On View

“i.de.al.is.tic”Through April 3 at the University of Albany
What the gallery says: “The University Art Museum, University at Albany, is pleased to present ‘i.de.al.is.tic,’ a new exhibition that features three rising Black artists and explores each artist’s acceptance of imperfection and their relationship to idealism.
“Curated by Michael Mosby, ‘i.de.al.is.tic’ brings together the work of artists Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, Sean Desiree, and Marcus Leslie Singleton. The exhibition explores each artist’s relationship to the concept of idealism—the unrealistic aim for perfection. Singleton deals with the everyday, while Akinbola abstracts the concept of a Black identity, and Desiree objectively describes the inherent beauty in public housing units. In each of these artist’s practices there is an acceptance of imperfection, and through this resolve a true picture of a complex Black narrative emerges.”

Why it’s worth a look: In distinct and innovative ways, all three artists bring visual tropes and signifiers long associated with Black American life and identity under the microscope, juxtaposing joy and hardship in glimmering snapshots of day-to-day life.
There are Akinbola’s collaged durags, which are a symbol of Black excellence and respectability within the community, but have been criminalized in the wider culture; Desiree’s tender (and sometimes claustrophobic) woodworked depictions of public housing, and the spirit of connection it provides; and Singleton’s highly emotive and sensitive paintings of figures living their lives as authentically as possible.
“These are works that make you think,” Mosby says. “They require more looking. It may not be obvious at first why they are connected, or what they mean. But together, they weave a narrative that’s rooted in pursuing our highest selves and our dreams, all while contending with the imperfect contexts that inform our stories.”
What it looks like:
Anthony Akinbola, Camouflage #020 (Chorus) (2020). Photo courtesy of the artist.

Anthony Akinbola, Chopped and Screwed #02 (2019). Photo courtesy of the artist.

Marcus Leslie Singleton, Love Letter to the Dogon (2020). Photo courtesy the artist.

Marcus Leslie Singleton, Guard at the Guggenheim (2019). Photo courtesy the artist.

Marcus Leslie Singleton, Love Letter to the Dogon II (2020). Photo courtesy the artist.

Sean Desiree, Marble Hill (2020). Photo courtesy the artist.

Sean Desiree, Franklin (2019). Photo courtesy the artist.

Sean Desiree, Greenwood Manor (2019). Photo courtesy the artist.

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In these turbulent times, creativity and empathy are more necessary than ever to bridge divides and find solutions. Artnet News’s Art and Empathy Project is an ongoing investigation into how the art world can help enhance emotional intelligence, drawing insights and inspiration from creatives, thought leaders, and great works of art. 

“Albers and Morandi: Never Finished”at David Zwirner, New Yorkthrough April 3
What the gallery says: “Both [Josef] Albers and [Giorgio] Morandi are best known for their decades-long elaborations of singular motifs: From 1950 until his death in 1976, Albers employed his nested square format to experiment with endless chromatic combinations and perceptual effects, while Morandi, in his intimate still lifes and occasional landscapes, engaged viewers’ perceptual understanding and memory of everyday objects and spaces.
‘Albers and Morandi: Never Finished’ will put each artist’s distinctive treatment of color, shape, form, morphology, and seriality in dialogue. Looking specifically at the stunning palettes of Morandi’s celebrated tabletop still lifes depicting humble vessels and vases and Albers’s seminal ‘Homage to the Square’ series, the exhibition will elucidate how the two artists’ careful daily acts of duration and devotion allowed each to highlight the essence of color and the endless possibilities of their respective visual motifs.”
Why it’s worth a look: Albers and Morandi, contemporaries born two years apart, diverged in many ways. While Albers focused, especially at the end of his life, on a proto-postmodern exploration of relationships, stressing that all things are affected by their context, Morandi brooded over still lifes and landscapes, somehow managing to capture the anxieties of the 20th century in seemingly quiet forms.
Both artists were concerned with color especially, and each one used it as a structuring and restricting element: Albers in his sometimes brash juxtapositions of blocks of pigment, Morandi in his more subtle, often monochrome palette. This show reveals the underlying mechanics that drove the artists in their differing yet crucially overlapping pursuits. Beyond that, the exhibition also reveals the emotional intelligence of two artists who figured out ways to be enormously emotive without using expressive marks.
How it can be used as an empathy workout: Both artists believed in cultivating observational powers to better understand the world around them. As Morandi once noted: “One can travel the world and see nothing. To achieve understanding, it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see.” And for Albers, the interactions between a work’s materials allowed the development of what he called “visual empathy.”
“Respect the other material, or color—or your neighbor,” he told his students.
Make sure to take time to look at each work carefully, noticing how the artists captured light, shadow, and their objects’ relationships to the spaces in which they sit. A sense of lonely beauty runs through Morandi’s 1947 work Fiora, for example, while Albers’s 1954 Study to Homage to the Square captures a kinetic kind of energy in bright, warm-toned hues.
What it looks like: 
Giorgio Morandi, Natura morta (Still Life) (1957). © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Courtesy David Zwirner.

