The emptiness of outer space incites a surprising kind of yearning in Brittany Nelson. “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” her 2024 show at PATRON Gallery in Chicago, drew on her interests in science-fiction archives, travelogue videos, and early photochemistry techniques—all soundtracked by a heartrending Bonnie Raitt ballad that mines the desire in unrequited love (“I can’t make you love me if you don’t / you can’t make your heart feel something it won’t”).
Nelson’s engagement with the erotics of extraterrestrial subject matter was inspired by an unusual muse: the storied Mars rover, Opportunity. “I call her a lesbian icon,” the artist said, adopting the feminine pronoun that NASA attached to the robot during its 2004–18 service on the Red Planet. “She’s one of the farthest-roaming robots we’ve ever sent off-planet, and she took an insane amount of images,” Nelson told me when I visited her studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. “She was on an expedition alone, doing these butch rock experiments while [casting] glances across the landscape, which is an absolute lesbian trope: the longing glance, never to close the distance.”
To lend pathos to Opportunity’s images, Nelson printed composites of them using the bromoil process, an early 20th-century technique that gives photographs a more ethereal, painterly look. Source pictures from NASA “are so amazing but are only shared on science-y, techno-fetishy blogs,” she said, noting that they tend to be treated as data sets more than aesthetic entities. “I wanted to put the romanticism back in the images.”
She also found metaphorical resonance in more personal terms. Recalling her upbringing in a “cultural vacuum” in Montana, Nelson said, “I started thinking about having to reverse-engineer what it was like to be a gay person stuck in a very isolated environment. Then all of these parallels with space exploration and sci-fi became apparent.”
In her studio, secreted within a former military supply base dating back to World War I, Nelson works with a giant Fotar photo enlarger from the 1950s—“we call it Lord Fotar,” she said—that moves along floor tracks to project negatives, allowing for prints of formidable size. (Her largest so far is three by seven feet.) But she also works with other technologies: everything but the signature is me (2023) is a typewriter she programmed to type a single word—Starbear—culled from flirty letters exchanged by sci-fi writers Ursula K. Le Guin and Alice B. Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr.
Nelson’s new work focuses on enormous telescope arrays, started as an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute, a Silicon Valley–based nonprofit studying the presence of life and intelligence beyond Earth. Last year, she showed photographs of a telescope array in California in a two-person exhibition (with Joanne Leonard) at Luhring Augustine in New York. For a solo show next year at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, she is making work inspired by one of the world’s largest radio telescopes, at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. “I’m in the middle of it, struggling,” she said of her work in progress. “But I’m personifying the telescope in some way, almost treating it like an ex-girlfriend.”
Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.
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Justin Vivian Bond is a star of the stage and a powerful singer and interpreter of songs. They are also a multivalent force of personality in and around the art world, with performance-oriented and visual work featured in institutions including the New Museum in New York, the alternative art space Participant Inc, and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
In 2024 the MacArthur Foundation awarded one of its prestigious “genius grants” to Bond (who has not been sheepish since about adopting the “genius” mantle) for “working in the cabaret tradition and weaving cultural critique and an ethic of care into performances that center queer joy.” In May Bard College awarded Bond an honorary degree in tribute to (in the Foundation’s words) a “decades-long journey across the landscape of gender [that] has both informed their artistic practices and played a significant role in ongoing conversations around gender identity and LGBTQ+ rights.”
During Pride Month in June, Bond will perform a series of stage shows at Joe’s Pub, a lower-Manhattan cabaret haven that has long served as a sort of home. They are also acting as the venue’s Vanguard Resident for the 2025–2026 season, curating a series of shows by other artists. For a set of performances in London in July, Bond will resurrect (with pianist Kenny Mellman) the beloved duo Kiki & Herb, for which Bond takes on the persona of a drink-swilling, pill-popping, elderly doyenne who has seen better days.
To take stock of their ongoing flurry of activity, ARTnews spoke with Bond (at home, in front of a giant Joan Crawford shower curtain hanging on a wall) about the current cultural climate, their evolving political activism, and their outlook on the survival of marginalized communities.
ARTnews: You’re performing the last part of a run of shows at Joe’s Pub soon. How will it end?
Justin Vivian Bond: “Well, Well, Well” is the third of a three-part series. “Oh Well” was last fall. “Well, Well” was in May. And “Well, Well, Well” starts June 18 [and runs through June 29]. I’ve been thinking for years that I should do a show of just great lesbian singer-songwriters. The fashion designer Erdem did a collection that he showed last fall based on The Well of Loneliness [a 1928 novel] by Radclyffe Hall, and I thought, “That’s it!” I reached out to Erdem and he provided me clothes from the collection to wear for the show, so it’s a little symbiosis inspired by the book, the designer, and great lesbian singers and songwriters. And then, because we have such an unfriendly trans climate, I decided to throw in some trans singer-songwriters too.
What about the Radclyffe Hall book intrigued you?
I’ll be perfectly honest with you: I did not read the book! [Cackles.] But I did research Radclyffe Hall and their relationship with gender and iconography. Radcliffe and their lover [Una Troubridge] definitely served very revolutionary nonbinary looks and butch femme dynamics, and they were very subversive. That’s what inspired me.
The V&A East Storehouse, part of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, just installed the wallpaper from a work of yours that was in the 2017 New Museum show “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon.” How do you feel now about that “Trigger” show? It’s been eight years—a very long eight years.
For me it’s a standout memory for several reasons. One is because it was my first exhibition in an actual museum. Also, I got to do three things at once. The show was on exhibition, I did a performance in the window, and I was also doing a show at the same time at Joe’s Pub. They all sort of played off each other. But the main thing is that my mom, who’s since passed, and my sister, brother-in-law, niece, and nephew all came to visit the museum with me. My mom was a painter, so for her to go into the museum and see my work hanging—work that I had done in high school up to the present—was amazing. We had so much fun. She of course was like, “Oh, I know where you got all your talent.” [Laughs.]
She later had her very first show of her watercolors, two months before she died. It was in the place where she was living, but it was very exciting for her to get a bunch of her paintings back from different people and put them on display. That was the last really big, major thing for her. I have her palettes and her watercolors and all the stuff at my house, and I’m going to reactivate it when I have time. I’ll make paintings with her colors.
