The Circular Inquiries of Allison Katz @ Hauser & Wirth

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

text by Emma Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High Desert Flower: An Oral History of Jasmine Little

photograph by Stefan Simchowitz

text by Michael Slenske

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

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

photo Marty Schnapf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Childhood / Origins 

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

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

photograph by Stefan Simchowitz

UCLA / Little Chan / Chinatown 

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

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

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

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

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

Early Promise 

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

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

Colorado / Wilderness / Reinvention 

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

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

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

Ceramics Breakthrough 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

photograph by Stefan Simchowitz

Studio Practice: Los Angeles 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community Pillar 

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

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

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

photograph by Stefan Simchowitz

Last Days 

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

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

The New Museum Reopens with a Century of Speculative Futures

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

text by Hank Manning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art of Noise Surveys the Relationship Between Music and Design

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Installation view. Photo: Thomas Barratt.

text by Hank Manning

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

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

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Installation view. Photo: Thomas Barratt.

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

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

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Installation view. Photo: Thomas Barratt.

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

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Installation view. Photo: Thomas Barratt.

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

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Installation view. Photo: Thomas Barratt.

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

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

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

At 93, Joan Semmel Is As Honest As Ever

Joan Semmel
Sunlight, 1978
Oil on canvas, 60 x 96 in. (152.4 x 243.8 cm)
Courtesy of The Jewish Museum, New York

text by Emma Grimes

Uptown at the Jewish Museum, Joan Semmel: In the Flesh provides a survey of 16 works, spanning from 1971 to 2023, that tell the rich and compelling story of Semmel’s artistic evolution. And further downtown at Alexander Gray Associates, Continuities presents recent works, painted within the last two years, from the same pioneering artist. Together, these concurrent shows spark timely questions about womanhood, self-image, and transformation.

The Jewish Museum’s show begins with works from Semmel’s Erotic Series—from the early 1970s—that depict heterosexual couples having sex. In Flip-Flop Diptych (1971), the first painting shows a woman, rendered in a yellow-orange hue, straddling a reclined man. The second image, as the title suggests, flips their positions. Nearby, Erotic Yellow (1973) shows a couple laying down, intertwined. The woman’s body is painted in cherry pink; the man in dark, olive green. The bodies appear as if inserted onto the canvas from somewhere else, and the colorful backdrops can almost feel sterile. The scenes are recognizable and undoubtedly of real life, but they’re also luminously artificial and constructed, as if these figures are on a sound stage, posing. 

Joan Semmel
Erotic Yellow, 1973
Oil on canvas, 72 x 72 in. (182.9 x 182.9 cm)
Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York

Semmel positions the woman as an equal partner. It is obvious, and might be taken for granted by young viewers today, that she has desire, is acting on that desire. What might resonate more for contemporary observers has less to do with Semmel’s representation of a reciprocal heterosexual dynamic, but more with how Semmel is shown to inhabit her own body. Given the recent resurgence and glorification of skinniness on social media, the proliferation of GLP-1s, and the normalization of plastic surgery, Semmel’s offering—that one can be at ease with one’s body, no modification needed—is perhaps more radical today than before.

Following these are Semmel’s self-portraits, also from the ‘70s. Each one is painted from the perspective of looking down. Due to the natural closeness between one’s own eye and body, the limbs and curves appear striking on the large canvasses. Works like Intimacy-Autonomy (1974) recall the spectacular, natural beauty of a Georgia O’Keefe landscape. 

The positioning also forces you into her own subjectivity. It reminds me, perhaps bizarrely, of Joan Didion’s description of writing as a hostile act. When an interviewer asked her to expand on this, Didion said: “It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture.” 

Semmel’s self-portraits, in a similar vein, are coercing the viewer to see things from her angle. And while every work of art must come from an individual point of view, rarely does the coercion itself become visible. In her self-portraits though, she makes you see from her own gaze while also making that very effort evident.

Joan Semmel’s Portrait: Joan Semmel, 2019.
Photo: Erica Lansner

In the middle of this show is a collection of other works from various artists and time periods that Semmel curated to be considered alongside her work. There are two pieces from Joyce Kozloff and Judith Bernstein respectively. There’s a sculpture from Hannah Wilke, Alice Neel’s portrait of Meyer Schapiro, Arnold Newman photographs of Louise Nevelson and Martha Graham, just to name a few. Then there are three curious variations of works referencing Adam and Eve: God’s Curse by James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1896-1902), Eve Eating the Forbidden Fruit and Handing it to Adam by Philip Galle (16th century), and Adam and Eve by Max Weber (1911-1916). There are too many to consider each in-depth, but they provide a fresh lens to consider Semmel’s work.

Max Weber
Adam and Eve, 1911–16
Oil on canvas, 22 x 17 in. (55.9 x 43.2 cm)
Courtesy of The Jewish Museum, New York, gift of Leonard and Phyllis Greenberg, 2014-26

The exhibit concludes with five nude self-portraits from this century, which is the subject of the entire show at Alexander Gray Associates. That exhibit, named Continuities, consists of around a dozen of these paintings, all made within the last two years. 

Before entering the main exhibition room, one encounters a confrontational gaze from Semmel herself. In this self-portrait, she rests leisurely in a chair with her head tilted upwards faintly, as if she is asking something from you. The painting is titled Here I Am (2025). On second thought, it’s as though she is demanding something of you, specifically that you meet her gaze, that you look her in the eye before turning towards her body.

Among these paintings, one will quickly notice that Semmel seems to have moved on from that ambitious, subjective perspective found in her earlier works. There is a single painting, titled Shadow Heart (2024), that’s from her head looking down, except the one significant difference is that Semmel’s hand covers her lower stomach and groin. If what made her earlier nudes remarkable was their unabashed representations of the self and body—so forceful that they were transformed into imperatives to look (from her eyes) and acknowledge—then these works are tragic indications that one cannot hold onto such self-assurance forever. 

Joan Semmel
Shadowed Heart, 2024
Oil on canvas 48 x 60 in (121.9 x 152.4 cm)
Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, NewYork; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels © 2026 Joan Semmel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork

Joan Semmel
Skin in the Game, 2019
Oil on canvas, 4 panels: each 96 x 72 in.
Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York

The language in some reviews of Semmel’s latest work is striking—well, striking, but not surprising. I mean the reviews that laud Semmel’s “courage” for revealing her 93-year-old body. “Shame is nowhere to be found,” one extolled. These reviews, needless to say, maintain the bottom-line idea that she should be—we’re expecting her to be—ashamed of her body. If nothing else, this is a curious assumption to make given her previous work. 

That being said, there is something undeniably self-conscious about Semmel’s recent works. One can see this shift in a few ways. First, the gaze is made external. We are usually looking at her in these paintings, not with. Secondly, her body is not nearly as relaxed as before. She stands in front of a mirror, looking at herself. She is posing. She even covers up parts of her body in a few.

Joan Semmel
Blue Space, 2025
Oil on canvas 601/ 8x 721/8 in (152.7 x 183.2cm)
Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, NewYork; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels © 2026 Joan Semmel/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork

Compare any of these recent self-portraits at Alexander Gray with her earlier work. Take Sunlight (1978) as an example. In this work, she looks down on her soft pale body. A hand rests over her thigh, the other caresses the back of her foot. A finger on this hand presses down onto one of her toes, a subtle but meaningful detail that turns a body into a person with feelings, preferences, impulses. Her brown hair twirls over her left breast. The sunlit body sits on a white blanket. In the corner of the canvas’s left side are small splotches of grass, offering a narrative clue: she is outside—perhaps in a garden—appearing to enjoy the day’s warm sunlight. Wherever this person is, one also wants to be.

