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    Banksy’s Already Covered Painting in London Comments on the U.K.’s Palestine Action Crackdown

    Banksy’s painting at Royal Courts of Justice, London, © Banksy 2025

    Banksy’s Already Covered Painting in London Comments on the U.K.’s Palestine Action Crackdown

    September 8, 2025

    ArtSocial Issues

    Kate Mothes

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    On a wall outside the Royal Courts of Justice in Westminster, London, a new piece by Banksy appeared this morning before being covered up within hours. The short-lived artwork, which the artist shared on Instagram and the front page of his website, depicts a judge in traditional robes and a large wig beating a protester with a gavel as blood spatters across the demonstrator’s placard.

    The piece by the anonymous artist is likely a response to the arrests of nearly 900 protestors during a rally against the ban on Palestine Action, a group that Britain has declared a terrorist organization. Membership in the group is considered a crime, which can be punished by up to 14 years in prison. Even though organizers insist the demonstration of around 1,500 was peaceful, The Met nevertheless arrested more than half of the attendees.

    Banksy is known for his statements about current affairs and socio-political issues around the world. He’s famous for stealthily targeting charged sites, like destroyed buildings in Ukraine or a small town in Wales that the World Health Organization for a short time deemed the most-polluted community in the U.K. His striking and subversive imagery is sometimes humorous, ironic, or tongue-in-cheek, always taking a direct and purely visual approach in his critique of contemporary issues.

    “What makes this work remarkable is not just its imagery, but its placement,” says Jasper Tordoff, a Banksy expert at MyArtBroker, on Artnet. “By choosing the Royal Courts of Justice, Banksy transforms a historic symbol of authority into a platform for debate. In classic Banksy form, he uses the building itself to sharpen the message, turning its weight and history into part of the artwork.”

    Follow the artist’s updates on Instagram.

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    ‘Between the Lines’ Showcases the Subversive Traditions of Art-Making While Incarcerated

    Djan Shun Lin, “Eagle” (ca. 1994, York County Prison, York County, Pennsylvania), paper and paint. All photos by Addison Doty, courtesy of the Museum of International Folk Art, shared with permission

    ‘Between the Lines’ Showcases the Subversive Traditions of Art-Making While Incarcerated

    September 3, 2025

    ArtSocial Issues

    Grace Ebert

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    Artists aren’t strangers to creative constraints. Perhaps they work full-time and have to sneak in just an hour of painting before bed. Or a grant requires that they follow a particular set of guidelines that push their practice in a new direction. Whatever the situation, artists are often uniquely positioned to find innovative, experimental approaches to making.

    For those included in Between the Lines: Prison Art and Advocacy, which was on view this past month at the Museum of International Folk Art, constraints are plentiful. Featuring an eclectic array of works by incarcerated artists, the group exhibition offers a survey of creativity in confinement.

    Artist name redacted, “Envelope (Austin, Texas)” (June 2002, Snyder, Texas), paper envelope, color pencil, pen

    A primary thread in the exhibition—which tends to connect most artworks made during a period of incarceration—is an innovative use of materials. John Paul Granillo, for example, renders blue pen portraits on a pair of canvas prison-issue shoes. Other drawings appear on envelopes sent to the Coalition For Prisoners’ Rights, a nonprofit project that mailed newsletters inside for several decades.

    There are also several paños, a genre utilizing commissary handkerchiefs, pillowcases, or bedsheets that originated with incarcerated Chicanos in the 20th century. The largely self-taught art form is perhaps one of the best-known traditions to emerge from inside carceral facilities and is a subversive mode of expression: often sent to family and loved ones on the outside, these fabric pieces offer both a way to communicate what might otherwise be censored in letters and a financial opportunity for particularly talented artists who might sell the paños for birthday, anniversary, and other gifts.

    While much of the work comes from facilities in the Southwest and Western states, Between the Lines extends its reach to connect carceral systems across the globe. A vibrantly beaded bird with bold text reading Masallah, or may Allah, comes from 1960s Anatolia. Purchased in 2005 in Istanbul, the piece is a “protective amulet and hung from car rearview mirrors or other places,” the museum says.

    As Brian Karl points out in Hyperallergic, the exhibition is less concerned with prison reform and larger questions of abolition than it is with showcasing the necessity of creating in such a dehumanizing environment. The eagle, a motif associated with freedom in the U.S., appears in several works and speaks to the lack of agency and autonomy in such a punishing system. When people are very literally confined with meager, if any, resources for self-expression, creating becomes both a mode of survival and a revolutionary act. As the exhibition’s title suggests, prison art is always bound up with advocacy and requires makers to find defiance in interstitial spaces.