You recently performed as part of “An Evening with Joy Episalla” at MoMA. What is your relationship with Episalla and fierce pussy, the queer art collective they helped found?
I met Zoe Leonard before I met any of the rest, when I lived in San Francisco years ago. Then, when I lived in [in New York] on Second Avenue from 2008 to 2011, I had a fierce pussy poster—which said, “I AM A / lezzie / butch / pervert / girlfriend / bulldagger / sister / dyke / AND PROUD!”—hanging in my loft. Somebody did a photo shoot and Joy saw that their work was hanging in my house. We started talking, and it wasn’t very long afterward that I had my first show at Participant Inc, and we hit it off. We had a conversation at PS1 about my work, and I kind of became an honorary member of fierce pussy. They took one of my childhood pictures—because I said that I thought of myself as a tomgirl—and it ended up at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art when they had a fierce pussy show there.
We were also arrested together in 2019 in Washington, D.C., outside the Supreme Court. I was nervous because I didn’t know whether I was going to jail or not, and I didn’t want to get separated from them. As I was getting arrested, I put on my lipstick and was like, “Well, if they see lipstick, maybe they’ll be sure and put me with the women.” We call ourselves the Lipstick Brigade, because we all put on our lipstick in solidarity as we were getting arrested.
You’re going to be resurrecting Kiki & Herb in London in July. What do you get out of shifting your persona into Kiki? What does it bring out of you, and has that changed over the decades you’ve been doing it?
It has definitely changed. When I first started doing it, it was in response to the world around me as a young trans person in San Francisco, when everybody was dying of AIDS. I was young and didn’t feel like I had any real authority—and I didn’t want to come across as earnest or strident, even though I wanted to be political—so I created this 60-some-year-old alcoholic lounge singer who had been everywhere and done everything. Then I could say all the things I wanted to say and that appealed to my community, and they could hear things that no other performers were really centering in their work.
That started in the early 1990s, and by the time we got to Off Broadway in 2003, I was kind of tired of it. But we kept getting offers, and then we were offered Carnegie Hall. After that I said, “OK, I’m quitting—I’m done.” I went over to get my master’s degree in performance design from Central Saint Martins College in London, and the Scissor Sisters asked us to come out on tour and open for them, so of course we did that. Then [in 2006] some people were like, “Why don’t you come and do Broadway?”
After that I couldn’t do it anymore because I wanted a different kind of a life. I felt like the rage that I had channeled when I first started as Kiki was genuine and real and truthful, but by the time I finished, I felt like I was manufacturing whatever it was that made her seem real to people and that appealed to them. It was also taking its toll on me, because it got in the way of me actually being happy and healthy and growing as an artist. So I had to stop.
But you didn’t stop.
In 2015 Joe’s Pub asked me if I would consider doing a series for my 25th anniversary in show business or whatever, and I was doing a whole season dedicated to shows I’d been doing over the years. They asked if I would do Kiki, and I told them I would do it if it made me enough money for a down payment on a house. So that’s why I did it then. And then I always joked that if I ever did it again, it would be “The Second Bathroom Tour.”
We haven’t done a non-Christmas Kiki & Herb show since, and Trump being reelected made me think it’s not going to be hard for me to manufacture rage. It’ll be organic, and it’ll be fun because when it’s real and centered and grounded, it’s kind of cathartic.
We’re obviously living in very troubling times for the trans and queer communities—and all communities in general. How would you describe your current mood regarding that?
It’s a lot worse for a lot of other people, you know. I’m very aware of how privileged I am, and I’m angry on behalf of not just my community but all at-risk communities. I’m a successful, white, trans woman who’s been around the block a few times. I’ve lived through enough to know that this isn’t maybe the worst thing that’s ever happened, because I remember when, literally, the government wanted us dead. It was not hyperbolic to say that the U.S. government wanted gay people to die. It’s so frustrating that we’re back here, and I know it’s terrifying for young people who have never lived through it. When it’s happening to you, what do you do? How do you rally? How do you pull yourself together? How do you fight? That’s where we all are, and we’re all kind of figuring it out as we go along. But one of the gifts of being older is that you can have a little bit more perspective and know that this too shall pass. But there’s always just so much collateral damage. People literally die, and for no good reason other than that these stupid, arrogant, rich, white people have no sense of humanity.
You cut a vacation short to return to New York for a protest march in April. How was that march for you? How much hope do you have that there is something brewing or bubbling up?
I wouldn’t say I have hope, but I have faith. I have faith that we will persevere. As queers, trans people, and other minorities who are in dangerous and treacherous positions, we’ve always managed to survive. We’ve always found work-arounds. Whether it’s a highly visible thing, like a march, or just finding ways to not follow the rules, live our lives, and protect each other, we are adaptable. No matter what happens, we will adapt—I have faith in that. But do I have hope that it’s going to change and these people are going to wake up and do the right thing soon? No, I don’t. I think they’re always going to be horrible and evil, and until something comes along, like a huge wave of all of us banding together and removing them like a cancer from their positions of power, it’s going to just be this way.
Was there anything about that recent march that felt different or unique to you?
I read this piece that was saying we’re all out there marching to show that we’re in solidarity with each other, but there are never any demands. There’s never anyone saying, ‘We’re not moving and we’re not going to leave until you tell us you’re going to change this or change that.’ Marching is good for the spirit, and it’s good to give newspapers a story to write about, saying that there is resistance. But power isn’t being harnessed in order to force these people to make decisions and act in the way that we need them to act. When you have people surrounding Social Security offices or government facilities to keep DOGE from going in, that is major. That’s effective. That matters.
Word of mouth stands to take palpable form this season at the Storm King Art Center, when the idyllic upstate New York sculpture park plays home to an acoustic mirror created by the sculptor and sound artist Kevin Beasley. Measuring 11 feet tall and 100 feet wide, the four-part work was inspired by World War I–era defense structures that, in curved and reflective fashion, amplified distant sounds and dispersed sonic signals of encroaching enemies.
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Two such structures—one still in standing in Kent, England, the other on the coast of Malta—were models for the artwork, which will surveil a newly designated plot of parkland (over what used to be a parking lot) when Storm King reopens on May 7. The older acoustic mirrors were made of concrete and turned obsolete not long after their construction—when, as Steve Goodman wrote in his 2012 book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, “operation problems due to noise from the sea, wind, local towns, and ship propellers rendered the structures onto the sad scrap heap of twentieth-century dead media.”
While the concrete acoustic mirrors now exist as ghostly relics, the new one by Beasley—which will magnify visitors’ voices and the sounds of the outdoors during its run through the fall—is populated and embodied by a very different material: recycled clothes cast in resin and molded into a sort of memorial for humanity and the land it inhabits.
For Beasley, land is a living subject to be appreciated but also scrutinized. “When I look at a field, it’s not trauma-inducing, but there’s a cultural and historical context that shrouds the experience, and I’m trying to think about what that really means,” the artist said. “I don’t want to make assumptions or take things for granted, but I also don’t want to skirt the issue that, when thinking about landscape, you’re talking about colonialism, Manifest Destiny, even what’s happening now in Gaza—the idea of land being a contested site for belonging. Peoples’ right to live and exist is tied to land, and it’s hard to remove the struggles around who has a claim to land and who is a steward.”
The Storm King project relates to past works by Beasley’s that were inspired by his roots in rural Virginia, where strong family ties but also specters of racism and slavery remain. But the Storm King work also engages the specifics of its setting in the cradle of the Hudson River School of painters who, in the 19th century, imagined a sort of American Eden seeded by Manifest Destiny and hubristic notions of conquest. “It’s a very white occupation to be able to depict the landscape in the way that it was depicted,” Beasley said of storied painters including Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and others. “As an artist, it’s not hard to find refuge in terms of the skillset and the exploration and curiosity in the images that the Hudson River School painters made. But there’s another conversation that is often left out.”
While Beasley’s installation engages the land it stands on, it also celebrates the cycle of the seasons and people who work in the service of agriculture. The four parts of the sculpture, each composed of three conjoined panels viewable from the front and back, bear titles that allude to shifting states of being at different times of year: Proscenium| Rebirth, Proscenium| Growth: The Watch, Proscenium| Harvest, and Proscenium| Dormancy: On Reflection. The look of each corresponds with its respective season (summer is bright and bountiful; winter is ruminative and sparse), and all together they take on picturesque qualities and a sense of playfulness unusual among the formidable sculptures elsewhere on the grounds of Storm King.
Part of that owes to the clothes, made from cotton, polyester, and other forms of fabric, that are scrunched up and splayed within the work. Sourced from places like Goodwill and a laundromat near Beasley’s studio in Queens, the garments include house dresses, work pants, fast fashion from Shein, and T-shirts decorated with characters from Frozen or bearing messages like “Good Vibes.”
“There’s a relationship between live bodies and the kinds of embodied or implied figuration in the work,” Beasley said. “It’s all made of clothing, so there’s always a reference to people, maybe a distinct community or maybe one that is more opaque and unknowable. Where you experience these materials the most is in social settings—you’ve got your ‘outside clothes’ and your ‘inside clothes’—and there’s something about being in such a monumental scale that make you able to focus in on what it means to be human.”
People also figure in the “Proscenium” part of the titles, which invoke the presence of an audience in a sort of theater of the outdoors. Performance, an integral part of Beasley’s practice, will accompany the work during Upstate Art Week in July, in the form of a two-day event featuring musicians and dancers choreographed by Mariam Noguera-Devers (with whom Beasley has worked on projects associated with Ralph Lemon).
“There’s a scenic, almost theatrical, kind of framework,” Beasley said. “There’s activity—we’re not looking at something that’s stagnant. Being outdoors requires a certain kind of engagement. You’re not sheltered. Things are happening all around you. You have to be aware and engaged in order to, on a basic level, navigate and, on a more complex level, to survive.”
There’s no gallery show this year with a more eyebrow-raising title than “The Bitch,” and it would be hard to think of a more singular setting for a duo presentation of art by Matthew Barney and Alex Katz than the decrepit and at least a little bit creepy former restaurant space that currently plays home to O’Flaherty’s in New York.
Followers of the enigmatic gallery founded by the painter Jamian Juliano-Villani have been treated to a wild assortment of exhibitions over the past three years, from shows of sculptures of psycho toddlers to performers rubbing themselves with Vaseline, and “The Bitch”—on view through December 19 and very likely never to be duplicated again—is another one for the annals.
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At the entryway is a centerpiece of a sort: a video for which Barney, continuing his long-running series of “Drawing Restraint” works, filmed the 97-year-old Katz climbing up and down a ladder to make a painting. Katz is more agile than might be expected, and the mix of his movements with the contemplativeness of his gaze is transfixing over the course of close to an hour. Also confounding—especially given the three-screen display split between TVs hanging from the ceiling in an arrangement that evokes a sort of ghostly sports bar.
“I wanted to approach it like an athletic event and focus on Alex’s movement and his physicality, particularly his moves up and down the ladder,” Barney said in an interview at O’Flaherty’s last week. “He has a rigorous and consistent exercise regime. As I understand the way his painting works into his day, it’s a very physical thing for him. It’s a physical practice, and he trains for his physical practice. It’s one of the reasons why it felt like a ‘Drawing Restraint’ could be made with Alex as the subject.”
Amplifying the sporting atmosphere are brief interludes during which the screens turn to squint-inducing flashes of orange and blue soundtracked by moody disruptions of electronic sound. “We were thinking about those as commercial breaks in the context of a sports broadcast, how you’re in one situation and then you’re suddenly thrown aggressively into another,” Barney said. “It’s loud and has a different energy to what you’ve been seeing.”
Sound design figures subtly but significantly in the work, titled DRAWING RESTRAINT 28 (2024). Much of it transpires more or less as normal, with brush strokes and room tones and creaks from the ladder sounding as they otherwise would. But certain passages play with scale and sync so that aural events go out of phase, rise in volume to skew as more prominent, and transform into something closer to psychedelic, synesthetic events. The sonic signals, created via Foley sound techniques by longtime Barney collaborator Jonathan Bepler, also include invocations of city streets and the noises they emanate.
“Another thing we were thinking about is the way that Alex has worked in the center of Soho in the same studio forever,” Barney said. “There’s a way in which his practice has endured the commercialization of Soho and all the changes in the world around it. It has a constant, monastic energy, in spite of all that.”
The painting that Katz works on in the video—an imposing 8-by-10-foot abstraction in orange and white titled Road 25 (2024)—is on view upstairs. But before that, in a ground floor space that used to be an industrial kitchen, is Barney’s Water Cast 10 (2015), a large sculpture made by pouring molten bronze into a slurry of water and bentonite clay. “What happens is the gasses from the metal react with the water, as the water becomes steam, and create an explosion,” said Barney. “The metal blows back out into the room, and it leaves a hollow casting behind. These are exciting from a casting standpoint, because they’re made in just one instant. There’s no mold—it’s just fluid. They are direct castings of negative space.”
Barney said he connected with what he sees as an engagement with negative space by Katz in the painting that figures in the video, which is a part of a body of work that is more abstract and pared down than the style for which Katz is best known. “It would have been harder for me to connect to one of his figurative pieces,” Barney said. “There’s something about this body of work: they’re one color, and there’s a kind of directness. The fact that it is so reductive connects for me to the ‘Drawing Restraint’ language.”
He continued, focusing on the color that Katz chose for Road 25 and other related paintings scattered throughout the show: “The orange is like a kind of afterburn, a color that’s left behind from looking at something else. I assumed that to be the sky, because orange is the chromatic opposite of blue. If you look at the sky and then you look away from that blue to something white, you will see orange, which is why the color-field breaks [in the video] are blue. They’re chromatic opposites.”
The idea for a show pairing Barney with Katz—two titans of decidedly different kinds—originated with Juliano-Villani, who said she can hardly bear the thought of the exhibition coming to a close. “The show needs to stay together—it’s like the burning of the library of Alexandria,” she texted a few days ago. “The gravity of it is way bigger than our shitty gallery.”
She said the idea struck her when she saw Katz’s retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 2022. “I was walking up [the ramp of the Guggenheim] and saw the abstract paintings toward the top. There was a physicality to Alex’s work that made me think about Matthew. I’m such an idiot that I didn’t even realize Matthew did a show at the Guggenheim. They’re both really good at cinematic vision, like in the editing of an image. They do very similar things but completely differently—in my brain. I was like, they should fucking do a show together.”
About the results, Juliano-Villani said, “It’s very bro Zen, this show—very balanced.”
“It was a funny idea that kind of evolved,” said Billy Grant, Juliano-Villani’s partner in O’Flaherty’s. “It’s hard to say when it became a real idea. We were surprised that it became a real thing, because it was so weird, but Matthew really took the lead on it. We gave him a problem and he solved it in his own way.”
Asked what he thought of the pairing, Katz, via email, said simply, “Great idea. It was totally bizarre.”
The derelict restaurant space that plays home to the Barney/Katz exhibition was secured only for the duration of the show, so it remains to be seen where O’Flaherty’s—currently in its third location in three years—will rise again. But “The Bitch” continues for one more week.
As for the title, the meaning of it is a mystery for which only cryptic hints are offered in a bit of text written by Grant and Juliano-Villani for the show. “A gripping tale of unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, ‘The Bitch’ is a masterfully crafted show, eloquently understated and epic in scope,” the text reads.
About Barney and Katz—both “known for planning before spontaneously executing their work”—the press release poses a question: “Can they be like light and shadow, giving shape to each other?”
And then, in conclusion: “In the end the work gets all the glory. The bitch is just the plan, and mostly gets all the blame.”
Jonathan Lethem’s Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture is not a conventional collection of writings about art. Lethem is most celebrated for writing novels such as Dissident Gardens, Chronic City, Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn, but he has also written prolifically on art, which he approaches less as a critic and more as a fiction writer trying to imagine his way into works of different kinds. In doing so, he offers keys to new worlds—or at least a world a good deal weirder and more abstract than our own.
Some of the essays in Cellophane Bricks are easy to follow, though just as many of the pieces read like impressionistic prose poems or refracted flights of fancy that connect to their subject matter in obscure ways. As Lethem writes in an introduction to the book, recalling his beginnings as a writer commissioned by artists to muse over their work for catalogs, gallery materials, and other contexts, “The situation, that of running my language up against the mystery of the artifacts—which didn’t require direct description, let alone explanation—kept revealing interesting new problems.” Among the artists engaged in Cellophane Bricks are Fred Tomaselli, Gregory Crewsdon, Richard Prince, Nan Goldin, Richard Brown Lethem (the author’s father), Rachel Harrison, Jim Shaw, and many more.
ARTnews recently spoke with Lethem about his approach to thinking about art, arranging bookshelves as installations, and growing up with art all around him.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.
Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, a new ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.
ARTnews: You have been writing about art in different ways for a while. What led to you to compile work in this mode now?
Jonathan Lethem: I grew up thinking I was going to be a visual artist but, after some art school, switched to writing. I always thought I was going to be a writer like I was a painter: I wanted to make imaginative things, not be a scholar or a nonfiction writer or a journalist. There was some critical writing I loved—Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris, Greil Marcus, Ellen Willis—but I didn’t picture myself ever writing about other people’s films or paintings or songs or anything.
But I loved hanging out with artists and was kind of a vicarious participant. My studio-visiting life was very meaningful to me, so when the invitation first came from a couple people for their catalogs or gallery materials, I was like, “No, I don’t have that muscle. On the other hand, if you want me to write you a story, I can try to do that.” I did it for the strangeness and amusement and comradeship—for the hanging-out of it. And I liked the results, because they were stories that weren’t like the stories I’d written before. They had a relationship to my thinking and talking about art.
Then I started to be more deliberate about it. Anytime an artist cruised me, I would say, “Well, I do this thing. It’s not like what you’re asking me to do, but…” I started to propagate it, and I accompanied it with a barter vow. I was like, “Let’s take money out of the equation. I’ll do it for a piece, even a tiny piece, a sketch or a scribble.” That could be seen as a very canny on my part, because the art is worth a lot more than the writing. [Laughs.]
Looking back over it as a body of work, does writing about or in tandem with art bring certain things out of you that you might not be otherwise inclined to do?
There have been constant surprises and revelatory moments, from the earliest examples to when I felt like there was a method to it. They’re very weirdly personal pieces. From the beginning, I kept trying to write about other artists, and somehow they were reaching into me. I would go to someone’s studio—sometimes an artist I knew well, sometimes a new encounter—and would think I could do the Vulcan mind-meld and speak in tongues about their practice. But the only mind I really know is my own, so I would end up making these weird amalgam creatures. The characters in the book are some sort of inter-subjective creatures made from my guesswork about another person and their practice, their worldview, what their studio life is like—and, of course, me. I’m trying to meditate my way into the brain of the artwork, but I keep bumping into myself.
How collaborative is the process? What kinds of conversation are involved?
It really ranges. The first people—Perry Hoberman and Fred Tomaselli and others at the start—were friends, and I was always talking to them about artistic concepts or resonating with their practice and their way of looking at the world. There was a lot of immersion before I set out to make something out of it on the page. Then, as I became bolder and the fact that I sometimes wrote for artists got around, I would be approached by someone who I didn’t have a relationship with. Sometimes there’d be a very scant or oblique encounter. Nan Goldin and I have still never met in person. She’s elusive in some ways, but I’d grown up with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency as a book that I’d projected my fascination into. By one means or another, I have to find my way into a strong emotional relationship that feels exceptional to me to do a piece.
The Gregory Crewsdon piece is one of the most extensive, and it involves quotations from Italo Calvino, Robert Smithson, Lauren Berlant, Donald Barthelme, and others. How would you describe the process of writing that one?
The Crewsdon one was a real watershed, in the sense that I got professional about this thing that had been kind of a fugitive practice. It felt much bigger because it was for a Rizzoli coffee-table compendium of Gregory’s work and they wanted a big piece of writing. So I was like, “OK, I better believe in this method now, because I’m doing it not for some folding material that a gallery is going to hand out for free or a limited-print-run monograph or something. This is going to be in a canonical book.”
There was also something funny and hugely empowering about it, which is that Gregory and I knew each other as teenagers in Brooklyn. Even though I hadn’t been a studio visitor and we hadn’t seen each other a great deal as adults, I felt I had a superpower: I could relate to him the way I relate to my feral street-kid schoolmates and friends from the 1970s and ‘80s in Brooklyn. I was like, “I know where you’re from. Even if all these pictures are set in Western Massachusetts, I know it’s a city kid looking at New England.”
It also came around a time when I wrote “The Ecstasy of Influence,” an important essay for me where I tried to de-sublimate or un-disguise the element of pastiche, appropriation, and collage in my own writing practice. I felt like it was important to talk about that, and it involved overt borrowing and then giving citations and saying, “Look, this paragraph in my writing actually comes from somebody else’s writing.” It coincided with what I thought about Gregory’s photographs, which I felt also involved a lot of quotation from Hollywood film imagery. I wanted to think about sourcing and influence explicitly, and it became an appropriated piece, in part.
How about the Richard Prince stories? How did you wind up writing about a fantastical tale about traveling with Bob Dylan?
That piece stands slightly apart from the others in that it was written to introduce a book of Richard Prince’s writings [Richard Prince: Collected Writings, published in 2011]. By that time, I was looking for chances to play my game. Richard Prince got the got the joke, in a way, and I saw his work as having a provocative, sort of shameless, quality, so again I was doing an appropriation piece. A lot of the jokes in that just came from internet joke sites, and he never gave me a single piece of feedback or pushback. He just ran it exactly as I sent it to him. Prince’s work dares you to say: “You just pasted that in from somewhere else, right?”
You write about books in your surroundings being installations of a sort, and how rearranging them is something of a meditational practice. Has the nature of that changed for you over time? How actively do you tend that garden, so to speak?
It’s pretty active. I have residue from two parts of my life that I cherish and kind of mourn. One is that I was a sculptor as well as a painter, and the other is that I was a bookseller. I worked in used bookstores growing up. It’s really the only job I’ve ever had besides being an author and professor. I still feel like a bookseller. I like alphabetizing books and putting delicate dustjackets into plastic wrappers to protect them. I’m very into the materiality and physical quality of books. There’s some place where that intersects for me with collecting artworks, and my house shows the evidence of the way I nest them all together. It’s part of a curatorial impulse. Rooms of books, bookstores, libraries, and personal collections are beautiful things—an installation that models a person’s brain or sensibility. I’m not just a collector of books, of each of them alone, but I’m kind of collector of the plurality: rooms of books, different ways of storing them and exhibiting them and showing them, and the dynamic of them living together and talking to each other.
You write about living with some of your father’s work, like the painting Kansas City Star, and also a bronze piece by George Burk, about which you wrote “It’s a pretty strange artwork to take for granted, but I have to remember to find it strange.” Is there something in your experience of living with certain works for decades that you’re able to articulate or describe?
It’s sort of about embodiment, the intersection of our expressive selves, or these abstract impulses to make non-utilitarian gestures and present them to one another, to write a book or make a sculpture or make a painting. They also are, in a way, pieces of bodies or pieces of time. Kansas City Star being in my parents’ bedroom when I was growing up meant I studied it in the same mysterious way that you index: What is a parent? What is a bedroom? What are they doing in there when I’m not here? What is life? What is it to be an adult?
My father is still alive and painting, but when he’s gone, I’ll still have Kansas City Star as a piece of him that I’ve lived with on and off for more than half my years on Earth. You can’t always get something from a piece of artwork. You take it for granted, or it becomes almost invisible. But then there are other times when it stops you and opens you up again.
George Burk was a friend of my dad’s. There are pictures of this big, burly, bearded dude named George holding me as a baby. That one is also a mystery. Why did George make it? I didn’t ask that question as a kid, but I sure stared at that thing and tried to figure it out. Is George Egyptian? Is it meant to be scary? Is it meant to be sexy? It’s a very mysterious piece, but it was just also part of our kitchen. That’s where it hung when I was a kid, and now it’s in my academic office. My students might stare at and be like, “What does he mean by having that weird Egyptian lips thing in his office?” It’s a mystery and a piece of George that is moving through time and space, confounding interpretation everywhere it goes.
Jean-Pierre Villafañe, whose painting Twelfth Night (2022) appears on the cover of this issue of Art in America, is the subject of a “New Talent” profile in the magazine. From his studio in New York, Villafañe told A.i.A. the backstory of the piece, shown below in full.
The title Twelfth Night comes from a comedy by William Shakespeare that revolves around love, mistaken identity, and complexities of gender, themes that I work with a lot. It’s based on the 12th night after Christmas, a time associated with revelry and the inversion of social norms, which reflects the themes of disguise and transformation that Shakespeare based his play on.
My original training is as an architect: I studied for nine years before I went to work at an office in New York. We were designing a Botox clinic for the World Trade Center, and I decided to shift gears to become a painter, and fused my passion for architecture with painting. Twelfth Night is a painting that exemplifies my exploration of fragmented identity, in characters as well as architecture.
For the characters, I was looking at idiosyncratic personas that we see in downtown New York, such as a Goldman Sachs banker who is a finance bro throughout the day and, when night falls, wears drag. Or a doctor I met in the city who is an anesthesiologist; every night we would go out, he would get plastered, and then the next day he would go perform anesthesia at the hospital. There can be such disparity between a true self and the masks we wear in society. For this work, I decided to collide them in one singular figure, trying to echo this interest in social role-playing.
The geometric segmentation of faces overlaps with my architectural background and evokes my architectural sensibility. In architecture, when you’re drawing plans, sometimes you’re cutting sections vertically through a building to expose what’s inside, or taking isometric views to distort reality so you can see the top of a building as well as the facade. I’m using these tools of architectural representation to alter the reality of my figural compositions.
When I became a painter, after the pandemic, I felt like interpersonal relationships had shifted, and domestic spaces had become highly public. The house became more or less the total center of human life, in the sense that we were turning houses into offices, schools, and, in some cases, discotheques. I became fascinated by how not only certain characters were wearing masks, but the program of the house had shifted to a new role. In Twelfth Night, you have geometrical segmentation and fragmentation of the human figure, where it’s becoming split, and then also abstract fragmentation that aligns with the way I see the city and its inhabitants as a dynamic, shifting part of a larger narrative.
Steve Locke’s best-known works are paintings of faces with their tongues sticking out. This fatuous facial gesture is immediately relatable but also, as Locke discusses below, one that can be read in a number of different ways. Such multifaceted readings are typical for Locke, who trained as a painter and considers his subjects carefully and from many different vantages. Often, in work that can be moving or maddening, inspiring or impish, and sometimes more than a little funny, he captures stark realities related to the violence that has haunted Black and queer people.
The 61-year-old artist, long based in Boston but now living and working in New York, was the subject of “the fire next time,” a survey on view at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, until November 8. The show—whose title alludes to James Baldwin’s 1963 book of essays—included paintings, some of them freestanding portraits with tongues sticking out attached to poles and made to look like signposts. It also featured drawings from “#killers”(2017–ongoing), a series of portraits of racially motivated murderers; a newly commissioned set of sculptures of a faun’s head; and A Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans Who Were Killed By Police or Who Died in Police Custody During My Sabbatical from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, 2014–2015 (2016). That last work is a room-size installation that lists the names of 262 deceased men and women next to a neon sign that reads a dream, invoking a poem by Langston Hughes. Below, Locke discusses his restless and searching approach to portraiture, portraying whiteness and violence without resorting to spectacle, and wanting people to pay attention to crises happening all around them.
How did you start your series of “tongue paintings” (2004–ongoing)?
When I first started painting them, I was thinking about making portraits when there was this thing called “photography.” It seemed strange to be painting straight portraiture in a time of the camera. The camera does portraiture so much better than painting can, and with painted portraiture, you start to get into this whole emotional thing about the painter, which is not what portraiture is [supposed to be] about. Portraiture is about the sitter, not the painter.
Still, I was struggling with giving up straight or neutral portraiture, so I started thinking about the genre’s history, which mostly involves men and images of power: like a picture of the king on money, or a portrait of Jesus high on the wall of a classroom when I was a kid. It wasn’t until years later that I realized the portrait was up there because it had glass in front of it, so the nuns could see what we were doing while their backs were turned. All my life, I thought it was up there because nothing was higher than Jesus. But I realized it was a tool of surveillance.
What drew you to tongues specifically?
If you look to art history, there are people sticking their tongues out everywhere. Once you start seeing them, you see them all over. I started to wonder, What does this gesture mean? It could be a way of being inappropriate or of making a face at someone. Or maybe what you have to say can’t fit inside your mouth. Focusing on tongues started out as a way to push myself past traditional portraiture. But then I really started to think about the implications: it relates to language. It’s sort of sexual, sort of gross, sort of funny. It also goes back to Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (ca. 1570s), with Marsyas upside-down with his tongue hanging out. It goes back to my love of art history, and all these sorts of things that happen in paintings, because things happen in paintings that can’t happen anywhere else.
What most drew you to James Baldwin for the title of your show?
We live in such a fraught time, and I don’t think anybody in American letters warned Americans more about America than James Baldwin. He was like, Here’s the problem: we’re sitting around pretending that we’re not related to each other, and it’s too expensive for us to love each other. But if we don’t start to love each other, we’re going to destroy each other. That has become very clear in American life right now, probably more than at any other time I’ve been alive—and I was born during segregation. The warning signs are all there about what is happening in American life: hatred of women, violence against Black people. It’s almost like an orgy of violence against Black people.
The MASS MoCA show is an exploration of different kinds of warnings. We’re in a place where we’re looking at Black people as if they’re not human, as if they’re abstractions. You hear people talk about “the Black body” like it’s an abstract thing, but no—they’re not Black bodies, they’re people. Baldwin presciently said we have to live together—not just exist together but live together, like we’re related, like we’re of the same family.
How did you conceive of your series “#killers,” and what made you situate your drawings in so much negative space?
The “#killers” series is an ongoing project. I think I’m up to about 63 drawings now. I’m trying to get to 100, but it’s taking me much longer than I anticipated because it’s such a difficult thing to do. Did you ever see the movie Jerry Maguire (1996)? There’s a conceit in that film that Cuba Gooding Jr. is a star football player. He’s obnoxious. Everybody hates him. It’s not until he is almost killed on the football field that people actually love him.
I have long had this feeling that America loves everything about Black culture except actual Black people. When I was thinking about “#killers,” I was thinking about what happened to people like Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown, who were killed in the most brutal, demoralizing ways and then became avatars or spirits. I don’t think we need to convey nobility on murdered people, because they were already noble. There’s nothing I can do with a paintbrush that’s going to be more noble than Freddie Gray was to the people who cared about him. The idea that, in death, they are somehow more holy seemed obscene to me. It’s like dead Black people are better than living Black people.
That started me thinking about how [killers] are consigned to a basic level of evil—like, “Oh, they’re just evil, that’s why they do it.” No, they don’t do it because they’re evil. They do it because of racism. They do it because of the idea that one group of people is better than another group of people. When I started working on “#killers,” I began with a drawing of Dylann Roof. I worked on it and worked on it and worked on it, and it was a very bad drawing. Finally, I said to myself, “If I’m going to do this, I have to draw Dylann Roof with as much sympathy and compassion as I possibly can.” I stopped looking at these people as evil, and looked at them the way the state looks at them, as just killers. Because there were so many hashtags about different people who have been murdered, I wanted to put the focus on the cause of people being killed. There’s so much white space [in the graphite drawings] because it is the constitution of whiteness that makes this kind of violence possible. The wholesale engulfing of the myth of white superiority is what makes that kind of violence. You can’t kill somebody like that unless they’re not human to you.
The show includes a series of new sculptures of faun heads that hang from the ceiling. How did you arrive upon those as a form?
In 2017 I did a show called “The School of Love” [at Samsøñ Projects in Boston], which was about my coming out as gay and how I didn’t have any education in terms of how to have a relationship as a gay person. There was no role model for me, so I ended up finding role models wherever I could.
In that show, I made sculptures [modeled from] the head of a faun. I had found the faun in an antique shop. When I brought it up to the front, the lady at the shop said, “I don’t mean to be weird or anything, but that kind of looks like you.” So it became my avatar in “The School of Love.” Years later, when
I started thinking about this new show, I was thinking about the danger and the violence that’s inflicted on people, not just me but everyone. The faun heads in the MASS MoCA show are all hanging, so they start to feel a little bit less like people and more like trophies, or symbols, or signs. I did that because there’s something about seeing the body in distress that is exciting for people, especially when it’s Black people in distress. Like the Cuba Gooding Jr. thing—we really love him now that he’s injured. But if I take out the racial dynamics [and swap in a faun], it becomes more about the viewer, and then people start to have a sympathetic relationship with their own body. That’s the thing about violence: If it’s happening to someone else, maybe they deserve it. But if it’s happening to me, then it’s a problem.
That can be seen in some of the adornments you affixed to the heads. Can you tell me about those?
Some have nails. Some have hooks. One has dog tags hanging from it. One has scales: they’re meat scales. I went on eBay one night and bought all the meat scales I could find. I wanted to talk about commerce and exchange, but I didn’t want to be ham-handed … we feel value through weight. The nails are a reference to nkisi power figures from West Africa: everyone in the community comes and brings a nail with a prayer or problem, then drives it into a wooden figure. The figure becomes the carrier of all those things.
You depict violence very differently in A Partial List of Unarmed African-Americans Who Were Killed by Police or Who Died in Police Custody… Tell us about that work.
A lot of my earlier work dealt with the losses from the era of AIDS, which seems so long ago and so recent at the same time. Then, around when Michael Brown and Tamir Rice were killed [in 2014], a shift came about in the way I was thinking about both the world and my work. I was on sabbatical from teaching and had come back from a trip when, in an airport, I saw Eric Garner being murdered on television, over and over again on a loop. I wondered, When did it become OK to show Black people being killed on TV?
While I was on sabbatical, people kept saying to me, “Oh, that’s so great! It’s such a great time to be on sabbatical!” And I thought, Are you serious? Do you not see what’s going on?! Cops don’t keep statistics on who they shoot, but other groups were compiling statistics and posting them online. So I took a year and got [262] names, which are on the wall with the date, age, gender, location, and [cause of death]. I had a sign fabricated in blue neon, sort of like police-blue, that says a dream, from a line in the 1951 Langston Hughes poem “Harlem” that reads “what happens to a dream deferred?” I got sick of people asking me what I had done on my sabbatical with all these other people being murdered. It boggled my mind that so many people were blissfully unaware that Black people were being murdered with impunity.
There was a lot of talk about portals earlier this month at MASS MoCA, the enormous art space in Western Massachusetts now playing home to an eye-popping, shape-shifting installation by artist Jeffrey Gibson through the winter of next year. Gibson had already been granted access to a big stage when he was chosen to represent the U.S. in this year’s Venice Biennale—the first time a Native American artist has done so with a solo show since the exhibition’s inauguration in 1895. But this is a bigger stage still, at least in literal terms: MASS MoCA’s storied Building 5, a vast column-free space in a former factory complex described as the size of a football field.
Gibson’s commissioned show “POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT” is different than his offering in Venice—more antic and animated, with an emphasis on performative gestures and an engagement with “two-spirit” states of being that figure in Indigenous LGBTQI+ culture. The exhibition is boisterous, with clubby electronic music and kinetic videos that bring life to outsize ceremonial garments hung from the ceiling above illuminated sculptures that double as dance floors.
“It was different from filling a space like in a normal exhibition,” Gibson said during a public talk at the opening. “It was more about: how do we fill this space with all the ideas of what’s happening in the work?”
While the amount of space is otherworldly (19,000 square feet in Building 5, across two floors), the art within it is earthy and homegrown. During his talk to introduce the show, Gibson said he had been inspired by the kind of collective and communal activity that he grew up with in churches and, later, dance clubs. “We talked about a disco/church,” he said of early conversations about the project. “A lot of it has to do with faith based-practices, regalia, queerness—a very welcoming space.”
Sharing the stage was Albert McLeod, a human-rights activist and director of the Two-Spirited People of Manitoba who Gibson invited to discuss notions of two-spirit identity that date back to the term’s origin within Indigenous queer activism. “Spirit-naming is a historic tradition, and usually children receive a spirit name when they’re born,” McLeod said. “The implication is that the spiritual realm is benevolent to humans, so we ask for a guide for that child throughout their life, because there’s lots of brambles and wolves with sharp teeth. You need a spirit guide to help you, and there’s power in the belief that we, individually, are never alone, because there’s a spirit that walks with us for the rest of our lives.”
At a gathering in 1990, McLeod and other Indigenous queer activists turned to ceremony in search of guidance. “We had heard about healers and medicine people and dream interpreters and sweat lodges, but because we were on the periphery in our own community, we didn’t know very much,” he recalled. “That particular weekend, we opened a portal and were blessed, and on that journey we received the name ‘two-spirit.’ A lot of people think it refers to sexuality or gender, but over 34 years now, it’s more than that. For me, my community’s knowledge about history, tradition, language, and philosophy is [one] spirit. The second spirit is about love: nurturing for my siblings, my parents, my grandparents, my family, my community, and my Nation. It’s not so much about sex or gender, because those will always be part of the human experience. It’s about: what is that other level of knowledge or activism or energy that we need?”
McLeod compared art museums to the kind of portal that was opened during that weekend decades ago. “Portals to a sacred space—we have those in the Indigenous community, whether it’s a sweat lodge or a sun dance, where spirit exists, spirit lives, and spirit is accessible.” Gibson described how McLeod’s conception of two-spirit as a state attainable via passage through a portal made it “feel much more like a live concept than a term of description. For me, it has to do with different kinds of Native architecture and spaces that you enter through a portal, where you can be born, reborn, transformed.”
The exhibition itself includes a portal: after entering a cavernous space lit up by video screens (which broadcast the 1992 documentary Two Spirit People plus footage Gibson assembled of two-spirit DJs, drag performers, academics, and others), a show-goer walks through a twisting architectural structure to enter the other half of the building, illuminated by light streaming through windows and filled with more hanging garments and stages on the floor. At the opening, attendees traversed it with varying degrees of curiosity and uncertainty—before some stuck around for a concert by the musician ANOHNI to mark the occasion.
Gibson had made a special garment for the transfixing singer to wear: a white robe-like piece bearing the stitched words “All the things that led to this exact moment.” ANOHNI wore it well throughout a set that mixed hallmark songs like “Why Am I Alive Now?” and “Another World” with heart-wrenching covers of Beyoncé’s “Crazy Right Now” and the Velvet Underground’s “Candy Says” (the latter in front of footage of feted trans activist Marsha P. Johnson projected at larger-than-life size).
The next day, in an interview in a Resource Room part of the exhibition given over to archival two-spirit documents and books on the subject, Gibson credited his approach to the MASS MoCA project in part to one of his young children. “My daughter looked up at me one day and said, ‘Dada, sometimes your body changes and you forget your dreams,’” he recalled. “I was like, ‘What?! What did you just say?!’ I keep a running text to myself so I wrote it down, and I think [it applies to] the time that we’re living in. That could mean the last many, many years, but I’m going to say the last decade of going through so many movements focused on the politicizing of bodies and violence against bodies. That phrase became a backbone how this whole exhibition—especially when the term two-spirit came in, which, for me, is inclusive of the entire spectrum of genders and sexualities but also different facets of being a spiritual person.”
He continued, striking a note defiance and assuredness in equal measure: “It also took me back to when I was a teenager and knew I was gay, but also felt really empowered and fearless of change. I remember being like, ‘The world is changing and you’re fine—you’re going to handle it.’ As you get older, there’s something about change that becomes frightening, but I want to reconnect to feeling empowered [while] facing unknown factors. It seems like the thing we all have to be able to do right now is to move forward in the face of the unknown. We can’t know right now, on so many levels, obvious and not-obvious ones, when it comes to climate, technology, space, politics. It’s all so unknown that if we can’t feel grounded and somehow empowered in the present, we’re just going to get crushed.”
Eric Oglander makes his sculptures—poetic and odd, searching and guided by a sense of play—in the back of an eccentric antique shop. Hidden behind a wall in Tihngs, a store he stocks with one-of-a-kind finds, and operates on Sunday afternoons in Ridgewood, Queens, is a workshop filled with scraps of wood, piles of button-down shirts, and other cast-off materials that Oglander crafts into curious contraptions, often at minuscule scale. Some are elaborate and mechanical, like the homespun catapults and trebuchets he builds and coats in white paint; others are crafted from the simplest of gestures, like tiny wooden totems bearing curves and curlicues whittled with just a knife and a thumb. All of them could blend in on shelves full of offbeat objects.
“I was always into stuff,” Oglander said of his upbringing in rural Tennessee, where he obsessively collected things like arrowheads, fossils, and rocks as well as fish and other organisms. “I had 14 snakes at one point,” he said, expressing a persistent interest in pythons. Both of his parents and his brother were artists—as a family, they once mounted an art show in the Nashville airport—but Oglander is mostly self-taught, having dropped out of high school when he was a junior to follow his own idiosyncratic path.
After he moved to New York at age 26, Oglander made a name for himself with “Craigslist Mirrors,” searching online listings of mirrors for sale and posting pictures of their reflections on Tumblr and Instagram. In 2016 he published his collection as a photo book with TBW Books. “That was a lesson for me: that I should pay attention to compulsions I have outside of art,” he said. “That’s where the best art comes from—these weird little obsessions.”
One of his obsessions is creatures—as seen in Crab lamp (2024), a sculptural lamp he made using a crustacean shell he found on a Florida beach, set on top of a blue-and-white-striped Oxford shirt stretched over a wooden frame. A button doubles as the on-off switch. “I don’t often buy art supplies,” he said, noting that he started using shirts—a frequent motif—after finding one in an abandoned house, then saturating it in beeswax. “I like recontextualizing everyday things—stuff that’s readily available and that might be overlooked.” He approaches all that stuff with a careful kind of craftsmanship: Butterfly tongue (2024), a small slab of wood standing upright on a pedestal, features a corner slice curled over by a simple stroke of a knife.
Both those works featured in “Do Nothing Machine,” a solo show this past spring at Bernheim Gallery in London. Prior to that was “World Beyond World,” a group exhibition at New York’s 1969 Gallery in which Oglander showed a series of glass jars filled with water, plants, and living organisms one might find in an aquarium: snails, scuds, daphnia, ostracods. In text that accompanied the exhibition, he offered instructions too: “I encourage all purchasers to engage with their jar(s), and to treat this engagement as an engagement with the self,” Oglander wrote. “Welcome failure. Mimic nature. Have fun.”
Over the past five days, not one but two New York institutions—Creative Time and the Dia Art Foundation—celebrated their 50th anniversaries, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, on the verge of completing a historic building expansion, held its 13th annual Art+Film gala.
All of this on the eve of what many believe to be the most crucial presidential election of our lifetime. What luck! ARTnews stopped by all three to take the pulse of the art world, as America waits to find out who will be the next president: Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump.
The vibes were—to put it mildly—a little anxious.