At first glance, the ICA Miami’s sunny, second-floor galleries offer some jarringly eclectic views: Unpainted found wood is paired with monochromatic prints, and oversized triptychs butt up against unvarnished planks with industrial hinges. These are all the work of one artist, Mildred Thompson (1936–2003), whose recent exhibitions have worked around her wide stylistic variance by focusing on a single period in her life, as in the memorable 2018 wood-focused show “Against the Grain” at the New Orleans Museum of Art. This first comprehensive retrospective boldly links disparate styles and techniques across five decades.

Thompson’s identities were as complex as her oeuvre, and this exhibition, titled “Frequencies,” acknowledges her artistic evolution as she pursued education and audiences while moving back and forth between the United States and Germany. The eclecticism that risks being jarring turns out to be the show’s strength: It extends Thompson the courtesy to be complex, a courtesy not often afforded artists from marginalized groups. Indeed, though exhibition didactics address Thompson’s life as a queer Black woman, it is her artwork that drives the narrative, not her identities.

Across 49 pieces sourced from the artist’s estate in Atlanta and Galerie Lelong & Co.—the first gallery ever to represent her, starting 14 years after her death—the show expands her visibility following the 2017 “Magnetic Fields” exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., that reevaluated several overlooked Black abstractionists.

“Frequencies” features five groupings that balance a chronological progression with formal relations. The earliest works are a pair of 1959 etchings Thompson made in Germany as the first Black female student at the Hamburg Hochschule für bildende Künste, which the Museum of Modern Art acquired in 1963. The etchings avoid racializing their subjects, opting for fleshy forms, delicate eyelashes, and oversize hair, with stockings and high heels underlining the figures’ femininity. These are the only fully representational images in the show, highlighting Thompson’s strong proclivity for abstraction that grew in tandem with her interests in space, science, and spirituality.

Her formal affinities with the German Expressionists are evident, presumably inspired by her instructors and social circles from Hamburg; the didactics mention Emil Schumacher, Paul Wunderlich, and Horst Janssen in particular. The curator also points out that Thompson met Louise Nevelson in New York, ostensibly inspiring some of Thompson’s wood assemblages created from found materials in the 1960s and ’70s, when she resided in rural West Germany and traveled throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. She steered clear of the US due to the tangible racism she faced there as a Black artist: One gallerist even suggested she find a white artist to front for her if she sought an audience and commercial success. Thompson’s expatriate period is largely represented in “Frequencies” by way of these sumptuous wood constructions in two and three dimensions, notably, the humble Stele (ca. 1963) with its stacked squares sporadically punctuated with orange, blue, and red. Another standout is the graceful Wooden Picture (ca. 1972) whose slats transition from vertical to chevron to reveal an inner skin of purple.

When Thompson moved back to the US in 1974 for an NEA-funded artist residency with the city of Tampa, she declared “America has changed. I am ready now for America and I am eager to see if America is really ready for me,” going on to describe her birth country as an on-again, off-again lover. Her “Window” series from 1977 is the first body of work she created after repatriating. Bold stripes and stacked blocks offer a view through parted curtains and raised blinds of the American landscape—physical and social—that Thompson was giving a second chance. The artist’s abstraction matured further in her intaglio print series “Death and Orgasm” (originally made in 1978, shown here as a 1991 edition reprinted with master printer Robert Blackburn). The works’ individual titles make gripping references to spiritual practices, mythical sites, and heavenly journeys: Ascension, Mandala, Montsolva, Mulbris I, Variation of Mulbris I, and Saturnalia. Representing experiences just beyond the visible world, these amorphous forms undulate and climb, almost composing a face or a countryside or a celestial body. Mulbris I especially is gorgeously composed: The top half of the image is free of ink, its tonality conveyed instead by a pillowy embossed form.

By the 1980s, Thompson was preoccupied with new research on Einstein and quantum physics during short teaching stints in Paris before relocating permanently to Atlanta. In Georgia, she taught at Spelman and Morehouse Colleges, Atlanta College of Art, and Atlanta University. Only a quartet of watercolors represents this period: While three are untitled, Pleiades III signals Thompson’s shift to exploring the universal—whether at the macro level of galaxies, or the micro level of molecules and quarks.

