Arthur Jafa Assembles an Immersive New World

Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony, 2026. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

text by Hank Manning

From a young age, Arthur Jafa recognized the power of context and organization. He cut out and rearranged images from magazines and catalogs, now collected in binders. Clearly, their previous presentation was not the only one possible. This remains a core habit throughout his career, which he began as a cinematographer before gaining recognition as an editor. He moves from photography to sculpture to video to readymades: re-sorting items and images, many of them highly familiar, in a new and critical order. These rearrangements provoke changes in our patterns of thought. Uncanny at first, we then wonder: is Facebook or Google or any other giant conglomerate any more deserving of determining what we see than Arthur Jafa? In I Am Tony, the artist has put this to the test across two floors of the New Museum, curating a parallel universe encompassing the full breadth of his practice, and suggesting a cultural zeitgeist that could emerge from it. 

Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony, 2026. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

Throughout, there is an assertive, unsubtle portrayal of an American racial dichotomy. Each wall is painted either entirely white or black, just as scenes of white and Black faces seem to exist in entirely separate planes of reality. Jafa describes his art as “super Black,” but notes that his idea of Blackness is expansive. This view is strongly supported through the exhibition, which centers the building of Black identities through music, sports, and popular culture, as well as the deeper influence of African traditions. Uplifting scenes blend with comic relief, but also an ever-present specter of violence, leading to a sense of unease. 

Specific resolutions from his work—what to think or what to do—remain elusive. Many rooms are so dark that explanatory texts are difficult to read, as if to intentionally limit our ability to understand. Thus, in the mazelike floorplan, we have to find our own way, balancing consumption of the works with attempts to make sense of them. Again, this reflects the real world, where influences—sometimes at the periphery, others in focus—compete and may overwhelm us.

Through his ten films on display, extreme strategies attempt to capture ever-dwindling attention spans. The White Noise, a 30-minute collage of memetic videos from the past twenty years, a perfect match for an audience accustomed to rapid-fire scrolling, never sits too long on a single clip, shifting between race-based rants, menacing displays of weaponry, and jubilant dance. Others test our patience a bit. BEN GAZARRA, for which Jafa re-edited the final scene of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, replaces characters at a brothel with Black actors, as the screenplay—and common stereotypes—originally demanded. The sequence repeats a dozen times, presenting different ways the finale could have centered and reframed these characters. Another hour-long film, AGHDRA, features repetitive dark rolling waves and slowed-down soul music that could supplement meditation.

Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony, 2026. Exhibition view: New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni

The pieces directly impact and complement one another. Although each film has its own room, their sounds echo far and wide. The faces of Black musicians dominate the exhibition. (Its name derives from Tony Williams, drummer for Miles Davis.) Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, and Michael Jackson appear throughout. They are a reminder that redefining popular culture does not require any additions; it can result from a shifted perspective alone. Just as well, they reveal how one type of art, or even one facet of society, impacts another. Jafa notes with pride the diverse range of music his heroes developed: gospel, jazz, blues, reggae, hip hop; and his goal of bridging such diversity to the visual arts. 

With Travis Bickle’s status as an iconic anti-hero, and even inspiring the attempted assassination of a US President, we consider the butterfly effect that depictions of race in the arts have on broader events. If Bickle’s racism had been that much more obvious, as originally intended, would discussions around the film have changed, would societal conversations have adapted? This is just a single work of art, while Jafa rethinks our entire collective memories, although generally with the same ingredients. At first, this feels confusing. We are often left, metaphorically and physically, in the dark. But we can’t help but consider just how arbitrary our ordinary sense of comfort is: just outside the exhibition, other forces have determined our normal. 

Arthur Jafa, APEX, 2013.
Video, color, sound; 8:12 min. © Arthur Jafa.
Courtesy the artist and Gladstone.
Image: NASA, ESA, L. Calçada, Solar Dynamics Observatory

By making himself our authority on the presentation of so many common sights, and in the process disorienting us, we necessarily scrutinize the authorities outside the museum. Thus, Jafa has delivered a powerful anti-authoritarian message. His manifesto assembles piecemeal throughout the exhibition: “America is a Satanic cult,” “Jafa is the death wish of white supremacy.” At least he’s honest and consistent in his goals. We can’t say the same for the real-world corporate mantra, “Don’t be evil.”

Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony is on view through January 3 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York

Baby, It's Vegas: Gaegan & Escobar's "Sophisticated Boom Boom" @ Lomex Las Vegas

DeSe Escobar
ULTIMEYES SS04 YFKE, 2026
Calfskin, Italian leather shearling
and metallic lambskin, wood, and
acrylic leather paint
66 1/4 x 60 1/2 x 6 inches
courtesy of artists and Lomex Las Vegas

text by Max Kopelowicz

The glitz, kitsch, doom and sagging va-voom of Sin City is on full display at Sophisticated Boom Boom, Joseph Gaegan and DeSe Escobar’s show on view at Lomex Las Vegas. Situated on a golf course in the Paradise Palms neighborhood, an infamous enclave for entertainers and mobsters alike, the artists stage their works in the painstakingly restored mid-century residence-turned-gallery. The lime green shag carpeting, pink silk circle beds, and rockwall fireplace facade provide the set and setting for Gaegan’s paintings and Escobar’s sculptural furnishings in a full embrace of Lomex Las Vegas’s escapist ethos.

Gaegan, known for his tableaus depicting recognizable members of LA and NYC social scenes, brings his Ensorian sensibility to the Vegas set. His “Welcome to Fabulous” and “Seven Deuce Off Suit” both channel the grotesquerie and eschatological humor of Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889 wherein the artist composes a cattle call of personalities all vying to be seen even as they blur into the distance. Gaegan features himself prominently at the forefront of “Seven Deuce”, with a mutation of “Welcome To Fabulous” framed behind him, in a sort of reversal of Ensor’s Hitchcockian hiding of Christ. The artist wears a worried expression and purple pinstripe suit while holding the worst possible Hold’Em deal as a black cat looks on, but there’s no other cards visible to show whether it’s a winning or losing hand. 

The frames become less crowded with his other offerings including an homage to Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity entitled “Fun, Laughs, Good Times”, where ten marfanic men pose along a cabaret club’s rail, and “The Royal Hawaiian”, featuring Lomex Las Vegas’s interior designer Carlotta Champagne squatting-in-wait as a young man in Gaultier stripes photographs a decrepit showgirl posed on a naked mattress with other Lynchian figures dotting a stretch of desert. Two of Escobar’s colorfully striped shearling and iron wrought dining chairs (“Minimally Baroque and Ashley” and “Minimally Baroque and MK”) frame “The Royal Hawaiian” in the gallery’s bedroom where, through the glass doors, one can see several of her calfskin and leather painted screens leering around the house and backyard. Inspired by Prada and drag icon Divine, the changing screens invite the viewer to gawk at whoever might be swapping costumes behind them—embracing the never-shy atmosphere of the exhibition. 

Sophisticated Boom Boom is the third show at Lomex Las Vegas, the brainchild of art advisor Ralph DeLuca and Tribeca gallerist Alex Shulan, after Heji Shin and Mathieu Malouf’s inaugural NYE blowout and an exhibition of Karen Kilimnik’s models and paintings. Founded with a David Hickey-esque sensibility, the pioneering gallery operates like an HVAC, designed to clear the unctuous air of the culturati seeking the next Marfa or Aspen. What DeLuca and Shulan offer, like Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo before them, is an alternative oasis amidst the aridity of the art world where artists are free to embrace their kitschy whims and fans can arrive in showgirl costumes, seemingly stepping out from either behind one of Escobar’s screens or Gaegan’s frames. Together they create an atmosphere that harkens back to the halcyon decadences of early art fairs, inviting people from near and far to embrace and indulge in the worlds that artists and gallerists create.

To this effect, the evening became a great Stefan, Bill Hader’s SNL club reviewer, monologue. This opening had everything: a DeLorean parked in the driveway, waif CSM students leaping over the bow tied pool like Nureyev, LA’s nightlife impresarios fresh from last night’s bender wearing odes to Liza and Liberace, and New Yorkers taking turns posing Las Vegas locals in front of the artwork. In summary: pure, unadulterated, seldom-seen, often-nostalgically romanticized fun, and as the troupe banded off to Ichabod’s, a piano bar and restaurant where the spirit of Sinatra is served in chilled glasses, one can feel the promise of the house DeLuca and Shulan built always winning. 

Sophisticated Boom Boom is on view by appointment only at Lomex Las Vegas through October 10th. 

Cole Sternberg: along the high embankments Presented by LAND in Santa Maria, California

photograph by Liz Fish

text by Oliver Kupper

There is something so perfectly appropriate about encountering Cole Sternberg’s along the high embankments inside a concrete bunker in the Santa Maria Valley. The building was conceived for human use but never truly fulfilled its purpose; abandoned, it became something else, quietly occupied by plants, animals, moisture, and time. Sternberg’s paintings arrive after the fact, acting as just another layer in its ongoing transformation.

Presented by Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) at Presqu’ile Winery, the exhibition brings together a new body of large-scale paintings made specifically in response to the site. Sternberg has subjected the canvases to the landscape itself—dragging them through the vineyard, burying them in the earth, exposing them to the elements and pulling them through the Pacific. The resulting surfaces carry traces of those encounters: dirt, grass, abrasion, staining; marks made by unpredictable forces of nature.

Inside the bunker, the relationship becomes more complicated. The immense concrete interior has a strange, almost sacred scale, and Sternberg’s works can read at moments like banners, relics or fragments of some civilization being slowly reclaimed. There is a productive tension between the paintings’ evidence of exposure and the bunker’s unmistakably human architecture. One represents the attempt to make an image; the other represents the attempt to make a structure that will outlast us.

Sternberg has long been interested in the uneasy position of humanity between its desire to control nature and its absolute dependence upon it. Here, the idea is immediately legible. The dirt on the canvas is dirt; the weathered surfaces are weathered; the abandoned bunker is an abandoned bunker.

As you journey into the bunker, away from the winery and into this strange architectural void, the paintings change. As bodies move through the space, so too does the light, and the material histories of each work become more apparent the longer you look.

