On View

Talk about a week of honors. Legendary songwriter and longtime Elton John writing partner Bernie Taupin is in New York this week for his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame at Barclays Center, alongside other superstars such as Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow, and Missy Elliot.
However, amid those career-capping festivities, Taupin also found the time to add another accolade to his busy schedule: the opening last night in Soho of his solo art show at Chase Contemporary. The show, titled “Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory,” features a selection of compositions centering on the American flag, a motif that emerges from his reflections on family history—his father fought in WWII—and patriotism (“you would be hard pressed to find one having a more far-reaching effect on the psyche of the world than our own Stars and Stripes,” he writes in the press release.) 
This is not the first time Taupin has shown such works. Previously, his flag-inspired canvasses were featured in a show called “American Anthem” at the Museum of Biblical Art in Dallas. And, while painting is not what he is best known for, it has been a lifelong passion for Taupin. “My inspiration for the visual arts started at a very young age looking through picture books with my mother of works by J.M.W. Turner—especially the heroic battle scenes—and the works of Van Gogh,” he explained via email.
Installation view of “Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory” at Chase Contemporary in Soho. Image courtesy the artist and Chase Contemporary.
He first began painting in earnest at his ranch some 20 years ago. While Taupin says that there is not a real relationship between his songwriting and his visual art, they are connected in at least one way: It was the international success he had with Elton John that allowed him to have the exposure to art that inspired him to paint.
“During our travels in the music world, I frequented most of the major museums, refining my eye and my taste,” Taupin said. “On our first trip to America in 1970, I had the opportunity to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York where I discovered and was amazed by the Abstract Expressionists, particularly De Kooning and Hans Hoffman.”
Other figures that impressed Taupin include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Wassily Kandinsky, Anselm Kiefer, and Robert Rauschenberg. Some of these influences you see in canvasses featuring guitars stuck to the surface, vibrant colors, and scrawled text. He appreciates art, he said, that is “more from the heart and the brain than for the eye.”
Installation view of “Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory” at Chase Contemporary in Soho. Image courtesy the artist and Chase Contemporary.
Taupin said that he appreciated that the audience would probably come to “Ragged Glory” based on his celebrity—he is literally in the pantheon of Rock and Roll now, after all—but hoped they would find something deeper in the paintings. “I suspect most visitors to the exhibition may arrive with our songs and even with Elton’s melodies playing in their heads,” he wrote. “I hope people will experience another form of expression—a most personal statement from me.”
“Bernie Taupin: Ragged Glory” is on view at Chase Contemporary, 413 West Broadway, New York, through November 19, 2023.
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A new exhibition of works by David Hockney at the National Portrait Gallery in London has been a long time coming. When it opened in February 2020 to mixed but generally favorable reviews, it was cut short after just 20 days by the pandemic. It never had a chance to reopen before the museum closed for a mammoth $52 million renovation and rehang, which opened in June. Opening November 2 in an expanded version, the show boasts 33 new paintings produced between 2021 and 2022 at Hockney’s studio in Normandy, including one much-hyped portrayal of global superstar Harry Styles.
For Hockney, now 86, portraits have been a constant. He has returned again and again across the decades to the same subjects: himself and his friends, most notably former lover Gregory Evans; fashion designer and muse Celia Birtwell; and Maurice Payne, a printer with whom Hockney often collaborated. Far from feeling needlessly exhaustive, whole rooms dedicated to each sitter present a masterclass in all the ways that one person’s essence can be captured.
Take the artist himself. His self-portraits from the 1950s and early 1960s, when he was still at art school, evince early attempts at self-fashioning, with prominent glasses and lightly eccentric formalwear. The look, later completed with a flat cap, would become quintessentially Hockney. His always imaginative flair can be found in etchings like A Rake’s Progress (1961-1963), a humorous retelling of Hogarth’s classic tale of downfall and depravity that was partly inspired by a trip to New York where Hockney eagerly explored the gay nightlife.
