SAN FRANCISCO — Every few months, a custodian at Greg Lamarche’s elementary school in Queens would climb up to the roof and throw all the tennis balls and frisbees that had landed on it down to the kids in the schoolyard. Lamarche, aka Sp.One, remembers looking at the roof and seeing a patch of exposed black tar. Someone had spray painted “We Don’t Need Ladders” in that spot. 

“That’s really the first graffiti I remember reading and being like, ‘Wow,’” Lamarche told Hyperallergic. “That was the first real challenge of, ‘Okay, this is something I want to do.’”

Lamarche, now an artist and graphic designer, started writing graffiti and making collages when he was around 12. Pretty much everyone he knew had markers in their pockets, he said, and a couple of major highways and underground subway tunnels with parked trains nearby provided plenty of places to use them. 

When he graduated from college in 1991, Lamarche describes the job market as bleak, so he moved into at his parents’ house in Massachusetts. One day he ran into an old friend, who was working as the night manager at a copy shop in Boston. “Funnily enough, it was called Copy Cop, and their motto was ‘Call the Cops’,” Lamarche laughed.

From his friend’s invitation to make color copies and enlarge photos came the idea to start a magazine. That magazine was Skills (1992–95), a seminal publication with an outsized influence for its short run. Contributors sent in their photographs (or “flicks”) and Lamarche arranged them into collages, which he photocopied, producing 100 copies of the first issue. In 1993, the music chain Tower Records picked it up for distribution, and 10,000 copies of the seventh and last issue were printed. 

The magazine’s seven issues make up part of the exhibition Subscription to Mischief: Graffiti Zines of the 1990s at Letterform Archive, curated by Lamarche, along with his longtime friend David Villorente (Chino BYI), Kate Long Stellar, acting deputy director and librarian at Letterform, and Kel Troughton. Along with Skills, the exhibition includes more than 40 zines from all over the world, many inspired by the magazine, as well as letters, flicks, and submissions to Skills.

Troughton, a graphic designer who teaches type design at Letterform, grew up spray painting large, labor-intensive paintings in Northern California. He thought Letterform needed a graffiti collection, and he found an ally in Stellar. Part of the problem, Stellar noted, is that Letterform doesn’t collect photos, which are often the way that graffiti is documented. 

“So how do we show it authentically if we’re not using photographs?” she asked. “We started talking about reference books because there are a ton of really important ones, and also about magazines because they were hugely important to the culture, especially in the ’90s.”

As an example of the creativity involved in graffiti, and how it can lead to careers in the arts, Stellar pointed to a wall with a copy of Graphic Scenes and X-plicit Language, a zine made by Sacha Jenkins, who has written for magazines such as Vibe, worked as a creative consultant and writer on the TV show The Boondocks, and directed documentaries. 

“Usually graffiti’s a study of letters, a study of shape, and a study of color,” Stellar said. “These things end up becoming part of people’s professional practice.”

When planning the exhibition, Troughton reached out to Lamarche, who suggested bringing in Villorente, who had edited The Source’s “Graf Flix” column for more than a decade and boasts an encyclopedic knowledge of graffiti writers. 

The show includes the work of artists beloved to both graffiti writers and the wider world. For Villorente, the Community Service section is particularly meaningful. It showcases the global community in a pre-internet era, with a wall displaying letters, drawings, and flicks that Lamarche received while making Skills. Villorente finds something intimate in encountering this. 

“It’s a community of future all-stars a few years before their rookie season in the league. These guys were just doing it because they loved it. None of them were working professionals, so they were just passionate about what they were doing,” he said. “There were letters and drawings from Barry McGee and Shepard Fairey and Dash Snow, and all sorts of creatives who have gone on to do really interesting things years later. So maybe it’s like finding a teenage letter from James Baldwin or Stevie Wonder or your favorite artist, right? Like, how cool would that be?”

Both Stellar and Troughton have received positive responses to the exhibition, with lots of teenagers visiting, some bringing their parents along. “If we are interested in anything here, it is letters,” Stellar expressed. “So, it made sense to me that as a collection that’s really interested in accessibility and interested in letters, we look at one of the most democratic versions of letters that exists.”

Subscription to Mischief: Graffiti Zines of the 1990s continues at Letterform Archive (2325 Third Street Floor 4R, San Francisco, California) through January 7. The exhibition was curated by Greg Lamarche, David Villorente, Kate Long Stellar, and Kel Troughton.

On a crisp December morning, Seeta Chiang loaded around 20 artworks by various Chinese artists on a small truck. The pieces included illustrations, photography, and sculptures all inspired by last year’s “White Paper Revolution,” a series of protests against China’s draconian COVID-19 restrictions also known as the A4 Revolution in reference to the standard paper size for printers.

After getting everything on the vehicle, Chiang drove off to Amsterdam with his friends, where they set up a mini art exhibition at Dam Square titled A4 Revolution: Transnational Solidarity for Human Rights in Europe.

In November 2022, a fire broke out in an apartment in Urumqi in the western region of Xinjiang, killing 10 people. At the time, many claimed that China’s intense COVID-19 lockdown measures delayed rescues and hindered residents from escaping, allegations the government denied. The response sparked protests across all major cities in China and diasporas worldwide in a shared call for freedom. 

A year later, five Chinese human rights groups based in Paris, London, Berlin, and California decided to hold an art exhibition across Europe to commemorate the anniversary of the protests. The collective had its first exhibition in London on November 25, followed by others in Paris, Amsterdam, Prague, and Munich over the last three weeks. The tour is expected to travel to Milan and make its final stop at Lyon by the end of December, hopefully giving participants an opportunity to connect with other activists around the world.  

Chiang, a Chinese artist now living in France, thinks the White Paper Revolution was an important milestone for China’s human rights movement, especially for younger people.

“It was the first time our generation, who were born in the 1990s and 2000s, took to the streets and voiced our political opinions,” Chiang told Hyperallergic, noting that many advocacy groups that sprung up last year at the height of the protests slowly became inactive as China intensified its police crackdown on dissidents. 

“An art exhibition is a relatively gentler form of activism than demonstrations,” he continued. “[But] I believe art can be used to gradually spread ideas between people and make a difference in our community.”  

He added that images may have a more long-lasting impact in our ever-changing social media age. “Many years down the line, people might not recall the details of a protest they pass by in Europe, but they are more likely to remember a certain sign that caught their eye,” Chiang said. “I think having a protest-related art exhibition is worth trying when our movement is at a low ebb.”

Among the works in the show is 404 & Winsor’s “Big Brother” (2023), a robotic statue of Chinese President Xi Jinping that repeats the phrase “Make China Great Again”; photographs of the protests transformed by YBRT and paobupaoPAOMIAN; and satirical cartoons poking fun at Chinese propaganda. 

Apple Lin, a Chinese dissident activist with the London-based organization Deviant China, said the team wants to raise awareness about China’s human rights violations to Europeans. “The concept of this exhibition is to treat the entire continent as a piece of blank paper for us to showcase a diversity of voices and possibilities,” Lin said. 

However, the team had to jump through many hoops to make the exhibition a reality. Lin said artists who are still based in China have faced threats.

“We received submissions from artists who were interrogated by the government after sharing about our art exhibition on social media,” Lin said. “Even some of our members here were intimidated by the government.”

According to reports by the nonprofit human rights organization Safeguard Defenders in 2022, China has over 100 secret police stations in 53 countries worldwide. Beijing has denied the allegations, claiming that the “police stations” are volunteer-run services aimed at helping overseas Chinese nationals with administrative tasks, such as driver’s license renewals. 

Despite all the hurdles they faced, Lin hopes this art exhibition can act as a call to action as well as an encouragement to fellow Chinese dissidents to keep the conversation going. While many people who visited the exhibition have been paying attention to human rights issues in China, he said, there were also pedestrians who stopped by because they were intrigued. 

“It is interesting to hear how locals feel about China and see their different reactions towards each artwork,” Lin said.  

Details about the date and time of exhibitions in each European city are available online at @a4_euro_tours. 

What’s your go-to excuse when you miss an important deadline through no fault but your own? Death of a grandparent? Leaky ceiling? How about … constant diarrhea? Sorry to say, but the latter may just be one of the oldest tricks in the book, as evidenced by written correspondence between troubled Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Scottish-born Liverpool banker George Rae — a fervent collector who was strung along for about five years regarding a commissioned painting.

While chatter around Rossetti’s personal life typically revolves around his torrid and obsessive relationships with the models who posed for his paintings, the National Museums Liverpool (NML) is shining a different kind of light on Rossetti — and showing that he didn’t hold back in more ways than one. Sourcing from its archives, the NML is displaying one of several letters between Rossetti and Rae pertaining to the former’s repeated failure to complete “Sibylla Palmifera” (c. 1865–70).

“I have had a constant diarrhoea and other troublesome symptoms since coming to Speke [Hall]; nevertheless, as I found I should not see you here today,” Rossetti wrote to Rae in August 1868, dodging an attempt to meet with the collector during a visit to Liverpool while having procrastinated on completing “Sibylla Palmifera” for a few years by then. The museum’s Walker Art Gallery archives possess the entire back-and-forth correspondence between the two regarding the painting among other communications.

Beyond the diarrhea excuse, the artist also wrote about getting sidetracked with other assignments as Rae began losing his patience and pressing more aggressively for the work he was buttered up to pay a hefty deposit for. The banker had become increasingly frustrated with Rossetti’s inability to communicate the status of the painting’s completion, and the annoyance mounted days before the diarrhea admission when the artist had sent him an invoice for the painting’s custom frame about a week prior — two years before the work would be finished.

By the end of 1870, Rae wrote a desperate plea that “after the many many Christmases we have looked forward to this supreme delight, could you not in the intervals of your greater work finish her [the painting] merely as a relaxation?”

In an email to Hyperallergic, NML’s curator of British Art Melissa Gustin shared that she came across the letter while looking for a different piece of correspondence from the artist.

“I did almost drop the letter when I came across it in the file, because there’s diarrhoea just fully visible on the front page — I think Rossetti would have thought that was funny,” Gustin said.

Speaking on how these documented interactions “humanize” Rossetti, who quite honestly may have been experiencing “troublesome symptoms” at the time due to his poorly health and habitual substance abuse, Gustin hopes that the public can see more of themselves in the artists and works they create through exposing the behind-the-scenes drama.

“They’re relatable people who send bitchy letters going, ‘Where is my painting, it’s been four Christmases and I want my painting! It will ruin my party if we don’t have this painting and cure my ailments if I do have this painting!'” the curator remarked. “I definitely find Rossetti more relatable for his excuses than for his poetry.”

To end the extended saga on a happy note, Rossetti did eventually complete the painting in 1870, to Rae’s total delight. Perhaps the moral of the story all along is that you simply cannot rush good work!

The letter will be displayed alongside the completed “Sibylla Palmifera” through April 2024, and the painting will remain on display for the foreseeable future.

With Christmas upon us, many observers of the Christian holiday commemorate the season with reconstructions of the famed Nativity scene, depicting the birth of Jesus Christ. From early two-dimensional renderings to elaborate Baroque sculptures, the practice has been adopted by numerous communities around the world and reinterpreted by various artists. In 2019, the elusive British street artist Banksy released “The Scar of Bethlehem” (2019) as a political statement against Israel’s concrete wall around the city of Bethlehem in the West Bank. That same year, a United Methodist Church community utilized the art form to call attention to the imprisonment of children in detention facilities along the United States-Mexico border.

But long before the nativity became a protest symbol, the holiday staple can be traced back hundreds of years to the first visual depictions of the biblical story of Christ’s birth. Based on the Gospel of Matthew, these visual representations largely focused on the biblical visit from the three wise men, who brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the newborn Jesus, according to a 2016 essay by Yale professors Felicity Harley-McGowan and Andrew McGowan. The earliest surviving examples depicting this scene include the ancient “Adoration of the Magi” fresco in the catacombs of Priscilla in Rome, dating from the late 3rd or early 4th century, as well as early 5th-century carvings on a Roman marble sarcophagus, found during excavations of the cemetery of Saint Agnes. As the Yale historians point out, the Gospel of Luke narrative about Jesus Christ lying in a manger was not portrayed until the 4th century. One of the earliest surviving examples is a marble rendering on view at the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens, depicting Jesus Christ resting alone in a manger, accompanied by an ox and a mule on either side.

Historians debate when exactly the first three-dimensional depictions of the birth of Jesus emerged. Some claim that papal documents prove that the practice came about in 432 CE when Pope Sixtus III commissioned the recreation of Bethlehem’s stable scene in the newly built Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica. According to this unconfirmed theory, this “cave of the Nativity” was supposedly the first presepio (Italian for “nativity”), commemorated with a “festive celebration.” 

Despite the lack of conclusive evidence, the earliest surviving nativity scene figures sculpted by Arnolfo di Cambio during the late 13th century also indicate Santa Maria Maggiore as a birthplace for the Nativity tableau practice. The cluster of marble statues was displayed alongside a wooden manger structure, inspired by Saint Francis of Assisi’s living nativity in 1223 Greccio, which featured real people and animals.

The Italian city of Naples is often credited with helping popularize presepios during the 15th-century Renaissance, as local artists began creating life-size statue displays for neighborhood chapels. Subsequently, in the 17th century, elaborate tableaus featuring detailed architectural structures and characters dressed like Neapolitans of the Baroque era helped inspire an entire movement of Nativity scenes that can still be viewed seasonally today at institutions like Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

With the global expansion of Christianity, the practice of staging living and sculptural Nativities has been adopted by countless cultures and peoples, who reenact the scene often in ways that reflect their communities. In the Philippines, these crèches are referred to as beléns, introduced during the 16th century with Spanish colonization. 

In Austin, Texas, the Mexic-Arte Museum stages an annual nacimiento (Spanish for nativity) that reflects both Indigenous Mexican culture and the historical impact of Spanish colonization. Featuring more than 600 pieces, the colorful display includes depictions of Mexico City, Tzintzunztan, and Michoacan, and is one of several nativity scenes from all over Mexico in the museum’s permanent collection.

Year-round, audiences can view more than a hundred nativity scenes featuring over 2,000 figurines from various countries at the International Museum of Nativity Scene Art in Málaga, Spain. “My wife, Ana Caballero, and I noticed that every year after Christmas high-quality works were dismantled by their creators. However, they deserved to continue so that other people could enjoy them,” museum co-founder Antonio Díaz, told Hyperallergic. “That’s why we decided to launch this museum, so that nativity scenes, which are works of art, could be seen at any time.”

The museum includes classic creches from Italy, Austria, and Spain, as well as contemporary interpretations based on popular culture and current events, including one in the style of the sci-fi Star Trek series and another display set in an unnamed neighborhood besieged by war, illustrating the boundless evolution of the art form.

In the 1960s the Hudson River coastline below Chambers Street was the site of deserted and dilapidated docks. As the landfill that would be developed into a new neighborhood — Battery Park City, consisting of housing, parks, and retail and office spaces — the Battery Park City Authority began commissioning mid-career New York artists to help transform the emerging area into a showcase for new public art in new public space. This is their story.

Few contemporary artists have had access to wide-open spaces in Manhattan, or breathtaking riverfront locations as the canvas for their visions; fewer still have had such impact and lasting influence as Mary Miss, Ned Smyth, R.M. Fischer, Siah Armajani, Tom Otterness, and Martin Puryear. Hear pioneers of public art Mary Miss, Ned Smyth, and R.M. Fischer discuss the freedom and challenges they encountered, and the often-hands-on solutions they devised while working on new land in lower Manhattan. Their monumental installations “South Cove”, “Upper Room”, and “Rector Gate” remain as popular and influential now as they were when the artists broke ground nearly 40 years ago.

Pioneers of Public Art, New York in the 1980s and 1990s continues Battery Park City Authority’s ongoing legacy as a world-class destination to experience the art of our time – always free and fully accessible to all. Our goal is to welcome, inspire, and engage diverse communities to connect with the exceptional artistic talent that is always on view in Battery Park City.

The Public Art collection in Battery Park City includes work by Ned Smyth (1987), Siah Armajani (1988), Richard Artschwager (1988), Scott Burton (1988), R.M. Fischer (1988), Mary Miss (1988), Tom Otterness (1992), Demetri Porphyrios (1992), Jim Dine (1993), Martin Puryear (1995), Louise Bourgeois (1995), Tony Cragg (1996), Ugo Attardi (1997), Brian Tolle (2002), Thierry Noir (2004), Ann Hamilton and Michael Mercil (2005), Autumn Ewalt and Dharmesh Patel (2019), Gianni and Jill Biagi (2020), and Segundo Cardona and Antonio Martorell (2021).

Battery Park City Authority also manages a temporary public art program that has presented artwork by Agnes Denes, Beverley Pepper, Roy Lichtenstein, Tyrone Mitchell, Muna Malik, Mildred Howard, Shuli Sade, and other artists. The current installation on display, James Yaya Hough’s “Justice Reflected,” (2022) is presented in partnership with the Art for Justice Fund.

Pioneers of Public Art, New York in the 1980s and 1990s will take place on January 10, 2024, at 6:30pm (EST) at 6 River Terrace in New York City. The event is free, and RSVPs are encouraged.

Visit bpca.ny.gov for more information and to see videos about the art and artists.

Public Art on Video

• Autumn Ewalt – “Sunrise, Sunset (Revolution)”
• Ann Hamilton & Michael Mercil – “Teardrop Park”
• James Yaya Hough – “Justice Reflected”
• Mary Miss – “South Cove”
• Brian Tolle – “Irish Hunger Memorial”
• Louis Bourgeois – “Eyes”
• Tom Otterness – “The Real World”
• Mildred Howard – “The House That Will Not Pass For Any Color Than Its Own”
• Martin Puryear – “Pylons”
• Giancarlo Biangi and Jill Burkee – “Mother Cabrini Memorial”
• Jim Dine – “Ape & Cat (At the Dance)”
• Tony Cragg – “Resonating Bodies”
• RM Fischer – “Rector Gate”

In London, a new anti-war artwork by the British street artist Banksy was stolen less than an hour after he authenticated it on Instagram earlier today, December 22.

Footage circulating online shows two men removing the work, a stop sign onto which Banksy had painted three aircraft resembling the American MQ-9 Reaper drones, recently seen flying over Gaza.

Onlookers are heard muttering “Oh, my god,” and “makes me so annoyed,” as a man is seen fleeing the scene with artwork.

Banksy depicted the same series of aircraft in a 2017 artwork titled “Civilian Drone Strike,” in which the unmanned vessels soar over a framed childlike drawing of a girl with her pet witnessing the bombing of a house. The work was displayed at the Art the Arms Fair, an event organized by artists and activists to protest against a weapons trade show in London.

Meanwhile, the Banksy-designed Walled Off Hotel in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem in the West Bank has been shuttered since October 12, citing the escalation in the region. The artist has also painted murals in Gaza whose fate is currently unknown.

More than 30 original holiday wreaths handcrafted from unexpected materials, including discarded Metro cards, thumbtacks, artificial hot dogs, pharmaceutical vials, and candy wrappers, are currently on display in Central Park for the 41st iteration of New York City Parks’s Wreath Interpretations exhibition. Hosted in the third-floor gallery of the historic Arsenal Building, the annual free show brings together an eclectic assortment of alternative wreaths created by Parks employees, commissioned artists, and New York City residents for a whimsical display.

Wreaths have historically played a number of roles. In Roman and Greek antiquity, they were emblems of power and victory, frequently awarded to the winners of sporting competitions and appearing in depictions of various deities, such as Apollo in Antonio Canova’s marble sculpture “Apollo Crowning Himself” (1781–1782). In Christianity, evergreen wreaths symbolize eternal life and everlasting faith; during Advent season, laurel rings are decorated with four candles that are subsequently lit each week leading up to Christmas.

But the artists in Wreaths Interpretations, go beyond these classic meanings to transform a holiday staple into new works of art, from an aluminum and gold leaf display commemorating Caribbean cooking to a diorama wasp nest containing a hidden memorial honoring Ukraine. On one wall, an unsettling wreath crafted out of plastic eyeballs tackles sleep deprivation, while another piece made of yellow Post-It notes playfully comments on work-life imbalance.

In another corner, a pizza box with wiry rat tails emerging from the center — an unmistakable homage to the viral “Pizza Rat” — is situated between a spiral of playing cards and a ring of glistening frankfurters, humorously titled “THE WURST WREATH EVER MADE: YOU NEVER SAUSAGE A TERRIBLE WREATH” (2023). As Elizabeth Masella, Public Art Coordinator for the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation, told Hyperallergic, “the weirder, the better.”

“We’re always just impressed every year with the ideas that people come up with,” Masella continued. “I don’t think we’ve really seen the same materials twice.”

Many of the artworks are constructed out of found objects and recycled materials, such as Xiomara Morgan and Kathy Urbina’s joint project “FOUND IN NEW YORK CITY” (2023), composed of found Metrocards, snack bags, and a styrofoam life preserver. Marie Ucci’s “The Shape of Dreams” (2023) is an assemblage of ceramic shards, dried fruits and vegetables, scraps of felted wool, and feathers, carefully pieced together like a bird’s nest, while Suzie Sims-Fletcher’s “All is Calm, All is Bright (Home for the Holidays)” (2023) comprises cleaning puffs, scouring pads, plastic mesh, and rubber gloves. Another wreath by Beatrice Wolert consists of a shredded tire with a bubblegum pink interior. Materials used in other displays include vinyl records, Popsicle sticks, garden fencing, and thumbtacks.

Several of the displays also focus on environmental issues plaguing the city’s parks. A work by Maria Magdalena Amurrio employs repurposed water bottles for a wreath of butterflies, an insect increasingly threatened by climate change and human development, while Jean-Patrick Guilbert’s “Coral Wreath” (2023) calls attention to the destruction of our oceans’ coral reefs. Another wreath made of saltmarsh cordgrass, hay, lavender branches, and other natural materials native to Staten Island’s William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge tackles the issue of marsh degradation. The work was created over two days by a team of eight ecologists, wildlife biologists, and botanists from NYC Parks Environment and Planning.

“The wreath is meant to symbolize how New York City salt marshes are at risk of drowning from sea level rise under climate change,” Desiree Yanes, an NYC Parks wetlands restoration specialist, told Hyperallergic, pointing out the materials’ symbolic placement around the circle.

“We’re very much a science driven team, but it was a really refreshing mindset shift just to undertake an artistic endeavor together,” Yanes added. “It was just a really nice breath of fresh air.”

Most of the wreaths on display are also available for purchase, ranging from $40 to $6,000. A portion of the sales proceeds goes to support the gallery and the Parks’ public art programming. Visitors can view this year’s Wreaths Interpretations exhibition at the Arsenal Gallery located at 64th Street and Fifth Avenue until January 4, 2024.

‣ If you couldn’t make it to the epic Vermeer retrospective earlier this year at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam … well, good news! You can visit it virtually with this 360 view of the show.

‣ Michael Louie of Hellgate writes about Karolina Zaniesienko, who has collected animals and fauna from the very polluted Newtown Creek (which divides the borough of Brooklyn from Queens) and used that to create a diorama of the river in a fish tank in her living room:

She keeps a rotating cast of characters in her tank, like an East River hostel, before eventually returning them to the waters she plucked them from. Over time, she’s learned to be careful about what occupants she allows into her aquatic terrarium. One of her former fish tank residents, a hake she dubbed “Hake Williams, Jr.,” was so aggressive and territorial that she couldn’t introduce a second hake into her tank. But mostly, she keeps what looks interesting. She usually tosses crabs back because “they eat everything I don’t want eaten,” like tunicates, snail eggs, and anemones, though she once kept an invasive European green crab because Redditors told her to kill it rather than put it back in the creek.

