Criterion Collection and Dover Street Market launch Holiday Curation In Los Angeles and New York

This holiday season, Criterion steps out from the living room and into the city, partnering with Dover Street Market to transform film history into a tactile, immersive experience. For two days only, December 13–14, dedicated installation spaces at DSM New York and DSM Los Angeles will host a carefully curated selection from the Criterion Collection—inviting visitors to browse, discover, and linger among some of cinema’s most enduring works.

At the heart of the program is a reverence for authorship and atmosphere. Collector sets spanning the radical tenderness of Agnès Varda, the baroque spectacle of Fellini, the aching romanticism of Wong Kar Wai, and the existential weight of Bergman anchor the offering, alongside Criterion milestones and cult-defining epics like Godzilla: The Showa-Era Films. Single editions punctuate the selection with sharp contrasts: the icy ritualism of Eyes Wide Shut, the restless rebellion of Breathless, the intimate spectacle of Grey Gardens, and the cultural urgency of Do the Right Thing.

The films and merchandise will remain available throughout December, extending the invitation to revisit, rewatch, and reframe the season through the language of film.

Diesel’s SS26 Collection Is Leading the Way in Democratizing Fashion

 

text by Alper Kurtul

 

Rather than presenting a collection this season, Diesel launched a game. . Milan’s streets, clubs, bars, hotels, galleries, and even its hidden corners were transformed into a giant egg hunt, turning the city into a living fashion map. Fifty-five looks appeared inside transparent capsules waiting to be found, with the first five people to discover them all receiving full Diesel looks before Christmas. 

Inside the transparent capsules, the clothes confront the city without fear. One of the looks features a pastel-printed top paired with a skirt made from soft, furry textures, cut into oval openings that reveal the hips with a mischievous wink. The long floral skirt that completes the silhouette suggests a memory of domestic comfort., Yet the futuristic enclosure and the glowing circular platform beneath the model’s feet transform that memory into a performance. This tension between intimacy and spectacle is pure Diesel. It is softness that dares to provoke.

 
 

Another look turns fragility into armor. A cloud-like explosion of fiber surrounds the shoulders and chest, as if the model had grown wings. The muted velvet skirt and floral tights extend the body like vines reaching for streetlights. A small handle bag hangs from her wrist like a treasured secret. The gaze is direct and unshaken. Diesel understands that beauty has teeth and that elegance can be a weapon.

SS26 proudly carries this attitude. Denim on denim is back in full form. The courage of the 2000s and the freedom of the 1970s meet in the same silhouettes. Bleached effects and visible seams bring the fabric’s raw essence to the surface. Distressed satin denim pulls you in with a single touch. Grey skirts, hair clips clipped into bags, leather cuffs, and metallic footwear celebrate experimentation as identity.

Accessories become characters in this story. Bags sit at a midpoint between sculpture and utility, and some are treated almost like wearable secrets with compact shapes that ask the viewer to come closer. Silver shoes and buckled heels ground the looks in a crisp present tense while futuristic jewelry sits high on the collarbone like talismans from a world where fashion and survival share the same language. Every piece is a reminder that attitude requires an object to anchor itself in the real. Diesel offers those anchors with confidence and mischief.

Jumpsuits appear as if psychedelic animal skins were taken apart and rebuilt again. Knit pieces wrap the body while refusing every expected rule. Punk-like defiance blends with pop-like shine in a single movement. Diesel chooses to redefine luxury rather than hide beneath its shadow. Fashion is a participatory act. That is why the collection is not restricted. It is shareable. People are hunting for these looks, because fashion is finally for everyone.

timo fahler’s TERMINAL CLASSIC Meditates on Personal Upheaval & Collective Uncertainty @ Sebastian Gladstone Gallery

 

timo fahler, SKYBEARER, 2025, Steel, stained glass, lead, found object, 62" H x 42" W x 4" D

 

text by Caia Cupolo

timo fahler’s TERMINAL CLASSIC is a series of eight sculptural wall works that combine images from ancient Maya culture with symbols of America power, meditating on memory, the weight of ancestry, personal upheaval and collective uncertainty. Its title refers to the period between 250-900 CE, when many of the great Maya city-states in the southern lowlands experienced a socio-political collapse and abandonment that is often referred to as the Maya Collapse. Created while the artist was moving from Los Angeles to Amsterdam, these works mark a major life change as his family expanded and emigrated.

fahler’s “SKYBEARER” in stained glass is set behind rusting window bars. This is one of the four deities responsible for holding up the sky, separating it from Earth, and making mortal life possible. His incarceration might explain what has gone so terribly wrong with the cosmic order.

In “IDYLLIC, IDEALIC, IDEA LICK, I’D EEL LICK, I DEAL ICK,” the White House is presented “like a stage prop or an empty shell, holding only the idea of something.” It serves as a potent symbol of the crumbling face of American capitalism, particularly in juxtaposition with “FLAG,” which is seen directly ahead when you enter the gallery. This buckling discarded bedspring that sat in the artist’s studio for months revealed itself as an American flag when fahler discovered that it was composed of thirteen rows. It was the very last piece he created before leaving Los Angeles.

 

timo fahler, flag, 2025, Steel, stained glass, lead, found object, 73" H x 50" w x 8" D

 

Because fahler is of mixed heritage, his work often touches on what it feels like to be caught between his Mexican and American cultures. This inner conflict is further articulated by the delicate friction between fragile, colorful glass held by rough, industrial materials, like rusted steel fences, metal bed springs, and rebar. This skillful balance of strength and fragility gives the work an almost animist sense of emotional stability.

When the light hits the stained glass, it casts vivid, colorful shadows on the wall, creating an ethereal extension to the work that is constantly transforming as the day passes. In effect, these shadows act as a performative counterpart to works that are initially perceived as purely visual. Within the changing environment, the integrity of the work and the narrative it portrays persist.

TERMINAL CLASSIC is on view through December 13 @ Sebastian Gladstone Gallery 36 White Street, New York

Beverly Buchanan in Berlin: "Beverly Buchanan. Weathering" @ Haus am Waldsee

text by Arlo Kremen


Standing a block away from the last stop of the U3 at Krumme Lanke, Haus am Waldsee, a beautiful residence turned art museum, sits by the Zehlendorf quarter’s local lake, or Waldsee. Haus am Waldsee is the only property on the lake where all visitors are free to access the water, a facet of the institution deeply in line with the ethos of the late Beverly Buchanan’s work. For her “shack” works, Buchanan regularly trespassed onto the grounds of these structures of Southern American vernacular architecture for photos and inspiration, coming face to face with many upset, disgruntled, and irritated homeowners, but also new friends. In this regular practice, she met Ms. Mary Lou Fulcron, a woman who had built her house and lived alone. In an excerpt of the artist’s writing, Buchanan shares how she helped carry logs for Ms. Fulcron, and her challenge of ingratiating herself with an isolated black woman in Georgia, a challenge that had become a regular exercise for the artist. From her brief diary entry pinned up in the show, Ms. Fulcron meant a lot to Buchanan. A woman of endurance, who, when hospitalized, escaped back to her house on foot, ten miles away, scared something would happen to her home.

These are the stories Buchanan saw in every shack she came across, with many of these structures being somewhat-restyled slave cabins. She saw power, endurance, and survival in each and every one. When speaking to curators, Beatrice Hilke and Pia-Marie Remmers told another story of Buchanan entering a home at night without a roof. All she wrote about was how clear the stars were. She never came to a home with judgment, critique, or patronizing worry; she came to these homes as if they were art objects—monuments to those who live and have lived in them.

