Shows & Exhibitions

German artist Katharina Grosse might technically be classified as a painter, but the artist has made a career out of exploding the limitations of the medium (sometimes quite literally). Her sprawling interventions and installations call attention to the architecture in which they are installed and encourage viewers to walk around, atop, and sometimes inside them.
In an exclusive interview with Art21 filmed back in 2014, the artist describes her process as an attempt to “reset the idea of what a painting can be.” As Grosse’s works became larger, with site-specific commissions at Brooklyn’s MetroTech Plaza and Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center, she began collaborating with her brother, who works as an engineer.
Speaking about the impact of having a non-art worker as part of her team, Grosse said that she benefitted from her brother’s ability to “connect the theoretical thinking” of the engineering process to the practical aspects of building large-scale works.
Katharina Grosse, Mumbling Mud – Silk Studio (2018) at K11 Art Museum. Courtesy of Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, Austria, © 2021 Katharina Grosse and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
“My work is not idea-based, it’s really thought based,” the artist said, describing it as a fluid process that is also physically engaging. In an upcoming installation at the Helsinki Art Museum, Grosse will be on site painting while viewers wander in and out, becoming active participants in the creation process.
In the Helsinki exhibition, which opens June 8, the artist’s work will take over the main exhibition halls—which Grosse hopes will also challenge the hierarchy of media.
“Am I a painter? Am I a sculptor? I don’t know,” Grosse said in the interview. “I’m talking to the world while painting on it.”

