On View

Archie Moore has made history. Not only did he become the first artist from Australia and the first First Nations artist to win the coveted Golden Lion for best national pavilion at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale this spring, his “quietly powerful” installation “kith and kin” is also a work that dives deep into history, tracing the footsteps of his ancestors dated as far back as 65,000 years in a meticulously hand-drawn family tree inscribed across the surface of the walls and ceilings of the pavilion.
“The recording of names, places and time in the family tree drawing serves as proof of identity — evidence of my Aboriginality,” he said. Born in 1970 in Toowoomba, a city in Queensland, Australia, Moore is a Kamilaroi-Bigambul artist whose practice centers around histories—his own and those of his nation. He explores key signifiers of identity: skin, language, and genealogy, racism, and understanding and misunderstanding that occur between cultures.
The somber work in “kith and kin” is the embodiment of his research that took place over more than four years and included 3,484 people; with piles of state records on display in the center of the installation, Moore draws attention to the depth of research as well as the high rates of incarceration of First Nations people, and its documentation.
We caught up with Moore to learn more about his historical win in Venice, which will sow the seeds for changes to come in the future.
Archie Moore, “kith and kin” (2024), Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024. Photographer: Andrea Rossetti. © the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and The Commercial.
As the first Australian and the Kamilaroi-Bigambul artist to win this coveted award, were you surprised when they announced that you were the winner at the auditorium? How did you feel when you were sitting there at the ceremony?
I was very happy to receive the award. While I didn’t know that we were going to win the Golden Lion, we did get a phone call from La Biennale the night before saying that we should attend the ceremony. The call came in just as Naminapu Maymuru-White (who is exhibiting in “Foreigners Everywhere”), her grandson Ŋalakan Wanambi and Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr arrived at “kith and kin” to sing to all of the ancestors that I inscribed into the artwork. It was an incredibly moving experience and I felt touched that they wanted to make this significant gesture within my installation. Naminapu and Ŋalakan gifted me a golden owl artwork, which in retrospect seems like it was a premonition of things to come.
The process of creating “kith and kin” appears to be very intense to outsiders just by the sound of it. It is hard to imagine the incredible amount of research involved (how many pages of documents are we talking about?), and the labor of spending two months inscribing the 65,000 years of history on the dark walls of the pavilion. How was this work developed?
My research started in 2016. I started looking in the archives for my mother’s Kamilaroi-Bigambul side and my father’s British-Scottish side. I have come across hundreds of pages of material in archives and museums and digitized newspapers and archives on the National Library of Australia’s search engine Trove as well. I’ve been using the genealogical website ancestry.com and there are more than 3,500 people in my ancestry.com tree.
I spoke to a lot of people through the Ancestry website, mainly descendants of people who were relatives of people who worked or owned properties around where my parents lived, asking if they had letters, photographs, stories, or rumors that tie back to my family. I also talked to many family members in Inverell and Brisbane.
The recording of names, places, and time in the family tree drawing serves as proof of identity—evidence of my Aboriginality. If anyone were to research those names of my ancestors you will find records that identify them and their tribal groups. This proof of Aboriginality may be required for employment in Indigenous-identified positions, enrolling in schools, government loans and assistance, and for land rights claims where a continuous and unbroken connection to [the] country since colonization needs to be proven. The artwork continues to grow by adding new names, places and other information.
Archie Moore, “kith and kin” (2024), Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024. Photographer: Andrea Rossetti. © the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and The Commercial.
How did you pull it off with those months spent in Venice? What were your working hours? What motivated you to keep going and completing the work? How did you share the work with your three collaborators? What was the most challenging part?
I had to draw the mural twice. I did it once at 1:3 scale in Australia in pen and paper on my kitchen table. This was then digitised and placed within a digital model of the pavilion so that we could see the composition of the artwork and tweak the artwork before coming to Venice. And then again in the Australia Pavilion over eight-hour days, six days a week for five weeks. We would draw for 45 minutes and then stretch and rest to ensure our bodies could endure the long installation process. The writing on the ceiling was the most physically challenging and now I know how Michelangelo felt working on the Sistine Chapel.
You have said that your family’s history was something you had “been avoiding.” But this changed when you became interested in genealogy, and you took the opportunity to ask your mother a lot of questions. How and why did you change from avoiding your family’s history to embracing and diving deep into it? What kind of questions did you ask your mother? 
My Mother’s minor stroke was what made it urgent—the thought of losing that archive and she also became more open about discussing things. The stroke also seems to have made her more lucid. I was asking her about people I would see mentioned in archival material. I was cross-referencing what she said with what was written down in an official document. This made me aware of how good her memory was.
For instance, I came across a genealogical chart from when anthropologist Norman Tindale visited Boggabilla in 1938 and interviewed my great-grandmother on my maternal side. What Tindale recorded from my great-grandmother seems very accurate and correlates with what my mother has said. He drew a Western linear family tree; in my artwork the linear part of the mural becomes engulfed with and outnumbered by all the traditional Aboriginal names for people, plants, animals, waterways and land.
Archie Moore, “kith and kin” (2024), Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024. Photographer: Andrea Rossetti. © the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and The Commercial.
The epic family tree you realized at the pavilion represents 65,000 years of history, and yet, none of this was mentioned in your school days. Has this changed today? And how do you think the visibility and exposure of your Golden Lion win will make a further difference?
