On View

This week, to mark the 545th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth, conservators in Florence unveiled the newly restored Medici family chapel designed by the Renaissance master.
Their eight-year effort to clean the tomb was aided by an uncommon tool: bacteria.  
Starting in 2019, experts quietly introduced varying strains of bacteria to the marble sculptures of the New Sacristy, where multiple members of the Medici dynasty are entombed. The microbes promptly set about eating centuries’ worth of grime, glue, and other debris that had discolored the sculptures on the tombs. 
The bacteria were especially adept at tackling one substance tarnishing Michelangelo’s handiwork: organic fluids that had seeped from the long-rotted corpse of Alessandro Medici, a one-time ruler of Florence, whose body had been deposited in a sarcophagus without being properly eviscerated.
One hungry strain in particular, Serratia ficaria SH7, managed to do away with the stains caused from the fluid in just a matter of days, according to the New York Times.
“SH7 ate Alessandro,” Monica Bietti, the former chief of the Medici chapels museum who led the all-female team in the restoration project, told the paper last year.
The tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours, 1524-1534 at the New Sacristy, Medici Chapels, Basilica of Saint Lawrence in Florence, Italy, 2017. Courtesy of Getty Images.
Bietti, along with several other conservators on the project, spoke at the unveiling sponsored by the Academy of the Arts of Drawing this week.
“The restoration of one of the most symbolic places of art required knowledge, experience, and science, combined with the qualities of sensitivity and intelligence,” she said.
“For this reason, the work was tested from the start and then subjected to constant optical, methodological, and scientific checks.”
Michelangelo was commissioned to design the New Sacristy, located among the Medici Chapels in Florence’s San Lorenzo church, in 1520. The tomb’s frontispieces feature sculptures depicting two members of the Medici family—Lorenzo di Piero, Duke of Urbino and Giuliano di Lorenzo, Duke of Nemours—as well as figures symbolizing dusk, dawn, night, and day.
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Temptress and turncoat. Mother of a new nation. Chicana heroine. 
La Malinche has lived many lives in the cultural imagination since her death in the 16th century, as generations of people have appropriated her image to promote their own political agendas. Now, a landmark exhibition at the Denver Art Museum (DAM) explores the complex legacy of the woman and her impact on artistic culture on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border—the first major scholarly presentation to do so.
An enslaved Nahua woman who became Hernán Cortés’s interpreter and consort during his conquest of the Aztec Empire, La Malinche proved to be a key actor in one of the defining moments of world history. Whether she did so willingly or not, we don’t know. In fact, there’s much we don’t know about her life. And yet, for five hundred years, La Malinche has loomed large in modern Mexican legend.   
That much is evidenced by the 68 artworks that make up “Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche,” on view at DAM through May 8, 2022. (Following its presentation at DAM, the exhibition will travel to the Albuquerque Museum and the San Antonio Museum of Art). It’s an important presentation that doubles as a statement unto itself.
Antonio Ruiz, La Malinche (El Sueño de la Malinche) (1939). Photo: Jesús Sánchez Uribe.
The show took six years to pull together, with independent curator Terezita Romo working along with Victoria I. Lyall, DAM’s curator of Art of the Ancient Americas, and Matthew H. Robb, chief curator at the UCLA’s Fowler Museum. 
“This is the first time there’s ever been an exhibition like this,” explained Romo. “Even in Mexico, La Malinche’s story is always connected to Cortés—it’s always about the conquest. This exhibition really pushes that out. It’s more about this young indigenous teenager and what she did in terms, not only surviving, but of actually changing history.” 
The show is broken down into five sections, each devoted to a different personification of La Malinche’s legacy. The first, “La Lengua” (or “The Interpreter”), examines her role as an interlocutor between the Aztec and Spanish peoples, from Cortés’s first written description of her as “la lengua que yo tengo” (“my tongue”)—an appellative he used instead of acknowledging her name—to posthumous depictions of her as a woman empowered by language. 
Next comes “La Indígena” (“The Indigenous Woman”), which looks at how the racial designations imposed upon her by conquistadors forms the foundation of her mythology, an otherized object of beauty from a defeated people; and “La Madre de Mestizaje” (“The Mother of a Mixed Race”), an exploration of how, in the wake of the Mexican revolution, the country adopted La Malinche, the mother of Cortés first son, as as a symbol of a new mixed race. 
Santa Barraza, La Malinche (1991). © Santa Barraza. Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
By far the biggest section of the show, “La Traidora” (“The Traitor”), focuses on the way La Malinche was depicted throughout much of the 20th century—as a person who turned her back on her people, inviting generations of ethnic cleansing. (Roma points out that the most prominent examples of this depiction “mainly came from men, which is not a coincidence.”) It was during this time that the word “malinchista” was popularized as a pejorative term for someone who prefers foreign cultures to their own. Even today, it’s through that word that most Mexicans know La Malinche at all. 
“One of the things we wanted to accomplish with the retelling of this story was to have those visitors who are familiar with her story reexamine their preconceived notions and to really understand how pernicious some of those metaphors can be,” said Lyall. “That her name is the basis of a slur that’s quite popular—this is a way of passively emphasizing the sexist and misogynistic view of a woman’s influence.” 
