Backstage: Louis Vuitton Men's Spring/Summer 2027

Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring-Summer 2027 by Pharrell Williams unfolds as a “Dandy Experience” shaped by the ocean as both metaphor and material reality—where the wave becomes a universal equaliser, drawing together coastlines, cultures, and ways of living. Set against a hyper-sensorial staging in Paris, the show channels surfing as a global language of movement and belonging, with water imagined as a force of life, connection, and return.

As the moon—the wavemaker—rises over the Parisian sky, the collection emerges from a monumental wave, dissolving the boundary between city and shoreline. Pharrell Williams extends his signature dandy silhouette into this coastal vocabulary, fusing unconventional elegance with the tactile codes of surf culture: hand-spun textures, weathered finishes, and bohemian ease translated through Louis Vuitton’s technical savoir-faire. Wetsuits and tailoring are placed in dialogue, while trompe l’oeil surfaces and surf-inspired graphics blur the line between illusion and touch.

Parked beside the dunes of the set, a silver camper reimagined in the House’s future-facing design language anchors the narrative—like a suspended drop within an elemental landscape, placing the nomadic dandy in direct contact with nature’s rhythm. A cinematic prelude featuring surfers Mikey February and Julian Wilson sets the tone, as the sound of crashing water merges with an original score recorded in Pharrell’s Louis Vuitton studio.

Extending beyond the runway, the collection connects to Louis Vuitton’s Regeneration 2030 initiative in partnership with Coral Gardeners, supporting reef restoration in French Polynesia—out-planting 1,000 corals and restoring 250 square metres of reef habitat at the Tiaia site in 2026. In this context, the show frames the ocean not only as aesthetic inspiration, but as a living system to be preserved and regenerated.

Details: Prada Spring/Summer 2027 Menswear Show Inside The Deposito at Fondazione Prada, Milan

Precision, concentration, the reactive act—Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons approach Spring/Summer 2027 menswear through the idea of choice: what is kept, what is removed, and what becomes clearer in the process. It is not about reduction, but distillation—bringing clothes back to what feels fundamental and exact. Everyday garments like jeans, denim jackets, and T-shirts are re-examined and refined, not reinvented, but re-seen. Familiar things, adjusted just enough to shift their meaning. The silhouette is controlled and linear, consistent throughout, with accessories absorbed into the system rather than sitting on top of it. Everything is tightened into a quiet logic where function and form are almost indistinguishable. What emerges is a kind of clarity built from restraint. Not absence, but focus. A way of looking at the same things with a different level of attention.

Saint Laurent Men's Summer 27 by Anthony Vaccarello Presentation At Bourse de Commerce

Saint Laurent’s Summer 2027 Men’s collection by Anthony Vaccarello unfolds inside the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, where architecture, atmosphere, and absence become inseparable from the clothes themselves. The circular structure—designed by Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, and Agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier—grounds the presentation in a language of restraint: concrete, proportion, and light forming a silent, continuous frame for what is revealed within it.

At the center of the experience is Fujiko Nakaya’s Cloud #07156 (2026), an immersive fog installation that transforms the rotunda into a shifting field of visibility and disappearance. As mist fills the space, the building ceases to function as a static container and instead becomes a breathing environment—one in which bodies and garments appear, dissolve, and re-emerge like fragments of thought.

Vaccarello’s collection is anchored in a provocation: “Nobody is trying to seduce you. What makes them seductive is that they do not need to.” From this premise, the show considers desire not as accumulation but as withdrawal—what happens when drama, noise, and excess are withheld rather than amplified. Across 40 looks, restraint becomes its own form of intensity.

Tailoring is sharpened into new proportions: a three-button jacket cut higher on the body, paired with narrow flat-fronted or softly pleated trousers; familiar Saint Laurent codes—the waistcoat, the ribbed V-neck sweater—recalibrated through precision rather than reinvention. Even athletic blousons appear refined, rendered in unexpectedly delicate technical taffeta. Gold threads through the collection not as ornament but as transformation, turning the utilitarian trench into something heightened yet still functional. The palette remains grounded—grey, brown, black, beige—punctuated by flashes of orange, ochre, claret, lime, powder blue, and shimmering gold.

The collection is informed by figures who treated restraint as a form of expression: Marguerite Duras, Tina Chow, and the fictional Mr. Ripley. Each, in different ways, embodies Vaccarello’s central idea that omission can be more powerful than declaration. As the notes frame it: “It is refusal, perhaps, that most powerfully fuels desire.” And further: “We have forgotten the pleasure of the unknown, the unseen and the unspoken.”

The presentation extends this philosophy into space and choreography. Models move through Cloud #07156 in a sixteen-minute sequence, emerging and dissolving within Nakaya’s fog. Here, clothing is never fully fixed in view. Instead, it becomes part of an atmosphere where presence is temporary, and disappearance is designed. The installation is not a backdrop but an active force—another articulation of absence, restraint, and desire in motion.

Campaign: CELINE Autumn/Winter 2026 Collection by Michael Rider

CELINE’s Autumn/Winter 2026 campaign under Michael Rider builds from the frame of menswear and what CELINE stands for, filtering it through the energy of the here and now. As Rider puts it, “We took the frame of menswear, and what CELINE stands for, and then talked a lot about the energy of today, the here and now, the way people live and want to look.” At its core is a shift from performance to presence: “Character over costume.” The collection resists excess in favor of clarity, positioning dressing as something grounded, instinctive, and personal. It’s about a wardrobe that doesn’t overwrite identity but refines it.

CELINE becomes, in Rider’s words, “a place to come and get dressed, for all sorts of days and nights and moments in life,” where clothing is meant to be lived in rather than staged. The invitation is open-ended—“inviting everyone to find the best pieces and then to appropriate them into their lives, their rhythms, their style.” Everything resolves into utility and emotion at once: “Everything you could need,” expressed through garments that feel necessary, personal, and made in beautiful fabrics that endure. The attitude is quiet but precise—“classics with bite,” where “discretion and restraint make the right kind of noise.”

photographs by Andrea Spotorno

Backstage: Dries Van Noten Men's Spring/Summer 2027 Collection

“We started the collection with the desire to make something that feels light and delicate.” From its earliest sketches, the project unfolds like a memory half-remembered, shaped by creative director Julian Klausner’s reading of L’Après-midi d’un faune, Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1876 poem where a dreamlike creature drifts between waking and sleep, caught in “the haziness the verses depict” and the constant slipping between the real and the imagined.

That same suspended state defines the collection’s sensual grammar. “The idea of sensuality guided many of our choices,” Julian notes, as wardrobe staples dissolve into something intimate and unstable—“like a dream that vanishes upon waking up.” Lingerie suggestions run through the silhouettes: charmeuse silks, spaghetti straps as drawstrings, tank tops woven with hints of undress, and a cosmetic palette of blush and earthy tones lifted by nature’s greens and blues. The masculine wardrobe is seen “through hazy eyes that just woke up from an afternoon nap,” where tailoring flows and flutters, sequins shimmer like sun on water, and familiar forms are softened into garments that feel “loose, delicate, easy to remove, ready to fly away.”

photographs by Leon Prost

Aesop's Queer Library Returns to Celebrate the Transformative Power of Queer Storytelling

Aesop's Queer Library returns for its sixth year in partnership with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, transforming select stores into spaces dedicated to queer literature. Visitors are invited to take home a complimentary book by an LGBTQIA2S+ author, continuing a global initiative that has distributed more than 115,000 books worldwide. Rooted in Aesop's longstanding commitment to literature, this year's edition celebrates writing that expands visibility, challenges convention, and affirms the power of storytelling to foster empathy, community, and joyful resistance. Stop by an Aesop store until Sunday, June 28 to receive a complimentary book or click here to redeem a free audiobook.

Skirting on the Border: Salim Green's "Paintings" @ François Ghebaly

 

Salim Green
Untitled, 2025
Oil on wool felt on wood panel
9 x 9 inches (23 x 23 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York

 

text by Arlo Kremen
photos by Brad Farwell

Tucked away in a commercial complex on Grand Street, Ghebaly’s New York location holds two modest-sized rooms. In a departure from his expansive LA show this past fall, Salim Green showcases nine felt-on-wood paintings, each measuring 9 x 9 inches, in a series he has broadly titled Paintings. Simple and to the point, the exhibition’s name is a perfect descriptor. With each piece given plenty of space to breathe, the intimate gallery space is opened up into extended swaths of pure white paint, only to be ruptured by boxed contentions of felt and paint.

At first glance, Untitled, the show’s welcome team, sets a false tone. A melting and misshapen face in red, this painting is uniquely anthropomorphic. Cartoonish yellow geometries pool around black pupils. A nose, ear, and jaw might also be found in darker red protrusions jutting out of the head. The same might be said for the black formation at the top of the head, mirroring what could be the shadows of a mouth. But, whatever it is, its setting is evident. The left edge bears terse dark strokes, mimicking the ringlets of a notebook, and, when considered alongside the white and grey stuccoed background, Untitled’s allusion to doodling feels nearly certain. A notebook’s stark emptiness provides a decontextualized surface for discreet drawings, either spackled across a single page or as a processional flipping of figures and scenes. Untitled offers a curious reversal of Green’s predominant method of this set of paintings that results in similar ends. He utilizes figurative abstraction to reveal the complex legibility of the blank surface of notebook paper. A blank surface with remarkable similarity to that of the gallery wall. Although far from notebook drawings, Green’s Paintings revel in the negative space, like portals to new visions.

 

Salim Green
Untitled, 2025
Oil on wool felt on wood panel
9 x 9 inches (23 x 23 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York

 

Another curious use of representation is figured in another untitled work that utilizes yellow and orange oil paints smeared within an unctuous brown. A black bifurcating line splinters the work just to the right of its perfect center, where nine orange circular blobs pair off across the divide with an abandoned marigold floating at the bottom-right. The work has an unmistakable resemblance to Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, scored by Marius de Zayas in 1913. De Zayas’s absolute caricature bears a bifurcating line in the dead center of the composition with ten circles on either side—the middle pair are colored in dark, a nod to Stieglitz’s eyeglasses. Both works also include a frame within a frame that is subsequently intruded upon by the artwork. De Zayas’s line and top-most and bottom-most circles stretch beyond the confining rectangle he drew up to hold his caricature. Green seems to have done something similar, only in reverse. The brown border is smeared above, thus partially obfuscating yellow strokes. The bifurcating line extends into the outer border, as do three black marks on the left-end of the composition, mimicking de Zayas’s use of line in her visual lexicon. De Zayas’s idea behind his ‘absolute caricatures’ was a way of representing someone internally, capturing their spirit through line and shape, leaving visual codes readable to a knowledgeable viewer. Thus, much like Green, his absolute caricatures sit on the border of legibility, entirely abstract to an unknowing eye who has not seen or heard of Alfred Stieglitz.