I don’t know exactly what is in the school curriculum of today, but I hope there is more of First Nations history being taught compared to when I went to school and was taught that Australia’s history started with Captain Cook and the British invasion. One of the aims of the exhibition was to bring international attention to First Nations Australian culture, sovereignty, and greater recognition of Indigenous deaths in custody and the lack of action in solving this fatal issue. The artwork also highlights how we are all part of one larger family and should be living in peace. Moreover, “kith and kin” foregrounds how injustices, such as racial discrimination and deaths in custody, would not happen if we saw ourselves as part of one large family.
On the Creative Australia website there’s a warning that there may be names or images of First Nations people who are deceased on the website. Is there superstition about this among the Kamilaroi and Bigambul people? Can you share with us some special cultural traditions or characteristics among the Kamilaroi and Bigambul that a lot of people especially foreigners don’t know about? 
In most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, hearing recordings, seeing images or the names of deceased persons may cause sadness or distress and, in some cases, offend against strongly held cultural prohibitions.
At the entrance to the “kith and kin” exhibition, there is a warning that the artwork contains names of the deceased. The names of the deceased in the coronial inquests have been redacted out of respect for the dead, even though this is publicly available information so that they aren’t just represented as statistics. While names in the family tree are represented as part of a tightly woven kinship system.
Artist Archie Moore stands on stage with his Golden Lion at the Lion Award Ceremony during the Art Biennale. Photo: Felix Hörhager/picture alliance via Getty Images.
Do you agree that the theme of “Foreigners Everywhere” has finally set a stage for the art world and beyond to properly look at the historical voids of the violence of the colonial era? With many still haunted by the histories of colonization or even facing re-colonization, how will this edition’s Venice Biennale make a difference?
I’ve made an artwork that comes from the personal histories of my family. Accessing documents from archives that feature my great-great-great-grandfather—where my family began to be documented—and everyone else related. Although the accounts of how they were classified, documented, and the nature of their circumstances are personal, they are not unique and other Aboriginal people will have similar experiences. The exhibition covers more than 65,000 years of time; I wanted to show how long Aboriginal cultures have existed and—in spite of invasion, massacres, and systemic over-incarceration —continue to exist into the now.
Did you have time to look at the Biennale or other exhibitions in Venice? Do you have any favorites? 
Unfortunately, I did not have time to see all 87 pavilions. The Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise at the Dutch pavilion with their objective of land regeneration through art was one of the highlights.
What will happen to the family tree inscribed on the walls of the pavilion when the exhibition concludes in November?
I chose to use the material of chalk in “kith and kin” because it represents the fragility of life; it is a metaphor for how easily people, histories, and memories can be wiped away. At the end of the exhibition, the walls will be painted over, but those names will forever be part of the pavilion’s DNA. The ancestors and family members will be inscribed onto the walls of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia when “kith and kin” is on display in 2025-2026. The installation can be re-made again in other locations.
What is next for you? 
My next exhibition expands upon my series of ‘Dwelling’ installations in which viewers are immersed within the architecture and memories of my childhood home. For this exhibition at Samstag Museum of Art [in Adelaide, Australia] there will be a significant moving image component as it is commissioned with the 2024 Adelaide Film Festival.
The 60th Venice Biennale runs through November 24. 
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Jennifer Angus uses her bare fingers to delicately remove a pin holding down the thorax of a large, green insect affixed to a foam board she had used to transport its body. She must be careful: the specimen has been used so many times that holes have appeared in its form. After removing the pin, she hammers the body to the gallery wall to begin forming a pattern.
“It’s about the negative space between the bodies” Angus said as she worked to install her new solo show at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. The show, “Jennifer Angus: The Golden Hour,” (on view through September 8, 2024) reuses the bodies of around 5,000 bugs to comment on an impending human-made global catastrophe.
The show begins with an Alice in Wonderland-esque experience in which Angus plays with scale. She has made small model homes that are elevated on platforms and form a sort of “main street” leading to a small church. The intent is to make the viewers feel insect sized.
Along the walls are small display boxes, dioramas in which Angus has personified some of her insects. In the same room, she has placed some of her damaged specimens in jelly jars to create a kaleidoscopic stained-glass window. The orange walls and glow of the “stained glass” give the room a feeling of sunset, mirroring the name of the show.
Jennifer Angus holds an insect specimen that she prepares to nail to a wall at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut as part of an art installation. Photo by Adam Schrader
The titular “golden hour” references the warm glow of light that illuminates the sky as the last rays of sunlight begin to fade, Angus said in a statement. She proposes that human life is in its golden hour and draws comparisons to the Doomsday Clock, a symbol for the likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe caused by things like nuclear war or climate change.
“We are in the twilight of the world as we know it,” she said in a statement. “‘The Golden Hour’ is intended to highlight what we stand to lose if action is not taken to prevent climate change, preserve natural habitats, quell the use of insecticides and overall see nature as something to be protected as opposed to a commodity to be used.”
In the next room is Angus’s cabinet of curiosities, where the artist has removed drawers from an antique to create more dioramas using her bug specimens. In some, she mixed the fallen-off parts of different bug species to create characters like the Cicada Lady, who has a cicada head, a beeswax body, and grasshopper arms.
A closeup shows the artist Jennifer Angus removing a pin from a bug she transported to be used in an exhibit at the Bruce Museum. Photo by Adam Schrader.