In response to this period of denigration, La Malinche was reclaimed as an icon of the Chicana movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. This is the subject of the fifth and last part of the show, a section that extends to today, looking at how her image has been embraced by a number of different communities, from feminists to trans activists.
Jesús Helguera, La Malinche (1941). © Calendarios Landin.
Despite the myriad ways in which La Malinche’s mythology has been exploited, she’s always resisted reduction, explained Romo. 
“That has always been the core of what has interested me about her—she was such a complex being,” the curator said. “It’s what makes her so powerful: she elicits these different representations from people.” 
Thanks to their work, more people will be bringing their own contemporary interpretations to her story. Prior to the opening of the show, DAM launched a series of outreach programs, trying to both gauge the perception of La Malinche in the community and educate people about her story.
“The best comment we had was, ‘How come there isn’t a Disney princess movie about her?’” Lyall recalled, laughing. “That was definitely not the avenue we wanted to go, but to me it really underlined how, even if our visitors don’t know who La Malinche is, once they hear her story, they are hooked.”
Jorge González Camarena, Lapareja (The couple) (1964). © Fundación Cultural Jorge González Camarena, AC. Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum.
“Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche,” is on view at the Denver Art Museum now through May 8, 2022. It will travel to the Albuquerque Museum from June 11–September 4, 2022, and the San Antonio Museum of Art from October 14, 2022–January 08, 2023.
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He might technically be “the younger,” but he still died 500 years ago. He’s also responsible for the best painting show in New York right now.
I’m speaking, of course, of Hans Holbein the Younger, the German-Swiss artist who pushed Renaissance painting to new heights in the 16th century. Beginning in Basel, and later in England, where he served as court painter to King Henry VIII, Holbein made his mark with portraits of nobles, merchants, and scholars. Many of these works form a quietly momentous survey currently on view at the Morgan Library and Museum.
“Holbein: Capturing Character,” as the show is called, is billed as one of the only major solo exhibitions dedicated to the painter ever mounted in the United States. It might be the last we’re treated to in our lifetimes, too, being the product of the kind of intercontinental, inter-institutional collaboration that is exceptionally rare and exceptionally expensive.
“Holbein’s paintings and drawings are the crown jewels of museums that own them,” the show’s organizers, John McQuillen and Austėja Mackelaitė, said in a joint email to Artnet News. “Such institutions can be reluctant to part with their most prized pieces. Many of the works are also fragile, which can make travel difficult or even impossible.” 
Hans Holbein the Younger, A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling (Anne Lovell?) (ca. 1526–28). Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
Indeed, logistical concerns with loans, transport, and insurance were among the biggest obstacles McQuillen, Mackelaitė, and their fellow organizer, Getty Museum curator Anne Woollett, had to overcome in putting the show together. The multi-year process was made all the more complicated by the pandemic. 
The Holbein exhibition actually debuted last fall at the Getty in Los Angeles, but that version and the one on view at the Morgan differ in significant ways. Some institutions only agreed to loan certain prized pieces for a short period of time, allowing for inclusion in one, but not both, shows. The Frick, for example, lent Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More to the Morgan, and his painting of Thomas Cromwell to the Getty. Both pieces rank among the portraitist’s best. 
All in all, the exhibition features loans from 10 U.S. institutions and collectors, and 13 from overseas. Roughly 60 pieces spanning the artist’s entire career are included view, 31 paintings among them. Particularly significant gets for the museum include Holbein’s portraits of Erasmus of Rotterdam (circa 1532), A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling (Anne Lovell?) (circa 1535–40) and Simon George (circa 1535–40). 
Hans Holbein the Younger, Simon George (ca. 1535–40). Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
The Morgan and the Getty were responsible for the last American exhibition dedicated to Holbein, a smaller display of the artist’s drawings that took place in 1983 and 1984. “The fact that it has taken almost 40 years for a more comprehensive overview of Holbein’s artistic practice to be assembled in the U.S. speaks to the difficulty of negotiating loans of the artist’s works,” McQuillen and Mackelaitė said.
For the curators, Holbein’s work is just as compelling now as it was then—and perhaps even more so. 
“Holbein is one of the few artists who was extremely successful and popular in his own time, and whose work has never gone out of fashion,” they said. “His extraordinary mastery over the medium of oil paint led him to create highly naturalistic images, which are filled with tactile, closely observed details that simultaneously delight and seduce.”
Those details, the curators explained, are what make the artist’s output special. Whereas other painters focused on their sitters’ features, Holbein honed in on their physiognomy—the physical traits, that is that can reveal a person’s desires, disposition, or social status—as well as their garb. They are also the central preoccupation of the show (hence the title, “Capturing Character”).
“Although Holbein was not the only Renaissance artist who used portraits to create statements of visual identity for his patrons, the intensity of his preoccupations with these issues distinguishes him from many of his contemporaries,” the curators said.   
See more works from the Morgan’s exhibition below.
Hans Holbein the Younger, The Wife of a Court Official of Henry VIII (ca. 1534). Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
Hans Holbein the Younger, Preparatory drawing of Simon George (ca.1535). Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
Hans Holbein the Younger, Erasmus of Rotterdam (ca. 1532). Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
Hans Holbein the Younger, Terminus, Device of Erasmus (ca. 1532). Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
Hans Holbein the Younger, A Court Official of Henry VIII (ca. 1534). Courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
“Holbein: Capturing Character” is on view now through May 15, 2022 at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.