The final two galleries feature a suite of outsize paintings for which the artist is most well-known. In the larger gallery, two “String Theory” pieces evoke the staccato brushstrokes of Alma Thomas with compositions that are far more engaging than those in Thompson’s relatively subdued “Heliocentric” series from 1993. The second gallery features the show’s standout installation, Music of the Spheres (1996), which permits the viewer to stand at the center of Thompson’s universe. These impactful tableaux representing Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Mercury are paired with the artist’s sonic vision for the planets, with sound emanating from speakers behind each painting, giving the impression of music pouring from each celestial body. Inspired by the NASA Voyager recordings, Thompson composed a soundscape for each painting, incredibly synthesizing early music software with musical instruments and even sounds from children’s toys. This is but a glimpse into her ability to work across media: She also published at least one children’s book and played in a blues band with her partner in Atlanta.

As Thompson’s first major retrospective, “Frequencies” succeeds in loosely threading together the abstraction in her distinct shifts across the decades, letting an expansive body of work feel complex and cohesive at the same time. While most of the larger paintings—specifically the “Heliocentric” series—are not particularly interesting individually for their simple compositions, the overwhelming scale and color repeated across the final two galleries are nevertheless compelling for the universe they create together. But Thompson’s universe was bigger than the show acknowledges: Though wall labels note her cosmopolitan life spent between Germany and the US, they neglect her time in Africa and the Middle East. The verticality and thin-limbed bodies in her “Vespers” series show clear references to West African popular sculpture, and key moments of Thompson’s life—like her romantic and professional relationship with Audre Lorde—trace back to her 1977 participation in FESTAC, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos. Should the ICA find future venues or develop a publication from the exhibition (which this critic would fully support), shoring up some of these biographic touchpoints would more honestly situate the particular and the personal notes of Thompson’s reach, as we reconsider the universal in our narratives of mid- to late 20th-century abstraction.

An NSFW picture of Lorde has gone viral, stirring debate on social media about why the singer chose to bare it all for a special-edition release of her new album Virgin.

The photograph, which appears in the vinyl edition of that LP, shows Lorde donning a pair of see-through pants, without any underwear beneath them. Composed so that there is little to see beyond her waist, the picture echoes the album’s cover, an X-ray of the singer’s pelvis by artist Heji Shin.

Artist Talia Chetrit appears to be credited as the photographer of the picture in the liner notes for the vinyl, which were posted to Reddit by fans earlier this week. Chetrit previously photographed Lorde for the cover of one of the album’s singles, “What Was That,” featuring the singer’s face dripping with a translucent substance that may be water, sweat, or something else entirely.

Many of Chetrit’s photographs feature herself and others in various states of undress, often as a comment on how erotic desire and power play a role in how we see. “Power dynamics, agency, sexuality, and the psychology behind imagery have always been an important part of my work,” she told Flash Art in 2018. She has worked on commission for fashion magazines and shown her art in galleries.

Similar pants to the ones worn by Lorde here have also appeared in at least two other pictures by Chetrit, both of them self-portraits. In both, the artist artist poses before a mirror, spreading her legs and holding her camera to her face.

Of Plastic Nude (2016), Amanda Maddox wrote in Aperture last year, “While Chetrit’s see-through garment leaves virtually nothing to the imagination, it’s not exactly titillating by default. Perhaps this image is an evocation of the striptease, which, as Roland Barthes characterized it, ‘is based on a contradiction: Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked.’ Then again, is Chetrit nude? As she leans back against a piano, her plastic-wrapped torso and legs all but open to be viewed, I can’t help but be reminded of the beguiling woman dressed deceptively in a flesh-colored body stocking that E. J. Bellocq photographed a century earlier. In each case, the viewer must look closely to determine if the nudity is an illusion.”

Seen in that light, the new photograph of Lorde speaks to Virgin’s broader concerns with how much one is meant to reveal of their inner self, specifically when it comes to gender. “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man,” Lorde sings on the opening track, “Hammer.” And of the album more broadly, she has said that, during its making, “I was beginning to understand that my gender was more expansive than I had thought.”

Throughout the run-up to the album, Lorde has subverted gender conventions. In the video for “Man of the Year,” she tapes her breasts and writhes around on a pile of soil that references Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977), an iconic work of the Land art movement. That movement has always been aligned with a certain brand of masculinity, even though women such as Agnes Denes and Nancy Holt are also associated with it.

“Today, land art appears as an almost perfect distillation of the art world’s history of male privilege, with its conviction that man is entitled to space to roam, to make his mark; women, however, never enjoyed that privilege,” wrote Megan O’Grady in 2018. Lorde’s mimicry of the De Maria piece seems to upend that notion, as does the closer of Virgin, a song called “David,” whose name may be an allusion to the Michelangelo sculpture, arguably the most famous male nude in art history.

The Virgin vinyl photograph also points up a contradiction: though Lorde has left little of her torso to the imagination, we still can’t see aspects of her gender identity. That much is also obvious based on the Shin photograph on the album’s cover, one of many X-ray photographs she’s taken. As Shin told ARTnews in 2019, “Even if you can see through me, you can understand even less of what’s going on.”

