Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2022

Figurative painting takes a lead role in this issue, starting with a remarkable cover by Anna Weyant. In her accompanying text, novelist Emma Cline discusses how Weyant’s precisely rendered scenes often allude to something sinister just beneath the surface.

We invited Roxane Gay to guest-edit a special section in this issue’s pages. The essays she has brought together focus on some of today’s leading Black female artists who are working within and against the tradition of figuration.

It is a thrill to read Frank Auerbach talking with Richard Calvocoressi about his friendships with Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud. The interconnected lives and practices of those legendary artists were often photographed by Bruce Bernard, whose documentation of and participation in the London group is considered in a companion article by the painter Virginia Verran.

Our Building a Legacy column spotlights the Andy Warhol Foundation, exploring its navigation of philanthropic pursuits, licensing opportunities, intellectual property, and more. Our Bigger Picture series focuses on artists and organizations making a stand against mass incarceration in the United States. The final installment of a ghoulish love story by Venita Blackburn, which we have published in each issue over this past year, brings her fiction contribution to a dynamic conclusion.

A recently published monograph on the work of Walter De Maria promises to bring the entirety of his career into singular focus. We speak with the editors of that volume about the discoveries they made in their research and about an extraordinary exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston. Presenting De Maria’s early works, the show allows us insight into the lesser-known but foundational building blocks of his practice.

Our Game Changer column focuses on the gallerist, patron, and curator Virginia Dwan, whose early and long support of a vital generation of artists proved critical in cementing their legacy. She played a role in helping them to realize their milestone achievements throughout her unparalleled life and career.

McDonald, Editor-in-chief

Walter De Maria: The Object, the Action, the Aesthetic Feeling

The definitive monograph on the work of Walter De Maria is being released this fall. To celebrate this momentous occasion, Elizabeth Childress and Michael Childress of the Walter De Maria Archive talk to Gagosian senior director Kara Vander Weg about the origins of the publication and the revelations brought to light in its creation.

54

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Anselm Kiefer

The fourth installment of the series.

56

Fashion and Art, Part 12: PierreAlexis Dumas

Pierre-Alexis Dumas, the artistic director for Hermès, speaks with the curator Abby Bangser about the central role of the house’s art collection in their creative process.

60

Anna Weyant: Baby, It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over

Novelist Emma Cline traces the boundaries between terror and hilarity in Anna Weyant’s new paintings.

68

The Celestial Cinema of Gregory Markopoulos

Raymond Foye reports on the Temenos, the screening of Gregory Markopoulos’s film Eniaios in Lyssarea, Greece, in the summer of 2022.

76

Frank Auerbach: Artist Friends

In this candid interview with Richard Calvocoressi, the painter Frank Auerbach reminisces on his friendships with Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud.

88

Bruce Bernard: Portraits of Friends

Virginia Verran details the photographer’s friendships with the London painters.

94

Urs Fischer: Denominator

Urs Fischer sits down with his friend the author and artist Eric Sanders to address the perfect viewer, the effects of marketing, and the limits of human understanding.

102

Bigger Picture: Artists against Mass Incarceration

Salomé Gómez-Upegui reports on cultural organizations and artists standing up against mass incarceration in the United States.

106

Serra/Seurat: Drawings

Cocurated by Lucía Agirre and Judith Benhamou, the Bilbao exhibition Serra/Seurat: Dibujos puts drawings by Georges Seurat and Richard Serra into dialogue. A Spanish-language catalogue was produced for the show, featuring texts by both curators; the Quarterly is pleased to debut the English translations of these texts.

114

Myths and Monsters

Mike Stinavage visits Dimitris Papaioannou in Athens as he closes one world tour and opens another.

120

Roxane Gay: Black to Black

A special section guest-edited by Roxane Gay.

156

Rachel Whiteread: Shy Sculpture

For the unveiling of her latest Shy Sculpture in Kunisaki, Japan, Rachel Whiteread joins curator and art historian Fumio Nanjo for a conversation about this ongoing series.

162 Memoirs of a Poltergeist, Part Four

The fourth and final installment of a short story by Venita Blackburn.

NXTHVN: Curatorial Visions

Jamillah Hinson and Marissa Del Toro, the most recent curatorial fellows of Titus Kaphar’s nonprofit community arts hub NXTHVN, address their curatorial praxes.

Building a Legacy: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

For this installment of Building a Legacy, the Quarterly ’s Alison McDonald meets with Michael Dayton Hermann, the director of licensing, marketing, and sales at the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, to discuss questions around intellectual property and licensing.

176

Screen Time: A Conversation with Andrei Pesic

In conversation with Ashley Overbeek, scholar Andrei Pesic traces the art-historical roots of the NFT market to the Paris Salons. Along the way, they discuss questions of authenticity, value, and ownership.

182

The Actual Picture: On Karin Kneffel’s Painting

Ulrich Wilmes takes note of the radical break in the painter’s new series of portraits.

202

Game Changer: Virginia Dwan

Charles Stuckey reflects on the unparalleled life and career of the gallerist, patron, and curator Virginia Dwan, enumerating key moments from a lifetime dedicated to artists and their visions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS WINTER

Front cover: Anna Weyant, Two Eileens , 2022, oil on canvas, 60 ⅛ × 48 ⅛ inches (152.7 x 122.2 cm) © Anna Weyant. Photo: Rob McKeever

1932 COLLECTION

THE STARS ALIGNED

In 1932, Gabrielle Chanel created BIJOUX DE DIAMANTS, t he first high jewelr y collection in history. Inspired by t he allure of t he stars, it was designed to be worn freely in a brand-new way. Mademoiselle t hen turned her concept of jewelr y in motion — par t of her vision for women — into a manifesto .

In 2022, C HANEL High Jewelr y celebrates t his celestial revolution wit h t he launch of t he 1932 COLLECTION , based on t he perpetual motion of t he stars and tailored to t he natural movements of t he body In t he same spirit, C HANEL asked an aut hor known for his reflections on movement to write a manifesto for t he new collection.

After winding around from the nape of the neck, the string of diamonds suddenly bursts into a shooting star, trailed by a cascade of sparks leading to a sapphire that ts perfectly into the negative space of a crescent moon of diamonds. A fragmented nimbus then explodes around a profusion of carats pulsating at the neckline. A line of precious stones rises and falls with the rhythm of the breath, trapping the gaze in their bewitching depths. Beneath this blue eclipse, a string of cr ystals leads the eye toward the heart, where a diamond sun blazes, its early-morning rays oscillating and sparkling with the wearer ’ s movements. In this theater of precious stones, celestial bodies undulate on the skin’s “Milky Way,” sketching new landscapes each time the head moves or tilts. Like the necklace, the collection is a series of celestial bodies journeying across the skin and enhancing each movement of the body as the planets travel past twinkling stars. e beauty of the world lies in this radiance. e glow of the stones is tangible, sculpted into the diamond, itself becoming a jewel, liberated, as if the aura could be removed and worn as a brooch. What was a parure has become a jewel, a stone cut in stone, made even more precious by what has been removed from it. From the depths of the Earth to the Cosmos, there is little light, but it sometimes burns beneath the eyelids in insistent lines. e gems begin to dance within us: diamonds, blue diamonds, rubies, yellow diamonds, sapphires and rings running along the ngers, orbiting, spilling their brilliance over the hand. Bracelets and diamonds give way to a streaking comet on the skin, a virtuoso play of light and the ever-changing gestures of a woman who is suddenly the center of the universe.

Hugo Lindenberg

LA ROSE DIOR COL LEC TION

Ye llow gold, pi nk gold, wh ite gold and diamonds

E C O LLE CT IO N

Actr ess Kathr yn Ne wton photogra phed by Christian Högsted t

Alison

Wyatt

Contributors

Lucía Agirre Frank Auerbach

Abby Bangser

Judith Benhamou Venita Blackburn

Richard Calvocoressi

Jordan Casteel

Elizabeth Childress Michael Childress Emma Cline

Michael Dayton Hermann Marissa Del Toro Pierre-Alexis Dumas Urs Fischer

Raymond Foye Roxane Gay Salomé Gómez-Upegui

Jeff Henrikson

Jamillah Hinson

Randa Jarrar

Ladi’Sasha Jones

Anselm Kiefer

Alison McDonald

Fumio Nanjo Brooke C. Obie Hans Ulrich Obrist

Ashley Overbeek Andrei Pesic

Amber J. Phillips

Calida Rawles

Kellie Romany

Eric Sanders

Ashley Stewart Mike Stinavage Charles Stuckey

Kara Vander Weg Virginia Verran Rachel Whiteread Ulrich Wilmes

Thanks Karrie Adamany

Richard Alwyn Fisher Julia Arena Jin Auh Firelei Báez Priya Bhatnagar Martha Blakey Kalia Brooks Michael Carl Michael Cary

Serena Cattaneo Adorno Claudia Chow Alice Chung

Vittoria Ciaraldi Cristina Colomar Emily Cooper John Dennis Andrew Fabricant

Mark Francis Hallie Freer

Brett Garde

Jonathan Germaine Lauren Gioia

Darlina Goldak

Lauren Halsey

Kezia Harrell

Delphine Huisinga Alejandro Jassan Sarah Jones

Titus Kaphar

Karin Kneffel

Jennifer Knox White Linda Levinson Tyler Logan Lauren Mahony Kelly McDaniel Quinn Rob McKeever Trina McKeever Olivia Mull

Louise Neri Kathy Paciello

Dimitris Papaioannou Mark Recker Ian Rubinstein

Antwaun Sargent

Tschabalala Self Richard Serra Isabel Shorney Diallo Simon-Ponte Micol Spinazzi

Jessica Steele Chandler Sterling Sofia Strazzabosco

Gio Swaby Harry Thorne

Jess Topping

Andie Trainer

Lisa Turvey Louis Vaccara

Timothée Viale

Mark Webber

Ketter Weissman

Anna Weyant

Lilias Wigan

Eva Wildes

Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2022

Photo: Tom Powel

Virginia Verran

Virginia Verran is a painter based in London, England, whose work implies large atmospheric space incorporating small graphic details. She has exhibited and been celebrated internationally and has taught at leading institutions, including the Chelsea College of Art and Design. She represents the Bruce Bernard Estate.

Photo: Dafyyd Jones

Frank Auerbach

One of Britain’s preeminent postwar painters, Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1931. Arriving in England as a Jewish refugee in 1939, he attended St Martin’s School of Art, London, and studied with David Bomberg in night classes at Borough Polytechnic. He then studied at the Royal College of Art and has remained in London ever since. His first exhibition was held at London’s Beaux Arts Gallery in 1956; since then his works have been collected widely.

Photo: © David Dawson/All rights reserved, 2022/Bridgeman Images

Richard Calvocoressi

Richard Calvocoressi is a scholar and art historian. He has served as a curator at Tate, London, as director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and as director of the Henry Moore Foundation. He joined Gagosian in 2015.

Rachel Whiteread

In Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures and drawings, everyday settings, objects, and surfaces transform into ghostly replicas that are eerily familiar. Through her use of the casting process, her subject matter—ranging from beds, tables, and boxes to water towers and entire houses—is freed from practical use, suggesting a new permanence, imbued with memory.

Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Jeff Henrikson

Jeff Henrikson is a New York City–based photographer whose work focuses on portraiture and revolves around the eclectic worlds of art, fashion, and music. He has contributed to many publications including W, Vogue , L’Uomo Vogue , and A Magazine

Curated By Photo: Daniel Arnold

Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in The Best American Mystery Stories 2014, The Best American Short Stories 2012 , Best Sex Writing 2012 , A Public Space , McSweeney’s , Tin House , Oxford American , American Short Fiction , Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other publications. She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times . She is the author of the books Ayiti , An Untamed State , the New York Time s–bestselling Bad Feminist , the nationally bestselling Difficult Women , and the New York Times –bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is at work on television and film projects. She also produces a newsletter, The Audacity, and a podcast, The Roxane Gay Agenda

Jordan Casteel

Jordan Casteel received her BA in studio art from Agnes Scott College, Decatur, and her MFA in painting and printmaking from the Yale School of Art, New Haven (2014). In 2020, Casteel presented a solo exhibition, Within Reach , at the New Museum, New York, accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. Other recent solo exhibitions include Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze , presented at the Denver Art Museum in 2019 and at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University in 2019–20. Casteel is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2021). She lives and works in New York.

Ladi’Sasha Jones

Ladi’Sasha Jones is a writer and curator from Harlem, New York. Her research-based practice explores Black cultural and spatial histories through text, design, and public programming. She is currently a PhD student in architecture at Princeton University.

Calida Rawles

The paintings of Calida Rawles merge hyperrealism with poetic abstraction. Ranging from buoyant and ebullient to submerged and mysterious, her recent work uses water as a vital, organic, multifaceted material: Black bodies float in exquisitely rendered submarine landscapes of bubbles, ripples, refracted light, and expanses of blue. For Rawles, water signifies both physical and spiritual healing as well as historical trauma and racial exclusion. Photo: Glen Wilson, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin

Brooke C. Obie

Brooke C. Obie is a screenwriter for TV and film, the award-winning author of the Black-revolution novel Book of Addis: Cradled Embers , and an awardwinning film journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of Will Packer Media’s Black-women’s lifestyle site xoNecole.

In 2019, she was named to the Root 100 Most Influential African Americans in the media category.

Amber J. Phillips

Amber J. Phillips is a storyteller, filmmaker, and creative director. She creates world-building narratives using warm visuals and vulnerable performances through the lens of a fat Black queer femme auntie from the Midwest. Phillips recently released her first short film, Abundance , which was a 2021 BlackStar Film Festival selection and won the audience award for Best Short Narrative.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer’s monumental body of work represents a microcosm of collective memory, visually encapsulating a broad range of cultural, literary, and philosophical allusions as well as symbols from religion, mysticism, mythology, history, and poetry. Photo: Peter Rigaud c/o Shotview Syndication

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. He was previously curator ats the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in St. Gallen, Switzerland, in 1991, he has curated more than 300 exhibitions. Photo: Tyler Mitchell

Emma Cline

Emma Cline is the author of The Girls (2016) and of the story collection Daddy (2020). Cline was the winner of the Plimpton Prize and was named one of Granta ’s Best Young American Novelists. The Girls was an international bestseller and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, the First Novel Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Randa Jarrar

Randa Jarrar is the author of three books, most recently Love Is an Ex-Country. She is a performer and professor and lives in Los Angeles.

Urs Fischer

Urs Fischer mines the potential of materials, from clay, steel, and paint to bread, dirt, and produce, to create works that disorient and bewilder. Through scale distortions, illusion, and the juxtaposition of common objects, his sculptures, paintings, photographs, and largescale installations explore themes of perception and representation while maintaining a witty irreverence.

Photo: Robert Banat

Eric Sanders

Eric Sanders is a Los Angeles–based writer and artist.

Kellie Romany

Kellie Romany is an abstract painter interested in bodily representation, materiality, and the history of the painting process. Using a color palette of skin tones, Romany creates objects that act as catalysts for discussion of human connections, race, and the systems surrounding these themes. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including shows at the High Museum of Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the DePaul Art Museum. Photo: Perry Haselden

Elizabeth Childress

Elizabeth Childress is the director of the Walter De Maria Archive. She was De Maria’s archivist and studio manager from 1979 until his death, in 2013. She is the coauthor and editor of Walter De Maria: The Object, The Action, The Aesthetic Feeling (2022).

Ulrich Wilmes

Ulrich Wilmes is a curator, editor, and writer. Previously deputy director of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and chief curator at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, he has published numerous books and articles on contemporary art.

Michael Childress

Michael Childress is an artist based in Northampton, Massachusetts. He began working with the Estate of Walter De Maria in 2013 and helped to establish the Walter De Maria Archive. He is the coauthor and coeditor of Walter De Maria: The Object, The Action, The Aesthetic Feeling (2022).

Venita Blackburn

Venita Blackburn’s writing has appeared in thenewyorker.com, Harper’s , Ploughshares , McSweeney’s , The Paris Review, and other publications. The winner of the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction for her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes , in 2017, she is the founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write (livewriteworkshop. com), which provides free creativewriting workshops for communities of color. Blackburn’s second collection of stories, How to Wrestle a Girl , was published in the fall of 2021. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.

Michael Dayton Hermann

In addition to being director of licensing, marketing, and sales at the Andy Warhol Foundation, Michael Dayton Hermann is a multidisciplinary artist and the author of Warhol on Basquiat and Andy Warhol: Love, Sex, and Desire . In his role at the Warhol Foundation, he has developed numerous high-profile Warhol projects.

Jamillah Hinson

Jamillah Hinson is an independent curator and arts programmer. With a focus on historical and contemporary Black cultural and artistic traditions as they present themselves through experimental sound, film and photography, and performance, her practice engages various methods of storytelling and centers artistic and community narratives. Hinson has realized exhibitions and developed programming with the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, the Art Institute of Chicago, LATITUDE Chicago, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive & Outsider Art, and the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, among other independent art and cultural spaces.

Ashley Stewart

Ashley Stewart joined Gagosian as a director in 2019 and is based in New York. She manages a number of the gallery’s artists, including Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Titus Kaphar, and Stanley Whitney. She was previously the director of sales at Salon 94, where she oversaw the sales team and worked directly with a number of artists.

Marissa Del Toro

Marissa Del Toro is an independent curator and art historian of contemporary and modern art of the Americas (primarily Latin America and the United States). Currently based in New York, she was a 2021–22 curatorial fellow at NXTVHN in New Haven, Connecticut. In both her professional and her personal life, she continues to work for the promotion and advocacy of diverse narratives in art.

Salomé Gómez-Upegui

Salomé Gómez-Upegui is a Colombian-American writer and creative consultant based in Miami. She writes about art, gender, social justice, and climate for a wide range of publications, and is the author of the book Feminista Por Accidente (2021).

Abby Bangser

Abby Bangser is founder and creative director of the exhibition platform Object & Thing. She is a former Artistic Director of Frieze Art Fairs and was the founding head of the Americas Foundation of the Serpentine Galleries. She has worked for nonprofit arts institutions in New York and Los Angeles including the Dia Art Foundation, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Ashley Overbeek

Ashley Overbeek is the director of strategic initiatives at Gagosian. She has been collecting NFTs since early 2019 and is a cohost on Wednesday Wonders, a weekly Twitter space where she interviews leading crypto artists.

Lucía Agirre

Lucía Agirre is a curator at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. She joined the museum in 2000 and has been involved in both the organizational and the curatorial aspects of the art program, curating temporary exhibitions and presentations from the permanent collection. She has also conducted research on the museum’s artistic holdings, collaborating with international artists, curators, and institutions.

Mike Stinavage

Mike Stinavage is a writer and waste specialist from Michigan. He holds a masters degree in political science from CUNY Graduate Center. As a Fulbright and Martin Kriesberg fellow, he researched the politics of waste management and wrote his second collection of short stories in Pamplona, Spain. His writings can be found in Slate , the Brooklyn Rail , the Riverdale Press , and more.

Judith Benhamou

Judith Benhamou is an art critic and exhibition curator. She has been writing about art and the market for the past thirty years in the French daily newspaper Les Échos . She has created a website, Judith Benhamou Reports (https://judithbenhamouhuet. com/), dedicated to international art news and notable for its video interviews. The exhibitions she has curated include Ai Weiwei Fan-Tan (2018) at the Mucem, Marseille, and Mapplethorpe—Rodin (2014), at the Musée Rodin, Paris.

Charles Stuckey

Charles Stuckey is a widely published independent scholar who has served as curator in major US museums including the Art Institute of Chicago. He has worked on highly acclaimed retrospectives of Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, and others.

Raymond Foye

Raymond Foye is a writer, publisher, and curator currently based in Woodstock, New York. In 2020 he received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for his editing of The Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman for City Lights. He is a consulting editor with the Brooklyn Rail Photo: Amy Grantham

Andrei Pesic

Andrei Pesic is a cultural and intellectual historian of early modern France, with special interests in the arts and economic thought.

THE OBJECT, THE ACTION, THE AESTHETIC FEELING

The definitive monograph on the work of Walter De Maria is being released this fall. To celebrate this momentous occasion, Elizabeth Childress and Michael Childress of the Walter De Maria Archive talk to Gagosian senior director Kara Vander Weg about the origins of the publication and the revelations brought to light in its creation.

ELIZABETH CHILDRESS I first met Walter at The Light ning Field [1977] in 1978; I was there with my boy friend, John Cliett, to photograph lightning storms over the field. We were good friends with Robert Fosdick and his wife, Helen Winkler, one of the founders of the Dia Art Foundation. They were working closely with Walter at The Lightning Field , developing a program for visiting the sculpture. Dia was a huge supporter of Walter and his work at the time, providing spaces and funds for major projects but also providing artists with assistants and archi vists. They really did so much to make it possible for Walter to make his work, which was often quite complex to create, install, and maintain.

Anyway, we became a bit of a family. By the end of that summer, after leaving The Lightning Field , Walter asked me to be his assistant and help him organize his studio in SoHo. Then I was approached by Heiner Friedrich, the German art dealer who founded Dia in 1974 with Philippa de Menil and Helen. Heiner thought that it would be great if John and I could work on more photographs of The Light ning Field . We went back in the summer of 1979, and when I returned to New York, Heiner set me up with an office in part of the New York Earth Room [1977] gallery and I started working with Walter on a reg ular basis. This primarily entailed establishing an archive and working with him on his new projects. Eventually we moved over to his building at 421 East Sixth Street in Manhattan and over the years I con tinued to work with him on many projects, until he had a stroke in 2013.

KVW And your work has continued, because after his death, you were responsible for archiving the

entire studio.

EC Yes. Because Walter died quite suddenly, none of us were prepared. Walter had work that was not completed. He had an enormous building full of art that we had to inventory. He had worked, for nearly thirty years, on the Truth/Beauty series [1990–2016], and we were able to complete that with the support of his family and the gallery. That was huge. The gallery, in addition to Dia, was really important to Walter, particularly toward the end of his life. And after he died, you and the gallery were so supportive—it made the whole process so much more structured. And you worked closely with Walter’s family to make a plan, and that was ideal, because Walter never established a foundation.

KVW Larry Gagosian began working with Wal ter in 1989, and from the very beginning he saw the importance of the work. Over the years, he saw that, as is often the case with artists, consistent sup port makes a big difference in terms of their careers and legacy, so whenever he could he would sup port Walter in that way and allow him some lee way. It was Walter’s exhibition that inaugurated the Thompson Street gallery that Larry operated with Leo Castelli.

MICHAEL CHILDRESS And during our research we dis covered that after his first show with Larry, Walter never showed with another private dealer again. He had plenty of institutional recognition and exhibi tions, of course, but his only gallery representation after that moment was through Gagosian.

KVW And then there were the New York shows we worked on together in 2007: 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows [1985], on Twenty-Fourth Street, and A Computer Which Will Solve Every Problem in the World/3–12 Polygon [1984], on Twenty-First, which belonged

KARA VANDER WEG Elizabeth, when did you first meet Walter De Maria?

Previous spread: Walter De Maria, 1961. Photo: George Maciunas

This page: Walter De Maria and his wife, Susanna, in New York, c. 1961. Photo: courtesy Walter De Maria Archive

to the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rot terdam. We borrowed it back from the museum because it was important for Walter to show those two objects together and to have that circle com pleted, so to speak.

EC When did you first meet Walter, Kara?

KVW I first met Walter in 2005, a year after I started working for Gagosian. Larry told me to call Walter De Maria and see if he wants to do anything in any of our spaces. And I think I called for about, I don’t know, a couple of months, and he would just hang up—the phone would ring and then he would hang up [laughs ].

EC [laughs ] What? No.

KVW He thought I was a real estate agent trying to sell the building. Eventually I sent a fax saying, I’ve always admired your work. I love the Earth Room , I love the Broken Kilometer [1979]—both of those installations are meaningful to me. Then he called me up and said, “Hello, this is Walter De Maria” [laughs ]. So that was my introduction to Walter.

EC It would always take Walter a little bit of time to feel comfortable and trust people. But you were one of those people whom, eventually, he really did.

KVW Well, I appreciate that trust. That for me was why it was important to try to make a book about his life and work. It deserves such a publication and I think it’s crucial in terms of memorializing that material and informing people going forward; there’s a paucity of information on Walter’s work out there. Additionally, because we’re able to coincide with the exhibition taking place at the Menil Collec tion in Houston, which includes so much of Walter’s early work [Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work , October 29, 2022–April 23, 2023], the timing feels particularly appropriate.

Michael, maybe you could talk about how you become involved with Walter’s work, and

specifically about all the great work you’ve been doing on the monograph and the archive.

MC I grew up knowing him, but only on the phone, really. But when he had to prepare the sec ond floor for the Bel Air installation at the Menil Collection in 2011–12, I came by the studio and worked with him going through a lot of the mate rial that was being stored there on the second floor, and moved it up to the fourth floor in preparation for the restoration turning the second floor into a gallery space. It was fortunate that we had that time together because two or three years later, when Walter died, I came down to go through that mate rial that I’d only just moved, and to figure out what it was that we had just gone through. Later we began the process of analyzing and initiating the database project, with the goal of eventually producing the monograph.

KVW And can you describe what the database pro ject is?

MC Everything was well organized in its phys ical form, but after the move, we realized that we needed to have a digital system with which to access the material. When we were looking for a database, we found a system that was specifically focused on making a catalogue raisonné. From there, we started entering the data from the office, setting up a base that we could use to make the book.

KVW Were there any surprises in the book that arose as you were putting this material together?

EC The most extraordinary moment was when we first created a timeline. We had images for each of Walter’s works, with the dates, and we laid them out according to their chronology on side-byside panels across three long tables. I had never viewed his work from that perspective before; when you’re working in it, you’re not thinking about the timeline. Seeing the evolution of his career, and

This page: View of Walter De Maria lying on the desert floor touching one chalk line of Mile Long Drawing (1968). Photo: courtesy Walter De Maria Archive

Opposite: Walter De Maria, Truth / Beauty, 1990–2016, solid stainless steel and granite, 14 sculptures in 7 sets, each sculpture: 7 ½ × 42 1⁄8 × 42 1⁄8 inches (19 × 107 × 107 cm).

Installation view, Walter De Maria , Gagosian, Britannia Street, London, May 26–July 30, 2016. Photo: Mike Bruce

BOXES FOR MEANINGLESS WORK

Walter

Below:

Above:

Above:

Louisa

Sarofim. Photo: Paul

Photo: Rob McKeever

recognizing early moments that foreshadowed later major works, was something of a revelation. And that carries through into the finished monograph.

Also, all of Michael’s work with the drawings and studies provided so much more information about Walter’s process, especially in the early 1960s.

MC Picking up on these arcs in Walter’s work, being able to see the echoes of his early work in later projects—that’s something that wasn’t possible before.

KVW I love looking at some of those early drawings and seeing, as you were saying, the early ideas that he was developing, even the early iterations of The Lightning Field . And I love seeing Walter’s hand in these works, because when I knew him, the work had been developed to the point where it was all so well-produced, milled—it was perfect. But with these drawings and studies you really get a sense of the person behind the work.

EC And his sense of humor!

KVW Oh God, yes.

MC The drawing that we always use as an exam ple is Untitled [Large Ball in Small Room ] [c. 1959–62]: to know that he was thinking about that in ref erence to Michelangelo’s David , all delineated on

the same page, was revelatory. His interest in art and architecture from the very beginning opens new ways for experiencing the work. Also, the essays in the monograph, by Donna De Salvo, Michael Govan, Christine Mehring, and Lars Nit tve, all elucidate different aspects of his work.

KVW He had such an interest in current events, which I experienced in my conversations with him between 2004 and 2013. He would bring up events that he had seen on television, sporting events, that sort of thing. But in those early drawings, where he writes about the death of JFK or the Cuban mis sile crisis, you realize that all these artworks, all these steel sculptures that appear to be straightfor ward abstract geometric forms, have all this content behind them in some way.

EC He was a history major.

KVW That was really the topic of every conversation.

EC I think we must have had subscriptions to about twenty-five magazines. Walter read everything.

KVW Another part of the book that will be a discov ery for people is the chronology, written by Dagny Corcoran but of course the two of you were editing, supplying illustrations, and connecting her with the

right people. It was a delicate dance to give a com prehensive overview without violating Walter’s pri vacy, which he valued very much. Many decisions were required about what was applicable to Walter the man versus Walter the artist. For me, the infor mation about the music he made, his participation in early Happenings and performances, his early family life, his friends and acquaintances—this was incredible information and often quite unexpected.

MC Absolutely, that’s not what his reputation was. Walter was not known for being out and about and traveling a lot, but when you read this chronology, it subverts all those misunderstandings.

KVW Do each of you have a favorite part of the book? Or a project that piqued your interest in a different way when you were working on it for the book, as opposed to looking at it in real life?

MC Speaking further about the echoes or themes that we can now pick up on because of the chron ological order, or just having all his work in one place, we can see new relationships arising between artworks. For example, The Arch [1964] was the first time Walter really engaged with architecture or with an environmental installation. You see here that his “box” has increased in scale to the point

Walter De Maria framed by

The Arch (1964) in Walker Street studio, 1964. Photo: courtesy Walter De Maria Archive

where you’re no longer reaching into it, as you are with Surprise Box [1961], but actually entering and ultimately passing through it. This type of form, the corridor or passageway, is also related to his Walls in the Desert proposal [1961–64] and the Mile Long Drawing [1968]. Even his channel sculptures, such as Instrument for La Monte Young [1965–66] or Cross [1965–66], can be looked at as formally related to the passageway.

In addition to these thematic relationships, a deeper understanding of the work is achieved when looking at the development of Walter’s sin gular ideas over time. Many people know of The New York Earth Room as a permanent installation in SoHo, but they may not know that this was the third earth room that Walter made. Or that he later took the concept even further with 5 Continent Sculp ture [1989], using white rocks sourced from mines around the world, a work relating back to his Three Continent Project proposal [1967–69].

KVW Well, I hope the Menil exhibition and this book will generate more conversation, more ideas, more books, more museum exhibitions.

EC I think that’s exactly what will happen. When we had to document many of these early works, I realized how little I knew about that period in his career, so we had to go back over and over again to make sure all of our facts were correct. Walter rarely spoke about his earlier work, so most people don’t know about it, even those who know the later work quite well.

KVW Now that you’ve done this, may I ask what resources you had available?

EC The first time I ever went to Walter’s studio, in 1978, he had this two-room setup—essentially an enormous loft, where he lived on one side and worked on the other. There was a series of about ten tables constructed out of four-by-eight sheets of

plywood and sawhorses, and on each one of those tables there were piles of paper. That was Walter’s office [laughs ].

KVW That sounds very artistlike.

EC Nothing was organized. So I started putting things in boxes and asking him about each piece of paper.

KVW So forty years later, when you’re writing descriptions for the early artworks, you could go back to these boxes, find correspondence or— EC Exactly. And we were also able to access infor mation from different European archives—one of them in particular was hugely helpful for informa tion about the never realized 99-Sided Circle [1977], they made scans of everything they had in their files. So now, in the book, you can see some of these unrealized projects that Walter initiated when he was much younger, like the Three Continent Project , and understand what his intent was.

MC We were fortunate that most of Walter’s work is owned by public institutions. A huge part of the initial phase was reaching out to all known owners and sending them the fact sheets that we had pro duced with the database and having them verify a lot of that information for accuracy.

KVW Well, I have to say, your work has made a huge difference in making available this incredible his torical resource that you used to compile the mon ograph and that will be in the archive for the future. Do you think differently about Walter after working on this book?

MC For me as a young artist, the opportunity to read through the notes and works on paper that he was working on at my age, essentially, was extremely rewarding. He was really going through and developing his ideas, but also encouraging himself to stay true to his vision in a way that I have found quite inspiring.

This page: Walter De Maria, 5 Continent Sculpture (cube installation), 1989, white stones, painted steel frame, and plexiglass windows, overall dimensions: 16 feet 4 7 8 inches × 16 feet 4 7⁄8 inches × 16 feet 4 7⁄8 inches (500 × 500 × 500 cm), volume: 163.49 cubic yards (125 cu. m), weight of stones: 400,000 lb. (18,1437 kg). Installation, MercedesBenz Group AG International Administration Building, Möhringen, Germany, Collection Mercedes-Benz Group AG, Möhringen, Germany. Photo: Dieter Leistner

Opposite: Walter De Maria, Time / Timeless / No Time: The 3-45 Series , 2004, Indian Green granite, mahogany, Manetti 23 ¾-kt red gold leaf, and cement, sphere: 86 ¾ inches (220 cm) diameter, sphere weight: 34,000 lb. (15,422 kg), twenty-seven gilded wood sculptures, each overall: 52 ¾ × 34 7 8 × 10 ¾ inches (134 × 88.6 × 27.1 cm), twenty-seven 3-sided rods, each: 50 × 6 ¾ × 5 ¾ inches (127 × 17 × 14.6 cm), twenty-seven 4-sided rods, each: 50 × 5 × 5 inches (127 × 12.7 × 12.7 cm), twenty-seven 5-sided rods, each: 50 × 6 ½ × 6 1⁄8 inches (127 × 16.5 × 15.6 cm), twenty-seven cement pedestals, each: 5 1⁄8 × 39 3 8 × 14 inches (13 × 100 × 38 cm), gallery: 32 feet 9 ¾ inches × 32 feet 9 ¾ inches × 78 feet 8 7 8 inches (10 × 10 × 24 m), commissioned by Soichiro and Nobuko Fukutake for Chichu Art Museum, Naoshima, Japan. Photo: Naoya Hatakeyama

Artwork © Estate of Walter De Maria

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire

Anselm Kiefer

In this ongoing series, curator has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents are invited to make a selection from the larger questionnaire and to reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the fourth installment, we are honored to present the artist

.

4. What is harmony?

A: I mistrust harmony. Harmony can be the opposite of truth, which according to the “coincidentia oppositorum” is, in essence, untruth.

9. What keeps you coming back to the studio?

A: I never leave it.

13. The future is . . . ?

A: We all create from memory, without which nothing new can emerge. As Andrea Emo stated, “The new arises out of us, ourselves the future if we can relinquish it.”

6. What is your unrealized project?

A: The masterpiece.

10. Who do you admire most in history?

A: Alexander the Great.

14. Do you write poems?

A: No, but the poems of great poets, some of which I have learned by heart, accompany me, they are in me. For me they are like buoys in the sea—without them I am lost.

26. Who or what would you have liked to have been?

A: A woman.

27. What was your biggest mistake?

A: To leave Germany—a mistake that, in the end, was fruitful for me and my work.

32. What is your favorite book?

A: At the moment, “Finnegans Wake.”

31. What music are you listening to?

A: Hildegard of Bingen.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Anselm Kiefer

Pierre-Alexis Dumas, the artistic director for Hermès, speaks with the curator Abby Bangser about the central role of the house’s art collection in its creative process.

ART PART 10:

Abby Bangser: I’ve been looking at the plans for your new location in New York and I noticed that the Hermès art collec tion is at the core of the architecture and design choices in the store. How have you related to the art col lection during your career?

Pierre-Alexis Dumas: Well, first, I always say that the store is more than a store; it’s a house that functions as a deep expression of what Hermès is about. This is true of all Hermès locations, and this new house in New York truly exem plifies that perspec tive. The art collection is key to this.

I’ve always had a personal interest in the visual arts—I studied art his tory at Brown—and in my work at Hermès, I’ve pushed the idea of pairing the work that we do with the art on the wall. This dialogue goes into everything, from our printing process to our designs, stores, and offices.

Hermès was founded in 1837 by my ancestor Thierry Hermès, a skilled craftsman who made horse harnesses. Through his success in this enter prise, he was able to acquire his own workshop and produce the harnesses for carriage-making companies in Paris. In the nineteenth century, Paris was full of carriages, so the demand wasn’t insignificant. Thierry’s son, CharlesÉmile Hermès, started the idea of extending the craft. Their clients were rid ers and Charles-Émile convinced his father that they should also make sad dles and that they should have a store where they could sell directly to their clients.

It’s interesting to see how each generation alters the family history. Crucially for this story, Thierry’s grandson Émile Hermès changed trajec tory in a remarkable way. Émile was a compulsive collector. He started col lecting at the age of twelve, and with an unusual object, I’d say: an umbrella, which he bought because he was fascinated by the mechanism and the way it was made. He was from a family of craftsmen so maybe this isn’t so sur prising. From there, he bought whatever he could afford, which meant not much, or what wouldn’t interest other people. He started to buy everything he could that related to the tradition of the horse. This was the period of the industrial revolution—did he have an intuition that that tradition would van ish? Did he sense that it was going to fade away? Maybe, because something dramatic did happen, which was World War I. At the time, Émile was run ning Hermès with his older brother, Adolphe, so it was called Hermès Brothers. And at the end of the war, Adolphe told Émile, “We have to sell the busi ness. Our clients now have automobiles. Our busi ness is dead.” And Émile told his brother, “You’re selling, I’m buying.” And he bought his brother’s shares and found himself the owner of Hermès. He gathered his craftsmen and said, “What can you do with your hands that will be relevant to our cli ents, since they don’t have horses anymore?” The shift was immediate: they started to equip their cli ents to travel in automobiles with luggage, hand bags, clothing. Émile created the brand called Her mès Sport. For a man born in 1871, he was very modern, and he met immediate success.