Green might continue his allusion to the publishing of Portrait of Alfried Stieglitz in the quarterly Journal edited by Alfred Stieglitz, Camera Work, with the black shape in the bottom-right corner—a shadow behind a flipping page, prefiguring the left-to-right movement of its viewer. A painting registering its own serial status, just one of several paintings. 

Salim Green, in another work, slathered above the usual felt and paint, oil and acrylic, bedding of beeswax. Although a degree of the shielded painting comes through the white wax, hole punctures shore up bits and pieces of what lies below. Three dark craters rupture the surface, and a volcanic glob of paint bubbles up into a hard crust. There is something unmistakably alive in this work’s absence. Layering organic material, stippled with holes and surface texture holding faint colors from whatever it is underneath, the painting has a tryptophobic effect. That, at any point, something, or somethings, might crawl out. But, in the same breath, it is also topographic. Small ripplings and cracks in the wax forge mountain ranges, colors produce a sense of scale differentiation. The painting oscillates between these two extreme perspectives, the organic and up-close and the aerial and cartographic.

Something similar is accomplished with another untitled painting, where, white paint is used to cover up earlier surfaces rather than beeswax. Here, an aerial perspective is also felt, melting snow over farmland, although hardly affirmed. The felt texture protrudes in and out of fields of material, underscoring the layering process central to the making of this work. Obscurity is revealed as a core tenant of Green’s methodology.

 

Salim Green
Untitled, 2025
Oil on wool felt on wood panel
9 x 9 inches (23 x 23 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, New York

 

Both works feel as though they had been cut out of a larger composition, just a peephole into what was there before. A sense dramatized by the mystifying expanse of the gallery wall surrounding it. A fourth painting seems to literalize this feeling, where two color stories sit in contradiction. In a painting consisting of a grassy green field and some orange ground with a thick red curve, the edge of the work is a slick layer of purple and then white paint. It is difficult to ascertain whether a layer of wool felt is squeezed between the visible composition and the palimpsested one, but, regardless, the hidden paint comes to the viewer as a sickly icing mushed in between layers of days-old cake. Where is the rest of the cake? Who can say? But its absence makes it all the more present.

Salim Green’s Paintings is on view through June 20 @ François Ghebaly, 391 Grand Street, New York City.

Monet and the Floating World

text by Perry Shimon

“It’s too beautiful to be painted,” Monet is said to have remarked, in a prominently placed quotation opening the thoughtfully conceived exhibition at the de Young Museum, co-organized with the Brooklyn Museum, on Monet’s late visit to Venice. The period under review was a challenging time in the artist’s development, a moment of intense frustration with his water lilies, and an encounter with a city so beautiful—and so beautifully rendered—that he felt overcome. We are told that the subsequent late lilies painted back home in his Giverny garden—some exceptional examples of which are on display in the exhibition—were largely a result of this Venetian journey.

One of the more interesting, if not entirely surprising, curatorial gambits of the exhibition suggests the extent to which much of Monet’s output resulted from pressure exerted by his dealers to produce for the market. This detail makes the rather uninspired and repetitive suite of Venetian paintings appear something of a capitulation to those imperatives. That Monet was captivated by Venice seems clear, though the works on view betray an ambivalent practice distinctly disenchanted by market pressures and anxiety before tradition.

San Biagio, James McNeill Whistler

Santa Maria della Salute, John Singer Sargent

The Piazzetta, Palazzo Ducale (Doge's Palace), J.M.W. Turner from 1840

The show contextualizes Monet’s engagement within a lively milieu of contemporaries, each endeavoring to make a mark on the flowing city. Whistler produced a series of fine etchings depicting working-class Venetians in the shadowy crevices of the city; Sargent offered a shimmering eruption of watercolor scenes rendering its excitement and affluence; and Turner created a suite of watercolors and gouaches that barely coalesce into legible scenes, rather more as ambient moods of light on water.

Venice, the Grand Canal looking East with Santa Maria della Salute, Canaletto around 1740

Canaletto’s formidable paintings, frighteningly beholden to the grid, impose a stately grandeur and insistent rigidity diametrically opposed to Monet’s intuitive transience. They render administrative power, mercantile prestige, and Grand Tour spectacle, produced amidst the political decline of the Republic and in the wake of the sumptuous and suffocating Christianity of Bellini, Titian, and Tintoretto.

A little over a decade before Monet’s visit, Venice inaugurated the Biennale di Venezia, a cultural super-event descending from the Crystal Palace exhibitions and world’s fairs and growing into a nationalistic arena, a watery Colosseum, in which power and culture compete on a global stage. Today, Venice exists as a year-round spectacle of art, finance, soft power, and attentional economies. In the current edition, Austrian artist Florentina Holzinger orchestrated a number of performances, which she describes as “highly complex compositions with a short duration, important material studies, and a peak intensity.” Her SEAWORLD VENICE features a cast of naked performers engaged in activities such as riding Jet Skis in circles inside a small gallery and sitting in tanks filled with water filtered from portable toilets that visitors are encouraged to use.

Florentina Holzinger: SEAWORLD VENICE, 2026, Austrian Pavilion, 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

Abbas Akhavan: Entre chien et loup, 2026, Canada Pavilion, 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

Montreal-based Abbas Akhavan, representing Canada in this edition, offered Entre chien et loup (Between Dog and Wolf), reimagining the Canadian Pavilion as a Wardian case—an early terrarium used to transport, among many other things, giant water lilies endemic to South America, favored by British colonial elites during the Victorian era and named after the Queen.

The exhibition concludes with a small photograph—a “selfie” avant la lettre—of Monet’s own reflection in a floating lily garden, a thoughtful curatorial gesture invoking the coming age of photography, already at work unsettling a painting tradition infused with broader cultural influences and beset by the epochal unrest of the industrial age, with its many social and ecological dislocations. Beside the photograph hangs a late painting: an animated limning of floating lilies suspended in a harmonious balance of water, light, and space.

 
 

If you should take a ferry from Honshu or Shikoku to Naoshima, the art-revitalized, postindustrial former fishing island, and on through the now rather overcomplicated app-based pilgrimage to see the monumentalized installations of artists from East and West proffering syncretic concepts of impermanence, quotidian beauty, and commodified spectacle, you’ll arrive, after walking through a shimmering water garden, at the Chichu Museum, where Tadao Ando has built a naturally lit subterranean den of white marble and luminous, softly curving walls for its collection of large, late Monet lilies. You’ll be invited to remove your shoes, walk into the cool cavern, and observe the ongoing transformation and relational becoming.

Chichu Art Museum, Monet Room, Yurika Kono

Monet and Venice is on view through July 26, 2026 at the de Young Museum

Prada Mode Takes Over Hotel Chelsea

Bard Room at Hotel Chelsea

text by Emma Grimes


Before even walking into Hotel Chelsea last week, Prada Mode already began. Outside, taxis branded with the iconic Prada logo embellished their tops, while striking, handsome employees dressed in chromatic spacesuits were busy checking guests in and handing out brochures.

For its 14th annual cultural experience, Prada Mode visited New York City with Satellites II, a mesmerizing, immersive installation curated by Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn and Japanese video game creator Hideo Kojima. Reviving their earlier installation in Tokyo last year—known as Prada Aoyama—the two friends and partners transformed the historic Hotel Chelsea into a retrofuturist dreamscape. The multi-day experience featured moderated panel discussions, live musical performances, and delicious offerings of food and drinks.

The first two days were only open to a select group of invitees, and the activities ranged from conversations about UFO sightings in New York City to a performance by experimental pianist Precious Renee Tucker. A discussion featuring Refn, Kojima, and actress Sophie Thatcher delved into the changing entertainment industry, while later in the day, Maya Hawke hosted her own story time. Later that evening, guests continued the festivities further downtown at the iconic Katz Delicatessen, which was partially cleared to make room for a dance floor and included their famous pastrami sandwiches. Among those in attendance were Hunter Shafer, Louis Partridge, Allison Williams, and more.

Back at the hotel, the Bard Room hosted engrossing performances by the Velveteers, Lydia Lunch, Sophie Thatcher, and Miho Hatori. Each night ended with a live DJ set by William Benton, alongside impressive kendama performers.

Among the event’s most popular attractions were the conspicuous, silver vending machines stationed around every corner of the hotel. Emblazoned with Prada imagery, the machines attracted crowds who patiently waited their turn to select a row and column before receiving a metallic, mystery box. Inside were Prada branded keepsakes, ranging from glitter pens to a decorative cassette tape, allowing attendees to take a small piece of the party home with them.

Otherwise Part VIII: Quotidian beauty, hospitality, and artful life in relation

by Perry Shimon

I live in a small village, both alike and not alike from other small villages. Within it, there are many artful relations. Many mornings, I bicycle to the bluffs overlooking the ocean. Along the crumbling promenade, people have hospitably installed and dutifully maintain simple benches and chairs, made from wood, where one may rest and take in the sensuous abundance of each day.

The roads in this village, in the areas where most people live, are unpaved by design, ensuring everyone moves slowly, lessening the fear and danger of speeding automobiles. The coastline where we live is designated public and accessible to everyone, in one of the greatest and most appreciated acts of art and hospitality that colors my life. 

In the winter months, when the days are more precious and the sky more abundant with clouds, I watch the sun rise from one of several beloved benches. I’ll often continue to my friend Peter’s home, perhaps bringing a book, a song, or a thought to share. Peter has said in the past, in his offhand and friendly way, that all he wants is to live in a world where friends come over to visit unannounced. He is often learning a piece of music from the past, making small, thoughtful changes, and then sharing the inherited and reimagined songs. He types up his poetic thoughts with an old rusty typewriter on thin onionskin paper sheets, which he collects neatly in a wooden box he stores beneath the bed in his small cabin.

