On View

You are probably not doing much aimless browsing in stores right now. But if you did find yourself walking through the airy fifth floor of Nordstrom’s 57th Street flagship in Manhattan, you would encounter an artist’s tender ode to suburban teenage girlhood tucked in between rows of cosmetic displays and candy-colored athleisure.
The installation, by filmmaker and multimedia artist Maggie Lee, is the latest site-specific work in an ongoing partnership between the retailer and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s emerging artist program, which began in 2018.
Malls have a special place in the artist’s heart; she recalls spending endless afternoons as a child waiting for her mother to finish work at a department store in suburban New Jersey.
“I thought about department stores and malls and how teenagers like to spend time in places for long periods of time and for no good reason at all,” the artist said in a statement. Of course, today, teens are more likely to spend time with one another in virtual space than real life. But Lee’s work is a remnant of a less connected time, and extends an open invitation for anyone to loiter.
The installation, called Daytime Sparkles, is a more sanitized and arch version of other nostalgia trips, like Hulu’s cringe-comedy series Pen15, which celebrate the awkwardness and joy of coming of age. What Lee wants is for others “to reclaim and be part of something. To see something special in the daytime—a sparkle is irregular.”
The living room-style space is configured around clunky television sets, which screen commercials Lee created to advertise products that teenage girls could only dream of affording: luxe Diptyque candles with scents like Mimosa, Fig Tree, and Tuberose and $65 Byredo Suede hand wash (perhaps the 2021 equivalent of Bath & Body Works cucumber-watermelon body spray).
On the walls, glittery floral cutouts and origami folding stars are arranged in clusters, alongside a few large “NO LOITERING” signs. A pop song the artist produced in collaboration with Stefan Tcherepnin is plays over the speakers.
Installation view, Maggie Lee, “Daytime Sparkles.” Photo: Connie Zhou. Courtesy of Nordstrom.
The seeds for this project were planted when Lee’s mother died unexpectedly in 2012 and she found herself thrust back into her childhood home in suburban New Jersey. At the time, Lee was constantly blogging to work through her grief, and her posts caught the attention of producer Asher Penn, who invited her to turn her musings into a film. The result, a feature-length film called Mommy, was released in 2015 by Beta Pictures, and also figured in group shows at Greene Naftali and the Whitney.
Combining snippets of home videos, voicemails, family photographs, stuffed animals, and internet screen savers, Mommy is a sort of memorial time capsule. Daytime Sparkles continues this thread—but what is trapped in amber now is Lee’s younger self and a past-time at the mall that may soon go extinct.
Daytime Sparkles is on view through May 16, 2021 at Nordstrom NYC Flagship, 5th Floor
Installation view of Maggie Lee’s Mommy (2015) at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Installation view, Maggie Lee, “Daytime Sparkles.” Photo: Connie Zhou. Courtesy of Nordstrom.
Installation view, Maggie Lee, “Daytime Sparkles.” Photo: Connie Zhou. Courtesy of Nordstrom.
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What is a table? According to the characters in a humorous artist book by Lawrence Weiner, it’s “something to put something on.” Simple enough, right? Not for artist Rashid Johnson, who has said that reading Weiner’s book, aptly titled Something to Put Something On, sparked a whole new way of thinking, and inspired his series of shelf-like sculptures that would hold a range of objects with specific importance to Johnson.
“I was really interested in this idea,” Johnson says in an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of its New York Close Up series, “the semiotics of how something exists and why it exists and what we call it. So I started making something to put something on.” 
Johnson made the shelves from black wax, pieces of mirrors, tiles, and branded wood, all chosen to send up traditional notions of domestic objects are constructed with. Lining the shelves are pieces of the artist’s Afro-centric material life: “the books I was reading, the records I was listening to, the things I was applying to my body,” he tells Art21, and the combination of those things became stand-ins for the artist, his cultural affiliations, and “began to gel together to form what I thought was my conversation.”
Production still from the Art21 “New York Close Up” film, “Rashid Johnson Makes Things to Put Things On.” © Art21, Inc. 2011.
Influences including James Van Der Zee’s photographs of the Harlem Renaissance, Sun Ra’s mystical Afro-futurist philosophy, and Marcus Garvey’s political views all meld together in Johnson’s fictional secret society: The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club—an acknowledgement of the historic struggles of Black Americans tempered by an optimism for the future.