    John Paul Granillo, “Shoes with ink drawing” (2011–2012, Federal Correctional Institution, Ray Brook, New York), blue pen ink, white fabric, rubber

    Michael Guzman, “PA. LA. Casa (To the House)” (1982–1984, New Mexico State Penitentiary, Santa Fe), paper, colored pencil, pen. Work courtesy of Stuart Ashman in honor of the talented inmates at the New Mexico State Penitentiary

    Artist name redacted, “Envelope (buffalo skull and stepped chevron design)” (October 2005,Salinas Valley State Prison, Soledad, California), paper envelope, color pencil, pen

    Artist unrecorded, “Picture Frame” (1980s, New Mexico State Penitentiary, Santa Fe), plastic-coated gum wrappers, photograph

    Artist unrecorded, “Amulet” (1960–1970, Anatolia, Republic of Türkiye), glass beads, cotton string, sequins, stuffing

    J.D., “Te Amo (I Love You)” (2018–2020, Cibola County Correctional Center, Milan, New Mexico), torn cotton bedsheets and ink

    Carlos Cervantes, “Hispanic History in the Southwest” (1996, New Mexico State Penitentiary, Santa Fe), cotton handkerchief, lead pencil, colored pencils, ink pens

    Ray Materson, “Where Are You Now” (1990, Somers, Connecticut), sock thread, silk, fiber

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    Maria Gaspar On Abolition and the High Stakes of Working with Incarcerated Communities

    ‘Disappearance Jail’ (2020-ongoing), inkjet print on rice paper. All images courtesy of Maria Gaspar, shared with permission

    Maria Gaspar On Abolition and the High Stakes of Working with Incarcerated Communities

    August 26, 2025

    ArtConversationsSocial Issues

    Grace Ebert

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    Having grown up in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, where Cook County Department of Corrections sprawls across 96 acres, Maria Gaspar has always felt the haunting presence of detention. As a child, she visited that jail as part of a Scared Straight program and, through the years, became more involved in conversations about mass incarceration, abolition, and spatial justice.

    Both an educator and practicing artist, Gaspar has put collaboration, compassion, and critical thinking at the center of her work. At the School of the Art Institute, she teaches students to develop interdisciplinary, research-based approaches to art making. Outside the classroom, she strives to engage communities that might not otherwise be brought into the creative act, whether that be local teens and their families, activists, or people trapped inside the carceral system.

    Following a studio visit last fall, Gaspar and I met virtually in May to discuss her practice and Disappearance Jail, an iteration of which we would be working on together for No One Knows All It Takes at the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee. In this conversation, we consider the necessity of care in collaboration, the possibilities of abolition, and how healing is always political.

    This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

    Grace: Can you take us back to the beginning of Disappearance Jail? What was the impetus for that project?

    Maria: When I began the project, it was the height of the pandemic. I had already spent a number of years working in prisons and with incarcerated people. I had just had my child, and I was unable to return to Cook County Jail to teach a series of workshops due to the jail being a COVID hotspot. I was trying to figure out what to do, how to respond to the moment, and was mostly at home. I wasn’t able to get to my studio at the time.

    I was thinking a lot about ways of making this static and rigid place more porous through materiality. I’ve done it in various ways, including performance and installation, as well as other kinds of site interventions. But I was curious to see what it would look like, materially, using a photograph. I took to my home printer and started printing out images of Cook County Jail I had taken over the years. I continued to print out photographs of all Illinois prisons. Using materials I had around me, I began experimenting with types of perforations. I cut them into pieces, much like an erasure poem. I tore them, and I hole punched them

    At the time, I performed a piece where I cut up text from the jail’s website and then pieced it back together like a concrete poem. It may have happened at the same time when I was working with paper and cutting things up that I then took to my hole puncher and started hole punching this iconic image I took of the jail in relation to a major thoroughfare—26th Street in Little Village. I’ve gone back to that photo many times.

    That led to the current project, where I am making porous all images of jails, prisons, and detention centers in the United States. Visually, I was playing with the shadow of the scanned punched-out image and noticed how the gaps started to take on their own form. I liked how that looked, and then I kept doing it.

    ‘Disappearance Suits.’ Photo by Martin Seck, courtesy of Museo del Barrio, New York

    Grace: Is the project related to Disappearance Suits, or do they just share a name?

    Maria: There’s a connection. I’m interested in the simultaneous visibility and invisibility of places like jails and people and bodies, the way people are extracted from communities and put into prisons. It’s an ongoing project, but when I first started it, it was about examining the way brown appears in various spaces. It was certainly talking about a political identity and a racialized body.

    For me, it connects to the ways jails and prisons function and erase predominantly Black and Brown or poor communities. There’s a relationship, and I was very conscious of that title, of reusing it or applying it to the perforated images of jails. It’s interlinked in my mind, separate projects, but linked in many ways.

    Grace: Invisibility is something that I wanted to talk about in relation to the exhibition at the Haggerty Museum. One of the things we’re thinking about with that show is the ways we societally conceal problems, particularly issues like addiction, trauma, and mental illness, all of which can push people to the margins without care.

    This invisibility, coupled with the belief that people who have committed crimes deserve whatever punishment comes to them, seems to lead to the idea that people who are incarcerated are less than human. I’m curious, as an artist working with incarcerated people, how you ensure that people are able to show their full selves?

