On View

From a rugged northern desert to an urban marina, a hotel foyer to an airport terminal, a shopping center to a hospital, a theatre to a museum, art will be installed across Qatar. This, at least, is the aim of Qatar Museums, the government institution founded in 2005 and tasked with supercharging the Gulf state’s cultural status.
Although the building of starchitect-designed museums has drawn the most attention—Rem Koolhaas, Jean Nouvel, and Jacques Herzog all have projects in the country—funding public artworks has also been central to Qatar Museums’ mission.
In the run up to the FIFA World Cup, such ambitions have been amplified by Qatar Creates, the country’s very own year of culture, comprising 300 different experiences, for which former soccer star David Beckham is the public face. The goal is for the more than 100 public artworks to form part of the Qatar World Cup’s legacy, enduring long after the expected 1.5 million visitors return home.
“As tourists visit this region of Qatar to experience these new art installations they will learn about Qatar’s natural landscape and history and come away with a better understanding of the diversity of Qatari culture,” said Qatar Museums chairwoman Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, in a recent press statement.
And as with its museums and stadia, Qatar has commissioned some of the most celebrated names in the art world to create site-specific installations. Olafur Eliasson has placed giant rings and mirrors in the desert. Fourteen bronze fetal sculptures by Damien Hirst line the road to a hospital. Sculptures by KAWS, Tom Otterness, and Urs Fischer greet visitors at the Hamad International Airport. One of Richard Serra’s most expansive works stands in the Brouq nature reserve. The list goes on.
See some of Qatar’s most eye-catching public installation artworks below.
Ernesto Neto, SlugTurtle, TemplEarth (2022). Photo: Iwan Baan, Commissioned by Qatar Museums.
Installation view of Olafur Eliasson’s Shadows travelling on the sea of the day (2022), Doha, Qatar. Photo: Iwan Baan, Courtesy of the artist.
Richard Serra, East-West/West-East (2014). Photo: Iwan Baan, Courtesy of Qatar Museums.
Subodh Gupta, Gandhi’s Three Monkeys (2012). Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy of Qatar Museums
Simone Fattal, Gates to the Sea (2019). Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy of Qatar Museums.
Faraj Daham, The Ship (2022). Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy of Qatar Museums.
Isa Genzke, Two Orchids (2015), Qatar National Theatre. Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy of Qatar Museums.
Damien Hirst, The Miraculous Journey (2013). Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy of Qatar Museums.
KAWS, SMALL LIE (2018). Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy of Qatar Museums.
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We often hear about how the Impressionists’ break with tradition paved the way for Modern art. But since the works of each movement tend to be siphoned off into separate galleries, we rarely get a chance to connect the dots ourselves.
This fall, the Fondation Louis Vuitton is presenting a unique dialogue between the works of Monet, one of the best known Impressionists from Paris, and Joan Mitchell, a leading light of Abstract Expressionism working many decades later in the U.S. The melting away of chronological distinctions has been heightened by taking the works by Monet out of their ormolu frames, creating a timeless effect and bringing attention to the works’ formal characteristics.
The famous “Water Lilies” by Monet, who died just one year after Mitchell’s birth, in 1925, became widely known in America during the 1950s. They were clearly of interest to Mitchell, who took part in two exhibitions of so-called “abstract impressionist” work in 1957 and 1958.
The connection between the two artists became particularly strong after 1968, when Mitchell moved to Vétheuil, the commune on the banks of the Seine where Monet lived and worked between 1878 and 1881. The region’s natural surroundings became a crucial source of inspiration for both artists, though each used real life only as a starting point to create highly moving and evocative studies reflective of their unique eye and experiences.
The show presents 36 works by Monet side by side with 24 works by Mitchell. Those hoping to learn more about the latter’s life and work can also visit a special retrospective running simultaneously in the lower floor of the building.
“Monet-Mitchell” is on display at Fondation Louis Vuitton until February 27, 2023. See some of the paintings included in the show below.
Installation view of “Monet-Mitchell” at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Photo courtesy of Fondation Louis Vuitton.
Claude Monet, The Garden at Giverny (1922-26). Photo courtesy of Musee Marmottan, Paris.
Joan Mitchell La Grande Vallee (1983). Photo by © Primae / Louis Bourjac, courtesy of © The Estate of Joan Mitchell.