With that success, whenever he could he would buy art. Now, in his generation, he could have bought Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907 or something, which would have been wonderful,

but that wasn’t his culture: he was a man of the nineteenth century. He was probably melancholic in a way, and he managed to turn that into something positive by being creative and accumulating all these objects that were rem nants of the past he had known. That was the origin of his fabulous collec tion, and with each successive generation we’ve continued to buy works that we think he would have appreciated.

AB: I’ve read about Émile’s legendary office, where the collection is primar ily kept—I must come to Paris to see it. That mixing of times and that nonhi erarchical approach, bringing different materials and media together, is a great interest of mine and I think it’s exactly how art and design should be appreciated. When we separate it so much, as we tend to do in museums, we lose the sense of how it’s meant to operate in the world and how it was created in an artist’s studio.

PAD: Exactly, and this is what propels the collection forward. It’s really all about curiosity and serendipity, allowing your mind to make nonrational connections. That is the essential foundation for the emergence of a cre ative idea.

AB: As I understand it, there are multiple collections. You’ve spoken about Emile’s; what are the others?

PAD: We have the Émile Hermès collection, which is all these objects we buy related to equestrian culture, but they are not Hermès objects. Then we have a second collection that we call the Conservatoire des Créations Her mès , the Hermès creations collection. We started collecting our own pro duction in the 1980s. This was begun by my father, who, when he became a young chairman, in 1978, realized we had very few items from our own past.

He even placed an ad in the national newspapers asking people who had old Hermès products they wanted to get rid of to contact Hermès. That’s how we started the Conservatoire. Today we have over 35,000 items and have managed to go all the way back to 1860.

Then there’s a third collection. I wanted to introduce a contemporary element into these collections, not to be focused only on either the nine teenth century or our own work. More specifically, I wanted to find a medium that wouldn’t clash too much with all the drawings and paintings we already owned, and I thought of photography as a good alternative that could coexist harmoniously with the older collections. This was the origin of the Hermès Photo Fund, and we’ve been buying since 2008. Presently we have more than 1,300 photos.

Previous spread: The Émile Hermès Museum, Paris. Photo: Nathalie Baetens, courtesy Hermès This page, above: Pierre-Alexis Dumas. Photo: Julien Oppenheim

This page, below: The exterior of Maison Hermès on Madison Avenue. Photo: Kevin Scott Opposite, above: Artwork by Cassandre, Émile Hermès Collection

Opposite, below: Graham Little, Untitled (two vases), 2020, gouache on paper, Hermès Collection of Contemporary Art

These three collections are represented in every one of our stores. For a special store like Madison Avenue, I wanted a big statement, so I worked on this unique staircase design. I thought, This is my exhibition space to celebrate serendipity and curiosity and our own culture, which is a visual culture and also a symbolic culture around all the values you associate with horses and horse-riding and traveling: journeys, journeys of the mind and also of the soul.

AB: Could you tell me more about the works that you’ve cho sen for the central staircase?

PAD: One of my favorite items is a miniature carriage made as a toy for children in the nineteenth century. It is functional and would have been pulled by a pony or a goat. Fascinatingly, it’s an exact replica of a one-person taxi dating back to 1840—what was once called a cabriolet, which is where the English word “cab” comes from. And in Paris and London the cabriolets were yellow and black.

AB: Incredible. Perfect for New York City.

PAD: Exactly, and it links back to the question of heritage. My father used to tell me that you can’t create without memory. I can’t see how you can devise the future if you don’t know your history, if you’re not inspired by the past, so that you can go beyond your heritage but also nourish your mind with it. When ever we’re short on ideas, we go back to the collections. We just wander and let serendipity happen. But the purpose of art is to invent, to stimulate the mind to project ourselves into the future, to go further. The pieces I chose are all related to the interactions between North American culture and Paris culture. There are all these invisible threads.

Before the staircase, we have two beautiful small gouaches made by the French artist Cassandre in the 1930s as covers for Harper’s Bazaar. My grandfather bought them because Cassandre also designed for Hermès. They’re a really great example of collaboration between a French artist and an Amer ican magazine, and they come back to life in the Hermès store in New York. These are small touches that I think are moving.

Another piece that I’m thrilled to be showing is a work by the New York–based painter and graphic designer Elaine

Lustig Cohen. The American team introduced me to her, I went to her home in the city and we had a long, incredible conversation. She was in her late eighties at the time, a very elegant, sharp woman with an incredibly intense eye. While there, I fell in love with a beautiful abstract painting, and she allowed us to reproduce the colors in a collection we were working on. And now we’re able to put that very same work on display.

AB: It’s brilliant to bring this all together around the staircase. If we look at the boutique as a whole, are there other areas that you see as quintessen tial to the overriding concepts of Hermès?

PAD: First, the fundamental element of that building is natural light. The reason for the staircase is that at the top of the building is a glass dome, which allows light to travel down through the staircase to the ground floor. The idea is natural light has to penetrate as deep as possible because light is life. Light is the beginning of everything.

Second, our ever present inspiration at Hermès is nature. It is nature that gives us the materials; we merely transform what is given. Entering on the ground floor on Madison and 63rd, you’re somewhere geometrical by virtue of the architecture: already as you walk in, you see the geometry in the stonework, the floor, and the vertical elements. But it’s already more humane and warmer because of the materials. And as you walk up, the whole idea is that at the top of the building you have a garden and you have light. The whole architecture of the building gradually becomes more organic, with more curves, and the walls literally open, and in the recesses of the walls, as if in the bark of a tree, you’ll see a bag.

AB: I’m sure the window displays will be a visual treat for people walking past the store, as they always are at Hermès.

PAD: The window showcase is an integral part of the Hermès story, from Émile Hermès to the incredible work of Annie Beaumel and Leïla Menchari in the twentieth century, and on to the present, where we continue to col laborate with creators from a variety of disciplines. I’ve met important art ists who have told me that they remember seeing the Hermès windows as a kid with their mother or grandmother, and dreaming and feeling strong emotions that they cannot forget. For a long time, my biggest fear was that people didn’t dare to push open the door, thinking, This is not for me, this is not my world. I don’t expect people to come in and buy everything, or even buy at all; I expect people to come in and enjoy and open their eyes. I hope we’re contributing to enriching the cultural life of New York City. New York is a city about retail, like it or not, so better make that a fun and exciting experi ence. If you told me I couldn’t go into an art gallery because it’s not my world and I’m not going to buy a painting—No, no, no. Go into the gallery and look at the art, even if you can’t afford to buy it.

ANNA WEYANT:

BABY, IT AIN’T OVER

Novelist Emma Cline traces the boundaries between terror and hilarity in Anna Weyant’s new paintings.

The paintings of Anna Weyant evoke a certain airless time of day: 5 p.m., the house still, the air going stale, the silver starting to cast off reflections from the lights. Composure with tension build ing underneath, an edge, like someone clearing their throat in a silent room. There is the quality of waiting, as in the opening scenes of a fairy tale—a girl, in prim clothes, about to be acted on by forces beyond her understanding, the normal rules of the universe tinted with a dream logic.

I was sitting at a long table with a lot of nice things on it , begins a short story by Alexandra Kleeman called “Fairy Tale.”

My mother and father were sitting next to each other on the long side of the table, and a man I didn’t recognize at all was sitting next to them. I sat across on the other end, alone.

I was looking at all of the things and trying to notice connections between them. Why this table, why now? . . .

It was then that I noticed none of the others seated

at the table were looking at the table or its con tents. They were all looking at me. . . .

You were announcing your engagement, said my father helpfully.

To who? I asked. . . .

To us, they said. All of you? I said.

No, only me, said the man in the button-up shirt, whom I did not recognize. . . .

Who am I engaged to? I asked.

To me, he said, no longer looking satisfied.

The young woman finds herself playing a part in a story that has lost all connection to reality. In this world that she doesn’t recognize, her fate is out of her hands. Even her mother and father are no help—they are part of the confusion, no longer reliable. What surreal logic propels her forward?

I think of Anna Weyant as a great teller of fairy tales. And girlhood is a kind of fairy tale, one in which your existence, even your body, can become distorted and unreal in sudden and even violent ways. As in a fairy tale, women are often subject to forces beyond their control: the strange dance

of passivity and power that they experience, cast in the starring role of the story while simultane ously defanged, made into dollhouse dwellers, figures arranged in the scene by hands outside the frame. And, as in the great gothic fairy tales, there is, in Weyant’s paintings, a sinister elegance: the Dutch-master black of her backgrounds, the expertly rendered silver candlesticks and unbe lievably lovely roses, the salmon-pink balloons and the figures done in narcotic marzipan smoothness. But Weyant’s universe never stops at that polished surface—the work is deeper than that, much deeper and much darker and very, very funny. There is always another element cutting through the static, an added bite—a fearless mordancy and a bracing wit that feel entirely contemporary and entirely her own.

In Weyant’s telling, the valence of the fairy tale takes on a savage and brilliant edge: the tropes are distorted, slyly rearranged, made more uncanny or hilariously deflated. A young woman flops out of a many-tiered birthday cake, her hair a flag of bored surrender. A gleaming revolver is now beribboned, a weapon made into a lovely little gift or even a

kind of acerbic invitation. A pair of wine glasses meet in a crashing “Cheers,” both glasses shattered into jagged teeth—social encounters as minor-key battle. A woman engages in what at first seems to be convivial conversation; then her smile becomes more of a grimace, a jackal’s bark. Her hand, bound in gauze, rests politely on the table, an injury that you suspect will go unexplained.

There was a book of Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales that fascinated me as a child. I still have the copy I grew up reading—a clothbound Jun ior Library edition with jewel-toned illustrations by Arthur Szyk. Even though I read them obses sively, the stories gave me a queasy feeling. They were frightening in a way that I couldn’t yet under stand, and the horror was doubled by the illustra tions, baroque images of girls and women in trou ble. One illustration obsessed me more than the others, accompanying the story “A Girl Who Trod on a Loaf.” It’s a weird little tale in which a girl’s vanity (protecting her new shoes from the mud at the expense of a loaf of bread meant for a hungry family) results in her doom (instantly banished to a terrible underworld). The illustration in my book

shows a blonde, droopy-eyed Szyk girl in a red furtrimmed coat, trapped in a massive spider’s web, surrounded by all manner of creatures who mean to do her harm—gape-mouthed dragons and fear some bats and an enormous rocky toad. “Great, fat, sprawling spiders spun webs of a thousand years round and round their feet,” the caption reads. A thousand years! Doom! Yet the girl’s expression is only mildly concerned. There’s something in the way her eyebrows are raised, a weary resignation in her features, that seems almost to say, Ok, great, fat spiders, hideous beasts, a thousand years—so what?

The women in Weyant’s paintings navigate their uneasy surroundings with that same cool know ingness, a gimlet-eyed awareness that inures them to the vagaries of this fairy-tale world. These are not the passive heroines of fairy tales, asleep for 100 years—if a Weyant subject slept for 100 years, it would be because she was bored, withdrawing from society in Bartleby-like protest: I would pre fer not to

If the subjects at first appear strangely calm, even under duress, on second glance their remove starts to look like a choice, an exhausted opting-out

This spread: Anna Weyant’s studio, New York, 2022. Photos: Jeff Henrikson

or a calculated pose, a weaponized strategy formed as an illogical response to a ridiculous world. These strategies can result in their own form of violence, too: a young woman with a bow around her ponytail, taking the innocent, enthusiastic pose of a cheerleader, is—you realize—standing on brutal tiptoe, her body balanced on a young woman’s cheek. Do both of these women have the same face? The brutality is turned inward, acted out on another version of the self. As in a horror story, the call is coming from inside the house. Or from inside yourself. Even so, the expressions on these faces are placid, amused. The woman grins happily as her cheek is ground down by the cheerleader. None of this, their faces seem to say, is entirely unexpected. Even when a Wey ant subject is screaming, the scream seems hilar iously mellow, self-aware, an echo of an echo of terror.

In Weyant’s recent paintings, these ripples of otherworldliness and the uncanny appear in more overt ways, breaching their formerly polite bounds. It’s exciting to see these parts of her work

Opposite: Anna Weyant,

This page:

intensify, torquing her visual universe with new energy. Weyant’s bone-white roses, unsettlingly perfect, are now joined by flat fake daisies, like the gag flowers on a clown’s lapel that might sud denly blast you with water. The elements of artifice are foregrounded, made visible. In another paint ing, a cartoon face distorts the features of a beau tiful young woman, like a startling rude blurt into this composed world. Something hidden makes itself known. So much is controlled; then Weyant ruptures the control with psychological precision, exposing what spills out of us even when we try to keep the boundaries maintained.

In a still life of polished silver, the reflections in the surface of the pots and pans aren’t just innoc uous flashes of light and dark—we see a shadowy, sinister figure creeping in the background, a knife raised in their hand in Norman Bates fashion. The polish reveals the poison. But is the danger real?

Or is the violence cartoonish, just juvenile haunt ed-house antics?

Weyant plays with doubling: a woman in a silk slip dress smiles in a satisfied, internal way, her

eyes closed. Then she is twinned, only the twinned version glances down to the side with mild disdain or regret, like that moment of pause after you’ve said too much at a party. In a single painting, Wey ant toggles between these two selves, the pleased self and the self that polices that pleasure, doesn’t appear to quite trust it.

There’s something very funny, too, about the discomfort in an Anna Weyant painting. It’s a pres surized, antic hilarity, the tension between the lovely, prim surface and what’s underneath, threat ening to breach that surface—like the queasy and awful thrill of trying not to laugh at an inappropri ate time. Needing to laugh, but knowing you abso lutely cannot laugh—humor teetering on the knife’s edge of horror, like the balance Weyant so expertly strikes. A thousand years bound in a spider’s web, a woman en pointe on your cheek, a figure with a knife creeping up behind you: horrifying? Maybe. Maybe also kind of funny. And maybe that medi ation between humor and horror is a truer kind of fairy tale, a fairy tale that crystallizes this moment brilliantly, as only Anna Weyant can.

CELESTIAL CINEMA OF

MARKOPOULOS

Raymond Foye reports on the Temenos, the screening of Gregory Markopoulos’s film Eniaios in Lyssarea, Greece, in the summer of 2022. Addressing the mythological and mystical nature of Markopoulos’s singular cinematic production, Foye traces the developments in the filmmaker’s life that led to this influential work.

Time is the moving image of eternity. —Plato, Timaeus , c. 360 bce

In June 2022, approximately 150 people gath ered in the heart of ancient Greece for one of the stranger rituals in the world of cinema: two week ends of screenings devoted to the epic work Eni aios , an eighty-hour 16mm film created by Greg ory J. Markopoulos. This legendary independent filmmaker’s official filmography comprises more than forty films created between 1940 and 1976, followed by his final film, Eniaios , completed in 1991—the year before his death—which largely consists of a radical reedit of many of these ear lier films, plus later footage that does not appear elsewhere. ( Eniaios means “uniqueness” or “unity.”) The filmmaker himself never saw the finished work projected; short of funds and ter minally ill, he only had time to edit the film and put it on the shelf, leaving an immense number of

practical details to be realized by his life partner, the filmmaker Robert Beavers. The relationship of Markopoulos and Beavers is in itself one of the more affecting accounts of artistic collaboration in our time, making the screenings—an event called the Temenos—a true union of spirits. 1

For Markopoulos, “filmmaker” meant many things: scientist, sorcerer, physician. At the Temenos, all these roles are in play. Joseph Campbell once said that myths are public dreams and dreams are private myths; Markopou los’s films function like a communicating ves sel between these two states. He saw life through

the framework of the Greek myths, which to him were expressions of psychic states, the “universe of fluid force,” as Ezra Pound called it. 2 Markopou los created his own myth and then inhabited it.

Eniaios is a work of endurance on the part of both filmmaker and audience. Since 2004, reels of Eniaios have been premiered at long week ends of screenings that last three to five hours per night.3 To see the entire cycle as it is currently presented—only at four-year intervals—would take twenty-eight years. 4 Since 2004, all of the reels screened have been premieres. This is not about the popular but, in Markopoulos’s words, about the search for the “single perfect Spectator.”5 Aside from the barest of over views, I will not attempt to review these films in any conventional sense. Highly abstract in concep tion and execution, they exist well beyond words. I would rather inspire lov ers of cinema to make this pilgrimage of discovery themselves.

“ Temenos ” in Greek means “holy grove,” a place apart. The location is a field in a natural amphi theater near Lyssarea, in the region of Arcadia, home of the great god Pan and a place rightly synonymous throughout centuries with idyllic natural beauty. The censorship of Markopou los’s film The Illiac Passion (1964–67) in Athens in 1980, because of nudity, led him and Beavers to start search ing for an appropriate site for his films. Staying with an uncle in Markopoulos’s ancestral village of Lys sarea, they began screen ing their films annually in this setting from 1980 to 1986. After a hiatus due to Markopoulos’s illness and

Previous spread: Temenos, Lyssarea, Greece, 2022. Photo: Linda Levinson

Above: Gregory Markopoulos, Psyche , 1947, 16mm film, color, sound, 24 min. © The Estate of Gregory J. Markopoulos. Courtesy Temenos Archive

Temenos, Lyssarea, Greece, c. 1980s. Photo: Giorgios Zikoyannis

© The Estate of Gregory J. Markopoulos. Courtesy Temenos Archive

death, the screenings resumed, in 2004, 2008, 2016, and 2022. The Temenos proper—which is to say, the screening of the late masterwork Eniaios is usually held only once every four years.

The Temenos offers a refreshing lack of distrac tions: the guesthouse where I stayed had no Inter net, but did have a balcony with a view of a beauti ful fruit and vegetable garden tended daily by an elderly couple. Sheep roamed freely through the town and the local café was open until 3 a.m., or whenever the last patrons decided to go home. There is something in the DNA of Greeks to welcome travelers from afar, and the cordial ity of the locals continues to this day.

In the early 1970s Markopoulos withdrew his work from circulation, one of many peremptory acts that defined his career. (He similarly demanded that P. Adams Sitney remove the chapter about him from the author’s classic study Visionary Film , of 1974; Sit ney obliged.) 6 Lyssarea is now the only place where one can see his epic, and for those who love inde pendent film, attendance is as close as it comes to the Muslim hajj, a pilgrim age de rigeur at least once in one’s life. Markopoulos took the adage “If you build it, they will come” to the extreme. Carrying an idea to its farthest point, regard less of practicalities or cost, was what he excelled at. This is about as absolute as art gets.

Crucial models for the Temenos were the sacred sites of ancient Greece described as healing centers in the travel writ ings of Pausanias, from the second century ce. Attend ees stay in local guest houses and in the early evening are bussed to the village of Lyssarea, from which they then hike by foot for thirty minutes as night falls. (Arrangements are made for the physically challenged.) The amphi theater commands a pan orama 100 miles around, and every sound, no matter how small, seems to carry. The films are silent save for the insects, frogs, and owls who contribute an ambi ent soundtrack. The nat ural setting establishes a remarkable relationship between the screen and its environs: the boundary where the film ends and

the cosmos begins is blurred. The silent atten tion among the audience is a meditation in itself, and the soul of the place soon becomes palpa ble. To call the experience immersive is an under statement. This was made clear on the third night this year, when heavy rains necessitated a move indoors into an old schoolhouse, and the spacious ness was lost.

Through the combined forces of art and nature, Markopoulos created something akin to

an environmental sculpture, highly conceptual. One thinks of The Lightning Field of Walter De Maria (1977), a place of latent power and potenti ality, where meaning is revealed not only in the event but in the waiting. This quality of abiding constitutes an important part of the experience. Attendance means just that: readiness, anticipa tion, awareness. It is a formula that carries over into the films, which are largely composed of clus ters of frames, often as few as three or four (so that

Gregory Markopoulos filming Swain , 1950 © The Estate of Gregory J. Markopoulos. Courtesy Temenos Archive

they take up less than a second on-screen), sepa rated by longer stretches of clear and black leader. To look away even for a second is to miss some thing important.

Addressing the small gathering in the vil lage square one evening, Beavers described Markopoulos’s montage technique, involving elaborate numerical notations on pieces of paper that were discarded after the editing. In his writ ings Markopoulos describes this as a “musi cal-mathematical structure,” and it creates an overall abstract framework into which images are placed as minimal units. Spontaneity was also a factor: edits were improvised until the very last

moment. In Markopoulos’s focus on single frames, one senses him working on a quantum level, and the absoluteness of his vision is both stunning and forbidding—it is as if one were inside a perplexing philosophical theorem. In his essay “Element of the Void” (1972), the filmmaker took this infini tesimal focus one step further, speculating about the uncaptured images that existed between the twenty-four frames per second that the camera caught, escaped images he calls “the winged con science of total reality.”7

Many of the reels premiered at the Temenos in 2022 displayed Markopoulos the master of the film portrait, in which, he said, “the personalities

photographed . . . released their true selves.” 8 Subjects included Peggy Guggen heim, Jasper Johns, Shirley Clarke, Jonas Mekas, Mar guerite Maeght, and David Hockney. Other sections of Eniaios focus on nature, architecture, and sacred spaces: the “Divinity of a Place,” in the filmmaker’s words. 9 Like Pound (who also had to leave his home land to realize his true self), Markopoulos composed a sprawling personal epic built from fragments of memory—a lost paradise where form and formless ness are locked in perpet ual struggle.

I have brought the great ball of crystal; who can lift it? Can you enter the great acorn of light?

—Ezra Pound, Canto CXVI , 1969

The ancient Greek phi losopher Markopoulos was most drawn to was Par menides, a pre-Socratic who left his teachings in the form of poems, exploring the dialectics of light and darkness and the nature of being. For Parmenides, “Light/Fire” and “Night” were the opposite poles of the cosmos, and this duality seems to constitute the psy chic energy of the Temenos. The writings from the last decade of Markopoulos’s life are poems and hymns that invoke the elements of his cinema: Light, Silence, Eros, Cosmos, Intuition, Image. These writings are distributed to attendees of the Temenos in beau tifully printed oversized folios bearing the symbol of the event: a grasshopper, emblem of ancient Athens.

Markopoulos was an expert cinematographer, and he seems to have absorbed most of the history of cinema. As a student at the University of South ern California, Los Angeles, he attended lectures by Josef von Sternberg, and his first film, Psy che (1947), was made concurrently with Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) and Curtis Harrington’s Fragment of Seeking (1946)—three cornerstones of American homoerotic cinema made by acquaint ances in close proximity. Shortly after, a disas trous experience attempting to make a movie within the Hollywood industry set Markopou los on a path of total independence. His encoun ters in the 1950s with Jean Cocteau in Paris and with Maya Deren in New York encouraged

David Hockney in Gregory Markopoulos’s

Genius , 1970, 16mm film, color, silent, 60 min.

© The Estate of Gregory J. Markopoulos. Courtesy Temenos Archive

further explorations into the heart of dream, myth, and trance—Markopou los’s personal intensity is such that his images seem to always exist in the dead center of the psy che. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Markopou los explored homosexu ality to a far deeper and more serious degree than any other filmmaker I can think of, in a way quite devoid of the often self-deprecating camp of Andy Warhol or Jack Smith.

From the start, Markopoulos eschewed cine matic conventions such as fades and dissolves in favor of single frames, rapid cuts, and in-camera superimpositions. The plastic nature of film, its physical fact, supplanted illusion. Many of the inno vations credited to the French New Wave may rightly have originated with Markopoulos, who had spent time in Paris in the 1950s. (Jean-Luc Godard asked Markopou los to sponsor his visa for his first lecture tour of America.)

In the early 1960s, Markopoulos worked a dreary day job at a bookstore in Greenwich Vil lage, sacrificing every comfort for the films he was making. One day the filmmaker Jack Smith offered advice: “Looking very much like a char acter from a James Ensor painting he suggested to me quite seriously that I should give up my job

at Marboro Books and simply make films. When I protested as to how I would live, he gave me the clue: simply do.” 10 A vow of poverty has always been a very real option for the brave and commit ted artist, and I have seen this up close with fig ures such as Harry Smith and Jordan Belson. To be clear, this is not about glorifying poverty: to be hungry or unable to afford medicine is never a good thing. A vow of poverty as Markopou los lived it involved a rejection of all material fri volities and an effort to live as much as possi ble within a mutually supportive community, so

that his sacrifice benefited others. This austerity became part of the aesthetic of his films, a way of defeating the ease with which things are offered in the consumer society. Without a penny to his name, Markopoulos took on the commercialentertainment film, and through relentless indi vidualism and purity of intention, gave us an enduring alternative.

Photographs of Markopoulos always show him impeccably dressed in white shirt and tie, unusual attire in the underground scene of the ’60s. According to his assistant Jerome Hiler, he only owned two shirts, and washed one every evening. This innate elegance is also reflected in his films, which, despite their radicality, are often formal and poised. Markopoulos did not use drugs and told Hiler that true artists should reach states of intoxication only through their art.

Markopoulos imagined reality through the frame work of Greek myths, which are often points of departure for his films. As Pound once noted, these myths embody extreme psychic states, and this is how Markopoulos used them. Like Cy Twombly in painting or Gregory Corso in poetry, he was not seek ing a historical or nostal gic re-creation but a con temporary realization of enduring truths. Twice a Man (1963) is based on the story of Hippolytus and its theme of homosexuality, and takes its title from Rob ert Graves’s retelling of the myth. It was shot in New

Jasper Johns in Gregory Markopoulos’s Galaxie , 1966, 16mm film, color, sound, 92 min.

© The Estate of Gregory J. Markopoulos. Courtesy Temenos Archive

Gregory Markopoulos, The Illiac Passion , 1964–67, 16mm film, color, sound, 91 min.

© The Estate of Gregory J. Markopoulos. Courtesy Temenos Archive

Photo: Jerome Hiler

York City, on the Staten Island Ferry, and in Bear Mountain State Park. The characters wear con temporary dress.

Aeschylus’s play Prometheus Bound , writ ten in the fifth century bce , was the basis for Markopoulos’s film The Illiac Passion (ninety-one minutes, with color and sound), made between 1964 and 1967. This was a moment when the spirit of collaboration was still com mon in the underground film scene, and Markopou los responded to Mekas’s call for film artists to pull together. Warhol was cast as Poseidon; when put ting him in a bathtub in the ocean proved impractical, he was instead placed on an exercise bicycle. Jack Smith (Orpheus), Tay lor Mead (both Demon and Sprite), Beverly Grant (Persephone), and Tally Brown (Venus) are all in the cast. Garden scenes were shot in the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx (until everyone was chased out). Persephone makes her descent into the underworld via the New York City sewer sys tem (from which they were also chased out). Although

this description sug gests a camp film, that term in no way applies to Markopoulos. His aim was always to reach the viewer’s psyche.

To everyone’s sur prise, the seeds of per sonal cinema that were planted in the 1940s and ’50s bore fruit in the 1960s, to the degree that many of these filmmak ers were able to earn a modest living from their work, especially if they took to the lecture cir cuit. (According to Anger, his Scorpio Rising played in a Los Angeles theater for three months upon its release, in 1963.) In the 1960s, Markopoulos was a generous and tireless promoter of experimen tal film, championing in print and lectures the works of Stan Brakhage, George Landow, Marie Menken, Andrew Meyer, Ron Rice, Barbara Rubin, Harry Smith, and dozens of others. His reviews and appreciations appeared in Film Culture , filmwise , Scenario , The Evergreen Review, and Art and Lit erature . By the early 1970s the novelty, fashion, and commitment around this type of film had sub sided, and Markopoulos slipped into a new and final phase of his career—which would prove as reclusive as the previous chapter was genial.

When Markopoulos abruptly withdrew his films from circulation in the early 1970s, many filmgoers felt this was a form of punishment of the public for its inadequate recognition of his genius. But once those special years of subver sion and solidarity in the New American Cinema movement had passed, it seemed to Markopou los that the options were to be consumed or to be ignored, so he saw little choice but to leave on his own terms. He denounced New York as “pro vincial” and “insulated” and he and Beavers left America for good. 11 Conspicuous by his absence, Markopoulos managed to preserve the serious ness of his art precisely by shielding it from the public for so many years, until the sacred space he yearned for could be settled on. In 1961, under the heading “dreams,” he had written in his diary, “To build a modest home for the Cinema. To build a home step-by-step just as our films were made. To find the property. To find the funds for its con struction. And if need be devote time and energy to the very building of it.”12

In Eniaios , Markopoulos achieved his cher ished ideal of “film as film.” Narrative is dispensed with, the trance form is abandoned, the film is nei ther conscious nor subconscious. Markopoulos’s “shooting scripts” were enumerations of frames, not scenes. Images are sparing and speak for themselves; often a few isolated frames appear between longer lengths of black and clear leader— an encoded semaphore of numbers and ratios. The conventional distinction between still and moving images is erased. Because many images appear for less than a second between long stretches of light and darkness, one is forced to watch the film atten tively, and the cumulative effect is both exhaust ing and exhilarating. Pound’s definition of the poetic image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” comes to mind. 13 Yet when all the accoutrements of story and nar rative are eliminated, the drama still remains. I would say one of the principal subjects of the film

Leonor Fini in Gregory Markopoulos’s Genius , 1970, 16mm film, color, silent, 60 min. © The Estate of Gregory J. Markopoulos. Courtesy Temenos Archive

The cover of Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos , ed. Mark Webber (London: The Visible Press, 2014).

is memory, but with no sense of nostalgia.

Markopoulos was a published poet and a highly readable and pro vocative film theorist, a true philosopher of the image. Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Greg ory J. Markopoulos belongs in every library of art and ideas. Meticulously edited and published by Mark Webber (the guitarist in the rock band Pulp) and his Visible Press, Lon don, it includes introduc tory essays by Webber and Sitney that are funda mental to understanding Markopoulos’s oeuvre. For over 500 pages the film maker praises, cajoles, and condemns. The keenness of his writings may be suc cinctly conveyed through a brief list of their titles: “Projection of Thoughts” (1964), “A Supreme Art in a Dark Age” (1971), “The Filmmaker as Physician of the Future” (1967), “The Complex Illusion” (1972), “The Threshold of the Frame” (1974), “The Ancient Future” (1983), “The Pyramid of Sight” (1986). To many peo ple I know, this book is a bible. Film scholars read about, think about, debate Markopoulos’s ideas, and then for a few days every four years one gets to see the work, if one is lucky.

At which stage one is back to point zero, reeval uating everything one thinks one knows about Markopoulos’s cinema.

In Eniaios , Markopoulos reduced film to its barest minimum: “film as film,” as he often said. But that does not mean things are simple. For the uninitiated, the original experience of Eniaios can be confounding: is one viewing profound depths or the emperor’s new clothes? In “The Complex Illusion” Markopoulos wrote that what he was seeking was “a return to the experiential not the intellectual where one already knows everything about what one is looking at.” Mystery itself is a part of the experience. After midnight one inevita bly sometimes drifts in and out of brief periods of sleep. Waking up to the film, I found this momen tary disorientation only added to the experience. With typical sarcasm, Harry Smith once said that the best compliment the viewer could pay his films would be to fall asleep. (For Aristotle, sleep was another form of sense-perception, a sense-faculty like hearing or seeing.) 14 Darkness has always been the fundamental ground of Markopoulos’s cinema, and throughout these screenings one is reminded of the importance that night had in ancient times, its materiality now banished by electric lights. In the natural amphitheater at the Temenos, not a single man-made light or struc ture is visible.

Markopoulos was driven by a utopian vision of art. In scale and location, an obvious compar ison would be Wagner’s Ring cycle at Bayreuth. In the twentieth century I think the epic impulse best manifests in long poems such as Louis Zuk ofsky’s “A” (1928–74), Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems (1950–70), and Pound’s Cantos (1915–62), works whose elements still include endurance, heroic ambition, cosmological time, a world sys tem, et cetera, but these elements now take place within the poet’s consciousness. Markopoulos’s film can be thought of in this context. He put before the serious viewer one of the greatest chal lenges of cinema as an art form. Markopoulos’s question is, Can one person radically redefine a medium as colossal as film? The answer, on his own terms, is yes.

One night this summer, as the final shot faded from the screen at 2 a.m., a shooting star streaked across the sky in a seamless bit of editing worthy of Markopoulos himself. The audience gasped. It felt like a vote of confidence from the universe.

The Temenos relies entirely on donations and volunteers to restore the films and archives of Gregory J. Markopoulos. Please consider making a donation at the website thetemenos.org.

1. “Temenos” is also the name of the monographic archive that Markopoulos conceived and began to establish in the early 1970s.

2. Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance , 1910 (reprint ed. New York: New Directions, 2005), 92.

3. Temenos 2022 was unique, so far, in taking place over two weekends. Following the first weekend’s premiere of cycles XII–XIV, the opening cycles of Eniaios , which were originally projected in 2004, were shown again on the second weekend. Because of the pandemic, this summer it had been six years since the last gathering.

4. In relation to the Eniaios cycle, most numbers are approximations. All that is fixed is that Gregory Markopoulos made twenty-two cycles of various lengths. The present arrangement has largely been determined by practical considerations. The fact that the Temenos only takes place once every four years, for example, is largely determined by the fact that it takes that long to raise the money to restore and print the film. All of the original splices must be redone, a considerable undertaking for a film whose edits often fall not between individual shots but between individual frames. Quality lab work for 16mm film is increasingly hard to come by, and the lab that printed the 2022 reels has since gone out of business, creating yet another crisis. This is a race against obsolescence, and Robert Beavers and his team of volunteers must constantly raise money to fund their endeavor, just as Markopoulos did all his life.

5. Markopoulos, “Points I,” 1985, in Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos , ed. Mark Webber (London: The Visible Press, 2014), 455.

6. With Beavers’s permission, P. Adams Sitney’s chapter on Markopoulos was restored in the third edition of Visionary Film published in 2002.

7. Markopoulos, “Element of the Void,” 1972, in Film as Film , 363.

8. Markopoulos, “The Siege of Bruxelles,” 1969, in ibid. 289.

9. Ibid., 288.

10. Markopoulos, “The Adamantine Bridge. For Paul Kilb,” 1968, in ibid., 262–63.

11. Ibid., 268.

12. Markopoulos, “A Part of the Alphabet,” 1961, in ibid., 96.

13. Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Poetry, March 1913, 200.

14. Aristotle, “On Sleep and Waking, II,” Parva Naturalia , 350 bce

Gregory Markopoulos splicing Eniaios , Gstaad, Switzerland, February 1989. Photo: Robert Beavers © The Estate of Gregory J. Markopoulos. Courtesy Temenos Archive

FRANK AUERBACH: ARTIST FRIENDS

In this candid interview with Richard Calvocoressi, the painter Frank Auerbach reminisces on his friendships with Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud. The two spoke during the planning of the exhibition Friends and Relations , a show that examines the interconnected lives and art practices of this group of London painters.

RICHARD CALVOCORESSI Frank, can you recount your memories of those John Deakin photographs of you, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Michael Andrews, and Tim Behrens at Wheeler’s restau rant in Soho in 1963?

FRANK AUERBACH I remember every single detail of the photo shoot. Francis Wyndham, one of those people who tended to circulate in Soho, organized it. 1 There seemed to be some sort of community between Mike, Lucian, Francis, and me, and he sug gested that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a photo graph taken of us, as, if not a group, in inverted com mas, a sort of coven of artists who congregated to some extent. And he wanted to commission Deakin, who by that time was in a pretty bad way.

It was arranged that Deakin would photograph us at Wheeler’s at eleven in the morning. Wynd ham had thought that Tim Behrens was, as it were, one of us—which he wasn’t quite. He’d been a stu dent of Lucian’s and for a time was very friendly with him, but he was of a different generation and didn’t take part in the actual continuous conversa tion that took place between the rest of us.

So we all turned up at eleven at Wheeler’s. A table had been laid. We sat against the wall and Deakin got up on the bar and started taking a few photographs. And that was more or less it. Francis always hated being associated with other people.

He declared he didn’t like the whole business. The rest of us—Mike, Lucian, and myself—were much less pleased to have to go somewhere at eleven in the morning when we would rather be doing some thing else.

RC Yes.

FA And when the shoot, which took no more than five minutes, was over, Tim suggested that we open one of the bottles on the table, which nobody wanted to do, but . . . and if anybody had been asked to pay for it, it would certainly have been Francis. So a bottle was opened at Tim’s behest, and we may have had a sip of champagne, and then went our separate ways. The photographs were not entirely in focus, and Queen magazine rejected them as not up to their standard. That would have been the end of the story except that one of the pho tographs resurfaced and it’s now been reproduced about fifty times, as far as I can tell.

RC Yes, it’s become iconic, to use that overused word.

FA Yes.

RC In another of them, it looks as if you’re giving Francis Bacon a light.

FA I am indeed, yes.

RC For someone who would later claim that he never smoked on account of his asthma, I was a bit surprised by that.

FA No, no, he smoked. He smoked Gauloises. He smoked them for quite a long time. There was a court case, and it was said that pot had been found in circumstances that cast a slightly dubious light on the police—I think there’d been a backstory, somebody wanting to get his own back on Fran cis phoned the police and said there was pot in his place, and they said they found some—and Francis said at the trial that smoking gave him asthma and therefore he couldn’t have smoked pot. But he did in fact smoke. I don’t know whether he inhaled, and not very excessively, but he did smoke, yes.

RC In Deakin’s photos, you, Bacon, and Andrews are all casually but tidily dressed, while Behrens is the stereotype of the scruffy art student. But Freud, in jacket and tie, looks as if he’s just come from an interview with his bank manager. Was Lucian always dressed so formally outside the studio?

FA No. Lucian was sometimes conspicuously scruffy, sometimes in very well-tailored suits. But always with a sense of style—he was very conscious of clothes.

RC Behrens, who looks from the photographs like a sort of hanger-on, and as you say was much younger, was nevertheless very close to Lucian, who painted him a number of times.

FA Absolutely. Lucian had taken a great inter est in Tim when he was a student at the Slade—he may in fact still have been a student there when the photographs were taken—and became friendly with him and did some paintings of him. And then, I’m not sure on what grounds, they had a sort of falling out, which was a falling out both ways.

RC I believe around this time, the early ’60s, you photographed Deakin.

FA Yes, I did take some photographs of Deakin! This was the circumstance: someone—almost cer tainly Francis—asked Deakin for some photos of himself. Deakin’s response was to go across the road to the Golden Lion pub—less crowded than the Colony Room—and thrust a camera into my hand and ask me to take some snaps. I was totally unfa miliar with cameras.

RC Moving on to the subject of friendship por traits, if we can call it that, Lucian painted you, he painted a double portrait of Mike and June Andrews, and he also painted Francis. Fran cis painted Lucian many times. Mike painted

miniportraits of both Lucian and Francis in The Colony Room 1 [1962]. Did you ever paint any of the other three?

FA Francis also painted a double portrait of Lucian and myself.

RC Of course, it’s in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

FA It was done from photographs in Paris Match of French soldiers relaxing in Algiers, as you might expect. I suppose it registers, for me, as a painting rather than a portrait.

I did a drawing and an etching of Lucian, but I never painted either Mike or Francis, although I painted a number of pictures of Leon Kossoff, who, simply because his lifestyle was different, was not a great habitué of Soho. Even before he was married, he always had a more domestic background. The people who tended to drink in Soho were people who didn’t really have what’s called homes.

RC What are your memories of sitting for Lucian?

FA I sat for Lucian in one of his very run-down apartments, in a condemned terrace of empty houses. I sat for three hours at a time, I don’t know how many sittings. Lucian would, I think—mem ory fails—give me a lift at both ends. It was always very well heated and warm and there was often a restaurant meal afterwards, four times out of five paid for by Lucian. The whole process of painting from a person is so very familiar to me that I cannot remember anything as being remarkable.

Lucian sat for me in my studio for the drawing, and did a surprising number of sittings—perhaps fifteen—for the little etching in his Holland Park flat.

RC By 1963, when Deakin’s photos were taken, Bacon was already quite famous, having had a big retrospective at the Tate.

FA Oh, he was almost like Dylan Thomas: as soon as he appeared he was famous. People regarded him as quite remarkable and on a differ ent level from almost the whole of current English painting. The fact that his audience grew is true, but the quality of his reputation was there from the very, very beginning. It has to be remembered that the painting that the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought was bought before any retrospec tive—perhaps from his second show at the Hanover, or even from his first, after the war.

Opposite:

Bacon, Head of a

Bacon.

WE TALKED OF EVERYTHING UNDER THE SUN, AND BY IMPLICATION, SOMETHING FAIRLY AMBITIOUS IN ALL FOUR OF OUR ATTITUDES TO PAINTING WAS PART OF THE UNDERCURRENT.

RC Painting [1946], the one with the umbrella?

FA That’s right, yes.

RC I think the museum bought it from the Han over in 1948.

FA Yes. Alfred Barr may have been a genius among twentieth-century curators in the Eng lish-speaking world. In the late 1940s or early 1950s he acquired some small paintings of Lucian’s before there was any question of his having any sort of international standing or fame.

RC Of the three of them—Lucian, Francis, and Mike—who were you closest to, or did the relation ships change over the years?

FA They certainly changed over the years, in the sense that Francis fell out with all of us. But for a time I was closest to Francis—some of this sounds self-serving but it’s absolutely true. He was, from the beginning, quite interested in what I had to say—or so he said—and after my first show he went out of his way to get to know me. He arranged with

Helen Lessore that we should all three of us go together to the premiere of the film that Eduardo Paolozzi and Mike were in—

RC Oh yes, Together 2

FA Yes. We’d spoken before but he wanted to be formally introduced. And he took us to Wheeler’s afterwards. Then, for about fifteen years, we spoke frequently, and probably incoherently, but I think with a sense of mutual stimulation. In fact I remem ber one occasion, after a meal with Francis and Lucian, when Lucian said he was so stimulated by Francis’s and my conversation that he rushed home and went on with his painting in the middle of the night.

This persisted for some time, and Francis was extraordinarily kind to me in many ways. I lived in . . . I guess you’d call it rock-bottom poverty, and he took me to many, many meals. But then he fell out with all of us. I think with me first—I think he got fed up with me and my work. I very slightly got

fed up with him as well, after about fifteen years.

With Lucian it was more complicated because they were the two closest. I might have seen Fran cis twice a week for about fifteen years, but Lucian and Francis were together all day, when they wer en’t working, for a very considerable time, and it was very rare to see one without the other. Francis expressed a sort of polite respect for Lucian’s work. Lucian was totally loyal to Francis and was clearly fascinated by his work and admired it. But as was Francis’s wont, whenever Lucian had a show, he would go and start telling people it wasn’t really the sort of thing he liked, he preferred [Walter] Sickert really, this looked like Stanley Spencer, he didn’t care for it, and so on.

But I think Francis was stimulated by, as it were, cutting himself off and being on his own, and very often spoke of the delights of treachery, which to some extent he practiced. It has to be said that this was run concurrently with extreme generosity and

friendliness, and in fact, in my case, before we fell out, he was very helpful—I mean, I think he told people about my work a bit and perhaps persuaded one or two people to buy it, and may have even praised it for a while. But then he got fed up with it. And he got fed up with Lucian too, later, and he got fed up with Mike as well, although for a time he’d admired his work. I’m probably overinterpreting, but I think Francis felt stifled by having too close a relationship of that sort. And the people he was more at ease with were people like Miss Beston at the Marlborough, Sonia Orwell, his nanny—that is, friends who were in a different sphere.3 He some times said, since he was inclined to be provocative, that he preferred what he called ordinary people to artists.

RC For those fifteen years when you and Francis spoke consistently, what were the sorts of topics that you covered?

FA Well, that was the trouble, you see, when I was told we would do this interview, I found it very difficult to remember. We spoke about painting. We spoke also about literature and gossip and all sorts of things. It wasn’t in any sense structured. We never had, as it were, a debate about painting. You can’t say that this was artists discussing art. It wasn’t quite like that. There were implications of certain standards of extremism, a certain disdain

for painting as being in any sense of social value or something that makes life more pleasant or any thing like icing on the cake. And I think it touched on poetry and literature as much as it did on paint ing. I mean, we spoke a great deal about, I don’t know, Yeats and things. But it was more gossip and jokes and so on. For God’s sake, don’t represent it as like Van Gogh and Gauguin seriously discussing art! There was no discussion of that sort. We were in the same ambiance. We kept seeing each other because presumably we felt there was some sort of sympathetic community. We talked of everything under the sun, and by implication, something fairly ambitious in all four of our attitudes to painting was part of the undercurrent. Mike had immac ulate manners but underneath this mask he was intensely ambitious, as was evident in the fact that, right from the very beginning, he was clearly focused on painting large masterpieces of National Gallery quality.

RC Were the four of you competitive?

FA I think we were more competitive than coop erative—there was obviously a bit of both. But I think the basis of the association was a feeling that the others were worth contending with.

RC So if you were influenced by each other at all, it was really lifestyle and behavior rather than each other’s painting.

FA Exactly. I mean, when I was younger and even more callow than I am now, I found Lucian’s idiom, and particularly his use of the sable brush—the intense clarity of his early idiom—and indeed Fran cis’s idiom, what seemed to me slightly vaporous, sensational, unstructured: I rejected both. And then I gradually began to accept and admire their work because I realized as I grew up that it wasn’t a ques tion of idiom but of intensity and range of sensibility.

RC Given that figurative painting went out of fashion in the late 1960s, early 1970s, with the rise of Minimal, Conceptual, politicized art, and so on, what did the four of you feel? Isolated and unloved?

A dying breed? Or something like a sect whose time would come?

FA I think we all took a longer view. It may be pretentious but I’m all for pretension—it gives one something to live up to—but we all, while interested in everything that was going on in art, related in our own ways to the whole history of art. That is, we noticed, oh, [Jean] Dubuffet, [Henri] Michaux, Yves Klein, [Jackson] Pollock etc., etc. I don’t think we thought of all that as necessarily comprehensive, but in our own way we were all aware of history.

Lucian, quite broad-minded, related to all firstclass art ever made. Of course, the tradition has always been, in Ezra Pound’s words, “Make it new.”

It’s now almost two centuries since Baudelaire

suggested that the phrase “avant-garde” should be given back to the military and that we should look for the absolutely new (which is slightly harder to detect). Paul Valéry’s claim that “The new is always the old” is a typical French paradox but one can sense a meaning.

Francis’s behavior was very grand, he simply didn’t waste any energy on telling people what he thought of Pop art and so on. Possibly sometimes in an aside, he would say something—I may say totally mistakenly—derogatory about David Hockney, who’s a rather remarkable painter in my opinion. It was quite clear that Francis was certain that if you painted well enough, if you made a great image, that was all that was necessary. You didn’t have to take notice of what was going on around you.

RC Yet, of all of you, he seems to have been more intrigued and open to including passages of what one might call abstract painting, large flat areas of a single color, even though he was at the same time decrying abstraction.

FA Well, we’re all affected by what goes on, whether we’re aware of it or not. But I think it’s a little simplistic to think that when he went down to Cornwall and saw Patrick Heron cover a can vas with orange, he was affected by it. Francis was enormously inventive. His avatar, his model, would be Picasso, really, if it was anybody. And in the

Previous spread: Michael Andrews, The Colony Room I , 1962, oil on board, 48 × 72 inches (121.9 × 182.8 cm), Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, Wilson Gift through Art Fund (2006) © The Estate of Michael Andrews/Tate. Photo: Mike Bruce

Opposite: Harry Diamond, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, and Francis Bacon , May 1975, gelatin silver print, 5 7⁄8 × 9 1⁄8 inches (14.9 × 23.2 cm) © National Portrait Gallery, London, bequeathed by Harry Diamond, 2012

This page: Michael Andrews, Self Portrait , 1988, oil on board, 10 × 8 inches (25.4 × 20.3 cm), Private collection © The Estate of Michael Andrews/Tate. Photo: Stuart Burford

same way Picasso can in some moods be regarded as the greatest artist who ever lived, in the sense that he made radical images at various points of his life, Francis too, as soon as he’d done something—I think this is true of most artists—he wanted to do exactly the opposite.

Francis was fairly contemptuous of most of his contemporaries, actually. He might have been affected by anything he saw out of the corner of his eye, including furniture in a shop window, but I don’t think he would have been influenced by anybody. I remember him once pointing out to me in the National Portrait Gallery a portrait of James Joyce by Jacques-Émile Blanche—not in my opinion a tremendously distinguished paint ing, but he liked the way the paint had been put on in the background and he went on about it as though it actually mattered to him. So anything could affect him. But I don’t think there’s any thing linear about influences being exchanged in that way with English painting—particularly since he always had a greater respect for French thought, and spoke French fluently. Michel Leiris and Alberto Giacometti and so on became people he spoke to a lot, and I think Georges Bataille— that was all part of his background.

Looking back, I’m struck by the extraordi nary reasonableness and honesty and clarity and

modesty of whatever Lucian said. He was very lively as far as gossip and life were concerned, it was full of interest and excitement. He didn’t make many pronouncements about painting but when he did, they were fairly simple and always worth listening to.

So we did have an effect on each other, but I don’t think it was any—there was no particular community between us. As I said, Francis’s habit ual tendency towards treachery was combined with extraordinary generosity and sympathy. I mean, he gave money away and performed many acts of extreme kindness. It made him, I think, what he wanted it to make him—on his own and not part of any sort of gang.

RC In his landscapes of the 1970s and ’80s, Mike Andrews used a spray gun to cover or stain large areas of unprimed canvas with acrylic paint. Bacon also, I think, used an aerosol spray in his pictures of sand dunes and jets of water. Were you ever tempted to experiment technically in this way, or does work ing from the live model—as opposed to photographs, like Bacon and Andrews—preclude this?

FA I was never tempted to use a spray gun. I think, or feel, that for me, painting is a form of drawing. But the use of painting is always experi mental, different every time.

RC What about art critics—David Sylvester, for

example? Did he help to sustain this idea of an association or group? He wrote about all of you quite positively, I think.

FA Yes, I think he wrote about Lucian pos itively at the very beginning and then turned against him. He certainly wrote positively about Mike, but I think turned against him as well. And the same was true of me. But I think Francis and David were quite close—I’m making everything complicated because Francis would seem and be extremely friendly with people and then run them down behind their back. But I think he respected David Sylvester’s intelligence, and what I think of as the admirable clarity of his prose, which seemed to me very simple and direct. I think they worked together on that book of interviews—I think Francis had very considerable input. He always said that he didn’t take any notice, this all happened behind his back, but I think he worked on the book with David over a period of time. And like many things in life, when I first read it, I was excited about it. When I read it again ten years ago, I thought Fran cis was talking for effect. When I read it again recently, it seemed rather good again. Francis was quite frank about “Who can’t you tear apart if not your friends?” So all of his friendships had this ambivalence about them. But I think he was close to David.

And as far as I was concerned, David, by himself

and without being told, seemed to respond to my first show. He liked me for some time, and then I think he hoped that I would become something like an American painter who had an artistic profile that he held to throughout his life. Whereas I don’t think I would have liked to be [Mark] Rothko, for all his talent. As my work developed, it seemed to trace a certain autobiographical line that wasn’t— I’m interpreting—entirely the sort of thing that David Sylvester went for.

RC You all identified very closely with London as a setting for living, and also as a subject. I think only Mike left London for the country—in the late 1970s—and didn’t return for another fifteen years.

FA Well, Francis was always going on about how he’d like to move to Paris because that’s where the center of corruption was. I don’t think that Fran cis painted London particularly, although all those men in suits somehow seem rather English. But I don’t think there was an avowed attachment to London. There certainly was in my case and in Lucian’s case, for the quite obvious reason that, you know, we clung to it as a raft in the sea, that we’d come here from somewhere we’d escaped. This meant survival for us, really, London. And of course, in London, particularly after the war, there was a curious feeling of equality and free dom, because we’d all survived the war and noth ing else was all that important. It had a feeling of

adventure and freedom and unconstraint and a sort of—not that I particularly believe in equality—a sort of equality, that anybody could be anybody. Gradu ally, of course, everything became stratified again. Before the war, it was largely on the basis of class; after the war, I think to a very large extent on the basis of money.

RC Of the four, you were the one who painted images of London postwar, the period of destruc tion and reconstruction.

FA Yes, and Leon Kossoff too. But I mean, you would have to be totally insensitive not to—if you went on the bus, you saw these wrecked buildings all around, deep holes in the ground, five stories with fireplaces and pictures on the wall and the rooms sheared away, great heaps of rubble every where. It wasn’t that different from the photographs you get now of Ukraine.

RC In Lucian’s paintings, you get glimpses of down-at-heel parts of the city such as Paddington, through windows and so on.

FA Yes. And he painted a waste ground or two as well. There’s a feeling of time in Lucian’s immediate postwar work: everything seems to be unstratified and loose before it all settles down again.

RC Both Francis and Mike died in the early 1990s. You continued I think to see Lucian on a regular basis until his death.

FA Yes, I did. I was very fond of Lucian. Apart

This page: Lucian Freud, Reflection (selfportrait), 1981–82, oil on canvas, 12 × 10 inches (30.5 × 25.4 cm),

Private collection © The Lucian Freud Archive/Bridgeman Images. Photo: Antonia Reeve/ National Galleries of Scotland

Opposite: Frank Auerbach, Self Portrait III , 2021, acrylic on board, 23 ¾ × 21 inches (60.3 × 53.3 cm)

© Frank Auerbach, courtesy Geoffrey Parton. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

from the fact that we had quite a lot in common (we’d both been to the same sort of school, and had the same sort of background, and our families in Berlin had known each other), I found Lucian quite exceptionally nice, an exceptionally sweet man, and a good friend, and very frank and honest and everything one could wish for in a friend. He would sometimes ask me to go round and see what he’d done, and I used to do that. I saw him frequently.

And Mike, I liked Mike very much as well. We certainly never fell out. We saw each other more rarely—I had dinner there once or twice, he had dinner with us once or twice. We met in Soho. I think he knew that I respected and admired his work. But even during the time that I saw him fre quently, I didn’t see him quite as frequently as I saw Francis, and certainly not as frequently as I saw Lucian for something like fifty or sixty years.

RC And I believe Bruce Bernard was a mutual friend of—

FA Absolutely, of all of us, yes. He took a photo graph of me a week before he died. I thought it was a very good photograph. He was already extremely feeble. Virginia Verran came with him. He couldn’t actually set up the camera tripod by himself, and I remember Virginia quietly doing everything for him, everything physical, and then squatting in the corner as though she wasn’t there in the studio. And he took this photograph, which was I think

quite a good photograph. It’s got me in the mirror and there’s almost like a hangman’s noose hanging over my head.

RC How did Lucian’s large collection of your work come about?

FA Well, he said it was his taste. He said he liked my work and he started buying things very early on. And he bought over a period of forty years or something—it wasn’t bought in one go.

RC No, no—

FA I think he bought very early on from Helen Lessore, and he bought fairly late on, you know, before he died. In fact, there was a time when I felt slightly uneasy: I thought all my best pictures were going into Lucian’s house.

RC Well, in the end he had I think fifteen oil paintings and numerous works on paper, which were all distributed around museums in this coun try after his death. Did you ever yourself acquire the work of any of the other three?

FA I’m not a collector. I’ve never actually lived in a respectable place. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but—I mean, I’m still—this is comparatively lux urious, but it’s total squalor compared to the way all the others lived. And I could totally afford to, but

I just haven’t been bothered. Lucian gave me his prints, and I’ve kept one of Kai and one of Ib, but I gave the others to the Courtauld Gallery.

RC And are you still painting?

FA Yes, I’m doing my best. But as you may dis cover if you’re lucky, old age is fairly difficult.

RC But you still have sitters, or—

FA I still have one or two. Otherwise I’ve been painting self-portraits. I’m rather glad that I didn’t do self-portraits before, they seemed a little banal to me—everybody’s done self-portraits. But in the last few years I’ve been working from myself, and in fact I find it endlessly interesting. It’s different every time you do it.

Conversation recorded in London, August 3, 2022

1 . Author, editor, and publisher Francis Wyndham was at the time an editor of Queen magazine, which commissioned John Deakin to photograph the five artists at Wheeler’s. Wyndham would later be painted by Freud.

2. Helen Lessore was director of the Beaux Arts Gallery, London, which gave Auerbach his first show, in 1956. The film Together (1956), in which Michael Andrews and Eduardo Paolozzi play deaf mutes, was directed by Lorenza Mazzetti, a founding member of the Free Cinema movement, together with Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson. She had been a contemporary of Andrews’s at the Slade School of Fine Art, and in 1954 he painted her portrait.

3. Valerie Beston looked after Francis Bacon at Marlborough Fine Art, London, from the time he joined the gallery, in 1958, until his death, in 1992. Sonia Orwell was the second wife of the writer George Orwell, having married him three months before his death. As Sonia Brownell she had been assistant to Cyril Connolly, editor of Horizon magazine. The final days before her death in 1980 were spent penniless in a comfortable London hotel, where Bacon visited her and paid all the bills. Bacon was devoted to his nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, who died in his studio-apartment at Cromwell Place, South Kensington, in 1951.

PORTRAITS

By the painter Virginia Verran

The photographer never knows quite how the best pic tures are going to turn out any more than the painter does, and the best ones are very little concerned with cleverness.

—Bruce Bernard, 1999

I first met Bruce Bernard in around 1984, when I was graduating as a painter from the Chelsea School of Art, and we were close friends for the rest of his life. Over this time there were so many opportunities to discuss painting and photography and to wit ness Bruce’s complex relationship to his own photo graphs, disliking on the one hand too much praise, on the other too much silence, from the people he showed them to. Having spent much of his career as a highly regarded picture editor at the magazines of

London’s Sunday Times and Independent newspa pers, he had worked with many well-known pho tographers and had a natural humility about his own pictures, although he did have them published in those magazines from time to time and exhib ited them in the 1990s. He disliked what he consid ered the “prize-winning image” and any kind of self-conscious vanity behind the lens.

After being in touch with Irving Penn’s studio in 1999 to request a photograph for Century , his powerful book chronicling the history of the twen tieth century in photographs, Bruce had contact with Penn when he replied personally. I remem ber how much this meant to him. It is a pity that he didn’t see a postcard Penn sent to me in 2007, after I contacted him about Bruce; “I never set eyes on Bernard but did admire his photographs and his effect on both [Lucian] Freud and [Fran cis] Bacon. And his modesty. I was not aware that

he ever beat his own drum, although his talent was real.”

After Bruce’s death, in 2000, I became the cus todian of his work and have made his photographs available for exhibitions and publications on a reg ular basis. The link between painting and pho tography was vital for Bruce throughout his life, and the chance to bring his photographs together with paintings by the artists and friends he greatly admired in the exhibition this season at Gagosian in London is a profound one. It was brought about by the decision to release a group of photographs kept private since 1983. In 2019 I decided to print, small scale at first, six photographs of Freud, his daughter Bella, and the painter Celia Paul together, planning to show them in a small exhibition in 2020, the twentieth anniversary of Bruce’s death. This was impossible owing to the pandemic, but during the lockdown period, after making sure that

Bella and Celia were happy with the idea, I made four of the photographs into editions, and these will be shown for the very first time as part of the Lon don show. Bruce said, with characteristic modesty, in the late 1990s,

Lucian Freud, who I had known since early youth, offered me the opportunity of beginning what became a set of photographs of him, his studio and models, some of which I cannot per suade myself to feel too ashamed of. It all began with my photographing him and his daughter Bella in front of the almost completed painting Large Interior W11 (after Watteau) [1981–83] and shooting a few informal ones of them both and also the painter Celia Paul larking about a bit in the studio. Lucian was doing something frivo lous with Celia Paul’s hair—a picture for which the world is not ready, and perhaps never will be.

Some now well-known photographs of Freud and his models will also be shown, including Lucian Freud Standing on His Head, with Daughter Bella , of 1983 , (in which Bruce was insistent that the tip of the shoe should be in the frame when the photograph was printed) and a rare lifetime-print triptych of Leigh and Nicola Bowery posing for the painting And the Bridegroom (1993).

The photograph of Freud posing rather bal letically in Lucian Freud Posing as a Henry Moore (1983) came about as an impulsive commandment from him to “Do me as a Henry Moore.” This had something to do with an intense dislike of posing formally for portraits. Bruce said, “I later came to think he may also have had someone like [Vaslav] Nijinsky in mind when he found the pose.”

Bruce photographed his friend Francis Bacon in two sessions in 1984. He had known him since 1949, finding him “endlessly interesting and amusing

Previous spread, left: Bruce Bernard, Lucian Freud Standing on His Head, with Daughter Bella , 1983

Previous spread, right: Bruce Bernard, Virginia Verran in Front of “Black Painting No. 1”, 1995

This spread, top left: Bruce Bernard, Bella Freud, Celia Paul, and Lucian Freud , 1983

This spread, bottom left: Bruce Bernard, Lucian Freud Posing as a Henry Moore, 1983

This spread, right: Bruce Bernard, Francis Bacon in His Studio, 1984

and remarkably thoughtful considering his limit less ambition, fundamental loneliness, and angry fixation on his own mortality and limitations as an artist.” In 1998 Bruce wrote,

I knew him over a long period, if not nearly as well as I thought I did, and feel honoured that such a considerable figure behaved like a good friend for so long.

I am glad that these photographs exist as I think they do him no dishonour as he is seen entering his last decade—as well as being per haps the best account of his work as a mural painter.

Bruce first photographed Frank Auerbach in 1986, when the painter represented Britain in the Venice Biennale. The unusually smiling photo, which will be shown for the first time at Gagosian,

brought this from Bruce:

I am pleased to have caught him laughing in my photograph as he does so very freely though hardly ever at cameras.

His insistence on an almost monastic strict ness in his painterly devotions makes me think he may well be the greatest painter monk since Fra Angelico and the most uxorious since Fil ippo Lippi (I jest only in part).

The single color photograph of Frank is hard to date, and when I asked him years ago if the fact that he was wearing a corduroy jacket might help pin down an approximate time, he said, “Oh, I’ve been wearing that for decades.”

The later black-and-white portraits were taken in the last month of Bruce’s life, and two of them have not been shown before. The now well-known portrait of Auerbach with the rope behind his head

This spread, left: Bruce Bernard, Portrait of Frank Auerbach , March 21, 2000

This spread, right: Bruce Bernard, Michael Andrews with His Portrait of Bruce Bernard , c. 1990

has great intensity and pathos as the two men look into each other’s eyes. As Bruce was very weak from cancer, I was present as support for this final shoot, on Bruce’s birthday, having volunteered to go to the pub at 11 a.m. to allow the two men pri vacy. Soon, though, I found Frank running breath lessly into the bar to bring me back to the studio as Bruce had dropped a vital screw for the tripod and was getting anxious. Once the screw was found, and while Bruce was loading the camera, Frank and I were talking and perhaps trying to provide distraction. We both fail to remember exactly what prompted him to suddenly and dramatically launch into Philip Larkin’s “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.” He recited all three verses word-perfectly. On the rare occasions when I was in the company of Frank and Lucian at private dinners, there was scintillating exchange between them, from high to low culture

in the blink of an eye—reciting both known and obscure poems, or singing music hall songs, and they were always, impressively, the full versions.

Bruce photographed Frank in various parts of the studio in that session, and I remember light-heartedness and then gravity as the pressure of what would be the final photograph grew. This is captured so movingly in this portrait.

The photographs of Bruce’s close friend Michael Andrews show an easy familiarity, with Andrews smiling and pitching his paintings at odd angles, or embracing his portrait of Bruce on the easel (one of the photographs has the portrait mischievously placed upside down). Bruce said of the painting,

Mike painted a small portrait of me in the 1980s and this gave me further insight into his pains taking purposefulness as well as making me quite like (no one else could have done that)

my look of somewhat testy disdain. It states as clearly as any portrait I have seen how many times it is necessary to look at anything in order to paint it as a true study in observation, and in this case to convey it with none of what Francis Bacon, in an almost opposite but related context, called “its boredom.”

His photograph of Andrews standing in front of an early state of A View from Uamh Mhor (1990) is the photograph in which Bruce felt he properly cap tured him.

This exhibition will, I hope, convey the respect and sometimes palpable warmth that Bruce Ber nard felt toward his painter friends and that they in turn felt toward him.

Text and artwork © Estate of Bruce Bernard, courtesy Virginia Verran

resonates with them in any way?

UF In many ways, my dream is always the same: that my work communicates enough by itself, with out too much context, that people who don’t engage with art get something out of it. That’s a really grat ifying experience, to have someone just see some thing and think, Wow, that’s cool, and they’re not from within the art world.

ES Is that because you identify more with that person?

UF Probably, yeah [laughter ].

ES That makes total sense. It’s like, who you want to love your work is you [laughs ].

UF Exactly.

ES Do you know any people who you think see similarly to you?

UF Yeah, totally.

ES Do you try to work with them or do you prefer not to, to let them be more objective?

UF They’re not so much from my trade. I mean, I don’t really have a clear practice, so in some way, I think I identify most with my friends who have a very radical or full-on approach to how they engage in what they do. That’s really something I can relate to. So more than a content thing, it’s about this sense of dedication and fearlessness. That’s very appealing.

ES Can we talk about this cube of random com mercial footage that you’ll be presenting in New York this fall? [laughter ] It kind of feels like this might be what it’s like to die.

UF Well, with this cube, we take footage from 100,000 sources and we algorithmically determine

Urs Fischer sits down with his friend the author and artist Eric Sanders to address the perfect viewer, the effects of marketing, and the limits of human understanding.

ERIC SANDERS Did you always enjoy the work, or is that a newer experience?

URS FISCHER Yeah, I always enjoyed the work, but the understanding of how to belong—that’s where most of my not liking it comes from. More so came from. You want to communicate, but the communi cation can feel very limited because we define what is possible, you know? It’s like a village, and this village has its own rules, its own mythologies. Or, you’re defined from the outside. And that’s more where my discomfort, the not fun part, comes from.

ES I get that, because you can’t control the framework or the context within which you find yourself. According to the world, you’re an “art ist,” you’re a “sculptor,” this is an “art gallery.” There are all these predefined rules. How can you break through? How do you overwhelm someone and make them forget all of the stuff that isn’t what you’re trying to communicate?

UF Do you think anybody ever felt like they broke through?

ES [laughter ] I mean, is it possible?

UF Well, is it possible to enjoy your own work? I mean, besides the process of doing it. Because you never have an experience where you encounter it from the outside.

ES So how much stock, if any, do you put in what other people think of it? Do you care if it actually

Urs Fischer, CHAOS #118 Rhizome, 2022 (still), raw data file, instructions for rendering the artwork in motion, digital rendering, and URL © Urs Fischer

Urs Fischer, CHAOS #217 Zodiac, 2022 (still), raw data file, instructions for rendering the artwork in motion, digital rendering, and URL © Urs Fischer

the content of each shot within each commercial, dating from 1950 up to now. So in the last ten, fifteen years, that starts to ramp up, from YouTube to social media to TikTok, you name it. The crazy thing is, if you think about it: before you had imagery gener ated through technological means, like photogra phy or video, every image was made by hand. And with images made by hand, you have to select what you depict. Back then, we didn’t really have that “industrial consumer products” kind of mentality, you know? If you go to a baroque church, there’s heaven and hell and that’s it. But then, over time, you start to have a new type of imagery that’s made solely to sell stuff, and it has no collective long-term understanding or context. And this new type of commercial imagery has replaced those old images. So when you think of a beach, is that an actual beach you’ve been to, or a beach you saw on a TV show, or some combination of the two? You fill it in. So this collective human experiment—public rela tions, marketing, advertising, whatever—leads to a complete replacement of any images we have inside us.

ES That’s what it’s like to do ayahuasca [laugh ter ]: the mind vomits up these images and most of them aren’t yours. Like, almost all of my images are not my images. It’s horrifying.

UF Do you think there was ever a time when everybody had their own images?

ES No, but if we go back to your idea of what the mind was like before: obviously there was some thing there, right? It wasn’t just empty space, but it wasn’t this

UF No, it wasn’t this [laughs ]. I mean, I’m just

fascinated by it. Because all our references, our moods—we need a model for them. So that’s why, when we talk about something, we use a TV show or character to describe the moment. We’re not even aware we’re doing it.

ES David Foster Wallace, who’s probably my favorite writer, wrote this great essay in the early 1990s about how television had affected literature [“E Unibus Pluram ,” 1993]. He wrote about how writers and artists, gradually over hundreds of years, morphed from writing or depicting things they’d experienced directly, or, let’s say, archetypal myths in their culture or whatever—you know, uni versal symbols—to, in the twentieth century, start ing to refer to mass media, television, as if it were their own memories. And they didn’t know the dif ference, right? So when you picture an American family, you picture a family in a TV show, not your real family. He’s talking about how our original images have kind of morphed with the bullshit.

UF Yeah. If you think of pizza, you don’t think of the pizza you made at home, you think of some gooey shit from a Domino’s advertisement.

ES Exactly. It’s very disturbing.

UF I don’t know.

ES [laughs ] Tell me what you think.

UF I don’t know what to think. I mean, I will

Previous spread: Urs Fischer, CHAOS #501, 2022 (detail), raw data files, instructions for rendering the artwork in motion, digital rendering and URL © Urs Fischer. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging

Urs Fischer, CHAOS #273 Thespian , 2022 (still), raw data file, instructions for rendering the artwork in motion, digital rendering, and URL © Urs Fischer

Urs Fischer, CHAOS #256 Psychogenesis , 2022 (still), raw data file, instructions for rendering the artwork in motion, digital rendering, and URL © Urs Fischer

never have a life that’s not like that. I grew up already like that and my desires are already there, and it’s impossible for me to envision a life outside of that. So I’m looking at it—I try to look at it—with this work, for example, in the same way you look at a landscape. If you’ve never seen one or even a picture of one, you would have to look for your self. There’s no preexisting context delivered to you; it would be you, live in a forest, looking at the thing. So you would see what you see in that land scape. That’s the way I try to look at this collective imagery. It’s just something you look at. You actu ally look at this, so it’s an active moment.

ES Totally. And there’s no judgment there.

UF Zero, because it’s pointless.

ES It’s a very wise point. We talked a month or two ago about the glitch of the mind, which is, “How can mind perceive mind?” Right? But you’re trying. You’re trying to project mind outside—and I guess maybe that’s what artists do, is project mind outside. You’re seeing it outside because that’s as close as you can get to seeing inside, you know?

UF You try to show what you see in some way. And then, through that, you create an image. An image that allows you to see, you know?

ES At this point in your life and career, do you ever get scared of what’s coming out?

UF No, I’m more scared of myself than of what’s coming out.

ES But that’s you, what’s coming out, isn’t it?

[laughs ]

UF I don’t know. I was thinking about all these cultures and religions that had no images—what do you call it: antiiconography. So they don’t create an image. And in some way, not putting anything out there prevents you from having a false image. But even that led to its own kind of imagery, because there’s always a desire for images.

ES Well . . . we see

UF Exactly, we see. So in some way, I thought, if you’re afraid of an image—or of yourself, of an iden tity or whatever, or of being sucked into some defin ing thing—this is an approach to not making a pic ture but smashing a picture, you know? Instead of abstaining from it, you just overload it. So no image has a chance to become prominent, because there’s such a flood. In a way, it’s the same as the absence of an image, to create this image that’s the overload of an image.

ES That makes sense. It also gets it out of your sys tem: if you didn’t do this, you would never get this out so that you could move on to the next image, you know?

UF It’s a catharsis.

ES Exactly. Getting it out, you know. Puking it up [laughs ]. Do you ever think your mind or whatever will stop wanting to vomit up these images?

UF No.

ES Is that just what it does?

Urs Fischer, CHAOS #236 Power, 2022 (still), raw data file, instructions for rendering the artwork in motion, digital rendering, and URL © Urs Fischer

Urs Fischer, CHAOS #227 Interactio n, 2022 (still), raw data file, instructions for rendering the artwork in motion, digital rendering, and URL © Urs Fischer

UF That’s what it does. I love it.

ES Yeah. It’s not a bad thing.

UF I have fun doing that.

ES So you don’t want it to ever be done? There’s no end?

UF No, I’m enjoying this. This is awesome.

ES [laughs ] That’s a great place to be. So what’s the difference between the overload you’re talking about—advertising, consumer products—and going to Yellowstone or something like that and being overwhelmed by nature?

UF Between drowning in our own garbage, basically?

ES Well, I know it’s just semantics, but why is something that humans created different?

UF Oh, it’s not good or bad. I don’t have an opin ion but I have an experience. And my experience is, I like what resonates for a long time. That fills me with something and it doesn’t drain me. The other thing can at times drain me. Entertainment can drain me, anything that keeps me busy, busy, busy. There’s just not enough residue. But being overwhelmed by nature—what overwhelms you, the smell, the beauty, the life—

ES The awe.

UF The awe, yeah.

ES Do you ever experience that in Los Angeles?

UF Well, in Los Angeles there’s a lot of nature. Even the plants that come out of every crack in every sidewalk. There’s a lot of life here.

ES It’s trying.

UF Remember in the beginning of the pandemic, all the bunnies came out because the roads were empty?

ES Yeah, you used to see wolves in the parks.

UF Suddenly there was all this wildlife that was hopping around on the streets.

ES Yeah, it was insane. . . . There was this book years ago called The World without Us [2007]. This guy [Alan Weisman] just ran through, as literally as pos sible, what would happen if the human species were gone. And you know, within a month, this is what it would look like and feel like to walk around New York City: a bald eagle flies through, and there’s a bobcat. Like it was right there the whole time, pressing at the gates, and we kept it out. A bear wanders through fucking Manhattan, you know? [laughter ] Does that bring you peace, to think that?

UF That does.

ES [laughs ] Do you hate the human species?

UF You know, we all try to make sense of why we’re here, and it’s very confusing having to be a human being. We’re not exactly smart the way we go about things, even though we think we’re very intelligent. It’s a superconfused experience.

ES [laughs ] The most confused animal of all time.

UF Yeah.

ES Or the dumbest animal of all time [laughs ].

UF Yeah.

Urs Fischer, CHAOS #181 State, 2022 (still), raw data file, instructions for rendering the artwork in motion, digital rendering, and URL © Urs Fischer

Urs Fischer, CHAOS #101 Design , 2022 (still), raw data file, instructions for rendering the artwork in motion, digital rendering, and URL © Urs Fischer

BIGGER PICTURE ARTISTS AGAINST MASS INCARCERATION

Over the past forty years, the United States has seen a 500-percent increase in its prison popula tion. 1 Today, more than 2 million people are incar cerated here, meaning one out of five prisoners in the entire world is in the so-called land of the free. 2 A closer look at these numbers reveals that Black people in the United States are imprisoned at almost six times the rate of white people.3 And while Black men make up around 6.5 percent of the US population, they make up close to 40 percent of the entire prison population. 4 The issue of mass incarceration in the United States is a human-rights crisis that can no longer be ignored.

Activists in this country have tirelessly denounced mass incarceration. Poets such as Bryonn Bain and Reginald Dwayne Betts have called for justice and prison reform for decades. Collectives such as Critical Resistance have challenged Ameri ca’s prison-industrial complex and pushed for abo lition. And there is of course the work of scholars such as Michelle Alexander, whose seminal book The New Jim Crow (2010) emphasized the atrocious effects of mass incarceration on people and com munities of color. “When the system of mass incar ceration collapses (and if history is any guide, it will),” Alexander writes, “historians will undoubt edly look back and marvel that such an extraordi narily comprehensive system of racialized social control existed in the United States. How fascinat ing, they will likely say, that a drug war was waged almost exclusively against poor people of color . . . stigmatized for life, denied the right to vote, and ushered into a world of discrimination.”5

Recently, it has seemed as though the relentless efforts of these longtime advocates are finally gar nering the attention they deserve. The call to end mass incarceration in the United States has become louder, notably within the art world. Art collectives are addressing the subject, major institutions are organizing topical exhibitions, and, most impor tant, formerly and currently incarcerated artists are receiving long-overdue support.

In 2015, the renowned philanthropist Agnes Gund sold a Roy Lichtenstein painting from her personal collection for $165 million and desig nated $100 million of that to create the Art for Jus tice Fund, a decarceration fund with a mission of reducing the number of people in prisons and jails throughout the United States. The story goes that Gund decided to launch the project after seeing Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th (2016), which unveils the gruesome reality of America’s broken carceral system. Since its official launch, in 2017, Art for Justice has galvanized the art world around the topic of mass incarceration, receiving dona tions from artists such as Nick Cave, Jeff Koons, and Julie Mehretu, and supporting hundreds of individuals and organizations. Due to its nature as a catalytic spending fund, the initiative will sunset in June 2023, but Helena Huang, project director of the fund, is confident that the increased atten tion being paid to mass incarceration in the Amer ican art world will continue well beyond its closure.

“My belief is that others will come with new ideas, new resources, and ways of functioning. It’s like a garden that we’ve helped nurture and plant—some will continue with those seeds, and this community

Salomé Gómez-Upegui reports on cultural organizations and artists standing up against mass incarceration in the United States.

Sherrill Roland, The Jumpsuit Project, 2016–, performed in Washington, DC, 2019.

Photo: Christian Carter-Ross, courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/ Los Angeles

will continue to grow and have ripple effects,” she told me.6 Huang also believes that the burgeon ing conversation about mass incarceration reflects the sheer number of lives touched by America’s relentless carceral system. “Thousands of people have come home from prisons and jails and have assumed their rightful position leading advocacy organizations and spearheading the fight to end mass incarceration,” she explains.7

Another powerful example of a thriving ini tiative stems from Nicole Fleetwood’s critically acclaimed book and exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration , which debuted at MoMA PS1, in Queens, New York, in 2020. Mark ing Time showcases the work of more than thirty artists, many of whom are or have been incarcer ated; it is currently traveling around the country and is often accompanied by public-education and community-oriented programs. The project illus trates the importance of art as an essential medium to spotlight the brutal failures of America’s prison system.

Claudia Peña, executive director of For Free doms, a coalition of academics, artists, and organ izers, founded in 2016, that centers art and crea tivity to catalyze liberation, echoes this sentiment. “There are more formerly incarcerated and cur rently incarcerated artists now. And that’s changed the narrative because they have the ability to tell the story in a way that nobody else can. It’s so com pelling and so powerful that people can’t help but pay attention,” Peña says. 8 In the past, For Free doms has championed diversity and social jus tice by revamping Norman Rockwell’s Four Free doms paintings for Time magazine and launch ing national billboard campaigns tied to election cycles. Their most recent initiative, “Another Justice: By Any Medium Necessary,” calls for a

rethinking of the possibilities of justice during a time of imbalance and includes a nationwide bill board campaign, launched in May of this year, exhibiting more than fifty artworks that reflect on the criminal justice system. One Los Angeles bill board was designed by Susan Burton, founder of A New Way of Life Reentry Project, a nonprofit organ ization that supports formerly incarcerated people in the process of rebuilding their lives; her bill board read, “Did you know women are the fastest growing prison population?” Another, in Atlanta, made by artist Jared Owens, stated “Build schools, not prisons.”

As an artist who was once incarcerated, Owens understands the ruthlessness of the prison com plex firsthand and has dedicated a great deal of his work to underscoring the importance of the subject, often receiving meaningful support from art organizations along the way. He was a recipi ent of the Right of Return USA Fellowship, the first national fellowship supporting previously impris oned artists, founded in 2017 by formerly incar cerated artists Jesse Krimes and Russell Craig in partnership with the Soze Agency. He is also a current fellow at Silver Art Projects, a New York–based nonprofit offering mentorship and free stu dio spaces to artists from underserved communi ties. Silver Art recently announced that it intends to assign a quarter of all future residency spots to formerly incarcerated artists.

Another organization using billboards to dis play artworks that bring attention to mass incarcer ation is Art at a Time Like This. Founded in 2020 by independent curators Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen, Art at a Time Like This is a nonprofit that explores the power of art and artists to make a dif ference in turbulent times. “We think mass incar ceration is the biggest crisis the US is facing right

This page: Guerrilla Girls, billboard for the “8x5” project, organized by Art at a Time Like This, Miami, 2022.

Opposite: Susan Burton/A New Way of Life Reentry Project, Did you know women are the fastest growing prison population?, billboard for the “Another Justice: By Any Medium Necessary” campaign, organized by For Freedoms, Los Angeles, 2022.

now and we think art is at the essence of starting conversations about change,” says Verhallen.9 “The thing with mass incarceration is that it has touched everybody in this country. It has destroyed cer tain communities, and everyone knows somebody who has been harassed by the police, wrongfully charged, or unable to pay bail. We are finding that artists of all sorts of different backgrounds have been personally affected by this,” Pollack adds. 10

Earlier this year, Art at a Time Like This debuted “8x5,” a billboard project, its title alluding to the average size of a prison cell. Showcasing commis sioned works by artists such as Shepard Fairey, Guerrilla Girls, and Trenton Doyle Hancock on bill boards across Miami, the project focuses on shar ing information about mass incarceration in Flor ida. One particularly harrowing billboard, created by multidisciplinary artist Sherrill Roland, states that roughly 17,000 wrongfully incarcerated peo ple currently sit in Florida prisons.

As a graduate student, Roland was wrongfully incarcerated and spent ten months in prison before being fully exonerated. Upon regaining his free dom, he returned to graduate school and began The Jumpsuit Project , a performance in which he wore an orange prison jumpsuit on campus for a year, including during his graduation ceremony, to share his story and interrogate the trauma of incarceration. Mostly, Roland says, The Jumpsuit Project was intended to engage communities out side of traditional art institutions on the issue of mass incarceration. “There are a lot of invitations extended to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists to participate in these institutional spaces,” he says, “but there should be some outward efforts to engage communities too. These conversations don’t always have to happen in a four-white-wall space.”11

Empowerment Avenue is an organization that is adamant about community-building and engagement with incarcerated artists and writ ers. Cofounded in 2020 by journalist Emily Nonko and incarcerated journalist Rahsaan “New York” Thomas (who is also a cohost of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated podcast Ear Hustle , to which he con tributes from San Quentin State Prison in Califor nia), it is devoted to building networks that help incarcerated creatives to access mainstream ven ues and get paid for their talents. And although Nonko and Thomas have previously worked mostly with writers, they have recently begun to expand their outreach to artists. “We’ve started seeding what an artists cohort can look like in San Quen tin, and we’re also seeding an artists cohort at the women’s central facility in Chowchilla, California— that’s going to be in 2023,” Nonko says. “Rahsaan has curated the art that’s come out of San Quentin for a few shows. And so we’re also thinking about what it means to have curators in prison so that shows can be envisioned from inside. And then we can take that model and push outside institutions to make space for it.”12

Given the long US tradition of marginalizing and overlooking people in prisons, to center the voices of currently and formerly incarcerated art ists is fundamental in efforts to confront and end mass incarceration. “I think for so long we’ve held this narrative that people in prisons have noth ing to contribute to society,” Nonko explains, “but that myth can be dismantled in five minutes. It falls apart as soon as you start talking with someone who is or has been incarcerated, when you hear their perspectives, see their artwork, and hear about their life story.”13

Nonetheless, an unintended consequence of turning to directly affected individuals to discuss and solve this problem is the risk of permanently labeling them as incarcerated, even after they’ve left that part of their story in the past. Owens is particularly vocal about this concern. Regardless of the awareness he wants to bring to the Ameri can criminal-justice crisis, he also knows that his experience in prison doesn’t tell his entire story.

“I’m an artist first; it just so happens to be that I was incarcerated,” he says. “So that’s a challenge for me, to get past all that, because human beings like to pigeonhole and categorize everything so they can deal with it. And I like to think I don’t fit in any conventional boxes.”14 In a similar vein, Roland speaks of the importance of giving formerly and currently incarcerated artists the credit that is oth erwise given to all others. “I would love for honor and respect to still be afforded to the work, even though it’s coming from these atypical spaces,” he says. “Don’t diminish or take anything away from it because of its origin story.”15

Still, the indisputable truth is that artists who have experienced the brutality of the prison system are uniquely poised to raise awareness on the mat ter. “We need to create a durable narrative change about the carceral system in this country,” says Huang. “We need the stories of Jared Owens and Jesse Krimes and so many other artists who have come home from prison, understand the complex ities, and can explain that we’ve created an $80 bil lion carceral system that is doing more harm than good. These narratives help us understand how destructive this system is on every level.”16

Moreover, Peña believes that using art to tell these stories is especially urgent, since art has the unique power to change hearts and minds, help ing us to interrogate our personal ideas around

justice—“and not just around the big criminal legal system and prisons,” she says, “but also around how we think about harm and punishment in our own interpersonal relationships. What do you do when someone has harmed you? What do you do when you harm somebody? Are you good at apol ogizing? All of the ways in which we think about these things at the individual and interpersonal level add up and inform the larger systems that exist.”17

For all of the gut-wrenching statistics and diffi cult realities revealed when discussing mass incar ceration in the United States, there is space for hope. The increased attention being paid to artists, activists, and organizations fighting to imagine a different, more just future in which “mass incarcer ation collapses”—to use the prophetic language of Michelle Alexander—is a testament to that. Change can and does happen, but as Nonko says, “it just doesn’t happen without art.”18

1. See the Sentencing Project, “Criminal Justice Facts,” 2022. Available online at www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justicefacts (accessed August 24, 2022).

2. ACLU, “Smart Justice,” 2022. Available online at www.aclu. org/issues/smart-justice/mass-incarceration (accessed August 24, 2022).

3. See the Sentencing Project, “Criminal Justice Facts.”

4. See Ava DuVernay, 13th (Sherman Oaks: Kandoo, 2016). As of this writing the film is available on Netflix.

5. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 170.

6. Helena Huang, in an interview with the author, July 28, 2022.

7. Ibid.

8. Claudia Peña, in an interview with the author, July 21, 2022.

9. Anne Verhallen, in an interview with the author, July 18, 2022.

10. Barbara Pollack, in an interview with the author, July 18, 2022.

11. Sherrill Roland, in an interview with the author, July 21, 2022.

12. Emily Nonko, in an interview with the author, July 21, 2022.

13. Ibid.

14. Jared Owens, in an interview with the author, July 7, 2022.

15. Roland, interview with the author.

16. Huang, interview with the author.

17. Peña, interview with the author.

18. Nonko, interview with the author.

SEURAT

Cocurated by Lucía Agirre and Judith Benhamou, the Guggenheim Bilbao’s exhibition Serra/ Seurat: Dibujos places in dialogue drawings by Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and Richard Serra. Although both artists are better known for their work in other mediums (painting and sculpture, respectively), for both, the practice of drawing constitutes an end in itself and an arena in which to explore materiality—working in tones ranging from the most opaque black to the most transparent light. A Spanish-language catalogue was produced for the show, featuring texts from both curators; the Quarterly is pleased to debut the English translations of these texts.

seurat: the artist for the artists

The scene unfolds one late afternoon in Paris, in the spring of 2008. The light is beautiful in the apart ment overlooking the Palais Royal gardens, just level with the treetops.

Richard Serra is preparing for a spectacular exhibition at the Grand Palais. Poetically titled Promenade , it is composed—to cite the figures—of five steel slabs, each measuring seventeen meters (c. fifty-six feet) tall. This is not your average prom enade. While Serra was staying in France, he had asked to visit a collector known for his nine teenth-century drawings and particularly those of Georges Seurat. Accompanied by his wife, Clara, Serra inspects the framed sheets of paper very slowly, one after another, as they hang out of direct sunlight. They feature Seurat’s usual repertoire, reflecting his fondness for themes taken from the daily lives of ordinary people, but also the urban views from this period of the birth of modernity. Serra pauses for a long time in front of a maritime landscape that can be found in the exhibition: Un Soir. Gravelines (Evening. Gravelines, 1890). He also observes a series of electricity poles that seem to have been installed in a precarious perspective over railway tracks, as well as a quickly sketched scene depicting a butcher, seen from behind, wear ing a large apron. His pleasure, which is obvious, is conveyed by a large smile that spreads across his face. While observing these artworks, he clearly expresses the fact that this is what he wants to do in his work too.

Both the owner of the Seurat artworks and I are startled by this remark, but we say nothing. In the course of the conversation, we learn that Serra him self owns drawings by Georges Seurat. Le Fauteuil (The armchair, 1883), included in the exhibition, is from Serra’s collection.

Later, while observing the drawings made by the American artist, we understand the inspira tion he finds in the small-scale works made by his French forefather. The immense fragility of Seurat’s sheets of Michallet paper covered in Conté crayon is accompanied, in certain cases, by a monumen tal power.

This is what Serra calls the weight of shapes.

“The weight of the drawing derives not only from the number of layers of paintstick but mainly from the particular shape of the drawing. It is obvious— from Mantegna’s Christ to Cézanne’s apples—that shapes can imply weight, mass and volume.”1

We find other similarities between the two expressions: the effect of repeated motifs, the deep presence of black, and the interplay with the mate rial of the paper that serves as a support. In an interview from 2000, when Serra was asked about black not being a color, he responded, “It’s a color. It’s definitely a color. . . . As soon as you think of Seurat drawings you think of black as a color.”2

Seurat’s dexterity extends beyond the mere aspects of representation. The depth of his shades of black produces a certain mystery. There are places where the artist pressed so hard with the crayon that it left significant marks on the paper.

If we reason by analogy, we are led to think of Ser ra’s Ramble series of 2015, made with lithography crayon and black pastel. Serra states, “Black for me is one of the easiest ways of marking and one of the most graphic ways of marking. What I’m inter ested in is the graphicness of black and the weight of black; the fact that it sucks up more light than any other color.”3

Through the simple association of images, the Ramble series takes us to Troncs d’arbres se reflétant dans l’eau (Hommage à Stéphane Mallarmé) (Tree trunks reflected in water [Homage to Stéphane Mallarmé], 1883–84). The viewer gets lost among Seurat’s vertical stripes depicting tree trunks; any detail that would indicate the sky and the sun has been deliberately obliterated.

It was the art critic and soon-to-be dealer Félix Fénéon (1861–1944) who discovered and promoted Georges Seurat. Fénéon was also the first per son to describe his work as Neo-Impressionist, in 1886. After Seurat’s premature death, in 1891, when he wasn’t yet thirty-two years old, his family appointed his close circle to compile an inventory of his studio.

Maximilien Luce

Among them was not only Félix Fénéon but also another Neo-Impressionist painter, Maximilien Luce, who owned the second version of Le Prom enoir (Night stroll, c. 1882). In the exhibition we are presenting the first version, which currently belongs to the Von der Heydt–Museum, in Wup pertal, Germany.

Paul Signac

Paul Signac (1863–1935) was part of the group, and like the others, he received several drawings as compensation for his time spent at Seurat’s studio. Later he would go on to purchase more, from Seur at’s brother Émile as well as from exhibitions. In total he would come to possess no fewer than sev enty drawings by his friend, including En bras de chemise (In shirt sleeves, c. 1881), which currently belongs to the Musée d’Art Moderne in Fontevraud, France.

The artist’s great-granddaughter, Charlotte Hellman, explained how Signac was initially in awe of Seurat as a draftsman. “Long before this decisive meeting made any impact on the paintings, it was the black drawings that first attracted the young Signac, whose own graphic work soon came to be modified. Although he was already drawing, he adopted the Conté crayon so that he could in turn produce drawings in which the black and white were treated as zones of shadow and light. . . .

When Signac died, in 1935, Seurat’s drawings still lined the walls of his house in Saint-Tropez, where he continued to stay regularly, and those at the rue Fontaine in Paris, the home of his former wife, ‘Berthe,’ which he would very often strip bare when exhibitions would call for it. Throughout his life, defending Seurat’s artistic legacy was a true mis sion for him.”4

Seurat was the indisputable originator of a new aesthetic expressed in painting through what is commonly known as pointillism, derived from Eugène Chevreul’s scientific theory on the law of simultaneous contrast in colors, among other things. But his genius lies in the fact that in parallel,

Judith Benhamou explores the appeal of Seurat’s drawings and their vast influence on his contemporaries and successors. She addresses a series of artists, beginning with Richard Serra, in short vignettes.

Previous spread, left: Richard Serra, Ramble 5–9, 2015, litho crayon and pastel powder on paper, 24 ¼ × 18 ½ inches (61.6 × 47 cm) © Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Rob McKeever

Previous spread, right: Georges Seurat, La Lampe, 1882–83, Conté crayon on paper, 12 × 9 ⅜ inches (30.5 × 24 cm), Henry Moore Family Collection. Photo: Errol Jackson

This page: Richard Serra, Ramble 5–6 , 2015, litho crayon and pastel powder on paper, 28 ½ × 22 ¾ inches (72.4 × 57.8 cm) © Richard Serra/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Rob McKeever

This page: Richard Serra, Ramble 4–38 , 2015, litho crayon on paper, 35 ¼ × 36 ¼ inches (89.5 × 92.1 cm)

© Richard Serra/Artists Right Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Rob McKeever

Opposite: Georges Seurat, Troncs d’arbres se reflétant dans l’eau (Hommage à Stéphane Mallarmé) (Tree trunks reflected in water [Homage to Stéphane Mallarmé]), 1883–84, Conté crayon on paper, 8 ⅞ × 12 ⅛ inches (22.7 × 31 cm), Villa Flora, Winterthur, Switzerland: permanent loan of Hahnloser/Jaeggli Foundation. Photo: Reto Pedrini, Zürich

Following spread: Georges Seurat, L’Homme couché (Étude pour “Une Baignade, Asnières”) (Reclining man [Study for “Bathers at Asnières”]), 1883–84, Conté crayon on paper, 9 ⅝ × 12 ⅜ inches (24.5 × 31.5 cm), Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Sammlung Beyeler.

Photo: Peter Schibli

in his drawing, he also developed a mode of rep resentation that was literally pixelated, adapted to the support, the paper, and the tool, the crayon.

Daniel Buren

The French artist Daniel Buren wrote on this sub ject in 2013, in the catalogue for the exhibition Les Archives du rêve , at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris that year. In a commentary on a Seurat draw ing, Le Nœud noir (The black bow), from around 1882, Buren stated, “What is no doubt less well known is the fact that with a drawing like Le Nœud noir, from the Musée d’Orsay’s collections, he discovered the system upon which all computer images today are founded. . . . As in his painting, only more unexpectedly, here we are dealing not with a variation on pointillism but rather with a form of pixel art avant la lettre.”5

Camille Pissarro

On the route to Divisionism, Seurat was followed by a veteran of Impressionist art, Camille Pissarro, who didn’t hesitate in 1885, when he already had a successful career, to believe in his theories and support this fascinating young colleague. He broke away in 1890, consider ing this form of expres sion using little dots to be just a phase, but his credibility helped con siderably to gain rec ognition for the move ment. Le Badigeonneur (The painter, 1883–84), another drawing from the vast collections of the Musée d’Orsay, thus became, along with other papers, the property of Pissarro until his death, when his family donated it to the French state. In total, according to the information provided in the catalogue rai sonné, it would seem that Pissarro either bought or was given seven of Seurat’s drawings.

Vincent van Gogh

During the same period and more specifically on March 10, 1888, an artist based far from Paris was keeping a close eye on the Neo-Impressionist movement and its originator. Vincent van Gogh, who met Seurat in November 1887, wrote to his brother Theo that day in Arles, “Congratulations on buying the Seurat. With what I send you you’ll have to try to make an exchange with Seurat as well.”6 He considered organizing with Theo a consortium of artists including the young painter. A few days earlier at the Hôtel Drouot, Theo van Gogh had acquired Eden Concert (1886–87), a cabaret scene that currently belongs to the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Félix Vallotton, Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Théo van Rysselberghe, André Breton, Jacques Lipchitz

Catalogues raisonnés reveal many things, and

the book dedicated to Seurat’s drawings—which finally appeared in 1961, authored by César Mange de Hauke—provides us with many precious pieces of information. The first is that despite the artist’s early death, he produced no fewer than 527 draw ings. The other, which is clear, is that Seurat is an artist whose visual language has particularly affected other artists. The list of owners of draw ings by Seurat includes the likes of Félix Vallotton, Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Théo van Rys selberghe—in this exhibition, see Torse de femme (Woman’s torso, c. 1884), which belonged to Van Rysselberghe and is now part of the collection of Jasper Johns—André Breton, and Jacques Lipchitz, as well as avant-garde writers such as Paul Valéry, the nihilistic creator of Monsieur Teste (1896); Octave Mirbeau, the author of the fascinating Jour nal d’une femme de chambre (1900); J. K. Huysmans, inventor of the ultimate dandy and collector Des Esseintes, the hero of À rebours (1884); and even the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard.

influence. Between the summer and autumn of 1915, Matisse had a particularly experimental period during which he painted Nature morte d’après “La Desserte” de Jan Davidsz de Heem (Still life after Jan Davidsz de Heem’s “La Desserte,” 1915), in a Cubist style. This canvas, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is divided into various deconstructed planes, some of them made up of backgrounds featuring black shadows that are strongly reminiscent of Seurat’s drawings. In September 1915, Matisse wrote to his friend the painter Charles Camoin about this painting, “My work continues. I have already done many things to my painting. It is far more consolidated than when you saw it. It has made me do a lot of reflection due to its proximity to a second Seurat that was lent to me by Fénéon.”7

Pablo Picasso

Pierre Daix, one of the major references con cerning Picasso’s biography, talks about how the Málaga maestro visited Seurat’s first retro spective at the Bern heim-Jeune gallery, organized by Fénéon, in 1908. 8 At the time of the sale of Picasso’s estate, no fewer than seven Seurat draw ings were counted in his collection. Picas so’s partner Françoise Gilot, whom he met in 1943, said, “It was easy to get him to show you his Seurat drawings.” Picasso even seemed to revisit, at times, Seurat’s drawing tech nique. The Fondation Beyeler incidentally possesses a charcoal on canvas made by Picasso in 1932 depict ing a sculptural por trait of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter in which he employed the technique of cross-hatching, using the shadows and white to create areas of vol ume in the style of his predecessor.

Henri Matisse will go down in the history of twen tieth-century art first and foremost as the color genius, yet very early on—long before Pablo Picasso, for example—he showed an interest in Seurat’s Conté-crayon drawings, to the point of acquiring four of them (as well as a small oil-on-wood panel). His familiarity with the Neo-Impressionist’s oeuvre stems from the fact that he had a business relation ship with Fénéon. This art critic later staged exhibi tions at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, bringing Mat isse onto the gallery’s roster and at the same time selling him works by Seurat, apparently between 1906 and 1915. With the exception of La Lecture à la lampe (Reading by lamplight), the three drawings chosen by Matisse all depict women’s silhouettes seen from behind. In Se retroussant (Raising her skirts, c. 1882, now in a private collection), the dark and elegant female figure, captured going about her everyday life, is surrounded by a halo of light. What did she inspire in Matisse?

Nothing is completely literal in this game of

It cannot be said, however, that the Seurat draw ings acquired by Picasso through dealers or friends in 1941, after the sale at auction of the Fénéon estate, are masterpieces as they are understood within Seurat’s oeuvre. Here we don’t see the deep black, the effects of volume and monumentality; instead we see the artist’s sketched line. Couple assis (Seated couple, 1881), which belongs to the Musée Picasso in Paris, displays a “scribbled” attitude in which the cross-hatching overlaps with the lines forming the figures. But Picasso wasn’t like the other collectors; what he was looking for, it would seem, in all the works that surrounded him and constituted his collection, was evidence of works in gestation. Hélène Parmelin, an art critic who was close to Picasso, writes in the catalogue for the exhibition Picasso collectionneur, “We could end up with a paradox. To say that Picasso loved all paint ers. As painters. As brothers. As poor souls who are eternal seekers of a truth laid flat.”9 To confirm this theory, we could add to this a memory of André

Henri Matisse

Malraux’s, who said that Picasso had placed a small cardboard sign on a wicker chair in his studio on which he had written, “If you think you haven’t ruined your painting, go back to the studio and you’ll see your painting is ruined.”10 This is the idea behind Seurat’s drawing Étude pour ‘Un Diman che d’été sur l’île de la Grande Jatte’: Détail de jupe (Study for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte”: detail of skirt, 1884–85), which also belongs to the Musée Picasso in Paris. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again . . . “When Seurat reworked his large can vas in autumn 1885, he greatly widened the bus tle of the promenading woman by adding a flow of curves along its front,” explains Robert L. Herbert. 11 Here Seurat was executing a focus on the folds at the front of the skirt to expand the outline of one of his multiple figures standing on the waterfront. Picasso identified with the effort of the artist who, like him, was never satisfied.

Henry Moore

Between the mid-1960s and the 1970s, the Brit ish sculptor Henry Moore acquired three drawings by Seurat, including La Lampe (The lamp, 1882–83). 12 A mysterious figure cuts discreetly through the twilight thanks to the faint glow of a lamp with a long stand and a shade with lace. This is very close in spirit to the ghostly fig ures of Seurat’s contempo rary Odilon Redon.

Moore greatly admired Seurat. He even conceived, in later life, a pastel work from 1980 that he called Homage to Seurat: Girl Playing the Piano . Of the Neo-Impressionist painter he said, “In 1941 I was not particularly aware of Seur at’s drawings. It was only later that I came to admire him, especially in the last ten years since I have owned two of his draw ings myself. I look at these almost every day, and I feel that my recent ‘black’ drawings also owe a lot to him.”13

Bridget Riley

In this way, by unraveling the chronological time line of history, we become aware that contemporary artists too find in Seurat, and particularly in his drawings, an exemplary effect that remains undi minished by the passage of time. The British artist Bridget Riley, for example, wrote a text explicitly titled “Seurat as Mentor” in the catalogue for the landmark exhibition on the French artist’s drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2008: “Even today I feel a thrill when I read Félix Fénéon’s first essay on Seurat, which ends: ‘Let the hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, perspicacious, cun ning.’” And later on: “My engagement with Seurat was at its most intense in the late 1950s, and it is usu ally to that period that I find myself returning when connections between his work and my own abstract paintings come to the surface. . . . Seurat seized every opportunity to place dark against light, build ing a beautiful rhythm of alternating contrasts.”14

Dorothea Rockburne

The American abstract artist Dorothea Rockburne visited the exhibition of Seurat’s drawings at the Museum of Modern Art. “I have a theory about Seurat and what Seurat was doing. I think he was highly influenced by Egypt. The Napoleonic Expe dition came back to France in 1799 with the Egyp tian artefacts. It took a while to accession all of those things and put them on display. I think Seur at’s generation was looking at that Egyptian art.”15 Rockburne had a keen eye. Her theory was veri fied in 1991 by Herbert in his analysis of the paint ing Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte [1884–86], which involved numerous preparatory drawings: “Several of Seurat’s critic friends compared his promenad ers to figures in Egyptian art. Indeed, the seated nurse on the left has the chunkiness of an Egyptian seated scribe, and the woman in the center has the exact pose of the ubiquitous standing priestesses of the New Kingdom.”16

Rockburne perceived, moreover, a commonal ity in her work and Seurat’s: “It was a great help to

printing practices—half-tone, color separation, and the like. This argument bears on his work in cont é crayon.” Shiff went on to liken Johns’s work to a Seurat drawing in the artist’s collection: “Like Seurat, Jasper Johns has had reason to develop a depersonalized technique of marking. (No doubt, he admires this quality in Seurat’s ‘Female Nude,’ which he owns.)”18

Here the art historian connects, conceptually, the quasi-mechanical hand of Seurat to Johns’s rep resentation of everyday objects, from a can to a target or a flag. More literally, he is also making a comparison with drawings such as the work in graphite pencil and graphite wash on paper from 1955 in which the flag literally emerges from the “scratches” of the pencil that cover the paper in the style of the Neo-Impressionist’s drawings.

It is out of this dust, manipulated by the artist, that forms emerge. And if artists are, as they are so often called, creators—or, in other words, gods— this use of the Conté crayon leads us to one of the famous lines from the book of Genesis (3:19): “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

Seurat’s drawings could consequently be inter preted as exquisite vanitas pieces that have been fet ishized by these creators and the followers of their cults all around the world, the collectors.

1. Richard Serra, “Notes on Drawing,” in Writings, Interviews (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 178.

2. Serra, in R. Eric Davis and Serra, “Extended Vision: Richard Serra Talks about Drawing,” Art on Paper 4, no. 5 (May–June 2000): 65.

3. Ibid.

4. Charlotte Hellman, quoted in Signac collectionneur, exh. cat. (Paris: Gallimard and Musée d’Orsay, 2021), 118.

5. Daniel Buren, quoted in Les Archives du rêve. Dessins du Musée d’Orsay; Carte blanche à Werner Spies , exh. cat. (Paris: Hazan, Musée d’Orsay, and l’Orangerie, 2004).

me to see that show because I felt in some way that I was not alone. The light works like this, but in a very different way in all his work. I’m doing the same thing—the light and the dark are distributed across a distance.”17

Jasper Johns

Lastly, in the pantheon of artists who have fallen in love with Seurat, we cannot fail to cite Jasper Johns. In 2008, the Craig F. Starr Gallery in New York staged a dialogue between Johns and Seur at’s drawings. Richard Shiff, a specialist in the Neo-Impressionists, wrote a short essay titled “Screens.” He shared Buren’s idea of the pixelated screen: “His small, discrete marks created a screen like surface—tones evenly distributed but vibrat ing, as if kept in motion by light itself. Seurat’s art prophesied the look of television, long before the phosphorescent blur of the new medium trans fixed its bourgeois public. . . . Critics of the time claimed that Seurat’s painting rendered magical skills of the hand obsolete, as if he had developed a parallel to the most advanced photographic and

6. Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo van Gogh, March 10, 1888, in Vincent van Gogh: The Letters , ed. Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, and The Hague: Huygens, 2009), no. 584. Available online at https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let584/letter.html (accessed September 30, 2022).

7. Henri Matisse, letter to Charles Camoin, September 1915, in Claudine Grammont, ed., Correspondence entre Charles Camoin et Henri Matisse (Lausanne: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1997), 77.

8. Pierre Daix, Le Nouveau Dictionnaire Picasso (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2012), 822.

9. Hélène Parmelin, in Hélène Seckel-Klein, Picasso collectionneur, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1998), 11, 21, 224. 10. Ibid.

11. Robert L. Herbert, in Herbert et al., Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991), 219, no. 148.

12. Information provided by Henry Danowski, the grandson of Henry Moore.

13. Moore, in Henry Moore on Sculpture: A Collection of the Sculptor’s Writings and Spoken Words , ed. Philip Brutton James (New York: Viking, 1971), quoted in Auden Poems, Moore Lithographs , exh. cat. (London: British Museum, 1974), n.p. Moore would go on to buy a third Seurat drawing.

14. Bridget Riley, “Seurat as Mentor,” in Georges Seurat: The Drawings , exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 185, 193.

15. Dorothea Rockburne, in Ellsworth Kelly, Rockburne, and Isabelle Dervaux, “Drawing Connections with the Old Masters: Two Artists in Conversation at the Morgan,” Master Drawings 46, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 248.

16. Herbert, “Un dimanche à la Grande Jatte , 1884–1886,” in Herbert et al., Georges Seurat, 1859–1891, 174.

17. Rockburne, in Kelly, Rockburne, and Dervaux, “Drawing Connections with the Old Masters” 248.

18. Richard Shiff, “Screens,” in Jasper Johns/Georges Seurat: Drawings , exh. cat. (New York: Craig F. Starr Gallery, 2008), 30.

RICHARD SERRA

Although Paul Signac intended it as praise when he said that Seurat’s drawings were the most beauti ful ever made by a painter, he was in a certain way diminishing the artist by considering drawing a residual part of his work rather than something of the first magnitude. When I see the drawings of the sculptor Richard Serra, a similar thing happens to me: I feel that the categorization of him as a sculp tor, even when we are dealing with one of the great est sculptors of our time, somehow limits Serra the artist, turning his drawing into something almost accessory despite the great impression it leaves as a tenacious, autonomous, revealing, and significant oeuvre. We seem to be unable to accept the artis tic importance of drawing; something that Serra has embraced unreservedly since the beginning of his career still eludes the vast majority. In front of a drawing and a painting by the same artist, we tend to think that the painting is more impor tant, exactly as dictated by the art market, but the truth is that the drawing may have contributed much more to the history of art than any painting by the same artist. Likewise the term “draftsper son,” when opposed to the term “painter,” seems to belong to a lesser category. Some critics have even gone so far as to claim that Serra’s drawings are almost paintings. But Serra is a master of draw ing, a draftsman from the start, and one of the art ists who have most successfully transgressed the drawing tradition to endow it with new meanings, as Seurat did in his time.

We must forget old classifications and the parameters that have been imposed on us. Serra was able to see that sculpture is not only a matter of carving, modeling, or casting; sculpture is con structed through the most diverse forms and mate rials in order to act upon the spatial experience of human beings. In drawing, too, Serra proved able to go beyond what had been imposed or learned, turning it into an autonomous language that no longer serves merely as a means to other ends and subjecting it to new techniques, formats, and mate rials. The dense oilstick, applied in bricks or bars on large sheets of paper that cover giant walls in some of Serra’s previous works, so modifying our

spatial experience, is now transformed into grease pencil or lithographic crayon for the “small” Ram bles , whose scale is modest within his oeuvre, although their size is still considerable compared to the drawings of other artists. Each and every one of Serra’s drawings is made on a human scale, as they are always designed to affect our experience, and his Rambles are no exception.

The Rambles form part of a series that Serra began in 2015, and although the titles of his draw ings normally arise as a means of facilitating their classification, they are related in this case to an installation of the same period made up of twentyfour plates of weathering steel around which the public can move. I dare say that the title could not be better chosen, as these drawings tell us how Serra explores or rambles across the paper while applying two different techniques, with different intensities, and leaving traces that betray this.

In these drawings, Serra revels in his materials, such as handmade Japanese paper, with which he has been working for many years, and whose man ufacturing process ensures that every sheet and every fiber constituting it generates different acci dents, not only in its tortured planarity but also in its size and limits. No Ramble is the same as any other, both because of the way in which Serra inter venes on the paper and because not one of these sheets of paper looks like any of the others, so that the way in which this material reacts to the artist’s technique always leads to a different result. The format of the paper itself dictates the horizontal ity or verticality of the work. When a work might become an excessively elongated horizontal rec tangle, the artist arranges it vertically, containing the form in our central space and keeping it within our field of vision.

Serra creates these works on a scale weighted to the human but does not resist endowing them with a certain monumentality, always arranging thir ty-three of the smallest Rambles in a grid defined by three rows of eleven. This configuration obliges us to focus on the process he has followed in mak ing them, to compare them, and to study the effects generated by each impression on the unique sheets

of paper, and it permits us in this way to under stand the process or action that has led him to cre ate them. As Roberta Smith rightly said of these drawings, “Mr. Serra remains, after all these years, the Process artist par excellence. The series echoes his famous Verb List (1967–68), which compiled dif ferent ways to manipulate materials.”1

In the Rambles , the lithographic crayon is applied with two different methods, one a trans fer and the other a direct mark on the sheet. In the first, the degree of pressure makes for a greater or lesser transfer, and so what in some works might seem like a light mist is converted in others into a dark and hazy frequency. Besides being a differ ent technique, direct application allows the amount of grease used on the paper to be not only more controllable but also apt to generate a very differ ent result. The black of pencil and the powder of pastel, in all their nuances, make it a fascinating experience to enjoy a single Ramble . Standing in front of several of them is also an exercise in com parison that goes beyond simple aesthetic enjoy ment, obliging us to employ other mechanisms of understanding.

For Serra, drawing is an independent action in its own right, as he explained in 1977: “Drawing is a concentration on an essential activity, and the cred ibility of the statement is totally within your hands. It’s the most direct, conscious space in which I work. I can observe my process from beginning to end, and at times sustain a continuous concentra tion. It’s replenishing. It’s one of the few conditions in which I can understand the source of my work.”2

First published in Spanish and Basque in Serra/ Seurat: Dibujos , exh. cat. (Bilbao: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 2022). Translated with permission from the authors and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

1. Roberta Smith, “Richard Serra Scales Down with ‘Ramble Drawings,’” New York Times , October 15, 2015.

2. Serra, in Lizzie Borden, “About Drawing: An Interview,” 1977), in Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective , ed. Bernice Rose, Michelle White, and Gary Garrels (Houston: Menil Collection, 2011), 59.

Lucía Agirre examines Richard Serra’s Rambles series on the occasion of its exhibition alongside works by Georges Seurat.

Mike Stinavage visits Dimitris Papaioannou in Athens as he closes one world tour and opens another.

MYTHS AND

Below the Athens Concert Hall and Confer ence Centre is, unsurprisingly, its basement, and below that is an immense concrete vault. Unlike the conference center, which, in early September, was crowded with attendees of the 11th Interna tional Aerosol Conference, the underground vault remains silent except for the hum of the utility pipes tethered to the high ceiling above. This is where one can find the studio of the Greek theater direc tor Dimitris Papaioannou.

On one side of the studio is the characteristic disarray of a sculptor’s or carpenter’s studio dur ing lunch break. Two aisles of materials stacked high overhead run the length of the space. Scat tered across a workbench are clamps, power drills, paintbrushes, and adhesives. On the surrounding shelves are the foam mats, tubing, wood panels, floorboard slats, and sheets of fiberglass typical of Papaioannou’s work. Toward the end of the second aisle, the rocklike Styrofoam blocks from the Sis yphean struggle in Transverse Orientation (2021) are wrapped neatly in cellophane.

Between the aisles and the rehearsal stage is a changing room. Because there are no walls, one can easily see the portable wardrobe, a line of neatly paired shoes, and two glass terrariums, bulblike in shape, on which perch the mock octopi of Ink , Papaioannou’s most recent work. Opposite the stage are the kind of full-length mirrors typical of dance studios.

Without windows and little air circulation, it’s easy to lose track of time. Against the brutality of the space, Papaioannou and his technical crew are the source of warmth. “This is the space we were given,” he said, almost reluctantly, as I looked at the image board of Spanish bullfighters, details of

red and black figures on amphorae, and two stud ies by Picasso, Two Brothers (1905) and Figure of Young Man (1906), in which prepubescent boys, not yet contoured by musculature or hair, stand nude.

This is where Transverse Orientation was made. In the months before the pandemic, Papaioannou and his collaborators had just set the structure of the piece. When Greece went into lockdown, work halted abruptly, with the crew uncertain whether the piece would become another casualty of the pandemic. “What is surprising,” Papaioannou observes, “is that the production survived. We kept thinking: if the pandemic kills it, it’s going to be killed. But somehow everyone was committed to trying to do it.”

For Papaioannou and his collaborator Šuka Horn, the months of lockdown were not unpro ductive. They quietly came to the studio to make a new piece, a duet titled Ink . When the lockdown ended and all work resumed, Transverse Orienta tion underwent a revision: “When I came back, I removed myself. The piece lost its narrator. This is a dramatic change, I think. It gave rise to humor. It became more open to surrealism and free-form association.”

Papaioannou speaks with slow precision. He selects his words with the carefulness with which the materials of his studio are stored. When asked a meandering question, he is quick to ask for clarifica tion or to admit that he simply doesn’t understand. In those moments, a sense of artifice, of boyish pleasure, enters his expression. When asked a clear question, he patiently chooses his words and tactfully maneu vers ambiguities to provide a clear response.

After debuting in Lyon, France, in 2021, Trans verse Orientation arrives in the United States in

Previous spread: Dimitris Papaioannou, Transverse Orientation , 2021, Théâtre de la Ville at Théatre du Châtelet Paris. Performer: Michalis Theophanous. Photo: © Julian Mommert

This spread: Dimitris Papaioannou, Ink , 2020, Megaron Athens Concert Hall. Performers: Dimitris Papaioannou and Šuka Horn. Photo: © Julian Mommert

November 2022, when it opens at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The tour closes in Stanford, California, the following month. The pandemic has shaped both the logistics of the piece and its con tent. The year-and-a half-long tour was redesigned three times. For Papaioannou, the outcome was not exactly untoward: “For me I have benefited from having more time to think about the piece. Gener ally, those interruptions for me are very welcome because I get to rethink a little bit what I am doing.”

Transverse Orientation , like Papaioannou’s pre vious work, The Great Tamer (2017), may appear to be a nonlinear and noncumulative assortment of visual delicacies, but however unrelated the sequences may seem, there is a distinct logic and a general narrative arc. “The sequences are being built by experimenting and playing in the studio. By throwing materials and ideas to the performers. By trying them out with our bodies. By selecting a lot of stuff that I find even remotely interesting, and then trying to revisit it after it has been born. Some of those moments, when you see them, you can imagine that they could work together and so you put them together, but they don’t work so you try again. Those small stars create a constellation. I have to be alert to what I find interesting.”

Transverse Orientation , including its moments of horror and repulsion, is a rich visual repertoire that mixes recognizable images from Greek myths and canonical portraiture. “The basic symbol is the bull, which is unhinged masculinity. The wonder ful and dangerous elements of masculine force that have to be tamed.” The bull comes in many forms. Early in the piece, the dancers struggle to restrain, and simultaneously animate, a life-size pup pet bull. Then, throughout the piece, a minotaur

appears and disappears among his human coun terparts. “It’s a wonderful image, a male body with a bull’s head, and a wonderful fight—it’s so clearly and beautifully and so obviously that battle with our animal self.”

Under the stage lights, Papaioannou’s devi ous play with unhinged masculinity is embod ied by youth and beauty. What is seen onstage is an enchanting abstraction that moves backward toward atavism instead of forward toward activ ism; there is no value judgment. The consequences of masculinity, homoerotic and otherwise, are not embodied but explored. “I have a fixation on Sis yphean concepts onstage, that people are doing things that they seem to have been doing for eter nity,” Papaioannou said. “Youth, for me, is a fix ation. A beautiful youthful body that has to go through a lot of discoveries—that is another arche typical idea.”

If we rack our brains long enough, the struggle becomes meta: the primary challenge is no longer the struggle itself (animalistic urges, insecurities, cardinal sins, and so on) but the struggle of rep resenting that struggle. A distant, more diluted, and less personal struggle thereby replaces the primary one. Yet even if we fall into this tempting deep read of Sisyphean challenges at large, we may not, sadly enough, accomplish much. The rock will come tumbling downward.

What is accomplished, according to Papaioan nou, is deception. “I invite the audience into the ridiculousness, always reminding them that if there is magic happening, it’s only happening because they want magic as well, not only because we can do it. Because it’s all a lie. But beauty is there. Aphrodite [in Transverse Orientation ] becomes a fountain, which is funny and dark, which is still

extremely beautiful and extremely sexy, but it’s extremely fake.”

He pauses for a moment, and then continues: “What is continuously fascinating for me are chi meras. To create the illusion of the combination of the animal and the man, of a man and a woman, of a rearranged human body, to suggest images that everybody knows don’t exist but to suggest them in a way that people believe that it is there—this is a wonderful game for an illusionist. And another shortcut to human connection, because we some how identify with it.”

For Papaioannou, there isn’t much more than a month between the closing of one international tour and the opening of the next. Ink , which has already debuted in Europe, will begin its world tour in Greece in January 2023. The new iteration will be distinct: the piece has been outfitted with a new finale, a new costume design, and new sound. “I started from a very happy place with a very happy collaboration with Šuka Horn and all this darkness came out of myself. I couldn’t believe it. I was very happy when I was working on Ink . One of the hap piest periods of my life. The work that came out is almost psychological.” He then offered, “I think it’s about desire.”

This could be the last piece from Papaioannou for a while: “After Ink I don’t have more projects. I hope I will stop and take time off. Maybe a year. In the creative process,” he said, looking at an unde finable point before him, “I am asking myself, life, and the studio, secretly, what am I looking for. And I believe that when I like something that I see, it is what I’m looking for.”

“The goal,” he said over lunch the next day, “should never be to not be a monster.”

Dimitris Papaioannou, Transverse Orientation , 2021, Dance Umbrella, Sadler’s Wells London.

Performer: Christos Strinopoulos. Photo: © Julian Mommert

ROXANE GAY

Finding your way into art collecting is a lot like stumbling into an elaborate dance routine with a partner who expects you to anticipate their every move even though you are unfamiliar with the choreography. It can be awkward and far more chal lenging that you might imagine, but still, you want to master the steps.

My parents have been collecting Haitian art my entire life. I grew up around vibrant depictions of Haitian life and culture, mostly oil on canvas, often large in scale. My great-aunt Car mel owned a gallery in Port-au-Prince, and when we visited during the summers, she would let us roam the gallery freely, marveling at the paintings and the sculpture. But I was never exposed to the business of art. And then I got older and ma jored in English and eventually became a writing professor, so art collecting seemed well beyond my reach. I certainly en joyed art in museums and galleries, but I never considered that I could own art. I understood the price points of art as either forty-dollar posters or multimillion-dollar Basquiats sold at a frenzied auction.

And then I met my wife, Debbie, who has been a collector for more than twenty years. Everywhere you look in her, now our, house, there is art, whether it’s originals or prints or inter esting objects. Once we knew each other better, I asked how she built her collection, and she shared how she started with just one $500 piece that she could barely afford in the 1990s. From there she bought art she was drawn to that was within her means. Then as now, she is very distinct in her tastes. She likes experimental art and anything with typography. Some times, she refers to our home as “The House of Type,” be cause everywhere you look there is art with words demanding to be read. She prioritizes women and queer artists but has a truly diverse range of artists in her collection. There is always something interesting to look at and contemplate. As I start ed spending more time in our home, I was reminded of the pleasures of living with art, of a life suffused with it in a myriad ways.

My own collection started innocently enough. One evening Debbie introduced me to the website Artsy. I started brows ing and a couple hours later, a monster was born. Art news! Artist features! Auctions! The very first piece I bought was (I think) Kahlil Robert Irving’s Music Memorial in Film [(Greeting Screening Chained) Daily Ritual & tribute (terror)] (2019), a col lage on industrial ceramic tile. Then I started exploring other art-related sites and discovering new artists and appreciating the work they made. When we’re in New York, we live in Chel sea, so everywhere I look there are galleries and although in Los Angeles, where we also live, the galleries are a bit farther afield, the art they offer is just as urgent and exciting.

The guiding of my collection has been to find art I want to live with. Certainly, I have specific collecting interests. I’m drawn to the work of Black artists, women, LGBTQ artists, and people who live at the intersections of those identities. I love collage and mixed-media work, figurative art, textiles. And although I have these interests, I don’t limit myself. When I find something I love, and that is within my means, I try to bring it into my collection.

When avid art collectors offer advice on building a collec tion, they often encourage you to buy what you love. That is indeed valuable advice, and not as simplistic as you assume. Really what they’re saying is, buy art you care about and have a connection to instead of looking at art merely as an invest

ment or a means of accruing social capital. But there is a lot of advice that is never shared, perhaps because the advice givers assume that budding collectors already understand the way the art world works. I was rather naive when all this start ed: I assumed that if something was for sale and I wanted to buy it, a simple transaction would ensue. But rarely is that the case. Many of the practices of acquiring art are . . . confound ing if you’re an outsider. It can be intimidating to walk into the hushed void of an art gallery. They are, generally, spartan affairs, the better to appreciate the art within, I suppose. A young person or two dressed all in black might be working at something architectural resembling a desk. If you’re lucky, there is a small stack of reading material, and if you’re very, very lucky, there is a price list. Mostly you’re left to your own devices, particularly if you aren’t legible as an art collector.

At art fairs, held in cavernous spaces with high ceilings, you can wander from booth to booth, taking in presentations of work, sometimes from a single artist, sometimes from a selec tion of a gallery’s artists. There are a lot of people with chic glasses and expensive designer accessories milling about, trying to outdo one another in expressing, loudly, their opin ions on what they see and how bored they are with the whole scene. And again, if you aren’t legible as a collector, you are practically invisible.

There is nothing like seeing art in person, being able to look at the craftsmanship, construction methods, brushstrokes, the texture of layers of paint on canvas, but there is also some thing to be said for the simplicity of looking at art online, from the comfort of wherever you are, without the awkwardness of having to navigate the social mores of the art world. Over the past few years, I have developed a real fondness for galleries that are not coy with information about the art and artists they represent. Though I generally abhor being on mailing lists, the one exception is galleries, because their emails are clear in purpose and when they send installation previews, most of the information you might be seeking is available in a handy PDF or online viewing-room.

Every community has its rules, both spoken and unspoken, and to collect art requires understanding that. Not all galleries are created equal. There are the smaller galleries and the galleries that are vanity projects and the galleries with a mission, and then there are the megagalleries, the Death Stars if you will, representing blue chip artists with branches in the world’s most glamorous cities.

There are the small collectors who just want to own a piece or two of original art and there are the people who view art as an investment rather than a joy to live with, and of course there are all kinds of collectors in between.

When it comes to buying art, not every collec tor pays the same price. Not every collector gets to acquire the work they covet. You can nego tiate the sale price a bit, but that can be tricky, since unless the gallery absorbs the discount from its steep percentage, the artist will receive less money for their valuable labor and art. But before you even get to the negotiating stage, you have to contend with the reality that just because something is for sale does not mean you can buy it. Gallerists, generally, are representing their art

ists’ and their own best interest, which means they sometimes want to place that work with “important” collections or muse ums and other institutions.

If a gallery has no relationship with you, which seems like it would be the case most of the time, they might ask you to share more information about yourself. What they’re really seeking is a better understanding of your collection and its provenance, to see if you’re a worthy (by their arbitrary stan dards) steward of the work. Once, a gallerist asked me to tell her a bit more about myself. This was before I understood how things worked so I dashed off a spicy email with an extensive biography and, as you might expect, never heard back. Anoth er time, when I wanted to buy a specific piece from an artist whose work I love, the gallery told me they reserve his pieces for customers with whom they have an ongoing relationship. They offered instead to sell me another piece of art by a differ ent artist I didn’t know, which is to say, they wanted me to buy something I did not want in order, maybe, someday, to have the opportunity to buy a piece of art I actually did want. By now I’ve learned that there are reasons for some of these practices. Artists understandably want some control over where their work goes and what happens to it. They want to protect their work from being sold on the secondary market too soon. They want to protect their standing in the art world. And galleries want to protect their artists, too. But in a world predicated on prestige that is also susceptible to the biases we all live with in one way or another, some collectors are dis missed out of hand. At the Frieze Los Angeles VIP preview in 2020, Los Angeles artist Genevieve Gaignard wore a beige dress with the words “sell to black collectors” emblazoned on the back. This was not an act of self-promotion; it was a way of instigating a conversation about access to art. Translat ing that conversation into change, though, has been elusive. I love art, even if I find the art world as inscrutable as it is in teresting. When I was approached to curate this special sec tion of the Gagosian Quarterly (see: Death Star), I welcomed the opportunity to shine some light on the corners of the art world I enjoy. Every piece in this section is written or curated by a Black woman and features the artwork of Black women. The talented Brooke Obie profiles Gio Swaby, whose Love Letter 1 (2018) was one of the first pieces I added to my collection. Over Zoom, I sat down with Calida Garcia Rawles and Jordan Casteel to talk about how they make art and make space for making art in their busy lives. The deeply intelligent writer and critic Ladi’Sasha Jones writes about Black women artists and how they use collage to reflect their understandings of the world. Chicago-based abstract artist Kellie Romany shares some of her own work in “Many Bodies Corralled.” Randa Jar rar, one of the most vibrant writers working today, explores the visual abundance of Fresno-based artist Kezia Harrell. And last but certainly not least, the amazing multihyphenate Amber J. Phillips writes about the art of Firelei Baez and Tschabalala Self and how they complicate our understandings of Black women’s bodies. This special section is a conversation, and you

invited to listen.

In the wake of a global pandemic, the Bahamian artist Gio Swaby is living in the extremes. From the grief of losing her mother at the height of covid to the elation of watching her seven nieces and nephews grow and think and be via FaceTime, Swaby is dealing with the intense emotional extremes of the world’s new normal with her own secret weapon: Animal Crossing.

This social-simulation Nintendo video game is Swaby’s favor ite way to go “outside” these days as the pandemic rages on in Toronto, where she lives, keeping her away from family and her beloved Bahamas. Still, with so many people stuck at home but more accessible in other ways, Swaby has found herself closer to her family than ever. It’s no wonder themes of finding play, con nection, and joy in the midst of tragedy remain constant in her art: it’s just the way she lives her life.

A recent iteration of this twenty-nine-year-old artist’s life and mission was her debut solo exhibition of mixed-media art, Both Sides of the Sun, at New York’s Claire Oliver Gallery from April to June 2021. A play on psychologist Dr. David Viscott’s saying “To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides,” Swaby’s show featured over twenty new pieces—what she calls “love let ters to Black women”—displaying the fullness of Black woman hood in mixed-media textiles and life-size threaded line works. The Pretty Pretty series, for example, is a collection of swagged-out, full-bodied Black women rocking Afro puffs, plaits, natural updos, and headwraps, all made from fabric and thread stitched into can vas. A pop of color in each piece lies in a woman’s belt or combat boots, a patterned fabric that spans the length of a pant leg or the lining of a kimono. In Swaby’s hands, Black women on canvas are the baddest in the game, striking their poses—a hand in the air or on a hip—with unmitigated confidence and irrevocable beauty.

This series marks a “breakthrough” in her artistry, Swaby tells me over Google Hangouts, as it shows new depths in both her skill with a needle and fabric and her willingness to be exposed with her viewers. “It has stitching for the line work, but the side that’s displayed is what’s technically the back of it,” she says. “So that marks a special shift in how I’m thinking about my work. I create this portrait on one side and then the side I’m revealing [to the viewer] is the side that’s normally hidden, to be able to share this moment of vulnerability with the viewer, to have them be able to map the process of How did I make this?” With threads hanging from her pieces in this series, she fully embraces a path of self-love through acceptance and the celebration of imperfection.

While Swaby’s line work may now be visible to the viewer, it’s still difficult to fathom her talent of encapsu lating lifetimes of Black women in a single piece of art. Take her Love Letters series in the same show. These por traits of Black women in Bantu knots, fades, and natural updos are also made in fabric and thread stitched onto canvas, but the women are featureless, the outlines of their heads and necks filled with quilted flower and geo metric patterns that feel simultaneously ancestral and modern, giving the women the ability to represent all the women in their lineage who came before them, as well as their present selves.

“That idea of an exploration of ancestry . . . that’s what a lot of the work is for me,” Swaby tells me. “I don’t have a good grasp on my own ancestral history because of slav ery, and being from the Caribbean, too, record keeping is tenuous—for anything even 100 years ago, it’s difficult to find records. My artmaking was a way to connect to

that, to explore my ancestry through visual aesthetics—the way I look, through hair care and hair styling, too,” she says. “I see it as an exploration of self, but also like a celebration of a lifetime of being supported and uplifted by Black women. It feels like a really great honor to do that.”

It’s not just Swaby’s unknown ancestors that she is tapping into when her needle meets a canvas, but also her late mother. A seamstress in the Bahamas, Swaby’s mother, Judy Carey Swaby, was always sewing school uniforms for students, and Swaby would help her as a child, sewing buttons and hooks onto skirts. “It’s never really been easy for me within my family, verbally ex pressing affection and love to one another, but that action of us connecting to one another, through sewing and making things Gio Swaby, Love Letter 1 , 2018, thread and fabric sewn on canvas, 68 × 31 inches (172.7 × 78.7 cm) © Gio Swaby, courtesy Claire Oliver Gallery, New York

together, really was an act of love between us,” she says.

Still, although Swaby was always creative, she never imag ined making a living as an artist. In those days the self-described “black sheep” of her family dreamed of being a pediatrician. Only when she started the fine-arts program at the University of the Ba hamas, in 2009, did she truly feel that art was not only her calling but a career she could pursue with both hands and a full heart. She jokes that her villain origin story could have begun around this time when, surrounded by family at her birthday party, she announced that she was studying art and planned to be a full-time artist—much to the dismay of her older family members, who did not see art as a viable future. “That doesn’t make sense!” they told her. How would she ever make a decent living as an artist? The response was so shocking and devastating for Swaby that

she briefly excused herself from her party. No one in her family or immediate vicinity was an artist; she had no in timate example or path to follow. But she felt content to let her heart take the lead. “I just cried in the bathroom and shook it off,” she says of that night, and became more determined than ever to perfect her craft.

During a residency at Popop Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, Swaby met the quilter Jan Elliott, learned free-motion sewing—a technique where the feed dog of the sewing machine is disengaged, so that the sewer has control over where the needle moves—and imme diately felt connected to the method. “That’s one of the times in my life I can identify a specific point when I felt like I was supposed to do this or this was supposed to happen,” she says. “I saw it as so many different parts of my life connecting, like being able to connect my back ground in sewing to my art practice, back to my family and then also to this idea of community and quilting. It was really exciting to see this way of using thread to draw. I’m a person who can become quite obsessive, and that was one of the things I fixated on, trying to figure out, How can I build on this technique and where can I go with it?”

While the Caribbean’s history of slavery has distorted more-specific ancestral connections for Swaby, she still in corporates the passed-down knowledge of her forebears into her art. Like the mishmash of fabrics in her pieces, Bahamian identity comprises not only the African peoples enslaved on the islands but also the indigenous Lucayan people, the first peo ple Christopher Columbus encountered—and enslaved—in the Caribbean. The Lucayans, Swaby says, “are described as very peaceful people, and docile; because of that, instead of taking that as a sense of kindness, [Columbus] saw it as a way to eas ily make them into slaves. They were almost completely wiped out.” The Lucayans live on in present-day Bahamians, who can also trace their family histories back to specific islands in the archipelago by their surnames. “My mother’s side of the family comes from an island called Eleuthera,” Swaby says. “We even know down to the settlement, Tarpum Bay, because our people still live there—my great-aunts and -uncles—and we still visit. It is the closest thing to an ancestral land I can identify.”

These topics of tracing Black Diaspora ancestry after the vi olence of slavery, and exploring Black women’s hair and hair care in an anti-Black, white-supremacist world that polices and criminalizes our hair, can be triggering and traumatizing to revisit in art. But in Swaby’s lens, the focus is always on the unbreak able connections and intricate beauty of Black hair traditions. In resisting the master narrative of Blackness in her practice, she finds, as Alice Walker said in her 1992 novel Possessing the Secret of Joy, that very secret. “So much of my work is about paying tribute to the women I’m representing, and immortalizing not just them but other Black women and girls who see themselves in the work,” Swaby says. “I have goose bumps right now just thinking about it because the most important, most humbling part of what I’m doing is making those connections, representing us in a way that’s full of personality, full of character, full of personhood—espe cially when historically we’ve been very excluded in that respect.”

Swaby goes on to observe, “So much of that is removed in rep resentations of Black people because it wasn’t other Black peo ple creating that artwork. We’re bombarded with images of Black people suffering and experiencing trauma. It affects you; it takes a toll to see it over and over again.” Aware of the traumatic elements that her art touches upon, she insists that trauma isn’t the only legacy in our lineage. “That’s at the crux of what I’m doing,” she

Gio

says. “I talk a lot about the work being about joy, but you find that joy through healing. The work I’m making does not disregard that trauma; it’s thinking about how we can heal,” she says. “For me, finding joy is a way to do that.”

Every image of elated Blackness that Swaby puts into the world is a conjuring of Black joy, not just for herself and her practice but also for the viewer. “My artwork is contributing to my healing from a lifetime of being indoctrinated into very anti-Black ideologies, and also healing from perpetuating that myself,” she says. “I’m also hoping to create that moment, once the work is finished: someone sees it and interacts with it to create that moment, and feels a sense of being seen and feels that joy.” In that joy, Swaby also aims to create for her Black audience a collective experience of reprieve from the burden of anti-Blackness by seeing ourselves

reflected through her lens of love. “When I’m making my work, I’m thinking about creating a space of community, creating a moment of relief—just a moment of relief—when you can enter that space and feel a sense of being able to be at rest for just a moment with this work,” she says. Swaby’s work is both in the resistance tradition of icon ic interdisciplinary artist and quilter Faith Ringgold and in conversation with that tradition. From her earliest works of the 1950s, Ringgold’s art reflects her experiences and struggles as a Black woman growing up during the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, and the women’s movement—with all of the terror and joy that en tailed. Swaby’s quilts talk back to the story quilts that Ringgold began to make in the 1980s, snapshotting life for young Black women in the new millennium. “I’m al ways supergrateful to the people who have come before me and have already made these pathways for me to be able to make the work I’m making now,” Swaby says. “I feel like I have a community of support; I’m a part of the conversation about reframing existence for Black people and what that can look like, and also the conversation about futurism: what do we see happening for us and how can we make that happen?”

As for what’s next for Swaby and her art, there is no limit. “I almost could see anything in my future,” she says without hesita tion. Fans of her Pretty Pretty series have asked whether the shoes and clothes she’s designed and drawn by hand, with thread, are available for purchase, and while she’s not quite ready yet to be a fashion designer, she wouldn’t count it out. “I just love learning,” Swaby says. “I love that experience of just being open to always learning and doing new things.” That boldness and willingness to take risks come from her father, who passed away in 2016. “My dad said, shortly before he passed, that he was happy because he got to live his life. He wasn’t old, he was sixty years old. I took some of his principles of living,” she says, because “as far as I know, I only get this one life here. And what am I doing if I spend the whole time working or worrying?”

These days, Swaby is enjoying Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry, a social-media platform where Hersey preaches naps and rest for Black women as an act of resistance. Swaby is finding her rest on the couch, watching her favorite TV shows—Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum and the Netflix comedy series Sex Education and Special. Issa Rae’s Insecure is also a source of inspiration for her: “I can’t identify a specific moment, but the way that show is lit for Black skin, I just get so much feeling like, This is incredible. I want to see how I can re-create that same feeling within my work.” She adds, “That idea of being able to be imperfect is revolutionary to me.”

Swaby’s biggest source of joy remains her home country, the Bahamas. Until she can make it back there, she dreams of the food she will eat immediately upon her return. “I have to do guava duff, a Bahamian dessert, and a conch salad,” she says. “I have to get a fried-fish dinner that has to be nice; if it’s not nice, it don’t really count.” (“Nice,” to Swaby, means superseasoned and fried “dry, dry, dry,” so it’s extra crispy.) To Swaby, food is also art, is also joy.

Swaby may be living in the extremes, but by doing so, she elu cidates the fullness of joy. Black joy is bigger than survival; it’s expansive enough to hold the depths of ancestral grief and tri umph. Black joy is an inherited behavior, a dedicated practice, and a daily commitment, to self and each other, to keep showing up—seams showing, threads hanging down—and choosing life.

In an interview, the writer often points out that their subject is having a moment. They’ve achieved a ca reer pinnacle worthy of celebration or critical attention, and that is the impetus for the conversation. But at this point in their careers, Jordan Casteel and Calida Garcia Raw les are enjoying much more than a moment. As visual artists they have exhibited their work in galleries and museums across the United States and abroad. They have enjoyed criti cal acclaim and professional oppor tunities that are nearly impossible to turn down. And now they are grap pling with taking the time to appreci ate the successes, making the time to create new work, and finding the time to nurture themselves and the people in their lives. The three of us spent an hour over Zoom, as is the way of the world for now, talking about the art they make, the vague dissatisfactions of ambition, and let ting their work speak for itself.

ROXANE GAY: When did you first make art?

CALIDA GARCIA RAWLES:

In kindergarten, I drew this dinosaur and the teacher kept asking me, did I trace it? I said no. She tried to ex plain like I didn’t un derstand what tracing was. Then she took me out of the class room and went and got another teacher and showed her my drawing and said, I think she has talent. I remember the feeling of get ting pulled out of my class and the teachers talking about me in this way. It was like, I’m about to draw all the time.

RG: Do you find yourself still chasing that feeling?

CGR: Oh, what a good question. I probably do get a little joy in feeling that people like what I do. They don’t have to, though. When I got to a space where that wasn’t the only goal, the work got better.

RG: That’s interesting.

CGR: That’s probably the more risky work, when you’re more afraid of showing it because you know it satisfies you and you don’t know if people are going to like this but you’re going to put it out there anyway. That’s the purest place.

RG: Jordan, what about you?

JORDAN CASTEEL: I was a junior in college when I took my first oil painting class and fell in love with that specific material. Until that point, I was the crafty child. I loved baking and making things. It didn’t matter what I was making but I liked staying busy. I was always making mobiles! I had all these mobiles hanging in my room and I’d make them out of spoons and forks and things I would just find around the

family provided a glue gun and pom-poms and

or

paint, I would turn

I loved that. As long as I can

way

seeing the world

could be translated through objects that start as nothing and become something. It’s my safe place, my meditative place. I like being there. And like you, I think sharing it with the world is always a risky thing. And it usually is really excit ing when you’re taking that risk.

RG: How do you deal with the risk? How do you find that courage to say, You know what, however people might feel about it, I’m putting this work into the world?

CGR: I get scared. The work I’m doing for this next show is more abstracted. It makes me nervous because I know people really liked my last show and they want it to look a certain way. But this is what I want to paint. I try to brace myself, remind myself I’m on the right path, and I hope it will translate to others. I don’t know how you get the strength to do it—you just take a leap of faith.

JC: I always tell my students that to be an artist is A, to have an ego and B, to be an extreme risk-taker. There’s a point when people don’t all appreciate your craft in the way you appreciate it or want peo ple to appreciate it, and to make in spite of know ing that is really risky behavior. Part of what we’re forced to do and reckon with as we’re making is— we’re writing, we’re painting, we’re doing whatever in solitude—and then there’s this moment when it transitions outside of our space and it’s a letting go.

RG: You both work on large canvases and I love large-scale work, even though I have run out of

room on my walls. When you’re thinking about scale, how do you decide, This is how much space this piece is going to take up? And where does a piece begin?

CGR: When I did the show A Dream for My Lilith [2020], I knew I wanted the figures to be larger than life. I thought of Renaissance paintings, these large-scale, almost godly fig ures, and it was very important to put Black females in that light. I wanted people to look up at them too, gazing at them, almost godlike. I enjoy that the scale made that happen.

JC: So interesting that there are a large number of us who think in those terms, in terms of representation and paint ing. The first massive Black figure I ever saw was in a Ke hinde Wiley painting and it was overwhelming. I had never seen representation of someone like me that big and that beautifully painted before. In museums, I was looking for me. There was this sense of, Where would I be in this pic ture frame? That’s how I approach paintings: where am I? When I’m painting and thinking about scale, I think there’s an automatic instinct for some of us to take up all this space I know I deserve, that my body deserves, that the bodies in these paintings deserve. At the very beginning of making my paintings, I wanted the size to make the figures feel like they’re pushing against a literal frame. I liked the idea that there was a pressure they’re pushing against. And in ad dition to that, I wanted people to make room for them—to make a conscious choice.

RG: I love the thinking about the life of the piece beyond the canvas.

Jordan Casteel, Within Reach , 2019, oil on canvas, 35 × 60 inches (88.9 × 152.4 cm)

© Jordan Casteel, courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York.

Photo: Dario Lasagni

JC: Every technique, every gesture, matters. It’s not just the painting, it’s the physical surface. The first step for all of us before making a painting is asking, What is the surface go ing to be? Am I going to prime it to its smoothest form? Or do I want the texture? All of us talk to each other about how to stretch a canvas all the time. We’re all seeking the perfect ground to build on.

RG: How do you find that perfect ground? There are so many options and techniques for stretching canvas, for cre ating texture, for choosing other media for your art.

CGR: I like canvases with texture because I grind in while I paint. I have to buy new paintbrushes with each paint. I need the grittiness.

JC: Do you just do like one coat of gesso or some thing?

CGR: I do gesso for sure, but it’s very thin. I use acrylic but I probably paint it very much like water color. I use little paintbrushes and very thin strokes. I get mad at my own process sometimes. Or I tell my self, This is the painting where I’m going to loosen up. And then I get the tiny brush, it takes over, and I let it go.

JC: I feel such relief hearing you say that becauseCalida Rawles, Infinite from Root to Tip , 2020, acrylic on canvas, 48 × 96 inches (121.9 × 243.8 cm) © Calida Rawles, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin

We don’t get the luxury of just making work and letting it be what it is. People project a lot and I can imagine, especially as visual artists and doing figuration of the Black body, that people project quite a lot onto things that you create.

—Roxane Gay

I do the exact same thing. It’s such an internal battle no one else would understand. I’m doing the same thing all the time, asking, Why do I do this to myself? Five hours later I’m putting in polka dots in a very strange, monotonous way that could have been easier done with a different brush or a different texture.

RG: When you’re working on those painstaking details and you know your process is laborious and you resent it, how do you find the patience and the discipline to stick with it, to know that in the end, it will be worth it?

JC: The resilience, the patience, for me comes in that mo ment of satisfaction at the end. It feels like such a strenuous labor of love that at the end, when I step back, there’s some thing about that process that feels unique, that couldn’t have been done another way.

CGR: What keeps me going is usually listening to books. If I can get lost in the words, I can sit for hours and get lost in that story. I can just work.

RG: You have families, you have partners, you have friends; the more you love, the more people ask of you. How do you also love yourself and your craft to make that time?

CGR: Sometimes it’s very hard. I’m about to send my kids away because I have this show. I try to recognize where I am, and when I can give, and do what I can, but I have to recognize I’m limited because I have to take care of this craft right now. I have to take care of myself, I know what I need to do. But it’s always a pull.

RG: Do you feel that pull, Jordan?

JC: Tremendously. I’m in the thick of it. And with my health circumstances, it’s going to look and feel different from most of my peers, so I’m finding myself needing to articulate that more frequently and that articulation is exhausting. On one hand I want people to know, so they can see me as more than my Instagram feed. I feel this sense that my community often perceives that I’m good, that everything’s good, and I’m not always good. I’m often trying to find balance.

RG: There’s always stuff you do to support your art but you don’t get to actually make the art as much as you probably want. It’s a good problem to have but it’s still a problem. How do you say no, and how do you deal with the trap pings of success, which are great but take you away from the thing that made you successful?

CGR: I keep reminding myself of what you just said, that in the end, it’s all about the paintings. If I can’t make the work, all the other stuff will probably stop anyway. I have to make sure there’s room and space for that.

JC: I have a list of questions I keep by my desk that help me evaluate whether the opportunity is good for me. So I try to create rational strategies. Does it pay my fee? Is it a different audience? During the past year I shed the weight

of things and people who don’t serve me, who just pop up when it’s convenient. I’ve become more protective of my energy.

RG: One of the things I know you have to deal with as Black women artists—I think any Black creative deals with this—is where you’re asked to speak to diversity, equity, and inclu sion initiatives when you don’t really have any training in this. How do you handle these expectations for being a capital-B Black artist, expected to provide the world with answers on something that has plagued us for the entirety of humanity?

CGR: I haven’t thought of myself as a voice of that, I’m just painting and doing stuff that speaks to me. I definitely ground myself as a Black artist. I’m doing a lot of Black male figures in this show but I’m making sure when it’s written about, I don’t want these pieces I’m creating right now to represent Blackness itself. The Black male figure represents Blackness, unfortunately, in a universal way that excludes us.

JC: Every day I am asked about my practice through the lens of activism. The way that I address this is to not bring into the studio the weight of other people’s expectations of my Blackness, or what it means for me to be a Black person making work at this moment. A lot of it is managing language and reminding people that I don’t see myself as an activist. That there are people who have worked their entire lives to do that work and that is not the work that I do, although I recognize that my practice serves a certain role in contextualizing those narratives. It is me, it’s a reflection of my way of seeing the world. I don’t need to define myself for you.

CGR: I can talk about the pieces but I don’t want to, I paint ed them. If I wanted to articulate so much, I would write a book.

RG: I hear you. You’re speaking to my spirit right now be cause so many times, people want me to tell them more on a topic and I’m like, I literally wrote a whole book, I just don’t know how much more I can say on this subject. I don’t need to contextualize further because that work has been done. Now you take it, engage with it, think about whatever you want. If you want to discuss it, you have to do that with other people, because my work is done. Also, everything we do is interpreted as activism. I’m called an activist all the time and I’m like, Guys, activists are the people who are on the street marching, putting their bodies on the line to demand change. I’m a writer and we need to understand that there’s a very clear distinction, though granted, sometimes there’s overlap.

JC: Y’all just literally blew my mind. I feel like I’ve been sucked into this system of feeling the need to articulate my self because I’m so protective of the language because ev erybody else screws it up so exquisitely. And then I become the custodian of righteousness to the narrative around my work because y’all are going to destroy it. At the same time, can we get rid of wall text, maybe?

RG: The thing is, if you don’t take that control over your work, somebody else will.

CGR: Right.

RG: That’s the unfortunate thing: we don’t get the luxury of just making work and letting it be what it is. People project a lot and I can imagine, especially as visual artists and doing figuration of the Black body, that people project quite a lot onto things that you create. As you think about your careers, do you find that you’re ambitious? What do you want from your careers?

CGR: It’s evolving, my desires and what I want. I really hope the work resonates and people feel . . . I don’t know, I feel

like when I’m doing my work, I’m really in the core essence always dealing with the dichotomy of life, of feeling like I’m drowning and floating, being happy and at the same time being overwhelmed. This whole thing of water, that’s why it means so much to me: you can drown in it, it’s scary, but it sometimes feels so good. That is what I’m constantly going through in life. I love that odd space and I want to further that conversation, that there’s no good and bad, that life isn’t just winning or losing, there’s just so much more complexity and I love pushing.

JC: I’m with you on the evolution of what my ambitions are and what they’ve become. As the world opens, the ambitions change. The more I see or I’m experiencing, those experiences influence the things I then desire or long to participate in, whatever that might be. I have a painting that just went on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and my mom called. She said, “How do you feel, baby? I’m crying, I can’t. . . . ” If I’m being really honest with you, I don’t know if I am feeling it as much as I should be. I’m often caught up in what’s next, and the actual achievement now has been diluted by the sense of self-critique that happens all the time. Maybe the ambition is actually to enjoy things and celebrate and feel joy, like the real joy of when you ride your bike for the first time and you’re proud of yourself.

CGR: I’m with you. I have a hard time celebrating myself. By the time I have a goal, by the time I get down to that goal, if it’s a hallway, I open the door at the end and there’s another hallway and I just keep going to the next one. I’m already thinking of the next show and how I’ve got to do that. I’m already too far ahead to enjoy where I am. RG: What do you like most about your practice, the work you put into the world?

CGR: I’m hoping I can create something that stirs some thing in someone to want to do more or be better or feel good or feel something they may not have touched or reached. Sometimes I paint and I’m like, Somebody should have already painted this, but it feels good to feel like I’m ex pressing something—even though it’s a thought people may have already had—in a different way and a different form that can reach new people.

JC: It’s the relationships I’ve built along the way. A lot of the people I’ve painted have become real family members or friends—they’ve become steady, grounded forces of joy in my life, without expectation. You would think that somebody you painted would be the first to want something of you but they’re actually often the least likely to want something of me. My commitment has allowed these people to enter my life. I feel a lot of gratitude and joy around the practice bringing me to this kind of moment.

Calida

My introduction to archives began during a summer break between college semesters. I attended a public program at the Schom burg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem, New York, around the burgeoning In the Life collection and left that evening with an internship in the library’s Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books division. I spent the summer going through the unpro cessed papers of Black feminist poet Cheryl Clarke, whose work I knew well and greatly admired. Walking up Lenox Avenue to 135th Street to make my way through the boxes and folders of Clarke’s writings, community-organizing documents, and letters, carefully studying each piece of paper and ephemera, became a practice I fell in love with. This intimate engagement with the archive of a Black woman artist offered me a great deal of learning around research and storytelling as unfolding acts of change. Clarke’s collection taught me how to look closely and slowly; how to annotate findings and develop strategies for note-taking; and how to map time and the meas ures of collaboration. That summer, I experienced not only archives as sites for preservation and data collection but the practice of archiving as an artistic device that transmits values around deter mined narratives and knowledge systems.

There is art in telling one’s story, any story, through the cumulative process of storing asso ciative files, images, and objects. Consider the emergence of poetry across an assembly of records. Consider the subjective shadows dis tilled from organized marks on preserved paper. Consider the art of record-keeping and docu mentation, of collecting and holding on to the cultural materials that reflect the qualities of aPrevious spread: Lauren Halsey, ma foreva thang , 2019 (detail), inkjet print on paper, 67 × 45 ½ inches (170.2 × 115.6 cm) © Lauren Halsey. Photo: Jeff McLane, courtesy David Kordansky Gallery This page: Billie Zangewa, An Angel at my Bedside , 2020, handstitched silk collage, 28 × 46 inches (71 × 117 cm) © Billie Zangewa, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin

The archive is a site where tactile conditions of intimacy not only exist but matter.

life, a community, a place, a movement. Now consider the shared ground between the archive and collage: both invite the emergence of new interpretive meanings and connections from collected materials. Although at times didactic, the archive can appear as a multitude of abstract matter. Similarly, collagists assemble media fragments or objects across time and space to signal a storyline or a new imagining. A whole new entity is made from a cumulative process. We know that Black wom en’s histories have been historically submerged or rel egated to the periphery, if present at all, within archival repositories. Traditionally, local and communal sources of record-keeping have sustained our stories. However, many contemporary artists are using collage to remap these power constructs and address the social fields of community-building and storytelling.

Visceral assertions around body politics appear across the works of several Black women collagists. We can trace the scaled messaging embodied in cutouts of an arm, a lip, or a slick hairdo, but what surfaces for me is the buoyant logic or sensibil ity of rebellion that is often present in figurative narratives across this visual medium—for example, the works of Wangechi Mutu. Mutu’s daring figures are positioned in environments that are oth erworldly or exist beyond this one. They trouble and dance wildly in the spatial holds of the feminine, referencing the fragility of the postcolonial and its violent impacts on the environment. In Non, je ne regrette rien (2007), Mutu’s characters are not averse to risky

behaviors or to dwelling in a space of transmogrification. Once upon a time she said, I’m not afraid and her enemies began to fear her The End (2013) features a creature made up of earthy, cellu lar, and industrial parts, walking across a jagged landscape and marking its travel by leaving nondescript splats or pollutants in the air as it moves along. This figure, like many of Mutu’s charac ters, is both an actor and a keeper of consequence. In reflecting on Mutu’s work I find myself recalling Jamaica Kincaid’s famous short story Girl (1992). The story is structured as a single sen tence, an elongated breath of instructions for coming of age into womanhood. I believe Mutu’s intransigent figures, like those that stand tall in her sculpture series Sentinel (2018– ), would easily dispel the warnings or expectations toward tradition offered in Kincaid’s story as they are en route to remaking and contorting the world in their own image.

What blooms in the space of self-imaging? Does power bloom? World-building?

Lorna Simpson has an enduring engagement with figuring Black women subjects. Art historian Huey Copeland writes that Simpson’s practice “has consistently worried over the status of the body and the consequences of its divergent modes of self-perception for the constitution of the black female subject.”1 This is definitely true of the playful yet poignant gestures in her early photographic works, and of her popular Jet (2012–18) and Ebony (2014– ) series of collages. The popular images of Black women that scored the pages of those periodicals are also the source

in the Earth and Sky series (2016– ),

which pairs cutouts of models with raw materials and gems that crown their heads. Similarly, Speechless (2017), from the Ebony series, features a black-and-white cutout of a model’s face with scrambled letters crowning her head. Simpson’s video work Ani mations (2016) features a more speculative activation of these serial collages, wherein a model is suspended on a billboard plank amid a sky of shifting clouds, while gray puffs bil low from the headspace of another. The piece seems to situate these collages in an extended narrative that transmogrifies the subjects into allusive glitches. These subjects are not mere specular beings, they are performing critical acts of fissure as they are remade and refashioned apart from the folds of a magazine. Deborah Roberts’s portrayals of Black children are also constructed in a space of associative glitches, yet are projected as sublime motifs. Her figures are posed in a void, where the surrounding scene is absent or to be imagined over the blank horizon. Black children occupy public space and are hypervisible yet self-pos sessed. Roberts works with the intention of collect ing pictorial references that close the dissonant gap between their ages and the sliver of innocence that is extended to them by publics, institutions, and legal authorities. In Let Them Be Children (2018) and Between Them (2019), she renders the figures with an interiorNjideka Akunyili Crosby, 5 Umezebi St., New Haven, Enugu , 2012, acrylic, charcoal, pastel, colored pencil, and Xerox transfers on paper, 84 × 105 inches (213.4 × 266.7 cm) © Njideka Akunyili Crosby

There is art in telling one’s story, any story, through the cumulative process of storing associative files, images, and objects.

quality that is not typically relayed in representations of Black youth. The children are posed with humor and fragility. There is also an air of leisure and coolness in their assembly. Across these works, Roberts is depicting what many of us already know to be true, and that is that our children are the gatekeepers of Black cool. Still, a prevailing overtone amidst the dramatic flares of coolness reminds us that the figures are indeed children. They are young people whom we are charged with nurturing and pro tecting at all costs, as their safety is a measure not only of our contemporaneity but of our futurity.

In alignment with expressions of Black cool, the aesthetics of funk color the practices of Lauren Halsey and Xenobia Bai ley. Their work proposes how one can take direct action through the material space of textiles and the built environment. Through architectural approaches, Halsey’s sculptural and graphic com positions are developed in direct response to her home place of Los Angeles. The mixed-media installations we still here, there (2018) and My Touch (2020), alongside the digital collage gotta get over the hump? (2010), are great examples of how she assem bles found objects and a range of LA-based retail iconography to shape a body of work that volumizes the hyperlocal. Halsey’s gypsum installations are monumental gestures to honor her envi ronmental context. They are striking exercises in self-historiciza tion that are deeply tied to larger motivations around caring for Black urban and communal space: “No matter the context, I’m always thinking about what returns and gets redistributed to my neighborhood. There’s always a community ethos. I don’t see art and architecture as separate from the community. They’re sort of a cause and effect.” 2 Halsey’s concern with local redistribu tion has grown into a social practice of place-making through the building of the Summaeverythang Community Center in South Central, which has taken on the service of reimagining organic foodways for her community.

Where Halsey’s work tackles city and communal forma tions, Bailey’s mandala tapestries pull us inward to reflect on the funktional work of the Black homemaker. Much of her work bends toward projects that are shaped around histories of Black self-built and handmade designs. Motifs of world-building are sketched across her fabric pieces, such as Sistah Paradise Great Wall of Fire Revival Tent Mandela: cosmic tapestry of energy flow (1999) whose larger narrative involves a uniform and tools for the folk character “Sistah Paradise.” Both artists directly communi cate their love, a deep love, for Black folks. Their visual geogra phies inhabit the multifarious vernaculars of Black social life and cultural production through bright neon colors, dense repetition of patterns, lo-fi architectural constructions, bold typography, and surrealist design.

For me, the archive is a site where tactile conditions of intimacy not only exist but matter. Like Bailey, Billie Zangewa creates tap estries based on quotidian scenes of home life and the famil ial. Zangewa began her practice reproducing cityscapes before shifting her gaze to the domestic space. Many pieces center acts of solitude, moments of aloneness that are hand-stitched across silk collages such as Afternoon Delight IV (2018) and In My Soli tude (2018). There are also scenes that feature multiple figures, akin to the collage-based photo works of Njideka Akunyili Crosby, who focuses on domestic convenings of friends and family, the companionship between lovers, or the twinkling capture of a table set for teatime. In 5 Umezebi St., New Haven, Enugu (2012) a group of people, ranging from children to adults, are positioned across the composition with lots of motion and energy, evoking a

lively family gathering full of play, discussion, and caretaking. Her interiors are autobiographical studies of Nigeria past and pres ent, as depicted through the styling of garments, room settings, furniture, and the placement of products. They are constructed from composites of xeroxed popular imagery, family archives of photographs, and other sources that add depth to the textures and a sense of time or rhythm to the works. Looking at art by Zangewa and Akunyili Crosby during this time of isolation and calculated public engagement during the pandemic reminds me of the lush garden of togetherness we have gone without over the past two years. Works by both artists spark longing memories of homes filled with many bodies, voices, and smells. To be in a crowded living room or hallway surrounded by aunts and cousins.

To ascend a flight of stairs and reach a pair of open arms await ing to embrace you as loving words sing-song between your ear and cheek. These sites of home and kinship are sprawled across both of their bodies of work, illustrating that we are very much alive, both at home and in public, when alone and in the fellow ship of others.

The installation and collage work of Mickalene Thomas digs further into the aesthetic qualities of interior domesticity, not only as a social setting but as a site for the stylized fashioning of the Black home. The living room and spatial designs in Clarivel #5 (2014) and Interior Wicker Red Chair Leopard Rug And Candles (2015) are filled with wood-grain paneling, mirrors and reflective surfaces, florals and cross-checked and paisley patterning on the curtains and sofas, and often a floating view to the outside.

The atmospheres are warm and fully dense, far away from mini malist principles. Seemingly depicting scenes before a party or a gathering of sorts, they convey homes that are active. Homes that collect things, from a scattered library to hangings on the wall. Homes that transform constantly as they are lived in year round.

Homes adorned with cultural aesthetics as a site for recovery from the outside world.

One can trace similar elements of aliveness from the archival world-building within Thomas’s living room sites to the playful engagement in Martine Syms’s Web-art piece EverythingIveEver WantedtoKnow.com (2007). Despite its digital form, this work can surely be written into this conversation of an archival, even research-driven engagement with collage. The piece presents a multiyear index of Google searches, illustrating the digital ques tions, information exchanges, and data collection that shape so much of our relationship to the Internet and modes of knowledge production. This cheeky, nonchronological assembly of queries directly positions the index as a tool of record management and a form of collage—a gestural data performance or exploratory exercise on user profiling, privacy, and consumption.

The affects of archival transmission and circulation materialize within this piece by Syms and across the collage works of Mutu, Simpson, Roberts, Halsey, Bailey, and Thomas. Framed as spec ulative archival acts that commemorate Black quotidian life, imag inings, and space, their record-keeping and spatial constructions connect to the archival efficacy I encountered within Clarke’s papers many years ago. A visual language is being marked, one that strategically considers the unfixed workings of memory and interiority. These artists rigorously empower a compositional sub lime of Black thought and media, alongside the wild potential of love and change.

1. Huey Copeland, “‘Bye, Bye Black Girl’: Lorna Simpson’s Figurative Retreat,” Art Journal 64, no. 2 (Summer, 2005): 74.

2. Lauren Halsey, in “The Art of Community,” a conversation with Alice Grandoit-Šutka and Isabel Flower, deem, n.d. Available online at https://www.deemjournal.com/stories/lauren-halsey (accessed August 26, 2022).

Kellie Romany, Safe Space? (3), 2019, oil on board, 30 × 24 inches (76.2 × 61 cm) © Kellie Romany

Kellie Romany, Safe Space?

, 2019, oil on board, 24

24 inches (61 × 61 cm) © Kellie Romany

Kellie Romany, Untitled, 2019, oil on board, 12 × 12 inches (30.5 × 30.5 cm) © Kellie Romany

BY RANDA JARRAR

Kezia Harrell’s Such Gatherings (2020) is a landscape of purple sky, rolling green hills, and green grass, a fat Black woman at its center. She lies on her voluminous belly, her ample bottom, back rolls, and legs behind her in the air, one foot wearing a sock, one bare. Her

breasts squash a man’s face beneath her. Two more men’s faces bloom from the grass around her, bearing looks of anguish. Her own face shows a calm ecstasy. Her hair is a natural afro haloed around her and her hoop earrings bracket her smile. She rests her chin in her hand, her fingers tipped with long curling red nails. She is a goddess, outside of time and place. Her cheekbones shine.

“My work is very personal; it’s annoying,” Harrell says, laugh ing. “My art is figurative and abstract. I’m always thinking about my process. My work doesn’t have an already-set-in-stone place to exist, so I created it. There’s no such thing as a place African Americans are indigenous to, so I’m just taking concepts of Amer icana and placing them as a forever land, a land for us to exist in

in all our joy and glory. And all of our chaos.”

The anguished faces in Such Gatherings, a work in marker and gouache on cotton paper, are part of that chaos. “The land I paint exists inside those questions. How do you get to such a place? It’s so scary,” the artist says. Harrell attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied with the painter Brett Reichman—“the modern-day Car avaggio,” she calls him. She was a natural artist as a child and studied anatomy in high school. “I took my art very seriously early on,” she says. “My concepts now rise from everything, the whole life of the person. I have to document real Black people. I’m deeply connected with my child roots. I research and study everything.”

Harrell’s work has a powerful sense of embodiment, which her materials accent and access. “I use everything. I am very technical and do research on the materials. My drawings are ink, alcohol marker, colored pencil, everything, but I ensure that everything is layered correctly and is in harmony.” A selfdescribed survivor and old-school oil painter, she finds valida tion in telling her own story. Bliss: Americana Hot Mamma (2021) is a self-portrait in oil on a birch panel. A forever-land cherub covered in purple fur blows bubbles at a nude figure reclining peacefully, her braids floating up in bows, her nipples and abdo men dusted with golden glitter. Fat women are so rarely shown this accurately and lovingly; the figure’s knees dimple, her side rolls rest against grass, and her large belly hangs peacefully on her rippled thighs. “I love painting my body,” Harrell says, “be cause I can make it do all sorts of weird stuff. I visualize my body as a thing I can admire . . . a system [I] belong to.”

Bodies and time work in abundant ways in Harrell’s art. In pieces such as Butterflies Are Bows (2019), Black women pose with their braids floating high above them, carried up by but terflies. In Butterflies Are Bows #2 (Home Is Where The Heart Is) (2020) the figure’s long nails are pastel pink, yellow, and green, signaling a rich and fertile alternative Easter season. The work is made in chalk pastel in addition to her usual ink and gouache, bringing fertile elements to the figures and setting. Two of the braids are carried up by orchid bees, gem like, brilliant-colored insects that don’t make honey but exist solely to pollinate exotic flowers and capture their perfume for mat ing. The piece shows the powerful, dormant, and cyclical power of the natural world in her work’s forever land.

What’s next for Harrell? “I’ve been work ing on a graphic novel. It’s connected to all the work. I am a part of all of my artist ancestors. I tag into Black Dada, the Black renaissance in Harlem, Afrofuturism. And I love Octavia Butler,” she says. Harrell is drawn presently to New Age painters “doc umenting the experiences of people who didn’t get to be documented in time, who were captured out of time, their narratives, their personal stories: millions that weren’t stored into time. It’s about that. It’s actually about archiving Black life. That’s what my work gets to do; it gets to archive my Black life. One of many millions. It’s very spiritual.”

BY AMBER J. PHILLIPS

One of my favorite self-care practices is to take myself on solo dates to experience something I’ve never seen or felt before. I’ve learned that when it comes to developing a taste, you must have a wide range of experiences to create a deep-rooted sense of what you like. And I have a taste, a hunger, rather, for art and culture created by Black peo ple, women, and queer folks. Knowing as much as possible about us is my greatest pleasure. Unfortunately, capitalism routinely creates barriers to dis covering what brings us pleasure. These barriers are mas terfully constructed around the experience of visual art—even when the art is specifically created with someone like me in mind. I learned this the first time I took myself on a date to visit the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washing ton DC.

At the time, I was living in DC, and the Portrait Gallery was a straight-shot bus ride from my apartment in Colum bia Heights. Young teenage Amber was right: there was a world beyond going to church several times a week, Ohio State football, and excellent ice cream. Now I could visit crit ically acclaimed art on a casual Saturday morning. On this morning, I ventured into downtown DC specifically for Rob ert McCurdy’s photorealist oil painting of the beloved writer and fellow Ohioan Toni Morrison and the recently hung por trait of former President Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley.

The portrait of Obama is surrounded by other works, but it’s clear who the main attraction is, given the line of peo ple waiting to see the piece. Normally I’d be deterred by a queue of mostly white people, especially pre-covid. But I wanted to stare at Wiley’s chrysanthemums, jasmine, and African blue lilies without any heads interrupting my sight line. I don’t believe I’d looked for a full ninety seconds before I was directed to “keep moving” so more people could see the flowers. Slightly annoyed but still delighted to be in the building with these images, I perused the gallery on my way to see the painting of Morrison. I suppose I was leaning too far in, challenging my eyes to identify the paint strokes that made up McCurdy’s hyperrealistic rendering of one of the greatest Black American writers of my lifetime. It didn’t take long before a man wearing a cheap imitation of a cop uni form asked me to take a step back.

In this moment, I realized I was most likely being closely watched the entire time I was at the gallery. I was there alone, big and Black. I was well dressed for my version of a day out in DC, but not as your typical DC tourist or patron of the arts. I think my Hyper Violet–and-black Air Jordan 12s gave me away. The experience left me feeling like I didn’t belong, despite visiting exhibits that felt like they already be longed to me. I wanted to be there not only to see the work but to learn its history and context.

Before Wiley painted Obama, he had an exhibition in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, titled Kehinde Wiley: Colum bus (2006). I was fifteen years old and visited the Columbus Museum of Art on a field trip with my art-focused after-school program. Somewhere in the world is an old hot-pink Mo torola Razr with a picture of me standing in front of Wiley’s

Portrait of Andries Stilte II (2006), mimicking the pose. When you’re a kid in a museum, everyone talks to you. You’re there to learn and people want to share what they know with you.

I remember watching a short video on display in the gallery that showed Kehinde driving around Columbus looking for subjects to paint. The Black men in these larger-than-life vi brant images were my neighbors. I never forgot how it felt to see someone imagine us bigger than our circumstances.

Where we discover new art, how we are treated in those moments of discovery is as important as the art itself. And of course, existing in a Black body, and how my body is per ceived, also determine my level of ease in navigating with in art institutions. Unearthing the work of Firelei Báez and Tschabalala Self during the covid-19 pandemic lockdown made me feel how I imagine the Black men in Kehinde’s paintings must have felt seeing themselves honored in their XXXL white T-shirts and Lugz boots in 2006.

As a fat queer Black femme, I live outside the illusion of patriarchal safety because of my gender while also being routinely denied access to the myth of femininity because of my race. Although Báez is constantly referred to as an artist who paints the “female form,” her paintings entirely obliterate the restrictive nature of identity. Visually decon structing gender, she offers us a stunning mystical image of Black, Brown, and Indigenous embodiment through her depiction of Ciguapas, magical creatures fabled to haunt the mountains of the Dominican Republic. Ciguapa Pantera (to all the goods and pleasure of this world) (2015) depicts an almost-human life form covered in brown fur and adorned in a crown of tropical plants. This enchanting personification of creatures and land is also on full display in How to Slip Out of Your Body Quietly (2018). In the painting we see multiple Ciguapas unfolding into a vast forest. A wind is painted into the tossed branches of the palm trees and the gust seems to be coming from the movement of the Ciguapas instead of their environment. Báez’s depiction of slipping out of a body as a means of duplication and expansion. This lands as a specific nod to the innate abundance of Black and Brown people and our legacy of self-discovery as a means for growth and cultural wealth.

In an early-morning Zoom interview with Báez, I asked her how she views gender in her life and in the worlds she is creating with the Ciguapas.1 She shared that “I was always aware of gender even as a young child, and I wanted to find a slippage. In the slippage you get to understand how everything is a construct. In romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, etc.), they always have very clear gender in everything. Along with that gendering, nature is also gen dered female. And when you gender something female in those languages, you predicate it as passive. A tool for use. Ciguapas are not actually gendered. They aren’t women and they aren’t men. They are something unto themselves.”

As an artist of Dominican and Haitian heritage using the folklore of the Ciguapa, Báez shows us how to mine our specific cultural history in order to envision the possibilities of gender, race, and geography.

I find Báez’s paintings remarkable and incredibly moving. I pray to be able to see her work in person one day; so far I have only seen it online, where I tend to view it full screen,

so that I can get as close as possible. Being nose-to-nose with her pieces, even virtually, helps me wrap my mind around the easeful precision in her bold, colorful strokes—as if jumping inside her pieces will help me better understand the question I’m constantly asking of artists I’m learning to love: “How did they do that?!” In speaking with Báez, she gave me something more powerful than simply telling me how she creates her work, instead recalling a notable Toni Morrison quote: “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” Our shared knowledge of Morrison confirmed that Báez’s work is meant to be interrupted by people like me who may not know everything about art and art history but love the work and the people whose stories are being told. Báez paints inside of the being Morrison speaks about.

In the summer of 2021, Báez opened her big gest exhibition to date, an immersive sculptural installation at the ICA Watershed, Boston, that is her manifestation of the ruins of the SansSouci Palace in Haiti. A mural featuring a Cigua pa welcomed guests into the massive show, the scale of which gave her audience space to be enthralled by stories of migrant histories. The vis itor stood in an open space, enclosed by indigo materials that served as signifiers of both shelter

and disaster. Once you accepted the invitation to be sub merged in the experience, there was no way to be too close to the work or to be rushed along.

Most days, I’m not sure whether it’s intentionally whimsi cal or aggressively absurd to believe that art is an effective tool of liberation. This is especially relevant when artists are in on the fact that they are amplifying what they love. Like Báez, Tschabalala Self unravels and mends our incomplete understanding of Black bodies and gender performance. Her mixed-media painting Evening (2019) is almost as tall as my five-foot-eleven-inch frame, and feels familiar. The fig ures are large and exaggerated in a way that feels not like a caricature of a big Black femme body but like an apprecia tion of one. Even Milk Chocolate (2017) feels quotidian and reads as a reclamation of the title phrase, which has been forced on me, a darker-skinned Black femme, as a compli ment. Self is in on the experience of navigating the world in a Black femme body and offers a nod of solidarity to others like her.

Self has said that her muses are “America, Black America, Black Americans—Black individuals in general.”2 She rejects the assumption that the Black bodies in her work are “dis torted” or “enlarged,” saying instead that they are scaled to her body and the bodies of Black folks with whom she is in community. Self’s images make me feel alluring and worthy of being placed on a pedestal of protection. I would love to know what it feels like for someone other than a low-budget imitation cop to tell people to back up if they get too close to me. And please make them stand in a line and stop staring when I’ve had enough. Out of context, all Black people can seem bigger than average, especially when we are separated from our communities. I’m sure Self’s work will seem huge against the white walls common in galleries until an equally huge Black body shows up in that space. Out of Body (2015) visualizes the ambivalence of the way we Black femmes view ourselves in relation to how other people take in our image. She calls into question the idea of realism when applied to a group of people whose entire existence has been violently distorted by the white patriar chal gaze. Our work to right this wrong through our own interruption is being measured against old tropes that we never created to begin with.

Poet, essayist, and cultural strategist Aurielle Marie chose Self’s work Nate the Snake (2020) as the cover art for their recently released poetry collection Gumbo Ya Ya. As a fat, Black, queer, Southern, and Disabled person, Ma rie is also contending with the limits of Black identity and gender in her work, specifically in the arena of language and storytelling. Talking about where her creative writing aligns with Self’s art, Marie told me, “Anytime I talk about girls I spell it with an ‘x’ instead of an ‘i’ as a way of noting my being as genderqueer, but Black folks are also gen derqueer. Black folks are very counterculture in the ways we navigate gender, because of race. I was looking for something very gaudy and offensive to anyone who, as my grandmother would say, has a sensitive or demure palate. I wanted the image to be something confrontational be cause Gumbo Ya Ya is a confrontational text.”3

Both Self and Marie are creating in a way that allows

Presenhuber.

Photo: Matt Grubb

them to set the standard by which their art is con sumed and interpreted. Most Black women, femmes, and nonbinary artists aren’t only making their work, they also have to actively create their own context. We aren’t just holding up a mirror to ourselves and our communities; we are building the mirror. We are teaching people how to see us and make space for what they see.

In January 2019, wanting to give myself permis sion to fully commit to being a writer and storyteller, I accepted a Civic Media Fellowship with the Annen berg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. Moving away from the comfort I had built for myself in DC to relocate to LA has been the big gest self-care experience I’ve given myself to date. My plan was to experience and learn as much as possible about the art that is globally distributed out of the cultural center that is Los Angeles.

By March 2020, though, I found myself quaran tined in my apartment, away from most of my friends and family during my first viral pandemic. In addition to the omnipresent fear of becoming sick and unbearably lonely, I was forced to reckon with not being able to adventure through the art galleries and museums in my new city. Turns out I wasn’t alone in processing how to access joy and imagination during a pandemic. The temporary closures of cultural institutions did not stop the curation and making of art; it made both more accessible. Conversations be tween established and emerging curators and artists were broadcast live on YouTube and Instagram. Some galleries even allowed viewers to join Zooms where we could ask our questions directly to emerging, new-to-me voices such as Bisa Butler and Kennedi Carter. Formerly inaccessible

cultural experiences became accessible from the comfort of my own home. I was able to experience visual art as some thing that could come to me. I was able to take in art in a completely new way that wasn’t just among white walls in hushed tones. I finally gave myself the permission to learn about art in a comfortable setting where only my gaze mat tered. During one of the most isolating years of my life, I found joy by recommitting myself to an old love in a new way.

As we move forward with collectively creating our new normal in an ongoing pandemic, my hope is that the new environments I enter and the ones that I return to will hold me with as much care as I have held myself. In this after math, we must be serious about imagining a more abundant experience for witnessing and creating art. As Báez shared with me during our conversation, we should all be asking ourselves, “How do we get to the point where psychically we get somewhere else together? For better or worse we are

planet. So

we

beyond this point of

into something bigger?” It’s not enough to simply exhibit the work of artists such as Tschabalala Self

racism

Firelei Báez. We must apply the les sons we are gleaning from their work to make their muses and

feel as honored as the work itself.

RACHEL WHITE–READ SHY

SCULP–

A minka is just an ordinary house in Japan.

On the occasion of the unveiling of her latest Shy Sculpture, in Kunisaki, Japan, Rachel Whiteread joined curator and art historian Fumio Nanjo for a conversation about this ongoing series. They address the origins of these sculptures and the details of each project.

FUMIO NANJO Rachel, it’s nice to meet you—I’ve known your work for a long time, but I’ve sadly never had the opportunity to connect with you until now. I’d love to hear your perspective on your past works, from the beginning, and how they led to your new project in Kunisaki.

RACHEL WHITEREAD I think I’d start in 1990, with Ghost , the first architectural sculpture I made. When I decided to make that piece, I wanted to use a small Victorian family room, similar to a room we had in my childhood home but also the kind of place I lived in when I first left home. Within that room I wanted there to be a window, a door, a fire place, cornicing, and a skirting board; I then used those five elements to break up the surface of the piece architecturally and sculpturally. It was all made from the inside out, and then I took it to my studio and put it on a framework.

The next piece I made, which was in a similar vein, was House [1993]. It was the cast of the interior

of a Victorian house, which was made by simply— well, not simply—by spraying concrete inside the house and the building and then removing the building. This involved working with engineers, and it was the first time I worked in a way that I do quite often now, with engineers, builders, and larger teams.

FN And where was this located?

RW House was in the East End of London. It took about two years to make and then it was up for just a short period of time, about four months, but it became an interesting point of contact for peo ple talking about contemporary sculpture, politics, housing, and all sorts of other issues that were very much in people’s minds in [Margaret] Thatcher’s Britain, which was a difficult time politically.

FN It was controversial, wasn’t it?

RW Yes, it was very controversial. There were the political reasons that I just touched on, but also there was very little public sculpture being made

and put in the street like that, so people were sur prised by it. They reacted, first of all, with a lot of interest and discussion. Later on it became a sort of political pinboard. By the end of its life, there was a lot of graffiti, lots of notice boards up, signs up saying “For sale,” and all sorts of things going on.

It really had attracted people’s imaginations.

FN So what happened to it?

RW It was torn down. And then the land was turned into a park, which is still there.

This was really the beginning of making memorials—a memorial to a lost place—as part of my practice, and it later translated into making a Holocaust memorial in Vienna. That was another difficult piece to make. It took about five years to get it made and put in the square; the government changed I think three or four times during the pro cess. There was a right-wing government at one point that didn’t want it to happen. There were sug gestions that it should be moved to another place,

but my work is site-specific and always has been. I completely refused for it to be moved.

FN It must still be there?

RW It’s still there and very well looked after. But again, this caused an enormous political uproar. I was getting exhausted by being a political pawn while making work, so I decided to start working on a group of works that I call Shy Sculptures . The term “shy sculpture” means a work that’s almost hidden away, that minds its own business and that people have to make an effort to go and see.

The first piece in this genre was called The Gran Boathouse [2010] and it was a boathouse cast in con crete on a fjord in Oppland, Norway, about twenty miles out of Oslo. To go there you drive for an hour, and you get to this place that in the summer is on the water’s edge and in the winter is frozen into the fjord. It has this stoic presence; there’s noth ing else there.

FN It’s interesting that some people may happen

on the work accidentally. I wonder what they think it is.

RW There is a discreet notice, and I think in the village there are some more notices about it as a point of interest in the town. But the idea really was to make something blank and understated, some thing that could be ignored, as we often do with what I call “invisible buildings”—buildings that live in many urban or rural landscapes and that people just don’t pay attention to. It’s about giving these places a voice, however soft.

The next sculpture I made was Houghton Hut [2012], a shepherd’s hut. On grand estates in the UK, they would have these little huts on wheels that could be lifted and wheeled around the estate.

FN So again, this is far from the town?

RW It’s at Houghton Hall, near Norwich, a sub stantial town in Norfolk. The piece is placed within the grounds of the estate.

Another example is a pair of works in California,

in the Mojave Desert near a place called Joshua Tree, where a number of artists have made inter ventions in the landscape. These two works were cast from what can be called shotgun shacks, which are like caravans or temporary sleeping and living places where people would buy small plots of land outside Los Angeles and stay in the desert over the weekend. A lot of these shacks are spotted around the desert and you could buy them quite cheaply. A friend bought these two structures and asked me to cast them, which was done under my direc tion, first in 2014 and again in 2016. It’s an involved journey to get to them—you have to know where you’re going. They’re quiet works in an extreme environment.

There’s also a work called Cabin [2015] on Gov ernors Island in New York City, a very interesting small island in the harbor that has been turned into a park. Many years ago, when 9/11 tragically happened, I was asked if I would think about how

to memorialize the Twin Towers and the tragedy, but I was sure that I didn’t want to do that. I felt it was too early—I felt that it needed time to settle, it needed people to mourn and grieve and gradually something else would emerge. Of course there are a number of memorials there now that are very suc cessful as places of rest and grieving. In any case, I was commissioned to make a work on Gover nors Island and I decided to do something that was my answer to that early request to make a work in response to the Twin Towers. This is my first piece that’s completely invented. I wanted to somehow represent a place where a loner might live, a hermit or someone outside of society. I also thought about a number of American poets and writers who wrote during the Romantic period. There are a number of smaller pieces around the cabin, pieces of rubbish, cast in bronze, that sit around the edge. It feels as if someone had once lived there and that experience has somehow been fossilized.

FN Again, the location contains important meanings?

RW Yes, it does. From one side of the island you can see where the Twin Towers were, and on the other side you see the Statue of Liberty. These two things juxtaposed against the landscape, with the cabin in the middle of it, for me are extremely powerful.

FN It’s a hut on the outskirts of Manhattan, of civ ilization. Huts seem to recur in your work. So most recently, you made a Shy Sculpture in Kunisaki. Had you been to Japan before?

RW I’d been once, just to Tokyo. And I’m looking forward to coming again.

FN This time the building you worked from was made of wood. Was it difficult in a different way?

RW It had its challenges. We began with a 3D model that was produced after many discussions. This really gave us a sense of what the final piece would look like and allowed us to assess different

decisions. Initially it was extremely difficult to understand what the interior of the building con sisted of. From the start, I was very clear that this was too complex to cast as is, so I asked the team to map out what was there. They produced extraor dinary digital images of the interior of the build ing. I gradually began to understand that what was inside was what is referred to as a minka , is that right?

FN Minka , exactly—an ordinary house.

RW This traditional Japanese house, which resembles an intricate piece of wooden furniture, was inside this much more complicated building. We had to work hard to find the building, and then we had to demolish everything else. I decided that I wanted to keep the walls around the original house as well as the traditional Japanese garden. Once the work has settled in the garden, the garden will replenish itself.

FN How did you find the building? Were you

shown many examples?

RW No, I was shown the one example and I was asked if I’d be interested in casting it. Initially I thought it was far too complicated, too many rooms. The interior was phenomenally complex; it wasn’t designed by an architect, it was very much a kind of do-it-yourself house. Once I’d figured that out, there was a lot of discussion with the fabricators, who on Zoom worked tirelessly to make sure that the tight deadline was met. You can see the intri cacy of the wooden screens and the fantastic detail that they’ve managed to capture, the bulbousness of the back of it where there are cupboards and parts of rooms.

FN In its location, this one is a bit different: it’s surrounded by neighbors. It’s not completely shy.

RW You’re right, it’s not completely shy, indeed. But hopefully it will have respect from the neigh bors and they will understand its personality and let it be shy [laughter ].

A little boy named Julius disappeared from a rural Alabama town in 1907. The boy was found, said the newspaper, the next day. Human history books contain some of the greatest fictions ever written. I can attest to the truth because me and my kind were there in every instance. If accurate reporting were the goal, the newspaper would’ve said, the boy was found alive. Better: the boy was found alive by a witch in the woods. Best: the boy was found alive by a witch in the woods and forever changed.

We poltergeists too have what we consider crimes—speaking this language, using calendars, love, etc. I had my own concerns other than editing human literature. Love, ahhhh, the drug of warriors and the conquered, of kings and housewives, of fiends and monsters alike. Just so we’re clear, I was in love with a ghoul who possessed a widow named Rebecca who was in love with a local prostitute named Sadie, so I possessed the prostitute in order to be nearer to my heart’s half, said ghoul. Relationship status: complicated. There’s a species of octopus that recognizes gender based on size and color. The males are usually large and mostly dull gray, the females are small and colorful. Among this species is a unique kind of male, very small, like a female, and it can change colors to look feminine. This male often sneaks into occupied dens already inhabited by a male and female and pretends to be another female looking for love. The big male is excited, believing he has acquired two female lovers, but while he sleeps the small male mates with the female and dashes away. The problem with polyamory is that somebody always gets their feelings hurt or decapitated in the end.

The unbearable heat of the previous days abated and a chill ran through the night when Julius was found. The townsfolk walked one by one to the church where the boy sat, needing proof that the fever of disruption to their safe concealed lives had ended. The missing boy allowed them to forget that Rebecca’s husband had been killed by strangers. A lost child gave them something sensible to worry over and then sigh in relief once that simple worry ended. All were satisfied for a while.

Sunrise simmered behind the trees and the final bell of the night sounded. It rang dull and weak like the metal had been beaten so profusely that it gave up all substance and was just the faint memory of what a bell should sound like. Rebecca and Sadie took their turns to look at the boy on the pew asleep on his mother’s lap. A pair of men’s boots rested on the floor next to them both, positioned in such a way that an invisible man could’ve been wearing them and sitting on the pew with a hand on Julius’s back or neck.

Not far from the boy, the mother, and the boots was the witch. The witch that found young Julius was not known as a witch yet. They called her grandmother first. They called her the old woman. They called her the aunt. They met her with gratitude when she said she and the boy ate mushrooms and wild meat together. She kept him warm. Gratitude like youth and good manners is fragile.

At first glance, the boy really was fine, whole, quiet, breathing steady and sleeping without a grimace or fever. His long black lashes curled upward and downward, feathers of beauty on his sharp brown face. Dirt streaked over his forehead, snot crusted his nose, and his nails were snagged, a little bloody and completely filthy, a lovely child.

Rebecca and Sadie passed over the boy and out of the church into the rising light of morning, feeling something between them I hadn’t felt for some time, confidence maybe, horny for sure, safe, definitely safe, and maybe worst of all, hopeful. The nightmare they imagined had turned out ok at least then, which meant maybe other things they desired might turn out ok too.

The people were tired and thirsty and some a little resentful that the tragedy of the hour had not fully manifested, so there was nowhere to direct their residual rage and annoyance. A few men said watch him to the mother in a tone slathered in judgment. Others looked hard at the old woman,

who was nobody, nobody’s mother, nobody’s neighbor, nobody’s friend, cousin, butcher, or wife. She had frizzy red hair, somewhere in between friend and enemy.

Only later, in better light, did people notice the damage on the boy, his wrists rubbed raw from fabric tied tight. Only later did the town have more questions for the witch. How did you find him? Why were you alone? How long have you been there watching?

Before then, Rebecca and Sadie, my ghoul and I, had a whole morning together uninterrupted by the goings on of bad men. In the delirium of sleep deprivation and the high of hope brought on by the events of the day, Sadie stayed with Rebecca in her marriage bed, pressed tight and slippery in the lap of urgency relief. I tried to stay hidden but still near the surface of Sadie’s body and mind to see my ghoul, but there wasn’t enough resentment in the air from Rebecca or Sadie to hold my ghoul in place. They retreated deeper into Rebecca like a stone thrown in a pond. I could’ve wept.

That would’ve been a good time for me to go, for my ghoul to go. Leaving a possession is a little easier than entering one. Whereas the latter is like sucking flour through a straw, the former is like tearing off a bandage that has been stuck so long to infected flesh that a little bit of skin and scab has grown over the whole thing. You know what you’re getting into, a fuck load of pain.

Suddenly, like a prayer answered, the town delivered something more delicious than a sweet escape from the drowning of love. The town wanted to keep the witch, not like a pet or a house guest to be sure. She’d tried to retreat back into the woods that morning when Rebecca and Sadie were chin deep in one another. The deputy sheriff held the witch back with a large palm held out. I’m sure she just sat right back down.

I’m glad I gave these people a little time to convert their fear into gratitude and then into resent ment and eventually into fear again. With fear comes the need to have control over what’s meant to exist in chaos. My ghoul was intrigued, and I could feel them rising to the surface of Rebecca again.

These are the questions I’m always asked at this point in the story:

Why keep the old woman when she was the savior?

I’m always shocked that the points I make about the nature of humanity continuously go misun derstood or, worse, blanketed in disbelief. People are crazy. I repeat, people are crazy. There is no innate sense of logic and reasoning governing this species. Under the right conditions, they will boil their mothers for a dollar or a cheeseburger.

Why didn’t you leave while you could?

This is quite the concern, one where I have no words to express the grave and horrific disappoint ment I have in myself and my kind have in me. Maybe I’m broken. Maybe the perfect agent of discord and mayhem that I once was is gone forever. Maybe love is infectious and I’m a ripe host, immortal and unrepentant. Maybe it’s my goddamn business and no one else’s.

Where did the witch come from?

There are always witches, cataloguing things they find in dirt and organizing their periods to the movement of celestial bodies. They have a good wholesome sense of humor though, really into dad jokes like the one about putting pepper on a soldier to make a seasoned veteran. Is she a real witch with magic or just an escaped slave that never went back?

Both can be true at once.

What are our odds of survival?

Now that is a tough one. If anything, I consider myself a fair and honest observer of humanity, only occasionally caught up in some bullshit that skews my perspective. Ultimately, I’d say it’s a generation and a half before humanity implodes on itself, but I said that a couple millennia ago too,

so, you know, 50/50. Is love always this messy? Yes.

As for Sadie and Rebecca, they were still reveling in the dream of possibilities. They spoke of winter, the leaves turning hard and golden then vanishing into the air and earth. Before the snow and the bells of Christmas, they considered all the places that could sustain their dream. There was the North, a place Sadie already knew and said was not all that different from Alabama, just with worse food and the illusion of more freedom than what was guaranteed. Then there was the West, a vast dry desert with mythical men on horses and sombreros. Certainly the West was big enough to hold all the debris of their imaginations, strange prickly plants and the perpetual hunt for water. It seemed like a place trying in various haphazard ways to kill anyone that crossed it. They laughed at their fantasies, at their ignorance, and the glee of having a choice at all.

The dreaming turned more serious when they considered how they might love one another, in secret or in public. Rebecca would not need to be a widow anymore and Sadie would not need to be a prostitute (unless they wanted). Their history was theirs to write and rewrite based on a mood. They could dress as men and move about more freely. They mourned the loss of their hair and dresses.

History is still a thing that lasts in the minds of those who encounter it for a while before it can be undone. Lies can be real for a while. The truth can become invisible for a while. For the two of them, there was only one truth that really mattered, that they lived.

Outside of the dream, they were still in the town, and another body had been found in the woods. This body was not found alive and was certainly forever changed. It was a man, pale, unlike the townsfolk, with hair wet and flat against his head. He was brought to the church barefoot and sod den, dragged from the bank of a pond. That is how the gratitude became resentment and fear. The stranger’s body belonged to someone somewhere and a clock began on when those people would come looking for him and how they would repay the favor of his discovery.

I killed him, the witch said.

Her eyes did not focus on just one spot, but wandered in competing directions, perhaps seeing a little more than the rest of them.

In the early afternoon, the town met in the church again to discuss how to proceed. Rebecca and Sadie crossed the dirt road and the wild grass into the building. There was chatter when they entered that died down as they walked deeper inside, finding a pew. Sadie wondered if the people could smell them, their secrets. Still in black, Rebecca reminded them all of what was possible with men like the dead one that lay wrapped up near the altar.

I’ll see you later, Sadie said.

Rebecca fought the hand that reached out for Sadie to stay and just nodded. Sadie and I walked to the sheriff’s office. There was no one inside, no one except the witch behind a wall turned into a cage.

Are you hungry? Sadie asked her. You don’t look like you have any food?

I don’t. The witch said nothing else and cast her eyes in various directions. Sadie left and re turned with some bread and hominy. The witch accepted.

What did you do?

I killed him and took his clothes.

Was he going to hurt Julius?

Does that matter anymore?

They’re all afraid now. Afraid they’ll come and do to us all what they did to Rebecca’s . . . to the Pastor. They didn’t have a reason then but they have a reason now.

That makes it worse? A reason?

Sadie didn’t speak anymore and didn’t need to with a woman like that. Unfair judgment was not unfamiliar to them both.

Hang her!

A man in the church shouted as Sadie returned. The chatter from earlier had grown to screaming and demands for blood faster than even I expected. It was past lunchtime and the people were tense with hunger they mistook for rage. Hot sunlight came through the glass windows and heated the church to the point of discomfort.

Deliver her alive, said a different hot and hungry man. Send her with the dead son of a bitch and a note.

The idea of a note put a flicker of a smile on Rebecca’s face at a moment when humor seemed nearly impossible, but of course in such a state of the absurd, anything is possible. What might that note have said? Dear murderous racist neighbors, here is your kin, murdered for attempting to strangle one of ours. Please leave us the fuck alone now. xoxo

The arguments that followed were less diplomatic and far more strategic and marvelously grue some, as with the suggestion that they carve up the dead man’s body and feed it to the wild animals. Let the beasts and the earth have him, they said. Nature keeps secrets, they said.

How pretty a thought for my ghoul to rise from. A fly buzzed around Rebecca’s head and then another and another. She did not flinch. The crowd debated and rested on the idea of depositing the dead man and his boots in the water and holding the witch hostage in case they needed to trade her for peace. She was of course just a stranger.

That night Sadie seduced the sheriff and Rebecca escaped with the witch into the night. They met a mile out of town on stolen horses without lights to guide them or a map with any destination that seemed more appealing than others. The only destination was escape from debates on whether to chop up corpses or how to prolong fear indefinitely. That’s pretty much the end.

Of course I’m often asked some follow-up inquiries:

Where did they go?

How did they eat?

Who did they meet?

What happened to the boy and how was he changed?

How long did they live?

Why did you stay?

Sooooo, everybody died eventually you know, in ten years or forty or whatever else. We were with them, my ghoul and I, Rebecca and Sadie, for the rest of their lives. When the women died, we were released easy as sliding from under a sheet. A single fly shared the room with me. We were gorgeous again, the shape of chaos and misery, together and naked in the stale breath of the dead wafting up and away. Death from old age spreads out like water spilled on a table. Only people are afraid of death. There was nothing left for us once that happened. The end isn’t the point at all.

NXTHVN: CURATORIAL VISIONS

As a graduate student at Yale University in early 2006, Titus Kaphar began imagining a way to sup port artistic and economic development in the Dix well neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut. This once burgeoning and diverse working class community had gone on a decline in the face of the economic challenges now common in postindus trial regions, made worse by policies and attitudes of past decades that worked to perpetuate inequal ity. Dixwell had become a disadvantaged, predom inantly African-American neighborhood, standing in stark relief to its gilded university neighbor.

Over a decade later, in 2018, Kaphar cofounded the non-profit community arts hub NXTHVN in col laboration with Jason Price, the name referencing its home in New Haven as well as the goal of being the “next haven” for artists to cultivate their prac tices and careers. In the years since, the project has grown steadily, affording young, underrepresented artists and curators opportunities and the commu nity a core on which to build. Among its initiatives,

NXTHVN employs local high school students as paid apprentices; during the pandemic, the center hosted pop-up vaccine clinics and helped organ ize a food drive to collect groceries for local fami lies. Much like Kaphar’s art practice, NXTHVN’s programs and exhibitions generate conversations that confront injustice, reveal hidden narratives, and shift perspectives. The ever-open doors and cross-sector collaborations demonstrate art’s vital social role.

Kaphar and Price, together with Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, drew from Dixwell’s history to breathe new life into NXTH VN's built environment. The tailored architecture of the NXTHVN building—full of individual stu dios, gathering spaces, a black-box theatre, and a forthcoming library—fosters creative work and community-building.

NXTHVN’s program of yearlong fellowships provides dedicated workspace, rigorous critique, and professional development workshops for

early-career artists and curators. Its unique cur riculum emphasizes intergenerational mentorship, practical business and career skills, and cross-sector collaborations. Fellows work closely with the local high school apprentices to ensure that the next gen eration of regional talent is given a chance to excel in the fine arts. Offering what many of the country’s underfunded public schools cannot, NXTHVN pro vides local students with paid opportunities to learn from and work with contemporary artists.

In the following pages, the most recent cura torial fellows, Jamillah Hinson and Marissa Del Toro, address their curatorial praxes. In her essay, Hinson engages with the work of several art ists working through the complexities and chal lenges of a topic that informs her curatorial mis sion: the archive. Del Toro meanwhile reflects on the evolution of her thinking around notions of care and community, directly addressing her time at NXTHVN.

ASHLEY STEWART

Previous spread, left: NXTHVN, 169 Henry Street, New Haven, Connecticut.

Photo: John Dennis

Previous spread, right: Interior view of future cafe space at NXTHVN. Photo: Tim Williams

This page, left: NXTHVN 03 Curatorial Fellows Jamillah Hinson and Marissa Del Toro, March 2021. Photo: John Dennis

This page, below: Marissa Del Toro in NXTHVN’s gallery before the opening of Let Them Roam Freely, featuring artwork by Hong Hong and Darryl DeAngelo Terrell.

Photo: John Dennis

Opposite: Marissa Del Toro in the NXTHVN Aula during a professional development session. Photo: John Dennis

MARISSA DEL TORO

Driving the winding roads from Connecticut to New York in the fall of 2021, all I could focus on was the lushness of the reds and oranges in the woods that lined my path from New Haven to the Hudson Valley. Having lived on the West Coast and in the Southwest most of my life, dramatic changes of season were new and marvelous to me. Making my way through the curvaceous roads of the valley and along the riverways, I also thought about the work of Emilio Rojas, an artist and visiting lecturer at Bard College to whom I was making a studio visit that beautiful day, and about his use of nature and natural spaces to deconstruct traumas and create pathways for decolonization. Later, over a meal of handmade tortillas, arroz , and pollo guisado, I got to know more about his practice. Besides comfort ing my nostalgia for my home and family in Cali fornia, sharing that meal with Rojas was a moment of exchange and discussion, providing me with a sense of community and engagement that I had been missing since moving to the East Coast.

I had arrived at NXTHVN as a curatorial fellow in July of that year. I didn’t know what to expect: after months of the covid -centered reality of Zoom worlds and TikTok videos, I had just moved across the country from California to live and work in the Dixwell neighborhood of New Haven. As a cura tor and former museum worker, I had witnessed and experienced what Dr. Kelli Morgan, curator and inaugural director of curatorial studies at Tufts University, calls the “nefarious culture of white supremacy” in American art museums. 1 So I came to NXTHVN as already an advocate for change, and as what curator and art historian Maura Reilly describes as a “curatorial activist.”2

In addition to NXTHVN, I also worked, and con tinue to work, as codirector of research for Muse ums Moving Forward (MMF), “a data-driven initi ative to support greater equity and accountability in art museum workplaces through coalition-build ing, research, and advocacy.”3 Much of my work entailed researching the front-facing aspects of museums, specifically data on exhibitions and col lections, which many know have predominantly favored white male artists. Even though much of MMF’s work is focused on data research, we are

also active in building relationships with other groups and key stakeholders as a way toward establishing equitable and accountable practices in museums. Collectivity and coalition-building have been heavy themes in my career, and this was part of the reason I was excited to be at NXTHVN. My goal for my year there was to give myself the time and space to contemplate my curatorial praxis— to look at the movements of curating and how it is enacted. I was especially interested in its power as a process that can potentially create degrees of change. In retrospect, I did learn more about my curatorial practice while at NXTHVN, and about myself as well, in addition to cultivating a greater sense of the kind of support that artists need as they navigate and work in the art world.

When Titus Kaphar, MacArthur-winning con temporary artist and cofounder of NXTHVN, first met with us at the beginning of our fellowship year, in August 2021, he emphasized that the coming year was going to be a whirlwind but also a pivotal moment for all nine fellows. In this moment, he noted, we were now part of each other’s networks.

We in the third year of the fellowship, Cohort 03—Layo Bright, John Guzman, Jamillah Hinson, Alyssa Klauer, Africanus Okokon, Patrick Quarm, Daniel Ramos, and Warith Taha—began the fel lowship as strangers coming from all walks of life and levels of experience, but once we began the seminar discussions, we started to realize some of our commonalities and shared understandings.

Over time, as we spent more time working along side each other and living in the same apartment building, we became more than a professional net work; we became mutual supporters and friends. I will note that we did not always agree with each other or see each other’s perspective as clearly as we would have liked, but we did for the most part accept one another, even in our disagreements, and as we shared our experiences and at times the grievances that we’d encountered in our respec tive careers, we developed a strong sense of trust.

We offered each other a safe space as we spoke on our realities, some of which were hard to hear, and we suggested strategies for each other on how best to navigate and maneuver the grittier parts of the art world. Through these discussions I also began to learn more about the type of care artists need and what I can offer them as a curator. Patience is necessary in any professional environment, but I believe that artists are especially in need of it. There is often a hustle and sense of urgency in the

art world that puts undue pressure on people and can lead to less-than-ideal work. Creatives need the space and time to feel, create, and think—which is part of what NXTHVN offers.

Beyond our professional discussions and sem inars, we came together as a community. All but one of us were new to New Haven, and we arrived amid a pandemic. We moved carefully for our own safety and the safety of others. In the fall, we began holding small dinner parties at each other’s apart ments. These social events gave us all a chance to relax and to separate ourselves temporarily from studio and curatorial work. When the snow arrived—a first for a few of us—we began to gather around the warmth of homemade stews, such as Hungarian goulash. The aroma of paprika joined us as we ate, warming our cold hands on our bowls before returning home in the cold weather or start ing a late-night snowball fight during one of Con necticut’s first blizzards of 2022. These collective moments allowed us to let our guards down and just hang out.

Additionally, as I cocurated with my fellow cura torial fellow Jamillah, we managed to merge our distinct curatorial styles into two engaging exhi bitions. The first we coorganized was Let Them Roam Freely , at the NXTHVN gallery, where we commissioned the artists Hong Hong and Dar ryl DeAngelo Terrell to create new works. Using

performance-based methods of physical move ment, Hong and Terrell developed works in rela tion to the idea of the portal, Hong a large-scale painting on paper, Terrell photography and sound. It was the first time either Jamillah or I had commis sioned artists, so we learned and experienced quite a bit through this show. For myself, I learned that projects like this one require a collaborative mutual guidance between artists and curators, as well as a flexible understanding that not everything will go as expected. When one of the artists turned out to have forgotten a key piece of equipment, for exam ple, the result was a four-hour-round-trip Sunday drive to New York for a replacement. The success of our mission was celebrated in a deli over one of New York’s finest slices of pizza, where we laughed over how lucky we had been to make it to the city before the store closed. That melted cheese was a much-appreciated reward for our unexpected jour ney, though not as much as seeing the work beauti fully finished and installed in the gallery.

At NXTHVN, I learned more in depth about what care looks and feels like in curatorial work. Even though I arrived with a strong background and experience, I was able to learn and develop my practice. I came away from my year there with a greater sense of how better to support artists and creatives, as well as how to best to use my position as a curator.

JAMILLAH HINSON

Brought up in a living archive masquerading as a house, I was unknowingly immersed in cultural and art-historical information. My earliest encoun ters with record-keeping were familial and com munal, being largely based on storytelling and oral histories. Eventually I became fascinated with non-Western archival traditions, and with experimental and nonarticulate forms of archiv ing. As I moved farther into my practice, both pro fessionally and conceptually, I developed an aver sion to the traditional Western archive. The impor tance placed on institutional archives, and on their standards of useful information, made less and less sense.

“The traditional Western archive,” in my think ing, refers to the amassed material and informa tion, visual and linguistic, held in many cultural institutions, as well as to the conceptual meaning behind the existence of these collections and the histories of how they came together. When looking at these archives, we must understand the trauma stored in the collection and in its use. We cannot remove from it its concept and action—its compres sion of the lives of Black and Indigenous, margin alized and gender-expansive and disabled people into data.

To seek other forms of record in place of those traditional archives that historically have both erased and enacted violence on Black and Indig enous people and communities is to admit the shortcomings of a stagnant archive. To recog nize the place of ambiguity and ephemerality in record-keeping and documentation is to allow for a kind of softening of the metaphorical barriers into and out of the archive. This in turn allows for the introduction of experimental documentation into an art practice, through process, material, or the artist’s own personal and practice archives.

Pushing against norms of documentation to break apart the archive and the acceptance of its conceptual and material presence and his tory, artists Sadie Barnette, Tsedaye Makonnen, AJ McClenon, and Alisha B. Wormsley consider their humanity, Blackness, and presence. The conventional archive, the art world, and the West are spaces in which Blackness is not afforded

normalcy, and normalcy is inherently linked to humanity and autonomy. Why should one be indebted to protocols that determine an archive in which one is terrorized?

The archive tends to be viewed as an infalli ble tool of human record-keeping, dependable beyond fault or misinterpretation. Yet ambigu ity and ephemerality are very much settled in the archive, which today is being disrupted more often and with more nuance. Whether visual or linguis tic, archives are increasingly being used as starting points for their own deconstruction.

In the book Black Women as/and the Living Archive , Makonnen compiled years of interwoven text threads, emails, design decks, Zoom screen shots, camera-roll footage, and images of Black family homes, altars, and pets. The collection is fuller and more humane than historical and con temporary record-keeping allows the traditional Western archive to be when it comes to Black peo ple in the Americas. Unlike records of “commod ities,” or data systems articulating likelihood of death, Makonnen’s archive breathes life into those it documents.

Existing as a chronicle of the larger Black Women as/and the Living Archive curatorial pro ject, as well as of the histories that brought its par ticipants together—beautifully articulated through

a foldout “Relational Connection” map webbing the lives of eight women over the last twenty years— Makonnen’s book amalgamates the information she deems necessary to bring the viewer on a pil grimage tracing her journey while leaving room for individual interpretations of her work. A center piece of Black Women as/and the Living Archive is Wormsley’s film Children of nan: Mothership (2020). Widely known for her serial billboard project There Are Black People in the Future (2017–20), Worms ley uses a historical and anthropological narrative throughout her practice to tell metaphorical stories about Black women’s power and survival, and ulti mately about our search for and discovery of our selves through the archive. Wormsley’s practice utilizes the power of simply making it so, demand ing space and presence.

Cementing a place in the future means affirming your autonomy in the present while seeking and protecting those in the past. Following the inter disciplinary and nondisciplinary practices of their predecessors, artists are expressing autonomy through destruction, remembrance, and physical assertion of themselves into the record, dissolv ing the purported permanency and authority of the archive.

With the placing of her hand into an image of a family photograph or a surreal re-creation of the Black family and Black communal spaces, Barnette introduces ephemerality and movement into mul tiple interlocking archives: archives of her family, archives of San Francisco’s cultures and pasts, and the political record. Her installations pull memo ries, specific eras, and bygone spaces back into a physical world, recontextualizing Black and queer histories, among others, as this newly created space merges with the original. In The New Eagle Creek Saloon (2019) she accesses past, present, and future by mining the installation’s namesake, the New Eagle Creek Saloon in San Francisco, opened in 1990 by her father, Compton Black Panther Party founder Rodney Barnette, as the first Black-owned gay bar in the city. In Sadie Barnette’s re-creation of the saloon, a stylized Eagle Creek sign, glowing in pink neon, perches on a bookshelf that flows into a translucent pink-topped holographic bar. Beneath the bartop, faces peer back at the viewer, in photographs snapped in the original estab lishment. Crushed beer cans and glitter-coated telephones are nestled into the body of the bar, overlapping primary and re-created ephemera. Glittering speakers and couches upholstered in holographs are washed in pink and purple light

Opposite, top: Jamillah Hinson with NXTHVN Studio Fellow Alyssa Klauer in the NXTHVN Aula during a professional development session. Photo: John Dennis

Opposite, below: Installation view, NXTHVN: Undercurrents , Sean Kelly, New York, June 10–August 5, 2022. Photo: Jason Wyche, New York, courtesy NXTHVN and Sean Kelly, New York

This page: Installation view, Let Them Roam Freely, NXTHVN, New Haven, Connecticut, March 5–May 15, 2022. Photo: Chris Gardner

in an otherwise blank space. Barnette conceives of a space where the idea of the archive, particularly archives of queerness and nightlife, is flattened in time but enlivened through physical presence.

The current emergence of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary artists may correlate to the inter est in the archive, and the disturbance and reim agining of it, as a center or by-product of contem porary practices. Columbia University professor Saidiya Hartman’s idea of “critical fabulation”— the reimagining of the archive to give humanity and identity to those whose lives have become data points within it, introduced in her essay “Venus in Two Acts” (2008)—is crucial as we deconstruct and refashion the archive’s limits and powers. Criti cal fabulation, antiarticulation, general fractur ing—these tools can be used to create anarchy in the traditional archive without centering it in prac tice. The focus on experimental and nontraditional record-keeping passively deconstructs the tradi tional archive, removing direct labor from the art ists. Which is not to say that the labor that scholars such as Hartman are dedicating to freeing those narratives directly is to go unnoticed. Nonlinear narration is not a modern convention; it’s an intu itive way of storytelling and presenting facts that when used in film or literature mimics the elusive ness of memory. Using the body to archive experi ence is far from new to storytellers; like nonlinear narration, it doesn’t rely on rigid structures to tell a story or communicate information.

In their 2019 performance series Dark Water: Polarity, Sharks, Adolescence, and Being the Dark est Girl in the Pool , McClenon examines the histor ical and political relationships surrounding Black Americans in relation to bodies of water. Employ ing experimental sound and performance, McCle non demonstrates the strength of presenting archi val material in an alternative way. Merging theater, modern dance, and storytelling with cultural and historical research, they reimagine and release the stories of others in tandem with their own and that

of their community. Through their performance, McClenon effortlessly offers the audience a deep understanding of the relationships they examine. Using languid yet entrancing movements, they recall traumas they didn’t witness but inherited while simultaneously enacting joyous motions of Black leisure along the water. Just as in Makonnen’s and Wormsley’s practices, McClenon’s series is steeped with information that refuses clarity.

As these artists turn to questioning and re-cre ating, a sense of anarchy emerges in their practices around information. The heritage they draw from Black cultural traditions makes the destruction of enforced social hierarchies wonderfully possible. Countering the idea that theoretical or academic work is the only appropriate intellectual or crea tive framework in which to analyze data, the acts of record-keeping and documentation, in this context, don’t concern themselves with summarization.

The new structures being built and collapsed and reworked and celebrated in the processes and practices of these artists are both singular and col lective. Whether or not they resemble each other, they cannot exist without one another. Shifting and blurring as needed, object, documentation, body movement, and story repeat and repeat themselves until the details adjust to accommodate what must be heard and remembered. Sharing stories and blending newly realized archives is a radical exam ple of creation, inserting the self and others into time and giving new existence to those the tradi tional archive silences.

1. Kelli Morgan, “To Bear Witness: Real Talk about White Supremacy in Art Museums Today,” Burnaway, June 24, 2020. Available online at https://burnaway.org/magazine/to-bearwitness/ (accessed August 25, 2022).

2. See Maura Reilly, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018).

3. Museums Moving Forward website, online at https:// museumsmovingforward.com/ (accessed August 25, 2022).

Building a Legacy

ALISON MCDONALD What do you think Warhol wanted for his legacy? It might seem like a simple question, but I am sure it has been complicated to navigate.

MICHAEL DAYTON HERMANN During his lifetime, War hol said that he wanted to be reincarnated as a big ring on Elizabeth Taylor’s finger. And while I can’t confirm one way or the other whether that hap pened, what we do know is that his will stipulated that a nonprofit charitable organization be created with a mission to support the advancement of the visual arts. This act of generosity is often overshad owed by the artist’s celebrity, which just continues to grow over time. It is my hope and expectation that over time, the Warhol name will eventually be known as much for the philanthropic work of the foundation as for the artist’s incredibly impactful art practice.

AMCD Was the foundation established during his lifetime?

MDH No, but his will dictated that nearly all of the assets from his estate go to the foundation, which was established shortly after his passing, in 1987.

AMCD The mission is rather open-ended: “the advancement of the visual arts” can be interpreted in many ways. How does the foundation come to a consensus about what that might mean?

MDH Yes, the phrase is short and highly open to interpretation—which one can only assume was Warhol’s intention. Other artists are certainly much more specific about exactly how they want their foundations to be administered. We’ve inter preted the directive we’ve been given differently over time because the world is always changing. Warhol always kept his finger on the pulse of Amer ican culture, and the foundation tries to honor that. To that end, I think one of the biggest strengths of the foundation is our incredibly engaged, diverse, and dynamic board of directors, which consists of seventeen members with term limits. That struc ture ensures that we can meet the evolving needs of the foundation and respond to the communities that we serve.

AMCD How do you tackle the responsibilities of stewardship?

MDH We see stewardship through the lenses of past, present, and future. For the past, we ask

ourselves what Warhol’s historic legacy was. This is the realm of scholarship, the catalogue raisonné, and the care of original works of art. For the pres ent, we ask ourselves what Warhol’s legacy means today, and this manifests itself mostly in our licens ing projects. And for the future, which of the three is the most directly related to the mission Warhol set forth, we ask ourselves how we can honor War hol’s wishes by advancing the visual arts for future generations, which consists of our grant making.

AMCD How has Warhol’s family been included in the foundation?

MDH Warhol’s family has always been included in the foundation in some way. And for me per sonally, one of the great privileges that I’ve had is getting to know Warhol’s brother John Warhola, who served on our board for many years. Follow ing his passing, Andy’s nephew, John’s son Donald, was appointed to our board of directors. As fam ily members who were close to Andy, their voices remind us that not only are we stewards of this iconic artist who continues to influence culture, but we’re fulfilling the wishes of a human being, some one who was a son, a brother, and an uncle. That’s very grounding.

AMCD What revenue streams are available to the foundation and how do you keep them thriving?

MDH Well, when your founder is famous for say ing being good in business is the most fascinat ing kind of art, it sets a really high bar of expecta tion. The foundation has primarily three sources of revenue: art sales, licensing, and gains from our endowment. Since our inception, we’ve been quite thoughtful about how original works of art from our collection are sold. One of our first projects consisted of partially gifting more than 100 major works to twenty-four different museums across the United States. Since then, over decades, we have also worked with commercial galleries to introduce bodies of work through exhibition catalogues and scholarly essays. Most recently, over the past two years, I’ve conceived and curated three high-pro file auctions and established an ongoing project with eBay for charity. That effort has introduced new works into the market that have appealed to collectors across the spectrum of subjects, medi ums, and price levels, and has raised more than

$6 million for the foundation. In terms of licensing, we proactively seek out partners who understand and are inspired by Warhol’s legacy and have the capabilities to celebrate that legacy in ways that are relevant for audiences today.

AMCD During Warhol’s lifetime, he was interested in the commercial world, the power of media, and all types of collaborations with brands. In fact one could argue that his artmaking practice extended into all types of media, with projects like Interview magazine, for example. Given this precedent, how has the foundation made decisions regarding intel lectual property?

MDH I see Warhol as a creative genius who really wasn’t interested in boundaries between art, com merce, and media. For him, it was all part of one creative vision.

In decision-making around licensing, we are mindful not to ask ourselves what Warhol would do. First, it’s presumptuous to try to get into the mind of somebody thirty-five years after they’ve passed away, and second, Warhol was always ahead of his time. The one thing we do know is that he would do something beyond what we can imagine, so we don’t try to imagine it.

That said, we do ask ourselves how we can be inspired by what Warhol did during his lifetime. And when we answer that question appropriately, our licensing activities become a natural extension of Warhol’s interests.

AMCD How do you know what not to do?

MDH There are no hard rules for us in terms of what we can or can’t do. It’s a matter of how you do it, right? For some projects, such as our past licensing collaborations with Perrier and Absolut, we picked up on projects that Warhol undertook during his lifetime. Others, such as the collabora tion with Comme des Garçons or the Netflix docu series that launched recently, we feel offer a fresh understanding of Warhol and his work.

The most important consideration for all licensing projects is the impact they may have on the artist’s legacy. We also take great care in con sidering the alignment of a project with the foun dation’s values and mission. And following that, we certainly take strategic and financial aspects into consideration. The decisions I’m most proud of in

This ongoing series features conversations with experts in the fields of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship who offer insights that might prove useful to artists, their staff, foundations and estates, scholars, and others. For this installment, the Quarterly ’s Alison McDonald met with Michael Dayton Hermann, the director of licensing, marketing, and sales at the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, to discuss questions around intellectual property and licensing. The two also address the foundation’s origins, philanthropic goals, and catalogue raisonné project.

this role are the things that nobody’s heard about because we said no to opportunities.

AMCD For other artists interested in exploring the value of their intellectual property, what are some of the practical considerations they need to be aware of?

MDH First and foremost, it’s important for artists to recognize that the world of licensing is an entirely different industry from the art world. It operates in different ways. For any artist wanting to meaning fully leverage their intellectual property, it’s impor tant that they have a really good lawyer who spe cializes in this field so that they understand how to navigate the space. They also need to be interested in committing time and energy to gaining knowl edge in the market where they want to leverage their IP. If they want to get into fashion or NFTs, they really need to understand what those indus tries’ markets are like.

Lastly, if they can afford it, they should con sider hiring dedicated staff with experience in licensing, as that can be quite helpful. People often look at the work that we do, and at this point we have a large and sophisticated licensing program, but what I often remind people is that we started quite small in all ways, and we thoughtfully took our time to get to the place where we are now. Art ists should really take their time to slowly explore this and move thoughtfully through the space at a reasonably slow pace, instead of jumping into it.

AMCD How important is it to protect your IP? What measures do you need to take to protect the IP rights the foundation holds?

MDH It’s very important to protect your intellectual property. If anything uses your intellectual prop erty, most audiences will assume it was done with your authorization. So you want to minimize con fusion in the market and you don’t want your repu tation to be negatively affected. I think how artists choose to deploy their intellectual property should always be a natural extension of their artistic prac tices. Unauthorized usages, by definition, aren’t that. And even with authorized usages, it’s impor tant to acknowledge that the potential audience for a licensing project is exponentially greater than the audience for an original work of art. Far more people saw the Warhol Burger King advertisement that was aired during the Super Bowl, for example, than saw the Warhol retrospective at the Whitney Museum [of American Art, New York]. Because of this, licensing decisions have enormous potential to impact the reputation of an artist both positively and negatively. As we make decisions in our licens ing program, I often remind myself that my first exposure to contemporary art was a Keith Haring Swatch watch that I got when I was about twelve years old. And while in Haring’s case it made me a lifelong fan, the opposite can be true as well.

AMCD During a recent conversation you described to me how creators outside the visual arts—authors, musicians, dancers—tend to have most of their rev enue generated through licensing arrangements. It would be interesting for our audience to hear about similarities and differences for visual artists in this regard.

MDH It’s important to recognize that copyright was designed to encourage creators to create new works by giving them a limited monopoly over their cre ations. What’s unique about visual artists is that they generally make most of their income from the first sale of an object, not the licensing of the copyright, whereas authors, playwrights, musi cians, and other creators’ primary income is often through licensing rights to their work.

AMCD Would you tell us about the ongoing cata logue raisonné project at the foundation?

MDH My career at the foundation started when I was an assistant to the catalogue raisonné’s editor, Dr. Neil Printz. The project was initiated during Warhol’s lifetime, in 1977, by the Swiss art dealer Thomas Ammann. When he passed away, in 1993, the foundation partnered with his gallery, Thomas Ammann Fine Art, and then took full stewardship of the project in 2004. As of today, five volumes have been completed, documenting Warhol’s paintings and sculptures from 1961 to 1978, with volume six in the works. When people ask how prolific Warhol was, I just point to these books to indicate that it really is far beyond what most peo ple would ever imagine.

We have a team of six people dedicated to this project. Led by Dr. Printz and Sally King-Nero, they’re world-class scholars and researchers and they’ve produced a comprehensive and exacting catalogue of Warhol’s works, which is a terrific read, if you spend time with the entries for each of the works.

AMCD The foundation is actively engaged in philan thropy. How much money have you given away and over how many years?

MDH The Andy Warhol Foundation started giving grants shortly after it was incorporated, in 1987. To date, over the past thirty-five years, we have dis tributed over $260 million in cash grants to 1,000 arts organizations in forty-nine states. Today, we award approximately 100 grants annually; we have a budget of about $17 million dedicated toward grantmaking, which is administered by a staff of four people in our program department.

AMCD Are the grants given to institutions or indi viduals? And how do you determine the best recip ients for them?

MDH Since its inception, the foundation has felt that it can best serve the needs of artists by fund ing the arts organizations and cultural institutions that support them rather than trying to offer them grants directly. The grants that we provide cover the full spectrum of artistic activity, from grass roots happenings to alternative spaces to major museums. The common thread in our funding is that we actively support projects that challenge the status quo. We try to push the field in new direc tions through risk-taking and experimentation.

AMCD How does the application process work?

MDH The application process is intentionally designed not to be prescriptive. We recognize that artists and the organizations that support them have incredibly diverse ways of operating, so we accept requests from 501(c)(3) organizations twice a year. Applicants must submit a three-page proposal that describes the organization and the activities for which funds are being requested. Then each proposal is carefully considered on its own merit by our grants team, which makes recommendations to our board of directors. While we would often love to fund more, our budget is limited. But still, with 100 grants a year and $17 million dollars, the work is quite impactful.

Prior to covid, our program department was constantly traveling as a way to better understand the needs of artistic communities throughout the country. We also work with thirty-two different regional regranting organizations; they in turn support local artistic communities.

AMCD How has the foundation risen to challenges such as covid, hurricanes, et cetera?

MDH One of the foundation’s strengths is how responsive and adaptable its grants program is.

The program team have their fingers on the pulse of the issues that are central to artists today and they’re able to respond quickly to urgent needs that come up. Some examples include our estab lishing and funding Creative Capital, which was launched in response to diminished NEA funding in the 1990s, and our responses to the needs of the artistic community following 9/11, Hurricane Kat rina, Hurricane Sandy, covid, and most recently the war in Ukraine. We have a reputation for acting quickly to support artist communities in need.

AMCD What are some of the fundamental gifts and other types of support that the foundation has given over the years to establish significant hold ings of Warhol’s art and documentation of his life in other institutions?

MDH Warhol’s legacy is so vast and complicated that one institution can’t do it all. To date, we have donated 52,000 works of art to over 300 institu tions. The highlights include the establishment of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. We cofounded the museum with the Carnegie Insti tute and Dia Art Foundation, donating 8,000 works of art, as well as the tens of thousands of archi val objects that form the basis of the Andy Warhol Study Center. We also gifted the Andy Warhol pho tography archive to Stanford University—130,000 negatives and contact sheets that were scanned, catalogued, and made available online for the public.

Another tremendous gift is the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Project, in which over 28,000 original photographs by Warhol were given to 200 college and university collections. We supported the Andy Warhol Film Project, which is a joint effort among the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Warhol Museum to preserve and catalogue all of Warhol’s films. We’ve contrib uted over 35,000 high-resolution files to Artstor, which is the leading image resource for educational and scholarly usages. The list goes on, but [laughs ] we’ll stop there.

AMCD What infrastructure is required to be in place before a foundation can embark on this type of giv ing? What are some of the legal and logistical con siderations? How much staff is needed to oversee this properly?

MDH In terms of infrastructure, I’ve found that art ist foundations are as varied as the artists’ prac tices. The artist-endowed foundation commu nity really benefits from an organization called the Aspen Institute Artist-Endowed Foundations Initiative, which is led by Christine Vincent, that thoughtfully brings together leaders from the field to share knowledge and information. Recognizing that all of these foundations are set up differently— and necessarily so, because they represent such a diversity of artists, yet share interests—it is impor tant that they share information and knowledge, so that has been an incredible resource for the artist-endowed-foundation community.

AMCD What do you see in the future for the foundation?

MDH We will continue to steward Warhol’s legacy and fulfill his wish to advance the visual arts for the foreseeable future. Warhol said that his Fac tory was a place where people came not to see him but to see who else showed up. And the work of the foundation similarly expands beyond the celebra tion of Warhol to inspire and support a multitude of artistic practices that challenge us to see the world differently.

In conversation with Ashley Overbeek, scholar Andrei Pesic traces the art-historical roots of the NFT market to the Paris Salons. Along the way, they discuss questions of authenticity, value, and ownership.

Ashley Overbeek: Andrei, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. You teach a class at Stanford called “Art and the Market,” which back when I was a student I took and loved. What was your impetus to start the class?

Andrei Pesic: My desire to talk about art and the market, especially with Stanford students, was spurred by how dissatisfied I was with media coverage of the contemporary art market. It tended to trumpet or bemoan every event as an unprecedented innovation, and thus had a very narrow focus on the contemporary. So instead, I wanted to try to place the very real novelties in our time in the longer historical context of the ways that artworks have been valued and exchanged.

AO: When did you first start hearing about NFTs?

AP: Gosh, I’m a bit of a dinosaur. I’m a historian, so I’m never the first one to hear about something. I heard about NFTs right before the Beeple auction in the spring of 2021. I was able to add the topic to the syllabus immediately and I said to my students, There’s nothing academic to read about it but we can read the journalistic accounts, watch the auction video, and look at the Everydays project. And that produced such fantastic discussions among the students about the nature of value in art. It became this wonderful concrete example, one that really offended a lot of the

students in an interesting way. I found myself being the defender of trying to understand NFTs on their own terms, whereas a lot of the twenty-year-olds were utterly outraged by it and thought it was really just a scam. And I thought that that was an interesting dynamic in itself.

AO: On scams, I think that’s such a common, immediate reaction when people hear about something going on in the crypto space. How have NFTs impacted the conversation around authenticity in the art world?

AP: There are so many wonderful examples of forgeries and so much deep uncertainty about the attribution of a lot of artworks, especially from the past. Although, as we saw with the cardboard [Jean-Michel] Basquiat scandal, it can happen with artworks made during our lifetimes just as easily as with Vermeers. There has long been interest in what forgery shows about the socialtrust and authority structures that undergird the whole art-historical complex that authenticates artworks.1 In a way, the NFT was undermining even the most basic version of that structure. The blockchain allows NFTs certainty of ownership and artist attribution, and yet there is radical uncertainty about their value.

You can think of previous waves of outrage with conceptual artworks, for example Marcel Duchamp’s Tzanck Check [1919], in which a fake check became an artwork. The question of its authenticity as something that Duchamp created himself was certain, whereas its status as a check was obviously false. So we have lots of people who have played with this distinction of whether an individual object has value or not, but it’s really interesting to see a whole category of objects,

NFTs, and the question of their value become such a lively topic for discussion.

AO: I don’t think you can talk at length about NFTs without speaking about the merits of blockchain’s immutable record-keeping. But this technical solution— the ability to store an artwork’s proof of ownership and provenance information on a blockchain—hasn’t solved much regarding the larger concerns of NFTs’ value, worth, and scams in the art market. Some might argue that the role of a dealer is to help an artist navigate such a complicated environment, but the NFT community is often vocal in its advocacy of direct communication between artists and their collectors, without a gallery as an intermediary. What can the NFT space learn from historical dealer/artist relationships?

AP: In a way, what’s funny and interesting about watching the early development of NFT marketplaces is that it’s almost like going back to the time before the dealer system really got going, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. In my class we read two sociologists, Harrison and Cynthia White, who describe a transition from what they call a focus on canvases, individual artworks. For artists coming to display their work in the Paris Salon, you’re only as good as your last hit; you’re bringing new artworks to the market every year and trying to sell them as individual

works. 2 And what the dealers do, starting at the end of the eighteenth century and then even more so in the nineteenth century, is to instead bring this focus to the longer span of an artist’s career. So you go from

This

Pietro Antonio Martini, Exposition

Salon de

etching and engraving,

Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

canvases to careers. The dealer supports the artist from presumably an early point in their career, helps them develop, provides some sort of financial stability for them to make their work and to have the kind of freedom to not have to be constantly worried about producing work just to make ends meet the next month.

So what’s funny is that NFT marketplaces are providing more of a canvases model for now, where it’s an individual artwork that’s the object. Lots of artists, even famous artists with gallery representation, are selling NFTs, but the marketplaces themselves are structured on the level of the artwork. In a funny way, it kind of recreates the visual effect of the Paris Salons, where you had this enormous room in the Louvre covered in paintings and sculptures from floor to ceiling, creating an overwhelming visual spectacle where individual artworks kind of struggled to stand out from this tapestry of other ones surrounding them. That’s very much the NFT marketplace aesthetic, as compared to the modern gallery, where a singleartist show is the gold standard for display. History is not exactly repeating itself—the decentralized NFT marketplace is the opposite of the Paris Salon’s curation by an academy—but the cutting out of the middleman, of the dealer, raises some of the same questions that were raised in the past when you had artists selling their work directly into the marketplace.

AO: In the canvases model of the Paris Salons, were the public attendees also purchasing work? I ask because this discussion makes me think about all the ways in which we assign value to NFTs. In a lot of conversations

that I’ve had, people say the best NFTs are the ones that sold for the most. The sale price is almost like an adjective describing the artwork or the artist’s value. So I’m curious: who were at the Salons, and were they mostly looking, or were they buying? How does that differ from what we’re seeing today, when almost everything in the NFT space comes attached with its sale price?

AP: In the Salons, you could go in for free if you were decently dressed. That was a rare kind of mixing of social classes in old-regime Paris. There are many historical descriptions focused on the very heterogeneous audience, countesses next to fishwives—that’s the kind of joke the writers of the time would make.

In terms of whether the public was also purchasing, it’s, again, very mixed. It’s known that all of the collectors would show up at the Salon to see what was going on, but tens of thousands of people would come over the course of the run, a month, and very few of them could afford to or were interested in purchasing artworks. So a lot of the academicians were offended by the idea that anyone could come in and pronounce judgment, or that an art critic who couldn’t paint a painting well him- or herself would dare to pronounce on the artists’ talent or the paintings they’d produced that year.

The idea that the most expensive artwork is the best one is something that eighteenth-century critics would see as just utterly false. Back then, the most expensive work could just be a portrait of a very rich patron. In

Emperor Huizong, Finches and Bamboo, early 12th century, Northern Song dynasty, handscroll, ink, and color on silk,

John M. Crawford Jr. Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

the case of the Salon, the public goes in and says, you know, What’s this ridiculous portrait of this fat guy in a wig? Who is he, who does he think he is? And it obviously horrifies the artist to hear that kind of thing because portraits are such a big part of their practice, and yet that type of painting sits badly in this big Salon space. A Salon is just not the ideal condition to see portraits of individuals, especially when the public doesn’t know who they are and can’t figure out who they’re supposed to be.3

AO: This conversation has gotten me to start thinking about ownership. A lot of the appeal of NFTs is the idea that you can take something that’s digital, and therefore infinitely reproducible, and make it ownable and scarce. Historically, possession and ownership of art have been important. And then you have the Salons, where people are getting to interact with an artwork without owning it, and there’s value in that kind of dynamic relationship between viewer and art. Likewise in a museum, where attendees may go and experience art but they don’t own it. How has ownership, or the premium that people place on owning art versus viewing it, changed over time?

AP: Great question. I don’t think there’s a very clear progression from one to the other. I think it’s absolutely clear that the public display of artworks really changes in museums: they changed the extent to which people can potentially have a relationship with an artwork even if they don’t own it, right? I’m thinking of the great Thomas Bernhard novel Old Masters: A Comedy [1985], where the protagonist goes and sits in front of the same paintings in the Vienna Kunsthistoriches Museum every day and has a strange quasi-proprietary relationship with these paintings, even though he doesn’t own them, and spends much of his time yelling at people for not appreciating them.4

Conversely, I can think of ways in which collections, and what it meant to have a collection, really changed in art history. In eighteenth-century Italy, the idea was that you were creating a collection that would stay in your family’s palazzo, hung in the same way with the same works over hundreds of years. There was a different model for collecting in France, where art collectors would put together a compilation, sometimes among the best collections of paintings, and then sell it all at once at auction. They’d say, I’m not interested in Dutch seventeenth-century work anymore, I’d like now to collect something else. I’m going to get rid of this collection, I’m going to make a new one. And it was much more a relationship—almost an intellectual relationship—that would be memorialized in a book. You’d print a book illustrating your collection, saying this was what it looked like at that moment. That collection doesn’t exist anymore, they’re all in different places. It was like temporarily bringing together objects that would then lead other lives somewhere else.5 So even in art history, you can think of all these different ways in which people have understood ownership.

On the other hand, there is a long history of special relationships between collectors and the objects in their possession. You can think of the very different model in Chinese art, where some collectors would put

their seals on the borders of a painting and write texts that would then be attached to it. The collector would become a part of the history of the artwork that would then be passed down with the painting itself.

So it’s clear that a deep engagement with an artwork can happen exactly because you own it, because you live with it, because you spend time with it. NFTs again provide such a perfect test case for allowing us to disaggregate different parts of this mindset in saying that there may be a deep kind of connection that a collector can have by owning an NFT that they couldn’t have if they were just looking at it in some other digital context. Also, the choice to spend money on it, to collect, to bring it into your collection, forces the question of aesthetic judgment in a way that walking through a museum doesn’t because you don’t have to say, I’ll take it, or, I don’t want it. In the museum you can have much more of a disinterested regard. That moment of choice in collecting has interesting effects on the kind of aesthetic judgments that you make. AO: So does ownership matter in the case of crypto art?

AP: With digital/crypto artworks, there is a radical possibility for ownership not mattering, so it will be really interesting to see if it still does matter. And it does seem, to some people at least, that ownership continues to matter. It’s almost like a philosopher invented the NFT to pose this kind of question about human nature—whether we would still care about the ownership of something even if we could still enjoy it without owning it. I think that in the end, if there’s a good reason to own NFTs beyond some potential financial return, it will be something along the lines of the act of judgment that acquiring an NFT will show, and the kind of collection that you can create in putting certain works in dialogue with each other. Maybe there’s still meaning in this exercise of investing in a certain number of artworks and bringing them into your home, whether they’re digital or physical, and that act provides a different kind of experience with artworks and a depth of interaction with them that is rarely realized without the concept of ownership.

1. See Bernard Lahire, This Is Not Just a Painting: An Inquiry into Art, Domination, Magic and the Sacred, trans. Helen Morrison (Cambridge: Polity, 2019).

2. See Harrison White and Cynthia White , Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

3. See Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).

4. Thomas Bernhardt, Old Masters: A Comedy, trans. Ewald Osers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

5. See Patrick Michel, Peinture et Plaisir. Les Goûts picturaux des collectionneurs parisiens au XVIIIe siècle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011).

THE ACTUAL PICTURE

KARIN

n 2021, Karin Kneffel embarked on a new series of oil paintings, different from any thing she had made before. Derived from her photographic studies of early North ern Renaissance polychrome-painted wood sculptures, these portrait diptychs appear for the first time in the exhibition Face of a Woman, Head of a Child at Gagosian, Rome. Art historian Ulrich Wilmes provides a first look, noting how Kneffel links pictorial and empirical realities, past and present, in a topic of universal human significance.

What you see is my view of the world. I don’t want to depict real moments, but everything in the picture should be plausible and function as a pictorial reality.

—Karin Kneffel, 2022

With twelve new diptychs of women and children, Karin Kneffel has ventured into two fields of which she had always been wary: portraiture—with few exceptions, people had not previously featured in her imagery—and vertical format of medium scale. Each painting shows a

woman’s face, closely framed, and the head of a child. In terms of both content and form, then, the artist faced a challenge.

Kneffel never uses titles, leaving viewers to their own devices. However, given that she derived most of these portrayals of heads from painted sculp tures, the reference to those objects overlays the observation that we are looking at a series on the theme of the woman and child. Although this phrase might serve as a general term for the series, it is not yet an adequate interpretation of their con tent, not least because the ten diptychs based on historical artifacts are joined by two contemporary portraits. Of particular interest is Kneffel’s firstever self-portrait, which also shows her son; the other work depicts a mother and child from the artist’s inner circle.

Kneffel’s realism appeals to a “seeing” viewer who not only recognizes the objects depicted in the painting but who also views the painting as the result of a “phenomenal description” that forms “the foundation of a particular meaning that cannot be formulated any other way.”1 This distinction between “seeing” and “recognizing” was introduced by the art historian Max Imdahl

as a key element of the analytical method he called “iconism.” In his approach, these two ways of seeing merge in an act of visual appropriation: “In iconic viewing, or iconism, the picture becomes accessible as a phenomenon in which the objective, recognizing view and the formal, seeing view mediate each other, giving access to a higher order and totality of meaning that both includes and surpasses the practical experience of seeing.”2

This “difference between reality and what the picture shows,”3 in Kneffel’s words, is precisely the focus of her painting: “The reality of a picture is one reality, the reality of life another. There should be no doubt about this.”4 Over the years, the rela tionship between Kneffel’s works and reality has developed into a highly complex cosmos in which many visible layers appear to intertwine. By con trast, these new paintings take us back to her work of the early 1990s, where no multiple reflections or fogged-up windows veil our view of the subject.

The small-format pictures of animals that Knef fel also made at that time, showing cropped heads against neutral backgrounds, are thematically quite different from the new works but are compa rable in structure. By engaging in these portrayals,

with their characteristic individual physiognomies, Kneffel dealt with her anxiety about human por traiture, a genre she had felt unable to tackle at that stage in her career: “I’m interested in the theme of the portrait but painting people struck me as too complicated, too psychological, and vain, and there was also the struggle for resemblance. Which is why I chose domestic pets that everyone knows. For me, making portraits of animals involved defamil iarizing my interpretation of the animal, as well as my visual habits and prejudices.”5

Although the new pictures share an apparently simple template, like all of Kneffel’s paintings they reveal various, more complex layers of “reality.” Each layer has its own figurative and visual properties, which align in the painting. It is through process that we “see” the actual picture.

The process began with sculptures in painted wood from the fourteenth through the sixteenth century. Kneffel’s view of these diverse works enhanced her fictions about their contempo rary relevance as historical artifacts. What inter ests her, as a contemporary artist, about this reli giously and art-historically charged motif is not otherworldly ecstasy but worldly existence. The

Previous spread: Karin Kneffel, Untitled , 2021, oil on canvas, in two parts, 47 ¼ × 39 3⁄8 inches (120 x 100 cm)

Opposite: Karin Kneffel, Untitled , 2021, oil on canvas, in two parts, 47 ¼ × 39 3⁄8 inches (120 x 100 cm)

This page: Karin Kneffel, Untitled , 2021, oil on canvas, in two parts, 47 ¼ × 393⁄8 inches (120 x 100 cm)

Following spread: Karin Kneffel in her studio, Düsseldorf, Germany. Photo: Eberhard Knauber

skillfully executed sculptures she chose reveal an unusual degree of subjectivity on the part of the artists who made them. The resulting realism is at odds with the notion of supernatural perfec tion aimed for by Renaissance masters in their portrayals of the Madonna. Instead, the marked facial traits of these “women” evoke the real-world model on which each wood-carver based his work. Accordingly, one feels invited to speculate on the relationship between each model and each artist. Her status as companion or muse, perhaps with a romantic attachment, is impossible to prove; but the theory of a close, perhaps familial relationship is supported by one conspicuous fact: to varying degrees, an emphasis is evident throughout on the resemblance between woman and child. And this resemblance provides an important point of depar ture for Kneffel’s work.

Over time, Kneffel photographed these sculp tures wherever she found them, building up an archive of images that she would eventually work into paintings. Photographs are the ambivalent originals on which most of her paintings are based. Here, the transformation of a solid object into the two-dimensionality of the picture plane begins a distancing process that is central to her concept,

creating an added pictorial layer and inserting it between the reality of the original artifact and its representation. In turn, this distance enables a more intimate approach to the essence of the sculp tures themselves.

Kneffel photographed the ten woman-andchild motifs in close-up. Rather than showing the whole figure, she focused tightly on a small section, showing the woman’s face and the child’s head. She then departed from the originals by arranging her depictions of woman and child on separate can vases, and almost always in such a way that their eyes don’t meet.

Converting photographs into paintings nec essarily increases the distance between subject and image by rendering the connection between the two unclear. In and of itself, the painting pro cess challenges the picture’s bearing on the real ity of the subject. Because Kneffel’s paintings are abstractions of real objects, existing mental images and the various psycho-physiognomic interpreta tions that they evoke intervene constantly in the viewing experience.

The sculptures and their layers of paint are executed in very different styles, all to exacting standards of craftsmanship. The treatment of their

surfaces in particular has a delicate smoothness that flatters Kneffel’s painting style in the trans ference from one medium to another. Basing the paintings on photographs fosters both tactile crea tion and the contemplative experience of a homog enous surface. This reflex is intensified in the expe rience of the paintings, but the traces of historical aging processes are not erased, even if they are smoothed by the slight blur in which the paintings are bathed.

The face of each “woman” is expressive in a specific way, showing a similarity with the face of the corresponding “child.” Isolating the portraits on separate canvases gives this resemblance the air of a kind of profane devotion. The presence of such similarities, clear to a greater or lesser degree in most of the portraits, was evidently a criterion in Kneffel’s selection process.

Further features are worth noting: in most of the paired portraits the shape and position of the eyes, with their finely drawn brows, are almost identical. In one pair the traits that determine facial appearance are rendered with special deli cacy—wide-open eyes, smiles hovering around the corners of the mouths, noses with straight, slen der bridges and slightly upturned tips—revealing

striking similarities that offer irrefutable proof of the mother-child relationship and lend the faces a sympathetic approachability.

Ruddy, applelike cheeks are a shared attrib ute in some portraits, imparting a layer of sweet ness. This effect is heightened by the boy’s smile, whereas the mother looks down on the viewer with a self-assurance that borders on pride. Generally, the sightlines of the two figures run in different directions, except in one case where the mother’s eyes seem to meet those of the boy, who looks up at her from the right. This diptych also differs from the others in that the mother’s and child’s faces do not share a strong resemblance, despite the diago nal gaze that binds the two canvases into a single compositional unit.

Another diptych is unique in the series for a different reason: while the subjects of the other portraits have well-proportioned features, here the faces of both mother and child are unsightly, giv ing an impression of imperfect workmanship on the part of the sculptor. With their lack of symme try, the faces appear strangely distorted, almost comical. Their eyes gaze blankly into a void, seem ing entirely detached. Perhaps this sculpture orig inated in a folk religion, where it was revered in a specific context. The figures’ shapelessness is

underpinned by their crude garb, which frames the faces in what looks like chain mail.

The vividly rendered facial resemblances in these paintings appear as a result of the direct relationship, human and physiognomical, between mother and son. This raises the question of the sculptor’s model, and of the artist’s ties to the woman and child in the picture.

Both by nature and by comparison with the other works, the painting of the living mother and daughter and Kneffel’s self-portrait with her son appear thoroughly contemporary. They feel more true, for their appearance presents a more direct link between pictorial and empirical reality. The path from recognizing the subjects to understand ing their portrayal seems considerably shorter. The layering of reality is reduced, leading from model to photograph to painting. The women’s faces loom against dark backgrounds while the children are depicted as busts. And now the figures gaze in the same direction. The subjects of Mutter und Kind are both seen frontally, their eyes fixed firmly on the viewer; the heads in Selbstporträt mit Sohn are in different positions, the woman looking diagonally down at the boy, who is shown in three-quarter view and whose gaze is also directed downward.

The two portraits speak of very different rela tionships between the two figures. The frontal, side-by-side arrangement of the first pair gives little clue as to the tie between woman and child, since their gazes do not connect but are directed in par allel out of the picture plane. Kneffel’s self-portrait suggests a connection, as she looks down at her son, but the status of the relationship seems ambiv alent. Both works display a convincingly human relationship between woman and child, situating them within the lived reality of today, as opposed to the pictures based on historical artifacts.

Kneffel’s paintings are based on painted wooden sculptures of the Virgin Mary. The Madonna and Child is one of the most distinguished topoi in Western art history, playing an important role in the development of the worship of Mary as the mother of God—a title acknowledging the central doctrine that Jesus Christ is both truly divine and truly human. The Virgin has been worshiped since the early days of Christianity and is a key element of the popular Christian faith, which appeals to Mary as an intermediary between God and humans during their time on Earth.

These theological factors, however, played no part in either the concept for the series or the

selection of the sculptures. Nor did Kneffel seek out or choose these artifacts on the basis of their art-historical significance, although the history of painting is among her key concerns: “I am always interested in the historical aspect of painting, and that is also how I approach portraiture. An unbi ased approach to this subject is not really possi ble. Our visual habits are shaped by art history.”6 Kneffel’s formal dissolution of the mother-child unit in the original sculpture by separating them onto two canvases acts as a corrective to the rela tionship between imagined narrative and objec tive reference.

The originals on which Kneffel’s series is based are linked by chance—she discovered them all in places she visited while traveling. Each of these found objects contains traces of a specific per sonal reality, its appearance revealing a subjec tive interpretation of the mother-and-child motif. The paintings focus on the “human” dimension inherent in the figure of the mother of God. Kneffel takes the unquestioning, unconditional surrender of one’s fate to divine providence, and the conven tional role of the servile, silent woman as mother and educator, and places them within the reality of modern life. Tackling this theme is a mighty, seem ingly impossible task; for a contemporary artist, the

distance between rational knowledge and the exis tential spheres of transcendental faith would seem too great. The intrinsic accord that Kneffel identi fies in this series makes mother and child appear as human individuals. And despite the spatial dis tance between the figures, this sense of humanity creates an emotional affinity between the viewer and the motif.

What fascinated Kneffel most about the Madonna portrayals was their distinctive traits. The emphasis on family resemblance that is iden tifiable to varying degrees in the faces of these women and children gave her a starting point, and in her artistic appropriations and transformations she foregrounded the humanity sensed by both the sculptors and the viewers of the sculptures. In her own paintings, Kneffel underscores this perceived connection to create a clear link between the time less past and the present moment.

1. Max Imdahl, Giotto. Arenafresken. Ikonographie, Ikonologie, Ikonik (Munich: Fink, 1980), 99.

2. Ibid., 92–93.

3. Karin Kneffel, in Gabi Czöppan, “Ich wollte unbedingt malen,” H.O.M.E., October 2019.

4. Kneffen, in an interview with Daniel Schreiber, 2010.

5. Kneffel, in Czöppan, “Ich wollte unbedingt malen.”

6. Kneffen, in the interview with Schreiber.

Opposite: Karin Kneffel, Untitled , 2021, oil

parts, 47 ¼

(120

canvas, in

39

This page: Karin Kneffel, Untitled , 2021, oil

parts, 47 ¼

canvas, in

39

Artwork © Karin Kneffel

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Property of a Distinguished Private Collection

Diane Arbus, Identical twins, Roselle, N. J., 1966 Sotheby's Contemporary Evening Auction | May 19, 2022

Price Realized: $693,000

Sold on behalf of a client of Gagosian Art Advisory

River of Forms: Giuseppe Penone’s Drawings has been made possible by the Directorate-General for Contemporar y Creativity by the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (2021)

Unti

(Senza

1982 by Giuseppe Penone (Philadelphia Museum of Ar t: Gift of the ar tist in honor of Dina Carrara, 2019-183-88) © Giuseppe Penone/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome

Additional funding is provided by the Daniel W. Dietrich II Fund for Excellence in Contemporary Ar t, Barbara B. and Theodore R. Aronson, Ginevra Caltagirone, Ms Jennifer S. Rice and Mr Michael C. Forman Susan and James Meyer, Agnes Gund Katherine Sachs, Thomas and Alice Tisch, Constance and Sankey Williams, and ot her generous donors Support for the accompanying publication was provided by Gagosian Marian Goodman Gallery and Susan and James Meyer.

Two decades ago, if you lived in Los Angeles and received an HIV diagnosis, you were sent home with a prescription for lifesaving medication. But if you lived in Lusaka, you were sent home to die because treatments we re unavailable. We’ve made huge advances in the global fight against HIV, but COVID-19 is now threatening our hard-won global health progress.

This past spring, Ed Ruscha collaborated with Gagosian and (RED) to create a limited-edition silk twill scarf of his prescient 1986 drawing Science Is Truth Found Out.

The edition of 500 raised more than a million dollars for The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, matched by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

It’s easy to get lost in the numbers, but every dollar raised translates to lives saved, enabling the Global Fund to provide essential deliverables, including over 100,000 face masks and other PPE for medical staff, 150,000 COVID tests, and training for more than 1,000 community health workers.

We are so grateful to Ed for his generosity and we are thrilled that he has offered Science Is Truth Found Out for a winter edition of the scarf—again limited to 500 scarves sold exclusively through Gagosian, available November 2022 from the Gagosian Shop.

This limited-edition of 500 signed and numbered scarves is produced by Massif Central, a New York-based company that collaborates with contemporary artists, inspired by the trajectory of traditional French silk scarf-making that originated in the region from which the company takes its name

Neil Jenney, North America Divided, 2001-09, Oil on wood, Collection of the Artist © Neil Jenney

Neil Jenney, North America Divided, 2002-04, Oil on wood, Collection of the Artist © Neil Jenney

Capturing scenes of the landscape and everyday life, American Realism Today celebrates the rich tradition of 5HDOLVWDUWLQ$PHULFDZKLOHUHµHFWLQJWKHLQQRYDWLYHVSLULW of our contemporary times. Curated by acclaimed artist Neil Jenney, the exhibition encompasses more than 50 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by a network of 21 artists working across generations, including Robert Lobe, Kathleen Gilje, Joseph McNamara, James Prosek, Faith Ringgold, and many others.

GAME CHANGER VIRGINIA DWAN

No one in the postwar art world was more trusted and beloved than Virginia Dwan, who died on Sep tember 5 at the age of ninety. One of the foremost art philanthropists of her generation, she always engaged directly with the artists she supported to share in the spiritual peace or exhilaration of their visions. An artist herself from time to time, she took special satisfaction in Dwan Light Sanctuary, her creation at United World College in Montezuma, New Mexico. Opened in 1996 with various ecu menical ceremonies, this meditation sanctuary had its origin in a dream about the spiritual significance of the number twelve (astrological signs, months, etc.), which she associated with the experience of visiting a pueblo kiva. She took me there in 2011 to experience the meditative calm. Large prisms, designed in dialogue with Virginia by the artist Charles Ross, refract the light entering large win dows so that spectral colors slowly sweep across the walls and floors. After exhibiting at the famous Dwan Gallery in Manhattan, in the early 1970s Ross began construction of Star Axis , an obser vatory structure far outside Santa Fe, finally com pleted this year. Virginia also invited the architect Laban Wingert to collaborate on the realization of her concept. Bringing artists together, interactively when possible, with herself at the table was her modus operandi.

Enabled by an inheritance and the recent expansion of transcontinental jet service, Virginia, smart, gracious, idealistic, adventurous, and good looking, started to collect postwar art in 1959, at the age of twenty-eight, along with her husband, Philippe Kondratief. She simultaneously opened a Los Angeles gallery to bring works by prominent New York– and Paris-based artists to a West Coast audience. Eager to expand her own consciousness in the company of visionary personalities, while at the same time reducing shipping costs and has sles, Virginia invited faraway artists to visit Los Angeles with their partners, providing beachside accommodations and studio space. Once there she introduced them to local artists, such as Ed Kien holz, and to collectors and curators, some of them friends from 1950s college art classes. Word soon got out that spending a few weeks in Los Angeles to do a show with Virginia was creatively invigor ating. As a gallerist, she collaborated energetically with the artists, sponsoring and publicizing a non stop program of exhibitions, screenings, lectures, and performances, and often joined forces with her fellow LA gallerists. Lifelong dialogues with John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint-Phalle, and Jean Tinguely resulted from the hospitality she provided while coordinating something like an arts festival in March 1962, when the Merce Cunning ham dance company came to town. She offered art ists contracts with monthly stipends as advances against future acquisitions, consequently stockpil ing unsold works. Starting in the 1980s she donated hundreds of these to museums, culminating with her transformative donation to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 2016.

Success followed success. But as her marriage dissolved, in 1964 Virginia took a sabbatical from her gallery business to live in Manhattan, her pri mary home for the rest of her life. She quickly joined the patrons of the downtown artists’ coop erative Park Place. In order to accommodate an especially large sculpture by Mark di Suvero (one of the Park Place artists) at her pristine Los Angeles gallery in September 1965, she was obliged to cut a hole in the ceiling, a gesture that exemplified her commitment to doing no matter what on behalf of art while at the same time foretelling her growing awareness of the limitations of a traditional gallery for art free from commercial considerations.

Artists were crazy about her. She delighted in a postcard from Ad Reinhardt dated May 12, 1965: “I want you to show your affection for me more in public, what are people going to think otherwise . . . I want to talk to you of private matters, I want your advice about my career, I want you to be nicer to me, I want to see you.” Of course, like the other

wrote to Virginia that this show was “the only one about which I have always felt happy and satis fied—a show that was just right.”

Virginia told me that when Smithson encour aged her to read The Annotated Alice , a scholarly edition of Lewis Carroll, she identified with Alice asking the Cheshire Cat which path to take. The artist Bill Anastasi told me how thrilled the gallery artists were every Christmas when Virginia gave out gift certificates to Rizzoli’s to splurge on books and recordings. She encouraged them to make field trips and expand their minds, sharing Reinhardt’s passion for travel to open the imagination to art as a universal experience rather than a tradition related to a particular time and place. When possible, she accompanied them, to participate in and help doc ument their discoveries.

It was with Smithson most of all that she came to understand the limitations of gallery space, exhib iting physical samples, photographs, and film of his Land art works in the gallery as documentary tokens of large ideas emphatically at a remove from it. In October 1968, after conceptually sym pathetic artists, including Walter De Maria and Michael Heizer, had joined the gallery, she pre sented Earth Works , a group exhibition to investi gate and encourage this new direction. An applica tion to participate in a Swiss art fair in 1969 summa rized the mission: “We have found it increasingly difficult to operate within the traditional confines of the gallery format and our exhibitions have been, for the most part, documentations of activities and realizations of large projects which have taken place elsewhere, usually in an outdoor setting.”

established artists whose work Virginia exhibited in Los Angeles, Reinhardt was already under con tract with a New York gallery. Undaunted, Vir ginia welcomed the opportunity to assemble her own team of artists, whose works all partook of what she described in a lecture of 2004, “Selling Silence,” as a “quiet” look, with an emphasis on sublimity, conceptual rationality, energy, essence, and/or wholeness. When I first interviewed her at length, in 1984, we sat in her living room, where her Abyssinian cat danced across the rungs of a modular white wall construction by Sol LeWitt, who brought her attention to other eligible artists, including Carl Andre and Robert Smithson. Some times at her apartment in company with Reinhardt, more often at the bar Max’s Kansas City, these art ists discussed the scope and contents of a special show to be presented in October 1966, entitled 10 (because the artists could not agree on another title), that would define this new quiet look, gener ally now called Minimalism. No less a perfectionist than Agnes Martin, one of the exhibiting artists,

As if inspired by her own program, Virginia closed the gallery in 1972, without interrupting her support for special projects: Heizer’s City in remote Nevada, only recently completed fifty years later; De Maria’s first, trial version of The Lightning Field , a ten-pole installation in Arizona; and Ross’s Star Axis . She had always run the gallery at a loss and was facing tax penalties. As she decided to leave the gallery world, Virginia was aware that the Ger man dealer Heinrich Friedrich, whose Munich gal lery had presented some Dwan artists in Europe, now intended to open a space in the SoHo neigh borhood, where contemporary-art galleries were moving into larger spaces. Indeed Friedrich’s role in creating the Dia Art Foundation to support vast artist projects can be understood as an extension of Virginia’s ideas about art philanthropy.

It was when Virginia agreed to be interviewed for the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of Amer ican Art that I first met her. In 2010 she asked me to undertake a follow-up interview. It has never been my pleasure to discuss art with anyone more highminded and farsighted. Surely any account of the visionary artists she supported will be inadequate if it overlooks how crucial Virgina was in so many ways to their success.

Charles Stuckey reflects on the unparalleled life and career of the gallerist, patron, and curator Virginia Dwan, enumerating key moments from a lifetime dedicated to artists and their visions.

Virginia Dwan in her New York gallery during the exhibition Language III , May 24–June 18, 1969. Photo: Dwan Gallery records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution