On View

In 1970, 24-year-old Pacita Abad left her home in the Philippines, fleeing political persecution after leading a student protest against the Marcos regime. She was planning to study law in Spain. Instead, she wound up in San Francisco, an intended one-day visit with an aunt changing the course of her life.
In the years that followed, Abad became a talented artist. She developed a vibrant and luminous style that was entirely her own. Her signature trapunto paintings were richly colorful and embellished quilted canvases inspired by textile traditions from around the world. Until her premature death from lung cancer in 2004, Abad worked prolifically, creating some 5,000 works over a 32-year period.
Now, roughly 40 of those pieces, which engage with issues of race, immigration, and feminism, are finally getting their moment in the sun. Abad’s long-overdue first career retrospective, organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, is currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
“The exuberance of her work is one of the first things that people notice. They see the colors, the patterns, and how wild so much of the work is. It’s the exact opposite of Minimalism,” Nancy Lim, SFMOMA’s associate curator of painting and sculpture, said in a video interview. “The material and visual seductions of her work are undeniable.”
Pacita Abad, If My Friends Could See Me Now (1991). Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Peggy Guggenheim. Photo by Don Ross, courtesy of the artist’s estate.
The exhibition, which will travel to MoMA PS1 in New York and Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario next year, is poised to be a well-deserved breakthrough moment for Abad. Despite an extensive exhibition history, the artist remains a fairly obscure figure in 20th century art history. (Her auction record, set in June 2022, is just ₱9,344,000, or $176,063, according to the Artnet Price Database.)
Personally, I had seen a handful of the artist’s work at art fairs, courtesy of New York’s Tina Kim Gallery, but still found the show to be a revelation when I encountered it at the Walker over the summer.
Each room was painted a different vibrant color, in keeping with the way the artist and her second husband, Jack Garrity (who now manages her estate), decorated their homes around the world. Starting with a year-long trip across Asia in 1973, the two spent time in some 60 countries thanks to his career as a World Bank economist.
Pacita Abad, European Mask (1990). Collection of the Tate Modern, London, purchased with funds provided by the Asia Pacific Acquisitions Committee 2019. Photo by At Maculangan/Pioneer Studios, courtesy of the artist’s Estate and Tate Modern.
The works, many of them monumental, invite close examination with their profusion of different materials. Despite little formal art training, Abad effortlessly mixed oil and acrylic paints with a wide variety of adornments, from plastic buttons, beads, and rhinestones to cowrie shells, fringe, and mirrors, working on padded canvas.
“Pacita immersed herself in artisan communities wherever she was traveling, studying material culture wherever she went,” Lim said. “It was through textiles that she learned about abstraction, about color, about patterning, about all of these things that she ended up incorporating into her aesthetic sensibility.”
Her influences included Burmese and Indian embroidery, Indonesian batik, Nigerian tie-dye, and Korean ink brush painting, as well as indigenous mask traditions from across the globe.
Portrait of Pacita Abad at work in her Manila studio in 1984. Photo courtesy of the artist’s estate.
But her itineracy also prevented her from establishing roots in any one community, which helps in part to explain her relative obscurity. (And that’s to say nothing of the racism and sexism Abad faced in dismissals of her work as ethnic, feminine, or decorative—all too common for a woman embracing traditions of craft.)
“She was kind of everywhere and nowhere at once,” Lim said. But when exhibition curator Victoria Sung, now the senior curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, first approached SFMOMA about the traveling show, the museum jumped at the chance to put Abad in the spotlight.
“Pacita’s creative origins are in San Francisco. Her family has often described San Francisco as her spiritual and artistic home, because this is where she first got the idea to become an artist,” Lim said.
It was a brief first marriage to local artist George Kleiman that introduced Abad to the city’s artistic milieu. And the city’s activist movements, such as the Black Power Movement, expanded Abad’s political awareness. (Her parents were both politicians, and their many children were actively involved in their campaigns.)
Pacita Abad, My fear of night diving (1985). Collection of the Lopez Museum and Library, Manila, Philippines. Photo courtesy of the artist’s estate and Lopez Museum and Library.
Abad’s later work would respond to such world events as the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the Haitian refugee crisis, and Mexican migrants’ detention at the U.S. border. Other pieces appear less obviously tied to politics, like her “Underwater Wilderness” series featuring gorgeous aquatic scenes of coral reefs, which contains references to Spain’s colonization of the Philippines. This range complicated the reception of Abad’s work.