There’s a surreptitious element in what she’s doing: While not illegal, it doesn’t feel exactly proper, either. Maybe it’s the weird looks and confusion from bystanders that makes it feel like it should be illegal, but—like the many sailboats tied to the bulkheads on the Greenpoint and Long Island City sides of the Creek despite clear “No Mooring” signs—there’s an unspoken permissiveness that quietly relies on authorities being too busy doing other things. 

‣ A Chinese professor used AI to write a sci-fi novel and it won a national competition. South China Morning Post‘s Holly Chik reports:

When a professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University set out to write a science fiction novel about the metaverse and humanoid robots, he turned to artificial intelligence for inspiration.

The AI ended up generating his entire book – which then took out a national science fiction award honor.

The nearly 6,000-character Chinese-language novel Land of Memories, by Shen Yang, a professor at the university’s school of journalism and communication, was among the winnder of the Jiangsu Youth Popular Science Science Fiction Competition, Jinan Times, a newspaper in Shandong province reported.

‣ Mike Godwin, who is responsible for Godwin’s Law, writes in the Washington Post that it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler:

But when people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.

And that’s why Godwin’s Law isn’t violated — or confirmed — by the Biden reelection campaign’s criticism of Trump’s increasingly unsubtle messaging. We had the luxury of deriving humor from Hitler and Nazi comparisons when doing so was almost always hyperbole. It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore.

‣ Writing in New Lines Magazine, Asef Bayat calls out German hypocrite, I mean philosopher Juergen Habermas, for his stance on Gaza:

Now, some 25 years later, in Berlin, I read your co-authored “Principles of Solidarity” statement on the Gaza war with more than a little concern and alarm. The spirit of the statement broadly admonishes those in Germany who speak out, through statements or protests, against Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza in response to Hamas’ appalling attacks of Oct. 7. It implies that these criticisms of Israel are intolerable because support for the state of Israel is a fundamental part of German political culture, “for which Jewish life and Israel’s right to exist are central elements worthy of special protection.” The principle of “special protection” is rooted in Germany’s exceptional history, in the “mass crimes of the Nazi era.”

It is admirable that you and your country’s political-intellectual class are adamant about sustaining the memory of that historic horror so that similar horrors will not befall the Jews (and I assume, and hope, other peoples). But your formulation of, and fixation on, German exceptionalism leaves practically no room for conversation about Israel’s policies and Palestinian rights. When you confound criticisms of “Israel’s actions” with “antisemitic reactions,” you are encouraging silence and stifling debate.

As an academic, I am stunned to learn that in German universities — even within classrooms, which should be free spaces for discussion and inquiry — almost everyone remains silent when the subject of Palestine comes up. Newspapers, radio and television are almost entirely devoid of open and meaningful debate on the subject. Indeed, scores of people, including Jews who have called for a ceasefire, have been fired from positions, had their events and awards canceled and been accused of “antisemitism.” How are people supposed to deliberate about what is right and what is wrong if they are not allowed to speak freely? What happens to your celebrated idea of the “public sphere,” “rational dialogue” and “deliberative democracy”?

‣ Jehad Abusalim writes about his beloved teacher, Gazan poet Refaat Alareer, for the Nation. It’s a moving account of someone who captured the heart of the world with his words and bravery in the face of hate and violence. Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike on December 7, 2023:

To understand the impact of Refaat’s loss, it helps to understand a bit about him. As a professor of English literature at the Islamic University in Gaza, Refaat was respected as an intellectual integral to Gaza’s cultural scene, but he was also more than a teacher and professor. For him, the English language was a vehicle for liberation and empowerment. In Gaza, a place beset by decades of occupation, de-development, and isolation, connecting with the outside world was a formidable challenge. Refaat understood that teaching and learning English presented a unique opportunity to break through the physical, intellectual, academic, and cultural barriers imposed by the occupation. He viewed English as an act of resistance and defiance.

‣  Best Christmas decorations ever? You decide:

‣  In Newsweek, Andrew Goldberg wrote about how his son faced anti-semitism in a Connecticut school and how the school tried to silence them:

It got worse, progressing from general bullying to targeted antisemitism.

One student, whom my son considered a friend, invited my son to sign up for his “camp” which had “great showers”—”Camp Auschwitz.” He said another Jewish classmate of theirs had already signed up.

My son, who is just 12, found this concerning and upsetting, but this was a new friend, and he hoped this interaction was not indicative of anything more.

‣ A good example of how New York Times reporting was used by US intelligence agencies to influence communities. The whole thread is worth a read:

‣ Vilissa Thompson writes for the Nation about the uphill battle for disabled writers:

Ableism—the social prejudice against disabled people—is a barrier disabled people have faced since the beginning of time. It is prevalent in journalism primarily because storytellers often ignore lived realities in favor of stereotypes and simplified sketches. This distortion is concerning for disabled journalists, because people read news for “the truth” and often take specious narratives as accurate. Magazines, newspapers, and blogs often make missteps that contribute to the public’s misunderstanding of disabled people, including by emphasizing inspiration porn (such as an ambulatory wheelchair user who is able to stand or walk for the first time); downplaying mercy killings by highlighting the elimination of the “burden” on caregivers; disregarding the societal barriers we face in experiencing violence and discrimination in public spaces; and allowing parents and caregivers to be the voice for a disabled person without engaging with that person directly.

‣ Sam Cooper writes about how an October 2022 Canadian Intelligence Assessment suggests that the Indian Consulate in Canada interfered in the Conservative Federal leadership contest, and that’s not all of it. He writes about it in his Substack newsletter, The Bureau:

The October 2022 Intelligence Assessment says “a body of CSIS reporting since 2020 indicates that a Canadian GoI [Government of India] proxy agent continues to claim that they are providing electoral support – including significant amounts of money – to a number of politicians at all levels of government.”

It says the unidentified Indian agent is trying to keep pro-Indian politicians in office with clandestine funding, but also to forge “a bond with newly elected politicians who, in turn, will owe the proxy agent future favours.” 

And like Chinese Communist Party-affiliated community leaders that attempt to corral Chinese-language voters for preferred candidates, CSIS says this Indian agent is “a gatekeeper for the sort of community support upon which political candidates rely for electoral success in ridings with a significant South Asian diaspora.”

‣ Today in how did Mayor Eric Adams embarrass the citizens of New York City:

‣ Peter Beinart writes for Jewish Currents on how Harvard University ignored its own antisemitism experts when it convened a group of other “experts” to study the topic. The Ivies, I tell ya:

But while Gay’s letter suggests that the task force will explore what she casts as a worrisome relationship between antisemitism and activism for Palestinian rights, none of its members have conducted scholarly research into this supposed intersection. Most notably absent from the advisory group was Derek Penslar, the director of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies and a leading scholar of Zionism and its critics. His acclaimed recent book, Zionism: An Emotional State, includes a chapter entitled “Hating Zionism,” on the different motivations that have driven Zionism’s opponents since its creation. Given the relevance of his scholarship, Penslar would have seemed an obvious choice for the advisory group. But according to four faculty members familiar with Jewish studies at Harvard who requested anonymity to discuss internal university affairs, not only was he not selected, he wasn’t even consulted. One professor compared snubbing Penslar to “creating a task force on AI without consulting the chair of the department of computer science.” 

Why wasn’t Penslar chosen? One likely factor is that he signed the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), which states that “criticizing or opposing Zionism” is not necessarily antisemitic. By contrast, most of the people appointed to the advisory group—none of whom have Penslar’s expertise—have made public statements alleging that anti-Zionism is antisemitic, or are affiliated with organizations that hold that view. Though Gay’s email claims that the advisory group is committed to “bringing our teaching and research mission” to bear in the fight against antisemitism, the group’s composition suggests that its members were selected less for their scholarly credentials than for their political beliefs, which align with those of influential donors, some of whom have already withdrawn funding or have threatened to do so.

‣ I hate acknowledging how right George Santos is but … :

‣ Today in life at a Brooklyn coffee shop (no lies detected):

‣ Today in Chinese lessons for hot girls:

‣ Speaking of Ivies, it is getting very Hunger Games at Yale:

Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

It’s time for a holiday edition of our column of new and noteworthy video essays! Granted, none of these videos are holiday themed; it’s just coming out in mid-December. This time around we have a lot of essays about tech-related subjects and history. As always, if you have a recommendation for an essay to feature in this series, or want to submit your own video for consideration, reach out to danschindel@gmail.com.

“Why Did Davy Jones Look SO Realistic?” by CGY

This is a great look at how and why we perceive computer-generated effects as convincing, using the supernatural captain Davy Jones from the Pirates of the Caribbean films as a case study. Why does this early all-CGI character look so much better than many similar creations that have been made since? This video highlights all the subtle (often thoroughly mundane and lower-tech) aspects that helped sell the visual. Did you ever realize that because Jones is so moist, his skin didn’t have to react as realistically to light? I hadn’t!

“Eclipse – The Demo That Sold 3D to Nintendo” by The Video Game History Foundation

I had never heard of this early experiment in 3D video game graphics before. Despite the fact that video games have been around for less than half a century, the field already faces a dire preservation issue. For this reason, I’m glad that entities like the Video Game History Foundation exist. You don’t have to be technically minded to understand or appreciate this explanation of how incredibly simple tools conjured rudimentary three-dimensional visuals, and how a 17-year-old used them to demonstrate where graphics could go next. 

“You’re Not Wrong, The Internet Is Different Now” by Garbage Day

Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day is one of the best tech-related newsletters out there, and I greatly appreciate his regular video supplement. This is fairly basic, as far as an essay goes — much of it is simply Broderick speaking to the camera. But his points are compelling and well-articulated. Why does the experience of using and being on the internet feel so qualitatively different now from what it used to be? The answer, as he sees it, is the evolution from peer-to-peer communication to a kind of “broadcast model” brought on by the rise of video-based and streaming social media apps.

“The History of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out World Records” by Summoning Salt

Summoning Salt covers speedrunning, the art/sport/pastime of trying to complete a video game as quickly as possible. There are competitive speedrunning scenes for every type of game you can think of, and this channel has produced fascinating and in-depth videos about many of those scenes. This installment covers the Nintendo classic Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, and the evolving tricks that players have figured out over the years to find faster ways to beat it. This may mean shaving fractions of a second off one’s time — but that can make all the difference.

“The Life on Lost Landmasses” by The Budget Museum

This is a fun invitation to dive into further research. The lost island of Atlantis may not be real, but there were actual landforms that vanished beneath the sea — such as Doggerland, which long ago connected Britain to the European mainland, or the Bering land bridge that was once between Russia and Alaska. What kinds of creatures lived in these places? What kinds of humans lived there? Find out!

BERLIN — Coco Fusco’s first career survey, Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island, at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, offers a rare opportunity to trace the development of this essential American artist, whose performances, videos, extensive writing, and curatorial work have often revolved around issues of race, identity, marginality, and power. Fusco traces her own emergence on the art scene in the 1990s, in the book The Bodies That Were Not Hours (Routledge, 2001), at a time when, as she describes it, the identity-based political art of the previous decade was suffering a backlash, in favor of more generalized notions of aesthetic beauty. By contrast, Fusco has often commingled the highly political content of her work with a style and strategy that ranged from provocative to meditative to elaborately discursive. Throughout, she’s been concerned with how, as she notes in the book, “symbolic visibility is no guarantee of political power,” passionately arguing for lasting changes, both in the art world and in US society. 

Power, its structures, and its imbalances, are Fusco’s enduring themes. KW’s chronological exhibition begins with her performances from the 1990s on the ground floor, moving into the early 2000s to the present day in the basement exhibition space. Primarily videos, these latter works include the lyrical single-channel “Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word” (2021), which debuted in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. For the piece, Fusco rowed around the Hart Island penitentiary, where the bodies of unidentified COVID-19 victims had been buried — a moving meditation on invisibility, fear of an unknown “other,” and mortality. The section also presents videos in which Fusco reflects on the intertwining of Marxist ideology, politics, and art in her mother’s native Cuba. (She was born in New York City in 1960, the year that her mother fled Cuba, after Castro’s takeover in 1959.) Particularly evocative here are the four videos dedicated to Cuban poets banned and arrested by Castro’s regime, such as Heberto Padilla, to whom Fusco dedicates “The Confession” (2015), presenting archival materials documenting his exile.

KW opens with what is perhaps Fusco’s best-known performance, “Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West” (1992–94), a collaboration with artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, here documented in a large color photograph and a video. For the work, Fusco and Gómez-Peña wore replicas of Indigenous clothing, painted their faces in red or covered them with feathered masks, and installed themselves in a cage in various art institutions and in the streets. The reactions from audiences registered in the video of the two artists enacting racist stereotypes varied from fascination to shock.

The racialized female body as a political entity is the underlying subject of the exhibition. “Dolores from 10 to 10h” (2002), a video in the form of a surveillance tape, records a performance that Fusco staged in collaboration with Ricardo Dominguez, in which a Mexican woman is intimidated and held hostage by her male, American employer, and pressured to resign. Another work, “a/k/a Mrs/ George Gilbert” (2004), reenacts the hunt for activist Angela Davis in 1970, partly from the viewpoint of FBI agents. The video plays alongside Sightings (2004), a photographic series of enlarged filmstrips from a spy camera, showing Black women under surveillance (during the hunt for Davis, numerous Black women were racially stereotyped and wrongly apprehended). Repeatedly, Fusco interrogates how the racist fantasies of women’s bodies are weaponized against them. 

For one of her most ambitious projects, resulting in a book, A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008), a video, and a series of illustrations, Fusco invited women to participate in a workshop led by former army personnel, to examine the roles that women played in the US military apparatus of torture, not only using stress positions, noise, and food deprivation, but also intimidating nonwestern prisoners, exploiting cultural phobias: one illustration, for instance, depicts a woman interrogator shirtless, wearing only a bra, exposing herself to a man trying to cover his eyes; another shows her scratching the man’s face, leaving bloody marks, while shirtless and exposing her underwear. Here, as through the entire show, the artist’s analytically rigorous art frames power as a dynamic construct, laying bare the many mechanisms through which subjugated bodies are stripped of their agency. Fusco’s ability to delve into the multiple layers of this issue, with a breadth of tools and a wide variety of texturally rich, imaginatively deployed materials, continues to give her art its staying power.

Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island continues at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Auguststraße 69, Berlin, Germany) through January 7. The exhibition was curated by Anna Gritz and Léon Kruijswijk with assistant curator Linda Franken.

Charles LeDray’s sculpture toggles back and forth between the two poles of a deeply personal, talismanic intensity and a more open, iconic presentation, at times incorporating both qualities into the same piece. The first work viewers encounter upon entering his current exhibition, Shiner, at Peter Freeman, Inc. is a reconstruction of an earlier piece destroyed in a fire (“S.A.M.,” 2022–23). The roughly half-scale version of the uniform he wore as a guard at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) is a resurrected memorial to both his youthful self and the work that initially brought him real attention in the art world. He eventually had his own solo show at SAM. Although we can’t see, visitors are told that the pockets of the gray pants contain a miniature pencil and scratch pad of drawings, and his museum work schedule. An enlarged version of one of the drawings hangs nearby.

Other pieces in the show include a miniature shoe shine kit, along with associated paraphernalia, a reduced-scale hope chest overflowing with reproductions of his mother’s craft work, newspaper clippings, photos, ticket stubs, and the like, and another small suit on a hanger. Titled “Backward Suit” (2010–23), it pairs a camel hair sport jacket (with leather elbow patches) with a pair of plaid wool pants in a dramatically outdated style, fancy clothes for a working stiff in the 1940s or ’50s. All three pieces summon themes of pride, display, and intimacy in an overlooked or undervalued working class culture, a world in which LeDray presumably grew up and subsequently left far behind.

“Briefs” (2020–23) draws on another of LeDray’s longstanding interests, cigars. An edition of 27 miniature cigar boxes, each containing a different assortment of odds and ends, recalls a set of cigars and smoking equipment he made for a show at Jay Gorney gallery in 1996. Indeed, much of this show projects a feeling of nostalgia with an edge of melancholy, a Proustian search for lost time. How does the artist’s use of miniaturization relate to this feeling? It makes everything both close and distant; the toy-like scale gives everything a glow of childhood play and fantasy while pushing it far away.

The show’s most impressive pieces are “Revolution” and “Spool’n: How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life” (both 2015–23) — the latter quoting the title of a famous Arshile Gorky painting in the Seattle Art Museum. Both are standing vitrines with glass on all sides and seven glass shelves. “Revolution” is filled with thousands of tiny hand-thrown terra cotta vessels in an encyclopedic variety of styles, while “Spool’n” contains thousands of thread spools, each decorated with a different pattern. The pots suggest a dollhouse fantasy gone into hyperdrive while the spools, with their connotations of domestic crafts, are decorated with folk-art-like patterns in bright childhood colors. They are both spectacular instances of LeDray’s insistence on handcraft, not so much in terms of the mark of the artist but as manifestations of time passing and the fruits of attention. Considered from this perspective, they seem almost like natural wonders.

Charles LeDray: Shiner continues at Peter Freeman, Inc. (140 Grand Street, Soho, Manhattan) through January 6. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

Banksy’s Walled Off Hotel in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem has closed amid Israel’s ongoing assaults on Palestine, which have killed more than 20,000 people in Gaza and hundreds in the Occupied West Bank where the hotel is located. The three-star establishment houses Banksy artworks in its rooms and lobby and directly faces the illegal wall that has facilitated what many organizations describe as a system of apartheid in the region since its construction over two decades ago. Banksy has painted several works denouncing Israeli violence on the over 443-mile-long barrier, and the Walled Off Hotel boasts the self-proclaimed “worst view in the world.”

“Due to major developments in the region we have with regret chosen to close the hotel for the time being,” the hotel said in an Instagram statement. “We will post updates here as the situation evolves.”

Bethlehem, the biblical birthplace of Jesus situated six miles south of Jerusalem, has long served as a pilgrimage destination. Tourists must pass through an Israeli military checkpoint to get to the city; Palestinians need a special permit to leave. Israel has continuously constructed settlements in the West Bank, and even before the October 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers, this year had proven the deadliest in history for the occupied territory, with at least 483 Palestinians killed there.

Among other amenities, the highly rated Walled Off Hotel includes a British colonial-themed lobby bar with “an air of undeserved authority,” according to its website, that serves tea and scones beneath hanging depictions of cherubs with oxygen masks. A Classical-style sculpture choking on teargas looks over the scene. The hotel’s gallery features the work of local artists, and a museum and bookstore are dedicated to the history of the barrier steps away from the museum’s front doors.

The Walled Off Hotel opened in 2017, the 100-year anniversary of Britain’s Balfour Declaration that stated the nation’s intention to create a homeland for Jewish people in Palestine. Banksy held a satirical “apology” tea party for Palestinians timed with the United Kingdom’s formal celebration of its century-old proclamation.

Among other artworks, Banksy created a 2019 sculpture for the hotel titled “Scar of Bethlehem,” a nativity scene below a segment of concrete wall perforated with what looks like a star-shaped remnant of an explosion. A decade earlier, Banksy painted a rat holding a slingshot on an abandoned Israeli military outpost close to the nearby barrier. The work was reported in a Tel Aviv art gallery last summer, and the Palestinian Tourism Ministry denounced the transport as a “theft of the property of the Palestinian people.”

The Walled Off Hotel has not responded to Hyperallergic’s inquiry into the status of the establishment’s art collection, its staff, or its plans for reopening. Banksy’s representative organization Pest Control has not replied to a request for comment.

A Palestinian contemporary art collective and gallery space reported that its facilities were “totally destroyed” by an Israeli airstrike earlier this month. Eltiqa Gallery, which once operated on the bustling Omar Al-Mukhtar Street in downtown Gaza City and participated in Documenta 15 last year, posted the images of its damaged storefront on its Facebook page. The destruction was subsequently corroborated by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture.

Eltiqa was founded in Gaza City in 2002 by seven Palestinian artists with multidisciplinary practices, offering exhibition space, workshops, and educational avenues. Last year, Eltiqa was invited to co-curate an exhibition alongside another Palestinian art group called Question of Funding (QoF) for Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany.

Documenta’s administration and the 2022 exhibition iteration’s artistic directors, the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa, were repeatedly hit with allegations of antisemitism for the inclusion of QoF and other “anti-Israeli” participants with ties to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and vandals broke into QoF’s exhibition venue to graffiti “187” and “Peralta” onto the walls. Eltiqa’s co-founder and participating Documenta 15 artist Mohammed Al-Hawajri was accused of antisemitism for the display of his series Guernica Gaza (2010–2013), which likened the Nazi destruction of the Spanish city in 1937 to the continued Israeli attacks on the Palestinian territory.

QoF recently posted additional details regarding Eltiqa’s report of destruction on Instagram, sharing that all of the gallery’s members have been displaced from the area and confirmed that the gallery had been “totally destroyed.” QoF also reported that Eltiqa’s founders were made aware that Gazan locals accessed the gallery to burn artwork and furniture for warmth and to make bread.

“They [Eltiqa’s members] said they are sad to know that their artworks have been burnt, but they also asked what is meaning of art now? Aren’t people’s lives far more important? In a genocide, the wooden frame of a painting becomes much more essential than the canvas,” a section of QoF’s post reads. “What is art in the time of genocide?”

The first known painting by Vincent van Gogh to depict the outdoors is joining the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art thanks to the executive producer of Law & Order. Absent from everyone’s 2023 predictions bingo card, the New York museum announced today, December 20, that American television and film producer Dick Wolf has made a “transformative holiday gift” to the institution of over 200 works from his personal collection, including the aforementioned van Gogh, and a substantial financial endowment that will put his name on two galleries.

The Met’s announcement specifies that the gift from Wolf’s collection will enhance three of the museum’s curatorial departments — European Paintings, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and Drawings and Prints — with works across all media ranging from the 15th through 18th centuries as well as some modern selections. The museum declined to provide Hyperallergic a full list of artists and artworks included in Wolf’s gift at this stage, though its press release notes work by Bronzino, Orazio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Sandro Botticelli, and Guercino, among various others.

Van Gogh’s “Beach at Scheveningen in Calm Weather” (1882), which Sotheby’s notes in its 2022 lot description is the artist’s first depiction of the outdoors, stands out as a lucky star from Wolf’s collection. The artist rendered the landscape during the beginning of his foray with oil painting, noting in a letter to his brother Theo that he found paint to be “very appealing on account of it being a powerful means of expression.” According to some reports, the work was stored in a crate left with a mover when van Gogh’s family shifted towns. The artist never reunited with the paintings before he died by suicide, and neither his mother nor his sister came to collect them until long after he passed. But by then, the mover who was storing the crate had reportedly sold it to a junk dealer in 1902 for the equivalent of $0.50, who in turn flipped the works to an art dealer the following year.

“Beach at Scheveningen in Calm Weather” shifted ownership a few more times, exploding in value as it passed through collections and eventually selling last year for $2.8 million.

Other noteworthy highlights include Orazio Gentileschi’s “Madonna and Child” (c. 1620), which is already on display in the museum’s reopened galleries for European paintings from 1300 to 1800, and Sandro Botticelli’s own tempera on panel rendition of the same scene.

With Wolf’s accompanying financial contributions, the Met will be naming Galleries 500 and 503 in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department after the producer. The museum is working to integrate portions of Wolf’s collection to further amplify its existing display of 15th- and 16th-century sculpture and objects and will curate an installation of select drawings from Wolf’s gift down the line.

“I’m sure most collectors would agree that seeing your art displayed in the world’s greatest museum is an honor,” Wolf stated, highlighting that his collection was greatly informed by his childhood visits to the Met. “This is my holiday gift to the Museum, the people of New York, and the city where I first encountered the power and beauty of great art.” 

