On View

As Women’s History Month comes to a close, run—don’t walk—to see the latest iteration of the “Every Woman Biennial,” which is as dynamic, fascinating, and just plain fun as ever. The show, formerly known as the Whitney Houston Biennial and now in its fifth edition, closes Sunday.
The female and non-binary art festival features 200 contemporary artists whose works are hung in a salon-style exhibition, as well as a slate of performances. The 2024 exhibition’s title, “I Will Always Love You,” continues its homage to Whitney Houston’s music, and includes work by stars like Michele Pred, Pussy Riot/Nadya Tolokonnikova, Phoebe Legere, Swoon, and many more.
Image courtesy Every Woman Biennial
The wide-ranging material on view includes paintings, prints, textiles, and video. Pred’s eye-catching Love as Activism (2022), a neon-red heart surrounding a pink fist, lights up La MaMa’s street window and is visible to passersby. Pussy Riot/Nadya Tolokonnikova’s Holy Squirt (2023) is a pink and glittered take on a holy water fountain, inviting all to be “conceptually baptized” in the Holy Rainbow Church of Matriarchy (matriarchy is a theme explored by several artists in the show).
A dedicated section of the gallery also includes specially created (and very affordable) talismans by each artist that in many cases derive from or expand on the nearby works, many of which have already found buyers.
The show, which launched on March 2 and drew an opening night crowd of roughly 2,000, is marking its closing weekend with high-energy performances with music, dancers from the Metropolitan Opera, and a mixed-reality “rock opera” from Erin Ko and Kanami Kusajima.
Pussy Riot/ Nadya Tolokonnikova, Holy Squirt, (2023) at the Every Woman Biennial.
The show is co-curated by a team that includes founder C. Finley, executive director and producer Molly Caldwell, artistic director Eddy Segal, and gallery and production manager Jerelyn Huber.
When the show started in 2014, it was an organic response to create a place for women artists not being equally represented in exhibitions and biennials.
C. Finley was asked by friends what she would do if she ran a biennial and she responded: “I’d make it all women!” Segal had the idea to name it the Whitney Houston Biennial. A one-night show  was organized in which women came together in a Brooklyn loft, hung their artworks, and made impromptu performances for hundreds of friends and fans.
Kariny Padilla, Guilty of Nothing (2024). Image courtesy of the artist and Every Woman Biennial.
Two years later, the show was timed to coincide with the Whitney Biennial, and was expanded to a full exhibition of women and non-binary artists in a downtown gallery, with work selected from an open call. The event have continued to be presented in New York since then and has expanded to sister cities—Los Angeles in 2019 and London in 2021.
Identity and gender fluidity, social and racial justice, women’s rights, and flipping the stereotypes of “women’s work” are focuses of many of the artists’ pieces, which provide representations of their daily lives, bodies, desires, and traumas. Many also immortalize those they cherish—friends, lovers, mothers, grandmothers, mentors, and icons.
The show continues through Sunday March 24 at La MaMa Galleria at 47 Great Jones Street, New York.
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Early Netherlandish painters of the 1400s pioneered portraits as highly detailed, distinctive records of an individual. Two centuries later, artists of the Dutch Golden Age made these faces come alive with an expressive, characterful twist. This genre of smirks, pouts, glowers, and gapes was dubbed the “tronies.”
“Turning Heads,” a survey of “tronies” that features works by world famous Old Master painters like Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, and Johannes Vermeer, recently opened at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. Some examples of the genre that will be familiar with audiences include Rembrandt’s The Laughing Man (1629–30) and Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat (ca. 1665–67).
Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Red Hat (ca. 1665–67). Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
This small jewel painted on panel from Vermeer’s limited oeuvre has a particularly spontaneous air, as though the subject has turned with surprise to see us enter the room. Though no amount of ravishing detail is spared on the rich textures of the woman’s hat and shawl, her face stands out for its strikingly lifelike, everywoman familiarity.
