Editor’s note: Joel Shapiro died June 14, at age 83. In the final weeks of the sculptor’s life, Max Norman interviewed him for a career-spanning profile. What follows are some of Shapiro’s reflections on his storied legacy. This article will also appear in the annual “Icons” issue of Art in America, due out in late August.

Alongside the larger sculptures in what turned out to be Joel Shapiro’s last show in New York, at Pace Gallery this past fall, there were a few roughly painted, pin-studded models about the length of your forearm, perched on rectangular white plinths. They shared a room with small insectoid bronzes, so it wasn’t clear whether these wooden models were meant to be read as documents of Shapiro’s process or as its product. But the ambiguity was perhaps the point. “It’s when you’re doing the work that transformation happens,” Shapiro told me in April. “It’s actually physically working with wood, looking at it, cutting it, changing it, altering it, until it somehow satisfies some aspect of your unknown intent.” That’s what attracted him to sculpture in the first place, “It was a fact and a form,” he said.

To walk through Shapiro’s Long Island City studio—among the works in various states of undress beneath the lofty ceilings of the ground floor, up to the menagerie of smaller pieces on the third—was to be surrounded by facts and forms. In one sunny corner a branching cactus grew in a pot atop a dolly, held up with an armature of plywood and a green pole. At first glance, I thought it might be a work I’d never seen, or some caprice Shapiro threw together and then abandoned in another of his numerous experiments. It was, in fact, just a cactus.

But I wouldn’t have been too surprised, since Shapiro’s long career was sustained by constant inquiry into the most fundamental artistic questions, a kind of sculptural Manhattan Project that left no aspect of his medium unexamined. From gargantuan to Lilliputian and back again, from austerely abstract to cheekily representational, from the floor up onto the wall or onto stilts and then into the air, from senseless just across the threshold to meaning—with unashamed sincerity and unrelenting focus, Shapiro pushed sculpture to new places.

He is best known for his sculptures of the human figure, most often fashioned from long rectangles of painted wood or cast bronze, gracefully frozen in a gravitational in-between that tickles your brain and tightens your stomach. He developed not just an unmistakable style but also a signature sculptural language, a syntax of loose connections and obscurely intuitive forms, like the recognizable lines but unfamiliar harmonies of Schoenberg’s music.

Very few of his sculptures have titles, but the Pace show was something of an exception. At its heart were three large new works made of wooden volumes covered in fast-drying casein paint, which Shapiro has used on wood and paper since the 1970s. In one corner, the more than eight feet of Splay (2024) splayed back: Two narrow blue rectangles formed a kind of body, and at its base were red and black fins resembling short legs, with a yellow sprout on top joined so loosely as to seem impossibly tangential. It was mirrored, on the other side of the room, by Wave (2024), an eight-foot-tall sculpture whose broad horizontal forms gave it a winglike quality relatively rare in Shapiro’s oeuvre.

Between the two hovered the artist’s last masterpiece, which bears the weighty name ARK (2020/2023–24). At more than 18 feet long and nearly 12 feet high, the piece is Shapiro’s biggest wooden sculpture. Yet unlike Splay or Wave, ARK rests on just three tiny points of contact with the ground, as if en pointe. Two enormous rectangles the color of dried blood spelled out its core; nestled behind one was a long narrow turquoise wedge, while two longer, narrower ones extended upward, like masts or feelers. This big sculpture has lots of room for surprises—not least a shock of orange on the internal face of one rectangle, with blue on its narrowest edge.

“The work makes you more aware of your body as your body moves around it,” sculptor Rachel Harrison told me. For the young British artist Jesse Wine, Shapiro “keeps it soft in places and hard in others. It’s almost a type of pacing.”

An ark—whether Shapiro’s ARK or the Bible’s—is a vessel of preservation, a means less of conveyance than survival. It’s an uncanny note to end a career on, but a fitting one. Roberta Smith, in a 1982 essay, once suggested that Shapiro, a bit like a latter-day Noah, “helped bring sculpture back from the brink of extinction.” In the sublime but infertile desert of Minimalism, Shapiro saw a path forward for his medium: It would take repurposing sculpture’s past, and his own.

SHAPIRO’S STUDIO IS HOUSED in a surprisingly stately former ConEd substation in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. The situation is apt, and not just because Shapiro, who was born in 1941, grew up just a couple of miles away, in the left-leaning working-class neighborhood of Sunnyside Gardens, Queens. For one, what he described to me as his “first really radical” piece was a diminutive 1973 sculpture of nothing other than a bridge. And Shapiro himself was something of a bridge artist, spanning the Minimalism of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Tony Smith and the Postmodernism that followed. That’s why he is often classified as a Post-Minimalist, a term that describes artists like Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, Lynda Benglis, and Robert Morris, who brought the maker’s process and psychology back into sculpture.

It took time, though, for Shapiro to figure out that he could be an artist in the first place. His mother was a microbiologist, and his father a physician who once sewed up Robert G. Thompson, chairman of the New York State Communist Party, after he was stabbed. There was art around the house (African, Indian, Indigenous), and as a kid Shapiro took classes in ceramics, drawing, and painting from a local artist. But up until his graduation from NYU, where he arrived after an abortive year at the University of Colorado Boulder, and then night classes at Queen’s College, it was assumed that Shapiro would follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. “The idea of being an artist didn’t seem possible,” he told art historian Lewis Kachur in 1988, in an oral history for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Two years in India with the Peace Corps changed that. Following in the footsteps of his sister, who had married an Indian man and lived in Bombay, Shapiro spent 1965 to 1967 teaching gardening techniques in rural areas as part of an effort, begun by Gandhi, to encourage Indians to grow their own food. Stationed in Andhra Pradesh, he traveled widely and made friends with locals and like-minded expats. He was surrounded too by sacred Indian sculpture, whose dense designs and endless variations on the human form he photographed on tours across the country. The experience “heightened my sense of the hugeness and variety of life in general, but also the possibility of actually becoming an artist became very real to me for the first time,” Shapiro reflected in 2007.

Back in New York, Shapiro talked his way into the MFA program at NYU and started working in earnest. He also married Amy Snider, the founder of Pratt’s Art and Design Education department; the two had a daughter, Ivy, now an art adviser. To support the family, Shapiro worked polishing silver for a then-decent $3.25 per hour at the Jewish Museum, at the time, a radical force in New York, having mounted “Primary Structures,” the first real institutional show of Minimalism, in 1966. Brice Marden and Mel Bochner worked there as guards.

In his studio, then downtown, Shapiro went through “an idea a week.” These experiments first became public when Marcia Tucker selected a piece for the Whitney’s 1969 “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Material” show: a five-foot square of dyed nylon monofilament stapled to the wall. (After the show, Tucker wrote, the piece “becomes an art corpse set to rest in a plastic bag in a corner of the artist’s studio.”) The monofilaments, which he made for about a year and a half, “had an intensity and … a sensual aspect that was peculiar,” Shapiro told me.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, he created a series of drawings (one now in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection), made only of messy grids of repeated impressions of the artist’s fingers. In 1970, for his first solo show at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, Shapiro installed small wooden shelves in a straight line across two adjacent walls. (Shapiro moved to Pace in 1992.) On each shelf rested an identically proportioned rectangle of different materials—steel, plaster, gum rubber, Homasote wall board, and copper. With his fingerprint works, he had isolated the most basic gesture of drawing: mark-making. The shelf works similarly isolated the most basic gesture of sculpture: the presentation of material to be read by the viewer.

For his next show, in 1972, Shapiro produced process works like One Hand Forming (1971), a stack of sausage-shaped clay cylinders formed with one hand, and Two Hands Forming (1971), balls of clay formed with both hands arranged à la Hesse in round groups on the floor. 75 lbs. (1970), in a clear nod to Andre, juxtaposed 75 pounds of magnesium and 75 pounds of lead; the latter form was, true to its material, much smaller. Looking back, Shapiro reflected that he was “basically figuring out where something, at least for me, became more than a pile and had some real intent or purpose.”

