What I Eat In A Day: Nothing

 
 

text and images by Vermeer Ha

Open TikTok and you’re greeted with a slot machine of women not quite eating. “What I eat in a day” videos, filmed in diffused apartment light, showcase cucumber slices, matcha, a single rice cake with almond butter. It’s not framed as wellness. It’s aesthetic. It’s girl dinner!

The term began innocently enough: a can of olives, a string cheese, a handful of chips. A meal not intended for male consumption or anyone’s approval. Originally it was a joke—a playful nod to the strange, snack-like dinners many women make for themselves when no one is watching. But, as with most things on TikTok, the joke calcified into a trend, and the trend metastasized into something darker. Now it’s a quiet collective agreement of not needing much—a lifestyle built on the soft eroticism of restraint.

I’ve participated too. Once, I posted a photo of my own girl dinner: a close-up of my Prozac, a handful of cherries, a glass of red wine, the rim of the glass haloed in lipstick like salt on a margarita. Also pictured: a vibrator. The caption was self-aware, maybe even funny. I can’t remember.

 
 

I joined TikTok during the pandemic. I watched trends rise and fall. I absorbed the platform’s new vocabulary, born from censorship and irony. Suicide became “unalive.” Ass became “dat ahhh.” It was absurd but poetic in its own way. Language, like sea glass, reshaped itself to fit the medium—what was once sharp worn down into something vaguely familiar but entirely different.

These codes are legible if you spend enough time marinating in the app’s glossary of brain rot. But the more dangerous grammar is subtler. The algorithm doesn’t just reflect your preferences—it hones them, coaxing you toward extremity. As The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Briefing podcast put it, TikTok “learns your deepest desires” in an eerie few beats, feeding you more of what keeps you watching. Every observable input is tracked: your search queries, the velocity of your scrolling, the pauses between swipes. Anything over five seconds counts as a view. Each becomes a signal, aggregated and weighted against billions of others to predict your next move. The result is not a mirror, but a statistically optimized version of you—built to keep you watching.

Over time, it can feel more intimate than self-knowledge—drawn from impulse, from the hidden parts of the mind that rise only when you are certain no one is watching. The algorithm pulls from the same place as your late-night searches: the weird medical question at 3 a.m., the kink you’ve never said out loud, the idle thought about disappearing or having an affair. Your search engine has always known. Now that information lives inside every feed you open, refined and fed back until it can predict not just your habits but the outline of your most private impulses.

When I began shaping my own feed, I searched for innocuous terms like “healthy dinner ideas” or “easy meal prep under twenty minutes.” I often forget to eat—not for any alarming reason, but because decision-making can feel impossible. Just figuring out what I want, what my body wants, is enough to drain me for the rest of the day.

At first, the algorithm obliged. Between niche fashion accounts, videos of borzois, and primitive tool survivalists, it offered me recipes: smoothie bowls, salmon with blistered vegetables, quinoa in a jar. I clicked. I bought the ingredients—spirulina, colostrum, collagen powders, and various leafy greens. Everything ended up rotting in the bottom drawer of my fridge.

Then the feed changed. Slowly at first. “What I eat in a day as a model.” “How I stay thin for castings.” Then, carousels of reconstituted pro-anorexia Tumblr images, posted without comment, recycled like vintage. The descent is gentle. You don’t notice the slope until you’re already sliding.

You’d think that, at thirty-two, I would be immune. But that’s the hubris of mortals who believe age can shield us from influence. I began to feel the weight around my hips as a gravitational pull into depression. If I sat and felt a softness in my stomach, I would reach for a fiber pill and a cigarette instead of lunch. Hunger became proof of discipline. A performance of elegance.

And the app cheered me on.

What I didn’t realize was that my own behavior—clicking certain videos, searching specific phrases—was reinforcing the spiral I was already in. When I searched for “healthy” dinners, I was rewarded with aspirational videos that confirmed a deeper belief: eating less is glamorous. The more I lingered, the more the algorithm assumed I wanted proof. And so it offered me more.

TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t care if the content is healthy. It doesn’t moralize. It optimizes. In the span of a month, my vague curiosity about eating better snowballed into a kind of guided fasting: bone broth breakfasts, five-hundred-calorie meal plans, women with translucent skin and visible ribs demonstrating Pilates routines—all to the beat of a Lana Del Rey song slowed down by thirty percent.

The algorithm doesn’t ask if this is good for you.
It only asks: What will make you stay?

Inside the Fantasies of Grayson Perry’s Delusions of Grandeur

Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur at the Wallace Collection.© Trustees of the Wallace Collection.

text by Poppy Baring

Delusions of Grandeur is the Wallace Collection’s largest exhibition of contemporary art to date and Grayson Perry is fully involved in every aspect of this display. From narrating the audio guides, writing the object labels, curating the exhibition from his favorite pieces in the museum’s collection, to creating a new body of work that responds to that selection, Sir Perry is threaded through this complex exploration of identity and mental health.

