On View

The past six months have opened a lot of people’s eyes to the importance of unsung, so-called essential laborers. For Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1939–), the fundamental need to honor such workers has been at the heart of her work for decades.
Since 1977, Ukeles has been the official artist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, where she famously shook the hand of each and every one of its 8,500 employees in an 11-month-long performance titled Touch Sanitation (1979–80). She told each worker “thank you for keeping New York City alive.”
Now, her message is being be amplified across the city, with public art installations in Times Square, on the facade of the Queens Museum, and across 2,000 digital-advertising spaces in the subway system. The new project, titled For ⟶ forever…, addresses service workers, and acknowledges the never-ending nature of their labor.
“The work isn’t going to be done,” Ukeles told Artnet News. “It’s not like you work, work, work so hard and it’s finished, like a painting.”
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, For⟶forever… (2020). Photo ©Mierle Laderman Ukeles by Ian Douglas/Times Square Arts.

Ukeles’s messages, although digital, are handwritten in a nod to the personal nature of her work. But at 81, she’s firmly in the at-risk category, and has been largely confined to her apartment in Israel.
Her last trip to New York was in March. Upon her return home, she watched events in New York unfold from across the ocean. As the city reopened, friends would update her on the state of things.
“They kept talking about how clean the subway is,” Ukeles said. “That’s because workers are in there making it safe for people to come back. And in the process of making it safe for people to come back, they expose themselves.”
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, For⟶forever… (2020). Photo ©Mierle Laderman Ukeles by Marc A. Hermann/MTA New York City Transit.

When the Queens Museum, where she had her 2016 retrospective, approached her, together with Times Square Arts and MTA Arts & Design, she was eager to make a public artwork calling attention to and celebrating the service workers who had kept the city running.
“Many people are out there thanking health workers. They are truly heroic. But this piece is about service workers,” Ukeles said. “They need to be honored.”
The roots of Ukeles’s interest in menial labor and its never-ending nature can be traced back to 1969, when she composed her Maintenance Art Manifesto.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (1976), installation shot (2016). Photo by Hai Zhang, courtesy of the Queens Museum and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

The year before, she had given birth to her first child, and quickly realized that parenthood constrained her in a way that didn’t apply to the male artists she considered her heroes. “I realized Jackson [Pollock] doesn’t change diapers,” Ukeles said.
The defiantly feminist manifesto boldly proclaimed that all her household tasks and other chores, which had to be done again and again as part of the routine maintenance of everyday life, would henceforth be considered her artwork.
“I was working like a lunatic, trying to be an artist, trying to be a mother,” Ukeles said. The manifesto “developed out of being so pissed off that people didn’t see what I was doing. What I was doing as a mother wasn’t seen.”
ArtForum published the Maintenance Art Manifesto in 1971, and Ukeles made good on its words. In 1973, she mopped the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, for a performance titled Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside.
Then Ukeles turned her eye to the invisible labor of others, documenting—and thereby elevating—the activities of 300 maintenance workers at the Whitney Museum for I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (1976).
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Touch Sanitation Performance, 1979-1980. Image courtesy of the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

She sent a selection of press clippings to the sanitation commissioner, who extended an invitation to scale up. Why settle for 300 maintenance workers, when you could work with 10,000? (The position was and is unpaid.)
“I felt like I had been invited to come up to the major leagues of maintenance world,” Ukeles said.
Greeting each sanitation worker helped spotlight the contributions of a labor group that is often invisible, even though, unlike office workers, they work out on the streets.
“We are, all of us, whether we desire it or not, in relation to sanitation, implicated, dependent if we want the city, and ourselves, to last more than a few days,” Ukeles in wrote in the Sanitation Manifesto! (1984).
“The streets of New York used to be an accumulation of weeks and months of garbage, and people would walk around on that,” Ukeles said. No more—and for that, we have service workers to thank.
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The second edition of the Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art opens to the public today at the Garage Museum in Moscow.
As you might expect for a country as large and diverse as Russia, putting together an overview of contemporary artistic production is a monumental task. The sprawling inaugural show in 2017 was the result of a crack team of six curators scouring 42 cities and towns across 11 time zones for talent.
This time, the curators took a more unorthodox approach. Leaning into the geographical spread that informed the inaugural triennial, curators Valentin Diaconov and Anastasia Mityushina asked the more than 60 artists who took part in 2017 to pick the artists for the second edition. Naturally, a number of artists nominated friends and family, while others chose to auction or raffle off the coveted position. 
This was all fine with the curators, who asked only that these connections were made explicit, and that selector and selectee worked together on some dimension of the presentation. The results are being published on the triennial’s website, and include strange collaborations such as Maria Alexandrova’s documentation of a long drive to a remote Siberian village with the grandmother of her nominee, Anna Tereshkina, and Roman Mokrov’s chaotic promise to watch the kids while his nominee, his wife Maria Obukhova, worked on her art.
Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Yuri Palmin ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

