Shows & Exhibitions

“New Grit: Art and Philly Now” makes a heckuva case for Philadelphia as a creative capital.
The show, surveying 25 artists based in the city, opened alongside Frank Gehry’s big, highly anticipated expansion of the Philadelphia Museum of Art last month. Gehry’s work adds multiple access points, a dreamy underground promenade, and sweep of new gallery spaces—but the goal was clearly not to do anything that would disrupt the grand, stately museum’s vibe.
That leaves “New Grit” to project the museum towards the future. And its curators land the trick wonderfully.
Almost everything in the show hits. Overall, the tone of “New Grit” feels both engaged with the world and personally invested. The show has heartfelt and bracing moments, but also offbeat and even funny ones.
A visitor to “New Grit” viewing two works by Ken Lum. Photo by Ben Davis.
Wonderfully textured abstractions by Howardena Pindell play off the wonky tapestries Mi-Kyoung Lee made from twist ties. There are large, witty text paintings by Ken Lum that channel the verbose titles of 19th-century books to tell contemporary stories. And there’s a pleasingly strange installation by Doug Bucci of intricate little sculptures floating in an endless circuit on water.
There’s really too much good stuff. Here are just five artists that stick out as reference points.

Judith Schaechter
Judith Schaechter, Over Our Dead Bodies (2020). Photo by Ben Davis.
For sheer formal verve, Judith Schaechter’s intricate stained-glass works stick in my head. Radiant in color, with the feeling of needing to be read like some exciting coded surface, they are dense with details of swirling flora and fauna and suggested narrative.

Kukuli Velarde
Kukuli Velarde, San Sebas (2011) from the “Corpus” series. Photo by Ben Davis.
Equally great are Kukuli Velarde’s painted ceramic figures from her “Corpus” series. They represent pre-Columbian deities bursting forth from the shell of Baroque Catholic icons, merging into new gene-spliced contemporary entities.

Tiona Nekkia McClodden More

Since his tragic death from an overdose at just 27 years old in 1988, street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat has become an art-market darling and near-legendary figure, the subject of seemingly countless exhibitions, organized by leading institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum and London’s Barbican Centre, and mega-collector and former arts publishing magnate Peter Brant.
Now, for the first time, Basquiat’s family is organizing a show of its own, drawn entirely from their extension collection of his work, most of which has never been shown publicly.
The exhibition, which is billed as an immersive experience, is set to touch down at New York’s landmarked Starrett-Lehigh Building in early spring 2022.
Though largely dedicated to offices, the building is home to the School of Visual Arts’ Chelsea Gallery, and hosted a Mr. Brainwash show to benefit a throat and neck cancer charity in 2018.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jailbirds (1983). Courtesy of ©the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Basquiat’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, who run the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate with their stepmother, Nora Fitzpatrick, came up with the idea during lockdown.
“Much of what has been shared about Jean-Michel, thus far, has stemmed from the perspective of those who met or knew Jean-Michel at a specific point in time,” the sisters told Artnet News in an email.
“We are constantly approached by people who want to know and hear more about who Jean-Michel was. Many are budding artists themselves who are seeking inspiration through connecting to Jean-Michel’s story,” they added. “Only we can provide the broader context of his cultural and familial roots, and how those played into the narrative of his art.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (World Famous Vol. 1. Thesis), 1983. Photo ©the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The show, titled “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure,” will feature 200 “never-before and rarely seen paintings, drawings, multimedia presentations, ephemera, and artifacts,” according to a statement. The family and the estate have brought on ISG Productions and Superblue to produce the show, with Spotify and Phillips as sponsors.
Details about the experiential aspects of the exhibition, as well as specific works on view and ticketing information, remain forthcoming, but the sisters are confident the show will resonate with audiences.
“We hope they take away inspiration [and] a deeper appreciation for Jean-Michel’s humanity, journey, and all that he brought to pop culture and art,” Lisane Basquiat and Heriveaux said.
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The curator and artistic director of the next Venice Biennale, Cecilia Alemani, has announced the title and theme of the 59th edition of the prestigious international art exhibition.