David Hockney, Celia Carennac August 1971. Photo: Richard Schmidt Collection, The David Hockney Foundation, © David Hockney.
Over time, Hockney found increasingly inventive ways to depict himself, as in the case of the cartoonish Man Looking for his Glasses (1986) or Self-Portrait Using Three Mirrors (2003). Famously, in 2012, Hockney trod where few other artists had dared by making paintings on an iPad. One self-portrait is presented as a recording, revealing the digital brush strokes being made as if in real time, so we can see part of this unusual mark-making process.
Across all the works, Hockney plays with a mix of historical references. Some expressionistic or deconstructed elements are clearly borrowed from the moderns, of which he most reveres Picasso, but elsewhere a three-quarter profile, stately pose, or Rembrandtesque brown ink reveals Hockney’s admiration for Old Masters.
David Hockney, Self Portrait 26th Sept. (1983). Photo: © David Hockney.
Hockney’s interest in different stylistic approaches is clear in the contrast between Gregory Reading. Vestrefjord (2003), a colorful watercolor sketch in which the figure is loosely outlined but more detail is given over to the tablecloth, and a 1977 drawing in which Gregory’s face is almost lifelike but the rest of the image slowly melts away. Either way, we eventually get to know Hockney’s subjects. What emerges in every case is not merely how their faces change with age but how life makes these characters harden or evolve.
Though the exhibition is supposedly all about drawing, this term appears to be used more in the sense of sketching to capture a moment rather than strictly the act of putting pencil to paper. For this reason, the more recent Normandy paintings are a welcome addition. Fitting all 33 into one room allows the museum to show off its new, more stately galleries.
David Hockney, JP Gonçalves de Lima, 3rd November (2021). Photo: Jonathan Wilkinson, © David Hockney.
In these works, the wider cast of characters are, again, mostly friends and acquaintances of the artist, though notable figures (besides the obvious) include music producer Clive Davis, art dealer David Juda, writer and gallerist Jean Frémon, and writer Charlie Scheips, who appears in two portraits. There are also multiple self-portraits and images of Hockney’s partner J.P. Gonçalves de Lima. These paintings are hardly the artist’s best work—the portrait of Harry Styles has been widely acknowledged to be disappointing and most of the sitters are a slightly grotesque shade of pink, with either aggressively furrowed or aggressively shiny foreheads modeled with strips of peeking white ground—but they still never lack Hockney’s reliable character and éclat.
“David Hockney: Drawing from Life” opens tomorrow and runs through January 21, 2024.
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This summer, as Barbie fever took over popular culture, so did the film’s signature brand of pink. Seemingly overnight, the color was everywhere—on runways, red carpets, car insurance commercials, even Burger King buns. The furor ultimately led to a global paint shortage. 
The Barbie “moment” came up in a recent conversation with Yvette Mayorga, a Mexican-American painter and sculptor whose work is almost always awash in a similar pink hue. This was not the first time she had been asked about it. 
“I think it’s a good beginner introduction to feminism,” Mayorga said of the film, somewhat equivocally, before clarifying that she was left “wanting more of a complicated narrative.”  
Installation view of “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy of the Aldrich.
The artist, who was speaking on the occasion of her new exhibition “Dreaming of You,” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, was smart to hedge. For one, Barbie-mania feels, today, less like a marketing campaign built around a movie and more like a movie built around a marketing campaign. (The film’s $150 million marketing budget was indeed bigger than its $145 million production budget.) Barbie may mock the commoditization of gender, but its corporate overlords have exploited it to pull a similar trick. 
More importantly, Mayorga’s relationship to pink is a deeply personal one forged well before the film and its attendant consumer craze. The color has been a staple of the artist’s work almost since the beginning of her practice, roughly a dozen years ago. She’s always viewed pink as an “underdog”: oft dismissed for its feminine, kitsch associations, but extra potent for the same reason.  
In her world, colors can’t be reduced to stereotypes. Nor can people. 