Co-curator Valentin Diaconov tells Artnet News that the resulting eclectic triennial, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” highlights the important role that relationships play in Russian culture. Diaconov says the triennial’s semi-official slogan is “Corruption and Love.”
“Corruption has been a driving force for Russia since time immemorial, but we often forget that the corrupt politicians and individuals do it all for love—an apartment for grandma, a private jet for a lover,” Diaconov says. “This works fully in this show: you practically buy a place for the closest friend with your enthusiasm. It works beautifully—this level of trust has paid off, and the quality of the work reflects the quality of relationships.”
The offbeat approach to the selection process also reflects the curators’ suspicion towards the idea that there could be one single way to evaluate art in a multinational state with as much cultural and social diversity as Russia. To that point, not all of the artists included in this edition are Russian. The final lineup includes a Japanese artist, Ikuru Kuwajima, and several artists who were born in the USSR but hold passports from Western countries.
“I personally believe that there is no national art anywhere in the world and every artist is a complex amalgam of influences from different communities of religion, online activities, educational background…,” Diaconov says. “So, to define who is a Russian artist is a thankless task.”
“A Beautiful Night For All the People: the 2nd Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art” runs through January 17, 2021, at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. See more pictures of the exhibition below.
Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Yuri Palmin ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Yuri Palmin ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

Gaarage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Ivan Erofeev. ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

Gaarage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Ivan Erofeev. ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

Gaarage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Ivan Erofeev. ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

Gaarage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Ivan Erofeev. ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

Gaarage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Ivan Erofeev. ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

Gaarage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Ivan Erofeev. ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

Gaarage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, “A Beautiful Night for All the People,” installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2020. Photo by Ivan Erofeev. ©Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.

Svetlana Hollis, Hot and Cold (2020). Production photograph. Photo by Valeria Suchkova. Courtesy of the artist.

Sanya Kantarovsky, Two Suns (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York.

::vtol::, Guest (2019). Multimedia installation. Photo: ZARYA Center for Contemporary Art, Vladivostok. Courtesy of the artist.

Anna Tereshkina, Portrait of My Grandmother (2015). Courtesy of the artist.

Leonid Kharlamov, Fragments of the installation Black Obelisk (2020). Courtesy of the artist.

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The opening notes of Omer Fast‘s 2012 video work CNN Concatenated sound almost identical to the swelling chords and staccato notes of CNN’s actual theme music, right down to the God-like voiceover that says, with great import, “This is CNN.”
After that introduction, Fast’s work diverges into a compilation piece, where each word is spoken by a different newscaster, spliced together to form phrases that Fast himself wrote in the aftermath of 9/11. Fast actually began the piece months before the terrorist attacks, he explains in an exclusive interview with Art21, by gathering short clips from the Cable News Network without knowing exactly what they would become.

Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “Omer Fast: ‘CNN Concatenated.’” © Art21, Inc. 2015.

He had moved to Germany just weeks before when he “heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center, and realized that the piece, in a sense, would have to change too,” he told Art21. Fast wrote a script that comes together in the video, phrases formed by simple words spoken in an entirely different context.
“Where do our responsibilities begin? Where do we go from here? Who can we trust?” are just a few of the questions posed in the video, questions that remain largely unanswered as the 19th anniversary of the attacks approaches. While Fast pored over the VHS tapes he’d ordered from CNN, “the challenge was to articulate a voice,” he told Art21, a definitive voice that “speaks through it at the same time.”
Watching the video, there is a cognitive dissonance between the script Fast composed and the talking heads that speak the lines, but the artist insists that the work succeeds when you are able to tune out the background noise and the faces. Once that happens, Fast says, his voice comes through—and “that voice, it’s a pretty scared voice” he says, referring to it as his doppelgänger. “It’s a pretty urgent, demanding, aggressive, scared voice.”
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series “Extended Play,” below.
[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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After months of an at-home, eye-watering art diet of digitally-mediated exhibitions, New Yorkers were finally able to resume museum going starting the last week of August.
The phase-four reopening meant that institutions, which had been on lockdown since mid-March, could once again operate with visitors—as well as hand sanitizer, face masks, and temperature checks. Though the Met and MoMA are used to welcoming tens of thousands of visitors each day, now they can only host a fraction of those numbers.

People outside the Metropolitan Museum as the city continues phase four. Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images.

As more reopenings continued throughout Labor Day weekend, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Natural History Museum, photographers captured the surreal images of a socially-distanced art-going public.
At the Met, for the first time ever, artist-designed panels greeted visitors instead of exhibition advertisements, and banners by Yoko Ono proved hopeful and inspiring. Meanwhile, at MoMA, a tribute to artist Milton Glaser, who died earlier this summer, welcomed post-lockdown visitors with a classic New York logo.
See images of the new normal, below.