The biennale will be titled “The Milk of Dreams,” a name borrowed from a book by the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. While living in Mexico in the 1950s, the artist invented and illustrated a series of mysterious tales which, according to Alemani, describe “a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination, and where everyone can change, be transformed, become something and someone else.”
The exhibition, which Alemani promises will take us on an equally imaginative and transformative journey, will run in Venice from April 23 through November 27 in 2022. It was originally slated to take place this year but was pushed back due to the public health situation.
Roberto Cicutto and Cecilia Alemani. Photo by Andrea Avezzù Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
Alemani, who is the first Italian woman and the fifth woman ever to helm the prestigious event, announced the details this morning, June 9, with the biennale’s president Roberto Cicutto.
The curator said in a statement that the exhibition concept has been grounded in conversations she has had with artists since she was named to the role last January.
“The questions that kept emerging seem to capture this moment in history, when the very survival of the species is threatened, but also to sum up doubts that pervade the sciences, arts, and myths of our time,” Alemani said. “How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life, and what differentiates animals, plants, humans, and non-humans? What are our responsibilities towards the planet, other people, and the other organisms we live with? And what would life and the Earth look like without us?”
Alemani said that the exhibition will focus on three primary themes: the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; and the connection between bodies and the Earth.
She also expanded on the links to Carrington’s mysterious tales that have served as a jumping off point for the concept. “Told in a dreamlike style that seemed to terrify young and old alike, Carrington’s stories describe a world set free, brimming with possibilities,” Alemani said. “But it is also the allegory of a century that imposed intolerable pressure on the individual, forcing Carrington into a life of exile: locked up in mental hospitals, an eternal object of fascination and desire, yet also a figure of startling power and mystery, always fleeing the strictures of a fixed, coherent identity.”
The biennial’s president Cicutto said in a statement that Alemani’s concept ties in with the title of the ongoing architecture biennale in Venice, “How will we live together?” 
“These two choices are the product of the current times, which lack all certainty and burden humanity with immense responsibilities,” he said. Following a temporary exhibition investigating the history of the biennale last summer, which Alemani co-curated, the president added that the starting point for the next biennale seems to be “the reinvention of new and more sustainable relations between individuals and the universe we live in.”
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An astoundingly ambitious show hopes to capture the many artistic languages across the continent of Europe at a time when nationalism is on the rise and many countries remain isolated by travel restrictions.
The exhibition “Diversity United,” which will travel to Moscow, Berlin, and Paris, brings together work by 90 artists from 34 European countries that ruminate on freedom, democracy, and dignity. The show was originally scheduled to coincide with the the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, but was pushed back due to the pandemic.
Now, it is finally ready to open on June 9 across two hangars of the former Nazi airport Tempelhof in Berlin. It will travel to Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery before heading to a final stop early next year at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The final dates have yet to be announced. (The show was originally due to open in Moscow first, but the plans were scrambled by logistical complications.)
Anselm Kiefer Winterreise (2015-2020) Private Collection. © Anselm Kiefer. Photo: Georges Poncet.
Initiated by German curator Walter Smerling, the show is expected to bring major turnouts in each capital.
“The aim is for the countries to come into a dialogue that is beyond their particular interests,” Smerling said on a recent tour. “Europe is 44 countries, and each country is different from the other, with its own identity, history, problems, and visions. But they belong together. And similarly, each artist here has their own language but the works can communicate with each other.”
The star-studded exhibition is supported by the countries’ three presidents, Germany’s Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and French President Emmanuel Macron. Steinmeier helped inaugurate the show this week in Berlin, describing it as “an expression of the self-confidence of art and artists in Europe.”
Some might note the irony of a show about democracy having the blessing of Putin. According to DPA, there is some fear that works in the show critical of Russia might endanger the exhibition’s display in Moscow.
Flughafen Tempelhof Hangar © Tempelhof Projekt GmbH. Photo Claudius Pflug
Nine curators in different cities were tapped to pull together their own pot of artists, nearly a third of whom created new commissions for the occasion. Chinese painter Yan Pei-Ming, who has been living in Dijon, France for decades, made a brooding new painting called The Cave—so new its paint was not yet dry during a preview. Nearby, a series pays tribute to Napoleon. “The effects of Napoleon, his wars, his strategies are huge—he changed Europe,” Smerling said.