“People would not understand why some works would seem very political, and then suddenly she appeared to be making a left turn to create other bodies of work that are apolitical,” Lim said. “Pacita was a slightly mysterious and confusing figure for a lot of people.”
Nearly 20 years after her death, however, the artist’s appeal is now instantly apparent in Abad’s must-see retrospective. As she put it herself, when asked in 1991 to summarize her contribution to American art, “Color! I have given it color!”
See more from the show below.
“Pacita Abad” at SFMOMA. Photo courtesy of SFMOMA.
“Pacita Abad” at SFMOMA. Photo courtesy of SFMOMA.
“Pacita Abad” at SFMOMA. Photo courtesy of SFMOMA.
“Pacita Abad” at SFMOMA. Photo courtesy of SFMOMA.
“Pacita Abad” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Photo courtesy of the Walker Art Center.
“Pacita Abad” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Photo courtesy of the Walker Art Center.
“Pacita Abad” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Photo courtesy of the Walker Art Center.
“Pacita Abad” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Photo courtesy of the Walker Art Center.
“Pacita Abad” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Photo by Eric Mueller, courtesy of the Walker Art Center.
Pacita Abad, (1998). Collection of the collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2022. Photo by Max McClure, courtesy of the artist’s estate and Spike Island, Bristol.
Pacita Abad, 100 Years of Freedom: Batanesto Jolo (1998). Photo by Chunkyo In, courtesy of the artist’s estate.
Pacita Abad, Marcos and His Cronies (1985–95). Collection of the Singapore Art Museum. Photo courtesy of the artist’s estate and the Singapore Art Museum.
Pacita Abad, Flight to Freedom (1980). Collection of the National Gallery Singapore. Photo courtesy of the artist’s estate and the National Gallery Singapore.
Pacita Abad, Spring Is Coming (2001). Photo courtesy of the artist’s estate.
Pacita Abad, Anilao at its Best (1986). Photo by At Maculangan/Pioneer Studios, courtesy of the artist’s estate and MCAD Manila.
“Pacita Abad” was on view at the Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, Minneapolis, April 15–September 3, 2023; and is at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, California, October 21, 2023–January 28, 2024. It will travel to MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave, Queens, New York, April 4–September 2, 2024; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 12, 2024–January 19, 2025.
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The Scandinavian artistic duo Elmgreen & Dragset are back with another playfully conceptual sculptural installation, this time converting Prague’s Kunsthalle into a public library with a few surprise twists.
The celebration of books pays tribute to the Czech capital’s illustrious literary past, while also drawing attention to the contemporary communal structures that allow us to access these works but are too often threatened by funding cuts and digitization. Always subverting the viewer’s expectations, the surreal installation contains everyday facilities that don’t quite work, like one disintegrating staircase that leads to an unknowable room marked “Filozofie” (Philosophy).
Within this uncannily familiar yet dysfunctional setting, the pair have revived a long-running, international performance series known as the “Diaries.” Taking place every Wednesday and weekend throughout the show’s run, Prague Diaries (2023) sees five young men sit at a long table and fill their journals with private musings as museum visitors mill around, free to satisfy their curiosity by sneaking a peek over the diarist’s shoulder.
“We approached this exhibition by asking ourselves: ‘What happens to libraries and the printed matter within them if digital technologies were to make them obsolete?’,” said Elmgreen & Dragset in a statement. “In the process, we have investigated how artists historically have reimagined and reworked the idea of what a book can be.”
To do this, the pair selected works from the Kunsthalle’s collection to feature throughout the installation, whether tucked into a book shelf, stuck to the wall, or nestled among the stacks. These include Giorgio de Chirico’s Forbidden Toys (1916), a painting that abstracts books into anonymous geometrical shapes, and other historical works by artists like Kurt Schwitters and Endre Nemes. Contemporary sculptural pieces that explore the formal qualities of the physical tome in an increasingly online era are provided by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, Spanish performance artist Dora Garcia and the collective Slavs and Tartars.
The Kunsthalle Praha is a new art space in Prague and Elmgreen & Dragset’s “READ” runs through April 22, 2024. Check out more images of the exhibition below.
Installation view of Elmgreen & Dragset’s “READ” exhibition at Kunsthalle Praha. Photo: Vojtěch Veškrna.
Installation view of Elmgreen & Dragset’s “READ” exhibition at Kunsthalle Praha. Photo: Vojtěch Veškrna.
Giorgo de Chirico, Les jouets défendus (Forbidden Toys (1916). Photo courtesy of Kunsthalle Praha.
Installation view of Elmgreen & Dragset, The Guardian (2023) in “READ” exhibition at Kunsthalle Praha. Photo: Vojtěch Veškrna.
