Sterling Ruby’s Atropa Explores the Duality of Life @ Sprüth Magers New York

Atropa by Sterling Ruby, Sprüth Magers New York, 2026. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

text and photographs by Isabella Bernabeo

Hidden away on the second floor of an old Upper East Side building, Sterling Ruby’s Atropa explores the duality of life through unconventional artistic methods. Named after the nightshade genus, more commonly known as deadly nightshade, Atropa also references Atropos, a Greek Fate and the eldest daughter of Zeus and Themis. She is the goddess who cuts the thread of life, allowing her to decide the time and manner of a mortal’s death.

After climbing up an old, rickety staircase, we enter what appears to be an empty apartment flat. The sleek white walls and dark brown hardwood floors dominate the space until they are met by tiny, intricate black lines within pale wood frames, arranged along the walls. 

Atropa by Sterling Ruby, Sprüth Magers New York, 2026. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

These graphite and pen-on-paper drawings seem to shift and move, their lines twisting fluidly like a worm wiggling to life. Though they were made just last year, these pieces trace back to a series that Ruby began working on thirty years ago. Each of them is drawn with instinctive human gestures rather than the controlled mark-making characteristic of a traditional representational practice. 

All eight drawings are also named after a flower – from Henbane in the nightshade family to Bleeding Hearts in the poppy family to Morning Glory in the convolvulaceae family – many of which are highly poisonous plants. 

The artworks, each with a dark void near the center of the penwork, seem to represent the endless dangers that accompany the natural world, yet the black, scrawled lines from the void seem to reach beyond the page, yearning to reconnect with the land of the living. The pieces showcase the true paradox nature embodies: the destructive venoms of a flower alongside its medicinal properties, the beauty humans create alongside the destructive instincts that surface daily. 

Atropa by Sterling Ruby, Sprüth Magers New York, 2026. Photo: Isabella Bernabeo.

Settled between the drawings are six bronzed flowers, some resting upon dark brown mantels, others stationed on white podiums, and one even large enough to stand on its own: a lone slouched sunflower waiting for the sun to rise. 

All of these flowers, which are the exhibition’s sole sculptural component, are made in Ruby’s studio after being cut, dried, and cast. The burnout process fully incinerates the flower, leaving behind only a bronze mold of what it once was. These sculptures each reveal the flowers in various states of blooming and decay, underscoring once again the bewitching parallels of life. 

It’s only then that you turn around and spot a small square opening leading into a second room, just now realizing that Ruby’s exhibit is separated into two parts. The second section clearly contrasts with the first space; the endless whites, blacks, and browns are now replaced with vibrant splashes of blue, purple, and green. 

This compact rectangular room is filled with watercolor collages. Hanging on the wall to the right are three black-and-white photographs of overgrown trees whose branches split off in every direction. One of the images, SPLITTING, remains as simple as that, whereas the two others are engulfed in a spray of green lines that design a checkered pattern. On the adjacent wall hang two very similar works, yet instead of black-and-white photographs of trees, it’s a flat landscape. Painted above the curvy hills are clouds of purples, pinks, and blues, creating a stunning winter sunset. 

Across from this scene, beige and aqua take over, as two final collages hang next to a wood and bronze sculpture. The sculpture, Vestige, appears to be a curved sword or feather thrust into a stone. The handle, a light burl wood, slowly morphs into an aqua blade. The collages, Hippies and Kissing Hippies, apply large black watercolor stains on a beige background to create human faces, both crowned with wreaths of leaves and flowers. 

Whereas Ruby’s first room encapsulates the natural decay of an environment, this room embodies an exuberance of life. Atropa collocates mortality within two separate encounters, balancing the pleasant beauties and agonizing inevitables that life has to offer.

Atropa is on view through March 28 @ Sprüth Magers  22 E 80 Street, New York

Medieval Desire Reconsidered @ The Met

 

Aquamanile in the Form of Aristotle and Phyllis
South Netherlandish
late 14th or early 15th century

 

text by Hank Manning

The Met Cloisters, a replica of a medieval castle atop a hill in Manhattan’s northernmost neighborhood, has collected more than fifty items from Western Europe, produced between the 13th and 15th centuries, to reanalyze them through modern queer theory. The collection—including statues, manuscripts, jewelry, and household items—reveals that, although the church wielded immense power during this period—and with this came restrictive laws on sex and marriage—gender fluidity, androgeny, and same-sex relations were neither hidden nor uniformly stigmatized in art. 

 

Christ and Saint John the Evangelist
German
1300-1320

 

Much of Spectrum of Desire’s art considers the complex ways in which artists have interpreted Jesus Christ’s gender and relationships. Christians’ relationship with Jesus is paramount, and artists often framed this in erotic terms. Nuns forsake romantic relations on Earth and instead devote themselves spiritually to Jesus. This takes on another dimension in the frequent portrayal of Jesus as a handsome baby. Men, too, form special relationships with the prophet, such as Saint John the Evangelist, depicted in a 14th-century German statue in which the two men pose like a married couple, with right hands joined and Jesus’s left hand hugging John’s shoulder. (In another piece, the Virgin Mary appears in a similar union with her cousin Elizabeth.) Artists considered the fluidity of Jesus’s gender. After all, why should an image of God, creator of all people, conform to only one gender? His wound on the crucifix often resembles a vulva; his suffering is compared to birthing pangs, and the entire experience is said to be the birth of a religion. 

Two Riddles of the Queen of Sheba
Upper Rhenish
circa 1490–1500

Artists of the time held broad perspectives on gender fluidity, even though they did not have anything approximating this modern term. At least thirty Christian saints changed their gender appearance, most from female to male. Considering how frequently God is depicted as a man, as well as the universal specter of patriarchy, it is not surprising that some considered it advantageous, maybe even a move closer to God, to become more masculine. Saint Wilgefortis begged God to make her less attractive, and God granted her request by giving her a beard. Saint Theodora of Alexandria became Theodore merely by changing her clothing and stated identity. Others believed that behavior, rather than appearance, determines gender. In Two Riddles of the Queen of Sheba, King Solomon explains that girls intrinsically catch apples in the laps of their dresses. 

In other cases, androgyny was encouraged. Thomas Aquinas argued that angels do not assume bodies and thus transcend traditional gender categories. To become more angelic, therefore, men could make their gender more ambiguous. Some theologians, including Saint Augustine, considered chastity more virtuous even than sex within a marriage. To encourage this, some men endured castration, becoming eunuchs who then developed more feminine features. The 1533 Book of Hours illustrates the baptism of an Ethiopian eunuch, a tale from the New Testament. 

 

Plate with Wife Beating Husband
Netherlandish
circa 1480

 

Gender role reversals were sometimes a source of humor or a warning of female power. Saint Jerome’s peers swapped his robes for a blue dress to publicly humiliate him. A copper water pitcher depicts a confident Phyllis on a confused Aristotle, grabbing his hair and sitting on his back as he crawls on all fours. A similar depiction on a Belgian plate shows a wife beating her husband’s exposed backside with a broom. 

Base for a Statuette
South Netherlandish
1470–80

To be sure, much European medieval art portrayed sex as a dangerous temptation. A French health guide from the 1440s shows a fully clothed couple in missionary position and warns that too much sex causes weak kidneys and bad breath. A South Netherlandish statue, from around 1470, posits that the original sin came from same-sex attraction: it shows Eve in the Garden of Eden lured by an anthropomorphized female snake named Lilith. Courtly art sometimes associated eroticism with humiliation and cruelty. In the fable of Febilla and Virgil, drawn on a 14th-century French ivory tablet, both suffer. After Febilla publicly mocks Virgil’s advances, the poet—here also a sorcerer—extinguishes all the fires in the city—except for a candle stuck up the genitals of Febilla, who must then allow the entire populace to rekindle their flames through her. Even with positive connotations, love and pain often went hand in hand in the medieval imagination, as in a depiction of Jesus as Cupid, slinging a “javelin of love” at devotees. 

Walking through the exhibition, it is readily clear that gender fluidity is neither a new invention nor inherently antithetical to Christianity. 700 years ago, although artists did not categorize their subjects as they do today, opinions on sex and gender were nonetheless varied and complex. While some today argue that gender re-assignment and fluidity are affronts to God’s will, many historic Christian saints saw these as ways to become closer to God. Philosophers and artists, whether aligned with the church or otherwise, presented equally wide-ranging perspectives on our relationships with our own identities, each other, and the divine. 

Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages is on view through March 29 at the Met Cloisters, 99 Margaret Corbin Drive, New York 

Wearable Innovation: Monamobile’s Take On Functional Fashion

 

Barkin Bag

 

text by Lola Titilayo

Desk Dress, fan earrings, the Lockini bralette — each object appears distinct, yet all converge at a single point of origin: Monamobile. Operating at the intersection of fashion, technology, and critique, the Berlin-based designers, Mona Gutheil and Maximilian Benz, propose a mode of dress that is not merely worn, but activated. Their work resists the passive consumption traditionally associated with fashion, instead demanding engagement, interpretation, and, at times, discomfort. By embedding everyday technologies into garments and accessories, monamobile reframes clothing as both utility and critique, offering a sharp commentary on the capitalist systems that structure one’s contemporary life.

A recurring motif throughout their collections is the “wheels on dress” concept, most notably realized in the scooter dress from their 2023 debut collection, You won’t believe. This garment encapsulates monamobile’s approach to duality. Designed to be worn in two distinct ways, and allowing the body to alternate between walking and riding, the scooter dress functions as both clothing and mode of transport, collapsing the boundary between dressing and commuting. The garment reflects what might be described as the dual tiredness of the capitalist world: physical exhaustion from constant movement and psychological fatigue from the pressure to remain productive. 