Most social media users haven’t engaged with the artful ideas broached by Chetrit and Shin’s photography for Lorde. Some have questioned why the vinyl’s picture did not gain the controversy that followed a recent Sabrina Carpenter album cover featuring that pop star kneeling before a man who can be seen grabbing her hair. (Carpenter later released new cover art that she jokingly said had been “approved by God.”)

One X post with 86,000 likes appears to mock the photograph as “groundbreaking” while labeling the Carpenter cover “anti-feminist.” Its poster, whose X page notes that they run a parody account, then wrote in a follow-up tweet, “today when us woman are still fighting for our rights, its bizarre that influential people do weird stuff like this for engagement. both covers are very odd.”

In response to that post, one user, apparently referencing Madonna’s 1992 Sex book, wrote, “No need for all the discourse. 90’s Madonna would kill you all.”

Other users have also poked fun at the Virgin picture. “when you open your Virgin vinyl and see lordussy,” reads one tweet accompanied with an iCarly clip in which the actress Miranda Cosgrove enters a room and is met with a blinding flash of light.

The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) will lay off approximately 30 unionized staff members, according to the Art Newspaper.

A spokesperson described the staff reductions in a statement as “the difficult but necessary process of reducing its operating budget to ensure long-term sustainability.”

Warren Williams, the president of CUPE 15—the local branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees which represents workers from a number of organizations and institutions in Vancouver, including the museum—said he was “deeply saddened by the employer’s recent decision” in a memo to VAG staff published on June 23. Williams also wrote: “Although the union has not yet completed its comprehensive evaluation, we have made the difficult decision to permit the employer to present voluntary severance package offers to individual employees.”

Williams told the Art Newspaper approximately 20 percent of VAG’s 150 unionized staff members represented by CUPE 15 will be laid off, and he was unsure of how many non-union staff would also be laid off due to the overall reductions in staff.

The news follows the recent departure of director and chief executive Anthony Kiendl in March, and the cancellation of plans for a new C$600 million ($420 million) building designed by Herzog & de Meuron last December after the budget rose from C$400 million to C$600 million. The cost for the cancelled project was C$60 million, according to the Art Newspaper.

In January, VAG announced the gallery would seek a simpler, less expensive new home through an invitation to 14 Canadian architectural firms to apply to design the new gallery.

The Art Newspaper reported that the mass layoffs “have raised doubts about the timeline for the new building project, which is already a decade and a half in the planning” and occurred after the city of Vancouver, one of the gallery’s funders, also announced budget cuts and hiring freezes across multiple sectors.

Williams added that CUPE 15 will continues to negotiate for “better severance packages—as our collective agreement allows for our members. Those who want to move on from the gallery need a financial incentive to do so as well as protection of benefits for a certain amount of time and career counselling.”

“Considering the financial status of the gallery and the new site being put on hold—they are in a bit of a pickle,” Williams noted.

The mystery provocateurs behind last week’s eight-foot-tall golden monument of President Donald Trump crushing Lady Liberty have returned to Washington, D.C.’s National Mall with another contribution to the genre of unauthorized presidential fan art—this time, video.

On Thursday morning, a life-sized, gold-painted television set appeared near Third Street NW, pointed squarely at the Capitol, the Washington Post reported. Its screen played a silent, 15-second loop of Donald Trump performing his now-infamous slow-motion dance moves—arms stiff, hips ambivalent, a slow-grinding shimmy—set against backdrops ranging from campaign rallies to a party with Jeffrey Epstein. The latter, for those who have forgotten, was the late financier and convicted sex offender who died while awaiting trial in 2019.

Above the TV sat a spray-painted gold eagle, wings spread in what might generously be described as majesty. Gold ivy trailed down the sides like a rejected Versace ad. At the base, a plaque read: In the United States of America you have the freedom to display your so-called ‘art,’ no matter how ugly it is. — The Trump White House, June 2025

The quote was pulled from a White House statement last week responding to the previous installation, Dictator Approved—a golden thumbs-up smashing the Statue of Liberty’s crown, accompanied by fawning quotes from Trump’s strongman fan club: Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro, and Kim Jong Un.

According to its National Park Service permit, the purpose of the video work is to “demonstrate freedom of speech and artistic expression using political imagery.” Translation: trolling with a permit. The piece is allowed to remain on the Mall through Sunday at 8 p.m., barring executive orders to the contrary.

The White House, still nursing its bruised aesthetic sensibilities from last week, was again unamused.