Through Shirley Smith, an imaginary artist created by Perry, the English artist uses ceramics, painting, textiles, and even wallpaper to bring visitors through a corridor of his mind. “The Story of My Life” tapestry shown in the second room of his exhibition extends this sentiment to museum visitors. It captures how Perry interacts and how he suspects other people to interact with artwork they see at a museum. The large tapestry includes fragments of paintings from the collection that mainly include female characters scattered throughout the canvas. These figures phase into Netherlandish landscapes that also bop and weave throughout the piece, and overall, this tapestry comments on how viewers relate artworks back to themselves and their lives.

 

Grayson Perry © Richard Ansett, shot exclusively for the Wallace Collection, London

 

The idea for the fictional Shirley Smith was influenced by the artist Madge Hill. Having navigated traumatic experiences in her early life, Hill challenged her trauma into her art and, surprisingly, considering she was an outsider artist who had no formal training, exhibited her work at the Wallace Collection in 1942. Sir Grason Perry, a title which somewhat dilutes his anti-establishment stance, then invented his own ‘outsider artist’. He envisioned Shirley to be obsessed with the Wallace Collection so much so that she saw herself as the heiress of Hertford House, home to the collection.

Complicating the exhibition even more, Perry brings in yet another identity, the Honourable Millicent Wallace, the alter ego of the alter ego (Shirley’s imagined persona). Delusions of Grandeur follows Shirley’s delusions, delving deep into her emotions and her fantasies of wealth and friendship. This exhibition underscores mental illness throughout the three rooms. For example, in the piece titled ‘A tree in a Landscape’, all the characters that are present in the Wallace collection miniature series have been compiled together into a family tree. Each of these miniature portraits has then been given a DSM-5 (the UK’s standard classification of mental illnesses) diagnosis.

Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur at the Wallace Collection.© Trustees of the Wallace Collection.

Perry admits that these imagined characters were created to somewhat distance himself from the creation of the pieces presented, explaining that Shirley’s existence gave him the freedom to play with colors and pattern that you wouldn’t naturally associate with the museum. However, not all of the new work on view is made by Shirley Smith. Some of the works are that of Grayson Perry, some by Shirley, and even some by Shirley as Millicent Wallace. It’s not usual for Perry to rely on a central fantasy figure when creating an exhibition, but the identities present in Delusions of Grandeur leave you doubting who is real and, indeed, where the fantasy begins and ends.

Delusions of Grandeur is on view through October 26th at the Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W1U 3BN

Grayson Perry. I Know Who I Am, 2024. Cotton fabric and embroidery appliqué. 234 x 234 cm
92 1/8 x 92 1/8 in © Grayson Perry. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Rooted, Relevant, and Evolving: Read an Interview of Curator Rajiv Menon

 

Suchitra Mattai, Set Free, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

 

With each new generation of immigrants from South Asia making their way to the various corners of the world, so too does their culture and unique interpretation thereof. With the context of comparison, they offer perspectives on their homeland that challenge the idea of authenticity deriving from one’s geographic placement. Thus is the crux of Non-Residency, a group show that comprises sixteen artists of South Asian diasporic identity curated by Rajiv Menon. Bringing the work of non-resident South Asian artists directly to Jaipur is a first for the young gallerist and curator who opened Rajiv Menon Contemporary in Hollywood, California, in his quest to bolster representation of the Indian diaspora within the United States. He refers to these artists as the Non-Resident School, effectively defining a voice of Non-Resident Indian (NRI) taste that is both united and richly diverse by way of its orientation. Read more.

India Couture Week 2025: Threads of Identity, Echoes of Dreams

 

image courtesy of JJ Valaya

 

text by Parrie Chhajed

Every July, Delhi transforms. The city, with its bustling character and chaos, becomes home to the patronage of Indian fashion. A legacy, a staged walk by greats, it hosts the India Couture Week, a celebration of craftsmanship and couture, a sanctum where heritage meets modernity, and where the past and future walk parallel. 

India Couture Week 2025 was held at the iconic Taj Palace Hotel in Delhi, curated by the FDCI ( Fashion Design Council of India ). The week staged poetic interactions between culture and innovation, local and global. 

Since its founding in 2008, India Couture Week has become a pivotal event in the Indian fashion calendar. The event is an ethos of the Indian spirit rooted in traditions, craftsmanship, and artisanal heritage. An answer to the Paris Haute Couture Week, an interpretation derived from India’s passed down stories and values, honoring the handicrafts that characterize Indian design. 