    Maria: As a society, we normalize the way we mistreat people in the criminal legal system. This idea that they’re less than is felt not only within the carceral boundaries but beyond. It’s felt when you’re thinking about people from a lower economic status or a racialized group or some other marginalized identity. So the carceral aspect is just one part of it. Like you’re pointing out, it’s a bigger systemic issue. 

    Working with incarcerated communities or about incarceration is high-stakes work. It’s quite different from what an artist is doing in their studio with a discrete object. I teach at an art school, so I think a lot about how we’re educating younger artists, especially those interested in activist or community-based practices, particularly if they’re not coming from or don’t have experience in that space.

    In my experience, community-based work with incarcerated communities is both tender and political. It often involves a group of people who may be different from what we are accustomed to within a very white and homogeneous artistic environment.  This work means that you might be in meetings with the sheriff’s department or with violence prevention workers. There is a system that is uniquely different from the art school or museum context. 

    ‘Disappearance Jail’ (2020-ongoing), inkjet print on rice paper

    Therefore, as an artist, I believe one must be thoughtful and open to collaborating with diverse groups of people, but it also needs to include a power analysis. Within those groups of people are different kinds of power structures and hierarchies. Navigating between these various systems is quite challenging and sometimes disorienting. At the end of the day, one has to really think about what the core values are. What is the intention behind the work? What is most important, and how do you make sure that as you’re navigating through these spaces, you’re not compromising the work and what the work means, and that you’re not compromising the lives of people who are in the most vulnerable state, which are the people behind the cages? That’s one piece, remembering that you can’t just take a risk out of whimsy. You have to remember that you’re dealing with people’s lives and lived experiences, and it must be with utmost care.

    What is most important, and how do you make sure that as you’re navigating through these spaces, you’re not compromising the work and what the work means, and that you’re not compromising the lives of people who are in the most vulnerable state, which are the people behind the cages? Maria Gaspar

    I also value the ways in which artists can be subversive, the way they can be wild and wacky, audacious, and joyful. Artists are not always taking the preconceived pathway. We’re often pushing those boundaries. And so I also want to honor the creativity and creative capacity and possibility that not only I hold but that my collaborators hold. How do I create the conditions within a community-based practice that feels creative, even within the limitations, even within the precarities? How do we recognize those limitations and precarities and move forward? How do we work together while also finding ways to flourish and nourish ourselves within a creative environment? Those two things aren’t always compatible, right? Captivity and creativity, or the freedom to be creative, work against each other. They’re meant to be in conflict.

    But we have seen artists who are incarcerated supercede their environment. I love how people like Dr. Nicole Fleetwood highlight those artists in her exhibition and book, Marking Time. I feel like my role as an artist, with the skills and the tools that I have gained over the years that I continue to sharpen, continue to learn from and continue to add to, is that I want to find ways to soften those boundaries, make those boundaries porous, so that there’s something to be gained, that there’s something meaningful, that we can make together. It may not be this polished, highly finished work at the end. It might be the beautiful process that we just engaged in that we can’t even put into words. That is meaningful to me. That’s worth it when we can be in a room together, building something transcendent where people feel like they can be themselves

    Christopher Coleman, one of the “Radioactive” ensemble members, said something so powerful in a podcast interview we conducted a couple of years ago. I think they had asked him a question about what his experience was like being part of the “Radioactive” project, and he said something along the lines of, “It was so transformative that even the shackles came off the hands of the guards.” I thought that was such a potent image. What it said to me was that not only is the carceral system oppressing those who are incarcerated, but it’s also oppressing the staff and all the other people who work within those systems.

    This leads to other questions about how these systems become the primary economic driver of an entire community and how we rely on them. Why do we depend on them? To me, that was a compelling statement that went beyond ourselves.

    Grace: I think a lot about the phrase carceral-impacted people or justice-impacted people. I understand why we use that phrasing, but it bothers me because we are all impacted. The threat is always there. I reread Are Prisons Obsolete? a couple of weeks ago, and there’s a point about how anyone unwell, anyone deemed unfit, anyone outside the norm gets put into prisons. By hiding people inside, we don’t have to confront any of these issues on a deeper level that could prevent them from happening in the first place. It creates this necessary remove to keep the system in place.

    Maria: Yeah. I’ve been consumed by rage over what’s been happening in the last few months regarding the kidnapping of immigrants. We saw a version of this a few years ago with incarcerating entire families and children in immigrant detention centers. We’re seeing this in ways that maybe we hadn’t quite seen before. It’s absolutely brutal. The ways that people are being dehumanized and mistreated and abused, there’s a political rhetoric around normalizing this. We have to fight against it. 

    While I am filled with rage, I am also hopeful. I think people are recognizing that this is a larger issue. We’re entering this fascist political moment, and we have to fight back. We have to defend each other and love each other and take care of each other, our neighbors, our community members, our students, and our loved ones.

    I do feel like abolition has become more possible given how people have been embodying it in these different ways. It’s about this process. It’s about learning and relearning and holding each other accountable but also holding each other with some love and some hope. I hope that’s the direction we’re moving, but it’s going to take a lot of work. 

    Grace: That’s one of the reasons I was so drawn to Disappearance Jail. One of the biggest questions about abolition is what will we have instead? Your project puts that question in the hands of the public in a way that allows everyone to reimagine what’s possible. I’m wondering how you set up that experience. How do you bring people into that conversation if they’re either skeptical about the idea of abolition, the way that art can be effective in these very real world problems, or maybe they feel they’re not creative enough to participate in something like this?

    Maria: I think of it much like doing a public artwork. I’ve mentioned that I come from a mural background. That was my entry point into art making. What I recall from those experiences and working with local muralists in Chicago was that it was almost always a very inviting place. There was always an invitation to engage. Engaging meant cleaning the brushes, or engaging meant putting paint on the wall, or helping create the design, or helping take the scaffold down or up, but there was always this invitation to be a part of it. I feel fortunate to have had mentors who created those conditions where I felt like I could be part of something more. 

    I do the same for Disappearance Jail. There are people who can get down with abolition, who understand it or are trying to understand it, who are interested. There might be others who are against it or don’t understand it, but are curious. There are all these different positionalities. The punch party is an invitation for you to come. I have not had anybody yet say they don’t want to punch anything out. Everybody has punched out an image so far. And we’ve punched out around 2,000 images, so at least that many people have punched out images of carceral facilities and have thought about what they want to see instead.

    I guide folks through a set of five prompts, and we start with something like, Imagine freedom. What does it feel like? Taste like? Sound like? They need to take some time to think about what freedom means to them. Sometimes we do this in groups, or sometimes we do it individually. It depends on how people want to engage. Usually, it’s guided, so I’m giving people some context. I’m giving them information about the work. 

    ‘Disappearance Jail’ (2020-ongoing), inkjet print on rice paper. All images courtesy of Maria Gaspar, shared with permission

    In some situations, we’ve had co-facilitators. I co-facilitated a one-punch party in California with Christopher Coleman, who I mentioned earlier, who was part of the “Radioactive” ensemble. I’ve also done it with other people who are local to that city, who may come from a community-based practice or local movement. We lead groups to think about these specific jails and prisons that they might recognize or maybe they have a connection to. I’ve had people share that their loved ones were incarcerated or that they have family members who work in those facilities. There are so many different connections, and sometimes people will share publicly, and sometimes they’ll just tell me.

    I ask them to create a mark using the hole puncher and to imagine what, instead, they would like to see. Sometimes we’ll hold writing workshops, where participants can write a little bit about what that means to them to punch out. At other times, people will simply say it while they’re punching it out. They’ll say something like love or joy or community. It becomes this embodied experience of creating the perforation, creating the hole, and imagining a world without prisons.

    I collect all the perforations that will be transformed, possibly composted one day. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it would mean to compost or transform those materials into something else, to let something grow. The Disappearance Jail images are printed onto rice paper. It has a kind of softness to it, but it’s also quite resilient as a material. Sometimes hole punchers get stuck, and a bit of tearing occurs. It feels a little like fabric. It’s interesting as a material to think about its relationship to fiber and fibrous things that grow from the ground. 

    That is important to me, that touch feels good. That’s sometimes a strange thing to say when you’re looking at this image of a punitive system in your hands, right?Maria Gaspar

    Grace: I love the compost idea. That’s beautiful.

    Maria: I like the idea, too. I recently got into making paper. It’s such a beautiful process of making paper pulp and just working with scraps, you know? I think it’s such a beautiful transformation.

    Grace: That was one of my favorite things to learn how to do as a kid. I wanted to do it all the time because it just feels so good. It’s soft, and touching the pulp is so satisfying. 

    Maria: That is important to me, that touch feels good. That’s sometimes a strange thing to say when you’re looking at this image of a punitive system in your hands, right? And everything it represents. However, there’s something about the participant, being able to manipulate it, that’s really important: to cut away and be with the mark. 

    I made some guidelines for the perforations because there was a point in one of the cities where people were starting to add words. They were quite beautiful–they’re lovely–but then I had to step back and really think about what that would mean to see a bunch of words. I decided to add a guideline that focuses on marks, rather than words. I’m inviting people to make a puncture without a word, so that the mark could be felt more by the viewer. 

    Grace: How do you think about senses when you’re creating a community project? That feels so much a part of embodiment.

    Maria: There was a point in my practice doing community work where I was dealing with a surface through images and language. I started to feel like it wasn’t enough to just deal with the surface. Then that work changed. We were looking at the jail, thinking about the wall and making that porous. I did it through screenshots of the jail using Google Earth. 

    I wanted to take a different approach and to think of it like something that can be shaped and reshaped, abolished, or deconstructed. I was also beginning to do more performance work. I was really excited by the possibilities of movement and touch and creating these different kinds of compositions by way of the body or bodies together. We did some performance workshops for the “Radioactive” project, where we moved around in the room using  Augusto Boal-inspired performance exercises. Touching in jail is prohibited, so it was a particular kind of touch using just our fingertips.