Installation view of “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy of the Aldrich.
“Dreaming of You” is not Mayorga’s first museum show, but it is effectively her first survey, bringing together pieces from the last six years of her career. The exhibition does more than showcase individual objects. It puts on display the evolution of her practice during that time—a period that saw the artist extend her candy-coated vision beyond the canvas to sculpture, video, and installation.
Naturally, pink is all over the show; most of the museum’s walls have been painted with it. One gallery is entirely cloaked in the color, save for a black-and-white checkerboard floor that feels a little Lewis Carroll, a lot David Lynch.
For Mayorga, pink is a point of entry, luring viewers with its boldness. It’s also a point of departure, evoking the polish of Pop art and the lavishness of the Rococo, as well as the bubblegum, “girl power” aesthetics of her Y2K youth. Her preferred hue is “Mexican pink,” a color with historic cultural roots that has, in more recent times, also become symbolic of the Latinx experience in a divided America.
Yvette Mayorga, ICE ICE LADY (2017). Courtesy of the artist.
Reclaiming the labor of craft, Mayorga often applies her pink acrylic paint with bakery-style piping bags. The strategy is an homage to her mother, who worked as a cake decorator in Chicago’s landmark Marshall Field’s department store upon immigrating to the U.S. in the 1970s. It also lends the artist’s creations the appeal of something frosted and delicious. “When people encounter the work for the first time,” Mayorga explained, “they often say, ‘Wow, I want to eat it’ or ‘I want to touch it,’ ‘I’m craving something sweet.’”  
And yet, while Mayorga’s pink artworks look like confections, they taste more like medicine. At the core of almost everything she makes is a theme that underlies them all: the fallacy of the American Dream.  
One 2017 painting on view at the Aldrich, for instance, nods to the lavish epicureanism of a Late Baroque masterpiece, but its title conjures an altogether different scene: I Remember Eating Hot Chips when my Dad got Deported, After J.H. Fragonard, “The Swing.” Another work from the same series, called High Maintenance, plays on the dual meanings of the word “ICE,” depicting a woman swimming in a palace while an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent enters at the edge of the frame. 
“I want people to feel disappointed, in a way,” she said of her works’ bait-and-switch play. “Because not everything is what we think it is.” 
Installation view of “Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 2023. Courtesy of the Aldrich.
Among the standouts in “Dreaming of You” is a suite of three new life-sized portraits of her siblings. These form an extension of a body of work she introduced this time last year in a solo show at The Momentary, a satellite branch of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. 
The paintings were conceived as a reference to German lithographer Martin Engelbrecht (1684-1756) and his series depicting low- and middle-class laborers. Among Engelbrecht’s subjects are bakers and confectioners, but their jobs, Mayorga pointed out, are “not the defining characteristics of the portraits. You see the people first, then you see these very subtle references to labor.”
Mayorga’s versions are ovular, shaped like mirrors. They have a lot of mirrors embedded in them too: “I thought it was really important for the viewer to be able to see their reflection in the work.” The idea, she continued, is to remind viewers to “[consider] who the person is before tying them to their labor. That’s a really important conversation to have right now, because of the way that Latinx people are perceived. We are not a monolith.” 
Yvette Mayorga, Scorpion After Ouvrière en Porcelaine (2023). Courtesy of the artist.
“Yvette Mayorga: Dreaming of You” is on view now through March 17, 2024, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. 
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Ever since receiving a paint-by-numbers set during the pandemic, Sharon Stone has been conversing with colors. That, at least, is how the ’90s Hollywood icon describes her all-consuming relationship with painting, one which has seen her spend up to 17 hours a day in a dedicated studio she’s created in her Beverly Hills home.
Not that wielding a paintbrush is new to Stone. She grew up painting under the tutelage of her aunt and briefly studied art at Edinboro University, Pennsylvania, before dropping out to pursue a career in modeling and acting.
