On View

In the later category, she pointed to the work of photographer Marilyn Nance, famous for her work documenting African-American life and the African diaspora in New York (and beyond, though the works in this show are focused on New York City), as well as Hiram Maristany who grew up in East Harlem and regularly documented the lives of the close-knit Puerto Rican community.
Works by Hiram Maristany in “Greater New York.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Maristany was the official photographer of the activist group known as the Young Lords, Katrib noted. In addition to protests where they asserted their rights, the Lords were also involved in activities to support the East Harlem community, including organizing clothing drives and picking up trash.
Katrib pointed to a more contemporary documentary impulse in the work of Black Mass Publishing, a collective established in 2018. The group publishes zines and books of both new and archival content by Black artists aimed at fostering new conversations about Black cultural production.
Installation view of gallery devoted to Blackmass Publishing in “Greater New York.” Photo by Ben Davis.
In “Greater New York,’ one gallery, dubbed “Black Mass Publishing Study Hall,” features a library of zines and pamphlets to peruse.
Another work that seems to encapsulate New York City’s former gritty downtown days is the video of poet Diane Burns. Standing in front of trash and rubble-strewn empty lots, against a backdrop of ghostly tenement buildings, Burns is captured reciting her poem, Alphabet City Serenade, her voice looping in the galleries.
Video of Diane Burns, Poetry Spots: Diane Burns reads ‘Alphabet City Serenade’ (1989) in “Greater New York.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Burns, who was born in Kansas to a Chemehuevi father and an Anishinabe mother, ruminates on “Loisada” versus her life back home. “Hey man, can you spare a cigarette? Do you know of a place to sublet?,” she riffs.
Katrib pointed to Japanese-American artist Yuji Agematsu as using a mixture of both documentary and surrealism to convey his experience. zip:01.01.20 . . .12:31.20 (2020) is a massive but delicate wall-length work composed of a series of vitrines.
One of the cases from Yuji Agematsu, zip:01.01.20 . . .12:31.20 (2020). Photo by Ben Davis.
Inside each is a “calendar” with individual days portrayed as intact cellophane cigarette wrappers that serve as containers for the debris the artist gathered and placed in them on a particular day—chewed gum, bottle caps, scraps of paper—after having gathered them from the streets of New York.
“It’s like this calendar archive document, but it’s also very surreal and abstract,” says Katrib.
Works by G. Peter Jemison in “Greater New York.” Photo by Ben Davis.
The show has a focus on issues related to indigeneity. You see this, for instance, in the work of G. Peter Jemison, an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation of Indians. But it is also international in scope, incorporating the work of artists from Brazil, Iran, Lebanon, and Egypt, often touching on issues of attempted integration and feelings of estrangement.
The curatorial team also includes writer and curator Serubiri Moses, MoMA PS1 director Kate Fowle, and MoMA Latin American art curator Inés Katzenstein. After more than a year of lockdown and organizing—including Zoom studio visits with artists who were just minutes away—the show they have produced feels both timely and on point.
“The situation we’re in now is really just underscoring and underlining the things that artists were already dealing with,” says Katrib. “I think one of the biggest challenges was just the isolation, especially for the older generation of artists who were more at risk. We really wanted to respect and honor that New York is a city where different generations of artists can be together and support one another.”
“Greater New York” is on view at MoMA PS1 in New York through April 18, 2022. More

For all the criticisms of stodginess, it is a testament to the ongoing cultural significance of the Turner Prize—the U.K.’s most prestigious contemporary-art honor—that it continues to incite passionate analysis from aficionados and naysayers alike. Though historically a controversial event, recent years have seen increased fervor for upending the familiar formula, usually in the name of today’s most popular buzzword: “solidarity.” 
For instance, the 2019 finalists—Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, and Tai Shani—famously both shunned and welcomed the award with their joint acceptance of the prize, made as a “statement in the name of commonality, multiplicity, and solidarity.” 
Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, U.K., this year’s Turner Prize exhibition venue. © Garry Jones Photography.
In May 2020, Tate Britain doled out ten individual artists’ bursaries in lieu of a single winner and the customary group exhibition. Again, the lofty goal was to “help support a larger selection of artists through this period of profound disruption and uncertainty,” as Tate Britain announced in a press release. 
Now, in 2021, this turn toward the utopian continues, with this year’s iteration marking the first time the Turner Prize jury selected a shortlist consisting solely of artist collectives. Tate Britain has said that the nominees—Array Collective, Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.), Cooking Sections, Gentle/Radical, and Project Art Works—“reflect the solidarity and community demonstrated in response to the pandemic.”