Giorgio Morandi, Natura morta (Still Life) (1953). © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Courtesy David Zwirner.

Giorgio Morandi, Fiori (Flowers) (1947). © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Courtesy David Zwirner.

Josef Albers, Study to Homage to the Square (1973). © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and David Zwirner.

Josef Albers, Study to Homage to the Square (1973). © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and David Zwirner.

Josef Albers, Study to Homage to the Square (1973). © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and David Zwirner.

Josef Albers, Study to Homage to the Square (1954). © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and David Zwirner.

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One of the defining moments of Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz’s career happened when he was just 10 years old.
“I remember my mother bringing us to the British Museum in London,” Rakowitz recounts in an exclusive new interview with Art21. She led him to the Assyrian galleries and pointed out a relief depicting the lion hunt of Ashurbanipal.
“What is this doing here?” she asked.
That was when Rakowitz began to understand that museums are not always neutral repositories for artifacts, but can also be tombs for objects that colonizers wrested from their homes and the people who created them.
The artist has since attempted to replicate the thousands of cultural artifacts looted from the National Museum of Iraq—a project which he acknowledges may be impossible to complete—as part of an ongoing series titled “The invisible enemy should not exist.”
One of the works, the bas-relief Room F, section 1, Northwest Palace of Nimrud (2020), is made from Middle Eastern food wrappers that the artist used as papier-mache to recreate a wall relief from a palace in Mosul that was destroyed by ISIS in 2015.
“I started to think about what it would mean for those artifacts to come back as ghosts to haunt Western museums,” Rakowitz says in the interview, which is part of Art21’s Extended Play series, adding that since he began the project in 2006, scores more cultural sites, like the Mosul palace, have been decimated by ISIS and other extremist groups. 
Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “Michael Rakowitz: Haunting the West.” © Art21, Inc. 2021.

Rakowitz often dresses his “ghosts” in the contemporary guise of imported food. “If a ghost is going to properly haunt,” he says in the video, “it has to appear differently than the entity appeared when it was living.”
At Hamilton College’s Wellin Museum, the artist was commissioned to recreate another of the palace’s chambers: Room H, which was originally a reception area filled with steles, sculptures, and reliefs. In the 19th century, many of those objects were shipped out of Iraq to institutions like the British Museum, the Louvre, and even the Wellin Museum itself. In Rakowitz’s reproduction, only the objects that were still in situ when ISIS destroyed the palace in 2015 are replicated, haunting the very kind of Western museum that now houses the objects of his own past.

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s Extended Play series, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. “Michael Rakowitz: Nimrud” is on view at the Wellin Museum through June 18, 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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Today marks the opening of Omega Mart, Meow Wolf’s long-awaited Las Vegas follow-up to its wildly popular Santa Fe immersive art installation the House of Eternal Return, which helped kickstart the art world’s experience economy.
“It’s really up to you to write your own story,” Emily Montoya, one of Meow Wolf’s co-founders and Omega Mart’s creative director, told Artnet News during a robot-led Zoom tour of the 52,000-square-foot space. Montoya recommends a two-hour stay, probably more than one: “You can’t really see everything on your first—visit multiple trips are encouraged to get the full thing.”
The main attraction at Area 15, a retail and entertainment complex that opened off the Vegas strip last summer, Omega Mart bills itself as “America’s Most Exceptional Grocery Store.”
At first glance, guests might mistake the exhibition’s entrance for a normal supermarket, with its shelves lined with ordinary comestibles. But a closer look reveals that they are stocked with more than 100 custom-made products, each more bizarre than the last, including “Who Told You This Was Butter?” air freshener, “Nut-Free Salted Peanuts,” and “Plausible Deniability Laundry Detergent.”
Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