Circle of Rembrandt van Rijn, The Man with the Golden Helmet (ca. 1650). Courtesy of Gemäldegalerie Berlin.
Rather than rely on descriptive documents of a specific sitter that may or may not be saved for posterity, intimate studies of human subjects could be used to capture fleeting interior states with universal resonance. The private contemplation tinged with anguish on this elder man’s face provides an interesting counterpoint to the obviously impressive glimmering gold of his helmet.
Rembrandt van Rijn, Interior with Figures (1628). Courtesy of National Gallery of Ireland.
A rare genre scene attributed to Rembrandt, Interior with Figures is a dimly lit work that contains an ambiguous confrontation between a group, in which narrative depth is provided by the the expressions and gestures exhibited by the central figures. Across the canvas, we can variously read defiance, shock, confusion, and shame.
Michael Sweerts, Head of a Woman (ca. 1654). Courtesy of J. Paul Getty Museum.
The Brussels-born Flemish painter Michael Sweerts worked in many places, including Persia (now Iran) and Goa, India. In his mid-twenties, he moved to Rome for nearly a decade, joining a movement of fellow Dutch and Flemish genre painters known as the Bamboccianti for their shared interest in everyday scenes of peasant life and people living on the margins of society. Erring from caricature, Head of a Woman is empathetic painting of a humble woman captures some of her vulnerability through its careful depiction of her weathered features, toothless grimace, and teary eyes.
Peter Paul Rubens, Head of a Bearded Man (c. 1612). Photo courtesy of Princely Collections Liechtenstein, Vienna.
With the invention of “tronies,” artists of the Dutch Golden Age and Flemish Baroque era were able to get creative, experimenting with technical skills to bring about fun visual effects. In this way, they also discovered the capacity of painting to materialize otherwise abstract, intangible notions like emotions, age, wisdom, or fragility. Explorations and introspections like these would have a lasting influence on modernism.
Michael Sweerts, Head of a Woman (ca. 1654). Photo courtesy of Leicester Museum & Gallery.
“Turning Heads: Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer” is on view at the National Gallery of Ireland until May 26, 2024. 
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Damien Hirst has brought his infamous preserved animal carcasses and shiny Mickey Mouse sculptures to the sloping hills of southern France. “Damien Hirst: The Light That Shines” at Château La Coste presents a sweeping survey of around 90 of the YBA artist’s historic and recent artworks.
Nestled in one of the country’s oldest winemaking regions near Aix-en-Provence, the 500-acre vineyard has been converted into a hotel and a destination for contemporary art. Hirst’s show marks the first time a single artist has had full run of the compound.
“Amid laughs and giggles, chats and cups of tea, great ideas evolved as they do when Damien is his playful self,” said the institution’s founder, the property tycoon and hotelier Paddy McKillen. “He has planned out the show to perfection. He has conceived each element to compliment both art and architecture, all set amongst Cezanne’s Provençal landscape.”
Works from the “Natural History” series at “Damien Hirst: The Light That Shines” at Château La Coste, March 2–June 23, 2024. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024.
Over a multi-decade career, Hirst has produced more than enough work to fill the site’s five unique architectural pavilions. The dead animals preserved in formaldehyde for which he is most notorious are being exhibited in a pavilion by Italian starchitect Renzo Piano. Early attention-grabbing examples from the “Natural History” series, as well as their multi-million dollar price tags, catapulted Hirst into the public eye in the 1990s.
Pieces from Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable at “Damien Hirst: The Light That Shines” at Château La Coste, March 2–June 23, 2024. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024.
Another pavilion, designed by the late Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, showcases Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelieveable (2017), which was originally debuted by the Pinault Foundation at the 57th Venice Biennale. These works are all imagined as the heavily patinated, coral-encrusted treasures retrieved from a fantastical ancient shipwreck off the coast of East Africa.
Flower paintings at “Damien Hirst: The Light That Shines” at Château La Coste, March 2–June 23, 2024. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024.