LONDON — Armies attack, parry, bludgeon, obliterate, all in relentless pursuit of their pitiless goals. As do artists. Artists do not pussyfoot either. Art too can be, and often is, a species of combat, a fight to the death. 

Take Leon Kossoff and his practice, which we can divide, for the sake of argument, into drawing and painting. Kossoff painted and drew throughout his life. Springing to Life, a new, extensive exhibition of his drawings (the first since his death in 2019) brings these issues — of lifelong battle and confrontation — into sharp and fascinating focus. The floors and walls of his studio overlooking the street in the north London house where he lived were as horrifying for any unsuspecting art critic to behold as any war zone. And all the more surprising because the man himself, when met at the door with a degree of queasiness and suspicion, was so reticent, shy, and mild-mannered. 

Why? Because he painted on board, which enabled him to engage in physical punishment, fight-back, to wrestle with a painting until it was battered into submission. This involved, always, the application of paint, often in thick globs or slatherings, followed by a furious scraping away. On and on it went. An application and a scraping away. The floors and walls looked like the worst of all possible crime scenes. Only the intense glare of lighting and walkie talkies were absent.

But the drawings were something quite different. They were just as important — just as obsessively important, you could say, because Kossoff was an obsessive man. Yes, he drew every day, every morning. “Why though?,” I once asked. Every day began with drawing because he always feared that he might have lost the ability to draw, and to draw again was to prove quite the opposite, much to his relief and satisfaction. 

So the drawings were the very key to his continuing existence as an artist. There were four main subjects: his models (the same ones again and again, over years, which included his parents); the buildings of London; the railway network and all it had spawned by way of junctions, stations, the curving outreach of its tracks; and his take on the great painters of the past.

Kossoff’s models do not smile. They do not directly engage with us at all. Heads and bodies are usually slightly averted. Bodies hang slack and ponderous. “Father in an Armchair” (1957), in charcoal and gouache on paper, is asleep, but this father’s sleep looks like a final act of submission to world weariness. When railways rush into view — perhaps a train roaring across the bottom of the garden, or outside King’s Cross Station, where beings rendered in little more than light graphic notation move as fast and furious as the daily timetable must forever relentlessly dictate — Kossoff’s fingers take fire. And then there is Hawksmoor’s great church at Spitalfields, to which Kossoff, the enthralled Jewish onlooker, never fails to return. What is it about the list and the lean of this church? What was the conversation between the artist and the backward-rearing monumentality of its steeple? Was the church expressing surprise?

Springing to Life: Drawings by Leon Kossoff continues at Annely Juda (23 Dering Street, London, England) January 20. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

Uranus may not be the butt of the joke for much longer. In a new photo released earlier this week by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the ice giant emerges as an awe-inspiring, glowing planet framed by a series of blue and white iridescent rings.

Taken by the James Webb Space Telescope using infrared light, the image captures storms, 14 of Uranus’s 27 known moons, a seasonal cloud cap at the northern pole, and detailed depictions of the planet’s rings, including the faint Zeta ring closest to the center.

In a statement published alongside the new image, NASA said that the closeup shot of this ring could prove “invaluable” in planning future missions to the planet, especially as we approach Uranus’s next solstice in 2028. “Webb will help disentangle the seasonal and meteorological effects that influence Uranus’s storms, which is critical to help astronomers understand the planet’s complex atmosphere,” the agency said.

Uranus might not be the solar system’s most inviting destination, however. It has the most extreme weather of any planet, and tilted at 98 degrees, half of the planet is cloaked in darkness for a staggering 21 years at a time. (The Earth, by comparison, is at around 23.5 degrees.)

The first photos from the Webb Space telescope, the product of a collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, were released just last summer. They offered stunning snapshots of a cloudy nebula, a “stellar nursery” in the shape of a mountain range, and images of entire galaxies (one was an astounding 4.6 billion light-years away), immediately humbling the Hubble Telescope launched in 1990.

Since then, NASA has released a few more curious photographs that have spurred online analysis and conversation, including an image of the sun that users compared to a cartoonish smiley face and a snapshot of two developing stars forming what looked like a question mark.

It’s time for the most potent and divisive argument of the year: What movie should we watch this Christmas? Traditionalists might tune in for straightforward fare like Miracle on 34th Street; delusional romantics fire up the Hallmark Channel; and elder and younger Millennials debate Home Alone versus Elf while your spooky cousin demands The Nightmare Before Christmas.

But this is all well-worn territory, and this December, maybe you’d like to get even further out of the box than usual. From a nostalgic children’s tale that treats holiday stories with an artistic touch to films that consider Christmas a fair setting for horror to a movie more existentially dreadful to watch than Reindeer Games, here are our offbeat picks of the genre to help spark memories — or family feuds — this season!

Rankin/Bass’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) + The Year Without Santa Claus (1974)

First aired on NBC as part of the “General Electric Fantasy Hour,” Rankin/Bass Productions’s stop-motion animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer has been a mainstay of holiday viewing ever since. Generations of viewers love its anachronistic style and exploration of the titular character’s misfit-turned-perfect-fit story. It holds the title of longest-running Christmas TV special in the United States, and has spawned several iconic holiday franchises, including Frosty the Snowman (1969) and a 2001 Island of Misfit Toys sequel.

Oh, Rudolph is too mainstream for you? No worries. The 1960s and ’70s were positively festooned with oddly animated Christmas television specials. Based on a 1956 Phyllis McGinley book of same, Rankin/Bass’s The Year Without Santa Claus gives the “Wonderful Life” treatment to Santa himself (voiced by Mickey Rooney). With a plot more convoluted than A Tale of Two Cities, the main thing to know about this special is that, despite all manner of holiday hijinks, the Christmas spirit prevails. I mean, truly, when does it not?

The Snowman (1982)

Originally a 1978 illustrated children’s book by Raymond Briggs, the wordless story that follows the overnight relationship between a boy and a snowman-come-to-life was adapted as a short film for television in 1982. Directed by Dianne Jackson, who previously worked with producer John Coates on The Beatles’s Yellow Submarine, the short went on to be wildly successful, first in the United Kingdom and then worldwide. Its adaptation for American release featured a live introduction by David Bowie speaking as though he were a grown-up version of the boy in the film. Briggs, who passed away last year at the age of 88, has an impressive oeuvre of Christmas-related content, including Father Christmas (1991), The Bear (1998), and the 2012 sequel The Snowman and the Snowdog. Interestingly, the original Snowman narrative has nothing explicitly to do with Christmas, which makes it perfect for enjoyment and lively debate about its nature as a holiday movie.

Gremlins (1984)

Let’s face it, no one wants to be that bummed out while watching a Christmas movie. But Christmas horror is a legitimate genre in its own right, and no film nails the balance between campy jump scares and holiday hilarity better than Gremlins. Firmly establishing Christmas as the motif in an opening sequence that looks like the interior of a wholesome small-town snow globe, the movie soon descends into chaos as our protagonist Billy fails to follow the operating instructions on his Christmas gift, a mogwai named Gizmo. Gizmo soon replicates some evil friends, who transition quickly into the titular creatures and waste no time turning the scene from Norman Rockwell to Norman Rockhell. Best of all, the movie’s bar sequence highlights the particular plight of servers during the holidays, with the ineffable Phoebe Cates standing in for every beleaguered bartender putting up with the excesses of the season. Throw on Gremlins 2 for New Year’s Eve, and you’ve got a whole holiday theme going!

Tangerine (2015)

Set in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve and shot entirely on iPhone 5S, Tangerine premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015 to a strong critical reception. The action mostly follows two trans sex workers, Sin-dee and Alexandria, the taxi driver who loves them, and the pimp-slash-boyfriend who cheats on them. Plumbing the depths of interpersonal betrayal and featuring drama set in strip clubs and donut shops, the movie also maintains a comedic vibe, even as characters smoke meth, street fight, form unlikely friendships, break up marriages, and experience anti-trans violence. For a fun holiday activity, innocently suggest this one and place side bets on when your MAGA uncle will lose his entire mind and leave the house (the over-under is two minutes).

Merry Cine-mas!

Amid the devastation, delight, and general sense of cognitive dissonance that suffused this year, the best way for many of us to digest and make sense of the present is to sink deeply into books probing art’s past and future. Catalogues on artists from Nan Goldin to Gwen John, feminist writings on artist-parents and the many meanings of the monstrous, modern art’s overlooked religious and spiritual influences, and a host of other excellent publications provided us moments of revelation, comfort, and rousing awakening. In no particular order, our editors and writers offer you the top 20 art books from the past year. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin, editorial coordinator

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

We all know Christina Sharpe is one of those rare academics who tackles her subjects with true literary skill, so I was curious about her newest book that compiles short reflections, thoughts, and insights into a collection of 249 “notes.” Sometimes these passages read like social media posts, other times like very short stories. This is the kind of book that pokes and prods you into considering thoughts that are often floating in our minds and bodies and need to be given form — one of Sharpe’s talents. I do find the way the images are laid out a little awkward, but regardless, this is the type of book I’ll place by a reading chair, knowing it could inspire new thoughts by exploring the honest musings of someone who thinks deeply about the world around them. As she explains in note 242, “I write these ordinary things to detail the sonic and haptic vocabularies of living life under these brutal regimes.” I had to pause for a few minutes after reading that. —Hrag Vartanian “10 Art Books We’re Reading This November“

Buy on Bookshop | DelMonico Books and ICA Boston, October 2023

Marina Abramović: A Visual Biography by Marina Abramović and Katya Tylevich

The queen of contemporary performance art has produced an impressive visual biography harnessing that strange and galvanizing energy between the personal and systemic that her best art captures and distills. Archival images are accompanied by quotes, phrases, and diaristic entries to tell the story of an unapologetically individualistic artist.

Co-created with Katya Tylevich, this volume is probably one of the easiest-to-read coffee table books I’ve ever held, while the weight and size of the book itself echo the artist’s desire to take up space. Sure, there are parts of the tale that made me think, “maybe you should talk to someone about that,” but then again, she’s typical of many artists of her generation who used art as a way to figure out how to exist in a world that hadn’t yet figured out how to financialize the crap out of contemporary art. The one major downside? It’s such a visual biography that I suspect there won’t be an audiobook version coming out any time soon. —HV

Buy on Bookshop | Laurence King, November 2023

Coco Fusco: Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island

Cuban-American artist, writer, and activist Coco Fusco is an inveterate truth-teller and a longtime fighter for the rights of the marginalized, persecuted, and dispossessed. She is the enemy of the dictatorial state and the morally rotten art establishment. This beautiful book, released in conjunction with the opening of Fusco’s namesake exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin earlier this year, looks back at her influential work, including many of her memorable performances, in the three decades since she emerged on the scene in the 1990s. It’s an unfinished story as Fusco is still making work and publishing words that bring deep discomfort to the powers to be. —Hakim Bishara, “10 Art Books to Add to Your Shelf This December“

Buy on Bookshop | Thames & Hudson, October 2023

Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well

In an art world full of feckless, two-faced opportunists, Nan Goldin stands out as an artist who doesn’t hesitate to put herself on the line for a just cause. Look at how she weaned major museums off the Sackler family’s dirty money with her opioid advocacy group PAIN. That’s just one of the struggles she waged throughout her life. She’s taken many hits along the way — her youth and early life marked by sexual and emotional cruelty — but she also gained myriad golden memories, many of which she captured with her camera and organized into slideshows and films. Accompanying a namesake traveling show organized by Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, this book gives you a glimpse into the work and life of this once-in-a-generation artist. Here’s the best part of Goldin’s story: She survived. —HB, “10 Art Books We’re Reading This November“

Buy on Bookshop | Steidl and Moderna Museet, February 2023

An Indigenous Present

A project conceived by Jeffrey Gibson, nearly 20 years in the making, An Indigenous Present celebrates the work of artists working across photography, weaving, fashion design, choreography, performance, writing, and more, each of whom has creatively impacted Gibson in one way or another. The book prioritizes artists’ works and voices, especially when compared to other publications that rely heavily on academic essays to establish credibility, and the nonlinear format highlights the fluid, enduring nature of creative practice. Especially compelling is its exploration of artists working with music and sound, including Laura Ortman and Raven Chacon, and those forging ahead in the realm of technology and digital tools including AI, such as Kite and Dylan McLaughlin. The book defied my expectations. It’s truly a gift, showing how these Indigenous artists are setting the standards for creative realms that are yet to be defined, while also carrying their traditions and communities forward. —Nancy Zastudil

Buy on Bookshop | DelMonico Books and Big NDN Press, August 2023

Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex by Sophia Giovannitti

Artist Sophia Giovannitti’s perspicacious book wends its way through her personal experiences, art history, and legal frameworks to trace the parallels between art and sex work. Both, she writes, can be understood in the context of the market, yet must not be solely examined as such. Particularly against the backdrop of sex workers’ criminalization due to legislation such as SESTA and FOSTA, Giovannitti’s candid writing and limpid examination of the two fields challenge the way we think about them, inspiring new understandings in the process. —LA

Buy on Bookshop | Verso Books, May 2023

Wendy Red Star: Bíilukaa

In a new tome titled after a word meaning “our side,” referring to how Apsáalooke people speak of themselves, artist Wendy Red Star highlights the links between her vast body of work and familial history. The book includes interviews she conducted with her parents, her sister, and Indigenous art curators Annika Johnson and Adriana Greci Green. The layered transcripts and full-page spreads of her artwork — from childhood drawings to works based on Apsáalooke cultural objects held in collections — bring each other to life, rendering her already personal work all the more powerful. —LA, “14 Art Books and Catalogues We’re Reading This Month“

Buy on Bookshop | Radius Books, April 2023

How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers by Hettie Judah

As some spheres of the art world catch up on the fact that motherhood and artmaking are not mutually exclusive, this slender but informative text on the failure of institutions, residencies, and galleries to provide proper support to artists who choose to become parents lays bare the progress we have yet to make. As Debra Brehmer writes, critic Hettie Judah “provides context on the history of sexism in the art world and examples of possible solutions to abide this dilemma.” Her interviews with artists and discussion of new programs creating sustainable ways for them to both make work and parent serve as a crucial record for the future that artist-parents are working to build. —LA

Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Lund Humphries, January 2023

When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting

When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting is a must-read catalogue that accompanies the landmark, internationally touring exhibition curated by Koyo Kouoh and Tandazani Dhlakama at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in Cape Town, South Africa. The sections of the book are arranged as powerful meditations on themes from the exhibition — the everyday, joy and revelry, repose, sensuality, spirituality, and triumph and emancipation. Each contribution from the curators and invited authors historicizes and poetically interprets the aesthetics and politics of Black figural paintings in Africa and its global diaspora. As opposed to solely offering a didactic overview of the exhibition, the book provides rich theoretical engagement with Blackness and figural representation from transnational and transhistorical perspectives. Such a text is necessary to unpack our current moment, a time when African and African diasporic portraiture is prolific and Black artists are consistently expanding the medium. —Alexandra M. Thomas, “11 Art Books to Add to Your Reading List This Summer“

Buy on Bookshop | Thames & Hudson, March 2023

Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris by Alicia Foster

Gwen John is one of the most important British painters of the early 20th century. Yet, until recently, she was largely relegated to the margins of canonical art history. She was overshadowed by the men in her orbit — brother Augustus John and lover Auguste Rodin — and dismissed as an unambitious recluse during her lifetime, but since her death in 1939, her significance has slowly come to light. CuratorAlicia Foster’s illustrated biography of John (published alongside an exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery) frames the artist as an intrepid, bohemian figure who defied the norms of her time, with a vibrant social sphere and complex interior life that both found their way into her work. After moving to Paris in 1904 with the goal of becoming a great artist, John found her signature focus: painting anonymous, solitary women in muted interiors. She went on to create dozens of indelible portraits, always of women (and occasionally of cats), many of them featured in this biography. Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris honors its subject’s life and secures her legacy — a truly remarkable book. —Sophia Stewart

Buy on Bookshop | Thames & Hudson, July 2023

Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin

Associating monsters and women, thanks to myths aplenty and sexism in general, is as old as patriarchy itself. But when Jenny Offill released her 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation, her use of the term “art monster,” specifically as it relates to women artists, struck a new chord, spawning a rich exploration and reclamation of its layered meanings. In Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, Elkin takes a poetic approach as she considers this concept in the context of feminist art and literature. She grounds her study in the symbolic duality of the forward-slash (/), which she uses to both link and distinguish her musings. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Virginia Woolf, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Sutapa Biswas, and a host of other artists with feminist perspectives on the monstrous and disobedient are threaded together and put under Elkin’s magnifying glass. Straddling poetry and creative nonfiction, she invites us as readers to grapple with, and even nurture, the monsters within. —LA, “10 Art Books We’re Reading This November“

Buy on Bookshop | Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2023

Sophie Calle (Photofile)

In art as in life, our true heroes are those who devote themselves entirely to an idea, risky as it might be. Sophie Calle belongs to that category of people. She will go wherever a project takes her, often forfeiting autonomy and control in the process. She famously shadowed a man from Paris and all the way to Venice, asked her mother to hire a private detective to follow her, worked as a hotel maid to snoop through guests’ belongings, and opened her bed to strangers. She tells us the stories behind these works and others in this precious little book, combined with photographs, personal reflections, and anecdotes. However, I could’ve gone without art historian Clément Chéroux’s overly psychoanalytical introduction to the book, which imposes too much theory on an artist who has mastered the skill of letting go. —HB, “11 Art Books to Add to Your Reading List This Summer“

Buy on Bookshop | Thames & Hudson, February 2023

Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion by Erika Doss

What caused Jackson Pollock’s breakthrough moment that led to his iconic drip paintings? In her new book Spiritual Moderns, Erika Doss offers an answer that may come as a surprise. For Pollock, it wasn’t just putting down the bottle and picking up a stick dripping with paint, as Hollywood and mainstream narratives suggest. It was instead the close observation of queer mystical painter Mark Tobey’s “white writing” paintings that were inspired by Baháʼí calligraphy. The long-standing anti-religious bias in modern art glosses over how the frenetic calligraphy of the Baháʼí faith spread from Tobey to Pollock. Doss’s book demonstrates that religion and mysticism have influenced modern art far more than the presentation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City or college art history courses let on. With additional case studies on Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell, and Agnes Pelton, Doss unearths the spiritual and religious influences that earlier generations buried. —Daniel Larkin

Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | University of Chicago Press, May 2023

Pacita Abad

Born in 1946 in Basco, Filipina artist Pacita Abad charted an unusual course through life from the beginning. Raised in a political family that was threatened by the rise of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Abad began studying law but was diverted into the arts during a move to San Francisco in 1971, where she witnessed the predominant counter-culture movement of the times. Abad then hitchhiked with her life partner Jack Garrity across Asia in 1973, traveling overland from Turkey to the Philippines through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It was during this yearlong journey that Abad began to collect and wear traditional fabrics and jewelry and absorb the techniques and aesthetics that would ultimately shape her work for decades to come. Abad is perhaps best known for her trapunto technique, inspired by the Italian embroidery method, but this career-spanning publication, which accompanies the Pacita Abad exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, brings every aspect of the artist’s colorful and multifaceted life and art into view. Cataloguing more than 100 works and featuring oral histories from Abad’s closest interlocutors, the book extensively details the beautiful visual practice of an artist who was remarkably unbounded in lifestyle, medium, vision, and process. —Sarah Rose Sharp

Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Walker Art Center, June 2023

This Is Not a Gun

Printed in conjunction with artist Cara Levine’s exhibition To Survive I Need You to Survive at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, This Is Not a Gun uses form and content to powerfully address police violence and gun control in the United States. Levine writes that the book, along with the eponymous long-term multidisciplinary project, “seeks to move beyond the realms of mere empathy or sympathy and into deeply embodied self-aware conversations and actions about how race, gender, ability, and class shape our relationships to our bodies and the objects we interface with.” What follows is over 50 entries from artists, writers, activists, and healers in creative response to 44 objects, each of which police officers say they misidentified as a gun when they shot an unarmed civilian, often fatally. Levine encouraged contributors to choose an object that resonated with them. As a reader, I approached the content in the same manner, beginning with tinfoil, cane, sub sandwich, underwear, and hands — each inherently harmless yet circumstantially interpreted as a threat. Designed as a narrow, elongated rectangular object, the book has done more to shape my awareness of policing and bias — whether toward race, gender, ability, class, or an intersection of these identities — than any statistical report or DEIA training. —NZ

Buy the Book | For the Birds Trapped in Airports and Sming Sming Books, February 2023

Trailblazing Women Printmakers: Virginia Lee Burton Demetrios and the Folly Cove Designers by Elena M. Sarni

Who would’ve guessed that one of America’s longest-running artist guilds was a group of women printmakers in a small cove along the Massachusetts shoreline? Working upstream against the growing, male-dominated Abstract Expressionist movement, the Folly Cove Designers collective was encouraged to draw from the world around them — meaning that their designs reflect a distinct moment of their seaside hamlet in mid-century Gloucester. Scholar and curator Elena M. Sarni’s book is the masterful culmination of 13 years of archival work, during which she unearthed many Folly Cove designs that haven’t been seen for decades. This first-ever history of these brilliant women will be critical for lovers of ornament, printmaking, mid-century modern design, women’s art history, WPA-era craft, and art pedagogy alike. —Isabella Segalovich

Buy on Bookshop | Princeton Architectural Press, August 2023

Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding

I hadn’t yet made it down to see Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding at the New Mexico State University Museum by the end of this year, but the publication that accompanies the traveling retrospective (originating at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego) proved worth revisiting over and over. Part career survey and part visual examination of Álvarez Muñoz’s Enlightenment series, the publication’s design mirrors the artist’s conceptual and narrative practice of engaging text and images. Here, two books are connected by a shared cover, eschewing distinct borders and enabling a slippage of one form into the other, and a generous selection of images provides for an intimate reading. Co-curator Kate Green bookends, as it were, her essay “Un Puro Cuento” with recountings of Álvarez Muñoz’s 1981 and 1992 performative lectures titled Petrocuatl. The essay also traces the artist’s experiences in fashion illustration and advertising to her conceptual art and institutional critique, all the while foregrounding her interest in personal narrative. An exchange between Álvarez Muñoz and Roberto Tejada and essays by Josh T. Franco and Isabel Casso each delve further into the artist’s experiences, influences, and collaborations. —NZ

Buy on Bookshop or shopmcasd.com | Radius Books and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, November 2023

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

How do you feel when you discover that an artist or author you love has done or said things you abhor? Does creative genius permit, even demand, a certain selfishness on the part of artists and audiences alike? What do we owe the people whom predators victimize in creating masterpieces that shape our lives, and do we partake in their monstrosity when we admire their work or embark on creative careers of our own? If you’ve wrestled with any of these questions, then Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is for you. While Dederer does not break new ethical ground or offer general prescriptions, she delivers a brutally honest, compulsively readable biographical account of her struggle with these questions as they’ve informed her life and career — of interest to any if not all of us invested in the arts. —Nandini Pandey

Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Knopf, April 2023

The Tarot of Leonora Carrington

This second edition of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, edited by Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq, comes courtesy of the Spanish publisher Editorial RM, with a gold cover of The Magician and The High Priestess, two cards from the surrealist artist’s gorgeous tarot deck. The authors’ scholarship gets more breadth in this new iteration, including a close review of each card and a deep look into how tarotic symbols and imagery appeared throughout Carrington’s oeuvre. We also learn more about the artist’s explorations of feminist spirituality and the alchemical possibilities of blending gender expressions — what we might today call nonbinary or genderqueer identity. It’s essential reading for surrealists and tarot practitioners alike. —AX Mina

Read the Review | Buy on Bookshop | Rm, December 2022

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

Definitely in the running as the book of the year, Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger might not be a volume you were expecting to see on this list, but I think it is an important read for anyone into art and culture. The double, or doppelganger, is a prevalent theme in contemporary art. Klein explores the theme beautifully and poignantly, while also grappling with the practical reality that she keeps getting mixed up with Naomi Wolf, whom she describes as another White Jewish “big idea books” author with long brown hair. While other, weaker authors may have shunned the case of mistaken identity, Klein leans into it and uses this real-life experience as a way to examine the use of doppelgangers in everything from tech to literature, notably Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock (1993) — a favorite section of the book.