“Wow, these liberal activists masquerading as ‘artists,’ are dumber than I thought!” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, in a statement presumably meant to be read aloud in all caps. “I’ve tricked them into taking down their ugly sculpture and replacing it with a beautiful video of the president’s legendary dance moves that will bring joy and inspiration to all tourists traversing our National Mall.”

She concluded: “Maybe they will put this on their next sculpture.”

As for who’s behind all this? Still a mystery. The materials and gallows humor are consistent with guerrilla works that popped up last fall in D.C., Portland, and Philadelphia: a bronze tiki torch, a replica of Nancy Pelosi’s desk topped with fake poop—part performance art, part lowbrow indictment of the January 6 insurrection.

Permit records list a “Mary Harris” as the applicant, though no contact details were provided. For those into clues: Mary Harris Jones was the real name of labor leader “Mother” Jones. Either the artist is playing a long game or moonlighting as a U.S. history teacher.

The Persistence of Memory (La persistencia de la memoria) (1931) is a trifecta of superlatives: Surrealism’s most famous painting, created by its most famous artist, featuring its most famous motif. The painter, of course, is Salvador Dalí, and his iconic rendering of melted pocket watches is instantly recognizable to nearly everyone, even those with little or no interest in art.

Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory when he was 28. By that time, he was already a well-established member of the Surrealist circle, having moved to their base of operation in Paris five years earlier. His reputation preceded his arrival thanks to his fellow Catalan artist Joan Miró, a Surrealist OG whose work inspired Dalí’s own. Miró introduced Dalí to André Breton, Surrealism’s founder and ideological enforcer, who welcomed Dalí into the movement—though in time, the latter’s penchant for flamboyance and self-promotion, as well as his sympathy for fascism, would lead to a very public rupture with Breton.

Nevertheless, The Persistence of Memory, and Dalí’s work in general, represented the epitome of Breton’s call to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality.” Moreover, Dalí’s thinking, like Breton’s, was deeply indebted to the writings of Sigmund Freud and his belief that the mind could be unlocked through psychoanalytical methods such as the interpretation of dreams.

Dalí added his own peculiar twists to Surrealist ideology as well. For example, when artists of varying stripe began to flock to Breton’s movement, he enlisted Dalí’s aid in coming up with a way of making art that could conceivably span the panoply of styles and aims sheltering under the Surrealist umbrella. As a response, Dalí offered the “Surrealist object,” a psychosexual spin, essentially, on Marcel Duchamp’s Readymade strategy of taking ordinary, functional items—a bicycle wheel, a bottle rack—out of their original mass-produced context and labeling them unique works of art. But instead of puckishly violating the boundaries between art and life or between high and low culture, as Duchamp did, Surrealist objects would dredge up repressed thoughts and feelings. Dalí based the idea on Freud’s theory of fetishism, which explored the erotic fixation on shoes and other items associated with particular body parts. (Dalí’s own contributions in this regard included 1938’s Lobster Telephone, a handset sheathed in a crustacean carapace.)

More relevantly for The Persistence of Memory, though, was another concept Dalí formulated the year before he painted it, which he called the “paranoiac critical” method. Based on the notion that paranoiacs perceive things that aren’t there, Dalí’s “method” secreted phantom pictures within his compositions as a kind of stream-of-consciousness Rorschach test for viewers. Dalí called this strategy a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena.” In other words, Dalí was asserting that insanity provided him a model for pictorial organization—though, as he drily noted, “the only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.”

For his part, Breton embraced the paranoiac critical as an “instrument of primary importance”—until he didn’t: In 1939, after Dalí expressed his admiration for Hitler (saying, for example, that he often dreamed of the fürher as a woman whose “flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me”), Breton finally managed to engineer Dalí’s expulsion from the Surrealist group, something he’d tried and failed to do in 1934 after Dalí threw his support to the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. He accused Dalí of espousing race war and denounced the paranoiac critical method as reactionary.

The Persistence of Memory was first exhibited in 1932 in a group show of Surrealist art at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City. Levy had acquired the painting on a trip to Paris, and it immediately became a media sensation—the first for a work of art in New York, perhaps, since Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase rocked the Armory Show in 1913. It entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art two years later.

Dalí’s approach was notable for its almost hyperrealistic attention to detail, all with the aim of creating “hand-painted dream photographs,” as he put it. His otherworldly precisionism owed a lot to the polished biomorphic abstractions of fellow Surrealist Yves Tanguy, so much so that Dalí allegedly told Tanguy’s niece, “I pinched everything from your uncle.”

