Shows & Exhibitions

Sanford Biggers is taking over New York’s Rockefeller Center this spring with a campus-wide art installation headlined by Oracle, a monumental bronze sculpture that—standing 25 feet tall and weighing in at over 15,000 pounds—is the Harlem-based artist’s largest work to date.
Delayed from a planned September debut, Wednesday’s unveiling “was amazing just because of the sheer size and magnitude of the work itself,” Biggers told Artnet News. “To open right now, as the city is starting to open up and the weather is getting nice, and to leave this as a gift in the city I live in is an extreme honor.”
Biggers first started talking with Art Production Fund, which organized the show with New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery, about staging a public art project over a decade ago, and the current project has been in the works for about four years. When the APF team suggested Rockefeller Center as as a possible site, Biggers was immediately enchanted.
“It was like a lightbulb popped up over my head,” he said. “When Raymond Hood was designing this complex, he was grabbing from stories from antiquity, mythology, art… to wind up with this beautiful Art Deco monument. I wanted to reference various cultures and histories as well.”
Sanford Biggers, Oracle (2021) at Rockefeller Center. Photo by Daniel Greer, courtesy of Art Production Fund.
Biggers sees his work as as a companion of sorts to three of Rockefeller Center’s most prominent artworks: the Zeus relief sculpture at the entrance of 30 Rock, the gold Prometheus sculpture by Paul Manship overlooking the skating rink, and Lee Lawrie’s monumental Atlas on Fifth Avenue.
“Because of all those mythological references,” Biggers said, “having this work here that has a lot of African elements to me is sort of completing the rest of the story.”
Oracle is the latest in the Biggers’s “Chimera” sculpture series, which merges African masks and European figures. The seated body is inspired by the ancient Temple of Zeus, while the head is based on masks and other sculptures from various African cultures, including Luba art and the Maasai religion.
Sanford Biggers, Just Us (2021) at Rockefeller Center. Photo by Diane Bondareff/AP Images for Tishman Speyer
On the Oracle throne, there is the image of a lotus blossom, a recurring motif in the artist’s work where each of the petals is actually the cross-section of a slave ship.
The lotus also appears in photographic works Biggers has throughout the complex, which feature details from works in his “Codex” series, paintings and sculptures made from antique African American quilts featured in his recent exhibition at the Bronx Museum. (The show which will travel this summer to the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.)
A Sanford Biggers vitrine at Rockefeller Center featuring one of his “Chimera” sculptures against a photo background of a still from the video series “Shuffle, Shake, Shatter.” Photo by Daniel Greer, courtesy of Art Production Fund.
“The quilts have a craft background, but so do small African masks and figurative pieces—and when blown up to a monumental scale, it has a different dialogue with the history of public sculpture,” Biggers said.
Biggers has also created work for the Rockefeller Center flagpoles, featuring a wave-like pattern inspired by Japanese kimonos and Buddhist mandalas. The waves, which seem to move as the flags blow in the wind, are meant to represent the slave trade’s Middle Passage and the flowing of water.
Throughout Rockefeller Center, “there are smaller symbols of the triangle trade and the slave trade. You see references to tobacco and cotton and sugar,” Biggers noted. “I wanted to put a piece here that.. is actually looking past that at the magnificent and powerful influence that African diasporic culture has had on New York City throughout its history.”
Sanford Biggers, Seigaiha (2021) at Rockefeller Center. Photo by Daniel Greer, courtesy of Art Production Fund.
Biggers says he felt empowered to remix classical sculpture in part because our contemporary understanding of these forms is already so flawed. The classical European sculptures we know today as sparkling white marbles were once brightly painted, while African masks were originally beaded, pigmented, and adorned.
“So you have a white-washed version of the European objects and a black-washed version of the African objects,” Biggers said. “Editing, cutting and pasting, chopping and screwing has been happening the entire time.”
Sanford Biggers, Oracle (2021) at Rockefeller Center. Photo by Daniel Greer, courtesy of Art Production Fund.