Installation view of work by Gentle/Radical in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: Garry Jones.
Indeed, the fabric of all five collectives’ practices consists of various threads of social activism woven together through film, painting, installation, or sound. But the decision sparked backlash, with a chorus of think pieces (in ArtReview, Frieze, and elsewhere) lamenting the character of the 2021 Turner Prize. Nominee B.O.S.S. actually issued its own statement denouncing the Tate’s allegedly superficial commitment to social issues.
Installation view of work by Gentle/Radical in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: David Levene.
All of this preemptive brouhaha has finally culminated with the official opening of the Turner Prize exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, the U.K.’s 2021 City of Culture. The five collectives’ presentations stretch across four individual galleries, with the Welsh entrant, Gentle/Radical, serving as the curtain-raiser in an introductory space removed from its nominated peers. The community activists—not all made up of traditional artists—present a series of flags alongside a projection focused around Gorsedd bardic prayers, in a defiant post-colonial reclamation of Welsh culture.
Installation view of work by Cooking Sections in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: Doug Peters/PA Wire.
Elsewhere, the ultra-hot Cooking Sections, who just closed a stellar solo show at Tate Britain, somewhat lazily relies upon a reheat of that recent exhibition, once again examining the effects of salmon farming. Since this duo is concerned with how our food consumption impacts the climate emergency, why not shed light upon a new aspect of that complex and enormous issue, given the opportunity of this highly visible platform?
Installation view of work by B.O.S.S. in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: David Levene.
B.O.S.S. offers a dark room sparsely outfitted with a stark set of speakers paired with flowing banners animated by household fans placed on the floor beneath, all capped off with a black obsidian sphere on a plinth. A streamer announces that “Sound is the only system,” which comes across as a half-baked declaration: despite the conviction with which it is declared, the statement’s zeal is rendered moot by the absence of precise meaning. (If the installation underwhelms, it should be noted that B.O.S.S.’s public criticism also addressed the lack of adequate time for the group to prepare for the exhibition.)
Installation view of work by Project Art Works in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: Doug Peters/PA Wire.
Project Art Works, hailing from Hastings, restages a “typical” artist’s studio. Their intervention initially appears to be an ordinary creative space, with framed works hung on white walls. Yet the gallery’s conventional white-cube feel is interrupted by a smaller enclave, installed smack-dab in the center of the room, that houses an archive of over 4,000 works by neurodivergent artists. Project Art Work’s accomplishment is rooted in this sleight of hand, disarming the audience with the slick banality of the initial setting, which amplifies the revelation that neurodiverse creators are responsible for all of the art on view—thus making it clear that greater visibility and acceptance for such “disabilities” benefits culture at large.
Installation view of Project Art Works in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: Garry Jones.
Last but not least, the Belfast-based Array Collective, which focuses on social issues affecting Northern Ireland—including abortion rights, queer visibility, mental health, and gentrification—has created a makeshift pub which takes up the majority of their allotted gallery space in an installation that stands head and shoulders above their fellow nominees.
The colloquial “pub” dates back to 1859, a slang shortening of “public house.” Though that fact is not explicitly referenced in the exhibition text, the idea of a location built solely as a space for a community to come together looms large here. A three-channel video work is mounted on the far wall, with members of marginalized communities relating mythological stories with knee-slapping barroom humor. I was moved to tears by one portion describing LGBTQ+ persons living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Despite the horror of that history, tales of “Catholic fairies” and “Protestant fairies” who managed to actively identify and recover a sense of love, kindness, and community provided the most powerful moment during this year’s remarkable Turner Prize exhibition.
Installation view of work by Array Collective in the Turner Prize 2021 exhibition at the Herbert Art Museum and Gallery, Coventry. Photo: David Levene.
Pitting socially-minded activist collectives against each other could be perceived as a contest of moral superiority, particularly when staged during a moment in which use of the term “solidarity” has become near-meaningless in its ubiquity. But even if the concept of solidarity seems saccharine—and even arguably outdated at this point—the Turner Prize jury correctly identified the pulse of current art-making. By that measure, this is a successful exhibition. It should appeal not only to those interested in contemporary art, but also to those with a stake in discourses propelling critical change in society today.
“Turner Prize 2021” is on view at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry, U.K., September 29, 2021–January 12, 2022.