Through the years, ICW has recognized and defined moments in the careers of Indian designers and placed India on the global stages and fashion and luxury map. It remains one of the few platforms where, every year, we backtrace further into our culture and craftsmanship while creating new stories and keeping up with today's silhouettes and innovations. 

While last year revolved around softness and sentiments, the 2025 couture week conversed about identity, urging us to look deep within. The ideologies were seen being represented through shapes, silhouettes, and styles appliqued with reimagined traditions.

Through the lenses of legacy, identity, and reinvention, stories unfolded on the runway, and the ones that shone out the most were: Rahul Mishra, Amit Aggarwal, JJ Valaya, Aisha Rao, and Ritu Kumar.

Rahul Mishra – Becoming Love

 
 

The week opened with Rahul Mishra’s ethereal collection titled Becoming Love, which unfolded like a flower in the rain. Inspired by Sufiism’s magic, Mishra’s couture offered seven stages of love, each captured in finely hand-embroidered stories across fabrics such as silk organza, velvet, and tulle.

A combination of magnificence and reality. While one moment, a gown shimmered like Klimt’s The Kiss, the next, a lehenga carried the ache of longing. Alas came Tamannaah Bhatia, walking down the runway in a sculpted floral gown—proof once again that Rahul Mishra stitches emotion into every sequin.

Amit Aggarwal — Arcanum

 
 

If Mishra spoke of emotion, Amit Aggarwal answered with introspection. His collection Arcanum—a word meaning ‘mystery’—explored identity through the architecture of DNA. Using his signature polymer techniques and handwoven metallics, Aggarwal built garments like sacred codes: twisted helixes, cocooned corsets, and chrysalis gowns.

But behind the science was softness. There was something deeply moving about how structure met surrender. Couture here was not just worn—it was inhabited. Aggarwal reminded us that even the future has ancestry.

JJ Valaya — East

 
 

No one stages drama quite like JJ Valaya, and East—his closing show and a celebration of 33 years in fashion—was an imperial epic. A curation and compilation of Ottoman silks, Rajput extravagance, and East Asian tapestries, the collection was detailed and imaginative. Catalogued a collection where there was something for all, embroidered jackets, obi-style belts, brocaded cloaks, and voluminous skirts, as if they were brought to life. 

Rasha Thadani and Ibrahim Ali Khan closed the show with old-world poise and new-world flair. It was a fitting finale—part history lesson, part fantasy film.

Aisha Rao — Wild at Heart

Making her ICW debut, Aisha Rao was the season’s freshest dream. Her collection Wild at Heart bloomed with lotus petals, banana leaves, and rose-gold mosaics—each appliqué whispering a kind of untamed tenderness. She layered nature into couture like a fable.

Sara Ali Khan was stunning in a beautiful Banarasi lehenga. Rao's world feels like a place where rebellion is subtle and fantasy is intricately woven with thoughtful details. The entire show was truly unforgettable.

Ritu Kumar – Threads of Time: Reimagined

A quiet storm came in the form of Ritu Kumar, one of the original matriarchs of Indian fashion. In Threads of Time: Reimagined, Kumar revisited and revitalized her archives, reworking iconic prints, paisleys, and kalidars for a new generation. It felt like a love letter to Indian textiles, with the wisdom of decades and the freshness of reinvention.

This wasn’t nostalgia—it was memory made malleable.

What We Saw, What We’ll Remember

This year, ICW saw a return to tactility. Couture was about touch—embroideries you could feel with your eyes, textures that moved like memories. There was structure, but also surrender. Motifs of roots, DNA, nature, and spirituality ran across collections like leitmotifs in a symphony.

We saw metallics meet brocade, corsetry meet kalidars, and flowers sprout from pleats. And above all, we witnessed a reclamation of Indian identity in high fashion—not as tokenism, but as a language only we know how to speak.

India’s couture scene is now more intimate and more international than ever before. With young voices like Aisha Rao stepping in with fresh fantasy and veterans like Rahul Mishra and Amit Aggarwal pushing boundaries between concept and craft, couture is evolving. Indian fashion today isn’t just bridal lehengas, it’s chronicles of the land, reflected in silhouettes and fabrics, expressed by the artists, with imagination for the bold futures.

The designers were encouraged to reflect, dream, and truly connect with their vision.

Lumière sur la Place: Reflections from This Year's Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles

text and images by Perry Shimon

It was hard to locate the disobedience in this year’s theme of disobedient images at this extremely pleasant festival, in the extremely charming UNESCO city of Arles, in the extremely agreeable Provence region. The works on view this year spanned the familiar preoccupations of affluent liberal audiences: conflicted zones, colonial histories, marginalized identities, and trauma narratives. It evokes a peculiar, perhaps Catholic, sequence of hedonism, sermonizing, and repentance. As though wandering through an artful overabundance in the palimpsestic old city, pausing for long leisurely meals on la place, must be atoned for by encounters with images of intense suffering and historical prejudice. 