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, below. Katharina Grosse: Chill Seeping From The Walls Gets Between Us,” opens June 8 at the Helsinki Museum. 
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This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org
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The Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris reopened last week with its first solo show dedicated to a contemporary African artist: Barthélémy Toguo. Displayed alongside historical African artworks, the Cameroonian multimedia artist’s exhibition addresses viruses, immigration, the lynching of African Americans, African dictators, and the shortage of water.
Titled “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo,” it is curated by Christiane Falgayrettes-Leveau, director of Fondation Dapper. Launched in Amsterdam in 1983 by Michel Leveau to support African and Caribbean art, the foundation was given carte blanche for the exhibition.
Particularly pertinent is Vaincre le virus! (Beat the virus) (2016). The six-and-a-half feet tall vases depicting bats, red hands, and patterns relating to the transmission of the Ebola and HIV viruses were realized five years ago when Toguo was nominated for the prestigious Prix Marcel Duchamp. After carrying out research with scientists at the Institut Pasteur in Paris to glean ideas on how to convey the viruses visually, Toguo had the vases produced in Jingdezhen, China, which is renowned for ceramics.
“In 2016, I talked about the problem of viruses and how we should encourage scientists to find the viruses that are threatening the world—it was a universal message but nobody listened to me,” Toguo told Artnet News. “Then in 2020 came the worldwide problem of Covid-19 that mobilized the world of science and medicine.”
Barthélémy Toguo, Strange Fruit. Installation view. “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” 19 May – 5 December 2021. ©Musée du Quai Branly, photo Léo Delafontaine © ADAGP, Paris, 2021.
Nearby is the disquieting installation Strange Fruit (2017). Next to an empty noose tied to a branch are a swooping vulture, crows and aggressive dogs all in brass. Vinyl records from Billie Holiday’s 1939 record about lynchings in the American South, the sleeves painted with an open-mouthed face, are scattered among the branches. “I wanted to talk about the mistreatment of Black people and then a few years later [the murder of] George Floyd happened,” Toguo said.
Born in Cameroon in 1967, Toguo studied at the fine arts school of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, then in Grenoble and the Dusseldorf arts academy. In Dusseldorf, he was taught by the Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis and encountered Tony Cragg.
In 2015, his work featured in the Venice Biennale, eight years after he refused to participate in the African Pavilion organized by the Sindika Dokolo Foundation. “The proposal was reductive because Africa is not a country but a region and I maintain my position about that problematic ghettoization of African artists,” he said. “My stance upset the Italians.”
It was reading the French author Albert Camus’s 1957 Nobel Prize speech, about an artist’s obligation to move the largest number of people by offering an image of common suffering and joy, that instilled in Toguo his sense of mission.
“Camus’s thoughts on the role of an artist fascinated me,” Toguo recalled. “I told myself that I have a role in society to bring a message. For me, an artist is a visionary who has the capacity to look into the future, see societal problems and inform people through his production.”
Barthélémy Toguo, Water Matters (2020). Installation view. “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” 19 May – 5 December 2021. ©Musée du Quai Branly, photo Léo Delafontaine © ADAGP, Paris, 2021.
Some artworks evoke ideas metaphorically. Road to Exile (2008)—a wooden boat overflowing with cushions in African fabrics and surrounded by innumerable bottles of water—expresses the precariousness of young Africans trying to reach Europe in boats that might capsize. The newest work, Water Matters (2020), made for the exhibition, comprises a painting of a figure with outstretched palms in front of a table lined with glass bottles. It pertains to Toguo’s desire to redistribute water between countries that have too little and those that have too much.
Around 50 works by Toguo are presented along with historical African artworks from Fondation Dapper, the Musée du Quai Branly, and other collections that find a resonance with his pieces. The first two parts showcase works relating to the body, such as a painting of bleeding hands wounded by nails.
“I tried to identify recurring elements in Barthélémy Toguo’s work and noticed the presence in his paintings and drawings of nails, which hark back to Christ and the crucifixion, but also to objects used by people in Congo to master negative forces,” Falgayrettes-Leveau said. “Although he didn’t consciously reflect upon this aspect of African heritage, they’re unconscious references.”
Installation view. “Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” 19 May – 5 December 2021. ©Musée du Quai Branly, photo Léo Delafontaine © ADAGP, Paris, 2021.
Toguo’s engagement as an artist extends far beyond his own practice. In 2013, he created Bandjoun Station in Cameroon, encompassing an art center, artists’ residency and coffee plantation. “There was no place to celebrate art in Cameroon and, with all my experience, I needed to give something back to Africa,” said Toguo, who divides his time between Cameroon and Paris. “All my artistic production was in western museums like Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou and MoMA.”
Vocal about the need for the African continent to acquire artworks by its artists, Toguo added: “Whereas African masks were stolen by colonizers and remained in the west, contemporary works by Romuald Hazoumè, Chéri Samba and El Anatsui have been bought by western museums who recognize their value. But there is nothing in Africa because politicians don’t know [about contemporary art]. So I’ve created a space for artistic exchanges. Kounellis gave me three drawings and artists worldwide have given me works that I’ve installed alongside African artists like Soly Cissé and Siriki Ky.”
The Musée du Quai Branly, which is restituting 26 works to Benin, has been called upon by a group of African activists to restitute more pieces to the continent. But that is a “different issue”, pointed out Toguo, who was clearly elated about his solo show: “I’m astonished and moved because this is the first time that this curatorial eye has been applied to my work.”
“Craving for Humanity, The world of Barthélémy Toguo” is on view at Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris through December 5.
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Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, and Carrie Mae Weems are among the dozen artists who will reflect on the cultural legacy of the Great Migration in an ambitious opening next year at the Mississippi Museum of Art and Baltimore Museum of Art.
The exhibition, “Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration,” which is set to open at the Mississippi Museum in April 2022, before traveling to Baltimiore in October, also includes new commissions from artists Akea Brionne Brown, Zoë Charlton, Larry W. Cook, Torkwase Dyson, Allison Janae Hamilton, Leslie Hewitt, Steffani Jemison, Robert Pruitt, and Jamea Richmond-Edwards.
“The project is grounded in a key prompt,” said Mississippi Museum chief curator Ryan Dennis and Baltimore Museum associate curator Jessica Bell Brown, who co-organized the show, in a joint statement. “‘What would happen if today’s leading artists were given the space to think about the intersections of the Great Migration in a wholistic, expansive, and dynamic way?’”
The artists, all of whom are Black, work in practices that “deal with personal and communal histories, familial ties, the Black experience, and the ramifications of land ownership and environmental shifts, among so much more, to consider how we can expand our understanding of this essential moment in American history,” the curators added.  