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Of the many era-defining societal shifts and inequities that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought into focus and accelerated, the change in the ways we use and navigate the metaverse are perhaps the least widely recognized and understood. Our dependence on the virtual realm seemed to swell overnight, as those who could moved their work to online rooms, minted NFTs, traded cryptocurrencies, and sent their avatars gaming with like-minded strangers. Only now are we realizing that this version of Web 3.0 being created has the potential to be as grim as the current moment in our physical world: For one, right-wing extremists recruiting and organizing in online quest games has very concrete ramifications in real life.
In his nine-part Metaverse Primer, updated in June 2021 in response to the effects of the pandemic, venture capitalist and former head of strategy for Amazon Matthew Ball offers this definition: “The Metaverse is an expansive network of persistent, real-time rendered 3-D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identity, objects, history, payments, and entitlements, and can be experienced synchronously by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence.” Or, to put it in simpler terms, “No one really expected the next generation of the internet would come from mobile gaming, and yet here we are.” That some of the most in-depth writing about this new reality comes from a venture capitalist says it all.
Nektarios Pappas performing The Last Judgement–Reloaded at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Photo: Emilios Charalambous.
“ECLIPSE,” the 7th Athens Biennale (AB7), cocurated by Ghanaian-American curator Larry Ossei-Mensah and Omsk Social Club—a Berlin-based group whose practice is anchored in speculative role-play gaming—under the artistic direction of Poka-Yio, homes in on questions surrounding the utopian promise of Web 3.0. It is up to us, this divergent curatorial team argues, to lay claim, create, meet, build, and thrive in those digital realms. It’s on us to queer the Metaverse.
Fittingly, the list of participating artists includes many individuals and collectives working under pseudonyms and exploring the possibilities of digital practices. Afro-Hungarian artist Huntrezz Janos delivered a digital performance titled Eclipsatrix Exuvia during the biennial’s opening weekend, her bejeweled, chimeric avatar twerking and spinning on a screen inside one of the exhibition’s venues, a former department store. Nascent, a Berlin-based duo founded in 2018, is showing a multipart work titled Temporal Secessionism.  A series of digital clocks installed on all floors of the abandoned store, the work keeps track of three different time-measuring systems: one is based on real-time Bitcoin transactions; one shows the consensus of time that syncs all online servers; and another, dubbed “healing time,” moves according to the frequency of broken quartz, the crystal used in analog clockwork. On the 3rd floor, the pseudo-company Hypercomf (brainchild of the Greek artists Ioannis Koliopoulos and Paola Palavidi) has set up an office environment, replete with ergonomic chairs, branded mugs, and indoor plants, and desks made of pressed plastic waste. Some of these elements are coated with organic matter to enable mycelium growth, possibly inviting strands capable of decomposing plastics. Mycelium also happens to be the name of a popular Bitcoin wallet.
Claude Eigan, Inner Saboteur II (2019), at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Emilios Charalambous.
Despite its digital-savvy focus, AB7 also raises issues concerning our fragile physical existence and the class and racial inequalities affecting it. The approach, however, is to address and activate viewers’ tacit and embodied knowledge, rather than beating them over the head with identity politics: the messages are communicated not discursively but instead appeal to viewers’ intuitions surrounding social hierarchies and racial divides. It’s portraiture in lieu of manifestos.
In fact, there is a dazzling amount of photography on view by artists who consider, claim, and reimagine the ways in which to represent nonconforming, disobedient, or other-ed bodies. A series of portraits of members of South-Africa’s LGBTQ community by Zanele Muholi is stunningly straightforward; Kayode Ojo’s glossy portraits are jarring in their rejection of representational tropes, a rallying cry to turn our (luscious, warm) backs on excessive consumerism in favor of a celebration of the unbranded self. Awol Erizku’s still lifes, populated with signifiers of Black culture, are blown up to cover entire walls in what used to be the department store’s sports section.
Andrew Roberts, RHYTHM RATTLESNAKE: The world ends with you, baby centipede (2020), at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Photo: Nysos Vasilopoulos.
There are numerous soundscapes and sound installations by artists, including Moor Mother, whose activist spoken-word and protest poetry, which deals with intersectional feminism, inherited trauma, and systemic racism, resonate through the main venue. An installation by the Belgian composer and artist Billy Bultheel, commissioned for AB7, fills the basement of the former Santaroza Courthouse in Dikaiosinis (or Justice) Square, which stood empty for 30 years. The biennial’s organizers initiated the building’s reopening to the public, as well as the cleanup of the small green lung—so scarce in Athens—that the square provides between two main thoroughfares.