Elsewhere, garishly colored flowers from The Secret Gardens Paintings series will be familiar to anyone who checked out Gagosian’s booth at Frieze London last year. As flower paintings go, the works provoked some fiercely mixed reactions and seemed to set the tone for a turn towards whimsical escapism in contemporary art. Butterflies, a common motif in Hirst’s work, also appear many times over in the swirling red kaleidoscopes of The Empress Paintings. 
Hirst has also made good use of the château’s ample outdoor space to stage mammoth sculptural works. The 21-foot painted bronze sculpture Temple (2008) resembles a male torso as one might have seen in biology class at school. Successive cut-away sections of the body allow us to glimpse the figure’s organs and musculature. Charity (2002), which once stood beside The Gherkin in London, wryly takes an old charity collection box and turns it into a monument, but one that has evidently been ransacked and its coins seized.
Outdoor sculpture at “Damien Hirst: The Light That Shines” at Château La Coste, March 2–June 23, 2024. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024.
As part of the château’s ever-evolving sculpture park program, McKillen also regularly commissions new site-specific works. Hirst has dreamed up a chapel that will take the form of a 100-foot-high bronze hand pointing skywards.
“I designed this arm as a sculpture. It was based on a hand holding a mobile phone. But it was a bit like Christ’s fingers,” Hirst said. “And then I thought, it’s like a spire. It was Paddy’s idea to put steps inside it so you could go up it.” The chapel is scheduled to open in 2025.
The holy hand joins an array of high-profile permanent installations that dot the rolling vineyards and wooded walking trails of the property, including works by artists and architects like Louise Bourgeois, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tracey Emin, and Sophie Calle.
“Damien Hirst: The Light That Shines” is presented by HENI. It is on view at Château La Coste until June 23, 2024.
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Since the very earliest art forms, artists have been compelled to depict the human figure. These images allow us to see ourselves, our societies, and our cultures reflected back and recorded for posterity. “The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black figure” is a new survey at the National Portrait Gallery in London that considers how 22 artists from the African Diaspora are currently choosing to reflect the Black experience.
Some of the biggest names on show include Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, Michael Armitage, and Lubaina Himid, and all of the works were completed at some point in the past two decades. The exhibition was initiated by Ekow Eshun, the writer, broadcaster, and curator behind the Hayward Gallery’s hit show “In the Black Fantastic” in 2022.
At the “The Time is Always Now” opening, Eshun explained that the exhibition’s title comes from “an awareness that we’re in an extraordinary moment right now, a moment of flourishing when it comes to work by contemporary artists from the African Diaspora working in figuration.”
“These works are thinking about a history of being overlooked, misrepresented, or depicted without agency,” he added. “These works are not a rectifier of that, per se. These artists are simply commanding space on their own terms.”
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Father Stretch My Hands (2021). Photo: Rob McKeever, courtesy of Gagosian.
The show’s first of three themes, “Double Consciousness,” borrows its title from the great thinker W.E.B. Du Bois, who used the term in 1897 to encapsulate the Black experience of living within a white society but also outside, psychologically speaking.
“It is a peculiar sensation, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” Du Bois once remarked. If this feeling can be translated to canvas, it might resemble the fragmented portraits of Nathaniel Mary Quinn, which remind us that our perceptions of the world around us are never static or entirely coherent. His beguiling works are among the best on show.
Claudette Johnson, Standing Figure with African Masks (2018). Photo: Andy Keate, courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London.
Out of a handful of sensitive and warm character studies, Jennifer Packer’s intimate portraits of family and friends attract the eye for how her painterly apparitions appear to almost melt or drip away. Claudette Johnson’s Standing Figure with African Masks (2018) offers a fun twist on one of the defining images of the avant-garde, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).  Johnson takes the West African Dan masks Picasso appropriated in his seminal 20th century painting and reclaims them as the backdrop for an assertive image of herself that she had originally planned to name Brazen Woman. By the entrance, gleaming under the gallery lights, is a towering gold monument to the Black figure, a young woman in sportswear by Thomas J. Price.
