Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room Is an Unchanging Link to Nature in an Ever-changing City.

Walter De Maria, The New York Earth Room, 1977. © The Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo-John Cliett, Courtesy Dia Art Foundation

text by Isabella Bernabeo

I buzz myself in and start to walk up a narrow, rickety old staircase inside an old New York City building located at 141 Wooster Street. A pungent smell greets me as soon as I hit the second floor and turn to enter the exhibit. That’s when I see it. Mounds of dirt thrown inside an apartment’s meant-to-be living room. It’s an unusual sight, and it causes me to think, what am I supposed to make of this?  

Built in 1977, The New York Earth Room has been hidden behind a Soho door for nearly half a century. Walter de Maria installed the piece on the second story of German art dealer Heiner Friedrich’s gallery and apartment building, where it still lies to this day. 

The exhibition contains a white room filled with 250 cubic yards of unsterilized dirt, 22 inches deep, across 3,600 square feet. Originally, the exhibit was intended to last only three months, but it remained on display indefinitely. 

The New York Earth Room wouldn’t be what it is if it were placed in a small town in the middle of the rural Midwest. It’s the fact that it is installed in such a fast-paced city that makes the experience special, especially in the middle of Soho, where materialism and consumerism are practically the only things on visitors’ minds.  

This artwork forces its visitors to slow down and take in their surroundings. The dirt is slow and unwavering, offering a relaxing getaway from the bustle of activity outside. Yet, it is also quite surprising and provocative to witness so much dirt thrown inside a room, where it is so quiet that all one can hear is their own breath.   

The space is not just for tourists. New Yorkers who love hiking and camping also find meaning here. The piece provides locals with an escape from the city’s constant chaos. It is very much a sanctuary space. Spaces like this are hard to find without taking the Metro-North upstate.

As such, it fits perfectly in the city’s melting pot. It proves that anyone can belong. 

Maria himself never commented on the meaning of this piece, wanting each person to create their own connection. However, it’s notable that the Earth Room was installed only a few years after the United States Environmental Protection Agency was formed. And just a few years prior to that, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was released. This was a time when environmental awareness was exponentially on the rise. I’d like to think that this piece has been preserved to represent humanity’s obligation to care for our own Earth.  

This context adds to the artwork’s significance. However, this wasn’t Maria’s first or even second Earth Room installation.

Maria had actually built the first Earth Room in Munich, Germany, in 1968, and the second one was made in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1974, both of which were temporary exhibits that were dismantled after a few months. 

Maria died in 2013, and since then, Bill Dilworth has been the face of The New York Earth Room through the Dia Art Foundation, founded in 1974 by Friedrich. Dilworth cares for and maintains the exhibit by constantly watering, raking, and weeding the dirt, and even cleaning mold off the walls. 

Visitors can see The Earth Room Wednesday through Sunday between the hours of 12:00-3:00 pm and 3:30-6:00 pm for free. People can ring the bell to be buzzed into the apartment and make their way to the second floor for viewing. Photography is not permitted.

Sixties Surreal Reconceives Postwar Social Upheavals @ Whitney Museum of Art in New York

text by Caia Cupolo

photography by Matthew Carasella

Women walking by Peter Saul's Saigon painting

Installation view of Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026). Peter Saul, Saigon, 1967. Photograph by Matthew Carasella

When you step off the elevator onto the 5th floor at the Whitney Museum, you enter a scene of three life-size camels against a bright orange-red wall. This feels almost misplaced  as a leading work in the exhibition, but it’s only at the end  when viewers find their way to a didactic that describes the illogical nature of camels—from four stomachs to a dislocating jaw—but they still exist. Reality is strange.


Sixties Surreal, currently on view at the Whitney Museum of Art, is a compelling argument that Surrealism was far from dead in the era of Pop Art. An argument that takes form in the shape of sculptures made from “junk,” otherworldly paintings, and haunting photographs. The curatorial team brilliantly positioned this collection not as a nostalgic look back, but as a critical examination of how the classic movement, built on Freudian theory, mutated into a politically-charged, media-saturated, and truly American force during the decade of cultural upheaval.