 
 

Oscillating between fashion, accessory, and performative statement, the dog dress stands out as an understated yet bold design concept. The contrast between the dress’s neutrality and the disruptive presence of the sculptural dog handbag at the end creates unfamiliarity, reinforcing a sense of intrusion while sustaining the viewer’s curiosity.

A key part of Monamobile’s work is the integration of technology directly into design in a way that feels obvious, physical, and sometimes uncomfortable. Rather than employing a sleek and seamless approach to their pieces, as one might expect, technology is placed very conspicuously on the body. From the mobile chastity belt to light-up pearly nails to a phone worn as a bobble in the hair, these objects become part of how the body is dressed and seen. Technology shifts from something we carry to something we wear. They make the wearer more aware of their being constantly connected, turning everyday technology into something increasingly personalized.

Monamobile’s resistance to conventional fashion structures extends beyond form into production and release strategy. In the fall of 2025, Monamobile took a different approach to fashion and consistency, opting to release a single product each month according to a calendar system. Disrupting the industry’s rhythm of silence between seasonal collections, each release is given space to exist on its own terms — hinting at a future where clothing is designed not just to be seen, but to function, evolve and endure beyond the standard seasonal lifespan. 

 
 

Read An Interview of Curator & Amsterdam City Council Candidate Zippora Elders →

 
 

Zippora Elders Tahalele has been designated Director of the Nederlands Fotomuseum effective mid-April, as she is running for Amsterdam’s city council elections, and election day is today, March 18. Currently number 14 on GroenLinks’ list of candidates, a party she joined as a young adult, Elders intends to step up for art and culture in the city and beyond. Her platform is built on inspiring people to use their imagination in every aspect of life, which mirrors her curatorial approach as well. In her most recent exhibition Make Some Noise - Desire. Stage. Change at van Abbe Museum, Elders invites the audience to listen to and sense what moves them (emotionally, physically, socially) in a world full of fractured infrastructures. It does so by presenting work that offers deeply personal methods to amplify voices beyond oneself in an effort to ignite change. Elders was motivated to actively take on that charge at home in Amsterdam after having witnessed and fought cancellation, in addition to the exclusion of programming and dissenting perspectives in Berlin while in her role as head of the curatorial department and outreach at Gropius Bau. Read more.

Kristen Stewart Dives Headfirst into Filmmaking

The Chronology of Water, 2025.

text by Emma Grimes

Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water is an audacious debut—a film about girlhood, the making of sexual identity, and the long work of recovering one’s voice. Adapted from Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2011 memoir, it follows a childhood warped by parental abuse, a sanctuary found in swimming, and finally her odyssey into becoming a writer.

Stories of people finding their voices are familiar, as are tales of how art heals and can redeem suffering. The Chronology of Water contains both, but by being anchored to the ruthless specificity of Lidia’s life, it avoids falling into the cliched catharsis that such tales often deliver. Stewart cares about individual formation. She’s interested in how a self, particularly a female one, comes together inside an incessant, gendered environment of surveillance, and how desire takes shape within this structure.

The form of the movie is fragmented and disjointed, which Stewart carries over from the memoir. Early in the book, Yuknavitch writes: “I remember things in retinal flashes. Without order. Your life doesn't happen in any kind of order…It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations.” The movie similarly withholds chronology, jumping across periods of Lidia’s life without locating them in a linear timeframe. 

The film opens with a shot of menstrual blood flowing into a shower drain, followed by abrupt, disjointed images from Lidia’s life. These flashing images only acquire their appropriate context much later. The sound is visceral and can feel invasive. And while the presumed strategy behind this is to drag you straight into Lidia’s world, in moments, it’s raucous to the point of pulling you out.

Those flashing bits of memory place you into her mode of remembering, where certain images, like the corner of her childhood living room, and sounds, like the crack of a belt, intrude the present moment. It’s in this position that one can insert their own fragmented experiences. While many won’t recognize themselves in the precise details of Lidia’s circumstances, there is a universality to her relationship with memory—the way it arrives and interrupts. But as with the sound at times, the harsh editing has a piercing way of yanking you out of the film.

A book, by nature, allows the reader to self-pace. Once you’re seated in a theater, however, you’re committed to enduring whatever the screen throws at you. Stewart throws a lot and trusts you can take it. Her singular vision and fearlessness in executing it is spectacular, even if at risk of being alienating. Stewart made the deliberate choice to stay true to her vision instead of placating a wider audience, and for that reason alone, this film is worth seeing.

Following that introduction of flashing images, the film begins to jump between memories from Lidia’s childhood. In one dismal scene, the family pulls off the road in a Pacific Northwest forest to cut down a Christmas tree. The father takes Lidia’s older sister into the white density of trees, while Lidia and her mother stay in the car. They’re gone long enough to cause uneasiness. When their figures finally reappear in the frosted car window, they have no tree. Claudia opens the door, her face sunken and repulsed. The camera briefly catches the mother in the front seat—face obscured by hair and upholstery—and in a single blink it becomes clear that she understands exactly what has transpired.

The film returns again and again to such memories. Years later, at swim practice, Lidia and her teammates line up in identical orange swimsuits and step onto a scale. For every pound over the limit, the coach gives a “lick,” striking them with a clipboard. We’re never shown the coach’s face, instead the camera stays low, fixed on their torsos. The smack of the wood on flesh punctures your eardrums. When the coach reaches Lidia, he says because she is a freshman, he will “make it count.”

Moments like these, calmly presented, are more disturbing for their implied routine than for their downright repulsiveness. It recalls a line from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, in which Nelson reflects on the violent sexual material she encountered in books as a child and then pauses, writing, “I don’t even want to talk about female sexuality until there is a control group. And there never will be” (66). Stewart gives this idea a form, suggesting that violation doesn’t intrude upon girlhood but is one of the foundational, organizing structures of it.

The film moves forward through Lidia’s adult life and relationships. She marries a gentle man she can’t ever accept, believing he’s too good for her. Later, she marries a man who shares her hunger for self-destruction. In between, she suffers a devastating loss. Finally, a friend brings her to a writing class taught by Ken Kesey, played with full bravado by Jim Belushi. She begins writing and doesn’t stop.

This is where the film’s form finally steadies. The previous jolts of memories ease and scenes lengthen. This is the reward you get for sitting through those first quarters, watching Lidia find her stride. After she leaves her second marriage, she visits a professional dominatrix, played with an intense tenderness by Kim Gordon. The sessions allow her to reframe her pain from something unbearable to something she can move through.

The culmination arrives when Lidia is invited to participate in a reading of her work. Waiting backstage, the scene is crosscut with a recurring image of her as a toddler biting her lip—the moment the narration earlier identified as when she “lost her voice.” Up on stage, reading from her short story “The Chronology of Water,” she constructs a voice for that earlier self when none existed. “Memories are stories,” she says at one point. “So you better come up with one you can live with.”  

One of the memoir’s greatest strengths is in the way Yuknavitch resists framing herself as a heroic figure. No matter how intricately she chronicles her own trials, tribulations, and victories, she never transforms herself into a classic, beat-the-odds winner. Yuknavitch writes from the position of somebody assured in her own significance not because of her accomplishments but because of her personhood (“My sister and I, we were selfish,” she writes. “We wanted selves.”). She refuses to satisfy the demand that a woman’s achievement is what makes her story worth telling.

The film’s conclusion, on the other hand, fails to capture this and inserts into the text what was intentionally left out of the original—Lidia as Hero. Stewart manages this by offering a cliched conclusion that stresses Lidia’s successes, both personal and professional, reshaping the story into a recognizable arc of triumph. It ultimately indulges the familiar expectation that suffering must be redeemed and that only exceptional women are worthy of narrative attention. The conclusion dilutes what precedes it, softening the book’s most radical claim: that an ordinary, messy life is already enough.

It’s a Family Affair: Read an Interview of Jenny Fax on Her Fall Winter 26’ Presentation

 

interview by Kim Shveka
photographs by Jasmin Avner

 

With her FW26 collection, designer Jen-Fang Shueh of Jenny Fax gives shape to the feeling of time passing. Consumed by this sensation, Shueh found herself reflecting on the power of personal memory as our last bastion of unique chaos; a place before algorithms, where our identities are mapped only by our family trees. Crafting her memories into the room, she made every visitor feel the warmth of her home while keeping her codes of color and whimsical silhouettes. The presentation unfolded like a living photo album, the models appearing as if revived from framed memories sitting on a shelf. In a moment of consensual voyeurism, the audience witnessed personal creation in its most raw form. Read more

Hocketing the Apocalypse: LA Art Week 2026

Amanda Ross-Ho at Frieze

text and images by Perry Shimon

‘Not Frieze’ LA exclaims, as in the international powerhouse art fair that provokes the broad ecosystem response we’re now calling Los Angeles Art Week. There are 8 fairs this year, of which I will see half, and an incalculable range of offerings calibrated to the influx of international art energies.

The main draw appears to be the lively and decorated Los Angeles crowds, which clearly preoccupy the guests more than the wall art. The fairs, with their high-key lighting, tiers of exclusivity, and long rambling promenades, are an easy win for LA audiences who turn out en masse for the spectacle and remind us—with a high calculus of automobile logistics—how poorly suited Los Angeles is to easy and spontaneous social gathering.

Frieze

Earlier this millennium, waves of displaced and precarious artists decamped from NYC and moved to Los Angeles in search of softer climates and more affordable, larger workspaces. There was a momentary feeling of discovery and excitement that quickly gave way to the predictable surge in real estate prices and attendant gentrification patterns. I wonder today where the center of cultural gravity exists in North America—less for market figures, and more for artist scenes and spaces—and it remains an open question for me. I let myself be carried away by the week, and then beyond, and sit here now with my phone open, doing a kind of mnemonic forensics to reconstitute a vaguely coherent narration of the unfolding events.