The painting, from a technical standpoint, is sublime (one does not want to look away), but what has always persisted for me, after one must look away, is this woman’s embodied presence. It is an attunement both with life outside and the life within. She is more than just unashamed of her body; she actually seems innocent of the knowledge that she ever had to be—like Eve, of course. And this mode of being cannot coexist with self-consciousness, and self-consciousness is precisely what worms its way into Semmel’s more recent self-portraits. Iris Marion-Young would describe this phenomenon as a woman seeing herself as another thing in the world, and therefore, she “remains rooted in immanence, is inhibited, and retains a distance from her body as transcending movement and from engagement in the world’s possibilities.” It is this distance that becomes present in these recent works where Semmel’s hands cover her face or where she watches herself mediated through the mirror reflection. What nevertheless remains astonishing is how Semmel—ever, yet alone for so long—created work unveiling her own body that simultaneously denied anyone the ability to turn her into an object. Where that sounds like a contradiction, it somehow never was. 

This shift might provide an answer as to why Semmel chose multiple works depicting the story of Adam and Eve to be viewed alongside her exhibit. Tragically, one can’t stay in the garden forever.

Joan Semmel: In the Flesh is on view through May 31 at The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, New York. Continuities is on view through May 30 at Alexander Gray Associates, 384 Broadway, New York.

Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market Present "Market Market" In Los Angeles

Comme des Garçons and Dover Street Market is bringing its Market Market sale to Los Angeles for the first time. Titled Market Market: Message Market, the event opened May 8 and runs until May 13 at Mica Studios as a temporary retail installation focused on archived inventory and past-season product. Items from Prada, Stüssy, Kiko Kostadinov, The Row, Nike, and COMME des GARÇONS will be included, with discounts reaching up to 70 percent.

The sale follows earlier editions staged in Europe and New York, continuing DSM’s rotating format of large-scale archive clearances. Footwear, CDG Play basics, and runway pieces are expected to make up a large portion of the offering. Entry tickets are being released in phases in an attempt to manage attendance and reduce wait times. As with previous editions, product availability will vary throughout the duration of the event. photos by Richard Brooks

Noguchi’s New York Envisions an Ideal City

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Isamu Noguchi at the debut of Unidentified Object (1979)
Photo: Donna Svennevik. The Noguchi Museum Archives, 04144.

text by Hank Manning

In celebration of its 40th anniversary, the Noguchi Museum presents Noguchi's New York, highlighting the artist’s attempts—many of them unsuccessful—to beautify and improve the city. The exhibition presents more than 50 works, including sculptures, photographs, and plots for landscape architecture; and celebrates the museum and sculpture garden, situated in Noguchi’s former home and studio, as one of his gifts to the city. 

Installation view. Photo: Nicholas Knight

Noguchi saw cities as inseparable from their people, particularly enjoying the feeling that, like him, every New Yorker came from somewhere else. In the 1920s, after dropping out of Columbia, he befriended a diverse group of artists. To fund his world travels, he sculpted busts of these friends in various materials meant to represent their personalities—Claire Boothe Luce in marble, Buckminster Fuller in chrome, Suzanne Ziegler in wood. As a central figure in New York’s intelligentsia, he even testified as a character witness at John Lennon’s immigration hearing.

Noguchi’s oeuvre grew to be as diverse as his social circle. After voluntarily spending time in a Japanese American internment camp as a means of protest, he produced more abstract statues, including the geometric Red Cube, installed outside an architecture firm’s office, and Unidentified Object, an eleven-foot monolithic piece reminiscent of a totem. He designed set pieces for Martha Graham’s Broadway production of Phaedra. Noguchi’s first retrospective took place at the Whitney in 1968. He worried that he might be pinned down by the museum’s framing of him as a “throwback modernist carver” more so than a “vital contemporary artist.” This experience strengthened his opinion that “Sculpture is no good if it’s just put in a gallery—It must be a part of daily living.”

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Isamu Noguchi
News (Associated Press Building Plaque), 1940
Photo: Miguel de Guzman

In spite of—or possibly because of—his frequent travels and long periods away from the city, Noguchi defined himself as a New Yorker. He saw his public works as attempts to make the city more interconnected, thought-provoking, and playful. His first-implemented sculpted environment was Sunken Garden, which contains seven large stones extracted from the Uji River in Japan. He described it as “a turbulent seascape from which immobile rocks take off for outer space.” News, a stainless steel plaque depicting a team of heroic journalists, adorns the former Associated Press Building, now 50 Rockefeller Plaza.

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Isamu Noguchi
model for United Nations Playground, 1952 (cast 1963)
bronze

Unfortunately, dozens of Noguchi’s most ambitious designs fell victim to political fights and were never realized. He had a strong desire to enhance playgrounds so that children could find their own creative paths. To this end, he both redesigned the particulars—slides, swings, and jungle gyms—and planned to reshape large sections of public parks. In 1933, he unveiled his first public proposal for the city—Play Mountain, which would have occupied an entire block and included steps in the shape of a pyramid’s side, an amphitheater, a summertime water slide, and a winter hill for sledding. These and similar rejected proposals for redevelopment at Washington Square Park, Riverside Park, and United Nations Plaza are now brought to life through animated films at the exhibition. Rejected as well were playscapes at the Bronx Zoo’s Great Apes House, a totem greeting visitors at Kennedy Airport, and MoMA’s sculpture garden.

The exhibition envisions a world where idealists like Noguchi had triumphed, unlike the real city, overly sanitized by powerful urban planners like Robert Moses, who focused on building new highways rather than revitalizing existing communities and at times laughed Noguchi out of his office. Although some of the park plans do seem fanciful—reminiscent of landscapes out of a Dr. Seuss book—we can certainly appreciate the consistent vision, as well as his adaptive spirit—when critics worried children would fall off his playground equipment, Noguchi designed the curved, hilly but not steep parks that made serious falls impossible. He felt equally proud of his unrealized works as of the five public pieces currently standing in the city, understanding that rejection need not be permanent. His work reminds us of New York’s potential to continue improving and serving as a beacon for the rest of the world. 

Noguchi’s New York is on view through September 13 at the Noguchi Museum, 9-01 33rd Road, Queens

Crystal Skulls and Church Fires: Christelle Oyiri’s “Belief May Vary" @ Amant in New York

Christelle Oyiri and Neva Wireko
Hauntology of an OG, 2025
Commissioned by Amant Brooklyn, NY and LAS Foundation, Munich/Berlin, Bourse de Commerce, Paris

Christelle Oyiri
REVELATION SYSTEM, 2026
CNC milled polyurethane resin and clear urethan resin, acrylic
Courtesy of the artist and Gathering, London/Ibiza

Christelle Oyiri
Horns of Allure, 2026
CNC milled polyurethane resin, acrylic
Courtesy of the artist

Installation view of Christelle Oyiri Belief May Vary
Amant, Brooklyn, NY
Photo by New Document

text by Arlo Kremen

Christelle Oyiri’s solo debut in the US is at Amant, where she continues her investigation of myth-making as an infinite process informed by the continuous need to repatch and adapt to new conditions. Much like her show in Berlin at CANK, Belief May Vary situates Hauntology of an OG (2025) at the heart of this show, but a multiplicity of other media spring from the walls—bas-relief, photography, and sculpture that serve to expand on Oyiri’s film and sharpen its focus.

