On View

On September 2, on a lively street in Bonapriso, an upscale neighborhood of Douala, Cameroon, an eager crowd gathered outside Bwo Art Gallery. The stylish throng had come to see the gallery’s inaugural show—by Cameroonian artist Sesse Elangwe—and Central Africa’s newest platform for contemporary art.
The enthusiasm was just as palpable inside, where artists and collectors perused Elangwe’s richly detailed portraits of Cameroonians in outdoor spaces. There is an underlying sense of determination in the works. The show’s title, “The Defiant Ones,” refers to overcoming challenges the country faces, among them an armed conflict in the Anglophone regions that has raged since 2016.
Installation view of artist Sesse Elangwe’s “The Defiant Ones” exhibition. Courtesy of Bwo Art Gallery.
“If people can begin to do things in ways different from the structures that have been put in place in Cameroon and all over the African continent,” Elangwe said at the opening, “maybe change will come.” His paintings of people with one eye bigger than the other are intended as a metaphorical representation of strength and awareness. “We must always keep an eye open to visualize what we want to achieve,” he said.
With 1,079 square feet and a ceiling height of 16 feet, Bwo Gallery is a point of pride for Douala, the largest city in Cameroon with over 5 million inhabitants, but where precious few exhibition spaces exist. There are only a handful of galleries and, besides the National Museum in the capital of Yaoundé, which sporadically hosts contemporary art exhibitions, there are no contemporary or modern art museums in the country that receive government support.
Sesse Elangwe, The Allegory of Knowledge (2023). Courtesy of Bwo Art Gallery.
Bwo was founded by young entrepreneurs and friends Brice Yonkeu and Noelle Mukete-Elhalaby with the aim of showcasing talent from Cameroon as well as the rest of the African continent and diaspora. The gallery’s name, explained Yonkeu, is derived from Medumba, a language widely spoken by the Bangangté people in the Grassfields region of Cameroon. The word ‘bwo’ means ‘beauty’ or ‘beautiful,’ and it can also refer to fine art.
“We were very inspired by the growth of art scenes in other African countries like Ghana,” Yonkeu said, “with the rapid rise of its art scene, multiplying the number of artists in the country. Opening Bwo felt like the next step for us. We also wanted to choose a space where we could make a difference through art and Cameroon felt special. We felt it would be a great way for people to connect to the country through art.”
Three years ago, they launched the precursor to the Douala space: Bwo Art, an artist management and art advisory based in Atlanta, Georgia. Through their consultancy work there, they have placed over 150 artworks in private collections across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, and supported numerous exhibitions for their artists, who largely hail from the African continent.
Installation view of artist Sesse Elangwe’s “The Defiant Ones” exhibition. Courtesy of Bwo Art Gallery.
But the pair had always wanted to foster Cameroonian art from within Cameroon. “We wanted to provide an opportunity to engage with our own national past and contemporary heritage that is lacking on the ground, depriving local populations a part of their identity,” offered Mukete-Elhalaby at the opening. Ultimately, she said, “we want Bwo to go beyond the idea of a white cube art space, to provide inspiration for young and established creatives, and offer them a way to grow their career at home and abroad.”
Both Yonkeu and Mukete-Elhalaby grew up in Cameroon but studied and worked abroad, Mukete-Elhalaby in the United States and Yonkeu in France. With their new space, they hope to add a contemporary component to Central Africa’s existing talent, artists such as Pascale Marthine Tayou, Hervé Youmbi, Maurice Pefura, Samuel Fosso, Bili Bidjocka, and Barthélémy Toguo, who’s planning to open an art museum in Yaoundé.
“The art scene in Cameroon is vibrant,” said the art writer and curator Simon Njami, telling Artnet News that he continues to visit twice a year and will take part in the SUZA Manifest biennale in 2024, organized by Douala-based Galerie MAM. “There are a lot of initiatives, collectives, and individuals trying to make a change among the youth,” he added. “I have been conducting numerous workshops these past years with artists, curators, and writers under 30 and I was impressed by their determination to exist.” Moreover, he stressed, it doesn’t stop at art. “Musicians like Blick Bassy and intellectuals like Achille Mbembe are increasingly invested in the artistic and intellectual development of the country.”
Yonkeu said that, despite seeing how contemporary African art has flourished, African artists are “still a bit in the shadows,” adding, “The global understanding and perception of contemporary artistic production from this region doesn’t adequately represent the diversity, in terms of practices and discourses. Presently, the narrative is still not in our control but I am confident that with the emergence of more galleries on the continent, the recognition of more African curators and writers, we could occupy the full spotlight, permanently.”