In the coming weeks, Oracle will also begin to live up to its name with the launch of an interactive component allowing viewers to consult the sculpture about their future after activating a QR code. The sculpture will be voiced by “various celebrities,” according to Biggers, although he declined to name names.
Visitors will be able to ask the oracle anything they want, and if the oracle is “in,” they’ll get a live response from the day’s celebrity.
“They’ll respond as an oracle would,” Biggers said, “in mysterious, poetic vagaries which will hopefully be, if not helpful, at least mystifying.”

“Sanford Biggers” is on view at Rockefeller Center, Rockefeller Plaza between West 49th and 50th Streets, New York, May 5, 2021–June 29, 2021.
“Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch” will be on view at the California African American Museum, in Exposition Park, 600 State Drive, Los Angeles, July 28, 2021–January 23, 2022.
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Could the next Whitney Biennial be curated by artificial intelligence? A new online art project based on data from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Liverpool Biennial attempts to imagine 64 different curatorial statements and artist lists for future exhibitions, all “curated” by a robot.
“The Next Whitney Biennial,” reads the description of biennial number 45, “should reflect the vacillation of New York right now—unable to connect both its manufacturing and financial back-rooms—and operate within the bureaucratized discourse of de-postcapitalization…”
Each alternate universe is characterized by art speak that straddles the line between high brow and utter incomprehensibility and is based on data drawn from actual Whitney and Liverpool Biennials past.
“It uses the exhibition descriptions, art spreadsheets with demographics, all of the materials we had available in the database,” Christiane Paul, the Whitney’s adjunct curator of digital art, told Artnet News. “So many of them are interesting in their approaches. I like the kind of absurdist mix.”
Ubermorgen, Leonardo Impett, and Joasia Krysa, The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine (2021), screenshot. Image courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
The project is hosted on Artport, the Whitney’s website devoted to commissioning and displaying web-based art that Paul has curated since it was founded in 2001.
A collaboration by artists Ubermorgan, digital humanist Leonardo Impett, and curator Joasia Krysa, The Next Biennial Should be Curated by a Machine is the second joint commission from Artport and the Liverpool Biennial, and is also part of the biennial’s current edition, “The Stomach and the Port,” which, after a year’s delay, opened its outdoor installations on March 20.
Entering the website, viewers are greeted by a swirling black-and-white Op art animation covered with spinning gears. Clicking each one opens a new biennial universe, with a new video background and an accompanying musical clip, each of which comes from a TikTok playlist. (Selections include “Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice, “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga, and a clip of Alfalfa singing “You Are So Beautiful” from the 1994 film The Little Rascals.)
The A.I. curator runs on B3(NSCAM) software, a group of technical machine-learning processes programmed by Impett.
Ubermorgen, Leonardo Impett, and Joasia Krysa, The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine (2021), screenshot. Image courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
“We ran into some interesting challenges,” Paul said. “We noticed the language the A.I. wasn’t very interesting. It had this kind of academic, curatorial voice to it.”
To spice things up, the artists added articles from Rolling Stone to the dataset.
“We definitely wanted to investigate what curating can learn from A.I., and what A.I. can learn from curating,” Paul noted. “You have a reflection of curatorial desires and goals that are embedded in the data.”
From recent biennials, for instance, the machine learning picked up language surrounding identity politics. And it was easier for the A.I. to pick up on trends from the Liverpool Biennial, rather than from the massive stores of data from the much longer-running Whitney Biennial.
Ubermorgen, Leonardo Impett, and Joasia Krysa, The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine (2021), screenshot. Image courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Each biennial features a list of fictional artists, often with variations on the same first or last name—biennial 32, for instance, includes Lilijana Lieurance, Lilijana Gitlewski, Lilijana Tucknott, and so on—to ensure that real-world artists wouldn’t be the project’s biggest talking point.
“A framework of particular artists makes you judgmental by nature. You might say ‘oh, it’s all the usual suspects again,’ or ‘oh, it’s nonsensical because who would put those artists together?’” Paul said. “But all of these fictional artists are generated based on actual artists bios, so sometimes you can still see where that’s coming from. There may be moments where you can recognize an artist just by sentences from the bio.”