Dalí’s composition is, above all, a landscape that references geographic landmarks recalling his childhood in his native Catalonia, including Cap de Creus, a peninsula near Spain’s northeastern border with France, and Puig Pení, a mountain in the same region. Both take up the scene’s background, while its foreground is dominated by an ectoplasmic turkey-necked form that many take as a hidden self-portrait in profile. But it was also modeled after an anthropomorphic rock within Hieronymus Bosch’s dizzying medieval masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. (Much of Bosch’s works provided a template for Dalí.)

As for the liquefying timepieces, there are three in all, draped respectively across the aforementioned figure, the branch of a barren tree to its left, and an oblong box or bench jutting in sharply from the left border of the work to serve as a pedestal of sorts for the tree. A fourth pocket watch is also perched there, limned in orange, and though its shape is solid, it features ants converging in radiating lines toward a hole in the middle.

By Dalí’s own admission, ants represent his obsession with decay, but the melting watches have proved a bit more resistant to interpretation. Obviously they evoke time, though some have also suggested a connection to Einstein’s theory of relativity. For his part, Dalí described the watches as the “camembert of time and space,” as he’d gotten the idea for them by observing a plate of the cheese softening in the sun.

As with all things Dalí, including the maestro himself, The Persistence of Memory remains something of a mystery but is no less indelible for it. Indeed, one could almost say that Dalí’s title is a self-fulfilling prophecy as the painting tenaciously holds a place in our collective storehouse of imagery to this day.

Liz Collins had her work cut out for her when she conceived the two 16-foot-long tapestries she showed at last year’s Venice Biennale. Both textiles feature mountain ranges whose peaks emit rainbows that twist through a dark sky, and though they were among the largest works in the Biennale, they were crafted with such elegance that they appeared effortless.

In 2022, when she began work on them at the TextielLab in the Dutch city of Tillburg, Collins envisaged the two textiles as one 40-foot weaving. She thought, “I’m just going for the mother lode. I want to make this huge.” Going for the mother lode quickly revealed itself to be no easy task, however.

Collins quickly realized that her ambitions had outstripped what was actually possible, leading her to split her planned mega-tapestry in two. After an initial trial that didn’t look quite as she wanted, she switched to a lighter yarn. She was pleased with the final product, which she brought home to New York in duffel bags, not yet aware that curator Adriano Pedrosa was interested in showing them at his Biennale.

During a recent visit to her Brooklyn studio, Collins was transparent about the difficulty of producing these textiles, titled Rainbow Mountains: Moon and Rainbow Mountains: Weather (both 2023). But despite the arduous process of making the works, she also spoke of the resulting pieces as being transcendent and transporting. She described both as representing “this monumental space of distortion” and said her mountain ranges evinced “a persistent duality for me: the idea of danger, precarity, horror—the bad things—alongside joy, euphoria, the force of life, being alive, love and community and passion and emotion. Awe and wonder are in the mountains, but they’re also in the rainbows.”

The textiles depict “the promised land—this idea of something you’re looking toward that’s always a little out of reach,” as Collins put it.

Since the 1990s, Collins has been creating fiber art that attempts to reach that promised land. She has crafted wearable garments, painting-like weavings, and performance pieces involving collaborators, many of whom have knit large textiles as a collective. She weaves queer themes into her work—rainbows and Pride flags recur throughout—and often creates textiles that have a corporeal quality, with spills of yarn that recall locks of hair or rivulets of blood.

These labor-intensive pieces have been featured at commercial galleries, art fairs, and design expos and will now be surveyed by the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, where Collins did both undergraduate and graduate work and later was a faculty member in the textiles department. The RISD survey, opening on July 19 and running through January 11, 2026, coincides with the Museum of Modern Art’s iteration of “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” which features three works by her.

To create such elegant art requires physical and mental endurance (and sometimes the help of mills in Italy, Peru, and other foreign nations). The RISD exhibition’s catalog features an essay by Zoe Latta, cofounder of the clothing label Eckhaus Latta and student of Collins who participated in one of the artist’s “Knitting Nation” performances, for which Latta and others helped produce a giant red weaving using a loom in the auditorium of the Institute of Contemporary Art. “At some point,” Latta writes, “I remember that my machine was turning red and I realized my hands were bleeding from blisters popping on the handle of the carriage.” (Museum workers bandaged Latta’s wounds, and she returned to the performance thereafter.)

From such burdensome labor spring weavings in shades of deep crimson, gleaming pink, and alluring blue. The fact that Collins is able to spin pain into beauty has not been lost on her collaborators. The artist Nayland Blake, for example, once enlisted Collins to fix a beloved sock monkey torn apart by a dog and filmed Collins’s hands in close-up for a video called Stab (2013).