“She’s sort of a teacher, which I think is a reflection of me,” she said. The artist was inspired to anthropomorphize the bugs because of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale Of Two Bad Mice, in which she made these mice look “cute.”
During the installation, this room also included what Angus called her “bug hospital”—complete with an emergency room and an outpatient clinic. Specimens that suffered damage during transport or installation are taken there to be glued back together.
“We’ve trained the registrar here how to fix them. She’s now a certified bug surgeon,” Angus said. “We repair them if we have the pieces and we put the not-so-great specimens high up or low down and keep the best ones at eye level.”
The show does not contain informational text, Angus said, because she is “not a fan of didactic work.” But she said she hopes the message of her work is clear, or at the very least, that people go to her website and find out more information about the world of bugs.
Lou Adams, a printmaker and former assistant to the artist Jennifer Adams, helps the latter install her artwork using bugs at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut. Photo by Adam Schrader
“Really, my hope is that anyone who comes to see the show will think about insects differently and not be so quick, most important of all, to get out that can of Raid,” she said.
Angus began working with bugs because she teaches textile design at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. About 20 years ago, she was researching textiles in northern Thailand and came upon a garment that was embellished with green metallic beetle wings.
“It makes total sense because these are mother nature’s sequins. They’re shiny, metallic green,” Angus said. So, she learned more about how bugs had been used by different cultures over time. For example, in the Victorian era, beetle wing embroidery used bug parts for high fashion. And in Southeast Asia, some cultures used them in headdresses.
Model houses, including one that once housed crickets, is pictured in an installation by the artist Jennifer Angus at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut. Photo by Adam Schrader
One day, she decided to try her hand at using bugs to make patterns, which she said “felt really reckless” at the time. But the reaction she got from viewers of her first exhibit of such work affirmed her newfound medium.
“From a distance, the insects are flattened, and it looks like wallpaper and so people would walk up and then I’d literally see them take a step back as they realized what it was,” Angus said. “We see wallpaper as a domestic space. Yet that thing we don’t want inside is insects.”
Angus was surprised by the affordability of insect specimens. At the time, each bug cost her about 25 cents—even if they were somewhat difficult to purchase from insect specimen dealers used by academic institutions and museums. The most expensive insects in the exhibit are gold beetles from Costa Rica that can cost over $100 a pop.
“The internet was just starting so you would get a big book with all the species in black and white, no pictures. I had to learn what was right for my type of work,” she said. They have since become more expensive to buy but easier to obtain online.
Damaged bugs that cannot be repaired or reused in Jennifer Angus’s artworks are preserved in jellies she makes and includes in an installation mimicking stained glass effect. Photo by Adam Schrader
It was fortuitous Angus chose the first specimen she did, the Eupholus schoenherrii—a type of blue weevil. She selected them for their pattern but realized quickly their bodies could withstand wear-and-tear. Cicadas also do well for her purposes, but butterflies and moths do not, she learned. And she never works with rare or endangered species.
“People go, ‘how many insects died for this exhibition?’ and I tell them that, first of all, these are reused,” Angus said. “What you’re seeing has gradually accumulated over more than 20 years. And if you’re upset, wonderful. That’s fantastic. Do something. Most of the species I used come from a tropical rainforest. We all know how fast the Amazon is being cut down.”
Even Angus was a little squeamish when she opened her first shipment of bugs and over the years there have been some species too gross to work with. But now, she admits she can eat dinner beside her bugs while working.
The artist Jennifer Angus is pictured holding bugs as transported to be used in a show of her work. Angus uses insects to create geometric patterns and other art, Photo by Adam Schrader
“I frequently say to the people that are upset, ‘These are adult specimens because if they weren’t, they’d be larvae. And it’d be a totally different show,’” she said. “There are going to be people who aren’t going to like this, I remember an e-mail that I got, and the subject line was ‘insecticide.’ I thought, ‘that’s quite clever.’”
Angus and her critics often end up agreeing that they want to see the insects thrive, even if their means to that end are different. But sometimes she also thinks about insects that conservationists don’t want to flourish, like invasive lanternfly species.
While Angus has had her fair share of critics, entomologists and the science community have supported her artistic endeavors. She recalled an exhibition at the University of Nebraska where the chair of the entomology department thanked her for making entomologists “look sexy.”
A valuable beetle known as Chrysina aurigans, native to Costa Rica, is pictured in an artwork by Jennifer Angus at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut. Photo by Adam Schrader
When asked if she had ever considered using live bugs in her work, Angus revealed that she had once used live crickets. Returning to the houses on “main street,” the artist said the very first one had its windows and doors covered with plastic film to keep live crickets in.
“I was reading about cricket cages, which are popular in China in summer because they have a beautiful song. In Germany there was a similar tradition, but it was a much more elaborate house. So that’s where I got this idea,” she said. “But what I have found after the first showing is curators really hate having to look after the livestock.”
Photo by Adam Schrader.
Angus noted that the number of artists working with insects is relatively small and so they all sort of know each other.
“Like Catherine Chalmers, she’s the cockroach lady,” Angus said. “Jan Fabre, a Belgian artist, covered the royal palace with beautiful elytra. It’s inspiring, yet it’s horrific.”