Ubermorgen, Leonardo Impett, and Joasia Krysa, The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine (2021), screenshot. Image courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
The Whitney has no plans to stage any of these A.I.-generated biennials in the real world, but an A.I. named Jarvis has been tapped to curate next year’s Bucharest Biennial.
Does that mean actual human curators are in danger of being obsolete? Paul isn’t worried.
“I think A.I.-curated exhibitions, which will happen more in the future, will be artworks in and of themselves,” she said. “As curators, we have no desire for machines to replace us, and an A.I. could never have the granular contextual frameworks we as curators have through our interactions with artists.”
Famous last words?
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exhibitionIn 1969, tired of the lack of exhibition opportunities for Black artists, Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, and Norman Lewis took matters into their own hands and opened Cinque Gallery, a nonprofit exhibition space on Astor Place in New York’s East Village.
Cinque—named for Joseph Cinque, who led the 1839 revolt on the Amistad slave ship after being kidnapped in Sierra Leone—quickly became a thriving community of young and mid-career artists.
Over its 35-year existence at various spaces across the city, the organization showcased the work of some 450 artists of color, including Emma Amos, Dawoud Bey, Sam Gilliam, and Whitfield Lovell—all of whom are featured in the first-ever exhibition celebrating the legacy of Cinque Gallery at the Art Students League of New York.
“This is unprecedented,” Susan Stedman, the exhibition’s guest curator, told Artnet News.
An art administrator and close friend of the gallery’s founders, she was closely associated with Cinque throughout its history, and since 2017 has been working on an oral history of the gallery, building on the records held by the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
The show at the league grew out of a 2019 event at the Harlem School of the Arts organized by the Romare Bearden Foundation to mark the gallery’s 50th anniversary. Stedman was a panelist, along with Nanette Carter, who became Cinque’s first artist in residence.
Norman Lewis and students at the Art Students League of New York. Photo courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Among those in attendance that night was Genevieve Martin, then the league’s director of external affairs. The discussion caught her attention because many Cinque Gallery artists studied, and, in some cases, taught, at the league. At the end of the night, Martin approached Stedman and Carter and proposed putting on a show about Cinque and its ties to the Art Students League.
The first African American teacher at the league was Charles Alston, who joined the faculty in 1950 and later showed at Cinque. The school also employed Cinque artists Richard Mayhew, Jacob Lawrence, Al Loving, and Hughie Lee-Smith, as well as all three gallery founders. Bearden had also previously taken classes at the Art Students League, as did many Cinque artists including Elizabeth Catlett, Ed Clark, Mavis Pusey, and Charles White.
Highlighting those connections is a thread that runs through the show, but Stedman did not limit herself to league artists.
“I also wanted to seek out some of the elders, such Otto Neal, Frank Wimberley, and Bill Hudson, who are still working today, as well as women like Cynthia Hawkins, Debra Priestly, and Robin Holder,” she said. “Bill Hudson makes a point of saying he has only had two solo shows in New York—both at Cinque. His work should be more widely known. I wanted to have a mix of those who are still under-recognized with those who are now well known.”
“We want people to know about this space and how Cinque was instrumental in a lot of artists’ careers,” Carter, the guest programming curator for the show, told Artnet News.
Carter had first visited Cinque in the early 1980s after hearing about it from other African American artists. She was immediately blown away. “I thought, ‘wow, this is fantastic,’” Carter said. “They exhibited artists of color, including Asian artists and Hispanic artists, at a time when there were very few places showing our work. Artists from near and far would try and be selected.”
Bill Hudson, Ten Series #10 (1991). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Her residency took place when she was still fresh out of grad school, offering her a stipend that made it possible to focus full-time on her studio practice. But Cinque afforded similar opportunities to artists who had been pursuing their career for much longer.
“Cinque was supposed to be a gallery for emerging artists, but back in the 1960s and ’70s, you could be 50 or 60 and still be ’emerging,’” Carter said. “Many of these African American artists had been working all their lives but had not exhibited.”
And although Cinque provided an invaluable platform for artists of color, it still took years before many of them were widely recognized for their work.
Romare Bearden, Culture: Hartford Mural (1980). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
“I use the term cultural apartheid to describe the extent to which mainstream institutions and most dealers resisted any attention to these artists,” Stedman said. “Cinque didn’t have a dramatic or visible impact on the world of museums and galleries at the time.”
The exhibition is largely drawn from the league’s collection, with loans from various private collections.
“I deliberately did not include museums among the lenders, because museums have been overlooking and ignoring the work of Black Americans too long,” Stedman said. “This neglect continued for years and years and years, and it’s still a problem. I wanted to demonstrate that there are these other significant sources—Black collectors specifically—that are and were supportive of African American artists.”
“I’m hoping that on the heels of this show, people will think about doing further research about Cinque,” Carter said. “Someone could put together a mammoth museum show.”
See more works from the exhibtion below.
Norman Lewis, Untitled (1976). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Robert Blackburn, Youth (1944). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Robin Holder, No Toy Guns (1998). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Nanette Carter, Cantilevered #39. Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Otto Neals, Young General Moses (1984). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Mavis Pusey, Decaying Construction. Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Otto Neals, Young General Moses (1984). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Charles White, Mother (Awaiting His Return), 1945. Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.
Ernest Crichlow, The Strengths of Black Families (ca. 1970–73). Courtesy of the Art Students League of New York.

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For years, the Tate has held a trove of artworks by 20th-century British artist Eileen Agar without even necessarily knowing it.
“Interestingly, [her assemblages are] in their archive, not in their collection of artworks,” says Laura Smith, the Whitechapel Gallery curator who organized an Agar retrospective opening this May. “But she made them as artworks.”
Eileen Agar wearing a “Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse.” The picture was taken in 1936. © The estate of Eileen Agar.
This misplacement isn’t entirely the Tate’s fault. Agar’s assemblages are hard to define and full of natural curios, like a shell calcified to the top of a sea urchin or small vertebrae glued to string.
They’ve been at the Tate archive along with Agar’s unpublished stories and around 1,000 photographs that she took from the mid-1930s onwards. Few of her photographs of fellow artists or sculptural rock formations in Brittany have ever been publicly seen.
Eileen Agar’s photograph of “Bum and thumb rock” in Ploumanac’h (1936). © Tate Images.
“The majority of her photographic archive exists as negatives, rather than prints,” exhibition co-curator Grace Storey wrote in the show’s catalogue. Around 50 of these negatives have been printed for the first time for “Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy,” the artist’s retrospective at Whitechapel Gallery, and are, like her unseen assemblages and the rest of her obscure work, slowly coming to light.
“Angel of Anarchy,” which coincides with the release of a brief Agar biography published by Eiderdown Books, is the largest exhibition of Agar’s work to date, and is named after two sculptures she made in the 1930s by shrouding plaster busts with silk blindfolds, burlap, beads, and turquoise feathers.
Eileen Agar, Angel of Anarchy (1936–40). © Tate Images.
“It’s a description of Eileen as much as it is a title for the show,” Smith said. Frustrated by how Surrealists liked to peg women artists as their muses, the unconventional Agar wanted to flip that stereotype with these heads, which were molded after the face of her partner, Joseph.
Though Agar didn’t quite change the gender imbalance outside her Kensington studio, her retrospective and a simultaneous Whitechapel Gallery show devoted to British women of Surrealism fall within a wave of exhibitions attempting to correct that movement’s art-historical record.
Last year, “Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Frida Kahlo” at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt exhibited a group of 34 female Surrealists, and in 2019 the Tate Modern hosted solo shows for photographer Dora Maar and painter Dorothea Tanning. In 2015, a solo exhibition was dedicated to painter Leonora Carrington at Tate Liverpool.
Dorothea Tanning, Voltage (1942). Collection Ulla und Heiner Pietzsch, Berlin. © The Estate of Dorothea Tanning/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020. Photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin
Agar isn’t as big a name as some of her peers, partly because she remained in England after World War II, unlike other Surrealists who moved on to places like Spain, Mexico, and Paris.
But the bigger issue is that her work is tricky to pin down. “The way that she brought abstraction and Surrealism together, with this approach to color and nature and joy, it creates a very unique style that doesn’t exist anywhere,” Smith said. “She didn’t waver or change what she was doing to fit into any particular tendency, which, historically has probably been difficult.”
Agar’s work is an idiosyncratic combination of painting, photography, collage, and sculpture—fused in original configurations and using bizarre materials.
Photograph of “Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse.” 1936. © The estate of Eileen Agar.
“I surround myself with fantastic bric-a-brac in order to trigger my imagination,” Agar wrote in her autobiography, A Look at My Life (1988), of the fossils, textiles, leaves, and bones that she found and brought home. Collage was a central part of her practice that she described as “a displacement of the banal by the fertile invention of chance or coincidence.” 
Agar also liked mixing non-figurative elements with the playful irrationality of Surrealism, and by 1939 was showing regularly at international Surrealist exhibitions.
In her Erotic Landscape, a collage from 1942, for example, Agar combined abstract patterns with recognizable images of fish and a nude woman. A cut-out piece of red paper could be a tendrilled bit of seaweed, or a purely abstract shape.
Eileen Agar, Erotic Landscape (1942). © The Estate of Eileen Agar. Photograph courtesy Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. © Doug Atfield.
“I see nothing incompatible in that,” Agar said. “Indeed we walk on two legs, and for me, one is abstract, the other surreal—it is point and counterpoint.” 
Agar always marched away from convention, and towards the mysterious. “Above all she wished to avoid the banal,” critic and curator Andrew Lambirth wrote in the exhibition catalogue, based on his weekly visits to Agar’s studio during the last six years of her life. (She died in 1991.)
“Agar leads us to a new place, not quite on this earth though very much of it, a world of wonder, play, and glory. She gives us access to the kingdom of the imagination.”
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An ambitious new exhibition in Bern, Switzerland, has brought together artists from the bitterly divided nations of North and South Korea, which have long prevented artistic exchange.
In “Border Crossings: North and South Korean Art from the Sigg Collection,” 90 works by 30 artists made between the 1970s to the 2010s hang side by side the divergent histories of the two nations, which have been divided by a hard border since 1953.
The show, at Kunstmusem Bern, primarily hinges on the collection of Uli Sigg, who was the former Swiss ambassador to China and North Korea. He loaned 75 pieces that he acquired during the late 1990s when he was posted in the region, as well as works from South Korea and China that he began to acquire afterward.
It is a rare opportunity to see North Korean art, which rarely exits the country. The works on view from the country are all done in the Socialist Realist style and are largely propagandist paintings. There is a large painting by North Korean artist Pak Yong Chol called The Missiles depicting Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il jubilantly looking on as rockets shoot off.
Pak Yong Chol, The Missiles, (1994-2004). Photo: Sigg Collection. Mauensee © the artist.
The exhibition’s curator, Kathleen Bühler, said she strived to not make “hasty judgements” about the North Korean works, and to see them “against the background of the conditions under which they were made.” As a result, works on view are not grouped by nation but by theme.
“The accusation that North Korean art is mere propaganda explains only one part of these works,” Bühler said in a statement. “Because all art is always also an expression of the ideology of its time, and directly or indirectly conveys something of its living environment.”
Other works in the show come from the collection of Swiss activist Katharina Zellweger, who was a humanitarian in North Korea in the 1990s. She loaned the museum a selection of North Korean stamps and posters.
The exhibition also includes Chinese perspectives from artists who grew up on the border with North Korea. In He Xiangyu’s video The Yellow Swim Caps, the artist swims across the North Korea-Chinese border river Yalu to imagine what defectors might experience illegally trying to cross into China.
Other works show the moments of permeability that can exist along the 155-mile border. With the help of Chinese middlemen, South Korean artist Kyungah Ham managed to smuggle her embroidery designs into the northern nation where they were reworked by North Korean embroiders in a transgressive collaboration.
The show also reminds viewers of Kim Jong Un’s own curious relationship to border crossings: The current leader of North Korea lived in Bern for 11 years as a child, disguised as a family member of the North Korean embassy staff.

Border Crossings: North And South Korean Art From the Sigg Collection is on view at Kunstmuseum Bern from April 30 through September 5.
See works on view at the museum below.

Feng Mengbo Two Great White Sharks (2014). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © the artist.
Sea Hyun Lee, Between Red33 (2007). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © the artist.
Kyungah Ham, Chandelier (2012-13). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © the artist.
North Korea Collective, The Sea (2008). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee. © the artist
Inbai Kim Deller hon Dainy (3 Portraits) (2007). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © The artist.
Unkyung Hur Scopic, Image 3 (2014). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © the artist.
Kyungah Ham, Sweet-Sweet & Bling-Bling (2009-10). Photo: Sigg Collection, Mauensee © the artist.
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Now in its third edition, Desert X, the outdoor exhibition in the Coachella Valley of California, features 12 site-specific projects by international artists addressing themes of mass immigration, human rights, environmental catastrophe, and more.
The show, which is on view through May 16 and is curated by Neville Wakefield and César García-Alvarez, is free to the public (though some works require free timed tickets, which are available through the Desert X website).
Below, we rounded up five standout works from the exhibition.

Alicja KwadeParaPivot (sempiternal clouds)
Alicja Kwade ParaPivot (sempiternal clouds). Photo courtesy of Lance Gerber, Alicja Kwade, and Desert X.
Sitting atop a hill that’s accessible only after a steep 15-minute climb is Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade’s ParaPivot (sempiternal clouds), a work made of interlocking metal frames that appear to support large hunks of white marble that look like parts of broken glacier.
Viewers are encouraged to move in and out of the installation and observe how the marble appears to shift (and even wobble precariously) from certain angles. The work is Kwade’s comment on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (which asserts that “the position and the velocity of an object cannot both be measured exactly, at the same time, even in theory”) and how it applies to the instability of perception and the state of the environment.

Eduardo SarabiaThe Passenger
Eduardo Sarabia’s The Passenger. Photo courtesy of Lance Gerber, Eduardo Sarabia and Desert X.
Sarabia, the Guadalajara-based artist who has long explored the history of cultural exchange between Mexico and the United States, investigates the theme of intergenerational journeys in The Passenger, a maze shaped like an arrowhead that’s crafted from 350 joined “petates,” or sleeping mats woven from palm fibres.
The work comments on ancient Biblical migrations as well as present-day displacement, highlighting the journeys of immigrants looking for better lives. Viewers are encouraged to walk through the triangular labyrinth and reflect on these ideas. When they eventually reach the center, which features an open clearing, “I’m hoping they’re willing to contemplate their situation and have a little bit of perspective on somebody else’s situation,” Sarabia notes in a video on Desert X’s website.

Nicholas GalaninNever Forget
Nicholas Galanin’s Never Forget. Photo courtesy of Lance Gerber, Nicholas Galanin, and Desert X.
Galanin, a Tlingit and Unangax artist based in Sitka, Alaska, provides a critical look at the history of California and the Coachella Valley with his work Never Forget, which spells out “INDIAN LAND” in lettering that mimics the Hollywood sign, which was originally an advertisement for whites-only housing.
The work is a stark reminder that the land on which it sits originally belonged to the Cahuilla peoples. According to Galanin, it is also a call to present-day landowners to join the landback movement to return ancestral land to Native Americans. Galanin has also started a GoFundMe campaign to purchase a plot of land near the sign, which he hopes to return to the Cahuilla community.

 Zahrah AlghamdiWhat Lies Behind the Walls
Zahra Alghamdi’s What Lies Behind the Walls. Photo courtesy of Lance Gerber, Zahra Alghamdi, and Desert X.
Saudi Arabian artist Zahrah Alghamdi’s work is often made of tightly packed layers of various organic materials representing the way memories take form and eventually coalesce into a life’s worth of experience. Her Desert X work, What Lies Behind the Walls, is a lifesize wall-like sculpture that joins together Saudi Arabian and Coachella Valley architectural forms in stacked foamy layers filled with cement, soil, and dye from both regions, suggesting how landscapes constantly change over time.
The work also comment on walls in general, and asks viewers not to view them as immovable blockages, but as invitations to peer over them to the other side. “My idea is that we should not always put up barriers,” Alghamdi notes. “We shouldn’t build walls between us.”

Serge Attukwei ClotteyThe Wishing Well
Serge Attukwei Clottey’s The Wishing Well. Photo courtesy of Lance Gerber, Serge Attukwei Clottey, and Desert X.
Artist Serge Attukwei Clottey’s The Wishing Well consists of two large-scale cubes made up of cut sheets of yellow plastic from gallon containers used to transport water in the artist’s native Ghana. The gallons were originally introduced to Ghanians by Europeans to transport cooking oil, standing in as visual symbols of colonialism and its long-term ramifications.
The title of the work references the wells to which people around the world trek to access clean drinking water. Additionally, with its placement in the Coachella Valley, it also underscores water supply issues in California and beyond, hinting at current and looming environmental challenges.
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There are only a handful of living artists as well known as Yayoi Kusama. The 92-year-old’s colorful hair and stern gaze in photos is as recognizable as her mirrored funhouses and spot-covered installations, which have made her one of the most in-demand artists in the world.
But a major new retrospective at Gropius Bau in Berlin looks beyond that span of famous work. “A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe,” which opened today (but will temporarily close again due to a new lockdown), has recreated eight exhibitions that mark less-recognized turning points in the Japanese artist’s career.
The indexical approach sheds light on the enduring complexities that hide in plain sight in Kusama’s obsessively painted and warping world. Though pleasurable for all the senses, a plunge into Kusama’s work offers little reprieve from the anxieties and shifting realities outside. Each decade of her oeuvre is packed with frantic energy and emotion. Boundaries are crossed, one’s psychological stamina is tested. There is a sort of endlessness to each installation that creates a frenzy of seeing as chaotic and constant as a TikTok feed.
Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room — Love Forever (1966/94). Courtesy: Ota Fine Arts.
The exhibition spans Kusama’s 70-year career, starting chronologically with her childhood in Matsumoto, Japan, where she had her first shows. Earlier pieces, many from the artist’s own collection, ring with a similar intensity to later works, but young Kusama was more somber. A lonely pair of trees is swallowed up by an ominous landscape in the 1950 painting Accumulation of the Corpses (Prisoner of Depersonalization).
Revelations about abusive episodes from her childhood filter in a restaged version of her 1963 show “Aggregation: One Thousand Boats,” which was originally held at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York. The row boat, dressed up with Kusama’s signature stuffed phalli, touches on the artist’s self-described “fear of sex” that resulted from watching her father’s affairs at the behest of her mother. It is a disturbing story that importantly complicates the crazed landscapes of bulging sculptures that appear in the following rooms.
There was a frenzy of touch in her 1960s and ’70s happenings, and her recreated exhibition “Love Room,” originally shown in The Hague in 1967, exemplifies Kusama’s utopian visions of blending boundaries between herself, others, nature, and the universe. She paints dots on naked visitors who move around the room in a recording from the opening.
“I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness,” Kusama once said.
“Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
On the wave of that 1970s mood, the artist returned home to Japan but found the hippie revolution would not rise up there in quite the same way, the exhibition panels explain. With the jubilance of the times somewhat subsided, the artist leans into the prevailing anti-war politics that marked the post-Vietnam war era. In Japan in 1977, she made a series of work that cast an unrelenting look at the horrors of war, collaged paintings with mixed photos from Vietnam and World War II. That same year, Kusama committed herself to a psychiatric facility, where she still lives and works today.
