On View

A legendary figure who fought against and transformed the rigidity of the art world, French-American sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle has finally received a well-earned U.S. reception honoring her trailblazing artwork at MoMA PS1.
During her five decade-long career, the French-born, New York City-raised artist fearlessly defied categorical constraints to explore a boundless artistic practice. And the MoMA PS1 exhibition, underwritten by Swiss luxury skincare house La Prairie and entitled “Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life,” over 200 works spanning sculpture, drawings, video, and more reveal the vast expanse of Saint Phalle’s imagination and a steadfast dedication to her craft.
Niki de Saint Phalle, L’Estrella Carta No. XVII (The Star) (1997). © 2021 Niki Charitable Art Foundation.
As a child, Saint Phalle was subjected to a violent and tumultuous household. Deeply rooted trauma stemming from emotional and physical abuse would remain with Saint Phalle throughout her entire life. But rather than letting it swallow her, Saint Phalle channeled tragedy into an artistic practice.
At her psychiatrist’s recommendation, she began to translate the lingering pain of her early life into paintings. With the intention of creating joy, she began to adopt a visual vocabulary of almost childlike iconography, using a distinct palette of primary colors to build worlds of optimism and hope. 
From the onset, Saint Phalle’s practice explored human complexities. She welcomed hard-hitting subject matter, closely analyzing, for example, the treatment of women in society, and sought to transform and transcend these themes into a utopian existence.
In this way, Saint Phalle gifted herself a form of escapism from the sadness she carried. Play would also remain at the heart of Saint Phalle’s work throughout the entirety of her career, something she acknowledged kept her from falling into the pitfalls of depression. Though many in the mainstream art world would reject inviting in such a concept, for fear of not being taken seriously, Saint Phalle brilliantly adopted frivolity as a mechanism by which to connect with audiences around the world. 
Niki de Saint Phalle, La fontaine Stravinsky (c. 1983). Photo: Green Moon Marketing. © 2021 Niki Charitable Art Foundation.
From the onset of her public life, Saint Phalle was unafraid to rebel against the expectations placed upon women. Called by Gloria Steinem “the first free woman I have ever seen,” her practice was purposefully loud and unapologetic. Carving out a lane for herself during the 1950s was no easy feat. Women at this time were both explicitly and implicitly instructed to take up little space, remain submissive to their male counterparts, marry young and live for the sole purpose of producing children and taking care of the home.
Though Saint Phalle began her adult life entering into the roles of wife and mother, she would reclaim her life through her artistic practice. She soon found herself part of a close-knit artist community made up of almost entirely men, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Jean Tinguely, who would become her second husband. 
Though Saint Phalle first began garnering attention for “Tirs,” a body of paintings produced by firing a gun at plaster reliefs that released pockets of paint, her work would be cemented into the iconography of art history via the “Nanas” series. As female-inspired figures with curvy, exaggerated bodies, Saint Phalle’s “Nanas” looked toward art history and the ways in which women have been depicted since ancient times, and additionally looked to dismantle notions of the female form as a kind of object. The “Nanas” were eye-catching, bold, and highly memorable, nurturing an ongoing dialogue.
Niki de Saint Phalle, “Mini Nana maison” (c. 1968). © 2021 Niki Charitable Art Foundation.
A key aspect of the “Nanas” that existed elsewhere in Saint Phalle’s practice is a “disarming simplicity,” a term coined by Ruba Katrib, curator of “Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life.” The undertones of the artist’s work were always far more complex than what the visual language might offer. Saint Phalle did not want to isolate audiences with complexities; rather, she invited the masses to enjoy her work as a shared human experience. “Her Nanas confront Western standards of femininity and decorum: they are brash, ecstatic, and embrace sexuality,” noted Katrib, in a statement from La Prairie. “She created her Nanas at such a large scale specifically so that they could dominate – literally tower over – men. Saint Phalle was also an iconoclast in her personal style and way of life.”
Though always intrinsically a part of Saint Phalle’s work, political and social issues would become more obviously woven into the artist’s work toward the latter part of her career. 
Niki de Saint Phalle, book cover of AIDS, You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands (1986). Photo: NCAF Archives. © 2021 Niki Charitable Art Foundation.