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Lita Albuquerque’s electric blue sculpture of a woman, seated in a meditative lotus pose, sits atop a gigantic rock overlooking the sand in AlUla, Saudi Arabia’s ancient desert region. Now the work, which was installed during the first edition of Desert X AlUla in 2020, and purportedly marking the first public showing of a female figure in the kingdom, can be viewed from a pool lounger at a new eco-friendly luxury resort, Habitas AlUla.
Albuquerque’s sculpture, titled NAJMA, is symbolic of Desert X AlUla’s historic launch two years ago. The woman’s calm focus against her breathtaking natural backdrop, is reflective of the country’s determination to build an art ecosystem in AlUla, despite the chaos and controversy that surrounds it, including the ongoing war with neighboring Yemen, boycotts over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and other human rights violations.
Despite the global pandemic, Saudi Arabia, closed off to the world for decades, has continued its ambitious plans for development, which are part of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman’s “Vision 2030.” Desert X AlUla, which takes its cue from the Land Art movement of the late ‘60s and ‘70s, is a major part of that agenda. This year the biennial, which was organized again in partnership with the Saudi Royal Commission of AlUla, features commissioned work by 15 international artists (open now until March 30).
Shadia Alem, I Have Seen Thousands of Stars and One Fell in AlUla (2022). Photo: Lance Gerber.
The message, say Desert X organizers, is the same in Saudi Arabia as it is in the biennial’s other site, the Coachella Valley: Focus on the art, its relationship with the land, and the plurality of artistic voices and cultures represented.
“The mood now is that the artists don’t need to explain themselves anymore,” Reem Fadda, a curator of the 2022 edition alongside Neville Wakefield and Raneem Farsi, told Artnet News. “There is no need for anyone to explain or defend themselves. They are here to speak their minds, concerns, and anxieties that are universal. The artists have nothing to prove.”
Some participating artists also spoke of wanting to look beyond the government’s actions. “You have the choice to engage in dialogue and change the narrative or push it forward or not,” artist Shezad Dawood told Artnet News. “There was something about the particular situation in AlUla, the ancient civilizations, the geology, those are all things that interest me.”
But while frustration and backlash, particularly from the United States, still linger, Susan Davies, Desert X’s president and founder, said that “the dust is settling.”
“Overall, there have been many disappointments, not in terms of the art, but because every story that ran last time dug for the negative,” she said. “This is not the journalism I grew up with in the United States. It’s about what is the easy story, not what is the interesting story or what are the two sides of the story. It’s heartbreaking.”
Shezad Dawood, Coral Alchemy I (Dipsastrea Speciosa) (2022). Photo: Lance Gerber.
Despite its critics, the seeds are being sowed in AlUla for a future art ecosystem, and the biennial can arguably be viewed as a catalyst.
This year, the event is part of the first edition of the AlUla Arts Festival, where six international artists who are part of the AlUla Arts Residency have created work in-situ amid a verdant oasis. There’s also a photography exhibition in AlUla Old Town, a show at the Maraya Concert Hall featuring works by Saudi artists, and Swiss art collector and long-time Saudi resident Pierre Sigg’s newly launched Sigg Art Residency AlUla—the only independent, private initiative in the otherwise government-funded lineup of events.
The desert is the real curator of this edition of Desert X AlUla, which is now taking place in a larger location, the Al Mutadil valley. Staged under the theme of “Sarab,” meaning “mirage” in Arabic, the works, which were created freely without any guidelines by the organizers, are anchored in history, literature, and the physical reality of being in the desert. The art embodies man’s desire to control nature, but also nature’s elusiveness—which, as so many works demonstrate, usually escapes human command.
The artworks are subtler, more unassuming, humbler, and smaller in some instances than the more grandiose creations of the first edition. This year’s works interact and collaborate with the thousands of year-old rock formations, rather than compete with it.
“No work can beat the greatest artwork here, which is the surroundings—the rock art formations themselves,” Dawood told Artnet News.
“It’s a lovemaking with nature,” Fadda said during the press conference.
The artworks relay messages on climate change, human progress, the land, and ancient history. “We are living in a time of climate emergencies and places like AlUla are precious,” said Wakefield. “The works shed light on topics important to the desert but also to the world at large.”
Dawood’s large coral-like forms, Coral Alchemy (Dipsastrea Speciosa), seem to have landed like a meteoroid from outer space. While one is prominently placed, the other is embedded high up within a rock formation, its color nearly matching its surroundings. Through the works, Dawood explores the idea of the geo-biological relationship between the desert floor (at one time most of AlUla was underwater) and the nearby Red Sea. Moreover, the sensitive surfaces of the works change color according to heat reflected from the sun.
Further up, Palestinian artist Khalil Rabah’s Grounding presents a mirage of olive trees—which do not grow in AlUla. Displaced from their indigenous land and longing to be repatriated, the trees represent the Palestinian crisis.
Serge Attukwei Clottey, Gold Falls (2022). Photo: Lance Gerber.
An unmissable sight is Gold Fall, a long tapestry-like work made of cut squares from yellow plastic water containers draped over a rock formation by Ghanaian artist Serge Attakwei Clottey. The artist, who exhibited previously at Desert X Coachella, is the first and only African artist in the AlUla edition. While discussing the politics of the ubiquitous yellow water gallon in West Africa, the work, the artist explains, is also about forming a friendship with the desert.