Labor and exhaustion was one of the curators’ considerations, too, often implied via its actual remedy—an invitation to take a seat. A series of upcycled chairs made at an Athens workshop, commissioned by London-based designer Yinka Ilori as part of his program for people in addiction recovery, greets viewers on the department store’s first floor. (Ilori was enlisted to design ONX Studio in Athens, the Onassis Foundation’s new extended-reality center, slated to open in 2022). On the upper level, fantastical animal-headed furniture by Nuri Koerfer invites viewers to pause and sit on the sculptural works.
Ayesha Tan Jones performing The New Elementals at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Photo: Nysos Vasilopoulos.
In the biennial’s third venue, an abandoned office building, Miles Greenberg, who’s the youngest artist on view at 22, enthralls with the video work Late October (2021). A protégé of Marina Abramović, Greenberg edited footage from a seven-hour durational performance he staged Paris last year, in which seven Black performers (including himself), each representing a figure from Greek mythology, perch atop slowly revolving plinths. Treating the body as sculptural material, the 20-minute piece speaks of the erosion of both artifacts and empires.
Cajsa von Zeipel, Formula X (2020), at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery. Photo: Nysos Vasilopoulos.
But perhaps no other work captures the oscillation between the two realms we have come to create and exist in than Formula X (2021), a sculpture in silicone, rubber, and steel by Swedish artist Cajsa von Zeipel. Like a Mad Max: Fury Road amazon of the metaverse, a hyper-human pregnant figure is steering a three-wheel ATV into the unknown. Her bags are packed with diapers for her first baby and soon-to-be born second, and treats for her two dogs in tow, everything strapped onto her body or the vehicle with leather and rubber biker gear. The work’s dimensions are larger than life-size, just like the expectations and strain put on single mothers, not only during pandemic lockdowns. She is fierce and in control as she rides over sushi, which lodges between the tracks of the wheels. Or is this a projected avatar emerging from a deeply exhausted human existence?
The seventh Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE,” is on view at various venues throughout the city, September 24–November 28, 2021.
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Signs of fall have arrived in London. The air is brisk, leaves are beginning to change color, and a promenade through one of London’s royal parks leads to a parcours of contemporary sculpture. It can only mean one thing: Frieze Week is around the corner.
Now a yearly fixture teasing the arrival of the Frieze fairs in Regent’s Park, Frieze Sculpture opened to the public on September 14, a little later in the year than its usual summer opening due to ongoing complications relating to shipping. 
At the unveiling, Frieze London’s artistic director Eva Langret promised that Frieze and Frieze Masters, returning October 13–17 after a pandemic hiatus, will be back in force. The curator of the sculpture program, Clare Lilley (who is also the director of program at Yorkshire Sculpture Park), highlighted the global character of this year’s selection, with artists hailing from South America, South and North Africa, Indonesia, Pakistan, the U.S. and Canada, and Europe.
“I see exciting sculptural conversations across time and geography, and while many sculptures here relate to social and environmental concerns, there is much heightened color and dextrous handling of material, resulting in an overall sense that is celebratory,” Lilley said in a statement. “As we learn to live with the pandemic and emerge into public spaces, Frieze Sculpture 2021 allows people to come together in safety and with pleasure and is a tonic for the mind, body, and soul.”
Counterspace, fragment of Serpentine Pavilion 2021 for Frieze Sculpture 2021. Presented by Serpentine Galleries, London. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
The works, by 18 artists spanning three generations, range from soapstone skulls by Solange Pessoa to a quirky pineapple courtesy of Rose Wylie to Vanessa da Silva’s joyful steel-and-fiberglass figures, Muamba Grove.
One highlight is a fragment of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, a gathering table designed by Johannesburg architectural studio Counterspace; its inclusion marks the first time one of the U.K.’s public institutions has taken part in the Frieze initiative (the other works are presented by commercial galleries). By extending the pavilion’s tendrils outside of its traditional home in Hyde Park, the installation is suggestive of themes relating to migration and displacement. Another notable entry is artist-preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos’s Biosignature Preservation (2019), a repurposing of the security fence erected by the U.S. Embassy in Oslo after 9/11 that recalls contorted iron rebar left after bombings or natural disaster.
Frieze Sculpture is on view at the English Gardens in Regent’s Park, London, through October 31. See more images below.