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When we think of Abstract Expressionism, we think of large, declarative canvases onto which pigment has been flung, dripped, pooled, or applied in broad, bold brushstrokes. Usually by men. “Montage,” a new exhibition at Gazelli Art House in London, puts the spotlight on women Abstract Expressionists, offering a mix of big names like Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, and Betty Parsons alongside those whose legacies are still unfairly overlooked, like Perle Fine, Nancy Grossman, and Sonja Sekula.
“Montage” shows how these artists, best known as painters, also applied the movement’s radical, experimental spirit to smaller-scale collage works. This survey of mixed-media works includes examples made using all manner of found materials like wood, tissue paper, and sand, in many cases embellished with paint, ink, and charcoal. In this way, the works also evince the enduring influence of European Modernism on the midcentury New York art scene.
Artnet News picked out four artists from the show whose work was critically acclaimed in their lifetimes and are now finally receiving the attention they deserve.
Perle Fine 
Perle Fine in her New York studio in c. 1963. Photo: Maurice Berezov, courtesy of Perle Fine Estate and Gazelli Art House, © AE Artworks.
Born in Boston in 1905 to Russian immigrant parents, Fine showed an early interest in art and moved to New York in her early twenties to pursue an education at the Art Students League. There she opted to study under the renowned German-born artist Hans Hofmann, who was instrumental in developing the formal breakthroughs that defined European movements like Cubism into a more gestural, expressive style. Over time, Fine cultivated a number of high-profile collectors including Museum of Modern Art founding director Alfred Barr, art director and publisher Emily Hall Tremaine, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright, but also supported her practice by working as a gallerist.
By 1945, Fine had developed an interest in nonrepresentational art and joined the American Abstract Artists group. Five years later, Willem de Kooning nominated her to join “the Club,” a members-only meeting place on 8th Street where a tight-knit community of artists met to socialize, plan, and debate. The group selected her to participate in the historic Ninth Street Show, which featured artists like Philip Guston, Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, and Barnett Newman; the show established Abstract Expressionism as a major American art movement. Fine exhibited in all six of the subsequent annual invite-only exhibitions until 1957.
Perle Fine, Supersonic Calm (c. 1966). Courtesy of Gazelli Art House and Berry Campbell, New York. © A.E. Artworks.
In 1968, Fine noted that collage helped her learn how construct a composition. “When you do something to that white paper, when you put one or two forms on that white paper, that simple sheet of white paper can become one of the most beautiful things in the world if those forms are put in there in such a way as to involve every inch of that from top to bottom and from left to right,” she said. “Which is something I never was as aware of as when I worked this out in collage and later in painting. So that another great truth about art was revealed to me in this way!”
After many years living with Alzheimer’s, Fine died of pneumonia aged 83 on May 31, 1988.
Lilly Fenichel
Lilly Fenichel in her studio. Courtesy of Lilly Fenichel Foundation.
Fenichel was born in 1927 to a Jewish family in Vienna that fled the Nazis in 1939, eventually settling in Hollywood. After completing her studies at the California School of Fine Arts (later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1952, Fenichel became a regular on the burgeoning Los Angeles art scene and eventually a key member of the second generation of the Bay Area School of Abstract Expressionism. She supplemented her income by working as an art director and costume director in the film industry.
From early in her career, Fenichel became known for striking works made using monochromatic or somber palettes. Though she befriended significant artists on the West Coast like Larry Bell and Ed Ruscha, she decided in 1952 to move to New York, where she believed women artists were more respected. There she befriended artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and began teaching art classes at the Museum of Modern Art.
Lilly Fenichel, Collage IV (1961). Courtesy of Gazelli Art House and Berry Campbell, New York, © Lilly Fenichel Foundation.
“I was an Abstract Expressionist, but with a lot of drawing in it,” Fenichel reflected in 2011. “From the early ’60s, I drew a lot. They were kind of surrealist, very personal, demon, abstract drawing and paintings… There was a progression from those into these minimal paintings that were in my first one person show, at the Santa Barbara Museum in the late ’60s.”
In 1981, Fenichel moved to New Mexico, having fallen in love with the city of Taos some decades previously. She died in Albuquerque in 2016, just short of age 90.
Sonja Sekula
Sonja Sekula in her Breton Studio in 1945. Courtesy of Peter Blum Gallery.
Born in Lucerne, Switzerland in 1918, Sonja Sekula moved around with her family from a young age, settling in New York in 1936. She eventually joined the Art Students League and studied under fellow European-born Modernist artists George Grosz from Germany and Morris Kantor from Russia. She fell in with a crowd of exiled Surrealists like André Breton and began exhibiting through major gallerists like Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons, in one case appearing alongside Pollock and Newman in a 1949 show. At one time, she lived with dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage.
Sekula was known for small, densely intricate, usually very colorful works. Shortly after she joined Betty Parsons, some of the gallery’s biggest stars, like Pollock and Rothko, complained that it had let in too many artists, “many of them amateurs, most of them women,” and left.
Sonja Sekula, Untitled Collage (1959). Courtesy of Gazelli Art House.
Those who knew Sekula remarked on her easy, spirited nature. It is also notable that she was very open about her homosexuality. “To feel guilt about having loved a being of your own kind body and soul is hopeless—let us hope there were many pure moments in each of these attractions and loves,” she wrote in her journal.
It has been recorded that during frequent hospitalizations in psychiatric wards, doctors tried to cure Sekula of her homosexuality. In 1961, she wrote: “Life was an interesting experience. I do not regret it.”