The exhibition’s core power lies in its unflinching focus on the era’s social and political injustices. This is exemplified in Noah Purifoy’s “Untitled (66 Signs of Neon),” made following the Watts Rebellion. Purifoy walked the streets of litter and so-called junk, where he aimed to give new life to these found objects. Taking the objects out of a negative context to put into his art brings a new, empowering meaning and reclaiming of the events. The rubble that made its way into the piece has a darkness that emulates a haunting past, but is put into a new environment surrounded by stamped symbols and words. Surrealism emerged as the ultimate tool for protesting the unspoken contracts of the era.

Installation view of Sixties Surreal showing Camel VI, Camel VII and Camel VIII by Nancy Graves

Installation view of Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026). Nancy Graves, Camel VI, Camel VII and Camel VIII, 1968–1969. Photograph by Matthew Carasella

This strain of Surrealism is deeply intertwined with the proliferation of television. The medium didn’t just report the news of upheaval to the American public; it delivered the chaotic images of war and protest directly into their living rooms, fusing reality with performance. The curatorial choice to present the exhibit in highly contrasted environments—sudden walls of hot pink interrupting stark, institutional grey—serves the subject matter well. It forces a jarring, non-linear experience that mimics the sensory overload and fractured perception delivered by the blinking, often distorting, television screen. The consistent use of small, scattered screens looping avant-garde animated shorts throughout the galleries is a clever tactic, effectively tying the artwork to the rise of mass media and demonstrating how artists were already diagnosing the medium that would eventually dominate culture.


The consumerist boom could not be left out when discussing the post-World War II era. Martha Rosler’s “Kitchen I, or Hot Meat” was a piece that stood out in its portrayal of this phenomenon. Female body parts appear on appliances, leaving the greater message that women’s bodies were readily commodified and contorted to fit within their economically prescribed domestic roles. Rosler reminds us that the human body was not meant to fit onto an appliance, so women should not be forced to conform to any specific role. 


On a similar note of early feminism, Martha Edelheit’s “Flesh Wall with Table” is a breathtaking, large-scale repudiation of the male gaze. Edelhait depicts almost two dozen naked women lounging across the canvas. She did not use any models, opting instead to focus purely  on her perception. The women vary greatly in position, shape, and skin tone, most having non-flesh-colored skin, like shades of green and blue. As a female artist, there was a particular pride in painting female nudes, especially so many for such a large piece, when you consider how much of the canon is filled with nude women rendered by men. Lastly, near the center of the work, lies a white rectangle wherein a woman is painting. This is Edelheit including herself in the work, further empowering herself in the building of a utopia where women can relax.

Installation view of Sixties Surreal showing Claes Oldenburg's Soft Toilet sculpture and Alex Hay's Paper Bag sculpture

Installation view of Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026). From left to right: Karl Wirsum, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, 1968; Claes Oldenburg, Soft Toilet, 1966; Alex Hay, Paper Bag, 1968; Lee Lozano, No Title, 1964. Photograph by Matthew Carasella

While the show occasionally leans into the obvious tropes of the era, its central thesis holds firm: Surrealism became the ultimate protest art of the 1960s. It provides a necessary historical correction, proving that the decade’s artistic legacy is not merely defined by Abstract Expressionism’s final bow or Pop Art’s slick surfaces, but by the messy, urgent, and deeply subconscious cries of the artists who tried to make sense of a world where domestic dreams were exposed by televised violence. It’s an essential, if disquieting, tour.

Sixties Surreal is on view through January 19, 2026 @ Whitney Museum of Art in New York 99 Gansevoort St, New York.

A Conversation with Artist Karice Mitchell →

Karice Mitchell
Sensation (Diptych), 2025
Archival inkjet print, custom frame, sandblasted glass

“I love using familiarity as a way to ask unfamiliar questions,” says Karice Mitchell.