The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel

Yunji Park

Carlye Packer Gallery

Felix, the bungalowed poolside alternative art fair extended across several floors of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, opened the proceedings and set an easy pace of socializing, art grazing, and scene clocking. Weaving in and out of modernist suites, I encountered notable presentations from Allesandro Teoldi with Marinaro Gallery and Erin Morris with EUROPA, beautiful and uncomplicated things producing pleasant feelings.

Julia Stoschek Collection at the Variety Arts Building

In the evening I went to what would be my first of three visits to the Julia Stoschek pop-up, who appeared to have fled the Berlin winter with a canonical collection of video art and installed what I heard billed as the largest such exhibition in US history, in the curious and dilapidated Variety Arts Building in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. The building has a fascinating history, initially constructed in the 1920s in a Renaissance Revival style to host the first women’s club in Los Angeles, with a grand auditorium for hosting performances and lectures, a library, galleries, and a banquet hall.

Buster Keaton

Cyprien Gaillard

Variety Arts Building

Anne Imhof

The knowledgeable docent at the entrance was offering historical overviews to the impromptu groups of guests gathered at the gratis popcorn counter. She informed us that after its life as a women’s club, the building became a vaudeville theater, underground punk club, rave spot, and then was bought by Justin Bieber’s megachurch, who brought it up to code and sold it during the pandemic. Fact-checking this oral history, I encountered the wonderful bigorangelandmarks.blogspot.com by local visual historian Floyd B. Bariscale, who documents historic buildings in LA, and encountered a lively comments section with contributions like:

Anonymous said...

MY NAME IS LONNIE HICKS. DURING THE YEAR 1980 I PROMOTED A VERY SUCCESSFUL DISCO IN THE BALLROOM ON THE FOURTH FLOOR ON THURSDAY NIGHTS ONLY. FOR TEN MONTHS I HOSTED PARTIES WITH SOME OF THE BIGGEST NAMES IN BLACK HOLLYWOOD .I TRIED VERY HARD TO ATTRACT A MIXED CROWD BUT IT NEVER SEEMED TO WORK OUT .SO WE WERE LABELED A BLACK CLUB. AT THAT TIME SEATING LEGAL ATTENDANCE IN THE ROOF GARDEN WAS 686 PEOPLE. MANY NIGHTS OUR ATTENDANCE EXCEEDED THAT FIGURE . THE ROOF GARDEN, IN MY OPINION IS ONE OF THE GREATEST BALLROOMS IN THE CITY. I FELL IN LOVE WITH IT FROM THE FIRST MOMENT I LAID EYES ON IT.I INTRODUCED MANY PEOPLE TO THE VENUE AND I USED ALMOST ALL THE BUILDING AT ONE TIME OR ANOTHER ; FROM THE THEATER, TO TIN PAN ALLEY, AND OF OFCOURSE " THE FABULOUS ROOF GARDEN". I WOULD LOVE ANOTHER SHOT AT PROMOTING THE ENTIRE BUILDING . I CAN BE REACHED FOR COMMENT OR INPUT ABOUT THE VARIETY ARTS CENTER AT 813-539-1965 OR AT TAMPASELESCT.COM

December 27, 2016 at 11:36 AM

LONNIE HICKS said...

HI, LONNIE HICKS AGAIN. I FORGOT TO MENTION THAT JAZZ GREAT AL JARREAU RECORDED A SONG ABOUT THE ROOF GARDEN BALLROOM TITLED, OF COURSE, "THE ROOF GARDEN .IT WAS RELEASED ON THE WARNER BROS. LABEL IN 1980 .BECAUSE THE ROOF GARDEN WAS DESIGNED BACK IN THE TWENTIES TO BE A BALLROOM DURING THE TIME IT WAS AS A DISCO IT WAS TOTALLY THE CLASSIEST ONE IN TOWN; WITH A CAPACITY MOST CLUBS COULDN'T COME NEAR.BOY, THOSE WERE THE DAYS !!!

December 28, 2016 at 9:47 AM

Our erudite popcorn docent was of the opinion this building should be converted into a long-term cultural center, and I agreed—keeping its rough-and-ready charm and availing itself to rotational curators doing seasonal evening programs of mixed-media art. And why not? How much tax money goes to subsidize sports arenas and Western imperialism instead?

Stoschek's collection contours the curious canon of ‘video art’, an imperfect category of moving-image art put into crisis—or at least into history—with the rise of mass visual culture in the age of smartphones and social media. If video art emerges no less as a space of visual experimentation outside the formal codes of Hollywood and corporate media than as a way to designate certain works of moving image as scarce and rarified, it all seems to be awash in the disorienting deluge of moving-image production that overwhelms the present. I couldn’t help wondering how this arbitrary and idiosyncratic canon of video art would be remembered at the cusp of a visual revolution.

Arthur Jafa

Robert Boyd

The forty-some-odd works on view across five floors were hard to neatly characterize—though violence, sex, and power were distinct leitmotifs. Robert Boyd’s four-channel Xanadu displayed a frenetic MTV-era montage of political icons, fundamentalist movements, doomsday cults, and escalating war over a pop score in the basement of the building, with an orbiting disco ball. A kind of Christian apopalyptic millenarianism that would be encountered again in Bruce Conner’s preceding Three Screen Ray on view at the Marciano Art Foundation, as well as in the infinite scroll of social media with its dizzying jump cuts of sex, violence, and pop music.

Bruce Conner at the Marciano Art Foundation

I encountered the sublime violence of Conner’s video works, monumentally installed and scored by Terry Riley, as a lilliputian war of American imperialism unfolded on my phone in streaming images, and I couldn’t wrest my eyes away—even driving down Sunset Blvd with its building-sized billboards advertising war films and luxury brands with deified and cosmetically sculpted celebrities. I began to feel as though art criticism has nothing to offer; nothing to elaborate on the unambiguous violence and horror of this country with its imperial realist aesthetic regime: coterminously streaming Al Jazeera and the US Dept. of War’s IG feeds as Tesla Cybertrucks surround me in front of Crypto.com Arena.

Outside of Frieze, on a manicured soccer pitch, a performance artist named Amanda Ross-Ho spent the duration of the fair rolling a giant inflatable earth, in an interpretive gesture I couldn’t help associating with planetary technocracy, geoengineering, and a global class of art elites for whom the world is theirs to play with recklessly like a children’s toy. Inside the fair was an incredible pageant of Los Angeles characters and a credible roster of collectible art.

At Marian Goodman, recently departed, Tacita Dean presented a collection of delicate chalk works, exquisitely beautiful and fragile drawings gathering chalk in gossamer gradations, collecting like weather and constellations, filigreed with fugitive fragments of poetry, salutations.

Nearby Wolfgang Tillmans shared his signature horizontalist, mood-board style of image-making neatly installed around the airy expanse of Regen Projects in Hollywood. A short looping video work in a back gallery, scored by Tillmans, circumnavigated a flowering wild carrot plant that seemed to contain the cosmos and announced the early Los Angeles spring: a teeming biodiversity region undeterred by automotive and anthropocentric impositions.

Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans

After all these small—and not-so-small—commercial offerings I ventured to LACMA to see some more historically rigorous and contextualized presentations. Walking past the open tar pits I came upon the sweeping modernist Geffen Galleries, still under construction, and traversing Wilshire with its grand curvilinear California modernist gestures. I spent some time with the Deep Cuts exhibition drawn from their impressive collection of block prints from around the world, and shows on Impressionism and Buddhist art, offering unexpected resonances and juxtapositions like a series of beatific Bodhisattvas perched in front of a symmetrical row of palms and Michael Heizer’s 340-ton granite megalith Levitated Mass. 

Edvard Munch

Modigliani

Detail of Chakrasamvara and Vajravarahi 15th century Tibet

Kuwase Hasui

When making his 2000 debut Amores Perros, Alejandro G. Iñárritu left over a million feet of film on the cutting room floor. From this rejectamenta was assembled SUEÑO PERRO, a kinetic, smoke-filled cavern of multiple projections and cinematic machinery. The film assumes a quantum superposition as variations collapse in the ambulatory viewers, bathed and implicated in the recombining images. Its dually sculptural character: light extending materially through the haze and towering 35mm projectors like ouroboroi of flickering film, recursive and contingent.

A few blocks down along Wilshire were a trio of exhibitions housed in vacant properties owned by the same developer: a former Sizzler, an office building, and a 99¢ store—a kind of holy trinity of dystopian late-stage capitalism. The programming largely cleaved to each of the buildings' designated purposes. The Sizzler offered the kind of art popular in alternative art fairs: fast, unattractive, relatively inexpensive, and designed to produce simple palate-stimulating responses in its consumers. The office building offered a series of talks, panels, readings, PowerPoints, and other post-industrial forms of labor, slightly queered, Angelenosized, and performed in the drab and dispiriting cubicle and particle-board environs—picture attractive actors reading repulsive Paul McCarthy essays while guests sit uncomfortably in Great Recession-era office furniture. The 99¢ store offered a kind of anarchic, everyone’s-welcome free-for-all experience for maladapted objects and subjects, chaotic piles of capitalism’s overproduction and metabolic excretion.

I visited the Huntington for an early spring sakura and to see the beautiful tripartite Edmund de Waal exhibition 8 Directions of the Wind—after a line from a Bei Dao poem—rendering poetic stories of migration, diaspora, and exile with porcelain, poetry, marble, and burned oak. The installations and assembled libraries were interspersed across the flourishing springtime gardens and reflected quietly on quotidian ceramic practices inside the opulent architectures. Waal, descending from an aristocratic and oligarchical Jewish family persecuted by the Nazis, exhibiting the work in the sprawling pleasure grounds of a North American robber baron, produced an unusual setting for the reception of works informed by simple vernacular ceramic practices, or mingei; an uneasy migration between classes and cultural contexts that nonetheless rewarded close attention with the subtlety and poetry the works occasioned.