There is an obvious danger in this kind of work. Contemporary art has developed an extensive vocabulary for talking about ecology, impermanence, interconnectedness and the more-than-human world. Phrases like “listening to the land” are easily prone to semantic erosion. Along the high embankments occasionally brushes against that language. Yet the actual works are more ambiguous than the rhetoric surrounding them. They simply remind us that the environment is always changing.

Situating contemporary art inside an agricultural and commercial landscape adds another layer of context. Presqu’ile is a working vineyard; the bunker belongs to the history and infrastructure of the property. This is a hallmark of Los Angeles Nomadic Division and their mission to democratize contemporary art by inviting us into an experience of aesthetic inquiry outside of the white cube.

At its best, along the high embankments is an exhibition about contact: between canvas and soil, architecture and weather, human intention and forces that are indifferent those intentions. Its strongest moments occur when the conceptual framework falls away and the paintings simply register what has happened to them.

The bunker will eventually become something else, as all buildings do. The paintings will move on too. What remains is the more modest and convincing idea at the heart of the project: that a work of art can be a record not only of what an artist wanted to make, but of everything that happened to it along the way.

Cole Sternberg’s along the high embankments is presented by Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) and on view through November 8, 2026. Reserve a one-hour time slot and explore at your own pace. The experience is self-guided — plan for about an hour to take in the work fully. Time slots are available Saturday and Sunday from 12-5PM.

Museum Pieces: Art Historical Excavation & Attaining Material Persistence Beyond the Contemporary

Mixed-media sculptor Skylar Haskard reprocesses the ‘lost and found’ of greater Los Angeles into labile statements of hybrid corporeality.

Skylar Haskard
detail of Kid-Nap-eee, 2025
photo by Hannah Bhuiya

text by Hannah Bhuiya

“We have not found a dozen reliefs, but a whole artistic period that lay buried and forgotten!” —Alexander Conze, 1878 (archaeologist and director of the Berlin Museums) upon the rediscovery of the Pergamon Altar.1

“Never retrieve a dirty tennis ball before breakfast.” —Snoopy’s Philosophy, Charles M. Schulz, 1977. 2

As a child, I always wanted to be an archeologist. (I became a writer instead.*)

A ‘midden’ is the archeological term for a repository of the discarded remnants of past human settlement. These inadvertently preserved trash piles are heaped full of evidence of our quotidian existence: cracked mollusk shells, their soft valves devoured. Animal jaws with teeth attached, once prized cutting and scraping tools. Food scraps: split seeds, gnawed bones, peeled skins. Broken pottery, fingerprints still pressed in the clay. Bodily excretions hardened into stony coprolites. The layers of accumulated refuse become revelatory strata, which, like those in which fossils are found, deliver telling clues. By digging through what has now crumbled into dirt, the diet, trade-route access and labor division of the location’s long-dead inhabitants can be reconstituted. The irony, of course, is that a midden pile or pit was never meant to be preserved—it’s just there. Wholly unlike a carefully dug burial chamber or proud hilltop temple, precisely laid with sacred objects and precious offerings symbolically placed, these common waste dumps only survived because no one ever thought to move them. These heaps of cross-generational refuse that grew without plan, before the cities they served were abandoned or obliterated by a cataclysm. This uncontrived origin means that the stories it offers up are raw, bare, honest. A midden tells the truth. 

The Pergamon Altar, 2nd century BCE, Pergamon Museum, Berlin via Smarthistory/Flickr

The Pergamon Altar, 2nd century BCE, Pergamon Museum, Berlin via The Museologist

The Pergamon Museum in Berlin is one of a series of monumental structures built by the order of a succession of Prussian kaisers from 1830 to 1930. It is a central edifice of ‘Museuminsel,’ an unstable artificial island protrusion reclaimed from the muck of the Spree River. It houses, as its name suggests, the “Pergamon Altar”. ‘Pergamum’ (now Bergama, Türkiye) was an important outpost of Alexander the Great’s empire, and the majestic marble friezes were transported block by block to Germany upon their rediscovery. The endeavor can be construed as either a rescue mission or an opportunistic theft.3 Also housed inside the museum are life-size reconstructions of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon in bull-and-lion embossed blue glazed brick (circa 575 BCE), and the imposing Market Gate of Miletus (2nd century CE). Despite the goals of kings and later, the State, to enshrine imperial and then national strength in great architecture, the grand idea to set buildings full of weighty ancient stones upon a 40-meter-deep mud layer was not at all practical. Visitors to modern Berlin notice the large pink pipes in the area, through which the groundwater gush is pumped upwards; it is a constant hydrological battle to keep the reclaimed land claimed. The museum’s walls and the gargantuan, transplanted urban infrastructure they house are calculated powertecture, both ‘restored’ in a patchwork of ‘original’ and impersonated elements. A museum does not tell the truth.

When I first moved to LA, I read a quote about Aldous Huxley’s own late 1930s relocation from Europe, which set up a direct correspondence between golden California and the Golden Age of Ancient Greece. I remember that the paragraph was in a book and on the left-hand side of the page and although I did not note the exact words, the idea they conveyed has never left me. It went something like, “with its abundant sunlight, ocean, and year-round Mediterranean climate, Los Angeles possesses all the essential factors to become a new Athens on the Pacific;” that the city-states shared a rare set of natural conditions and latitudinal band (34° N and 37.9° N, respectively) that had already proven their potential as a crucible for intellectual flowering. This was a place with endless toga weather, where the body and mind could resonate in peak health. Where those attracted to dwell here could lead the planet into a glowing new age of philosophy and peace. While the City of Angels has undoubtedly made massive contributions to global creative culture, we all know that’s not what happened. At all. Whatever glimpses there are of any Utopian ‘harmonic order’ are quickly eclipsed by the eyewitnessed reality of life at street level. The lost quote that I never wrote down is merely a tantalizing ideation of ‘what might have been.’

 

Skylar Haskard
Ran$om, 2025
photo by Paul Salveson

 

Ten years later, the fecund, roiling miasma that is the Los Angeles contemporary art scene delivered a way to integrate the fascinations above. This came in the form of a chance encounter with Skylar Haskard at a screening at Emma Fernberger Gallery on Western Avenue of T.S.O.Y.W. (2007), a dual-screen, over three-hour-long film by Drew Heitzler and Amy Granat. Patterned after The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe. Playing protagonist in the atmospheric literary-art film was not ‘an actor,’ but in fact, an(other) artist. Mainly silent, Haskard delivered a brooding young Werther for the 21st century, wending over Southwest roads on a Harley-Davidson. His singular passage was followed by two cameras capturing the real-time monotony of dry desert highways, punctuated by American monuments, landmarks such as Spiral Jetty, Roden Crater and the Hoover Dam. I was soon to discover that Haskard, a practitioner of what he has described as the ‘humorous conceptualism’ of Los Angeles, is a bricoleur extraordinaire. A closer look at his recent work opens up a conversation about how ‘the city’ functions to generate art that reflects itself. And into the powerful urge that, across time and space, compels independent artists to continue to create it.

A tall international American with a layered British-West Coast timbre, Skylar was born in LA in 1977. Being raised partly in London, he later completed his BFA at Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, a renowned incubator of aesthetic rebelliousness. The young graduate was then lured back to the USA to enter the ‘New Genres’ MFA program at UCLA, where instructors included California’s finest boundary-pushers Chris Burden and Paul McCarthy, as well as Swiss eccentric Pipilotti Rist. “At the time, I was very much invested in the performative, particularly in terms of materials, and of course, ‘The Body.’ I was building sprawling maximalist installations, then setting them up in different locations, mainly outside. Modular, architectural things that would then find their way into the gallery space, in whatever state they were in.” 

Skylar Haskard
The Man Who Works, 2025
photo by Paul Salveson

Visiting We Blue It, Haskard’s most recent solo show at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery, I am confronted first by four major works built on circular trampoline bases set at an angle to the floor, with truncated body parts and sliced furniture emerging from their blue-painted discs. One figure, sporting a Pepto-Bismol pink canine snout, wrists bound, is splayed astride a generic white Monobloc-pressed plastic chair, sliced in half. A chopped-up odalisque with a ratty Powerade-blue wig is titled “The Melancholy of a Beautiful Day,” after de Chirico, suggesting that she is reeling, overcome with beauty. “Ran$om” is a Froot-Loops cereal bag-clutching man, encircled by a plush snake. Details: a toy gift heart, the protruding pink tongues, oversized joke-store teeth, tease and surprise. Around the walls are set smaller works depicting everyone’s favorite cartoon dog, Snoopy, drifting out to sea upon an incongruous wire cage, and another dog, strapped with a hobo bindle. Most are sketches on paper, with one distinct in blue biro, Sharpie, and flat paint on thick plywood. An Absurdist fusion of cannibal slaughterhouse and a defunct Toys ‘R’ Us, it’s all somewhat deranged, but the bright, friendly colors make it fun and ‘funny’ too. 

Skylar Haskard
The Melancholy of a Beautiful Day, 2025
photo by Paul Salveson

Haskard devised a rough-and-ready method to more quickly birth his life-size humanoids, several of whom are also missing arms or legs. “I’m always trying to work with things that already exist. I’d bought a set of mannequin-makers molds from a guy who had gone into retirement—I liked the idea that these bodies were not only sculpted, but also ‘found.’ Then I came up with basically the shittest way possible of casting them, and the quickest, using plaster and detritus from around the studio.” The result was that the ‘bulk’ of the figures is formed using expanding polyurethane foam. It’s a very flexible technique, in stark opposition to those necessary for hefty marmoreal constructs of similar proportions. “Say I need an arm here, or a part of a torso, I take the mold in two parts, and spray a very thin layer of plaster into that, and then I’ll build it up, let the plaster dry, put bits of cardboard in, some wire. Everything is material to me. I sometimes go to Costco and collect all the cardboard there, ’cause then I don’t have to spend so much on the foam. Because I’m not dealing with stone, this is detritus and waste, and it’s about employing strategies to try to make that stable.” The semiotic language of the show is in continuum with motifs Haskard has been circulating for several years (the hobo dog, the upturned thumb sconces, and reworked chairs are a longtime obsession), but lent a new orientation: “The current pieces were originally weird assemblages of figures and dogs and other stuff, and they just weren’t working. Then I started sawing everything in half. I realized that this profile, or ‘relief’ form was really freeing me up—I was getting two sculptures out of one, and I could also put them on the wall.”