Annie Morris, Stack 9, Ultramarine Blue (2021), presented by Timothy Taylor. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Anthony Caro, Palanquin (1987/1991), presented by New Art Centre. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Biosignature Preservation (2019), presented by Holtermann Fine Art. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Isamu Noguchi, Play Sculpture, ca. 1965/ca. 1980 (fabricated 2021), presented by White Cube. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Vanessa da Silva, Muamba Grove #1, #3, and #4 (2019), presented by Galeria Duarte Sequeira. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Gisela Colón, Quantum Shift (Parabolic Monolith Sirius Titanium) (2021), presented by Gavlak. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Ibrahim El-Salahi, Meditation Tree (2018), presented by Vigo Gallery. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Tatiana Wolska, Untitled (module 1 and 2) (2019), presented by L’Etrangère and Irène Laub Gallery. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Solange Pessoa, Untitled, from “Skull” series (2016), presented by Mendes Wood DM. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Stoyan Dechev, Event Horizon (2019), presented by Anca Poterasu Gallery. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Rose Wylie, Pineapple (2020), presented by David Zwirner. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
Yunizar, Induk Monster (Mother Monster) (2017), presented by Gajah Gallery. Photo: Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.

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If you thought $14 was an expensive price for avocado toast at your local cafe, how about $2.9 million (€2.5 million)?
That’s the cost of German artist Tim Bengel’s Who Wants to Live Forever?, a pure gold sculpture cast from an avocado on a bagel. 
The artwork, which scans as a mash-up of Maurizio Cattelan’s gold toilet (America [2016]) and duct-taped banana (Comedian [2019]), is up for sale now, via Galerie Rother. The piece will make its public debut tomorrow for Berlin Art Week, going on view at a local restaurant, the aptly-named Avocado Club.
The goal of Who Wants to Live Forever?, Bengel explained in a press release, was to “freeze the zeitgeist.” For him, avocados exist as a status symbol at the crossroads of several trends: millennial indulgence, the clean eating boom, and the global fruit industry’s impact on the environment.
Artist Tim Bengel with his sculpture. Courtesy of the artist.
He sees an analogy between his creation and the Greek myth of King Midas, who was granted his wish to turn anything into gold with a single touch, only to later die from starvation. “Something similar is happening today in turbo-capitalism,” Bengel’s press release reads, “which, in its greed for profit maximization, is destroying its own participants.”
To make the piece, the 29-year-old artist 3D-scanned 27 different pieces of his lunch: five avocado wedges, tomato slices, and onion rings; 10 arugula leaves; and two halves of pumpkin bagel. He then cast each piece in 18-carat gold and reassembled them as a sandwich. 
Altogether, the object weighs more than 26 pounds—which is roughly equivalent to an adult Corgi (albeit with a fraction of the charm). Galerie Rother even designed a specialized case to display the thing, which alone cost $47,000 (€40,000), according to German newspaper Stuttgart News.
In a statement, dealer Christian Rother said he believes the work could become “an icon of our time.”

“[The sculpture] will hopefully make big waves like the shredded Banksy or the diamond-covered skull by Damien Hirst,” Bengel told the news outlet.
The young artist first rose to fame around 2017, when his meticulous paintings, made by gluing gold leaf and colored sand to canvases, went viral online. For Berlin Art Week in 2019, he built an ominous skull-shaped garden from heather shrubs and marble gravestones.
Bengel’s avocado sculpture will make its way stateside later this year, arriving for Miami Art Week in December.
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In her quest to transcend her physical body and live forever, Marina Abramović has done a lot of weird stuff.
Throughout her career, this pioneer of durational performance art has pushed the limits of her body and mind, withstanding pain, exhaustion, and bodily harm in her pursuit of emotional and spiritual transformation—from a three-month sojourn across the Great Wall of China with her former partner Ulay in 1988 to her 700-hour-long performance The Artist Is Present at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2010.
But in recent years, she has been experimenting with different media in an effort to bestow her work an afterlife beyond her own. Some have been more successful than others. (I’ve locked eyes with a blank-faced hologram of the artist at the Serpentine Galleries, and even eaten her in macaron form). But in her latest effort to surpass this mortal coil, the Serbian artist has partnered with the Internet-based file transfer service WeTransfer on an immersive experience in London.