These works shared the Minimalists’ ambition to isolate what Judd called the “specific object,” devoid of reference to anything beyond itself. Yet they bore what Judd sought to banish: the literal mark of their maker. Beneath the surface, they also reflected Shapiro’s exposure to craft in India, where he had taught locals to build ovens out of clay, and once recalled observing “cow dung patties on the wall, conic displays of pigment and spice… endless rolls of fabric. All raw material.” A 1970 photograph of Shapiro’s worktable—strewn with pieces of hammered copper, balls of clay, and stacks of river-rock-like lozenges—could easily be mistaken for a disorganized display in an anthropological museum. “His works of this period [the 1970s] exude emotions as vehement as a child’s fears combined with something akin to the austere discipline of a scientist,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in 1993.

It was these vehement emotions and a child’s fears that seem to have pushed Shapiro away from conceptual questions and toward an intensely personal figuration. The pieces in Shapiro’s 1973 show at Alanna Heiss’s Clocktower Gallery in New York are viscerally affecting, coming just after the dissolution of Shapiro’s marriage to Snider the year before. The centerpiece was Bridge (1973), a simple milled cast-iron structure just 3½ inches tall. (It superseded a balsa wood version shown earlier that year in a group show at Paula Cooper.) The bridge was displayed by itself, marooned on the vast floor beneath a high ceiling. In the same show, an 11-inch-tall ladder leaned against the wall and two rough birdlike shapes, formed in clay by Shapiro’s right and left hands and then cast in bronze, rested on a shelf at waist height. The following year, again at the Clocktower, a mangled drawing mannequin splayed in one corner, right by the scuffed baseboard—a disturbing work critics immediately linked to Giacometti’s chilling bronze Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932). Around the same time, Shapiro produced a three-inch-tall chair in bronze (it “looks as if it were conceived by Gerrit Rietveld for a dollhouse designed by Plato,” Robert Pincus-Witten, who coined the term “Post-Minimalism,” once quipped) and, perhaps most iconic of all, a five-inch-tall cast-iron polygon that resembled a house.

“There were all these prohibitions about representation and anything that had reference,” Shapiro said of the art world’s attitude at the time. He didn’t care. These figures “were a record of my emotion, of my anxiety.” Indirectly, they may have reflected his sense of powerlessness; directly, of course, they represented home, and his role as creator of more than just art. “I was also building doll furniture for my daughter,” the artist remembered. “All of a sudden I’m looking at this three-inch chair on the floor and it does something spatially on the floor that I hadn’t seen. That really engaged me. It seemed like a real place to go.”

The simple fact of these sculptures’ smallness—the opposite of the maximalist scale favored by the likes of Morris, Serra, and Tony Smith—was profound. Had they been larger, they would have lost their power. “It was dragging you into this interior, almost ‘Alice in Wonderland’ stuff,” Shapiro observed. “I wanted them in your space.” These works were intimate but nonetheless impersonal, imbued with equal parts pathos and irony. “If these sculptures locate the contents of memory within a public space,” Rosalind Krauss wrote in 1976, “it is in order to show that the privacy of our memories is what is most trivial about them.”

Beginning in the mid-’70s, forms like chairs, stools, boxes, houses, birds, horses, and even coffins were rendered so elementally as to hover between figuration and abstraction. Teasing the plinth—considered, like cast iron, retrograde at the time—Shapiro mounted houses on small shelves or on tabletops. In one of the most famous iterations, from 1974, he mounted a small rectangular house, cast in bronze (and with a gently sloped roof whose angle he lifted from the helmet of Donatello’s David), on a narrow bronze shelf that protruded about two and a half feet and then dropped down at 90 degrees, a physical embodiment of the sightline—and the out-of-sightline. These pieces still exert a mysterious force, like Etruscan funerary objects or Cycladic figurines, evoking the near past of our own childhood and, somehow, childhood itself. Our desire to read these stubbornly suggestive shapes is as innate and reflexive as the desire to make sense of our inchoate feelings, to love the family that wounds us.

Some of the forms were themselves wounded: Shapiro made a series of small, hollow rectangular volumes with apertures of various sizes; most were orthogonal, but some were organic, more abrasions than openings. It was one of these that Antony Gormley saw in 1980, on a formative visit to the Panza collection in Varese, Italy. “Here was something that immediately by inference engaged your body,” he recalled to me. “They referred to shelter, the human need for habitat, but without overplaying it.” Gormley—who also spent time in India, and who made his debut at London’s Whitechapel Gallery a year after Shapiro made his in 1980—views this early work of Shapiro’s as “playing with Minimalism while making one very aware of what Minimalism has declined to engage with.” It was a “really useful irritant.”

SHAPIRO HAD FLIRTED with the human form from the beginning, with the mannequins strewn in corners. But his now instantly recognizable manner of representing bodies took root in the second half of the 1970s. In 1976 Shapiro cast in bronze what looks like a fallen bough, with a pair of limbs stemming from a slightly thicker rectangular trunk; one was bent into a kind of knee, the other extended straight. Both divide, like wishbones, into two smaller branches. That was the same year his sister died by suicide. “I was looking at trees, trying to find some image that might convey that,” he told me. The bronze tree “was very much about her.”

Around the same time, he cast in bronze a nine-inch-tall running man and, defying another Minimalist taboo, painted it in stripes of black and red—a color here reminiscent of Rodchenko’s Constructivism, which the body’s rectangular figure evokes. Experiments ensued, with mannequins posed like caryatids and with sitting, lying, and crouching figures. But he found his stride—or his balance—in 1980, with a figure made of four-by-fours straight from the lumber yard leaning forward on one “leg,” as if frozen on its way to a yoga pose, or halted mid-trip. On one “arm,” a sawmill’s stamp is still visible, like a tattoo.

In the decade that followed, Shapiro’s work was “figurative with a vengeance,” as Schjeldahl put it. Crucially, almost all of it stood vertically in space instead of lying on the floor. “Somehow the ground, the wall, the table, they became a frame,” he remembered.After working beneath the weight of so much grief in the ’70s, Shapiro’s work was literally elevated by “a kind of enthusiasm,” tending increasingly vertical. Even the floor works from the decade, which include fragmentary figures (a rectangular “torso” sometimes with just a “head”) cast in iron, or made from wood or plaster, reach up into space, or lift themselves up as far as they can. Around 1980, he began mounting small, brightly colored reliefs on the wall. By the end of the decade, he was elevating volumes on long dowels, like spider crabs, and hoisting forms on poles.

These sculptures, whatever their form, are decidedly off-kilter, “sidestepping all of the hubris that has marked all of sculpture in the Western canon,” as Gormley observed. Shapiro tapped back into sculpture’s tradition of figuration, but slantwise, making light of what might otherwise have been monumental. He drew inspiration from Degas, whose sculpture, he once said, “is so refined and elegant in his projection of form into space, whereas Rodin builds from the ground up.” And while he employed materials—beams in bronze or wood or aluminum—evocative of industrial modernity, he made all the heaviness seem light. His bronze and iron casts often preserve the grain of their wooden molds, even the traces of the saw. Metal makes for permanence, but not always perfection.

By the 1990s, Shapiro was experimenting regularly with doubling bodies, seeing how, in combination, they come even closer to abstraction. And his work scaled up with time, as he received ever more public commissions. Among the most important was Loss and Regeneration (1993), a monumental installation on the steps of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., comprising a 25-foot-tall figure that seems to plunge earthward, its head down and a long arm extended into the air, and, some 40 feet away, a nine-foot-tall house poised, like a dreidel, on one corner of its roof.

Catastrophe worked strange magic on Shapiro. Divorce, grief, a world-historical tragedy that haunted his secular Jewish upbringing—all stimulated his art. And so it was one morning as he was in a cab on his way to the Newark airport, when his second wife, painter Ellen Phelan, called to tell him that a plane had collided with the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

In the years following 9/11, Shapiro’s geometric compositions became increasingly complex and contingently joined. He began breaking up models and recombining them into dynamic and unstable forms, strung together and suspended with metal wire that had all the jumbled eloquence of rubble. (It figures that a sculptor would see the collapse of the Twin Towers a bit differently from the average New Yorker.) In the wake of that event, Shapiro “recognized—it’s a harsh thing to say—the limitation of what I was doing previously,” he said. The trauma worked to “push my work beyond a kind of representation,” to study “collapse and joining.”

His fragile, mobile-like assemblages begun in the 2000s look back to two of Shapiro’s long-standing influences, Calder and Miró, whose lightness is often subtended by darkness. But they also point to where Shapiro would go in the coming decades.