Installation view of “Monet-Mitchell” at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Photo courtesy of Fondation Louis Vuitton.
Claude Monet, Nymphéas (1916-1919). Photo courtesy of Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
Joan Mitchell, Quatuor II for Betsy Jolas (1976). Photo courtesy of Joan Mitchell Foundation © The Estate of Joan Mitchell.
Installation view of “Monet-Mitchell” at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Photo courtesy of Fondation Louis Vuitton.
Claude Monet, Agapanthus (1916-1919). Photo courtesy of Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
Joan Mitchell, La Grande Vallée XIV (For a Little While) (1983). Photo courtesy of Joan Mitchell, La Grande Vallée XIV (For a Little While) (1983). Photo: Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris © The Estate of Joan Mitchell.
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The Whitney Museum’s newly opened show “Edward Hopper’s New York” is sure to be a blockbuster in the fall art calendar, both for veteran New Yorkers and for the throngs of international tourists who flock to the museum’s eye-catching building at the base of the High Line elevated park.
With over 3,100 Hopper pieces, including more than 220 paintings, the Whitney is the largest holder of the artist’s work. And while the museum has held many exhibitions devoted to the artist over the years, this is the first to focus exclusively on his relationship to New York City, where he lived and worked for more than six decades.
“There is truly no better place to experience this group of works that were largely created only blocks south of where the museum is today and that connects us in often-unexpected ways with the past and present of our city,” said lead curator Kim Conaty during a press preview. Its last major Hopper show, which concentrated on the artist’s drawings, took place in 2013, when the Whitney was still at its former, longtime home in the Marcel Breuer-designed building on the Upper East Side.
The current exhibition is a dynamic mix of artworks and archival materials that tell the story of Hopper’s life and work in New York City—from visits made during his youth from his hometown just north in Nyack on the Hudson River and later during his art-student days to commuting into the city while working as a commercial illustrator and eventually as a fine artist and master of shadow and light, who continuously explored themes of alienation and loneliness against the backdrop of the rapidly developing metropolis.
Along with famous paintings and sketches from the museum’s own collection, there are dozens of major institutional loans as well as archival materials, including letters, postcards, theater tickets, and notebooks, that carefully record both earlier advertising commissions as well as later painting sales.
As museum director Adam Weinberg pointed out at the preview, the show is sure to be a learning experience for even the most seasoned Hopper experts, including himself. “It’s rich in materials, there is so much to see. I learned so much in the process.”
Here are six key takeaways on Hopper’s relationship to, and life in, New York City.
Edward Hopper, Blackwell’s Island, (1928). Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy Art Resource, New York. Photograph by Edward C. Robison III
The Whitney Is Truly Hopper’s Home
Hopper was a touchstone for the Whitney even before the museum was officially founded, said Weinberg. In 1920, the artist was 37 years old when he had his first solo exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club—an association formed by Gerturde Vanderbilt Whitney that was the forerunner of the museum.
Hopper had eight exhibitions at the Studio Club before it closed to make way for the Whitney Museum, which, at the time was on 8th Street and which is now the studio school. It’s also not far from Washington Square North, where the artist lived and had his studio for about 63 years.
In May of 1930, the Whitney became one of the first museums to acquire one of Hopper’s works when Vanderbilt Whitney bought Early Sunday Morning (1930). The artist participated in 29 annuals and biennials at the museum, “which is I think probably the record,” Weinberg said, adding: “Hopper’s painting Room in New York (1932) was included in the first Whitney Biennial in 1932 and it’s back here 90 years later in the museum show.” He noted that the 3,100 Hopper works owned by the Whitney represent “roughly ten percent of the total holdings,” of the museum. “The Whitney is truly Hopper’s home.”
The Horizontal City
“The Horizontal City” is one of eight thematic sections that make up the show. As Conaty pointed out, it is “not a retrospective since it doesn’t include works from Maine or Cape Cod or Hopper’s other locations of interest. But it does cover Hopper’s entire career, since New York had been a part of his life since he was a child.”
The artist “famously detested skyscrapers and the increasing verticality of the city,” said Conaty. With respect to Early Sunday Morning, she said she is fascinated by the fact that it was painted in 1930, the same year that the Chrysler building became the world’s tallest building only to lose the title a few months later to the Empire State Building. “Yet the vertical dynamics of the growing city were of little interest to Hopper. And there is a certain irreverence here in the idea of painting compositions like Early Sunday Morning in that year and a constant tension between longing for the past and yet an embrace of the modern city. And there is, of course, a hint of what is to come by the looming gray rectangle,” in the upper right hand corner of the work.