The opening week coincides with the Fête du Costume, where locals dressed in 17th-century finery perform elaborate processions around the city, simulating past rites into less-violent echoes of themselves; bullgames replacing bullfights. Such transformations invite broader comparisons. One could make a case for this as a cultural evolution: perhaps the collection and trophy-like display of images, many from formerly colonized and marginalized peoples, is a less violent enactment of the collection and domination of lives, labor, and time. Is this an incremental improvement, a continuum, a contestation, or a symbolic order? The answer may shift depending on one’s vantage.

Adam Ferguson, Église Sainte-Anne

Arles has long been a seat of power: from the Celto-Ligurians, through Roman emperors, to today’s LUMA Foundation with its €150 million Gehry-designed castle and landscaped pleasure ground. The unpopular-with-the-locals architectural folly is a striking distillation of neoliberal values; the imperial and the cultural entangled through architecture, objects, history, and spectacle. Inside, exhibitions with titles like #metime, slide installations from Carsten Höller, and accounts of early industry-led collaborations between tech companies and avant-garde artists sit comfortably together: all an expression of a technocratic, individualistic, neoliberal worldview.

Wael Shawky, I am Hymns of the New Temples, LUMA

Ho Tzu Nyen, Hotel Aporia, LUMA

Also on at LUMA was Wael Shawky’s I Am Hymns of the New Temples, an immersive film installation of cosmological marionette theatre set in Pompeii, which filled La Grande Halle; and a significant retrospective of Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, offering a broad survey of his technologically situated engagements with Asian history, including a particularly haunting and fascinating work commissioned for the Aichi Triennial—Hotel Aporia—which explores wartime visual cultures and philosophical currents in Japan.

Lumière des Roses, Cloître Saint-Trophime

Some of the highlights of the photo fair this year included selections from Marion and Philippe Jacquier’s Lumière des Roses gallery in Grenoble, whose collection of anonymous, often amateur photography was installed in the cloister of Saint-Trophime. Within the austere, devotional architecture of the cloister, the effect was wondrous; small, strange pictures suggesting unknowable interiorities of past lives lived below the usual interests of history.  

Retratistas do Morro, Croisière

The Retratistas do Morro presentation, subtitled João Mendes and Afonso Pimenta: Reflections from Serra Community, Belo Horizonte (1970–1990), offered selections from a massive archive focused on two key photographers who, over half a century, documented residents of the Serra community—one of Brazil’s largest favelas. The work resists exoticization, intimately contouring the kin and cultures of this supremely syncretic, culturally vibrant era. What emerges is a celebration of quotidian life, a revealing counterpoint to the structural violence imposed upon its subjects. 

Diana Markosian, Father, Espace Monoprix

Diana Markosian’s Father was a complex, exquisite rendering of the Moscow-born artist’s reconnection with her estranged father, building on her earlier Santa Barbara project, which detailed her mother’s abrupt departure from post-Soviet Russia to marry a Californian farmer—taking both children and leaving the father behind in the middle of the night. In Father, the artist enlists her father, now living in Armenia, to participate in a staged reenactment of their reunion. The carefully lit, highly-stylized scenes stand in stark contrast to a vitrine filled with his actual, voluminous, and desperate correspondence: letters scrawled in Armenian to anyone he could think to contact in America, trying to locate his family. All above an open and bustling Monoprix grocery store.

The Louis Stettner presentation in the Espace Van Gogh showcased the underrepresented work of a resolutely twentieth-century photographer. It carried an affirm-the-canon sensibility, offering more-or-less poignant takes on familiar humanist themes and modern alienation, with highlights throughout, particularly a somber series depicting New York train commuters.

Batia Suter, Octahydra, Cryptoportiques

Batia Suter offered a hypnotic meditation on spatial resonance, projecting architectural affinities onto thin, overlapping muslins suspended within a 1st-century BCE Greco-Roman crypt. The work resisted explication, asking instead for a kind of intuitive attentiveness to form. For me it evoked underground server farms, circulating images, and a kind of visual associative learning and recombination characteristic of the age of AI. Nearby at LUMA foundation, the artist Tino Sehgal hung selections from their collection of photographs in a like fashion, determined by a surface-level visual similitude—inviting the question: after like is grouped with like, what remains outside of the data and dictates that determine them so? 