In the food cooperative where he is a part of the collective, he arranges small quotidian objects of pleasant and curious character into small shrine-like assemblages that bring feelings of peace, friendliness, and welcome. The cooperative, limited as it may be by the constraints from which it emerges, suggests an alternative conception and social organization of work. Most people work five-hour shifts a few times a week, there is no firm hierarchy or boss, and by and large, colleagues treat each other with dignity and respect, if not friendly and familial warmth.

The cooperative sits in a small plaza, free of automobiles and protected from the wind, where the community gathers, doing the maintenance of understanding itself with quotidian conviviality. Opposite the food cooperative is a community kitchen, attached to a community center, and connected to a beloved public library. Between the food cooperative and the community center is a small building the size of a bedroom, affectionately called the ‘Freebox,’ where the community deposits things that are no longer of use or desired by one person but could be useful or desirable to another. On the remaining side of the plaza is a house that is collectively shared and protected through a local organization from the cruel, dislocating forces of the real estate market. Within, an intergenerational group of people live together amicably and tend to these common spaces. Each week there are events, classes, seasonal gatherings, rituals, performances, plays, food banks, and community meals.

From the food cooperative and farm stands, I collect vegetables and bread and bring them to my small home or to the kitchens of friends. We often eat from vessels made by Carey, a local potter and friend, who has been making beautiful ceramics for longer than I’ve been alive. His pots bring me great happiness every day while I use them. I visit him often, mostly to sit quietly, sometimes talking a little, and our dogs play together in the yard he shares with Patricia, another skillful potter and artist who makes everything around her quietly shimmer with quotidian beauty.

My daughter Agnes makes bowls and cups from clay as well. When I use them, or wash them, I feel the contours and echoes of her hands. I can almost feel her small fingers in mine when I move them around the vessel, and they provide me a great sense of love and appreciation. I use them every day, and often to hold some other object of importance and regular use.

My companion lost her mother, suddenly, at a tragically young age and she has a collection of plates and bowls that her mother made for her. These earthen objects, made with her hands, are great treasures that we use and care for daily and keep her present in our lives.

Each day, a slow, contemplative walk yields more beauty in relation than could fit into an art gallery. Each day, I notice the play of light on water, the weather on the ridge, the seasons of plants, birdsong, smiles on my neighbors’ faces, the laughter of children, wisdom of elders, the many migrations, passings, and renewals. I notice falling and fallen leaves like brush marks, each with their own changing beauty, small artful unfoldings.

My friend makes paintings and prints that resemble the becomings we encounter during our walks on the mountain, in the forest, and along the ocean. Like other dear friends, we became so with a mutual love and openness towards the possibilities of art. As much as I enjoy her paintings and prints, I enjoy watching her cut mushrooms and ginger, turning them over in oil, inside a pleasantly patinated copper pot with a rough-hewn wooden spoon. We often sit by the fire, reading aloud or talking, while the flickering light animates the beautiful objects, often found as they are, assembled on shelves and in alcoves around her home.

The Japanese philosopher Soetsu Yanagi, who in the early twentieth century helped found the Mingei movement dedicated to the beauty which resides in the life of everyday objects used by ordinary people, suggested that beauty knows no borders and mingles where you can hear voices speaking in friendly tones.

There are many friends and neighbors who make my world artful and pleasurable through their words, expressions, vocations, and diverse practices. This open and becoming notion of art-in-relation has developed my senses and sense of what is beautiful and important. This capacious, friendly, welcoming, and abundant sense of art accompanies me through the quotidian, and I offer that art’s greatest gift is its capacity to occasion friendship.

Otherwise Part VII

Proportions by Chiara Bottin & Debora Brune

 

dress by TIMSTO
ballerina by Rombaut
tights by Wolford
wool brief by Lou de Betoly

 

text, styling & creative direction by Chiara Bottin
photographs by Debora Brune
talent Pauline Anna Gudet
hair by Alan Antoineh
makeup by Jennifer Le Corre
assistant Emma Obermann
styling assistant Ana Elena Uscatu

 

dress by Lina Nix
heels by Bottega Veneta
tights by Wolford

bralette by Lou de Betoly
gloves by Squillance
mesh brief by Her Senses 
wool brief on top by Colombe de Naes
tights by Wolford
heels by r.l.e

 

I’m always trying to feel the right proportions. Not in my head, but in my body. How much tension I can hold before it turns into something else? Stretching, yoga, bending myself into strange shapes — it’s how I stay connected when things get too loud. Balance never stays. The moment I think l’ve found it, it slips away. I drift. 

 
 

My body folds into awkward positions, pauses too long, leans too far. It doesn’t look right, but it feels necessary. Sometimes being weird is the only way I can breathe. Most of this happens when no one is around. Almost invisible moments. Naked or half dressed, a cigarette between my fingers, stretching without knowing why. My favourite boots on the floor or still on my feet, grounding me. I’m just listening — to my weight, to gravity, to what I can carry and what I need to drop.

puffer jacket by Alessandro Santi
ballerina by Rombaut
corsage & brief by Her Senses

jacket by Cem Cinar
skirt by Colombe de Naes
hook mules by Sia Arnika
hat by Polyhedron

Outside, things soften. I hug a tree, let my legs hang from a branch, give in instead of holding myself together. Nature doesn’t ask for balance. It allows imbalance. 

The story moves between inside and outside — apartment, studio, open space. 

Each place shifts something in me.

dress by Ottolinger
heels by r.l.e
tights & transparent socks by Wolford

full look by Sia Arnika
bracelet by Laruicci 

mini knit cardigan by Colombe de Naes
knit bra & brief by Lou de Betoly
wheel skirt by TIMSTO
heels by r.l.e
tights by Wolford

The same body, but different proportions, depending on how exposed I feel. Balance isn’t calm. It isn’t clean. It’s fragile and messy and personal. I don’t find it by being correct. I find it by letting myself be off.

 

dress & brief by Ottolinger
boots by Rombaut
tights: Wolford

 

body by Polyhedron
knit floral hat by Colombe de Naes
heels by r.l.e
transparent socks by Wolford

 

Arming the Mind: Nina Hartmann's "Actualization Machine" @ Silke Lindner

Nina Hartmann
Hypnosis Tracking, ESP Research (Wilderness of Mirrors) (Diagram 4), 2026
Encaustic medium, pigment, inkjet print on wood panel
73 x 93 x 1 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Silke Lindner, New York

text by Arlo Kremen
photos by Chris Herity

Former State Department officer John Marks brought light to CIA operations involving LSD experiments, truth serums, mind control, brainwashing, and other paranormal and psychoactive practices in his meteoric 1979 book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate.” The attempts to discover and utilize supernatural psychological abilities were another part of this operation, which also involved the study of hallucinogenic properties and practices of hypnosis. Under the name of MKUltra, the US government spurred the program out of fear that the Russians had beaten them to the punch, already researching mind control methods to brainwash US operatives and arming soldiers with supernatural abilities. There was also Project Stargate, which aimed to advance forms of psychic espionage. These covert projects were launched shortly after videos of telekinetic and mind-reading demonstrations in the USSR began circulating in the West. A psychic militarism ensued, and mountains of money funded these parapsychological programs in the hopes of results that were never proffered. Nina Hartmann’s Actualization Machine at Silke Lindner features sculptural paintings, lightboxes, and resin reliefs that support diagrammatic images of ESP training and mind control techniques. Hartmann turns her head toward this uncovered history, swollen with conspiracy, faith, and mysticism, seeking to rethink the ways in which choice and free will are rendered in a social landscape saturated with suggestive words and images.

In her recontextualizing of found imagery, there is a smoothness that, in its diagram background, appears nearly propagandistic. Using images she came across while sifting through declassified documents, her work in creating instructive connections and relationships between previously hidden photos presents a counter-propaganda seeking to elucidate systems of power and social influence. This propagandistic quality of her work, however, is complicated by the general anonymity of her found images. Although they likely could be traced to the collection of files from this period of psychological and psychedelic experiments, the many faces, bodies, and scenes are presented with titular context alone. This effect is particularly felt in Trickery and Deception Star (Destabilization Diagram) (Diagram 3), where the title manages to accentuate this work’s uniquely dislodged images. The seven-point star’s images are unclear but have an atmosphere of violence. Its central image is burning, radiating reds, oranges, and yellows off of a nude man. Possibly a bodily experiment, possibly just an action of harm. (Potential) LSD <-> Mind Control Connections (Diagram 2) is similarly obfuscated. A black-and-white image of a hunched-over man caught in the central hexagon is surrounded by a second hexagon with images of people and places that imply a causal relation, but both the cause is and the people’s identities come up against another blockade.

ESP Star (Diagram I), on the other hand, bears a very recognizable figure and scene as its centerpiece—Nina Kulagina. It was images and videos of Kulagina, a self-professed psychic and psychokinetic housewife from Leningrad, that propelled the US into psychomilitary research. Another star figuration, this time a five-point star, colored blue with red-tinted images, Kulagina is pictured moving what seems to be a watch with her mind. She claimed these abilities, tested them on video, and then underwent experiments by a herd of scientists looking to validate her self-professed skills, even being asked to stop the heart of a living frog floating in solution, which, according to her researchers, she did. Although many have disputed her abilities, commenting on the uncontrolled testing environments and the simplicity of her feats in the context of sleight-of-hand magic tricks, films of her accomplishments inspired many around the world to begin researching psychic abilities. A person of global fascination, the found imagery of this work is less than esoteric; it is practically a relic of pop culture, having allegedly inspired the character of Eleven in Netflix’s Stranger Things. But, in fairness, it was Kulagina who inspired it all—MKUltra, Project Stargate, and every other government research project for psychoactivity during the Cold War. Crucially, however, it was not her feats that triggered the development of these research programs, but the disseminated photographic and filmic documentation of her feats. The strength of her images launched a number of senselessly abusive and exploitative research methods into existence. Kulagina may not have had the psychic powers or skills she claimed, but the images of her surely did.

 

Nina Hartmann
Remote Viewer I (Diagram 5) (PL Logick), 2026
Resin, UV print
24 x 17.5 x 1.25 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Silke Lindner, New York

 

In Hartmann’s use of mind control and parapsychological experiments, she attends to the image’s function as a tool of influence. Hartmann’s Remote Viewer I (Diagram 5) (PL Logick) culminates in Actualization Machines' questioning of the social operations of the image. The work is shaped out of resin and is much smaller than the larger sculptural paintings. Remote Viewer is a jumble of the US seal’s symbols. Now a circle with human legs merged with a hexagram, Hartmann appears to nod toward systems of statecraft. The upside-down aspect of the hexagram boasts small triangular embellishments depicting a military submarine, and the circle contains another set of three identical images of a hand holding a knotted string. The central image is an older woman with a hand to her head, perhaps being hypnotized, with her eyes blurred into nonexistence. This act of, if not mind control, identity erasure, is imposed on a Frankensteined national seal. The phrase, “Architecture as a way of undoing choice," repeats around the circle and the five-point star in which the central image sits. 