“The history of the desert from an African perspective represents struggle, death from migration, water scarcity, and sadness,” Clottey told Artnet News. “But having an exhibition in the desert brings life and humanity to the place and to nature. Using the gallon here as a representation of water scarcity, I wanted to change the perception in this space as to how water can represent hope and life.”
Participating in the exhibition, added Clottey, is a way to see more African artists represented  internationally.
The curation of the works is tighter and more thought out than the first edition, where the air felt more revolutionary and celebratory. Works have been placed in dialogue not just with nature but with each other.
In front of Clottey’s water gallon are the 364 pyramid-shaped concentric sand mounds of American land artist Jim Denevan’s Angle of Repose. Made in collaboration with local AlUla residents all who volunteered, the magnitude and repetitive nature of the circles, which become smaller as one enters the center of the work, is at once otherworldly and distorting in vision—both aims of Denevan’s as he tries to shape the visitor’s experience in the desert.
Shaikha Al Mazrou, Measuring the Physicality of Void (2022). Photo: Lance Gerber.
Behind Denevan’s majestic sand creations are the lengthy steel-made inflated sculptures of Emirati artist Shaikha Al Mazrou, titled Measuring the Physicality of the Void, wedged into voids within the rocks. Tensely balanced in the landscape, if it weren’t for their shiny surfaces, one might not know they were there. Further up is Saudi artist Abdullah Al-Othman’s Geography of Hope, a gigantic anamorphous-shaped flat steel work that replicates a body of water. According to the artist, it represents the experience of a mirage, and the hope that it brings in the desert when one might have lost their way.
The act of viewing the works in Desert X is physically laborious, which adds to the experience. To reach Saudi artist Ayman Zedani’s soundscape and installation, The Valley of the Desert Keepers, one must walk up a steep rock following long yellow and green rope. The sound of crunching rocks, akin to that of glass, conjures up its own kind of music that immediately merges with Zedani’s recording of an Arabic narration of the names of desert plants, blasted through speakers on the rock. The experience is at once meditative and surreal, and when one looks over the crevice, Claudia Comte’s Dark Suns Bright Waves appears—a line of large rectangles with black-and-white stripes exploring the patterns found in nature.
Works by Saudi artists delve deep into the ancient histories of AlUla. Palestinian Saudi-born Dana Awartani’s concave geometric structure made from sandstone, Where the Dwellers Lay, takes its inspiration from ancient Nabatean tombs in AlUla. It invites viewers to take a seat inside the work, as if it were a tomb or a throne, where they can appreciate the art and the surrounding space.
Sultan bin Fahad’s mud structure, made in collaboration with local AlUla residents, entered from a long pathway into a circular enclosed space where a glass sphere shape, embossed with four protective symbols used in Nabatean tombs, points to the sky. It pays reverence to the history of the Desert Kite, after which it takes its name.
Desert X AlUla landscape. Photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy RCU and Desert X.
“This is where you need to come on your own to meditate and become one with the history and the land,” the artist said.
But who will come to meditate and contemplate next to these artworks? The elegantly clad art world crowd arrived on February 10, Desert X AlUla’s VIP opening. Among them was Alicia Keys who was to sing the following day at the Maraya Art Center. She twirled in the center of Denevan’s sand mounds, her white dress echoing that of a whirling dervish as onlookers snapped her photo.
Will the audience for these monumental artworks be limited to the few that can afford the journey to view their magic?
“Many Saudis will come,” said artist Moath Alofi. “There are now direct flights from all over the Kingdom to AlUla. We come all the time.”
By 2035 AlUla aims to be able to welcome just two million people annually—a controlled number for a region nearly the size of Belgium so it does not transform into a mass tourism hub.
Perhaps the work that most acutely points to AlUla and its artistic rebirth after thousands of years is Saudi artist Shadia Alem’s shimmering star sculpture, I have seen thousands of stars and one fell in AlUla.
In the shape of a giant origami, it glistens in the sand as if foretelling a prophecy for the area, symbolizing death just as it does rebirth—a cycle of change and renewal—like life itself, and like the present state of Alula as it rises once again. More

The gallery for Sadie Barnette’s current exhibition at the Kitchen is practically pitch black—except for a horseshoe bar ringed with stools. Barnette’s re-creation of the New Eagle Creek Saloon—a gay bar and nightclub, the first Black-owned one in San Francisco, which her father, Rodney Barnette, ran from 1990 to 1993—sits in the middle of the room, lit up in neon pink and purple. 
When I visited the celebrated art institution in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, where Barnette’s installation will be on view through March 6, a family with two young children walked in behind me. They let out a collective gasp. The kids ran up to the installation, instantly amused by seeing their reflections in the mirrored bar. They then stood in front of the installation, underneath the neon “Eagle Creek” sign and near the glittered boom box they’d just been gawking at, and signaled for their parents to take a picture. After that, they all left.
Installation view, Sadie Barnette, “The New Eagle Creek Saloon,” at the Kitchen, New York. Photo: Adam Reich.
And this is what the installation will be for a lot of people. It’s dramatic. It’s fun. It sparkles. On the days when madison moore, assistant professor of queer studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Kitchen’s first nightlife and club culture resident, is hosting DJ events in the gallery, it’ll be a raucous dance party, invoking the spirit of queer nightlife.