Titus Kaphar, Seeing Through Time 2 (2018). Photo: Christopher Gardner, courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
The white gaze that has dominated so much of the art historical canon is sidelined in a series of galleries dedicated to the theme “Persistence of History.” Titus Kaphar takes to task a staple portrait set-up from the colonial era, that of a Black boy attending to a white female sitter. In his standout work Seeing Through Time 2, the central subject of Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth is removed and the boy instead kneels in reverence to a Black figure who fills the empty silhouette.
Barbara Walker’s drawings similarly foreground the Black servants or enslaved people that had been historically relegated to the status of background figures, filling them in with graphite while those who were once considered to be the composition’s obvious subjects are merely suggested by an embossed outline.
Jordan Casteel, Yvonne and James (2017). Photo: Adam Reich, courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York.
Finally, the theme of “Our Aliveness” unites works by artists like Toyin Ojih Odutola, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and Henry Taylor, that display a sense of contemporary community. Jordan Casteel places the spotlight on everyday, easily overlooked passengers riding the New York City subway; in this case the sitters are James, who sells vintage vinyl records, and his friend Sylvia, who runs a soul food restaurant in Harlem. Meanwhile, Hurvin Anderson’s colorful yet subtly understated paintings center the barbershop as a site of kinship for people of Caribbean origin in Britain.
Denzil Forrester, Itchin & Scratchin (2019). Photo: Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery.
The exuberance of a crowd that fills a dimly lit but lively reggae dancehall in London in the 1980s practically leaps off the canvas in a work by Denzil Forrester. Opposite, the dense layering of imagery in Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Still You Bloom in This Land of No Gardens (2021) is masterfully achieved so as to never detract from the principal composition. A self-portrait of the artist with her child, the work is immediately striking long before the viewer steps closer and drinks in the intricate patterns and archival photographs imprinted onto the scene’s lush foliage.
“The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure” is on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London through May 19, 2024. 
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Gustav Klimt, a Viennese Symbolist painter and co-founder of the Viennese Secession movement, first came to prominence as a mural painter. Later, he became known for his paintings of women, including those prominent in Viennese society around 1901–09. This period in the artist’s career was dubbed the “Golden Phase,” and was characterized by striking portraits adorned with glistening gold leaf, which have captured the public’s imagination for decades. Now however, the Neue Galerie is focusing on a significant part of Klimt’s oeuvre that has been overshadowed by the artist’s famed late portraits, with the exhibition “Klimt Landscapes.”
Installation view of Klimt Landscapes, on view at Neue Galerie New York. Image courtesy Neue Galerie New York, Photography by Annie Schlechter
Painted predominantly between 1898 and 1918, Klimt’s landscapes were produced for the artist’s own pleasure during summer vacations in the Austrian countryside, and in particular to Lake Attersee in the Salzkammergut region. These works form a substantial proportion of Klimt’s overall oeuvre and were celebrated during his lifetime.
Moriz Nähr, Gustav Klimt in the garden of his studio at Josefstädter Strasse 21, 1911. Courtesy of Neue Galerie, New York
In the winter of 1903, around 20 landscapes featured in the artist’s only substantial one-man show in Vienna before his death. Known for their innovative square format, which betrayed the artist’s interest in photography, and produced en plein-air (outside), an approach also favoured by the Impressionists, these bucolic works were praised by contemporary critics and were highly sought after by collectors.
Gustav Klimt, Printer: K. K. Hof-und Staatsdruckerei Reproduction of Sunflower (1907-08), Collotype with gold intaglio. First Publisher: H. O. Miethke, 1908-14. Reissued: Hugo Heller Kunstverlag, 1918. Courtesy of Neue Galerie, New York
The current exhibition combines highlights from the Neue Galerie’s Klimt collection with important loans from several private and public collections in the United States and Europe. Klimt’s nature scenes are contextualized in the broader trajectory of his artistic career, which developed from an academic painting style towards greater adoption of Symbolist and Art Nouveau tendencies.