IF SHAPIRO’S FIGURES linger in the rich limbo of balance, in the 2000s, he burrowed into the density of contraction and collapse. A high point came in 20 Elements (2004–05), an 11-foot-tall, 7-foot-wide, 10-foot-long cluster of 20 brightly painted wooden rectangles, commissioned by the Musée d’Orsay, that responds to Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Dance (1865–69), a virtuosic academic relief originally intended to adorn the facade of the Paris Opera. (A study for the piece was on one of the models on display at Pace.) Mirroring the central, leaping figure in Dance, the heart of Shapiro’s composition is a large yellow rectangle, which he characteristically lofted at a diagonal. Responding to the dynamism of Carpeaux’s sculpture, none of the 20 elements is joined along an edge but instead seem to be magnetized to some core. This refusal to let the shape of the volume dictate its mode of connection to other shapes—a hallmark of Shapiro’s later style—is of a piece with his desire to resist the ways architecture could wind up framing, even constituting, so much of Minimalist sculpture.

Shapiro then “overwhelmed the architecture” altogether in his 2010 show at Pace, which included works like Was Blue (2010), composed of six painted rectangles of various dimensions, suspended with taut fishing wire as if in antigravity. “Of course they were dependent on the wall and floor,” Shapiro said, “but they weren’t organized around it.” In a 2016 show at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Shapiro suspended irregular polygons, including two in crimson that resembled houses, echoing a volume in a dark-blue sculpture that sat on the floor below. This work represented a “real sense of abandon,” he said. If his sculptures had always insisted on being viewed in the round, these new installations compelled the to move through them, within them—what Andre called “sculpture as place.”

“I’VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO DRAW,” Shapiro told me. But that’s not exactly true: He often sketched forms that eventually turned into sculptures, and even scribbled a series of unsettling etchings in the mid-’70s of couples dancing, or fighting, or both. Shapiro produced numerous drawings in charcoal and pastels, plus gouaches and woodblock prints, many of which reflect his sculptural preoccupations.

In the ’80s, he drew geometric forms in smudgy black charcoal on white paper—like blueprints for his houses, or X-rays of his stick men. (These bracing monochromatic pieces clearly left a mark on Christopher Wool, who served as Shapiro’s assistant for several years in the early ’80s. “His work is something I still think about all the time,” Wool told me.) Shapiro made blobby gouaches in bright colors around the time he started putting small, bright sculptures on the walls. He also started making collages, and collage-like geometric patterns, just as his sculptures themselves began to work more through juxtaposition than straightforward joining.

In his final years, Shapiro rapidly assembled pieces of wood using epoxy resin and one-inch pins shot out of a chunky, green-enameled pneumatic gun, made by the Italian company Omer. It was a kind of drawing in three dimensions, not so far removed from playing with blocks. “Even if it’s miserable, it’s playful,” Shapiro told me. To make ARK, for example, “I remember jamming pieces of wood into the vice, and compressing them,” he said. “I wanted layers of compression.” At some point, Shapiro’s longtime collaborator and woodworker, Ichiro Kato—who got his start crafting Donald Judd’s furniture—might translate a model into a finer maquette, which would then be translated once again when Shapiro chose to produce a piece at scale. In this iterative process, which sometimes unfolded over years, composition and contingency blended together. A sculpture might be transformed when a model got knocked over or fell apart; scrap snatched up from the floor might look like an invitation.

At the end of our meandering conversation, Shapiro and I spoke about two of his most towering predecessors, the totemic David Smith and the somewhat more puckish Anthony Caro. “I think David Smith really had to prove he was an artist in some way,” Shapiro said. “Caro not quite as much.”

I asked him if he still felt that he had something to prove. “I still think I do,” he replied. “But I think at this point I can be light-handed,” he added. “I think that’s a privilege of years.”

Suzanne Valadon’s painterly style was brash and unflinching. She was self-taught, gleaning tips and techniques from the painters for whom she modeled, and she did not shy away from harsh colors. An 1898 self-portrait places green shadows across her forehead and chin to create a vivid contrast with the glaring reddish tones that dominate the composition. She returned to herself as a subject repeatedly, and in another self-portrait from 1931, appears as a bare-breasted 66-year-old with the same resolute gaze and piercing expression as her younger self. Despite Valadon’s proximity to artists investigating abstraction, including Picasso and Matisse, she remained—firmly, even stubbornly—committed to representation throughout her career.

A recent swell of attention devoted to the French painter—the subject of six major exhibitions in as many years, including a 200-work retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris through May 26—has generated no clear conclusions about Valadon’s place within the history of art. The Pompidou show, revealingly, has no subtitle: It is simply “Suzanne Valadon.” A previous exhibition at the institution’s Metz location declared the artist to be in “A World of Her Own,” both celebrating and isolating her contributions. A 2021 exhibition at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation subtitled “Model, Painter, Rebel” signaled the multiple roles the artist played in her lifetime.

While failing to characterize Valadon’s work definitively, these titles are an improvement on the historical telling of her story. Valadon (1865–1938), who came of age in the heady world of Montmartre’s cabaret scene, achieved commercial success as an artist in her lifetime. But she fell under the shadow of her artist son, Maurice Utrillo. When she has been written about, it is often in reference to the male artists with whom she associated. Books dedicated to Valadon refer to her as The Mistress of Montmartre and Renoir’s Dancer. Even the name by which we know her, Suzanne, was based on her bodily availability to the male gaze—after Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec compared Valadon, who was then a popular model called Maria (born Marie-Clémentine), to the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders.

The recent exhibitions, in focusing on Valadon’s art rather than her personal life or modeling career, reveal a broader shift in the art world toward prioritizing female agency. In her iconic essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” one of Linda Nochlin’s explanations for the lack was propriety: Women were not permitted to study the male body, the most vaunted subject of 19th-century academic painting. Perhaps, then, this explains the fascination with Valadon’s representations of nudes, which have featured heavily in every recent exhibition and publication about her work.

Rendering naked figures was Valadon’s most blatant assumption of her own power. Adam and Eve (1909), a thinly veiled portrait of Valadon and her future (second) husband André Utter, is often hailed as the first representation of a naked man by a female artist. With its slender figures laced with sinewy muscles, the painting proves Valadon was comfortable with the human body in all its flawed reality (the fig leaves for modesty were a later, unwelcome, addition). A slew of Valadon’s portraits of female models includes soft bellies, sharp collar bones, and visible body hair, and the recent exhibitions of her work celebrate her unidealized approach to this canonical art subject.

But Nochlin was calling for much more than simply adding female artists to the existing canon and modes of representation. She saw the absence of significant female figures in art history as a “crucial question of the discipline as a whole”—one that, once answered, might transform the field and “challenge traditional divisions of intellectual inquiry.” Valadon’s revolutionary potential for art history lies not in her essential femaleness but instead in her participation in a radical milieu during a formative moment in the modern city of Paris. Her work speaks not only to the history of art but also to the emergence of mass culture at a time when so-called high art and popular representation became inextricably intertwined.

VALADON WAS NOT just female but poor. Her mother was a laundress in a small town in western France, her father unknown to her. The two came to Paris around 1866, settling in the working-class district of Montmartre a few short years before the arrival of both war and popular revolution. Valadon, only 4 years old when Prussian troops invaded the city, was sent to live with an aunt in Nantes. She missed the siege and the Commune that came after, but returned to a city marked by the scars of battle and a neighborhood characterized by revolt.

That defiant spirit fueled Valadon as she made her way in life, working odd jobs, modeling, and drawing for her own pleasure. She became a single mother at age 18 to Maurice Utrillo, giving him the last name of a Spanish journalist who was a friend. Marriage to a banker in 1896 afforded her the opportunity to focus on painting, but the partnership dissolved when Valadon later began an affair with André Utter, who was Maurice’s friend. That she became a successful artist despite these circumstances testifies not only to her determination (which critics often coded as “virile” and “masculine”) but also to the possibilities for social mobility in the rapidly changing world of late 19th-century Paris.

Valadon was working on the cusp of 20th-century modernity, a period of profound transformation in where and how people lived and the opportunities they enjoyed for leisure and pleasure. Montmartre experienced an influx of residents displaced from the gentrifying center of Paris, notably the community of artists who would provide Valadon’s initial livelihood as well as entertainers—including some at a circus, at which she claims to have performed—who would make her life so lively.