As Barnette sees it, expressions of pleasure and joy are legitimate responses to the work—the bar, in its day, generated quite a bit of both for its patrons. Digging a little deeper into “New Eagle Creek,” though, there is far more to the installation than first meets the eye—which is why, in the last two years, it has traveled to venues including the Lab in San Francisco and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. This presentation at the Kitchen, and in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem, is its first on the East Coast.
Installation view, Sadie Barnette, “The New Eagle Creek Saloon,” at the Kitchen, New York. Photo: Adam Reich.
Man, Father, and Muse
Sadie, now 37, was seven years old when her dad first took her to the New Eagle Creek Saloon in the Haight. At the time, the bar was sponsoring a float for the 1992 San Francisco Pride Parade. 
Rodney opened the bar “because of the racism that he and his multiracial group of gay friends experienced at white gay bars in San Francisco,” Barnette explains. “So it really was out of necessity—for the dignity of being cute and Black and gay in San Francisco in the 1990s that he set up this bar. And it really ends up being kind of a community center, a safe haven.”
As Barnette remembers it, the theme for the float was “Black people through the ages.” She was dressed up as a Black Victorian. The event conjures up memories of being surrounded by an exuberant group of Black pharaohs and Black robots and Black astronauts. It was like being a part of the Black past, present, and future, all at once. From that moment on, the bar lived on in her imagination as a “larger than life; a mythical, fantastical space,” she recalls. “So it didn’t make sense to make my installation look like the original bar. It made sense to make it look like me dreaming in my aesthetic about the bar.”
The “New Eagle Creek Saloon” was hardly the first time Barnette has pulled from her family’s history for her work. Back in high school, she says she took up photography as “a way of seeing the world or a way of engaging with the world as a witness”; realizing how political even her own personal history was, she has nurtured a documentary impulse ever since. “I was entranced by the stories and the performing of stories and the gatherings and the history and seeing so much of American history contained just within the living room,” she says. 
In the last five years or so, the Oakland-based artist has centered her practice on her father’s past. In 2011, when Barnette was working on her MFA at the University of California, San Diego, her father suggested that they submit a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to obtain the surveillance file the FBI had once compiled on him. In the 1960s and ‘70s, Rodney was a Black Panther. He founded the Compton chapter of the organization in 1968; stood guard for Angela Davis as she awaited trial for murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy in 1970; and was for years deeply involved in Black revolutionary activism. 
Sadie Barnette, Family Tree (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. Photo: John Wilson White.
“I figured the [FOIA documents] would make [their] way to being a part of my work, since my work has always been centered around my family,” Barnette says. 
Her father’s past, in particular, provides direct links to significant movements in Black history still left largely untold, such as the extent to which the Black Panthers influenced American politics and how Black people were active participants in the rise of LGBTQ culture of the late 1980s and early ’90s. 
Sadie Barnette, Untitled (Dad, 1966 and 1968). Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.
When the FBI documents—500 pages in total, covering seemingly mundane but also intensely private details of her father’s life—arrived four or five years later, Barnette started integrating them into her practice; first, as material in her first solo show in San Francisco, at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in 2016—which ran concurrently with her installation of similar work in a group exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California—and then within countless other shows over the years. In her approach, she doesn’t just display the documents as is. She manipulates them; she marks them up with spray paint, decorates them, tarnishes them—but never lets them escape her personal touch. By doing this, Barnette folds her voice into the construction of her dad’s legacy. She reclaims the parts of the documents that make no sense to her. Because she’s never seen her father as a threat. He’s always just been her dad.
“The project that she did with the FOIA act that she submitted for her father,’” says Legacy Russell, executive director and chief curator at the Kitchen, “that body of work has since become really instrumental and a turning point across her process.”
Installation view of “Sadie Barnette: Legacy and Legend” at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, July 22–December 18, 2021. This exhibition was co-organized with Pitzer College Art Galleries. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
And in recent years, her projects have become even larger and more ambitious in scale—while still directly tied to her father’s life. 
“I knew my dad had this amazing history with his bar. But the story was almost lost to history,” Barnette notes. So why not, she thought, also focus on this other profound period in Rodney’s life? Lately, though, she’s also “really looking to and is excited about fusing those narratives together,” says her dealer Jessica Silverman, “so that they don’t become these two separate issues. They became part of a whole, because that is who he is.” (The artist is also represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles.)
The two narratives might not be so separate anyway. As Barnette puts it, Rodney’s engagement with many different communities—especially marginalized ones—is “just a part of the way that my father moves through the world,” she says, “whether it’s fighting for Angela Davis’s freedom or hosting a bar, I think it’s all about protecting the people.” Barnette’s forthcoming installation at Los Angeles International Airport, scheduled to be unveiled in 2024, will pay homage to efforts to shelter Davis while she was sought by the FBI.
“Here’s one thing that my father said to me that I really appreciated,” Barnette says. “He’s like: when you read the history books, you don’t necessarily need to see your name there, but you just want to know that you were there and participated.”