“It’s not fully about the predicament of history,” Johnson says in the video, which first aired in 2011, “it’s about what you’re able to author yourself and how you’re able to form the future rather than living purely kind of in the past.”
For one of his latest shows, at Storm King Art Center in upstate New York, Johnson has installed his sculpture The Crisis, a steel yellow pyramid that is activated by an accompanying ballet, conceived with choreographer Claudia Schreier. The performance follows two hikers, both African American, on individual journeys that eventually meet up.
“How does the Black body function in space when it’s being witnessed versus when it’s not?” the artist asks, noting the rise of footage of violence against Black men and women, and the onslaught of media at the U.S.-Mexico border. “It’s about how the body becomes accustomed to the conditions of stress and anxiety.”
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. “Rashid Johnson: The Crisis” is on view at Storm King Art Center through November 8, 2021. 
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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.
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Can an artwork be too beautiful? That’s the question that prompted artist Barbara Kasten to abandon a series of experimental photographs she made early in her career.
In an exclusive interview filmed as part of Art21’s Extended Play series in 2018, Kasten said she didn’t initially show the works because, “for a long time, I thought they were too beautiful”—a suggestion that might sound odd. But “in the 70’s, the rest of the world thought that beauty was a weakness.” 
Kasten made her works almost by accident. While teaching a sculpture class, in the midst of describing how to render a flat, woven textile as a three-dimensional object, she got the idea to use non-traditional materials with textures incorporated onto prints.
This led Kasten to begin making cyanotypes, a kind of photograph that results in deep blue surfaces because of the type of compound in the emulsion. By placing layers of materials like crinkled paper or window screens onto the emulsion, the resulting works appeared almost like abstracted shadows. 
Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “Barbara Kasten: Beauty Was a Problem.” © Art21, Inc. 2018.
Her early trials with cyanotypes gave way to other experimental photographic and printmaking practices. Although she has since branched out to use kaleidoscopic colors, the legacy of the cyanotypes is evident in the shape-shifting abstract works.
“I still have an affinity for materials,” she told Art21. “I still respond to the transparencies and textures of different surfaces.” That’s especially apparent in “Barbara Kasten: Scenarios,” a show up now at the Aspen Museum of Art.
And happily for us, she no longer finds weakness in beauty: “the reality is, it’s a strength.”
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s Art in the Twenty-First Century series, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. “Barbara Kasten: Scenarios” is on view at the Aspen Art Museum through April 4, 2021.
[embedded content] This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.

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The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has made a major acquisition: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Lucretia (ca. 1627), a striking portrait of an ancient Roman noblewoman pictured moments before she stabs herself with a dagger.
The painting had languished in a private collection in Lyon, France for decades before appearing at auction in 2019, when it sold for a record-breaking $5.3 million at Paris-based Artcurial, six times its high estimate. The previously little-known work set a record at auction for Gentileschi. In a statement preceding the sale, the auction house said that Lucretia was “worthy of the great museums of the world”; now it has been proven correct.
The Getty acquired the painting from an anonymous collector. A spokesperson did not respond to a query about whether the acquisition was a gift, purchase, or mix of the two. Gentileschi works are hard to come by—there are only 40 in public collections, a small portion of which are in the United States.
The subject of this work—the noblewoman who sought to die by suicide after being raped, according to legend—is particularly resonant for Gentileschi, who was raped by her teacher Agostino Tassi at the age of 17. The horrific experience set the tone for Artemisia’s chosen subjects, which often depict strong women who have suffered sexual violence.
“Her achievement as a painter of powerful and dramatic history subjects is all the more remarkable for the abuse and prejudice that she suffered in her personal life—and which is palpably present in Lucretia’s suicide, and other of her paintings where the central protagonist is a wronged or abused woman,” Getty director Timothy Potts told the Los Angeles Times, adding that the painting “will open a window for our visitors onto important issues of injustice, prejudice, and abuse that lie below the beguilingly beautiful surfaces of such works.”
Artemisia Gentileschi, Jael and Sisera (1620). © Szépmüvészeti Múzeum / Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.