Four decades on, Stone is seemingly focused on painting full-time. She has built off her Spring show at Los Angeles’ Allouche Gallery with “Welcome to My Garden,” her East Coast debut, now on view at C. Parker Gallery through December 3.
The show name is taken from one of the 19 paintings on display in Greenwich, Connecticut, and speaks to a collection that teems with trees, flowers, and leaves—albeit ones that are often washed translucent or dashed and sketch-like.
“This new exhibition offers a never-before-seen panorama into Sharon Stone’s creative prowess,” said gallery director Tiffany Benincasa. “The artist invites viewers on a journey through the vibrant landscapes of her imagination, reflecting her inner world.”
Sharon Stone, There’s a Breach in the Atmosphere (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
The title is also something of an invitation into Stone’s world view. It turns out she has quite a lot to say. Jerusalem, an abstract work comprised of loose puddles of sandy yellows and grays, reflects on her visit to the Western Wall and her prayers for peace. A State of Affairs is Stone’s commentary on the patriarchy with swirls of black snakes coiled over clouds of pink and blue. There is a Breach in the Atmosphere is one of several works that confronts humanity’s indifference to earth’s environmental catastrophe. All pressing and current causes to be sure, but the titles have more bite than the works themselves.
It’s easy to be cynical about actors who take a mid-career detour to explore other artistic pursuits. In Stone’s case, it’s worth putting such skepticism aside. The variety of work in “My Garden” seems to show a young artist working through their practice and many boast depth and a strong balance of color.
In interview, Stone has listed the likes of Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Claude Monet as influences, but sometimes these figures weigh a little too heavily. Amelia has the block and curvature of a Kandinsky abstract and Reflections, perhaps consciously, appears like a Monet close-up.
This doesn’t detract from “My Garden,” but rather shows the flashes of a painter still finding their palette and range. Just don’t call it a hobby.
See more images from the show below.
Sharon Stone, Reflections (2021). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone posing alongside her work Bayou (2022). Photo courtesy of C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone, Amelia (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone, Jerusalem (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone, City Lights (2021). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone alongside her canvas Welcome to My Garden (2023). Photo courtesy of C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone, Bamboo Forest Fall/Winter. Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone, Dreamscape 1. Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone, The Lantern (2022). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
Sharon Stone, It’s My Garden, Asshole (2022). Photo courtesy of the artist and C. Parker Gallery.
“Welcome to My Garden” is on view at C. Parker Gallery, 409 Greenwich Ave, Greenwich, Connecticut, through December 3.

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Some may have questioned whether flowers could still be a relevant motif in contemporary art today after some major floral artworks failed to please certain critics at Frieze London recently. But a certain thoughtfully curated flower-themed art exhibition staged by a historic perfume and beauty brand in Paris may go a certain way toward restoring faith in the colorful blooms as among the most enigmatic and provocative subject for artists from around the world.
Curated by Hervé Mikaeloff, a curator and art consultant based in Paris, the exhibition “Les Fleurs du Mal” (“The Flowers of Evil”), which pays homage to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, is a delightful surprise. It sheds a new light on the beauty of flowers and floral artworks, and the ways they represent the fragility and sensuality of human nature and emotions.
Opened during the week of Paris+ by Art Basel across three floors of Maison Guerlain, the historic boutique of the eponymous 195-year-old florist, perfume, and skincare house on Avenue des Champs-Elysées, the exhibition features works by 26 international artists. They come in a range of media—from paintings and sculptures to photography and installations—and there’s no lack of compelling, memorable pieces.
Hymne à la Rose (2022), by the Madagascar-born Joël Andrianomearisoa, for example, is a site-specific sound installation featuring 42 metallic sculptural roses in a dark room filled with the vocals of Moroccan singer Hindi Zahra and Guerlain’s fragrance Épices volées.
A pair of rose sculptures by the Tel Aviv–based Roni Landa may look ordinary at first glance, but it gives a jolt when the viewer realizes how erotic it is. There are also highly symbolic photographic works by the famed Japanese artist and photographer Nobuyoshi Araki and Chinese artist Jiang Zhi, and a rare 2012 watercolor by Anselm Kiefer that is vastly different from the heavy, monumental works for which the artist is better known.