Sekula returned to Switzerland with her family in the 1950s. She died by suicide in Zürich in 1963 at the age of 45.
Amaranth Ehrenhalt 
Amaranth Ehrenhalt shot for Vogue in 1951. Courtesy of Anita Shapolsky Gallery.
As an extension to the main exhibition, Gazelli is also showing work by artist Amaranth Ehrenhalt, who was born in 1928 and grew up in Philadelphia, earning her BFA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1951. She later moved to New York, where she befriended many artists and began producing work in the Abstract Expressionist style. At one time, she recalled how her desk was a door propped on top of a bathtub in her tiny Greenwich Village walk-up. As well as paintings, Ehrenhalt produced textiles, ceramics, and even a 150-foot mosaic mural in the French town of Banlieue, where she once lived.
Having long harbored a love of Europe, when Ehrenhalt was invited on a three-week trip to Paris, she ended up living there for four decades, supporting herself as a divorcée with two children through odd jobs. Her reputation inevitably suffered from being so far removed from the center of the art world at that time, but she came to know influential artists like Sonia Delaunay, Alberto Giacometti, Natalia Goncharova, and Yves Klein.
Amaranth Ehrenhalt, Neilius I (1958). Courtesy of Gazelli Art House.
In 2018, Ehrenhalt said in an interview with White Hot Magazine: “I am a colorist. I like to think about my work as a symphony on a flat surface. Everyone who has written about me use words like energy and color, ‘joie de vivre.’”
Ehrenhalt moved back to New York in 2008, where she died at the age of 93 on March 16, 2021 from coronavirus.
“Montage” is on view at Gazelli Art House in London through July 13, 2024. 
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The Met is honoring one of the bonafide greats of American decorative arts. A new exhibition is dedicated to Edward C. Moore, the influential collector, celebrated silversmith, and creative leader of Tiffany & Co. in the late 19th century.
“Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co.” opened on June 9 and features 70 precious silver creations produced during Moore’s tenure as chief designer at Tiffany & Co. These are paired with an impressive 180 items from Moore’s personal collection, which spans ancient Greece to Japan and the Islamic world.
So, who was this distinguished doyen of silversmithing? Born in New York City in 1827, Moore apprenticed under his father before inheriting the business in 1851. His artistry soon caught the eye of the very best in the business at Tiffany & Co., where he was offered an exclusive contract before being appointed chief silver designer in 1868. Only a year prior, Moore had been awarded the gold medal at the world’s pre-eminent Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867.
Installation view of “Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co.” at The Met in New York City, opening June 9, 2024. Photo courtesy of The Met.
Over the following two decades until his death in 1891, Moore would leave his mark on one of the most iconic American luxury design houses. Highlights from this era on show at the Met include the Bryant Vase of 1876, the first piece of American silver to enter The Met’s collection, and an ornate 1874 pitcher bearing an elephant head.
Vase, Tiffany & Co. (1878), Private Collection, New York and Vase, Tiffany & Co. (1877), Brooklyn Museum. Courtesy of The Met.
By pairing these exquisite 19th century archival pieces alongside the trove of historic treasures to which Moore found himself drawn, the exhibition initiates fascinating lines of inquiry into the possible influences at play in his work. Some particularly magnificent pieces from across centuries and continents include a Roman perfume bottle from the 1st century C.E., a 13th-century Syrian enameled glass bowl, an 18th-century Murano glass cup from Venice, and a 19th-century Japanese lacquered box.
An installation image of an intricate swan. Photo: Eileen Travell, courtesy of The Met.
Moore’s dedication to learning from the past and natural beneficence is perhaps best exemplified by his decision to found a school for apprentices at Tiffany & Co. and to supply the students with cherished items from his private collection to use as models and stylistic inspiration, according to a 1891 report in The Studio. The paper also noted how Moore had been motivated not by vanity but by a deep appreciation of beauty, or “the definite purpose of supplying standards, as perfect as could be obtained, in the several industrial arts.”
Moore bequeathed more than 2,000 objects from his expansive holding of glass, ceramics, and metalwork to The Met. These exceptional items formed the basis of the museum’s collection of decorative arts.
“Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co.” runs at the Met from June 9 through October 20, 2024. It was made possible by Tiffany & Co. 
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The London art scene has been busy installing its final batch of exhibitions before collectors flee en masse to some far-flung villa or yacht this summer. To mark the occasion, the fourth edition of London Gallery Weekend (May 31–June 2) has partnered with 130 galleries to offer its usual program of free events, talks, public performances, and parties.
Among the highlights this year will be curated walking routes by the likes of artist Lubaina Himid, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, and editor Edward Enninful. The filmmaker John Akomfrah, who is currently representing Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, is also unveiling new work as part of the Cork Street Banner Commission.
Despite ongoing concerns about London’s health as a global art capital post-Brexit, this weekend offers a chance for the U.K.’s sprawling capital to flaunt its lively and diverse gallery scene. From NW to SE, here are the shows that have caught our eye.
Atta Kwami at Goodman Gallery
Atta Kwami, Yibor Square (2018). Photo courtesy of Goodman Gallery.
In 2021, the Ghanaian artist and scholar Atta Kwami received a long overdue boost in global attention after winning the prestigious Maria Lassnig prize, which honors overlooked late-career artists. His award, a large-scale public mural commission at Serpentine North in London’s Kensington Gardens, remains on view until September 30. That same year, however, Kwami sadly died at the age of just 65, leaving behind a trove of bold abstract canvases composed from interlocking planes of color. Some highlights from his estate made between 1999 and 2021 are now on view at Goodman Gallery on Cork Street, including Money Can’t Buy It (2019), a large, walkthrough structure conceived as a “three-dimensional painting.”