While the rape trial of her teacher made headlines during her life and would go on to define Gentileschi’s story for centuries, recent exhibitions and scholarship have expanded our understanding of her work and identity. London’s National Gallery organized a show of 29 paintings by Gentileschi, its first-ever exhibition dedicated to a female artist, which closed in January 2021. The artist’s turbulent life is also the subject of a forthcoming scripted TV series from ViacomCBS International Studios.
In 2016, the Getty acquired a work by Artemisia’s father and teacher, Orazio, depicting Danaë (ca. 1621), which Potts described at the time as a “masterpiece of 17th-century Italian painting.” The Getty also owns Orazio’s Lot and His Daughters, which has been a hallmark of the museum’s Baroque holdings since 1998.
In an announcement, the Getty museum noted that Artemisia Gentileschi’s work will be on view when the institution reopens “in the coming weeks,” though a concrete date has not been set. Los Angeles museums were recently given the green light to reopen, following those in San Francisco and the rest of the Bay area, after having been closed for nearly a year.
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Looking at one of Julie Mehretu‘s mammoth canvases is like peering into an alternate reality—the intersecting lines that crisscross in all directions conjure architectural plans and blue prints, but also relief maps and musical compositions. Often there are larger shapes that hover amid the chaos, anchoring it for a moment and orienting the viewer, but always maintaining abstraction, and room for subjectivity.
After a critically acclaimed exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Ethiopia-born artist’s mid-career survey has arrived at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, where viewers can appreciate the work’s real-world touchstones in the museum’s skyline views.
In 2010, Mehretu was featured in an exclusive interview as part of Art21’s Extended Play series, where she is seen in her Berlin studio contemplating one of her calligraphic compositions. “Some days, you’ll have a great, great day and work for the entire day,” she tells Art21, “and make headway, and have realizations and leave in the best place because you had this intense engagement.”
But, like anything else, some days aren’t so productive. Because of the all-over-ness of the works, Mehretu often finds “a new point of entry” that allows her to reengage with the picture, she says. Ultimately, being surrounded by her work—she often has multiple paintings and drawings in various states of completion at any given time—affords Mehretu the time and space she needs.
“I think that’s part of the work,” she says, “just being in here… really realizing the painting.”
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s Art in the Twenty-First Century series, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. “Julie Mehretu” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through August 8, 2021.
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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.

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The Liverpool Biennial, which officially opens to the public on March 20, is the first major exhibition to take place in England in 2021.
Initially slated to run last summer, the postponed opening was hampered by ongoing lockdown restrictions. But organizers have decided to push ahead and open an outdoor-only section of the show ahead of anticipated relaxations on restrictions later this season.
More than 50 artists, including Black Obsidian Sound System, Larry Achiampong, and Linder, are taking part in the full exhibition, titled “The Stomach and the Port,” which references Liverpool’s maritime history.
It includes 47 new commissions of sculptures and installations, a selection of which have been peppered across the city’s public spaces. Now on view are new works by Rashid Johnson, Jorgge Menna Barreto, and Teresa Solar.
“The first ‘outside’ chapter presents works that connect bodies and experiences to key places, past and present, speaking of the movement of humans across the sea and proposing new understandings of the relationships between the body and nature,” curator Manuela Moscoso said in a statement.
Rashid Johnson, Stacked Heads (2020). Installation view at Canning Dock Quayside. Photo by Mark McNulty.
Already installed new commissions include Larry Achiampong’s Pan African Flag For the Relic Travellers’ Alliance, which is being flown in 10 locations, and five kayaks sculptured by Teresa Solar in the shape of human bones.
Rashid Johnson has created a large-scale totemic sculpture titled Stacked Heads, which draws on his ongoing “Anxious Men” series. The new work is made of two bronze heads planted with yucca and cacti plants.
Elsewhere, feminist artist Linder has created a street-level billboard commission called Bower of Bliss. The artist’s photomontages, which she will also present at Tate Liverpool for the biennial, juxtapose everyday images of women from fashion magazines with graphic pornographic images and other archival materials.
Moscoso says the show, in sum, is about “change and healing following the universal shifts we have all experienced in this past year.”