Installation view of “Sadie Barnette: Legacy and Legend” at Pitzer College Art Galleries (Lenzner Family Art Gallery) at Pitzer College, July 22–December 18, 2021. This exhibition was co-organized with the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
Beyond the Barnette Orbit 
While it suits her father just fine knowing that he was there and made a difference, Barnette is striving for a little bit more.
“In Sadie’s case, she’s really drawn to thinking about the way in which those who lived these experiences can be the ones that tell their own story,” says Russell. 
In many ways, her work is breathing life into a history on life support. As far as official records of the New Eagle Creek Saloon, Barnette’s work is “not really reintroducing [the archive],” Silverman notes, “because there really never has been one.” 
“There isn’t a National Archives for queer nightlife,” moore says. “Obviously, people have papers that might be related to queer nightlife—such as Langston Hughes, for example, whose papers are at the library and you can find some stuff in there about nightlife—but you have to sort of read between the tea leaves, if you will.”
There has been a growing contingent of artists of late, ranging from Karon Davis to Garrett Bradley, who are intent on filling in gaps within the annals of Black history. And in reevaluating the idea of what that archive can be, “the documentation of [Barnette’s] project over time is in and of itself the archive,” Russell says, becoming much more than simply “the preservation and resurrection of Rodney’s legacy, and the memory of the space that he founded.”
Installation view of “Sadie Barnette: Legacy and Legend” at Pitzer College Art Galleries (Lenzner Family Art Gallery), July 22 to December 18, 2021. This exhibition is co-organized with the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. Photography courtesy of Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
Such an archive can also be meaningfully integrated in other arenas. In bringing this installation to the Kitchen, Russell hopes to explore “a really important history that creates a through line between different parts of New York City history,” she continues, “[because] this project steps right into those intersections. It’s a project about city change and gentrification. It’s a project about the whitewashing of Black space. It’s a project about the kind of migration and journeying of Black people and Black economies.”
When Barnette takes stock of her own life, as she’s done with her father’s for her work, she realizes that she is, and always has been, a storyteller. 
“The title of the show that was just at Jessica Silverman was ‘Inheritance,’” Barnette says, “and I really do think of history and stories as a type of inheritance. And it’s a gift. It’s a treasure. It’s also a responsibility.”
“Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon” is on view at the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, New York, through March 6.
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For just a few short weeks, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is hosting “Artists Inspired By Music: Interscope Reimagined”, which pairs paintings by Ed Ruscha, Amoako Boafo, Kehinde Wiley, and Anna Weyant with songs or albums from Interscope Records. The exhibition came about as a means to celebrate the music label’s 30th anniversary, and Dr Dre, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Nine Inch Nails, and Lady Gaga are among the musicians from which the participating artists drew their inspiration.
The show closes on February 13, so in case you can’t go see the works yourself, take a look at (most of) the work on view here.

Adam Pendleton, Untitled (Dr. Dre, The Chronic) (2021), reimagining the Dr. Dre album The Chronic (1992), silkscreen ink on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.
Amoako Boafo, 6Lack – Black Woolen Hat (2021), reimagining the album FREE 6LACK (2016), oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.
Anna Park, Intermission (2021), reimagining the Billie Eilish album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019), charcoal on paper mounted on panel. Private Collection.
Anna Weyant, Dessert (2021), reimagining the Gwen Stefani album The Sweet Escape (2006), oil on canvas, Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian
Burnt Toast, Seeing Sounds (2021), reimagining the N*E*R*D album Seeing Sounds (2008), digital file. Courtesy of the artist.
Cecily Brown, If Teardrops Could Be Bottled (2021), reimagining the Billie Eilish EP don’t smile at me (2017), oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist.
Chloe Wise, The River’s All Wet (2021), reimagining the Yeah Yeah Yeahs album It’s Blitz! (2009), oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech.
Damien Hirst, Addict (2021), reimagining the Eminem album The Slim Shady LP (1999), mixed media. Private Collection.
Derrick Adams, The Breakthrough (2021), reimagining the Mary J. Blige album The Breakthrough (2005), acrylic on wood panel. Courtesy of the artist.
Ed Ruscha, All Eyez on Me (2021), reimagining the 2Pac album All Eyez on Me (1996), acrylic on linen. Private Collection.
Emily Mae Smith, Broken (2021), reimagining the Nine Inch Nails EP Broken (1992), oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel Gallery, New York.
Ferrari Sheppard, Blackstreet Harmony (2021), reimagining the song “No Diggity” (featuring Dr Dre and Queen Pen) from the Blackstreet album Another Level (1996), acrylic, charcoal and 24k gold on canvas. Ferrari Sheppard Studio.
Genesis Tramaine, Black Woman Saint Cleans Jesus (2021), reimagining the Summer Walker album Over It (2019), acrylic, oil paint, Lawry’s Seasoning Salt, the Holy Spirit. Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech.
Henni Alftan, Untitled (2021), reimagining the Olivia Rodrigo album SOUR (2021), oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Karma, New York.
Henry Taylor, Untitled (2021), reimagining the song “DNA” from the Kendrick Lamar album DAMN (2017), acrylic on canvas. Private Collection.
Hilary Pecis, Untitled (2021), reimagining the Selena Gomez album Rare (2020), acrylic on canvas. Private Collection.
Issy Wood, Gwen with All the Obstacles (2021), reimagining the song “Cool” from the Gwen Stefani album Love. Angel. Music. Baby. (2004), oil on linen. Lent by the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London.