Installation view of Klimt Landscapes, on view at Neue Galerie New York. Image courtesy Neue Galerie New York, Photography by Annie Schlechter.
Photography and design objects by artists of the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Worskhops) accompany Klimt’s paintings and emphasize the artist’s central position in the vibrant artistic environment of turn-of-the-century Vienna. The exhibition also accentuates Klimt’s important personal relationships, for instance with fashion designer Emilie Flöge, whose family the artist often accompanied on his productive summer vacations.
Heinrich Böhler, Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge,Kammerl/Attersee, 1909. Courtesy of Neue Galerie New York
“Klimt Landscapes” is on view at the Neue Galerie in New York through May 6, 2024. See more images from the exhibition below.
Gustav Klimt, Park at Kammer Castle (1909). Courtesy of Neue Galerie New York.
Gustav Klimt, Two Girls with Oleander, (ca. 1890–92). Courtesy of Neue Galerie, New York.
Gustav Klimt, Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden), (1914). Photo: Hulya Kolabas. Courtesy of Neue Galerie New York.
Gustav Klimt, Fable (1883). Design for Allegorien und Embleme, no. 75aWien Museum, Purchase, Verlag Gerlach & Schenk, 1901 Photo: Birgit and Peter Kainz, Wien Museum.
Gustav Klimt, Idyll,1884. Photo: Birgit and Peter Kainz, Wien Museum. Courtesy of Neue Galerie, New York
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An early portrait bust by the avant-garde sculptor Constantin Brancusi that was believed to have been destroyed is now on display at Artmark auction house until February 25.
The Romanian-French sculptor is celebrated for his stylized pieces like Mademoiselle Pogany (1910-11) or abstract works like Bird in Space (1928) or Endless Column (1938). Earlier in his career, however he produced more traditional sculptures. Portrait of Achille Baldé (1905-6) was made when Brancusi was about 30 years old and had only recently arrived in Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts.
At this time he was still casting rather than carving his sculptures and was stylistically influenced by Auguste Rodin, but Brancusi was on the precipice of radically rethinking his approach and changing the course of modernist sculpture forever. Some of his very first works that paved the way for his highly original, more simplified style were The Prayer (1907) and The Kiss (1908).
Whereas Rodin is famous for portrayals of influential thinkers like Anna Noaille and Balzac, Brancusi’s subject Baldé was a waiter at Bouillon Chartier, the same restaurant where Brancusi had worked as a dishwasher when he first moved to Paris.
The bust was eventually passed down to Baldé’s descendants, although records on it disappeared and art historians assumed it had been lost. They knew of it only through archival photographs of Brancusi’s Dauphine Square studio where it appears as a plaster model. The rare artwork is signed by the artist.
It was rediscovered when it appeared at the Paris auction house Drouot last year. The rare find was snapped up by a Romanian collector for €377,000 ($406,000).
“This bust was probably left in the family from generation to generation, and they didn’t know the author’s value,” suggested art historian Doina Lemny, who spoke at the statue’s unveiling on February 17. “It was believed that the work had been destroyed by Brancusi.”
She added that there is also another missing bust portrait from the same period of Brancusi himself, which may yet resurface.
“Brâncusi Exclusiv” is at Artmark’s headquarters at Cesianu-Racovita Palace in Bucharest, Romania, until February 25. There is no sale planned for the work at this time.
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We live in a time when, thanks to generative A.I., we can conjure almost any image we want in an instant. To which new worlds will we prompt this magic technology to take us? It seems that, in the face of overwhelming possibilities, there is a sudden craving to return to nature.
This has clearly been the impulse driving the world’s most famous A.I. artist, Refik Anadol. His new show “Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive,” opening February 16 at Serpentine North in London’s Kensington Gardens, presents three of his latest projects made using custom A.I. generators trained on images of coral reefs and the rainforest.