A panoply of art history’s greatest hits stepped up to inform the progression from Eureka moment to actualization. “You’re not really aware of the intricacies of reliefs until you’re actually making them. So I looked at the Pergamon Altar, which brings along with it the complexities surrounding how the stones were recovered by German archeologists and reconstructed in the museums of Berlin. At that time, the marble of the friezes was being crushed and burned to make lime mortar, or had been used to build other local structures—they dug it out of walls. I also looked to Trajan’s Column, and also Marcus Aurelius’ ‘Snail Column.’ Both have scenes of battle and war set around in a spiral, which ties in to what we’re living through now.” When what we’re living through now is to bear witness to a UFC ‘Octagon’ fighting cage being built right outside (what is left of) the Neoclassical White House (soon to have gaudy Corinthian capitals tacked onto its elegant Ionic columns) and a current President of the Republic who longs for his own Triumphal Arch, the assertion holds. The stuffed serpent twisting around one dismembered figure can also be linked to the fractured masterpiece ‘Laocoön and his Sons,’ currently on display in the Octagonal Court of the Museo Pio-Clementino at the Vatican Museums. Arguably the finest marble carving ever made, the composition derives from a Greek original of around 200BCE, but we only know it through this Roman copy made a couple of centuries later, lost and then unearthed again in 1506. The amputee of circumstance is currently again fitted with his original right arm, which only came to light in 1906, and was affixed in 1957.

Skylar Haskard
Untitled“ (Just Because), 2025
courtesy Guggenheim Gallery 

Skylar Haskard
Untitled (Tis Not Too Late), 2025
courtesy Guggenheim Gallery

The install dextrously offers an immediate antidote to the horror factor present in the central pieces via the comforting and familiar figure of Charles Schulz’s Snoopy, who features in multiple works set along the gallery perimeter. In one, Charlie Brown’s best friend floats on a wavy ocean in a cage with the line “Tis not too late to seek another world” from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses emblazoned above him. So, why Snoopy? “I really like to draw with ballpoint on plywood; you can be quite scribbly and expressive.” With this particular series, “these blobby shapes were coming out; I was like, “What are these things?” Then I realized that they all looked like Snoopy. That was the first time he popped up, completely unconsciously.” The enigmatic philosopher-pup has been included in this show, Skylar continues, because: “We blew it. It’s not working anymore. So now let’s trust the animal, let’s listen to him.” The Odyssean pups lead on to Haskard’s sensitively drawn ‘Hobo-Dog’ character in “Untitled (starburst fellow).” Dogs also deliver us to the street-level origin point of Western philosophy. In tandem with their remarkable sculpture, Ancient Greek culture produced distinct philosophical schools—their appreciation for the refinement of the physical form in sport and art was matched by pursuit of intellectual refinement via inquiry and debate. While the later Stoics taught from the shade of the ‘Stoa Poikile’ (the painted porch) in the center of Athens, insouciant pioneer Diogenes of Sinope willfully lived in a discarded wine amphora out on less-traversed streets. He lived like, as his contemporaries observed, a stray dog. He had nothing and wanted less, rejecting social mores, money, and grooming standards. Through him, our term ‘cynic’ derives from kynikos, ‘doglike.’ With his dry wit and practical wisdom in the face of numbing suburban inertia, Snoopy, or Peanuts creator Schulz, can be construed as one of the most influential modern cynics.

Skylar Haskard
Untitled (Lost at Sea Empty), 2025
photo by Hannah Bhuiya

Just as artifacts are dated from the carbon-bearing items found nearby them, I decide to pull back and examine the wider strata around Haskard. I deduce that Haskard is very much an artist’s artist; after all, I had met him in an art gallery flickering on the dual-screen, the avatar within the art. Wife Nevine Mahmoud is a sculptor of amorphous forms, mainly using marble, showing at the latest Frieze LA with Sebastian Gladstone, with whom Skylar exhibited his Rickle Works (chair-component assemblages and vitrine collages) in 2023. Not only did he study under Burden and McCarthy, around the time he left UCLA, he also became John Baldessari’s gardener. “We would sit around and have drinks. He didn’t have a green thumb much.” Gardening then, and now, reinforced Haskard’s dedication to the circular economy, on the most basic level. “I feel that composting is foundational for people to be educated in that whole cycle of reuse—holding nutrients and organic matter to feed into the cycle that exists beyond our control. There is a parallel there with reusing objects in art.” Baldessari then asked Haskard to collaborate on a piece that was a reinvention of an Allen Kaprow work, Apple Shrine, as part of the Art as Life retrospective at MOCA LA. “John didn’t really want to put that much energy into it, so he was like, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ I think the curators were a bit pissed. I spent a solid month at the Getty Research Institute in Allen Kaprow’s archives, and we’d meet every two weeks and go over ideas. Kaprow’s legacy is tied to the ‘happenings’ he did, but to me, he’s an incredible materialist. I’m far more into his use of materials, the elaborate installations he made out of found things.” This approach is evident in Haskard’s Squaresville Pio Pico solo in spring 2025, which brings to life the adventures of heroic Hobo Dog ‘Souperman,’ sceptred with a broomstick and seated in an upended wheelbarrow throne, anchored by a stack of gravy cans.

 

Skylar Haskard
Souperman (seated with stick), 2025
photo by Charles White

 

In 2016, Haskard was brought in to coordinate the landmark Rick Owens furniture show at MOCA LA. “I have to say that I keep my own work and my work for other artists quite separate. But here, I was injected into this world where design, art, and fashion were all one, and that to me was fascinating. For Michèle [Lamy], everything is ‘one big thing;’ there’s no separation between art and life. I think it really helped me approach my own art practice from a different place, like ‘Let’s get back to what your vision is,’ and I did. I started making work again, objects that could be categorized, formally, as ‘furniture,’ but were also about the body; I was trying to create a new, ergonomic relationship using furniture as sculpture.” Uncovering imagery of his work from this era, I am reminded of a statement by Robert Horvitz, found within one of the first critical reviews of the work of Chris Burden in 1976, wherein he claimed that the work resembled “isometric exercise equipment more than sculpture.”4 Rick and Michèle appreciated the series, selecting for their private collection Haskard’s tubular-chair-integrated-with-grey-hoody-guy “Body Object 1” (2017) as debuted at London’s DOMOBAAL gallery in a duo-show with his also-an-artist brother, Aubrey Haskard.

Skylar Haskard
Untitled (Body Object 1, ii), 2017
photo courtesy the artist

Skylar Haskard
Untitled (Body Object 2, ii), 2017
photo courtesy the artist

Continuing to sift through his extant digital footprint, I discover the time Haskard put in as Raymond Pettibon’s studio assistant, and also that he was part of the team which constructed French artist Vincent Lamouroux’s arresting Projection installation on Sunset Boulevard in 2015. I locate an Instagram post of the art worker up on a fully extended boom-lift, applying the obliterating whitewash to a palm tree. Everyone in LA remembers the strange ‘permanent snow-storm’ effect, which blanked out the entire 4301 Sunset Boulevard plot and was visible all the way up until 2023 when the old motel was finally demolished. The continuous actions of tireless ‘makers’ like this, even the smallest, has causal impact; the countless other jobs that support a dedicated contemporary practice are the connective tissue of the enmeshed ecosystems that sustain this boom-bust, rise-fall, but ultimately entropic, metropolis. 

On the subject of his city of birth, Skylar observes: “If you look at it on a map, LA’s on the edge of the world, and people here live like there’s nothing beyond it, you know? I’ve always felt where we’re decades ahead, here, is in the devolution of the world we live in. In one way or the other, it’s ever-present in all of our peripheral vision, and this manifests in a lot of the things you can see out on the street.” So, as I also often stop in my tracks in wonder at random compositions of street-side detritus, I ask Skylar about an amusing anthropomorph posted on his Instagram, wherein bare wooden slats tacked to a municipal post sprout fingered arms to reach out and ‘hug’ another shorter post. “I saw those in Frog Town. I don’t know who made them, but they’re just brilliant. They say pretty much what I want to express with my own work … I’m on the verge of trying to come up with some kind of ‘manifesto’ for myself. It’d have points like, “You will not show in galleries.” “You will make work and leave it where you make it.” Not exactly that, but something like that. And that piece, whoever did it, represents my feelings towards showing in galleries, or defined ‘art’ spaces. A lot of times, I’m trying to fit work into those more defined spaces to be able to show it. I’ve made so much work outside of those, a bit more guerrilla, because I firmly believe that my works are ongoing, and the only way that they come to appear ‘resolved’ is purely because time’s run out and they need to get into wherever they’re being shown. It’s hard for me to resolve things.… They’re all really collages. Ongoing collages.”

 

 Los Angeles, February 2026, photo by Skylar Haskard

 

And that contingent nature is what allows Haskard’s Pergamene contortions, which he chooses to craft from the brightly-colored matrix of our condition of consumer overload, to offer a biting snapshot of the conflict-molded contemporary psyche and our position at the End of (Art) History as digitized and virtual remixes take over from more corporeal formalism. When we discussed references, Skylar had noted Giovanni Anselmo’s Struttura che mangia (1968), literally, “structure that eats,”  as a key conceptual touchstone. The hinge of the seminal Arte Povera work is a head of lettuce set between a smaller and larger granite block, ‘secured’ with a copper wire. As the lettuce withers, it must be replaced by a human hand to stop the smaller block from falling, and potentially shattering. The city is that structure which eats. Work like this spits back what grows from its accumulated compost. Haskard’s rough-hewn hybrids tell the chaotic truth of life in our times, especially in Los Angeles, a place where grotesque imbalance is to be observed everywhere. The unholy tension of begging amputees passed by others with plastic-augmented bodies and lips pumped up to ideals uncanny. Bound into our own frameworks of comfort, we walk past persons making the street their philosophical pulpit, just like Diogenes, but we have become too cynical to stop and listen to what they have to say. 

