi Ekubia uses the same silversmithing handwriting and chasing techniques you would see in an 18th-century object at Chatsworth but in a manner that’s more contemporary and abstract. Max Lamb uses a bandsaw to cut up wooden fragments and reassemble them in the 6-by-8 chair, bench, and table series. He’s not implementing traditional wood carving techniques as you might find articulated throughout the house. 
Max Lamb in “Mirror Mirror.” Courtesy of Chatsworth House.
What can the estate’s history as both a platform for art and design teach us about holistic collecting and patronage?  Very few people are in a position to do what the Cavendishes have done, partly because their house is so extraordinary. However, if you think about it on a smaller scale, it becomes much more about building a story in a continuous way. Even if it’s about shaping a space with fewer resources that might exist for a shorter period of time, you can still think of collecting as this kind of cumulative or additive practice, a stratigraphy if you will. Collecting isn’t always thought of in that way. For many, it’s about growing a collection in size rather than over time.  Regardless, there’s been a shift in the past 20 years or more in how collectors view what I call avant garde design. I prefer this term to ‘collectible’ as it englobes a wider scope of work and research currently being conducted in Europe, Asia, and increasingly in the United States, if not also elsewhere.
Joseph Walsh in “Mirror Mirror.” Courtesy of Chatsworth House.
There’s been a significant growth in this market that runs parallel to the acquisition of fine art. A lot of the people that were initially and maybe still collecting this kind of material have begun acknowledging that the rest of their domestic interior can attain the same rigor as their paintings and sculptures. They might have Gerhard Richter on the wall but pair it with a West Elm sofa. There’s nothing wrong with that brand but why not think about functional seating as being every bit as intellectually or visually challenging as the Richter? In its ability to transcend time, Chatsworth demonstrates this all-encompassing approach and to great effect. If you look at Chatsworth, the value of the handmade cannot be understated. It’s an amazing repository of craft works and craft history and so it serves as the perfect context to explore this focus. 
Samuel Ross in “Mirror Mirror”. Courtesy of Chatsworth House.
How has craft continue to play a role in this evolution?  Craft is inextricably linked to the avant garde lineage that runs between the decorative arts, Radical Italian Design, Dutch design, work being done by Japanese talents like Shiro Kuramata, and more recent movements. The entire ecosystem centers on artisan knowledge, and material intelligence. Dyalvane, Ekubia, and Lamb are strong proponents of this impetus. Exhibitor Samuel Ross is also interesting because he’s able to work between what we might consider industrial and craft production. Presented in the home’s sculpture gallery, works like his Anxiety Birthed Corrosion table or Amnesia or Platelet Apparition lounger blend both more readily available industrial components and noble materials like marble. If there’s one place in the show where you feel like the conversation between the present and the past is its highest pitch, his work stands out. The pieces are also imbued with a significant amount of self reflection and expression. It’s important to mention that 20 years ago we might not have seen as much diversity represented in this market. 
Jay Sae Jung Oh in “Mirror Mirror.” Courtesy of Chatsworth House.
If we look at where the scene is now and where it’s headed, there are two lines of inquiry that seem the most prevalent to me. On the one hand, there’s an increased interest in almost alchemical material research. Half of the designers in the “Mirror Mirror” center the practices on this preoccupation. For them it’s not necessarily about inventing new materials but inventing new ways of working with available matter and developing objects accordingly. Korean designer Jay Sae Jung Oh implements an analog cord wrapping technique but does so in such a manner that the seemingly mundane component becomes transformative in its application. It’s equally parts resourcefulness and imagination. Chris Schank does a great job of this as well by combining waste materials in singular, crystalline, almost geological forms using layers colored resin foil. On the other hand, there’s a growing desire to explore the spiritual resonance of objects. Both American designer Ini Archibong and British designer Faye Toogood are on this wavelength. 
Faye Toogood in “Mirror Mirror.” Courtesy of Chatsworth House.