During the 1980s, as AIDS enveloped her community, Saint Phalle used her established platform to create work that directly called out the systems at play for insufficiently addressing the crisis.
Much of the work she would create at this time and in the decades until her death in 2002 feel astoundingly contemporary, especially as climate change, inadequate social and political leadership, and corruption remain crucial issues. 
La Prairie’s Nighttime Oil from the Skin Caviar collection. Photo courtesy La Prairie.
La Prairie’s involvement in “Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life” is a seamless fit for the brand, which has  taken inspiration from Niki de Saint Phalle’s monumental career since 1982, when the La Prairie team first encountered her work—and her compelling use of cobalt blue, which she once described as “the color of joy and luck”—in a shared New York design studio.
With an oeuvre of work that welcomed many forms of creating as a means to self-fund her more ambitious projects, Saint Phalle was, at the time, working on producing her own perfume, Flacon de Parfum. From then on, the cobalt blue of Saint Phalle’s perfume bottle would go on to serve as the direct inspiration for the color of La Prairie’s iconic Skin Caviar Collection. This Fall, the iconic collection goes beyond lifting and firming, and journeys into the depths of the Cobalt Night with the Skin Caviar Nighttime Oil, imbued with Caviar Retinol. An innovative, Bauhaus-inspired, double-glass encasement houses and protects an elusive and powerful new ingredient—Caviar Retinol—derived from La Prairie’s legendary Swiss caviar extract. Niki de Saint Phalle committed her life toward progressivism, so too has La Prairie demonstrated an unwavering duty to pioneering discoveries. 
For more content, see the below links. 
Art Basel x NikiLa Prairie x MoMA PS1: “Encountering Niki” Art TalkLA Prairie on Niki de Saint Phalle
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Michelangelo’s famed Sistine Chapel is coming to cities across the U.S. thanks to high-resolution, nearly full-scale reproductions of the artist’s famed frescoes.
“Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition” has been touring the globe since 2015, and previously went on view in New York beneath the soaring ribbed ceiling of Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus at the World Trade Center in 2017, under the title “Up Close: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.”
The latest iteration of the show, which has opened in Chicago, San Antonio, and Charlotte, North Carolina, and will soon be back in New York, seems to have been retooled to capitalize on the newfound popularity of the runaway hit “Immersive Van Gogh.”
The earlier chapel presentation struck a scholarly note, with detailed wall texts identifying the figures in the paintings. And despite the Oculus’s location inside a mall, the brightly lit space recalled the classic white cube gallery. More

In 2018, Chinese-Indonesian art collector Budi Tek announced an unprecedented partnership with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) that effectively granted the museum—vis-a-vis a dedicated foundation—co-ownership of his vaunted collection of contemporary Chinese art.
Now, for the first time, a selection of art from that trove is on view at LACMA. Twenty pieces from Tek’s collection make up the new exhibition “Legacies of Exchange,” including works by Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, and Qiu Anxiong, among others.
The show “highlights works that relate to cross-cultural exchange, both recent and historical, between China and the West,” said Susanna Ferrell, LACMA’s assistant curator of Chinese Art who organized the show, in a statement.
The first of the show’s two sections brings together examples of Chinese artists in conversation with historical European paintings. In a 2006 canvas, for instance, Zhou Tiehai reimagines Jacopo Palma’s Venus and Cupid with the mascot for Camel cigarettes standing in for the Roman Goddess. In a 1997 painting, Yue Minjun recreates the central young girl in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas as a hysterical pink man.
The second half of the exhibition, meanwhile, looks at the ways in which artists have appropriated the language of commercial advertising in their work, such as in Huang Yong Ping’s 1997 installation Da Xian: The Doomsday. The piece comprises a trio of larger-than-life porcelain bowls filled with boxes of cereal that all give the same expiration date: July 1, 1997, the day of Hong Kong’s handover to China.
Yue Minjun, Infanta (1997). © Yue Minjun. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
A prominent entrepreneur, Tek began collecting art in 2004. By 2014, he had amassed a personal collection of more than 1,000 pieces and founded a 9,000-square-foot private institution—the Yuz Museum in Shanghai—to house it all. Then came an unfortunate turn: The following year, Tek was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Just as quickly as his museum opened its doors, Tek was forced to decide its long-term future. After China denied attempts to make the Yuz Museum public, Tek turned to Michael Govan, LACMA’s CEO and director, with an alternative idea. Their eventual collaboration yielded a new foundation to oversee the collection, which would live in China but otherwise travel between LACMA and the Yuz museum for temporary exhibitions.