Wolf’s own trajectory is part of the appeal of this story, notably because the former liberal intellectual darling who helped Al Gore during his 2000 Presidential bid quickly became a fixture of right-wing conspiracy podcasts in recent years, after a public fall from grace (she is a regular on a podcast hosted by former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.) Klein takes a deep dive into this alternative mediascape into which Wolf has immersed herself, offering a clear perspective on this skewed world. The book truly shines when the author steps back to make unexpected connections: her section on the doubling related to Israel, Zionism, and Palestine is a timely must-read. What you walk away with is the sense that we’re all being doubled in many ways, and while we all may have our own personal experiences (I’ll never forget the time someone with my same name unfriended me on Facebook,) we may have to come to terms with the fact that our online lives already function as doubles. —HV

Buy on Bookshop | Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2023

The Master of Fine Arts in Studio Arts (MFASA) program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) is a low-residency graduate degree program mindful of students’ needs to maintain professional, family, and community relationships while pursuing advanced studies in contemporary studio arts. Our model allows artists to pursue an MFA from anywhere in the world and encourages interdisciplinary art practices throughout the curriculum.

The MFASA program’s primary function is to train and empower artists, mentors, leaders, and teachers through an Indigenous-focused, professional education. The core pedagogical approach of our two-year MFA program is based on nurturing mentorships with prominent Indigenous artists and centering Indigenous Ways of Knowing. By engaging with complex histories and examining art’s function in contemporary multicultural societies, the MFASA program supports students in pursuing critical lines of inquiry and developing their individual art practices.

The Institute of American Indian Arts has been dedicated to the study and advancement of Indigenous arts and cultures since its inception in 1962. We deliver a world-class contemporary art education and embolden our students to give voice to a broad spectrum of experiences. IAIA’s low-residency MFA programs offer creative professionals the opportunity to remain committed to their communities while gaining an understanding of and contributing to emerging discourses of contemporary art production.

Applications are due February 15, 2024.

To learn more, visit iaia.edu/mfasa or contact us at mfasa@iaia.edu.

A flag artwork featured in an exhibition addressing femicide and domestic violence at the Consulate General of Greece in New York was removed from display on Monday, December 18, by order of the country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Swapping the country’s signature blue and white stripes for pink and red, “Flag” (2021) was created by Brooklyn-based visual artist Georgia Lale, who used multicolored bed sheets donated by women living in Greece to reimagine the national flag. The work was featured in a solo exhibition Neighborhood Guilt calling attention to the country’s rising rates of femicide and domestic violence. After opening at the consulate last Friday, December 15, the show was supposed to run until January 31 as the inaugural exhibition for a bimonthly series spotlighting six Greek artists based in New York. But less than a couple days after the exhibition’s opening night, far-right Greek politician Dimitris Natsiou, who heads the country’s ultra-religious Niki party, decried Lale’s work in parliament, referring to the art as a “literal rag” on X.

“Our flag is blue and white and it can be dyed red only on one occasion: with the blood of our heroes during national struggles,” Natsiou announced t0 the 300-member house on Sunday, December 17, to the vocal approval of his party members, Associated Press reported.

Additionally, at approximately 4:30am that same day, authorities responded to and extinguished a fire set with an “accelerant liquid” in a planter outside the consulate. No injuries were reported and no arrests have been made while an investigation into the incident is ongoing. It is unclear at this stage whether the fire is connected to the controversy. Hyperallergic has contacted the Consulate General of Greece and the Ministry for comment.

Following’s Natsiou’s statements and the fire, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Giorgos Gerapetritis sent an order to the Consulate General to remove the artwork from view and the work was deinstalled on Monday. Accusing the minister of “censorship,” Lale removed their remaining artwork — a quilt honoring femicide victims in Greece — from the exhibition in protest.

“The Greek Consulate General in New York and its independent Cultural Committee invited me to show my work at the Consulate,” the Athens-born artist told Hyperallergic. “I proposed to show two art works that address the uprising phenomena of femicide and domestic violence in Greece.”

Supported by the consulate and the advisory committee, the proposed works were both made from repurposed bedsheets donated by women living in Greece “under the condition that they have used them to rest their bodies and dream of a world where women will not be afraid to chase their dreams and stand up for their rights,” Lale said.

For “Neighborhood Guilt” (2023), the artist created a nearly six-foot long quilt featuring 22 patchwork pink and red houses, each dedicated to a femicide victim who was killed in Greece 2022.

Declaring their “undivided support” for Lale and opposing the minister’s decision, the exhibition’s advisory arts committee members Eirini Linardaki, Natasha Katerinopoulou, Lola Koutoudis, and Panos Tsagaris said in a collective statement shared with Hyperallergic that the artist’s work was chosen “for its strong symbolism.”

“Unfortunately, the work has been misinterpreted and instrumentalized for political purposes, which have nothing to do with the social issue for which it was created,” the committee members said, adding that they hope to continue the artist exhibition series and remain “optimistic that the local artistic community will continue to support artistic freedom and creation.”

On social media earlier this week, users expressed further support for Lale, denouncing the minister’s orders and calling on the consulate to redisplay the work. While some users disapproved of the artwork and accused the artist of so-called “desecration,” others disagreed, defending Lale’s right to freedom of expression and the work’s important message.

“We need more art like this that generates thought and change in society. This isn’t about ‘flag desecration.’ It’s about raising awareness through art of an important societal issue,” New York poet and lawyer Effie Pasagiannis commented on the consulate’s Instagram.

Nassos Iliopoulos, a Greek parliament representative and member of New Left party, also came to the artwork’s defense, reiterating in a statement that “if our country’s flag does not contain victims of domestic violence, if it does not contain murdered women, then it does not contain anyone.”

“I am glad that the independent Cultural Committee and the Greek Consulate gave my art a platform and they have been supportive through this ordeal,” Lale said. “The responsibility falls on the Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs Georgie Gerapetritis that censored my work to satisfy the demands of a far right party.”

Did you enthusiastically agree to and then completely forget about your friend’s white elephant gift exchange? Are you scrambling to find a meaningful present for your significant other that doesn’t reek of capitalist excess? Need a fittingly thoughtful birthday gift for your favorite Capricorn?

We’ve been there! That’s why we’ve compiled a list of artsy and crafty gifts from some of our favorite creators, from rug-tufted art to quirky ceramics. Peruse our picks below — and a reminder that a Hyperallergic membership never goes out of style! 😉 —Valentina Di Liscia, News Editor

Milo Hachim’s Adorable Miniature Ceramics

Tiny cats perched in petite armchairs, lounging bunnies gripping single flower stems, and a pair of Elton John-style sunglasses sized for a mouse are among Chilean ceramicist and illustrator Milo Hachim’s charming array of offerings. The artist handshapes and handpaints her creations, which are infused with a decidedly childlike wonder. Most objects are under $50; visit the store here. — Elaine Velie, Staff Writer

Prints From Entangled Roots Press

Portland, Oregon-based artist Ali Cat creates prints, jewelry, and tapestries that incorporate plantlife motifs while speaking to the urgency of cultural and political movements. Her vibrant pen- and ink-drawn “Palestinian Land Print” (2023), commemorating the annual March 30 celebration of Land Day, is now being sold to benefit Palestine Legal, an organization that works to protect the rights of people who speak in support of Palestinian freedom. Cat’s screenprint speaks to the visual language of Palestinian resistance, featuring bright-red poppies and green olive leaves framed by the words “Liberate” and “Return.” The nine-by-nine-inch print costs $30 and can be purchased here. —EV

Ruth Rodriguez’s Prints and Holiday Cards

“Making prints is a way to bring a little bit of art to people who wouldn’t normally buy it,” New York-based artist Ruth Rodriguez told Hyperallergic. She makes deeply personal works, layering images such as photocopies of a lover’s clothing with brightly colored figures to probe the experiences of womanhood. “I wanted something that had a representation of my Dominican American culture, something funny and cute that was relatable,” Rodriguez said of her print series Cafecito Por Favor. “A lot of the women I draw are in their underpants or relaxing on the couch. I want to make my work feel familiar in an art space where it is often easy to feel intimidated.” Each print costs $25 and can be purchased here; the artist also sells handmade $5 holiday cards. —EV

Daisy Tortuga’s Clever Tufted Rugs

Multidisciplinary artist Daisy Tortuga makes everything from sculptural glassware to mohair bonnets. Her imagery and style can appear irreverent — as evidenced in Christmas tree ornaments of ceramic cigarettes with satin and velvet bows — but her work also conveys something deeper. In tufted rugs and clay works, Tortuga evokes eerily familiar yet perennially unnamed feelings of womanhood. Available items range from £15 (~$19) to £500 ($636). —EV

Michele Mirisola’s Sea Life-Inspired Art

As her shop name betrays, Brooklyn-based artist Michele Mirisola found a delightful niche in making ceramics using real sea shells, which she adorns with delicately placed strings of air-dried clay that look like piped icing. Mirisola turns conches into wine stoppers, scallops into collect-alls, and oysters into salt dishes (complete with a viscous-looking clump of resin at the bottom). The artist also creates larger pieces, such as intricately tiled mosaics and appetizer trays that could easily outshine the food they serve. Prices range from $45 to $1,700; shop here. —EV

Jori Brennon’s Detailed Beadwork

Jori Brennon, a queer Two Spirit Cree artist based in Canada, creates intricately patterned beadwork featuring traditional motifs on a wide range of forms. Current offerings include an orange, yellow, and green bolo tie; cuff bracelets adorned with the silhouettes of buffalo; and shimmering red and gold heart earrings that Brennon says “sparkle like nobody’s business.” Prices range from $115 for earrings to $1,143 for beaded cuffs; shop the artist’s store here. —EV

Skye Tafoya’s Intricate Paper Weavings

Skye Tafoya comes from a long line of basket weavers from the Eastern Band Cherokee and Santa Clara Pueblo Tribes, and the multidisciplinary artist continues the tradition through her paper-making and weaving practice. Tafoya’s carefully arranged artworks have a vibrant and sometimes even psychedelic appearance, and are always mind-bogglingly detailed. For a more affordable option, the artist also creates prints. These are available from $90, and weavings sell for up to $1,700. —EV

Larysa Bernhardt’s Hand-Sewn Sculptures

Ukraine-born, Missouri-based artist Larysa Bernhardt reuses vintage tapestries to craft hand-sewn moth sculptures that honor the embroidery techniques passed on by her mother. Outfitted with wired wings; shrouded in velvet, silk, and Belgian linen; and finished with glass beads, the uncanny yet elegant pieces can be placed decoratively on a surface or hung on the wall to cause a buzz among artsy house guests. Prices online range from $215 to $600; inquire here for availability. —VD

Watan Palestine’s Prints, Posters, and More

With two storefront locations in the suburbs of southwest Chicago and Amman, Jordan, and bolstered by an online shop, Watan Palestine is a heritage-based art studio and business focused on empowering Palestinian Americans to creatively learn about their identity, cultural heritage, and history beyond a foreign lens. Through prints and posters, home decor, apparel and accessories, and stationery and stickers, Watan provides a multitude of avenues that familiarize and celebrate Palestinian culture and advocacy within the diaspora. Naturally, our top picks are of the “Catffiyeh” variety, but there are plenty of beautiful design tributes to Palestine to choose from. Prices vary; shop here. —Rhea Nayyar, Staff Writer

Marion Kadi’s Whimsical Portraits

In Marion Kadi’s inventive portraits, familiar faces emerge from abstract patterning and imaginary scenes. Her subjects can be seen leaving from a lamp as a genie and heading a dinner table propped up by human legs. Kadi also takes commissions for eight-by-10-inch pet portraits: Interested parents can send her a few of their favorite animal photos and the artist will render them faithfully. “I take some liberties with the colors and I invent a background,” the artist told Hyperallergic, but promises to capture the pet’s expression “precisely.” In a work completed earlier this year, Polina the cat lies majestically on a yellow-hued bluff casting her gaze at the passing ships below. Pet portraits cost $200 plus shipping; inquire here. —EV

PRINCETON, New Jersey — As I wander through the solo exhibition Threading Memories / MiKyoung Lee, I feel a rising wave of affection and an urge to hug one of the artist’s fuzzy, bulbous sculptures. Made from everyday materials (twist ties, pipe cleaners, sewing thread), Lee’s sculptures feel approachable and familiar, reminiscent of home and imperfect human bodies. 

Tapping into traditional textile techniques and memories from growing up in South Korea, Lee knots, twists, and stitches together her chosen materials to form the wiry, basket-like netting that comprises many of her sculptures. In doing so, she transforms unassuming mass-manufactured materials into hulking orbs, organic vessels, and undulating wall pieces. Her process-centered approach and material sensibilities harmonize with those of artists like Ruth Asawa, Lenore Tawney, and Eva Hesse. Lee considers her tactile, labor-intensive methods a “ritual ceremony,” rich with symbols for human life. “There is an exceptional satisfaction in touching materials with my hands while developing my projects — the simplicity of binding, netting, knitting, sewing, and stitching,” she writes in her artist statement. “These are the metaphors of our lives, how we live, and how we connect.”

Endearing in their bodily wonkiness, Lee’s sculptures cast shadows that look like line drawings as they rotate ever so slightly from nearly invisible threads attached to the ceilings of Art@Bainbridge, a gallery operated by Princeton University Art Museum that’s located inside a restored house built in 1766 in downtown Princeton. The homey space, with wooden floors and fireplaces in every room, emphasizes the domesticity of Lee’s art materials, which also populate her home studio in Virginia.

The show’s 20 works — featuring sculptures, thread and wax “drawings,” and ink drawings — span the past 15 years. Each of the gallery’s four small rooms is dedicated to a different theme (dreams, nature, tradition and labor, and life cycles) and a dominant color, which progress in a sunset-like gradient (lemon, glinting gold, bubblegum pink, and crimson). 

Large, suspended sculptures anchor the exhibit. In the first room, there’s “Bubble” (2016), a trio of dangling forms whose abstract shapes suggest human anatomy (maybe livers, spleens, and stomachs) in shades of mustard and lightning-bolt yellow. The blood red “Bubble #3” (2008) — the earliest and largest work — crowns the show. At six feet tall, the bold-yet-porous sculpture seems to consume the final room with its presence and impressive use of pipe cleaners. Standing in front of it, I felt a swelling tenderness and suppressed my urge to wrap my arms around it, knowing this would not only be frowned upon, but would crush its voluminous shape. 

This monumental sculpture intersects with a significant shift in the artist’s personal life. She made it the same year of her first pregnancy, marking her entry into motherhood and all the attendant beauty, challenges, transformations, and surprising twists and turns. “Accumulating tangles is part of life,” the artist wrote in her artist statement. “The threads in these works seem chaotically ordered, but they come together beautifully; they become reordered to create something new, with new textures and contours.”

Threading Memories / MiKyoung Lee continues at Art@Bainbridge at Princeton University Art Museum (158 Nassau Street, Princeton, New Jersey) through January 7. The exhibition was curated by Zoe S. Kwok, Associate Curator of Asian Art at Princeton University Art Museum.

LOS ANGELES — Food has played a central role in Islamic societies for hundreds of years, with ideas about hospitality, community, identity, class, and leisure finding expression through the gustatory traditions and accoutrements of courts throughout Southwest Asia, North Africa, and beyond. Dining with the Sultan: The Fine Art of Feasting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is a historic survey of these culinary cultures and customs, featuring 250 objects from Iran, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, India, and elsewhere. The exhibition predominantly features tableware, serving vessels, and dining accessories, but also paintings, recipe manuscripts, textiles, and musical instruments complemented by an 18th-century reception room from Damascus on view in the United States for the first time and a contemporary installation by Iraq-born artist Sadik Kwaish Alfraji.

“Food is a great way to introduce an American audience to Islamic art and by extension to culture,” exhibition curator Linda Komaroff told Hyperallergic. “I like to do exhibitions that are not so much focused on a particular medium or dynasty, but on a universal theme.” In keeping with this idea, the show is divided into thematic sections such as “Outdoor Feasting and Picnicking,” “Coffee Culture,” and “Dressing for Dinner,” areas of interest that cut across eras and regions.

One way in which Komaroff has made the show more accessible is through a “virtual meal” located in one of the exhibition galleries, which features a traditional sufra, a round cloth covering a low, communal table at which visitors are invited to sit on cushions before a menu and a surprisingly realistic facsimile piece of puffy, round bread. On screens embedded in bowls on the table, images of six dishes prepared by Iranian American chef Najmieh Batmanglij float by: Badhinjan mahshi (eggplant dressed in sauce), zereshk palaw ba gusht (rice and lamb with chickpeas and barberries), and a khagina (sweet omelet) among them. Online video tutorials offer museum-goers the chance to recreate the dishes at home.

“This circle of the sufra, where we sit together to eat on the floor, it is not only a time of eating, it is also a time of love, gathering, happiness, and this warm feeling of family,” artist Sadik Kwaish Alfraji told Hyperallergic. “Sitting in a chair is different from sitting on the floor — everything will be next to each other, your knee will reach the knee of your brother or father. When you eat, you share the same dish. It’s very special.”

That sense of communal gathering and hospitality is also felt in the impressively restored Damascus Room, a sumptuously decorated reception room from a late-Ottoman-era courtyard home built between 1766 and 1767. The 20-by-15-foot room features painted and carved wood walls, the upper portions of which are covered in calligraphic poetry verses; a stone fountain; and a soaring arch that separates the lower reception area from a raised seating area lined by cushions. The room is missing its wooden ceiling and clerestory stained glass windows, though the latter have been approximated with colorful projections.

The house it was part of was slated for demolition to make way for new roads in the 1970s. In 1978, it was sold to an antiques dealer, disassembled, and shipped to Beirut, where it languished for decades. After arriving in London in 2011, it was acquired by LACMA in 2014, undergoing four years of restoration and conservation. It was finally mounted on a metal framework, making it the “first-ever portable Damascene period room.”

As much as the objects in the exhibition convey culinary traditions unique to Islamic cultures, they also depict networks of aesthetic and cultural exchange. The show features Italian maiolica, tin-glazed pottery featuring colorful scenes on a white background, that Komaroff explained were influenced by Islamic lustreware coming through Spain. It also includes several examples of ceramics exported from China. “In most of the courts — Mughal, Safavid, Ottoman — the rulers dined on imported Chinese porcelain. if you look carefully at paintings and illustrations, you’ll see Chinese porcelain being depicted, and blue and white reinterpretations of it made locally,” Komaroff said.

Alfraji’s animated video installation “A Thread of Light Between My Mother’s Fingers and Heaven” (2023) also tells a story of migration, albeit with an aura of loss. He moved from Iraq to the Netherlands in the 1990s, and his piece is like a hazy recollection of familial warmth. Black-and-white images appear and are replaced by others, leaving palimpsests behind: his mother’s hands, flowers, a communal meal, and the mythological winged creature with a human head and horse’s body.

“When they told me about the concept, I immediately thought about my mother’s fingers as she made bread,” he said, calling back to a formative memory that spans all five senses. After living abroad for so many years, has he ever been able to find a bread that can stand up to his mother’s, that can provide the same sense of warmth and connection? “Never, always there is something missing. The touch of my mother’s hand, the feeling when I’m watching her making bread, she takes it out of the oven and I just take it from her hand and eat it. That gives it a kind of taste that I haven’t found anywhere.”

A former conservative political candidate was arrested last week after allegedly decapitating a Satanic Temple statue on display at the Iowa State Capitol. Michael Cassidy, who unsuccessfully ran for a Mississippi US House of Representatives seat last year, was charged with criminal mischief in the fourth degree. The destroyed statue depicted the deity Baphomet, a figure that has increasingly angered right-wing groups in recent years.

This was the first year the Satanic Temple, a nontheistic religious organization, contributed an exhibit for the Capitol’s multidenominational display, which also includes a nativity scene and a message from an atheist group. The Temple’s work prompted backlash, with Florida Governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis chiming in. In a statement issued before the vandalism occurred, Iowa’s Republican Governor Kim Reynolds called the depiction of Baphomet “absolutely objectionable” but said that “in a free society, the best response to objectionable speech is more speech.” Reynolds went on to call on fellow Iowans to pray alongside her.

In a Fox News interview, Cassidy said the statue “touched a nerve” so he “pulled his head off” and put it in a garbage bag. He has not responded to Hyperallergic’s request for comment.

Cassidy now faces a $2,600 fine and up to a year in prison. Conservative donors have shown an outpouring of monetary support, raising almost $80,000 for the former politician’s legal defense fund. Turning Point USA, the organization dedicated to entrenching “conservative politics” in high schools and colleges, pledged $10,000, and DeSantis wrote on X that he would also contribute.

The Satanic Temple has not yet replied to Hyperallergic‘s request for comment. In a video posted after the incident on Facebook, the group said that “justice is being pursued the correct way, by legal means.”

“We carry with us a sense of accomplishment and a renewed commitment to advocating for religious pluralism and freedom of speech,” the Satanic Temple wrote in a December 16 statement.

Among other initiatives listed on its website, the Temple’s national congregation has affirmed its support for abortion, bodily autonomy, and LGBTQIA+ rights, rejecting “tyrannical authority” and “injustice” while encouraging “benevolence and empathy.”

Religion influenced modern art’s development far more than most accounts let on, and some of today’s most iconic artists mined their spiritual practices as sources, including Andy Warhol and Joseph Cornell. Contrary to popular belief, God is not dead. Alas, art historians and art critics have buried the lead, glossed it over, or outright ignored this influence. Erika Doss’s new book Spiritual Moderns bravely retells the story of modern art, fraught as it may be, with a more honest look at how religion shaped it.

The book takes place amid a tectonic shift: The mainstream art world is becoming more open to spirituality and religion. In 2019, before the pandemic, Swedish mystic artist Hilma af Klint shattered the Guggenheim’s all-time attendance record, bringing in around 600,000 visitors. In 2018, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute presented a show on the Catholic imagination in fashion. In 2019 and 2021, the Brooklyn Museum and the Andy Warhol Museum jointly put on the first institutional show on Andy Warhol’s religious beliefs. The late modern art critic Clement Greenberg must be rolling in his grave. A certain anti-religious bias — once de rigeur in the art world — is fading but not yet entirely gone. It still distorts how we retell many important stories in modern art history. Erika Doss now attempts to correct the record.

“How do we actually do this? What is a methodology that we can use to look at religion and modern art?” Doss asked rhetorically in an interview with Hyperallergic. Although art history employs a refined methodology to discuss religious symbols in works by the Old Masters, the connection between religion and the avant-garde is relatively undertheorized. Vague allusions to Vasily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in the Art (1911) function as a smokescreen concealing deeper unresolved epistemological quagmires in general, and to some extent in the book. Through a series of four case studies, along with an intro and conclusion, Doss exposes how earlier historians of modern art have downplayed religion as a key ingredient in some of modern art’s most heralded breakthroughs.

Inevitably, Doss’s introduction had to first answer the tricky questions of “what is modernism?” and “what is religion?” Alas, her approach to both was too diplomatic, perhaps revealing how her editor and prestigious publisher might cling to outdated notions of academic neutrality.