Seeking economic opportunities and freedom from Jim Crow laws, more than six million African Americans relocated from the post-Reconstruction South to urban areas in the West, Midwest, and Northeastern U.S. from 1916 through the 1970s. The Great Migration, as the phenomenon was called, forever changed the creative landscape of the country. 
Accompanying the show will be a two-volume publication, including newly commissioned essays by writers Kiese Laymon, Jessica Lynne, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, and Willie J. Wright.
“The exhibition will attend to and complicate histories of racial violence, trauma, and socio-economic exigency, while also examining the agency seized by those who fled as well as those who stayed behind,” said Dennis and Brown. “In many ways, the story of the Great Migration is neither complete in its current telling nor finished in its contemporary unfolding.”
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The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has unveiled its landmark exhibition, “Slavery” (through August 29), an unprecedented survey of 10 personal stories of those who were involved in the slave trade, either as profiteers or victims, as it made its way across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and into the Netherlands’ various colonies.
The show, which has been four years in the making, includes 140 objects from the 17th through 19th centuries, and includes two towering Rembrandt portraits of Oopjen Coppit and Marten Soolmans, who were the ultra-wealthy beneficiaries of a sugar refinery, as well as disturbing artifacts such as collars that were forced on enslaved peoples and gifts exchanged between an African monarch and a slave trader.

Among the stories told is that of Wally, an enslaved man forced to work a sugar plantation in the colony of Suriname. Along with others, Wally organized a failed revolt on the plantation and fled, a crime for which he was executed by immolation in 1707.
In an audio presentation, his history is narrated by Surinamese-Dutch former kickboxing world champion Remy Bonjasky, whose ancestors worked on the same plantation. Wally’s “blood,” Bonjasky said in the recording, “has been passed down through generations, and is one of the reasons why I was able to become a kickboxing world champion three times.”
Valika Smeulders, the head of history at the Rijksmuseum said that, through such true-to-life storytelling, the show gives “insight into how individuals dealt with legalized injustice.”

Unknown, Multiple leg cuffs for chaining enslaved people, with 6 loose shackles, ca. 1600–1800. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, schenking van de heer J.W. de Keijzer, Gouda.
“By delving into [the history of slavery], we can form a more complete picture of our history and a better understanding of today’s society,” Rijksmuseum general director Taco Dibbits said in a statement, pointing out that these stories are integral to the Dutch past. The Dutch king Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, whose descendants were profiteers of the trade, was given a first tour of the exhibition by Dibbits.
Dutch traders forcibly brought at least 600,000 Africans to North and South America. They also moved 1.1 million people across and through the Indian Ocean. Among the country’s former territories are Caribbean islands such as Aruba, Curaçao, and Saint Martin’s. One of the country’s largest colonies was modern-day Indonesia.
For now, before the show can be opened to the wider public, it will be accessible to student tour groups.
See images of the exhibition below.
Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
Augustus van Bengalen Holding Hendrik Cloete’s Pipe (1788). Source: Anonymous. Courtesy Rijksmuseum.
Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
Enslaved Men Digging Trenches (1850) Source: Rijksmuseum with support from the Johan Huizinga Fonds.
Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum
Slavery exhibition, Photo: Rijksmuseum

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Well folks, it’s finally happened: the U.K. government has given museums the green light to reopen to the public, and the culture-starved among us have engaged in a battle royale to secure tickets to see the best of what the country’s institutions have to offer.
From the main contenders (Heather Phillipson at Tate Britain and David Hockney at the Royal Academy) to the lesser-known gems (Shara Hughes at the Garden Museum), here are 11 exhibitions not to miss in the U.K. this spring.