Yes, you read that right. Well, technically it’s WePresent, which is the company’s lesser-known digital arts platform, but you get the idea, and together they have created a pop-up Marina Abramović experience. Called “Traces,” the exhibition is set in the Old Truman Brewery in London’s vibrant Shoreditch neighborhood and features five rooms, each of which commemorates an object that has been important to her life and work over the past five decades.
General view at the preview of ‘Traces’ by Marina Abramovic and WePresent by WeTransfer, at Old Truman Brewery in London. Photo by David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for WePresent/WeTransfer.
The first room is dedicated to the Rose of Jericho, a desert plant that Abramović says embodies her faith in the power of life. Tripping on through to the second room, visitors will be met with a sure-to-be-popular moving-light show inspired by Van Gogh’s Starry Night. (The artist says the painting expresses something of her understanding of the cosmos, but even the Abramović fans among us can’t help being a little skeptical that this is not an effort to jump on the immersive Van Gogh bandwagon.)
In the third room, visitors sit around a big hunk of ancient quartz to experience Abramović’s 1991 work Crystal Cinema. Next, a bright room commemorates Susan Sontag’s crucial book-length essay Regarding the Pain of Others; which the artist said helped cultivate her sensitivity to human pain. Finally, in a room dedicated to a rock from Mars, visitors can listen to a recording of her 2015 work reciting the names of 10,000 stars (within an installation that I can’t help but note resembles another much-hyped artist’s work: Yayoi Kusama’s Narcissus Balls).
Installation view, Marina Abramović, “Traces.” Photo by Naomi Rea.
In a wide-ranging discussion with Tim Marlow, the director of London’s Royal Academy, which will hold a postponed retrospective exhibition with the artist in 2023, Abramović opened up about her interest in building her legacy. “What is incredibly powerful about performance is that it is immaterial. There’s nothing there except for the memory of the audience left,” Abramović said, adding that it is difficult to maintain or cherish the energy of the work outside of these memories.
While some of her performances have been photographed, and she has flirted with the idea of works being re-performed after her death—“Your work is not yours anymore, you give it up to the universe,” she said—she noted that she would “never” give permission for someone to repeat some of her most dangerous pieces, such as Rhythm 0, a risky performance the artist undertook at Studio Morra in Naples in 1974, when she was just 23: for six hours, she invited visitors to use any number of 72 objects she had laid out on a table, which ranged from feathers to a saw, on her body in any way they chose. 
Installation view, Marina Abramović, “Traces.” Photo by Naomi Rea.
“I’m going to die one day—what do you do?” she said. “The digital is one solution, and mixed reality is another.” A digital version of the experience will run concurrently on WePresent (Abramović has been a guest curator on the platform for a year), alongside spotlights on five emerging performance artists and a digital manifestation of her masterclass, the Abramović Method.
The artist’s other recent experiments have included working in different styles of performance, such as opera—as in 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, which debuted in Munich last year—and creating an immersive cinematic experience of the work, Seven Deaths, which is currently on view at Lisson Gallery.
Marina Ambramović’s “Traces” is on view through September 12 at the Old Truman Brewery, 91 Brick Lane, London. Tickets can be booked for free online.
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Street art and collectibles sensation–turned art market darling KAWS (born Brian Donnelly) unveiled his latest work at New York’s Rockefeller Center this week: an 18-foot-tall bronze sculpture perched above the ice skating rink where the famed Christmas tree lives during the holidays.
The piece, commissioned for the occasion, is titled SHARE, and features KAWS’s Mickey Mouse-like “Companion” character carrying a miniature “BFF” figure, a furry Elmo knockoff the artist first introduced in 2016. Both have the artist’s signature crossed-out eyes. The design was first introduced as a series of vinyl figurines in February 2020.
When deciding what work to create for the public art exhibition, “I was thinking about what this area means to me,” Donnelly said at the sculpture’s unveiling. “The verticality of all the architecture and visiting Rockefeller Center as a kid and looking up and being overwhelmed, I wanted a sculpture that could relate to those feelings.”
The artist KAWS unveils his new sculpture SHARE at Rockefeller Center in New York. The 18-foot-tall bronze figure features two of the artist’s iconic motifs, “COMPANION” and “BFF.” Photo by Diane Bondareff, courtesy of AP Images for Tishman Speyer.
“KAWS has created a universal language for anyone who interacts with his instantly recognizable figures,” E. B. Kelly, Tishman Speyer’s managing director overseeing Rockefeller Center, said in a statement. “KAWS’s work subverts expectations while feeling both familiar and stylized.”