Jenna Gribbon, Lana Watched (2021), reimagining the Lana Del Rey album Born to Die (2012), oil on linen. Private Collection.
Jennifer Guidi, Seeking Hearts (Black Sand MT, Pink Sand, Pink CS, Pink Ground) (2021), reimagining the BLACKPINK album The Album (2020), sand, acrylic and oil on linen. Private Collection.
John Currin, Newspaper Couple (2016), reimagining the song “Beautiful Day” from the U2 album All That You Can’t Leave Behind (2000), oil on canvas. Gagosian, Courtesy of the artist.
Jordy Kerwick, Bloody Valentine (2021), reimagining the song “Bloody Valentine” from the Machine Gun Kelly album Tickets to My Downfall (2020), acrylic on canvas. Private Collection, courtesy of Vito Schnabel Gallery.
Julie Curtiss, Venus (2021), reimagining the song “Just a Girl” from the No Doubt album Tragic Kingdom (1995), acrylic and oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York.
KAWS, Better Days Ahead (2021), reimagining the Snoop Dogg album Doggystyle (1993), acrylic on canvas. Private Collection.
Kehinde Wiley, The Watcher (2021), reimagining the Dr. Dre album 2001 (1999), oil on canvas. Private Collection.
Lauren Halsey, Untitled (2021), reimagining the Kendrick Lamar album To Pimp a Butterfly (2015), gypsum on wood. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.
Loie Hollowell, Mandalora Squeeze (2019), reimagining the Lady Gaga album The Fame Monster (2009), oil paint, acrylic medium and case resin on linen over panel. Private Collection.
Lucy Bull, 10:00 (2021), reimagining the song “Spiderwebs” from the No Doubt album Tragic Kingdom (1995), oil on linen. Private Collection.
Marc Quinn, We Share Our Chemistry with the Stars (MGK200) (2021), reimagining the Machine Gun Kelly album Tickets to My Downfall (2020), oil on canvas. Marc Quinn Studio.
Matthew Wong, The Outside World (2018), reimagining the Lana Del Rey EP Paradise (2012), gouache on paper. Matt Wong Painter Ltd.
Nicolas Party, Portrait with a Parrot (2021), reimagining the Lady Gaga album Joanne (2016), pastel on cardboard. Private Collection, courtesy of Karma, New York.
Nina Chanel Abney, 2 PM (2021), reimagining the 2Pac album The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory (1996), collage on panel. Pace Prints and courtesy of the artist.
OSGEMEOS, The End (2021), reimagining the Black Eyed Peas album The E.N.D. (2009), mixed media on MDF. Courtesy of OSGEMEOS.
Rashid Johnson, Good Kid (2021), reimagining the Kendrick Lamar album good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012), ceramic tile, mirror, red oak, oil stick, spray enamel. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.
Raymond Pettibon, No title (Lake Placid) (2019), reimagining the Lana Del Rey album Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019), ink on paper. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
Reggie Burrows Hodges, Swimming in Compton: Look Ma (December Day) (2021), reimagining the song “Swimming Pools (Drank)” from the Kendrick Lamar album good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012), acrylic and pastel on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Karma, New York.
Richard Prince, Untitled (2021), reimagining the Nine Inch Nails album The Downward Spiral (1994), acrylic and ink jet on canvas. Courtesy of Richard Prince.
Sayre Gomez, Commemorative Merchandising (2021), reimagining the 50 Cent album Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ (2003), acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of François Ghebaly Gallery.
Shepard Fairey, Yeah Yeah Yeahs (2021), reimagining the Yeah Yeah Yeahs album Fever to Tell (2003), stencil impression and mixed media collage on album covers. Courtesy of Obey Giant Art Inc.
Stanley Whitney, Roma 32 (2021), reimagining the song “King Kunta” from the Kendrick Lamar album To Pimp a Butterfly (2015), oil on linen. Courtesy of Lisson Gallery.
Takashi Murakami, Goodbye & Good Riddance (2021), reimagining the Juice WRLD album Goodbye & Good Riddance (2018), acrylic on canvas mounted on wood frame. Courtesy of Kaikai Kiki Co Limited.
Titus Kaphar, Seeing Through Time (2021), reimagining the Eve album Scorpion (2001), oil on panel. Private Collection.
Toyin Ojih Odutola, Damn (2021), reimagining the Kendrick Lamar album DAMN. (2017), graphite on black board; graphite on Duralar. Private Collection.
Umar Rashid, The Dar al harb according to Tupac. Or, Shakur vs the other world. Earth like, violent, and prone to frequent periods of injustice. Alas, if one seeks it, one can find beauty in the hideous. (Me against the world) (2021), reimagining the 2Pac album Me Against the World (1995), acrylic and spray paint on canvas. Courtesy of Half Gallery and Blum and Poe.
Will Boone, HELMET (2021), reimagining the Helmet album Meantime (1992), acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles.

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“Can you spot a Deepfake?” That is the question that first greets visitors to the website for In Event of Moon Disaster, an Emmy Award-winning documentary that uses deepfake technology to present an alternate history of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon.
After viewers answer either “yes” or “no,”—if you click yes, the response chides: “Okay Hot Shot, Let’s Go”—they watch a short film and then are asked a series of questions to discern what in the video is real and what is not. The results are surprising, to say the least.