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Scottish artist France-Lise McGurn told me that, growing up, her family had a running joke—if you sat still for too long, their mother would crochet over you.
“Matching Mother/Daughter Tattoos” a new exhibition at New York’s Margot Samel, offers a window into the artist’s relationship—as a daughter and a creator—with her mother Rita McGurn, a mother of five, and a set and interior designer who spent decades making delightfully idiosyncratic crochet figurative sculptures, as well as paintings, drawings, and fiber objects in their Glasgow home. 
Rita, who passed away in 2015, rarely showed her creations in her lifetime, and only ever locally. “She didn’t think of them as artworks in a traditional sense,” France-Lise explained. This marks the first time the McGurns have had their works exhibited side-by-side and the first display of Rita’s works in the United States, offering insights into the complex and even unconscious ways Rita’s creative spirit shaped her daughter. 
France-Lise McGurn and Rita McGurn, installation view of “Matching Mother/Daughter Tattoos” at Margot Samel, 2023. Photo: Lance Brewer. Courtesy of Margot Samel.
But this isn’t a maudlin tribute. Decidedly not. “My mother didn’t have a sentimental bone in her body,” said France-Lise, speaking to me at the gallery. Her mother’s delightfully colorful and idiosyncratic crochet figurative sculptures crowded around us as though listening in. “She’d find all this art talk very pretentious,” she said with a wry smile, “She loved me and worried for me, but talking about art wasn’t part of our mother-daughter relationship.” 
The title of the exhibition hints at Rita’s winkingly down-to-earth spirit, too; in the 2000s, a young France-Lise returned to Glasgow from a trip to New York with a black star tattoo, one that matched her mother’s own. Rita looked over at the tattoo while cooking, and said, “‘Matching mother-daughter tattoos? Charming,’ with lighthearted practicality. “She was not impressed,” laughed France-Lise.  
Portrait of France-Lise McGurn. Photo: Amy Gwatkin.
In eschewing memorial indulgence, “Matching Mother/Daughter Tattoos” instead offers something quite lively, full of color and movement. The exhibition has the buzzing electric feel of an apartment party or a full family house. A floor-to-ceiling mural fills the gallery walls. France-Lise painted it over three days. “My mum would not have liked a very clear, austere art gallery setting. She would have absolutely painted over the whole thing. We wanted it to be very playful,” she said.
Known for her free-flowing compositions in vibrant, quasi-Mannerist hues, the younger McGurn works intuitively and often in sweeping gestures. Her works have earned her shows at London’s Simon Lee Gallery and have entered the collections of Tate Modern. Here, androgynous figures dance across the gallery’s walls. New paintings, made specifically for the exhibition by France-Lise, are installed atop the mural, as are two paintings by Rita from the 1990s. These paintings are distinguished not only by Rita’s distinct painterly hand but also by their decorative frames that hint back to the domestic sphere she so loved.
France-Lise McGurn and Rita McGurn, Glasgow, 1980s.
Rita’s crochet sculptures and carpet, all of which are untitled, are arranged in groupings throughout the gallery. One sculpture, larger-than-life-size and in a purple and blue swimsuit, is situated by the gallery window like a benevolent sentry over this familial space. These works are just a drop in the bucket of her oeuvre. “She was the most prolific artist I’ve ever met. It was a compulsion,” said McGurn. 
When asked about the motivations or meanings behind her mother’s work, France-Lise hesitates. “I wouldn’t attach too much explanation of mine onto individual works of hers. It’s very difficult for me to talk about how she thought,” said France-Lise. “She never talked about it.” Then turning back to the bathing-suited sculpture by the gallery window, she noted, “Well, this one has a mannequin inside, so the feet pop through occasionally. That shows something of her process. She would have gotten that mannequin and she would have humped it up the street and then covered it. Everything was material for her.” 
An untitled sculpture by Rita McGurn. Photo: Lance Brewer. Courtesy of Margot Samel.
France-Lise McGurn, Zoflora, the midnight blooms (2023). Photo: Lance Brewer. Courtesy of Margot Samel.
While she won’t speak for her mother, France-Lise does have her own suppositions. “My mum was an orphan, raised by her gran. She had a rough childhood,” she explained. “In my childhood memories, she just seemed to be filling her life up with people. Either she was having them, or she was making them. Or she was inviting them over. But she was never, ever, alone. She was just populating everything all the time and always cooking.”