With a career spanning four decades, Kwami’s work is held in the collections of the Met, the British Museum, the V&A, and the national museums of Ghana and Kenya. This spring, the Serpentine is publishing a landmark monograph dedicated to Kwami and its editor, Melissa Blanchflower, will give a talk at Goodman Gallery on May 31 at 11 a.m.
Cara Benedetto’s “White Girl Wasted” at Rose Easton
Cara Benedetto, Barbie Does Tina (2024). Photo: Jack Elliot Edwards, of the artist, Rose Easton London, and Chapter NY.
Sometimes thought-provoking art can lean a little dry, but Rose Easton’s East London gallery has a reputation for shaking things up. For those hoping for an injection of humor, look no further than Cara Benedetto’s irreverent exploration of the term “white girl wasted,” which originated online to describe a liberated, messy woman who doesn’t wish to be aware of the real privilege she wields. The works are filled with fun pop cultural references, from the bland corporate feminism of Barbie (2023) to the accidentally camp biopic Spencer (2021), in which Kristen Stewart makes an unlikely appearance as a woefully forlorn Princess Diana. The works ask: Where sits the line between victimhood and complicity?
Adam Rouhana’s “Before Freedom Pt.2” at T.J. Boulting
Adam Rouhana, Under the Olive Trees (تحت الزیتون). Photo courtesy of the artist.
Fresh off the back of “Before Freedom” at Frieze No. 9 Cork Street comes Palestinian-American activist and photographer Adam Rouhana’s next chapter, “Before Freedom Pt. 2,” celebrating the beauty and small joys of everyday life in his homeland. While our TVs and social media channels are flooded with urgent footage of terrible suffering in Gaza, Rouhana’s poignant photographs, which have also touched a wide audience on Instagram, offer subtly defiant scenes of resilience, community, and hope.
In a recent essay for the New York Times, Rouhana described annual trips to Palestine as a child that he began documenting with a camera. “In the news media, Palestinians were often portrayed as masked and violent or as disposable and lifeless: a faceless, miserable people,” he wrote, noting that these images make it “easier for the viewer to see Palestinians as silhouettes who have always been this way instead of as people with entire lives, histories, and dreams.”
He added: “Instead, what I photograph is unconditional communal love, a rootedness and sense of historical belonging in the land, and a daily generosity and collective spirit that I rarely experience in America.”
“Intension” at Copperfield More

The name of Chu Teh-Chun (1920–2014) should be no stranger to art market watchers. The late Franco-Chinese painter is best known for his poignant abstract paintings that marry the techniques of traditional Chinese painting and that of Western art. Over the last several years, his work has been commanding ever-higher prices at auction. There are more than 3,200 entries of auction transactions on Artnet’s Price Database, with an auction record of $29.5 million set in 2021 at a Sotheby’s Hong Kong sale.
Although one might catch a few individual works by the 20th-century master on view at an auction preview, a thorough survey of Chu’s work has been hard to come by despite the fact that his paintings have been widely exhibited in and collected by more than 50 museums worldwide.
The opportunity for a comprehensive review of his artistic practice is here now. Coinciding with the Venice Biennale, retrospective of Chu titled “In Nebula” is currently on show at Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore through June 30.
Chu Teh-Chun, La grace de l’aurore (2001). Courtesy of Chu Teh-Chun Foundation.
Organized with the support of the Chu Teh-Chun Foundation and thoughtfully curated by art historian Matthieu Poirier, this beautifully mounted exhibition in a vast space that was once a large swimming pool showcases some 50 exceptional works by the artist, including one on loan from the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, from across the different periods in his expansive career.
Installation view of “Chu Teh-Chun: In Nebula.” Courtesy of Chu Teh-Chun Foundation.
Poirier takes the audience on a time-travel journey to discover Chu’s past and the evolution of his oeuvre, which is presented in a reverse chronological timeline that blends seamlessly with the architecture of the space. Viewers’ downward, winding movement along the three levels of boardwalk to the base of the pool reflect a journey into the heart of Chu’s mystic paintings.
“Those paintings never let your eyes rest,” said Poirier during an introduction of the exhibition, noting that the artist was an abstract landscapist. “When Chu arrived in France, he carried his memories of the landscapes with him.”
Chu Teh-Chun, Nature Hivernal A (1985). Courtesy of Chu Teh-Chun Foundation.
Born in Baitu Zhen, Xiao district, Jiangsu province (now Anhui) in China into a family of art connoisseurs, Chu began learning calligraphy and Chinese poetry at a very young age. He then started painting under his father’s encouragement and in 1935, at the age of 15, he enrolled the Hangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, where he was first exposed to modern Western art from the teaching of artist-professors such as Lin Fengmian and Wu Dayu, both were educated in France. Around this time, he also met Wu Guanzhong, who went on to become one of the greatest painters of his time.
Installation view of “Chu Teh-Chun: In Nebula.” Courtesy of Chu Teh-Chun Foundation.