Augustin Rebetez, Primitive Manifesto, Croisière

Augustin Rebetez’s Primitive Manifesto presented an unhinged, accelerationist, Rube Goldberg machine of anarchic play, mental illness, and attention economies, unfolding noisily through the Croisière. The cursed AI images and hyperbolic memes, produced at Trecartinesque velocities, were a humorous and upsetting break from the other more measured and polished official offerings.  

Lisa Sorgini, Église Sainte-Anne

Lisa Sorgini’s sensitive and intimate family portraits shot during the ‘Black Summer’ immediately preceding the COVID lockdowns were a highlight from On Country: Photography From Australia in the Église Sainte-Anne; the beauty and terror of raising a family in troubling times. Letizia Battaglia’s Always In Search Of Life in the Saint-Martin du Méjan Chapel exhibited a powerful survey of the committed photographers' unsparing work, centered on midcentury Palermo; dark clouds of Christian passion and mafia violence tinged with quietly sublime silver linings. 

Letizia Battaglia, Saint-Martin du Méjan Chapel

This Rencontres wasn’t so much disobedient as familiar, and that which was verging on disobedience felt more like a performance to please the structures of power and privileged audiences. The title suggests simply that art is subordinate, should know its place—and if it steps out of line, it can be easily controlled, domesticated, and put back to work in service of its owners. On the whole, though, Rencontres is a marvelous, superabundance of thoughtful and beautiful images in-and-around the official presentations. There are ample opportunities to revel and wonder together in the slow plazas, myriad exhibitions, Mediterranean light, and historically rich surroundings. À la prochaine.

Libraire Du Palais

Le Sauvage

Sophie

A Good Read: Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje

 

Cover Design by Emma Ewbank. Photograph © Nathan Landers

 

text by Poppy Baring

Ivona and Vlaho personify the often-felt but never easy human experience that is being so close but ultimately, impossibly, and frustratingly out of reach from the ideal happy ending. Told by Ivona, Slanting Towards the Sea depicts a heartbreakingly intense and oh-so-tangible love story set against the lapping Croatian sea. Passing between their youth and budding university relationship, following through a childless marriage, and divorce brought about by wider family pressures, this story tells the effects and sadness of love and longing.

Touching on themes like death, infertility, employment, and numerous other relatable life events, Lidija Hilje writes this story openly, never skimming a subject but revealing it in sharp focus. As Ivona attempts to find her feet in her homeland, she is continuously hit by attacks that seem to throw her off balance, whether it’s adoption difficulties or visa frustrations, only in the end does she realize that the life she has remained attached to has not fully served her.

This is a book that you never want to end, one that is a joy to go back to and which feels like you are zooming into a summer romance. Describing the life of Ivona and bringing readers along as the characters discover hidden and complex parts of themselves, Hilje writes with vivid imagery of Croatia’s changing seasons, where we can feel the stillness of a night at the height of summer or picture the hush of the olive grove that comes “seeping into your soul if you make your self still enough.”

While Ivona moves through the chapters of her life, which remains tethered to her ex husband’s, Marina (Vlaho’s wife and mother of his children) and Asier (Ivona’s new love, the first in nine years) provide sounding boards to her actions and inner voice. With the potential she holds looming over her head and while she’s kept by aging parents in her childhood home, our protagonist tries to claim a life of her own, free from concealed resentment.

The story ends with a poignant statement about parent and child relationships. Vlaho’s life is revealed to be “a sum of his countless confessions to others,” and in the end, he makes a decision in the hope of changing a pattern of choices that goes back generations. Slanting Towards the Sea is Hilje’s debut novel, but it feels as though it has inhabited our bookshelves for years, collecting watermarks from summers past.

 

Lidija Hilje.  Suzy New Life Photography.

 

A World With No Safe Word: Read An Interview of Nicolette Mishkan

Nicolette Mishkan
Lethe's Harem, 2024-2025
Oil on linen
48 x 60 in121.9 x 152.4 cm

What if death were just a blackout between this life and the next? With its memories wiped clean in a cycle of spiritual cleansing, your soul might carry only faint notions of who you once were, like a SIM card with a brand new hippocampus. Such is the gist of the River Lethe, an underworld tributary from ancient Greek mythology whose waters wash away all remembrance of one’s existence. In Lethe’s Tavern, the fabled Greek river becomes a watering hole where painter Nicolette Mishkan’s ego goes to slosh around, bifurcate, and eventually sing its swan song. Informed equally by Sufi mysticism wherein wine is used to symbolize the intoxicating effects of divine love, she annihilates her sense of individuality by eliminating any distinction between herself and others. Together, these figures revel in the ultimate surrender to their fate, a resplendent transcendence into the unknown where who she once was lies buried without even an epitaph. The following interview took place at Megan Mulrooney on the occasion of the exhibition’s closing and has been edited for length. Read more.