Hauntology draws heavily on the Memphis Pyramid’s symbolic potential. Clarifying the object through its parallel in the Giza Pyramids, tombs of pharaohs, and monuments to death, faith, and earthly transcendence, the Memphis Pyramid carries a uniquely American interpolation of these associations. Once a sports stadium called the “Tomb of Doom,” it is now home to the largest Bass Pro Shop in the country, a capitalist tourist attraction that brings droves to Memphis to witness this postmodern World Wonder. Today, the Pyramid is a hotel, restaurant, and shopping center, but between 2002 and 2006, it served as a site of worship. The Church of God in Christ held holy convocations in the Pyramid, gathering thousands for their assemblies. Another congregation considered buying the Pyramid during a period of uncertainty and economic failure. Pastor Gary Faulkner, whose 5,000-member congregation filled three different locations for Sunday services, saw the economic drag the structure had on the city, so he offered a solution. He also planned to develop commercial outlets to support the building financially. This offer overlapped with the city’s deal with Bass Pro Shop, which eventually won out. If not, the Pyramid would most likely have been demolished.

Christelle Oyiri and Neva Wireko
Hauntology of an OG (still), 2025
Courtesy of the artists; Amant, Brooklyn, NY; LAS Art Foundation, Berlin; and Pinault Collection, Paris

The Pyramid is undergirded by histories of capitalist spectacle, faith, and the looming threat of destruction, making Oyiri’s Egyptian comparison all the more prescient—how did faith get here? The Parisian filmmaker represents this history without judgment or any moral lashings, using local Memphis lo-fi visuals to probe the Pyramid on its own terms. In collaboration with Memphis poet and rapper Darius Phatmak Clayton and a sample from Princess Loko on her original synth-driven composition, the artist collapses the city’s past and present to unveil the failed futures that continue to mold how faith operates in Memphis.

Hauntology contends with, along with the Pyramid, the burning of Clayborn Temple, which horrifically occurred during her filming trip. Clayborn Temple was a home to a historical Black Presbyterian congregation and was heavily involved with the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ strike in 1968. The church had a similarly sizable involvement in the 1960s civil rights movement as a center for grassroots organizers. Clayborn Temple was a beacon of light for racial equality, an equality that never really occurred as originally intended, with economic devastation marking this majority Black city. Oyiri stills the frame of Clayborn Temple’s burning in CNC-milled polyurethane resin on a wall for Melting Temple (2026). She marks the front of the church and miraculously standing remains of the structure in gold acrylic, while the ongoing fire is left nearly absent; its plumes are signaled by a topographic texture, pushing into and away from the viewer’s space. Rather than propounding destruction, the artist uplifts architectural endurance amidst apocalypse.

Christelle Oyiri
Melting Temple, 2026
CNC milled polyurethane resin, acrylic
Courtesy of the artist

Christelle Oyiri
REVELATION SYSTEM, 2026
CNC milled polyurethane resin and clear urethane resin, acrylic
Courtesy of the artist and Gathering, London/Ibiza

REVELATION SYSTEM (2026) combined CNC milled polyurethane resin and clear urethane resin to create a model of the Memphis Pyramid. Painted in gold to also mimic the Pyramids of Giza, the tip of the tetrahedron, buried in clear resin, is a skull. The myth goes as such: construction workers uncovered a metal box attached to the top of the pyramid, inside of which laid a crystal skull placed there by Isaac Tigrett to “ward off evil spirits.” The skull was displaced, and Tigrett forewarned that a curse would be cast on the new entertainment space. Several misfortunes befell the pyramid—sewage floods and facilities that fell below NBA standards, leading to substantial renovations that had little effect. The space was closed and practically abandoned for most of 2007 to 2015. REVELATION SYSTEM brings this folktale to the fore, situating it within a greater historical context of a snuffed-out future of racial freedom and prosperity that is particularly felt in a city like Memphis, which was a hub for much of the US’s grassroots civil rights activism.

Christelle Oyiri
ALL ABOUT MONEY — DJ SQUEEKY, 2025
Aluminum-charged polyurethane resin foam, aluminum, acrylic
Edition of 5 + 1AP
Courtesy of the artist, and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

Oyiri similarly positions two other myth systems as existing in the wake of the promises of the civil rights movement: rap and the Black Hebrew Israelites. On the far wall of the show, cassette-shaped plaques monumentalize foundational Memphis rappers 8Ball & MJG, Tommy Wright III, Three Six Mafia, and DJ Squeeky. These figures, along with those memorialized in Hauntology—Princess Loko, Gangsta Boo, Young Dolph, Lord Infamous, and Big Scarr—managed to create light from the immense darkness and subjugation at the root of America’s racial capitalism. The cassette was the earliest form of quick dissemination, spreading the words of these legendary sonic architects. In Clayton’s words, “music possesses souls.”

Christelle Oyiri
I DON’T TRUST A SINGLE IMAGE BECASUE I SAW THE TRUTH FROM TWO ANGLES, 2026
Framed lenticular print
Courtesy of the artist

The Black Hebrew Israelites speak on the street while, presumably, the photographer tape-records them. I DON’T TRUST A SINGLE IMAGE BECAUSE I SAW THE TRUTH FROM TWO ANGLES (2026) embodies the quality of the image’s lenticular print, adapting to its spectator’s movements with its three-dimensional illusion. Here, it seems as though Oyiri begs for different treatment of the Black Hebrew Israelites, as, like the other faith systems present in Belief May Vary: racial capitalism’s persistence is the site in which all of these beliefs can be sourced. Words of God do not come from a void; they can always be traced to a rupture, referring to the artist’s continued exploration of how faith and belief are rarely sourced purely from doctrine and are instead informed and sculpted by survival and endurance. Oyiri proposes a balanced consideration of belief as mutable and ever-evolving, often drawing on  social ruptures as a vehicle for faith’s transformations. To quote Clayton once more, “Not only roses but honeysuckle bushes too grow from concrete.”

Belief May Vary is on view through August 16th @ Amant 315 Maujer Street, Brooklyn.

Otherwise Part VII: Conviviality, Artful Infrastructures, Itinerant Organizing & the Creative Commons

La Place

text by Perry Shimon

“…as long as the over-all structure of society does not favor the degradation of everyone into a compulsory voyeur.”

— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

The previous essays in this collection have sought to examine a conventional contemporary understanding of art that primarily reflects the dominant dynamics of power and finance in the age from which it emerges. Yet the capacity of art, as an evolving and contested category, is not exhausted by the tenets of neoliberal realism. Within the capaciousness of the category, there exist models for the otherwise.

In this penultimate chapter, I want to highlight a number of cultural infrastructures, institutions, and practices that offer inspiring alternatives to the possessive individualism and ever-increasing financialization of both art and life. A precondition for participation in these architectures of artful conviviality, however, is a more equitable distribution of self-determined time, alongside the conditions of social safety and care required to sustain it. The struggle for a more artful and beautiful world is inextricably bound to human and more-than-human emancipation from the ecological and social ruination produced by the destructive logics of endless growth and concentrated accumulation under capitalism.

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Santo Domingo plaza Oaxaca, by ryan doyle via Unsplash

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IAGO

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Francisco Toledo’s Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (IAGO) remains an example particularly close to my heart of a small-scale, community-focused art space that is widely used and beloved. Founded in 1988 in an 18th-century building adjacent to the lively plaza in front of Santo Domingo Church, it was seeded by Toledo’s donation of tens of thousands of art books from his personal collection. These now form a public reference library beside a print studio, gallery, and bougainvillea-covered courtyard alive with birdsong and conviviality. I have many fond memories of reading there happily while listening to the quietly cheerful polyglot murmur, bird sounds, and diffuse sociality of the nearby plaza, with celebratory brass-band processions punctuating the rhythms of the day. Openings at IAGO are warm, gregarious, intergenerational affairs, free to all and accompanied by hearty food and music.