Likewise, the foundation is governed by a board of trustees made up equally of representatives from LACMA and the Yuz Museum.
“I said to Michael Govan, ‘Now we are like a husband and wife. You don’t vote by saying I’m one percent bigger than you—you can’t outvote someone,’” Tek told Artnet News in 2018.
The first fruits of the partnership came in the form of “In Production: Art and the Studio System,” an exhibition of works from LACMA’s collection that brought in over 20,000 visitors to the Yuz Museum in 2019. 
See more images from “Legacies of Exchange” below.
Installation view of “Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021. Courtesy of LACMA.
Wang Guangyi, Joseph Beuys’ Dead Hare (1994). © Wang Guangyi. Photo: Arnold Lee, Dijon Yellow Imaging.
Installation view of “Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021. Courtesy of LACMA.
Qiu Anxiong, The Doubter 2010). © Qiu Anxiong. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Wang.
Installation view of “Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021. Courtesy of LACMA.
“Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation” is on view now through March 13, 2022 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
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The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris has opened a new solo show featuring works by Damien Hirst, making it his first museum show in France.
The artist, best known for making artworks out of dissected sharks, pill cabinets, and suspended animals, recently made a return to painting to realize a 107-piece series of canvases featuring flowering cherry blossoms inspired by Pointillism and Impressionism.
Thirty of the works are now on view at Cartier’s Paris-based foundation through next January.
The works present branches laden with blossoms in white, maroon, pink, and green, all depicted in short, thick brushstrokes with elements of gestural painting that nod to Action Painting. More

This week, the Korean public got its first chance to see a smattering of artworks from the multi-billion-dollar collection amassed by the late Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee. 
Two shows dedicated to Lee’s former possessions went on view at major venues in Seoul Wednesday, July 21. The events marked the first time that any pieces from his collection have gone on public display since being conferred to two institutions in April. 
The National Museum of Korea unveiled a presentation of historical artifacts from the Lee collection, including 28 pieces designated by the state as National Treasures. The 77 objects on view represent just a fraction of the more than 21,600 items donated to the institution by Lee’s heirs. 
Meanwhile, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) opened an exhibition of 58 Modern and contemporary paintings and sculptures by 34 Korean artists selected from the almost 1,500 artworks gifted from the Lee collection. 
Jeong Seon, Clearing after Rain on Mount Inwang (1751). Courtesy of the National Museum of Korea.
“We selected items that have artistic and historic value for this exhibition,” National Museum curator Lee Soo-kyung said during a press preview, according to the Korea Herald. “Our main purpose is to show the characteristics of Lee Kun-hee’s collection.”
On view in the two-month-long National Museum exhibition are rare examples of paintings, porcelain, metal statues, and wooden furniture dating from the prehistoric era to the early 20th century. The highlight of the group is Clearing after Rain on Mount Inwang, a 1751 landscape painting by Joseon-period artist Jeong Seo. It’s thought to be the Samsung chairman’s first major art purchase.
“A large part of the 1,488 artworks donated to our museum from Lee’s collection is Modern art, which our museum has a shortage of,” Park Mi-hwa, curator of the MMCA exhibition, explained in a preview of that institution’s show.
“Accordingly, for the first of our special exhibitions featuring the donated Lee collection, we selected Modern art pieces by Korea’s most popular artists.” Among those represented in the exhibition are landscape painter Byeon Gwansik, abstractionist Kim Whanki, and sculptor Kwon Jinkyu.
The historic gifts to the two museums this spring ended a months’-long debate about the fate of the more than 23,000 works of art following Lee’s death in October of 2020.

MMCA 이건희컬렉션 특별전: 한국미술명작국립현대미술관 서울2021. 7. 21. ~ 2022. 3. 13.