Drawing from Players magazine, often dubbed “the Black Playboy,” Mitchell’s photo-based works explore the no man’s land between exposure and illegibility, frankness and mystery, modesty and obscenity. Through her closely cropped diptychs, triptychs, and modified images sourced from the pages of this landmark magazine of Black erotica, she explores the self-definition, personal expression, and resilience of Black women. Economy of Pleasure, her latest show at Silke Lindner and her first solo exhibition in the U.S., hones in on the early 2000s: the era of the video vixen, digital downloads, and lower back tattoos. Sand blasted over intimate images of a woman’s shoulder, a hoop earring, a pristine pump and a French pedicure are words pulled from the magazine’s pages and models’ nommes de guerre: angel, sensation, paradise.

After a frustrating moment of censorship when she was commissioned to do a public work of art in her native Vancouver, British Columbia in 2023, Mitchell returned more committed than ever to her project exploring the representations of Black women in adult media. While it may seem salacious, the work itself is deeply sensitive and interior. There is recognition between women who have worked to claim their bodies as their own through ink, jewelry, donning clothing, or shedding it. The work is seductive but withholding. Notably missing are the Players models’ faces — rather than exposing these women to judgment and interrogation once again, Mitchell’s work gives the audience only glimpses of a personality and a life lived. Her work is an interrogation, a negotiation, and a reclamation. The rest is on the viewer. Read more.

Walk a Mile in Women's History Museum's Shoes →

Image courtesy of Company Gallery

It was February 2024, and one model at the Women’s History Museum show couldn’t stop falling over. Determined, she trundled down the runway only to trip once again. The culprits were obvious: two enormous, cumbersome brown boxing gloves attached to the toes of classic stiletto. “Take them off!” cried members of the audience, a mixture of fashion insiders and queer iconoclasts. Still, the model made it to the end and hoisted the gloves in her hand, triumphant. K.O.

Unlike most New York footwear, the shoes of Women’s History Museum are not designed with functionality as a priority. In a city where pedestrians reign supreme and comfort is a must, the shoes of fashion label/art duo/vintage store curators Amanda McGowan and Mattie Rivkah Barringer are here to tell a story. Whether they’re white wedding heels bedazzled with a clatter of bones and colorful pills or gold boxing slippers rendered into precarious platforms by two wooden pillars, the shoes of Women’s History Museum exist in the sweet spot between strength and softness, power and precarity, barbarity and beauty.

Vintage remains an essential reference point for the duo. They maintain a carefully curated secondhand designer shop on Canal Street, sort of a modern-day SEX, stocked with everything from ‘80s Vivienne Westwood and ‘90s Gaultier to Edwardian furs and linens. In a similar style to early Alexander McQueen, Barringer and McGowan mine fashion references of the past – Victorian riding boots, rocking horse platforms, 70s crocodile skin clogs – for highly stylized fashion performances that entice as much as they reject traditional categories of beauty. The result is something that feels entirely 2025 in all its shredded, everything-out-in-the-open glory. Throughout Women History Museum’s nine staged collections, they return to similar references: animal prints and pelts; competitive sports, particularly boxing; and New York City, with the coins and shattered glass that cover the sidewalks. The clothes bare skin and barb it too.

Shoes, in many ways, remain the ultimate fetish object. They’re exalted, often the most expensive part of an outfit, yet they spend most of the day in contact with the filthy sidewalk. They’re civilizing, often constricting, and conceal the foot, which remains almost as hidden from public life as the body’s most nether regions. Shoes have often been used to control women as with painful and restrictive footbinding practices, yet their erotic potential is undeniable, as with the long, sensuous lines created in the body with a clear plastic pleaser. It’s no wonder that they served as the basis for Women’s History Museum’s latest show at Company Gallery, on display until June 21. Autre caught up with Barringer and McGowan to talk stilettos, surrealism, and the seriously sinister parts of living – and walking – in New York City. Read more.

The Long Journey Home: Read Our Interview of Composer Sbusiso Shozi and Fondation Cartier Artistic Director Isabelle Gaudefroy →

Picture © Zivanai Matangi

Before judging someone, walk a mile in their shoes.

It’s an age-old adage. Our shoes carry the weight of our daily lives, our stories, our hardships. They represent the wear and tear of our history but also the tenacity and possibilities of new paths forward. 