Painters pose for a photo after installing an oversized presentation of the iconic “I Love NY” logo designed by Milton Glaser inside the west end of The Museum of Modern Art lobby. Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images.

A woman walks past Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm Number 30 in the newly reopened MoMA. Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images.

A visitor in front of Van Gogh’s Starry Night at MoMA. Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images.

A security guard stands at his post at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images.

A worker checks the body temperature of a visitor outside the Metropolitan Museum as the city continues Phase 4 of re-opening. Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images.

A visitor is seen in front of Mexico City-based artist Hector Zamora’s sculptural installation at the Met. (hoto by Selcuk Acar/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

Visitors walk through an exhibition at the newly reopened Whitney Museum of American Art on September 3, 2020 in New York City. Photo by Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images.

Visitors walk through an exhibition at the newly reopened Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images.

Visitors at the Met. Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images.

A fully PPE’d young girl visits the Met as it reopened to the public. Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images.

Sheryl Victor-Levy and her daughter Sidney Levy pose inside the lobby of the Museum of the City of New York. Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images.

Members of the American Museum of National History. Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images.

People line up inside the entrance on reopening day at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images.

People wearing face masks visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Liao Pan/China News Service via Getty Images.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Liao Pan/China News Service via Getty Images.

A visitor looks at a piece in the “Collecting New York Stories” exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images.

Two friends in face masks sit in front of Claude Monet’s paintings at the Metropolitan Museum during its first day open to members since March on August 27, 2020. Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images.

Members of the American Museum of National History enjoy exhibits on September 02. Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images.

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The High Line—a 1.45-mile-long elevated park on a converted railroad line, filled with verdant plants and an array of contemporary art installations—is one of the gems of Manhattan.
Free and accessible public art has long been a draw for High Line visitors. The latest iteration in the park’s revolving art program is the Plinth commission, which has been occupied by Simone Leigh’s towering female bust Brick House since 2019. Now, the High Line wants the public to weigh in on the next work to take pride of place, with 80 artist submissions to choose from for the next two commissions, set to appear in 2022 and 2024.
So, what do you want to see rising above the city at 30th Street and 10th Avenue? Below, see a selection of proposals and then visit the High Line website by the end of September to comment.
Nick Cave, A·mal·gam. Courtesy of the artist and the High Line.

Iván Argote, Dinosaur. Courtesy of the artist and the High Line.

Meriem Bennani, Bouncy Storm. Courtesy of the artist and the High Line.

Bronwyn Katz, Untitled (roots). Courtesy of the artist and the High Line.

Mary Sibande, Old Wars are Out and a New Reason of Humanity is In. Courtesy of the High Line.

Carlos Motta, Koray Duman, and Theodore Kerr, THE VOID. Courtesy of the artists and the High Line.

Amanda Williams, Sandra’s refuge: Safe Passage for Free Movement in Public Space.

Banu Cennetoğlu, right?. Courtesy of the artist and the High Line.

Willie Cole, Totem. Courtesy of the artist and High Line.

Nina Beier, Women & Children. Courtesy of the artist and the High Line.

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In exactly two months, Americans will vote in the presidential election, determining the social, economic, and cultural trajectory of the country for the foreseeable future.
In a prescient artwork aptly titled Theatre of the Absurd, the multitalented artist Eleanor Antin crafted paper dolls to resemble the outrageous characters running as Republican candidates in the 2016 presidential race. In an exclusive interview with Art21, Antin laughed darkly, saying, “I thought that I was finished working with paper dolls and was on to other things until those idiotic Republican debates and that insane list of characters.”
The installation features a diminutive Donald Trump hamming for the camera, Marco Rubio “trying to be noticed,” and Ted Cruz, who Antin describes as vampiric.
In the video, which originally aired in 2016 as part of Art21’s Extended Play series, Antin describes the surreality of seeing her work reinvented and re-performed as life unfolds it through a contemporary lens at this moment in time “with the similarities and the ambiguities—I realize, oh my god, this is like I was prophesying!”

Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “Eleanor Antin: Politics & Paper Dolls.” © Art21, Inc. 2016.