But Chu had to deal with hardships during the subsequent turbulent years of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese civil war between the Communists and the Kuomintang. He left the country to Taiwan in 1949 and eventually settled in Paris in 1955. He lost nearly all of his early works amid the turmoil. Following his settlement in Paris, despite continuing to create, Chu remained as a marginal figure.
Chu Teh-Chun, Composition n°228 (1966). Courtesy of Chu Teh-Chun Foundation.
“He was a quiet person, an introvert,” said Poirier, explaining why the artist was not very good at making himself the center of the spotlight, and hence a late boomer in his career. “He didn’t get his first retrospective until 1978. He was already 58,” noted the curator.
Chu Teh-Chun, Le 8 juillet (1976). Courtesy of Chu Teh-Chun Foundation.
The exhibition puts Chu’s works in context and as one walks further down to the bottom of what used to be a swimming pool, one can catch a glimpse of Chu’s evolution from the earliest figurative works available to the monumental paintings depicting not just an abstraction of landscape, but the depth of space conjured by light, time, colors, and brushstrokes.
“Chu Teh-Chun: In Nebula” is on view until June 30 at Fondazione Giorgio Cini, San Giorgio Maggiore Island, Venice.
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Sotheby’s has partnered with Art UK, a charity that provides online access to every public art collection in the United Kingdom, and 12 public museums to stage an exhibition that showcases the multicultural history and diversity of the nation’s art scene throughout the centuries.
“London: An Artistic Crossroads” is a free exhibition running until July 5, held at Sotheby’s New Bond Street location in the heart of the capital. It promises to bring together an incredible selection of artists who found inspiration, refuge, patronage, and influence within the U.K., including Piet Mondrian, Francis Bacon, Frank Bowling, and Magdalene Odundo.
Francis Bacon, Pope I (Study after Pope Innocent X by Diego Velázquez), (1951).Aberdeen City Council (Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums collections). Presented in 1956 by the Contemporary Art Society. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2024.
The exhibition has been designed as a counterpart to the National Gallery’s new National Treasures program, launched to celebrate its bicentenary this year. The initiative sees 12 masterpieces from the museum travel to institutions across the country, including Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus (1601) and Diego Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus (1647–51).
In mounting this new show, Sotheby’s has effectively done the reverse, by celebrating works of art that are to be found elsewhere across the nation (although there are two notable inclusions from London), as something of an advert for the strength of collections based far from the capital. It is the inaugural event in an ongoing partnership with Art UK.
“This exhibition brings together a dozen stunning artworks primarily from museums outside London, highlighting the treasures to be found in our regional collections,” Andrew Ellis, chief executive of Art UK, said. “It powerfully illustrates how the U.K.’s rich cultural heritage draws on creators and influences emanating from well beyond our shores.”
Showcasing the important contributions of immigrants and refugees is a key component of the show, which feels particularly pertinent in the wake of Brexit and the government’s implementation of “hostile environment” policies.
Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, Frances Howard, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox (ca. 1621). © Compton Verney, photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
The oldest work on display is a portrait of Frances Howard, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox (ca.1621) by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. The artist was among thousands of Flemish protestants who fled persecution in the Netherlands in the late 1560s. While he arrived in London as a child, he developed a distinctly Dutch style of painting that revolutionized English portraiture. The work is traveling from Compton Verney in Warwickshire.
Johann Zoffany was a neoclassical painter who completed his training in Germany and Italy before making his home in the U.K., where he found patronage among the aristocracy. He declared, “I am an Englishman, because in that country I found protection and encouragement.” His elaborate depiction of the collector Charles Towney, surrounded by friends and his considerable collection of books and antiquities, has been loaned by Towneley Hall Art Gallery & Museum in Burnley, Lancashire.
Johann Zoffany, Charles Townley and Friends in His Library at Park Street, Westminster (1782). © Towneley Hall Art Gallery & Museum, Burnley Borough Council / Bridgeman Images
More contemporary examples include Big Bird (1864) by abstractionist Frank Bowling, on loan from the Victoria Gallery and Museum in Liverpool. The artist moved to London from Guyana (then British Guiana) as a teenager and recalled his first visit to the National Gallery: “I was very struck by the British painters like John Constable, J.M.W. Turner and William Gainsborough, whose marvelous touch I was engaged by,” he said.
Bowling’s career is a prime example of the rich networks of influences that inform and enrich an arts ecosystem. He was deeply inspired by two other artists included in the show, Francis Bacon and Piet Mondrian, and was also a peer of Peter Blake, David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj (another featured artist). He has also influenced and supported subsequent generations of creative talent through his work as an educator.
“We are honored to be able to contribute to this important exhibition at Sotheby’s celebrating the major contribution that artists of African diaspora heritage have made to the British cultural landscape, and recognizing how London has had such a pivotal role in that process,” said Dr. Amanda Draper, the curator of art and exhibitions at the Victoria Gallery and Museum.
Magdalene Odundo, Tall Bottle (2010). School of Art, Museum and Galleries, Aberystwyth University.
Beyond painting, two examples of ceramics are included in the show. A bowl and a vase by Lucie Rie, who fled Nazi persecution in Vienna, has come from the Crafts Study Centre at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham. Rie is widely considered to be a trailblazer of British modernist ceramics.
Meanwhile, Tall Bottle (2010) by Magdalene Odundo has travelled from Aberystwyth University Art Museum. Odundo was brought up in Nairobi and Mombasa before studying in the U.K. and honing her craft in Nigeria and Kenya. She was celebrated with an O.B.E. in 2008.