Known for his cartoon aesthetic that draws on pop culture references from the Smurfs to the Simpsons, Donnelly is currently the subject of his first New York museum show, “KAWS: What Party,” on view at the Brooklyn Museum through September 5.
“What motivates me? I think communication and having a dialogue with people and having opportunities to put my work into the world,” the artist said, describing his work as “optimistic, personal, [and] inviting.”
In SHARE, the “Companion” is meant to represent a sense of sadness, fear, and isolation, while the smaller “BFF” doll it carries suggest the comfort that so many of us need.
“With the city opening up again and up coming out of the last year that we did, I feel like it’s a really important time to have public art,” Donnelly added.
See more photos of the work below.
KAWS, SHARE at Rockefeller Center, New York. Photo by Diane Bondareff, courtesy of AP Images for Tishman Speyer.
KAWS, SHARE at Rockefeller Center, New York. Photo by Diane Bondareff, courtesy of AP Images for Tishman Speyer.
KAWS, SHARE at Rockefeller Center, New York. Photo by Diane Bondareff, courtesy of AP Images for Tishman Speyer.
KAWS, SHARE at Rockefeller Center, New York. Photo courtesy of AP Images for Tishman Speyer.
The artist Brian Donnelly, better known as KAWS, unveils his new sculpture SHARE at Rockefeller Center in New York. The 18-foot-tall bronze figure features two of the artist’s iconic motifs, “COMPANION” and “BFF.” Photo by Diane Bondareff, courtesy of AP Images for Tishman Speyer.
“KAWS: SHARE” is on view at Rockefeller Center, 45 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, August 11–October 8, 2021.
“KAWS: What Party” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, February 26–September 5, 2021.
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Many artists throughout history have claimed some sort of otherworldly inspiration (the muses, for instance). But the visionary American artist Paulina Peavy (1901–1999) may be one of the only to attribute her talents to communications with a U.F.O.—specifically one named Lacamo. 
During Peavy’s lifetime, she enjoyed many early successes, including showing with Los Angeles’s Stendahl Gallery, studying with Hans Hoffman, and exhibiting work at the opening of the San Francisco Museum of Art—all before falling into art world obscurity.
The new exhibition “Paulina Peavy: An Etherian Channeler,” on view at the Beyond Baroque art center in Venice Beach, is hoping to reintroduce Peavy as a powerful and one-of-a-kind creative force in the nascent southern California art scene of a century ago. 
Paulina Peavy, Untitled (circa 1930s–1980s). Courtesy of Beyond Baroque and the Paulina Peavy Estate.
The fascinating show, curated by Laura Whitcomb, marks the first exhibition of Peavy’s work on the West Coast in 75 years, and traces her myriad creations —paintings, films, drawings, intricate masks—from the 1930s into the 1980s. Various ephemera related to theosophy and astroculture are also on view in a series of vitrines, along with some of Peavy’s own writings, which detail the elaborate occultist belief systems that informed her work. 
Even before UFOs got involved (and we’ll get to that later), Peavy’s story was one against the odds. She was born in Colorado to a miner father and a Swedish immigrant mother. In 1906, the family moved to Portland in a covered wagon following the Oregon Trail. Peavy’s mother would die tragically a few years later. In spite of the gender conventions of the time and her own humble origins, Peavy would attend Oregon State College (now Oregon State University), studying art with Farley Doty McLouth and Marjorie Baltzell. After winning fourth place in a national competition hosted by the Art Students League in New York, Peavy was accepted to the Chouinard Art Institute to study with Hans Hofmann. 
Paulina Peavy holding masks. Photo by Sam Vandivert. Courtesy of Beyond Baroque.
In the 1920s, Peavy began to play a pivotal role in the emerging West Coast art scene. She established the Paulina Peavy Gallery, which also functioned as a salon and school, hosting classes for the Los Angeles Art Students League. Like many other artists of the age, Peavy had interests in the supernatural and was loosely affiliated with the occultist art group the Group of Eight, as well as the Synchromists and a group of West Coast surrealists led by artist Lorser Feitelson.
But her true moment of breakthrough came in 1932, when Peavy, by now the mother of two and in the midst of a divorce, attended a seance at the Santa Ana home of Ida L. Ewing, a pastor of the National Federation of Spiritual Science. During the seance, Peavy claimed to have encountered a discarnate entity she called Lacamo, which she later described as a “wondrous ovoid-shaped UFO.”  It was an event that would have a profound impact on Peavy and her work for the rest of her life—because Lacamo, she said, revealed great universal truths which she attempted to convey through her art. (She sometimes co-signed her works with Lacamo.) 