MMCA Lee Kun-hee Collection: Masterpieces of Korean Art MMCA Seoul21. Jul. 2021 ~ 13. Mar. 2022 pic.twitter.com/gVnh6rQK2c
— 국립현대미술관 (@MMCAKOREA) July 20, 2021

Media outlets had previously speculated that Lee’s heirs, including his son Lee Jae-yong and widow Hong Ra-hee, might sell some of the prized artworks to international buyers in order to cover the $11 billion (₩12.5 trillion) inheritance tax bill on the $20 billion (₩ 22 trillion) fortune the chairman left behind.
Ultimately, the heirs chose to keep the collection in the country, distributing its pieces among state institutions, including the National Museum, MMCA, and the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art.
But the artworks, owned by the state, won’t stay in these institutions for long. Earlier this month, the South Korean minister of culture, sports, and tourism, announced plans to build a new museum solely dedicated to the Lee collection. 
Reservations to see the National Museum show are booked for the next month, a spokesperson for the museum told the Herald.
Tickets to see the MMCA show aren’t quite as hard to get. There, reservations are unavailable through early August, per Korea JoongAng Daily. 
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In 1962, Joseph E. Yoakum had a dream that told him to make drawings. 
He was 71 then, a retired veteran and one-time circus hand living in Chicago. He had no experience making art. But for the next decade of his life—his last, it would turn out—drawing was what he did, churning out some 2,000 wondrous pieces in the process. 
Most came in the form of dreamy landscapes, tethered equally to the natural world and the artist’s own fantastical one: scalloped mountains and pristine pools of water, forests that look like heads of romanesco, and winding roads that disappear into the horizon line. A sense of yearning pervades it all.
The old adage about the Velvet Underground—that only 10,000 people bought their first album, but that every one of them started a band—also applies to Yoakum. Not many people saw his drawings, but those who did came away as immediate and lifelong fans.  
That was certainly the case with Roger Brown, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum, and Ray Yoshida—all members of the influential group of Chicago Imagists, the Hairy Who, who were among Yoakum’s most ardent admirers since meeting the self-taught artist in 1968. (Brown would later compare their discovery of Yoakum to Picasso’s discovery of Henri Rousseau.)
Now, thanks in large part to significant loans from that group, others will get the chance to fall in love with Yoakum’s work, too. A major survey of the late artist’s output—the largest ever mounted—is on view now at the Art Institute of Chicago, with subsequent stops at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Menil Collection in Houston planned for October of 2021 and April of 2022, respectively.  
Joseph E. Yoakum, Waianae Mtn Range Entrance to Pearl Harbor and Honolulu Oahu of Hawaiian Islands (1968). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
“Jim [Nutt] once told me, “The only reason I can figure that Yoakum doesn’t have greater visibility is that he doesn’t have a weird backstory,’” recalled Mark Pascale, curator of prints and drawings at the Art institute and an organizer of the show.   
“Yoakum,” Pascale explained, “was just a regular person.” 
Well, sort of. The artist may have lived a rather regular life, but that’s not how he told it. Yoakum had a habit of fabricating stories about who he was and where he’d been. He was a full-blooded Native American, he told some (or a “Nava-joe” Indian, as he put it); he had a dozen brothers and sisters, he told others.   
What we do know is that Yoakum, an African American, was born in Ash Grove, Missouri in 1891. He left home at nine to join the circus, and spent the next 10 years of his life traveling throughout the United States and, eventually, Asia, with various acts. In 1918, he enlisted in the army, through which he was stationed in Canada and then Europe.
Roughly 40 years later, after multiple failed marriages, he settled in a storefront apartment on Chicago’s South Side. It was there that he first began showing his work, hanging drawings in the window. And it quickly became clear that all the travels of his youth had a demonstrable influence.
Joseph E. Yoakum, American Zeppolin Flight from New York City to Paris France in Year 1939 (1969). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Yoakum’s drawings were almost always captioned with specific (and often playfully misspelled) names—so specific that you’d assume they were based on places he’d actually been to.
“Mt Baykal of Yablonvy Mtn Range near Ulan-Ude near Lake Baykal of Lower Siberia Russia E Asia,” reads one.
“The Open Gate to the West in Rockey Mtn Range near Pueblo Colorado,” says another.
Whether the artist had ever been to these places is unknown, and because of his penchant for stretching the truth, we may never know. But when it comes to his work, that may not be relevant. 
By his own assertion, Yoakum accessed these places through a process that he called “spiritual enfoldment.” The phrase was drawn from the literature of Christian Science (Yoakum was a devout believer) and was used by the artist to describe how he used art to locate memory.  