In attempting to define modernism, the introduction did not go far enough to indict the toxic feedback loop between which modern artists break records on the auction block, what hangs in collector’s homes, and whom curators then spotlight in museums. That loop generates a “canon” of modern art, which has left out some of the artists she spotlights despite their historical influence and critical acclaim.

Religion’s definition is deeply contested with theologians, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, historians, rabbis, priests, monks, imams, and mystics all seeking to shift the terms of debate. There is, quite simply, no precise agreement upon what religion is or its first principles. Rather than gingerly stepping around these conflicts with a smorgasbord of primary source quotations to offer context, it could have been illuminating to forthrightly discuss these tensions. Perhaps the editors reasoned that digging into this debate would lead the reader too far away from the art history they ostensibly signed up for.

These quagmires lead Doss towards four discrete case studies, instead of attempting something more systematic. And it is here that her strength as a historian shines bright. The following four juxtapositions illustrate the main subjects of Doss’s new book: Andy Warhol, Mark Tobey, Agnes Pelton, and Joseph Cornell. These comparisons make a vivid case for modern art’s extensive interconnections with religious and spiritual currents, but also reveal the underlying methodological debates that will need more theorization.

Growing up as a Byzantine Catholic, Andy Warhol experienced sacred images at church in a profoundly different way than Roman Catholics or Protestants. The Byzantine rite is a unique Catholic community that originates in Ukraine. Holy Angels Byzantine Catholic Church in San Diego demonstrates that Byzantine Catholic visuals are more akin to Eastern Orthodox ones. The church is similar to Pittsburgh’s St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church, which the young Warhol attended. The iconostasis — the screen of icons that forms the focal point of liturgy — features the seriality and repetition that would become mainstays in Warhol’s artwork.

In the theology of icons, a church’s particular icon is experienced as a “copy” of a sacred prototype image. In a similar vein, Warhol had a sharp eye for finding images in modern life that were ripe for repetition and revisiting. Just what is it about Jackie Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe that makes us want to keep looking again and again? Perhaps it is easier to tell the story of Warhol’s struggle to reconcile his queer sexuality with a dogma of homophobic hate. It is harder and less familiar to show how Warhol’s repetitive pop sensibility resonates with the semiotics of icons. The history of the icon boasts an extensive museum in Athens, but only an alcove at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre. Doss’s Warhol chapter rightly chose this harder path, challenging all of us to start talking about Warhol in a way that centers the influence of icons.

Mark Tobey is far more important than current museum shows and auction prices let on. As a deeply spiritual gay man who worked in several eclectic styles, he was never going to be Clement Greenberg’s number one. But the inconvenient truth is that Greenberg’s number one, Jackson Pollock, got the inspiration for his legendary drip paintings from looking at Tobey’s signature “white writing” technique. No one in the 1950s was going to tell the story that the queer mystical artist Tobey got there first, long before the burly Pollock. Although critics like Rob Weinberg recently acknowledged Tobey’s influence on Pollock, and the documentations of their encounters are indisputable, it is still hotly debated because Pollock was too macho to say it himself.

It’s clear that Tobey’s painterly scribbling owes some kind of debt to calligraphy. However, the dominant art historical discourse has generically attributed it to non-Western calligraphy and egregiously left out his deep and specific engagement with Baháʼí calligraphy. Doss addresses this overlooked connection. Early followers of Baháʼu’lláh, who founded the Baháʼí Faith, wanted to record his revelations and developed a unique shorthand, which is far loopier and chaotic than most Persian calligraphy that preceded it. As Mark Tobey became a devoted Baháʼí, his encounters with this shorthand undoubtedly shaped his “white writing,” with its sporadic, frenetic quality. The vexing problem is many art critics are not cognizant of the nuances of Baháʼí calligraphy, so the chain of influences isn’t clear. There would arguably be no Jackson Pollock drips if not for Baháʼí calligraphy — and Mark Tobey as the link between them. If you’re bristling, it’s because the bias that modern art developed outside any religion’s influence is deeply entrenched. Why are we betraying the foundational art historical methodology of honestly identifying and naming sources for formal innovations?

It was inevitable that one case study would venture into the occult, astrology, yoga, and theosophy, which influenced so many avant-garde artists. Here Doss examines the life and work of modernist artist Agnes Pelton, who drew upon all of these sources to create unabashedly occult images. Her work was dismissed as mystical for years but is being reappraised in this new epoch.

Theosophy was a 19th-century movement begun by Helena Blavatsky, which appropriated some ideas from Hinduism and Buddhism, and eclectically mixed them in with the preexisting Western occult traditions of alchemy, hermeticism, and Neoplatonism. She then topped it off with a heavy dollop of Orientalist frosting, serving it to Western renegades disillusioned with Christianity. Blavatsky was born in the city of Yekaterinoslav, then in the Russian Empire. Today, her birthplace is known as Dnipro, which remains part of Ukraine despite the current war. Although the Theosophical Society today remains relatively small, its influence on several artists was immense.

There is a clear affinity between Agnes Pelton’s painting “Sand Storm” (1932) and the illustration of the Crown Chakra in C.W. Leadbeater’s The Chakras (1927), the book that introduced the chakra system to the United States and Europe. As modern artists of the early 20th century sought to find new forms, many like Pelton turned to theosophical texts and their unusual illustrations.

Like Frida Kahlo, Joseph Cornell is often crudely lumped in with the Surrealists, when his life and work followed a trajectory far away from André Breton. The real story is that Joseph Cornell was a Christian Scientist and often introduced himself as such to many people in the art world. Doss’s chapter convincingly shows the concept of “unfoldment” is a far more essential ingredient in Cornell’s work than surrealism’s faint echoes.

As DeWitt John once wrote, “In Christian Science the word unfold has special meaning. It means to express, to show forth, to develop and display, to bring out what is real in its fullness.” This process is concretized in the window displays and window boxes of many Christian Science reading rooms, which invite viewers to slow down, look, read, and allow something to unfold within their minds as they reflect upon what they perceive. There is a similar unfolding in Cornell’s boxes that invites viewers to ponder and allow the connections between the disparate pieces to sink in. For example, in Cornell’s “Blue Soap Bubble” (1949–1950), the viewer is invited to slow down and unfold the connections between the glassware, the Angola stamp, and the celestial images. When Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science in the 19th century, unfoldment was one of the numerous concepts she introduced to facilitate healing and mental clarity as an alternative to other Christian sects, such as the Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Anglicans, or Lutherans. Doss demonstrates how Cornell’s work invites the viewer into this slower gaze of unfoldment and to draw out unanticipated connections.

College students often grumble that introductory art history courses feel like Sunday School. How much of the Bible do they need to know to get Giotto? Many breathe a sigh of relief when modernism comes along and frees them from religious symbols. Nevertheless, it’s an error of omission to discuss Warhol without icons; Jackson Pollock without Mark Tobey and Baháʼí calligraphy; spiritual artists like Agnes Pelton without the influence of theosophy; and Joseph Cornell without Christian Science. It doesn’t help that Byzantine Catholicism, Baháʼí, Theosophy, and Christian Science are not the predominant faiths of today’s art collectors and museum patrons. In presenting these four case studies, Erika Doss indicts the theological laziness at the heart of most accounts of modern art. The facts — inconveniently — lead somewhere else.

Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists & Religion (2023) by Erika Doss was published by the University of Chicago Press and is available online and in bookstores.

The British Museum has finally put an end to the rumors about severing ties with its long-term sponsor British Petroleum (BP). In a statement today, December 19, the institution said the oil giant will provide £50 million (~$63 million) in funding over the next decade to help the museum meet its carbon neutrality and facility modernization goals.

Climate emergency activists who have targeted the museum for demonstrations over the years were left aghast at the news, with Culture Unstained stating that the institution is “burying [its] head in the sand,” and museum trustee Muriel Gray has reportedly stepped down from the board in protest, though the reasons for her resignation are not confirmed.

The museum declined to comment beyond what was outlined in its public release. Gray has not yet responded to Hyperallergic‘s inquiry.

In its statement, the British Museum briefly outlined a plan for the restoration and renovation of its Bloomsbury location, including the debut of its Architectural Research Collection site, a “state of the art energy center” to help phase out the institution’s reliance on fossil fuels, and an architectural competition for the redesign of one-third of the museum’s galleries. The museum also notes that it will remain open to the public as these changes unfold.

“We will ramp up the pressure at the museum by staging protests and creative actions to demand an end to this deal,” Bayryam Bayryamali, a member of the volunteer grassroots anti-oil theater group BP or Not BP?, told Hyperallergic. “The museum can’t be allowed to shut down those rightly calling for the fossil-free future we so urgently need.”

Citing Israel’s recent license approval for BP and other oil firms to explore off-shore gas reserves amidst the military attack on Gaza, Bayryamali added: “The British Museum is not only breaking its own climate commitments but deepening its relationship with a company which is profiteering from the genocide of Palestinian people, as well as climate breakdown.”

BP has sponsored the British Museum since 1996 and was once a prominent sponsor for a variety of institutions and venues across the United Kingdom’s arts and culture sector. A majority have since ended their financial partnerships with the company in the last decade, including the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, the Scottish Ballet, the National Galleries Scotland, the Royal Opera House, and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Climate activists have been puzzled by the museum’s stated environmental goals in relation to its continued acceptance of Big Oil funding. At the British Museum’s annual trustees dinner in November 2022, museum chair George Osbourne announced that the institution will “no longer [be] a destination for climate protest but instead an example of climate solution,” ushering in the £1 billion (~$1.2 billion) “Rosetta Project” that would help the institution set course for “net zero carbon” operations.

But throughout the last year, the British Museum had repeatedly dodged questions about its future with BP, continuously stating that “museums today have a mixed funding model and we need corporate and private money to fulfill our public mission.”

Chris Garrard, co-director of the climate activism group Culture Unstained that has conducted multiple demonstrations at the museum calling for its divestment from BP, called the partnership renewal an “astonishingly out of touch and completely indefensible decision.”

“We believe this decision is illegitimate and in breach of the museum’s own climate commitments and sector-wide codes and will be seeking legal advice in order to mount a formal challenge to it,” Garrard said in a statement, noting that the institution is becoming “increasingly isolated” in its continued allegiance to the oil company.

Culture Unstained also underscored that in February, BP reneged on its own goals to cut down emissions from its fossil fuel production by over 35% by 2030, instead announcing that it would aim for a reduction of 20% to 30% following record-breaking profits in the 2022 fiscal year. The activism group has also been vocally critical of BP’s close ties to the repressive Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, whose autocratic government has detained over 60,000 political prisoners, in the interest of exploring and siphoning from the nation’s oil reserves.

BP has not yet responded to Hyperallergic‘s request for comment.

The Wormfarm Institute is pleased to announce a national call for artist proposals for its biennial Farm/Art DTour on October 5–14, 2024. Described as an “agri/cultural excursion,” the DTour is a self-guided drive through 50 miles of Sauk County, Wisconsin, located on the edge of the famed Driftless Area. Travelers experience scenic, winding roads and working farmlands punctuated by temporary site-responsive artworks, pasture performances, roadside poetry, educational Field Notes, local food markets, and more. The Farm/Art DTour draws thousands of visitors from the region and across the country with its invitation to experience a landscape and rural communities where farming plays a central, though changing, role.

Wormfarm will commission up to 10 artists to create large-scale, outdoor projects that will be temporarily installed at various locations along the DTour route. The request for proposals invites artists from all backgrounds and locations to apply, including those who are formally trained and those who are self-taught. The selection criteria includes:

• Artistic excellence
• Visual impact
• Demonstrated ability to realize concept
• Feasibility of the project in the context of the larger event
• How the proposal fits within the broader curatorial vision
• Site and/or community responsiveness

Proposals will be reviewed by a jury, which will select 15 finalists for an orientation in Sauk County this spring. Up to 10 DTour artists will be selected from the group of finalists.

Funding support ranges from $5,000 to $10,000 and a stipend is available for finalists. The deadline to apply is February 12, 2024.

For more information, visit wormfarminstitute.org.

Questions may be directed to info@wormfarminstitute.org.

Earlier this fall, the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) announced the eight New Orleans-based artists who will participate in the institution’s Creative Assembly residency for the 2023–24 year. NOMA’s Creative Assembly initiative fosters community engagement by inviting artists of all disciplines for year-long collaborations with the museum’s permanent collection, special exhibitions, and programs.

2023–24 Creative Assembly Cohort

• Charm Tayor (Multidisciplinary artist and songwriter)
• Daniel Fitzpatrick (Novelist, poet, and translator)
• Dianne Honoré (Cultural activist and Black Masking Indian)
• Jourdan Barnes (Photographer)
• Kr3wcial (Rapper and lyricist)
• Lauren Messina (Dance choreographer)
• Paige DeVries (Painter)
• Simone Immanuel (Performer and writer)

Over the next year, the Creative Assembly Cohort will develop on-site and off-site public offerings that connect different neighborhoods across the city.

“This year, the Creative Assembly Cohort is taking inspiration from New Orleans’s neighborhoods, which are vital clusters of creativity, community, and tradition in our city,” said Kelci Baker, Community Engagement Manager at the New Orleans Musem of Art. “Our hope with this program is to work with artists to foster a space of belonging where visitors can see reflections of their own neighborhoods and find themselves at home in the museum.”

Projects already underway for this residency session include recent field drawing programs with cohort members and visiting artist Alyssa Lizzini, an upcoming series of poetry workshops with writer Daniel Fitzpatrick, and a spring performance orchestrated by Kr3wcial, featuring hip-hop artists from across the city.

To learn more, visit noma.org.

LOS ANGELES — Long before reality television series like the ever-popular Naked and Afraid, true crime shows, and WWE and MMA extravaganzas entertained millions with the suffering (whether feigned or authentic) of others, there was the wildly popular yet short-lived phenomenon of dance marathons in the 1920s and ’30s.

Throngs of paying customers watched contestants dance to the point of slumping exhaustion, or worse — not just for hours, but for days, weeks, even months. One couple would eventually win the top prize (which could be a considerable sum in those days) while all others fell by the wayside, sometimes literally; medical personnel were on site. This weird fad began in the ebullient Jazz Age but assumed far grimmer significance during the Great Depression, with desperate people competing for cash. 

These marathons have long been a potent theme for Kambui Olujimi, whose eclectic work spans sculpture, installation, performance, painting, and other mediums. The eight engrossing paintings (all watercolor, ink, and graphite on paper) and two ceramic sculptures (all works 2023) in his memorably titled exhibition All I Got to Give — his first with Susanne Vielmetter gallery — turn dancing couples, admission tickets, trophies, and, more implicitly, audiences into complex, extremely pertinent meditations on endurance, fragility, care, resistance, transcendence, and — importantly — race. 

The introductory painting is an outsize, handmade rendition of an admission ticket from way back when in “Detroit, Mich.,” as it says on the ticket (“Champion Ticket”); like so much else in the United States of those times, dance marathons were strictly segregated. A Black couple seems buoyant and graceful, yet the words undercut the pleasant image: “2005 HOURS” (more like sustained torture than dancing), “5 COUPLES LEFT!!” (gruesomely Darwinian).  

Nearby is the startling image “Still Standing,” with the emphatic title words, rendered in both black and white, seemingly reverberating on a dark, smudgy background replete with what look like hovering eyes and flashes of light, maybe from cameras. These words are at once straightforward and defiant. Still standing in America after, well, everything. 

In “Props,” with its multiple meanings (Olujimi can be quite a wordsmith), two bone-tired dancers still tenderly support one another; they are vulnerable but also stalwart and full of care. Bursts of light in the background suggest camera flashes but also stars. This dance hall scene becomes cosmic.

Olujimi’s paintings are often exquisite, including the dancers’ nuanced expressions, and color is a judicious yet dynamic force, however they are also willfully scruffy, with drips, stains, scrawls, and smears. Grace and elegance abound, but so too do rugged drama and discomfort. One couple — she’s in leopard print pants, a pink top, and green shoes; he’s in blue shoes, gray pants, and a purple shirt — could be asprawl but also aloft, twining together in aerial exuberance (“Boardwalk Float”). Enveloped by numbers, two upright yet sagging dancers are extraordinarily thoughtful and tender in each other’s arms (“Peacock Numbers”). Like most of Olujimi’s figures, they are also mobile in time, maybe existing decades ago, maybe right now. A bit of research reveals that the Peacock Ballroom in Portland, Oregon, famous for its marathons and walkathons, was also infamous for its discriminatory practices and abuse of contestants, including children.

Ceramic sculptures of trophies are hardly flawless and sleek. Instead they are handmade, irregular, and a bit ungainly, even precarious, as if imbued with, and honoring, the extreme physical effort and emotional struggle of the dancers. Accessing an obscure and bizarre historical oddity, Kambui Olujimi’s exhibition is also spot on for our own troubled times.

Kambui Olujimi: All I Got to Give continues at Susanne Vielmetter (1700 South Santa Fe Avenue #101, Downtown, Los Angeles) through December 23. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

This month: Stolen brass instruments, dropped consonants, modern nondairy options, Bronze Age gender-bending sculpture, and more in this compact grid.

Editor’s Note: This article was produced in collaboration with the Arts & Culture MA concentration at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Cockroaches scuttled around a cubed vivarium. Their antennae wriggled at the sight of a fellow roach or the remnants of a vegetable that had been thrown into the enclosure. Three people examined the bugs’ sanctuary of dirt and transferred a few to a Tupperware container that came supplied with a slice of cucumber. A student needed to borrow them.

The student, Zelle Westfall, told Hyperallergic she was planning out a piece on stillness for a performing arts course. She planned to stand silently and let the cockroaches crawl over her while her classmates watched.

To find her co-stars, she didn’t need to go far or consult any entomologists. She simply went up to the second floor of the School of Visual Arts (SVA) Fine Arts Building on West 16th Street in New York City. There, the SVA Bio Art Laboratory sat stocked with materials like insects, fish, petri dishes, plants, and lab coats — all reserved not for students of biology, but for burgeoning bio artists. 

Bio art — artwork that uses living matter — emerged as a recognized genre some 25 years ago and has produced practitioners like Zheng Bo and Anicka Yi, in addition to some ethically challenged works that grabbed sensationalistic headlines early on, such as Eduardo Kac’s “GFP Bunny” (2000), which involved creating a “fluorescent rabbit through molecular biology.” 

Bio artists and their supporters have long claimed that their work is misunderstood and underestimated by mainstream audiences. Still, the field has made strides as institutions, critics, and the public have come to better understand how the genre aims to examine issues including climate change, sustainability, animal rights, and more through the visual and plastic arts.

But now, some bio artists fear they are losing ground. The world’s first laboratory dedicated to the biological arts, SymbioticA, is slated to close on June 30, 2024.

The University of Western Australia (UWA) announced last year that it would not fund the lab any longer. Artist Oron Catts, who co-founded SymbioticA in 2000, said he is not in a position to discuss the specifics of the lab’s termination. But he noted that “we’re back to square one” when it comes to convincing institutions to support bio artists moving forward.

UWA declined to provide comment to Hyperallergic, but told Australian science magazine Cosmos last year that the school needed to “prioritize its resources to core teaching and research areas.”

In an interview with Hyperallergic, Catts noted that the biological arts are extremely resource-intensive. Artists who want to engage with cutting-edge, biotechnological processes, such as gene splicing or cloning, “require considerable financial backing,” as historian Frances Stacey wrote in a 2009 article for Nature. 

At SVA, for example, the Bio Art Lab houses expensive equipment, including a BioBots 3D printer, biological microscopes, DNA quantitators, and laboratory fume hoods, for the sake of art. Funders and universities looking to cut budgets — especially in a climate that minimizes the importance of arts and humanities — may see considerable savings by cutting programs like SymbioticA.

Artist Suzanne Anker, who founded the Bio Art Lab in 2011 and led the total renovation of the SVA Fine Arts building that same year, said that university President David Rhodes was initially confused by the lab and its purpose.

“It’s not an easy sell,” she told Hyperallergic. “He didn’t really know what I was talking about.” Rhodes was unavailable for comment, but Anker said that he came to appreciate the work and is now proud that the school supports students in exploring bio art, from performing with a cockroach to molding a fungus’s growth into the shape of a heart.

In terms of biosafety levels (BSL), Anker added, the stakes were comparatively low. “Labs are rated by their ability to deal with organisms,” Anker explained. The SVA Bio Art Lab is rated the lowest level of BSL-1, meaning they don’t deal with high-risk viruses or deadly bacteria.

In contrast, students and faculty at SymbioticA, a BSL-2 lab, regularly work with materials considered biologically hazardous as part of their artworks. The laboratory is housed within UWA’s School of Human Sciences, rather than, say, the School of Design.

When Catts and researchers Stuart Bunt, and Miranda Grounds co-founded SymbioticA, they combined their backgrounds in the arts, medicine, neuroscience, and human anatomy. Under the continued direction of Catts and visual artist Ionat Zurr, the institution garnered international acclaim. Catts and Zurr are well-known for the Tissue, Culture & Art (TC&A) Project, a precursor to SymbioticA. Artwork that came out of TC&A was exhibited at and collected by institutions like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

“Victimless Leather” (2004), for example, forced consumers to face the potential consequences of lab-grown leather in the fashion industry. A miniature, “stitch-less” jacket sat suspended inside a custom-made perfusion chamber that fed it nutrients. It was alive, grown from a mouse’s stem cells, a sampling of the kinds of materials that Catts and Zurr worked with at SymbioticA.

The New York Times took notice of the piece when it had to be literally killed at MoMA’s 2008 show Design and the Elastic Mind. Paola Antonelli, the museum’s senior curator, told the New York Times that the artwork was “growing too much.” The cells multiplied so fast that the incubator began to clog. “I felt cruel when I turned it off,” she said.

It was exactly the type of reaction and discussion Catts and Zurr had hoped — and still hope — to ignite through their art.

“We’re not shying away from presenting the reality of the blood and gore in the sense of the practice of manipulating [living] systems,” Catts said. “This is part of it and should be. People should be aware of it.”

When SymbioticA’s potential defunding was announced, a “Save SymbioticA” petition circulated and garnered more than 13,000 signatures. Messages of camaraderie poured in from around the world, Catts said, including from Anker.

Despite the response, UWA stood by its decision and implemented an 18-month transition period to allow postgraduate students to finish their studies.

“But what’s really nice to see is that there’s many other labs that have been developed around the world,” Catts continued, “most of them modeled after SymbioticA, most of them by people who have spent time doing research with us.”

American bio artist Amy Karle, who credits SymbioticA as an instrumental pioneer and voiced her support during the “Save SymbioticA” campaign, is one such international colleague carrying on the laboratory’s legacy. She primarily works in the computer technology sub-genre of bio art, a distinction made by Anker in her scholarship on the practice over the last two decades, and examines how technology and biotechnology impact the human body.

In recent artworks from the 2010s, she made a 3D-printed heart that pulses with imaginary blood (“The Heart of Evolution?”) and a scaffold in the shape of a human hand seeded with donated human cells that she hopes will grow into tissue and bone (“Regenerative Reliquary”).  

At the heart of these works by Karle, Catts, Zurr, and Anker is a perceptual license to explore the philosophical and spiritual aspects of the life sciences that traditional biologists, neurosurgeons, or chemists are not typically granted. 

“Most people can’t talk about that in their fields,” Karle said. “If it’s not so strictly scientific, they don’t have a lot of space to talk about it, at least in America.” She added that bio artists are in a unique position to guide humanity through “the philosophical questions, the ethical questions [that] are a lot harder than the technological problems.” 

And that means, Catts said, that artists need the same access to resources as physicists, synthetic biologists, and others who are working with biological materials, even if they were not initially trained in biology. Karle has found financial support for her work from companies like HP Labs and Autodesk. Anker’s lab at SVA, like others around the world, continues to thrive. 