Beverly Buchanan
Three Families (A Memorial Piece with Scars) [with legend], 1989
Print on paper
10 x 23 cm
Courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery

Ima-Abasi Okon made two accompanying works to the show. The first involved lockboxes outside the premises that take visitors to the lake and onto the private property around the museum. In these lockboxes are lube and organic materials. Lube is a substance to bring an object into a space where it does not belong. With its sexual connotations, the interaction between foreign object and intruded upon space can be procreative and pleasurable, referring to Buchanan’s trespassings and their paramount role in her practice. The other works Okon made were wall paintings covering every inch of wall with pollen. Titled Sex (2025), the walls are streaked yellow, bringing the materiality and smell of the outside inside. Here, Okon submits the walls to environmental degradation, a frequent technique of her more labor-intensive sculptural works. With a title like Sex, Okon also propounds this feature of her work as similarly pleasurable and procreative. 

A common misconception of Buchanan’s oeuvre is that she is an outsider artist. However, the artist had been exhibited at A.I.R. gallery alongside contemporary and friend Ana Mendieta and started out as an abstract expressionist under the tutelage of Norman Lewis. Buchanan was trained as an insider. Her works are of the trends of her time, land art, conceptual art, and post-minimalism, but her works have a D.I.Y. inflection to them. Her shacks, alongside her other wooden construction pieces, are undeniably in conversation with the folk art of the South. According to Buchanan, she always “made things,” never really understanding her creations as art objects until later. She began her professional life in medicine, studying parasitology at Columbia University, which brought her to New York, where she eventually connected with the Art Students’ League. 

Beverly Buchanan,
Lamar County, GA, 2003
Oil pastel on paper
56 x 76 cm
courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery

The artist suffered from several chronic illnesses, having stacks of medical bills to pay at any given time. To pay these bills, Buchanan sold many of her works for the exact prices of different bills, spreading her work across a plethora of private owners in and outside of Macon and Athens, Georgia. Hilke and Remmers, doing research in the state to prepare for this show, ventured into many homes only to find different Buchanan works on unassuming walls and tables. All of her flower works exhibited in the show came from these homes. The flowers were put together by Okon, offering a contrasting side to the artist, who, in adjoining rooms, has her still sculptural works. One such room includes her monumental frustula, cement sculptures whose molds she made from bricks and found materials like milk cartons. The frustula works, while many being of different cement mixtures, all have a timeless, enduring quality—shaped by time. The flowers, on the other hand, are electric. Quick, loose-colored scrawlings across paper build up a shape that could be called anything but still lives. Her shack pastels have an identical effect. Often exhibited with the shack sculptures, the curators made the decision to show the pastels on the second floor, overlooking the sculpture garden. By separating pastels from sculptures, both mediums could stand autonomously, the curators prevent the unfortunate hierarchy that tends to favor the shack sculptures as the more prominent representations.

Beverly Buchanan
Untitled, 1978—1980
Print on glossy paper
20 x 25 cm
Courtesy of the Estate of Beverly Buchanan and Andrew Edlin Gallery


Beverly Buchanan. Weathering took a very gentle, nuanced approach to the wide-ranging work of Beverly Buchanan, permitting her work to breathe and soak up the space as individual works and as series, while simultaneously forwarding the artist’s massive archive. Buchanan had a rigorous documentation process—photos, writings, poems, and drawings—spread by the stairwell on the second floor, situating her ephemera as a prime feature of her practice. Her archiving instinct became of sizable importance to her Marsh Ruins (1981). For this land piece on the coast of Georgia, Buchanan built a memorial to the enslaved people who, once landed on American soil, raced to the water and drowned as an act of return to their homes. Funded by the Guggenheim grant, Buchanan worked with a few other laborers to make tabby stones that blend into the swamp landscape, becoming nearly unrecognizable as human-made objects. Shown as a slideshow, the recording covers the correspondence between the artist and the Guggenheim, the work proceeds through the day-by-day photographic coverage with supplementary captions taken by the artist to prove the project was completed. Although not necessarily Marsh Ruins, the work shown is an artwork in its own right, turning bureaucratic processes into a creative act. Beverly Buchanan. Weathering showcases a nuanced approach to Buchanan’s work, all while giving visitors a glimpse into her mind to reveal a singular person who stretched her art into every corner of her life.


Beverly Buchanan. Weathering is on view through February 1st @ Haus am Waldsee, Berlin.

Clearings, Cosmos and Underground Rivers: Labubu at Highgate

text by Perry Shimon

Over the span of two days, the two most important—and certainly most online—people in my life told me about Labubu. They sketched out the general contours of this social and economic phenomenon, the latest craze in children’s collectibles, seemingly growing ever more complex alongside the development of capitalism. We did a cursory review online. One meme caught my attention: someone had photographed a Labubu on Marx’s grave at Highgate Cemetery. 

This darkly brilliant intervention invoked what Marx described as “commodity fetishism” and the difference between “use value” and “exchange value.” If we accept that Labubu has even a modicum of inherent pleasure or comfort, this would be considered its use value; the exchange value lies in the exorbitant prices and resale markets it commands.  Commodity fetishism is the hype that occludes the material and labor conditions that produce Labubu, in this case, workers in Dongguan factories where China Labor Watch has chronicled endemic overtime hours, low base wages, non-compliance with contracts, and unsafe conditions involving toxic chemicals. In some cases, Dongguan workers endure 70–100 hours per week, are cheated out of overtime pay, and are housed in overcrowded dormitories.

These small, moderately cute, and largely demonic-looking commodity fetishes embody the speculative character of financial capitalism. Collectors buy a Labubu at a dubious cost, often not even knowing exactly what they’re getting, or “blind boxing,” as it is marketed. The value of each fetish is arbitrarily determined by an artificial scarcity. Then the figures trade on secondary speculative markets, potentially generating profits. Labubu is an education in financialization for children.

A few nights earlier, I saw an acquaintance at a birthday gathering at Close-Up, a beloved east London independent cinema—a theoretical cosmologist, professor, and conceptual artist called Reza. We shared a long, convivial conversation about art, friendship, and the cosmos, and he invited me for a walk in Queen’s Wood near Highgate.

On the overground ride up to see Reza, I asked ChatGPT to elaborate Labubu for me, prompting Marxian, postmodern, and psychoanalytic readings, as well as inquiring what Sianne Ngai might have to say based on her theorization of the aesthetic dimensions of post-Fordist capitalism—and in particular her fascinating work on the cute and the gimmick. When we met at the station near his home, I gave Reza a short, AI-augmented primer and suggested we check on the Labubu status at Marx’s grave. He warmly agreed, though with what felt like minor reservation—that I later learned was the £10 fee to enter the cemetery where Marx is buried: perhaps one of the greatest perversities one could conceive.

On our walk over, Reza recounted his affectionate conversation with a transit worker at the tube station and lamented the walls that now enclosed the common grounds and cemeteries he had happily wandered in his youth. When we arrived, I informed the gentleman at the ticket counter that I was a journalist who worked for a Los Angeles-based art magazine and was here to do a story about the Labubus accumulating on Marx’s grave. “And this is my friend Reza, who’s a theoretical cosmologist,” I added.