“He’d make the drawing, he’d have a spiritual enfoldment, he would recognize where the place was, and then he would label it,” Pascale said.
Joseph E. Yoakum, Mt Baykal of Yablonvy Mtn Range near Ulan-Ude near Lake Baykal of Lower Siberia Russia E Asia (1969). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
There’s a common misconception, given the Imagist’s interest in Yoakum, that he had a great deal of influence on their work. And it’s not hard to draw a line between their brand of representation and his own. But that’s not quite right, explained Pascale. Nutt, Nilsson, and the other Imagists were almost fully formed as artists by the time they discovered Yoakum in the late 1960s. 
If there was one thing that the movement’s members found in Yoakum’s work, though, it’s an interior picture. 
“[The Imagists] were all trying to find their way as artists,” said Pascale. “They were looking for this place inside of themselves that was unique. With Yoakum, there it was—this guy found it.”
In a sense, it was the only thing Yoakum had. By the time he made his drawings, he was estranged from his children and had outlived all his ex-wives. He was alone.
Joseph E. Yoakum, Mt Cloubelle Jamaca of West India (1969). Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
“My takeaway, from all the years I’ve spent thinking about it, is that the landscape drawings that Yoakum made are a picture story of his life,” said Pascale.
“They are his self-portrait, his autobiography. It’s like 10 years at the end of his life spent making a visual diary of where he was, where he had been, and where he had hoped to go, where he felt most excited and comfortable, and where he felt he lived the most.” 
“Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw” is on view now through October 18, 2021 at the Art Institute of Chicago.
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As we wrote last week, the Clark Institute’s outdoor show “Ground/work” is one of summer’s more exciting events, offering visitors the chance to engage with bold public artworks outdoors, at the institution’s sprawling Berkshires campus. 
And one of the show’s most fun and resonant works is that of Iranian-German artist Nairy Baghramian, whose installation Knee and Elbow (2020) represents the feeling many of us in the last year can share. In the piece, two abstracted forms of two of the body’s primary joints—carved from marble and steel—face off and work together at the same time, suggesting the dual modes of strength and fragility that people around the world have had to endure throughout the pandemic.
The blocks of marble are “heavily veined and pitted on their surface, suggesting, in the artist’s words, ‘possible collapse,’” according to the show’s notes. At the same time, their power—the ability of knees and elbows to hold the body up—is also emphasized through the work’s dynamic, humorous nature, suggesting themes of hope, possibility, and change. Furthermore, the artist sought to shift the joints from their usual orientation so they could “rest and recover from the stress and impact of daily use.” 
The Clark also notes that Baghramian—who has long dealt with issues of vulnerability, power, and authority through her careful deconstructions of the human form—sought to build the artwork near the top of Stone Hill’s open meadow, to which visitors must hike. The sculpture’s vantage point, the show notes, “encourages viewers to find a moment of contemplation and pause as the panorama of the landscape unfolds below.”   
See images of the work below.
Nairy Baghramian’s “Knee and Elbow” (2020). Photo courtesy the Clark Institute.
Nairy Baghramian’s “Knee and Elbow” (2020). Photo courtesy the Clark Institute.

The artist on a site visit to the sculpture. Photo courtesy the Clark Institute.
Behind the scenes into the making of the sculpture. Photo courtesy the Clark Institute.
A portrait of the artist. Photo courtesy the Clark Institute.
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Alex Harsley’s new exhibition, a survey of his more than six-decade photography career at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works, is a big deal. In terms of scope, it’s likely the biggest of his life. And yet, the octogenarian artist isn’t exactly taking a victory lap. 
“I’ve moved far beyond that stuff,” he says, referring to the retrospective nature of the show, which includes New York street photos, arty portraits, and experiments in video from the 1950s through to today. “I’m into a whole different area [in terms of] exhibiting now.”
We‘re sitting inside the 4th Street Photo Gallery, a cramped storefront space in the East Village overstuffed with old cameras, darkroom gear, and prints—thousands of prints, all lining the walls and stacked in piles of indeterminate age (they might be load-bearing at this point). Harsley has occupied the space for 48 years. 
“This,” he says, gesturing to the space around him, “this is like an installation.”
Indeed, 4th Street is like a living, breathing artwork. What has historically been an exhibition space for up-and-coming photographers is, today, more like Harsley’s personal office or studio. At almost all waking hours of the day you can find him in there working—scanning slides, editing photos, hanging and rehanging his work. At 83, his days of roaming the streets of New York with a camera in hand are mostly over, but he has scores of archives still to work through. 
“Alex is really unsentimental about his own work,” said Vivian Chui, Pioneer Works’s director of exhibitions who co-curated the show with Harsley’s daughter, Kendra Krueger. “He really just wants to make images. He’s not thinking about his legacy, he’s not thinking about where his work was. He’s always much more focused on where his work is going.”
Alex Harsley, Nite Meetings. Courtesy of the artist.
Harsley was born outside of Rock Hill, South Carolina, in 1938, and grew up on a rural cotton farm. Only one or twice a month did he see a car or electricity, he recalled. That is, until age 10, when he moved with his mother to New York. 
Following a stint in the army in his late teens, Harsley moved back to the city, bought his first camera, and learned his way around the darkroom while working as a staff photographer at the district attorney’s office. Then the young photographer was off: churning out 35mm pictures of New York’s faces and places; capturing activists, athletes, and musicians in action.
In 1971—half a century ago this year—Harsley founded Minority Photographers Inc., an artist-run non-profit based in his apartment that showed the work of up-and-coming image-makers. Two years later came the group’s headquarters: a derelict street-level space offered by the city on the cheap, thanks to Minority Photographers’ 501c3 status. That was the birth of 4th Street Photo. It’s the same space Harsely’s sitting in today. 
Alex Harsley, Playing In Chinatown (1970). Courtesy of the artist.
So out of place in the now hyper-gentrified neighborhood is 4th Street that it’s easy to walk past the spot and not even see it, the way you would a travel agency or a phone booth or other neighborhood vestige. And yet, Harsley still gets his fair share of walk-ins coming to look at his work; many even buy it. During our interview, a mother dressed in athleisure came in to pick up a couple of prints for her college-age daughter, who had just moved to the neighborhood. I asked if they’d seen the show at Pioneer Works. They said they had no idea how to get to Brooklyn.  
For Harsley, an artist largely ignored by museums and galleries in his career, passersby looking to purchase a piece of New York history are his clients. And he’s okay with that. “It’s not about me and my name,” he said. “It’s about the content. So I like to stay behind the [work].”
But that’s not to say the photographer doesn’t have fans in the art world. If off-the-street visitors are one-half of Harsley’s collector base, then the other half is fellow artists, many of whom were affiliated at some point with 4th Street Photo or Minority Photographers.
Alex Harsley, Cousins (1980). Courtesy of the artist.
For generations of up-and-coming photographers in the 1970s through the turn of the century, 4th Street was a site of community, mentorship, and—perhaps most importantly—wall space. Among those who have shown in the gallery are Dawoud Bey, David Hammons, Eli Reed, and Andres Serrano, while others known to have frequented the space include Robert Frank, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Cynthia MacAdams. 
Harsley, for his part, has stories about all of them—and he’d surely be happy to share them should you stop by. (Bey was a “serious hustler,” he said with admiration; Frank “sold his soul to the devil.”) But listen in and you may detect a latent tinge of bitterness, too. It’s the chip on the shoulder speaking: success never came to Harsley the way it did those heavyweights, even though he considered himself a mentor to many of them. 
“When I started Minority Photographers, I had to leave myself behind. I worked very hard at helping other people become successful,” he said. “But in the course of all of that I had to sacrifice my own interests.”
The mood hung heavy for a second, before Harsley lit it up with a joke: “If I had known I was going to be in the same place [50 years later], I would’ve said, ‘Let’s do something else!’” 
Alex Harsley, Fashion Shoot (1972). Courtesy of the artist.
“I don’t know if I believe that,” Chui said when I recalled this comment to her. It’s not that Harsley forfeited a great legacy in the name of 4th Street and Minority Photographers; those projects are his legacy. “The nonprofit and the gallery were so special,” she said, “it’s hard to imagine him having not done that.”
“Alex Harsley: The First Light From Darkness” is on view now through August 22, 2021 at Pioneer Works.
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