A series of 60 overpainted photographs by Gerhard Richter is installed near Anselm Reyle’s Winterreise (2015). Work by younger names, including Estonian artists Kris Lemsalu and Katja Novitskova, collective Slavs and Tatars, and France-based Kapwani Kiwanga are also on view.

One of the most memorable works in the sprawling show is Italian artist Marzia Migliora’s FIL DE SËIDA (2016), a view of two tightrope walkers in business suits wobbling against the backdrop of the Alps. After all, while the show embraces a certain celebratory air and a true variety of viewpoints, a cautious political warning tows the line: Europe and European diversity are, after all, deeply fragile concepts.

“Diversity United” is on view from June 9 to September 19 at two hangars in the former Tempelhof airport.
Diversity United. Flughafen Tempelhof Berlin. Photo: Silke Briel / © Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn
Diversity United. Flughafen Tempelhof Berlin. Photo: Silke Briel / © Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn
Diversity United. Flughafen Tempelhof Berlin. Photo: Silke Briel / © Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn
Diversity United. Flughafen Tempelhof Berlin. Photo: Silke Briel / © Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn
Diversity United. Flughafen Tempelhof Berlin. Photo: Silke Briel / © Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn
Diversity United. Flughafen Tempelhof Berlin. Photo: Silke Briel / © Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur, Bonn
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After a year’s delay, London’s Serpentine Galleries have unveiled the latest iteration of the summer architectural pavilion.
Designed by up-and-coming architecture studio Counterspace, which is led by architect Sumayya Vally, it is the 20th pavilion to be mounted in the green space of Kensington Gardens in Hyde Park.
With its unveiling, the 30-year-old architect—the youngest to receive the commission—has joined a long line of leading practitioners including Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, and Jean Nouvel.
The temporary pavilion will be on view from June 11 through October 17.
In a statement, Vally said the pavilion “is centered around amplifying and collaborating with multiple and diverse voices from many different histories with an interest in themes of identity, community, belonging, and gathering.”
Serpentine Pavilion 2021 designed by Counterspace, Interior View. ©Counterspace Photo: Iwan Baan.
The Johannesburg-based architect has taken design inspiration from public gathering spaces across London, from mosques and other places of worship, to open-air markets, restaurants, bookshops, and libraries. 
Vally has also extended the commission outside the plush setting of Kensington Gardens by installing four fragments of the pavilion in different locations across London (New Beacon Books in Finsbury Park, one of the first Black publishers and booksellers in the UK; the Tabernacle, a multipurpose community space in Notting Hill; the Albany arts hub in Deptford; and Valence Library in Barking and Dagenham) to create new gathering spaces.
The pavilion also presents a commissioned program foregrounding the stories and sounds of lost spaces around London. Called Listening to the City, it includes works by artists including Ain Bailey and Jay Bernard.
Serpentine Pavilion 2021 designed by Counterspace, Interior View. ©Counterspace Photo: Iwan Baan.
To mark the anniversary of the  commission, and in response to Counterspace’s approach to architecture, the Serpentine has announced a new £100,000 ($140,000) fellowship program to support artists called Support Structures for Support Structures.
The funds will support up to 10 London-based artists and collectives working at the intersection of art, politics, and community practice with unrestricted grants of at least £10,000 ($14,000). The recipients, to be announced in July, will also form the beginnings of a network for support, development, and mentoring. 
“The spirit of community that has carried us as an institution throughout such a challenging year is the same that we hope to enliven this project,” Serpentine artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist and chief executive Bettina Korek said in a joint statement. “Here’s to a new chapter.”
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The museum giveth, and it taketh away. Decades later, compelled by law, it giveth back.
That’s the best approximate description of the journey taken by Austrian Jewish collector Richard Neumann’s masterpieces.
Neumann (1879–1959) came of connoisseurial age as Vienna’s royal collections (particularly Habsburg holdings) opened to the public. But the very arts institutions that shaped the young textile manufacturer’s aesthetic taste—to which he lent works, and with whose leaders he had close relationships—subsequently facilitated the Nazi plunder of his art.