“London: An Artistic Crossroads” runs through July 5 at Sotheby’s New Bond Street, London W1A 2AA.
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Just in time for the summer crowds to descend on the Eastern End of Long Island, Guild Hall in East Hampton has opened an intriguing show of textile art, organized by collector and art historian Estrellita Brodsky and Raul Martinez. The artists in it are all handpicked, mostly from her own collection.
“Spin A Yarn,” had its debut at Brodsky’s own nonprofit art space in Chelsea, the appointment-only “Another Space,” where she welcomed visitors and numerous student groups from nearby schools for educational tours during its four-month run (November 10, 2023-March 15, 2024). At Guild Hall, the show is open to the public with free admission and related workshops, through July 14.
“Spin A Yarn” examines artists’ interest in textile-making “as both subject and medium to reflect on social, political and environmental concerns,” according to a statement. Brodsky notes that while Western cultures have historically prioritized the written word, many societies, and particularly those in Latin America, have rich traditions of using threads, knots, and woven materials, as markers of identity and as a means of passing down information from one generation to another. The mostly fiber artwork on view is by more than two-dozen artists from different regions and periods.
In conversation, Brodsky noted that textiles have played an important role in preserving memories and traditions. “We explore the ways in which artists have built on rich textile traditions from pre-Hispanic cultures as precursors of geometric abstraction to present day contemporary artists who use embroidery and weaving techniques as a means of advocating for the protection of the environment as well as of indigenous communities,” she said.
Front: Dubreus Lherisson Blue Princess, (2018) Left: Mulyana Betty 10, (2022) Right: Chonon Bensho Wai (Farm), (2023) as part of “Spin A Yarn” at Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York.
The show includes work by Claudia Alarcón, Olga de Amaral, Tony Bechara, Chonon Bensho, Feliciano Centurión, DETEXT, Jorge Eielson, Mónica Giron, Sonia Gomes, Sheila Hicks, Huari Culture, Jessie Homer French, Randolpho Lamonier, Julio Le Parc, Dubreus Lherisson, Mulyana, Anna Perach, Alejandro Puente, Mónica Millán, Manfred Mohr, Sandra Monterroso, Societé Réaliste, Susan Spangenberg, Pedro Tineo, Georges Valris, Cecilia Vicuña, and Yvonne Wells.
One fascinating and unexpected aspect that Brodsky highlighted to me, during a walkthrough of the show in Chelsea, is the connection between computers and textiles as ways to store and code information. As the show’s statement explains, “the punch cards used in some looms to control the weaving process are the basis of computers’ binary logic.”
For example, Manfred Mohr’s P-159-B from 1974 shows a sequence of intricately stitched geometric forms that evoke “an unknown arcane language,” generated by algorithms. Mohr, a leader in the concept of “rational aesthetics,” underscores the “ancient relationship between textiles and mathematical computer programming,” Brodsky told me.
Front: DETEXT (Raul Martinez) Manstopper, (2015). Left to right: Mónica Millán, Inventar la piel (To invent skin), (2023); Claudia Alarcón, Tewok Tes P’ante (The Origin of the River), (2023), as part of “Spin A Yarn” at Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York.
Many of the works here show modern and contemporary artists using indigenous textile techniques to reflect on environmental, political, or social issues. For instance, Alejandro Puente and Sheila Hicks reference the feather works and weavings of ancient pre-Hispanic cultures to convey a newly imagined language of abstraction. Argentine artist Mónica Millán has worked with Guaraní communities in the town of Yataity del Guairá in Paraguay, and advocates for the preservation of Ao Po’i textile traditions.
Artists Jessie Homer French and Mónica Giron draw attention to the environmental crisis through their use of embroidery and knitting techniques that confront climate change and the loss of biodiversity. Cecilia Vicuña warns of the devastating effects of droughts while also bringing attention to ancient Mayan creation myths.
Feliciano Centurión, Untitled, from the series Familia (Family), (1990) as part of “Spin A Yarn” at Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York.
Other artists in the show use textiles as a way to explore issues ranging from gender discrimination and racial injustice to gun violence. For instance, Feliciano Centurión, an openly gay man, originally from Paraguay but working in Argentina, began producing embroidered and crocheted works on everyday household fabrics, placed alongside toy dinosaurs, to reference illness, sexuality, and death. (The toy dinosaurs reference extinction.)
Meanwhile, social justice is the focus of Yvonne Wells’s large quilt titled A Shadow Over Justice (2004). Both a utilitarian object and a means of memory keeping, the quilt confronts bias in America’s criminal justice system. And DETEXT’s Widowmaker (2020-2022) is a woven rug that upon closer examination is made with nearly 30,000 bullet casings, referencing both policing and the gun industry in the US.
Alejandro Puente Quipu “nudos,” (1971) as part of “Spin A Yarn” at Another Space in Chelsea, New York.
Another Space in Chelsea, where I saw this show, is a nonprofit established by Estrellita and her husband Daniel, dedicated to building recognition and international awareness to artists from Latin America and its diaspora within a global context.
Jessie Homer French, Westside Fault Zones Mapestry, (2018) as part of of “Spin A Yarn” at Another Space in Chelsea, New York.
Said Estrellita: “I am particularly excited to be partnering with Guild Hall in East Hampton, a museum in an area where the Latino community plays an important role and that is free to the public.”
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