Images may not be architectural by themselves, but since advertisements have become the sides of skyscrapers, architecture has absorbed the image. Images of clothing brands, food delivery apps, streaming services, fast food joints, and any other business with enough money to slather its branding on any surface available for rent. Ads have become an integral segment of built space. Digitally, images are everything. Whether encased in a scrolling grid or not, all there is to online life are images and pictures and logos. Words, too, are images, fixed to look a certain way, which further standardizes what might pass for an ‘o’ versus a ‘0,’ which regulates people’s mental conception of the two characters. Technology has always had this kind of effect on human psychology, but changes to digital culture have been uniquely forceful, with companies coding addictive platforms to maintain usage or provide AI models with conversational abilities, driving many into what has been colloquially termed ‘AI psychosis.’ And although these images are sourced from companies, the distinction between private commerce and the government is negligible when many of these companies lobby government officials and aid in weapons development, like OpenAI. Images of the current era might be described as having the mind-controlling powers of the projects Hartmann engages with in Actualization Machine. If images could be considered a form of mind control, perhaps it is time to recognize MKUltra as an incidental success.

Nina Hartmann’s Actualization Machine is on view through May 30 @ Silke Lindner, 350 Broadway, New York City.

Marc Newson Crafts The Horizon Aluminum Suitcase For Louis Vuitton; A Revolution In Luggage Design

For more than a decade, the collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Marc Newson has represented a meeting of two worlds: the House’s long-standing mastery of travel and the designer’s relentless pursuit of innovation. By the time Newson first partnered with Louis Vuitton, he had already established himself as one of the most influential industrial designers of his generation, celebrated for works that ranged from furniture and transportation design to luxury objects. Yet one of the most ambitious projects born from the partnership was not a limited-edition collectible, but a reimagining of the suitcase itself.

Introduced in 2016, the Horizon suitcase distilled travel to its essential form. Defined by clean lines, lightweight construction, and meticulous engineering, it reflected Newson’s belief that the most elegant designs are often the most technically demanding. Over the years, the Horizon evolved into a contemporary Louis Vuitton icon, available in canvas and leather and adaptable to the House’s seasonal expressions.

Now, on the tenth anniversary of the collaboration, Louis Vuitton introduces a new chapter: the Horizon Aluminum, the House’s first aluminum suitcase.

The choice of material is both practical and symbolic. Long valued for its strength, lightness, and recyclability, aluminum has been a signature element throughout Newson’s career. It also echoes a lesser-known chapter of Louis Vuitton history, when the House produced aluminum trunks for explorers at the end of the nineteenth century. The Horizon Aluminum draws from both legacies, merging historical craftsmanship with contemporary engineering.

Its construction demanded a radical rethink of conventional luggage design. Sheets of aluminum are stamped and laser-cut to create the shell’s distinctive rounded form while preserving structural integrity. Rather than relying on the grooves typically found on aluminum luggage, Louis Vuitton embosses the Monogram directly into the shell, transforming one of the House’s most recognizable motifs into a functional element that reinforces rigidity.

Newson’s pursuit of visual purity extends to every detail. Traditional rivets have been eliminated entirely, replaced by an ultra-thin frame system attached directly to the shell. Concealed hinges, integrated within the suitcase rather than mounted externally, preserve the uninterrupted silhouette. The result is believed to be the first rivet-free aluminum suitcase on the market.

Inside, functionality is equally refined. An external trolley system maximizes packing space, while a flat interior compartment offers exceptional capacity. Oversized wheels, an extra-wide telescopic handle, TSA-certified locks, and leather-trimmed details underscore the balance of performance and luxury.

Engineered for decades of travel and designed to age with character, the Horizon Aluminum embodies Louis Vuitton’s enduring vision of travel: innovative, elegant, and built to accompany a lifetime of journeys.

The Horizon Aluminum suitcase will be available at select Louis Vuitton Stores and online

Julie Mehretu’s Cryptic Paintings Challenge Our Impulse to Classify @ Marian Goodman

Julie Mehretu
Black Monolith (after Atopolis: For Édouard Glissant by Jack Whitten), 2024-2026
Ink and acrylic on canvas
144 × 180 in (365.8 × 457.2 cm) (overall), 144 × 90 in (365.8 × 228.6 cm) (each)

text by Emma Grimes


Our Days, Like a Shadow (a non-abiding hauntology) is a replete showcase of Julie Mehretu’s latest paintings. All of the works on view are made in two of Mehretu’s familiar styles: her large-scale, abstract canvases and her three-dimensional paintings mounted on metal fixtures (made by Nairy Baghramian), which Mehretu refers to as her TRANSpaintings.

The first work visitors encounter is a striking, 144-by-180-inch black canvas invigorated by abstract dashes and marks that activate every inch of the surface. Its title, Black Monolith (after Atopolis: For Édouard Glissant by Jack Whitten), references a 2014 monumental painting by Jack Whitten. Both formally and conceptually, this work, alongside the exhibit more broadly, revisits themes that have long captivated Mehretu, but it all feels especially urgent and renewed in today’s political climate.

The word “monolith,” referenced in the title, recalls Glissant’s ideas about the right to opacity, specifically his conviction that no person, including oneself, can be fully grasped. Writing in a postcolonial context, Glissant argued that the West had presumed to understand certain people, and viewing anyone as transparent inherently reduces the human.

It’s this refusal of transparency that fiercely resonates throughout Mehretu’s latest body of work. Every canvas in the show changes as one moves around it. Light, streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows and ceiling fixtures, hums across the surface. As you move your eyes across, certain strokes glimmer like shooting stars; one would not be far off, even, in describing the experience as cinematic. The paintings are never entirely complete hanging on the wall or staged in their metal fixtures. They require the gaze of the viewer to be stimulated, and their mutability is an intrinsic part of their nature.

Julie Mehretu / Nairy Baghramian
TRANSpaintings (blue) / Upright Brackets, 2024
Ink and acrylic on monofilament polyester mesh in an aluminum sculpture
Painting: 72 × 60 in (182.9 × 152.4 cm)

Mehretu’s TRANSpaintings embody this ethos even more directly. Upon first encounter, they seem transparent: if one waves their hand behind the canvas, its shadow appears from the other side. But this first impression is almost a trick, as they are not really transparent at all. While they are more porous than the typical canvas, they’re still largely opaque and refuse to be seen through clearly. They also, like the wall canvases, transform as one walks around them. They depend on the changing conditions of the light and your eyes, which alter the moment-by-moment manifestation of the painted material.

The second floor contains numerous, a near overwhelming amount, TRANSpaintings in varying colors and configurations. By the time one reaches the third floor, which holds many wall canvases done in a similar shade as Black Monolith, one has the sense that the exhibit is testing your desire to categorize and generalize. There are simply so many works that resemble each other within such a confined space that you intuitively think about them as a monolith, and it’s precisely this human tendency to classify and group together, which fundamentally eliminates difference and diversity, that the show’s arrangement ends up drawing attention to. The paintings themselves, meanwhile, are reminders of the imperative to refrain from trying to totally understand. They whisper not to be grasped fully, but to be respected in their opacity.

Our Days, Like a Shadow (a non-abiding hauntology) is on view through June 6 at Marian Goodman Gallery, 385 Broadway, New York.

The Circular Inquiries of Allison Katz @ Hauser & Wirth

 

Allison Katz
First Impression, 2026
Oil and acrylic on linen, 160 x 145 x 3.6cm / 63 x 571 / 8 x 13/8 in
© Allison Katz
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Eva Herzog

 

text by Emma Grimes

At Hauser & Wirth, Allison Katz’s show Outta The Bag, her first solo exhibition at the gallery’s New York location, is on view. In this latest series of works, Katz makes her usual references: there’s a still-life of a cabbage, a couple roosters, a coral-pink caricature of a mouth, many windows, and plenty of nods to art history. Katz still has a predilection for words too: what they can do to, with, and alongside the canvas.

The exhibition opens with an image of a young, blonde-haired man hanging a framed painting onto what appears to be a windowsill. We’re thus primed with an acknowledgment of art’s capacity to function like a window, to transform an empty white wall into something else entirely. Interestingly, though, the title of this painting, Reflection, reverses the analogy, shifting attention away from how these mediums open up the world and instead underscores their mirror-like quality; that is, how what one sees out there—whether in a painting or the world at large—is a reflection of one’s inner world. Katz seems interested in painting not as a way of looking through, but of looking back.

 

Allison Katz
Reflection, 2026
Oil, acrylic and sand on canvas, 160 x 145 x 3.6 cm / 63 x 57 1/8 x 1 3/8 in
© Allison Katz
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Eva Herzog

 

The details in Reflection, as in all of Katz’s work, are impressive. The figure is entirely composed of sand that’s densely glued onto the canvas, then painted over. The three-dimensional sand makes the vivid strokes of paint feel as though they’re protruding out into the room. 

Across the room hangs First Impression, which is an illustration of the Museum of Modern Art’s first exhibition in 1929, surrounded by a set of white teeth and pink gums. In fine detail, paintings from Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and Van Gogh are recreated inside the wide-open mouth. Life and art are taken in, for Katz, at the gut level: not the eyes, ears, or nose—which are all too cursory—but the mouth, where one chews, tastes, digests. Both Reflection and First Impression, in speaking to the mechanics of looking and engaging with art, are shrewd introductions to the rest of the show.

One of the most striking paintings is Burden. It shows Katz submerged in a rippling pool, her hands raised on either side, as though she is finding her balance. Standing on her head is a massive orange and green rooster, outlined in painted-red pieces of rice. At this point in her career, Katz’s frequently cited image of a cock presents itself as quoting her previous work. It’s no longer a sincere attempt at pointing towards an original symbol. Is Katz balancing under the weight (or burden) of being an artist? Is she poking fun at herself and the inherent ego necessary to create? These questions are no longer at the forefront; the cock can’t help but allude to all of its past versions of itself. Katz seems to be experimenting with how long one can apply the same symbols before their edges dull, when a quotation itself becomes the reference point, and the original meaning grows distant. In this way, and in a very broad sense, Burden can be read as a meditation on the instability of meaning.