Edward Hopper, Manhattan Bridge (1925–26). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.1098 © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Eschewing The ‘Post Card’ Pics
Noting that the Manhattan Bridge, built in 1901, was a site that Hopper returned to many times, and of which there are numerous depictions in the show, Conaty said: “I love his focus on the Manhattan Bridge, because on the one hand it’s not the Brooklyn Bridge.” Hopper was “skeptical of landmarks and popular, ‘postcard’ New York sites.”
There are also paintings of the Queensborough Bridge (Hopper lived nearby on 59th Street in his early years in the city) as well as views of Blackwell’s Island, now known as Roosevelt Island, the Williamsburg Bridge and the lesser known Macombs Dam Bridge near 155th Street. The double-truss construction and Gothic Revival abutments of the Macombs bridge caught Hopper’s eye.
Edward Hopper, Roofs, Washington Square, (1926). Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Bequest of Mr. and Mrs. James H. Beal. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Washington Square Park
Historic Washington Square Park, which has its own thematic section, plays something of a starring role in the exhibition. Hopper and his wife Josephine, who was also an artist and the model for nearly all of her husband’s female characters, lived and worked there at their respective studios at No. 3 Washington Square North. Included in this section of the show are their own depictions of the surrounding area, such as the Judson Memorial Church, and portraits of the artists by photographers such as Bernard Hoffman and George Platt Lynes.
The couple were also fiercely protective of the area, with Hopper even penning letters to various civic officials and to developer Robert Moses when he thought his home was at risk of destruction due to encroaching development. Through the letters, said Conaty, Hopper “is trying to really fight off gentrification,” which certainly resonates in a place like New York.
According to the wall label text:  “The Hoppers witnessed the incessant cycles of demolition and construction as 19th-century buildings like their own were torn down to make way for new structures. During their many decades in Greenwich Village they advocated for the preservation of the neighborhood as a haven for artists and as one of the city’s cultural landmarks.”
Edward Hopper, The Sheridan Theatre, (1937). Newark Museum of Art, NJ; Felix Fuld Bequest Fund. © 2022 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image courtesy Art Resource
Love of the Theatre
A thematic section focused on the theatre is fascinating on two fronts. While paintings like The Sheridan Theatre (1937), which sat on 12th Street, speak for themselves, archival materials help to provide a window into the couple’s love of the theatre. Included in this section is a large collection of their ticket stubs on which Hopper meticulously recorded each production they attended. The fact that their seats were mostly in the balcony points to the couple’s frugality, said Conaty. Further, the materials are part of the Sanborn Hopper archive acquired by the museum in 2017. A lengthy New York Times profile delved into how the Rev. Arthayer R. Sanborn, who lived close to Hopper’s childhood home in Nyack, came to possess the huge collection of letters, photos, news clippings, and notebooks documenting Hopper’s life.
Edward Hopper, Drug Store (1927). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of John T. Spaulding.
Blending Fantasy With Reality 
While many of Hopper’s paintings depict discernible New York sites and locations, others show facades and structures that are ultimately more “composites” of a streetscape, such as Drug Store (1927) which Hopper endows with a name “but not an address,” according to the label text. Said Conaty: Hopper “is showing us this old view of New York, this nostalgic view of New York.. this almost jewel box atmosphere that was created to capture people’s attention and their imagination as they strolled the city at night. 
“You would be hard-pressed to find a pharmacy so decorated today. I think our CVSs haven’t really taken that cue,” she joked.
“Despite his private, solitary, hermit-like nature, Edward Hopper was a man of the city, of New York City,” said Weinberg. “While capturing the soul and soullessness of modern life, he simultaneously shunned it and sought to find those moments of beauty and quietude, despite the changes that he detested. He painted the world that he saw, the world he knew, the world he invented, and the world he wished.”
Conaty summed up her remarks by recapping an exchange between a journalist and the couple during an interview at their home. When the reporter asked what they liked to do for fun, Jo, who was known to be the more outgoing one, said: “We’re not spectacular, and we’re very private, and we don’t drink, and we hardly ever smoke.” After a pause, Hopper said: “I get most of my pleasure out of the city itself.”