The exhibition’s opening also coincided with the launch of the Lee Ufan Arles and Maison Guerlain Art and Environment Prize. A jury presided over by the Korean-born artist handpicked the French artist Djabril Boukhenaïssi as the winner and four other finalists among the 381 applications. Boukhenaïssi will be awarded a six- to eight-week residency opportunity followed by a solo exhibition in the Espace MA of Lee Ufan Arles in summer 2024.
“Les Fleurs du Mal” runs until November 13. Below are some of the highlights from the exhibition.
Jiang Zhi, Love letter no. 25 (2014). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Roni Landa, Rose Labia (2023). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Roni Landa, Flora Erecta (2023). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Nobuyoshi Araki, Sans titre. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Mennour. Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Anselm Kiefer, Extases féminines–Margherite Porete (2012). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Pauline d’Andigné, Flowers (2023). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Duy Anh Nhan Duc, Constellation (2019). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Jean-Philippe Delhomme, Roses et Matisse (2023). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.
Mykola Tolmachev, Dégel (no 1) (2023). Installation view, “Les Fleurs du Mal” at Maison Guerlain. Photo by Tomy Do.

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The Yiddish Book Center is something of a misnomer. The Amherst, Massachusetts, institution runs language classes, trains translators, produces podcasts, hosts the summer music festival Yidstock, and will soon open the world’s first museum spotlighting Yiddish culture. But yes, it has books too: more than a million have been salvaged since its beginning as a pet project of energetic grad student Aaron Lansky.
“Yiddish: A Global Culture,” its new core exhibition that was five years in the making, has seen curators scour the archives and tie together donations that have arrived over the past four decades from around the world. The result is a peripatetic tour of Yiddish culture over the past 150 years and a poignant reminder of its diminished status in today’s popular consciousness.
One hundred years ago, you would be hard pressed to wander through downtown New York, Berlin, or Buenos Aires without encountering some marker of Yiddish life. Walls were plastered with theater show posters, newsstands stocked with daily papers, shops announced their wares with bilingual signs. Yiddish culture was, as the show’s lead curator David Mazower put it, a natural part of the urban landscape. The Holocaust and the ensuing speed with which Jews assimilated in the postwar period, losing their language in the process, has rendered the former prominence of Yiddish culture forgotten.
Through more than 350 cultural artifacts, this exhibition seeks to make this history visible again and dispel some misconceptions in the process.
“For the general public, I think it’s more about a lack of knowledge: Yiddish maybe means Fiddler on the Roof,” Mazower said. “For Jews, it’s a different story. Sadly, many Jews have internalized age-old stereotypes about Yiddish—that it’s a jargon without a proper grammar and that it doesn’t really have a culture worth speaking about.”
In “Yiddish: A Global Culture,” we meet writers, renegade philosophers, weavers, poets, avant-garde puppeteers, playwrights, and many more besides. The culture they carry spans the globe, comprising an informal network dotting from Cuba to China and from Lotz to the Lower East Side. In each we catch a glimpse of the world they inhabited and a sense that this is a culture as vibrant and idiosyncratic as any other.
Here are six objects that bring that culture to life at “Yiddish: A Global Culture.”

Martin Haake, Yiddishland (2023)
Detail from Yiddishland by Martin Haake. Courtesy Yiddish Book Center.

The first artwork visitors encounter at the Yiddish Book Center is Yiddishland, a 60-foot mural by Berlin-based illustrator Martin Haake. Influenced by children’s books of the 1950s, Haake’s works are flat, bright, and playful. Maps are a format Haake has repeatedly returned to and this sits well with the mission of “Yiddish: A Global Culture”: to spotlight the breadth of the Yiddish diaspora. Yiddishland succeeds presenting a globetrotting tour of Yiddish life over the past century.