Kate Irvin, the curator of Collins’s RISD survey, said that for the artist, “the idea of labor leads to this idea of magic, of alchemy—of creating form or structure out of a line of fiber.” Irvin compared Collins to a trickster, saying, “She’s finding a pathway to other places that are generative and creative and safe.”

Collins herself said that the physicality of her process has helped to root her in her body—and that she even welcomes the tedium that accompanies weaving. “Either it’s boring, or you find a way for it to be transformative,” she said. “You can transcend the monotony.”

Collins was born in 1968 in Alexandria, Virginia, and spent her childhood visiting Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C. “It was so much a part of my life to experience art,” she said, recalling such formative experiences as attending the National Museum of African Art, where, during one visit, she viewed a video about men who make kente cloth.

She described an early compulsion to make “something with the heaviness of painting.” But she eventually found herself dissuaded from taking up that medium. As part of her required foundational studies as a freshman at RISD, she tried painting, but “there was something about it that felt stressful to me—the rectangle, the rigid rectangle,” she said. She found herself gravitating toward modernists like Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Anni Albers, and Sonia Delaunay, all of whom fluidly translated their abstractions across paintings and textiles. Those artists “really helped me know that I could do that too,” Collins said.

When she became a textiles major in her second year, she finally found her purpose. She learned to weave using a warp board and found the experience of running yellow yarn through it “so special and new and perfect for my body,” as she says in the RISD catalog.

Yet even the textile program left something to be desired: She wanted to create clothes, and all her teachers were fiber artists or designers. “I wanted to work with Jean Paul Gaultier, who could take my magical fabric and turn it into a magical garment,” she told me. Despite being unable to find a Gaultier-like mentor on RISD’s faculty, Collins followed her own intuition. When she was assigned to create a “political piece” for one class, she took camouflage-print fake fur and slashed it. She has since continued to produce weavings with gashes in them.

After graduating with an MFA in 1999, Collins launched a knitwear company that briefly made her a fixture within the world of fashion. “I had this meteoric rise to visibility and recognition, because my work was very unusual,” she said. “I was breaking rules. I was hand-making things with knitting machines, not using factories, and making these very unusual constructions that people hadn’t seen.”

Many of those constructions aspired toward liberation. A tight-fitting bustier from 1999 that appears in MoMA’s “Woven Histories,” for example, features red veins that run across the torso and over one shoulder; sheer dresses donned by runway models featured dangling red threads and gaping holes. “I came out as a queer person through my clothing,” Collins said. “It was a raw expression of my emotional landscape, my sexuality, my anxiety, my repression.”

Her clothes entered the mainstream, with the rapper Lil’ Kim wearing a pink silk and wool top designed by Collins in a 2000 music video. Some in the art world gained appreciation for them, too, including the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson, a longtime friend who dedicated her 2017 book, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, to Collins. “When I want to feel at my most fierce, protected, and glamorous, that’s when I choose to wear a Liz Collins garment,” said Bryan-Wilson, whose wedding dress was designed by Collins. “They are witchy and eye-catching. They’re statement pieces. People are always, like, ‘Oh, my God, what is that you’re wearing?’”

But Collins began to feel burnt out by the business of fashion. She wasn’t making enough money, and she had grown exhausted by customers who placed specific demands on her, not realizing all that went into the production of her clothes. Collins knew she could not make it on her own anymore, so she applied for work with other designers, including Donna Karan. But when she came across a position in RISD’s textile department, “everything shifted for me,” she explained. She recalled having “slowly segued” out of fashion while continuing to take on projects with designers such as Gary Graham, with whom she crafted the Pride Dress (2003), which was made from a tattered American flag.

Bryan-Wilson herself donned the Pride Dress for Knitting Nation Phase 1: Knitting During Wartime (2005), the first in a series of performances that helped cement Collins’s place within the art world. Staged on Governors Island, Knitting During Wartime involved many collaborators working together to knit an American flag that was then laid on the ground, trod upon, and defaced. Collins intended the piece as a response to Sunny A. Smith’s The Muster, a series of artworks interrogating Civil War reenactments. Smith aspired to answer the question “What are you fighting for?” Knitting During Wartime appeared as many Americans were asking something similar of themselves while the United States continued its conflict in Afghanistan. Bryan-Wilson recalled Knitting During Wartime as a “ruckus” highlighted by the loud noises of knitting machines and said she understood the piece as a “critique of wartime nationalism and the feminized labor of knitting.”