He and his heirs sought restitution for decades, with the most recent work being returned to Neumann’s descendents last November.
The Worcester Art Museum’s exhibition, “What the Nazis Stole From Richard Neumann (and the Search to Get It Back)” (through January 16, 2022) tells the story of Neumann and his collection, which Vienna documented in 1921, designating 28 works as “landmarks.” The designation scored Neumann tax breaks and required occasional public access to his pictures.
Less than two decades later, the Albertina curator Otto Benesch, who had advised Neumann on his collection, was appraising the works for the Nazi government—despite Benesch being married to a Jewish woman, said Claire Whitner, the Worcester museum’s director of curatorial affairs.
“It gets very murky in that summer of 1938,” Whitner said, reached via Zoom in Copenhagen. 
To Whitner, the exhibition—which includes 14 of the 16 works returned to Neumann’s heirs to date—highlights a collector who sought Old Master works at a time when his Austrian Jewish colleagues gravitated to contemporary art. Whitner calls him a collector’s collector.
“He was a lover of Christian Old Masters, and his house was filled with ‘Madonna and Childs and altarpiece wings,” she said. “He was a real art historian.”
Giovanni Battista Pittoni the Younger’s Hannibal Swearing Revenge against the Romans (1720s). Courtesy Worcester Art Museum.
The show also offers a cautionary tale for collectors, as aesthetic fault lines shift. Mirroring the riches-to-rags journey of Neumann—who lost everything fleeing to France then Cuba, ultimately immigrating to the United States—the works he collected have seen their stars diminish in passing decades. Artists whose works Austria’s top museums sought out 100 years ago may draw blank stares today.
“The way we experience art museums are all constructs of taste and who was buying this art, when they were buying it, when the museum had money to make acquisitions on their own, and who was helping them buy things,” Whitner said.
Neri di Bicci was once one of the best-known 15th-century Florentine painters due to his extensive journals. Yet his name is rarely familiar to non-experts, even though his Madonna and Child (1400s) is a personal favorite of Whitner’s. 
Whitner suggested that Neumann was drawn to the work because it reflected the transition from medieval symbolism to Renaissance naturalism. “Jesus is starting to look a little bit more like a baby and less like an old man,” Whitner said, although the nursing Mary is “just so bizarre. Her breast seems to be coming out of her collarbone.” 
By serendipity, di Bicci’s family tree—which Giorgio Vasari bungled—twice echoes Neumann’s.
The Italian artist (1419–91) was the third in a grandfather-father-son chain of painters, just as Neumann followed his father and grandfather in the family business after earning a philosophy doctorate at Heidelberg.
Maerten van Heemskerck’s right altar wing with female donor (around 1540). Courtesy Worcester Art Museum.
Meanwhile, Giovanni Battista Pittoni the Younger’s Hannibal Swearing Revenge Against the Romans (1720s) is “so alive,” Whitner said. “The brushwork is so fluid; the color is so vibrant. It’s clearly a connoisseur’s painting.”
A contemporary of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s, Pittoni, like di Bicci, is relatively obscure today. That’s despite the Portland Art Museum noting he was among Venice’s greatest painters, with “airy, courtly treatments of Biblical and mythological subjects [that] brought him an international clientele.”
Then we get to Maerten van Heemskerck’s 1540 altar wings depicting male and female donors, which were Neumann’s prized possessions, and were the subject of a lawsuit he filed against Austria in 1950.
We may not all know the artist today, but Whitner notes that the panels “have all the hallmarks of Netherlandish painting, with crisp naturalism, extraordinary attention to detail, and this incredible variety of surfaces.”
Interestingly, the American businessman and collector Henry Walters (1848–1931) collected many of the same artists at the same time as Neumann.
In 1902, for example, Walters bought two di Biccis (Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Saints and The Coronation of the Virgin with Angels and Four Saints) and van Heemskerck’s Panorama with the Abduction of Helen Amidst the Wonders of the Ancient World. Perhaps five years later, he bought Pittoni the Younger’s The Sacrifice of Polyxena at the Tomb of Achilles.
Neri di Bicci, Virgin and Child Enthroned With Four Saints (around 1450). Courtesy Walters Art Museum.