“Edward Hopper’s New York” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, October 19, 2022—March 5, 2023. 

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An old chest sits open on the floor of a storage room in Peter Hujar’s 1973 photograph, Clown’s Trunk. Piled inside the container are balled socks and boxes full of makeup. A dog-eared biography of Buster Keaton sits on the yawning lid like a bible atop an altar. 
“That’s a picture I had seen before, but I had not paid as much attention to it as it deserved,” recalled San Francisco gallerist Jeffrey Fraenkel, who has represented Hujar’s estate since the mid-2000s. 
That the unassuming photograph went overlooked amongst Hujar’s many sensuous studies of writers, rockstars, and fellow artists makes sense; it feels, at first blush, like an outlier. But when the shot happened to be among the 50 pictures chosen by pop icon Elton John for a new exhibition at Fraenkel’s gallery, the dealer looked again. 
Encoded in the trunk tableau, he realized, was a portrait of a person whose rich onstage life left them with little when the curtains went down.
“This is a picture about a performer who goes out in front of an audience in god knows whatever town, does his best to entertain them, then comes back to his dressing room, packs everything into the trunk, and moves on to the next little town,” Fraenkel explained. “And I thought, ‘Wow, Elton John is somebody who would understand the deeper meanings of this picture.’” 
Tellingly, Clown’s Trunk is one of many portraits of performers included in “Peter Hujar: Curated by Elton John,” an exhibition that highlights both artists’ visions.
Peter Hujar, Cockette Kreemah Ritz (I) (1971). © 2022 The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
John, who is now on the road in a yearlong farewell tour, has quietly become one of the world’s preeminent photography collectors over the last three decades. In the Rocket Man’s personal collection are prints by Nan Goldin, Tina Modotti, Man Ray, and Cindy Sherman, among others. 
Hujar’s name didn’t join that list until 2011, John explained, in a forward he wrote for the Fraenkel show catalogue, but he has been a favorite of the pop star ever since. 
“In the years since acquiring that first Hujar, I’ve added 14 more into my personal collection,” John wrote. (Many of those were sold by Fraenkel, the gallerist confirmed.) “Hujar’s humanity, depth, and sensual insights aren’t for everyone, and don’t need to be, but once his pictures get into your bloodstream, they are impossible to shake.”
Peter Hujar, Ethyl Eichelberger as Auntie Belle Emme (1979).© 2022 The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
That’s a loaded metaphor for an artist who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1987. But John is right that Hujar’s best work lingers with its viewers—often to ineffable effect. “His pictures share, in place of a style, an unfailing rigor that can only be experienced, not described,” New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote.
A sense of sorrow pervades the Fraenkel Gallery show, as many presentations of Hujar’s work often do. His early death, and the death of so many of his subjects, casts a shadow hard to escape. John, to his credit, embraces it.
Elsewhere in the exhibition is a 1974 picture of Warhol star Jackie Curtis, laid up in the hospital. Stripped of her usual gaudy makeup, she looks thin and pale. On an adjacent wall is another portrait of Curtis, this one taken after she died of a drug overdose. She lies prostrate in a coffin, and the makeup she has on is the uncanny kind they put on corpses for a funeral. 
A picture of her onstage persona is perched behind her like the Buster Keaton biography in the Clown’s Trunk. It’s a connection only John could see. 
“After all these years, it’s so clear to me that the most interesting way to learn something new about an artist is to look at their work through the eyes of another artist,” Fraenkel said.
See more Hujar photographs from the exhibition below.
Peter Hujar, Don Mahoney and Peter Hujar Painting 189 Second Avenue, October 14 (1983). © 2022 The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Peter Hujar, Waves, Fire Island (1966). © 2022 The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Peter Hujar, Peggy Lee (1974). © 2022 The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Peter Hujar, Nude from Behind (date unknown). © 2022 The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Peter Hujar, Skippy (Boa Constrictor) (1985). © 2022 The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Peter Hujar, Drag Queen with flower, Halloween (1980). © 2022 The Peter Hujar Archive, LLC / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
“Peter Hujar: Curated by Elton John” is on view now through October 22, 2022 at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco.
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The poet E.E. Cummings, a rare household name who brought avant-garde syntax to the everyday reader, composed at least one poem per day between the ages of 8 and 22.