Future “Knitting Nation” performances involved producing Pride flags and heaps of red fabric. Collins said that, with these performances, she was “focused on telling a story about the physical labor of making fabric and laying bare this medium that I thought was like alchemy, taking a spool of yarn and then putting it through this machine.”

Collins staged the last “Knitting Nation” performance in 2016 and has since produced a range of dreamy textiles. In 2017, working on commission for the Little River Cafe in New York, she produced Inheritance, a group of hanging white textiles that dangle over the heads of diners. (These were an allusion to the sails of boats like the one manned by Collins’s father when she was a child.) That same year, for a New Museum show called “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” Collins made Cave of Secrets, an installation bathed in bluish lighting that included two chairs of differing heights yoked together by violet fibers.

These days, Collins said, she is experiencing a “strange color moment” in which her work often features clashing hues. She pointed out a new weaving from a series called “Zagreb Mountains,” which showcases jagged, zigzagging lines in a range of colors, from raucous yellow to soothing cerulean. “Left on my own, I can come up with some wacky shit like this,” she said.

Read more of our Pride Month coverage here.

The art market isn’t broken, exactly, but in the eyes of art market veterans Ed Dolman, Alex Dolman, Brett Gorvy, Philip Hoffman, and Patti Wong, it doesn’t function the way it used to. The group aims to change that with a new collaborative consultancy, New Perspectives Art Partners (NPAP), announced Thursday.

The consultancy won’t operate like a normal firm: each partner is keeping their day job, and they’ll only assemble when there’s a high-level, specialized problem that needs solving. Think of it like the Avengers, but for the art world.

“We’re not just another advisory,” Gorvy told ARTnews over the phone earlier this week. “This is more like a McKinsey model—a team that comes together to dissect a problem and solve it.”

NPAP isn’t looking to simply broker sales. Instead, it will advise collectors, fiduciaries, and family offices on how to manage, grow, or disperse significant collections with global context and institutional muscle. A major selling point is the group’s deep experience across different segments of the market—from auction houses and top galleries to institutions and high-end advisory—and a geographical footprint that spans Hong Kong to Doha.

Gorvy and Dolman both acknowledged that the current art market is at an inflection point. “We’re not starting this in a boom,” Gorvy said. “We’re starting this in a market that’s becoming complex.”

Dolman pointed to the proliferation of third-party guarantees, declining resale premiums, and regional fragmentation as evidence of a “paradigm shift” in the auction market, with the biggest houses becoming “victims of their own success.”

“What used to be a straightforward business has gotten massively complicated,” Dolman said. “That auction model, once full of surprise and upside, now feels rigid—designed more to manage risk than to serve buyers.”

Gorvy suggested that the market’s fragmentation and increasing complexity have created an opening.

“The tried-and-tested platforms are all showing signs of failure—or at least exhaustion,” Gorvy said. “But that chaos creates opportunity. If you can help clients navigate it, you can add real value.”

NPAP, the partners say, draws strength not just from its flexible structure but from the chemistry behind it. Dolman and Hoffman have known each other since the early 1990s. Gorvy worked closely with Dolman in the early 2000s. And although Patti Wong was a longtime competitor—she led Sotheby’s Asia while Gorvy served as Christie’s chairman and international head of postwar and contemporary art—Gorvy always admired her from afar.

“I was jealous of her power in the marketplace,” he said.

Both Gorvy and Dolman stressed that discretion is baked into the consultancy’s model. There’s no brand-building exercise, no junior staff scrambling for consignment quotas.

“Relevancy is what we keep coming back to,” Gorvy said. “What’s relevant to collectors right now? What’s relevant to institutions? To fiduciaries?”

The chief executive of English Heritage, the British conservation charity, has stepped down from his role having only joined at the beginning of 2024.

English Heritage said in a statement that Nick Merriman resigned for personal reasons linked to family health. Geoff Parkin will now step into the role on an interim basis.

Merriman’s reign was not without tension; he oversaw a restructuring of the charity and proposed cutting its workforce of 2,535 employees by 7 percent (189 jobs). The charity said it would aim to avoid redundancies while maintaining a team of more than 75 curators, historians, and conservators. He also planned to slash opening hours across its 400 sites by 10 percent as part of the overhaul. It was agreed that 21 sites would close over winter, including castles and abbeys.

The organization had reportedly begun to consult with staff and its unions on the proposals as part of a formal consultation period which was not concluded before Merriman’s departure.

The Guardian reported that some staff were “angered by cost cutting under [Merriman’s] watch.”

Gerard Lemos,  the chair of English Heritage’s trustees, said in an official statement to staff: “I am sorry to say that Nick has requested to step down from his role as chief executive for personal reasons relating to family health. The Board has agreed to his request, which will take place with immediate effect. The Board would like to thank Nick for everything he has done.”