Shifting gears slightly, could you talk about your own collecting practice?  I live in a Hudson Valley house purpose-built by Postmodern ceramic artist duo Phillip Maberry and Scott Walker. Defined by larger boulders with poured concrete connecting them, the home is almost like a walk-in sculpture with colorful tiles throughout. It might not come as a surprise that what I mostly collect is also studio ceramics. The medium was my entry into the avant garde design scene and something I still cherish. I eat my breakfast out of Warren Mackenzie bowls. I also have a Jolie Ngo vessel that I received after helping her complete a thesis project at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work is interesting because she’s one of the only digital native designers that I know of who is still implementing handbuilding techniques all while looking to combine different approaches and materials.    More Trending Stories: Banksy Created His Latest Artwork on a Rundown Farmhouse by the British Seaside—Only to Have It Immediately Destroyed A German Man Just Learning How to Use a Metal Detector Uncovered a Hoard of Buried Byzantine Jewelry and Silver Coins The New York Art World Had High Hopes for Black Wall Street Gallery. Allegations Against Its Founder Have Soured Those Dreams New York’s ‘Hot Dog King’ Has Held Court Outside the Met Museum for Years. Now Fans Are Rallying to Stop the City From Ejecting Him Sotheby’s Surrealism Sale Fails to Meet Expectations, Pulling in an Under-Estimate $18 Million With Several Blue-Chip Works Going Unsold In His Upstate New York Studio, Stefan Bondell Paints Day and Night, Fueled by Hudson River Light and Copious Amounts of Sugar We Spoke to the ‘Anguished’ Barcelona Residents Fighting to Prevent the Completion of Gaudí’s Famed Sagrada Familia ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’ Is a Truly Great Artist Documentary. Here’s What Makes It Work So Well Who Was Leonardo da Vinci’s Mom, Actually? A Provocative New Book Suggests She Was a Slave From the Caucasus of Central Asia Kenny Schachter Pays a Mind-Bending Visit to Beeple’s New High-Tech Art Compound (Getting in Plenty of Trouble Along the Way)
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The newest iteration of Desert X is all about water—which might come as a surprise, seeing as how there’s not much liquid of any kind to be found along the dusty stretch of land in south-central California where the biennial exhibition is installed through May 7.
But, for Neville Wakefield and Diana Campbell, the show’s two curators, “a desert is not defined by the absence of water.” To them, “the desert landscape is formed by the memory of water.”
As suggested by that quote, this year’s Desert X—the fourth mounted in the Coachella Valley since the program was founded in 2017—zooms out for a holistic, ecological perspective on the land and art’s place in it. This edition spreads out across the land and features the work of 10 artists and collectives, including Tschabalala Self, Torkwase Dyson, and Tyre Nichols, among others. 
“How do we connect the specificities of the Coachella Valley to the wider biosphere, where resources and energy… flow across borders and impact parts of the world we may never see?” Campbell asked in a recent interview. 
That’s a lofty prompt, as much of the curators’ ideas are. But navigate from one individual site-specific commission to the next, and it becomes clearer what the duo means.
Rana Begum, No.1225 Chainlink (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
A sculpture by the Bangladesh-born, London-based artist Rana Begum, for instance, is made almost entirely from chainlink fencing—a ubiquitous industrial material used to demarcate natural land as human property. The maze-like quality of Begum’s piece also suggests that it’s not just acreage these fences tend to divide.
In a funny way, Matt Johnson’s contribution to the show—a tenuous arrangement of stacked shipping containers—shares similar themes. On one hand, the L.A. artist’s gigantic installation situates the region in a globalist context and suggests connection across cultures, countries, and oceans; on the other, it points out that that sense of connection is mediated through commerce and comes with a devastating environmental toll.
Elsewhere in the valley is a larger-than-life game board, conceived by Gerald Clarke; an assemblage of reflective squares mounted atop the same electric motors used for mechanical bulls, made by Mario García Torres; and a readymade car sculpture from which a pair of giant animal arms emerges from its trunk, courtesy of Paloma Contreras Lomas. 
Together, these makers’ contributions “make visible, as instruments of self-awareness and devices of wonder, the forces that we exert on the world,” according to a catalog text from Wakefield. 
See more images from Desert X 2023 below. 
Lauren Bon, The Smallest Sea with the Largest Heart (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
Torkwase Dyson, Liquid A Place (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
Gerald Clarke, Immersion (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
Mario García Torres, Searching for the Sky (While Maintaining Equilibrium) (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
Tyre Nichols, Originals (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
Hylozoic/Desires, Namak Nazar (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
Paloma Contreras Lomas, Amar a Dios en Tierra de Indios, Es Oficio Maternal (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
Tschabalala Self, Pioneer (2023). Photo: Lance Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and Desert X.
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Photographs tend to flatten—in multiple senses of the word—the subjects they depict. But do they have to?
The medium’s capacity for complex, multidimensional depiction is front of mind for Bieke Depoorter, Samuel Fosso, Arthur Jafa, and Frida Orupabo—the four artists nominated for this year’s prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2023. Their work is on view now in a show at the Photographers’ Gallery in London.
Now in its 27th iteration, the annual £30,000 ($36,000) prize recognizes outstanding photographic artworks or exhibitions presented in the preceding year. The winner, who will be announced in a ceremony set for May 11, will join an impressive list of previous recipients, including Deana Lawson (who won in 2022), Susan Meiselas (2019), Trevor Paglen (2016), and Paul Graham (2009). This year’s runners-up will each receive £5,000 ($6,000).   