A Deep Dive into a Century of Swimming and Style @ London’s Design Museum

Exhibition Photography © Luke Hayes for the Design Museum

text by Poppy Baring

Walking into this Design Museum exhibition doesn’t feel too dissimilar to walking into an indoor leisure center. After stepping down a wide white staircase and through a small corridor, you approach Splash!, a show investigating a century of swimming and style, together with the social and cultural impacts of the sport. This exhibition was designed, unsurprisingly, with swimming environments in mind. The central plinths, located in each of the rooms, which are divided into Pool, Lido, and Nature, are scale models of the three separate swimming spaces.

In the first room, Pool, these islands are models of the London Aquatic Centre and have been made from Storm Board, a recycled plastic waste that can later be remolded into different shapes. Entering this room, you are greeted by a large, bold lithograph poster that speaks to a poolside chicness that is often associated with the sport. The late 1920s poster was one of the first attempts to ‘brand’ the seaside as fashionable, bold, and modern. Seen next to this is a 1984 poster by David Hockney for the Los Angeles Olympics. A symbol of affluence and leisure, the poster celebrates California life and shows a swimmer immersed in a pool, with a pattern that mimics the one painted on Hockney’s own pool.

Overall, this room features interesting swimming treasures, namely Olympic and Paralympic swimsuits of medal winners past. The costumes and stories of Tom Daley, Yusra Mardini, and Ellie Robinson guide you down the room, where you then meet 1920s and 30s knitted swimsuits and swimwear catalogues. Labels explain the history of wool swimmers, starting in the 1920s, initially with the intention of promoting hygienic clothing, as well as magazines that advertise the “suit that changed bathing to swimming.”

Exhibition Photography © Luke Hayes for the Design Museum

Blue arrows painted on the floor then bring you into room two, Lido, which opens into a show of swimsuits and clothing. Aiming to include an extensive range of themes and topics, from architecture to fashion, politics, and fabric development, the exhibition can feel slightly overwhelming at points and sometimes, because of its broad objectives, fails to dive fully into one topic or another. The rise of mass tourism, sun protection trends, ‘homosexual activity,’ and changing beauty ideals are all discussed before you have had a chance to fully feel like you’ve entered the room. These weighty topics are paired next to swimwear-clad light blue mannequins, which don’t naturally transport you to the beach.

 

Rudi Gernreich, Monokini, around 1964. Jersey, Tricot. Courtesy of Fashion Museum Hasselt.

 

There are, however, a few iconic pieces that are thrilling to see in person. Pamela Anderson’s iconic 1990s red Baywatch swimsuit, seen by roughly 1.1 billion viewers weekly, is one, and a 1964 Monokini by Rudi Gernreich, which was designed in a statement about liberating women from hyper-sexualisation, is another. As visitors continue, swim caps from the 1970s and from Miu Miu’s 2016 collection also stand out, and the line-up of accessories from ‘bathing shoes’ to Speedos brings a sense of charming nostalgia to the show.

The third and final section of Splash! is Nature, which touches on folklore and myths associated with the sea. Century-old tales of Merfolk are addressed before discussing the niche and unexpected contemporary trend of mermaid-core. Finally, a fascinating film about the haenyeo-women of South Korea finishes the exhibition. This film brings visitors underwater with a woman who follows her mother twenty meters below sea level with no help from a breathing apparatus. This historic exploration for seafood and seaweed has been conducted by women for centuries, and is an intense but extraordinary end to a fact-filled summer exhibition.

Exhibition Photography © Luke Hayes for the Design Museum

Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style’ is on view through the 17th of August at the Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High St, London, W8 6AG

Otherwise Part 1: Neoliberal Realism

Image of Immersive Van Gogh, courtesy of Redd Francisco and Unsplash

text by Perry Shimon

Walk into most art fairs today and you can reasonably expect to find yourself on the outskirts of an urban area in a sterile convention center, walking through a maze of white booths selling wall hangings and sculptures. Meanwhile, visual culture in the internet age is increasingly variegated, saturating, operational and complex. In many contemporary art institutions today, we often encounter a range of aesthetic practices that, more or less, reproduce the dominant social and economic relations of today. These deserve closer examination.

The production of contemporary art in the age of neoliberalism largely articulates and legitimates the economic logics that encompass it. Today’s art world routinely rehearses and enacts the post-industrial trends of deskilled labor, the rise of the marketing and service sectors, and precaritization—particularly through on-demand labor contracts, often between the artist and institution as well as between the artist-entrepreneur and the labor manufacturing the art. It also serves the substantive agenda of neoliberalism to further the spread of its values: marketization, possessive individualism, and the dismantlement of existing social customs and protections. It engages in the same rhetorical obscurantism of finance capitalism, analogous to the specialized language applied to highly-questionable speculative assets. On the occasion that contemporary art work performs resistance to neoliberal logic, this resistance is frequently only recognized at the moment it is recuperated into the circuits of commodity exchange. For instance, Hito Steyerl’s 2015 Factory of the Sun, commissioned for the Venice Biennale and collected by MoMA, takes up themes of surveillance capitalism, data extraction, gamification of exploitative labor and ineffectual aestheticized critique, offering us a paragon of this theme.  

Installation view of Hito Steyerl: Factory of the Sun, February 21–September 12, 2016 at MOCA Grand Avenue. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo by Justin Lubliner and Carter Seddon.

Contemporary art is largely determined by arbitrary aesthetic conventions, rituals, and social relations developed within a late capitalist neoliberal cosmology. The art market administers the largest unregulated global asset class—trading at tens of billions of dollars a year—and is part of a half-trillion dollar (and growing) global market. One could even say that contemporary art is the threshold where social and material relations become private property. Consider for example the now-ubiquitous photographic image, coalescing manifold relationships produced by an incalculably vast range of historical relationships and actors. Under art’s jurisdiction this social and technical image is transformed into a proprietary object, which in an art context is arbitrarily rendered into a limited edition of prints and positioned in the market as scarce and valuable commodity with a speculative character. 

Contemporary art functions in a prospective register: an avant-garde goes out in search of new enclosures, commodities and market frontiers. In this respect, the art world shares many similarities with science, which prospects proprietary financial opportunities and employs similar scopic regimes, including similar lens-based, lighting and spatial conventions. The art market necessarily omits all but the most rarefied initiates who adhere to esoteric procedures and codes, producing the scarcity necessary to command blue-chip prices. This scarcity propels the work of the small group of players who control the market, as well as their many aspirants. 

The unique features of internet capitalism, too, find expression in artistic production today. The capture and exploitation of social energies by internet capitalism is mirrored in, for example, contemporary art’s turn toward social practice. In this way, contemporary also resembles earlier periods of feudalism, where the labor of landless serfs was largely expropriated by landed lords. This historical analogy becomes more resonant as the ability to survive in the contemporary becomes increasingly dependent on one’s presence online: each so-called user is allocated their own individualized space and identity from which to competitively accumulate and transact attentional capital, in an illiberal metaversal space owned by an elite class who are the primary beneficiaries of all the subordinate social energies. The resulting spectacularized and competitive milieu is reminiscent of the Roman Colosseum, a distracting and placating arena of cruelty, competition, and violence where an anonymized and often vicious crowd administers ad hoc adjudications with their thumbs and fickle affects. These users are further subjected to relentless surveillance, advertising, and increasingly sophisticated forms of behavioral manipulation. 

Pollice Verso, Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1872.

The set of ideologies, practices, and material effects of free-market capitalism, and their expression in art and its financialized transaction, can be described collectively as “neoliberal cosmopoetics” and are a central focus of the series to follow. Beyond the fiercely-guarded confines of contemporary art, and within the general field of aesthetic interaction, exist incalculable aesthetic articulations of neoliberal cosmopoetics, sometimes jostling for a position within the art market or making themselves available to the appropriative and acquisitive mode popular among professional contemporary artists. 

A telling recent example of a neoliberal cosmopoetics, transversally articulating itself through variegated media space, extends from Angela Nikolau, who was born in post-Soviet Moscow and studied gymnastics and art before becoming a social media sensation for rooftopping—or climbing skyscrapers and taking vertiginous selfies. She began collaborating with her now partner Ivan Beerkus to make a series of images of the couple scaling the largest skyscrapers in urban capitalist centers and performing romantic tropes on life-threatening pinnacles. It’s hard to imagine a better articulation of neoliberal cosmopoetics actually: the performance of a competitive, zero-sum, life-or-death ascent up the tallest, phallocentric markers of capitalist architecture, to then be filmed with selfie sticks and drones and broadcast over social media to an alienated audience, and eventually leveraged for a Netflix streaming deal. The resulting film served to announce and promote the artist’s NFTs.

 
 

NFTs, blockchain, and Web3 more generally, are part of a project of building the infrastructure for a new frontier of capitalism that aims to commoditize every conceivable and transactional object and social relation. Contemporary art, as the most promiscuous and versatile of commodity forms, has been mobilized as an avant-garde on this new metaversal front. An infrastructure that can transact and account for the capaciousness and variability of contemporary art is suited for nearly every other conceivable form of commoditization. The realization of this infrastructural and psychological project will mark a totalizing saturation of neoliberal realism. Everything from the commoditization of hospitality and even experiences on Airbnb to the pornogrified self on Onlyfans articulate the extent and pervasiveness with which these operationalizing logics manifest themselves. 