The biennial also has an online portal through which you can find information about participating artists, as well as sonic and digital commissions including a series of podcasts by Ines Doujak & John Barker and an artificial intelligence project from art duo Ubermorgen. 
See more of the new commissions below.
Teresa Solar, Osteoclast (I do not know how I came to be on board this ship, this navel of my ark) (2021). Installation view at Exchange Flags. Photo by Mark McNulty.
Larry Achiampong, Pan African Flag for the Relic Travellers’ Alliance (2021). Installation view at Dr Martin Luther King Jr. building. Photo by Mark McNulty.
Linder, Bower of Bliss (2021). Installation view at Liverpool ONE. Photo by Mark McNulty.
Ines Doujak & John Barker, Transmission: A series of five podcasts on Disease and Pandemics in a Distorted World (2021). Podcast artwork. Courtesy the artists.
Larry Achiampong, Pan African Flag for the Relic Travellers’ Alliance (2021). Installation view at St. John’s Gardens. Photo by Mark McNulty.
“Liverpool Biennial: The Stomach and the Port” runs through June 27, 2021.
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Seventeenth-century painter and biographer Arnold Houbraken records that Rembrandt once told a studio visitor to stand back from a canvas and its disagreeable paint fumes. Whether Rembrandt used his warning as a pretext to corral viewers to optimal viewing distances, or believed that paint—often made of noxious elements like lead—posed a risk, is uncertain.
But “Smell the Art: Fleeting Scents in Color,” a new don’t-scratch-but-do-sniff show at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, reverses the Dutch master’s advice.
In preparation for the show, the museum recently shipped kits with scent spritzers capturing two of the exhibition’s eight scents to journalists. It is now working on a larger “fragrance box”—with four of the scents created for the exhibition—to ship to viewers (smellers) worldwide. Each package, with an invitation to a digital tour, runs €25.
“I don’t think that’s been done before—that you can actually smell something at home,” Ariane van Suchtelen, the show’s curator, tells Artnet News. “We have to see how it works. This box is still an experiment.”
Part of the home experience fragrance box accompanying the exhibition “Fleeting – Scents in Colour” at the Mauritshuis Picture Gallery.

The exhibition explores how smell enhances other senses, which is consistent with the research of Dutch national Justus Verhagen, a neuroscience professor at Yale University who says there is truth to the “Proustian phenomenon” that odors elicit nostalgic, autobiographical memories.
“The sense of smell is tightly interwoven with the evolutionarily old limbic system of the brain by having direct access to structures like the amygdala, hippocampal complex, and cortex,” Verhagen says. “These are strongly involved in emotions and memories.” Other senses, like vision, are “much less direct, as they are gated via the thalamus, among other things.”
Those who lose their sense of smell—as many COVID-19 patients do—report that subsequent experiences are bland. “You feel more ‘connected’ to the environment if you simultaneously smell it,” Verhagen said.
And you’ll definitely smell the environment.
International Flavors & Fragrances, which created the scents for the exhibition, created one that approximates the smell of the building’s interior, which John Maurits (the museum’s namesake), decorated with wood he brought from Brazil.
Present-day visitors will experience a lost scent, as an 18th-century fire destroyed the original interior. (The Mauritshuis also worked with the company to create a separate new smell-based tour of the permanent collection, designed particularly for visually impaired visitors.)
“We view and experience everything—not just art—with all of our senses,” van Suchtelen says. “The exhibit is also about exploring how the artists, who were very much aware of this fact, dealt with that in their paintings, and how they suggested and conjured up all sorts of smells.”  
Prior to researching the show, van Suchtelen had often seen Jan van der Heyden’s View of Oudezijds Voorburgwal with the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam (circa 1670) in the Mauritshuis collection without noticing a privy beside the bridge. The outhouse empties into the canal, where a nearby woman washes clothing; presumably the clothes emerge dirtier than before.
Tourists are likely to celebrate Dutch canals, which no longer stink, for their Instagram splashes, which means modern eyes (and noses) need to recalibrate when taking in 350-year-old paintings. 
“We don’t have that ‘smell memory,’” van Suchtelen says.
To fill those lapses, researchers shared historical recipes with perfumers to approximate what, say, the bleaching fields depicted in a Jacob van Ruisdael landscape would smell like, or what chemicals were used to treat linens like the ones in a Pieter de Hooch interior, and how they would smell. (Both works appear in the exhibition.)