Guedale Tenenbaum’s micrograph portrait of Yiddish activist Chaim Zhitlowsky (1945)
The micrograph was created by self-taught artist Guedale Tenenbaum. Courtesy Yiddish Book Center.
Few championed the revitalization of Yiddish culture with greater fervor than Chaim Zhitlowsky. His many writings and tours across the Yiddish diaspora turned him into something of an icon, albeit a provocative one. Such status is evident in this portrait made by Guedale Tenenbaum, an immigrant textile weaver in Argentina, two years after the activist’s death in 1943. Composed of thousands of Hebrew letters, it hanged inside the Zhitlowsky School in Buenos Aires until its closure. It was discovered torn in half on the street and has only recently been cleaned, restored, and framed by the Yiddish Book Center.

Zuni Maud and Yosl Cutler’s puppet heads
A pair of Modicut puppets. Courtesy Yiddish Book Center.
The story of happenstance that connected puppeteers Zuni Maud and Yosl Cutler is a film waiting to be written. They met as satirical illustrators in 1920s New York and fell into puppeteering after the puppets they’d been commissioned to make were rejected. They duly wrote some scripts and opened a theater called Modicut inside an old clothing factory. The duo was a hit and set out on global tour, nearly parking their act in the Soviet Union where in 1932 they were asked to launch a Yiddish puppet theater collective. A year later, the two fell out never to perform together again, with Cutler killed by a drunk driver in 1935. Here, the Yiddish Book Center offers puppets from their avant-garde theater.

Writer Chava Rosenfarb’s typewriter
The Hermes Baby owned by Chava Rosenfarb. Courtesy Yiddish Book Center.
The Yiddish Book Center is the proud steward of the largest collection of Yiddish typewriters (45 and counting). Among them is Rosenfarb’s Hermes Baby, widely considered one of the most practical and portable models ever designed. Rosenfarb, a Polish émigré who moved to Canada in 1950, wrote extensively about her experiences in the Holocaust—she survived both Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen—and is considered a seminal figure in post-war Yiddish literature.

Novelist Sholem Asch’s medicine ball
A medicine ball owned by Sholem Asch. Courtesy Yiddish Book Center.
A member of the Warsaw literati in the 1900s, Sholem Asch was a totemic and divisive figure of 20th-century Yiddish literature. God’s Vengeance, his play set in a Jewish brothel, stirred controversy most everywhere it was staged, most notably in New York where it provoked an obscenity lawsuit in 1923. After relocating to the U.S. in the 1930s, Asch was hounded out of the country by the toxic climate of McCarthyism. One of his less polarizing pursuits was exercising. From his home in Stamford, Connecticut, he enjoyed swimming, horse riding, and working out, such as with this leather medicine ball.

A luxury edition of Monish by I. L. Peretz, illustrated by Pinchas Shaar (1952)
Peretz is considered a transformative figure in Yiddish literature. Image: courtesy Yiddish Book Center.
The influence of Paris’s Cubism movement is evident in Shaar’s composition. And indeed after surviving a death camp outside his native Lotz, Poland, Shaar completed his artistic training in the French capital before becoming a celebrated illustrator of Hebrew literature. In 1952, he produced a limited-edition cover for Monish, a narrative poem about the seduction of a young student written by I.L. Peretz, who, incidentally, had been an early mentor to the aforementioned Asch.
“Yiddish: A Global Culture” is on view at the Yiddish Book Center, 1021 West Street, Amherst, Massachusetts.

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In mid-September, at the unveiling of his much-deserved star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles, filmmaker John Waters declared, “God, here I am, closer to the gutter than ever.” It’s a quip befitting of the once-anointed Pope of Trash, but only somewhat true. The Baltimore icon may have spent the greater part of his career producing films that erred on the side of shock value and bad taste, but the latter-day embrace of his filmography has seen him inch ever closer to the stars.  
In fact, not far from the Walk of Fame, the first major retrospective on Waters’s transgressive oeuvre has recently opened at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (on view until August 4, 2024). Titled “Pope of Trash,” the show traces the creative processes, style, and themes that have fueled the director’s films and six-decade career.
“It’s been interesting to look at his trajectory of going from an outsider to an insider,” the show’s co-curator Dara Jaffe told Artnet News. “Part of his longevity is the fact that every subject matter he ever approached, even though he’s lovingly poking fun, it’s never with mean spirit. His movies are radically inclusive, and he did have a very original point of view that went beyond just shock.”
Installation view of “John Waters: Pope of Trash” at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles, California. Photo: Charles White, JWPictures/©Academy Museum Foundation.
In the 1960s, Waters began a run of independent films populated by despicable characters, absurd dialogue, and even more obscene scenarios not limited to the scatological. While derided on release, Waters’s films such as Multiple Maniacs (1970) and Desperate Living (1977) have increasingly been celebrated for their unparalleled audacity and queerness, leading to his studio outings including Hairspray (1988) and Cry-Baby (1990).  
On view at “Pope of Trash” are some 400 objects—including handwritten scripts, costumes, props, set designs, posters, photographs, and clips—that document the making of Waters’s classic works. Fans might recognize the recreated trailer from Pink Flamingos (1972) or the purple tutu worn by Jean Hill in Desperate Living. Waters’s scripts and expense ledgers, too, offer a peek into the daily realities of independent moviemaking.
Jean Hill as Grizelda Brown, Desperate Living (1977). Photo: Bob Adams, Courtesy Bob Adams.
To bring these objects together, the show’s curators, Jaffe and Jenny He, leaned on the Waters archive at Wesleyan University, which the director continues to build. But the organizers also scoured personal collections—”literally from the attics to the basements,” per Jaffe—particularly those of Waters and his regular collaborators, collectively known as the Dreamlanders, including actors Mink Stole and Divine, production designer Vincent Peranio, and costume designer Van Smith.
“John himself was an amazing wealth of knowledge in terms of helping us find the objects in the exhibition,” said He. “Not only was he connecting us to people to talk about the history of his movies, but also finding out where and how we can do our detective work.” 
Installation view of “John Waters: Pope of Trash” at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles, California. Photo: Charles White, JWPictures/©Academy Museum Foundation.
The exhibition also delves into Waters’s particular obsessions and inclinations. Curator He pointed out the recreated church environment that first greets visitors was made in reference to the director’s past penchant for debuting his films in Baltimore churches (Waters was raised Catholic). Jaffe noted that Waters’s massive collection of newspaper clippings, highlights not just what tickled his interest, but his avid newspaper-reading.
Due space is given over to how Waters’s legend has grown up around him. International film posters (as well as a photo of Divine and Tab Hunter promoting Polyester at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981) showcase his global footprint; a montage of his many cameo appearances in TV and film (what Waters calls “fame maintenance”) capture his status as icon; while fan art included at the close of the exhibition is testament to his singular appeal.
Pink Phlem-ingo bag for Pink Flamingos (1972). Photo courtesy of Ogden and Mary Louise Reid Cinema Archives, Wesleyan University.
Waters has relished the opportunity to revisit his career alongside his friends and collaborators, remarking to He and Jaffe that the exhibition was akin to an episode of the TV series This Is Your Life. He even instructed the curators to send examples of the “Pope of Trash” merchandise to Wesleyan so they may be collected.
“He told us that when he and his friends first started making movies, the people of Baltimore would steer clear of them—they’re the town pariahs. Now, you go to Baltimore and there are pink flamingos everywhere in dedication to him, and he’s the town hero,” Jaffe said. “I think it’s a testament to the heart that he put into his movies all along. He was way ahead of his time and everyone else is now catching up.”
“John Waters: Pope of Trash” is on view at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, 6067 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, through August 4, 2024. See more images from the show below. 
Installation view of “John Waters: Pope of Trash” at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles, California. Photo: Charles White, JWPictures/©Academy Museum Foundation.