Shara HughesGarden Museum, LondonMay 17–June 15
Installation view, Shara Hughes, Garden Museum, London, 17 May–5 June, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. Photo by Mark Blower.
For the New York artist’s first museum exhibition in the U.K., Shara Hughes has created a new series of site-specific works for the Garden Museum. Four large-scale paintings of flowers as well as works on paper will hang in the magnificent setting of the nave of the museum, a deconsecrated medieval church.

Mercedes Azpilicueta: Bondage of PassionsGasworks, LondonMay 19–July 4
Mercedes Azpilicueta, The Lieutenant-Nun is Passing: An Autobiography of Katalina, Antonio, Alonso and More (2021). Detail of Jacquard tapestry. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Joel Furness.
As part of her ongoing quest to dig out subversive and contested histories, the Amsterdam-based artist Mercedes Azpilicueta has offered a speculative vision of the real-life Catalina de Erauso, a 17th-century Spanish nun who moved to the New World and lived under male identities, and eventually became a ruthless lieutenant in the Spanish colonial army. Through a series of Jacquard tapestries, sculptures, costumes, and props, Azpilicueta recenters unheard voices from the past.

Ryoji Ikeda180 Studios, LondonMay 17–August 1
Ryoji Ikeda, test pattern ©Jack Hems, 180 The Strand, 2021, presented by Vinyl Factory in collaboration with Audemars Piguet Contemporary.
For his largest solo exhibition to date, the Japanese audio-visual artist Ryoji Ikeda has filled the inside of 180 Studios with a series of mind-bending digital sculptures. Including flashing strobe lights and sound frequencies the human ear struggles to comprehend, the spectacular exhibition tests the limits of the human senses.

Walter Price: Pearl LinesCamden Art Center, LondonMay 21–August 29
Walter Price, The fate of the animals (2019). Courtesy: Greene Naftali.
For his first institutional exhibition in the U.K., the U.S. artist Walter Price is showing paintings, works on paper, and sculptures created during his 2020 residency at Camden Art Center and during lockdown in New York. Some of the more remarkable new works possess a more subdued palette than we expect from the painter, whose rich language of symbols usually dances over bright fields of color. The resulting works echo his own exhaustion with relentless cycles of consumption, as well as with being a Black man invited to occupy and contend with “white” spaces.

Artes Mundi 9National Museum CardiffMarch 15–September 5
Firelei Báez, Left to right: Untitled (City Incinerator ‘B’) (2021) and Untitled (A Map of the British Empire in America) (2021). Installation view: Artes Mundi 9, Cardiff, 2021. Photo by Polly Thomas.
The biennial exhibition and prize Artes Mundi 9 brings a top selection of international artists to the National Museum Cardiff in Wales. Artists include Firelei Báez, Dineo Seshee Bopape, and Carrie Mae Weems. Their presentations explore themes such as the legacy of colonialism, environmental change, and intergenerational trauma and healing.

Tony CraggHoughton Hall, NorfolkMay 19–September 26
Tony Cragg at Houghton Hall. Photo by Jeff Spicer/PA Wire.
The British sculptor and Turner Prize-winning artist Tony Cragg has taken over the grounds and interiors of Houghton Hall in Norfolk with a series of spectacular sculptures. Cragg has curated the selection himself, from monumental bronze and steel sculptures in the gardens, to smaller pieces inside the grand house’s state rooms and galleries.

David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy 2020Royal Academy, LondonMay 23–September 26
David Hockney, No. 118 (March 16, 2020). ©David Hockney.
David Hockney is showing 116 iPad paintings at the Royal Academy that chronicle the arrival of spring in Normandy last year. The colorful paintings of flowers in bloom express optimism about the future and hope for renewal.