The exhibition has an immediately impressive visual impact of the kind that we can now reliably expect from Anadol. Unsupervised (2022), his splashy commission for New York’s Museum of Modern Art was an easy crowdpleaser that had its run extended until October 2023. Its fluid waves of surging and swirling color may have had a hypnotic effect on audiences, but such eye-catching theatrics could not convince the critics.
Artnet News’s Ben Davis dubbed it “an extremely intelligent lava lamp,” and New York‘s Jerry Saltz dismissed it as “a half-million-dollar screensaver,” eventually getting into an altercation with Anadol on X (Twitter).
Anadol’s growing celebrity paired with the current craze for all things A.I. makes this latest exhibit a total no-brainer for the Serpentine Galleries, but the same critiques stand. Short and sweet, the show invites audiences to wander through in idle wonder but they shouldn’t expect much substance beneath these psychedelic surfaces.
Living Archive: Large Nature Model (2024) is an immersive, field of moving images that wraps around the gallery’s perimeter walls. In a leafy expanse, animals metamorphose into each other. In one instance, a bear flickers and blurs until it mutates into an elephant.
Refik Anadol, Artificial Realities: Coral (2023). Photo courtesy of Refik Anadol Studios.
Apparitions like these are made possible thanks to Anadol’s new open source Large Nature Model trained on freely available data provided by sources like the Smithsonian Institution, National Geographic and London’s Natural History Museum. The A.I. model can clearly reproduce imagery derived from the natural world, but the presentation doesn’t exactly prove that it can do much more than that. The feeling that one may as well be at the National History Museum’s annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, where they could marvel at the real deal, needs to be suppressed.
Aesthetically, the three projects bleed into one another and its not always easy to tell where one starts and another ends. In one gallery lined with screens, a shape-shifting exotic bird is presumably part of Artificial Realities: Rainforest (2024). Nearby, a fuchsia pink coral-like formation surely belongs to Artificial Realities: Coral (2023).
Debuted at last year’s World Economic Forum, this surreal evocation of ocean environments is apparently intended to raise awareness of climate change. It is not clear that such an impact could offset A.I.’s considerable carbon cost.
A second gallery space is dotted with bean bags, inviting viewers to flop down and gaze up at a vast ceiling screen with undulating forms rippling over each other in avalanches of glowing green sand. The crashing sound of waves paired with sounds reminiscent of the “binaural beats” I sometimes play to induce deep concentration have a strongly meditative effect. It would be all too easy to get lulled into a trance and stare at the screen for an hour, an effect that Anadol is skilled in producing.
The potential of A.I. to reimagine organic forms in a way that feels new and exciting may be better evidenced by the work of other artists. Sofia Crespo’s Structures of Being, currently being projected onto Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona, has been a huge success, reportedly drawing crowds of nearly 100,000. Also relying on open-source photographs of underwater fauna, it brings to life and builds upon Gaudí’s own inventive use of these biological forms over 100 years ago.
Last year, Crespo collaborated with Anna Ridler on Various and Casual Occursions, a highly experimental and complex work inspired by the techniques of women botanists from the Victorian era.
Compared to these explorations, Anadol’s inventions feel more like a proof of concept than anything we could honestly call conceptual. Right now, it is still exciting just to see what A.I. is capable of. Some day, audiences may hope to see something more intellectually stimulating than merely stupefying.
“Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive” runs at Serpentine North in London from February 16 through April 17, 2024. 
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We are fortunate enough to live in a time when many contemporary artists are reckoning with the past and making heard the once suppressed voices of people of color, women, and members of the LGBT+ community. Often, however, representations of the white- and male-focused histories being redressed are physically absent from exhibitions of such works.
Not so at the Royal Academy’s “Entangled Pasts: Art, Colonialism, and Change” in London. Here, historical documents of empire, systemic exclusion, and outright racism are shown side-by-side with monumental works by some of the U.K.’s leading contemporary artists like  Frank Bowling, Yinka Shonibare, Isaac Julien, Sonia Boyce, and Lubaina Himid. Other major headliners include El Anatsui, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Betye Saar, and of course, Tavares Strachan’s majestic public sculpture in the museum’s courtyard.