Pieter de Hooch, Interior with Women in front of a Linen Cupboard (1663). Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Lizzie Marx, a doctoral candidate at University of Cambridge researching painted smells, provided the recipe that informed one of the scents sent to journalists: a pomander with a winter perfume. Pomanders, from the French for “amber apple,” were fashion receptacles which delivered scents believed at the time to reverse bad smells that bore illness and plague.
(The other scent… er, odor… sent out was one approximating a foul-smelling canal. Indeed, the spritzer left this reporter with the impression of a dirty gym bag full of spoiled fish.)
The exhibition’s exploration of medicinal smell use, like the pomander, is also timely. It’s easy to look down one’s nose at foolish 17th-century belief in illness-bearing smells, but there was little understanding a year ago about how, if at all, COVID-19 spreads through the air and on surfaces. In the 17th century, people thought disease entered the body through porous skin. Unlike today’s deodorants, perfumes were thought to neutralize dangerous smells. 
(As far as how the scents in the show are distributed, sophisticated dispensers—which use a dry method to release scent molecules—work even for masked visitors, and are operated via foot pedals.)
Other sections of the exhibition address religious ideas about smells—mostly centered on clashes between Catholics and the Protestant church in 17th-century Holland—and smells and food (although the Mauritshuis addressed that more in its 2017 exhibition, “Slow Food: Still Lifes of the Golden Age”).
Installation view, “Fleeting Scents in Color” at the Mauritshuis Picture Gallery.

Jacob Toorenvliet’s Young Woman and Fishwife (1675–80, private collection) in the current show portrays the older woman masking the smell of no-longer fresh herring with very-fragrant orange and while lilies. The young woman is twice maltreated, as a man robs her purse from behind in a manner suggesting sexual assault. 
Exhibition catalogue contributions—including several by Lizzie Marx—also chart new research territory. An essay by Jaap Evert Abrahamse, a city historian, addresses smells in Dutch cities. (Urban planners, you will learn, took into account eastern- and western-blowing winds, which could carry stenches in and out of cities.)
But in the end, when it comes to the smell kits, van Suchtelen warns that it is skin off a museum’s nose to create and ship fragrance boxes.
“We will be extremely happy if we break even,” she said of the 1,500 boxes the Mauritshuis commissioned. “If they are popular, we can of course make more. If we sell out, we break even, I think. So if we don’t, we don’t.”
“Smell the Art: Fleeting Scents in Color,” is on view at the Mauritshuis, The Hague, through August 29.
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Visitors to Munich’s contemporary art museum, the Haus der Kunst, will be met with towering sculptures made from cement, cardboard, and textiles flecked with bright pops of color. The works dominate their surroundings, threatening to topple over and sometimes blocking paths.
The sculptures are the creation of British-born artist Phyllida Barlow, who is the subject of a career retrospective at the museum as part of 2021 programming dedicated to contemporary female artists.
Inspired by the urban landscape of London and the functional materials of construction sites and public infrastructure, much of Barlow’s work is entrenched in the terrain of London, from the East End to the shiny new skyscrapers of the 21st century.

Production still from the “London” episode of “Art in the Twenty-First Century,” Season 10. © Art21, Inc. 2020.

In an exclusive interview as part of Art21’s series Art in the Twenty-First Century, Barlow describes the intersection of form and function in her work.
“Sculpture can take on the world we’re living in,” she says, explaining that the bits of color she incorporates into her work are based on “colors of information in the urban environment” used by builders to mark places in need of repair or other attention.
When she was younger, Barlow was introduced to the work of Eva Hesse and recalls being “completely mesmerized” by the artist’s approach to sculpture, in which she used basic materials like string and cloth to “consume space.”
Right now, Barlow is working on large-scale works that interrupt space, hindering movement and demanding attention.
“This is looking at where sculpture ends up,” Barlow tells Art21, “and what happens if it ends up in places where it’s not meant to be. I have sort of always been interested in the object that seems badly behaved.”
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s Art in the Twenty-First Century series, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. “Phyllida Barlow. frontier” is on view at the Haus Der Kunst through July 25, 2021. 
[embedded content]
This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.
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