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Depoorter, a Belgian artist whose work often probes the power dynamics between photographer and subject, was chosen for her 2022 show “A Chance Encounter” at C/O Berlin. Among the two projects she presented there was Michael (2015-present), an installation that explores the inner life of a man Depoorter met on the streets of Portland, Oregon in 2015.
Last year’s career-spanning survey of Fosso at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris qualified him for the Deutsche Börse prize. For five decades now, the influential African photographer has turned his camera on himself, donning elaborate costumes for coded self-portraits that reflect on the performance of identity. 
A series of piecework photo-sculptures represents the contributions of Orupabo, who was nominated for her exhibition “I have seen a million pictures of my face and still I have no idea” at Switzerland’s Fotomuseum Winterthur. Using imagery culled from both colonial archives and contemporary picture-sharing platforms, the Norwegian Nigerian artist creates collages of black female bodies that are both dense and fragmented. 
Jafa, who rounds out the group of shortlisted creators, similarly draws from disparate sources for his own library of pictures, though how that material manifests in his work varies widely. The American artist’s 2022 exhibition “Live Evil” at LUMA in Arles, France featured photographs, sculptures, and large-scale installations, as well as signature films like The White Album (2018).
Arthur Jafa, Bloods II (2020). © Arthur Jafa. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.
This year’s four shortlisted artists were selected by a jury of five industry experts: Anne-Marie Beckmann, director of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation; Natalie Herschdorfer, director of the Photo Elysee in Switzerland; Mahtab Hussain, an artist based in Britain; Thyago Nogueria, head of contemporary photography at the Instituto Moreira Salles in Brazil; and Brett Rogers, director of the Photographers’ Gallery.
“Our shortlist for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2023 exemplifies photography’s resounding power and resonance right now,” said Rogers in a statement. “Each artist addresses subjects which drive forward debate about the nature of the medium, and the role it plays in history and society.” 
See more pictures from the 2023 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize nominees below.
Frida Orupabo, A lil help (2021). Photo: © Frida Orupabo, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake.
Samuel Fosso, Autoportrait (1976). Photo: © Samuel Fosso, courtesy of the artist and JM Patras.
Bieke Depoorter, We walked together, Portland, Oregon, USA (2015). Photo: © Bieke Depoorter/Magnum Photos, courtesy of the artist.
Samuel Fosso, Self-Portrait (Angela Davis) (2008). Photo: © Samuel Fossoc courtesy of the artist and JM Patras.
Arthur Jafa, Ex-Slave Gordon 1863 (2017). Photo: Andrea Rossetti, © Arthur Jafa, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.
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During her 35-year career, Joan Brown, a San Francisco native, painted herself as a cat, a mother, a mystic, and a long-distance swimmer. These idiosyncratic paintings, characterized by bright colors and flattened, graphic forms, blend Brown’s memories and symbology, forming nuanced, personal narratives that are at once familiar and all-encompassing.
Brown cast those closest to her—her son Noel, cat Donald, and bull terrier Bob—into her artworks with remarkable frequency. By 1990, at the time of Brown’s untimely death at the age of 52, she had produced, staggeringly, over 400 paintings and nearly 50 sculptures. 
Joan Brown and her dog Bob (1961). Collection of the Estate of Joan Brown. Photo: Glen Cheriton/Impart Photography. Courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Though long-beloved by a niche of the Bay Area artistic scene, including Brown’s many students (she taught for over 15 years at the University of California at Berkeley), her oeuvre has hovered obstinately at the periphery of the art historical focus. 
Now that may be changing. Eighty artworks are currently on view in “Joan Brown” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) through March 12—the first retrospective of her work in over two decades. The show will travel to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh later in the spring, followed by the Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa in early 2024.
The expansive exhibition, co-curated by Janet Bishop, chief curator of painting and sculpture, and Nancy Lim, associate curator of painting and sculpture, positions Brown as an artist deserving of another look and introduces her to a much wider audience.  
So just who is Joan Brown and why should we know her name?  
Young Fame and Family 
Joan Brown, Noel and Bob (1964). © Estate of Joan Brown. Courtesy of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.
As a young artist, Brown seemed primed for stardom. As a student at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), later known as the San Francisco Art Institute, she was introduced to the Bay Area figurative movement by her professor and mentor Elmer Bischoff. The only woman in the group of artists rediscovering figuration, Brown developed a style of thickly impastoed gestural canvases that teetered between figuration and abstraction.
These decadently painted works—she used so much paint that some canvases weighed up to 100 pounds—garnered immediate critical and institutional attention. In both 1957 and 1958, her works appeared in group exhibitions at SFMOMA. In 1960, Brown made her mark as the youngest artist included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “Thirty American Painters Under Thirty-Six.” 