 

Allison Katz
Burden, 2026
Oil and rice on linen, 220 x 130 x 3.6 cm / 86 5/8 x 51 1/8 x 1 3/8 in
© Allison Katz
Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Photo: Eva Herzog

 

These ideas reach their apex in the following room. Allusion Cuts, a near-homonym of Allison Katz, layers different scenes into a single composition. The central image is a self-portrait from an advertisement Katz did for Miu Miu, overlaid with a hen and a bird, a badminton shuttlecock, and oranges sprawled across the ground. Katz presents another self-portrait, one that’s based on an image made for circulation. Placed alongside more cock references, Katz reaches the peak of her self-referential investigation. She turns her own image into a quotation, something that can be confused for the real person it represents. Mirroring the obfuscation between Allusion Cuts and Allison Katz, the woman in the Miu Miu ad might look like Katz herself, but it feels more like The Treachery of Images.

Outta The Bag is on view through July 24 at Hauser & Wirth, 134 Wooster St, New York.

High Desert Flower: An Oral History of Jasmine Little 

 

photograph by Stefan Simchowitz

 

text by Michael Slenske

In the northeast corner of the dining room at Blossom, the art-filled Vietnamese restaurant tucked into a pocket of Los Angeles’ Chinatown Central Plaza, a massive oil painting hangs high above the tables. It depicts a woman lying in a field of yellowed grass, staring up at the sky with her hands clasped beneath her head. Behind her, a near-limbless tree and a blackened roadside sign tilt ominously into the frame. She wears a burgundy cardigan, a denim skirt hugging the contours of her thighs, and a turquoise T-shirt emblazoned with what looks like a black-and-white graphic reminiscent of Peter Saville’s pulsar design for Joy Division’s 1979 album Unknown Pleasures. Her face is obscured, but the soles of her tennis shoes jut toward the bottom edge of the canvas, almost pushing into the restaurant itself. The perspective is disorienting and uncanny, a haunting image painted by and portraying the late Los Angeles artist Jasmine Little, who died tragically this February at age 41. The news of her unexpected passing from liver failure sent shockwaves through the city’s art community in the weeks leading up to this year’s LA Art Week. Simply put, the intimacy she imparted to her work, fellow artists, and friends was undeniable. 

“That’s one of my favorite paintings,” says Roger Herman, who was one of Little’s undergraduate professors at UCLA in the mid-aughts. “The painting at Blossom is so beautiful and so sensitive. This girl is just laying in the grass. It’s a masterpiece. It reminds me of this painting she showed me to get into my class.” This somewhat obscure self-portrait might seem like an outlier within Little’s broader oeuvre. But Jasmine Little was full of complications and contradictions. She was fiercely ambitious and competitive in her practice, yet she went out of her way to champion the work of her friends. She loved the solitude and serenity of nature in the high desert and Rocky Mountains, yet she craved the buzz of the Los Angeles art community. She wanted to be known as a painter, but made her biggest mark in sgraffito-carved ceramics, which were really just paintings veiled as sculpture. Her vessels were steeped in classicism and, truth be told, she wanted them considered against those made in the eras of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mythology that she pulled from, but she also had a blast hawking hand-carved soaps and coffee cups at artist markets, including the Ooga Booga Flea Market and one I organized around LA before and after Covid. Most tragically, she spent a decade sober and largely out of the spotlight but in Colorado honing her craft while hiking, ice climbing, and working in real estate appraisal, though her highest points of art world acclaim arrived when she was back in the city and at the lowest points in her addiction to alcohol. The irony is that it was probably because of, not in spite of, these contradictions that her work emerged with such frothing urgency and intensity. 

Self-portrait at Blossom. photo Marty Schnapf

Her career also had its complexities. Jasmine came to UCLA as a figurative painter focusing on self-portraits in the vein of YBA artists like Jenny Saville, but she gravitated toward performance and relational aesthetics with her classmate Jamie Chan, who formed one half of the collective Little Chan. In recent years, she expanded her practice into monumentally scaled stoneware vessels carved with references to medieval manuscripts, Renaissance painting, Safavid carpets, Grecian pottery, Japanese woodblock prints, Roman orgies, and her own Californicated landscapes and myths. She was an archaeologist of antiquity who strip-mined classical forms to remake them in her own inimitable style. 

“It was contemporary California language meets Joshua Tree meets antiquity, and then she’d put it all together into some stoneware that would probably last 30,000 years,” says Kirk Nelson, owner of La Loma Gallery, which represented Little during the last years of her life. “Her vessels are gonna wash up when all the buildings have burned down and you'll see a Jasmine Little sticking out of the sand somewhere.” 

These clay works were hewn from a proprietary clay mixture—dubbed Jasmine Red—embedded with gravel, porcelain, rocks and even bricks salvaged from an Arts and Crafts-era house in Pasadena. During this same period, she also produced lush, tumescent still-life paintings invoking the Dutch Masters with astonishing speed in a studio practice that would run into the morning hours for days, sometimes weeks, on end. 

“When she was working she would sleep till noon and then she'd paint all the rest of the day and all night, and she just wouldn't quit for 18 hours and she'd do that for months,” says her father, Dusty Little. “She was very dedicated. You can't imagine how much time she put into it, actually.” 

“Her work seemed really unique and very specific to her. Not like it was jumping into different artist gene pools, you know? It was more like, okay, this is a clear voice. And that's something you look for, that person who is making their own thing that's very identifiable,” adds Nelson. “Nick Aguayo introduced us in 2018 and after I met her I thought, this is a voice that I want to follow.” 

“Everyone knew she was a magical artist. Jonas Wood collected her art. I collected her art. Everyone knew that she was spiritually connected to that creative soup that we all know is true. There’s a truth that real artists connect to and it’s aesthetically coherent,” adds collector and gallerist Stefan Simchowitz, who bought Little’s work in bulk over the past decade. “We can't explain what it is, just like you can't explain why a joke is funny or why a Zen saying has meaning. It just does.” 

Born in 1984 in Portsmouth, Virginia, into a Naval family, Jasmine spent her grade school years as a prototypical Naval brat hopping between Norfolk, Chicago, San Diego, Long Beach, and Los Angeles. Her parents divorced when she was in junior high, and she went to live with her mother in the high desert military town of Twentynine Palms. While she struggled academically in high school, she attended Copper Mountain College in Joshua Tree before completing her undergraduate studies at UCLA. She later became part of the burgeoning Chinatown scene, exhibiting at spaces like Black Dragon Society, which was co-founded by Herman. 

“Jasmine probably had shows at every space in Chinatown over those ten years. She was just very present,” says Josh Callaghan, who was an MFA student at UCLA while Little was there.

“She was a force,” remembers Herman. “My class was full and she came and said, ‘I want to be in your class.’ And then I said, ‘I don't know. I really have no room, but can you show me some work?’ And she showed me these paintings of herself that were bigger than life, you know, like a real frontal with a bra on. She was unbelievable and very pure and it's tragic for me because I think she got messed up from the art world more than from her alcoholism. It ate her up. You know how the art world is.” 

On the heels of graduating from UCLA and after a hard run with partying in Chinatown, Jasmine moved in with her father in Alamosa, Colorado, and spent the next decade exploring the wilds of the San Luis Valley, where she focused on sobriety, got married, and earned her MFA at Adams State University, which still has a massive two-panel landscape depicting an almost alien vantage of the Rockies hanging in its halls. It was during this sojourn that she got into ceramics and even became a licensed real estate appraiser. 

“She was brilliant. She picked it up and passed the test the first time, got her license, and if you look up the national registry you'll find her in there until it expires,” says Dusty Little. “She used that same skillset in appraising and looking at art and deciding what was good and what wasn't.” 

This skillset surely bled into her practice at times, which borrowed heavily from the high points of art history. 

“I think a lot of the different periods of her work could be seen as Jasmine just loving different types of art and doing homage and falling in love with different art forms, like the way she did with ceramics,” says Jamie Chan. “She met someone who was really encouraging and ran a ceramics lab and ceramics is a community-based practice, you know, and painting is extremely isolated. So I think she got some relief from the pressure of trying to turn out amazing paintings, which can be exhausting.” 

Jasmine returned to Los Angeles in 2021 and quickly reengaged with the broader art community just as her career accelerated. Her ceramics and paintings appeared in exhibitions across Los Angeles at Night Gallery, Five Car Garage, and Wilding Cran Gallery in a show I curated a couple summers ago, where she exhibited a fulminating eight-foot-tall still life incredibly titled A Child’s Garden of Taxonomy. (She collaborated with her brother, Justin, to title all her paintings.) She showed in New York at Deitch and Johannes Vogt, in Miami at Nina Johnson, and curated a big group show at Tif Sigfrids in Athens, Georgia. Her work was also shown internationally in Paris, Shanghai, Brussels, and Salzburg. During this period, her ceramics entered the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Nevada Museum of Art. For a time, Jasmine Little was on fire. 

“I think she just loved making work. She got so excited about it, and that excitement was contagious. We’d feed off it together,” says Nelson. “The final works she was making were these eight-foot-tall vessels. She’d stay in the studio until two in the morning for weeks on end. That drive was innate. She had this inner fire to make work around the clock, and that’s why she was so prolific. It was thrilling to be around.”

For “Modesto Hoover Wagon Meet,” her final show at La Loma, Jasmine tapped artist Niki Ford to create a sprawling high-low charcuterie tableaux filled with Humboldt Fog, fresh baked bread, prosciutto, bortadello, squash, grapes, cantaloupe, M&M’s, gummy bears, homemade hummus, all wrapped in ivy and accented with crystal. It was as if you were eating from one of the engorged tableaux in the still-life paintings on the surrounding walls, and at the standing-room bacchanalian opening last June, artists and friends ate and drank nearly everything in sight, including the entirety of a Fluffy’s Ice Cream Cart. 

“It was like you were beamed down into ancient Greece at a feast for the eyes and gut,” says Nelson. 

In the spirit of harnessing that energy, La Loma is organizing a memorial (with another feast styled by Ford) this Saturday, May 30, from 2 to 5 p.m. in the Lanai Gallery at Vielmetter Los Angeles. In lieu of flowers, donations in Little’s name can be made to the Pearson Center for Alcohol and Addiction Research at Scripps Research or another charity of choice. 

“There will be some sculptures and paintings on display, but this isn’t a show. It’s a memorial for friends, collaborators, and admirers to gather, reflect, and share memories,” Nelson says. “Later in the fall, I’m thinking about organizing an exhibition with artists who were connected to her and inspired by her.”

Here, her friends, artists, gallerists, curators, and collectors give voice to the magical presence Jasmine Little carried in the studio, the wilderness, and the art community of Los Angeles. 

Childhood / Origins 

DUSTY LITTLE, father 
When she was a baby before she could talk, like 1 or 2 years old, she didn't like to go to sleep. She was a night owl from day one. So I used to carry her around the house and we'd look at every picture in the house. We had quite a few paintings, and I would just discuss what I could see in the paintings. And she was always enthralled. I'd say, “See how they make the zebra,” and I'd bring her up close and we'd just talk about the process of making the art. And then, of course, I had books about art.. I play guitar and if she couldn’t fall asleep I played guitar for half an hour, but she just loved to walk around the house and look at every painting again and again. 

NICK AGUAYO, artist and classmate at UCLA 
I think one of the first people I really became friends with in the art department. I remember, you know, you know, the art department was in the middle of Westwood at the time. And there was like a lot of energy there, and it was down the street from Whole Foods. I remember I was in line at Whole Foods and I was wearing a t-shirt for a record store that's in San Diego, and Jasmine was behind me, and, and she was like, “Oh, Lose Records. I have a friend that works there.” I'd seen her around the art department and then we got to talking and she grew up in the high desert, kind of near Joshua Tree. I grew up in the low desert near Palm Springs so we grew up going to the same mall, the Palm Desert Town Center. She went to Copper Mountain College up in the high desert and I went to a Communion College in the lower desert. And we had shared a teacher there, so it was like even before UCLA, we had kind of been taking the same steps even before we knew each other. Even though we didn't meet until our early twenties there was a kinship based on our interests. We just grew up kind of in the same place more or less. We had those connections, desert kids, you know. 

 

photograph by Stefan Simchowitz

 

UCLA / Little Chan / Chinatown 

JAMIE CHAN, artist, classmate at UCLA, co-founded Little Chan 
We met in Roger Herman’s class and became best friends pretty quickly. She and I just kind of clicked for some reason that is somewhat mysterious to me, but I was really fortunate to be able to have somebody like her to be around. She was a transfer student at UCLA and I also had transferred in from being an undecided major. In painting class we were next to each other in our studios and we both just started talking, getting to know each other, and I think there was just a type of energy that really coalesced around the UCLA art department at that time, because we were off campus at Kinross. It was an offsite building where the broad was still being deconstructed to be reconstructed. And, so there was kind of like an art school energy that was a little just different. because we weren't on campus. We used to hide in the bathroom to stay and work in our studios after hours. The security guards would come in check all the stalls and then turn the lights off. As Little Chan, the first things that we did was form a residency. The first one was in our senior painting studios. Jasmine and I just started building structural architectural stuff. We also started camping in the desert. I met a lot of her friends in Twentynine Palms. Her mom and dad had just divorced and her mom was still living in Joshua Tree at that time. Jasmine's studio became something called Giant Rock, which is a site in the desert which used to be the largest freestanding boulder. Actually Jasmine has written Yelp reviews of many Desert places,including Giant Rock. They're worth reading. 
The residency was designed to be like Jasmine's studio at UCLA. The senior studios are not given to everyone, they’re awarded and she used it to share the space with other people. So we built this cardboard facade to look like a rock. There were wooden pallets that she brought in so there was levels, there was a downstairs room with all these books we borrowed from the library. Upstairs we painted on the wall like a desert landscape so it seemed like you were outside. There was also a bedroom. We did performances in that space that were based on George Saunders’s Pastoralia. We had a camping party in the Giant Rock set up and that’s kind of crazy because it's in a campus building and we had a propane stove and we were smoking in there. We smoked in the studios all the time and people drank a lot in the studios. I mean, it was just was a different time.

NICK AGUAYO 
It was an exciting time at UCLA. It was kind of the tail end of when Roger was running Black Dragon Society on Chung King Road and Jasmine was very much a part of that, much more than I was. I lived in Westwood and was really like a college kid. Jasmine lived in a house downtown and was very much part of the art scene already back then. I remember Roser giving me a talk, saying, “You've gotta be like Jasmine. She is a go-getter. She makes her opportunities.” She was fearless. She just said so much moxie. Before the pandemic, she had a bunch of her ceramics in the back of her car, and she just rolled up to South Willard when it was in Mid-City and she just started talking to Ryan Conder. She was like, “I studied with Roger.” And she showed him her work and he just offered a show on the spot. Her work spoke for itself, but she was very charming and I think she knew how talented she was and was on a mission and it was cool. It was fun to be her friend.  

RYAN CONDER, owner of South Willard 
She really liked the artists that I had shown and she drove over with a bunch of ceramics she wanted to show me. I loved them immediately. It was like this new body of work with mermaids and the ocean. There was one particular one that was so beautiful. It was sort of an oceanscape and the waves were made of ceramic so beautifully. Sort of like Lucio Fontana. It was all ceramic with a glaze and there was a lot of blues in them and a lot of whites. She showed me her paintings and I loved those as well. She was just so prolific as an artist. She had such a nice touch to everything she did. So immediately I wanted to do a show. 

JOSH CALLAGHAN, artist and former UCLA MFA student
She had this clique of undergraduates that I got to know. They were all really cool kids in my eyes. I was already in my thirties so I definitely saw them as these youth, but she had this whole circle around her and they were really living their art lives to the fullest. After grad school, I finished in 2005, Chinatown was really going on and I would see her in that circuit. She was DJing with Jamie Chan and they organized art events as Little Chan. I went to several house parties at this old Victorian house she lived right off Temple just outside of downtown. 

JAMIE CHAN 
She lived on Boyleston Street and Temple. It was a very beautiful house but it was this artist house and it just was falling apart. She stayed there until they were totally evicted. She was the last one there.  

 
 

Early Promise 

ROGER HERMAN 
If I showed you this painting that I have of her with this little old dog under the table… and I have another one that she gave to me. It’s a huge bed, and it's just an unmade bed, and it's rough. It's not a painting I want to hang really, but it's brilliant. I think she wanted to be successful, and she was somewhat naive in that way. It's like how people think I'm not enough when I'm honest, so I have to be more polished or more articulate, more, more something else. She was a tortured, tortured person and the alcoholism didn't help much. 

NICK AGUAYO 
She had been drinking in our twenties in a pretty serious way, like more than I even realized at the time. And she moved out to Colorado and she got married and was sober for 10 years and we kind of reconnected. I had a show in Santa Fe and she drove from Alamosa to Santa Fe and that rekindled our friendship. That was in 2016, and she'd gone to school in Alamosa, but it was like she wanted to be in an art center. She wanted her work to be seen. She stayed at the Simchowitz house or crash with friends. She would be here for a week and meet up with a million people and she did that for quite a while. 

Colorado / Wilderness / Reinvention 

KIRK NELSON 
The hard part to talk about is her addiction. So the addiction to making art was the same addiction that was happening, you know, off camera. And that's such a hard struggle. But she found peace in places like Joshua Tree and Colorado. Her sketchbooks were filled with road trips and observations from nature. I think Los Angeles could be emotionally harder for her because of that disconnect from the landscape and natural environment she needed. 

DUSTY LITTLE
She liked the wilderness. If it was mushroom hunting season she’d be out. She thought nothing of getting on her bike and riding 20 miles. And she was really into mountain climbing and ice climbing up on waterfalls in the Rockies. Last time she was here, it was winter and she rounded up some guys that she knew and went climbing some waterfall on Wolf Creek Pass Yeah. So she was doing ice climbing and, and she was just always into that. She also loved going to the hot springs. It was an hour drive away, but she would go there just to relax. She loved Ojo Caliente down by Santa Fe and the one over in Pagosa Hot Springs. She’d go out of her way to take a day off and just go hang out in the springs. But you had to take separate cars. She wanted to take her own car, didn't really want company. 

LILY SIMONSON, artist and longtime friend 
One thing I always think about is that she painted the natural world a lot and so do I and that’s sort of where our interests overlapped. When she was living in Colorado she did this show in 2013 and I have a painting from that show that is mushrooms on the ground and I remember her saying when you’re hiking you’re mostly looking at the ground and that’s a straightforward observation but that’s why she was painting these views of the ground instead of these big landscapes and I thought that was really cool.

Ceramics Breakthrough 

STAN EDMONSON, LA artist and friend
I first met Jasmine Little at an artist-in-residency program in France less than a decade ago. We became fast friends and made plans to hang out in Los Angeles. She was living in Colorado with her then husband but needed a change and wanted to come back to LA. I invited Jasmine to work in my studio for a month around 2018. It’s where she made her first larger incised vessels that she is known for. I walked her through the process, came up with a clay recipe that I thought would work both technically and aesthetically, and fired her work in my large kiln. Luckily they came out beautifully!! She was getting some attention and selling work from my studio. People like Jonas Wood and Stefan Simchowitz stopped by to purchase work. 

JONAS WOOD 
She studied with Roger and I was like, “Oh this is another super-talented kid from UCLA.” She was in the mix for a really long time and her work was getting people's attention, that's for sure. I saw a bunch of her shows and purchased stuff from her early on. They’re like architectural pottery size you can fit a very large plant in. I got four or five maybe all at the same time. After she passed I made a drawing of all the pots that I own. 

 

Jonas Wood
Jasmine Little Still Life, 2026
Gouache, ink, and colored pencil on paper
59 3/4 x 41 inches
Artwork © Jonas Wood
Photo: Marten Elder

 

STAN EDMONSON 
We ran in the same circles and often hung out at openings. She would greet me with a “Hey buddy!!” and a hug and we would shoot the shit and go our separate ways. I was aware of her alcoholism and always let her know that I was available if she needed to talk. I am an addict myself and am aware of the downward cycle that we can fall into. Artists are sensitive souls. There can be a need to numb our feelings for a while. I was a huge fan of Jasmine’s and enjoyed seeing her work around town.  I will not soon get over the loss of her. 

RYAN CONDER, owner of South Willard
Stan would offer women artists like Jasmine a place to just work in silence where no one bothered them. And there'd always be like three women working there, and Jasmine was one of them. Stan was so generous that way. He would just help them set them up with clay, a place to fire everything and just let them work in peace. Stan's been that way to so many people. It's a shame he does not have the house anymore.

JENNIFER ROCHLIN, artist 
Jasmine and I were not close, but I think we both respected each other. I know I really respected her. I was absolutely in love with her work. Her solo show at Night Gallery in 2019 really blew me away. It was like she was defying the nature of clay. I did a month-long residency in England, and then she did a residency in Paris, but what she produced versus what I produced, I was like, “How did she do it?" And I was working 10 hour days. Stan Edmondson made her a clay body that enabled her to work big and quickly. It had a lot of grog in it, I think. She had some things that she had put in place for her to work at such a fast, big, obsessive scale. The whole act of sgraffito is so addictive. And it is a way to kind of deal with anxiety to like scratch into the clay. It might have just been that she just had a compulsion to work at such a manic pace, you know? We obviously shared a love of terracotta or earthenware clay with a white slip with the sgraffito. Our work had a lot of overlaps in that respect, even though she was dealing with more archetypal imagery where I was dealing with more personal imagery, but we were in a lot of the same group shows together, and I find that just when we would see each other at openings, we would seek each other out to just discuss clay shows, what we were making, just shop talk really. And I really enjoyed that with her. I thought she was a great artist.

KIRK NELSON 
She was competitive in the way that her career was looked at. She would compare and contrast like, “Why is this person getting this show at this giant New York gallery or in this institution?” And that was a kind of a piece and when I would talk to her about that, I would say, “Well, this happens in this moment for this person. It may happen in a year for you, it may happen in five years for you. But the work is great. So that part's the part that you don't have to worry about so much. Just keep making work. Keep trying to make the paintings better.” And she kept working on the stoneware and the sculpture, but there's no rhyme or reason to why it all plays for some earlier than others. I think she had a hard time managing those expectations. 

ROGER HERMAN 
I'm speaking for myself, but I think you get a little bit in a manic thing when you are always producing whether it's good or bad. There's no off button. And I think her way to maybe be able to stop is to get really drunk. It's a break, you know? I feel relaxed when I'm in a plane. I don't have to think about things. I can finally go read. There's a manicness about production that is sometimes scary in some people.  

DAVIDA NEMEROFF, owner and founder of Night Gallery
She had such a tenacity for making art and art was her life. So I would believe that she had a tenacity for life, you know? I met her because she reached out to me and she basically had the confidence to say, “You need to show my work, and I wanna show at your gallery.” And that was kind of the beginning of the conversation. It’s not the first time that it's happened to me, and it's also not the first time that it's happened to me and it's worked. I like artists who are confident in their practice and artists who are willing to do the are really interesting. In many ways the kind of people I want to work with are willing to put themselves on the line, willing to drive their work 3,000 miles and willing to do it all. That to me is somebody who can't do anything but make art. And that is magnetic. I thought that her work was great at the time that I showed it. And it honestly got so much better even after that. You know, her most recent work to me is by far her strongest work. And that's what, you know, makes it all the more painful is that she was like on a ascension for her artwork and sort of succumbed to the demon of addiction. 

NINA JOHNSON, founder of Nina Johnson Gallery in Miami
I was always drawn to the detail and painstaking labor involved in Jasmine’s work. Her pieces unfurled worlds that felt timeless. They were sexual, dark, funny and heavenly. I am forever grateful to have had the opportunity to show her work. 

 

photograph by Stefan Simchowitz

 

Studio Practice: Los Angeles 

JAKE SHEINER, LA artist who worked in same studio building
It’s hard to remember how I met Jasmine, but it was probably shortly after we both moved into our Lincoln Heights studio building. We became studio pals and spent time shooting the shit over cigarettes. At first in the alleyway outside her studio door, but then the cig breaks moved inside. I asked her if it was actually alright to smoke in there, and her response was basically “Whatever, I’m friends with the landlord, he'd never kick me out.” I think that’s just how she lived her life, the way she wanted to, with a force that if people didn’t like it they could just kick rocks and move out of the way. She was so prolific in her work output. It felt like she never left the studio and every time I’d swing by she'd have three more vessels made or two more giant paintings nearly completed in only a few days. The studio smelled like cigarettes and cats and her one, then three then four cats were the friendliest and would meet you at the door and climb all over you once you sat. She was immensely talented but when I’d come and look at a painting or sculpture she’d ask “do you think it’s good?” Of course I’d always say yes but I think she already knew it was good. She made so much work I don’t think any of it was precious to her, because she knew she had endless work left in her, there’d just be more soon anyway. Once, I was in her studio when she had someone over for a visit and they said “I love that small vase, it makes me think of my mom” and she just said “cool, take it.” I probably said “damn I want one” and she said “Okay, take one.’ She let me use her kiln for my own projects as well, which was a life saver. She was incredibly affable, a true character, and a person I always enjoyed running into at openings. She is gone too soon and will be greatly missed by me and the community. 

ROGER HERMAN 
Her last show at La Loma with all the flower paintings and these big vases and all this the food. It was great, and she was so happy, but there was something off and she was always on the go. I thought it was really technically impressive and she had such a virtuosity, she could do anything, but I think something was lost for me. I didn’t tell her that because Jasmine was a very vulnerable person and a very sensitive person and it was all just about artistry. Maybe I’m too harsh, I just didn’t see Jasmine in them, even in the vessels. 

RYAN CONDER 
I think Jasmine is such a good artist that you could give Jasmine two sticks and some charcoal and she would've made something incredible. She was just that kind of artist. So the material of course was important. And the beautiful thing about Jasmine is she always gave the material so much integrity. She always respected it so much, but I feel like she could work from material to material and be successful at everything she did. I'm sure if you trace Jasmine's work back to six years old, it's fantastic. She's one of those artists. I'm sure in her eighties she'd be making the best art of all. It was always such a sincerity with her. It was like a raw nerve, just exposed, but it sure made for beautiful art. 

EMILY MARCHAND, LA artist at the Cal State University Long Beach Center for Contemporary Ceramic
Last summer when we were working together at CCC some of my pieces cracked really badly. I was pretty devastated and she was very supportive emotionally and also offered me her clay to remake my pieces. I never took her up on that, but she was so generous with her knowledge, words and even her custom clay. One thing that I thought was really cool about Jasmine is she had Laguna Clay make her custom batches of clay and it was called Jasmine Red. Thousands of pounds would arrive at CSULB on pallets. I was saying to my husband, Sam, the other day that someone should make a monograph of her work and the book should be titled Jasmine Red. 

DARREN ROMANELLI, artist and collector 
Jasmine’s works carried a spirit and mythology that completely pulled you in. The way she channeled imagery, iconography, and stories from other times was unlike anything I had ever seen. I’ll always be grateful for her friendship, her generosity, and the incredible worlds she gave all of us through her art . 

JONAS WOOD 
She was making some really big pots at the end, and they're really, really beautiful and intricate. The scale was pretty radical as was the delicacy of the patterning. I remember she used to shove rocks in the pots early on and then she'd figured out which rocks always melted. I was just really into the way that she was using the materials and how contrasty and poppy they were in this hippie kinda way. And I obviously liked Greek pots and other ancient pots, and she was referencing some of that too. I think it garnered her a lot of attention when she started making those pots. 

EMILY MARCHAND 
We talked about joining her again at Long Beach in October to share some of her clay and start new work (each of our own, not collab), and when she posted recently that she was back down at Long Beach in January we chatted about being excited to be down there together again. Long Beach is such an intimate place for friendships to begin and I am so grateful for our brief sweet friendship. 

LILY SIMONSON 
She was so unpretentious, and her productivity was unbelievable. When she died, she was working at Long Beach and the last photo she sent me of herself was on the 2nd of February. I've been thinking a lot about Groundhog Day and addiction and Infinite Jest, and there’s so much there in terms of the life cycle that feels like this loop that addicts get stuck in. She was working on these huge pieces that were like the size of a shed. And she made made everything by herself. Her ex-husband used to help her a little bit lifting things. And sometimes she had assistants, but it was really just because she was so generous and somebody would be like, “I need money.” And she'd be like, “Come be my assistant.” But really, she made everything alone. 
We would often paint on FaceTime together and just sort of keep each other company in the studio that way. But last spring I was stuck working on a commission and I don't do well without a deadline, so I was just totally puttering with these paintings and she came and just like body doubled me in my studio and painted alongside me. I hadn't been with her through an entire painting before, but she made two huge paintings in a week. And she wasn't even working most of the time. She was just chatting with me most of the time. Her talent was just unbelievable. 

NICK AGUAYO
We never really talked philosophically about our work, but I feel like she sort of inserted herself in tradition. She pulled a lot classical themes and inserted herself into that. I would go to her studio and look at her bookshelf and there was a wide range of interest and I could kind of piece together what would feed the work, like hieroglyphics she saw in Colorado. I think of the desert being in her work—the sand and the dirt and clay— and a real physicality, especially with the ceramics. And her brother would title all of her work. They would collaborate a lot and he would title all of her paintings, all of her work. She would send pictures to him and then he would title it. There was some frustration on her part because I think her ceramics were in such high demand, and some people would be like, “I love your ceramics, but I don't like your paintings.” She really felt like she was a painter first and I think she was painting more and they were going into new places. She was always a great painter, but I feel like she was just getting really deep into those paintings. I can only imagine in the back of her mind it was like, “But I'm a painter.” I think we're all just like, “Dude, it's good. This is a good thing. You'll make paintings, everything you make is great.” 

ROGER HERMAN 
Hubert and I curated a show in Salzburg and we put Jasmine in it and we all flew out together. The first night we all went to a restaurant drank and ate, and all of a sudden Jasmine was gone. We found her later, it was like midnight, brought her back to the hotel, then at three, she left the hotel on her own. She doesn't speak a word of German, but she took a taxi, apparently to the next town that is a gambling town, and gambled all of her money away. And so the next day we, there was a press thing, and we had her there. She borrows money from Hubert and I, and then disappeared again to gamble. She’s like a Fassbender character. I mean, she was just crazy. I didn't know it would lead to such a destructive thing. Later on she was in AA. I'm sitting sort of on the fence now because I'm really against these, eulogies making people who have tragic ends into these heroes, you know? It’s a bad precedent. I got really mad when she died, and then all these people wrote to me, “Oh my God, how devastating. This is horrible.” And these were people who didn't even come to her openings. 