Expense ledger, Eat Your Makeup (1968). Photo: Owen Kolasinski/© Academy Museum Foundation, Courtesy of Ogden and Mary Louise Reid Cinema Archives, Wesleyan University.
Installation view of “John Waters: Pope of Trash” at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles, California. Photo: Charles White, JWPictures/©Academy Museum Foundation.
Installation view of “John Waters: Pope of Trash” at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles, California. Photo: Charles White, JWPictures/©Academy Museum Foundation.
Installation view of “John Waters: Pope of Trash” at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles, California. Photo: Charles White, JWPictures/©Academy Museum Foundation.
Baltimore bumper sticker. Photo: Owen Kolasinski/© Academy Museum Foundation, Courtesy John Waters.
Shoes worn by Edith Massey (Frederick’s of Hollywood Zingy Zip-Ups) in Female Trouble (1974). Photo: Mitro Hood © Academy Museum Foundation.
Installation view of “John Waters: Pope of Trash” at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles, California. Photo: Charles White, JWPictures/©Academy Museum Foundation.
Installation view of “John Waters: Pope of Trash” at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles, California. Photo: Charles White, JWPictures/©Academy Museum Foundation.
Bell and Howell Camera. Photo: Mitro Hood © Academy Museum Foundation.
John Waters at “John Waters: Pope of Trash” at The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles, California. Photo: Greg Gorman, ©Academy Museum Foundation

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Anyone who has peered over the soft vellum pages of an illuminated manuscript will have marveled over its intricate and colorful designs, which range from stylized floral borders to decorated initials. A new exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, titled “Graphic Design in the Middle Ages,” brings together manuscripts from different cultural traditions to show how these elaborate arrangements have long delighted readers and guided our interpretation of the texts.
Working together by hand, a scribe and illustrator would usually start by devising a book’s overarching design before producing unique layouts for the individual pages within. Visitors to the show will note how many of these experiments have become blueprints for how we still organize text today.
The first of four themes, “Designing the Medieval Page,” lifts the veil on some of the planning that went into the expensive and lengthy process of making a manuscript. Before putting pen to paper, the artists must strike the right balance between image and text, a decision mostly informed by the book’s message and its intended audience.
“Text and Design,” recalls a time long before we could browse a drop-down menu of readymade fonts by revealing some of the first techniques for guiding the eye across the page. This included emphasizing initials at the start of a sentence and the use of color to highlight more important parts of the text, as well as more subtle visual cues like those used to mark out specific dates or introduce a paragraph break.
Other means of communicating information that we may be more accustomed to seeing on a Powerpoint appear in their earliest forms in the section “Visualizing Information,” including diagrams, charts, and other methods for organizing and making sense of data. But not every design decision brought greater clarity. Some of the motifs included in the final section “Ornament and Abstraction” could almost be seen as a secret code, adding nuance or obscuring meaning to encourage thoughtful analysis and challenge even the most learned reader.
“We tend to think of ‘graphic design’ as a modern thing, something that happens in primarily digital spaces,” said curator Larisa Grollemond. “Medieval books are masterclasses in delivering complex information in interesting and visually sophisticated ways.”
Check out manuscripts from the exhibition below.
Decorated Incipit Page illuminated by Malnazar and Aghap’ir (1637–38). Photo courtesy of Getty Museum.
Canon Table from Gospel book (late 1200s). Photo courtesy of Getty Museum.
Bifolium from the Pink Qur’an (1200s). Photo courtesy of Getty Museum.
Office of the Dead from the Blandford Hours illuminated by Ricciardo di Nanni (1465–75). Photo courtesy of Getty Museum.
Decorated Initial D in Psalter (1420–30). Photo courtesy of Getty Museum.
Inhabited Initial D from Breviary (1153). Photo courtesy of Getty Museum.
“Graphic Design in the Middle Ages” is on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Dr, Los Angeles, through January 28, 2024.
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