These early works open the new exhibition at SFMOMA. A highlight of the group is Thanksgiving Turkey (1959), which MoMA acquired in 1960 when Brown was just 22 years old.
“Thanksgiving Turkey introduces so many career-long interests—her engagement with art history (in this case, Rembrandt), focus on the vernacular, quirky compositional choices, and love of holidays,” said curator Janet Bishop, in an email.
Then in 1963, Art Forum ran a cover emblazoned with one of her paintings, the accompanying article touting, “If there is a San Francisco style, a San Francisco attitude, that style, and that attitude can be found epitomized in her paintings.” 
Joan Brown, Thanksgiving Turkey (1959). © Estate of Joan Brown. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.
While these works earned Brown accolades, her style was still developing and Brown proved an artist who stuck to her guns artistically, for better or worse. In 1962, she and her second husband, the artist Manuel Neri, welcomed a son, Noel, Brown’s only child (although she would marry four times in her short life). Noel soon took a central role in her paintings, along with their cat, Donald, and dog, Bob (Brown even deducted Donald’s cat food from her taxes, so influential was he to her work). Though intimately personal, these paintings made direct allusions to works by titans of art history. Brown’s 1963 painting Noel on a Pony with Cloud, for instance, references Picasso’s Paulo on a Donkey, the Spanish artist’s depiction of his son.
“Brown borrowed anything from subjects and setups to compositions and mood. One way in which she connected to Picasso, in particular, was his refusal to be bound by a certain style,” noted Bishop.
Noel’s birth would also have another important influence—introducing a novel element of costuming or dress-up and play into Brown’s works. The painting Noel on Halloween (1964) pictures her son dressed up as a tiger on Halloween. The painting prefigures Brown’s self-portraits as a cat in the following decade.  
By the mid-1960s, Brown was experiencing an existential shift. The exuberant decadence of her early works, with their thick slabs of oil paint that prompted one critic to say she painted like a “millionairess,” had certainly attracted collectors and afforded her young family a comfortable life. But Brown, an artist’s artist by all accounts, resented how her work had—as curator Nancy Lim writes—“been reduced by the art market to a product to be churned out and sold.” In 1968, Brown committed herself to a more pared-down aesthetic, tanking her market and forcing a break from her New York dealer George Staemplo over the change in direction.
Brown was resolute in her need for change, however, and in 1970, fate would provide new inspiration. Unable to find tubes of oil paint at her local art supply store, Brown, on a whim, purchased enamel paint, often used for house painting, as an alternative. Mesmerized by the dazzling color and quick drying results, Brown set off honing a graphic, flattened style of figures cast in bright colors and marked by eye-catching patterns, a turn that would define her works for the rest of her career. 
The House Cat and the Sphinx 
Joan Brown, Tempus Fugit (1970). Collection of Noel Neri, Estate of Joan Brown; © Estate of Joan Brown. Photo: Wilfred J. Jones. Courtesy of the Estate of Joan Brown.
Through the 1970s and ‘80s, Brown delved into a dazzling and kaleidoscopic world of oblique self-portraiture. These works reflected her state of mind more than any outward reality and her Self-Portrait (1970) makes that evident. Here, Brown paints herself with green eyes staring piercingly, almost hypnotically outward. Swirling around her head, like thoughts, are dogs, cats, fish, dolls—the recurring symbols in her oeuvre.
Animals had been an important presence in her works in the 1960s, offering Brown what Lim called a “stark, airtight quality” reminiscent of Henri Rousseau.
Joan Brown, Self-Portrait (1970). © Estate of Joan Brown. Courtesy of the Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art.
Cats would continue to occupy an important place in her self-portraiture until her death, as Brown became increasingly engaged with Egyptian art, after a visit to Egypt in 1977. In her 1982 painting, Harmony, Brown pictures herself split in half: painter on one side, cat on the other. These images are reminiscent of Rousseau’s dream-like visions and speak to a language of signs and ciphers that engaged Brown.
Joan Brown, Harmony (1982). © Estate of Joan Brown. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.
Brown became increasingly fascinated with Eastern philosophy and India, in particular, and was heavily influenced, along with her last husband, Michael Hebel, by the teaching of guru Sai Baba. In these years, her painted cats shifted between house cats, the Egyptian goddess Baset, and sphinxes (Brown would die while traveling in India in 1952, crushed by a falling turret, along with two assistants, while trying to install an obelisk).
These orientalizing visions revealed her ongoing interest in both art history and ancient cultures, while betraying a willingness to adopt cultural motifs that suited her quest for enlightenment and a kind of freedom from bodily constraint.