Nearby neighborhoods also welcomed arrivals from France’s overseas colonies, contributing to a growing demographic of people of color that art historian Denise Murrell has traced in her work on 19th-century Paris. Valadon captured, obliquely, one aspect of this changing city in a series of five portraits of a Black model painted in 1919. When two of the paintings went on view at the Barnes Foundation in 2021, the museum convened and published a roundtable of scholars including Murrell and Ebonie Pollock (whose undergraduate thesis first brought the paintings to scholarly attention).

As part of the roundtable, Adrienne Childs cautioned against reading the images as free of the racism that defined Valadon’s time and that mars the long history of depictions of Black women. But Valadon, having worked as a model herself, may have been uniquely capable of understanding aspects of the Black woman’s experience, registering an embodied empathy for the tension in the figure’s left arm, which supports her weight, or the strain on her right, holding an apple steadily aloft as Valadon herself had in Adam and Eve. Times were changing, and Valadon was both benefiting from and recording that change.

Valadon’s capacity for appreciating change makes the still lifes she produced in the 1920s and ’30s feel especially fresh. Like the nudes, they are in dialogue with one of the most traditional forms of painting, harkening back to Jean Siméon Chardin’s 17th-century compositions and Edouard Manet’s 19th-century adaptations. Yet they are equally testaments to the fullness and freedom of Valadon’s life.

The Violin Case (1923) is rich with pattern, texture, and color, and Valadon’s large-scale painting of male nudes, Casting the Net (1914), forms its backdrop—those characteristically lean legs seeming to walk amid a table strewn with patterned textiles, ceramic vases, a jug of flowers, a well-worn book, and the violin of the title.

The inclusion of her own painting within another composition signals that these aren’t neutral or even symbolic objects. They are aspects of Valadon’s lived experience. Rendered unfussily, with the same unflinching gaze she brought to her models, the depicted things represent both the finest of art and the most quotidian of artifacts. They capture the world of Montmartre as one of sensory pleasure, a place where music, painting, and literature were available to everyone, even those born without privilege. Working between art and the everyday, Valadon opened up new possibilities for an art of the everyday—an idea of art we continue to benefit from in the present. 

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Marsha: the Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson, by the artist Tourmaline. It releases out May 20 from Tiny Reparations

Marsha remained fiercely committed to making the world better through her activism. She used banner-making as a way to build recognition for whatever key message she was focusing her energy on… Marsha continued to demonstrate her commitment to poor people in the gay community by marching with a banner that read, simply, GAY POOOR PEOPLE. With messaging, she didn’t mince words, and she labored over each banner painstakingly.

“Darling, every banner I work very hard on—they have to be hand-sewn in some parts,” she reminded Steve [Watson of the Village Voice]. These carefully crafted textiles endured long after each parade was over. In 2018, the artist Tuesday Smilie re-created Marsha’s STAR [Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries—a grassroots organiaztion dedicated to advocating for young trans people facing homelessness and police violence] banner for an exhibit at the Rose Art Museum in Massachusetts. Upon seeing archival photographs of Marsha and Sylvia [Rivera] marching with banners Marsha made, Smilie recalled to NPR, “There’s a presence to them… There’s this aliveness that is really beautiful and really resonant and… carries this photograph that’s now forty years old.” Marsha’s textile art, born on the stage of her activism, had the profound capacity to live beyond her years.

Since the early 1970s, and up through the rest of her life, Marsha’s artistic mediums spilled over and into one another, collapsing formal distinctions between acting, performance art, textile art, theater, fashion, songwriting, drag, and high muse-hood. The banners she created during these early years reflected this fluidity, as she began adding more levity and fun to the gay liberation movement through her aestheticized slogans.

For the 1978 Gay Pride parade, Marsha made buttons in the style of the Coca-Cola logo that read GAY LOVE and she sewed a “Gay Love” banner “because it said everything,” she recalled. The banner was simply so good that the off-off-Broday troupe Hot Peaches borrowed it for their European tour and never gave it back. Although it wasn’t a membership organization like STAR, Marsha’s imagined new group Gay Love—something she was trying to speak into existence—would provide a necessary componenet to the movement: birthday parties.

“All Gay Love will do is give birthday parties, because that’s not part of the movemet at all,” Marsha reflected. She dreamed of a moment when Gay Love would have birthday parties for people who had made significant contributions to the gay movement. This service would provide moments of pure, delicious frivolity, as repites from the constant challenges of the work. They’d honor Arthur Bell, Bob Kohler, Sylvia Rivera, people at gay bookstores and gay bars—a non-exhaustive list.

Marsha’s joy and exuberance—her birthday party-ness—would shine brightly through every art form she made. Her artwork touched the people immediately around her and those who lived in the decades to come. Marsha used art to innovate social transformation. She was always ahead of her time in a world that needed to catch up.

A core part of Marsha’s artistic practice, whether onstage or on the street, was to bring beauty and joy to brighten everyday places. This often meant she interacted with people who never met anyone like her before, not that there was anyone like her. A few days before being profiled by Steve Watson, Marsha wandered through the main floor of the Lord & Taylor department store on New York’s opulent Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. She floated from makeup booth to makeup booth like a pollinator going from flower to flower, taking out her pocket mirror to admire herself and trying out whichever lipsticks, eyeshadows, and blushes spoke to her fresh new desire.

The outset of the second Trump administration—we were just 12 weeks in when this issue went to press—has been tumultuous and frightening, with DOGE having decimated one federal agency after another. As I write this, the handwringing in the political precincts of such websites as Bluesky has finally turned into something like action, with Democratic New Jersey Senator Cory Booker taking over the Senate floor for a 25-hour filibuster, besting the previous record (set in 1957 by conservative Strom Thurmond). He electrified the chamber—as well as everyone who tuned in online—with a rousing and eloquent anti-Trump diatribe.

The art world too has been wringing its hands. In early April, the inevitable happened: cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. So now we ask, what is to be done? Here, in Art in America’s annual “New Talent” issue, the answer—or rather, answers—come from artists.

Nico Williams speaks of a powerful metaphor for how humor can be a political force: He elaborately beads everyday objects that are displayed in museums he couldn’t afford to visit as a child, with the hope that they will be met with “booming Native laughter that shakes windows down the street.” In this same vein, Bint Mbareh remarks, “I feel like it is a huge privilege to be able to make art that is political, but so much needs to be made fun of.” Justin Allen, on the other hand, found political critique in 2000s-era indie sleaze music. “It was a weird moment when everyone was scared for different reasons,” he says. “Whenever people are scared, interesting things happen in culture.” He might as well be speaking about today.

Maybe the answer is just to continue to do things, even if—especially if—they become scary. Agnes Questionmark makes unflinching work about being trans, a state of being that is increasingly under attack by the current administration. McKenzie Wark writes in these pages about how Questionmark “spent 12 hours a day for 16 days in a glass enclosure at a subway station in Milan, suspended via slings and cables in a casing with a mermaid-like tail some 20 feet long. Something about monstrousness can be triggering: She tells me of viewers who yelled at her and banged on the glass.” And yet, she persisted.

FEATURES

New Talent
20 exciting artists to watch, as chosen by the editors of Art in America.

Postmortem
On the recent boom in figurative painting.
by Barry Schwabsky

The Spiritual Turn
In a world that feels increasingly inhospitable, spiritual art offers a salve.
by Eleanor Heartney

What Is Art Good For?
Seven artists respond to an existential question.
as told to Emily Watlington

DEPARTMENTS

Datebook
A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Hard Truths
A painter wonders whether she doth protest too much, and a gallery worker cringes over a regrettable one-night stand. Plus, a jogging-themed quiz.
by Chen & Lampert

Sightlines
Fashion designer Michèle Lamy tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton

Inquiry
A Q&A with Amalia Ulman about her pivot from art to film.
by Emily Watlington

Object Lesson
An annotation of Sara Cwynar’s Apple on Sky I.
by Francesca Aton

Battle Royale
Art Fairs vs. Biennials—venerable gatherings go head-to-head.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on self-taught artists.
by Lynne Cooke

Appreciation
A tribute to Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who made her artistic voice—and those of so many others—heard.
by Emmi Whitehorse

Issues & Commentary
How to be a culture worker in times like these.
by Laura Raicovich

Spotlight
The French painter Suzanne Valadon celebrated changes in a modernizing Paris and within herself.
by Kelly Presutti

Book Review
A reading of Hito Steyerl’s Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat.
by Larissa Pham

Cover Artist
Jen DeLuna talks about her painting on the cover of A.i.A.