    There was something very sensorial, and there was a connection being made. For me, that was a moment where touch became really electric and in some ways radioactive, right? I thought that was a beautiful way of coming together, that we can be together through conversation and through drawing and through these collaborative exercises, but also through movement. 

    I’m always trying to make things that feel embodied. I completed a project where I created a large textile curtain called “Haunting Raises Specters,” where it was essentially a visual representation of the jail wall, which can be arranged and rearranged in various configurations as an installation. I really wanted people to experience both sides of that textile, but you don’t quite know what is what side and also that the wall is movable. It could be gathered. It could be opened up. People can participate in it somehow. It’s essential to me that it feel embodied, and so I think that’s how I come to touch. 

    Grace: I wanted to ask you a little bit about wellness. I think embodiment can sometimes be tied to influencer wellness culture and can mean a lot of different things to different people, particularly as we think about identity and positionality. Do you see there being a distinct connection between embodiment and collective or even individual well-being in your practice?

    Maria: That’s a good question. Recently, I’ve been thinking more about healing. I mean, I think I’ve always been thinking about healing. Being together and being in community, it always has healing potential. We know that we’re not solitary beings.

    It must be grounded in a consciousness of political struggle. I can’t think of wellness without some kind of political stake. Without it, it would feel really disconnected. It has to be grounded in understanding the different types of struggles that we have on an individual or community level, or neighborhood level or city level. There’s a political condition that needs to be recognized and identified, and considered when you’re thinking about what wellness means.

    The Colossal-curated exhibition ‘No One Knows All It Takes’ is on view through December 20 in Milwaukee. Find more from Gaspar on her website and Instagram.

    Maria Gaspar. Photo by Mark Poucher

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    In Milwaukee, Four Artists Unravel Trauma to Move Toward Collective Wellness

    Swoon, “Medea” (2017), wood, hand cut paper, laser cut paper, linoleum block print on paper, acrylic gouache, cardboard, lighting elements

    In Milwaukee, Four Artists Unravel Trauma to Move Toward Collective Wellness

    August 21, 2025

    ArtColossalSocial Issues

    Grace Ebert

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    In a world riddled with injustice and predicated on privilege for the few at the expense of the many, what does it mean to be well? An exhibition opening Friday at the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee considers the effects of concealed trauma and the inextricable ties between personal health and collective wellness.

    No One Knows All It Takes invites four artists—Bryana Bibbs, Raoul Deal, Maria Gaspar, and Swoon (previously)—who utilize art-making to grapple with complex emotions, imagine solutions to widespread problems, and share their stories and those of others. The timely exhibition, curated by Colossal, brings forth pressing issues like addiction, incarceration, immigration, and a lack of support for caregivers, conveyed through visually arresting works across media.

    Bryana Bibbs, “1.25.24-1.26.24” (2024), handwoven Papa George hospital blanket, Papa George playing cards, gifted pants, 11.5 x 14.5 inches

    No One Knows All It Takes opens with portraits by Deal, intimate renderings made through hours of conversations with the subjects. Paired with his wooden sculptures, the elaborate carvings explore the central role of immigration in American history and culture. Bibbs’ weavings and monotype prints—created while she cared for her dying grandparents with many of their belongings— follow as a sort of ghostly archive of what remains after death.

    Swoon’s “Medea” fills the fourth gallery space, a deeply personal installation that the artist made, in part, to confront her mother’s lifelong struggle with addiction and mental illness. An exposed tarantula mother, portraits of Swoon’s own family, wooden windows, and audio elements layer personal artifacts with recurring motifs about intergenerational trauma.

    The Wisconsin iteration of Gaspar’s Disappearance Jail series tucks into a smaller, more confined space at the end of the exhibition. Featuring images of 113 prisons, jails, and juvenile and immigrant detention facilities throughout the state, the project invites visitors to use hole punches to literally remove and obscure the carceral spaces. Because incarceration has historically been the only manner in which society addresses harm and trauma, Gaspar’s work tasks each person with the abolitionist exercise of imagining other possibilities.

    Raoul Deal, “Trenzas” (2023), woodcut with deckled edge, 28 x 42 inches

    The title, No One Knows All It Takes, came from a conversation with Bibbs, in which she described the emotional, mental, and physical toll of caring for her grandparents in their final months. Referencing the intersecting and multilayered effects of trauma, the phrase is also multivalent: it invokes the immense amount of energy needed to function while ill, the wide-reaching impacts of trauma on an individual’s life, and the social, political, and cultural costs of unaddressed issues.

    No One Knows All It Takes will be on view from August 22 to December 20. The Haggerty Museum of Art is located at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

    Maria Gaspar, Disappearance Jail series (detail), (2021-ongoing), hundreds of perforated archival Inkjet prints on rice paper, 5 x 7 inches each

    Raoul Deal, “Immigration Series #8” (2013), woodcut, 40 x 26 1/4 inches

    Swoon, “Medea” (2017), wood, hand cut paper, laser cut paper, linoleum block print on paper, acrylic gouache, cardboard, lighting elements

    Bryana Bibbs, “12.27.23” (2023), handwoven Papa George casino playing cards, Papa George hospital blanket, 14 x 9.25 inches

    Bryana Bibbs, “8.26.24” (2024), handwoven Papa George athletic tee, Papa George gifted pajama pants, Mema decor flowers, 25 x 9 inches

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    Xanthe Summers Weaves Themes of Labor and Visibility in Bold Ceramic Vessels

    “The Weary Weaver” (2024), glazed stoneware, 39.4 x 28.4 x 28.4 incjes. Photo by Southern Guild and Hayden Phipps. All images courtesy of Xanthe Summers, shared with permission

    Xanthe Summers Weaves Themes of Labor and Visibility in Bold Ceramic Vessels

    August 7, 2025

    ArtCraftSocial Issues

    Kate Mothes

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    “Clay is an incredible medium to hold narrative,” says Xanthe Summers, who turns to the medium as a way to explore themes around domesticity, craft, and so-called “women’s work” like cleaning, mending, working with textiles, and caregiving. When it comes to clay, she says, “I think mostly I am invigorated by its ability to hold—to hold water, to hold function, to give shape, to carry stories, and to carry meaning.”

    Currently based in London, Summers grew up in Zimbabwe, where she observed inequities within the social structure that mirror many places around the world, especially in terms of gendered labor within the domestic sphere that often goes largely unseen and unacknowledged.

    “Common Threads” (2025), glazed stoneware, 23.6 x 21.7 x 21.7 inches

    She explains that “many homes have cleaners and gardeners who exist within this ‘invisible’ framework: caring for children, cooking their meals, and sometimes traveling for hours—and their work is underpaid, undervalued, and considered unskilled.”

    Summers taps into ceramics, especially the archetypal vessel motif, to join the ever-evolving continuum of the medium. Throughout millennia and across myriad distinct cultures, the earthen material has found endless applications in the home, industry, and art.

    “Clay has the unique ability to cross the boundaries between functionality, art, craft, class, and culture, and because of this, it is a vital medium to hold stories about humankind,” she says. “I understand clay to be an archive for the stories of humans.”

    The vessels often take on figurative proportions, standing tall on plinths and exhibiting saturated hues, bold patterns, and tactile textures. Some of the pieces crumple, especially toward the top, as if hit with something or caving under some invisible weight.

    Installation view at Southern Guild, Cape Town. Photo courtesy of Southern Guild

    The artist’s vessels tread the boundary between form and function and delve into another craft often associated with women’s labor: weaving. She describes how everything from the sheets we sleep on to the carpets we tread across to the clothes on our back can be “extrapolated to speak more broadly about domesticity, women’s work, and racialized spaces in Zimbabwe and the Global South.” She adds:

    Weaving can be used as a wider metaphor for social cohesion—or lack thereof. This predicament is significant in Zimbabwe but is apparent the world over, where women’s work is undervalued.

    Next year, Summers embarks on a trip to Guadalajara, Mexico, for a residency at Ceramica Suro, where she will learn from local ceramic artists, glassblowers, and weavers. And this October, you’ll be able to see her work at London’s 1-54, a fair dedicated to contemporary African art, which runs from October 16 to 19. Explore more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

    “Woven Tales Stand Tall” (2022). Photo by Deniz Guzel

    Detail of “Woven Tales Stand Tall.” Photo by Deniz Guzel

    “By the Pricking of My Thumbs” (2025), glazed stoneware, 39.4 x 27.6 x 27.8 inches. Photo by Southern Guild and Hayden Phipps

    “Working Class Femininity” (2023), glazed stoneware, 41 x 19.8 x 19.8 inches. Photo by Deniz Guzel

    “Weaver’s Woe” (2024,), glazed stoneware, 22.4 x 19.7 x 19.7 inches. Photo by Deniz Guzel

    “Of Woof and Woe” (2024), glazed stoneware, 43.3 x 25.3 x 25.3 inches. Photo by Southern Guild and Hayden Phipps

    Xanthe Summers in her studio

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    Xanthe Somers Weaves Themes of Labor and Visibility in Bold Ceramic Vessels

    “The Weary Weaver” (2024), glazed stoneware, 39.4 x 28.4 x 28.4 incjes. Photo by Southern Guild and Hayden Phipps. All images courtesy of Xanthe Summers, shared with permission

    Xanthe Somers Weaves Themes of Labor and Visibility in Bold Ceramic Vessels

    August 7, 2025

    ArtCraftSocial Issues

    Kate Mothes

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    “Clay is an incredible medium to hold narrative,” says Xanthe Somers, who turns to the medium as a way to explore themes around domesticity, craft, and so-called “women’s work” like cleaning, mending, working with textiles, and caregiving. When it comes to clay, she says, “I think mostly I am invigorated by its ability to hold—to hold water, to hold function, to give shape, to carry stories, and to carry meaning.”

    Currently based in London, Somers grew up in Zimbabwe, where she observed inequities within the social structure that mirror many places around the world, especially in terms of gendered labor within the domestic sphere that often goes largely unseen and unacknowledged.

    “Common Threads” (2025), glazed stoneware, 23.6 x 21.7 x 21.7 inches

    She explains that “many homes have cleaners and gardeners who exist within this ‘invisible’ framework: caring for children, cooking their meals, and sometimes traveling for hours—and their work is underpaid, undervalued, and considered unskilled.”

    Somers taps into ceramics, especially the archetypal vessel motif, to join the ever-evolving continuum of the medium. Throughout millennia and across myriad distinct cultures, the earthen material has found endless applications in the home, industry, and art.

    “Clay has the unique ability to cross the boundaries between functionality, art, craft, class, and culture, and because of this, it is a vital medium to hold stories about humankind,” she says. “I understand clay to be an archive for the stories of humans.”

    The vessels often take on figurative proportions, standing tall on plinths and exhibiting saturated hues, bold patterns, and tactile textures. Some of the pieces crumple, especially toward the top, as if hit with something or caving under some invisible weight.

    Installation view at Southern Guild, Cape Town. Photo courtesy of Southern Guild

    The artist’s vessels tread the boundary between form and function and delve into another craft often associated with women’s labor: weaving. She describes how everything from the sheets we sleep on to the carpets we tread across to the clothes on our back can be “extrapolated to speak more broadly about domesticity, women’s work, and racialized spaces in Zimbabwe and the Global South.” She adds:

    Weaving can be used as a wider metaphor for social cohesion—or lack thereof. This predicament is significant in Zimbabwe but is apparent the world over, where women’s work is undervalued.

    Next year, Somers embarks on a trip to Guadalajara, Mexico, for a residency at Ceramica Suro, where she will learn from local ceramic artists, glassblowers, and weavers. And this October, you’ll be able to see her work at London’s 1-54, a fair dedicated to contemporary African art, which runs from October 16 to 19. Explore more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

    “Woven Tales Stand Tall” (2022). Photo by Deniz Guzel

    Detail of “Woven Tales Stand Tall.” Photo by Deniz Guzel

    “By the Pricking of My Thumbs” (2025), glazed stoneware, 39.4 x 27.6 x 27.8 inches. Photo by Southern Guild and Hayden Phipps

    “Working Class Femininity” (2023), glazed stoneware, 41 x 19.8 x 19.8 inches. Photo by Deniz Guzel

    “Weaver’s Woe” (2024,), glazed stoneware, 22.4 x 19.7 x 19.7 inches. Photo by Deniz Guzel

    “Of Woof and Woe” (2024), glazed stoneware, 43.3 x 25.3 x 25.3 inches. Photo by Southern Guild and Hayden Phipps

    Xanthe Summers in her studio

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    More than 70 Iconic Works by Kerry James Marshall Shape a Major Survey in the U.K.

    “Untitled” (2009), acrylic on PVC panel, 155.3 x 185.1 centimeters. Yale University Art Gallery, Purchased with the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund and a gift from Jacqueline L. Bradley, B.A. 1979. © Kerry James Marshall. ‘Kerry James Marshall: The Histories’ is organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris. All images courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, shared with permission

    More than 70 Iconic Works by Kerry James Marshall Shape a Major Survey in the U.K.

    July 31, 2025

    ArtSocial Issues

    Kate Mothes

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    Drawing upon art historical sources, contemporary culture, and comics, Kerry James Marshall vibrant paintings boldly challenge the past. Through often monumental portraits of Black figures, the Chicago-based artist (previously) delves into themes of race, identity, legacy, and representation to bridge history and the present and imagine a better future.

    In the largest survey of the artist’s work ever presented outside of the U.S., the Royal Academy of Arts hosts Kerry James Marshall: The Histories. Organized in collaboration with Kunsthaus Zurich and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, the exhibition opens next month and features more than 70 works that span the artist’s career thus far. The show also includes a monumental oil painting commissioned for the Chicago Public Library titled “Knowledge and Wonder,” which is on loan for the first time.

    “School of Beauty, School of Culture” (2012), acrylic and glitter on unstretched canvas, 274.3 x 401.3 centimeters. Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Museum purchase with funds provided by Elizabeth (Bibby) Smith, the Collectors Circle for Contemporary Art, Jane Comer, the Sankofa Society, and general acquisition funds, 2012.57. Photo by Sean Pathasema. © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

    The Histories is organized into 11 groups of works made between 1980 and the present, inviting viewers through a thematic and stylistic journey. The exhibition opens with “The Academy,” painted in 2012. A male model in a life drawing class stands in front of a patterned backdrop and looks directly at the viewer, giving the iconic raised fist of the Black Power movement.

    Marshall has long been guided by his early encounters with European art in museums and books, where he recognized a stark lack of Black figures. By the 1980s, he focused on the idea of visibility, creating the seminal piece “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self,” which emphasizes his interest in confronting stereotypes.

    Typically working in series or cycles, Marshall often touches upon epochal social and political paradigms of the past, like slavery and the Middle Passage, Black Power and the Civil Rights movement, and the historical omission of people of color from Western painting traditions. His works often highlight daily African American experience and elevate everyday activities and interactions, like gathering at the barber shop, making a painting, relaxing at the park, or hanging out on the porch. Marshall posits that the past can be a tool with which to hew the future.

    Kerry James Marshall: The Histories opens on September 20 and continues through January 18 in London. Plan your visit on the RA’s website.

    “The Academy” (2012), acrylic on PVC, 182.9 x 154.9 centimeters. Collection of Dr. Daniel S. Berger, © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

    “Knowledge and Wonder” (1995), oil on canvas, 294.6 x 698.5 centimeters. City of Chicago Public Art Program and the Chicago Public Library, Legler Regional Library, © Kerry James Marshall. Photo by Patrick L. Pyszka, City of Chicago

    “Vignette #13” (2008), acrylic on PVC panel, 182.9 x 152.4 centimeters. Susan Manilow Collection. © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

    “Untitled (Policeman)” (2015), acrylic on PVC panel with plexiglass frame, 152.4 x 152.4 centimeters. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Mimi Haas in honor of Marie-Josée Kravis, 2016. © Kerry James Marshall. Photo courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

    “Untitled (Porch Deck)” (2014), acrylic on PVC panel, 180.3 x 149.9 centimeters. Kravis Collection, © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London

    “De Style” (1993), acrylic and collage on canvas, 264.2 x 309.9 centimeters. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Ruth and Jacob Bloom. © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA

    “Untitled (Blanket Couple)” (2014), acrylic on PVC panel, in artist’s frame, 150.2 x 242.5 centimeters. Fredriksen Family Art Collection, © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London

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    Five Latinx Artists Explore Materiality, Identity, and Belonging in ‘Los Encuentros’

    Facade mural by Ozzie Juarez. Photos by Alex Marks. All images courtesy of Ballroom Marfa, shared with permission

    Five Latinx Artists Explore Materiality, Identity, and Belonging in ‘Los Encuentros’

    July 23, 2025

    ArtSocial Issues

    Kate Mothes

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    Marfa sits at the crossroads of US-90 and US-67 in the expansive Chihuahua Desert of far West Texas. About 60 miles from Mexico, U.S. Border Patrol trucks are a common sight along the roads, in addition to an unmissable, otherworldly tethered surveillance blimp that hovers near the highway between the town center and one of its most iconic installations, Elmgreen & Dragset’s “Prada Marfa.”

    As the current administration’s immigration policy has taken effect, the politics of identity and geography have again been thrust front and center—often violently. In this remote borderland, where the one-stoplight-town has been redefined by influential art world personalities for several decades in an idiosyncratic convergence of ideas and lifestyles, there is a unique opportunity to engage with themes of community, narrative, socio-economic realities, and a sense of place.

    Justin Favela

    Ballroom Marfa’s summer exhibition, Los Encuentros, gathers the work of Latinx artists Justin Favela, Ozzie Juarez, Antonio Lechuga, Narsiso Martinez, and Yvette Mayorga. The gallery describes an aim of the show, the title of which translates to “the meetings” or “the gatherings,” as “the representation of Latinx culture to confront the accessibility of art spaces, colonial art histories, the conditions of labor, and lived experience.”

    Amid daily news reports of ICE raids around the nation, the work in Los Encuentros is a timely and provocative exploration of today’s societal complexities along with being a way of “responding to the experiences of the people and places they engage with and depict,” a statement says.

    All the artists employ a wide range of materials and techniques, from Mayorga’s frosting-like, piped paint to Favela’s vibrant ruffled paper installations redolent of piñatas. Lechuga uses Mexican blankets, or cobijas, creating sewn textile collages that explore a wide range of experiences and perspectives amid the current political climate.

    Martinez continues to create intimate, candid portraits of farm workers by using produce boxes, bags, and repurposed plastic as his substrates as a reminder of the often invisible labor that goes into putting food on Americans’ tables. And Juarez has completely transformed Ballroom’s facade in to a giant painting derived from ancient Mesoamerican motifs.

    Narsiso Martinez

    Los Encuentros is curated by Texas-based Maggie Adler, who expressed delight at being able to collaborate “with artists whose practices center on allowing a broad range of community members to see themselves represented in art spaces.”

    The show continues through October 12. Find more on the gallery’s website. And during open hours, keep an eye out for Rachel Hayes’ colorful patchwork flag that flies out front.

    Ozzie Juarez

    Narsiso Martinez

    Justin Favela

    Antonio Lechuga

    Detail of a work by Antonio Lechuga

    Yvette Mayorga

    Detail of a work by Yvette Mayorga

    Antonio Lechuga

    Detail of a work by Antonio Lechuga

    Narsiso Martinez

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