What explains his interest?
“Henry Walters ended up with Heemskerck and di Bicci and people like that, all the early Italian panel paintings, because he was too cheap to buy like Frick,” said Gary Vikan, who directed Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum from 1994 until 2013 and is author of the 2020 book The Holy Shroud: A Brilliant Hoax in the Time of the Black Death.
Joseph Duveen, a baron and British art dealer, was instrumental in the deals, Vikan said.
“Walters believed Duveen was acting on his behalf, but in fact Duveen was acting on Frick’s behalf, so all the good stuff went to Frick,” Vikan said. “Duveen’s wife said that Walters was in the business of buying bric-à-brac.
Vikan suggested that Neumann’s finances may have been similarly constrained: “To play in the big leagues, even at those days, took a lot of money.”
That said, Vikan added that the canon is dysfunctional and predisposes people to think certain artists are better than others.
“If I haven’t heard of the artist, if he’s not in Janson in the class I took as a sophomore in 1965, how could he be any good? Janson was a guy who knew what was going on,” Vikan said of the art historian H. W. Janson, whose art history textbook taught generations of college students. 
“God willing, people will form their own judgment, and all of these guys are good,” Vikan added. “But Beethoven is Beethoven after all, isn’t he? Nobody is cheating the system on that one.”
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How’s this for a monument proposal: a gigantic bowling ball rolling down New York’s Park Avenue, chasing Billionaires’ Row residents like the boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
This is one of two Proposed Colossal Monuments (1966–67) cooked up by Claes Oldenburg that were set to be included in an exhibition planned by the humanist art collectors Dominique and John de Menil in the early ‘70s. Their vision was to bring together a group of postwar artists making public art that was, according to the de Menils’ notes from the time, “neither architecture nor sculpture.” 
But the show, called “Dream Monuments,” never saw the light of day.
At least, until now. On view through September 19 at the Menil Collection’s Drawing Institute in Houston, the exhibition “Dream Monuments: Drawing in the 1960s and 1970s” revisits and reimagines the de Menils’ plan. Included are drawings—and a few small models—of would-be monuments from 21 different mid-century artists, such as Beverly Buchanan, Michael Heizer, and Robert Rauschenberg. 
Claes Oldenburg, Proposed Colossal Monument for Park Avenue, New York – Bowling Balls (1967). Courtesy of the Menil Drawing Institute.
Almost all of these works were never actually realized. Many of them, like Oldenburg’s bowling ball, simply couldn’t be, defying physics or financial realities. Walter De Maria wanted to build two parallel mile-long walls in the desert. (He couldn’t raise the funds so he compromised by drawing lines in the sand.) Christo sought to erect an Egyptian funerary tomb—called a mastaba—by stacking no fewer than one million oil drums alongside a Texas highway. (Never one to give up, the late artist went on to realize a pared-down version in London in 2018.) 
That’s why it’s helpful to think of “Dream Monuments” as a drawing show—not a sculptural one. While the exhibition’s curators, Erica DiBenedetto and Kelly Montana, supplemented the lineup with additional works from artists active in the 1960s and ’70s, they retained the de Menils’ original title for this reason. 
“To my mind, ‘Dream Monuments’ is a term that evokes something that is specifically about drawing. It’s not about, in the end, building something for the outside world,” DiBenedetto told Artnet News. Instead, the term is about “an idea or a concept and how that’s explored through drawing.”
Here, added Montana, “the page is the space for the possible and the impossible.” 
Christo, One Million Stacked Oil Drums, Project for Houston, Galveston Area (1970). Courtesy of the Menil Drawing Institute.
The current iteration of the show was finalized during the middle of 2020, just as a dialectic about the role and relevance of monuments once again bubbled to the top of public discourse. It’s tempting to view the exhibition through that aperture—to look back and wonder if these artists, bound by the constraints of imagination rather than reality, can offer us the tools to reimagine a convention so desperately in need of it. 
But you won’t find a panacea here. “You can’t map the political and social concerns of today onto these works,” Montana said. “It’s not an easy fit; I don’t think there’s a way to draw a straight line.”