“They’re all real and you can buy all of them,” Montoya said.
And if one ventures over to the store’s “Frosty Drinkables” section for a cold beverage, you’ll step inside a refrigerator—almost as if passing through the wardrobe to Narnia—and reemerge in the otherworldly “Projected Desert.” Slip behind the lockers in the store’s employee break room, and you’ll find the futuristic headquarters of Dramcorp, the fictional corporate giant that runs the store.
“Omega Mart is a subsidiary of the cyber-spiritual corporation Dramcorp, which is innovating technologies to revolutionize the supply chain,” Montoya explained. “These technologies have opened up portals which serve as the gateway from Omega Mart into other worlds.”
Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

The vaguely threatening nature of Dramcorp implies a critique of consumer culture. It appears to be lacing its products with an addictive “Additive S” ingredient, derived from a mysterious fount of energy called “the Source,” located in the bowels of the factory.
Guests are welcome to tease out the details of this mythology if they like, or they can stick to posing with the Instagram-friendly displays for photos.
“Our goal is to create an environment to let people come in and have their own interpretation,” Montoya said. “Our intent is to portray  a very nuanced and rich narrative that sprawls across multiple parallel dimensions of reality.”
Those realities include 60 different environments spread throughout four thematic sections, all set to a soundtrack featuring Brian Eno, Santigold, and Beach House. More than 325 artists and other collaborators contributed 250 unique projects.
A double helix slide at Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo by Kate Russell, courtesy of Meow Wolf.

The experiential attractions include three massive slides for guests to ride. A sled outfitted with spray guns that release a sanitizing mist is sent down after each rider as part of health precautions, which also include timed tickets at 25 percent capacity and mandatory masks and temperature checks.
The Las Vegas opening is a big step for Meow Wolf, which, since its founding in 2008, has evolved from a scrappy art collective to a multimillion-dollar operation backed by Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. Omega Mart is the first new site to open in a planned series of expansions in Denver, Phoenix, and Washington, DC.
But the company’s explosive growth has been threatened over the past year. In April, citing the pandemic’s “devastating economic impact,” more than half of Meow Wolf’s staff was laid off or furloughed. The Santa Fe flagship, which had been attracting 500,000  visitors annually, remains shuttered due to health regulations.
There have also been rumblings of discontent among staff. Some announced an intent to unionize in September. Those efforts, Montoya said, “are still in talks and it’s still progressing, but that’s all I can really say.”
See more photos of Omega Mart below.

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Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

The Juke Temple at Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

The Projected Desert at Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

A desert environment at Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo by Kate Russell, courtesy of Meow Wolf.

“Deli meats” that look like famous paintings at Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo by Kate Russell, courtesy of Meow Wolf.

A worm character at Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart at Area 15 in Las Vegas. Photo courtesy of Meow Wolf.

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It’s been more than 70 years since Jean Dubuffet introduced the idea of Art Brut, and the art world is still learning to embrace the genre of art made outside of more industry-approved avenues of production. Now, there’s another evolution of the genus to consider: Photo Brut. 
So posits a new exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. The largest survey ever to consider photographic art emerging from outside the mainstream art world—and often outside society itself—it may be the best photo show you see all year. 
“Photo Brut,” as the exhibition is titled, brings together some 400 works culled from the unparalleled collection of French filmmaker Bruno Decharme, as well as the museum’s own holdings. In includes works by 40 artists, many unknown, who found in photography a space to reconstruct their lived realities into new worlds. (A larger version of the show was staged at the Rencontres d’Arles summer photo festival in 2019.)
In defining the genre, curator Valérie Rousseau, who co-organized the show, recalls the words of art historian Michel Thévoz, who previously oversaw the Dubuffet-founded Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne: These artists “use the camera to play against type, by making their daily life an unreality or making their chimeras hyperreal,” Thévoz once said. “They use photography in spite of or beyond its presumptive objectivity, to imbue fantasy with the stamp of realism or, inversely, to sublimate an ordinary subject.”
For these artists, Rousseau explains, “art making and the way they are living on a daily basis is fused; art is not a separate activity.” 
Morton Bartlett, Untitled (Girl Reading) (2006). (Original c. 1955.) Photo courtesy of the Bartlett Project, LLC. © The Bartlett Project, LLC.