Elmgreen & Dragset, Prague Diareis (2023), a performance as part of “READ” at Kunsthalle Prague. Photo: © Jan Malý.
Installation view of Elmgreen & Dragset, Fruit of Knowledge (2011) in “READ” exhibition at Kunsthalle Praha. Photo: Vojtěch Veškrna.
Slavs and Tatars, Kitab Kebab (Lviv and Wrocław) (2021). Photo: Alicja Kielan, courtesy of Slavs and Tatars.
Installation view of Elmgreen & Dragset’s “READ” exhibition at Kunsthalle Praha. Photo: Vojtěch Veškrna.
Installation view of Elmgreen & Dragset, Other Lovers (2018) in “READ” exhibition at Kunsthalle Praha. Photo: Vojtěch Veškrna.
Endre Nemes, Melancholy (1941). Photo courtesy of Kunsthalle Praha.
Installation view of Elmgreen & Dragset’s “READ” exhibition at Kunsthalle Praha. Photo: Vojtěch Veškrna.
Elmgreen & Dragset, Fruit of Knowledge (2011). Photo by: Elmar Vestner, courtesy The Aegidius Collection.
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Earlier this month saw the opening of “Hockney/Origins: Early Works from the Roy B. and Edith J. Simpson Collection” at Connecticut’s Bruce Museum. The exhibition shows rarely displayed works by the world-renowned artist, giving a unique insight into his early career starting from his student days at London’s Royal College of Art during the early 1960s.
The Bruce Museum’s tagline is “Where art meets science,” and its CEO and exclusive director Robert Wolterstorff sees Hockney’s practice as a fitting combination of the two: “Hockney is endlessly fascinated with how we see the world and represents it through marks on paper or canvas. That act of seeing, interpreting and creating is at the heart of both art and science.”
The exhibition, curated by Margarita Karasoulas, features 16 works loaned from the Roy B. and Edith J. Simpson Collection. The couple built up a large collection of Hockney’s works in their Connecticut home over the course of several decades. Edith J. Simpson said “we never believed it was ours to keep forever, so it gives me great joy to share this special collection with the Bruce Museum and the greater community.”
A key work in the exhibition is A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style (1961) made when Hockney was 24. The painting was inspired by Constantine P. Cavafy’s 1898 poem Waiting for the Barbarians. Cavafy was one of the first modern authors to write openly about homosexuality, and his work was impactful for Hockney who was living as a gay man before the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain in 1967. The artwork won Hockney the gold medal at the 1962 “Young Contemporaries” exhibition at London’s Royal Society of British Artists Galleries.
Hockney’s portfolio is vast and his inspiration has been taken from a multitude of places and styles. French Shop (1971) demonstrates the artist’s Pop Art inspirations, and Japanese House and Tree (1978) shows the influence of Fauvist Henri Matisse.
Some of Hockney’s best-beloved paintings include water: his painting A Bigger Splash (1967) is perhaps his best-known painting and its title was used for the 1973 biographical documentary about the artist’s life and breakup with he artist and author Peter Schlesinger. “Hockney/Origins” includes two pieces from Hockney’s “Paper Pools” series – Diving Board with Shadow (Paper Pool 15) (1978) and Swimming Underwater (Paper Pool 16) (1978), made before Hockney made his move from London to California. The works were inspired by his visits to the artist Kenneth Tyler’s New York swimming pool and they mark the beginning of a new medium in Hockney’s practice -paper pulp. 
The exhibition also includes portraits of friends and colleagues of Hockney’s, including Celia in Red and White Dress (1972) of his muse the textile designer Celia Birtwell. The pair first met in Los Angeles in 1964, and Birtwell sat for him several times over the course of 60 years. She was most famously depicted in Hockney’s 1970-1 painting Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, alongside her husband the fashion designer Ossie Clark. 
The Bruce Museum was originally the private home of the Reverand Dr Francis L. Hawks. It was deeded the to the Town of Greenwich by its next owner, the textile merchant Robert Moffat Bruce, in 1908 and its first exhibition was put on in 1912. Its collection now spans more than 30,000 objects and a new exhibition space was opened in April.
‘Hockney/Origins: Early Works from the Roy B. and Edith J. Simpson Collection’ is on view at the Bruce Museum. Check out more works from the show below.
David Hockney, Swimmer Underwater (Paper Pool 16) (1978). © David Hockney / Tyler Graphics Ltd.
David Hockney, A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style (1961). © David Hockney / Tyler Graphics Ltd.
David Hockney, Japanese House and Tree (1978). © David Hockney / Tyler Graphics Ltd.
David Hockney, Celia in Red and White Dress (1972). © David Hockney / Tyler Graphics Ltd.
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The buildings, billboards, and logos of Ed Ruscha’s 20th-century paintings don’t look like those that populate the world today. His were the product of a sparser, still-developing American West, before roads and cities were choked with cars and people and seemingly every facade was covered in the promotional copy of an overcrowded corporate landscape. Just imagine, for instance, a gas station with displays advertising… gas. Not energy drinks and e-cigarettes and Kit Kats and scratch-offs; just gas. 
That’s exactly what’s depicted in Ruscha’s 1964 painting, Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half. It may seem quaint, but there’s something about this scene—and the artist’s subtle, perspective-shifting inclusion of a dime-store magazine floating in the upper right corner—that resonates in today’s ad-saturated America. In this painting, Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott recently wrote, “we get a perfect juxtaposition of two ideas: power and majesty occupying most of the space, then fiction and lies besmirching or staining it in the far upper-right-hand corner.” 
Ed Ruscha. Photo: Sten Rosenlund. Courtesy of MoMA.
Fittingly, Standard Station is the image that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has chosen to feature in the promotional materials for its major “ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN” show, organized in close collaboration with the now 86-year-old artist. With more than 200 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and books, it is the most comprehensive retrospective of his work ever staged.  
The magnitude of the moment has not been lost on critics, many of whom have reached for the kind of superlatives not often seen in reviews these days. “To call it the show of the season is something of an understatement,” wrote Jason Farago of the New York Times.  
Installation view of “ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN,” on view at The Museum of Modern Art from September 10, 2023 through January 13, 2024. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. Courtesy of MoMA.
Even the critics who identified weaknesses in the MoMA presentation—some found sections of it, particularly those filled with Ruscha’s later work, inconsistent—were undeterred in their awe of Ruscha and his broader achievements. “If ‘Now Then’ strikes the same notes a few too many times for so inventive an artist,” wrote Linda Yablonsky for the Art Newspaper, “ultimately there is very little in it not to like. Anyone can connect to a picture with no fixed meaning; like the dual-action exhibition title, every Ruscha is a two-way street.” 
Indeed, just about everyone seems to agree: the retrospective is a fitting swan song for a generationally important artist and it should not be missed. See more images from the show below. 

Installation view of “ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN,” on view at The Museum of Modern Art from September 10, 2023 through January 13, 2024. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. Courtesy of MoMA.
“ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN” is on view now through January 13, 2024 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

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“Art has come out of its ivory tower and into the office building lobby,” New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in 1959. That is only more true today, as corporations have seen the advantage of wowing their visitors and potential clients with works by brand-name artists, especially as the art market has continued to grow and make global headlines.  
These works extend the great tradition of public art in New York into the indoors, and allow office workers to have a moment of beauty, aesthetic challenge, or intellectual interest on their way to work each day. 
The future of art in corporate lobbies can be subject to the vagaries of time and, especially, changes in ownership. For example, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi created a site-specific installation in the lobby at 666 Fifth Avenue in 1957; when Brookfield Properties took over the lease in 2020, they wanted to remodel, and argued that intervening renovations to the building that changed the context meant the installation no longer reflected Noguchi’s vision. They dismantled it and donated it to the foundation that cares for the artist’s work. 
Lobby art doesn’t necessarily have the reputation of being the most interesting or cutting-edge. Never one to shy away from pronouncing a bold opinion, the New York Post once boldly prounounced that “Lobby art sucks.” But that’s not necessarily the case. Some does, some doesn’t, and Artnet News is here to guide you. 
What are some of the best and worst choices for art installed in office lobbies across New York City? Here’s a quick roundup of five superlatives—from the worst to the best—to guide you as you look for art in different places in your travels throughout the city, if you are seeking something different from the museum and gallery circuit. 

Most Lame Visual Joke: Anish Kapoor at 56 Leonard 
A new permanent public artwork by artist Anish Kapoor at 56 Leonard Street in Manhattan. Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images.
The British-Indian artist’s first public artwork in New York is, in a way, a miniature cousin of his massive Cloud Gate, which has graced Chicago’s Millennium Park since 2006. 
Estimated to have cost as much as $10 million, the as-yet-untitled shiny sculpture is 48 feet long, weighs 40 tons, and is installed under the corner of a new Herzog & de Meuron–designed luxury tower at 56 Leonard Street in Tribeca. The new Lower Manhattan skyscraper is commonly referred to as the Jenga Tower for its distinctive shape.
While it might be a stretch to call the piece lobby art, since it’s outdoors, we think it’s close enough. And while the Chicago work is rightly beloved as a unique piece of public art, this one makes a lame joke, seeming to be bulging under the weight of the building that hosts it.
ArtNews’s Alex Greenberger wrote when it was unveiled that “this sculpture is no Cloud Gate, and personally, I wouldn’t mind if the building above it made good on its promise and crushed the thing altogether.”

Most Predictable: Jeff Koons, Balloon Rabbit (Red), at 51 Astor Place
Jeff Koons, Balloon Rabbit (Red) (2005–10). Photo: Tom Powel Imaging. Courtesy the artist. © Jeff Koons.
Balloon Rabbit (Red), 2005–10, which stands 14 feet tall and tips the scales at 6,600 pounds, has squatted (or whatever it is rabbits do) in the lobby of 51 Astor Place since 2014. 
It comes from the collection of Edward J. Minskoff, whose equity company erected the 13-story, 430,000-square-foot building, where IBM is the anchor tenant in a neighborhood that has drastically gentrified over recent years. Just a few feet away, at Cooper Square, legendary conceptual artist David Hammons once performed his Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983), in which the artist commented on the salability of whiteness and the absurdity of the art market by offering snowballs in various sizes to passersby on the sidewalk. 
And speaking of the selling of whiteness and market madness, in 2019, Koons’s 3-foot-tall stainless-steel Rabbit (1986) fetched $91.1 million at Christie’s New York, setting a record for the priciest work ever sold at auction by a living artist.
Having an artwork by a former Wall Street commodities broker from the collection of an equity guy dominating a lobby where giants like IBM are tenants is just so on the nose that to call it on the nose would be too on the nose. 
Most Journalist-Friendly: Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, Moveable Type, at the New York Times Building
Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, Moveable Type (2007). Courtesy: New York Times.
When the New York Times moved into its $1 billion, Renzo Piano–designed Midtown Manhattan headquarters in 2007, the paper’s architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote (where else?) in the Times that he was “enchanted” with the building. 
Though Ouroussoff didn’t mention it in his review, one element that enchants most people’s  visiting the building is Moveable Type, a digital artwork by New York artist Ben Rubin and Columbia University journalism professor Mark Hansen. 
The piece uses algorithms to parse selections of text from the paper’s daily output, as well as its archive and reader comments, which appear on some 560 small digital displays arrayed in two nearly 54-foot-wide grids. One algorithm, for example, pulls out noun phrases, another maps, another phrases containing numbers, yet another questions, as Rubin explains in a video (which, impressively, explains how many bad ideas they went through to arrive at this one).
Most Literary: Jenny Holzer, 7 World Trade Center 
Jenny Holzer, For 7 World Trade (2006). Photo: Joe Woolhead, courtesy Silverstein Properties.
Rebuilt at a cost of some $700 million, 7 World Trade Center was the first office building to reopen at Ground Zero, five years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. So a public art commission for this emotionally fraught site must have been daunting. But Jenny Holzer (who indeed told the New York Times that she was “taken aback at the gravity of the project”) rose to the challenge with a work that captures decades of expressions about the city’s pleasures. 
Stretching 65 feet wide and 14 feet high, Holzer’s For 7 World Trade was inaugurated in May 2006. The five-foot-high scrolling letters come from poems and prose texts about “the joy of being in New York City,” she told Art21, including works by writers like Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams, each writing about their first impressions of Gotham. In 2019, she added writing from 18 New York schoolchildren, and the text runs for a full 36 hours before repeating itself. 
Besides the literary content, Holzer focused on a satisfying chromatic experience, saying, “I want color to suffuse the space and pulse and do all kinds of tricks.”
Most Straight-Up Coolest: James Turrell, Plain Dress 2006, at 505 Fifth Avenue 
James Turrell, Plain Dress (2006), at 505 Fifth Avenue. Photo: H.G. Esch, courtesy KPF.
California Light and Space artist James Turrell is globally known for his Skyspaces and other installations that employ natural light and illumination to cast a spell. Construction is ongoing on his magnum opus, Roden Crater, in Northern Arizona.
While we wait for that, we can see a small and subtle work, a collaboration with architects Kohn Pederson Fox, in the lobby of Midtown’s 505 Fifth Avenue. As recounted in Architect magazine, the client wanted to invite an artist to create a work in the lobby in collaboration with the architects. During the building’s development, KPF design principal Douglas Hocking made an offhand remark about the light in a rendering of the lobby reminding him of Turrell, and it was off to the races.
Turrell transformed the lobby into a forced-perspective lightbox. Cabinets of light, vertical rectangles reminiscent of Mark Rothko paintings, anchor the installation. Behind their resin surfaces, a bank of LED lights is programmed to change color over a 24-hour cycle. The meditative interior provides a sublime contrast to the traffic and bustle of Fifth Avenue, just outside the glass entrance doors. 
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I don’t normally think of my nonna when I go to fashion exhibitions. Museums tend to vaunt the “genius” designers, the couturiers, or maybe the socialites or celebrities who wear their creations. My grandmother, by contrast, worked in a factory as a seamstress in Rockaway, Queens. She spent all day cutting jackets, stitching trousers, and sewing dress patterns for someone else’s label. Then she went home and fashioned garments for her three children.
Actually, many women in my family made clothes: they crocheted pink sweaters and baby bonnets, whipped up strawberry-print jumpers on sewing machines, embroidered fancy collars. Sewing gave them agency—a way to express their creativity, clothe their loved ones, or make money in a country where they didn’t speak the language.
Gallery view, “Agency: Liminal Spaces of Fashion.” “Theodosia” tea gown by Maria Monaci Gallenga, ca. 1925. Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I felt the spirit of all these women in my life as I walked through “Women Dressing Women,” a terrific new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. The show, on view through March 3, 2024, features 80 objects by 70 artists from the Costume Institute’s collection, from the famous—a Modernist black-and-cream Chanel suit from the 1920s—to the forgotten—a wonderfully weird plum velvet tea gown with sheer sleeves that hang like curtains from the Italian artist Maria Monaci Gallenga, who began making clothes for herself in 1910.
It also honors the often unsung, often unacknowledged ways that women have interacted, and in some ways shaped, the fashion industry. “There were some discoveries,” said Karen Van Godtsenhoven, who curated the show with Mellissa Huber. “As we still look at our collection critically and want to interrogate why some designers have been less visible in the past.”
The curators wanted to illustrate not only “the significance of women to fashion,” as Huber put it, “but in turn the significance of fashion to women.” “Women Dressing Women” opens with the Holy Trinity of female couturiers. A razzle-dazzle explosion of sparkling dresses that proves women can do showstopping design just as well as men.
Gallery view: Left, Evening dress by Madeleine Vionnet, 1924-25; center: Evening jacket, Elza Schiaparelli, 1937; right: Evening dress, Gabrielle Chanel, 1928-39. Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
There’s a slinky chocolate silk gown embroidered with shimmering gold thread from Madeleine Vionnet, the virtuosic technician credited with pioneering the bias cut dress in 1926; a star-studded blue velvet jacket from Elsa Schiaparelli, the flamboyant Surrealist; and a black tulle confection shot through with sequin fireworks by the one-and-only Coco Chanel.
That out of the way, the show then resumes chronologically. It starts with the countless anonymous dressmakers stitching custom wardrobes for clients: clothes filled with artistry but without a label.
That changed in the turn of the 20th century, when the skilled seamstresses, model-makers, and salespeople at these workrooms began opening their own prestigious fashion houses.
In the years between World War I and World War II, women ruled Parisian haute couture, churning out corsetless, loose-fitting dresses for liberated ladies like themselves. “Fashion was one of the first industries open to women,” Van Godtsenhoven said. “There’s this clichéd idea that fashion is just dresses or it’s frivolous, but in a very structural way, it’s given salary and a stable work life to women,” she added. “And I think there is also a connection between fashion and the larger feminist movement, because it’s really about women’s lives. There is a very big synergy between the progress women make in society and in fashion.”
Gallery View, “Agency: Appropriating Menswear.” Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Met has a trove of treasures from these women-led couture houses, many long-shuttered. Lucille—the label that self-taught dressmaker Lucy Duff-Gordon founded after her husband abandoned her and their young daughter—fabricated airy confections of silk chiffon. Callot Soeurs, helmed by a quartet of sisters who turned their lingerie and antique lace shop into a couture house, took inspiration from Eastern dress for their sumptuous, luxurious designs. The forgotten label Premet launched its sweet, tomboyish little black dress—dubbed “la garçonne”—in 1923, three years before Chanel took credit for the style.
Gallery view, “Agency.” Left: Evening dress by Pualine de Rothschild for Hattie Carnegie Inc.; center “Future dress” Claire McCardell, 1945; right: tea gown, Jessie Franklin Turner ca. 1928. Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The exhibit then moves on to the American ready-to-wear designers of the 1950s, such as Bonnie Cashin and Claire McCardell, who created easy, practical, yet idiosyncratic garments for the modern woman as an alternative to the stuffy couture coming out of Paris.
The “boutique generation” of the 1960s and ‘70s—including Biba and Betsey Johnson—demanded even more autonomy. They opened their own shops and imbued their designs with political, social, and artistic ideas, such as Vivienne Westwood’s T-shirts denouncing overconsumption or her subversive use of traditional tartan plaid.
The curators also aim to correct the historical record, giving credit to women workers who never got their due, including Ann Lowe, the Black society designer who made Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding gown. Lowe has one of her signature rosette-strewn dresses in the show, from 1968, created for A.F. Chantilly, Inc., one of the various companies for which she freelanced in order to make ends meet.
Gallery view, “Absence | Omission.” Left: Dress by Ester Manas and Balthazaar Delpierre for Ester Manas 2022. Right: “Delphos” gown, Adèle Henriette Elisabeth Nigrin Fortuny and Mariano Fortuny for Fortuny ca. 1932. Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
But the show’s most jaw-dropping revelation is the true creator of the iconic silk pleated “Delphos” gown by the Venetian house Fortuny. Historians had long attributed the design to Mariano Fortuny, instead of to Henriette Nigrin, his partner and muse—and a skilled seamstress herself—who actually created it.
“The people at the Fortuny museum found the patent for the dress, which had a written note with something like, ‘My wife made this, but I don’t have time to put her name down for the pattern,’” Van Godtsenhoven said.
When Fortuny died in 1949, Nigrin sold the brand to an interior designer named Elsie McNeill. She said Elsie could do whatever she wanted with their designs, she just asked that they stop production of her beloved Delphos. “These garments are of my own creation, even more than many others,” she wrote. “I desire that no-one else take them over.”
Rei Kawakubo with models wearing Comme des Garçons, published in People, December 26, 1983.Photo by Takeyoshi Tanuma. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
“Women Dressing Women” concludes with a selection of makers working today, such as Comme des Garcons’ Rei Kawakubo, the Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri, and Jamie Okuma, the first Native American designer invited to join the Council of Fashion Designers of America. Yet it’s the older, rediscovered, and reconsidered gems that feel the freshest.
How lovely that the women who poured their blood, sweat, tears, and artistry into these astonishing pieces—that were in turn cherished so much by the women who donned them that they donated them to a museum to be preserved forever—finally get their chance to strut.

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The humble public bench has undergone a radical revamp at Design Miami this year, thanks to artist and designer Samuel Ross. The British wunderkind has crafted a series of 12 innovative benches—in three styles—for use by the Miami Design District, currently and permanently installed along its posh promenades.
The site-specific installation—previewed at Design Miami Paris in October—comes just in time for Miami Art Week, with its throngs of well-heeled visitors parading about the slick galleries, luxury boutiques, and tony restaurants of the 16-acre district. Ultramodern and utilitarian, the sculptures will no doubt offer welcome respite for the crush.
A Samuel Ross bench located in the Miami Design District.
Yet despite their futuristic appearance, the benches sit in the canon of British sculpture, according to Ross. “When you view the work,” he explained via video from his London studio, “you can see the relationship to [Anthony] Caro, [Barbara] Hepworth, and [Henry] Moore, which is purposeful. I’m extending the lineage of British sculpture and abstraction.”
In particular, he said, the benches are a nod to Moore’s The Arch (1979–1980), a travertine marble monolith in Kensington Gardens that deftly combines architectural and anatomical forms. As a child, his father would often take him to see the sculpture. “Being raised by two artists, one who went to Central Saint Martins and the other who paints religiously, will have that effect.”
A Samuel Ross bench located in the Miami Design District.
Ross started the bench designs as charcoal sketches before translating them into 3D format and shaping the CNC steel in his workshop. In all, the process took 12 weeks to cycle through numerous iterations and prototypes. In addition to form, Ross also gave a lot of thought to human haptics, allowing for a smooth interaction between the benches and their use by people.
“Housing the body is so interesting,” he said, “and the way temperature, elevation, texture, and materials come into play.” He considered “local variations that I don’t have to think about in England.” In other words, color absorption and heat on a steel sheet surface. He ultimately went with a chalk-white surface and a gloss veneer to reflect the sun’s rays.
Sketches of benches by Samuel Ross.
“The tension between the sculptural and the functional is an obsession of mine. The line between the two is very exciting to push and pull.” Ross, however, is no stranger to pushing boundaries. It’s at the core of his product and industrial design company, SR_A, which is taking on increasingly complex commissions, most recently a tourbillon wristwatch for Hublot and headphones for Beats, leading Apple to offer him a newly created plum position, that of Principal Design Consultant for Beats.
SR_A is only part of his design ambitions. During Paris Fashion Week, his fashion line A Cold Wall has become a must-see runway event, particularly for its collaborations with brands including Nike, Dr. Martens, and Timberland. In fact, launched in 2015, the label was first on his to-do list of career objectives—at the urging of his mentor and friend, the late Virgil Abloh.
Samuel Ross with his new faucet for Kohler.
Fortuitously, one of the first actions Ross took upon finishing graduate school was contacting the celebrated architect-turned-artistic director of Louis Vuitton men’s. What began as an internship at Abloh’s own label, Off-White, led to the creation of A Cold Wall—which, in 2022, was the subject of a fashion exhibition at London’s V&A museum.
Ross’s forays into abstract painting are finding success, too. His exhibition at London’s White Cube in April was well-received. So, too, was a show of granite sculptures at Friedman Benda in May in New York, his second solo show with the gallery.
Bench by Samuel Ross at ‘Mirror Mirror: Reflections on Design’ at Chatsworth House, U.K.
There is another reason Ross has come to Miami, and that’s to present his inaugural collaboration with Kohler, the American bathroom company. Debuting at Design Miami, Ross has designed a distinctively angular double faucet, the Formation 01, that dispenses a smooth sheet of water. It’s cast entirely in a recycled epoxy, a new material developed by SR_A that “enables better angulation.” Created in solid orange, Ross’s signature hue, the striking tap will be sold in a limited edition of 299. In April 2024, Kohler will also host an installation by Ross at Salone del Mobile in Milan, taking over the Kohler palazzo.
This isn’t the first time Ross has participated in Miami Art Week. He started visiting Art Basel and Design Miami in 2020, he said, when “there was this shift happening, a convergence of commerce and artistry that was coming to a head, the coalition of all of these corporate entities and creative communities coming together that really defines Art Basel for me. It seems to have quite a serrated edge to it.”

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The mysterious conceptualist Lutz Bacher is having her first posthumous institutional show at Raven Row in London. The artist herself initiated the concept for the exhibition with curator Anthony Huberman as a mixed presentation of audiovisual pieces which featuring old VHS footage from Princess Diana’s funeral and the voices and imagery of legendary figures from pop culture, including Leonard Cohen—but also Darth Vader. Eerie installations, including a pit of sand, fill the gallery rooms. After Bacher’s passing in 2019, the non-profit exhibition center Raven Row worked with the artist’s estate and Galerie Buchholz to deliver the exhibition.
A California native, Bacher lived in the Bay Area and later New York. She was known to be highly secretive and never publicly revealed basic biographical information, like her birth name or age (although it is known that she was born in 1943). Nonetheless, she received widespread institutional recognition with solo shows at MoMA PS1 in 2009, the ICA in London in 2013, and the Secession in Vienna in 2016.
At Raven Row, Bacher’s blend of found material, digital ephemera, and appropriated sounds and images is quintessential Bacher. In one gallery, panes of glass shimmer with projected images of the Empire State Building lit up with bright colors at night. In the lobby, the visitor is affronted by loud traffic noises, whereas upstairs, bible passages are blared out of a huge speaker while tinny radios play run-of-the-mill pop hits over each other. These strange works, that are tricky to categorize or contextualize, manage to disorientate the viewer in much the same way as our information-oversaturated world often succeeds in doing.
“Lutz Bacher: AYE!” runs through December 17. Check out more installation views of the exhibition below.
Installation of “Lutz Bacher: AYE!” at Raven Row gallery in London. Photo: © Marcus J Leith.
Installation of “Lutz Bacher: AYE!” at Raven Row gallery in London. Photo: © Anne Tetzlaff.
Installation of “Lutz Bacher: AYE!” at Raven Row gallery in London. Photo: © Anne Tetzlaff.
Installation of “Lutz Bacher: AYE!” at Raven Row gallery in London. Photo: © Marcus J Leith.
Installation of “Lutz Bacher: AYE!” at Raven Row gallery in London. Photo: © Marcus J Leith.
Installation of “Lutz Bacher: AYE!” at Raven Row gallery in London. Photo: © Marcus J Leith.

Installation of “Lutz Bacher: AYE!” at Raven Row gallery in London. Photo: © Anne Tetzlaff.

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