Rita started making her sculptures in the ‘70s, before France-Lise’s birth, building into a height of creative output in the ‘80s and ‘90s. “I’m attracted to that period of Glasgow in my work, too, but also, psychologically, it’s quite an important period for me,” said France-Lise “It’s a time I remember my mum. It’s quite interesting to see works from the ‘90s, right next to all my work which is made in the last couple of months.” 
Portrait of France-Lise McGurn. Photo: Amy Gwatkin.
France-Lise believes the very busyness of her parents’ home pushed her toward art-making. “Which way round is it? Are you alone a lot because you’re a painter? Or is it actually why you’re a painter? Because you like to be alone?” she thought. “I was always trying to be quiet, away from all the madness.” 
Unlike Rita, who never titled her works, France-Lise’s titles offer clever, even cheeky, insights into her thought process—and her humor. The sides of her canvases are often filled with title ideas written in paint and crossed off. Music—particularly from her childhood and teenage years—is a major inspiration and so is that childhood home. The painting Zoflora, the midnight blooms (2023) hints at both. The painting shows a woman in pink and purple blues, with her legs pulled up. The title comes from a popular Scottish cleaning product of the same name—famed for its distinctive indigo hue, similar to the painting’s background. While that painting recalls a certain domesticity of housekeeping, it also hints at the era when France-Lise was throwing events at late-night clubs, when she herself was a kind of night-blooming flower.
Installation view of “Matching Mother/Daughter Tattoos” at Margot Samel, 2023. Photo by Lance Brewer. Courtesy of Margot Samel.
Two works—80s Mirror and 90s Mirror—more directly reference her childhood home, picturing a giant mirror her parents had in the living room.
But more than ornament or object, Rita’s primary influence on France-Lise seems to be in the spirit of constant evolution, of embracing change. “Creating for her was all an ongoing project that she didn’t really want to anchor down. She lived with these objects and she did go back and make changes to them. Nothing was ever finished. As soon as you said something was good, she would almost immediately change it,” France-Lise recalled. On one occasion, she even remembers coming back from college to find her mother had painted over one of her own paintings. “I said, that painting looks oddly familiar,” she remembered, with a laugh. “And It is strange to see these objects from her life in a frame or a gallery. It’s a little bit like seeing our childhood car in a gallery.” For France-Lise, who has been shepherding much of her mother’s artistic estate, the process is complex, not without its gray areas.
“Things change. This exhibition is about time in a way,” she said, “This mural I painted wouldn’t be the same mural if I painted it next week. And when this exhibition ends, it will go, and there will only be the memory of it. And that’s as it should be.” 
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New paintings by the musician Thom Yorke, lead singer of the English rock band Radiohead, will go on view at Tin Man Art gallery in London. The works were produced with artist Stanley Donwood, a long-time collaborator since he produced cover art for the band’s EP My Iron Lung in 1994.
For Yorke, the experience of making the works was reminiscent of his process as a musician. “That was what I found incredibly exciting,” he said. “I became so conscious of the fact that the two processes are almost exactly the same.”
Donwood and Yorke met while they were both art students. “I figured I’d either end up really not liking this person at all, or working with him for the rest of my life,” Yorke once recalled. Since 1994, Donwood has made all of Radiohead’s album art and promotional materials. In 2021, he sold some of his prospective cover designs, which were never used, at Christie’s. 
Yorke and Donwood started making art together a few years ago. Some early efforts were featured in the digital “KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION” that accompanied the release of Radiohead’s triple album of the same name that combined the records Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001) with previously unreleased material.
For this latest exhibition, “The Crow Flies Part One,” the duo worked side-by-side on the same canvas in a small studio. As well as making the album art for A Light for Attracting Attention, the 2022 debut of Yorke’s new band The Smile, they produced over 20 additional paintings that are now being made public for the first time.
Longtime fans of Donwood’s artistic interpretations of Yorke’s music will find the appearance of strange, stylized landscapes to be familiar. In this case, swirling abstract forms have been layered over intricate, map-like drawings. In keeping with the idea of using ancient maps as inspiration, the works are made on vellum, or calfskin, which was traditionally used before the widespread availability of paper. Compared to previous projects, the imagery is more delicately painted using old-school techniques like egg tempera or water-based gouache.
The exhibition runs through September 10, and will be followed by a second part scheduled to run from December 6–10. See more of the new paintings below.
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, Unchecked (2021–23). Photo courtesy of Tin Man Art.
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, Somewhere You’ll Be There (2021–23). Photo courtesy of Tin Man Art.
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, Membranes (2021–23). Photo courtesy of Tin Man Art.
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, Let Us Raise Our Glasses To What We Don’t Deserve (2021–23). Photo courtesy of Tin Man Art.