 

Giovanni Anselmo
Sans titre, (granit, laitue, fil de cuivre), 1969
image via Centre Pompidou

 

Every era gets the art it ‘deserves.’ Commissioned by kings and conquerors, paid in war booty gold, artists of antiquity used valuable, durable stones cut with strenuous effort from the calcified cliffs of mountains formed millennia before as the seabed rose, because that is what they had access to. We have more access to more materials than ever imagined; global supply chains end in our laps. Because, whether cave painters or frieze carvers, artists have never truly worked alone. Each is dependent on access to supply chains and the alliance of commerce to material systems for their work to exist, just as each human being is. But we’re no longer reliant on Silk Road camels or buccaneers’ raids for access to the novel and exotic. It’s all only one click away. If the Ancient Greeks had discovered plastics, I do not doubt they would have used them to create colorful, vivacious art—spectral imaging has detected traces of bright-toned paint on the pale stone and even bronze of both their sculptural figures and architectural decor indicating that in their own time, this statuary was closer to department store mannequins than the austere purity we have received via blanched ruins and Renaissance mimicry.5 More than any time in history, this is a moment of ‘civilization’ versus environment. Froot Loops will revert to sugar, but their petroleum-derived LDPE plastic bag and the woven polypropylene of the trampoline mats will remain revenants much longer. Those billions of Monoblocs made so quickly, so cheaply, will overtake several human lifespans before they crack and warp. Still, they’ll never truly disappear, degrading into minute microplastics that last virtually forever. Even when the install has left the gallery on the back of his truck and been disassembled into constituent parts, on a molecular level they will last longer than marble, which began as seashells crushed into limestone, and will return to such, following the natural cycle. The elegant arms of the Vatican’s Laocoön will disintegrate long before we lose these spray-foam limbs. 

If the artists of antiquity had cracked the alchemy of petrochemical conversion, museums worldwide would be full of glass jars of plastic dust, not resonant masterpieces. The greatest artworks of our time are perhaps our vast landfill sites, our great middens. Trash heaps that encapsulate telling clues, and will allow researchers to time travel back to investigate our predilection for obsolescence after all digital communications are erased in a colossal Coronal Mass Ejection or solar EMP. And what of our museums, and their contents, that we set so much store by? In the far distant future, will the heavy angles of the Zumthor-Govan LACMA concrete bunker be dug out of the tar pit into which they will sink? Transported to another city as a prized possession, will its Brutalist style be fetishized and gloated over, walled inside another museum’s walls? With none of us left alive to defend the remnants of our material culture, would this be an act of theft, or preservation? Locked into a perpetual cycle of wonder-to-waste, and back again, what we create will inevitably come up against systems of rigorous re-evaluation, either as recovered beauty, dusted off to be prized again, or crushed to powder to make way for new shapes to reign.

As a child, I had always wanted to be an archeologist. I became a writer instead. *I’ve discovered that it’s almost the same thing.

“Scene 24” (The First Battle) from Trajan’s Column, 113 CE. Source: National Geographic / Direct reconstruction based on casts from the National Museum of Romanian History or Museum of Roman Civilization, via “Trajan’s Column — Reading an Ancient Comic Strip,”

1 Alexander Conze, “Greek Relief Sculpture”, 1887. ↩

2 Because we should always remember: “Whenever your spirits sag, or your day seems droopy, you can always cheer things up with a gem of thought from Snoopy!” by Charles M. Schulz, Hallmark, 1977. Snoopy’s Philosophy ↩

3 As discussed in the documentary Pergamon Altar – A Looted Monument?, 2023, Medea Film Factory, part of Who Owns History? The Battle Over Cultural Heritage. ↩

4 Robert Horvitz, ‘Chris Burden,’ Artforum, Volume XIV, No. 9, May 1976, pages 24-31. ↩

5 See Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity, Vinzenz Brinkmann, Stiftung Archäologie, 2007; and Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World, issued in connection with the exhibition held October 28, 2017–January 7, 2018, at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s Legion of Honor. ↩

Pope.L Makes a Mess of Meaning @ The Drawing Center in New York

Pope.L
Skin Set series, 1997 - 2011
Installation View, Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L, The Drawing Center, New York. June 26 - September 27, 2026. Photo: Daniel Terna

text by Hank Manning


Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L begins with a wall of confrontational declarations, including “White people are the couch and the sofa” and “Black people are the rinoceri on the tight rope.” Before we consider the deeper meaning hidden in these metaphors, we should notice as well: “Blue people are racist,” “Purple people are the color of punarchy,” and many other statements that do not correspond with any easily understood stereotypes, let alone known races. (Nor does “punarchy” appear in any dictionary I can locate.) These are, after all, pieces from Skin Sets by Pope.L, who says he is “suspicious of things that make sense.”

 

Pope.L
Title unknown, 2000
Collage, photocopy, pen and paint on paper.
17 x 11 inches

 

Across drawing, painting, photography, installation, and performance, Pope.L explores canvases from the tiny—airplane napkins—to the immense—the streets of Manhattan, producing an oeuvre that continually invites us to develop complex theorems while even simple conclusions may remain elusive. His written language can rarely be understood or found in its entirety, though at times it is clear and provocative (“Dogs are useless”). He makes art with food, like ketchup and peanut butter, and although the exhibition is subtitled Works on Paper, there are also dozens of portraits on Pop-Tarts. He depicts paramount historical figures in unfamiliar forms and settings, as in Harriet Tubman Spins the Universe, wherein the abolitionist’s legs swirl in perpetual motion. Viewers inevitably feel like part of the experiment—recalling Marcel Duchamp’s assertion that the spectator who interprets the work brings it into posterity. 

Pope.L
Relational Painting a.k.a. if Black is Beautiful…, 2003 - 2022
Installation View, Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L, The Drawing Center, New York. June 26 - September 27, 2026. Photo: Daniel Terna

The second room prominently features a multimedia environment, Relational Painting a.k.a. if Black is Beautiful…, constructed over twenty years and containing a long shopping list of materials, starting with paint and marker, but also featuring amplifiers buzzing, cigarette butts, bottles, and a book by W.E.B. DuBois. It looks like a replica of a madcap artist’s studio, with a painting in progress, as if to demonstrate the environment in which he made the other pieces around the room. Photographs of the installation hang in the installation itself. 

Pope.L’s Failure Drawings best exemplify one interpretation of the exhibition’s title—that drawing is Certainly an Act. These small pieces appear on various materials at hand—letters, hotel notepads, medicine boxes, receipts—as if he had an impulse to draw, with no time to get to a studio. In contrast to this urgency, however, are his reminders that visual art is a durational performance too—all include multiple dates indicating when he began and then continued work on them, often years apart. 

The use of everyday items as mixed media attests to the artist’s belief that the division between art and life is porous. Complementing this reminder, we’re invited to watch a few highlights from the artist’s subversive public performances that most convincingly portrayed this ambiguity. For the Crawl series, he donned a business suit and held a potted plant (or in a later rendition, a Superman costume and a skateboard on his back) while strenuously maneuvering on all fours across Manhattan; surely few passersby could have recognized it as a staged act at all. In Alzheimer’s Talk, he sits behind a COVID shield as a phone repeatedly rings and a man offscreen punches him. Maybe his work seems difficult to understand because the same is true of life itself. 

Pope.L
Tompkins Square Crawl, 1991

Perhaps most startling, we hear Pope.L speaking enthusiastically about Conquest, a group performance of Crawl with 140 volunteers—and making perfect sense. The earlier crawls, like much of his work, were intentional social critiques; at the peak of a housing crisis, they effectively brought attention to the humanity and suffering of the unhoused. His soft-spokenness and words of encouragement while engaging the public also suggest that alongside the mind which produced the natural disasters, body horror, and anthropomorphized penises throughout Failure, his self-identification as “the friendliest Black artist in America” is not entirely ironic. 

Certainly an Act: Works on Paper by Pope.L is on view through September 27 at the Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, New York

Our Image Cosmos: Notes from Arles

Eva and Franco Mattes, Half Cat, 2026. Installation view, Modèle animal: 200 ans de photographie, Rencontres d’Arles

text by Perry Shimon

A wash of cicadas in the canicule. I stand in the shadow of a Roman amphitheater in Arles, where I’ve arrived at the Rencontres de la Photographie to experience this most prestigious of international photography surveys. This year, a proposal I submitted on a twentieth-century Greek cabaret, founded by Giorgos Darzentas and Dorothy Moore, was presented as part of a celebratory event at the end of the opening week before moving to a gallery for the duration of the festival. My engagement with the organizing team has given me insight into this expansive event, and my interactions have been invariably gracious, attentive, and thoughtful, enlarging my appreciation for the effort that goes into a survey of this scale.

From the Giorgos Darzentas and Dorothy Moore Archive. Courtesy of SKETCH Gallery.

Along with the growth of the Rencontres, certainly bolstered by the formidable presence of the Gehry-fortified LUMA Foundation, there is an unmissable chorus of critics lamenting the changing spirit and increased presence of commercial galleries, exclusive events, and luxury brand partnerships. I am familiar with these dynamics, if less so with the challenges of producing something of this scale, and would offer that one of the Rencontres' many winning features—beyond its superabundance of visual art—is the fact that one can’t be too sure whether one would have had a better time at a collector dinner in a private villa or in the lively place with its vibrant and worldly community of photo enthusiasts. In fact, it is extremely difficult not to find oneself constantly marveling at images, learning about the world, and having pleasant conversations with interesting people. Provided, of course, you can find a bed and have enough time not to feel rushed and overwhelmed—an increasingly difficult and costly proposition.

Hu Weiyi, Erosion, 2021–ongoing. Film processed with the artist’s gastric acid, The Inner Darkroom, Rencontres d’Arles 2026.

Vigilance: Work Under Tension, installation view, Rencontres d’Arles 2026.