The work of Morton Bartlett, one of the best known artists in the exhibition, is a helpful entry to the subject. From 1936 to ’63, Bartlett meticulously fabricated a series of lifelike plaster dolls, all styled as young girls and boys, and photographed them in tableaux alternately sweet and sexual, pure and prurient—in a way that recalls Balthus’s Thérèse paintings.
A freelance photographer and graphic designer by trade, Bartlett was clearly aware of the camera’s capacity for world creation. His work was undeniably artistic in its craft and concept, but whether or not it was intended for an audience beyond himself is unclear. His biography also invites a psychological reading of the work: He was adopted at the age of eight after both of his parents died.
Similar points could be made for nearly all of the artists in the show. They operated from a place of marginality, made work with little intention to show it, and, with few exceptions, experienced a great deal of trauma in their life. (The show, to its credit, focuses less on this latter point than does its catalogue, which was produced for the 2019 exhibition in Arles and never passes up the opportunity to mention possessive parents, abandonment, developmental disabilities, or homelessness.)  
Many turned to the camera to capture performance, transformation, or role play. Czech artist Lubos Plny, whose work was included in the 57th Venice Biennale, used it to document extreme physical acts, such as sewing his head to his arm. Meanwhile, Japanese artist Ichiwo Sugino, now in his mid-50s, uses tape, markers, and other crude tools to mold his face to look like famous figures—Keith Haring, Jack Nicholson,  Louis Armstrong—then photographs the results for his Instagram. The ingenuity on display in Sugino’s pictures is remarkable. He currently has just over 1,000 followers. 
Miroslav Tichý, Untitled (between 1960 and 1995). Courtesy of AFAM.

These two artists have found an outlet for their creations, but the same can’t be said for many of the artists in the show. Czech artist Miroslav Tichy, for instance, who made his own low-quality cameras to surreptitiously photograph women in public places, resisted showing his work even as curators took a liking to it late in his life. He lived on the streets while his apartment sat packed with prints, most degraded to the point of abstraction—an apt complement to his lascivious gaze. 
Tichy’s work, and other examples in the show like it, raises the question, should we be looking at this art? Rousseau, for her part, has a positive take on the subject.
“When I see these works in isolation, it can be raw or tough or crude; it can be a painful experience. But also I see a transformation,” she says. “I see a way that they have shaped their own trauma while building a reality that is absolutely positive and absolutely constructive. Everybody can look to these examples as inspirations, as… a desire to connect with people that are real around them.”
Artist unidentified, known as Zorro, Untitled (c. 1940). Courtesy of AFAM.

“Photo Brut” is on view through June 6, 2021 at the American Folk Art Museum in New York.
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The pandemic can’t stop the party in New Orleans, where residents have transformed their homes into stationary Mardi Gras floats to help adapt the city’s traditional pre-Lenten celebrations for the age of social distancing.
Last year’s festivities were among the nation’s first superspreader events, so there are no parades this year. Instead, in the interest of public health, Carnival has become a drive-through affair, with homes festooned with beads and all manner of decorations.
“We’re doing this. Turn your house into a float and throw all the beads from your attic at your neighbors walking by,” wrote Megan Joy Boudreaux on Twitter on November 17, the day that the city called off Mardi Gras 2021. What began as a joke was soon formalized, with Nola residents planning for the unconventional take on the holiday season on the Krewe of House Floats Facebook group.
The result is a stunning city-wide display of more than 3,000 homes decorated in the great traditions of American folk art.

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A crowdfunded “Hire a Mardi Gras Artist” initiative helped employ out-of-work artists to create 11 house floats, and commissioned work for two more homes and seven businesses, reports local CBS affiliate 4WWL. Each display costs about $10,000.
“We normally don’t do Mardi Gras stuff, but because the whole city wants Mardi Gras décor for their homes, we jumped right in,” Coco Darrow, of the local Stronghold Studios, told 4WWL. “Before the Krewe of House Floats, we had nothing. There were no jobs for months and we were barely surviving.”
“This was definitely the turnaround we needed,” Rene Pierre of local float company Crescent City Artists told the Denver Channel. The business is thriving after decorating 64 homes.
“Gustav Klimt” Mardi Gras house float, 1819 S. White Street. Photo by Laura Hettinger.

Many house floats have been inspired by local traditions and classic Mardi Grad imagery. There’s also a house for the late musician Prince at 3804 Banks Street, and one for Dolly Parton at the Scriptura stationery store on 5423 Magazine Street. It features an Andy Warhol-style portrait of the country singer, who helped fund much-needed vaccine research.
When Parton learned of the tribute, she sent a massive trove of her merchandise for the shop to hand out to visitors, reports the Times-Picayune.
Meanwhile, there’s a Lego-themed house at 418-420 Eliza Street, Algiers, that looks to “Lego” the trials of the past year, and a tribute to the late Alex Trebek in the form of a giant Jeopardy! game board on the facade of 2371 Chippewa Street.

Other memorable designs include the Little Shop of 2020 Horrors, which features murder hornets, a toilet paper shortage, and Audrey the man-eating plant at 430 Bounty Street, Algiers.
“I took a sculpture class from a local float maker,” homeowner Cori Haines told local ABC affiliate WGNO. “2020 was a dumpster fire, so let’s just throw all the elements from it in and have fun with it.”
Our favorite so far, however, is definitely the Gustav Klimt design at 1819 S. White Street, featuring a giant recreation of his masterpiece The Kiss.
The final day of Mardi Gras is February 16, or Fat Tuesday, and a map of the city’s house floats can be found here.
See more house floats below.
A Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

The Scriptura stationery store on 5423 Magazine Street has been transformed into a Dolly Parton-theme house float for Mardi Gras. Photo courtesy of Scriptura.

A motif in honor of Dolly Parton on a Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

A transformed into a Jeopardy!-themed house float for Mardi Gras. Photo by Erin Whitely.

The Bird House, a Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

The Krewe of Muses Cosmos House is decorated with the nine Muses for a Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

A Mardi Gras house float decorated to honor Prince in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.]

A Mardi Gras house float decorated to honor Dr. Seuss and Dr. Fauci in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.]

A Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans titled “How Sweet It Is to Be Loved Bayou.” Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

A Mardi Gras house float with a dinosaur in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

A Mardi Gras house float at 5438 Chartres Street, New Orleans. Photo courtesy of the Krew of House Floats.

The King Cake Baby house, created by Royal Artists, a Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

The Krewe d’Etat house, created by Royal Artists, a Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

View of Mondo Kaya Feng Shui, whose decorations are sponsored by Krewe of Red Beans, a Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

An absinthe fairy decorates a home in the Bywater, one of the Mardi Gras house floats in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

The Queen’s Jubilee House, whose decorations are sponsored by Krewe of Red Beans. It’s one of the Mardi Gras house floats in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

Goin Down Da Bayou house, a Mardi Gras house float in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

A Total Renovation Mardi Gras house float with decorations sponsored by Krewe of Red Beans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

The Birds of Bulbancha House, whose decorations are sponsored by the Krewe of Red Beans, honors indigenous birds of Louisiana. It is one of this year’s Mardi Gras house floats in New Orleans. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images.

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For the Caribbean-born artist Firelei Báez, her childhood creativity was associated with causing trouble and upending the status quo. They even called her “I don’t know if it was ‘The Demolisher’ or ‘The Hellion,’” she says in an exclusive new video interview.
Filmed as part of the new season of Art21’s series New York Close Up series, the painter delves into her upbringing on the border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, explaining how it informed her lusciously detailed works which blend mythical stories from folklore, scientific taxonomy, and a range of perspectives from the African diaspora.
The beauty in Báez’s work, which often centers on the female figure, is underpinned by a current of something sinister. But the artist sees the bodies she paints as misunderstood. In the interview, Báez describes the Dominican mythological trickster figures, the ciguapas, who appear as cunning seductresses with backward feet that literally lead people down the wrong paths. 
“She was meant to be something that made us so fearful, that we could be quiet for long enough to be groomed into civility,” Báez explains. But what if we could shift that perception and celebrate these figures as individuals?

Production still from the Art21 “New York Close Up” film, “Firelei Báez: An Open Horizon (or) the Stillness of a Wound.” © Art21, Inc. 2021.

“The understory,” Báez continues, “is they are highly independent, they’re self-possessed, and they feel deeply.” In her painting Untitled (Le Jeu du Monde) (2020) the figures are represented not as running amok, but shape-shifting, morphing between species, emphasizing the false notion that identity is fixed. 
Beginning in July 2021, the artist will present her largest sculptural installation to date at Boston’s ICA Watershed, which imagines archaeological ruins from Haiti that have cropped up in the bustling city. Drawing on Boston’s proximity to water and its history of revolution, Báez plans to evoke ideas of international exchange, culture, and identity.
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. “Firelei Báez” will be exhibited at ICA Watershed from July 3 through September 6, 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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Improvisational quilter Rosie Lee Tompkins was virtually unknown by the general public during her lifetime—an anonymity she not only welcomed, but carefully cultivated. Now, with two new Bay Area shows at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and Anthony Meier Fine Arts, the virtuosic talent likely has more work on view at one time than ever before. 
There’s just one catch—and it’s one that makes growing the public’s understanding of Tompkins’s work, not to mention her market, a unique challenge. The artist had a single primary patron who assembled a large collection of her work—and donated it en masse to one museum. How do you grow a legacy, and a collector base, when an oeuvre is so centralized?
Tompkins, whose real name was Effie Mae Howard (the pseudonym was a privacy safeguard), was born in 1936 to a many-membered sharecropping family in southeastern Arkansas. Though she learned to quilt at an early age, it wasn’t until her mid-40s, working as a nurse in the Northern California town of Richmond, that she embraced the craft as more than a hobby.  
She would, for the next 25-plus years until her death in 2006, churn out hundreds of quilts, many intricate enough in their control of color and jazzy sense of composition to draw comparisons to the great abstractionists of the modern era.
Rosie Lee Tompkins, Untitled (c. 2002). Courtesy of BAMPFA.