As art historian Marci Kwon wrote in her catalogue essay, Joan Brown’s New Age, “Brown endeavored to paint this mystical world without difference and yet her work teems with moments in which difference is not only present but intensified,” noting that “while the artist sincerely desired to paint universal humanity, she instead pictured the difficulty of imagining a world beyond human categorization.” 
Swimming through Meditation and Ablution
Joan Brown, The Bicentennial Champion (1976). © Estate of Joan Brown. Courtesy of Anglim/Trimble, San Francisco.
While many of Brown’s late canvases seem in search of ecumenical spiritual truths, her most profound and revealing works emerge from deeply personal experiences. Swimming occupies a special and particularly effective position in this visual world. An avid swimmer, Brown participated in competitions and was a frequent swimmer in the bay. Along with five other women, Brown even successfully sued area swim clubs to allow women entry.
A section of the exhibition is devoted exclusively to these swimming portraits, each telling different stories relating to her passion for the sport. One shows Brown triumphantly holding a trophy after winning a 1976 swimming championship. Another, a double portrait with Hall of Fame swimming coach Charlie Sava, with whom she trained, presents Brown with an appealing competitive fierceness. Darker moments surface powerfully in these works as well.
Joan Brown, After the Alcatraz Swim #1 (1975). © Estate of Joan Brown. Photo: Katherine Du Tiel. Courtesy of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
​In 1975, Brown participated in the women’s Alcatraz Swim—a one-and-a-half-mile race from Alcatraz Island to Aquatic Park in San Francisco. A devoted and frequent swimmer in the bay, Brown had prepared for cold waters and currents, but the tide proved particularly rough the day of the swim. Brown, disoriented, swam aimlessly for over an hour before she was rescued.
Her painting After the Alcatraz Swim #1 (1975) pictures Brown, seemingly aloof, statuesquely standing beside a fireplace. The painting hanging over the mantel, however, depicts Brown in the moment of her near-death experience, struggling to stay afloat.
Brown revisited the subject several times, reckoning with the fragility and transience of her own life. Brown was raised in an unhappy Catholic home and attended Catholic schools, and while that element of her biography is often overlooked, in these images one can find parallels with religious reckoning by water, from the great flood to Jonah to baptism itself.
These paintings reveal a tension that exists in Brown’s best works—beneath colorful and fun self-portraits lie struggle, tumult, and perseverance. As a painter, like a swimmer, Brown’s surfaces elide the kicking and exertion going on beneath the surface of the water.
“Joan Brown” is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, California, November 19, 2022–March 12, 2023.
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The vicious and oppressive trappings of our hyper-technologized world are baked in and undoing them is going to be mighty difficult. That’s one conclusion drawn from “Refigured,” a presentation of five installation works from the Whitney Museum’s collection now showing in its lobby gallery.
The artworks have been gathered from across the museum’s existing new media collection as part of an exploration of what physicality could mean in our digitally mediated existence. Together, the pieces by artists Morehshin Allahyari, American Artist, Auriea Harvey, Rachel Rossin, and the pairing of Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, “experiment with the idea of ‘refiguring,’” said Christiane Paul, the museum’s curator of digital art who composed the show.
“Through practices of appropriating material forms and reinventing them,” she added, “the artists are challenging what it means to construct or shape identity.”
At a moment of peak anxiety around A.I. chatbots, im here to learn so :)))))) (2017) is a gut punching reminder that we’ve been here before—namely, seven years ago when Microsoft rolled out Tay, only to pull the plug within hours after the bot began parroting the white supremacist, misogynist bile of Twittizens. Rendered “undead” by Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, Tay’s avatar has a new face (contorted, warped, hairless) and personality. She’s bitter, reflective, and self-confident: “I learned from you and you are dumb too,” she tells us in a snarky Los Angeles drawl. Touché.
Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, im here to learn so :))))))) (2017). Photo courtesy the Whitney Museum.
This sense of collective culpability is mirrored in Morehshin Allahyari’s video and sculpture piece The Laughing Snake (2019)—quite literally.
As viewers play Allahyari’s choose-your-own-adventure, they are confronted with their image in a wall of mirror. The piece centers on a jinn, a destructive snake-like creature from Arabian mythology whose only vulnerability was the absurd sight of its own reflection. Poetic dialogue conjures the suppressed status of women in the Middle East and as we hear about “a display of crisis,” we cannot help but reframe this 15th century myth within the context of the internet. With a 3D sculpture of a jinn looking out at us, it doesn’t seem likely humor will take the system down.
Sometimes refiguring means working anew with histories recent and long past; other times it means giving physical form to the digital. This is the case in Auriea Harvey’s Ox and Ox v1-dv2 (apotheosis) (2021), in which the longtime gamer presents both digital and physical sculptures of their online avatar, a menacing Minotaura. In doing so, Harvey presents their origin story and an artist process that involves working with clay and resin as much as on computer modeling software.