The monuments debate of today, mired as it is in issues of colonialism, slavery, and race, is very different than the one being had by Agnes Denes, Dennis Oppenheim, and others in the Menil show. Only in a few instances do these artists’ proposals come with an expressly political agenda; their concerns are largely more formal, more conceptual. (It’s also notable—and perhaps revealing—that the vast majority of the artists included in the exhibition are white.)  
Nevertheless, the questions these artists asked do resonate today: What is a monument? Is its function still relevant? Why do they look the way they look? 
Robert Smithson, Cambrian Map of Sulfur and Tar (1969). Courtesy of the Menil Drawing Institute.
A drawing by Robert Smithson, for instance, proposes dumping heaps of unprocessed sulfur into enormous pools of tar, putting in motion a process that, he believed, would map the movement of the Earth’s land and water 500 million years ago. Similarly, Mary Beth Edelson sought to fill uranium mines in Wyoming with mounds of soil that would both recall ancient sacred sites and literally embody the female form. 
These examples don’t look anything like the monuments you or I know. But as a thought exercise, Montana and DiBenedetto point out, they may prove useful insofar as they instruct us to think through the elements of modern-day monuments that have become so conventionalized we forget to question them in the first place.
Or, to put an even finer point on it: through rethinking the form of monuments, we may learn to rethink other aspects of them, too. 
“Dream Monuments: Drawing in the 1960s and 1970s” is on view at the Menil Drawing Institute in Houston, Texas, through September 19.
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When an artist still in her first year of graduate school has a solo show in a New York City gallery, it’s a reason to pay attention. And when that exhibition is an instant sell out, mostly to institutional buyers, as was the case with Gio Swaby’s debut at Harlem’s Claire Oliver Gallery, you can bet people will start to take notice.
Swaby, 29, hails from the Bahamas but currently lives in Toronto, where she relocated last fall to pursue an MFA at the Ontario College of Art & Design University. But unlike most art students, she had already secured gallery representation, thanks to a timely Instagram introduction to Oliver from curator Danielle Krysa.
About a year later, her debut with the gallery is a smash hit—but Swaby and Oliver still haven’t met.
“I haven’t been able to visit the gallery,” Swaby told Artnet News. “I haven’t seen my show in person. Although it feels like I’ve known Claire for a million years.”
Gio Swaby, Pretty Pretty 8 (2021), detail. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
“It was almost like a long-distance love affair where you get to know them really well because you’re on the  phone with them all the time,” Oliver agreed. The gallery had never signed an artist sight unseen before, but she knew Swaby was something special.
“Gio’s work is super dynamic. It’s well crafted, it’s singular,” Oliver said. “And once I spoke to her and heard the conceptual underpinnings that the work was based on, I just fell head over heels.… if you like it in photos, when you see it in person you fall madly in love.”
“Gio Swaby: Both Sides of the Sun” includes work from three series, all of which serve as celebrations of Black womanhood. The artist works with fabric to create threaded line portraits and striking silhouettes using colorful textiles, the patterns strategically placed to echo the natural curves and forms of the body. Many of the works are done in life-size scale, Swaby’s subjects—often, friends she photographs—proudly taking up space.
“We don’t have enough images of Black bodies experiencing joy. The media feeds us so many images of Black people in moments of suffering, and it effects you because you see yourself reflected in that,” Swaby said. “I wanted to create a space where we could see ourselves reflected in a moment of joy, celebrated without expectations, without connected stereotypes.”
Gio Swaby, Love Letter 7 (2021). Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
It’s work that has resonated with audiences, including—pending final board approval of purchases—some of the most prestigious art museums in the U.S. The show at the gallery closes this weekend, but—in a very unusual move for a commercial gallery show—it will travel next year to the Museum of Fine Art St. Petersburg in Florida and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, two of the eight museums that bought work from the exhibition.
Prices currently top out at about $25,000 for the largest works—if you’re lucky enough to get one.
“There’s over 100 people on the waiting list,” Oliver said. “It’s in the gallery’s mission statement to find the correct custodians of the work, who will care for it. That includes a lot of museums that will put this work on view for the greater public.”
Swaby has a strong collector base in the Bahamas that she has cultivated over the years, and private collectors who were able to purchase works from the current show include the author Roxane Gay and actor Hill Harper, of CSI: NY and The Good Doctor.
“I didn’t have these kinds of expectations,” Swaby admitted. “It’s a lot to take in, but I’m feeling more excited than anything else.”
Gio Swaby. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery.
“I think she has unlimited potential,” Oliver said. “I just feel like the sky’s the limit for where she’s going.”
Such success would have seemed unimaginable when Swaby was starting her studies at the College of the Bahamas.
“I had the belief that art couldn’t be something that you pursued as a career,” she admitted. “But nothing else felt right.”
Swaby received her associates degree in fine arts in 2012 and a bachelor of fine arts at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver two years later. She swiftly found her footing as a working artist, staging a pair of solo shows in Canada and the Bahamas, but a love of learning and a desire to refine her craft drew her back to the classroom—albeit virtually—this fall.
Gio Swaby, New Growth 7 (2020). Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Art and creativity has always been part of Swaby’s life. She traces her interest in textiles to her mother, a lifelong seamstress, who died last year.
“Growing up my house was full of fabric and thread and sewing machines,” she said. “I’m one of five siblings, but I was the only child who was really interested in sewing at all.”
Swaby recalls working on projects with her mom, sewing doll clothes or Halloween costumes. “I connect textiles with an act of love,” she said.
Gio Swaby, Pretty Pretty 5 (2021), detail. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Working in textiles also makes her feel like part of a broader artistic family of Black women who have broken new ground in the medium. Faith Ringgold, Bisa Butler, and Billie Zangewa “have created a path that creates space for artists like me,” she said.
This chosen medium also has broader significance.
“So much of it is connected with this idea of domesticity,” Swaby said. “I’m thinking about how this work connects with all of the unseen or under-appreciated labor that is a part of womanhood. Working this way is a way to honor that and to show my gratitude for that work.”
Gio Swaby, Pretty Pretty 9 (2021). Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
To further highlight that labor, her series “Pretty Pretty” actually features the backside of the work, with all the loose threads from Swaby’s hand-stitched portraits.
“The back of the piece is about sharing a moment of vulnerability with the viewer, rejecting this idea of perfection and embracing what might be considered flaws to have a recognition of beauty,” she said.
All of the work in the current show was made during 2020 and 2021—which required Zoom photoshoots, rather than in-person sessions with models, typically the artist’s friends. The exhibition’s title, “Both Sides of the Sun,” is a nod to Swaby’s isolation in Canada. Despite her physical distance from her loved ones in the Bahamas, she drew strength from the fact that they were all facing the same challenges, under the same sun.
Gio Swaby, Love Letter 7 (2021). Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
The artist was also responding to the events of last summer, to the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the globe in the aftermath.
“The feelings that I had at that specific time are always with me as a Black woman, and it was even more heightened during that period,” Swaby said. “It was incredibly hard already to be experiencing this global pandemic and sharing in that loss with everyone else in the world, but also experiencing with all other Black people the incredible loss that we have suffered and we are constantly reminded of.”
Swaby believes that bringing depictions of Black joy into museums and galleries—spaces that have traditionally excluded Black people—is both a radical act of resistance and an opportunity for healing.
“Some of the moments that have had the greatest impact on me as an artist is where I hear feedback from Black women and girls who are seeing the work and recognizing themselves, seeing themselves reflected in the work and being celebrated,” Swaby said. “I’ve had quite a few people  reach out to me on Instagram to express gratitude—it’s a lovefest.”
See more works from the exhibition below.
Gio Swaby, Pretty Pretty 6 (2021), detail. Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Gio Swaby, New Growth 11 (2020). Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Gio Swaby, New Growth 10 (2020). Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Gio Swaby, Pretty Pretty 5 (2021). Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Gio Swaby, Love Letter 5 (2021). Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Gio Swaby, New Growth 3 (2020). Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Gio Swaby, New Growth 2 (2020). Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
Gio Swaby, Love Letter 3 (2021). Photo courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York.
“Gio Swaby: Both Sides of the Sun” is on view at Claire Oliver Gallery, 2288 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, New York, April 10–June 5, 2021. 
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