In a statement the charity sent out in January, it said “high inflation has increased the cost of conservation work at our sites, but significant and ongoing expenditure is still required if the condition of the sites in our care is not to deteriorate.” The sites managed by English Heritage include Stone Henge, Hadrian’s Wall, and Dover Castle.

The charity became self-financed two years ago and said it no longer receives regular funding from the UK government’s Department of Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) to preserve the National Heritage Collection of state-owned historic monuments and sites.

Its annual 2023–24 review showed that the charity is operating at a loss, with its income totaling £141.4 million ($191 million), against £155.5 million ($213 million) in expenditure.

“Like many organisations, we are operating in a challenging environment and the aim of these proposals is to ensure that English Heritage is financially resilient and can fulfil our charitable purposes,” English Heritage said in a statement.

A new EU law aimed at preventing the sale of looted antiquities is set to go into effect Saturday. While Regulation 2019/880 has a partial exemption for temporary exhibitions, the law may still hamper loans from private collectors, according to a new report from the Art Newspaper.

The new law, first introduced six years ago, stipulates that any party which imports cultural goods from outside the EU will have “heightened due diligence requirements.” Cultural goods refer to fine arts, antiquities, decorative arts, and collectible items.

An advisory note published by the insurance company Lockton said the law is “intended to tackle the illicit trade of goods from countries affected by armed conflict, and where those goods may have been traded by terrorist or other criminal organisations.”

The three categories of cultural goods are 1) ones that have been unlawfully exported from third countries, 2) products from archaeological excavations more than 250 years old, regardless of their value and 3) various types of goods greater than 200 years old with a value above €18,000.

Goods from the second category will require an import license prior to their entry into the EU, and importers need to supply evidence the items were not illegally exported. Goods from the third category require an importer statement with a signed declaration they were also not illegally exported as well as a standardized description of the items.

Implementation of the new law will depend on the actions of individual EU member states, but non-compliance with Regulation 2019/880 could result in seizures and other legal consequences for art dealers, collectors, and other art professionals.

“Where importers lack the required documentation for such items, the entire shipment may be compounded,” Will Ferrer, Lockton’s head of fine art, wrote. “Alternatively, where importers submit false evidence in the course of an import license application, or make a reckless or knowingly fraudulent declaration, there may be criminal consequences. With a greater risk of confiscation, private collectors may also show more caution when deciding where, and to which institutions, to loan their works. This may hinder the efforts of certain institutions to secure works for loan.”

Regulation 2019/880 does have an exemption for “the purpose of education, science, conservation, restoration, exhibition, digitisation, performing arts, research conducted by academic institutions or cooperation between museums or similar institutions.” But the Art Newspaper noted that implementing regulation 2021/1079 limits the exemption to temporary loans from museums outside the EU—meaning private non-EU lenders do not benefit from it.

The new law was designed in response to looting of cultural heritage and archaeological sites in Syria and Iraq. Regulation 2019/880 also mandates digital records to enhance transparency and traceability through a International Cultural Goods (ICG) database. Museums only benefit from the law’s exemptions by registering for the ICG database.

Several art professionals told the Art Newspaper they did not question the aim of the law, but it would add a level of administrative difficulty, especially for works with incomplete documentation or complex histories of ownership.

Eike Schmidt, the director of the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples, said there is “a complete lack of administrative infrastructure” for the proper implementation of Regulation 2019/880. “Just consider the thousands of administrative officials, archaeologists, art historians, and restorers who would need to be hired to cope with the avalanche of requests,” he told the Art Newspaper.

“For many museums, requirements for import licenses and provenance proof may hinder international loans and exhibitions,” Tone Hansen, the director of the Munch Museum in Oslo told the Art Newspaper.

Ferrer also wrote that the new EU legislation will likely to increase the need for private collectors to do provenance research before selling goods from their collections.

“Collectors may find themselves in a difficult position of conducting the appropriate provenance research on a given item, with the knowledge that such research could reveal gaps or inconsistencies in provenance that complicate their efforts to sell.”

He also noted that for art dealers and institutions, seizure is excluded from insurance coverage as standard, and when an artwork loses value due to uncertain provenance, it’s unlikely the owner would be compensated by insurers.

“As a result, policyholders will not be covered in the event that any works are seized upon entry into the EU. However, insurers may be able to grant exceptions on a case-by-case basis. For example, insurers may be more inclined to provide cover to borrowing institutions for a single loan for exhibitions in their home country, where that country has a clearly defined set of rules around seizure.”