On View

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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When artist Shaun Leonardo was 21, his football coach once tried to amp him up by saying: “I want you to play like they just let you out of Riker’s.”
That off-the-cuff remark has stuck with Leonardo ever since, and informed his multidisciplinary practice, which probes notions of identity foisted upon Black and brown people.
In an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of its “New York Close Up” series, the Queens-born Leonardo speaks frankly about his experiences as both an athlete and an artist of color, and how he came to understand his identity through the impressions others had of him.
“As a young man… you don’t have the wherewithal or the tools to absorb that in a healthy manner,” he says of the incident with his coach. “I’m 40 years old and I’m still thinking about that moment.”
Much of Leonardo’s work deals with societal expectations of masculinity associated with sports. At one point during the interview, the artist pantomimes punching an invisible opponent, as he does in his early video works El Conquistador vs. The Invisible Man (2006) and Bull in the Ring (2008).
“I was offering the spectacle of violence and that identity of hyper-masculinity and aggression that is so often anticipated from a Black body,” he says. “We move through the world and serve as a mirror for white people’s projections.”

Still from Bull in the Ring (2008). Courtesy of Shaun Leonardo, archival media courtesy of Brad L. Cooper.

The artist recounts once seeing an image of Trayvon Martin and experiencing the recognition of how he, too, could be perceived by the outside world. That realization informed much of the drawings included in Leonardo’s new show, “The Breath of Empty Space,” at the Bronx Museum, which focuses on high-profile news stories about Black and brown men struggling with systemic violence, such as Martin, as well as lesser known incidents of police violence dating back to the 1970s.
When it comes to preconceived notions that white American have about their fellow Black and brown citizens, Leonardo says, “discovering and learning and finding ways to distort that image, to portray and feel deeply a fuller self that is not contained within these projections or these stereotypes. That has been my mandate.”

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Extended Play, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. “Shaun Leonardo: The Breath of Empty Space” is on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through May 30, 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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Thanks to an unexpected bequest, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art now boasts the largest collection of works by the Mannerist painter and nun Orsola Maddalena Caccia (1596–1676) outside the artist’s native Italy.
Upon hedge-fund manager Errol M. Rudman’s death last year, he surprised the Met with a gift that included three works by Caccia, whose art is rarely represented in US museum collections—or even outside of the convent in Moncalvo, Italy, where she lived and worked.
“I knew next to nothing about her when the gift came to us,” David Pullins, the Met’s associate curator in the department of European painting, told Artnet News. “Obviously, it’s extremely exciting.”
Caccia’s father, Guglielmo Caccia, trained her as an artist and she went on to use her work to support her religious community. A convent was constructed as an extension of the family home and painting became an important part of its income.
Orsola Maddalena Caccia, Flowers in a Grotesque Vase (c. 1635). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Errol M. Rudman.

Caccia’s work made something of a splash last May when a still life of birds set a record auction result of £212,500 ($264,350)—more than 14 times the pre-sale estimate. Nevertheless, the artist wasn’t exactly high on the Met’s shopping list, “because of the rarity of the works and the difficulty of attributing those work that do come on the market,” Pullins explained.
But her work falls in line with the Met’s goals to expand its holdings both of works by women artists and of still life paintings. The three donated pieces include two still lifes and one religious scene, as first reported by Art Herstory.
Orsola Maddalena Caccia, Still life of birds, including a marsh tit, chiffchaff, chaffinch, blue tits, goldrest, lapwing and a great tit. Courtesy of Sotheby’s London.

“The Redmond collection is really evidence of a focused kind of collecting that may not be in the multi-million-dollar category, but can absolutely help fill out the story of European painting,” Pullins said.
The two Caccia still lifes made their public debut at the Met in December. They are currently on view in “A New Look at Old Masters,” the newly reinstalled European paintings galleries at the top of the museum’s grand staircase.
Installation view of “A New Look at Old Masters” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This condensed presentation of works from the Met’s Old Master collection unveils the results of the first phase of a project to improve the museum’s natural lighting, and features Caccia—along with Bartolomeo Cavarozzi’s Basket of Fruit (1620), also donated by Rudman—on a wall dedicated to 17th-century still lifes.
Adding Caccia’s work to the display “helps to highlight the acquisition last year of a floral still life by Clara Peeters, a Flemish woman—a beautiful work, but intensely painted in a very different way,” Pullins said.
The two Caccia paintings are “textbook examples of her work,” he added. “Flowers in a Grotesque Vase is everything that she does—this very meticulous individuation, treating each strand of flowers independently. It results in this very graphic abstract reduction of form. That is part of the reason that her work appeals to a contemporary aesthetic.”
Clara Peeters, A Bouquet of Flowers (c. 1612). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace, Howard S. and Nancy Marks, Friends of European Paintings, and Mr. and Mrs. J. Tomilson Hill Gifts, Gift of Humanities Fund Inc., by exchange, Henry and Lucy Moses Fund Inc. Gift, and funds from various donors.

Still life, of course, was historically one of the more common genres for early women painters, who were typically denied access to live models and formal training alongside male students. Scholars now believe that, like many other women artists of the era, Caccia has had a significant number of her works misattributed to men—which partially accounts for their rarity.
That includes the Met’s third Caccia work, Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist (c. 1625), previously thought to be the work of her father. Part of the confusion stems from the fact that “she was probably reusing drawings and designs by her father for the figures,” Pullins said. But the painting’s many still life elements, especially the goldfinch and the profusion of flowers—Caccia’s trademark—point compellingly to her hand.
Orsola Maddalena Caccia, Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist (c. 1625). Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Errol M. Rudman.

Despite the relatively small number of known paintings by Caccia, the artist’s work is relatively well-documented compared to that of some of her female contemporaries—even within the Moncalvo convent.
Art historians have found that two sisters, for instance, were allowed to enter religious life with a reduced dowery “because they were sufficiently talented in painting and it looked like they would help the income of the convent,” Pullins said.
“There are a number of artists in the period where we know that a daughter or a sister was a painter. We know it archivally, but it’s very hard—if not impossible—to attribute works to them,” he added, citing Caccia’s contemporary Lucrina Fetti, a nun and sister of artist Domenico Fetti, for whom no known works have been definitively identified.
As the art world looks to uncover the careers and artistic output of these forgotten female Old Masters, the surge of interest in their work has led to a shift in the art market. Pop star and fashion designer Victoria Beckham has even been helping Sotheby’s promote the category at auction.
Now, Caccia’s canvases may be the most significant of the Rudman bequest, rather than a small-scale copper work The Flight Into Egypt (c. 1664) by Carlo Maratta. “Twenty years ago, the Carlo Maratta would have been the knock out. He was a very important Baroque artist working in Rome, and we had no works by him,” Pullins said.
Today, works by early women painters are among the most sought after by the Met, which is looking to continue building on a foundation that includes one work by Margaretha Haverman (c.1693–c. 1739), one by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1652), a pair of pastels by Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757), at least three Luisa Roldán (1652–1706) sculptures, and a newly attributed Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614).
When it comes to Old Master donations now, “marketwise,” Pullins said, “one would much prefer it be by a woman.”
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