John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark (1778). Photo: © 2024 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The role of art in shaping convenient narratives and promoting those with power is exemplified by many of the historical paintings on show. The American artist John Singleton Copley was an Academician known to have owned enslaved people and among his works in the show is a double portrait of a plantation owner’s daughters Mary and Elizabeth Royall (ca. 1758). His painting Watson and the Shark (1778) thrilled audiences when it was first shown at the RA for its depiction of a shark attack in Havana harbor, imbuing Britain’s activities across the Atlantic with a sense of heroic excitement.
These canvases form the backdrop to the exhibition’s standout work, Hew Locke’s Armada (2017–19), a suspended fleet of ships. These intricately detailed, colorful vessels represent various moments in history, from the Mayflower that brought early colonizers to America in the 1600s to the cruise liner HMT Empire Windrush, which carried Caribbean passengers to a new life in the U.K. in 1948. Local economies are represented by shipping boats while cargo ships are synonymous with modern-day global trade networks.
Kerry James Marshall, Scipio Moorhead, Portrait of Himself, 1776 (2007). Photo: James Prinz Photography, courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery.
Landscapes by the 18th century English painter William Hodges are typical for their era in how they depict places like the Caribbean and India as exotic, untouched idylls that bear no trace of colonial violence. They are placed beside Yinka Shonibare’s Woman Moving Up (2023), which directly quotes the grand staircase at Chatsworth House as a symbol for the generational wealth evident in Britain’s many country houses, much of which was accumulated by investment in colonial ventures abroad. A female figure ascends the staircase, representing for Shonibare the migration of Black Americans away from Southern states during the 20th century.
“While the geographical move for African Americans ended in 1970,” the artist explained in the show’s catalog, “the spiritual, cultural, economic, and social uprising has yet to cease.”
Installation view of the “Entangled Pasts, 1768–now. Art, Colonialism and Change” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, featuring Yinka Shonibare’s Woman Moving Up (2023), courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo: © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry. © Yinka Shonibare CBE RA.
The RA itself is implicated as a force of oppression and exclusion within the exhibition, which at least attempts to reckon with its own history as a venue for the promotion of Britain’s imperial ideals throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. The considerable crowds that flocked to its salons to witness works like those by Hodges and Copley are evidenced by a cartoon form 1787.
It would be a mistake to think that the promulgation of detrimental colonial values was limited to before the 20th century. Painter Frank Dicksee, who was president of the RA from 1924 to 1928, insisted that “our ideal of beauty must be the white man’s,” a world view clearly at play in his work Startled (1892), in which two pale figures frolic under a purifying golden light. Another damning painting in the exhibition is The Royal Academy Selection and Hanging Committee 1938 (1939) by Frederick William Elwell, which shows a formal dining table around which pompous white men sit and confer.
Installation view of the “Entangled Pasts, 1768–now. Art, Colonialism and Change” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, featuring El Anatsui’s Akua’s Surviving Children (1996), courtesy of the artist and October Gallery, and Frank Bowling, Middle Passage (1970), © Frank Bowling. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024. Photo: © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry.
Most staggering of all, however, is the fact that the first Black member to be elected to the Royal Academy was Frank Bowling in 2005.
In this exhibition, his majestic canvas Middle Passage (1970) is an abstracted meditation on the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. Yellows, oranges, and greens refer to his birthplace of Guyana and we can make out the faint but familiar outlines of Africa and the Americas. It is staged in conversation with El Anatsui’s Akua’s Surviving Children (1996), in which pieces of driftwood are assembled to imply a gathering of figures. The sculpture was made while the artist was in Copenhagen for a conference on the Danish slave trade, during which he discovered pieces of wood washed up on a beach that brought to mind the many people who had been torn from their homeland and enslaved.
“Entangled Pasts: Art, Colonialism and Change” is on view at the Royal Academy in London through April 28, 2024. 
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