Community Pillar 

JONAS WOOD 
We started the poker tournament in 2020 during COVID and that's when she started playing. I think she was already playing poker before that. I didn't really play that many hands with her, but she came to most of the tournaments and she passed just before this year's one. A couple people had passed away and it was very, very close to when she passed away and I mentioned that we lost some people in our community and that you should call your friends and be in touch. She was talked about a lot. 

KIRK NELSON 
She was really, really selfless about wanting to support her friends. It was like, “You should show this person's work. You should look at this person's work.” So I think that was something really special about her that a lot of other artists don't offer. She was just a good friend like that, which is cool. 

LILY SIMONSON 
I have a lot of friendships with artists and there's always this hint of competitiveness because the opportunities feel so scarce. But Jasmine never bought into that. She would always try to share opportunities. She would always introduce me to whoever, bring me to things, tell people about my work, and make it sound really interesting. She really worked hard to lift all artists up. I really felt it, and it was really important to me. 

photograph by Stefan Simchowitz

Last Days 

DUSTY LITTLE 
It’s hard to believe, it really is. And it's incredibly sad, but on the other hand, believe she was ready to go. She sent me a series of text messages back and forth the week before she passed. She was on the beach in Seal Beach, and she would send me pictures. She said, “There's something out there near the horizon and I wanna see what it is.” She seemed kind of distracted and I didn't think of anything of it at the time, but I think she knew it was time… she was going to go. She died in her own bed with her cats at her feet. I understand that she knew from the doctors that she had liver failure and that her days were numbered because of it. She didn't talk about it, but I think she was aware of what was happening. Her body kind of just couldn't hold up anymore.

Our time comes, every one of us. You don't know when. And she sure lived life to the fullest while she was here. She didn't back down off of anything. If there was anything she wanted to do, well she just did it whether it was making the biggest painting or pottery you’d ever seen, or going to Paris for a residency. She just did it.

The New Museum Reopens with a Century of Speculative Futures

Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York.
Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

text by Hank Manning

Reopening after two years of construction, the New Museum inaugurates its 60,000-square-foot expansion with New Humans: Memories of the Future, a gargantuan museum-wide exhibition, hosting more than 700 works by 150 creators—artists, writers, scientists, inventors—from the last 120 years, providing a brute force summary of what humanity might or might have become. 

The exhibition is organized into thirteen sections, many of which have ominous sci-fi adjacent names like “Automatic Women” and “Postapocalyptic Creatures.” We begin in “Reproductive Futures,” which, in addition to focusing on human births and new eras of humanity in general, quickly establishes the museum’s maximalist mentality and its attempts to illustrate through juxtaposition. It contrasts the 20th and 21st centuries, artistic and scientific impetus and responses to change, realism and abstraction, utopia and dystopia.

Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York.
Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

The show also frequently joins well-known artists with newcomers. The first section’s perimeter has familiar pieces: LIFE magazine’s 1965 photographs of an embryo growing into a fetus hang alongside Dalí and Picabia paintings that consider, respectively, globalization and American dominance, and the merger of man and machine. Our eyes naturally veer, though, towards the largest and most animated display in the room: Out of Body, a film by Lucy Beech commissioned by the museum that depicts waves, factories, and other phenomena that may evoke birth. In the center, Tamara Henderson’s Language of Mud, a two-meter-tall sculpture, seemingly embodies Picabia’s conception, reconstructing the female form with ceramic limbs and a faceless tube-filled head.

Replete with spinning gadgets and flashing lights, “Dream Machines” is the most overstimulating room, as well as the one that, on first impression, feels the least human. Its explanatory text (the exhibition demands substantial reading) reminds us that all machines contain some trace of humanity; after all, humans made them. They reflect our goals and thereby reorient the human condition, creating a form of traction in our ongoing development. Typewriters and computers come from the desire to transcend limitations and complete tasks more efficiently. So do slaughterhouses and weapons of war. Hito Steyerl’s film Mechanical Kurds emphasizes that even the most horrifying pseudo-autonomous machines—AI-powered drones—depend on hidden human labor for the most basic of tasks—distinguishing people, vehicles, buildings, and so on.

Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York.
Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

World War I, the start of the exhibition’s timeline, served as a signifier of and catalyst for “new humans.” Technological developments enhanced our capabilities, enabling us to systematically dehumanize one another. Of course, other developments healed bodies and rebuilt cities. Technology facilitates both destruction and renovation, forming something of a feedback loop of rapid change. 

New art movements also developed in response to the horrors of war. Artists needed new modes to elucidate and process unprecedented levels of destruction. The Dadaists, understanding war as inherently irrational, created intentionally irrational art. Surrealists, influenced by Freud, looked inwards, exploring dreams, desire, and the unconscious mind. Bauhaus focused on rebuilding society through functional designs. Throughout New Humans, these movements appear not only as aesthetic developments, but as competing attempts to imagine what humanity could and should become after catastrophe.

Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York.
Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

Our erratic journey ends in the “Hall of Robots,” which would resemble a haunted house if not for its bubblegum-pink carpeting. Even here, in the final room in an exhibition on humanity’s thoughts about its future, we immerse ourselves in a collection of decidedly obsolete automatons, inspiring nostalgia more than anything else. Most familiar is the animatronic skeleton of the alien from Spielberg’s E.T. We also meet Bruce Lacey’s Superman, looking like a man-cabinet hybrid, with detached spinning eyes and hands; a robot called Jogging Lady plays three videos: two on its chest and another on its belly. And there’s a third robot with a television that projects a dancing clock for its head. Somehow, the oldest design is the one that would blend in most naturally in our present day, perhaps in a biology classroom: Franz Tschakert’s Glass Man, an intricate anatomical model of the human body’s inner workings. Otherwise, this room serves as a reminder that predictions of the future generally prove inaccurate, oftentimes humorously so. Imagined futures reveal more about the fears and desires of the times of their creation than about what eventually arrives in reality.

In recent years, headlines about artificial intelligence, climate disaster, and war have continued to stoke apocalyptic fears worldwide. New Humans neither confirms nor calms any of our current anxieties. One walks away only with an acceptance that the possibilities are endless. 


New Humans: Memories of the Future is on view at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York

Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York.
Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

Art of Noise Surveys the Relationship Between Music and Design

 

Installation view. Photo: Thomas Barratt.

 

text by Hank Manning


At Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum in Andrew Carnegie’s former Upper East Side mansion, over 300 works consider the multisensory experience of music. Art of Noise analyzes the intersection of music and design, exploring how technology and graphics shape our consumption, understanding, and memories of music. 

Although the exhibition provides only a few opportunities to listen to music, the radios, jukeboxes, and turntables function as works of art in their own right. The first room features a timeline of product design, from phonographs to MP3 players. We witness a familiar trend towards more affordable, versatile, and higher-fidelity products. (Bright colors seem to cycle in and out of fashion unpredictably.) The oldest device on display is Edison’s Fireside Model B cylinder phonograph, released in 1912. It cost $25 (roughly $766 today) and exclusively played four-minute celluloid records. Featured on Beastie Boys and LL Cool J album covers, the JVC RC-M90 Boombox (1981) became a commercial hit and remains coveted by collectors. Today, a blue tie-dye Gomi Bluetooth speaker, smaller and less flamboyant than its predecessors, can functionally stream an infinite supply of music.

 

Installation view. Photo: Thomas Barratt.

 

Music accompanies both public gatherings and moments of deeply personal introspection. Accordingly, a divergence between communal and personal players began in the 1950s. The Regency TR-1 was the first device to make music easily portable for a large audience. Its rectangular handheld form seems particularly prescient, hardly different from modern portable electronics. Sony’s Walkman and Apple’s iPod further normalized the experience of listening on the go and provided greater freedom to curate personalized playlists. 

Stereos and speakers occupy space in our homes and thus must accommodate evolving popular cultural aesthetics. The trumpet-style horns on the earliest phonographs resemble instruments. Later, minimalist styles sat more comfortably with home decor, reflecting the futurism of the ‘70s (including the white spherical Rosita Vision 2000, which celebrates the moon landing) and chrome and steel in the ‘80s. The influence of Dieter Rams’ mantra “less, but better” design is obvious both in his own work and that of later designers. Many of his “Ten Principles of Good Design” are exemplified by his 1963 SK 55 Radio-Phonograph, with its simple rectangular shape and clearly-labeled knobs and buttons. These remind us of the tactile ways we experience music—the turning of knobs, clicking of buttons, the weight and texture of the devices. 

Installation view. Photo: Thomas Barratt.

The exhibition’s second half focuses on two-dimensional art: album covers, posters, and flyers. The 1948 introduction of commercial LPs established a new canvas for visual artists. Early on, they often featured title blocks and portraits of artists, but by the ‘60s, many embraced bolder choices in typography and abstraction that attempted to represent the music’s essence. Familiar sights include the electric colors and bubbly, distorted typefaces characteristic of psychedelic rock; and the elegant portraits of jazz musicians.

 

Installation view. Photo: Thomas Barratt.

 

The exhibition, first shown at SFMOMA, has adapted to New York by highlighting five genres that developed in the city: folk revival, salsa, disco, punk and new wave, and hip-hop. Associated works reveal how the cultures of genres and their audiences differed and changed over time. Early punk art, for example, often projected a DIY vibe, with hand-drawn and photocopied work, whereas later new wave graphics became more stylized and less defiant. To capture the genre’s raw energy, hip-hop imagery merged graffiti aesthetics with disco chic. 

 

Installation view. Photo: Thomas Barratt.

 

Some of the most compelling implications lie in what remains unsaid. Before the late nineteenth century, recorded music did not exist; music could only be experienced through live performance, making it an inherently communal but also cumbersome and infrequent activity. The now nearly universal experience of listening to music in solitude—while driving, exercising, or studying—did not become common until the rise of portable audio technology in the mid-twentieth century.

Art of Noise offers a time capsule of a possibly foregone era of specificity. Today, people often listen to music on their smartphones, devices also used for communication, gaming, and innumerable other daily activities. But the vast majority of objects on display were designed only for the function of listening. Likewise, a rapidly-evolving lineage of physical formats—records, 8-track tapes, cassettes, CDs—has coalesced into invisible digital files. Thus the specialized designs, even if obsolete, may stay fixed in our cultural memory as visual symbols of music. 


Art of Noise is on view through August 16 at Cooper Hewitt, 2 East 91st Street, New York