Antin’s opulent photographic series “The Last Days of Pompeii,” shot in La Jolla, California, draws parallels between the picturesque ancient city that was unknowingly on the brink of ruin and that of a wealthy 21st-century enclave, blissfully ignorant to the impending climate crisis, economic collapse, and societal inequities.
Antin’s work with paper dolls has also included creating likenesses of other artists she admires, including feminist icon Judy Chicago, the poet Jackson Mac Low, and the late painter Elizabeth Murray. Working with the figures allows Antin to keep their presence in her life, she says. “My work has always been political, has always been comic—and also sad” 
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series “Extended Play,” below.
[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 New York subway system isn’t exactly city dwellers’ favorite place to spend time, but it does provide a vital means of getting around—and it also happens to play an integral role in the city’s creative history. From early graffiti artists to contemporary photographers, the art on display underground has often been just as exciting as what’s going on above.
Now, to celebrate the recent Video Music Awards (which aired on Sunday, with most celebrity appearances filmed beforehand) two MTV employees decided to put on a pop-up art show celebrating BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists.
Invigorated by the uprising in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, Antonia Baker and Rich Tu reached out to eight local artists to create work addressing themes of music, space, unity, and the future, as well as their personal experiences.
The artists include Eva Zar, Amika Cooper, Bronson Farr, Eugenia Mello, Kervin Brisseaux, MorcosKey, and Zipeng Zhu. The installation will continue through September 6 at the Atlantic Terminal Subway Station in Brooklyn.
See images of the pop-up exhibition and individual works, below:

Courtesy of Eva Zar and MTV.

Installation view of the pop-up MTV VMA art exhibition at the Barclays Center.

Courtesy of MorcosKey and MTV.

Installation view of the pop-up MTV VMA art exhibition at the Barclays Center.

Courtesy of Zipeng Zhu and MTV.

Courtesy of Amika Cooper and MTV.

Courtesy of Bronson Farr and MTV.

Installation view of the pop-up MTV VMA art exhibition at the Barclays Center.

Courtesy of Kervin Brisseaux and MTV.

Courtesy of MorcosKey and MTV.

Courtesy of Eugenia Mello and MTV.

Courtesy of Eva Zar and MTV.

Courtesy of Zipeng Zhu and MTV.

Installation view of the pop-up MTV VMA art exhibition at the Barclays Center.

Courtesy of Kervin Brisseaux and MTV.

Courtesy of Bronson Farr and MTV.

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A painting once rejected as a lowly copy of the work of Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn may be the real thing after all, announced the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford on Friday. New scientific research has found that Head of a Bearded Man was almost certainly painted in the great artist’s studio, possibly by Rembrandt himself.
The painting, donated by an anonymous British art collector and dealer in 1951, had been previously accepted as an authentic Rembrandt, until the Rembrandt Research Project reviewed the work in 1981. The authenticating body ruled that the picture was a mere copy, perhaps not even painted during the artist’s lifetime, and the museum exiled the wood panel to its basement.
This week, Head of a Bearded Man will make its triumphant return to the galleries as a late addition to “Young Rembrandt,” the Ashmolean’s exhibition tracking the artist’s early career and artistic development. (The show’s dates have been extended through the fall following the museum’s reopening in August.)
“It is incredibly exciting to find out that a previously unidentified painting can be placed in the workshop of one of the most famous artists of all times,” said An Van Camp, the Ashmolean’s curator of northern European art, in a statement. “I am delighted to have the chance to show the panel in our exhibition where it can be seen alongside other works painted in Rembrandt’s workshop at the same time.”
This 1777 label on the back of Head of a Bearded Man (circa 1630) identifies the panel painting as the work of Rembrandt. Photo courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum.

Van Camp had been curious about the small, disgraced picture in museum storage since she joined the institution in 2015. “It is very typical of what Rembrandt does in Leiden around 1630,” she told the Guardian. “He does these tiny head studies of old men with forlorn, melancholic, pensive looks.”
While the exhibition was on pause, Van Camp and museum conservators Jevon Thistlewood and Morwenna Blewett enlisted Peter Klein, an internationally renowned dendrochronologist, who analyzes tree ring growth to date wooden samples, to examine the painting.
He determined that the wood panel had to have come from the same tree as two other historic paintings: Rembrandt’s Andromeda Chained to the Rocks (circa 1630, Mauritshaus, The Hague) and Jan Lievens’s Portrait of Rembrandt’s Mother (circa 1630, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden). At the time, Rembrandt and Lievens were both young artists working in Leiden, and possibly even sharing a studio.
Rembrandt_van_Rijn, Andromeda (circa 1630). Photo courtesy of the Mauritshuis.

The panel “came from an oak tree in the Baltic region, felled between 1618 and 1628,” Klein said in a statement. “Allowing a minimum of two years for the seasoning of the wood, we can firmly date the portrait to 1620 to 1630.”
These new findings are quite promising—which is why Head of a Bearded Man will go on view at the Ashmolean starting Wednesday. But they aren’t enough to reauthenticate the work outright.
“It requires further conservation and cleaning before any more conclusions can be drawn about it,” a museum representative told Artnet News in an email. “We will do this when it comes off display at the end of the exhibition.”
“Young Rembrandt” is on view online and at the Ashmolean Museum, Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PH, UK, August 10–November 1, 2020. 
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