REVIEWS

Los Angeles
Los Angeles Diary
by Jack Lowery

Amsterdam
“Anselm Kiefer—Sag mir wo die Blumen sind”
by Eugenie Brinkema

Chicago
“Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica”
by Joseph L. Underwood

London
“Leigh Bowery!”
by Eliza Goodpasture

New Brunswick
“Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always”
by Julia Silverman

Seattle
“Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei”
by Louis Bury

To launch the publication of Art in America’s “New Talent” issue, the editors assembled some of the artists selected for 2025 along with two luminaries—Carroll Dunham and Rochelle Feinstein—to talk about the art world’s current swing from figuration to abstraction. A toast was raised to this year’s designated “New Talent” artists—20 names to watch at pivotal points in their career, all to be revealed May 16 on newsstands and online. And the panel discussion, moderated by A.i.A. senior editor Emily Watlington, engaged one of the art world’s most significant stylistic shifts in recent years.

A.i.A. editor-in-chief Sarah Douglas and publisher Erica Lubow Necarsulmer welcomed guests to the ground-floor studio in PMC’s headquarters across from the main branch of the New York Public Library. To mark the occasion, they raised glasses of champagne provided by Ruinart—poured alongside wines from Presqu’ile—and offered a toast to the artists and an audience assembled to acknowledge and appreciate their work.

During the panel discussion, Dunham said of his early years as a painter beginning in the 1970s, “there was never any doubt in my mind that I was being called to work on abstract art when I was young.” But over the years, characters began emerging. “My work made me do it,” he said. “My work seems to want certain things of me.”

Feinstein, an avowed decades-long abstractionist, said, “I remember years ago I was told by a representational painter that I wasn’t part of painting culture.” But she was in search of something on her own. “I was trying to deeply understand geometric painting because that was the least emotional form.” About the pendulum swing between figuration and abstraction—a dynamic explored in a feature by Barry Schwabsky in the new Art in America issue—Feinstein panned back to provide perspective. “A pendulum marks time,” she said. “It’s fluid.”

As I write this, Los Angeles is ablaze and Accra, Ghana, is recovering from a fire; Richmond, Virginia, lost its potable water to a storm just after Asheville, North Carolina, finally got its supply back two months following Hurricane Helene. These climate disasters are having lasting impacts on, among other things, human health, dependent as it is on the health of our environment—the water we drink, the air we breathe. We are seeing whole populations, human and other, rendered disabled by chemicals and catastrophes. In her new book, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (2024), Sunaura Taylor even declares that climate change is ushering in an “Age of Disability.”

Taylor, a writer and artist, was born with her own Anthropocene-era disability on Tucson’s southside. There, toxic synthetic chemicals entered the groundwater by way of activities at Hughes Aircraft, a United States military contractor. By the 1970s, locals noticed that the water supply was killing their plants; their pets and livestock were ill; lupus, testicular cancer, brain tumors, and leukemia were popping up at high rates; and stillbirths and disabled newborns were unusually common.

In the course of writing her book, Taylor returned to Tucson to study not only the water that had disabled her, but the ways her community organized in response. There, she noted that while residents “told stories of often debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries,” they also mapped out “alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance” that we’ll need in the coming decades. This Tucsonian “vision of justice… included treatment for both human communities and landscapes.” As for herself, Taylor found that her “feelings toward this water are not of fear or anxiety or anger.” Instead, “they are of solidarity.”

A similar “vision of justice” is echoed in LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “Flint Is Family” (2016–22), a series of photographs gathered in a 2022 book. Scenes from the series comprise the standout contribution to “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice,” an exhibition about health and the environment that recently traveled from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to the Moody Center for the Arts in Houston.

Like Taylor, Frazier knows intimately the effects that environmental pollution can have on one’s body. As a child growing up in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier contracted lupus in response to chemical emissions from the United States Steel Corporation that have caused illnesses in three generations of her family, some of them terminal. “Flint Is Family” is a group of striking portraits of dignified disabled residents of Flint, Michigan, organizing and proving themselves resourceful amid a water crisis. While the book mentions the effects of lead poisoning on children, as well as Flint’s unusually high rates of cancer, lupus, and Legionnaires’ disease, Frazier’s focus is on introducing us to people who, confronted with the emotional, bodily, and economic effects of living without access to clean water, have adapted and persevered.

One example of resourceful perseverance comes from a Flint resident named Amber, who creates her own natural shampoo after doctor-prescribed pills and cream fail to redress the infected-looking bald spot on her daughter’s head. The hair grows back in three months, and Amber begins selling her product to other Flint residents facing similar symptoms. A desire to protect their community drives her family’s entrepreneurial spirit: They buy and steward land, rather than entrusting it to systems that have failed them.

The photographs do not resort to simplified clichés of what sickened or impoverished people look like. What comes through instead is resourcefulness and resilience, persistence and creative adaptation.

Taylor’s and Frazier’s books are both primarily portraits of communities—how they come together and adapt, how they organize. This community focus is fitting, for if there is one thing both disability and ecology reveal, it is how incredibly interdependent we all are.

If, as Taylor writes, “the future is disabled,” that disabled future is already here; but, to paraphrase William Gibson, it’s just not evenly distributed—owing largely to environmental racism. Tucson’s southside is predominantly Mexican American, while Flint is majority Black. Poverty, meanwhile, is America’s fourth leading risk factor for death, per the American Medical Association: It follows only heart disease, cancer, and smoking.

FRAZIER AND TAYLOR did more than document the ways their communities are adapting: they modeled new ways to get actively involved. For Frazier’s part, after three years of photographing Flint, she found she “could no longer idly stand by and wait for the government to do its job.” This was in 2019, after all the criminal charges against city and state employees were dropped, even as residents remained saddled with hefty utility bills for undrinkable water. The artist turned to Amber, asking what could be done.

Amber told Frazier about an invention by a man named Moses West: an atmospheric water generator that could collect clean water by extracting condensation from the air. It runs on solar power and generates water perpetually. Being off-grid, it does not require the kinds of governmental infrastructure the community had rightly grown to distrust.

The catch was that this contraption weighs 26,000 pounds, and had to be shipped from Puerto Rico, where West lived: This was costly, around $50,000. So Frazier chose to offer money from sales following her recent exhibition at the gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York; the donation was matched by a grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. In Frazier’s photos, the generator’s arrival in 2019 appears triumphant.

The final “Flint Is Family” photos were shot in color. In her 2022 book, these colors burst brightly against the sequence’s black-and-white buildup, as if leaving Kansas for Oz. We see residents relishing the atmospheric water generator, the water, and one another. They are hugging and beaming and praying in front of the green rectangular apparatus, filling jugs, playing in sprinklers, drinking from the spout.

But it’s not all rainbows and sunshine post-generator. The machine gets vandalized anonymously, though it is quickly repaired. Still, the instance seems to affirm suspicions that the water crisis was more intentional than simply neglect or ineptitude, more than lack of funds or inevitable environmental degradation. “It crossed my mind that they want us to die off and then redevelop,” says a Flint resident named Melvin. Certainly, making land unlivable is a tried-and-true tactic of dispossession, as Taylor details in Disabled Ecologies, referring to the colonization of the Americas. Still, Melvin dwells less on intent than he does on taking power back into his own hands: “My advice to Black people in Flint is, don’t move away, let’s build it up and let’s buy property.”

We’ll need the kinds of creative and communal adaptation Melvin describes in order to survive and care for one another amid this mass multispecies disablement, especially under a federal administration that appears unlikely to help. “Flint Is Family”is successful as an art project for the way it makes this resiliency visible in a climate where, for many people, survival is assumed, struggle is left outside the frame, and water is taken for granted.

TWO OTHER RECENT artworks stand out as modeling how we might adapt, tending to our health and to our environment too. The first is Ekene Ijeoma’s Black Forest (2022–), a project that will see the planting of 40,000 trees in Black neighborhoods across the United States. The trees bear tags that read “Black Forest: a living monument and archive for Black lives lost to Covid-19” alongside a QR code that links to a crowd-sourced archive. The trees foster the health of Black neighborhoods and residents by helping mitigate warming temperatures, offering shade, and cleaning the air.

