On View

Sirens wail in the distance and horns honk, a piano plays a quiet melody, and church bells ring. The sounds that wash over you in Bill Fontana’s “Silent Echoes” installation at the Villa Albertine in New York this weekend are the city noises “heard” by the bells of Notre Dame, Paris’s historic cathedral. 
The Bay Area artist was allowed the rare opportunity to enter the fire-damaged building earlier this year to install accelerometers on the church’s 10 bronze bells, starting with the largest and oldest, known as Emmanuel. These allow him to record the bells’ vibrations, which they continue to emit even when not actively ringing, in response to their environment. 
Working with technicians at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), which is linked to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Fontana is able to make these recordings audible to human ears. 
“The personality changes with the weather and the time of day,” Fontana said. “During normal business hours in Paris, Notre Dame is a construction site. So, the bells will hear the construction. When it is the late afternoon or evening, you sometimes have a street musician with a boombox in front of the cathedral. Early in the morning in Paris, I hear birds in the bell tower.”
Installation view of Bill Fontana’s “Silent Echoes : Notre-Dame 2022” at the Centre Pompidou, June 8–July 2, 2022. Photo: courtesy of the artist.
He has been live streaming the results in a sound installation now on view at the Pompidou, and is bringing the work to New York for two days (June 25-26), where he will also be showing videos taken from high up in Notre Dame’s towers. The aim is to get other institutions interested in presenting the piece. 
“With a live-streaming artwork, it would be possible to set up spontaneous pop-up exhibitions anywhere,” Fontana said. He is now working with the French telecommunications giant Orange to explore whether the fiber option network they installed in the bell tower to transmit the audio signals from the bells would also be capable of supporting live cameras. 
“The bells are acting basically like acoustic mirrors. They’re reacting to life around Notre Dame,” Fontana said. “At the Centre Pompidou, you don’t need a video element—you’ve got the best view in the world there. But when you’re at a museum, thousands of miles away, it would be interesting to have that kind of live view.”
[embedded content]Fontana is already bringing the work to Istanbul, where he has a solo show at the Arter gallery, and to the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria. The Louvre Abu Dhabi has also shown interest in presenting the piece, he said, and he hopes a New York institution will pick it up as well. 
On Friday, Fontana is previewing the installation to a group of art world guests at the Villa Albertine, the French government’s cultural space in Manhattan, just down the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The work will remain on view to the public through the weekend, transmitting the sounds of Paris in real time. “The sounds of the bells are not altered in any way,” Fontana said. “Their placement and movement in the space creates the composition.”
Bill Fontana in Notre Dame’s bell tower, underneath the largest and oldest bell, named Emmanuel. Photo courtesy of the artist.
He has previously described the sounds of Paris reverberating through the bells as the “spirit” of Notre Dame, showing that the historic church, which was devastated by fire in 2019, is a survivor. “It’s alive and well,” Fontana said, “and it’s ongoing.” 
His contract with Notre Dame allows his recording equipment to remain installed in the church through to the end of its restoration. Which means he will be able to hear the church as it returns to bustling activity. 
“I’ve spent so many hours of my recent life listening to these bells,” Fontana added. “It’s this very beautiful, almost mystical sound.”
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A bronze statue of Sally Ride, the first U.S. woman in space, was dedicated at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City on Long Island on Friday—the nation’s first monument to a woman astronaut.
At the time of her first mission in 1983, aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, Ride was also the youngest American ever to make the journey into space, at just 32 years of age. She died of pancreatic cancer in 2012, when she was 61.
Then President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Ride the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. He presented it to Ride’s partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy, allowing the late astronaut to finally come out as a member of the LGBTQ community—the first in NASA history to do so.
The memorial to Ride’s groundbreaking achievements is the brainchild of documentary filmmaker Steven C. Barber, and is actually the third NASA monument he has spearheaded.
Sally Ride, the first U.S. woman to go to space, monitoring control panels from the pilot’s chair on the flight deck during the Space Shuttle Challenger’s STS-7 mission in 1983. Photo courtesy of NASA.
His initial inspiration was a sculpture of Apollo 13 astronaut Jack Swigert at the Capitol building’s National Statuary Hall in Washington D.C., by George and Mark Lundeen of Lundeen Sculpture in Loveland, Colorado.
Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing in 2019, Barber helped raise $750,000 from Rocket Mortgage to install seven-foot-tall bronze statues of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins at the Kennedy Space Center’s Moon Tree Garden in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Six months ago, Barber unveiled an Apollo 13 monument of Swigert, James Lovell, and Fred Haise at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, completed thanks to $750,000 from Grainger Industrial Supply.
Lundeen Sculpture made the Apollo 11 monument in the Moon Tree Garden at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Photo courtesy of the Kennedy Space Center.
“As I went through my journey of building the Apollo 11 monument and the Apollo 13 monument, it occurred to me very early on that there were no monuments commemorating any of the 65 women who have flown in space and the over 12,000 women that had worked at NASA,” Barber told Artnet News in an email.
All three monuments are the work of Lundeen Sculptors, designed by the Lundeen brothers and Joey Bainer.
“When I take a vision to the Lundeen Sculptors, they inevitably make it better,” Barber said. “They decided to put the Space Shuttle in Sally’s right arm, pointing to the stars, which I thought was absolutely genius.”
Lundeen Sculpture’s Sally Ride monument. Photo by Warwick Productions.
A less complex composition than the two Apollo monuments because it features only one figure, the Ride memorial cost just $300,000 to create and install. But much like a NASA mission, the project was not without its complications.
“I spent several months calling hundreds and hundreds of executives at Fortune 500 companies getting unbelievable, gut-wrenching, demoralizing rejections,” Barber said.
In the end, he secured funding from the Matson Family Foundation, Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation, Cinemark Theatres, and Maria Shriver.
And then there was the artwork itself.
The mold of the Space Shuttle for Lundeen Sculpture’s Sally Ride monument. Photo by Warwick Productions.
“The sculpture was originally done in clay on a steel armature, but the night it was finished, it was consumed in fire that destroyed our studios,” George Lundeen told Artnet News in an email. “Although [it was] a great setback, we were able to reconstruct Sally Ride from the ashes.”
The company cast the work in bronze at a foundry using the lost wax process and finishing it with a multicolored patina.
The monument’s upcoming unveiling follows on the heels of the March release of the Sally Ride quarter from the U.S. Mint, part of the American Women Quarters Program, which will release 20 coins honoring historic women over the next four years.
The artist behind the coin’s design is Elana Hagler, part of the mint’s Artistic Infusion Program, and the sculptor who executed the artwork is Phebe Hemphill, who has worked at the mint since 1987.
The Sally Ride quarter, part of the American Women Quarters Program. Courtesy of the United States Mint.
The coin shows Ride at the window of the Space Shuttle, an image that was inspired by a statement she once made: “When I wasn’t working, I was usually at a window looking down at Earth.”
“I think the design reflects Sally’s dreamy view of the future and fierce determination,” O’Shaughnessy told Nerdist.
The first American Women Quarter was released in January, featuring writer and activist Maya Angelou. Chinese American film star Anna May Wong, American Cherokee activist Wilma Mankiller, and suffragist Nina Otero-Warren are also being honored this year.
Steven C. Barber with Lundeen Sculpture’s Sally Ride monument at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City on Long Island, New York. Photo courtesy of Steven C. Barber.
The Lundeens and Barber plan to continue building statues recognizing the achievements of women in NASA history, such as the African American mathematicians Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, who were depicted in the film Hidden Figures, and Mae C. Jemison, the first African American woman to go to space.
Barber is also shooting a documentary about Ride, which he hopes to release on a major streaming platform in 2023.
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The Picasso Museum in Paris is staging an exhibition of never-before-seen works by the Spanish master, bequeathed by his eldest child, Maya Ruiz-Picasso, in 2021.
The show features nine major works by the artist and personal family items dating from 1895 to 1971. The selection includes drawings, paintings, photographs, ephemera, a coloring in book, and an adorable how-to-paint book that the artist and his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter made for Maya.
Maya Picasso, Maya au bateau (1938). Photo © Succession Picasso 2022.
The exhibition, “Maya Ruiz-Picasso, Daughter Of Pablo,” was co-curated by Picasso Museum curator Emilia Philippot and Maya’s daughter Diana Widmaier-Ruiz-Picasso, who discovered drawings and sketchbooks by chance while going through storage. She showed her mother, who is now 86, and she remembered making the drawings with her father.
Maya recalled that time, paper, and pencils were in short supply then. “Who has never heard it said when looking at a canvas by Picasso, ‘A child could have done that!’” Diana wrote in the book accompanying the show. “Many of the artistic revolutions of the 20th century were greeted with mockery and scandal, it is true, but in Picasso’s case there is a hint of truth in that judgment. As Maya, his first daughter, recalls, ‘the mystery of life, and therefore of childhood, always filled that father of mine with interest.’”
Pablo Picasso, Lettre à Maya (1946). Photo © Succession Picasso 2022.
Picasso drew with Maya the way he had with his own father, who was a drawing professor, and the sketchbooks reveal this touching exchange.
“That’s probably why my father wrote in my exercise books and colored with my pencils. I still have fond memories of those moments when we met up in the kitchen to draw together. It was the only place in the apartment where it was warm,” Maya said, according to the Observer.
Pablo Picasso et Maya Ruiz-Picasso, Pommes (n.d). Photo © Succession Picasso 2022.
The drawings also give insight into Picasso as a father and as an artist.
“There’s a beautiful page where he’s drawing a bowl and she’s drawing a bowl,” Diana told the Observer. “Sometimes she’s making an image and he’s doing another, showing her the right way to do it. Sometimes they would depict different scenes. Other times, he would draw a dog or a hat. Sometimes he’s using the whole page to draw one particular thing. Other times, he’s depicting certain scenes, scenes of the circus. It’s very interesting.”
Pablo Picasso, Maya à la poupée et au cheval (1938). Photo © Succession Picasso 2022
“Maya Ruiz-Picasso, Daughter Of Pablo” is on view at Musée Picasso in Paris through December 31, 2022.
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The artist and poet Penny Goring’s clever and biting work has been getting a lot of attention lately, and now she’s having her first U.K. retrospective, at the ICA in London.
The exhibition, “Penny World,” takes us through 30 years of Goring’s emotive, political, and confrontational practice that encompasses sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and poetry, including some of her key series, “Anxiety Objects” (2017) and “ART HELL” (2019-20).
As an artist who has worked through trauma and poverty, Goring makes a point of using food dye, biros, and other inexpensive or free materials to make her work. If she uses a computer, she takes advantage of the free program Microsoft Paint that often comes preloaded on it. In her more recent work, she uses her financial restrictions, lack of therapy, and housing issues to address the reality faced of a lot of creatives in London at a time of a cost-of-living crisis.
Penny Goring, Yearn (2013). Image courtesy of the Artist and Arcadia Missa, London
“Despite the violence they depict, there is a sense of comfort to be found in Penny’s work,” Rosalie Doubal, curator at the ICA, said in a statement. ” Her works are empathetic; they embody the disorientation and stasis brought on by states such as grief. They also offer strength and, in their humor, disarming normality.
“ART HELL” (2019-20) looks specifically at the effects of recent legislation by the conservative government in the U.K. It was inspired by the PTSD visions of two alter egos of Goring’s, which comment on structural and systemic violence.
Penny Goring, Those who live without torment (Red 4), (2020). Photo courtesy of the Artist and Arcadia Missa, London
“I have always lived under the rule of men and money, and right now, I am angry at the ways it hobbles my life and my body,” said Goring. “I find the future we are in to be terrifying. Also ridiculous, in the way of a murderous clown. And I hate that it somehow feels inevitable, relentless, like a speeding juggernaut.”
Goring’s work communicates themes of violence, humor, and emotional health or the lack thereof through her use of fabric, color, and texture. Her “Anxiety Objects” (2017), designed to be worn on the body to alleviate anxious feelings, and her dolls offer a kind of comfort for darker times. Through addressing these themes in the places that they exist her works offer solidarity and humor.
Penny Goring, Dust Doll, (2019). Photo: Tim Bowditch. Courtesy of the artist and Arcadia Missa, London
“The body of work that Penny has produced over the last three decades is astonishing, and her very human compulsion to create as a form of coping is profoundly moving. I could not be more honored that the ICA has had the great privilege of staging this significant exhibition,” said Doubal.

Repeat Offender, from Fail Like Fire by Penny Goring. Photo courtesy the artist.
Penny Goring, Dim Jaw, (1995). Photo courtesy of the Artist and Arcadia Missa, London

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While many Americans were enjoying Memorial Day barbecues this past weekend, artist Kiyan Williams was concocting a cookout of a different sort: This Sunday at Lyles and King gallery in New York the artist will be frying up some American flags.
At the event, the artist will be dipping nylon flags that once flew over the U.S. capitol building into spattering pans of oil. Visitors are invited to bring their own regionally-favored seasonings for the batter.
A dozen previously cooked flags are already installed in the gallery as part of the New York-based artist’s solo show, “Un/earthing.” Crispy as corn dogs, the objects look both delicious and disgusting; more like something you’d find at a state fair than an art exhibition.  More

A show opening today at the Courtauld Institute in London will display nearly a dozen paintings by Edvard Munch that have never been seen by the British public.
The exhibition traces the Norwegian painter’s development from the 1880s through 18 key works on loan from the KODE Art Museum in Bergen, 11 of which haven’t been shown in Britain. It highlights several themes key to Munch’s rise to fame.
In Summer Night. Inger on the Beach (1889), for example, one of the painter’s earlier works on display, Munch marks an important shift toward conveying psychological undertones, a style that would come to define his oeuvre. 
“This is an unprecedented opportunity to see the major works from one of the world’s great collections of paintings by Edvard Munch,” said the show’s curator, Barnaby Wright. “Visitors will find Munch’s seminal early paintings extraordinary, if less familiar.”
The exhibition ultimately establishes a narrative that connects the trajectory of Munch’s career as a painter, beginning with Socialist Realism, naturalism, and the legacy of French Impressionism, through to the visceral depictions of psychological torment and trauma that he would become known for. 
Included in the exhibition are numerous works from the “Frieze of Life” series, instantly recognizable for Munch’s rich use of color and composition that reflect the deeply emotional state of the subjects he was portraying. 
Ultimately, the show presents Munch as perhaps the greatest emo painter of all time (no word, however, in the curatorial text on whether he impacted bands like My Chemical Romance), and it will treat the British public to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see many marquee masterworks such as Evening on Karl Johan (1892), Melancholy (1894-96), and By the Death Bed (1895). 
See images from the show below.
Edvard Munch (1863-1944), At the Deathbed (1895). KODE Bergen Art Museum, the Rasmus Meyer Collection.
Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait in the Clinic (1909). KODE Bergen Art Museum, the Rasmus Meyer Collection.
Edvard Munch, Moonlight on the Beach (1892). KODE Bergen Art Museum, the Rasmus Meyer Collection.
Edvard Munch, Melancholy (1894-96). KODE Bergen Art Museum, the Rasmus Meyer Collection.
Edvard Munch, Marie Helene Holmboe (1898). KODE Bergen Art Museum, the Rasmus Meyer Collection.
Edvard Munch, Morning (1884). KODE Bergen Art Museum, the Rasmus Meyer Collection.
Edvard Munch, Nude in Profile towards the Right (1894). KODE Bergen Art Museum, the Rasmus Meyer Collection.
Edvard Munch, Man and Woman (1898). KODE Bergen Art Museum, the Rasmus Meyer Collection
Edvard Munch, Inger in Sunshine (1888). KODE Bergen Art Museum, the Rasmus Meyer Collection.
Edvard Munch, House in Moonlight (1893-95). KODE Bergen Art Museum, the Rasmus Meyer Collection.
Edvard Munch, Children playing in the Street in Åsgårdstrand (1901-1903). KODE Bergen Art Museum, the Rasmus Meyer Collection.
Edvard Munch, Evening on Karl Johan (1892). KODE Bergen Art Museum, the Rasmus Meyer Collection.
Edvard Munch, Four Stages of Life (1902). KODE Bergen Art Museum, the Rasmus Meyer Collection.
Edvard Munch, Bathing Boys (1904-05). KODE Bergen Art Museum, the Rasmus Meyer Collection.
“Edvard Munch. Masterpieces from Bergen” is presented in the Courtauld’s Denise Coates exhibition galleries and will be on display from May 27 through to September 4, 2022. 
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“Why Cezanne? Why today?” 
These were the questions the curators of a new, once-in-a-generation retrospective of the French painter at the Art Institute of Chicago asked themselves as they went to work a few years back. When it comes to Cezanne, who, perhaps more than any other artist, laid the groundwork for the 20th-century avant-garde, how do you say something new—and how do you say it in a way that can be understood by someone who’s never picked up a brush? 
The curators, Gloria Groom and Caitlin Haskell, decided to look closely at Cezanne’s canvases for their answers—examining, through advanced imaging techniques, how the artist confronted his own questions about the urgency of painting through every brush stroke he ever made.
What they found was that we can all still learn something about the medium by doing the same thing.
Paul Cezanne, Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses) (c. 1894–1905). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
On view in the Art Institute’s show, simply titled “Cezanne,” are 80 oils, 40 watercolors, and drawings, and two of full sketchbooks. Included are some of the artist’s greatest hits, such as The Bather (1885) and The Basket of Apples (c. 1893).
With loans from five different continents—including pieces once owned by Matisse, Picasso, and other contemporaries who considered themselves among Cezanne’s biggest fans—it’s the largest retrospective dedicated to the artist in more than a quarter-century. (After its run in Chicago, the exhibition will travel to the Tate Modern this October.) 
The show, Groom explained, asks its visitors to slow down and adopt a discipline and deliberateness like Cezanne himself brought to his work. “He really is an artist who worked very slowly, came back to it very thoughtfully. That’s why Impressionism was not for him.” 
Paul Cezanne, Montagne Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine (c. 1887). © Courtauld Gallery / Bridgeman Images.
You may also notice, at this point in the article, that I’ve elided the accent over the “e” typically found in Cézanne’s name. So does the exhibition. That’s the way the artist wrote it, the curators explained, and so it’s the version they adopted for the show’s title, catalogue, and wall texts as well. It may seem like a semantic change, but it symbolizes something more: the organizer’s dogmatic dedication to Cezanne’s own vision. 
You’ll find subtle examples of that commitment elsewhere in the show, too. For instance, Groom and Haskell worked with conservators to remove all traces of synthetic varnish from the eight oil paintings owned by the Art Institute, which had been applied in years past, leaving their respective surfaces bare—another preference of Cezanne’s. 
That same group of paintings were put through a “whole battery of imaging techniques,” including x-ray infrared analyses, Haskell said, as she and her partner looked to Cezanne’s meticulous techniques for their own curatorial cues. “When you do that and you start thinking about painting really on the level of the mark, what you begin to have is a type of painting that is pretty honest about the way it’s constructed—and gets you thinking about the way it’s constructed,” Haskell added.
Paul Cezanne, The Basket of Apples (c. 1893). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Fruit-filled still-lifes, sun-baked landscapes, bathers beset by verdant flora: Cezanne revisited the same subjects over and over again. In a show like the one on view in Chicago, the repetition can make his artworks feel like studies—the efforts of a painter perfecting his craft before applying it to more sophisticated scenes. And in a way, that’s true: Cezanne never stopped honing his technique. 
But with that repetition, the show reveals something else too. 
“What you start to see over the course of the exhibition is an artist who is trying to figure how to make a painting for himself and who is doing that by constructing his work sensation by sensation,” said Haskell.
“He’s trying for something quite different,” Groom added, “trying to express how he feels in a stroke that will communicate to us a feeling of emotion. It’s hard to express, like anything that has to do with intangibles and art.”
“That was a liberating thing for artists,” he concluded. “We as a public have to work a little harder to fully appreciate what he’s doing.” 
“Cezanne” is on view now through September 5, 2022, at the Art Institute of Chicago.
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If you happen to wander into the National Gallery’s sculpture garden in Washington, D.C., right now you’ll come face to face with a 19th century-style wagon. On its covered sides, stark black silhouettes enact unsettling scenes of slavery. It’s a striking object in any context, but especially when it appears just a stone’s throw from the National Monument, the White House, and the Lincoln Memorial.
The wooden vessel is actually a steam calliope, a musical instrument that pushes compressed air or steam through large whistles to produce loud music. Titled The Katastwóf Karavan (2018), the calliope is a work by artist Kara Walker, who collaborated with musician Jason Moran on its initial presentation at the Prospect.4 triennial in New Orleans in 2018.
In its original site, stationed along the Mississippi River at Algiers Point, the work stood adjacent to former slave trading posts, where people were legally bought and sold like cattle.
Kara Walker’s The Katastwóf Karavan in the National Gallery Sculpture Garden. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.
In an exclusive interview with Walker and Moran filmed as part of Art21’s Extended Play series, the two artists reflected on how legacies of slavery are imbued in sites across America, and how the calliope serves as a modern-day monument.
“I wanted to really create this paradoxical space where the ingenuity of American manufacturing—the same genius that brought us chattel slavery—could then become the mechanics through which those voices that were suppressed reemerge for all time,” Walker said, noting that the work “honors millions of ancestors.” 
The calliope historically was movable, and Walker concieved of her contemporary iteration in the same manner, planning for it to travel around America, serving as a sort of mobile memorial, unlike the hulking stones and bronzes that typically serve as such markers.
“When you have monuments or commemorative things that just exist, they sit there and they disappear,” she said. The calliope, on the other hand, “always needs to be activated,” ensuring that the voices will continue to be honored.

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s Extended Play series, below. “Kara Walker’s The Katastwóf Karavan” is on view at the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden through May 19, 2022.

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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of news-making artists. A new season of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series, like New York Close Up and Extended Play, and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.
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