Knowing this, Catts remains hopeful about the future of bio art and the essential questions the practice raises. It may be shocking to see the original center of such work closed, and the loss of materials, funding, and collegial interaction for artists will certainly have repercussions. But Catts is not despairing. 

“Shutting down SymbioticA,” he said, “doesn’t shut down the field.”

Renowned metal sculptor Richard Hunt, celebrated for his near 70-year artistic practice rooted in civil rights, the natural world, and cultural dynamism, died in his Chicago home last Saturday, December 16 at the age of 88. The artist is survived by his daughter Cecilia and his sister Marian.

Hunt, whose metallic forms and public monuments are now displayed across the United States, began to pursue his artistic interests at an early age, enrolling in local art classes in Chicago’s South Side as a child. He later completed his undergraduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1957 with a concentration in sculpture, and was deeply fascinated with the work included in the AIC’s 1953 exhibition Sculpture of the Twentieth Century.

Speaking of his fixation with his chosen medium, Hunt told the Copper Development Association that he “think[s] in metal” as though it were a language, adding that “there’s a relative ease of fabrication, manipulation and longevity, and ease of maintenance that’s built into the material itself.”

At age 19, Hunt’s conceptual practice was forever reshaped in 1955 after he attended the public, open-casket funeral for Emmett Till, a Black American teenager who was kidnapped, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi over a false accusation. Till was raised only two blocks from Hunt’s birthplace and was killed while visiting extended family down south, prompting the artist to reorient his artistry toward civil rights and expressions of the Black American experience.

As a welder who initially sourced his materials from vehicle junkyards and curbsides, Hunt made history when he became the youngest artist to exhibit his work at the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle. The artist’s upward trajectory was marked by many firsts: In 1968, he became the first Black artist appointed to the National Council on the Arts, and at age 35, in 1971, he became the first Black sculptor to secure a solo retrospective in 1971 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which had acquired his sculpture “Arachne” (1956) in 1957.

The artist’s debut public art commission “Play” (1967), installed at the John J. Madden Mental Health Center in Maywood, Illinois, launched a regular flow of requests for commissioned monuments and sizable public works that necessitated collaborations with factories and engineers. Among his most well-known public sculptures are “Swing Low” (2016) at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and Flight Forms (2001) at Chicago’s Midway International Airport.

Hunt spearheaded 160 public sculptures commemorating notable happenings in Black history as well as Black American heroes in education, civil rights, and sports throughout his career, including journalist and activist Ida B. Wells, attorney Hobart Taylor Jr., and track and field athlete Jesse Owens.

Despite his frequent focus on specific historical figures, his biomorphic forms infused with suggestions of spirituality and mythology were decidedly abstract at a time when some Black artists chose to focus their efforts on figurative art. “I am interested more than anything else in being a free person,” the artist said of his practice, per a statement from his gallery. “To me, that means that I can make what I want to make, regardless of what anyone else thinks I should make.”

The influence of Emmett Till’s murder on Hunt will come full circle as one of the artist’s final creations was the model for a monument titled “Hero Ascending” (2023) that will be installed outside of the Emmett and Mamie Till-Mobley family house in Woodlawn next year.

A public celebration of Hunt’s life and legacy will take place in Chicago in spring of 2024. In the meantime, the artist’s website has an exhaustive list of his public commissions across the states, and his first solo exhibition as a newly represented artist at White Cube is still slated for March as planned at the gallery’s New York location. The show will include works from the first two decades of Hunt’s career as well as pieces from the artist’s personal collection.

Researchers working at the Colosseum Archeological Park in Rome have uncovered an ornate and exceptionally preserved mosaic inside a Republican-period domus, or wealthy townhome, near Palatine Hill. Constructed in phases between the first and second century BCE, the domus is located alongside a series of Agrippa’s warehouses that lined Vicus Tuscus, an important Ancient Roman commercial road leading from Palatine Hill to the trading port on the Tiber River.

The Italian Ministry of Culture revealed the details last week, noting in a statement that the excavated site is an “extraordinary discovery” that will further expand Rome’s cultural itinerary. The “rustic” mosaic is housed in a “specus aestivus,” a vaulted, cave-like room around the home’s atrium that’s used as a banquet hall or entertainment space with water features for guests during the summer seasons. Studded from floor to ceiling with seashells, precious glass, minerals, and Egyptian blue tiles, the mosaic will be presented to the public once the archaeological team completes its excavations of the site.

The mosaic’s design is partitioned into four aedicules (shrine-like sections) flanked by columns, depicting vases with lotuses and vines, stacks of weapons accompanied by carnyx horn instruments, and the prows of ships crossing each other over a trident. The vaulted lunette above the aedicule design portrays a pastoral landscape with shepherds and farm animals, and a seaside landscape scene including a cliffside view of city center buildings and three ships on the ocean. Because the imagery depicts naval activity and objects pertaining to war, it is thought that the domus’ owner may have been a high-ranking soldier or nobleman at the time.

What makes the mosaic most remarkable is the inclusion of precious polychrome glass as well as flakes of white marble, spongy travertine, and volcanic ash pozzolana. Futher restoration into the other rooms of the domus also exposed a stucco covering decorated with fine designs of landscapes, architecture, and figuration. The domus is reportedly a prime example of Asia Luxuria — a sumptuous but controversial display of wealth, greed, and the finer pleasures of life as a “consequence” of the Ancient Roman military conquests in the East.

“The archaeological excavation will conclude in the first months of 2024, and we will subsequently work intensely to make this place — among the most evocative of Ancient Rome — accessible to the public as soon as possible,” said Colosseum Archeological Park Director Alfonsina Russo.

For nearly a decade, future nurses and doctors enrolled at the University of Virginia have attended a workshop at the school’s Fralin Museum of Art to help prepare them for end-of-life care, a historically under-discussed subject in medical schools that has been increasingly incorporated into curricula in recent years.

In 2014, a group of students approached the museum’s Academic Curator and Interim Co-Director Jordan Love with the hope of adding an art focus to their program HeArt of Medicine (HOM). Other facets of the student-run extracurricular initiative include panel discussions with hospice care workers, chaplains, and emergency room doctors; simulated conversations with patients about death; and last year, a gathering during which participants wrote and recited poetry. The students organize an annual meeting at the Fralin, and Love prepares a two-hour workshop that starts with looking at art and ends with discussing the work and its implications in small groups. Around 60 people attended the last event.

Farah Contractor, a third-year medical student who serves as one of HOM’s co-leaders, told Hyperallergic that she particularly remembers a conversation about Benjamin West’s 1770 painting “The Death of General Wolfe” and its glamorized depiction of dying. Contractor noted that the rendering was “completely the opposite” of what she was used to seeing in the hospital.

“[Death] is considered a taboo topic, especially in medicine,” Contractor said. “Nobody likes to talk about it. Nobody likes to be real about how not glamorous it is sometimes, and how much suffering is involved.”

Love said she thinks it’s easier to broach the topic of death through the lens of art than to do so when it is taking place in front of you. “It gets the students used to talking about death in a meaningful way, so that it becomes easier over time when they need to do it with families, or they need to do it with colleagues,” she said.

Love and museum docents, including Professor Emerita Marcia Day Childress, who used to serve as a faculty advisor to HOM, use other paintings, prints, and photographs to cultivate different conversations: Rembrandt’s “The Raising of Lazarus” (c. 1630–32) to discuss the expectation that doctors act as miracle workers; Goya’s “Cartloads to the cemetery” (1812–15) to contemplate mass violence, disease, and death; William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (1732) to consider the moralization of dying; and Käthe Kollwitz’s “Woman with Dead Child” (1903) and War series (1918–22) to think about the impassioned emotions that emerge when someone dies. Danny Lyon’s 1963 photograph of a broken window at the bombed 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, helps address the subject of death in the context of systemic violence.

Contractor said she couldn’t remember a specific course or lecture that taught her how to talk about death and dying, but was lucky to be paired with residents who let her sit in on end-of-life conversations and even practice them.

“I felt really fortunate to have those experiences,” Contractor said. “But I think it’s something that you need to seek out.”

While medical schools have slowly begun to make space for end-of-life conversations, Love still sees the value in talking about death through art.

“It’s a vehicle for connecting ourselves to the past in a way that can get people more comfortable with talking about really difficult subject matter,” Love said.

This December, the New Bedford Whaling Museum revealed the groundbreaking restoration of one panel from Charles Sidney Raleigh’s “Panorama of a Whaling Voyage” (1878–80). The unveiling marks the culmination of a yearlong conservation effort at Gianfranco Pocobene Studios in greater Boston, funded by a national grant from the “Save America’s Treasures” program.

Raleigh’s “Panorama of a Whaling Voyage” is one of only eight known panoramas in US public collections. Painted on canvas, the original 275-foot-long panorama depicted the 1870–74 voyage of the last great whaling ship Niger.

In the 1960s, the painting underwent conservation measures that, while well-intentioned, altered its appearance significantly. Conservators sliced it into 22 12-foot sections mounted onto heavy aluminum panels with wax adhesive and a thick varnish on top. 

At 350 pounds per painting, challenges persisted for storage and installation; moreover, the varnish darkened to a deep yellow hue. Conservator Gianfranco Pocobene aimed to reverse these changes and faithfully return its original vibrancy. Delicately separating the canvas from the aluminum, removing layers of wax, and meticulously addressing cracks and creases, Pocobene brought the work back to life.

“It’s much more luminous and bright right now. It is what the artist would have originally intended,” said Pocobene. “In the end, we’re just one part of the history of the painting. What matters to us is doing the work, improving it, and it survives in a better state than when we first received it.”

Amanda McMullen, President and CEO of the Whaling Museum, emphasized the significance of modern conservation practices. “This project illustrates the challenges museums face in dealing with our larger artifacts. It has been tremendous to witness the evolution and see this rare piece of art back to its original beauty.”

For more information, visit whalingmuseum.org.

The MFA in Visual Arts at Purchase College, State of New York (SUNY), is a small, selective interdisciplinary program that fosters the artistic, intellectual, and professional growth of students through independent studio work and rigorous academic studies. State-of-the-art facilities include photography, video, and digital labs; wood and metal shops; and printmaking and letterpress studios. Nearby, the vast art communities in New York City play a crucial role in curricular and extracurricular activities. Students present a culminating exhibition at a New York gallery in one of the city’s thriving arts neighborhoods. The 2024 thesis show will take place at Performance Space 122 in Manhattan’s East Village.

The MFA/MA degree combines the MFA degree with an MA in Visual Art and Modern and Contemporary Art, Criticism and Theory, with the art history requirements completed in a third year of study.

As part of the State University of New York system, Purchase College is committed to a public education that combines academic excellence and affordability. Enriching their experience, students have access to the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College’s campus museum and the eighth largest university museum in the country; a renowned Performing Arts Center; and opportunities for community engagement throughout the United States.

A Vibrant Community of Makers and Thinkers
Graduate students can mentor with renowned faculty working in all areas. Additionally, students have access to a robust visiting artist and curator lecture series.

Financial Assistance
Purchase College’s position in the State University of New York system offers a significant financial advantage. Part-to full-tuition scholarships are available along with teaching stipends. Students can expect to pay significantly less than one-half the cost of attendance of equivalent private graduate programs.

Contact admissions@purchase.edu for application information and apply online at purchase.edu.

For further details, get in touch with Faye Hirsch, Visiting Associate Professor, MFA Coordinator, by emailing faye.hirsch@purchase.edu.

Centuries ago, in 2022, the FBI raided the Orlando Museum of Art and hauled away 25 fake Basquiats that had been on public display as the real deal for five months. Not one to be outdone, the year 2023 brought us a former auctioneer confessing to forging the works and selling them for cash out of the trunk of his car in a parking lot, the Florida institution accusing its former director of plotting the whole thing for personal gain, and — wait, there’s more! — the ex-director claiming the whole thing is a ploy to scapegoat him for the board’s misdeeds, including eliciting a false confession from the repentant forger.

If that doesn’t perfectly sum up the last 12 months for you … Indeed, this year has one-upped the last in almost every way. So without further ado, here are the wildest art stories of 2023 — from stunning art-historical discoveries and tourists’ eyebrow-raising transgressions to moments of blatant institutional failure.

Rogue Tourists

• Can your five-year-old do this? A prominent 18th-century sculpture of a water nymph by British artist John Bacon was found scribbled over in (fortunately washable) blue crayon.
• In Rome, a tourist was filmed unbelievably etching his name and that of his beloved onto the wall of the 2,000-year-old Colosseum. The visitor who caught the whole thing on camera can be heard in the background, asking: “Are you f–ing serious, man?”
• Also in Rome, a woman was caught trespassing on the famous Trevi Fountain to refill her water bottle. Record-breaking heat in the region this summer may be partly to blame, but still — that’s one thirsty tourist.
• A woman got a little too close to Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid sculpture, not only climbing the work but also posing for a photo pretending to kiss the iconic sea dweller as flabbergasted crowds looked on and booed in disbelief.
• Just a few weeks earlier, a German man was detained in Florence for ascending a 16th-century marble statue of Neptune for a selfie in Florence. Travelers to the region have gotten so audacious that Italy’s culture ministry threatened to impose five-figure fines for infractions.

Questionable Institutional Choices

• The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, no stranger to SMH moments, told a Black artist to leave an exhibition specifically envisioned as a safe space of rest for Black visitors. The incident followed a White woman’s complaint that British-Ghanaian artist Heather Agyepong was being “aggressive” for asking her to lower her voice. You really can’t make this stuff up.
• The Portland Art Museum issued a public apology after asking one of its visitors to remove her Indigenous baby carrier, citing its backpack policy. The mother, who is of Karuk descent, took to Facebook to denounce the incident, writing: “The Portland Art Museum, where being Indigenous is cool as long you are part of the exhibit and not actually practicing your culture.”
• The German contemporary art exhibition Documenta publicly condemned the curators of its 2022 edition, the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, for simply “liking” social media posts expressing support of Palestine. It’s one of many examples this year of organizations going after artists who have called for a ceasefire in Gaza, criticized the Israeli regime, and voiced or implied support of the movement for Palestinian liberation. Others, especially smaller spaces that are less dependent on market and institutional backing, are vocally pro-Palestine, as Hyperallergic also reported.

Extraordinary Findings

• The ancient archeological site of Pompeii really is the gift that keeps on giving, and this year, it endowed us with an, um, sizable discovery: A fresco of a god seemingly weighing his frankly massive penis on a scale. A few weeks later, researchers revealed what may be the first-known Ancient Roman dildo, a tapered wooden object previously thought to have been used as a knitting tool. You can’t fool me, grandma.
• Speaking of big, archeologists in Rome pulled a life-sized Hercules sculpture out of the ground while working on a routine sewer repair.
• Egypt may have uncovered its “oldest and most complete” mummy — er, mummified person — along with Old Kingdom-era stoneware and amulets near the Pyramid of Djoser.
• Meanwhile, in Peru, a man was discovered to be carrying a mummified body in a food delivery backpack. He reportedly referred to the centuries-old remains as “Juanita,” his “spiritual girlfriend.” 😳
• Not all discoveries were thousands of years old, and they weren’t always dug out of the earth. Sometimes they were hiding in plain sight, like this tiny demon concealed under layers of varnish in an 18th-century Joshua Reynolds painting. Kudos to England’s National Trust for identifying the terrifying fanged creature during cleaning and conservation of the work to mark the artist’s 300th birthday.

Shameless, Simply Shameless

• After New York art consultant Lisa Schiff was accused of “running a Ponzi scheme” in May and slammed with two costly lawsuits for alleged embezzlement and fraud, the Manhattan advisor filed for bankruptcy less than a week later and began liquidating her company Schiff Fine Arts in order to repay her debts, which amount to at least $3 million. In August, a document filed by her bankruptcy lawyer revealed that Schiff actually owed money to dozens of collectors, galleries, and businesses — and independent investigators claimed that 108 artworks totaling over $1 million that were in her company’s possession could not be located.
• A former payroll manager at the Art Institute of Chicago was indicted for depositing over $2 million in museum funds to his personal bank account. Charged with two counts of wire fraud and two counts of bank fraud, 56-year-old Michael Maurello hid the misappropriated funds by stealthily altering information in the museum’s payroll system in an illicit scheme that went on for 13 years.
• For more than a decade, Washington artists Jerry Chris Van Dyke and Lewis Anthony Rath sold Native artwork under the false pretense that it was authentic by misrepresenting themselves as Indigenous tribal members. After pleading guilty to violating the “truth-in-advertising” Indian Arts and Crafts Act, Van Dyke received an 18-month federal probation sentence in May while Rath was sentenced to 24 months probation and 200 hours of community service in September.
• The British Museum launched an independent investigation into approximately 2,000 missing or damaged items in its collection, mainly gems and jewelry in the Department of Greece and Rome largely believed to have been stolen by an as-yet-unnamed staff member dismissed in August of this year. (British outlets reported that the employee in question was Peter Higgs, senior curator of Greek art, though Higgs’s representatives have so far denied his involvement.)

Feel-Good Moments

• When New Yorkers learned “Hot Dog King” Dan Rossi had been sleeping in his iconic cart outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the past 11 years, they showed him an outpouring of support. Over 56,000 people signed a petition urging the city to help Rossi, who thinks the city’s poor oversight of vending permits (officially distributed to disabled veterans only) has subjected him to unfair levels of competition.
• A Dutch chef made an acute observation while visiting Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum: The “onions” in the artist’s “Red Cabbages and Onions” (1887) looked a lot like garlic. Ernst de Witte convinced the museum to retitle the painting, and he now serves a red cabbage and garlic dish at his Utrecht restaurant in its honor.
• Using x-ray fluorescence, researchers discovered a floppy-eared pup wearing a bowtie in a 123-year-old Picasso painting depicting a Bohemian scene of a Paris cabaret. While the artist had intentionally covered up the tiny dog, it turns out he was a canine lover in his lifetime; a friend once described the artist’s relationship with his Dachshund as a “love affair.” Picasso remains all sorts of problematic, but who doesn’t love puppies?
• A Barcelona museum partnered with a nudist club to host special tours of an exhibition featuring photographs of Ancient Greek sculptures. Notably, both the artworks’ subjects and the museumgoers were naked. As one docent mused, “We wanted people who came to see it to feel exactly the same as the work they were looking at.”

Artworks That Caused Controversy

• A Florida principal was forced to resign for showing sixth-grade students an image of Michelangelo’s “David” (1501–1504) after parents complained that the Italian Renaissance sculpture was “pornographic.” Just as weird, or maybe weirder, given that nothing surprises us anymore in Ron DeSantis’s dystopian Florida, is the fact that an early episode of the Simpsons from 1990 appeared to predict the incident.
• A rather curvaceous likeness of a mermaid caused a stir in the small fishing town of Monopoli in Puglia, Italy. Honoring eminent Italian scientist and Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini, the sculpture was described as a “tribute to the great majority of women, who are curvy,” but some found the voluptuous figure “provocative.”
• Odd-angle photographs of Hank Willis Thomas’s public artwork “The Embrace,” unveiled this January, elicited a nearly immediate outpouring of hilarious posts and memes as users perceived depictions of various sexual acts in the bronze’s intertwining limbs. The memorial to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King stands in the Boston Common’s 1965 Freedom Plaza, and some locals who were able to see it in person told Hyperallergic they admired the piece.
• A Hamline University professor in Minnesota was let go after she displayed Medieval Islamic depictions of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad during an art history lesson. Erika López Prater issued a content warning before showing the images, the prohibition of which varies across Islam traditions.

David Diao loves pure abstract painting as embodied by the highly revered work of Barnett Newman and Kasimir Malevich, even as he doubts their claims of attaining the sublime or achieving a utopian, universalist language. After a well-received debut exhibition of abstract paintings at Paula Cooper gallery in 1969, along with work in the 1973 Whitney Biennial, Diao decided to stop exhibiting in the mid-1970s, when high Modernist painting was superseded by Minimalism and Conceptual Art.

To me, Diao’s withdrawal from the art world — and reentry in the mid-1980s, with conceptually rigorous works that explored high-Modernist painting’s contradictory legacies — indicates his desire to investigate painting’s multiple, competing identities. Unswayed by the orthodoxies of Clement Greenberg and Donald Judd, he knew firsthand that a painting — whatever else it is — is a vulnerable object enmeshed in a variety of overlapping systems.

By examining the information stored in these systems Diao found a way to return to painting with an unrivaled intellectual forcefulness that I think the American art world has not come to grips with. (He has had major museum exhibitions in Europe and China.) He was one of the first artists to recognize that Greenberg’s emphasis on “stain” painting and Judd’s stress on the “specific object” denied cultural difference. Exploring his childhood memories, and the spaces in which he grew up, in Chengdu, China, and in Hong Kong, he knew that he would never be accepted into the US art world unless he performed as a White abstract painter, which he refused to do.

In his diverse explorations, Diao exposes a deeply held American art world prejudice, which is that the pursuit of the optical precludes an interest in cultural upbringing and biography. This is perhaps why Jack Bankowsky, writing for Artforum (March 1990), felt compelled to characterize Diao’s career as an “extended bout with abstraction [that] constitutes one of the longer, stranger sagas in the annals of recent painting.” Diao’s bout with abstraction looks decidedly less strange when you realize that it preceded Kerry James Marshall’s engagement with Newman in paintings such as “Untitled, Red (If They Come in the Morning)” (2011).

If you want to understand what might irk the art world, you need only go to the exhibition David Diao: On Barnett Newman, 1991–2023 at Greene Naftali, which brings together 12 paintings the former has made about the influential latter artist, who produced 118 paintings between 1944 and 1970, the year of his death. Diao’s acrylic paintings incorporate silkscreen, fabricated vinyl forms, and collage — materials and processes Newman did not use. Eschewing the postmodern strategies of citation and parody, Diao looks closely at an irrefutable facet of Newman’s art and career in each work, and uses him as a sounding board to explore both his own fascination with the artist and the contradictory legacies of modernism.

Although I had previously seen paintings from this group, I did not realize until this exhibition how thorough and open-ended this series is, or the range of ways that Diao has examined Newman’s work, relying on widely available facts, such as the number of paintings he made during each year of his career.

One of Diao’s responses to Newman seems to be puzzlement. The first painting I encountered in the exhibition was “Barnett Newman: The Sublime Is Now” (2023). Diao collaged the front and back cover of Tiger’s Eye, an artist-run magazine, along with pages of Newman’s contribution to the magazine’s theme, “The Ides of Art, Six Opinions on What Is Sublime in Art?” In 1948, three years after World War II ended and images of the Holocaust became widely circulated, I think it is fair to ask what possessed Newman to write about the sublime. The sublime is an experience that is both awe inspiring and terrifying, such as the boundlessness of the universe. What does it mean to make art that rejects all traces of history? Newman, who wanted to wrest this word out of its historical context of European philosophy, concludes his essay with this comment:

The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history. 

If pure abstraction dispensed with figure, space, and history, what do you do after this has been achieved, especially if you are committed to painting? This is one of the questions motivating Diao. 

In “Barnett Newman: Chronology of Work (Updated)” (2010), Diao is updating an earlier painting, “Barnett Newman: Chronology of Work 1” (1990). Since the earlier painting was not in this exhibition, I cannot say if the chronology was changed, but the use of “updated” suggests that new information prompted changes. At the same time, his use of charts and diagrams calls their accuracy into doubt. For all the fixedness of the “verifiable information” he includes, he knows we live in a fluid world and that change is the only thing that is permanent. What the updated version does convey is Diao’s sense of humor about his undertaking, which further adds to the complexity of his engagement with one of the pillars of Abstract Expressionism.