Ijeoma was inspired in part by the Neighborhood Tree Corps, founded by activist Hattie Carthan, who became known as “Bed-Stuy’s Tree Lady.” In the 1960s, Carthan planted more than 1,500 trees throughout Brooklyn, many thriving today. Black Forest also responds to 2020 reports that Black people were twice as likely to die from Covid as white people; living in tree-lined rather than redlined neighborhoods benefits the respiratory system.

In making Black Forest an art project rather than merely an environmental action—labor likely to go unnoticed—Ijeoma draws attention not only to how environmental racism distributes vegetation unevenly, but to the human hand behind the intervention, showing that ordinary people can intervene, too. The sleekly designed Black Forest tags call attention to this, as do the community events during which the trees are planted, on both public land and volunteered private property. “For some people, this will be the first time they’ve planted a tree,” Ijeoma told the Art Newspaper. “That alone is a profound experience”—a reminder of the agency we have over our environment.

That agency was present too in Asad Raza’s 2022 exhibition “Diversion,” which saw the artist reroute Frankfurt’s Main River to flow through Kunsthalle Portikus, located on a small island in the river. The water streamed into one of the museum’s galleries, where it was passed through a very fine coffee filter and boiled before an attendant added minerals. This simple intervention made the water drinkable; museum visitors were invited to partake, and thereby reconnect to their environs.

OF COURSE, THE IDEA of agency may seem paltry when you consider that 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions can be traced back to just 100 companies. But as Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein argues, “the pessimism of some who believe in climate change is just as detrimental as those who deny it outright.” Here, environmentalism might take a cue from disability politics, which centers accommodating and caring for people in whatever their state rather than finding a cure.

Instead, the mainstream environmental movement has had a thorny relationship to disability justice. As Taylor details in Disabled Ecologies, environmentalists have a habit of enlisting disabled people to monger fear or as a cautionary tale: Better protect your environment and your health, so you don’t end up disabled. One side effect is stigma perpetuated, with disability framed as a personal tragedy and not a political failure.

Taylor suggests the two movements team up—and shows they weren’t always so separate. She writes that for over a century in the United States, environmental protection and human health were grouped under the same governmental branch, until 1970, when Richard Nixon founded the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

He got a lot of reputational points for the EPA, and for pouring money into the National Cancer Institute as well. But the moves in the end benefited corporations: separating the two endeavors saw a decrease in environmental cancer studies, and in researching the chemicals that cause disease. Paradoxically, Taylor notes, all this happened on the heels of Rachel Carson’s bestsellers, particularly Silent Spring (1962), which had placed the health effects of synthetic chemicals on the mainstream mind.

So still today, in the US, chemicals are innocent until proven toxic. Whether testing forever chemicals or microplastics, you and I are the lab rats. This uncontrolled pollution that puts profit over people is the enemy, not disability.

The coming decades, Taylor suggests, might look something like the revenge fantasy in Audre Lorde’s 1980 book Cancer Journals, where an army of single-breasted women gathers at the Capitol Building to protest chemical contamination, their bodies the evidence. The changing climate, Taylor writes, is starting to resemble “something impaired, precarious, dependent, filled with loss and struggle, requiring assistance, accommodation, and creative forms of care.” And so disabled people—experts in all these things—“should be sought out as leaders in climate adaptation conversations.”

Charles Darwin noted something similar. In The Origin of Species, his focus was not only on “the survival of the fittest,” Taylor reminds us, “but on variation as the driver of life.” For Darwin, it was not exactly the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent—to say nothing of the wealthiest. Rather, it is the ones who are most adaptable. If you want to know more about creative adaptation, Taylor suggests, ask a disabled person.  

BASED ON DEMOGRAPHIC ANALYSES of the last United States presidential election, Norma McCorvey would probably have voted for Donald Trump were she alive today. The “Roe” of Roe v. Wade (1973), McCorvey was a non-college-educated white Christian woman who lived in the South. Born in Louisiana in 1947, she spent most of her life in Texas working as a janitor, housecleaner, waitress, and receptionist after dropping out of high school. She was married at 16, had her tubes tied by the age of 23, and said she never used contraception.

At the same time, she might not be that easy to pigeonhole: she in fact voiced her support for Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 election. McCorvey was also a lesbian, a sex worker, a sexual assault survivor, and an addict. She was raised mainly by her mother, Mary Sandefur, an abusive alcoholic who “beat the fuck out of her” for being a “die-hard whore,” as Sandefur herself told Vanity Fair in 2013. At the age of 10, she robbed a gas station with another girl and ran away to Oklahoma City; she was sent to reform school when a maid at the hotel where they were staying caught them kissing. She lived with her partner, Connie Gonzalez, another working-class lesbian, for 35 years despite her self-proclaimed belief that homosexuality was a sin.

What makes McCorvey such a resonant figure for the Trump era is precisely the contradictions she embodied. Many accounts describe her as narcissistic, “difficult,” and aggrieved—though her grief and grievance perhaps come as no surprise, given her lifetime of exploitation, manipulation, and abuse at the hands of her family, religion, the law, the state, and the pro- and antiabortion movements. Famously, in 1995, McCorvey “flipped” her position on abortion after converting to Christianity, because she felt condescended to and tokenized by the middle-class feminist movement. In response, she became a vocal part of the antiabortion right. In 2016 she made a “deathbed confession” to the documentary crew of AKA Jane Roe, declaring that she never actually believed in the antiabortion cause and only said what they paid her to say in a transactional relationship. She died several months later a woman who bore three children, raised none, and never had an abortion.

McCorvey’s biography brings into focus the contradictions and class antagonisms that surround not only abortion, but also broader questions of reproduction, care, and whose bodies and labor we value. These contradictions feel urgent and raw as we stare down two seemingly irreconcilable truths: A majority of US voters chose to protect abortion access in 8 of the 10 states where it was on the ballot. At the same time, and in many of those very same states, voters elected the man who claims credit for overturning Roe v. Wade, and who will potentially oversee the passing of a federal abortion ban. Certainly we are divided, but how those divisions cleave around bodily, social, and economic freedom is more complicated than our two-party system suggests.

I BECAME INTERESTED in Norma McCorvey after my own experience with making art from abortion while an undergraduate student at Yale University in 2008. My project, Untitled [Senior Thesis], involved a precise bodily intervention over the period of an academic year: From the 9th to the 15th day of every menstrual cycle, I used semen (collected from “fabricators”) to privately self-inseminate; on the 28th day of my cycle, I would ingest an herbal abortifacient, and experience cramps and heavy bleeding. This bleeding could have been either a normal period or a very early-stage self-induced miscarriage: The process was intentionally carried out so that not even I knew which. I used the term “self-induced miscarriage” because I was interested in what it meant to attempt reproduction “wrongly” on the body, specifically the queer body, and to use my biological capacities to create art.

As far as I know, I am the only artist who has made artwork from the intentional bodily act of abortion (others, please get in touch). That work caused enormous controversy, which was difficult to navigate for many years. I was denounced by both the left and the right, received death threats, and was told by the then dean of the Yale Art School that I would “never have a career as an artist.” After these reactions, I wondered whether abortion and the self-management of one’s reproductive capacities could ever be a palatable subject for the art world.

But in recent years, I’ve been heartened to see the groundswell of artists making work about abortion and reproductive freedom, as well as a resurgence of curatorial interest in such works past and present. I find myself especially struck by how many of the interventions contemporary artists are making today resonate with the complexities of religious belief, queer solidarity, women’s labor, and cultural value—impasses deeply ingrained in the story of Roe.

Art is a good vessel for narratives as complex as Roe’s, as complex as our less-than-black-and-white times. Artists deal in representation. Politics function through representation. The sustained labor of the curators and artists who have been doing work related to abortion for years makes clear that art about the subject can be more than a fundraising mechanism, market bump, or avenue for visibility. It can
be a means to explore stories as complex as McCorvey’s, as well as other, deeper questions about reproduction and social order in the world we have—and the world we want.

VIVA RUIZ OFTEN introduces themself as “a queer community-educated artist and advocate, descended from factory-working Ecuadorian migrants raised in Jamaica, Queens.” They have been making work about abortion since 2015 through their ongoing project, “Thank God for Abortion,” which they described in an interview with me as “inspired by my own abortions and how grateful I was to have them.” The project was conceived as a response to the closing of abortion clinics around the United States well before the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe: “People die without access to abortion. Roe never meant access for everyone. Legality is different than access.” It was also inspired by what Ruiz perceived as the seeming indifference to abortion in the queer community, an attitude often laced with misogyny and narrow ideas about what queerness means.