Paulina Peavy, Untitled (circa 1980). Courtesy of Beyond Baroque and the Paulina Peavy Estate.
At the core of these revelations was a complex cosmology consisting of 12,000-year cycles with 3,000-year seasons. The summer of these seasons harkened a kind of utopia in which human beings transcended the limits of their earthly bodies to become spirits, freed from their sexes and entering “one-gender perfection,” as well as a singular cosmic race. 
She also looked to other artists for inspiration. Peavy was fascinated by the Mexican muralists, particularly José Clemente Orozco who also shared a deep interest in hermetic and indigenous traditions, particularly philosopher José Vasconcelos’s belief that a great cosmic race would be born out of the Americas (Peavy exhibited 30 of her paintings at the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-40, where Diego Rivera exhibited mural work. She also painted a 14-foot mural titled The Eternal Supper, depicting a “Last Supper” filled with androgynous, racially ambiguous figures for the 1939 San Francisco Exposition.)
In numerous drawings on view in the exhibition, one sees Peavy alluding to pyramidal shapes and the icon of the Pharaoh, an image that would remain central to her visual lexicon. Within her complex cosmology, the Egyptian era stood as paramount, but one can also see these forms as drawings from the Maya and Aztec lineages heralded by the muralists. 
Paulina Peavy, Untitled (circa 1930s–1980s). Courtesy of Beyond Baroque and the Paulina Peavy Estate.
Undoubtedly, the most striking part of the exhibition are Peavy’s paintings, in which androgynous faces appear against darkened foregrounds, veils and wisps of colors hauntingly hovering above. For Peavy, who didn’t title or date her works, these paintings were ongoing revelations, and many are the result of 50 years of experimentation. Starting in the 1930s, Peavy employed a signature technique of layering translucent colors, then later, in the 1970s and ‘80s, she often returned to these paintings adding abstract crystal shapes that she believed would make viewers’ more receptive to transcendence and Lacomo’s unearthly wisdom. 
“She was instructed [by Lacomo] that her painting could change viewers’ neural pathways so that the viewer could become, over time, a receiver. In other words, the paintings were meant to increase neuroplasticity that would make viewers more psychic and more receptive as channelers themselves,” said Whitcomb. 
Paulina Peavy, Ghazi Khan (circa 1950s). Courtesy of Beyond Baroque and the Paulina Peavy estate.
Another fascinating portion of the exhibition includes a collection of intricately adorned masks that offer a window into Peavy’s practice as a channeler. As art objects, these many-layered masks, which she would wear while communicating with Lacamo, straddle both Surrealist objects and indigenous traditions. As with many women artists before her, Peavy also worked in costume design. In college, she had drawn Surrealist costumes for Oregon State’s newspaper. Later, in New York, she helped support herself by making costume designs for a fashion house. 
Still, everything Peavy created was primarily intended to celebrate her belief system. “Paulina considered herself a philosopher and wrote a number of manuscripts, but most poignantly made films which could elucidate her cosmology,” said exhibition curator Laura Whitcomb. Yet, in her time, these beliefs cast Peavy out of the mainstream art world.
“She has this incredible pedigree where she showed with Delphic Studios—Alma Reed’s gallery—and alongside Agnes Pelton. Peavy was articulate, intelligent, very well educated in the arts, but when she identified her discarnate entity Lacomo, in the aftermath of the war, when there was this fear and anxiety over the UFO phenomenon and the Roswell incident, everyone dropped her and thought she was absolutely crazy,” explained Whitcomb. “These were dangerous ideas to be affiliated with and could get you in a lot of trouble, even on an FBI list.”
Peavy at work in her studio. Courtesy of Beyond Baroque.
Peavy made her way henceforth by selling her work, not through galleries but through Albert Bender’s Space Review, one of the most important periodicals of UFO culture of the era, and showing work in astroculture conventions. “She became something of an astroculture celebrity,” said Whitcomb. “She realized the art world was very fearful.” 
Now, times have changed and spiritualist women artists such as Hilma af Klint, Georgiana Houghton, and Agnes Pelton are widely celebrated. “In the lead up to the Second World War, many artists were experimenting with the occult—Artaud was casting spells against Hitler. And the past years have been very scary,” said Whitcomb. “I feel like recent interest in the occult had to do with creating a cosmic balance and then we’re reminded of artists’ roles as shamans.” 
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