The impulse to escape into art as a palliative runs strong in horrifying times, and one finds little solace in the sun-soaked, hell-tinted, hypermediated LA art scene. Many conversations over the week centered on the elaborate social mechanisms of exclusion and affiliation that determine the social hierarchies governing the value of art in its institutional and financial inflections. These social rituals, in need of a dispassionate ethnography, eventuate in very idiosyncratic collections like the Stoschek and the all-night rituals of bacchanalian raves so popular with the same set. A student of both ancient Greece and the contemporary art world might notice the continuities between the mystery cults and the art world’s esoteric and largely inscrutable incantations, hedonistic dinners, and ecstatic late-night revelry.

At the former Masonic temple housing the Marciano Art Foundation, I attended a talk with the artist Una Szeemann, daughter of the late, storied Swiss super-curator Harald Szeemann, that centered on a collection of objects left with the estate when the Getty took his papers. Szeemann, a fascinating harbinger of an art world to come, was known for his indefatigable and idiosyncratic sprawling exhibitions anticipating our current vogue for superseding star curators and spectacularly scaled biennials. Una had curated a selection of minor objects, some taken from makeshift altars around her father’s southern Swiss Fabbrica Rosa estate, and presented them alongside thoughtful reflections from artists, curators, and anthropologists in a beautiful new library space generously featuring a browsable collection and modular furniture that rearranges to accommodate their public program. It had a kind of animist valence and invited speculation and meaning-making around these agential and talismanic objects.

Arriving at the Getty I encountered a descendant of Benjamin Franklin working at the gift shop and engaged in a rangey conversation about how the oil tycoon J. Paul Getty miserly installed pay phones in his home and about her practice of buying groceries for her colleagues’ undocumented relations who were afraid to leave the house on account of ICE raids. She was reading a book on the predominantly Black Sugar Hill neighborhood razed in the ’60s to install the I-10 freeway and went on to trace this kind of American racism back to George Washington, who, I learned from her, would rotate his slaves between Philadelphia and Virginia to avoid laws in the North granting them freedom after six consecutive months. I proceeded to a rather Manichaean-sounding special exhibition called Virtue and Vice: Allegory in European Drawing and found a suite of familiar and enduring ethical preoccupations. Describing the show later to a friend, I suggested they could have included a middle gallery—the size of the rest of the world.

Oh! If Only He Were Faithful to Me, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, 1770-75

Sitting in the Irwin Garden outside, I reflected on Jonathan Crary’s recently republished essay Robert Irwin and the Condition of Twilight, collected in the excellent Tricks of the Light, offering:

All of us within present-day technological culture inhabit a shifting mix of new and old perceptual modalities, of hybrid zones composed of Euclidean space and dimensionless experiences of electronic networks that often appear to be seamlessly connected. Thus even amid the fluctuating and unstable character of Irwin's work is a human subject who is still at least partially anchored within the enduring remnants of a Newtonian universe, even if these surviving components have been rendered contingent and spectral.

If the essay is astute in marking a shift into an increasingly indistinct virtual-experiential mode of seeing—if not being—and its attendant social parcellation, we are perhaps arriving at a time when these realms are no longer seen as dual and the visual takes on an agential role as it surveils and acts upon us, with increasing degrees of determinative automation.

Blinn and Lambert

At a new gallery in Chinatown, North Loop West, I saw a beautiful exhibition, another instance in a burgeoning—or perhaps continuing—Light and Space revival, from an artist collective Blinn and Lambert who darkened the gallery with large canvases covering the windows, with shapely apertures filtering warm light into the welcome cool calm of the gallery with the shifting sun. 35mm projectors set at 8:20-second (the time it takes light to reach Earth from the sun) and 60-minute intervals respectively threw cameraless pictures of light onto the walls creating a restorative and contemplative respite from the blazing sun and art-world velocities outside.

Meara O’Reilly and vocal ensemble

Solarc

Gathering a gift at the excellent Skylight Books, I chanced on a painful conversation between Maggie Nelson and Darcey Steinke about their respective surgery memoirs. I joined a new friend at the well-programmed 2220 Arts + Archives space for an evening of hocketing, or a staccato call-and-response vocal musical style popular in medieval Europe, central African vocal traditions, as well as corners of contemporary pop music, with LA composer Meara O’Reilly and her distinctly (and adorably) East Los Angeles-feeling vocal ensemble. The music felt fitting for an age of binary computational logic and stuttered along charismatically toward a higher-resolution but distinctly atomized kind of being-together somehow commensurate with our times. The following night we reconvened for the First Friday Flute Club gathering at the artisanal brewing new-music venue Solarc in Eagle Rock and enjoyed the company of a diverse cross-section of enthusiastic flutists sharing instruments, melodies, and fermented drinks.

Driving back to the Bay Area, the center of gravity for these new global technocratic shifts, I climbed the windswept arid pass, bracing my tiny 20th-century convertible against the Santa Anas, pushing it through the endless variable monocultures: grapes, cotton, citrus, almonds, houses. The absolute horror and putrefaction of the cow slaughter fields. A domestic dog split open on the side of the highway from a high-velocity impact with one of the innumerable trucks dwarfing me with their containers of terrible decisions and menacing spinning wheel-spikes.

A Psychic Language: Louise Bourgeois's "Gathering Wool" @ Hauser & Wirth

Louise Bourgeois
Gathering Wool
1990
Metal, wood, and mixed media
243.8 x 396.2 x 457.2 cm
© 2026 The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY
Courtesy the Foundation and Hauser & Wirth

text by Arlo Kremen

The story goes something like this: Bourgeois was born in Paris to parents who operated a tapestry business. As young Louise grew up, her father met and began an affair with another woman, Sadie Gordon Smith. In 1922, eleven-year-old Bourgeois would find that Smith would move in with her father and mother as her governess. The affair continued, and young Louise’s mother would remain silent about the matter. Mrs. Bourgeois, as young Louise’s mother, would lose her role in the house, that of the moral instructor, replaced by her younger counterpart, relegating Mrs. Bourgeois to that of a worker in the house. Young Louise felt betrayed by her father. In fact, she felt betrayed by her mother too, betrayed by her mother’s abandoning her in her meekness.

In 1982, Bourgeois was the first woman to have a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In press for this exhibition, Bourgeois spoke publicly for the first time about the trauma of childhood as a well of inspiration, sparking the reading of this early narrative into all corners of her extensive oeuvre. Gathering Wool at Hauser & Wirth continues this reading, bringing sculptures, reliefs, and works on paper, some of which have never seen the light of day, into the psychoanalytic dimensions associated with the artist. Interested in Bourgeois’s relationship to abstraction, the show focuses on her later works. Shown in juxtaposition with early works, Gathering Wool aims to demystify the evolution of her symbolically charged visual lexicon.

The titular work, Gathering Wool (1990), finds its title from an expression concerned with freedom from active, conscious thought. To ‘gather wool’ is to daydream and ruminate, caring for a form of thinking that is intuitive and fleeting. Spherical, wooden sculptures, seven in number, sit in a small circle. Behind, a four-panel metal divider haunts the collections of forms. In an interplay between light and dark, organic and industrial, and curved and linear, the precious sumptuousness of these works, shown vulnerable through the cuts and splits of wood, is underscored through juxtaposition. Bourgeois cherished the ‘gathering wool’ in her creative output, shoring up traces of her unconscious and sublimating her mysterious mental artifacts into her work.

Louise Bourgeois
Twosome
1991
Painted steel, electric light, and motor
190.5 x 193 x 1244.6 cm
© 2026 The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY
Courtesy the Foundation and Hauser & Wirth

Gathering Wool does not begin the show; that honor is belongs to Twosome (1991). A mechanical sculpture where a smaller cylinder routinely leaves and re-enters a container only slightly larger. This work continues Bourgeois’s preoccupation with child psychology, particularly psychoanalysis. Here, the viewer seems to witness the point at which a child enters the symbolic stage; however, the presence of a male-charged form is entirely absent. The title, Twosome, and the continual entering and exiting of the mother-form allude to the constant back-and-forth in the identification of the daughter to her mother. In a displacement of the father, the figure who, for Lacan, initiates the division of child from mother, the abandonment of the mother seems to have thrust Bourgeois into the symbolic stage instead. A video projection in the same gallery seems to concur, where Actress Suzan Cooper sings “She Abandoned Me,” a track that accompanied Bourgeois’s 1978 performance A Fashion Show of Body Parts.

The show makes note of Bourgeois’s interest in protruding forms. Untitled (With Hand) (1989) has a child’s arm shooting out of a sphere that was sculpted out of the raw pink marble on which it rests. Mamelles (1991) spits water from the bronze breasts fixed to the wall. The aforementioned Gathering Wool offers fertile material for mushrooms to sprout from the wood spheres. Twosome, as well, engages in an act of protrusion in its cycle of exiting and entering. In a slightly different gesture, Le Défi II (1992) bounces light off and through its glass vessels, resulting in a soft illumination across the work. In all of these works, there is a borderless quality. Pre-established divisions between container and contained, raw and mediated, one form and another form, and conscious and unconscious all undergo complication at the artist’s behest. In her treatment of abstraction as often a source of figuration and of forms of representation more broadly, Bourgeois elucidates her pathologically encoded visual language, affirming her status as one of America’s most prolific artists.

Louise Bourgeois’s Gathering Wool is on view through April 18 @ Hauser & Wirth, 22nd Street, New York City.

A Living Spiral of Becoming: Read An Interview of Lily Kwong →

interview by Alper Kurtul

Raised among redwoods and working at the intersection of ecology, sculpture, and community, Lily Kwong approaches art as a living system rather than a fixed object. From EARTHSEED DOME to the intimate transformations of motherhood, her practice unfolds through cycles of care, renewal, and collective belonging. Read more.