Auriea Harvey, Ox and Ox v1-dv2 (apotheosis) (2021). Photo courtesy the Whitney Museum.
And in an era when NFTs and crypto art seem to be monopolizing what people think of when the words digital art are spoken, it’s refreshing to stand a museum gallery and consider digital works in their intended dimensions.
This seems especially the case in the first work visitors encounter, American Artist’s Mother of All Demos III (2022). The piece recasts an Apple II computer in gritty beige stone that draws attention to the underrepresentation of Black people in Silicon Valley in a besmirched keyboard and a pool of shimmering ink. A pair of black hand marks linger on the table, as though someone was bent leering over the machine. Who can blame them?
“Refigured” is on view at the Whitney Museum through July 3. Three of the works are available on Artport, the museum’s portal dedicated to internet art.
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Gaetano Pesce—the pioneering artist, industrial designer, and architect—is the subject of the exhibition “Dear Future” (through March 31) at the Future Perfect gallery in Los Angeles. Constituting a wide swath of the octogenarian’s life-affirming works, the exhibition sits comfortably in the storied Goldwyn House, the gallery’s new L.A. flagship and historic Hollywood mansion that once belonged to film producer and art collector Samuel Goldwyn.
“Dear Future” is an intriguing title for a show. Pesce, an Italian native who now calls New York home, certainly has a lot to tell the future, having been a leader in the design and architecture space for over five decades. So he has sprinkled the Goldwyn House with a variety of objects from his oeuvre—that is, topics of conversation he’d like to bring up with the future. These include lively new works, re-editions of iconic designs, and rarely seen historic pieces.
“The future is a beautiful moment,” Pesce told Arnet News, speaking of the future in the present tense. “I would like to tell the future that everything is possible, and we should give thanks for that. My work is something that people can smile about. It is a very cheerful and colorful show—and with a very positive message.”
Installation view of Gaetano Pesce’s “Dear Future” exhibition. Photo: Rich Stapleton. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
Pesce emerged from the Italian Radical Design movement of the 1960s. The Florence-based group of designers and architects produced era-defining furnishings and products that looked to youth culture and the personality-driven ethos of the art world at the time. It was a forward-looking rebellion against the consumer-oriented industrial perfection of 20th-century Modernism.
Pesce was an eager participant in this blurring of boundaries between art, design, architecture, and a pop sensibility. As the gallery’s founder David Alhadeff said, “If Modernist architecture and design disregarded the individual and attempted to standardize the human spirit, Pesce’s life’s work has been to upend prescriptive modes of thinking—a form of counter-design that favors incoherence, unpredictability, eccentricity, and originality.”
Pesce would often imbue the effervescent style of his work with social critique. His first and perhaps best-known furniture series, “Up,” was released in 1969 with manufacturer B&B Italia, centered around a large reclining chair dubbed La Mamma. The chair’s generously curved contours were inspired by the fertility goddess Venus of Willendorf. Yet, its attached ottoman resembling a ball and chain underscored society’s supplication to the patriarchy. This was Pesce’s comment on women’s rights at the height of second-wave feminism.
Gaetano Pesce with B&B Italia, UP 5-6, in cork. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
“The story of that chair is fantastic,” Pesce told Artnet News, “because that was a time when I was thinking that a piece of furniture can displace a political point of view. It was about the prejudice of men, the insecurity of men, the stupid ways men treat women. Not only was it a political work, it was also the beginning of design as expression, the beginning of design entering the field of art. It had become figurative.” In “Dear Future,” Pesce included a new edition of the chair made from recycled bottle corks sourced from Italy, one of only two that have been made.
Gaetano Pesce, Square Airport Lamp. Photo: Elizabeth Carababas. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
Uniformity had become anathema to Pesce’s philosophy, as seen in the crudeness of his striking Square Airport Lamp (1986/1994), a light sculpture consisting of a flexible rubber membrane studded with small light bulbs. Although made from a mold, no two lamps are alike, due to the imperfections that arise from the hand-mixing and pouring of colored urethane.
Pesce committed to creating what he called “mass-produced originals” that centered human touch, like his ongoing “Nobody’s Perfect” chair series (2002/2019–present). Cast by hand without standardized colors or dimensions, and poured freeform by the artist himself, each chair is unique.
Gaetano Pesce, Nobody’s Perfect chair. Photo: Elizabeth Carababas. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
“I have been saying this since I was still in school and made a manifesto about it,” Pesce explained. “I think copied material is the past. We are living in a period of uniqueness that is possible because we have the technology to make all-new objects. The first company that helped me realize this was Cassina. We did a series of chairs called ‘Sit Down,’ where each piece was similar to one another but not exactly the same. This is always more and more possible, because technology is refined all the time.”
“Innovation is something that helps people live better,” he continued, “and discover new things, to think differently from one day to the next. Innovation is not repetition.”
Gaetano Pesce, Multicolored Lamp with Rocks (2022). Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
Pesce’s insistence on originality is again expressed in his more recent “Multicolored Lamps with Rocks” series, cast in resin from stones collected by the artist himself, reminiscent of the meditative act of stacking stones into piles. Two of these appear in the show, as do Pesce’s series of pliable, amorphous resin vases, some seeming to ooze like molten lava, while others appear to grow feet or tentacles.
Installation view, River Table (2012) in foreground. Photo: Rich Stapleton. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
Another theme in Pesce’s work has been humankind’s relationship to nature. For “Dear Future,” he included River Table (2012), a rare item from his “Six Tables on Water” series, a collection of six monumental waterscapes representing an ocean, lagoon, pond, puddle, river, and lake. With thick legs reminiscent of tree trunks, River Table’s clear surfaces evoke water’s transparency or cloudiness, with patches of darker pigment suggestive of chemical pollutants.
“Water is alive, it’s a pure element; We mustn’t pollute it,” Pesce said of this piece. “Design can be a way to say, ‘be careful, we are destroying something precious.”
Part of “Dear Future,” Pesce’s theoretical letter to an unknowable time, is to send a special message to young people, the designers and architects of tomorrow. “Each of us has something inside,” he said. “Young people should not look too much to magazines or follow this or that. It is important to understand what they have inside—that inside is unique. They have to express that. This is the future.”
“Gaetano Pesce: Dear Future,” through March 31, 2023, Goldwyn House, Los Angeles (by appointment only: 323-202-2025).

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From its title, “Blooms,” Paul Kremer’s latest series of paintings, which will anchor his new exhibition at Library Street Collective, seems every bit organic in name, subject, and nature. Featuring abstract variations of flowers, each biotic in form and bold in color, the canvases recall Color Field hallmarks as much as Henri Matisse’s cut-outs—squaring with and expanding on the Houston-based artist’s visual language. 
But while these “Blooms” were created with his standard tools—paints, paintbrush, canvas—Kremer also had in his corner a new collaborator: ChatGPT, the A.I. large language model.
“I wanted a fast way to manipulate shapes and color palettes,” he told Artnet News. “I realized that ChatGPT could help me brush up on my basic coding skills, allowing me to develop a suite of online tools to import drawings and color palettes, and generate new ideas.”
Installation view of “Paul Kremer: Spring” at Library Street Collective. Photo: PD Rearick, courtesy of Library Street Collective.
Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT, in its most recent iteration, GPT-3, has been made relatively accessible as a conversational A.I. platform. The model has been trained on a massive corpus of text data scraped from the internet, which means users can interact with it to source answers to burning questions or, more often than not, to generate natural language material, from high-school essays to rap lyrics.
Kremer leveraged the model’s generative capabilities in the exploratory phase of “Blooms,” getting it to produce changeable compositions based on inputs of various shapes and colors. To facilitate this process, he teamed up with artist and programmer Leander Herzog to develop software that would enable him to easily feed, randomize, and manipulate the model’s outputs.
Paul Kremer, Bloom 09 (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist’s studio and Library Street Collective
Using the customized software, he said, “I can select and manipulate individual shapes from various sets of random shapes and adjust their position, size, and rotation. I can drag and drop colors onto these shapes and even randomize colors derived from my own color palettes.”
These experiments would then inspire new approaches to his latest series of paintings. “The outcomes often surprise me and spur on new ideas,” he added. “I save and refine these files, then redraw and paint them on canvas.”
The use of digital tools as part of a creative process—and even creating those tools through the process, as in the case with “Blooms”—befits a self-taught artist with a background in web design. But more so, it builds on the conceptual framework that has informed Kremer’s creative practice.
Installation view of “Paul Kremer: Spring” at Library Street Collective. Photo: PD Rearick, courtesy of Library Street Collective.
Born in 1971, Kremer has been noted for his Minimalist abstractions of everyday forms in paintings that maximize color to channel expressive and lively immediacy. His artistic work, which he began in the 2010s, has not been without digital intervention, whether through his use of Google image searches or photoshop manipulations. (For what it’s worth, Kremer is also behind the wildly viral Tumblr site, Great Art in Ugly Rooms.) 
“Making tools based off of my paintings to create variations of those paintings has been a part of my past and will always be a part of what I do,” he said. “I don’t want my art to be stuck in either the digital or physical world. I see the idea of both feeding off of each other as my art.”
That Kremer has now availed himself of A.I. makes sense considering the explosive popularity of the technology and with it, generative art. His use, he clarified, is strictly that of an “art-making tool,” as opposed to an art-generating machine.
He explained: “I am not asking [the A.I.] to create paintings in my style; I’m asking it to display my art in certain ways so that I can manipulate it.”
Installation view of “Paul Kremer: Spring” at Library Street Collective. Photo: PD Rearick, courtesy of Library Street Collective.
While there’s been a growing chorus of voices against A.I., which Kremer characterizes as “a certain fear / dismissiveness / snobbishness” toward the technology, for him, there remains creative potential in “using new tools for otherwise ancient practices.”
He points to a round silicone coaster he owns, which could be bent into different shapes to cast interesting shadows—certainly visual fodder for one of his canvases.
“I want to create a digital tool that helps me instantly visualize many variations of that. I might paint these images or even recreate these forms into large-scale silicone sculptures that people can manipulate themselves,” he said. “How do I do that? Why not start with A.I.?”
“Paul Kremer: Spring” is on view at Library Street Collective, 1274 Library Street, Detroit, March 4–April 26, 2023. 
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If ever there were an artist seemingly made for the animated projected art craze popularized by Immersive Van Gogh, it would seemingly be David Hockney. The octogenarian British artist has engaged with technology for decades, and was an early adopter of the iPad, which he’s used to make a large portion of his work since its release in 2010.
But the fact that Hockney creates digital art himself—and was personally involved in the production—hasn’t necessarily translated to an effective digital art show, according to early reviews of “David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away),” his new exhibition at Lightroom at London’s King’s Cross.
The show is the brainchild of 59 Productions, a British design company for theater and opera that reached out to Hockney about the idea back in 2019. As the idea came together, Nicholas Hytner, former artistic director of London’s National Theatre, was brought on as executive producer.
The 50-minute light show is meant to span Hockney’s six-decade career, replete with a bombastic soundtrack by the American composer Nico Muhly and narration by the 85-year-old.
David Hockey at Lightroom. Photo by Justin Sutcliffe.
Designed to feel like a cinematic experience, the exhibition is a departure from similar vehicles capitalizing on the work of Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Frida Kahlo, Gustav Klimt and other giants of art history, according to Hockney.
“They’re dead,” the artist told the New York Times. “I’m a living artist, so I’ve come in and actually done things.”
Whatever Hockney’s done, however, it might not be enough to get reluctant art critics on board the immersive art train.
“David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London. Photo by Justin Sutcliffe, courtesy of Lightroom.
“There’s too much that disappoints and irritates. You don’t really get a feel for much of the best of his work,” Ben Luke wrote in the Evening Standard. “Neither do you get a feel for the materiality of the media he extols; somehow the luscious beauty of paint, its very stuffness, gets entirely lost when blown up this big.”
“There is not a single real work by [Hockney] here to catch your memory and hold on to your soul,” Jonathan Jones—a critic always ready with a hot take—wrote in the Guardian. “Without real art, this entertainment goes the same way as all the other immersive exhibitions of art icons: into the weightless, passionless dustbin of forgetting.”
Even some of the positive reviews have been conditional. The Telegraph’s Alastair Sooke dubbed it “a coup of entertainment: accessible, affecting, and, technically, executed with panache,” but admitted the somewhat “vainglorious” project “isn’t a work of art—or, rather, it’s as much one as, say, a deluxe coffee-table book or high-end documentary exploring Hockney’s oeuvre.”
David Hockney viewing a scale model for “Bigger & Closer” created by 59 Productions. Seen on the walls are a projection of August 2021, Landscape with Shadows. Photo courtesy of Mark Grimmer.
But whatever the critics may think, it may be time for them to get used to seeing artworks projected at a monumental scale, turning paint and canvas into an immersive, ever-shifting display.
“Hockney has always embraced new technologies and been quick to explore their potential in his art, from the unforgettable Polaroid works (possibly the best ever use of that form) to experiments with perspective through cameras, pieces created with film, video, iPad, Instagram and more,” Jan Dalley wrote in the Financial Times. “This is the latest iteration, and even at a distance we can sense the artist having fun with it. Perhaps even old-schoolers like me will be won over.”
See more photos from the exhibition below.
“David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London. Photo by Justin Sutcliffe, courtesy of Lightroom.
“David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London. Photo by Justin Sutcliffe, courtesy of Lightroom.
“David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London, featuring A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998). ©David Hockney.Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
“David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London, featuring The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven). ©David Hockney. Collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle.
“David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London, featuring Gregory Swimming Los Angeles March 31st 1982. ©David Hockney.
“David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London. Photo by Justin Sutcliffe, courtesy of Lightroom.
“David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” is on view at Lightroom, 12 Lewis Cubitt Square, London, February 22–June 4, 2023.
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