“Um… this is above my pay grade…” the ticket seller replied, picking up a radio: “I have a journalist from an art magazine in Los Angeleese, here with a…”

“Theoretical cosmologist,” I repeated.

“…and they would like to go see if there are…”

“Any more Labubus on Marx’s grave.”

After a long pause came a slightly garbled “Well, carry on then…” and we continued along, laughing together, until we reached the small gathering around Marx’s final resting place.

There were no Labubus to be seen, though there was one raggedy Beanie Baby, quite a few flowers, and several letters. I added a Gilchester bun—a favorite sourdough roll from the beloved E5 bakery—as a kind of ofrenda. We stayed for a bit, took some pictures, and Reza suggested we continue up to the park next door, where he offered a free and relatively unobscured vista on the same spot. Minutes later, standing behind the fence and looking back on the milling pilgrims, we expressed our sadness for these dark times. We sat in the park café and shared a cold bottle of water, marveling at a red-haired child playing in the verdant grass, floating butterflies, and gently windswept trees. Over the course of our conversation Reza quoted Rumi and contoured the limits of quantum mechanics. I asked about the ludic quality of math in Babylonia and how we’ve become so ruinously obsessed with the quantifiable.

Queen’s Wood is a 21-hectare ancient woodland where stately oaks and beech canopy holly, hazel, hornbeam, and hawthorn, and are home to breeding pairs of passerines like the endangered song thrush, long praised for its melodious call. Reza walked me to a clearing in the woods and on to the mouth of the subterranean Moselle River, one of several tributaries buried in the name of progress. We quietly reflected on these fascinating spaces of revealing and concealment. Reza shared that he had taken our mutual friends here for an installment of their London Walking Collective’s peregrinations. When we passed the clearing again on the way back, it was filled with children at play, their happy song in the peaceful wood. Reza had me over for a delicious vegetarian mezze. We ate in the garden with his wife, laughing about Labubus and recounting our day.

This World Which Is Made Of Our Love For Emptiness

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
this place made from our love for that emptiness!
Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.
Praise to that happening, over and over!

For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.
Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.
Free of who I was, free of presence, free of
dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece
of straw
blown off into emptiness

These words I’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:
existence, emptiness, mountain, straw: words
and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.

—Rumi
(The Essential Rumi, trans. C. Barks)

Bugonia Marks A Cosmic Return for Yorgos Lanthimos

IMDb

text by Alper Kurtul

Fresh off his Golden Lion win in Venice with Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos returns to the Lido two years later with Bugonia, a film that brings his unmistakable dark wit to a story shaped by escalating suspense and keeps its audience on edge for two relentless hours. The project follows Kinds of Kindness, a triptych released last year that recalled the scrappy inventiveness of his early low-budget films and featured Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons in three sharply drawn roles. The pair now leads Bugonia, turning their on-screen chemistry into yet another chapter of their ongoing collaboration with Lanthimos. Stone and the director first teamed up on The Favourite, and Bugonia marks their fifth project together. The partnership has already earned her two Oscar nominations and the Poor Things win, along with a long list of other awards. Yet, the fact that Lanthimos has not made a major English-language film without her in the last five years creates an odd feeling of dependence for both artists. A similar tension surrounds Plemons. After winning Best Actor at Cannes for his work in Kinds of Kindness, he returns in a role that, on paper, looked uncannily like a continuation of that film’s universe. When Bugonia was first announced, many wondered whether the project risked becoming an unofficial fourth chapter for both actors and whether they might be repeating themselves.

Despite all of these early concerns, both Stone and Plemons rise to the challenge with remarkable command. Their performances demand intense physicality and emotional whiplash, and they navigate these extremes with precision. Bugonia also marks a shift behind the camera. For the first time in years, Lanthimos steps away from his usual writing partners. The screenplay is not penned by Tony McNamara, who crafted the acidic dialogue of The Favourite and Poor Things, nor by Efthimis Filippou, who shaped the bone-dry strangeness of Dogtooth, The Lobster, and Kinds of Kindness. Instead, the script belongs to Will Tracy, who collaborates with Lanthimos for the first time after his work on Succession and The Menu. What distinguishes Bugonia most clearly from the rest of the director’s filmography is the fact that it is his first remake.

Photo: Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features

Bugonia is a strikingly faithful reimagining of the 2003 South Korean dark comedy Save the Green Planet. Tracy adapts the original work of Jang Joon-hwan into a suburban American hostage thriller without losing the unhinged spirit of the source. The story follows Teddy, played by Plemons, a man whose mental stability is tenuous at best. Together with his cousin Don, played by Aidan Delbis, he kidnaps Michelle, the CEO of the pharmaceutical giant Auxolith, played by Stone. Teddy blames the company for the illness of his comatose mother, portrayed by Alicia Silverstone, and becomes convinced that Michelle is secretly an extraterrestrial. The film unfolds around his desperate attempt to force a confession. It opens with a wildly funny abduction sequence that leans fully into physical comedy before dropping into a far darker register once the interrogation begins. The tonal shift is sharp but purposeful, and the film settles into an atmosphere reminiscent of the alien paranoia cinema of the 1970s, blending absurdity with the rhythms of a police procedural.

Bugonia arrives in a year when the horror and thriller genres have surged with films like Sinners, Weapons, and Together signaling a cinematic landscape hungry for provocation. Lanthimos’s film fits neatly into this environment, although it remains uncertain whether it will satisfy fans who have come to expect the feverish surrealism of his past work. Visually, the director leaves behind his signature fisheye lenses and stylized framing in favor of a more conventional aesthetic. The choice feels linked to the nature of the remake and to his decision to keep the structure of the original largely intact, aside from transforming the genders of two central characters. This fidelity pulls Bugonia slightly away from the flamboyant extremity associated with his name. Yet the presence of his long-standing collaborators preserves the film’s authorship. Jerskin Fendrix, whose music for Poor Things earned an Oscar nomination, returns with a score that hums with unease. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography mirrors the story’s jittery energy, and Yorgos Mavropsaridis, who has edited nearly all of Lanthimos’s major works, brings his familiar rhythmic discipline to the project.

IMDb

Following the success of The Substance, it has become clear that festival circuits are increasingly drawn to films that flirt with body horror and other boundary-stretching genres. Audiences, too, seem eager for bold cinematic experiences. In this climate, it is no surprise that Lanthimos would take on a project with significant commercial potential while still indulging his taste for tonal risk. Bugonia ultimately delivers an entertaining experience. Its clever structural feints and its somewhat anthological-feeling finale offer unexpected pleasures without alienating viewers. Even so, the film carries a faint sense of déjà vu. After a decade of English-language work that expanded his international reach, Lanthimos seems to be arriving at a crossroads. Bugonia is engaging, inventive, and unmistakably his, yet it subtly hints at the possibility that he has started circling familiar terrain. It remains a film that few will resent, but it also invites questions about where the director will go next.

Salone del Mobile.Milano Enters Into Three-Year Partnership With Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel Hong Kong

Salone del Mobile.Milano’s new three-year partnership with Art Basel feels like a turning point for both the design world and the art market. With its debut during the VIP preview of Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, Salone introduced a quietly luxurious Collectors Lounge designed by Lissoni & Partners and filled with pieces from many of Italy’s most respected makers—names like Poltrona Frau, Molteni&C, Foscarini, Arper, and others. The intention is clear: Italian design isn’t content to orbit the art world anymore. It wants a seat at the center of the conversation.

For decades, Salone has been rooted in Milan, anchoring what is essentially the world’s most important design week. It has always been a destination for architects, buyers, and the broader design community. But the landscape has shifted. Collectors now think about furniture and lighting the way they think about art—objects that reflect taste, identity, and, increasingly, long-term value. At the same time, the art market itself has expanded into territory once reserved for architecture and design. By stepping into Art Basel’s ecosystem, Salone is acknowledging this blurred terrain and aiming to shape it rather than react to it.

Maria Porro, the president of Salone del Mobile.Milano, described the partnership as both timely and strategic. “Our role, today more than ever, is to anticipate the changes shaping the international market and to create the conditions for Italian companies to engage with new worlds, where art, design and cultural investments all come together,” she said. She makes the case that this isn’t simply about visibility but about placing design where it belongs. “Bringing Italian design into the heart of its Collectors Lounges means not only amplifying the international visibility of our companies, but enhancing the culture of design as a competitive asset.”

The Lounge in Miami is less a showroom than a carefully staged environment—soft lighting, sculptural seating, and that particular sense of calm that Italian design does so well. For the companies involved, it’s an opportunity to be in front of an audience that matters: collectors, museum patrons, developers, and cultural players who influence how taste moves globally. For those visiting, it reframes design pieces not as decorative afterthoughts but as part of the cultural landscape Art Basel has spent decades cultivating.

What’s clear is that this move is about more than one fair. By embedding itself in the Basel circuit, including the Hong Kong edition, Salone is positioning Italian design as something closer to cultural currency—objects that sit comfortably alongside contemporary art and share its language of prestige and intention.

There are challenges in crossing over so boldly, of course. The art world can be demanding; design risks becoming overly polished or drifting too far from its roots in craft and utility. Still, under Porro’s leadership, the direction feels deliberate. She has emphasized that the goal isn’t simply to place furniture in a room but to bring the “culture of design” into dialogue with a global audience.

If the partnership succeeds, it could reshape how design is collected, discussed, and valued—and, in the process, give Italian craftsmanship an even bigger role in shaping the spaces where culture is experienced today.

Autre Magazine Hosts An Intimate Dinner Celebrating Women In Arts and Motorsports At The Miami Beach EDITION During Art Week

Last night in Miami, on the occasion of Art Week, Autre Magazine, in collaboration with Driven Artists Racing Team, hosted an intimate dinner celebrating women in art and motorsports. The evening honored racecar driver Zoe Barry, who graces the magazine’s FW25 “Work In Progress” cover, and highlighted the dynamic intersection of creative expression and high-performance racing. Supported by CADDIS, the gathering brought together cultural luminaries—including musician and artist Kid Cudi, George Clinton, Crystal Waters, Olivier Picasso, Jeffrey Deitch, Tony Shafrazi, Spring McManus, and more—who dined family-style under the stars at The Miami Beach EDITION’s Matador Terrace. The evening celebrated artistry, innovation, and the bold spirit of women leading in both the arts and motorsports.

Surrealism's Provenance: "Networks of Surrealism" @ Neue Nationalgalerie

André Masson
Massaker “Massacre,” 1931
Oil on canvas
120 x 160 cm
Courtesy of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch

text by Arlo Kremen


Tucked behind the cafe and gift shop of the Neue Nationalgalerie sits a modest L-shaped gallery space. Enough room to fit a medium-sized show, one would not expect it to be used to host the Surrealists’ international cohort, who could very well fill the entire museum with their verbose oeuvre. As such, Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning: Networks of Surrealism has a specific aim, a narrowing agent succinct enough as to make the gallery space feel appropriately expansive to cover the community of artists with twenty-six works. The show homes in on provenance, tracking each displayed painting sourced from the Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch Collection.

In 2023, around 100 artworks from the Pietzsch Collection received careful attention from researchers seeking to uncover each work’s origin and the succession of owners. The goal was to ascertain whether Nazi persecution played a factor in the shifting of ownership. During the Nazi occupation in France, the Surrealists and their interlocutors had to make a decision: flee into exile, remain as a part of the resistance, or go into hiding. This collection began in the 1970s and ended in the 2000s, acquiring works from galleries, dealers, and auction houses globally. The couple’s 2010 donation to the State of Berlin made this show and its research possible.

 
 

The show maps the provenance timeline of each displayed work, bringing historical narratives into the foreground. Biographical exhibitions can be a challenge. In a slightly different educational gesture than the anti-intellectualism plaguing museum plaques, where artists’ personal details take priority over the work itself, the work of art here still takes a secondary position to information. Art represents a story and thus loses its autonomy. The work is no longer important because it is art; the work is important for the history it represents. This approach attempts to give the gallery-goer a painless point of entry into art and meaning-making at large, but it never fails to come across as patronizing and distrustful of the audience’s intellect, assigning identity and history as prime tools for interpretation rather than the age-old skill of looking.

Many works benefited from the exhibition’s pursuit of historical narrative, unveiling colorful details of the Circle’s interpersonal affairs. The first painting of the show, Miró’s “The Arrow Piercing Smoke,” had originally been owned by the man it was dedicated to, Serge Lifar. The Ukrainian-French dancer and choreographer was a member of the notorious “Ballets Russes” and had worked closely with Max Ernst in costume and stage design. Appointed a year before and holding on to his directorship of the Ballet wing of the Paris Opera during Nazi Occupation, he was removed briefly for Nazi collaboration once the German occupying force retreated from France. “The Arrow Piercing Smoke” was held by Lifar for about thirty-six years before the painting’s acquisition by Paul Pétridès, where, at some point in the mid-1960s, it made the same leap across the Atlantic that Miró made to New York City nearly twenty years prior, eventually settling into the home of Alexander and Louisa Calder. While not necessarily about the art, the information supplementing the work poses it more as an object used to better understand the inner workings, members, associates, and the political landscape of the Surrealist diaspora.

Joan Miró
The Arrow Piercing Smoke, 1926
Oil on canvas
40 x 56 cm
Courtesy of Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch

The show has quite a few Ernst paintings given its relatively small size. And this is by no means a critique—he was not only one of the most central figures of the movement but also was interned at Les Milles, the concentration camp that would inspire his escape to the US with Peggy Guggenheim during his second arrest. His life is tinged with the effects of Nazi occupation, the driving narratological force of the show, but this fact led to a reliance on indirect ties to Nazism on the part of his displayed work. Kurt Siegelmann had many works alongside Ernst at the Exposition internationale du Surréalisme. He also held on to Ernst’s Garden Airplane Trap. Due to Siegelmann’s Judaism, he brought the painting with him to the US to avoid Nazi persecution. Another exhibited Ernst painting belonged to a different Jewish artist, Tristan Tzara, to whom Ernst gifted his painting Two Nude Girls, which remained in Tzara’s possession until his death in 1963, following his move to Marseille and his involvement in the French Resistance. Another displayed Ernst painting, Gala, Max and Paul, is a far cry from Garden Airplane Trap and Two Nude Girls, whose provenance is inseparable from Nazi persecution. Gala, Max, and Paul tells the story of Ernst’s ménage à trois with Paul and Gala Éluard. Despite being wonderfully scandalous biographical details, its inclusion in this show feels askew. A dramatic tone shift towards the playful fits poorly among so many artistic artifacts whose histories speak to evading Nazi destruction. Such an inclusion possibly hints, if read ungenerously, as wall filler or, more likely, an incomplete concept. 

To exhibit a show where wall texts are more important than the paintings themselves is undoubtedly bizarre, a strangeness that permeated the gallery. Walking through the show, it felt out of place in an art museum like the Neue Nationalgalerie—possibly resonating more with a public archive or history museum than with an art institution. To study color and form felt antithetical to the curators’ mission, and yet, the format of an art show prevents combing through extensive texts, as the form necessitates the primacy of artworks. Networks of Surrealism was between an art exhibition and a historical exhibition, and in an attempt to straddle both, was left with two feet in the air.


Max Ernst to Dorothea Tanning: Networks of Surrealism is on view through March 1 @ Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Straße 50, Berlin

Read An Interview of Author Tea Hačić-Vlahović on Her Latest Novel 'Give Me Danger' →

The structure of the natural and manufactured world may be a nodal web of endless coequal expansion, but if enough people accept a longitudinal hierarchy as their shared reality, mass hysteria ensues, and a social ladder becomes solid enough to climb. Such has been the case since the dawn of human imperialism, and ever since, those of us who can see the undressed emperor have always easily picked one another out in the crowd. I picked journalist and author Tea Hačić-Vlahović out from this crowd the first time I read her work. So, too, did Giancarlo DiTrapano, the late and legendary editor/publisher of Tyrant Books. A beloved champion of young and daring writers, DiTrapano resuscitated an indie lit scene that had been idling on life support for nearly a generation. He saw the hidden potential in writers like Hačić-Vlahović, whose unpolished prose needed just the right amount of elbow grease to elevate their natural patina. It was only a month before he passed in March of 2021 when Tea texted to tell me that he was planning to publish her second novel, A Cigarette Lit Backwards, and that she had incorporated a small anecdote I had shared with her a year earlier. Her third and most recent novel, Give Me Danger, builds on this lived reality, only in this fictionalized version, her lead character Val’s first novel is a lowbrow bestseller, and her dreams of gaining clout in the indie lit scene are dashed by the news of her would-be publisher’s demise. Val struggles to wade through the gatekeeping social climbers who constitute his outer entourage so that she can simply pay her respects, and her experiences navigating the pomp and circumstance of those who consider themselves the cultural elite are a left-of-center mirror reflecting under an alternating strobe of moody and halogen lighting. Read more.

Transience by Ryan Molnar and Natalia Farnaus

photography by Ryan Molnar
styling by Natalia Farnaus
model Marie Kippe
makeup by Paloma Brytscha
hair by Masayuki Yuasa

shirt, dress, shorts, tights, shoes VALENTINO

shirt, dress VALENTINO

black longsleeve STYLIST’S OWN
black top with fur trimmings ABLONDI
brown skirt REPARTO
tights FALKE
shoes AEYDE

high-neck top, jacket, leggings & boots LOUIS VUITTON

shirt, belt, skirt JULIE KEGELS
shoes AEYDE

blouse LOUIS VUITTON
skirt JADE CROPPER
tights FALKE
shoes AEYDE

blouse LOUIS VUITTON
skirt JADE CROPPER
tights FALKE
shoes AEYDE

Autre Magazine Presents Performa Biennial's Grand Finale with Mother Daughter Holy Spirit In New York

Last weekend, Autre magazine presented the grand finale closing event for the 20th anniversary of the Performa Biennial, co-hosted with trans rights fundraiser Mother Daughter Holy Spirit. A highlight of the evening was a special and rare performance from house legend Crystal Waters who performed her iconic track, “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless).” A very special thanks to Staud for the support. photographs by Oliver Kupper

The Choreography of Posting Online: Read an Interview of Maya Man

 

Photo by Charlotte Ercoli

 

interview by Emma Grimes

Maya Man is a New York-based digital artist whose work probes the changing landscape of identity, femininity, and authenticity in online and offline culture. Through websites, code, and generative AI projects, she explores how we perform ourselves in digital environments.

One of her signature projects is Glance Back, a browser extension that randomly takes a photo of users on their computers every day. Created in 2018, the project archives what Man calls “the moments shared between you and your computer,” turning the quotidian encounters with our devices into a digital diary. She is also the creator of FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT, a coffee-table book that compiles her generative artworks styled after the glossy and aesthetically pleasing graphics commonly found on Instagram.

Central to her practice are questions of authenticity and performance: what does it mean to perform and post on the internet today? Is performance inherently corrosive or just another facet of human expression? For Man, she tackles these questions with thoughtful nuance.

Her latest project, StarQuest, is a solo-exhibition currently on view at Feral File. Drawing on her own childhood as a competitive dancer, Man uses generative AI to restage the choreography and interpersonal dramas of the cult reality series Dance Moms. Read More.

Read An Interview Of Gallerist & Editor Oyinkansola Dada →

An image of Oyinkan Dada at the DADA gallery launch

Sahara Longe: Deceit, 2025 | Green and purple nude, 2025

interview by Lola Titilayo
photography by Adedamola

Sitting at the intersection of art, culture and fashion, Oyinkansola Dada is a multidimensional creative force. Trained as a lawyer but driven by a deep commitment to storytelling and cultural awareness, she has become one of the most dynamic connectors of artists across the African diaspora. As the founder of Dada Gallery, DADA Magazine, and the style-driven cultural phenomenon Lagos Is Burning, she has built a community that uplifts emerging voices while redefining how contemporary African creativity is seen and celebrated. With the recent opening of her first permanent gallery space in Lagos, Dada continues to shape the continent’s cultural landscape; promoting authenticity and creating spaces where African art and identity can thrive globally. Read more. more.

Volta Collective’s Loneliness Triptych Questions the Source of Our Unsettling Discomfort with Solitude @ New Theater in Hollywood

text by Summer Bowie
photographs by Roman Koval

As feelings of isolation grow increasingly profound in our society, it seems logical that we would bifurcate our psyche in an effort to keep ourselves company. Julian Jaynes, an American psychologist, proposed that the human race began with what he called a bicameral mentality, where our inner monologue was believed to be the voice of external gods making commands. There was no self-reflection, no ability to perform executive ego functions, such as deliberate mind-wandering and conscious introspection. British philologist Arthur William Hope Adkins believed that ancient Greek civilization developed ego-centered psychology as an adaptation to living in city-states. Could it be possible that the development of those city-states into supermetropolises infinitely connected by social media might effectively bend the arc of our psychological universe back toward bicameralism? Might Narcissus look so deeply in the mirror that he would eventually forget its existence?

Volta Collective’s Loneliness Triptych comprises three acts and an epilogue, directed and choreographed by Mamie Green, with a live, original score by Dylan Fujioka. When the house doors open, the stage is occupied by a rotating, black office chair, a folding chair, a small area rug, and an inflatable mattress propped against the wall. The first act, titled “Doppelganger,” begins with two women played by Bella Allen and Anne Kim. They are dressed identically in white tanks and black pants. One lies down on the rug so that the other can roll her up like a fresh corpse. Our narrator, Raven Scott, watches from above, the twin dancers serving as stand-ins for her allegory’s rotating cast of characters. She walks down the stairs to a mysteriously ambient symphony of bells, strings, and keys recounting her experience with cinema escapism—a coping mechanism for loneliness so firmly tied to the 20th century that you could almost feel nostalgic for it. She speculates on whether movies might actually be able to watch us back and celebrates the cyclical nature of time captured on reels of celluloid. The dancers start this act as a duet while our narrator tells their story. By the end, our narrator becomes integrated into the dance, the divide between subject and objects dissolves, forming endless constellations of triplets.

From the red velvet seats of the movie theater, we’re thrust into the 21st century with “Camgirl,” the second act, written by Lily Lady and played by themself and Mandolin Burns. Sonically, it feels as though we’re in a yoga studio and our heroes aren’t dressed identically, but their shared vibe is equal parts casual and sexy. They walk toward each other from opposite corners of the stage and meet in the center with the inflatable mattress. Lady rolls like a log across the mattress, mirroring the opening of the first act with the rug. Our camgirl doesn’t need a camera. Its existence is as inherent as the audience they can scarcely see behind the stage lights. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger wrote: “​​A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping.” Lady claims that they’ll do anything to avoid pain as their alter ego supports them through endless bouts of self-pity. The two embrace from either side of the mattress, and move together as a trio that is only two-thirds human. The mattress slowly deflates until the two melt into an embrace on the floor. The lights go red and the music gets industrial. Our dancers skip together across the stage; Burn fires on all cylinders in a solo dance that ends with her wrapping the deflated mattress around her body like a dress while Lady watches and contemplates a “form of introspection that ceases to be disaffected and self-indulgent.”

Act three, “The Kid,” eschews the text, pulling us into a pure movement experience with the office chair performed by Ryan Green and Ryley Polak. Practically indistinguishable in size and shape, they form a twisted counterbalance on the chair as it spins slowly centerstage. I’m reminded of how difficult it is to truly carry the full weight of oneself—to be solely responsible for the consequences of one’s existence. They are like the opposing forces of the id and superego, constantly keeping one another in check. The inertia of their movement echoes the chaotic percussion of dissonant, grungy drums and electronic glitching. Supporting one another through inversions and barrelling leaps through the air, their dance is an endless chain reaction of ever-impressive acrobatics. Suddenly, they are bathed in an ethereal overhead spotlight, and their spinning turns to melting. They’re like cogs propelling one another with teeth turning on opposite planes. Unlike the previous acts, their ending feels quietly triumphant.

The epilogue is populated by all of the dancers at once. The New Theater stage can hardly contain all seven of them, and yet each feels just as lonely as ever. Our cast is a mix of trained dancers and actors who know how to move. However, they don’t feel mismatched as mirrors. Their talents are perfectly complementary and masterfully executed. Green’s trademark, multidisciplinary approach to theater has found its most subtle balance in Loneliness Triptych. Her players embody their characters while allowing the text, music, and choreography to inform their lived experiences. They film themselves as they vape and exchange props to a remix of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River,” a turn-of-the-century ballad about refusing to forgive. We’re left to wonder if the source of our loneliness isn’t simply a product of our elective, disaffected self-indulgence. If we do not, indeed, prefer it.

Tehching Hsieh Made Time His Medium

Tehching Hsieh
One-Year Performance 1978-1979 (Cage Piece)
Photo: Cheng Wei Kuong

text by Hank Manning

After driving past horse farms on the way to Beacon, a suburb an hour north of New York City, I entered the Dia to join a sea of guests from around the world. We had come to see the oeuvre of Tehching Hsieh, a performance artist who completed six durational pieces between 1978 and 1999 and has since declared himself no longer an artist. However, the exhibition, which he helped design for its two-year run that began in October, is as much a work of art in its entirety as any of its particulars on display. 

For his first one-year performance, Hsieh lived in a small cell in his studio, furnished with a bed and sink, pledging to abstain from speaking, reading, and writing entirely. A friend helped him daily by supplying food and cleaning his waste, as well as taking a daily portrait photograph; all 365 now hang in chronological order. We also see the cell that was Hsieh’s home, still furnished with the material goods he had: paper towels, toothpaste, a glass, mattress, gray blanket, bucket, and a change of clothes labeled with his name. 

Installation view. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York

Next, in Time Clock Piece, Hsieh took even more photos—one every hour, on the hour, again for an entire year. The next exhibition space takes the form of a square with the same proportions as the first. These self-portraits are also hung in chronological order, underneath punch cards he stamped for each. Posed next to a clock, they serve as evidence that he rarely slept more than fifty minutes at a time, although Hsieh does list the occasional instances when he failed to clock in due to sleeping through his alarm. 

Seemingly tired of spending too much time in his studio, Hsieh proceeded to the opposite extreme—he attempted to spend an entire year outdoors. Daily maps document his walks around lower Manhattan. He also penned the times and locations he ate, defecated, and slept. (To my surprise, he seems to have returned to typical eight-hour nights.) To survive the harsher environment, he had heavier clothes than his prior prison-like attire and carried a few new items, including an “I ❤︎ NY” plastic shopping bag, a radio, and a Swiss Army knife, all now on display. Again, Hsieh gives full disclosure: police detained him for fifteen hours—unfortunately indoors—after getting into a street fight.

Hsieh’s fourth year-long performance was his most collaborative—he spent the entire year attached by an eight-foot rope to fellow artist Linda Montano. The two, staying close together but avoiding touch, were not a couple and had not met prior. Their daily photos show mundane activities—sleeping, cooking, typing. A few days are labeled “Fight.”

The next two rooms take up an equal amount of space in the museum as the previous four. For his final year-long performance, Hsieh declared that he would neither make, look at, read, nor discuss art. Then, for thirteen years straight, he would make art but not publicly reveal it. At the end of this final performance, he released only one piece, which looks like a ransom note reading: “I kept myself alive.” Whatever else he did to occupy his time, the exhibition provides no hints: the two rooms are nearly entirely unadorned. Walking through these open rooms after looking so carefully at each day’s record in the previous four inspires a sense of awe. We imagine the freedom Hsieh may have experienced in contrast to the passage of time in our own lives. 

Installation view. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York

The exhibition is constructed like a scale model of Hsieh’s life experiences. We see photographs taken from every day of his first four strenuous pieces, experiencing time at an accelerated rate, but at the same consistent intervals he charted his progress. Beginning each with a shaved head, his hair is almost the only discernible change over the spans of the first two projects, while the latter two show a vast number of environments. The small spaces between each room even estimate the “life time” (rather than “art time”) of under less than one year Hsieh passed between each piece.

“Why did he do this?” a six-year-old girl asked aloud what we were all wondering. Walking through and imagining myself attempting and failing any similar feat in a fraction of the time, I perceived the work as effective social commentary. After all, no matter how much I assume Hsieh suffered, many people’s real-life situations are even more perilous, as they live in prison cells or unhoused involuntarily and indefinitely.

 

Tehching Hsieh
One Year Performance 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece)

 

Alternatively, it is easy to see Hsieh as a trendsetter. Today, online influencers gain followings through any number of stunts, from, like Hsieh, living in intentionally difficult situations, to the more inane, like counting up to a million or eating dangerous quantities of food. Hsieh likewise often welcomed audiences. While living in his cell, he opened his studio for six-hour periods, allowing anyone to come and see him in person. Living outdoors and then with Montano, he advertised public meetups via flyer. 

But Hsieh claims neither of those ambitions. He says he struggled when he first moved to New York, undocumented, spending six years feeling like he just went back and forth between his home and the restaurants where he worked. He asked and answered himself: “What am I looking for? I am already in the piece.” Art comes from life, and life’s most basic and important element is time.

Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999 is on view at Dia, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, New York

Bisa Butler Weaves An Endless World of Love in “Hold Me Close” @ Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles

A close-up of a quilt by Bisa Butler, depicting a man and woman embraced, looking into the distance calmly.

Bisa Butler
Les Amoureux du Kinshasa, 2025
After Amoureux Au Nightclub, 1951-1975 by Jean Depara
Cotton, silk, lace, sequins, netting, vinyl, glass rhinestones, plastic beads, and velvet, quilted and appliquéd
95 x 59 inches
Photo by Mark Woods. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles

text by Laila Reshad

Bisa Butler’s Hold Me Close at Jeffrey Deitch is a reflective meditation on forever, negotiating our allowances to seek closeness in one another in a polarizing and alienating landscape disfigured by reality, by today. Where reality warps our sense of relationality to time and place, it is such that Butler’s intricately woven and layered mosaics of memory, whether contrived or lived, speak to a far more precedented truth that is largely absent in works of the contemporary American canon. Butler’s work is truthful and radical, a headstrong resilience narrating the stories of each person stitched into memory. In each depicted face, whether solemn, or overjoyed, we are pulled into their complex and vivid worlds. The works are full of life and detail, and I contemplate how they can be so easy on the eyes and yet distinctly subversive. Layers of tinted fabric composite countless pieces into faces, projecting color onto each world the characters inhabit. Intricate embroidery overlays each face, elevating the cosmic feeling that comes about when viewing the pieces in stillness for a while. The images that form begin to take shape and breathe–we really stand before the people we look upon, peering into their inner worlds and the intimate moments they exchange among each other, between us and them.

Butler’s journey was more complicated, having come into the medium as a young art student. She explains, “Professionally, I made my first quilt when I studied art at Howard in my B.F.A., but I was a painting major. I really didn’t have the license to go canvas-free until I took a fibers class at Montclair State, of which the whole entire fibers curriculum was probably initiated in the ’70s by white women, feminist professors who pushed that all art students at Montclair State had to not just have the regular foundations–which was drawing, painting, sculpture, design–but they also pushed that you had to have fibers and jewelry making. Thank goodness they did that because I was the beneficiary of it.” From there, Butler took on what came naturally to her and so continued her lifelong dedication to experimentation, to pushing herself across mediums, to endless possibilities. When I ask if she still considers herself a painter, she says, “I feel your creativity ends with you when you stop living. So whatever I put my mind to, I am. Right now, I’m doing fiber, and maybe I’ll do that forever, but maybe not. I’m starting to wander into sculpture, thinking about soft sculpture. Before I’m working, I’m sketching. I’m still designing clothing. I’ve been making purses lately. I remember seeing Jean-Michel Basquiat’s grave, which just reads ‘artist.’ I think ‘artist’ is good, it covers all the bases. I feel like my talent has always been limitless.”

 

Bisa Butler
Hold Me Close (My Starship), 2025
After Untitled, 1974 by Steve Edson
Cotton, silk, lace, sequins, netting, vinyl, faux fur, and velvet, quilted and appliquéd
90.5 x 54 inches
Photo by Mark Woods. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles

 

There’s a genealogical nature to quilting, particularly in its ties to Black history both domestically and abroad, that communicates family history, positionality, class, background, ethnic origin, and cultural practices. Butler’s work is inventive and rooted in a knowledge of the history that shapes and informs her work, even though she doesn’t have a direct familial tie to a quilting ancestry–she takes shape and fills a void to synthesize the two sectors of culture she negotiates between, both Black American history and African history. The matrons of quilting have certainly informed her work from a critical perspective, explains Butler, “I went to the Whitney and I see all these quilts on the wall by African-American women, specifically the quilters of Gee’s Bend, which had last names like that of the Pettways. I thought these women were wealthy. I thought each one in the show was a famous artist. You have a show at the Whitney. You have to be making money. I was walking around the room thinking, I got it. I know what I'm going to do now. I’m going to be a fine art quilter just like them.” 

Butler not only calls on the women of Gee’s Bend, whose work solidified her aspirations of becoming a quilter, but also the women of Ghana who use varied patterns in their quilting practices to signify fertility, wealth, class, and obscured ruminations on marriage and family, among many other things. So many messages are implicit and visible in her work, but the most engaging component is the various ways in which she subtly reinforces the narrative of the quilts. She establishes a legacy in her lineage, pushing forward what it means to shape and colorize fragmented or disregarded memories that matter. Saidiya Hartman conceptualizes this possibility when she writes on “critical fabulation,” wherein the absence allows for something to grow, for truth to emerge in what the Black artist materializes grounded in a Black historical truth. Butler constructs moving portraits of Black life, and through this, she historicizes a consciousness of her experiences, enmeshing them with ruminations on community, love, and her own familial ties. We don’t know who each subject is, but they are real, and we see their most intimate and honest forms when we look at them in these portraits. Butler expands the possibilities of the quilting canon, directing and dialoguing new approaches to the discipline by working through the absence of an archive, and by narrativizing the social and political themes of her work. She takes on the question of Black joy and resilience in the face of growing political and social tensions in the United States, suggesting that in order to feel seen, one must seek safety in a tender closeness. Through this, she stewards what we know to be true across cultures, languages, and even words: that our memories are shaped by those who help us feel safe in our daily lives.

Butler traces some of her earliest quilting work to her own family, crediting her father for the materials that opened the door to the themes she continues to unpack in her work today. She explains, “One of my first quilts was an imagined portrait of my grandfather. My father’s from Ghana, born in 1939 in a more rural part of Ghana in the north. Very agrarian. And he doesn’t have any photographs of his dad, so I never knew what he looked like. That’s always been in my mind, you know, what did my grandfather look like? What did he sound like? What was he like? I decided that I would find a photo of an elderly northern Ghanaian man because they have a specific kind of look. When African people see me, especially if they’ve traveled extensively, they know not only that I’m Ghanaian, but they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re from the north.’ It’s something about the sort of long narrowness of my face and my nose. So, I found a picture of a man, and I made my first quilt.”

 

Bisa Butler
Coco With Morning Glories, 2024
After Coco, 1993 by Dana Lixenberg
Cotton, silk, lace, netting, tulle, sequins, glitter, beads, glass gems, metal beads, silk and polyester woven fabric and velvet, quilted and appliquéd
84 x 55 inches
Private Collection
Photo by Zachary Balber. Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles

 

“I was using my father’s dashikis from the ’60s because I couldn’t afford fabric. I asked him, ‘Do you mind if I use these?’ not thinking. I just wanted African fabric because I thought this would be a good way to tell the story of a man from Africa. But it wasn't until it was done that I realized, oh, these are my father’s shirts. My father is one of those people who’s worn cologne his whole life. When I go into his room or touch his things, I can smell his cologne, and his shirts faintly smell like cologne. My grandfather's DNA is in my father. My grandfather’s DNA was in the portrait I made of him.” Butler’s lifelong dedication to her craft was solidified after this first project. “After seeing the Whitney exhibition on quilts at that time, I felt successful with that portrait. I felt like my father loved it. I loved it.”

An archival project in a stream of consciousness, Bisa Butler intentionally selects her materials to immortalize those who came before her in the fabric of time and memory. Perhaps this is what her larger project is: to solidify people in textural form. Textiles woven and stitched into each other, culminating into a whole that feels like we’ll know them forever. The exhibition was born out of our political time–the isolative, alienating properties of emotion Butler was working through. They leave us with a desire for our own versions of the depicted affections on display, a brazen introspection. Coco with Morning Glories (2024) depicts a pregnant woman looking into the distance contemplatively, a soon-to-be mother filled with warmth and hopefulness. She reflects, “Theorizing what I would put together really came from this moment that we’re in...I called the show Hold Me Close because that’s how I was feeling, like, goodness, I need somebody to hold me because I’m feeling terrified all the time. And that’s not a good state to be in. When we’re in a time of crisis, human beings, we usually band together. I was looking for images of people who were engaged in comforting each other, lighthearted moments, intimate moments. It could be mother and child, or father and child, lovers, friends. Most of the pieces in the show feature two people in them. There’s one with a very pregnant woman…. My grandmother had ten kids, and I was having my first daughter. I think I was exactly nine months pregnant. I was like, ‘I cannot wait for this baby to be born.’ My grandmother said, ‘This is the best time. You don’t realize it. Your baby is totally safe right now. You don’t have to worry. Are they cold? Are they tired? Are they hungry?’ The pregnant woman is also holding her baby very close.” Bisa Butler’s world of love is endless, is forever.

Vaginal Davis’s Magnificent Product Chronicles Five Decades of Her Playful Defiance @ MoMA PS1

Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

text and photographs by Isabella Bernabeo

Magnificent Product marks Vaginal Davis’s first major US institutional show, presenting art from her early Los Angeles projects to her more recent Berlin-based creations. Organized thematically instead of chronologically, the works take viewers on a journey filled with vivid colors, humor, and emotion.

Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

The exhibition begins in a light mint-green room titled Naked on my Ozgod: Fausthaus – Anal Deep Throat. This square room features green sheer curtains along every wall, with hundreds of photos from Davis’s early Los Angeles years covering the walls behind the fabric. Visitors are invited to slowly peel away the fabric from the wall to get an intimate view into Davis’s personal life before seducing them into the next room. This section is inspired by one of her first art exhibitions, originally held at the Pio Pico Library in Los Angeles. 

In the next space, HAG, Davis reconstructs her old Sunset Boulevard apartment in Los Angeles, the site where she produced many iconic zines, such as Shrimp, Yes, Ms. Davis, and Sucker. The dimly lit room glows pink and includes a walk-in box in the center. Inside, its walls display drawings and figurines of a woman’s head, possibly self-portraits. The slanted floor creates a warped, unbalanced environment that meshes reality with fantasy, just like the work it supports. 

Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

Another engaging room in Davis’s collection is HOFPFISTEREI, where visitors are encouraged to interact with her artwork. A table and four chairs occupy the room’s center, surrounded by piles of Davis’s zines, writings, and creations. A photocopier stands nearby for visitors to print out copies to take home. 

Davis also utilizes a screening room, which resembles the Cinerama Dome movie theater that operated on Sunset Boulevard from 1963 until 2021. Here you can watch low-fi videos she created during the 1980s, showcasing her range of personas as an artist, queer activist, self-proclaimed “Blacktress,” and more. These recordings, much like the earlier photos, give visitors a detailed and in-depth view into Davis’s life; they’re a testament to how interconnected her art is with her identity. 

Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

Another striking installment is from her Wicked Pavilion collection, displaying a reimagined version of Davis’s teenage bedroom. However, instead of her in the rotating bed, a large phallic sculpture sits in the space. The room is completely pink, from the walls to the rug to the curtains. A miniature desk sits in the right corner, topped with two lamps, a pile of jewelry, and an array of colored nail polish, hinting that Davis’s has relished dressing up as the showstopper she is since her youth. 

Along the ceiling, dozens of images are hung from a clothesline. These photos are of Davis’s muses, such as actor Michael Pitt or actress Isabella Rossellini. While visitors take a look around the bedroom, they listen to a mix of the song, “A Love Like Ours,” from the 1944 film Two Girls and a Sailor, interviews that Davis herself conducted for LA Weekly in 1996, and a voice message from Davis’s own secret admirer, creating a fully-immersive experience.   

Magnificent Production by Vaginal Davis, MoMA PS1, 2025. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

Across all of these works, Davis’s playfulness and defiance shine through. Magnificent Product is a living experience that can be overwhelming at times, yet each room offers a sense of freedom. Davis commands her viewers’ attention—and she intends it that way. 

Magnificent Product is on view through  March 2 @ MoMA PS1 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens

Read an Interview of Mariko Mori, the Japanese Artist Redefining Light, Time, and Spirituality →

Mariko Mori: Radiance at Sean Kelly, New York, October 31 – December 20, 2025, Photography: Jason Wyche, Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York

interview by Alper Kurtul

Tokyo’s energy, New York’s boundless creativity, and Miyako Island’s quiet, almost womb-like protective nature. Japanese artist Mariko Mori redefines light, time, and space as she moves between these different worlds. Her latest project, Radiance, brings together ancient stone spirituality and advanced technology to make the invisible visible. Her self-designed home, Yuputira, which she dedicates to the sun god, is not merely a living space for her; it is the architecture of becoming one with nature. Ahead of her upcoming retrospective, Mori shares with us both the source of her creativity and the enduring meaning of silence in the contemporary world. Read more.

Sharon Eyal: Into the Hairy at Sadler’s Wells

text by Lara Monro
photographs by Katerina Jebb

This Thursday, Sadler’s Wells will showcase Into the Hairy, the newest work from Sharon Eyal and longtime collaborator Gai Behar. Created for S-E-D Dance Company, the piece further refines Eyal’s unique choreographic language: a vocabulary of subtle intensities where sensation becomes form and form becomes meaning.

Those familiar with Eyal’s universe will recognize the pulse: a charged, hypnotic physicality that sits somewhere between ritual, runway, and rave. But Into the Hairy marks a shift, a paring back. As Eyal has recently said, her work has become “more precise, more clean, more pure, more minimalistic… less is much, much more.” What remains is movement distilled to its emotional core. 

 
 

Co-commissioned by Sadler’s Wells and created in close dialogue with London-based producer Koreless, the work is set to an original score that seems to emerge like breath through the body. Eight dancers move in unison that is both fierce and strangely intimate, the kind of togetherness that, as Eyal herself puts it, can make one feel “even more alone.” Clad in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s sculptural bodysuits, their forms are sharply visible; muscles, tremors, and the subtle hesitations of choice read like text.

Eyal often speaks of being uninterested in comfort. She wants the struggle, the fracture lines, the place where control and surrender collide. “Everything you see starts with my body,” she has said, improvisations that are then mapped, repeated, and refined until they become something shared. In Into the Hairy, that process is palpable. The dancers carry a vulnerability so present it feels like a kind of heat on the surface of the skin.

The result is both sensual and severe. A work that holds the paradox of contemporary life: closeness and distance, ecstasy and restraint, the collective pulse and the solitary self. It is a reminder that the body is an archive, that movement can speak before language, that emotion doesn’t need to explain itself to be understood. At Sadler’s Wells, Into the Hairy arrives not simply as a work of choreography, but as a deepening of Eyal’s ongoing inquiry into presence, power, and the vulnerability of being seen.

Into the Hairy is showing at Sadler’s Wells Theatre on November 13, 14, and 15 at 7:30 p.m.