Marguerite Humeau’s Scintille Is A Cave of Relational Ontologies @ White Cube New York

Scintille by Marguerite Humeau, White Cube New York, 2026.

text and photographs by Isabella Bernabeo

Spread across two floors, Marguerite Humeau’s Scintille is a call to lean into systems of mutual aid in times of darkness and uncertainty. Derived from the Latin word scintilla, meaning a spark or small flash of fire, this body of work is inspired by a cave in West Papua that the artist visited, as well as by John Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, in which the author attempts to define complex emotions that challenge the English language. Within these two floors, Humeau has created sculptures that make guests feel like they have not only traveled to a cave’s ecosystem but also as if they are a living and breathing part of the fluid exhibition’s environment.

Scintille by Marguerite Humeau, White Cube New York, 2026.

Upon entering, you are immediately immersed in a cave-like domain, where sleek brown floors, low lighting and a ceiling filled with what appear to be leaves create an unfamiliar yet peaceful ambiance. Two large sculptures act as sentinels to the cavern. Standing at twelve feet tall, these stalagmite structures are made from a repeated layering of sediment that loom over the rest of the gallery with a presence that is both menacing and comforting. Softament, also known as, The Guardian of Mineral Memory, and the larger of the two sculptures has an ombre that transmutes from black to a dark brown to a burnt orange to a yellow, almost as if the setting sun is reflecting off the tower. At the top is a line of circular stones that gradually increase in size and in their metallic reflection, they reenact the water that slowly drips off these structures in real life.

Scintille by Marguerite Humeau, White Cube New York, 2026.

Likewise, Stillenary, also known as, The Guardian of the Emergence, has water droplets rising up into the air. However, this thinner stalagmite incorporates a color range of blacks, whites, and greys, and attached to the structure is a light blue feathered cape with a range of holes in it, almost as if this guardian is a wounded hero.

Standing in the center of the gallery is Centurience, a short and stout stalagmite covered in splatters of dark blues, whites, greys, and blacks. However, on top of this youthful guardian is a blown and cast glass formation that appears like two white flowers with various sharp glass icicles stretching out. Centurience, a beautiful weapon, proves that avoiding extinction doesn’t come with size, but with patience.

Scintille by Marguerite Humeau, White Cube New York, 2026.

Humeau’s second floor is dedicated to the classic cave animal: the bat. Along the walls hang seven color-shifting cast glass sculptures, each given a name for the role that it plays within the colony: The Echolocation Maintainer, The Guardian of the Night Roost, The Retriever of the Fallen Pup, The Provider Beyond Bloodlines, The Dancing Bat, The Guardian of the Solution Pocket, and The Grape Transformation.

Each of these sculptures resembles a bat in motion. One dances through the air, redistributing warmth to the rest of the colony, another launches itself towards the ground to save a newcomer’s life, and another stands guard while the others sleep. They each exhibit self-sacrificing behaviors in an effort to care for the colony as a whole.

Scintille by Marguerite Humeau, White Cube New York, 2026.

Along the walls of the upstairs exhibit hang six more pigment and charcoal drawings. These illustrations are devoted to the living organisms that live within caves. Of them, Translucidency outlines the bodies of four flatworms slowly crawling their way through their underground habitation. The pink hue of the drawing presents all the tiny and linear organs that transparently shine through their body; The very darkness of their environment eliminates the need to hide one’s inner self.

Scintille by Marguerite Humeau, White Cube New York, 2026.

Humeau’s Scintille breaks down the barriers of the outside world’s individuality by highlighting the relational ontologies that exist in the world’s darkest corners, where Earth’s formations and living organisms exchange and encounter one another in a pitch-black harmony.

Read an Interview of Grimanesa Amorós on Her Light Installations @ Walt Disney Concert Hall and Printemps in Manhattan's Financial District →

Image courtesy of Sutton and Grimanesa Amorós Studio.

interview by Mia Milosevic

Influenced by the extreme terrain of Peru—its vast deserts where light refracts off the sand and temperatures plunge at night, and its rough Pacific coastline where ocean foam catches and fragments the sun—Grimanesa Amorós has built a practice around light as living material. For Amorós, darkness is imbued with light waiting to be released. Her two current works mark a significant moment in that practice. 

Radiance, a monumental installation within Walt Disney Concert Hall, was created in collaboration with the LA Philharmonic to coincide with its production of Prometheus—directed by composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and featuring pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet—which transformed the hall into an immersive landscape from January 9–11. Perfect Timing, Printemps’ first-ever commission of a light artist, opened January 19, 2026 at One Wall Street and runs through the end of March, engaging passersby in a meditation on presence amid Manhattan’s Financial District. Read more.

From Shaker Celibacy to Circus Unicorns: Read an Interview of Jodi Wille on the Utopian Ideals & Sex Practices of the Occult →

The Source Family 
Source Family women posing for Ya Ho Wa 13 album promotion 
1974 
35mm still/ digital file 
Special Research Collections, UC Santa Barbara Library 
Courtesy of Isis Aquarian Source Family Archives 

For over two decades, filmmaker and curator Jodi Wille has acted as a primary cartographer for the American underground. Known for her empathetic deep dives into intentional communities—most notably in her documentary The Source Family—Wille’s work consistently bypasses the “kooky cult” headlines to find the sincere human yearning beneath the robes and rituals.

Her latest endeavor moves from the screen to the gallery floor with Utopia: Three Centuries of Sexuality in American Cults and Communes. Invited by the Museum of Sex, Wille has curated an expansive exhibition that bridges 300 years of history through 300 rare artifacts. From the celibacy of the Shakers to the “complex marriage” of the Oneida Community and the Neopagan experiments of the 1970s, the show reframes these groups not as failed experiments, but as vital “think tanks” for human freedom. Read more.

Creative Director Brodie Kaman's 'One Thousand Scars Ago' is the Quiet Accumulation of Ephemera Undergirding His Most Familiar Visual Identities

In celebration of the release of ONE THOUSAND SCARS AGO, available now for preorder, Australian-born graphic designer and creative director Brodie Kaman will be hosting book launches in Paris (March 1), London (March 5), and Berlin (March 8).

Spanning the years 2016 to 2020, ONE THOUSAND SCARS AGO is a raw and unfiltered archive of Kaman’s non-commercial work. It brings together fragments, photographs, scans, and private visual material produced alongside, and often in tension with, his high-profile career in music and culture. Across 332 pages, the book assembles a body of work that exists outside briefs, clients, or commercial outcomes, operating instead as a record of lived experience, observation, and experimentation.

The book unfolds in two distinct movements. The first half presents an assemblage of found material, notebook pages, scanned ephemera, and visual experiments, fragments of a private studio practice that never sought public form. The second half shifts into a direct photographic register: iPhone images made in real time, capturing people, places, bodies, accidents, humor, damage, tenderness, and decay. Together, these sections form a continuous visual field in which the everyday, the abject, and the intimate collapse into one another.

Kaman’s reputation has largely been shaped through his work for some of the most visible figures in contemporary music and culture, including Lady Gaga, Don Toliver, FKA twigs, Nine Inch Nails, Mark Ronson, and Miley Cyrus, where his visual language is often understood through spectacle, branding, and cultural reach. ONE THOUSAND SCARS AGO presents the inverse, a private, unresolved, and frequently uncomfortable visual record that reveals how that same language is forged through failure, obsession, repetition, and risk.

The book’s foreword situates the work not as confession but as evidence of friction between a body and the world, of marks left by time, and of the ways images accumulate into structure. What emerges is neither diary nor document, but something closer to a living system of scars, headlines, snapshots, gestures, and debris organizing themselves into form.

Published by Year Zero, ONE THOUSAND SCARS AGO is both a significant artist book and a rare insight into the unseen foundation beneath a highly visible creative career. RSVP to attend the inaugural launch after party in Paris.

Brodie Kaman
ONE THOUSAND SCARS AGO
Published by Year Zero
softcover, 336 pages
Edition of 300 

Autre Magazine and Jeffrey Deitch, With Vince, Host An Dinner To Celebrate Frieze Los Angeles 2026 At The West Hollywood EDITION

Last night, Autre Magazine and Jeffrey Deitch Gallery continued their annual tradition of launching Frieze Week in Los Angeles with an intimate dinner at The West Hollywood EDITION, supported by Vince. A cross-disciplinary mix of guests—including Sharon Stone, Gus Van Sant, Nadia Lee Cohen, Saturn Risin9, Julia Stoschek, Beck, Eric Wareheim, Kendalle Getty, Vince creative director Caroline Belhumeur and others—gathered for a family-style dinner curated by Ardor, set amid rare tree specimens presented by botanical gallery Serpentine Los Angeles. The evening also placed a focused spotlight on Performa and commissioned artist Diane Severin Nguyen, who is featured in Autre’s Fall/Winter 2025 issue, underscoring the publication’s continued commitment to ambitious, time-based practices and international dialogue.

Mona Fastvold Chronicles an Enigmatic Mystic in The Testament of Ann Lee

The Testament of Ann Lee, Photograph courtesy Searchlight Pictures

text by Hank Manning

If humans, roughly half male and half female, were made in God’s image, and the first incarnation was a man, then the second must be a woman. Thus was the logic of the Shakers, a breakaway sect of Quakers that emerged in Manchester in the mid-1700s under the leadership of Ann Lee. In addition to their egalitarian gospel, they attracted derision for their charismatic, loud, and long-lasting style of worship—improvised dancing and singing that often continued for days until quashed by police. During her multiple prison stints, Lee organized her visions into a formal gospel and decided to move with her followers to colonial America.

The Testament of Ann Lee, a new film by Mona Fastvold, is in some ways a standard biopic of the putative prophet, portrayed by Amanda Seyfried. It depicts Lee’s life chronologically, nearly from cradle to grave, with heavy-handed narration by a tertiary character that can make Lee feel frustratingly unknowable despite the significant time viewers spend with her. The film takes inspiration from and highlights many of the Shakers’ great eccentricities—their hymns, dance, architecture, design, and progressive beliefs. What first registers as frenetic worship gradually enraptures viewers, becoming hypnotic by the film’s end. Lee herself is a remarkable figure for her ability to earn respect in a domain that almost invariably precluded female leadership, as well as for the prescience of her beliefs. In addition to gender equality, Shakers fiercely opposed slavery and war, encouraged simple living, and shared responsibilities on communal farms. It was Lee’s demand for celibacy (even in marriage) that pre-determined the early demise of the movement. She proclaimed it as God’s will after all four of her children died in early infancy. 

In their previous collaboration, Fastvold and her partner, Brady Corbet, wrote The Brutalist, which Corbet directed. Like Lee, Lazlo Toth, the titular architect, moved to America after facing religious persecution in Europe. Although the stories took place 200 years apart and Toth is a fictional character, they present similar narratives of America as a beacon of hope. Lee and Toth, a Holocaust survivor, both hope to reunite their families, practice their religion in peace, and achieve economic security. But as foreshadowed in a rather on-the-nose opening shot of the Statue of Liberty turned upside down, America ultimately fails to live up to its promise. 

The immigrants do find some success. Toth’s wife and niece join him as he reestablishes himself as a prolific architect. The Shakers find quality land for agriculture in upstate New York, grow their congregation through traveling preachers, and establish six Shaker villages. Nonetheless, Old World prejudices persist, and a sense of belonging remains elusive. Toth earns commissions but never the respect of his wealthy patron. He declares to his wife, “They do not want us here.” His niece, agreeing, continues her exodus to Israel. Lee likewise finds herself unwelcome, often the victim of violent mobs. Her strict beliefs continue to alienate her, as her husband and other early followers find celibacy untenable and depart. 

Both films feel, in some respects, like pieces of art created by the protagonists themselves, as if brutalism and Shakerism were film genres. Both protagonists teeter between heroes and anti-heroes, with audiences cheering for their success after persecution while also bristling at their bursts of anger, self-confidence, and rigidity. Their penchants for minimalist design—rectangular brutalist architecture and simple wood Shaker furniture—inspire expansive sets throughout. Daniel Blumberg, who won an Oscar for his horn-and-drum-focused score for The Brutalist, has now adapted Shaker hymns into a partial musical, at its most powerful as it accompanies the changing of seasons on their cross-Atlantic journey. Their hymn, “All is Summer,” convinces fellow travelers of their ability to tame the weather. 

In other aspects, the films are surprisingly maximalist. The Brutalist stretches on for three and a half hours, including a fifteen-minute intermission. The Testament of Ann Lee is no less expansive in spirit. Neither film is ever lacking in ambition, piling on period costumes, heavy dialect, and a determination to grapple with history, faith, gender, grief, migration, and power all at once, always with a sense of audacity that mirrors the uncompromising figures at their centers. But even these two, with their large ambitions, ultimately find themselves victims of circumstance. 

The film resists characterizing Ann Lee as either a progenitor of modern religious practice or merely an outlier within it. Many of her beliefs were shared with Quakers, whose practice has endured, while her own particular sect has nearly disappeared (today, the Shaker population has dwindled to just three practitioners). What the film ultimately withholds is a stable framework for interpretation: Lee is not a great woman of history, not merely an eccentric, and not reducible to an archetype. That ambiguity may be intentional. By refusing to resolve her into a legible category, The Testament of Ann Lee gestures towards a different truth—that history does not sort its figures neatly, and that our understanding of it is necessarily provisional and incomplete.

La Simulación En La Lucha Por La Vida: Mexico City Art Week 2026

text and images by Perry Shimon

Over the ten years or so that I’ve been coming to Mexico City art week, it seems to have grown beyond what one can reasonably expect to see and make sense of. In the earlier editions, it felt as though there was a generous and loosely choreographed range of offerings that most guests largely experienced, and this provided a common frame that gave the proceedings a shared feeling of intimacy. The last several editions, however, have begun to produce that major-biennial feeling of anxious FOMO as events and invitations proliferate throughout the frenetic week. This feels a bit sad to me, as I used to regard my seasonal visits to Mexico as a balm to the usual anxious feelings related to trying to do too many things. I suppose this is largely a me problem—if a problem at all—and what I would like to offer in the following essay are some modest and affectionate reflections from a becoming-more-familiar tourist.

I arrived early enough to get settled in and have a limpia and a leisurely breakfast at the Zócalo. I love this limpia, or cleansing ritual, with all the sights and smells of the Indigenous healers beside the partially excavated Aztec ruins of the Templo Mayor, in the shadow of the grandiose Gothic Baroque Catholic church in the Plaza de la Constitución, on what was formerly known as Tenochtitlan on Lake Texcoco. The burning of rosemary, blaring conches, shimmering feathers—all a testament to an enduring Indigenous presence and culture. This beautiful ceremony activates the entire sensorium, plunging the participant into a sensual presence of deep attention, breath, and touch, while chimes and bellows dissolve you into a vibrational individuated state. Warm, herbaceous smoke fills the lungs, and cool, fragrant branches invigorate the body. I like to do this ritual upon arrival, just before departing, and sometimes after the ZsONAMACO preview.

PEANA Gallery

Patricia Conde Gallery

Material Monday, part of the generous extracurricular program organized by the Material fair, offered a coordinated set of bus routes around portions of the gallery circuit. It was a rather ambitious schedule, pretty much incommensurate with the slow social unfolding of each opening, and we made it to maybe half of the stops. A backdrop of largely forgettable paintings and libidinally charged, often BDSM-inflected objects and installations set the stage for the young and vibrant scene of international art crowds. A North American gallerist friend worried aloud about getting stopped at customs with some carry-on paintings that may not have been properly declared and informed me that last year the customs agents had Androids and slap-on-the-wrist fines, whereas this year it was iPhones, Apple Watches, Google Image searches, and an extra punitive zero.

I never quite got settled into yet another proliferating, ill-sized, generic Airbnb with IKEA-showroom furniture, faux-aged wall art, gratuitous Ganesh figurines, pallid lighting, cheap blunt knives, Amazon Basics plates, and an alphanumeric series of codes, lockboxes, and passwords. There’s a haze of pollution, undrinkable water, and structurally immiserated urban poor and rough sleepers, mostly left out of the otherwise extremely Instagrammable frame of the parts of Mexico City that art tourists, expats, remote workers, and hip affluent Mexicans have largely claimed—not necessarily in that order.

Inner Stage at Escuela del Ballet Folklórico

MASA Galería

There’s a kind of jouissance in playing spot-the-art-tourist, often found standing around in an ill-fitting, overly constructed, and colorful costume, looking transfixedly into their phone near some Michelin-rated eatery and largely oblivious to anything else happening around them. If sheer volume is any indication, someone at Michelin has fallen in love with Mexico City—or maybe someone from Mexico City has landed a senior position at Michelin—or someone has started bootlegging the Michelin signs. Whatever the case may be, you can’t go a block in Roma or Condesa without seeing a constellation of Michelin honorifics.

Enrique López Llamas at Salón ACME

The now oft-repeated synopsis holds mostly true: Maco is a tedious convention center filled with conservative art; Salón Acme is the most beautiful space and the most fun setting; and Material features the kind of art most resonant with the kinds of people who make these kinds of aesthetic judgments. This year, on account of Netflix buying out Material’s usual home on Reforma for an Immersive Stranger Things Experience, the fair moved to a soundstage in an adjacent neighborhood that responded with a smattering of anti-gentrification graffiti around the venue and entrance. Gentrification politics notwithstanding, the new location offered a welcome outdoor courtyard for convivial gathering between salon visits.

Material

Angela Maasalu at Tütar Gallery

Romeo Gomez Lopez

Sophie Jung at Copperfield

Tim Brawner at Management

While the deracinated, standardized, and financially motivated confines of an art fair hardly offer the context to meaningfully present and situate artists and their work, the pieces on view in this edition—and more generally among a generation of artists today—seem to illustrate some widely shared tendencies in a moment of post-industrial capitalism in the Global North. Broadly speaking, I would offer a sense of alienation from both production and meaning: deskilling, appropriation, and insular, memetic self-referentiality. I got the sense there was a kind of semiotic slippage or drift, vectorized in niche corners and chambers of the internet, devirtualizing in the gallery and congealing into ambivalent fragments of semiotic disintegration. This is, of course, not without moments of beauty, curiosity, humor, irony, and so on. I also found myself wondering whether the promise of relational aesthetics—with its de-fetishization of the art object and return to the ritual object or practice that reinstates social exchange—has somehow not been delivered in Mexico City art week. Several gallerist friends jokingly confessed they don’t mind losing money, really, because of how much they enjoy coming down and hanging out.

Taverna

Salón Acme

Salón Acme has gotten many things right, and its now overbearing success—with overflowing crowds and lines around the block—is perhaps a sign that the lessons learned there could be more broadly emulated and publicly supported. The grand, crumbling Porfirian architecture and courtyard, featuring a large open call of emerging artists, always offer thrills and diverse social energies across a range of convivial and aesthetic zones: restaurants and cafés, verandas and vistas for people-watching, libraries and bookshops, rooftop dancing, and art installed on nearly every surface in between. It invites the question: why don’t we have many more spaces like this, with this level of public programming? Why don’t municipalities support more projects like this? France offers some possible models, with venues like Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille and 104 in Paris.

Tania Pérez Córdova at Travesia Cuatro

Graciela Iturbide at Fomento Cultural Banamex

Around the fairs, the Mexico City art ecosystem is on full display, offering a superabundance of institutional programming, satellites, events, artist-organized shows, performances, and historic architectures. Each addition seems to unearth and activate some overlooked or underexposed modernist architecture with art installations or contemporary design objects. This edition, I went to the Pedregal neighborhood to see the Casa Alonso Rebaque home designed by Félix Candela. Last year, I went to a performance at a Barragán estate inaugurated as a cultural institute, and the year before enjoyed beautiful tours of the Juan O’Gorman–designed home and studio of Nancarrow and the home and collection of Mexican architect Pedro Ramírez Vázquez.

I arrived early at the new crown jewel of Chapultepec Park, LagoAlgo, to see an exhibition by the London-based collective Troika, who converted the picturesque gallery into bands of RGB-tinted conceptual explorations of machine seeing and increasingly automated, algorithmically determined futures. Stills of eco-disaster captured on CCTV monitors—the collective noted there are 500 million of such cameras globally and growing—were meticulously painted at pixel resolution, while trembling plants sprouted from piles of silicon and salt around the gallery. A large monitor intersected the space with a CGI-rendered KUKA robot twirling a mane of virtual hair balletically atop a green-screened timelapse of climatological fluctuation. A haunting choral score stretched a lightly remixed line from a Rumi poem—“a drop in the ocean, the ocean in a drop”—into different permutations. Eva and Seb, two-thirds of Troika, shared that they were interested in the way certain animals, like dolphins and wolves, compress meaning into concentrated semiotic calls delivered across great time and space, and we considered what relation this might have to our packaged transmission of data through the internet. The conversation took a fascinating turn into the crystalline structures of modernity and a longue durée technological history of orthogonal logic. I believe Seb at one point suggested a kind of conspiracy of flint rocks, silicon, salt, and even mathematics in dominating the organic world—which, actually, makes a lot of sense to me. I found Troika’s work compelling for showing the similarities between art and science, as they are both largely lens-based partial epistemologies often co-engaged with metaphysical and ontological considerations and decidedly committed to our technological moment of massive planetary sensing: a moment that empirically demonstrates the severity of our polycrises, yet can only seem to find ways to profit from them, while the energetic costs of mounting planetary surveillance reinforce a downward ecological spiral.

Walking out of the gallery back into the grand architecture of the museum café and looking out onto a terraformed lake—what was once a natural lake—alongside a private tour of Northern collectors and art administrators that prompted my friend to mutter “Mar-a-LagoAlgo,” was a somewhat grim, if tastefully tisane-palliated, reminder of how unevenly these climatological experiences will be distributed in our unfolding future.

José Eduardo Barajas’s La Blanda Patria

I went downtown to see the large group show Columna Rota (Broken Column), curated by Francisco Berzunza around the theme of rejection, borrowing its title from Frida Kahlo’s 1944 self-portrait with an Ionic column in place of her spine, made during a period of surgery undertaken to overcome a debilitating physical injury. It was a bold curatorial gambit to foreground feelings of inadequacy in framing a rangy exhibition of some 150 loosely related international works. Many of the individual pieces overcame the curatorial determination on their own terms and complexity, and I found myself thinking over the coming days about the role of the curator in an art world of increasing bureaucracy and professionalization, and the restructuring of value toward those who control the vectors of circulation. I also found myself wondering what more structural concerns might be established and staked to link the disparate works on view.

Tamiji Kitagawa’s Two Donkeys

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Pray, Bless Us with Rice and Curry, Our Great Moon

Approaching the show, I felt small soap bubbles popping on my skin and learned they were made by Teresa Margolles using a solution employed to wash the dead in Oaxaca. We encounter José Eduardo Barajas’s La Blanda Patria, a mural installed in the ceiling before the start of the exhibition, and are then treated to a broad survey of works, with highlights including Tamiji Kitagawa’s Two Donkeys and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Pray, Bless Us with Rice and Curry, Our Great Moon—two works suggesting a more-than-human conception of rejection and overcoming. The show ended with a small comet study by José María Tranquilino Francisco de Jesús Velasco Gómez Obregón—or Velasco, as he is commonly known—whose work was contemporaneously enjoying a beautifully conceived retrospective at the nearby Kaluz Museum, housed in a restored and transformed viceregal hospice.

The Garden of Velasco at the Kaluz Museum draws from a collection compiled and acquired from the artist’s great-granddaughter and includes over 2,500 previously unseen paintings, notebooks, sketches, letters, manuscripts, books, and objects. The exhibition assembled from the archive is extraordinary in both selection and museography, and contours a brilliant polymath artist alive to his time in a critical, contemplative, self-reflexive, and ecological register. His journals, palette, and early experiments with photography provide beautiful insights. Taken in aggregate, the work rigorously engages a fraught modernist romantic regime emerging with its many internal conflicts and paradoxes, alongside enduring legacies of the construction, subordination, and instrumentalization of Nature.

UNAM’s MUAC galleries, ever a discursive force in the Latin American art context, offered a suite of compelling presentations, including an exhibition on Mexican collectives invited to the 10th Paris Young Artist Biennial in 1977 to show their aestheticized political work—perhaps a timely revisiting of this history in light of the recent documenta’s focus on the collective form—as well as the contradictions and tensions that emerge from exhibiting embedded, politically oriented collective practices within the European biennial format and the larger neoliberal context.

Los grupos y otras

Alongside Los grupos y otras, there were presentations of Marta Palau’s earthen textile, wooden, and ceramic works, and a large site-specific installation by Delcy Morelos, titled Womb Space, submerging the viewer in a chamber of fragrant earth. As surprising and pleasant as it was to encounter, I couldn’t help thinking of Jainism and how it might regard this work. Their sophistication of ecological awareness and ethics is so refined that they won’t harvest and eat allium vegetables so as not to disturb the microorganisms and surrounding insect life. It also evoked for me a kind of extractivism difficult to reconcile with the maternal invocations, and made me wonder about the labor and ecology of this presentation, as well as our implication in various forms of extractivism—for the purpose of making beautiful art installations, or mining the rare earth minerals needed for me to write and share this review.

Marta Palau

Delcy Morelos

The telluric theme ran through the Tamayo Museum, newly helmed by Andrea Torreblanca, who curated the gorgeous Archaic Futures exhibition in the downstairs galleries. The framing was both light and grand in its invocations of universals, archetypes, and cosmos, assembling, with high modernist elegance, a suite of recurrent natural motifs and sumptuous abstraction. In the airy atrium, now dedicated to relational art, appreciative visitors rested in a lattice of sweeping, undulating hammocks—a thoughtful and welcome reprieve from the art week’s velocities.

Archaic Futures

An artful highlight of the week, in the somewhat ironically named Arte Abierto space in a posh mall in Pedregal, was the painstaking, fragile, and menacing Temporal Advantage installation by Mauro Giaconi: a life-size ship made almost entirely from paper, graphite, and silicon, installed in a rooftop white-cube gallery. The impressive and beautiful work, compiled from thousands of sheets of paper—each skillfully rendered in graphite to evoke patinated metal—constructs a stalled, precarious, and ominous vessel filled with secrets, questions, and paradoxes. Upstairs, growing on the deck, was a garden made from machete blades; downstairs, a kind of galley kitchen with steaming pots resembling bomb equipment. One hidden real tin can sat on a shelf of paper ones, containing instructions for how to make a secret chamber in the base of a can to smuggle correspondence. A single book placed on the floor beneath a paper bunk bed was titled: La simulación en la lucha por la vida. 

Casa Wabi and Kurimanzutto offered case studies in beautiful architecture squandered on the presentation of overvalued individual artists. Meanwhile, the cheeky Purimanzutto popped up in a historic gay club and offered a lighthearted exercise in the radical subversion and reappropriation of a rigorously oppressive—if not contiguously gay—variation of Christianity, with campy, queered iconography and crucified Jesus disco balls adorning crowds of working-class local youth singing and dancing along to reggaeton anthems.

Guadalajara90210—whose 2019 Pabellón de las Escaleras 100-artist group show in an open-roofed building under construction in the Santa María neighborhood remains one of my greatest memories of Mexico City art weeks past—presented a sprawling forty-some-artist group show in their new space, alongside a solo presentation and a concentrated version of their last exhibition in a smaller gallery, combining small sculptures formerly stretched around the circumference of the gallery onto three shelves of densely wonderful works. Their plural, playful, social, and distinctly Mexican modernist approach to exhibition-making has made them beloved scene-makers in the flourishing Mexico City and Guadalajara milieus.

Joshua Merchan Rodriguez

Some of my favorite artistic interventions occurred at the infrastructural level. The dedicated public bus lanes that speed past gridlocked individual automobile traffic are a marvel of relational aesthetics. Parque México is a near-perfect and democratic achievement of social art that should be reproduced as widely as there are neighborhoods. Sitting in the central plaza, where every generation lingers and plays, and wandering the meandering paths filled with more-than-human life, I feel a sense of hope and contours of the otherwise.

Sunday dance group in the plaza

On my final night, I found my way to a deconsecrated church where the brilliant visual ethnomusicologist Vincent Moon had installed himself, with the help of local event producers Love Academy, for a twelve-hour durational live performance and mix of his thousands of music films produced around the world with ritual and devotional musicians. His approach felt shamanic and reverential, and I was moved to tears lying barefoot on the lushly carpeted and cushioned floor with an intergenerational audience enthralled by the sonorous beauty of our world’s diverse cultures and art forms. After the performance, Vincent stayed around, giving hugs and answering questions about his practice and equipment. He shared his humble thanks to the artists he has met and tenderly portrayed, and noted that all of his films are available for free for anyone to watch on his website.

The next morning, a final limpia and a return, fortified with beauty and ritual, to a dark and depraved, terrorizing Trumpian North America.