“At the Dawn of a New Age,” an exhibition at the Whitney Museum that explores oft-forgotten American modernists active from 1900 through the 1930s, re-asserts Cummings as an equally disciplined painter—and a cutting-edge one at that.
The show, which is on view until February 26, 2023, takes its title from a quote by the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks. “America is living at the dawn of a new age of humanity,” curator Barbara Haskell paraphrased for Artnet News. She curated the show specifically to introduce viewers to the forthcoming Whitney Biennial to deep cuts from the museum’s permanent collection.
Installation view of “At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism.” Front left: E. E. Cummings, ‘Noise Number 13,’ 1925. Photograph by Ron Amstutz. All photos courtesy of the Whitney Museum.
Assembling the show, however, challenged Haskell’s own preconceived notions about art history. “We think of early modernism as being a handful of artists,” she said, “but in fact there was this wide swath of artists who were channeling the developments of Cubism and Fauvism and turning it into a native-born American modernism.”
“That was the thrust of the show,” Haskell continued, “to break open the canon.”
The Whitney has helped create that canon, in fact. As a press release for the show notes, the Whitney widely ignored works from early American modernists until the mid-1970s, since the museum’s loyalty then lied with “the urban realists who formed the core of the Whitney Studio Club,” a social organization for artists founded by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1918.
Original self-portrait by E.E. Cummings and his music. March 30, 2007. Photo by David Jennings/Digital First Media/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images.
Haskell estimated nearly 20 percent of the works in “At the Dawn of a New Age” are new acquisitions, including Henrietta Shore’s Trail of Life (1923). Just under half have been in storage for decades. Albert Bloch’s Mountain (1916), for instance, reemerged after a half-century in the archives to headline the show’s flier.
Hence Cummings’s appearance alongside the likes of Yun Gee, “now considered one of the most important Asian American artists of the first half of the 20th century,” according to Haskell, and Pamela Coleman Smith, who showed with Stieglitz a year before he debuted Rodin’s watercolors.
The poet contributes an abstract oil painting titled Noise Number 13, featuring geometries and unexpected hues characteristic of the modernist aesthetic. He painted the work in 1925, upon returning from three years in Paris. Haskell sees the poet’s shock at the city in the cacophony in the painting.
Henrietta Shore, Trail of Life (1923).
After graduating from Harvard, Cummings moved to New York City. He made line drawing portraits for Dial Magazine, and started showing modernist works at the Society of Independent Artists. Soon after, Cummings saw a show titled “The Forum,” which presented 17 leading American artists of that moment, including Marguerite Zorach, who also appears in “At the Dawn of a New Age.“
“Cummings saw that show,” Haskell said. “That inspired him to do much more radical, more abstract work.” Now, the artists are reunited at the Whitney.
Yun Gee, Street Scene (1926). Courtesy the estate of Yun Gee.
Cummings kept painting with the same discipline throughout his life, but as his poetry picked up steam, his visual experimentation dwindled. He continued painting, but they were “much more conservative, realistic pictures,” Haskell said. “To be absolutely honest, they weren’t as good.”
Like Cummings, the paintings practices of Pamela Coleman Smith, Henrietta Shore, and Agnes Pelton, who all appear in the exhibition, receded into the background by the 1930s. “That’s part of the story, too,” Haskell said, “that they were so good at that moment.” But their experimentation and faith in the future remain timeless.
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Not every show is worth a special trip. But “Real Corporeal,” an ambitious exhibition organized by Gladstone Gallery in the former home of Gavin Brown’s enterprise in Harlem, justifies a commute. Helmed by London curator Ben Broome, the show brings together works by an intergenerational cast of artists in a variety of media, all concerned with re-asserting the body’s presence in the gallery space.
As anyone who’s ever had to use the restroom at an art show might know, white cubes are meant mostly for the mind and eyes. But a robust performance program accompanying the show aims to pack bodies into the gallery, where visitors will be surrounded by 30 works from artists with conversant practices.
“If one is to conceptualize the exhibition as a family gathering, the aunts and uncles are seated interspersed amongst the younger cousins,” the press statement reads. Renowned electronic musician Klein has a work, cheekily titled Life as a Clout Chaser is Hard (2022), alongside a contribution by her mentor, artist Mark Leckey. Sara Sadik’s moving images are kindred with those of Cyprien Gaillard.
Those who come to see Arthur Jafa’s latest, Dirty Tesla (2021), which riffs off his practice of sequencing found footage, may stay for Tommy Malekoff’s Desire Lines (2019), a 15-minute video of strange spectacle that contrasts car tires with fireworks. Also on view are figurative paintings by sought-after artists Chase Hall, Pol Taburet, Amanda Ba, and George Rouy.
Broome told Arnet News that the massive Harlem space was a natural fit for “Real Corporeal”: “It’s an incredible gallery for showing art—there’s nothing else like that monastic top floor in New York City.” But the architecture is but one of many entry points.
Broome maintains there’s no single “best spot” to understand “Real Corporeal” from—except the mind, counterintuitively, “when you’re on the train home thinking anxiously about whether Klein’s work Life as a Clout Chaser is Hard applies to you.”
Or, better yet, catch a performance. Gladstone recently hosted Chassol on September 24, and Slauson Malone 1 on September 26. Keep your eyes on the gallery’s Instagram for future announcements, including a yet-to-be-revealed performance from Joan Jonas, the eldest artist in the show.
“Without her,” Broome said, “I wonder how many of these artists would be here.”
“Real Corporeal” is on view at 439 West 127th Street through October 15, 2022.
Tommy Malekoff, Desire Lines (2019). Two-channel digital video and sound. Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery. Photography by David Regen
Installation view, “Real Corporeal,” including Arthur Jafa’s Dirty Tesla (2021) at center. Photography by David Regen.
Christelle Oyiri, The Twilight of The Idols (2022). Printed 4 plexiglass panel installation. Installation view, Photography © Jay Izzard
Installation view featuring works by George Rouy, Chase Hall, Christelle Oyiri, Walter Pichler, and Klein. Photo by David Regen
Chase Hall, Up and Downstate Boys (2022). Acrylic and coffee on cotton canvas
Pol Taburet, Fertilizer / Neg (2022). Installation view, with viewers. Photography © Jay Izzard
Installation view, featuring works by Pol Taburet and Rhea Dillon. Photo by David Regen
Amanda Ba, The Plower and the Weaver (2022). Oil on canvas
Mark Leckey, To the Old World (Thank You for the Use of Your Body) (2021). Two channel 9:16 video installation, aluminum, steel, with 7.1 surround sound. Installation view. Photo by David Regen
Christelle Oyiri, Family Fresco 2002 (2022). Printed 4 wooden panel installation. Installation view. Photography © Jay Izzard
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art has organized an important exhibition centered around 50 ceramic objects made by enslaved African American potters who were active in westernmost South Carolina during the 19th century.
“In the decades before the Civil War, a successful alkaline-glazed stoneware industry developed in Old Edgefield District, a clay-rich area,” the museum says in a statement. And while common depictions of slavery focus on the backbreaking labor of harvesting cash crops, the exhibition “Hear Me Now,” shows that enslaved people were also highly skilled artisans.
“When I talk to artists about it, they’re still incredulous about the fact that these jars were made, that they survived the kiln firing,” said co-curator Adrienne Spinozzi, an assistant research curator from the Met’s American Wing, of the unique ceramic housewares, which became a lucrative cottage industry in the plantation economy.
Face jug, by an unrecorded potter, attributed to Miles Mill Pottery (1867–85), Old Edgefield District, South Carolina, alkaline-glazed stoneware with kaolin glaze. Photo: Hudgins Family Collection, New York.
Michigan-based historian Jason Young co-curated the exhibition, contributing years of research and writing about the region’s pottery-rich past. Young also curated a show around Theaster Gates’s engagement with this history, called “The Clay Sermon.” Ethan Lasser, from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (where the show travels to next), rounded out the curatorial team.
Planning for the show started in 2017, when the Met acquired a face jug from an unrecorded Edgefield potter for their permanent collection galleries. Spinozzi saw the object as a route to have conversations about “American history and these really difficult and complex and challenging moments in our country’s past.” She then visited South Carolina to do further research.
The exhibition opens with 12 massive jars by David Drake—perhaps the best-known potter from Edgefield. Despite social restrictions against educating enslaved communities, Drake learned to read and write, developing exquisite handwriting, and he carved a wide array of simple literature onto his works, as well as signing and dating them. One jar from June 1834 reads “concatenation,” meaning a system of interconnection. Forty of the jars in the exhibition have similar “verses” carved onto them—sometimes poetic or biblical, sometimes informative (“this jar is for pork”) or even declarative,, proclaiming “I made this.”
Detail of work by Dave, later recorded as David Drake, American, ca. 1801–1870s.
Nineteen regional “face jugs” follow Drake’s works. These vessels, not commercial objects, were shaped to have visages with expressions in high relief. They appeared around 1858, half a century after the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed, but the same year a ship arrived with 400 captive Africans—100 of which went to Edgefield’s potteries. Many face jugs are believed to resemble minkisi, ritual objects hailing from West-Central African religious practices.
“Hear Me Now” bridges that history with the present moment by including contemporary Black artists who resonate with the Edgefield story, including Simone Leigh, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Woody De Othello, Theaster Gates, and Robert Pruitt.
Theaster Gates, Signature Study (2020). Courtesy of the artist and White Cube, LondonPhoto: © White Cube/Theo Christelis.
“As curators, we brought a different set of questions to the material,” Lasser told Artnet News. “We were also conveners, drawing on our own networks to engage friends and colleagues in the act of interpretation.”
Scholarship on enslaved artists from American history has been slim. A team from the Met traveled with a conservator to South Carolina in 2019 to take samples of residue from the vessels’ interiors beyond their prohibitively slender necks. They’re now working with outside experts to learn what these enigmatic face jugs actually held.
“We’re building this database that includes photographs of the interior,” Lasser added. “We’re looking at these objects, looking at their histories, trying to see if we can trace them back to the African American community.”
Storage jar (ca. 1845), by an unrecorded potter, Trapp & Chandler Pottery (1843–ca. 1850), Old Edgefield District, South Carolina, alkaline-glazed stoneware with iron slip. Photo: Courtesy of the Collection of C. Philip and Corbett Toussaint.
“We want viewers to walk away with an appreciation of the full breadth and depth of this fascinating material,” Young added over email. “We want them to connect with the people who created this material, even while living under a harsh regime of American racism and slavery.”
To further this aim, on December 3, the Met will host a public program titled “Learning from Edgefield,” which will have discussions with historians, artists, and museum leaders on the best practices around working with African American cultural heritage sites like Edgefield, and how museums collect, display, and interpret objects by enslaved makers.
“I am most looking forward to the conversations the show opens up,” Lasser said, “about Edgefield and ceramics, enslavement and industry—perhaps even about museums and collecting today.”
“Hear Me Now” is on view through February 5, 2023, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It then travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (March 4–July 9, 2023), the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor (August 26, 2023–January 7, 2024), and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (February 16–May 12, 2024).
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No artist in the history of New York City quite exemplifies the grit and determination of the 1980s quite like Jean-Michel Basquiat. 
In a first for Austrian audiences, Basquiat’s legacy is being given a major retrospective at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. The show includes iconic pieces such as La Hara (1981), a skeletal portrait of a police officer that sold at auction for $35 million in 2017,  and Self-Portrait (1983).
The exhibition is being billed as a legacy-defining one for the artist. More than  50 major works have been lent from public and private collections, including Basquiat’s estate (the artist’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, even attended the opening), the Nicola Erni Collection, and art dealer Thaddaeus Ropac.
Born in Brooklyn in 1960, to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat started developing his artistic style as a teenager, first conceiving the graffiti moniker SAMO in the 1970s with a high school friend, Al Diaz. 
Basquiat’s later work, which many critics defined as “neo-expressionism,” was deeply influenced by these early experiences creating street art, and by the rap and punk music scenes he was a part of. In 1979, together with filmmaker Michael Holman, for example, Basquiat formed an experimental band called Gray. 
The Albertina’s show unpacks the artist’s roots and follows his meteoric rise in the art world, from being the youngest ever participant at Documenta in 1982, to his relationship with other cultural superstars like Madonna and Warhol, through to his untimely death of a drug overdose in 1988, age 27.
“Basquiat: The Retrospective” is on view through January 8, 2023, at the Albertina in Vienna. See more images from the exhibition here. 
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Visitors attend the “Basquiat: The Retrospective” exhibition preview at Albertina on September 8, 2022 in Vienna. Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/Getty Images.
Untitled (1982) by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo: Studio Tromp; © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, licensed by Artesar, New York.
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