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Eiko Ishibashi

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Noise Research Union Residency

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In 2008, Hamish Dunbar and Keiko Yamamoto opened Cafe Oto in a former paint factory in Dalston, East London. It has since become a beloved institution, both locally and internationally, with one of the most adventurous programs of music and performance anywhere, and it offers a space to artists experimenting beyond conventional tastes and established traditions. In the evenings, there are concerts, performances, screenings, lectures, symposia, and residencies, all realized in a large yet intimate room without a stage or backstage. By day, the venue functions almost as a community center, with a cafe, a modest menu, and thoughtfully curated selections of books and records for sale and reference. It sits on a quiet, leafy street with some outdoor seating and benefits from very little automobile traffic—a stark contrast to, and great respite from—the frenetic avenue just behind. I’ve had countless beautiful and inspiring evenings there, often arriving without even checking the calendar, collecting a fresh mint tea from the kind, artful, and friendly staff, and settling in for an extraordinary cultural evening. Afterward, the room hums with gratitude, conversation, and questions in a deeply convivial atmosphere.

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Friche

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At another scale, commensurate with the diverse and lively constituency of Marseille, La Friche de la Belle de Mai is a sprawling multi-venue cultural center built on the foundation of a former tobacco factory. It offers galleries, theaters, rooftop space for concerts, gardens, sports facilities, restaurants, cafes, a skatepark, a soccer pitch, a bookshop, artist studios, media production facilities, zones for street art, daycare services, farmers markets, and many other kinds of special events. The facilities also host the offices of some seventy or so cultural and nonprofit organizations. It is filled with joyful life, art, and conviviality, and offers programs and amenities that are inclusive and welcoming to everyone in Marseille.

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Centquatre

In Paris, Centquatre—or 104—shares a similar spirit. Located in a former municipal funerary complex in the 19th arrondissement, it first became an informal gathering place for young people, often dancing, before eventually being built out (perhaps even a bit too much) into a vast cultural center with many amenities akin to those at Friche and a lively public program. Both venues provide free, hospitable spaces for sociality and art, without an overbearing commercial presence or the sociocidal imposition of automobiles. At the end of the twentieth century, Ivan Illich wrote in Tools for Conviviality: “The present world is divided into those who do not have enough and those who have more than enough, those who are pushed off the road by cars and those who drive them.” The automobile, and its domination of space at the expense of social and ecological life, remains a powerful example of anti-convivial technology, compounding the deeply uneven distribution of agential time and the impoverished conditions required for its meaningful use.

SESC Pompéia

Brazil’s popular, nonprofit, tax-supported SESC programs offer another shining example of cultural infrastructure worthy of wider emulation. With regional variations across more than five hundred locations in all twenty-seven Brazilian states—far beyond the scope of this précis—I will mention only the iconic SESC Pompéia in São Paulo, housed in a former steel drum factory reimagined by the great architect Lina Bo Bardi as a multipurpose “leisure center” containing libraries, workshops, exhibition spaces, theaters, sports facilities, eateries, and a swimming pool. It is composed of many zones of enjoyment and cultivation, and is enthusiastically used and appreciated.

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Minna no Mori

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Minna no Mori (Everyone’s Forest) Media Cosmos, a municipally led civic and cultural project in Gifu City, is housed in a stunning building by Toyo Ito. Its sweeping organic wooden lattice structures, suggestive of mycelial forms, cast a warm, diffuse light over an expansive library, workshops, galleries, and spaces for education and cultural exchange. The space is filled with members of the community from every generation: learning, playing, reading, and working within a structure that clearly expresses profound respect for the people and values that animate it. When I asked the reference librarian about an artist I was researching, she kindly asked me to return at the end of my visit, at which point she presented me with a brimming folder of carefully compiled resources and suggestions for further inquiry.

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More generally, Japan has one of the most sophisticated and robust cultural infrastructures I have ever encountered, combining more and less technologically complex forms and methods. In most places I visited, there were visitor information centers where all manner of cultural guidance was made freely available in a variety of languages. Warm, patient, upbeat, and hospitable guides generously offered advice and recommendations. A4 sheets announced imminent cultural happenings through beautiful graphic design and thoughtful presentation displays. This practice was common in significant cultural institutions of many scales, which in turn displayed resonant announcements for one another, connecting organizations in a mycelial web of aesthetic and social affinities. Online, robust and widely used platforms such as Tokyo Art Beat carry this spirit into the digital sphere.

Throughout the country, there is substantial regional and municipal support for recurrent seasonal art festivals that both celebrate local cultures and invite meaningful dialogue from abroad. These initiatives feel less determined by the market and its influence on a distinctly neoliberal form of biennial-making, which is more prevalent in the West. Many local art festivals honor their histories and earnestly invite cultural exchange with artists from abroad in a way that feels distinctly more open, playful, and inviting of participation.

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The Eagle

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I also felt, perhaps on account of the strong Shinto current still running through Japanese life, a reenchantment of quotidian aesthetic experience, along with a respect for the more recent past. I felt this acutely in jazz and classical kissas, or listening cafes, where people sit comfortably and quietly in an unusual kind of social space simply to hear beautiful recorded music played on excellent sound systems. My favorite kissa in Tokyo offered a small library of art and anthropology books and journals, and served a modest menu of simple pasta dishes in a cozy Japandi-feeling basement beneath a commercial corridor in Yotsuya. There was something akin to sacredness, and certainly deep satisfaction, in this contemplative being-together. It is not unlike the onsen and sento cultures where I found solemn peace and respite, especially from our hyper-technologized present and its tools, which, as Illich put it, “must inevitably increase regimentation, dependence, exploitation, or impotence, and rob not only the rich but also the poor of conviviality.” Spaces of respite and spaces of conviviality may well go hand in hand in providing models for how to be together outside the narrow, competitive, and antisocial relations of neoliberal exchange. Within Japan, and particularly in the countryside, I felt a sense of enchantment and gentle conviviality institutionalized in a way that feels profoundly absent from my life in Western metropoles. I was reminded of this daily by each, often simple, Shinto shrine encountered, inviting us into greater awareness of the quotidian and superabundant sacred.

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It has been profoundly depressing to witness the early promise of the internet largely captured by insidious monopolistic corporations developing increasingly predatory, addictive, and antisocial practices for extracting profit and attention. Yet, in response, and much like the public library system before it, there exists a strong creative commons countermovement demonstrating an entirely different mode of organizing cultural production and life. Its protagonists operate at many scales: from the expansive and global Wikipedia, with its incalculable number of contributors and contributions to the knowledge commons, to more intimate organizations such as the Public Domain Review, dedicated to presenting curated selections of public-domain materials and generously contextualizing them for artists and researchers. Sound-sharing communities like Freesound and image-sharing communities like Unsplash have created vast audio and visual commons through which people can share, create, and collaborate, illustrating our better capacities for mutual aid. Beyond even the creative commons movement are shadow libraries such as Memory of the World, Libgen, and UbuWeb, which explicitly common and curate copyrighted materials considered of social and cultural value.

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freesound.org

The questions of copyright and possessive individualism are complex, and I understand, to a degree, those positions advocating the fair remuneration of artists within neoliberal conditions. Unfortunately, however, I fear this line of thinking ultimately reinforces capitalist logics, narrows the range of beneficiaries, and fails to account for the collaborative and ecological contributors involved in anything that can meaningfully be called a work of art. Rather than devising ever-more-complicated technological and energy-intensive systems for administering artistic private property, it would be simpler and more socially beneficial to provide something like a universal or guaranteed income alongside a broad commoning of creative media and the redistribution of self-determined time needed for artful collaboration and exchange. The commoning of creativity I am describing already exists in impoverished form for most people making and sharing things today—writing, pictures, music, and so on—before the vast majority of value is extracted by a handful of monopolistic firms. How to enact a transition away from neoliberal realism within a geopolitical context of multipolar colonial power formations remains an open and urgent question, one illuminated by the precedents, axioms, and spirit of the models mentioned here.

Artists and organizers living under structurally disadvantaged conditions within the ruins of capitalism, and still seeking meaningful forms of gathering, have long experimented with alternative practices of sociality, art-making, and the sharing of knowledge. In a context poor in convivial cultural infrastructure, a few notable examples come to mind.

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It was through my friend Gareth Evans that I became part of the London Walking Collective, a perambulatory, convivial, and welcoming gathering of friends and friends of friends, who meet to wander a given, often urban, environment with a playful Situationist spirit, together co-authoring a social essay unfolding through time and space. Sometimes a historian accompanies the walk to provide context, other times, a theoretical cosmologist reads Rumi above a buried river in the so-called Queen’s Wood. These hearty and edifying perambulations typically end in a public space of sociality, a pub or restaurant, where everyone is welcome, and laughter carries the group joyfully into the evening. Gareth, an inveterate and largely unaffiliated organizer of cultural events around London, often concludes the gatherings he facilitates with an open invitation to continue elsewhere nearby. This simple act of hospitality in cultural facilitation is among the most generous practices of conviviality I know.

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Place Settings “Ascension” Photos by Noah Collier

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Place Settings “Experiments in Space"

Los Angeles’ Place Settings, founded by Laura Nelson and Anya Ventura, makes use of Hollywood sets and other nontraditional locations to organize thoughtfully conceived, place-focused lectures on subjects ranging from shorelines to supply chains to lithium mines. Emerging from interests in third spaces, alternative pedagogies, and the undercommons, the project invites us to consider how impoverished architectures might be détourned or reimagined so that we may gather meaningfully and exchange knowledge under conditions of duress.

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Each summer solstice in Oakland, California, within a stunning columbarium and mausoleum reimagined by Julia Morgan in a former transit center beside Olmsted’s Mountain View Cemetery, a day-long performance of new, classical, and experimental music takes place. Nearly a hundred musicians fill the labyrinthine architecture and gardens with porous sound. It is a joyful event I look forward to each year, skillfully conceived and organized by Sarah Cahill, featuring a beautiful ensemble of diverse musicians that score an experience encountered differently by every fortunate participant: a superabundance of sonorous conviviality resonating generously until the sun sets on the longest day of the year.

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Otherwise is a series on neoliberal contemporary art and its unbounded remainders by Perry Shimon.

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Otherwise VII: Coming Soon

Otherwise 6: The Totalizing Grid and the Music to Come

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Secret Sushi Pop Up In A Backroom Speakeasy At The Funko Store In Hollywood

Taz Arnold and Ian Skelly

Darren Romanelli

Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.

Ozzie Juarez and Khalif Boyd

Justus West, Liston Gregory, Simba Scott 

Ian Skelly and Cynthia San

Darren Romanelli and Austyn Weiner 

Sam Borkson, Ozzie Juarez and a friend

Darren and Candice Romanelli

A private sushi pop-up in Los Angeles, organized by Darren Romanelli in collaboration with LA Sushi, featured a live performance by Justus West. Entry was through a phone booth at the front of the venue—inside the Funko store on Hollywood Boulevard. A fixed sequence of courses was served without a menu or commentary.

Otherwise Part VI: The Totalizing Grid and the Music to Come

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Антон Дмитриев / ehmitrich

text by Perry Shimon

The grid, in short, is a medium that operationalizes deixis. It allows us to link deictic procedures with chains of symbolic operations that have effects in the real. Hence the grid is not only part of a history of representation, or of a history of procedures facilitating the efficient manipulation of data, but also of “a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made into subjects.”

- Bernhard Siegert

Music has no subject. It is neither the manifestation of an idea nor the illustration of a phenomenon. There is no musical heuristic. Music proves nothing. It refers to no dialectic of order and chaos, reveals no secret harmony of things, it does not render perceptible the mystery of mathematical relationships or the secret song of Nature. Nor does it call to God, nor does it corrupt the youth. It does far more than this.

- François J. Bonnet 

The grid has long functioned as a top-down cultural technology for organizing space and subjects. Orthogonal planning emerged in the Indus Valley around 2500 BC, with cities like Mohenjo-daro and Harappa laid out along straight streets, and standardized architecture intersecting at right angles. In ancient Egypt, around 1895 BC, under the reign of King Senusret II, Kahun (or Lahun) a city was built in a similar fashion—tellingly—to house temporary laborers enlisted to construct a tributary pyramid. Similar spatial ordering appeared in early Chinese imperial planning, with examples like Chang’an in the Tang dynasty, where the city’s rectilinear layout was bound up with cosmological ideas of political authority and cosmic harmony. In Mesoamerica, around 100 BCE, Teotihuacan emerged as a gridded city covering more than twenty square kilometers, with standardized living compounds and monumental axial avenues.

Watercolor by Jean-Claude Golvin

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Excavations at Mohenjo-daro in 1924

While much about the social relations of these cultures remains speculative, these projects developed in ways that imply a tendency to organize space and bodies into governable units. They appear as coordinated, external attempts to control contingent and autonomous movements and agencies—or a system of rule that operationalizes deixis, in the words of Bernhard Siegert.

In the classical Mediterranean, the grid became an explicit instrument of imperial administration. Greek planners like Hippodamus of Miletus promoted orthogonal city plans that divided urban space into regular blocks, reenforcing ideals of order, productivity, and civic organization. The Romans extended this logic across their empire through surveying techniques that divided conquered land into standardized parcels for settlement and taxation. Cities like Timgad exemplify this approach with a rigid intersection of axes that imposed a legible structure on territory, allowing the imperial state to efficiently administer property and movement.

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Timgad By Hamza-sia

During the early modern period European colonial powers applied the grid to remake landscapes across the Americas. Spanish colonial planning codes such as the Laws of the Indies mandated orthogonal town layouts centered on a plaza, replicating administrative order across distant territories. In North America, the grid reached an unprecedented scale with the Land Ordinance of 1785, which divided vast areas of land into square townships and mile-wide sections. Through this survey system, the continent was transformed into a vast cadastral grid, enabling land commodification, agricultural settlement, and speculative real estate markets.

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Nelson Loverin’s version of the “Polish System” or “centograph” in Loverin’s Chart of Time (1882). via Public Domain Review

Western music theory as well developed a grid-like ordering. The emergence of equal temperament, associated with figures like Johann Sebastian Bach and his paragonal Well-Tempered Clavier, divided the octave into twelve evenly spaced intervals. This tuning system smoothed over the irregularities of natural harmonic relationships so that instruments could modulate freely between keys. While often celebrated for enabling harmonic flexibility, equal temperament strictly determined a form of acoustic standardization: the continuous spectrum of pitch discretized into a fixed grid of twelve tones per octave. Like the cadastral grid imposed on land, the tonal grid turns sonic space into a uniform field of interchangeable units.

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Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier

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A similar process occurs in the organization of musical time. Western rhythmic notation, especially from the Renaissance onward, increasingly emphasized metrical regularity—bars, beats, and subdivisions that partition time into predictable intervals. The musical measure becomes analogous to a parcel of land within the larger temporal survey of a composition. Once time is divided this way, it becomes possible to coordinate large ensembles, synchronize performance, and eventually mechanize “musical” reproduction.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries this logic further intensified with the rise of electronic production tools. Digital audio workstations like Ableton Live and Logic Pro present music explicitly as a rectangular grid of time and pitch. Beats are subdivided into quantized increments and notes are snapped into place along vertical timelines. Quantization algorithms automatically correct deviations from the grid, pulling performances toward mathematically precise timing. The interface makes visible a conception of so-called music that is treated as a field of discrete coordinates where events can be standardized, reproduced, and transacted.

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Ableton view

This digital grid is another reflection of the same epistemology governing contemporary spatial infrastructures. Just as planetary sensing systems such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) discretize the Earth into coordinates, digital music production discretizes sound into samples, beats, and MIDI events. The result is a sonic environment in which musical gestures become data points within a computational framework. Rhythm becomes a timing grid; pitch becomes a numbered scale, and each “musical” event becomes parcellated and recombinable information.

Seen from this perspective, the history of Western music can be understood as a gradual intensification of quantization and emplacement on the grid—the translation of continuous sonic phenomena into standardized units. The same cultural impulse that divides landscapes into parcels and cities into orthogonal streets also divides sound into notes, measures, and beats. In both cases, the grid becomes the cultural infrastructure in which the world is discretized and datafied, so as to be owned, manipulated, and controlled.

Siegert presciently pointed out in the beginning of the 21st century that: 

The fusion of matrix grid and GPS has ensured the global presence of the operationalized deixis first conceived of in connection with the grid-and-register-shaped settlements of South America. Indeed, what better way to describe some of the basic aspects of our media culture than to point to the mutual translatability of cartographic grid, topographic grid, planning grid, and imaging grid? Linked with the convertibility of these diverse grids and with corresponding scaling techniques, grids—a formidable cultural technique—have become the basis of a mediatization of space from which hardly anything can escape. 

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NASA

The becoming-totalizing grid now surveyed by satellites and security cameras, in concert with the rectilinear self-surveilling smartphones now requisite for planetary citizenship renders everything and everyone on the planet susceptible to the spatial logics and social determination of the powers administrating them. 

Cultural production today is nearly completely rendered within the logics of the grid, from the material form our cultural artifacts take to the institutions that house them, the server farms that store and disseminate our art, and the proliferating screens that reproduce them. Music, and specifically electronic music, provides a particularly clear illustration of these governing logics. The automobile factory with its increasingly automated modes of production was the historical backdrop from which techno emerged in the northern United States, with artists articulating the sonic and subjective fracturing experienced by the dissolution of both job security and artisan skills. Automatically looped musical samples featuring human voices and instruments reduced to mechanically-produced recurrences performed this sociotechnological transition. The increasing totality and smooth functioning of automation coarticulated itself coextensively with the gradual diminution of earlier human elements and melodies (traditions and rituals) and tends towards a kind of fully mechanical and quantized techno, snapped to a disciplining grid and endlessly cycling through highs and lows, as characteristic of both contemporary techno and capitalism.  

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Aleksandr Popov

The interpellated subject of this neoliberal music typically spins around alone, arms flailing, in a tight and narrow choreography of repetitive gestures, often taking pharmacological drugs to induce spikes of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and other endorphin-like chemicals—that is, if they’re not simply standing and staring, subordinated, in front of the DJ with their phone recording. The power of these dynamics are not lost on preexisting power structures and strange syncretic blends have been emerging through these periods of transition. In late 2025, outside the 14th century St. Elisabeth Cathedral in Košice, Slovakia, a rave was organized as an evangelizing event and celebration of an archbishop’s birthday with a DJ priest and video blessing from Pope Leo XIV. The widely shared video on social media featured an elaborate laser light show spectacle to a rapt and roused crowd. In China today, both schools and factories have begun playing intense techno music to energize the students and laborers, while underground rave scenes are gaining in popularity for young employees who often work the “996” work week (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week). The idea of dancing alone to high BPM techno after a 996 work week seems to me to be yet another illustration of the internalization of the hegemonic values of power articulating themselves aesthetically in their time. 

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One might look at a DJ priest as a syncretic emergence of different forms of power and values, and just as easily look at critically acclaimed contemporary musicians to arrive at similar conclusions. Four Tet, Jamie xx, A.G. Cook, and Jacques Greene offer notable examples that contour these developments in power and music. Descending from traditions of well-tempered recurrent sonic architectures thoroughly emplaced on the grid, their music illustrates with extraordinary virtuosity a distinct spirit of neoliberalism, with its acceleration, volatility, dopaminergic calibration, and smooth quantized transactability. Their musical production is, of course, immediately at home on the grid, samples widely, incorporates diverse musical elements into its tumultuous cycles, and like much Christian music, tends towards a conjuring of transcendence and ecstasy.

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Four Tet’s recent Only Human (MPH Remix) neatly scores this essay’s thesis, engridding what appears to be a chorus of one singing anxiously, before totally parcellating and recombining it into an exuberant posthuman hocketing of the hyperventilating remnants of alienated breath. Jamie xx’s recent remix of Robyn’s Dopamine is like a veritable dopamine releasing agent, and you can feel your brain flooding with chemicals at the drop. The lyrics are a looping “I know this is dopamine, but it feels so good to me.” A.G. Cook and his live performance are a baroque accelerationist hyperpop spectacle of light and chopped sound producing rapturous effects in his ecstatic audiences. Jacques Greene’s Believe opens squarely on the grid, with mechanical bleeps invoking a life-support machine, and builds through breathless chopped and looped vocal segments that intensify—booming until they bust—and then begin again, until they are seamlessly mixed into the next like articulation.  

These Christian and liberal traditions of music have their critical practitioners who, with varying degrees of consciousness, interrogate and deconstruct these cultural techniques. Many jazz musicians of their day, like Elvin Jones or Milford Graves, seemed almost at war with the grid, playing in a fugitive relation to the imposing structures on life and art. It remains an open question how much this playing ahead of or behind the beat (the grid), and even beyond it, escapes the logics that determine its negation. I heard Fred Moten give a lecture in which he suggested the virtuosic drummer is a frantic attempt to reconstitute a lost polyrhythmic sociality after the deracinating horrors of the Middle Passage.  

Today, artists like Burial and Oneohtrix Point Never seem to be operating in a similar embedded antagonistic tradition, knowingly provoking and deconstructing these orthogonal conventions and genealogies. Listening to Burial’s “Archangel” is like wandering the ruins of grid-based domination, getting lost in a graveyard, desperately trying to find one trustworthy person in the deterioration of sociality under capitalism, praying in the apocalypse, and then not transcending it. Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Lost But Never Alone (Forced Smile Edit)-Amazon Original” of 2020 is a pandemic-era dirge of impossible-to-locate nostalgia at the end of history, a sonic rendering of the deep anomie and a reactionary turn to what was never there, or at least its highly dubious, glitching and unstable, metastasizing and mutating simulcra. Love in the Time of Lexapro, the strained limits of the standard “I Only Have Eyes for You”, and “Sticky Drama” (as well as A.G. Cook’s remix of the same) offers apopalyptic deconstructions rendering the incommensurability of modern affects and postmodern hyperspace.  

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Hatis Noit video stills from Angelus Novus

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The hypercultural artists of a post-internet age are upon us as well. While the twentieth century certainly had its many pleasurable syncretic modernisms, artists like Hatis Noit hailing from the remote Shiretoko in Hokkaido and now based in London, draw from a self-taught, largely YouTube-enabled exploration of Bulgarian and Gregorian chanting, operatic styles, Christian devotional music, Gagaku Japanese classical, and avant pop. She committed to music at sixteen while staying at a women’s temple in Nepal where she encountered a monk singing Buddhist chants alone. Her video for “Angelus Novus” shows a melting and shifting form, a kind of superfluid deictic subject, morphing and straining inside and against a becoming-virtual Euclidean space, while toggling divergent, diasporic musical styles and asemic whispering.  

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On social media, a new kind of hypercultural curator is emerging, piecing together and often scoring compilations of loosely authored, produced and distributed fragments of visual culture. There are echoes of ethnomusicology, though largely without the kind of rigorous analysis and historical situation the discipline is known for. There is a spectrum of contextualization ranging from musical and visual assemblist accounts like Dust-to-Digital which offers some light contextual information in their extraordinary and poetic round-ups of largely self-and-spectator-published musical ephemera; accounts like The Breeding Castle who revel in a hallucinatory hypercultural pastiche of libidinally-charged, often AI-generated, visual-musical production; as well as accounts like Error 404 who share a captivatingly curated variety of free-floating musical representations, which ostensibly promotes their own DJ practice and label. These unfolding histories of culture and power play out on the social media “grid” where echoes of anthropology, privatization, and extraction are ever present.   

In his thoughtful clearing of a space for the “music to come” François J Bonnet offers:

The music to come can never be a space for performance or for the demonstration of prowess. The virtuosity of this or that musician, the mastery of a conductor, the extraordinary vocal abilities of a singer, bravura pieces and extraordinary performances of reputedly ‘difficult’ works—these are the distinctive elements that contribute to the dramatization and glorification of music. There is a strong tendency toward the supplementation of music with superlative elements, from the authoritarian figure of the conductor to the near deification of the superstar. These elements are peripheral to music, but they constitute a connective tissue that is so present, so powerful, that it even ends up affecting the music itself. Prowess, glorification, and hubris have become components of the musical vocabulary. The unavoidable consequence of this hybridization of music and vainglory is to shift the stakes of music toward stakes of power, either through the exercise of power itself or through its representation, which is itself always already a process of power.

Otherwise is a series on neoliberal contemporary art and its unbounded remainders by Perry Shimon.

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Otherwise Part VII: Conviviality, Artful Infrastructures, Itinerant Organizing & the Creative Commons

Otherwise Part V: Landscape Aesthetics and the Liberal Commons

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The Hollywood, Star-Making Machine On View @ MoMA

Otto Dyar. Carole Lombard, c. 1933. Gelatin silver print, 13 7/8 × 10 1/2″ (35.2 × 26.7 cm)

text by Emma Grimes

MoMA’s Face Value exhibition, showcasing 20th-century celebrity press images, is a compelling exploration into the celebrity star-making system. The show includes more than 200 photographs, spanning 1921 to 1996, including discarded studio images of stars such as Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, and Marilyn Monroe. The pictures sprawl across two floors, submerging you in an atmosphere that feels reminiscent of walking around a movie studio in LA.

In one sequence of four images from 1933, Jean Harlow applies her makeup in front of the camera. She sits at a glass table, adorned with beauty trinkets, in a silk robe trimmed with fur sleeves. At first she gazes at her reflection in a hand-held mirror, then she applies her eyebrow pencil while looking into the camera, then her lipstick, and finally she breaks out into a laugh as she combs her hair. It’s the star performing a private moment, inviting the viewer into what appears to be her unguarded, real self. 

In his 1979 pioneering book about the constructed public image, Stars, film scholar and theorist Richard Dyer wrote about the mass desire to feel that we “know” celebrities as they “truly” are. We want to see the person at home in their Sunday morning pajamas as much as the impeccable, polished one on stage. Face Value’s appeal is in watching how this illusion is assembled. The photos of Harlow are glaringly artificial: studio lighting and design alongside her rehearsed spontaneity, yet knowing this doesn’t extinguish the felt sense of having been granted access to her private self.

Looking at some of these photographs that perform authenticity, it’s hard not to think of a few contemporary celebrities and pop stars who have mastered this art. They share just enough images to feel you’ve been given “access” to their inner world, whether they’re paparazzi photos leaving dinner or “no-makeup” selfies posted on social media. They know that success, especially the monetary kind, requires an attached audience devoted to your every move. To see Jean Harlow apply her makeup is to see a layer that’s supposed to be hidden, and devotion requires intimacy, even if it’s artificial.

Step back a few feet and allow your eyes to drift across all of the images, until their names and individual faces fall away. The stars flatten into one figure. She or he is likely posing in a studio with its bright lighting, wearing a glamorous dress or suit. The sheer quantity of these images, and their repetitive formula, challenges the comforting idea that fame is the natural consequence of an innate, magical essence. The pattern of posturing, lighting, and styling work conjunctively to construct each person’s allure. Taken together, these photographs are a telling portrait of the powerful machine that built them.

Installation view of Face Value: Celebrity Press Photography on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from June 28, 2025, through June 21, 2026. Photo: Jonathan Dorado

With the emotional manipulation inherent in the construction of these identities brought to the foreground, we can see how they’re designed to shape our perception of who is exceptional and worthy of devotion. They also tell us, more indiscreetly, to buy a ticket. The economic impact of movie stars is also a central subject of Dyer’s Stars. Studios, banks, and investors rely on the star as capital. In 1933, Paramount was in an economically precarious situation until the unexpected success of films like She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel starring Mae West stabilized the company. Deanna Durbin had a similar impact for Universal in 1937. Behind just about every great Hollywood producer, was a captivating woman who rescued him in a moment of fatal distress.

The exhibit moves closer to the present moment, including screen tests and images from Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper, Diana Ross, and Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey poses with the silhouette of Michael Jackson, promoting her special interview with him. In the original caption that contextualized the image, Winfrey’s name is underlined in red ink. Her name is a brand, and circulation of that brand is everything. The more it’s repeated, the more value it accrues.

Nearby, a wall of athletes extends the show out into a new territory. The football and baseball players are posed with an equal amount of deliberation as the actors, highlighting how the star-making machine stretches across the board. It might be easier to believe you’re a fan of a quarterback or baseball pitcher because they possess a unique, physical talent. And while they do possess talent (of a more measurable kind than actors), their equally constructed images call our attention once again to the way our attachments and sympathies are directed by a system working behind the scenes. As with the Hollywood stars, these feelings of adoration are the driving factor behind their earning potential.

Jackie Robinson, c. 1950. Gelatin silver print, 10 × 8″ (25.4 × 20.3 cm)

But knowing this doesn’t smother desire. Standing in front of a photograph of Barbara Stanwyck, I felt my long-lasting admiration for her. And though I had been contemplating all of the ways in which these images before me were manufactured to sell me something, I wanted nothing else but to go home and stream The Lady Eve.

Helene Schjerfbeck’s Long-Awaited Debut Arrives @ The Met

Helene Schjerfbeck
The Tapestry (1914-1916)
Oil on canvas
35 1/4 × 36 1/4 in. (89.5 × 92 cm)
Photo: Per Myrehed

text by Emma Grimes

The ongoing Seeing Silence exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers an impressive exploration of one of the 20th century’s greatest, and long-overlooked, Modernist painters, Helene Schjerfbeck. The sprawling show gathers more than fifty works by the Finnish artist, spanning from 1880 to 1945, just a year before her death at the age of 83. It marks an astonishing debut—Schjerfbeck’s work has never before been examined so thoroughly by a major US museum. While she has long been admired by Nordic countries, her oeuvre has only recently begun to draw broader international recognition.

Schjerfbeck was born in 1862 to an affluent family in Helsinki. Bedridden for weeks as a toddler following a tumble down the stairs, her father encouraged the four-year-old to begin drawing. While details of her childhood are limited, her biographers have largely characterized it as “lonely and bleak.” By eleven years old, she was enrolled at the Finnish Art Society’s Drawing School—her exceptional talent earned her free tuition—and quickly advanced through the coursework. Schjerfbeck, who was itching to visit Paris, was finally awarded government funds in 1880 to travel abroad.

Seeing Silence begins right after this period. The alluring portrait, Youth (1882), depicts a nude young man from the waist up. His pale skin emanates with the simple faultlessness of youth, while his muscular contour is painted with an equal measure of softness and precision. Behind the figure is a golden background, and Schjerfbeck’s restrained palette has the effect of intensifying each color. Every tone feels concentrated, as if the pigment had been distilled to its purest form. 

An early self-portrait from the decade demonstrates a similarly controlled and forceful use of color. Schjerfbeck gazes past the canvas as strands of yellow hair spill over her forehead. Her hair nearly dissolves into the dark, golden-brown background, making her pale face, pink cheeks, and grey-blue eyes appear like a spotlight on a stage. And though her facial features are sweet and delicate, they never conceal a deep-rooted solemnity.

Helene Schjerfbeck
Self-Portrait (1884-1885)
Oil on canvas
19 11/16 × 16 1/8 in. (50 × 41 cm)
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Henri Tuomi

By far the most intriguing work from this decade is The Door (1884), which depicts a flat, black door inside an unidentifiable room. Schjerfbeck painted this scene from a chapel in Brittany, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the scene. Strokes of light glint from beneath the dark doorway, and a nearby archway disappears into the wall. At twenty-two years old, her technical prowess had already been proven. What else was there to do but flirt with form and representation?

In the following gallery, the paintings leap forward in time. One of the many figure paintings on view, Maria (1906), depicts a woman turned away from the viewer, absorbed with a book in her lap. A bright splash of luminous blue paint represents her dress. The edges of her head appear lightly illuminated, as though catching rays from a distant light source. Yet even though light appears to fall across her face, there’s no implied world beyond the canvas. This painting, like many of Schjerfbeck’s works, refuses to allude to anything outside its own boundaries.

Schjerfbeck’s sitters are purified of excess, eliminating nearly all specificity. A stroke of grey suggests her elbow. A round-ish shape of paint represents her dress. Schjerfbeck offers the barest details while still maintaining the recognizable structure of a figure. But this painting contains a curious exception among her oeuvre. In the upper right corner, the artist has painted the sitter’s name: “MARIA”. For an artist so committed to ambiguity, it’s an oddly specific gesture.

The third gallery contains several of Schjerfbeck’s still lifes and landscapes, and it offers perhaps the most compelling opportunity to observe the evolution of her aesthetic. In her 1892 work Blue Anemones in a Chip Basket, delicate purple flowers rest in a finely rendered wooden basket. The blossoms are soft, lifelike, and precise. Compare these flowers with the apples Schjerfbeck would paint fifty-two years later in Still Life with Blackening Apples (1944).

Helene Schjerfbeck
Still Life with Blackening Apples (1944)
Oil on canvas
14 3/16 × 19 11/16 in. (36 × 50 cm)
Photo: Rauno Träskelin / Didrichsen Art Museum

In this later painting (painted at 82 years old), the apples appear less like the recognizable fruit and more like a sequence of rounded, brightly colored forms. Oblong shapes in mint green, raspberry pink, yellow, and black represent the fruit. Beneath them lies a horizontal block of layered color—splotches of lavender, blue, and green that blend and overlap. The artwork’s museum label says that the blackened apples are likely symbols of Europe, painted amid the devastation of World War II. Yet this was also, interestingly, painted two years before her death. And seen alongside the self-portraits from this same period, one might wonder whether the rotting apple functions as another kind of self-image.

The final gallery gathers multiple of these self-portraits across Schjerfbeck’s life, and it’s an extraordinary room to walk through. One moves chronologically through the space, beginning with the bright-eyed, naturalistic images and ending with stark, skeletal depictions that recall the disquieting distortion of Munch’s The Scream. Any resemblance to an elderly woman is coincidental. She doesn’t seem interested anymore in painting the face that gazes back in the mirror, but is profiling decay. Her eyes are empty holes; her mouth is in a perpetual, gaping “O”. They rattle and disturb.

Helene Schjerfbeck
Self-Portrait (1912)
Oil on canvas
17 1/8 × 16 1/2 in. (43.5 × 42 cm)
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Yehia Eweis

Helene Schjerfbeck
Self-Portrait with Black Background (1915)
Oil on canvas
17 15/16 × 14 3/16 in. (45.5 × 36 cm)
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Hannu Aaltonen

Helene Schjerfbeck
Self-Portrait with Red Dot (1944)
Oil on canvas
17 11/16 × 14 9/16 in. (45 × 37 cm)
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Hannu Aaltonen

Helene Schjerfbeck
Self-Portrait, Light and Shadow (1945)
Oil on canvas
14 3/16 × 13 3/8 in. (36 × 34 cm)
Photo: Matias Uusikylä / Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation

Installation view of Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck

Installation view of Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck

The exhibit seems to invite viewers to read these works as windows into Schjerfbeck’s self-perception and relationship with mortality, which is undeniably an instinctive and compelling way to approach them. Yet framed primarily as psychological documents, one might miss the ways in which these works present a culmination of Schjerfbeck’s lifelong investigation into form. In this final gallery, her face becomes just another object of fascination for her artistic endeavor. What if these self-portraits aren’t simply treated as autobiographical confessions, but are also viewed as the logical endpoint for Schjerfbeck’s perpetual formal exploration of the medium?

In this sense, her face is an equally privileged subject as the rotting apples in Still Life with Blackening Apples (1944) or the figure reading in Maria. The mirror is another surface upon which she can continue her inquiry into form. These late self-portraits aren’t only universal meditations on aging and death, but they are the conclusions to a brilliant, life-long investigation of reduction, and here they meet their most radical—and terminal—point.

Seeing Silence is on view through April 5 at The Met, New York.

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

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

text and photographs by Isabella Bernabeo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spectrum of Desire Challenges the Narrative of Our Current Culture War @ The Met

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

text by Hank Manning

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

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Christ and Saint John the Evangelist
German
1300-1320

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

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

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

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

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Plate with Wife Beating Husband
Netherlandish
circa 1480

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

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Base for a Statuette
South Netherlandish
1470–80

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

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

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

Wearable Innovation: Monamobile’s Take On Functional Fashion

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Barkin Bag

text by Lola Titilayo
photographs by Rebekka Roberts

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

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

Scooter Dress

Rollator

Barkin Bag Dress

Mobile Chastity Belt

Desk Dress

Fan Earring

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

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

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

Mobile Clip Cap

Mobile Case Clip

Mobile Case Clip

Beer Bottle Opener Earrings

Keychain

Beer Belt Skirt

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

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

Kristen Stewart Dives Headfirst into Filmmaking

The Chronology of Water, 2025.

text by Emma Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imogen Poots as Lidia Yuknavitch in The Chronology of Water, 2025.

Kristen Stewart directing The Chronology of Water, 2025.

Kristen Stewart with Kim Gordon.

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

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

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

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

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

interview by Kim Shveka
photographs by Jasmin Avner

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