“The Crow Flies Part One” is on view at Tin Man Art, 4 Cromwell Place, London, September 6–10.

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It’s the season for glistening, metallic flowers to bloom in Brooklyn. Come to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for the majesty of nature (and 12,000 different plants), stay for the French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel’s sublime floral sculpture exhibition.
“The Flowers of Hypnosis” opened last month and runs until October 22. It consists of six site-specific pieces and took Othoniel a year to produce. Using his signature strands of hammered steel spheres, Othoniel conjured visions of lotus blossoms and a shiny rose. As per the title, it is meant to be a heady, thought-provoking experience, as well as a journey into Zen.
Jean-Michel Othoniel’s “The Flowers of Hypnosis” at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Photo: Michelle Huynh. Courtesy of Dior.
“Nature can be a source of inspiration, contemplation, and beauty,” the artist said in an audio introduction to the show. “It’s very important now as a goal to survive the world to escape reality or to build yourself strong enough to face reality—that’s the power of gardens. In general, my sculptures are here to enchant and to push this feeling of contemplation in a stronger way.”
The enormity and materiality of the flora adds a surreal tinge to the paradisical surroundings, but at the heart of the project seems to be the artist’s goal to service his surroundings and pay homage to the ecology.
Jean-Michel Othoniel’s sculpture Mirror Lotus in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Lily Pool Terrace. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. © Jean-Michel Othoniel / ADAGP, Paris & ARS, New York 2023.
“Jean-Michel has a passion for gardens, flowers, and the natural world that reveals itself in his works for ‘The Flowers of Hypnosis,’ which respond to and enhance their garden settings,” said Adrian Benepe, president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
“The Flowers of Hypnosis” is sponsored by Dior as part of its Cultural Gardens initiative, which was formed to “maintain the intense links between creativity and the living world that forged the house’s identity.” A new Othoniel art piece created for the brand will be unveiled at a Dior-hosted event at the gardens on September 7.
The artist Jean-Michel Othoniel. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Othoniel’s art style might be familiar from his iconic Palais-Royale metro station in Paris. He had a 2012 survey that stopped at the Centre Pompidou, Brooklyn Museum, and other institutions. He has a permanent installation at the Château de Versailles, a dramatic serpentine fountain emerging in the palace’s lush garden.
The artist continues to be drawn to the natural world. “Gardens leave a great deal of space for the irrational, the inexplicable, the extravagant,” Othoniel said. “They are places of mystery, magic, and secrecy.”
Three sculptures in Jean-Michel Othoniel’s “Gold Lotus” series in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Japanese Hill and Pond Garden. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli. © Jean-Michel Othoniel / ADAGP, Paris & ARS, New York 2023.
“The Flowers of Hypnosis” is on view at the Japanese Hill and Pond Garden, Fragrance Garden, and Lily Pool Terrace sections of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
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Towards the end of last year, the Wellcome Collection in London decided to close its 15-year-old “Medicine Man” display because it “perpetuate[d] a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist, and ableist theories and language.” The museum, which predominantly displays medical artifacts, many of which were collected by 19th-century pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome, added that it was in the process of reconsidering “the point of museums.”
With its new exhibition, “Genetic Automata,” the Wellcome Collection appears to be putting forward an alternative proposition for the role of the museum. The presentation features four recent films by the British-Ghanaian artist Larry Achiampong and his long-time collaborator David Blandy, another British artist who is white. Together, the pair explore the legacy of scientific racism and how its ideas still resurface in contemporary culture, technology, and healthcare.
Installation view of “Genetic Automata” at the Wellcome Collection. Photo: Steve Pocock.
The latest film in the series, _GOD_MODE_ (2023), was co-commissioned by the museum and the Black Cultural Archives (BCA). Its first half is a direct riposte to the disturbing ideas of Victorian scientist Francis Galton, who established eugenics as a scientific discipline at University College London. The second half, created using Unity, a 3D platform for video games, and littered with references to modern gaming culture, makes an analogy between the myth of genetic superiority and the use of cheat codes to play a video game in the invincible “God mode,” highlighting the comparative lack of agency of “non-player characters.”
A display of related objects includes death masks used by the phrenologist Robert Noel to analyze the different skull measurements of criminals and intellectuals, a “pocket registrator” invented by Galton to secretly categorize people according to five types, and an eye color gauge used in the 1920s for an antisemitic study on the intelligence of Russian and Jewish school children living in London’s East End.
Installation view of “Genetic Automata” at the Wellcome Collection. Photo: Steve Pocock.
These items offer useful historical context to _GOD_MODE_, but the film in turn also gives a new and necessary context to these objects, pulling them out from the past in order to examine their influence on the present.
A particularly successful film, A lament for power (2020), imagines the perspective of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman who unwittingly became the source for the very first immortalized human cell line, known as HeLa, when her cancer cells were stored after a treatment in 1951. The cells were successfully cloned and sent out to researchers across the globe and have since contributed to many medical breakthroughs, including the development of a polio vaccine. Lacks’s family has objected to the non-consensual harvesting of her cells.
Once more in the style of a video game, large, cell-like forms balloon out from buildings within a eerily dystopian setting. Against this backdrop, we hear Lacks’s imagined voice speak out: “Growing in labs, spliced, injected, and infected for the good of mankind. Your body, swollen to gargantuan form, pulsing, mutating, and splitting, again, and again, and again, as others’ hands manipulate and inspect you,” she says. “Powerless to end this zombie life of your flesh living way past your soul.”
Still from Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, A lament for power (2020). Photo: © the Artists Commissioned by Art Exchange.
“A fortune made of you, and your family has seen nothing, knew nothing for decades. And their genes, through yours, are now visible to all,” she continues. “These riches built on your back. The soil of your cells owned, leased out, and licensed by white men in suits. A legacy for their families. Medicines are made thanks to your body that are then denied to your brothers and sisters for the want of a few notes.”
The final two films are A Terrible Fiction (2019), which tells the little known history of Darwin’s taxidermy teacher John Edmonstone, who was a freed slave, and Dust to Data (2021), which compares the colonial history of archaeology with the modern day practice of mining data to, once again, define people according to categories.
As each film develops, it delves further into the wider social and cultural implications of scientific and medical injustices. The exhibition suggests that “the point of museums” like the Wellcome Collection may no longer be as custodians of a fixed past, confined within glass cases, but as facilitators of an ever-evolving conversation that welcomes new voices.
“Genetic Automata” is on view at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London, through 11 February, 2024.
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Summer may be coming to an end, but the Hamptons season is far from over—at least for the art scene. Women’s voices and narratives are stronger than ever out East, with several powerful shows curated by women artists and collectors which are spotlighting both overlooked makers and up-and-coming talents. Discover a multitude of inspiring and powerful perspectives with these six must-see shows, spanning photography, craft, furniture, sculpture, and more.  
 
“Renée Cox: A Proof of Being”Guild Hall, through September 4 
Installation image, ‘Renée Cox: A Proof of Being’, courtesy Guild Hall of East Hampton. Photo by Gary Mamay.
Guild Hall is closing out its summer roster with a commanding retrospective of Jamaican-American artist Renée Cox. Over her 30-year career, she has become best known for her performative self-portraits and photographic tableaux in which Black women and men pose, reclaiming predominantly white art historical scenes. “The dramatic use of scale in Cox’s images is powerful, drawing you in or staring you down. A surprising, lesser-known narrative we encourage people to learn more about after seeing the exhibition is the series that depicts ‘Queen Nanny of the Maroons,’ the 18th-century female Jamaican national hero who defeated the British using guerilla warfare,” Andrea Grover, Guild Hall’s executive director, told Artnet News. 
Another highlight is a new video installation, Soul Culture (2022). Grover says this piece represents a “new direction” for Cox. “The room features moving patterns of sacred geometry collaged from the arms, legs, and bodies of Cox’s models. The artist says it’s meant to stop you from thinking and ‘keep you in the moment,’” added Grover.  
“Supernatural Beauty”Onna House, through September 5 
Installation view “Supernatural Beauty” at Onna House, 2023. Photography by Memry Anderson / BFA.
Last year, fashion designer and collector Lisa Perry opened Onna House, a restored modernist home in East Hampton, featuring a rotating mix of art and objects by female makers. “We reinvent ourselves with every show,” the multihyphenate tells Artnet News. This summer Onna House is showcasing six talents working across media ranging from fiber textiles to metal sculpture in a group show called “Supernatural Beauty.”  
“LA-based artist Lisa Eisner turns jewelry into art, and Spanish artist Adriana Meunié uses materials she sources in Mallorca to create artistic clothing and art,” said Perry who aspires for the exhibition to expand the meaning of art. “I love the idea of bringing together six women artists from multiple disciplines and backgrounds to find in essence they all speak a similar language with the common goal of seeking beauty in the ordinary and the extraordinary.” 
 
“Women Choose Women”Exhibition The Barn, through September 9 
Installation view “Women Choose Women” 2023. Photography by Eric Striffler.