“The project started because people I thought I had everything in common with were still shocked about abortion,” Ruiz told me in an interview. Even “people who had been part of the sexual revolution: gay men who had been deeply engaged in HIV activism. They were discounting pregnant people—some of whom are gay men, are people who can get HIV—and not seeing the intersections, which serves the right.” With “Thank God for Abortion,” they said, “I wanted to send up a flare.”

“Thank God for Abortion” began as “looks” for the clubs and wearables to host parties in. It quickly grew to encompass performance, starting with “Joyful Noise,” the first-ever abortion-themed float in the 2018 NYC Pride March, and then visual art: installations and altars made from posters, flags, bullet-proof shields, and costumes, shown in both galleries and spaces for reproductive care. The titular phrase, hovering in the project’s emblem above doves and outstretched hands, is an incantation and provocation akin to what the queer collective General Idea called an “image virus.” Ruiz, who grew up Christian and identifies as Christian now, draws on both queer camp and the pageantry of Catholicism: “The church armed me for this moment.”

Their project highlights something that feels novel, but is actually a foundational truth: that abortion access, queer community, and Christianity have long been profoundly intertwined. McCorvey was referred to her lawyer, Linda Coffee, by another lawyer, Henry McCluskey, who had arranged the adoption of McCorvey’s second child (the one before the Roe baby). He had a reputation for taking on cases for lesbian and gay clients, and in 1969 successfully challenged a Texas statute against sodomy. The two lawyers had met at church in Dallas as children. Both were gay and young, and both were responsible for landmark litigation over choice and bodily autonomy that hinged on the right to privacy—the overlooked queer origin of the right to abortion.

TO TALK ABOUT ABORTION, urgent as that is, is to isolate an appendage on the vast body of reproductive discourse. It’s the discursive clitoris: a hot-button issue that invokes, for anyone who has ever had one, a broader system of cost, care, and access, as well as philosophical questions around what it means to “reproduce.” Biological reproduction entails not only the having and not having of children, but also sustaining oneself and others through community and care—usually unpaid “labors of love.” Our lives encompass a reproductive surround. Everywhere we look, there is aesthetic or mechanical reproduction, which refers to copying an image or object, as in the reproduction of a physical print, photo, or commodity. There is social reproduction, which names the ideological conditions that must be in place for the structures and institutions of power to persist. Reproduction is a condition—the condition—that we share.

These intertwining forms of reproduction are in many ways the subject of photographer Carmen Winant’s practice. “The last safe abortion,” a series she conceived during the pandemic for a 2023 exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and subsequently showed in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, documents the labor that powers abortion care. The work comprises almost 2,500 photographs of the everyday tasks and community-building activities of physicians, staff, and volunteers—answering phones, sterilizing equipment, celebrating birthdays—that keep clinics going. Installed in grids of 4-by-6-inch lab prints (the kind you might once have gotten at a drugstore), the photographs were taken over the 50-year period before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, sourced from clinic storerooms, university archives, and personal collections, supplemented by photographs Winant took herself. Winant told me she sees “The last safe abortion” as a continuation of her work “on feminist healthcare.” It follows a project on her birth and birth care work, My Birth (2018), as well as a project on domestic violence advocates and support workers, Looking Forward to Being Attacked (2018).

McCorvey herself carried out tasks like those pictured in “The last safe abortion”: she had worked as a receptionist at an abortion clinic called A Choice for Women, in Dallas, in April 1995, when she made the flip to antiabortion work. McCorvey felt shunned by the mainstream feminist movement, which did not consider her a good spokesperson, and she remained fairly poor, having made very little from the advance on her book I Am Roe (1994)and the royalties from the made-for-TV movie Roe vs. Wade (1989), for which Holly Hunter won an Emmy. The Christian antiabortion organization Operation Rescue opened an office next door. McCorvey was antagonistic at first, though perhaps eventually, just lonely, for she soon began talking with Flip Benham, national director of Operation Rescue at the time, about their lives, then about the Bible. A month later, she converted. Her swimming pool baptism aired on national television.

Just the previous year, a group of Black women—Dr. Toni M. Bond Leonard, Reverend Alma Crawford, Evelyn S. Field, Terri James, Bisola Marignay, Cassandra McConnell, Cynthia Newbille, Loretta Ross, Elizabeth Terry, Mable Thomas, Winnette P. Willis, and Kim Youngblood—had voiced their own critique of the mainstream feminist movement and the rhetoric of “choice,” which did not account for the many women of color, poor women, disabled women, queer women, and trans people who were unable to access abortion even in places where it is legal. They coined the term “reproductive justice”—a combination of “reproductive rights” and “social justice”—that points to how something can be legal without being just. The term often focuses on abortion access, but it can also describe other forms of access, such as that to IVF and gender-affirming care, both now under increased threat.

In different ways, these two events of the mid-’90s were reckonings with all that was missed by Roe and the mainstream national conversation about abortion that it galvanized. Can art—wrapped up as it is in the market and reliant as it is on a shorthand that equates visibility with power—meaningfully address these inequities?

CERTAINLY, A NUMBER of recent exhibitions grappling with art about abortion and reproductive care are taking up the task. Among them are the open-call “Currents: Abortion”(2018) at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn; “On Abortion: And the Repercussions of Lack of Access” (2020) at the Museum of Sex in New York; “Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency” (2021) at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography; and “Unconditional Care”(2023) at Idaho’s Lewis-Clark State College. That last show saw artworks by Michelle Hartney, Katrina Majkut, and Lydia Nobles censored under Idaho’s 2021 No Public Funds for Abortion Act. Together, the shows make clear that artwork about abortion is becoming important in a way it has not been before. Yes, the art world has always moved through its topics du jour in quick succession, with frustrating shortsightedness. Nevertheless, such visibility can at least be an opportunity to channel the vast resources of the art world into supporting some kind of change.

That is the approach that Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Pauline Jampol, codirectors of the Newark and New York nonprofit Project for Empty Space, have been taking. Their show “Abortion Is Normal” (2019–20), featured more than 50 artists in a multipart exhibition that raised more than $300,000 from the sale of artworks for the Super PAC Downtown for Democracy; it appeared first at Project for Empty Space in Newark, then at Galerie Eva Presenhuber and Arsenal Contemporary Art in New York. The turnout was huge. The first iteration saw 30,000 people a day, “representing the mixed demographics of Downtown Newark,” Wahi and Jampol recalled in an interview with me. “To put the title wall ‘Abortion Is Normal’ there sparked a number of conversations. The two exhibitions in New York also brought out thousands, reinforcing the idea that we need this content.”

Their more recent traveling exhibition, “Body Freedom for Every(body),” takes place in a 27-foot-long box truck with a rotating display of more than 100 artists. Last year, it made 11 stops across the country. Like “Abortion Is Normal,” “Body Freedom for Every(body)” features several blue-chip artists, but also emphasizes lesser-known queer artists and artists of color. The success of these projects—both widely covered by the press—stems perhaps from Wahi and Jampol’s curatorial strategy: Leaning in to existing dynamics of visibility and power set by the market to highlight reproductive justice. “Body Freedom for Every(body)” made its last stop in Miami Beach in early December, coinciding with Miami Art Week. After all, they note, “Florida is a place that also has an abortion ban in place.”

“Is It Real? Contemporary Artists Address Reproductive Freedom,” an independent exhibition that opened this past October at Lagoon Studio in Dallas and hopes to travel, highlighted 31 artists and collectives (it included works by Viva Ruiz and me). Curators Emily Edwards and Sara Hignite titled the project “in homage to Juanita McNeely’s essential 1969 expressionist painting about abortion, Is It Real? Yes It Is!, to honor the artist’s legacy of feminist and disability activism, and emphasize the mirrored (sur)reality” of these pre- and post-Roe times. Expanding on this premise in an interview with me, they emphasized that “as curators living and working in Texas, it was imperative that we center Southern voices around reproductive freedom, since this had never been done before. […] Southerners live with this extreme anti-abortion legislation every day, and have for years.”