Hard to Read: An Interview of Barbara T. Smith, Fiona Duncan & Mara McCarthy →

Over the past seven decades, Barbara T. Smith’s transformative practice has charted the evolution of feminist movements, performance art, radical action, self-liberation, time-based media, and collective organizing. In a similar spirit, Fiona Duncan launched the literary social practice Hard To Read in 2016, and she is now presenting a special edition within Julia Stoschek Foundation’s audiovisual poem What A Wonderful World. This program spans multiple floors and features a rare recreation of a 1970s performance by Smith. Joined by Mara McCarthy—founder of The Box Gallery, representative of Barbara’s estate, and daughter of legendary artist Paul McCarthy—Smith and Duncan discuss the intersections of their practices, the lineage of feminist performance, and the enduring power of radical artistic experimentation. Read more.

Read Our Interview Of Julia Stoschek and Curator Udo Kittelmann On The Occasion Of What A Wonderful World In Los Angeles →

Set across all floors of the raw remains of the historic Variety Arts Theater in Downtown Los Angeles, a haunting, confrontational, and revelatory history of moving images flickers in the darkness. Presented by Julia Stoschek and her preeminent Berlin-based foundation for time-based media, this is not an exhibition, nor a retrospective, nor a white-walled museum journey through chronological time. Described as an audiovisual poem, What A Wonderful World—edited (not curated) by Udo Kittelmann—moves from early cinematic experiments and silent film to contemporary video works by artists working today. The breadth of visual storytelling is astonishing. We sit down with Julia Stoschek and Udo Kittelmann to discuss their landmark paean to cinema itself. Click here to read more.

Twins: An Editorial by Debora Brune & Sophie Ozra Cloarec

photography by Debora Brune @ DILLER Global
assisted by Emma Obermann
styling by Sophie Ozra Cloarec
assisted by Sybbi Rhaye
makeup by Adam de Cruz @ ONE REPRESENTS using Haus Labs
assisted by Yuichiro Kamei
hair by Chrissy Hutton
assisted by Milita Nagelyte
produced by Lea Bütefisch
modeling by Baillie & Brooke @ MODELS 1, Gabriele & Rayan @ AMCK MODELS, Hazel & Kirsty @ The MiLK Collective

left: Kirsty wears bra & trousers by Julie Kegels, panties by Skims, shoes by Charles & Keith

right: Hazel wears top by Skims, trousers by Samanta Virgino, belt by Julie Kegels, shoes by Ashley Williams

 

left: Baillie wears bra by Skims, jeans by Jeanerica, shoes by Kalda, bag by Charles & Keith
right: Brooke wears bra by Fruity Booty, bodysuit by Skims, jeans by Jeanerica, shoes by Aeyde, socks by Swedish Stockings

 

left: Gabriele wears jacket by Studio Nicholson, vintage t-shirt, jeans by Jeanerica, shoes by Russel & Bromley
right: Rayan wears blazer by Studio Nicholson, vintage t-shirt, jeans by Jeanerica, shoes by Vagabond

 

Gabriele & Rayan wear trousers by Jeanerica

left: Kirsty wears jacket by Studio Nicholson, shirt by Wales Bonner, gloves by Julie Kegels, tights by Calzedonia
right: Hazel wears dress by Ashley Williams, trousers & sweater, by Studio Nicholson

left: Hazel wears blazer by Malina, zip up by Wales Bonner, earrings, by Aeyde
right: Kirsty wears trousers by Wales Bonner, top by Fruity Booty, bolero by Lucila Safie, jewelry by Aymer Maria

 

Brooke wears shirt by Jeanerica, jeans by Studio Nicholson, zip up by Wales Bonner, boots by Vagabond
Baillie wears jacket by Vince, shorts by Studio Nicholson, tights by Swedish Stockins, shoes by Charles & Keith

 

left: Baillie wears bodysuit by Lucila Safdie, trousers by Juicy Couture
right: Brooke wears top by Lucila Safdie

A Play of Balance and Form, Arthur Simms's Caged Bottle Triggers Engines of Memory @ KARMA New York

 
 

text by Arlo Kremen

Arriving in New York City in 1968 at the age of seven, Saint Andrew, Jamaica-born Arthur Simms’ assemblages draw on the legacies of Duchamp and Rauschenberg. His new solo exhibition, Caged Bottle, at Karma New York shows works spanning nearly four decades from his studio on Staten Island. His sculptural works are made from found objects, often bound together by rope or wire. Rocks, bottles, toys, furniture, street signs, feathers, bones, and so many other discarded objects are manipulated by Simms into new forms. The binding of disparate objects together unifies them—a transformation of the many into a singular, fused work. Bug in the Cars (2024) is made from three toy cars, a roller skate, wire, and a bug, all stacked one atop another. The wire, wrapped around the glass encasing a bug carcass, cascades down to entwine two toy cars and the roller skate. A pink yarn webs the exterior of the sculptures into a fixed state, wrapped around the wheels of the roller skate, preventing movement. The third toy car, however, is quite literally disconnected. Free from the binding of wire and yarn, this car remains caged, likely able to move in the small space its cell affords, yet still a part of the overall sculptural figure—bound and unbound, unified and disunified, fixed and unfixed.

 
 

Simms’ use of yarn in Bugs in the Cars is relatively spare compared to his wrapping of rope in Sexual Tension (1992) and Spanish Town (2003). Both works are so densely bound with rope that their internal content becomes unclear from even a moderate distance. Whether it be the exact forms of wooden blocks in Spanish Town or whatever dark matter sits in the heart of Sexual Tension, a distinct separation occurs at the level of exteriority and interiority. The rope acts as a skin, concealing the beating organs it encases. Nearly spiritual, Sexual Tension, the earliest work in the show, although not relative to any human form, feels, in some sense, ghostly. A bodied quality sits hidden within an interior, inaccessible to onlookers, and can be directly encountered only through its shroud of hemp, while only the presence of an interior object is intimated.

Simms continues his interest in the spiritual in his works inspired by Congolese Nkisi (vessels for spirits or medicinal substances to resolve disputes, enforce justice, heal, or harm enemies). It is possible to argue that perhaps when creating Sexual Tension, Simms was already thinking of Nkisi, sculptures that are at times seen wrapped in rope, but his inspiration becomes more clearly articulated in The Knife and the Hammer, Fear of Aggression (1994). Mimicking the Nkisi in his puncturing the work with nails and knives, he activates the spirit within this totemic figure. The work is exhibited here for the first time but was assembled while working at the Brooklyn Museum as an art handler in the early 1990s, when Simms became fascinated with Nkisi and Central African throwing knives. The work, in its vertical orientation, features a slab of wood perpendicular to the floor, appearing nearly cross-like. In his bridging together of Christianity and Congolese spirituality, he reckons with art history. Art objects are manifested in the show as being inseparable from cultural modes of metaphysical belief. 

Just as much as his work might be about spirit, Simms pays quite a bit of attention to form. In his exhibited paintings, Simms propounds the strength of the line. With a collection of works from 2025 whose titles begin with “Search for form” followed by a number indicating their order, Simms demarcates exactly what is at stake in these works: the power of a line to define a form. He uses lines to create forms, to separate blocks of color, and to provide forms with loose details. These works apply lines identical to his Retablos from 2015 that continue his interest in spirituality. Two of the three retablos in the show, Retablo 5, Staten Island, and Retablo 1, Lois Dodd, are, unlike his searches for form, representative of something (Staten Island and Lois Dodd, respectively). He used the same techniques of line as used in 2015 as he did a decade later, studying the distillation of forms to lines and color, in a manner quite similar to Arthur Dove, and in the case of Lois Dodd, Marius de Zayas’s absolute caricatures. A throughline could be drawn from his acrylic paintings on wood and aluminum to his sculptural practice in his continued interest in rope and wire, linear forms. Simms explores the potential of the line as a sculptural gesture, something that can, of course, be used to bind and attach, but also the line as something that can conceal, mystify, and define interiors and exteriors, as is the case with Sexual Tension. He thinks of the line’s bulk—when wrapped repeatedly over itself, the line becomes its own form rather than a tool to define a form. 

Simms’ lines, particularly his ropes, are also soaked in memory. Being made of hemp, the use of rope betrays its presence before laying eyes on the works, with its pungent scent. Simms has spoken in interviews about his childhood memories remaining in smell and sound; thus, the olfactory dimension of the material triggers engines of memory. Many of his memories are related to the music he heard as a child, describing music as a process of layering and the coalescence and accumulation of sounds into a single work. As such, the binding feature of his linear forms refers back to his childhood.

 

Arthur Simms
The Knife and the Hammer, Fear of Aggression, 1994
Rope, glue, hammers, wood, knives, blades, wire, metal, screws, stones, monetary note, nails, cobblestone, and pencil
107 1/4 x 35 x 15 in.
© Arthur Simms. Courtesy the artist and Karma

 

In the exhibition’s titular work, Caged Bottle (2006), Simms tests the strength of the line in the most literal sense imaginable. Using both rope and wire, Caged Bottle is a balancing act between a deconstructed toy bike wrapped in rope and a recycling bin-like structure made from wires and a bike wheel. Glass bottles and an assortment of other objects fill the interiors of the two sides, providing a distribution of weight that allows Caged Bottle to balance its wheels on a small platform without tipping and crashing, which would result in the unfixed glass bottle in a birdcage tumbling off and shattering. This work is all about precarity. But in using the linear forms of wire and rope to hold it all together, the halves can balance each other, preventing the destruction of the caged bottle. In this display of Simms’ work, presenting his paintings and sculptures together for the first time, alongside his interest in art history, the spiritual, the cultural, and memory, the artist’s formalist attitudes are made clear, positioning him as a unique artist undeniably worthy of this spike in recognition after so many years flying under the radar.

Arthur Simms’ Caged Bottle is on view through February 14 @ Karma, 22 E 2nd Street, New York City.

Arthur Simms
Caged Bottle, 2006
Rope, wood, glue, bicycles, metal, bottles, and wire
50 x 62 x 36 in.
© Arthur Simms. Courtesy the artist and Karma