In Bridgehampton, three powerhouse women have teamed up to present the work of female artists and designers spanning the 1950s to today. Christine Berry and Martha Campbell, co-founders of Berry Campbell (a gallery known for its promotion of overlooked artists, particularly women of Abstract Expressionism) have joined Elena Frampton, principal of Frampton Co. at the designer’s gallery space, Exhibition The Barn. “Set within a converted 1910 barn turned gallery, ‘Women Choose Women’ presents historical and contemporary paintings, sculpture, collectible design, and our own furniture line, all within an unconventional living room setting,” said Frampton. 
“Women Choose Women” is named after the landmark exhibition held at the New York Cultural Center in 1973, which was also curated by a committee of women artists. Fifty years later, Frampton, Berry, and Campbell believe more progress needs to be made, and have, thus, brought together works, ranging from a rare work on paper by Elaine de Kooning to contemporary sculpture and furniture by Swiss-born, Los Angeles-based Carmen D’Apollonio, presented in collaboration with Friedman Benda. 
 
“(Mostly) Women (Mostly) Abstract”Eric Firestone Gallery, through September 17 
Judy Pfaff, Great Glasses (1988). Courtesy of Eric Firestone Gallery.
This August Eric Firestone Gallery is presenting a two-part exhibition across its East Hampton and New York City locations. The Hamptons iteration of “(Mostly) Women (Mostly) Abstract” features a cross-generational group of 22 experimental post-war artists, often on the fringes of the mainstream art world. “The show delves into the works of contemporary artists and their predecessors, who practiced abstract art and explored otherness in this genre—themes such as ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual orientation, which are as relevant now as ever,” gallerist and curator Eric Firestone told Artnet News. Though the artists are separated by time and experiences, their “intensely graphic work and saturated colors” form a cohesive narrative.  
Firestone says a can’t-miss work is American artist Judy Pfaff’s kaleidoscopic 1988 sculpture, Great Glasses. “Her work is highly fresh and relevant…you’ll want to explore the sculpture’s many facets and the story it tells,” he added. Among the other artists featured are Kennedy Yanko, best known for shaping paint skin into sculpture, and Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award recipient, Nina Yankowitz, whose sculpture, often made using handicraft techniques, challenges the notion of “women’s work.”  
 
“Change Agents: Women Collectors Shaping the Art World”Southampton Art Center, through September 30 
Installation view “Change Agents: Women Collectors Shaping the Art World” 2023. Courtesy of Southhampton Arts Center.
In celebration of its 10th anniversary, the Southampton Arts Center has staged a pioneering show bringing together 14 women collectors, as prestigious as Agnes Gund, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Lisa Perry, and Mickalene Thomas. SAC’s Executive Director, Christina Mossaides Strassfield, says it was founding board co-chair Simone Levinson who came up with the concept, which had surprisingly never been explored to this extent. “Historically and today, female collectors make a huge difference in the art world through their philanthropy and support of artists,” said Mossaides Strassfield, calling to mind Abigail Rockefeller, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Peggy Guggenheim. “The women whose collections are featured in ‘Change Agents’ continue to carry that torch.” 
Rather than be divided into sections by collectors, the works are interspersed, so that the “presentation lets each work speak for itself,” added Mossaides Strassfield. “The synergy among the results creates a beautiful dialogue that helps one to rethink the art historical cannon.” Artists in the exhibition range from heavy hitters, including Andy Warhol, Mark Bradford, and Lorna Simpson, to quickly rising talents, such as Michaela Yearwood Dan, Tala Madani, and Becky Suss. 
 
“Two Pieces in the Shape of a Pear: A Group Exhibition Curated by Pat Steir” Hauser & Wirth, through September 30 
Angel Otero, Splintered (2019)© Angel Otero. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Matthew Herrmann
Southampton’s most invigorating exhibition this summer has been curated by none other than Pat Steir, who has paired works across medium and genre. “Something magical often comes from inviting a great artist to curate a show of works by other artists they admire…Pat Steir approached the assignment as a way to reveal some surprising affinities between eight wonderful artists across several generations—people we might otherwise never have imagined together in the same way,” Madeline Warren, senior director at Hauser & Wirth, told Artnet News. “It took a painter to recognize the shared gestures, forms, and methods, the connections that lie within and underneath the contrasts. The show is full of delights because Pat’s provocative pairings tease out these sorts of unexpected connections.” 
For the show, Steir paired one of her electric drip paintings from 1993 with Rashid Johnson’s Surrender Painting “Pouring” (2023), a chromatically subdued, yet haunting iteration of his “Anxious Men” works. The other pairings include Cindy Sherman and Mickalene Thomas, Rita Ackermann and Avery Singer, and Mary Heilmann and Martha Tuttle. 