Diao uses a catalogue in his possession as the basis of the painting “BN: Spine 2” (2013). A jagged white line, echoing Newman “zips,” bisects the purple rectangle (a color in which he never painted). While Newman achieved a retinal vibration with large expanses of unmodulated color, dematerializing the surface in his late paintings, Diao applies his acrylic layers with a palette knife, merging color and materiality into a tight skin. By looking to a purple catalogue for the painting, Diao reminds us that facts may be neutral, but which facts are selected and how they are presented are not. 

Diao’s multilayered engagement with Newman is one of the high water marks of painting in the past 30 years. His scrutiny of painting’s promises and doubts never leads him to a conclusion. That ambivalence sets him at odds with many of his contemporaries. Exploring race, the history, of abstraction and utopian thinking, childhood, and pop culture, plus his own life as an artist living in the diaspora, Diao is a major figure in art. It is time we recognize and celebrate that.

David Diao: On Barnett Newman, 1991–2023 continues at Greene Naftali (508 West 26th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) though January 13. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

A white dress on a lone hill surrounded by woods. A line of brides, their heads replaced with a stack of books, a heap of twigs, an atomic model made of lead. Gowns dotting an empty greenhouse. A bucolic terrain eerily still.

One might be forgiven for mistaking the first ruminative minutes of Anselm, shot in 3D with 6K resolution, for an unusually somber outtake from The Polar Express. But in Wim Wenders’s imaginative, image-driven documentary about his friend, German artist Anselm Kiefer, the three-dimensionality serves less to entertain than to sensorily envelope and engross. From the plaster comprising “Femmes Martyres” (2018–19), the sculptural installation described above, to the ship-container towers over La Ribaute, Kiefer’s 100-acre estate in southern France, all surfaces are exceedingly tactile. Kiefer’s artworks punctuate a cinematic field of sweeping, multiplanar proportions — to which Wenders invites us to revel and recoil. 

Wenders’s shot composition mirrors the dense layering of materials that comprise the eponymous artist’s massive collaged works: scorched sunflowers, shattered glass, the rusted handlebars of a vintage bike. The camera moves between the planes of each shot as a dancer moves onstage. It’s no surprise that the director’s first 3D venture, in 2011, was a documentary about dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch.

Collaborative in both spirit and methodology, Anselm is less an homage to an individual than an intense poetic dialogue between two visionary German artists grappling with the relationship of form and content, collective trauma and creativity. Both born in 1945, and longtime friends, Kiefer and Wenders represent a specific generation of German citizens forced to reckon with their nation’s past crimes, which have haunted their entire lives. 

Superimposing footage of post-World War II German rubble onto the poetry of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, Wenders depicts the 78-year-old artist in his youth, middle age, and as he is today, suggesting that his art cannot be understood without grasping his life experiences during different eras in postwar Europe. (Kiefer’s earlier years are performed by Wenders’s grand-nephew and Kiefer’s own son, respectively, intertwining the legacy and creativity of the film’s creator and subject.)

Thus it’s unfortunate that Wenders does not acknowledge the continuing relevance of the themes Kiefer probes — collective memory, the willful erasure of traumatic history, the culpability of the German people and, by extension, Whiteness itself. As much as Kiefer and Wenders are still contemplating the ethnic and cultural myths that undergirded the rise of National Socialism and laid the groundwork for the Holocaust, why not relate these myths to the more recent rise of fascism and alt-right extremism throughout the world?

What does it mean for a film addressing overtly political themes to remain apolitical? As a director, Wenders has often limned this question: his 2023 Perfect Days pays tribute to a fictional toilet cleaner in Tokyo, but refrains from any sustained class critique; his 1987 Wings of Desire follows a brooding angel who falls in love with a circus performer in a divided Berlin. “Every film is political,” Wenders claims in his 1988 book The Logic of Images. “Most political of all are those that pretend not to be: ‘entertainment’ movies. They are the most political films there are because they dismiss the possibility of change. In every frame they tell you everything’s fine the way it is.”

While Anselm’s chief aim is not to entertain, it still resists framing Kiefer’s oeuvre within a contemporary sociopolitical context. While not an outspoken political voice, Kiefer has taken a quiet stand against both American imperialism and the consumeristic nature of the global art market — neither of which the film addresses.

“The greatest myth,” Kiefer intones slowly in voiceover, “is the human race itself.” This is one of the film’s many maxims that feels as profound as it is abstruse. Thankfully, the myth of the Great Male Artist isn’t what Wenders ultimately embraces, as Kiefer’s indebtedness to others is consistently scattered across the screen. It’s more accurate to see Anselm as a poignant, elegiac meditation on what it meant for two German men to make art in the aftermath of 20th-century carnage. How this relates to the 21st century remains largely ambiguous, suggesting the limited reach of both men’s spectacular imagery.

Anselm opens in select theaters on December 15.

As workers and tourists traversed the cobblestone streets of Lower Manhattan today, December 15, about 20,000 red paper poppies rested in front of the New York Stock Exchange, each flower commemorating the life of a Palestinian person killed by Israeli forces since October 7.

Around 30 artists and activists assembled to create the installation around 9am, some folding pieces of paper, others holding banners that read “stop funding genocide,” and a few distributing flyers to passersby. A police car was stationed nearby, but the activists were able to move forward with the action without interruption, leaving the area around noon.

The unaffiliated activist collective started making the poppies around Thanksgiving, when the Palestinian death toll was around 13,000. As the number climbed, the group made additional poppies out of tissue paper, felt, and tablecloth fabric, which they finished by twisting, taping, or tying with string.

Abbie Goldberg, a Crown Heights-based 29-year-old artist who works in puppetry, drag, and theater, told Hyperallergic that the flowers reference Félix González-Torres’s 1991 artwork “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.),” an installation comprising 175 pounds (the average adult male body weight) of wrapped candy that viewers are encouraged to take a piece from. That year, González-Torres’s partner Ross Laycock died of complications due to AIDS.

“It’s celebrating the sweetness of his life and also the complicity in his death, which is the same idea we had behind the poppies — continuing to make them and inviting others to make them as a way to be a part of this growing pile, honoring [Palestinian] lives,” Goldberg said. “But also, as US citizens, we are complicit in their death. The stock exchange, especially, is complicit in this destruction.”

Goldberg noted the statistics on the flyers: Defense contractors Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin have seen their stock prices surge since the October 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,200 Israeli civilians and combatants. At the bottom of the sheets of paper, four questions asked the reader to consider their role in the ongoing violence, an idea Goldberg said is based on AIDS activist organization Gran Fury’s similar strategies.

Ariel Friedlander, a 26-year-old artist and arts educator who is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace and ACT UP, elaborated on the commonalities between today’s installation and González-Torres’s 1991 interactive artwork.

“A public display of these handmade paper poppies is meant to recall that feeling of loss,” Friedlander in reference to the death of the artist’s partner. “And of another government-sanctioned tragedy.”

The activists intermittently read poems about Palestine by authors including Noor Hindi and Refaat Alareer, who was killed last week in an Israeli airstrike. Ali, 30, and Carla, 28, a married couple from Savannah, Georgia, who preferred to use their first names, stopped to create a few flowers on their way to catch the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. They said they are heavily involved in pro-Palestine organizing in their home city.

“It’s hard to see that you’re not able to do anything, but at least I’m able to support people doing something,” Ali said.

Rachel Goldberg (Abbie Goldberg’s sibling), a 26-year-old artist in Crown Heights who is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, described how they think artists can help continue to cultivate awareness.

“In a way, activism is a performance, and we need to be constantly making that performance very interesting in order to engage others,” Goldberg said. “Maybe they haven’t seen something exactly like this before,” Goldberg said. “And it starts those conversations.”

While a few pedestrians stomped through the flowers and yelled dismissive comments at the activists, most accepted the flyers, many stopping to look at the poppies below the twinkling Christmas decorations on the New York Stock Exchange.

“I see Jewish safety and Jewish liberation inextricably bound up in Palestinian liberation and freedom,” Abbie Goldberg told Hyperallergic. “Our struggles are bound up together, and we need to really show up.”

An ancient larger-than-life sandstone Buddha head, a bronze sculpture of a seated Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, and a 10th-century goddess statuette from a remote temple complex are among 16 looted Khmer works currently in the process of repatriation back to Cambodia and Thailand, according to announcements by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) released today, December 15.

Fourteen of the pieces will be returned to Cambodia and two will be returned to Thailand, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art said effectively expunges its collection of all known Khmer artwork connected to infamous antiquities trafficker Douglas Latchford, who was indicted in 2019 for purchasing works stolen from Cambodian heritage sites and illicitly dealing the looted items on the international market for over half a century. (Latchford died in 2020, before his trial).

Made between the 9th and 14th centuries, the sculptures are prime examples of the Hindu and Buddhist religious systems that dominated the era in which they were crafted. Ten of the 16 items will remain on display in The Met’s galleries for South Asian art with updated labels noting their deaccession from the museum’s collection while arrangements for their return are made, a Met spokesperson told Hyperallergic.

The museum’s repatriation efforts come after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published a report in March that revealed The Met’s collection holds more than a thousand objects connected to individuals accused or convicted of antiquities theft. After several art seizures by the SDNY, the museum announced in May that it would undertake several initiatives to reassess its 1.5 million object collection for looted works, including the hiring of four provenance researchers to review its holdings.

“The Met has been diligently working with Cambodia and the US Attorney’s Office for years to resolve questions regarding these works of art, and new information that arose from this process made it clear that we should initiate the return of this group of sculptures,” The Met’s Director and Chief Executive Officer Max Hollein said in today’s statement. In 2013, the museum voluntarily returned a pair of sculptures known as the “Kneeling Attendants” to Cambodia after learning they had been pillaged from the forested Koh Ker temple complex, the former capital of the Angkorian empire. One of the items now being returned, a sculpture of a female goddess missing its arms and feet, was also looted from this site, where fragments and its original plinth remain as of last November.

Since 2012, SDNY has been investigating and initiating the return of dozens of illegally trafficked Cambodian artifacts. In September, the office came to an agreement with the family of George Lindemann to return 33 stolen antiquities that investigators estimate cost the late billionaire at least $20 million. Several months earlier in June, Latchford’s daughter Julia Copleston also reached a settlement with SDNY to forfeit a 7th-century bronze Vietnamese statue depicting a Hindu deity in addition to $12 million of her father’s money.

At a ceremony on December 5 at the Turkish Consulate of New York, 41 looted ancient artworks that had been recovered by the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office in recent months were repatriated to Turkey. Among these were eight bronzes that originated in the ancient Roman city of Bubon in the mountainous southwestern region near modern Burdur. These include pieces handed over by New York’s Fordham Museum of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Worcester Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Noticeably absent from the group, however, is the statue known until recently as “The Emperor as Philosopher, Probably Marcus Aurelius,” at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), by far the largest, most significant, and most impressive work associated with Bubon in any American museum. Unlike other museums presented in the past year with evidence that they owned works looted from this site, the CMA opted not to surrender its piece immediately. Instead, the CMA has filed a lawsuit against the Manhattan District Attorney, seeking a declaration that it is the “rightful” and “lawful” owner of the headless bronze statue that has been the centerpiece of its Roman collection and one of the museum’s star attractions since 1986. The CMA claims that the connection between their statue and Bubon is unproven. However, there is far less uncertainty about the piece’s provenance and identification among experts than the museum suggests.  

In May 1967, Turkish authorities, acting on a tip about archaeological looting, discovered a stunning, over-life-sized nude bronze statue hidden in the tiny village of İbecik. Villagers led them to a fresh pit at the nearby Roman site of Bubon. Archaeologists soon arrived and uncovered a large, two-sided platform and several free-standing statue bases. These were inscribed with the names of 14 Roman emperors and empresses, the footprints of the statues that once stood atop them clearly visible. Another inscription identified the structure as a shrine to Rome’s rulers. But the statues had all disappeared, except for the one the authorities seized, which is today in the Burdur Archaeological Museum. 

Meanwhile, starting in the mid-1960s, an extraordinary number of extremely rare ancient bronze statues and Roman imperial portrait heads began showing up out of nowhere on the art market. Several — possibly all — were handled by the notorious antiquities trafficker Robert Hecht. The pieces surfaced slowly and singly until a bold, young Boston-based art dealer named Charles Lipson bought four statues in Switzerland in late 1967. Three of them portray idealized nude male figures in contrapposto stances with their right arm raised. One of the nudes still has its head and is recognizable as the Roman emperor Lucius Verus. The fourth figure wears the mantle and adopts the pose typical of ancient philosopher portrait statues. 

Cornelius Vermeule, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at the time, was the first to discuss Lipson’s bronzes in public. In talks and publications in 1967 and ’68, he divulged details that may have come from Hecht, including the statues’ discovery in southwest Turkey, their connection to a handful of other recently-surfaced bronzes, and the identity of one of the headless nudes as Septimius Severus (Hecht would later sell a bronze head of that emperor to a Danish museum, presumably the match to Lipson’s statue). 

At the time, Vermeule was unaware of the 1967 events at Bubon, and hypothesized that the bronze group came from a different site in the region, the ancient city of Cremna, whose recent looting was widely known. But in the 1970s, Turkish archaeologist Jale Inan began studying the connections between the recent art market bronzes and the one seized by Turkish authorities in 1967. In 1978, she published a lengthy scholarly article in the Istanbuler Mitteilungen matching the bronzes to particular inscriptions on the plundered statue bases at Bubon.

Even before this connection was made, Lipson had been struggling to sell his statues, which he’d borrowed heavily to acquire. The art world of the 1960s and ‘70s is hardly remembered for its deference to cultural patrimony laws. But even by the lax standards of that era, Lipson’s bronze quartet was beyond the pale. Good-faith antiquities buyers could convince themselves that a single, unprovenanced piece might have come from an old, forgotten aristocratic collection. But it’s much harder to sustain that belief in the face of four previously unknown, extremely rare statues of outstanding quality that surface out of nowhere all at once. Such a group can only be a recent, illicit discovery. 

It took Lipson 18 years to find buyers unfazed by these issues. Finally, in 1985, the collectors Leon Levy and Shelby White, a trustee at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchased the Lucius Verus statue (seized from her home by the Manhattan DA in 2022 and repatriated last year). The New York dealer Edward H. Merrin took the rest off Lipson’s hands, brokering the sale of the clothed figure to the CMA in 1986 and buying the other two himself in 1987. These two circulated among private collectors for years. One, which had been on a long-term loan to the Metropolitan Museum, was seized by the Manhattan DA in March and returned to Turkey; the other is rumored to be abroad. By 1988, Lipson had folded his business, apparently changed his last name, and disappeared from the art world. In 1993, Inan published a second article on Bubon with additional evidence tying the statues to the site, including new excavations, interviews with the looters, and the looters’ own handwritten notes on their finds and sales. Further evidence of the connection came out in a recent New York Times article revealing that Turkish investigators have reconfirmed the details of the looting with some of the original looters themselves.

Of particular relevance to the CMA’s case against the Manhattan DA: First, to my knowledge, contrary to the museum’s claim in the court documents that “many scholarly articles” have drawn “different conclusions about the statue’s origins,” no scholar has publicly contested the association of Lipson’s statues with Bubon since the appearance of Inan’s articles thirty years ago (she died in 2001). This is not because it is an “older theory,” as the CMA calls it in the lawsuit, and therefore irrelevant; it is because it has been, as far as I am aware, universally accepted by the field as correct. Indeed, the biggest proponent of the association between the statue and the site of Bubon was the CMA itself. The museum borrowed the Bubon head at the Worcester Art Museum to display alongside their statue when it debuted in 1987, along with photos of other Bubon pieces. They also sent their own curator, Arielle Kozloff, on a research trip to Bubon to learn more about the piece’s origins. Kozloff published an article in the museum’s scholarly Bulletin hypothesizing when and why the statues were set up there in antiquity (but never questioning that this was where they had been found by looters in the 1960s, contrary to the misleading insinuation of the CMA’s court filing). She even thanked Hecht for information in the acknowledgments. 

The museum claims in its lawsuit that based on “subsequent research,” Kozloff has had a change of heart, and that “she now believes that the Philosopher did not come from Bubon and that any previously stated connection between Bubon and the Philosopher was mere conjecture.” This alleged “subsequent research” has never been published, however, so there is no way to know when, why or based upon what evidence it was undertaken and no way to assess its merits. Nor has the museum ever put forward an alternative account of the statue’s origins. 

The “subsequent research” also apparently extends not only to the matter of the statue’s origins but to its very identity. For 36 years, in all of its public communications about the statue — the acquisition press release, multiple articles by Kozloff, handbooks, gallery labels, webpage text, and videos — the CMA identified the statue not as a Greek philosopher (which the costume and pose might suggest) but rather as “probably” the Greek philosophy-loving Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. This identification is supported not only by the statue’s impressive scale and quality, but also by its association with Bubon, where there is an empty pedestal inscribed with the name “Marcus Aurelius.” Again, contrary to the claims of the CMA court filing, the identity of this statue as a Roman emperor has never, to my knowledge, been questioned in print since Inan’s articles. Not, that is, until this summer, when, without any explanation, this well-established, longstanding identification was hastily scrubbed from the museum’s website and replaced with a description claiming total ignorance about who or what the statue is. Whereas the label formerly described the figure as “The Emperor as Philosopher, probably Marcus Aurelius,” and dated it very specifically to the period immediately following Marcus’ death (“180-200 CE,”) it is now given the very generic title “Draped Male Figure,” and dated very vaguely to a broad, 350-year span (“150 BCE – 200 CE”). The recent court filing doubles down on this cynical, desperate erasure of historical knowledge, a complete betrayal of the museum’s educational mission. 

While deeply dismaying, it is perhaps not entirely surprising that the CMA has been so much less willing than other American museums to surrender its Bubon bronze. Most of those other pieces were gifts to those institutions, while Worcester purchased its piece in 1966, several years before its origins at Bubon were known. Those pieces are also all relatively unexceptional portrait heads or fragmentary body parts — rare in bronze but easily substituted in museum displays by other works in their holdings. Compared to those acquisitions, the risk taken by the CMA when it paid $1.85 million (an astronomical sum for an ancient work at the time) for an extraordinarily unique, monumental statue, whose likely illicit origins had been published in a major scholarly journal eight years earlier, was enormous. The Cleveland Museum of Art took a gamble in 1986 that none of its peers in the museum field had been willing to take. No other American museum would touch Lipson’s once-in-a-lifetime, life-sized classical masterpieces — not the Boston MFA, not the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not even the famously acquisitive Getty. Lipson’s statues were toxic from the start, and their toxicity has only grown in the years since the CMA made its purchase, as the public’s awareness of the destructiveness of archaeological looting, discomfort with appropriating cultural heritage, and attention to museum ethics have increased. It’s time for the CMA to relinquish its claim to this plundered artwork and allow it to be reunited with the other statues it stood beside in antiquity — before its toxins undermine the museum’s very soul. 

The Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM), artist Yuan Goang-Ming, and curator Abby Chen are pleased to announce Everyday War, the exhibition representing Taiwan at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Yuan will use video art to create a space with an “everyday” domestic feel, contemplating the present-day realities of life and the hidden threats that underlie “the difficulty of dwelling poetically.”

Everyday War is expected to include five video artworks and a kinetic installation, of which two are new and four were previously released by the artist. The exhibition expands on Yuan’s signature audio-visual vocabulary, exploring themes such as home, dwelling, and an uncanny tomorrow as seen in “Dwelling” (2014), “Tomorrowland” (2018), and “Everyday Manuever” (2018). Employing a prosaic view with an air of warning, intended to magnify a sense of unanticipated crises, these works project anxieties about the current political and social environment. There is a state of eerie suspense due to escalating geopolitical tensions surrounding the Pacific island chain, across the straits, and around the world.

This solo exhibition will try to metaphorically explore the hidden fears of and threats to Taiwan in its current state of existence, and by asking questions about the future, it will re-examine the realities of the present, considering “war as part of normal life” and “war becoming the new normal”.

Yuan Goang-Ming

Yuan’s new piece, “Everyday War”, from which the exhibition takes its title, is a single-channel video work featuring before-and-after scans of domestic space. Glass shatters loudly as warplanes fly in one after another, destroying the objects in the room. Eventually, all the aircraft annihilate one another, leaving the entire house in ruins in the aftermath of battle. The camera pans back and forth in a straight, steady line, gradually bathing the entire interior in lights and shadows. The collapsed home slowly returns to its original, unscathed appearance, announcing a surreal prophecy with profound tension.

Yuan Goang-Ming’s observations and portrayals of Taiwan’s state of affairs aim to emphasize that contemporary warfare has evolved from the actual firing of artillery to subtle, invisible expressions: “War as part of normal life,” post-capitalist unequal distribution, contagion, cyber attacks, and the oppression of various religious and ethnic groups. War has become the “new normal” within the dwelling.

The intertwining multitudes of home encompass host and guest, private and public spheres, physical and virtual realms, the imagined and lived experiences. It reflects an artist’s competing reality of living in Taiwan, where fear coexists with courage. In an era of great uncertainty and division, Yuan’s declaration of one’s own vulnerability is the very fortitude and truth that transforms into empathy and shared connectedness.

The universal human condition of conflict perpetuates, so does the persistent search for the poetic essence. It is never settled in any dwelling. It lies in the moments of bravery, by those pursuing and acting.

Abby Chen, curator

‣ This week in art market shenanigans, a British couple avoids paying millions in inheritance taxes by donating a Renaissance bronze to a museum instead. Harriet Sherwood writes in the Guardian:

The AiL scheme allows people to settle an inheritance tax bill by transferring important cultural, scientific or historic objects to the nation. In the past decade, the scheme has brought £479m worth of artworks and other objects into public ownership.

Antico’s parcel-gilt bronze figure, inlaid with silver eyes, was “the quintessential Italian Renaissance bronze masterpiece”, the Fitzwilliam said. Created around 1520-22, it is just 41.3cm (16 in) high.

‣ A Pennsylvania school board president recently chose to be sworn into her role on a stack of banned books, rather than a religious text. The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Maddie Hanna has the story:

Smith, who was chosen as the president of the new Democratic-led board Monday, wanted to make a symbolic gesture — setting a new tone after the former GOP-dominated board passed a policy prohibiting “sexualized content” that led to bans of two books and paved the way for challenges of 60 others.

Smith, like the other Democrats who were in the minority, had opposed that policy, which became one of the most contentious measures passed by the board in its tumultuous two years in power.

“I’m not particularly religious. The Bible doesn’t hold significant meaning for me, and given everything that has occurred in the last couple of years, the banned books, they do mean something to me at this point,” Smith said Tuesday. She wanted to make clear “the commitment I’ve had to fighting for the books, and for our students’ freedom to read.”

‣ Journalist Masha Gessen’s New Yorker article on Germany’s antisemitism policies and relationship to Israel cost them a political thought prize named for philosopher Hannah Arendt after the German foundation behind the award denounced the essay. In it, Gessen writes:

Some of the great Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust spent the rest of their lives trying to tell the world that the horror, while uniquely deadly, should not be seen as an aberration. That the Holocaust happened meant that it was possible—and remains possible. The sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman argued that the massive, systematic, and efficient nature of the Holocaust was a function of modernity—that, although it was by no means predetermined, it fell in line with other inventions of the twentieth century. Theodor Adorno studied what makes people inclined to follow authoritarian leaders and sought a moral principle that would prevent another Auschwitz.

In 1948, Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter that began, “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Just three years after the Holocaust, Arendt was comparing a Jewish Israeli party to the Nazi Party, an act that today would be a clear violation of the I.H.R.A.’s definition of antisemitism.