That’s because the video depicts US President Richard Nixon informing the public that the Apollo 11 astronauts did not survive their mission. The speech was written for Nixon by William Safire in case such an unfortunate scenario occurred. Since it didn’t, the speech was never delivered.
At the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, the film, presented on an older model television set in a period-appropriate living room, serves as the centerpiece of a fascinating, timely, and unsettling exhibition “Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen.” The show explores the phenomenon of “deepfake” videos, which use advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning to create deceptive content, and how they are used to manipulate audiences and perpetuate misinformation or propaganda.
Installation view of In Event of Moon Disaster at the Museum of the Moving Image. Photo by Thanassi Karageorgiou / Museum of the Moving Image.
The moon disaster film, which was co-directed by Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund and produced by the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality, is a perfect jumping-off point to explore the potential harms and benefits of deepfake technology.
By presenting “an alternative version” of landmark historical events, the installation demonstrates that the representation of both the past and present is subject to powerfully effective technical manipulation, which can challenge our belief in what is real, according to a statement about the show.
Excerpts from the documentary To Make a Deepfake (2020), produced by Scientific American, are also on view, as well as a wide range of deepfake videos distributed online.
Installation view of How do you spot a deepfake? Mirror Room. Photo by Thanassi Karageorgiou / Museum of the Moving Image.
The show also offers examples of contested depictions of actual events from throughout the history of the moving image, ranging from a Spanish-American War reenactment dating to 1899 and credit to Thomas Edison, to the 1963 Zapruder footage of the JFK assassination.
Keep an eye on the related event series “Questionable Evidence: Deepfakes and Suspect Footage in Film,” which includes screenings and other public programs that explore synthetic media from a variety of perspectives.
The exhibition was organized by Barbara Miller, the museum’s deputy director for curatorial affairs, and Joshua Glick, assistant professor of English, film, and media studies at Hendrix College and a fellow at the Open Documentary Lab at MIT.
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“The feeling of presence: this is the defining quality of the metaverse.” 
So begins an audio composition in Theo Triantafyllidis’s new exhibition “The Metaverse and How We’ll Build it Together” at Meredith Rosen Gallery. That paradoxical line as well as others in the recording, which blasts from inside ceramic pots installed on old Amazon boxes, were culled from the video Facebook released upon rebranding itself to Meta, an eerie piece of technocratic propaganda that was lampooned to death on social media last fall.
Like many, Triantafyllidis—an artist who builds virtual worlds to interrogate our lived-in, physical one—found the video unsettling. 
“There is this very bizarre conflict between reality and fiction—between this totally utopian, almost completely tone-deaf, representation of our own lives that Mark Zuckerberg seems to have in his mind versus the banal reality of our online experience,” the artist said over video chat recently, Zooming in from Athens, Greece, where he was born and raised. (He’s primarily based in LA.)
An installation view of Theo Triantafyllidis’s exhibition “The Metaverse and How We’ll Get There Together,” 2022 at Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York. Photo: Adam Reich.
“Banal” is a funny word for the artist to use, given the way he illustrates that disjunction between fiction and reality in the second half of the exhibition. Two live simulations—that is, video games controlled by AI rather than human button-pressing—play out on a pair of screens.
The first is populated by a family of tech-obsessed orks. Operating by a code similar to that which drives The Sims, the creatures mindlessly perform a series of repetitive tasks in their virtual home as various catastrophes slowly destroy the world around them.
One ork sprawls before the TV, for instance, while another texts atop a toilet or surfs the web. A tortoise with a camera strapped to its back rides a Roomba, or at least tries to, as his weight keeps the robotic vacuum in place—a clever metaphor, perhaps, for how technology both speeds up our lives and keeps them in place. A fire in the kitchen blazes the whole time.  
A still from Theo Triantafyllidis’s Ork Haus (2022). Courtesy of the artist.
The orks look more like Shrek than those of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but that’s not to say they’re all cute and cuddly. Triantafyllidis’s creatures are crude and vulgar; that’s why he chose them as his avatars. Within gaming communities, the artist explained, there’s a debate about orks, with some saying they’ve been villainized in popular culture through the coded racial attributes we’ve chosen to assign to them. For Triantafyllidis, the idea relates to algorithmic radicalization, or the theory that the algorithms driving social media platforms inherently push people to extremist views.  
Algorithmic Radicalization is also the name of the second simulation in the show. Whereas the first plays out a domestic simulation, the second is all-out war. Humans and monsters alike fight, die, decompose, and respawn in an endless, self-perpetuating loop of violence on a blank battlefield.  

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“The more you look at the work the more you realize how stuck these characters are in the simulation,” Triantafyllidis said. 
The game-like war scene may look like it exists in a different world than the Zuckerberg-themed sound installation found in the room opposite, but for the artist, there’s a line to be drawn between the cycle metaphorized in the simulation and Facebook/Meta’s technocratic vision.  
“I think there’s a direct link between the radicalization pipeline and this utopian aura that this new video tried to present, offering up this new dream to look for during the hellscape situation that we’re in right now,” Triantafyllidis concluded.   
“Theo Triantafyllidis: The Metaverse and How We’ll Build it Together” is on view now through February 26, 2022 at Meredith Rosen Gallery in New York.
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