The scope of the survey this year is impressive and shows the extent to which artists and curators will go to offer something distinctive and unusual to the international audience. Chinese artist Hu Weiyi immersed exposed film rolls of natural landscapes in his own stomach acid, painfully extracted through his nose (as documented in the accompanying video), to make a "living chemical reactor" producing psychedelic prints enlarged to monumental scale. This work sat next to Vigilance, an exhibition celebrating industrial photography by the French electricity board, Électricité de France, and SODEL (Society for the Development of Electric Applications), commissioned for their titular magazine and featuring a delightfully high-modern photographic and design sensibility applied to workplace safety culture. These exhibits in the former SNCF train maintenance building-cum-gallery, adjacent to the Arles train station, are perhaps the first or last exhibitions visitors encounter, illustrating the festival's broad and colorful commitment to the capaciousness of the medium.

Nearby, on the second story of a bustling Monoprix department store, selections from the FNAC collection sit on view beside nominations for Le Prix Découverte de la Fondation Louis Roederer, including Jordan Beal's Polaroids of AI-generated images exploring the colonial histories of Martinique. I was amused to see art crowds walking through the Monoprix, getting distracted, browsing fast fashion, and buying GMO fruits.

Lech Wilczek, Simona Kossak with the raven Korasek, Modèle animal: 200 ans de photographie, Rencontres d’Arles.

This edition features many familiar genres and names: Harry Gruyaert’s bold color work, Martine Barrat’s European ethnography of the South Bronx, a range of unusual process-based works including notable presentations by Ming Smith and Meghann Riepenhoff, and large thematic surveys on broad subjects such as Ghana and animals. Some of the most lively sections for me were the selections of artist books, the book fair, and the Night of the Year, where some forty selected proposals were transformed into short videos that played during a celebratory performance before a selection moved into a nearby gallery. In the balmy evenings, crowds slowly trickled into a Roman amphitheater, where thoughtfully produced events engaging with photographic arts unfolded before keen and attentive audiences.

Pablo Saavedra de Decker presents the archive of his mother, photographer Marie-Laure de Decker, at the Théâtre Antique during Rencontres d’Arles 2026.

Throughout the festival, and particularly during the opening week, visitors proceed through a labyrinth of winding streets, churches, cloisters, museums, palaces, pavilions, and gardens, encountering the official selection, while nearly every available surface across the city is decorated with images. This offers a more interesting visual culture than the advertising and social media supersaturation to which we are accustomed, while remaining entangled with the logics and trends of the visual regime from which it emerges and against which it competes. 

Verena Paravel, Delta, 2026. Film still detail, Cosmofonia, LUMA Arles.

Chatting with an arts administrator I met attending the concurrent Les Suds music festival, after Clémence Gabrielidis' Sapphic exploration rendered in reimagined rebetika—looping processed vocals and musical phrases in the crepuscular evening light at the Musée départemental Arles Antique—our conversation turned toward LUMA, which she conceded certainly commissioned impressive art but was perhaps more interested in what artists can do with more modest means. I had been expressing enthusiasm for Verena Paravel’s sensory documentary on the ecology of the Camargue, where she embedded herself with a range of scientific recording instruments deployed with extraordinary poetry. These themes were picked up by Pooya Abbasian, in a nearby exhibition at the Lee Ufan space, where a similar attention to the local ecology intersected with nearly extinct animist myths from the region that somehow survived Christianity’s anthrochauvinism.

Grégory Dargent performs Soleil d’Hiver combining oud, electronics, magnetic tape, and projections at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie, Les Suds à Arles, 2026.

The flourishing of summer festivals in the region was an inspiring reprieve from the austere and increasingly fascist cultural context of the States, with its small cadre of market actors. As the opening of the Rencontres cross-faded into the ebullient world music festival of Les Suds, I encountered Grégory Dargent, whom I had last seen performing a powerful personal work of photography and processed oud at Café Oto in London, and had the pleasure of hearing an evolved version at the local art college. Both Clémence and Grégory are extraordinary musicians, and I couldn’t, while enjoying their brilliant performances, shake a sadness that perhaps the neoliberal artist is one who travels alone and makes the work of a community by themselves, slowly accumulating loops that seem to both echo and determine the limits of a sociality receding quickly from this conception of music. Cyborg troubadours salvaging diminishing syncretic cultures, swallowed by technology, progress, efficiency.

Ecology—or perhaps ecology as a lens through which everything else was refracted—was the dominant theme of my visit. Most inescapable was the punishing, record-breaking canicule that settled over southern France, becoming the larger medium through which the many ecologically themed exhibitions were experienced.

Camille Henrot, In the Veins, 2026. Film still, LUMA Arles.

At LUMA, Camille Henrot’s In the Veins was among the strongest works on view, a masterful meditation on solastalgia, or the grief of living through ecological loss while raising a child, much of it unfolding within a gorgeous, spacious, light-filled Manhattan high-rise apartment. The film is tender, emotionally and stylistically precise, imagining childhood as a space still populated by abundant animals and livable ecosystems even as those things disappear. Yet it is also emblematic of where many of LUMA’s most ambitious exhibitions ultimately arrive. They lavishly render the affective dimensions of our contemporary condition while stopping short of naming the economic relations and political systems responsible for producing it, let alone orienting viewers toward any coherent alternative political horizon.

This hesitation may not be incidental. Like the pharmaceutical fortune that underwrites LUMA itself, the institution excels at managing the symptoms of crisis—cultivating reflection, care, and aesthetic intelligence—while remaining largely silent about the structures that generate the illness in the first place. The result is a cultural practice of extraordinary sophistication that often feels more committed to diagnosis than transformation, when it is not simply celebrating technological innovation, art-inflected amusement park rides, or immersive spectacles calibrated to the social media economy.

Philippe Parreno, Danny, 2026, LUMA Arles

Across the hall from Verena Paravel’s Delta, from her Cosmofonia series, Philippe Parreno’s Danny unfolded according to its own internal logic. Governed by an array of sensors and its eponymous artificial intelligence system, it read the space and its inhabitants, responding with videos, lights, images, prepared piano, sliding doors, and intermittent performances conceived by Tino Sehgal. The installation produced an algorithmic choreography, continuously determining the movements of bodies within the space. A friendly docent informed me that Danny was feeling “exceptionally generous and friendly” that day, and that the proceedings had something to do with cleansing one of my chakras. Moments later, one of the performers led me by the hand out of Danny’s sovereign installation and into the bright atrium housing Carsten Höller’s giant, infantilizing slide, overseen by two spectacularly bored-looking art workers.

Clément Cogitore, Memory Palace, 2026, LUMA Arles

Perhaps my favorite work of the Rencontres, or at least a work I revisited several times, was a film by Clément Cogitore called Memory Palace, made from anonymous vernacular home movies that accompanied a polyphonically performed passage of compiled and sometimes modified texts expounding on memory and history. It was an ambitious work—a protest even, against the “angels of oblivion,” of brutal history concerned only with power, and an imploring call for a “requiem for peace.” The work amassed poetic and philosophical fragments in a distinctly Enlightenment register, still saturated with Christianity, performing a God’s-eye perspective on the great sweep of European history. Lines like “When I say we, I mean everything that lives,” and “It took him seven days to make, not one more… I would have taken a day or two more,” accumulated with the force of a sermon over sensitively selected scenes from amateur family movies, lightly augmented with AI. The blend is fascinating: grandiose and prophetic pronouncements alongside extraordinary sensitivity to quotidian imagery overlooked by history.

Clément Cogitore, Ferdinandea, l’île éphémère, 2026, Mucem, Marseille

I curiously continued on to visit Cogitore’s contemporaneous exhibition in Marseille at MUCEM, a thoughtful exploration of a volcanic island that emerged suddenly from the Mediterranean in the first half of the nineteenth century, briefly igniting scientific speculation and geopolitical turmoil before disappearing again into the sea. It had Cogitore’s now familiar style of rangy bricolage, voice and image, plural openness to various and emerging media forms, a writer’s steady hand, temporal promiscuity, and an abundance of poetic, philosophical, and ethical open questions. It was a bit challenging for me to focus on the broad scope of speculative geopolitical stakes, myself recently emerging from the Mediterranean and surrounded by the ebullient Marseille crowds.

DIE ZAUBERFLÖTE by Mozart, Stage direction and video: Clément Cogitore. Festival d’Aix-en-Provence 2026 © Jean-Louis Fernandez

I learned that the polymath Cogitore had also directed Mozart’s The Magic Flute for the coinciding performing arts festival in nearby Aix, which I attended as well. I again recognized Cogitore’s magpie aesthetics: vernacular and popular images presented with centrally placed subtitles—an interesting signature that unsettles the usual hierarchies of image and text. It was an ambiguous staging set in twentieth-century post-war Europe, with Sarastro as a blind man surrounded by a chorus of scientists in an opaque and fluorescently lit orthogonal scenography. It felt constrained by Schikaneder’s bizarre libretto, with subtitles in both English and French, Mozart’s rather over-caffeinated music, and the range of child and adult performers—that, at two hours and fifty minutes, starting at 9:30 p.m., and in the midst of a canicule, was all a bit much. It was kind of like watching the accelerating Western repertoire overheat, sweating festivalgoers aggressively fanning themselves in the outdoor amphitheater while the usual violence, tragedies, and other familiar preoccupations dressed themselves up in different outfits.

This Western repertoire, these tired, violent stories, are becoming almost unbearable for me. There is a dark, pathological fixation on tragedy running through so much of the inherited canon. Universal Pictures has just released Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Look at the names: a director named after Christ restages another violent epic for a studio that calls itself Universal. Such extraordinary resources are deployed to maintain these ruinous stories.

I took my daughter, dreading the experience. When it was over, I wanted to console her, to prepare her for the thousand variations on these themes she will inevitably encounter, and to reassure her: this is not entertainment, my love. This is trauma. This is sickness. These are the stories and images of pathological violence that continue to dominate the cinemas of nations still capable of astonishing barbarity, greed, imperial ambition, and the terrorization of others. We keep returning to them as though they contain some indispensable truth about what it means to be human, mistaking repetition for universality.