Pakui Hardware: Virtual CareBaltic Center for Contemporary Art, GatesheadMay 18–October 3
“Pakui Hardware: Virtual Care” installation view, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art 2020. Photo: Rob Harris © 2020 Baltic. Courtesy: the artists and carlier|gebauer (Berlin/Madrid). Commissioned by BALTIC centre for contemporary art.
Artists Neringa Cerniauskaite and Ugnius Gelguda, who together go by Pakui Hardware, are presenting their first solo exhibition in the U.K. at Baltic. Their site-specific commission transforms the space into a quasi surgery room, where technological tools and robotic surgeons are responsible for caring for abstract resin bodies. The poignant installation probes issues around virtual care at a time when people have been largely separated.

Alice: Curiouser and CuriouserVictoria and Albert Museum, LondonMay 22–December 31
Still from Curious Alice, a VR experience created by the V&A and HTC Vive Arts. Featuring original artwork by Kristjana S Williams, 2020.
The V&A is finally opening its long-anticipated Alice in Wonderland exhibition, which will trace the story of Alice from her 19th-century origins to the global cultural phenomenon she is today. The exhibition will also include a VR experience in which visitors can travel down the rabbit hole themselves and try their hands at a game of croquet with the Queen of Hearts.

Heather PhillipsonTate Britain, LondonMay 17–January 23, 2022
Tate Britain Commission: Heather Phillipson: Rupture No.1: blowtorching the bitten peach. ©Tate photography (Oliver Cowling).
Heather Phillipson, the artist behind the monstrous whipped cream sculpture on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, has utterly transformed the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain. In her signature style, she has created three distinct environments that through lighting, soundscape, and installation imagine alternative realities that hint at (but do not explicitly evoke) contemporary anxieties about environmental collapse and technological takeover. Within the unsettling installation, familiar industrial materials like fuel tanks and a collapsed silo have been remade into strange beasts, while animal eyes peek out at you from behind LED screens.

Masterpieces From Buckingham PalaceQueen’s Gallery, LondonMay 17–January 31, 2022
Jan Steen, A Woman at her Toilet (1663). Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
This is a rare chance to catch a glimpse of some of the most important works from the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace while its Picture Gallery is undergoing renovations. Masterpieces acquired by generations of royals are on view, including works by Titian, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Jan Steen.
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A new art exhibition in Italy takes an oblique look at the life of the poet Dante Alighieri, whose banishment from his native Florence in 1302 serves as the narrative lynchpin of the show. 
Dante, who is most famous for writing the Divine Comedy, was a Florentine government official when he was exiled in 1302 by political rivals. Forced to wander the Italian peninsula, he passed through Rome, Verona, and Bologna before finally setting in Ravenna, where he died of malaria in 1321, one year after completing his most famous work.
The exhibition at the Museo d’Arte della Città in Ravenna (“Art in Times of Exile,” through July 4) marks the 700th anniversary of his death and looks at the major artworks Dante may have seen on his travels.
Installation view. Credit MAR – Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna.
The show includes works by artists who were revered in Dante’s time, including Cimabue, who is represented by an important mosaic.
Works on view were borrowed from an array of institutions, including the Louvre and the Uffizi Galleries. The latter sent two works: the Stigmata di San Francesco by Maestro della Croce and the Badia Polyptych by Giotto di Bondone.
Other artists in the show include Arnolfo di Cambio, Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, and Giuliano da Rimini, all of whom were known to Dante.
“To think that our wonderful Byzantine mosaics influenced and inspired Dante in writing the last cantos of Paradise arouses great emotion and pride in us,” Ravenna’s mayor, Michele de Pascale, said in a statement.
“Prestigious loans from all over Europe are both expressions of timeless beauty and extraordinary sources for Dante’s inspiration, which informed the greatness of The Comedy and of the entire production of this supreme poet.”
See more images from the show below.
Installation view. Credit MAR – Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna.
Venetian-Ravenna master from the late 13th-century, Madonna Enthroned with Child. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Sculptures, don. Jean-Charles Davillier. Credit MAR – Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna.
Installation view. Credit MAR – Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna.
Arnolfo di Cambio’s Bust of Pope Boniface VIII. On loan from Vatican City, Fabbrica di San Pietro in Vaticano.
Giotto di Bondone’s Polittico di Badia (1295-1297). Installation view. Credit MAR – Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna.
Installation view. Credit MAR – Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna.
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One year ago, Rashid Johnson was holed up in a makeshift workspace in the basement of his Long Island home, churning out a series of apocalyptic oil stick drawings the color of a fire alarm. They belonged to his ongoing “Anxious Men” project, the artist told Artnet News at the time. He sounded anxious—as we all did then, a month deep into the pandemic, uncertainty still the dominant mood.
Now, as we prepare to return to a semblance of normalcy, Johnson has once again turned to that same anxious red color—but this time, he’s doing so to a more optimistic end.
Next month, the artist will unveil Red Stage, a new Creative Time-sponsored public art piece that will act as both a monumental sculpture and a participatory installation.
The work’s title doubles as a physical description: Installed at New York’s Astor Place, Johnson’s piece will take the form of a 30-foot-wide red platform backed by a 13-foot-tall proscenium.
Playing out on the stage for the project’s month-long run will be any number of activations, both planned and unplanned: Creative Time-organized programs, artist-curated takeovers, and what Johnson calls the People Days, in which the site will be turned over to artists and passersby to use it as they see fit—for rehearsals and performances, or maybe meditation. (A full programming schedule—including presentations by theater director Charlotte Brathwaite and the nightlife collective Papi Juice—will be announced in the coming weeks.)
Rashid Johnson working on an “Untitled Anxious Red Drawing” (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
“We are still contending with so much trauma and pain from what has been experienced during the course of the pandemic,” Justine Ludwig, Creative Time’s executive director, told Artnet News. “We’re back in the world and we’re thinking about the place that we want to be a part of. There’s a lot of tension that exists there.”
For three years, Ludwig and Johnson have been in discussions about a Creative Time presentation. Initially, the director explained, they were working on a “radically different project.” The pandemic changed that and their conversations pivoted. “Community, exchange, and collaboration, and thinking about how the city itself becomes a site of activation” became the new priority, said Ludwig. More

In a scene that seems ripped from the pages of a fantasy novel, a wooded forest has sprung up overnight in the urban jungle that is New York City.
But this is not the design of an evil sorcerer. The 40-foot-tall grove in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park is actually the work of artist and architect Maya Lin.
A warning about the dangers of climate change, Ghost Forest takes its name from the phenomena of the same name. Around the world, trees are dying because of insect infestations and rising sea levels, which can leave trees drowning in saltwater.
The work features 49 Atlantic white cedar trees from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. There, some 100 miles south of Manhattan, large swaths of decades’ old costal forests are being lost to salt water inundation.
“I call them my gentle giants,” Lin said at the opening of the exhibition, the trees having been carefully planted amid a tangle of electric utility cables and sprinkler lines buried beneath the park’s lawn. “I wanted you to feel like you’re wandering through something intimate.”
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021). Photo by Maya Lin Studio, courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
As a public art installation, Ghost Forest is somewhat of a departure for Lin, who remains best known for her 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., but has also created monumental earthworks like the undulating Wavefield at Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York.
“I don’t do temporary works,” she said. “I’m pretty slow. I’m very site specific—I like to connect you to the land under your feet.”
So when Madison Square Park Conservancy chief curator Brooke Kamin Rapaport asked her to conceive a project for its public art program back in 2013, it was a while before an idea took root. Initially, Lin wanted to work with living trees, but realized planting them would take years to have the visual impact she was envisioning.
“It was stumping me,” Lin admitted, before catching and apologizing for the unintended pun.
It was in 2018, during her annual stay in Colorado, that Lin encountered stands of rapidly dying Ponderosa pine trees, sparking the idea for the work. She called Rappaport: “Could I bring a ghost forest to downtown Manhattan?”
The piece presented numerous logistical challenges. Bringing in trees that had sickened due to infestation was out of the question for obvious reasons. And then there was the issue of public safety.
The project, announced in November 2019, was originally set to take place last summer, featuring a grove of dying cedar trees that have been in decline since Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
But with a year’s delay, Lin had to find new trees, to ensure she was using green wood that wouldn’t rot or risk become a safety hazard. One of the 50 80-year-old trees initially earmarked for the installation was nixed at the last minute when inspector found that it was already beginning to decompose.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021). Photo by Andy Romer, courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Luckily for the project—if unfortunate for the Pine Barrens—there was another set of trees that showed signs of saltwater tree rot from an overflowing river. Removing the entire stand, which would have died in a year or two, had the added benefit of allowing newly planted cedars to get the light they need to grow.
Debuting as New York City looks to rebound from the pandemic—as well as in the wake Lin’s own personal loss, with the death of husband and noted photography collector Daniel Wolf of a heart attack in January—Ghost Forest has also taken on added meaning since its initial conception.
“We’ve all shared in this pandemic. You can’t not think or look at these in a different way than a year ago. That does become part of the piece,” Lin said. “There is a sense of mourning.”
“There is a parallel between a global pandemic and climate change which is also a global threat to humanity,” she added. “By 2100, 50 percent of all species may go extinct due to climate change.”
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021). Photo by Maya Lin Studio, courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
The trees arrived on site last month, before the leaves had begun to bloom in the city, and will remain on view until they fall again in autumn. “They will bear witness as the park goes from spring to summer and fall,” Lin said. “They’re sentinels.”
Each trunk was buried eight feet at its base, two feet deeper than recommended by a consulting engineer. Foresters snapped off all the lower branches and any limbs that appeared even slightly insecure, adding to the stark, spartan appearance of Ghost Forest.
“Each tree, I realized has a distinct personality,” Lin said. “When I put each tree in, it helped me determine which its neighbor should be.”
The making of Ghost Forest will be the subject of fall exhibition at the nearby Fotografiska museum, featuring preparatory sketches and materials as well as photographs of the installation process and finished work.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest preparatory sketch (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.
The project also has an audio component, with a soundscape featuring bird songs from endangered and extinct native species composed by Lin in collaboration with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Upstate New York.
But what Lin is perhaps most excited about is the public programming about the intersection of art and ecology, which will feature climate activists and experts on topics such as wetland remediation, forest restoration, and other conservation efforts.
“I didn’t want to talk about [climate change] without offering solutions,” Lin said. “I do believe there is hope we could turn this around.”
Lin also kept track of carbon emissions related to the project over the past three years, including her own travel and the work of landscape contractors. The resulting 5.3 tons of carbon will be offset thanks to 1,000 trees and shrubs being planted across the city in the fall.
“[Those plants] will absorb 60 tons of carbon over the next ten years,” said Lin. “Nature-based solutions can offer some really positive emissions reductions and also protect species.”
See more photos of the installation below.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021). Photo by Andy Romer, courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021). Photo by Andy Romer, courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021). Photo by Andy Romer, courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest preparatory sketch (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021). Photo by Rashmi Gill, courtesy of the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest preparatory sketch (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021) at Madison Square Park, New York. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Maya Lin, Ghost Forest (2021) at Madison Square Park, New York. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
“Maya Lin: Ghost Forest” is on view at Madison Square Park, between Fifth Avenue and Broadway and East 23rd and 26th Streets, New York, May 10–November 14, 2021.
An exhibition about the making of the work will be on view at Fotografiska, 281 Park Avenue South, New York, September–November 2021. 
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