Of course, there’s a healthy dose of early and late Infinity rooms, the ultimate Kusama crowd-pleasers that, thanks to sensitive curating, are given an intellectual rigor. The artist’s first room, from her show “Peep Show or Endless Love,” in New York in 1966, features two small boxy “holes” that you can stick your head into, while someone else pushes their own face through another hole across the way. Together, socially distanced at the Gropius Bau, you can stare at each other, and into a never-ending optical illusion at the same time.
It struck me all as a bit of a pharmakon. While Kusama offers a dazzling escape from mundanity, the feelings of the world are turned on and tuned up when you step inside it. Decades later, the artist still seems to know our own vices better than we do.
“Yayoi Kusama: A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe” is on view at the Gropius Bau, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, Berlin, April 23–August 15.
Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective, Installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau Photo: Luca Girardini
“Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
“Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
“Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
“Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
Yayoi Kusama, The End of Summer (1980). Courtesy: Sammlung Goetz, Munich.
“Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
“Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
“Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
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“Fake news” will be a tempting aperture through which to approach “Off the Record,” a new group show at the Guggenheim that looks at the ways in which artists consider, critique, or otherwise manipulate “official” documents of history and state power. 
It wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to take that tack. But it’s not what was on curator Ashley James’s mind as she organized the show—her first since becoming the museum’s first full-time Black curator in 2019.
“I’m less interested in speaking to the specificities of our contemporary historical moment than in thinking about a certain position in relationship to history as such,” she tells Artnet News over the phone. She pauses as construction noises from the show’s installation clang behind her.
“It’s about a point of view,” she continues as the din dies down. “It’s about a kind of posture toward history and documentation that is something that’s applicable to the past, to the present, and to the future. It’s more about a methodology.”
Sara Cwynar, Encyclopedia Grid (Bananas) (2014). Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Heavy on photoconceptualism, “Off the Record” comprises some 25 works—all but one of which were pulled from the museum’s own collection—from artists including Sadie Barnette, Sarah Charlesworth, Hank Willis Thomas, and Adrian Piper. It’s a group that represents a wide swath of generations, interests, and artistic practices. What unites them here, explains James, is a shared “skepticism of received history.”  
But how that sense of skepticism manifests in the work varies with each artist. For Sara Cwynar, represented in the exhibition by three pieces from her 2014 Encyclopedia Grid series, it’s an intellectual exercise. Taking a cue from the John Berger classic Ways of Seeing, the artist has culled various pictures of the same subject (bananas, Brigitte Bardot, the Acropolis) from multiple encyclopedias and rephotographed them—a process that shows us, without judgment, the representational quirks and biases of the supposedly objective resources. 
Sadie Barnette, My Father’s FBI File; Government Employees Installation (2017). Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Lisa Oppenheim, meanwhile, sees creative potential in the document’s deficiency. For a 2007 photo series, the artist reimagined details redacted from a group of Walker Evans’s Great Depression-era negatives, which were hole-punched to prevent publication. Oppenheim’s own small circular photographs, paired next to Evans’s originals, read as a kind of revisionist history—albeit one that is just as flawed as its source material.
Other examples are more charged, such as prints from Carrie Mae Weems’s iconic 1995-96 series “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” in which the artist appropriates ethnographic photos of enslaved people to show how photography was used to reinforce racial inequality. Each is paired with a pointed phrase: “DESCENDING THE THRONE YOU BECAME FOOT SOLDIER & COOK,” reads one.
Hank Willis Thomas, Something To Believe In (1984/2007). © Hank Willis ThomasPhotography. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Like these examples, almost all of the artists in the exhibition draw on material from generations past. But that’s not to say that the show doesn’t have something to say about the contemporary moment, James points out—even if its message has little to do with the Trump era specifically. 
Best exemplifying this is the one work in the show that doesn’t belong to the museum’s collection: a 2020 wall-hung assemblage by Tomashi Jackson, in which an archival print of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act is overlaid with paint and campaign materials for a 2018 gubernatorial race. 
It’s a piece that literally fuses the past with the present, the “official” with the unofficial. And it alludes to another theme that ties together the various pieces in the show: “power,” says the curator, ”whether that power is because of the institution itself or power in a narrative that has been received in a certain way over time.” 
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