After the initial thrill and spectacle of the photo festival began to fade, I felt a kind of dread coming over me. As if this prolific image world were some kind of necrophilic cult—a quantum one no less—in this palimpsestic city, troubling the stability of my subjectivity with glimpses of infinite collapsing superpositions, slivers of alternate worlds and recurring temporalities. At a certain point, I needed the plaza like water in the desert: its animation, smiling faces, running children, affectionate conversations, one elder gently touching the face of a friend, laughing together. The open markets, shimmering colors, the offerings simply representing themselves.

Of course, it’s more than a cult of the dead, this photo love; I know this. It’s a celebration of life, as I keep reminding myself, even if it comes with a sacrifice of the moment. It’s an education of sorts—for seeing and sharing, for occasioning these convenings.

We are in an interregnum, I hear—again? Still?—and technological determinism is the most decisive characteristic of this new hyper-mediated world. We’re awkwardly stumbling into this cyborg age, with human agency, animism, and ritual receding quickly. We surround ourselves with windows into what has been and what might be, still mirrors in the palimpsestic city, reflecting our myths and desires, affirmations and contestations, rendered in the technological parlance of our age of representational world-building: our image cosmos.

Each night, on my return to my host’s home, I walked through a narrow chemin where I invariably encountered a young man sitting in the pallid blue light of a computer screen, a faint, sickly sweet smell of vape smoke lingering in the air, and I wondered how much his image world shares a common ancestry with mine.

There is a passage in David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything in which the authors observe that people have been moving over great distances since time immemorial to build temporary architectures for cultural exchange, and that the archaeological record suggests much of what they exchanged must have been social and ritual. I wonder, as I make my own seasonal pilgrimage to these busy confluences of ritualized aesthetics, what traditions I am helping to keep alive.

Abject Bodies Populate A Six-Woman Show at Asya Geisberg Gallery in New York

 

Sue de Beer
Untitled, 1997-1999
C-print
49.88h x 36.38w in 126.68h x 92.39w cm
Edition 3 of 3
Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery

 


text by Emma Grimes


The archetype of the monstrous feminine is front and center in Under the Skin, a group show that brings together six artists whose work examines the female body in relation to the genre of horror. The exhibition spans painting, sculpture, and photography, beginning with Clarity Haynes’ Infinity Birth Altar (2021). 

A cotton-candy-blue canvas is organized into a 6x6 grid, with each of the 36 squares containing a close-up illustration of a crowning vagina. Every square is slightly different from the next, reflecting a diversity of female body types, and each orifice is pushing out a different colored spherical object. The tight repetition creates the feeling of looking at a pattern, which banalizes the conventionally “unattractive” or “gross” image of a crowning vagina, while also putting it on a pedestal. Giving birth is treated as mundane and revered at the same time. The title—Infinity Birth Altar—further evokes this quality of worship, and put together, the work lifts up the everyday labor that is the creation of new life.

In another painting from Clarity Haynes, Origin I (2021), a figure’s hips and crotch are caught in close-up as a blue, jelly-like object juts out from bloodied skin. This image does not seem to allude to a particular orifice but rather to an unexpected and unintended foreign object emerging from the body. Recalling the genre of body horror, Haynes’ two paintings blur the boundary between natural and unnatural bodily processes, or even native versus foreign bodily entities. The latter work is presented in a tondo canvas, recalling Renaissance paintings and even devotional Biblical scenes. Placing this image in the revered tondo form encourages one to doubt their initial judgment of the work and to critically question the inner logic that we use to define words like “gross” or “repulsive.”

 

Clarity Haynes
Infinity Birth Altar, 2021
Oil on canvas
40h x 30w x 1.50d in
101.60h x 76.20w x 3.81d cm
Courtesy of the artist and New Discretions

 
 

Clarity Haynes
Origin I, 2021
Oil on canvas
48 inches diameter
Courtesy of the artist and New Discretions. 

 

What we find ourselves averse to must be considered. In Julie Kristeva’s theory on the abject, she writes that the things we find repulsive are that which is neither subject or object. Feces, menstrual blood, or a corpse are not repulsive because they suggest “uncleanliness,” Kristeva writes, but because they’re ambiguous. The abject is “what does not respect borders, positions, rules.” Like the blue-jelly object protruding from the skin or the crowning vaginas, what’s being disturbed is the idea of one singular, whole body.

In Infinity Birth Altar, Haynes juxtaposes the abject with cotton-candy blue and pinks. There’s a waltz between a lightness of style and an intensity of subject. Yet they bleed into each other, and one is unable to tease them apart. Thus the abject illustration also becomes charming. Again, like with the tondo canvas in Origin I, Haynes upends our instinctual assumptions about the abject.

Staged across the gallery floor are five sculptures from Eva Tellier and Alison Kudlow. Three cast-iron legs uphold a glass, off-white flower in Kudlow’s Catch (2026). Two petals stand upright while the third lies flat, inviting a peek inside. A small glass object rests solemnly surrounded by beads and shards of glass. Kudlow’s work always feels fragile yet sharp, as though the sculptures, if you stepped too close, would slice your hand. They feel self-made, like they constructed themselves. And while sometimes a piece of art is stagnant until activated by your gaze, these give the distinct opposite impression; they’re indifferent to it.

Closer to the back, Eva Tellier’s three-legged body-horror sculpture quietly lounges with the confidence of someone who knows they’re the most interesting person at the party. The three legs wear shoes of pointy teeth, and the outside material is like the brain’s membrane. The top of the sculpture is scooped out slightly, creating a vague slit, and is covered in curly brown hair. Chair et poil / Flesh and Fur (2025) is the most body-horror of all the body-horror pieces here, and one can imagine this sculpture suddenly becoming sentient and wreaking havoc on the world outside. 

 
 

Sue de Beer presents a photograph, Untitled (1997-1999), of an adolescent girl splitting down the middle. Standing against a wall, blood oozes down her white top and blue jeans. Her young face looks anguished, yet also on the verge of great relief. The archetype of the monstrous feminine, presented here, is drawn from film theorist Barbara Creed. In her 1993 book, Creed first points out how in horror films with “monstrous” female characters, their issues are usually tied back to their reproductive functions. In the older, male-directed films Creed was analyzing, such as Carrie or Alien, one can argue that the monstrous feminine was broached to be confronted and then controlled, contained, exiled, or punished. But in this photograph from de Beer of an adolescent grotesquely splitting in half, one only finds sympathy. 

The works on view from Haynes, Kudlow, Tellier, and de Beer—in addition to Katherine Hubbard and Carly Ries—interrogate the archetype without trying to contain or even condemn it. In this way, Under the Skin significantly contributes to the way we think about the female body, how we inhabit it, what we consider abject, and, most importantly, what we do with it.

Under the Skin is on view through Friday, August 14 at Asya Geisberg Gallery, 45 White Street, New York.

Rocío García and Carmen Maria Machado Navigate the Joys and Horrors of Power and Submission

Installation view. Photograph by Garrett Carroll

text by Hank Manning

Rocío García’s oil paintings look like frames taken from a movie’s climax. We wonder what led to the perilous conundrums depicted and if the subjects will get out safely or meet their demise. With a single perspective and key details cropped out, both the viewer and subject have only a partial understanding of the situation. Within every scene, there is a composite of genres—action, drama, mystery, horror, comedy. Headless men are chained together and handcuffed, whilst curiously riding rollerskates. Another headless man, this one with chicken feet, guards his bed with a rifle, while the decapitated heads of his prey above have seemingly reincarnated to plot against him. A fierce-looking man called Jack the Punisher stands shirtless in the snow, seemingly held captive by a small rabbit. 

 

Rocío García
Magia blanca, 2012
From the series El regreso de Jack el Castigador
oil on canvas
79 × 85.5 in
Photograph by Garrett Carroll

 

The exhibition is a collaboration between García and the author Carmen Maria Machado, whose memoir In the Dream House focuses on an abusive same-sex relationship. Machado, here in her first curation, wrote captions that thoughtfully explore some of the context the paintings so demand. She chose the show’s title, The Object of Power is Power, from George Orwell’s 1984. The paintings certainly support the assertion that people seek power without any need for external reward, but for sheer enjoyment of power itself. The works interrogate the multidimensionality of power—how individuals and institutions dominate one another through force, but also through voluntary and even enthusiastic consent. Power is a subject that naturally blends genres. It is sometimes simultaneously horrifying and hilarious, demeaning and arousing. It often feels permanently entrapping, though it may only truly endure for a brief period. 

 

Rocío García
La Bella Samurai, 2021
From the series Bella floras del mal
oil on canvas
63 x 75 in

 

Personality differences sometimes naturally precipitate power dynamics—in romantic couples, a confident, assertive partner may exert power over one who is more apprehensive. García draws on another literary influence in the painting La Bella Samurai, named after Charles Baudelaire’s book of poetry. Two women sit in a bath in a bright turquoise room. One of them appears relaxed, drinking a glass of wine, while the other, on high alert, grips a samurai sword, as she looks outward at the viewer. Clearly, love can feel like one thing for one partner and at the same time something very different to another. Baudelaire’s Le Vin de l’Assassin described the “dark enchantments” of love. García and Machado also clearly highlight the frequent anxiety involved. They further challenge the misogynistic tropes associated with femininity and, in particular, lesbian relationships, by showing that these dynamics are just as complex as any other. The sword contrasts symbols of domesticity also on view, including brushes, slippers, and flowers. 

Rocío García
Like the Last Blues (Triptico), 2006
From the series El Thriller
oil on canvas
all works 47 x 55 in
Photograph by Garrett Carroll

The exhibition links these intimate, natural power dynamics with those entirely artificial and at a systemic level. Like the Last Blues, a triptych, depicts a scene of tied-up and gagged migrants under the discretion of one free man who wields a passport. Besides the shackles and binds seen in most paintings (which Machado reminds us may be applied either by force or by choice), weapons, here swords and guns, can reinforce or reshuffle existing hierarchies. 

The large canvases are not black and white—neither literally nor figuratively. They all feature otherworldly bright colors, like Technicolor film cranked to maximum saturation. Likewise, most do not portray obvious good and evil. Neither García’s paintings nor Machado’s pontifications encourage us to root for or against any of the subjects, although many of them seem moments away from determining a winner and a loser, whether a victim escapes or succumbs, or if a complete reversal of fortune could occur. Power exists for its own sake, but it may be natural or man-made, voluntary or enforced, benevolent or destructive, or somehow, all of these contradictions simultaneously. 

The exhibition forces us to consider how to balance the power we give up. Some amount of vulnerability is pleasurable, and even necessary for social and romantic relationships. But erring too far towards submission leaves us vulnerable to abuse, both by individuals and the state. 

Rocío García: The Object of Power is Power is on view through September 20 at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, 26 Wooster Street, New York

The Politics of Bodily Autonomy at Galerie Lelong

Nancy Spero
This Womb..., 1985
Nylon appliqué and embroidery on nylon; suite of four
Each: 142 x 49 inches (360.7 x 124.5 cm)
© The Nancy Spero and Leon Golub Foundation for the Arts
Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Courtesy Galerie Lelong


text by Emma Grimes


Celebrating the centennial of Nancy Spero’s birth, Gallery Lelong presents “For it is our battle,” a survey tracing feminist art from the late 1970s to the present. Opening three years after the United States Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, the exhibition is grounded in the conviction that there is no freedom without bodily autonomy.

One of the first works you encounter is Spero’s We are Pro-Choice (1992), a silkscreen print that grounds feminism as a transhistorical struggle. The work includes five renderings of female beings across epochs, who stand proudly underneath the titular message scribbled in pink letters. At another point within the gallery, the significance of reproductive care is asserted again with the piercing silence that is Yoko Ono’s exquisitely simple Revolution: Object in Three Parts. The work, presented in a vitrine, displays three objects in bronze cast: a condom, a diaphragm, and a birth control pill. 

Tomashi Jackson’s I see Fields of Green (Put the Ball Through the Hoop) (2022) obfuscates historical images of Lyndon B. Johnson and Nina Simone with mixed material that includes paper bags, PVC marine vinyl, and marble dust, questioning whose stories get told. It sets up the rest of the exhibition to be considered through a critical lens, specifically asking questions such as: whose stories have been told and whose never got the chance? 

In the main gallery space hangs Erin Riley’s three-part tapestry Time Bomb Triptych (2022). In it, three vertical textile panels tell a very specific and universal story of encountering male violence. The first panel reads, “‘What,’ someone will ask, ‘are these scars on your chest?’ And they will answer, ‘I got them in the house of my lover(s).’” The second tapestry has an image of a blood-stained white garment; in the middle it says, “* DO NOT TEXT* ” and a yellow highlighter mark stroked through. The final panel contains a pair of torn black underwear. Below this deafening image reads, “every three minutes / every five minutes / every ten minutes / everyday.” 

One can’t help but recall and sit with their own adjacent, painful experiences. The materiality of the hand-stitched textile has the effect of holding everything: whatever arises in you—sadness, rage, grief—none of it’s too much.

Installation view, Galerie Lelong, New York, “For it is our battle,” July 9 – August 14, 2026.
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York. Photo by Daqi.

Then, the personal is made to correlate with the political: on the next wall are Spero’s four vivid banners draped from the ceiling. The first text reads in bright red print over white nylon, “This womb does not belong to doctors, legislators, judges, priests, the state, etc.” The second: "Certainly child,” then “Birth is our mortality, we who are women.” Finally, “For it is our battle.”

The one question the exhibition inevitably forms but does not answer is who the “our” in question is, exactly. In other words, what is a woman? While the exhibition gestures toward a broad spectrum of female experience, the show evades addressing this exact question, an absence that sits, slightly distractingly, like an elephant in the room. On the one hand, many of the works on view predate recent feminist and queer discourses that have challenged traditional understandings of gender. On the other hand, the exhibition's press release describes its aim as considering "all" female experiences, making the relative absence of work engaging those questions hard to ignore.

Even so, this does not take away from the show’s broader achievements. The works on view offer a rich constellation of perspectives on autonomy, embodiment, self-objectification, care, and violence, capturing many dimensions of lived female experience. Pinaree Sanpitak’s monochromatic paintings expunge an outsider gaze altogether. Using matawa, a natural fiber, Sanpitak fastens the material into loosely hourglass shapes over a pearl-background. These works aren’t about illustrating the female form from the outside, but about rendering how it can feel from the inside: there’s a nearly overflowing sensuality spilling off the canvas. Standing in the gallery, one’s attention is turned into an embodied awareness; the work bypasses your mind and lodges itself straight into your body.

 

Pinaree Sanpitak
Womanly Bodies I, 2021
Acrylic, mawata, and paper on canvas
78 ¾ x 47 ¼ in (200 x 120 cm)
© Pinaree Sanpitak
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

 
 

Pinaree Sanpitak
Womanly Bodies II, 2021
Acrylic, mawata, and paper on canvas
78 ¾ x 47 ¼ in (200 x 120 cm)
© Pinaree Sanpitak
Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

 

The work which follows marks a jarring, curatorially thoughtful pivot: hanging from the ceiling are a dozen or so circular cloths stitched with derogatory terms including Slut, Butch, Home Wrecker, and others. Lin Tianmiao’s Badges (2011-12) recall the common experience of being, to borrow Andrea Dworkin’s term, “temporarily branded” as a woman. The juxtaposition creates a kind of whiplash between Sanpitak's deeply embodied work, which turns attention inward, and Badges, which reminds one of the way women are constantly turned into objects in the eyes of others. Of course, this oscillation between subject and object also mirrors one of the foundational conditions of female experience itself. Tianmiao, by presenting these slurs as “badges,” inverts their objective to shame, thus reminding us that even if we can’t escape certain external realities, at the very least, we don’t need to internalize them.

 

Lin Tianmiao’s Badges (2011-12)
Photo by Emma Grimes

 

The high point of “For it is our battle” is precisely this astute curation, guiding you through a whirlwind of emotions and experiences reflecting both the small, everyday realities of being female and the much larger issues like lack of reproductive care. In stirring up personal memories and familiar feelings, many of them painful, the exhibition simultaneously creates a beautiful space for all of it to be held. 

“For it is our battle” is on view through August 14 at Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, New York.

Canal: A New Book Of Street Photography By Jesper Lund

Jesper D. Lund's CANAL is a quiet portrait of a neighborhood in constant motion. Drawn from photographs made around New York's Canal Street between 2016 and 2022, the self-published volume gathers moments observed in passing—on walks for coffee, lunch, or a break from the office—into a restrained record of everyday life. The 64-page book is accompanied by a poem from painter Landon Metz.

Read A Conversation Between Andreas Schulze & Monika Sprüth on Their 40-Year Working Relationship →

Few figures have shaped the contemporary art world as quietly yet decisively as Monika Sprüth. Since opening her gallery in Cologne in 1983, she has built one of the most influential international programs in contemporary art, championing artists including Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Rosemarie Trockel, Andreas Gursky, George Condo, Thomas Ruff, Sterling Ruby, and many others. What began as an attempt to create greater visibility for women artists developed into a gallery that has consistently introduced artists whose work expanded the language of contemporary art while maintaining an unusually long-term commitment to their careers.

The very first artist Sprüth chose to represent was Andreas Schulze. His inaugural exhibition at Galerie Monika Sprüth in 1983 marked the beginning of a collaboration that has lasted more than four decades. Throughout that time, Schulze has developed a singular body of work populated by distorted furniture, domestic interiors, cakes, household objects, and improbable architectures. His paintings occupy an unusual position within postwar German art, drawing from everyday life while resisting easy categorization through their flattened perspective, humor, and formal precision.

Their relationship also traces the transformation of Cologne from one of the most vital centers of the international art world during the 1980s into an important chapter in recent art history. As painting reemerged after the conceptual and minimalist movements of the previous decade, Cologne became a meeting point for artists, dealers, collectors, and curators from Europe and the United States.

Autre brings together artist and gallerist to reflect on the circumstances that brought them together in the early 1980s, the evolution of their partnership, the changing structure of the art market, and what it means to sustain an durational artistic dialogue. Read more.

Subversion Of Bureaucracy: Read An Interview Of Artist and Private Investigator Julia Weist →

In her latest work, artist Julia Weist turns the machinery of surveillance back on itself. After obtaining a private investigator’s license in New York, Weist used the same tools and databases available to investigators, law enforcement, and corporations to examine the hidden systems of data collection that shape everyday life. What began as an investigation into the infrastructures of privacy, identity, and power became a real-life confrontation with the state when she was called in for questioning by the New York Department of State to clarify why an artist would need a PI license in the first place.

The resulting work, Questioning, transforms that interrogation—an encounter between an artist, government officials, and the invisible architecture of surveillance—into a live performance that examines the legal gray areas, ethical contradictions, and personal stakes of being watched in a data-driven society. Blurring the boundaries between documentary, theater, and conceptual art, Weist reveals how easily the systems designed to observe us can themselves become objects of scrutiny. A performance of Questioning is currently on view at New Theater through July 19.

Iris van Herpen Brings Haute Couture to Life

Installation view of Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, Brooklyn Museum, 2026. (Photo: On White Wall/Paula Abreu Pita)

text by Hank Manning



Clothing may have originally been developed as a form of portable shelter from the elements, but at the Brooklyn Museum, over 140 garments reveal how nature can inspire fashion and how a garment might serve to connect us to, rather than separate us from, the world around us. In this way, Iris van Herpen invites us to shift our gaze to the organisms and systems we tend to overlook—because they are too small or too big, because they’re underground or under skin, or because they’re far under the ocean or off in outer space, or simply because their process of manufacturing is hidden from consumers. 

Seijaku, the first dress on display, asserts van Herpen’s persistent goal of finding harmony in chaos, looking at the whole world and attempting to find patterns. For this dress, she suspends a wave that somehow looks more calming than many of the symmetrical 3D-printed patterns that come later. Fittingly, as life on Earth began in the water, the first section (of eleven), “Water and Dreams,” reveals many ways in which movements of water—bubbles, raindrops, waterfalls—inspire her. 

 

Iris van Herpen. Living Algae Look, from the Sympoiesis collection, 2025.
Pyrocystis lunula algae, nutrient gel, H2O, silicone, silk organza, and tulle.
Collaborator: Chris Bellamy. Model: Stella Maxwell. (Photo: Molly SJ Lowe)

 

Sea life, much of it microscopic, forms an essential part of the world’s ecosystem. Van Herpen uses multidimensional modes of biomimicry; in addition to the stable appearance—shapes and colors—she also considers movement, her outfits simulating the gentle sway of coral or the rhythmic pulsations of a jellyfish. Truly merging biology and fashion, the dress Living Algae contains 150 million bioluminescent algae that light up alongside the wearer’s movement. One of the only dresses kept behind glass, it requires strict maintenance of temperature, humidity, and light cycles to keep the algae alive.

Terrestrial life motivates designs as well. Even some of our smallest neighbors—like bees and their honeycombs—and those seemingly stagnant—like trees’ root networks—form geometrically intricate and often precisely symmetrical systems. Luminous Lichen, replicating fungal networks, could also be said to resemble the wiring of a motherboard. Pioneering 3D printing in 2010, the Crystallization moved skeletons from beneath the skin to above it. 

Installation view of Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, Brooklyn Museum, 2026. (Photo: On White Wall/Paula Abreu Pita)

Van Herpen explores the diversity within and across human minds. In “Synesthesia,” she intimates the intertwining of senses by visually representing sound waves. She appropriates mythology, rendering gowns in the forms of metal snakes or items in Bosch paintings. Towards the end of the show, she considers how humans will continue to evolve, with biotechnology and extraterrestrial exploration. In “Cosmic Bloom,” some mannequins hang upside down or sideways to consider the opportunities of fashion in environments with little or no gravity, though the exhibition does not approximate how these billowing dresses would move in outer space. 

Throughout, artwork and scientific artifacts complement the dresses, challenging how we categorize the work. With immobile mannequins that the viewer can walk around, the experience differs greatly from a runway show. Here, each dress is its own work of art. The slow pace, encouraged by a somewhat gloomy soundscape by Salvador Breed, van Herpen’s long-time collaborator and life partner, is juxtaposed with the inherent joie de vivre and natural inspiration within the garments; they are like fossils frozen in time.

Installation view of Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, Brooklyn Museum, 2026. (Photo: On White Wall/Paula Abreu Pita)

To be sure, these pieces are not merely museum specimens. Worn in music videos, on musical tours, and on the red carpet, they are titans of popular culture. Repeat clients include Beyoncé, Björk, and Lady Gaga—Photographs of these and other “muses” appear near the show’s end, bringing the dresses back to life and providing a second perspective on their functions. 

Van Herpen’s reorientation underscores the egocentrism of the human race, with our fixation on things of our own size, in our near vision, and on the most familiar and easily observed processes. Likewise, we often ignore the labors of others even within our species. Inside our own bodies, operations constantly persist to sustain life in our circulatory, digestive, and nervous systems. And each of us, in our minds, has innumerable new and ever-evolving worlds. Van Herpen’s designs make the invisible visible, reminding us of the complex, interlinked, and essential beauty that surrounds us, big and small, near and far. One series at a time, they impress through their novelty and eccentricity; seen in aggregate, as in Sculpting the Senses, we get a sense of awe, an almost life-affirming quality. 

Van Herpen’s boundless curiosity—her ongoing discovery of untapped sources of inspiration—complicates her stated goal of finding harmony in chaos. Although she succeeds at this in many individual dresses, the show’s increasing diversity in color, form, and source hardly feels harmonious in aggregate. But, in this multiplicity, we can easily find comfort in our place in the interconnectedness and infinite beauty of the universe, inspiring a sense of wonder about what is still to learn.  

Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses is on view through December 6 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn

Installation view of Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, Brooklyn Museum, 2026. (Photo: On White Wall/Paula Abreu Pita)

Hollywood Glamour: Jools Rothblatt's "Berserker!" @ O-Town House

 

A fog of skirts, 2026
Oil on canvas
60 x 48 in (152.5 x 121.9 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and O-Town House

 


text by Arlo Kremen
photography by Evan Bedford

Taken from Joan Crawford’s 1967 horror flick Beserk!, Jools Rothblatt’s Berserker!—fixed safely as a noun—centralizes on a filthy and violent aesthetic identity. To try and nail her paintings down with concrete descriptors would disregard their dynamism. Almost lifting off the canvas, figures quickly dissolve into space and other neighboring forms. A fog of skirts envelops space in a cloud of pink, with long limbs hanging low, fingers gesturing at the magenta ground. A muddy nun’s head floats high, smudged dark with a bloody splat at the corner of her habit. As the nun disappears into the fog—or alternatively becomes the fog—it takes on her life force. An animated, living, tense mist. Rothblatt spoke of her paintings as capturing “the perfume of a room. It’s tension and thickness. That thing in the air in a club or a courtroom. That kind of sweat.” If this painting had a perfume, it would smell like cotton candy vape and a punch. A saccharine bruise. 

Lifetime Sports (Fistmagnet), 2026
Oil on canvas
24 x 36 in (61 x 91.4 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and O-Town House

Lifetime Sports (Fistmagnet), while not sweet, will undeniably leave a mark. A Bukowski poem as a painting, this barfly has received what might just be the last beating of the night. Head ducked down and shielded by two thin hands, his abuser seems to have pounded a receding hairline into the fistmagnet’s scalp. Red and blue patches creep up his crown like a fungus claiming new ground. His red shirt matches a streak of red slipped on just above his bent figure, all in the fore of a blue night background, a scene this night has gazed upon with an ordinary frequency.

Agitator Cracked Actor haha, 2026
Oil on canvas
24 x 36 in (61 x 91.4 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and O-Town House

Walking around the show, Rothblatt begins pointing to a number of painted figures: “that’s a diva, that’s a diva, a sprawled-out diva, that’s a punch in the face.” The figures which are present are largely sourced or inspired by Hollywood’s Golden Age in which Rothblatt revels in the often overlooked messiness embedded in the “Golden Age” epithet. Lifetime Sports is one such figure. Another is Agitator Cracked Actor haha. Here, not much is discernible other than a tightly corseted green dress with a fleshy body rising out of it, with a chest, shoulders, a neck, and a face somewhere along the spectrum from goose to human. Whatever she might be, what is absolutely certain is her diva attitude. Three tiny pinkish-purple figures creep in like adoring fans to witness her grandeur, and whatever stands between her and her fans is an abstracted intermingling of dark green and peach tones. What is going on is backgrounded by the feeling of a movie star and the vibration in the air when she appears. 

Another movie star, at least an animated one, Popeye’s Olive Oyl, is seen bent over with a gasoline pump up her rectum. On her blank face, her name is scribbled out. 7-Upskirt (gasoyline). What was once her long red dress has become a long-sleeve shirt paired with green booty shorts, plastered across a vehicle where the pump plugs right into her anus—a scatological genre painting for modern life.

 

7-Upskirt (gasoyline), 2026
Oil on canvas
48 x 36 in (121.9 x 91.4 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and O-Town House

 

The painted letters on Olive Oyl’s face also appear in Hollywood Music. The word is “Hollywood.” Rothblatt notes that this is the closest she’ll ever get to making a text painting. Many of the works have similar markings, although none of them come out to resemble any single letter or word. Rather, they sit in an interstitial space between meaning and meaninglessness. They come to the viewer like faded, unintelligible graffiti—words now lost to time. The markings demand close, attentive looking to register the nonsensical signs. Despite their lack of a clear referent, these markings do communicate. 

A red wall marking beside O-Town House’s charming second-floor kitchen speaks of Kim Fuck, the artist’s hardcore alter ego persona. Littered around LA bathrooms, Rothblatt mentions, keep an eye out for Kim. Much of the letter-like scribbles and scrapes act similarly to graffiti. Loose lettering, stacked and bleeding, and frequently illegible, both lettering forms communicate something that is floating, left without contextual ground, often meaningless to those who come to it later. Rothblatt makes note of how over the years her penmanship and brush handling have become nearly identical, that there is no longer a significant difference, especially when using smaller brushes. Her notebook is filled with words that are not really about the words themselves but the gesticulation and exaggeration of the forms, nearly identical to the paintings’ incoherent language. While these textual elements may have set meaning, their formal exaggeration betrays a sense of chaos. A babbling ambiance charges each painting with its own—to use the artist’s own words—perfume. 

This overwhelming sense of disorder, however, is the appeal. It is a central tenet of the theater of Hollywood. What would the film industry be if it weren't for stories of people like Joan Crawford, whose on-set abuse is legendary? What would it be were it not the unjust misogynistic targeting and maligning of actresses in the press for things of nebulous accuracy? Probably something much smaller and less interesting. Hollywood itself was a fiction, a story told as journalistic curiosity, whose cruelty and violence locked audiences into a professionalized gossip network. The life of Hollywood actors and filmmakers became its own movie, completely sensationalized. The line between on-stage and off-stage was thin, and it only becomes slimmer as time progresses. The violence of the screen is the violence of life, and Rothblatt meets this spectacular, bloody conflation with a wide, battered grin.

Jools Rathblatt’s Berserker! in on view through June 27 @ O-Town House, 672 S La Fayette Park Place, Suite 44/43, Los Angeles

Hollywood Music, 2025
Oil on canvas
24 x 36 in (61 x 91.4 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and O-Town House

Courting Obscurity: An Interview of Nayland Blake →

“Haunt”: Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre (2026)
Nayland Blake
Courtesy of Art Omi and the artist

interview by Emma Grimes

Across decades of practice, Nayland Blake’s work has explored identity, desire, power, and subcultures while posing incisive questions around freedom, bondage, gender, shame, and the complexities of human relationships. Born in New York City, Blake attended Bard College before earning an MFA from CalArts in the 1980s.

Blake’s newest work, Haunt, premiered at Art Omi on June 27. Marking their first outdoor installation, the work draws inspiration from the figure of the ornamental hermit—a historical practice in which wealthy landowners hired men to live in seclusion on their estates for years at a time. With Haunt, Blake continues their ongoing investigation into how discourse and exchange can take place beyond the limits of the white cube.

Read more.

Watch The Music Video For Boy Harsher's New Single "Jeans" Directed By Augustus Muller

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