“Tompkins’s work, I came to realize, was one of the century’s major artistic accomplishments, giving quilt-making a radical new articulation and emotional urgency,” New York Times critic Roberta Smith recently wrote of her experience seeing Tompkins’s work for the first time in 1997. “I felt I had been given a new standard against which to measure contemporary art.”
This snippet was one of many glowing passages in Smith’s 4,300-word review of Tompkins’s “triumphal retrospective” currently installed at BAMPFA. (The museum is currently closed due to California’s public-health protocols; it’s expected to reopen in the spring.) The article is one of the most rapturous pieces of criticism you may ever read. And she’s not the only one to consider Tompkins in such rarified air.
The demand for Tompkins’s work is as great as it’s ever been, but the supply is all but non-existent. That’s because her legacy grew late and fast; by the time her name was known by a larger audience, the majority of her work had been scooped up by a single enthusiastic collector named Eli Leon. He bought the works directly from Tompkins for what some estimate may have been a few thousand dollars each. 
So enthralled with Tompkins’s work was the collector that he asked for as much as $50,000 per piece from anyone who wanted to buy one from him—a whopping figure for an artist who was, at the time, a relatively unknown quantity. Because of this, Leon sold few. Before passing away in 2018, he arranged for his collection of quilts—including some 500 pieces by Tompkins—to be bequeathed to BAMPFA. 
Rosie Lee Tompkins, Untitled (date unknown). Courtesy of BAMPFA.

Today, very few of the artist’s pieces are in private hands, and none have ever appeared at auction, according to Artnet’s Price Database. They’ve only appeared in galleries a handful of times—which is what makes the current show of Tompkins’s work at Anthony Meier in San Francisco so noteworthy.
Eleven Tompkins quilts make up the exhibition, which Meier acquired directly from Tompkins’s family. (Meier says he doesn’t know how many more are out there, but he doubts there are any major untapped troves.) The price for each one hovers around the mid-to-high five-figure mark, the gallerist tells Artnet News, making Leon’s once-astronomical asks now seem reasonable. 
The show hasn’t sold out yet, but Meier says interest is coming from a much broader range of people than the gallery typically attracts. 
“If you combine the kind of praise that she has been accorded by people like Roberta Smith, with the incredibly limited supply and the kind of self-evident beauty of the work—it’s got three huge things going through it,” says Lawrence Rinder, BAMPFA’s longtime director and chief curator who organized the show. (Rinder retired in 2019.) “I’ve never been involved in the art market, thank goodness, but my gut feeling is that they’re worth a lot of money.” 
Because of that, Rinder says, the museum’s one-of-a-kind collection comes with a great deal of responsibility—a responsibility to shepherd Tompkins’s legacy, to both protect her life’s work and share it with as many people as possible. (Tompkins does not have a formal estate, as many late artists do.) What’s the prudent way to proceed?
Installation view of “Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2020-21. Courtesy of BAMPFA.

“This is a very, very important question for the museum right now,” the former director explains.
Rinder sees two possible directions in which the institution could go. One would be to hold onto all of Tompkins’s pieces and establish a research center dedicated to the artist, allowing scholars the opportunity to study the collection as a whole body of work even if it means limiting the public’s access to it. The other would be to strategically disperse the collection to other museums—be it through sale, long-term loan, or gift—in an effort to make it widely accessible, if decentralized. 
When asked which direction he would take, were he not retired, Rinder says this is an instance where you can “have your cake and eat it too.” 
“There are so many [of Tompkins’s artworks in the collection] that you could keep a core group and send the others out into the world. That way you’d be able to accomplish both things,” he says. “That’s what I would do.”
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