‣ In a thought-provoking essay for Jewish Currents, rabbi and activist Lexie Botzum reflects on the history of Hanukkah and how to subvert the colonial dichotomy of light and dark:

We don’t have to look far to find colonial invocations of these tropes. Soon after Israel began waging its genocidal war against Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted that what we are witnessing is “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.” Israeli soldiers have erected menorahs amid the ruins in northern Gaza, which Chabad emissaries insist “will bring light to the darkest places.” At the recent pro-war march in Washington, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson declared, “This is a fight between good and evil, between light and darkness, between civilization and barbarism.”

Given these nefarious deployments of the rhetoric of light “banishing” the darkness, how can we tell a story of Hanukkah that does not capitulate to a narrative of racist domination? In their essay “A Little More Darkness,” rabbinic intern Kendra Saperstein writes: “Taking my own Black existence seriously means that it is not enough to rely on universal metaphors for light during this time [Hanukkah].” How, then, might we heed this call to, in the words of writer bell hooks, “talk about the need to see darkness differently”? If not light as vanquisher of darkness, then what?

‣ TikTokers have are quitting vaping en masse, but it’s not for the reasons you might expect. Wedaeli Chibelushi explains for BBC how increased awareness around trafficking in Congolese cobalt mines is driving the online movement:

Videos of TikTokers like Ms Ndango pledging to quit vaping have indeed gained widespread attention. One of the most watched – by creator @itskristinamf – has been viewed more than 1.7 million times.

On Ms Ndango’s own videos, dozens of TikTok users have responded with comments like: “You aren’t alone. Just started the same thing” and “GIRL I QUIT TODAY TOO WE IN THIS TOGETHER”.

However, Christoph Vogel, author of Conflict Minerals, Inc.: War, Profit and White Saviourism in Eastern Congo, believes such digital activism is a “double-edged sword”.

It can draw mass attention to important issues, but can often only do so through “massive simplification”, he tells the BBC.

‣ Homeschooling in the US has a fraught past propped up by spotty studies, and Laura Meckler took a deep dive into one researcher’s outsized influence over its endurance for the Washington Post:

But Ray’s research is nowhere near as definitive as his evangelism makes it sound. His samples are not randomly selected. Much of his research has been funded by a powerful home-schooling lobby group. When talking to legislators, reporters and the general public, he typically dispenses with essential cautions and overstates the success of the instruction he champions. Critics say his work is driven more by dogma than scholarly detachment.

“You see this in a lot of areas,” said Jim Dwyer, a professor at William & Mary Law School who wrote a book about home schooling. “Someone with an ideological agenda can concoct bad social science and convince naive researchers and naive audiences to accept some position. It’s clearly true of Ray. … The research he relies on is not scientifically valid.”

‣ Penguins — they’re just like us! For National Geographic, Carrie Arnold reports on a recent study on the penguin parents who take four-second naps so they can still keep an eye on their babies:

Anyone who has ever nodded off briefly while on the subway or watching TV has experienced a microsleep, says Chiara Cirelli, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin who wasn’t involved in the study.

In both humans and penguins, microsleeps occur during times of fatigue and exhaustion, yet nesting chinstrap penguins seem to have a near-exclusive reliance on it, Cirelli says. Studying sleep in natural environments is difficult, so “the simple fact that they were able to record data in these conditions is incredible.”

‣ Moira Donegan reviews journalist Allison Yarrow’s new book on contemporary birthing practices for the Nation, examining its flawed claims about gender and womanhood:

Giving birth isn’t dangerous, Yarrow tells us, and you don’t need a doctor to help you do it. If you’re scared, it’s because you’ve been brainwashed; if it hurts, it’s because you’re rushing things and don’t trust your own body. Your body knows what to do—not your mind. In this way, Birth Control not only offers a critique of the troubling history of sexism in the medical profession; it also partakes of the subtler and more insidious mythology of biological destiny advanced by the natural childbirth movement—one in which the story of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood carries with it clear prescriptions about what women and their bodies should do and be.

‣ Last week, the Israeli military killed Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer. His friend and fellow poet Mosab Abu Toha, who was abducted by Israeli forces in November, reads Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die” aloud in his honor:

‣ Fashion historian and YouTuber Mina Le dropped a longform video essay titled “In Defense of Wearing Hats,” and it’s a fascinating watch on the garment’s history, especially as we head into oversized puffball hat season (guilty).

‣ Garrison Harrison out here bravely giving a voice to the voiceless, aka White men who wear their traditional cultural garb of salmon shorts and Patagonia vests:

‣ Cartoonist Edith Pritchett parodies the British Museum’s collecting habits:

‣ And lastly, a peek into this glorious canine holiday gathering for my fellow Bernese mountain dog lovers:

Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

LOS ANGELES — “[Nani Chacon] addresses how a secure home is essential.” This the phrase, from the press release for Chacon’s exhibition +Home+ at Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, forced me to pause. With the climate crisis impacting our shared home of the earth, continually increasing unhoused populations, and ongoing military onslaughts against the people of Gaza, I was eager to turn to an Indigenous artist, a Diné woman, and engage with her critical and creative perspectives on home.

The exhibition is a mediation on notions of home through the lens of Chacon’s ancestors, lived experience, and the legacies we leave for future generations. She began by asking questions — What does the idea of home actually mean? What do we really need? — and examining the different facets and nuances of home, from the familiar and comforting to the potential of a sacred transformative space or the body as home. The show also reflects on oral traditions and creation stories as narratives of survivance.

Beyond the exhibition, Chacon’s practice extends to murals and public works, illustration, installation, and design, all of which can be understood as participatory storytelling. Reflecting on storytelling, Diné creation stories, and Indigenous oral traditions, the artist said in conversation with Hyperallergic, “It is totally by design that all our histories are oral because it invites connection, it invites generational connection, and it lacks ownership. Everyone can own it. And I think when you lack ownership you invite everyone into the conversation.”

An intimate dialogue unfolds among the exhibition’s five works, beginning with “I Miss You…” (all works 2023), an inviting portrait of Chacon’s grandmother’s couch. Broken in and worn, the couch serves as both a refuge for and witness to the lives around it. Navajo weaving and textiles are folded and placed on the couch to protect from the constant use and provide warmth to its sitters. A blue translucent arch traverses the couch diagonally, emphasizing that this is not a static domestic object.

“Transformational Space: Walking clockwise/counterclockwise” stacks four perspectives of a hogan, a traditional Diné dwelling. The title highlights how sacred space contains transformative power that can raise consciousness and acknowledges how those spaces are meant to be entered. Conversely, “In Her Body She Made a Home…” explores treating one’s body as home. A female figure is both exposed and veiled as she washes her hair in a woven basket. While we can see the figure’s brown breast, Chacon drapes a textile on her back like armor. Yellow crosses sprinkled over her bent back and parts of her body (beyond her line of sight) convey a presence beyond what’s visible. 

The last two works look at home in terms of solitude and creation. Inspired by a Diné creation story, “Asdzáá Yoolgai Travels West Seeking Solitude” portrays a goddess in solitude. The turquoise sky hues match her eye shadow, pointing to her grounded gaze. In “Spider Woman Creates a Home,” a spider actively weaves on a loom. This points to the ways ongoing agency is required to establish and maintain a home. Much like spiders, Chacon shared, “All people, we are always in search of creating and preserving our home.”  

Chacon’s work isn’t prescriptive, nor does attempt to define “home”; rather, she invites us into an ongoing story to expand our scope of vision, as a starting place for radical change.

Nani Chacon: +Home+ continues at Timothy Hawkinson Gallery (7424 Beverly Boulevard, Fairfax, Los Angeles) through December 16. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.  

HARTFORD, Conn. — Does photographing the intimate features of one’s life inherently objectify them? This question permeates Talia Chetrit’s exhibition Matrix 193 at the Wadsworth Atheneum, the photographer’s first solo museum show in the United States. Well known for her arresting self-portraiture, Chetrit’s work spans genres and techniques, ranging from still lifes and portraits to fashion and archival imagery. This diverse mixture is well represented by the 15 film photographs on view, often picturing those close to her, in particular her partner Denis and their son. Chetrit’s imagery presents a compelling statement about the fine line between self-investigation and self-objectification in photography, a medium renowned for bridging the public and the private spheres.

In addition to her fine art practice, Chetrit is a successful fashion photographer, and several of the images on view are from magazine editorials. In many cases self-portraiture seeks to explore the self while commercial fashion photography objectifies its subjects, yet through Chetrit’s lens, the two meet in a dynamic that is, alternately, dissonant and harmonious. A nude photograph of Denis wearing a barely there ensemble, attended by their son in a tutu, layers what might otherwise read as a high-fashion advertisement with a comment on masculinity and traditional family roles, as Chetrit assumes the active stance of the photographer and her family becomes the object of a complex gaze.

She applies this approach to her self-portraits as well. In one of the exhibition’s most striking images, a pregnant Chetrit poses nude above a mirror, legs splayed, camera pressed to her face. Despite what we might view, initially, as in-your-face sexuality, it compels viewers to face questions about spectatorship: Is this an image of vulnerability or empowerment? Is it erotic or distant? Does it grant viewers entrance into something private or push them away? Chetrit has asserted that her work is not about private disclosure, and this image testifies to that; she may be turning her body into an object, even an eroticized one, but in so doing she’s really drawing attention to our reaction to it.

While it’s helpful (and not entirely inaccurate) to envision the exhibition as a kind of family photo album, replete with shots of her parents and her son shortly after birth, it’s less about personal investigation and more about conjuring the illusion of something ordinary — photos of family life — in order to question how ordinary that life really is. 

Chetrit selected a documentary by Barbara DeGenevieve (an artist whom Chetrit considers influential) entitled “Desperado” to be screened alongside the exhibition. The film features footage of DeGenevieve’s erotic encounters as well as a tense interview with a viewer of the footage. It’s an apt complement to Chetrit’s work: both artists train their lenses as much on their viewers’ assumptions as on the subject matter itself, often their own bodies. Chetrit’s photographs capture more than just faces and body parts — they show us something of ourselves as well. 

Talia Chetrit: Matrix 193 continues at the Wadsworth Atheneum (600 Main Street, Hartford, Connecticut) through January 7. The exhibition was curated by Jared Quinton.

Emerging from private holdings for the first time in nearly two centuries, a rediscovered pair of Rembrandt portraits is now on a long-term loan for public display at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. At nearly eight inches tall each, the portraits of Jan Willemsz van der Pluym and his wife Jaapgen Caerlsdr, whose son married the artist’s cousin, are said to be the smallest formal paintings (excluding studies) the Old Master ever created.

Created in 1635, the ovular paintings on panel remained in the family for over a hundred years until they were auctioned by the children of the couple’s great-great-grandson in 1760 following his death. The works passed through a few European nobles’ collections and were last sold in 1824 through Christie’s London to a private collection in the United Kingdom up until this summer. The auction house was consulted to sell the works again, and the pair was acquired by Henry Holtman for $14 million on July 6.

Scholars believe Jan Willemsz van der Pluym was a wealthy plumber from the Dutch city of Leiden who married Jaapgen Caerlsdr in 1591. Their only son, Dominicus van der Pluym, married Rembrandt’s first cousin on his mother’s side, Cornelia van Suytbroeck. Dominicus and Cornelia’s son, artist Karel van der Pluym, is thought to have apprenticed under Rembrandt and is recognized as the artist’s only heir.

Researchers at the Rijksmuseum collaborated with Christie’s to attribute the couple’s portraits as works by Rembrandt. The pair’s ages (Jan was 69, Jaapgen was 70) are inscribed on the works and were verified by the museum through research into their birth years. Technical research conducted through paint sample analysis and X-ray imaging confirmed that the pigments used throughout the portraits were frequently found in other Rembrandt works, and that the manner in which the Old Master built up their likeness was in line with other portraiture he completed between 1634 and 1635.

The loose, fast brushwork and small scale led the museum to believe that the works were completed as a favor to the couple, though Rembrandt reportedly painted larger renditions of their portraits.

As the Rijksmuseum hosts the largest collection of Rembrandt paintings in the world, Holterman decided that the two portraits should be displayed at the institution on a long-term loan. The tiny paintings are exhibited together alongside several other paintings from the artist’s lifetime.

Groups of demonstrators staged walk-in protests in Zara stores in Hannover, Germany, and Melbourne, Australia, this past week in response to a recent ad campaign by the fast-fashion brand that critics said appropriated images of Palestinian death and suffering. Carrying small bundles of white swaddling clothes, the activists denounced the ad for Zara’s Atelier collection, which featured model Kristen McMenamy standing in front of a partially destroyed studio set and holding mannequins shrouded in white plastic.

The since-removed campaign — which was apparently meant to advertise a new jacket line — was released earlier this month only to be met with swift scrutiny, as critics quickly pointed out its uncanny visual similarities to the real death and destruction in Gaza and began calling for a boycott of the company. For the past two months, Israel’s escalation on the occupied Palestinian territory has been distinguished by widespread photographs of white body bags covering dead Palestinian people and landscapes filled with the rubble of collapsed infrastructure across social media platforms.

“We have all seen the devastating images of shrouded bodies coming out of Gaza this is just an example but there are thousands more,” wrote Noor Amra, a Syrian-American ophthalmologist, on Instagram, calling Zara’s ads “a deliberate mock to Palestinians.”

Following the outrage, Zara pulled the controversial campaign and issued a statement on Tuesday, December 12, claiming that the marketing series was developed before Israel’s escalation began. “The campaign, that was conceived in July and photographed in September, presents a series of images of unfinished sculptures in a sculptor’s studio and was created with the sole purpose of showcasing craftmade garments in an artistic context,” the company said, adding that it “regrets that misunderstanding.”

Zara has not yet responded to Hyperallergic‘s request for additional comment.

Building on the online criticism, demonstrators in multiple countries including Germany, Canada, and Tunisia staged actions at Zara stores, carrying Palestinian flags, as shown in videos posted across social media earlier this week. One protest that took place at a Zara in Glasgow, Scotland, even led to the store’s closure for the day, Newsweek reported.

In Hannover, activists used swaddling clothes to draw attention to the massive number of children and infants killed by Israel’s bombardments, which the United Nations estimates is upwards of 12,743 — comprising approximately 70% of the 18,205 Palestinians killed since October 7 when Hamas militants launched an attack that resulted in the killings of 1,200 Israeli soldiers and civilians. This performance protest was also used in an action at Zara’s Melbourne location, as evidenced in a TikTok video that shows demonstrators carrying white bundles throughout the store and delivering them to employees working at the registers.

Some photos from the actions also showed window displays doused with what appears to be fake blood and red spray-praint, but it is unclear who was responsible for the work and whether it was part of the protests.

Below Zara’s Instagram statement about the withdrawal of the campaign, many users expressed their disappointment with the company’s response, commenting on the absence of an apology and reiterating their commitment to boycotting the brand.

“First of all, you should mention a direct apology to the people of the genocide who felt offended,” wrote Palestinian-American blogger Nisrin Issa. “Secondly, as a big company you should’ve been more careful when putting your customer’s need first, but this showed how careless you are about certain type of customers.”

The recent campaign is not the only instance in which Zara has been embroiled in allegations of anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiment. In 2021, the brand was criticized after its designer Vanessa Perilman sent incendiary messages to Palestinian model Qaher Harhash in response to Harhash’s social media posts addressing the killing of approximately 260 Palestinians by the Israeli military in May of that year. Zara’s parent company Inditex attempted to distance itself from Perilman’s comments by saying that they “do not reflect our core values of respect for one another, and we regret the offense that they have caused.” But the following year, the clothing brand landed itself in hot water again after hosting a campaign event for Israel’s right-wing National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

In addition to numerous allegations of plagiarism, the clothing brand has also been scrutinized for its ties to Uyghur forced labor, according to a new report by the Uyghur Rights Monitor, Sheffield Hallam University, and the Uyghur Centre for Democracy and Human Rights. The investigation found that “a substantial volume of apparel” from brands including H&M, Primark, and Zara was connected to forced labor in the Uyghur Region.

What do you get for the woman who commands a multibillion-dollar media empire? A place in the halls of history, of course. A newly commissioned portrait of Oprah Winfrey joining the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, was unveiled yesterday in a ceremony in the museum’s Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard. The oil painting by Chicago artist Shawn Michael Warren presents the iconic talk show host-turned-media mogul in virtuosic detail, wearing a dramatic purple dress with a full skirt and standing amid a greenscape on the grounds of her California home.

The life-sized framed portrait stands nearly seven feet tall and captures Winfrey flashing an easy smile, her gaze directed as though sharing a joke with someone standing behind the viewer to the right. A piece of greenery in her left hand could be interpreted as an olive branch, though the gesture is not one of extension or proffering, as the botanical symbolism might suggest.  

The dress is made from deep purple taffeta, masterfully rendered to capture the play of light in its folds and shiny surface. The color is apparently Winfrey’s favorite, and references her pivotal acting role in the 1985 Steven Spielberg film The Color Purple, based on the novel by Alice Walker. Winfrey has maintained her relationship with the franchise, as producer of a new film adaptation set to open on Christmas Day. Never one to waste a promotional opportunity, Winfrey plugged the movie in her speech at the unveiling, urging the audience to “get your tickets.”

On hand for the unveiling ceremony, Winfrey stood with Warren to see his finished work of her likeness for the very first time.

“I have never seen it,” she assured the audience before helping to pull the cloth on the massive, framed work. Winfrey seemed temporarily stunned as she examined Warren’s work for a long moment. Uncharacteristically quiet, Winfrey finally clapped a few times and went in to give the painter a hug.

“You did a great job,” she then told Warren. For a person who has been working in front of cameras for nearly 50 years and had her portrait taken literally thousands of times, Winfrey seemed legitimately moved by the experience.

Warren grew up in Chicago, where The Oprah Winfrey Show was broadcast for two decades, and had previously rendered Winfrey’s image in 2020 as part of a large-scale mural co-created with artists Jane Barthès, Anna Murphy, and Kalan Strauss. The mural is situated in Chicago’s West Loop, where Winfrey’s Harpo Studios once filmed the weekday talk show.

While an icon for many, Winfrey has also been criticized for her longtime engagement with diet culture, including peddling fad diets and using her considerable cultural clout to platform figures with questionable ethics, including Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz.

It could be argued that Oprah is among the most photographed people in the world, and one more image could hardly make a difference for a media icon of her stature — but it seemed, for a moment at least, that this one picture outweighed all her words. YOU get a portrait, Oprah! We haven’t seen her this excited since she released all those bees on a studio audience:

As we close the books on 2023, with its political absurdities, unfathomable atrocities, and aura of mounting pessimism, now is as good a time as ever to page through the months and remember what brought us together for moments of laughter. To acknowledge the ridiculousness of personhood is to embrace humanity, whether it be through connecting over ✧Girl Dinner✧ or learning about each other’s “Roman Empires.”

So let us take a moment to remember what brought a smile to our faces, a stitch in our sides, and the flashes of harmless but karmic justice upon those who went searching for it.

Barbie and Barbenheimer

I guess it’s not surprising considering the movie grossed over $1 billion internationally in under three months, but the hold that Barbie memes had on social media months before it even premiered needs to be studied. And when the initial meme stream dried out, the dam broke again from a cascade of “Barbenheimer” content sparked by the news that Greta Gerwig’s film release would coincide with that of Oppenheimer (2023). Despite the fun and games, the “Barbenheimer” marketing did receive criticism from Japanese media for trivializing nuclear warfare. All I can say is that I had “Kenough” of all of it by the end of summer …

Orca Attacks and the Imploded Submersible

So who remembers that June–July moment when the organized orca attacks on yachts suspiciously coincided with the “implosion” of that Titan submersible? You know, the one carrying those billionaires that was maneuvered by a PlayStation controller? I’m not saying that one was responsible for the other, but I’m not not saying that, either. The timing of the separate (until proven otherwise) incidents invited conspiracy theorists and anti-capitalists alike to make their own connections between the two. I mean … orcas are pretty smart and have been shown to have a chip on their shoulder.

“The Embrace” Martin Luther King Jr. Sculpture

One of few worthy art-related memes this year, and dating all the way back to January at that, was when the people of then-Twitter weighed in on photographs of Hank Willis Thomas’s “The Embrace” (2023), a bronze public sculpture honoring Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King in Boston, Massachusetts — and good lord, they did not hold back. Many pointed out the unintentional sexual imagery that’s impossible to unsee, perhaps causing Thomas himself to trip up with his own Freudian Slip about the criticism of the work on live TV.

“Dope” Francis

The viral Midjourney-generated image of puffer jacket Pope, also known as “Dope” Francis, was maybe just a flicker of a meme in the grand scheme of things, but it was so realistic at first glance that a ton of social media users were fooled when reposting it. “Dope” Francis also planted a seed for Hyperallergic‘s viral “April Fools” post about a fictional partnership between Balenciaga and the Vatican for a spiritual menswear line. Artificial intelligence for Good™.

Trump’s Mugshot

Despite the multiple AI generations depicting this very moment, we got the real deal earlier this year and it gave way to some unforgettable responses. The photo itself didn’t hold people’s attention for too long, but Trump’s expression, intentional or not, was clearly applicable to more situations beyond being booked and processed in a county jail.

Girl Dinner vs. Oyster Girl

Some of us are privy to ✧Girl Dinner✧, which the internet defines as a low-effort snack plate, and some of us can put it away like Oyster Girl, who slurped down 48 oysters and three lemon drops on a dud date and still had room for the next course. Both went viral this year, proof that people will always be fascinated with what women eat. I think the crux of it is whether or not you know what you want, and how you use your resources to get it. What else is there to say other than women contain multitudes? 💅 Just don’t ask me to quantify them unless you’re prepared for some Girl Math …

David Brooks’s Airport Dinner

Caught lying in 4K, unsuspecting New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks caught some major heat in September after complaining about the state of the economy due to a $78 burger and fries at an airport restaurant. 1911 Smokehouse Barbecue was not about to let that slide, though, setting the record straight with some receipts indicating that Brooks had imbibed several alcoholic drinks that he didn’t account for in his pointed lament. The Newark restaurant added insult to injury with a “D Brooks Special,” prompting social media users to chime in or add to the running gag.

Burning Man Mud-Bath

Mother Nature works in magical ways, doesn’t she? If the orcas were just a sign, Burning Man 2023 was a beacon of light concerning Earth’s omniscience for inconveniencing others. Not even a half-inch of rain upended the entire festival by making it impossible to get in or out of the “playa,” seriously harshing the vibes for a bunch of techies and influencers on their annual drug-fueled pilgrimage.

Roman Empire

Mixed in 2022 and leavened in 2023, this half-meme, half-research study revealed that a lot of men think about the Roman Empire pretty regularly. This took a lot of female content creators and social media users by surprise — myself included. I took Latin all throughout high school and I still don’t really get it, but it seems like it’s tapping into some male-dominated reflection on humanity’s technological and territorial achievements? Anyway, the Roman Empire trend opened the floodgates for different demographics or individuals to share their personal Roman Empires, which happen to include the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, devastating character deaths in literature and cinema, Princess Diana of Wales among other fascinations. So … what’s your Roman Empire?

Montgomery Brawl Folding Chair

Saved the best for last, just for you! Not only did the riverfront brawl that unfolded ( :~] ) in Montgomery, Alabama over the summer unleash a torrent of memes, it resurfaced some tidbits of Black history nestled in the archives of the web. It looks like the courts had a good sense of humor about it, too, since chair-wielder Reggie Bernard Ray made it out without jail time, only owing a fee and 50 hours of community service.

Honorable Mentions

As always, some memes were perfectly lovely but not quite year-defining material. Without further ado, who could forget:

The Shein Influencer Trip disaster:

The Boston Cop Slide video:

And last but certainly not least, Kevin James: