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.

Artist Carlos Agredano grew up on a dead-end street in the shadow of the 105 Freeway in Lynwood, a city that borders South Los Angeles. In the early days of lockdown, he would trace a path that ran parallel to the interstate highway, an 18-mile stretch of the LA basin’s vast infrastructural network, trying to understand the concrete monolith that had cut his neighborhood in half. That spring 2020 semester, he was finishing his undergraduate degree at Harvard University in his childhood bedroom, where each day he would methodically sweep the fine layer of black soot, pollution from car exhaust blown in from an open window, that had gathered on every surface.

The tyranny of the LA freeway system has since become the primary concern of Agredano’s practice. At the Los Angeles Nomadic Art Division (LAND), he recently exhibited FUME (2025), a traveling sculpture in which three different air quality sensors mounted to an aluminum circular platform are hitched to his black 1992 Toyota Pickup. One sensor monitors the output from the truck’s exhaust pipe. Another, monitoring ambient air quality, is enclosed by futuristic arches inspired by the Googie architecture of the LAX’s Theme Building: a vacant monument to Space Age hubris now stranded in the center of the loop of the airport’s eight terminals.  

As an object, both scientific and artistic, FUME collects the evidence of the gradual violence of toxic drift that seemingly takes place invisibly, primarily impacting working-class communities of color. “I want the sculpture to collect data in the way that my body or my family or my neighbors’ bodies collect data by how they are breathing in the debris,” he told ARTnews. “Although we don’t exactly know [the extent] of it or what it’s doing to us, the idea for this sculpture is to at least quantify it.” He joked that his medium is smog, and his artist assistant is the city of Los Angeles itself.

Over 50 years ago, postwar artists like Yves Klein, Otto Piene, or Fujiko Nakaya used air in different ways, though they were often animated by a utopian idea of air as a borderless, metaphysical material of shared experience. Agredano instead reveals how air quality is unevenly distributed via its sociopolitical context. By extensively researching social histories, like Eric Avila’s Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City (2014), scientific studies from UCLA’s Center for Occupational & Environmental Health, and environmental impact reports by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), among other sources, Agredano connects the evidence of pollution to the longer histories of destructive urban planning in Los Angeles (the vanity plate on his truck spells out JSTOR, the digital academic library.)

One example of this ruinous urban planning is, in fact, the 105, an auxiliary interstate freeway constructed in the early ’90s to improve access to LAX. Part of a 1960s masterplan by Caltrans, its construction was halted in 1972 after a community-led federal lawsuit—but only after homes had already been razed. “It’s really important to me to research the development of the freeway system, and know exactly why the freeways were built, which in Los Angeles was the same story of Black and Brown communities being seized through eminent domain and through the historical redlining of those communities,” Agredano said, adding that, under the guise of progress, these projects all follow the same pattern: “eminent domain, destruction of homes, removal of a community, and then the construction of a freeway.”

In an earlier piece, Collector (2019), Agredano placed an unprimed canvas in the backyard of his childhood home. Over the course of a year, it soon became dirtied. To those unfamiliar with the work’s history, at first glance, the canvas’s ashy blots resemble charcoal or smeared graphite. The caption corrects that impression, listing as its materials smog, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ground-level ozone, particulate matter, soot, dirt, dust, guano, and automobile tire microplastics, among others. Agredano thinks of the work as a self-portrait, one that indexes not only his body and what it experiences but the larger systems of which it is a part. Agredano’s work uses “gestures that are very minimal, but illustrative of these huge outside forces,” said Bryan Barcena, a curator at large at LAND, who organized the presentation of FUME, with Irina Gusin.

In its title, Collector also references the acquisition of art objects and how they circulate within the art world; a museum previously did not allow the work to enter its galleries because of its use of pollutants, according to Agredano. “I like that the work can create that sort of resistance in people,” he said, “because why is it okay for millions of people to live next to this material, but it can’t enter the museum space?”

As a canvas polluted in the predominantly Latino Lynwood, Collector also points out how conceptions of “dirty” and “clean” can be racially coded. Agredano is reminded of the Bracero Program, in which Mexican laborers came to the US during World War II to fill labor shortages. “This idea of the ‘dirty Mexican’ is a historical thing,” Agredano said, “When the braceros came to the US, they were literally sprayed with DDT, and were, in a sense, fumigated.”

As FUME collected air samples, Agredano invited local artists—Hunter Baoengstrum, Daid Roy, Angela Nguyen, Chris Suarez, Vincent E. Hernandez, Felix Quintana, Lizette Hernandez, Eduardo Camacho, Maria Maea, and Cielo Saucedo—to create works on or around the freeways significant to them. Agredano calls the collaborative project a form of “sous-veillance,” or “a view from below,” a form of data collection that captures what was “created against our will and creates a document of it.” Nguyen has created a tufted rug depicting the history of the 91, which runs from Gardena, through Orange County, to Riverside. Roy staged a noise concert in the bed of Agredano’s Pickup, Baoengstrum planted a filing cabinet on the 101, and Quintana installed a temporary tetherball court by the 105.

Against and within the freeways’ crude geometries, strangling the city and sloughing infinite toxic particles, these artists shape LA’s freeways into sites of resistance and invention, reappropriating privatized, policed, or abandoned spaces for the commons. Like generations of LA artists before them, from Studio Z to ASCO, Agredano and his collaborators are creating a new map of the city. 

The photographs of Cara Romero operate on the precipice between the risk of death and possibility of self-dissolution. A woman buried in sand stares resolutely at the viewer, or a figure floats in a body of water below an oil field. Her lens fuses Indigenous ancestral memory with the immediacy of pop culture. Her world-building, indebted to centuries-old oral tradition, doesn’t merely picture survival; it renders it mythic, futuristic, and, crucially, still unfinished.

Defying the erasure of California Indian peoples, Romero, an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, sees her work as “painting with the light of photography,” as she told ARTnews during a recent interview. “We don’t have a word in our language for photography. The figures [in my work] represent ideas and stories bigger than themselves––and at the heart of my work is shared storytelling, representation, and collaboration with loved ones, friends, and family appearing in a kind of repertory.”

Romero is having the greatest exposure of her career to date, having featured in more than 10 museum group exhibitions since last fall, including “Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time” at the Hudson River Museum (through August 31) and “Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene” at the Cantor Art Center (through August 3).

At Dartmouth’s Hood Museum in New Hampshire, she is the subject of her first institutional solo show, “Panûpünüwügai,” a Chemehuevi word that translates as both “source of light, like sun coming over the mountains” and “animating the inanimate, giving spirit, or living light.”

“The spirit of the light, or living light, references the painting of light with photography, bringing these stories to life and people together,” Romero said of the exhibition’s title. “These gifts photography has brought to my life.”

Romero’s wry, autochthonous lens cuts through the stereotypes of Native people, women in particular, placing them at the center of the American landscape. In TV Indians (2017), for example, a group of Indigenous people wearing historic garb are seen in a desert landscape, a mound of vintage televisions behind them. This pile of TVs refers to the ancestral adobe ruins scattered throughout the Southwest, and imbues them with a moribund quality, not onto the decidedly animate subjects, but instead upon the Hollywood caricatures, which flash on the screens behind them, that they are laying to rest.

In Romero’s images, an Indigenous futurist aesthetic emerges, as in 3 Sisters (2022), in which the titular figures are perched on a cloud against a purple celestial sky. Donning early-aughts rectangular sunglasses and Evoking it-girl goddesses, their bluish skin is tattooed from head to toe, in motifs specific to each sitter’s tribe (Anishanaabe, Pueblo, and Sioux, from left to right). They don early-aughts rectangular sunglasses, and wires carry life-giving energy from their bodies to the rest of the world. Romero’s 3 Sisters recalls depictions of nude women from across art history, while simultaneously upending the male and colonial gaze completely, reclaiming space—both literally and figuratively—for Native womanhood.

These Native women confront a world that seeks to dominate them, not as passive figures but as agents of deliberate refusal, according to curator Rebecca DiDimenico, who included Romero in a recent exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado. She added, “Her work disrupts not only how Native bodies are represented in the art world, but where they are allowed to exist at all––refusing the boundaries that would confine Indigenous subjects to ethnographic display or historical past.”

Moments of levity abound through Romero’s saturated colors and campy pop iconography. Her “Imagining Indigenous Futures” series features subjects adorned in stripes and traditional tattoos, suspended in space with corn, or haloed and enrobed in raven feathers. By contrast, Arla Lucia (2019) layers markers of Indigeneity—dentalia, bead and quillwork earrings, a heraldic necklace—onto a portrait of Wonder Woman, exalting Native feminine power through materials and myth. (The photograph features in both her Hood Museum survey and “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always,” curated by late artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at Rutgers’s Zimmerli Art Museum.)

Her interest in infusing pop culture into her images, Romero said, had been a motivation since childhood “because of our absence—and complicated presence—in media. We were never in Life Magazine, never in art books, never in the anthropological canon except as objects. But I also admired the photography of dominant American pop culture. Now, I’m creating a narrative by placing us in different decades, responding to that absence with a quirky presence.”

She added, “I blend time to say: we have our own lived experiences woven into the fabric of America. We’re not all historic or bygone. We’re still here, living tremendous lives.”

That insistent refrain of “We are still here” present across Romero’s oeuvre is best exemplified in works like Ha’ina’ia mai (2024), a black-and-white image in which a lei-draped Native Hawaiian woman rests on the seabed beneath the water’s surface, her hands extended in a submerged greeting, a gesture of welcome, survival, and futurity.

But Romero also turns her lens on issues of climate change, specifically from an Indigenous perspective, like in Evolvers (2019) where feather-crowned children sprint across hot sand in a desert sprinkled with wind turbines. In Weshoyot (2021), Weshoyot Alvitre, who is dressed in traditional Tongva garments, floats in a deluge, cleaving nets that try to catch her. Her apocalyptic compositions cut through the distant, desensitized haze of “climate porn” imagery that often accompanies these discussions, according to Eve Schillo, a photography curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At LACMA’s “Nature on Notice,” Romero’s Water Memory (2015) depicts two traditionally dressed Native figures in free-fall through water. Their descent is neither escape nor surrender, but an act of survivance in which memory of the past lives of the land are carried forth. The dammed rivers that submerged their homelands are remembered within the context of the climate crisis that now threatens all waters.

Entangled with the colonial gaze, Romero’s images don’t just disrupt the medium’s stereotypes but flip the structural frameworks that once sought to catalog, freeze, and erase Indigenous life altogether. In the 19th century, ethnographic photographers like Edward Curtis and Ansel Adams staged Native people in motley clothing borrowed from sundry other tribes, posing them in landscapes conspicuously cleared of settler presence to construct the fiction of a vanished race—all while obfuscating the violence that made such images possible.

“I call it the ‘one story narrative,’” Romero said of that 19th-century imagery. “There are thousands of different stories from our community, all totally valid.” This expansive vision feels particularly charged given Romero’s position as Chemehuevi, among California’s most systematically disappeared peoples and whose continued existence challenges the myth of a bygone people. Her pan-Indigenous casting becomes a kind of visual insurgency: Ohlone and Coast Miwok burial grounds, Native Hawaiian waters, Sioux beadwork traditions. It’s coalition building as aesthetic strategy, each collaboration a small act of resurrection against colonial archives that sought to fix Indigenous peoples in amber, forever in the past tense.

Romero continued, “When you can check internal biases about who Native people are—especially when it comes to photography harnessed by turn-of-the-century ethnographic photography—to be making contemporary work, it does a lot psychologically quite quickly. It says ‘Oh, these people are living,’ and ‘Oh, these people have a sense of humor,’ and ‘Oh, they have a shared sense of humanity that I can identify with.’ All those things are clever.”

Humor is a core strategy Romero employs across various bodies of work. She draws viewers in with jocular visuals and cheeky titles, only to deliver a resonant and psychological gut punch. In Sand and Stone (2020), for example, a woman with long jet-black hair lays buried in the Mojave Desert, illustrating the creation story of the locale’s Southern Paiute people. The Mojave, like many desert landscapes, has become a psychic playground for non-Natives in search of reinvention or forms of transcendence. (Burning Man is held on Northern Paiute land.) Romero’s work doesn’t imagine a new Eden; it recalls the one that’s always been there, one that has repeatedly been buried under sand, stone, and spectacle. In thinking of the migration of recent disaffected settlers seeking spiritual redemption on stolen lands, an understanding of the bond between people and land becomes especially poignant.

“What interests [non-Native] people about our cultures tends to be the culturally private,” Romero said. “Yet we, without a choice, understand Western culture completely.” Even amid the asymmetry, she feels that she must “give generously and willingly,” offering viewers not just critique but communion.

As revolutionaries often do, the feminist collective known as Guerrilla Girls began its battle against sexism in the arts with a list of names. Their first posters appeared overnight in May 1985, wheat-pasted onto walls and kiosks throughout SoHo, New York’s primary gallery district at the time. Along the upper border of each print ran a question, emphatic in all caps: “WHAT DO THESE ARTISTS HAVE IN COMMON?”

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Emblazoned black on white in bold, sans-serif font, the subsequent dossier enumerated interdisciplinary artists known for their vanguardism, all successful, all male: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, the list went on. At each sheet’s lower edge, an answer to the headline question was given: All allowed their work to be represented by galleries who showed 10 percent or fewer women artists. The public service announcement was signed, “Guerrilla Girls, Conscience of the Art World.”

Since then, the Guerrilla Girls have lambasted cultural producers, galleries, institutions, and collectors alike in splashy, provocative posters broadcasting uncomfortable realities about gender and racial inequality. Appropriating marketing aesthetics and radical distribution tactics, they follow a statistics-driven approach; as outlined in the press release that announced their formation, “Simple facts will be spelled out; obvious conclusions can be drawn.”

This year marks the Guerrilla Girls’ 40th anniversary, celebrated by retrospective exhibitions at the National Museum for Women in the Arts (NMWA) in Washington, D.C., the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Bulgaria in Sofia. Reexamining their incendiary trajectory in the arts and on the streets, one thing is clear: Their uncompromising activism hits as hard today as it did when they began their practice four decades ago.

All accounts place the Guerrilla Girls’ origins in the summer of 1984, with the opening of the exhibition “An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture,” curated by Kynaston McShine at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Of the 169 participants, only 13 were women and even fewer were people of color. To protest discriminatory curatorial practices, several feminist activist groups—including the Women’s Caucus for Art, the Heresies Collective, the Feminist Art Institute, and the Women’s Interart Center—organized the Women Artists Visibility Event (WAVE) in front of the museum. However, the demonstration did not have the desired impact. Visitors were all but oblivious to the picket line and walked around it to enter MoMA’s lobby.

Realizing that the methodologies of an earlier generation no longer resonated with the general public, several women began to meet to discuss other ways of responding to the sexism and racism blatant in the cultural sphere. “The art world isn’t avant-garde; it’s derriere,” reflected pseudonymous Guerrilla Girls “Frida Kahlo” and “Käthe Kollwitz” in a 2008 oral history interview with the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

Despite greater equality in the marketplace writ large, at the time of the collective’s founding, male artists still out-earned women two to one (the subject of another Guerrilla Girls sign from 1985). During their first convening in April 1985 at 513 Broadway in SoHo, “Kahlo” and “Kollwitz” suggested the framework of their first poster, taking their male peers to task for complicity with a system that privileged men above all others. Similar designs keyed to exclusionary galleries, critics, and museums soon followed.

The Guerrilla Girls’ direct, confrontational stratagems were palpably alluring, winning them an audience even while their accusations antagonized the upper echelons of the arts ecosystem. Within five years of their debut, they had been covered by the Village Voice, New York magazine, New York Times, and Artforum. By 1992 they’d also sneaked into the pages of Vogue.

To protect their personal lives and careers from backlash in the face of attention both good and ill, the art world vigilantes adopted noms de guerre and, during public appearances, donned gorilla masks (a mascot born from a typographic error). These pseudonyms now number in the sixties—counting all the members from 1985 to today—and represent an informal revisionist canon of deceased women artists and writers.

Speaking by phone about their aliases, “Kollwitz” said, “They honor these women of the past, many of whom had been forgotten when we started so many decades ago.” After our conversation, she sent me a roster that featured Zora Neale Hurston, Shigeko Kubota, Ana Mendieta, Liubov Popova, Alma Thomas, and Chiyo Uno.

Across the Guerrilla Girls’ career, the focus of their activism has gradually expanded, first encompassing the visual arts and, later, a world beyond. Through 1989 their attention remained trained on the New York art scene as they attacked the misogyny they found there. It was during this period that they conducted their iconic audit of the Metropolitan Museum, which resulted in the bus banner Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Musuem? (1989).

Beside a recumbent female figure lifted from Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814)—in their revision, wearing a snarling gorilla head—black and hot pink text blocks reveal that women represented only 5 percent of the artists in the museum’s Modern wing yet 85 percent of the nudes. This focus on gender equity went hand in hand with an intersectional alliance with racial minorities. For example, in a 1987 poster, they asked, “What’s fashionable, prestigious, and tax-deductible?” The answer: “Discriminating against women and non-white artists.”

In the 1990s the group’s self-appointed jurisdiction began to grow, its members speaking out on U.S. politics and urgent issues such as abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, the environment, and censorship. Guerrilla Girls’ Pop Quiz (1990) questioned the merit of government-instituted markers of social justice, challenging national awareness months as glorified lip service. The print asked, “If February is Black History Month and March is Women’s History Month, what happens the rest of the year?” The pithy riposte: “Discrimination.” During the pro-choice march on Washington in 1992, members of the group carried another wry sign, Guerrilla Girls Demand a Return to Traditional Values on Abortion (1992), which highlighted that early pregnancy termination was legal up to the 1850s.

In the 2000s, with changes in design and print processes brought on by the digital revolution, the Guerrilla Girls traded in the monochrome and grayscale of earlier decades for an explosive world of color, while also tapping into an increasingly international network of platforms and co-conspirators. Reflecting on this most recent era in their practice, “Kollwitz” added with zeal, “Now we have the power to put our work up all over the world.” One such international arena was the 2005 Venice Biennale, the first to be organized by women curators, María de Corral and Rosa Martínez. When invited to participate, the Guerrilla Girls created an installation of six 17-foot banners that underscored the absence of women artists in the biennale’s history and the city’s exhibition spaces.

For a group famed for institutional critique, the museological reification of the Guerrilla Girls over the past 20 years poses its own conceptual challenge, as their works have been collected and exhibited by international art museums including MoMA, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, and the Tate Modern in London. Rather than fighting these endorsements, the Guerrilla Girls have leaned into them as opportunities to produce new, research-based artworks and engage directly with the audience that is poised to care most about equity within and beyond the arts.

For example, as part of their retrospective at the National Gallery of Bulgaria this year (running through August 6), they produced a poster responding to the paucity of women in the national Council of Ministers (only 1 in 20). Beside an image of a banitsa—a traditional Bulgarian pastry—from which a meager portion has been cut, Cyrillic lettering announces, “Women of Bulgaria put on a crash diet! Don’t they deserve more than a thin slice of government?” Young women and representatives from the Guerrilla Girls carried the poster in banner form as part of the procession for women’s rights that took place in Sofia on March 11.

Their current survey at NMWA, Guerrilla Girls: Making Trouble, on through September 28, is particularly resonant in light of the parallel history of the institution, also founded in the 1980s to champion female artists. On a recent phone call, exhibition curator Hannah Shambroom remarked, “The formation of the Guerrilla Girls and the way that NMWA was developed really came out of a similar recognition of both exclusion and also undervaluing of the art of women.”

In tribute to their shared mission, the museum honored the collective at its annual gala, which was scheduled to coincide with the show’s opening. Drawn entirely from NMWA’s collection, the retrospective presents work from 1985 to 2024, including a wall-scale reproduction of Guerrilla Girls ManifestA: For Art Museums Everywhere (2024), which recalls street interventions ranging in scale from bumper stickers to billboards.

“I wanted to highlight that the group was at the forefront of artist advocacy work,” Shambroom said, reflecting on the Guerrilla Girls’ legacy and her curatorial process. “One thing I was really struck by as I was looking through our collection and their more recent works was how relevant many of the issues they were addressing continue to feel—still part of the news, still part of the public consciousness.”

At a time when reproductive rights and freedom of speech are challenged anew, the Guerrilla Girls and their perennially timely confrontation of authority demonstrate that much can be achieved by a few determined individuals. They remain insistent that more remains to be done. Unsurprisingly, the Guerrilla Girls know best how to describe their ongoing mission. In a 2016 appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, “Kahlo” said, “We say art should look like the rest of our culture. Unless all the voices of our culture are in the history of art, it’s not really a history of art, it’s a history of power.

“Guerrilla Girls: Making Trouble” is on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. through September 28, 2025; “Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly” is on view at the National Gallery Sofia, Bulgaria, through August 6, 2025; “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl” will be on view at the Getty Research Center, Los Angeles, from November 18, 2025 to April 12, 2026

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.

More than a decade after Pussy Riot cofounder Nadya Tolokonnikova was imprisoned in Russia for two years after performing a “punk prayer” inside of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the artist is putting herself back into a prison of her own making. 

For her installation Police State (2025) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (LA MOCA), Tolokonnikova has recreated a Russian jail cell. This time, however, she reimagines the cell as a space for art. The work is a form of reclamation not only for Tolonkonnikova but also for all the Russian, Belarusian, and American prisoners whose work is also included in the installation. The effort to include them is part of a larger ongoing project between Tolokonnikova’s organization Art Action Foundation and the Artistic Freedom Initiative, which work together to archive and exhibit prisoners’ art.

Within the piece, visitors are thrust into an eerie authoritarian state. Inside a prison cell, one can observe Tolokonnikova making music or art, or even resting throughout the day, via security camera footage and peepholes. Initially, these sights were meant to be seen only between June 5 and 14, but the show was extended due to the museum’s closure amid anti-ICE protests and the deployment of the National Guard.

ARTnews spoke with Tolonkonnikova to hear about staging this installation during ongoing political conflict in the US and abroad.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

ARTnews: How did you first conceive of Police State?

Nadya Tolokonnikova: I think the starting point was this idea I had about five years ago of reclaiming my prison experience as an art piece. I began thinking about my prison time from 2012 to the end of 2013 as one of the longest durational performance pieces in art history. That was my way to reclaim the time my government stole from me. I wanted to make them my bitches—not the other way around. The day after the United States elections, the [associate] curator of performance and programs at the Geffen, Alex Sloane, wrote me.

Walk me through what you’re doing as you perform in Police State.

Each day starts at 11 a.m. and runs through the end of the workday, which is sometimes at 5 p.m. or 6 p.m., and once, on a long Friday, went until 8 p.m.

I enter the cell a bit earlier to get ready, and I put all the stuff in its place. Sometimes I’m changing the artworks that I have on the walls because I’m showing a lot of artworks by current and former political prisoners. Then, I put on my uniform and headscarf, as all Russian female prisoners have to wear them in prison—it’s a super patriarchal norm and the law in Russia—and, if you refuse, then you’re not eligible for parole.

Once the day starts, I rotate between two tables. I stuffed them with everything I wanted to have in jail but couldn’t. I’m fulfilling my dreams around this idea of: what if prison could be place of creation? I’ve been thinking a lot about rehabilitation versus punishment, and how we can move toward the former. How can we help rehabilitate people through art? I’ve been in touch with a lot of people in different countries who run these programs.

One table is for audio production, where I mix and essentially produce music on the go. It’s a combination of different layers. The base layer is this deep subbase that penetrates your body. I wanted to create this very visceral feeling, before layering different sounds on top of it. Then, I took actual prison sounds from several jails in Russia. There are human rights groups who make videos of this torturing available on YouTube. I downloaded them, and I show the video footage on the TV in the installation and overtop I’m playing this very ambient, yet disturbing soundtrack. There is another layer that is more nostalgic to me, with old Russian lullabies my mother used to sing to me. Sometimes I play the old recordings or I sing them in a microphone that I have. Other times I play them on this little pink piano that’s on the table.

On the second table is a very old 1921 Singer sewing machine that I found on the street and made it work. When I was in the Russian prison camp, I was sewing military and police uniforms. So, I wanted to recreate that part of the experience of being in jail as well, but with my own twist. I attached some things, like lace and teddy bears, to the police uniforms to make them less menacing and to almost neutralize them, along with slogans and words that have meaning to me, like “alien”, “revoked”, “ghosts”, “deleted”—basically all the feelings I’ve had as a person who was forced to leave her home and try to find it elsewhere.

What does it mean to show this work in the United States right now?

It’s surreal. When the protests first broke out, it was only my third day of Police State and the museum closed. I decided to stay until the end of the workday because that’s what I agreed to, but my husband, John Caldwell, went to the protest and live streamed the sounds of protests. Now, instead of the original Russian prison sounds, I layered the sounds of the protests to create new soundscapes. The recording is chilling. There was one activist talking about this country turning into Russia. But we recognize having military on the streets. I have years of fighting with the National Guard in Russia under my belt. When I finally left the museum that day, there were lines and lines of police tear gassing and shooting peaceful protestors with rubber bullets. The bullets were flying so close to me and, since they don’t do that in Russia, I had never experienced that before.

I felt like those two days, when the biggest protests were happening, were like the scene from a 2001: A Space Odyssey where the character flies through multi-dimensional worlds. I felt like time and space were twisted in this ugly geopolitical authoritarian dance, where I’m experiencing once again what I did before. America started to remind me of Russia in 2011 and 2012, when we had this huge protest against Putin. We believed that we could save the country, and then we were not able to do that. From there, it all went downward. I just really hope that people here in the US have the capacity and persistence to defend this democracy. And the entire Pussy Riot movement is ready to help as much as we can.

What do you hope people will get out of Police State?

I want them to come experience it. It sucks that we can’t run it everywhere, all at once. We’re kind of tied to this big metropolitan city that understands everything anyway, but I want people to make their own conclusions—that’s the number one point. I don’t want to put any ideas in their head. There is room for interpretation.

How does it feel to put yourself in a kind of police state on your own terms?

The entire installation has this uplifting, almost church-like quality. I play a lot of religious music, mostly Gregorian chants, that are kind of sad on the one hand but also feel like they almost bring you to heaven. And so, through this horror and sounds of the police state, we have this beautiful, angelic choir to help us transcend this moment.

I want to encourage people to speak up and use any instruments they have—whether it’s art or something else. This moment reminds me of Russia in 2011 and 2012, when it felt like there was a potential for us to actually become democratic. I’m not an historian and I didn’t know what went wrong, but I feel like Americans still have a lot of room to express themselves and to exercise their rights. It’s not as bad as it could be and as it might be at some point.

There’s work by current political prisoners on the wall of the installation that I would like people to witness. If those people have courage to make their political artworks from the literal Gulag, where they could be murdered, like Alexei Navalny, and they can overcome such terrifying circumstances through the act of creation to show this, then each of us can too.

Tell me about this collaboration with prisoners.

There are two works. One is in collaboration with anonymous prisoners in the United States and Belarus. I sourced fabric produced by these prisoners and used that instead of canvas in the installation, on top of which I put my own calligraphy. One of the works says, “The last one here. I’m going to be the first one in heaven.” I guess this is the mood that I’m experiencing lately a lot—it’s sad, but also weirdly uplifting. Another features the signature Pussy Riot balaclava and I write in Russian the phrase, “They will not go through,” which was the slogan by antifascists against General Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War in the 20th century. The interesting part about acknowledging the pain that one has to go through in order to fight the system of oppression is also the beauty and the hope of it. Ultimately, the community is the place where I get most of my strength.

As I mentioned earlier, I also feature artworks by prisoners on the walls of the installation. Some that stood out to me include the portrait of a woman in jail by artist Asya Dudyaeva, who is serving three and a half years in Russia for distributing postcards against the war in Ukraine; an anarcho-kitten by poet Artem Kamardin, who is in jail for seven years for reading poetry on the streets of Moscow; and a bleeding banana work by Anya Bazhutova, who is serving five and a half years for speaking out about Russia’s crimes in Bucha, Ukraine. This little exposition of political prisoners’ work is part of a larger, joint project with my organization Art Action Foundation and the Artistic Freedom Initiative that I’m super passionate about. Our mission is to prevent artwork by artists from vulnerable groups from being erased by archiving and exhibiting the work.

Diego Velázquez’s 1656 portrayal of a Spanish princess and her entourage is one of the most important paintings in Western art history, if not the most conceptually complex by an old master. A deconstruction of the relationship between viewer and viewed, depiction and depicted, Las Meninas comprises a nesting doll of paradoxes that play with pictorial space to ask, Just what is it you think you’re looking at?

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Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor), was part of a broader backlash against the perfectionism of Renaissance art, which began with the revival of the classical aesthetics a millennium after the fall of Rome. Renaissance painters exalted truth to nature, even in religious art, using perspective, both in its geometric and atmospheric variants, as well as the modeling of form through gradations of light, to create the illusion of three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface. They also adopted the use of oil paint, which, along with glazes and varnishes, allowed light to penetrate layers of color, while keeping the evidence of brushwork to a minimum. Together, these tropes heightened the semblance of verisimilitude, opening a metaphorical window that was taken for reality, albeit one created as a Platonic ideal.

This pursuit of quintessence created constraints that began to chafe, compelling artists to react against them as the 16th century wore on. Paintings such as Madonna with the Long Neck (1535–40) by Italian Mannerist Parmigianino were exemplary in this regard, deliberately distorting figure and foreshortening to highlight the artifice of painting. Instead of Renaissance equilibrium, Parmigianino offers a vision of the Virgin Mother with an impossibly extended torso holding a giant Christ child; her own hand, and the eponymous feature supporting her head, are likewise elongated beyond natural proportions. The figure of St. Jerome stands in the background at lower right, but rather than receding according to the dictates of perspective, he’s pushed up against the picture plane, resembling a Hummel figurine dwarfed by Mary.

With the dawn of the 17th century, artists continued to diverge from orthodoxy in a number of different ways. Caravaggio eschewed the naturalistic, ambient illumination typical of the High Renaissance in favor of spotlight-like effects that picked subjects out of shallow, murky settings, giving them a cinematic presence avant la lettre. El Greco anticipated 20th-century Expressionism by rendering attenuated figures with broad and clearly visible brush marks, creating images that were miles away from the sublime sfumato of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

Las Meninas likewise bucked tradition, though not necessarily at first glance. For example, Velázquez’s facture shared some characteristics with El Greco’s, though he pushed pigment around in his canvases to subtler effect. This was true of Las Meninas, as was its adherence the laws of illusionism. But overall, it subverted the rules by adhering to them, creating spatial tensions that confused the dynamics between subject and object.

Las Meninas presents an ensemble gathered in a high-ceilinged chamber in what’s believed to be the Royal Alcázar, the palace-fortress in Madrid that was the seat of the Spanish Empire. They’re gathered around the doll-like figure of Infanta Margaret Theresa, eldest daughter of King Philip IV—who, besides presiding over Spain’s involvement in the Thirty Years’ War, was Velázquez’s principal benefactor.

The all-female retinue that surrounds the Infanta includes two little people on the right. (It is an odd aspect of court life at this time that servants with achondroplasia were commonly included as part of the household, apparently to make the monarch look bigger at ceremonies.)

Looking straight at us, the princess serves as the scene’s radiant centerpiece, attired in a silken dress with a voluminous hoop skirt tenting the lower half of her body. One might suppose that Las Meninas is an elaborate portrayal of a child potentate cocooned within the accoutrements of dominion. If so, these might include Velázquez himself, as he’s placed himself to her left, peering around the back of an enormous canvas on which he’s rendering his subject. But considering her position relative to the artist’s, it’s certainly not the Infanta. Who, then, is it?

An answer lies at the rear of the room delineated by the orthogonal progression of the ceiling and the window on the right. There, an image of Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, his consort and mother of Margaret Theresa, hangs amid an arrangement of other paintings. It appears to be a double likeness of the couple seen from the waist up, but it’s actually their reflection in a small mirror. What we’ve been seeing all along is their point of view from outside the picture, one that happens to correspond with our own. In essence, Velázquez has removed the fourth wall of Renaissance painting, extending it beyond the realm of imagination into the world of the concrete.

Other conundrums abound as well. A narrow door in the back wall is open to reveal a figure paused at the bottom of a flight of stairs, his body in profile while he turns his gaze outward. The man is Don José Nieto Velázquez, the queen’s chamberlain and head of the royal tapestry works (and perhaps a relative of the artist). He stands on the steps with one foot higher than the other, but whether he’s ascending, or descending, we’ll never know.

More concrete, though, is the position of the artist, who, somewhat astonishingly, privileges his presence above the monarch’s. This gesture speaks to the ambitions man who rose from humble beginnings (his father was a notary) to become the King’s official painter and curator of the royal collection. It also suggests that the soft power of art is greater than the bare-knuckle business of ruling.

Other discussions around Las Meninas have gone deeper into the weeds—that the image of Philip and Mariana wasn’t a reflection of them in the room, but rather of them in the painting Velázquez was working on, or that the composition as a whole exists within a mirror. What can be said for sure is that the painting was larger than it currently is: It was trimmed down on both the left and right sides, after sustaining damage during a fire that destroyed the Alcázar in 1734. The Infanta’s face also needed repainting.

Whatever its current condition, however, Las Meninas remains what it has always been: a triumphant puzzle that resists resolution.

Helen Chadwick was obsessed with the restless, fleeting vestiges of things and feelings that had vanished—what she called “fugitive traces.” Her huge breadth of multimedia installations bloomed out of the effort to examine the ephemera of life. “Chadwick is capturing the fugitive not in a spirit of grief or censure, but in celebration,” her friend Marina Warner wrote in a 1989 essay. Chadwick is now the subject of the largest-ever retrospective of her career, at the Hepworth Wakefield gallery in West Yorkshire, and a new biography edited by Laura Smith; her legacy continues to evolve in conversation with our current discourse on femininity.

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“I genuinely don’t think contemporary art in Britain would look the same without her,” Smith told me. “The boldness with which she used her own body as a material, and used humor, was really revolutionary.” Her diverse works, from furry sculptures to photographs dunked in the sea to piles of decaying food, are hugely ambitious in their scope. It feels as if there are endless layers of meaning to peel back as she walks a blurry line between the beautiful and the grotesque.

Chadwick (1953–96) was born in Croydon, South London, into a working-class, mixed-heritage family. She studied at Brighton Polytechnic and the Chelsea College of Art in the 1970s before settling into a studio practice in Hackney, where she was a founding resident of the prolifically creative squatting community at Beck Road. Although her work would incorporate many materials (from urine to brains), she was trained as a photographer and continued to rely on the tool of the photographic image throughout her career.

Her early work In the Kitchen (1977) was recently included in the pioneering Tate Britain exhibition “Women in Revolt!” (2024). A performance in which Chadwick and three other women occupied costumes-cum-sculptures of kitchen appliances, now recorded in photographs, it was “a key moment in British feminist art practice,” according to the exhibition’s catalog. Still, Chadwick regularly was disparaged by both feminists and their critics for using her own conventionally beautiful body in her work, a criticism that shadowed her throughout her career.

Her key large-scale installations, like Ego Geometria Sum (1983) and The Oval Court (1986), are a dizzying blend of micro and macro views of human life, so layered and conceptual that they’re almost impossible to describe, but I’ll try. Ego Geometria Sum is a series of 10 plywood sculptures with photographs printed on their surfaces, encapsulating Chadwick’s whole life in geometric form. She described it as “a narrative of material objects, equivalents for selfhood, within a bounded safe place.” Each sculpture matches the volume of her body at different ages, beginning with a small rectangular prism representing an infant incubator and growing to her adult size.

The Oval Court is even more complex, made up of a series of blue-toned photocopied images of the artist’s naked body among various flora and fauna, arranged to form a sort of pool in the center of the room it occupies, topped by five golden spheres. On the walls are images inspired by the baldacchino in St. Peter’s Basilica, Venetian mirrors, and photocopied images of the artist weeping.

Both of these works utilize cheap materials to make vast statements about the mutability of self, the history of Western art, and the universality of life. They can be read in minute detail—Smith tells me that the hand gestures in The Oval Court are all drawn from specific Greek and Roman mythological references—but they also have a universal beauty and the fundamental magnetism of a self-portrait. By using the specificity of her own body and biography to reflect on these huge themes, Chadwick seems to be holding her arms out wide and attempting to enfold the world in her embrace. Her selfhood becomes the vector through which we see the universe.

By the late 1980s, Chadwick had vowed to stop using images of her body in her art, leading her toward works like Piss Flowers (1991–92),a group of white sculptures that are the results of the marks made by Chadwick and her husband, David Notarius, urinating on mounds of snow. They poured plaster into the holes bored by their urine, freezing them into strange landscapes. Works like this are still about the physicality of bodies but no longer depicting them. Even works like Cacao (1994), which opens the Hepworth exhibition, are about the body: A huge, real chocolate fountain, bubbling away like a fairy-tale cauldron, it filled me with desire and disgust simultaneously. (My mouth literally watered, but after a few moments I felt nauseous.) “The point of her work is that it makes you feel weird,” Smith said.

As teacher at various art schools in Britain, including Goldsmiths, Central Saint Martins, and the Royal College of Art, Chadwick had a significant influence on the generation of artists that followed her. The group that became known as the Young British Artists (YBAs) trace her impact, particularly artists Sarah Lucas and Anya Gallaccio. Their play with gender, decay, unexpected materials, and multimedia installations is indebted to Chadwick’s legacy. In 1987 Chadwick became one of the first women to be nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, an early recognition of her exceptionally original work.

Chadwick died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 42 in 1996. One notice of her death in the Observer described her as “the most eminent woman artist of her generation”—both a high compliment and an annoyingly gendered one. But since her death, her name and work have become almost obscure, the price of being struck down in the midst of life and perhaps the consequence of the complexity of her work. “It might be said that she was an artist slightly out of her time,” wrote Stephen Walker in his 2013 book about Chadwick. One might also say that she was an artist out of time; her career lasted only 16 years, and there is a sense of unresolved business about her oeuvre.

Chadwick was a theoretical artist: Research led her in competing directions, which she tried to negotiate and reconcile in a way that was incredibly fruitful but also incomplete at the time of her death. “But our experience of her work is not theoretical,” says Ceri Lewis, curator of Tate Modern’s display “Artist Rooms: Helen Chadwick,” which travels to the National Galleries of Scotland in July. “It’s an embodied experience, engaging all our senses.”

Not all critics have been so kind. Tom Morton wrote a scathing review of the last retrospective of Chadwick’s work, at the Barbican Centre in London in 2004. “Chadwick’s work is, at best, a vivid souvenir of an art world long gone, and at worst a vaguely hysterical irrelevance,” he wrote in Frieze magazine. I quote this for two reasons: First, the remarkably sexist language is a reminder that feminist art is still not taken seriously—calling anything hysterical is a dog whistle for misogyny. Second, it points to the ways that Chadwick’s legacy is contested. There is a risk in novelty, which is that it becomes trite as soon as it has been done. But forgetting Chadwick’s perilous originality prevents us from recognizing the profundity of her work. “Her exploration of a more complex, fluid identity feels very current,” says Lewis.

The final work in the Hepworth exhibition is Carcass (1986), a rectangular plexiglass column filled with decaying food. It forms a sort of life cycle, with fresh-looking vegetables on top and compost that has almost become blackened soil on the bottom. Upon closer inspection, one sees that the piece is full of life: Bubbles rise up through the moisture that has gathered in the lower half as the rapid process of decay causes an effervescent fermentation. It is disgusting, but also hypnotic and remarkably beautiful. That perfect cocktail of pleasure and revulsion was Chadwick’s lifelong aim, and her bold pursuit of it continues to generate confronting, propulsive questions for viewers and artists alike.

Over the past 40 years, German artist Katharina Grosse (b. 1961) has gained many fans for using an airless spray machine to make eye-catching, color-saturated, and immersive paintings. Many of her works have been shown in museums and galleries—one from 2004 involved spraying paint across the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s interiors, along with clothing, papers, eggs, and coins scattered across the floor—but she has also created site-specific installations for less conventional places, including an abandoned military building in New York’s Fort Tilden Park.

This week, Grosse will take on one of the biggest projects of her career: a monumental painting that will fill the Messeplatz in Basel during the Swiss edition of Art Basel. Titled CHOIR and curated by Natalia Graboska, the project will see her spray paint the entirety of this pedestrian precinct in shades of magenta.

ARTnews spoke with Grosse about the evolution of her practice and her plans for this year’s iteration of Art Basel.

ARTnews: You were introduced for the time to a spray gun in Marseille. What was so enticing about it? 

Katharina Grosse: I was in Marseille for half a year in the 1990s. It was a very anarchic place, much more so than it is now. I got to see people work with spray guns and other tools. I only tried out a spray gun a few years later. [The people in Marseille] saw themselves as outsiders. The atmosphere there definitely changed my approach to painting.

Edvard Munch experimented with spraying devices to paint during the 1890s. Was he one of your inspirations? 

I did not have this reference, no. However, I have always been attracted to Munch’s work, especially because he was doing unusual things with his paintings, taking them off stretchers and hanging them off a hook in the snow. His outdoor studio is fascinating to me. His works had no beginning no end, which I can relate to because, to me, a painted image is not limited to a canvas. I traveled to Norway around 1985 to see where Munch lived and the landscapes he drew inspiration from. I am currently preparing a show that will open in 2026 at the Munch museum in Oslo.

How has your technique evolved since you spray painted a corner of one of the Kunsthalle Bern’s galleries in green, then realizing that painting “could pass over architectural structures and borders”?

Untitled [a 1998 work that involved spraying acrylic paint directly onto the corner between two walls and a ceiling at the Kunsthalle Bern] was a key moment in my career. It made me understand the independence of painting, which doesn’t have to comply with spatial rules. It’s almost like an exterior agent that swoops in, flickers up, shows possibilities we hadn’t seen before, makes them more complex and then, all of a sudden, wears off and disappears. Another turning point for me was The Bedroom. In 2004, I painted over my bedroom, including personal objects—books, sheets, works that I had made in the past, pieces of furniture. It did not feel like a loss, but rather like a transformation. It gave me another perspective on my life. Now, when I’m invited to paint in a public space, I draw from that experience. I see it as a crossover. I put a painted image—which is a proposition, part of my imagination—on top of something that everybody knows.

The same kind of crossover will happen on Messeplatz, which Art Basel has commissioned you to paint entirely before the beginning of the fair.

It’s the first time that a painter has been invited to take over the 53,800-square-foot Messeplatz. The challenge with that piece is that I have to be up to that scale. My movement determines how the place is being perceived. The spray gun will help me expand my reach. With this tool, I can paint endlessly. Then, I will go over the whole square—into the water, over the water, over the roofs that are in front of the entrance.

Fair-goers are transient. Once they step into the Messeplatz, they will become part of the work. I really want to create a painting that is almost like a threshold between reality and fiction. It is a membrane: you can walk through it, step out of it at any time, or stay in it as much as you want.

How will you do that?

I want to make a visceral painting that gets into your system so fast that you don’t have to think about it. In that prospect, I’ve worked working with photographs, floor plans, models of various scales, but with a clear vision in mind. [The idea] popped into my head right away—which is not always the case.

The square is being protected by a very thin layer of asphalt that will be peeled off and recycled once the fair is over. I usually don’t paint on black, so we’ll have to create a white structure for me to paint over. I chose two tones of magenta for their high visibility. This is the color that lifeguards now use instead of orange.  

How do you feel about your work being ephemeral?  

I like the idea that my work will disappear after seven days, once Art Basel is over. You can’t buy it, you can’t own it. It defies the reality of the fair, which is mainly about transactions. There is beauty in that transience.

Your exhibition at the Deichtorhallen Hamburg features an installation and a selection of studio paintings, as well as drawings and sketch books. What does working indoors bring you that performing outdoors does not? And vice versa?  

Working outdoors is almost like swimming in the sea; and indoors, like swimming in a pool. There are two different ways to do it, and yet, you’re still in the water. In my studio, I can be working on 20 to 30 works at the same time. My approach to color is then more experimental. Otherwise, I use it to come into an area which escapes labels, definitions, and descriptions, to feel a direct resonance with a space I am connecting with.

You are known for embracing the events and incidents that arise as you work. What kind of incidents could occur during the creative process?

I don’t expect anything, and that’s the point. In my experience, I start with what I have envisioned, to get a sense of the space and atmosphere I am working with, but I am still aware that many things may impact my work—the wind, the weather, my team. After a while, you become part of the painting, which makes it easier to adapt and find solutions. You resonate with everything and everybody you work with, like an organism.