For writer, composer, and musical director Sbusiso Shozi, shoes are a way to explore the many pathways of the African diaspora. Blending traditional South African musicality, oral tradition, and contemporary instrumentation, he’s mounting a new performance, African Exodus, for the Centre for the Less Good Idea, in collaboration with Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. 

Founded in 2016 in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Centre for the Less Good Idea is an incubator for experimental and cross-disciplinary art. The “less good idea” is the one that is more marginal, more daring and more ripe for invention and discovery. It also has to do with resourcefulness; a Sechuana proverb advises that ‘when a good doctor won’t cure you, find the less good doctor.’ The Centre for the Less Good Idea is the first organization to be hosted in residence by the Fondation Cartier, beginning with a week-long takeover of Fondation Cartier’s performance spaces in Paris in May 2024. African Exodus continues that partnership at the Perelman Performance Center in New York City, running from February 27 to March 2.

Autre editor-in-chief Oliver Kupper sat down with Sbusiso Shozi and Fondation Cartier artistic director Isabelle Gaudefroy to discuss performance and the two organizations’ ongoing partnership. Read more.

Daniel Arnold: New York Life Is Sustained by Forward Motion @ New York Life Gallery

Attuned to moments in the city that many fail to notice, Daniel Arnold: New York Life documents the personalities who rush, stumble, and idle through every sidewalk, subway, bodega, park, beach, and ferry throughout the five boroughs. From his vantage point—a camera perched on scaffolding in the rain or nestled to his torso amidst a crowd—he creates a time capsule of the city that is simultaneously unsentimental and imbued with sublime oddity. 

Arnold’s photographs feature a broad cast of characters improbably brought together on the street. People who appear archetypal or stereotypical at first glance are revealed for their idiosyncrasies—exposing the uncanny nature of unassuming subjects. Through his candid lens, metropolitan scenes steeped in cliché are distilled back into the raw, bizarre, humorous, and miraculous.

In Arnold’s universe, there is no right moment, wrong moment, or perfect shot; there is only the impulse to load a new roll and take the next picture. His work is sustained by this forward motion. While each image is an index of a particular place and time, the breadth and scope of Arnold’s photographs form a composite image of city life today. In New York, Arnold has found an infinite muse


Daniel Arnold: New York Life is on view through December 22nd @ New York Life Gallery  167-169 Canal Street, Floor 5, New York,

Aurel Schmidt "I Rot Before I Ripen" @ P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York

In her most recent works, on view at New York's P.P.O.W. Gallery, Aurel Schmidt retires her attention to detail and color in a series of mixed media drawings and installation. Showcasing items belonging to past and present lovers in I Rot Before I Ripen, Schmidt investigates girlhood, streetwear iconography, brand significance, and heterosexuality. I Rot Before I Ripen will be on view until October 7 at P.P.O.W. Gallery 535 W 22nd St, New York, NY. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller Opens Today @ The Brooklyn Museum in New York

In Iggy Pop Life Class, Turner Prize–winning artist Jeremy Deller used the traditional life drawing class to stage a performative event with Iggy Pop as model and subject. The exhibition, opening today at Brooklyn Museum, presents the resulting drawings along with works from historical collections, chosen by Deller, that depict the male body, examining shifting representations of masculinity throughout history. The fifty-three drawings included in the exhibition were created on February 21, 2016, during a one-day life drawing class, using Pop as the unexpected model. The class was held at the New York Academy of Art and included twenty-two artists drawn from New York City’s diverse communities, ranging in age from 19 to 80, with varying backgrounds and levels of education and experience. The class was led by artist and drawing professor Michael Grimaldi. Jeremy Deller "Iggy Pop Life Class" will be on view from November 4, 2016 to March 26, 2017 at Brooklyn Museum in New York. photograph by Elena Olivo

Marianne Vitale "Equipment" @ Invisible Exports Gallery In New York

Invisible-Exports presents Marianne Vitale’s “Equipment," the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery, consisting of a fleet of handcrafted wooden torpedoes, each hand-painted and adorned with a unique insignia. Equipment will be on view until October 16, 2016 at Invisible Exports Gallery in New York

Raymond Pettibon Creates A Limited Edition Tote Bag To Support The New York Public Library

This season, MZ Wallace teamed up with artist Raymond Pettibon to create a tote bag that benefits the New York Public Library. 100% of the proceeds will go toward enhancing the library’s special collections. Click here to purchase. photograph by Brad Elterman

Linda McCartney and Mary McCartney: Mother Daughter Opening @ Gagosian Gallery in New York

Exhibited together for the first time, the photographs of the late Linda McCartney and her daughter Mary explore the connective tissue of family, common experience, and a love of the photographic medium. Their images are highly instinctual, rather than analytical; as well they reveal a great ability to capture fleeting moments of intimacy. Spanning three decades, works by the photographers are organized to reveal the almost symbiotic harmony between them. The exhibition is a treasury of moments derived from relaxed interactions with family, a dazzling array of celebrities—Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Kate Moss, Rihanna—and everyday life. Evident is a shared sensibility between mother and daughter in how they establish an emotional rapport with their subjects and exact a sense of their true selves. Rather than distinguishing between works by Linda or Mary, the installation proposes their vision of the world as one. Linda McCartney and Mary McCartney: Mother Daughter will be on view until December 19, 2015 at Gagosian Gallery, 976 Madison Avenue, New York. photographs by J Grassi (Patrick McMullen Company)

Mark Grotjahn "Painted Sculpture" @ Anton Kern Gallery In New York

In his fourth solo exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery, painter and sculptor Mark Grotjahn presents a new body of painted bronzes. In a radical act of transformation, Grotjahn takes the most casual throwaway material, the cardboard box, and turns it into the most solid and noble of art mediums: the pedestal-mounted bronze sculpture. With their rough cutouts for eyes and mouths, glued-on cardboard tubes and toilet paper rolls for pipe-like noses, and ripped cardboard surfaces for texture and definition, these assemblages resemble primitive, child-like masks. Cast in bronze, Grotjahn paints them in decisive hues of green, purple, and red, inflected with smaller doses of other colors that are applied in gestural, expressionistic trails of paint and chromatic networks. Elevated on pinewood pedestals, the masks function simultaneously as paintings and as three-dimensional objects. Mark Grotjahn "Painted Sculpture" will be on view until October 29, 2015 at Anton Kern Gallery, 532 West 20th Street New York, NY

Kim Gordon "Design Office: The City Is A Garden" @ 303 Gallery in New York

303 Gallery presents "Design Office: The City Is A Garden," the gallery's first solo exhibition of new works by Kim Gordon. In this new body of work, Gordon's primary concern is the radical change in the landscape of New York City over the past several years. For the past 20 years Chelsea has been a center of urban renovation, including the opening of the highline in 2009. Small parks appear randomly in the middle of a street. Outdoor sculptures often accompany the arrangements. The new lushness of New York would seem to reimagine NYC as a city for the people, as well as a more attractive landscape for new consumers. Kim Gordon "Design Office: The City Is A Garden" will be on view until July 24, 2015 at 303 Gallery. 

Highlights From the 2015 SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York

Highlights from the 2015 SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York, a new curator-driven art fair during the Armory Arts Week. This year's theme is TRANSACTION – exploring visions of and commentaries on exchange in all its forms. Bodies in their exchange of gesture. Education in its exchange of ideas. Commodity in its exchange of objects. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star

Centering on 1993, the exhibition is conceived as a time capsule, an experiment in collective memory that attempts to capture a specific moment at the intersection of art, pop culture, and politics. The social and economic landscape of the early ’90s was a cultural turning point both nationally and globally. Conflict in Europe, attempts at peace in the Middle East, the AIDS crisis, national debates on health care, gun control, and gay rights, and caustic partisan politics were both the background and source material for a number of younger artists who first came to prominence in 1993. This exhibition brings together a range of iconic and lesser-known artworks that serve as both artifacts from a pivotal moment in the New York art world and as key markers in the cultural history of the city. On view now until May 26, 2013 at The New Museum, 235 Bowery New York, NY.