One standout among many nuanced works there was Ari Brielle’s three-channel video installation Screaming in the Palm of My Hands, which was her 2023 MFA thesis at the University of Texas at Arlington. The video intercuts live performances by Nina Simone, Beyoncé, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe with local Texas newsclips from the ’80s and ’90s about birth control and in vitro fertilization; and with research on Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy, the enslaved women “experimented” on by gynecology founder Dr. J. Marion Sims. The artist also narrates her own experience of endometriosis. The result is a nonlinear exploration of Texas history, medical history, music history, and personal history. “The throughline is mothering,” Brielle told me, “who I come from, but also who birthed this country.”

Reflecting on their fellow Texan, the Dallas curators described Norma McCorvey as “someone misunderstood and spoken over her whole life. So it was important to us that artists in the show felt very seen and heard… Some of the artists said they felt like it was the first time their work was taken seriously—which has helped them keep making it.” As an example, “Is It Real?”arranged for artists in the exhibition to speak at local universities, which was a way for the participating artists not only to feel heard, but to listen. Ruiz and I gave a talk at Texas Christian University, and it was moving to connect with students interested in reproductive justice there, as well as faculty navigating the current political climate to find ways to teach about it.

How do we not only represent reproductive justice in the art world, but reproduce it? This is the question at the heart of so much contemporary artwork and exhibition-making around abortion, and it is also a question that brings us back to teaching. I know of only one fine arts class currently being taught that centers these themes; it’s a class called “Art about Reproductive Justice” taught by painter Luca Molnar at Stetson University in Florida (again others, please get in touch). As a private university, Stetson doesn’t have the same restrictions on content as state-funded institutions; that didn’t stop Governor DeSantis from having his office contact Stetson’s president though, demanding that the school issue an apology after Molnar’s students put together a survey asking how their peers needed support in the wake of Florida’s abortion ban. (The school refused.) When I spoke to Molnar about her class, she described how content-driven rather than medium-driven art classes give students the opportunity to talk about big ideas. It made me wonder: Can reproduction itself—broadly construed—be a medium? Imagine the art world we would have if it could.   

Could Marina Abramović be the wellness guru we needed all along? It could have been Gwyneth Paltrow, she of the jade eggs and bone broths and chugging Mountain Valley water, who seemed, for a while, like the prophet we were promised. But her company, Goop, has become more of a place to buy $900 jersey dresses and titanium cooking pans. Anyway, Goop has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs in the past few months alone.

If Goop isn’t your thing and you’re in search of a more out-of-the-box approach, consider Abramović, who once told the New York Times “I like baby food.” Want to learn to live like her? The Marina Abramović Institute offers €2,450 (~$2,600) five-day Cleaning the House workshops in various locations—Brazil, Thailand—taught by people (not her) trained to lead guests “through a series of long durational exercises to improve individual focus, stamina, and concentration.” Their cell phones, laptops, watches, and electronic devices will be collected, and “during the workshop, participants should refrain from eating, speaking, and reading.” (Herbal tea and honey are permitted.)

For those wanting to micro-dose the longevity method, she even markets 99£ ($125) longevity drops with a Swiss doctor (one for immunity, one for allergy, one for energy) to achieve inside-out beauty via active ingredients such as pollen, cranberry, lemon, and garlic. They are packaged beautifully, not unlike similar tonics one can purchase at a health food store.

Her commitment to wellness courses through not only the products and experiences she offers, but through her art as well—although Abramović would surely say those are all the same thing.

HER LATEST SHOW, “Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy,” at the Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai, boasts 150 works over three floors, including many crystal-based sculptures nodding to her interest in Eastern medicine. Some of the pieces resemble a cross between furniture and something more ominous. There are wooden beds with large crystals pointed at the head; copper tubs with crystals pointed where a faucet might be; deck chairs facing metronomes; doorways with crystals mounted on every surface.

Wellness has always been a theme in Abramović’s work, only now, it’s become more explicit. The show is inspired by, and is a sort of addendum to, one of her most famous durational performances: The Great Wall Walk (1988), where she and her former partner, Ulay, walked from opposite ends of the wall toward the center and toward each other. “Me from the Yellow Sea, which is water and female energy… he will walk from the desert, which is the fire and the male element, and we will meet in the middle and we are going to get married,” said Abramović over Zoom from Shanghai back in October, while she was setting up the show.

For someone who is nearing 78 years old, she looks incredible: smooth, even skin; thick hair; and seemingly infinite energy. Shai Baitel, the Shanghai show’s curator, noticed too: “Marina is beyond generation. She’s beyond age.” Whatever she is doing is working: sign us all up for the drops, the workshops, whatever it takes.

Back to the Great Wall in 1988: She and Ulay loved the concept, and hated the negotiations and organizing required to make it happen. It took about 8 years, in which “our relationship completely fell apart,” she says, laughing. They did not get married.

She found symbolism and spirituality in the Great Wall. “We discovered the Great Wall was actually not only this kind of fortress to keep enemies out of China in those days. It was like a metaphysical structure. It was seen as a replica of our Milky Way,” she says.

While she was walking, she’d sleep every night in a different village and try to meet the oldest people who lived there, asking them about healing techniques, recovery, and their myths. They often told her stories about dragons: green ones and white ones and red ones. The wall itself, she was told, was a dragon too. Its head was with the dead buried in the Yellow Sea, its tail in the Gobi Desert, its body the mountains. What Abramović took away was that these dragons she was hearing about were all related to the ground she was walking on. “I realized there was aqua, there was iron, there was copper and so on, and I noticed how the state of my mind was changing,” she says.

After Abramović completed the journey, she went to Brazil, where her interest in minerals persisted. Her “transitory objects,” works “in which you trigger the experience of these minerals and the feelings they have,” spanned much of her work in the 1990s. During her 2010 retrospective at MoMA, she performed The Artist Is Present. Between March 14 and May 31, she spent 736 hours silent and unmoving while museumgoers took turns sitting opposite her.

NOW ARGUABLY THE WORLD’S most famous living artist, she has returned to China 36 years later. Using quartz, amethyst, tourmaline, copper, iron, and wood, she made objects for the audience to interact with. She doesn’t consider them sculptures because the object is not the point; the energy is. For example, there are concave stones mounted on the wall, inviting visitors to press their heads, hearts, and stomachs against them. “And then you actually don’t even see the work because you just see people facing the wall,” Abramović explains. In her ideal world, everyone would have a transitory object at home. “You do this before you make your espresso coffee, before you open a computer, before you look at your emails on the telephone,” she says. “That’s really something.”

The show’s title, “Transforming Energy,” refers to the ways that the materials are able to transform our own energy, but also to how that energy is constantly changing. “Because if you think about Marina’s philosophies, what is she all about?” asks Baitel. “Focus, disconnect from interruptions and the surrounding noise, discipline, disconnect from cellular phones, from social media, from focus on yourself, being in the present, be in the moment,” he replies. “That’s what we’re doing with transitory objects. Which means I curated energy, I curated the metaphysical. This is an entirely new concept. It’s the first time that an exhibition is curating energy.”

WHAT DOES ABRAMOVIĆ actually do for her own wellness routine? She swims. Every morning, for at least an hour. “I have to,” she says. While in Shanghai, she eats congee in the morning and a lot of tofu, which she fell in love with in 1988. She sees a qigong master for stomach-focused body work, and frequently does supplementary exercises at home. “I am always looking how I can balance all this,” she says, waving her arms. “Then taking long showers. It’s really important because water is giving energy, but then you have to get energy back. And then sleeping. I need to sleep eight hours a day.” Jet lag, she says, has only gotten harder to cope with as she ages—she’d been in China for two weeks when we spoke, and still felt it.

But here’s the most relatable thing about her life and routine, something anyone can take away from the rarefied and wacky world of Marina Abramović. Beyond the alleged baby food diet (she doesn’t mention it, and asking is useless; to talk to her is to submit to her own torrent of ideas), beyond the crystal healing, beyond the longevity tonics: she just wants to relax at home.

What she’s looking forward to is a knee replacement. “It’s a little bit fucked up. I tried the plasma shots, I tried everything,” she says. “I went to the doctor, he looked at my knee. He said to me, What kind of opiates are you taking? I said, Nothing—I never take anything. He said, What? And you’re walking on this?” So this past fall, she scheduled one. “I’m going to do physical therapy religiously,” she says. “And I’m not going to travel for three months.” She smiles at the thought.