Also while visiting Hauser & Wirth’s Southampton gallery, don’t miss “Jane Yang: D’Haene / earthbound,” presenting the Brooklyn-based artist’s experimental, highly textured ceramics, inspired by her South Korean heritage and Moon Jars. 
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Knowingly or not, every artist references the history of their craft eventually. Some do it to situate their own work in the lineage of greats, others to question the monolithic canon.  
Recently opened at the Princeton University Art Museum’s gallery Art on Hulfish is an exhibition of lens-based artists who look to Leonardo, Van Eyck, and other Old Masters for material. Their strategies and intents vary but ultimately lead to the same comforting truth.  
If this sounds like homework, it’s not. The show, like the last gasps of summer vacation alongside which it arrives, is light and warm. The art historical easter eggs are there for the nerds, but so is Vik Muniz’s charming 1999 photograph of the Mona Lisa recreated, in Warholian fashion, with peanut butter and jelly. You don’t need a PhD to appreciate what the artist is doing with that picture.  
Vik Muniz, Double Mona Lisa (Peanut Butter and Jelly) (1999). © Vik Muniz.
“Some of the art is serious. But I hope people come and laugh,” said Ronni Baer, the Princeton curator who organized the show. For her and the museum, the show checks several boxes. It’s historical but also contemporary, educational but enjoyable. It’s legible, and it also serves to remind visitors of the museum’s programming while its main building is being reconstructed on campus.  
(David Adjaye, the Ghanaian/British architect recently accused of sexual harassment and assault, designed the new Princeton University Art Museum. Though Adjaye has stepped away from numerous projects in light of the allegations, Princeton has said that the museum is too deep into construction for the school to distance itself from him now. The new museum is expected to open in 2025.) 
Ori Gersht, Pomegranate (Off Balance) (2006). Courtesy of the artist.
The exhibition, Baer said, points to the past but feels like the present. “The idea of searching for identity is something embedded in a lot of this work—and it’s as relevant then as today,” she said, referring to works like Yasumasa Morimura’s Daughter of Art History (Princess A) (1990), for which the older male artist recast himself as the young female subject of Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of the Infanta Margarita Aged Five (1956), and Nina Katchadourian’s “Flemish Style” self-portraits made in an airplane bathroom.  
As with these stately Renaissance portraits, the still-life is a popular point of departure in the show. Included are pictures of bouquets by Sharon Core, who painstakingly grows her own horticultural specimens, and Bas Meeuws, who pulls examples from his personal library of floral photographs and reassembles them digitally.  
A 2006 video by Ori Gersht recreates Juan Sánchez Cotán’s Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber (circa 1600) with pomegranate substituted in—a symbol of the violence that defined the artist’s childhood in Tel Aviv. (In Hebrew, the word for “pomegranate” also means “grenade.”) Gersht also layers on a reference to Harold Edgerton as a slow-motion bullet pierces the pomegranate halfway through.
Jeanette May, NY Tech Vanitas: Dot Matrix (2018). Courtesy of the artist.
Nearby, Jeanette May’s NY Tech Vanitas: Dot Matrix (2018) nods to the eponymous genre of still-life paintings popularized by the Dutch in the 17th century, which employed objects of pleasure to remind viewers that our time on this mortal coil is limited and shouldn’t be wasted on indulgences. But instead of the decadent snacks and emptied wine carafes favored by Golden Agers like Willem Claesz Heda, May has filled her frame with pieces of outmoded, obsolescent tech: flip-phones, a CD-ROM, a printer that uses—gasp—perforated paper. 
“All of it adds up to nothing, both then and now,” Baer said, somewhat jokingly, before putting a bead on the central idea of the show. “These themes,” she went on, “are centuries old. They’re human concerns about identity and the fleetingness of life and about how we choose to live.” 
“Art about Art: Contemporary Photographers Look at Old Master Paintings” is on view August 19 through November 5, 2023, at the Princeton University Art Museum’s Art on Hulfish gallery. 
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There are no naked bodies in “The Big Nudes,” Heji Shin’s new show at 52 Walker—at least not the kind implied by the title. Instead, what you’ll find are giant pictures of pigs, shot against a studio backdrop, and MRI scans of the artist’s own brain. Both subjects are technically bare, but this is not exactly the stuff of late-night sexts.
For some, Shin inspires “emperor’s new clothes” doubts. Her irreverent, provocative pictures have found fans in bleeding-edge fashion brands and art institutions, but for others, they flummox and inflame. There’s a good chance “The Big Nudes” will generate the same range of reactions.   
“I’m not that subtle,” the artist and editorial photographer said, deadpan, during a recent Zoom interview. She was sitting in an old farmhouse in the Hudson Valley, which she recently purchased and is trying to fix up. Born in South Korea, raised in Germany, and now mostly based in New York, Shin exudes a cosmopolitan cool that makes it hard to picture her doing housework in the sticks. “I don’t claim any intellectual approach in my art practice,” she went on. “I never wanted to be avant-garde.” 
Heji Shin, 2023. © Heji Shin. Courtesy of the artist and 52 Walker.
As with her 2020 exhibition “Big Cocks,” which exclusively featured photos of roosters, Shin uses the title of her new show as bait. “The Big Nudes” also nods to a 1981 portfolio of the same name by the late fashion icon Helmut Newton (which does feature a lot of naked bodies). Tellingly, Shin is an avowed admirer.
Critics of Newton’s work point to its objectification of female bodies. Susan Sontag once called him a “misogynist” who “humiliates women.” But others see genuine affection: “The true subject of his photographs, as rooted as they were in male fantasy, was the awesomeness of feminine power,” Variety critic Owen Gleiberman wrote in 2020, echoing a common—if somewhat flimsy—pro-Newton rebuttal.
Shin shares Newton’s wit and sense of style, and she similarly revels in the thrill of the gaze, even—or especially—if that gaze is a little prurient. But it’s not the space of “male fantasy” that her pictures explore. What she’s interested in is difficult to put a finger on, but it has something to do with the economy of images in the 21st century, where news and products and porn all blur together in the fight for real estate on our screens. 
That’s the space where Shin’s work lives. She photographs farm animals like pinup models and lovers like documentary subjects. Her photos twinkle with a commercial polish, but what they’re selling isn’t clear.  
Heji Shin, You’ve come a long way, baby! (2023) © Heji Shin. Courtesy of the artist and 52 Walker.
If punny titles are one of Shin’s signatures, so are odd pairings. She’s shown appropriated images of the Kardashians next to illustrations of A.I.-generated avatars breastfeeding and pictures of monkeys next to shots of role players recreating war scenes. As with those combos, the ties between the swine and brains of “The Big Nudes” are not obvious. (The MRI scans were generated specifically for this show and did not come from a health scare, Shin pointed out.)  
It’s easier to map these new pictures as coordinates in the broader constellation of Shin’s work, where, say, the “Big Nudes” birds relate to the “Big Cocks” pigs, which in turn point to the NYPD officers penetrating each other in her 2018 exhibition “Men Photographing Men.” “I think [they exist in] the same cosmos,” she said. “When you’re interested in certain archetypes, then one leads to another, one references the other.” 
Heji Shin, Big Nude II (2023). © Heji Shin. Courtesy of the artist and 52 Walker.
Shin’s current exhibition isn’t going to inspire the backlash that some her previous efforts have. The “Men Photographing Men” pictures made headlines, as did her 2017 Eckhaus Latta campaign, for which she shot real couples mid-coitus. The 2019 Whitney Biennial featured her two most infamous series: “Baby” (2016), which captured shriveled newborns emerging from their mothers, and “Kanye” (2018), for which she documented the eponymous rapper at the height of controversy and on a monumental scale.  
In past interviews, Shin deflected questions about taste. “I thought people would have more humor,” she once said of audience responses to her 2018 Kunsthalle Zurich show, which featured the “Kanye” portraits. “They could really only see one layer of the work.” 
Whether or not she agreed with the taboos others identified in her work, it’s clear Shin knew what she was doing. “There used to be a time when a certain kind of outrage would give meaning, in a certain context, to a work,” she said. But more recently, the artist has grown bored of provocation. “Maybe I’ve just changed,” she explained. “Back then, I think it was more interesting to see certain kinds of reactions. Now I don’t think it’s interesting.”  
Installation view, “Heji Shin: The Big Nudes,” July 21–October 7, 2023, at 52 Walker. Courtesy of 52 Walker.
Shin paused, eyes to the sky. “I think you choose your battles,” she continued. “I think that my battle is definitely more about doing art that interests me than going into a dialogue with people that I’m not interested in.” 
If the artist is in dialogue with anybody in “The Big Nudes,” it might be herself. At the center of the show is a freestanding glass pyramid, inside of which floats a 3D hologram of her brain, imaged from the MRI scans. It’s a work unlike any Shin has shown before, and yet it ties everything around it together. The real pleasure of “The Big Nudes,” it turns out, is seeing an artist trust her vision enough to indulge her singular impulses. Literally and figuratively, her mind is on display.  
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