The emerging, deterritorialized, illiberal, and almost entirely unaccountable metaversal plane of interaction is supported by an extremely large and rapidly growing supply of violently extracted and exhausted material, energetic and labor resources. The Silicon Valley model has been one of breathless Promethean marketing to raise venture capital, accumulate monopoly market positions and then make a public offering and cash out—leaving behind staggering social and ecological ruination, distributed unevenly according to class and geographical situations. In short, it functions like an enormous Ponzi scheme that requires more energy than most countries. In order to dominate these new metaversal markets and grow them insatiably, an army of behavioral scientists, interactive designers, and programmers develop libidinally-charged, dopaminergic algorithms to excite an unprecedented hyperstimulating and compulsive media environment. The net effect is perhaps the most addictive experience in human history, a never-ending hallucination of instrumentalized media collapsing history into an overwhelming, anhedonic, nihilistic, consumptive presentism.

Of course, every relation has its aesthetic dimension and so a latent and mutable artfulness.  This series of reflections will endeavor to contour the development of contemporary art coextensive with neoliberalism by examining generalized themes and conditions, engaging particular instances and protagonists, and exploring the aesthetic, ritual and social practices existing otherwise. 


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


AYA TAKANO'S World Comes to Los Angeles

AYA TAKANO’S “how far how deep we can go" exhibition at Perrotin in LA invites visitors into a mystical world which offers an escape and hope for a brighter existence.

AYA TAKANO 地球上のすべての生物のスピリット  | the spirit of all life on earth, 2025. 130.3 x 162 x 3 cm | 51 5/16 x 63 3/4 x 1 3/16 inches. Oil on canvas. ©2025 AYA TAKANO/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Perrotin.

text by Poppy Baring

Inspired by all art forms from Expressionism to the erotic art of Japan's Edo period, from manga artists such as Osamu Tezuka to Gustav Klimt, AYA TAKANO has been creating her own intimate fantasy since the age of three. Born in Japan in 1976, the painter, illustrator, and highly recognised Superflat artist welcomes LA residents to her new exhibition titled “how far how deep we can go”.

TAKANO presents otherworldly nymph-like characters that are extraterrestrial and yet still connected to and reflective of our reality. Drawing from the past and thinking to the future, she creates a limitless existence where time, gender, and age are undefined. Through various mediums, the Japanese artist investigates our inherent consciousness, exploring what it means to be marked by the past and connected to all life that occurred before us and will exist after us. Held in LA, home to spiritual seekers as well as recent environmental catastrophe, the exhibition offers a universe where all souls prosper as equals, a space where compassion prevails. In this interview, TAKANO provides insight into her worldview and her day-to-day life, asking visitors to look inwards and reconnect with the “radiance of all life.” Read More.

Atlas Loved: Slava Mogutin's Photographic Curation of Queer Romance @ The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division in New York

“What is ‘My Romantic Ideal’? If there were just one, I’d have been able to stop making images searching around the borders of yearning, imagining, and lusting, many years ago. These are some recent attempts at mapping those.” – Robert Flynt

Robert Flynt. Untitled (NPCG; NYC 41), 2023 Unique inkjet photograph on found atlas page (additional image on verso) 11 x 16 inches 

text by Summer Bowie

Like Lee Oscar Lawrie’s sedulously brawny statue of Atlas lunging interminably under the weight of the world in Rockefeller Center, Slava Mogutin has taken on the ambitious charge of defining Queer romance in all of its variegated multitudes. Drawing from the work of twenty-eight artists, his curation coalesces into a comprehensive cohort across the generational and gender spectrums with searingly vulnerable takes on romanticism. Such an endeavor seems only natural considering Mogutin’s personal history of putting himself on the line for the sake of his community. Working in a plurality of media, he has always questioned and prodded the boundaries of sexual freedom, from his early Queer activism and writings for the political weekly newspaper Novy Vzglyad to making the first attempt to register for a same-sex marriage in Russian history with his then-partner, Robert Filippini. As the first Russian citizen to be granted exile in the United States for reasons of homophobic persecution, his commitment through legal and artistic means to broaden our understanding of love and its ultimate liberation remains steadfastly on the frontlines. 

In Mogutin’s “Stone Face (Brian), NYC” (2015), we see an outstretched arm holding almost identical copies of a photograph containing a man’s face partially buried in rocks. More than just a nod to David Wojnarowicz’s “Untitled (Face in Dirt),” we see lower Manhattan’s skyline at sunset on the horizon. Where Wojnarowicz quietly mourns the violent isolation of ultimate abjection, Mogutin’s figure is rendered in print and then literally held by another man in the city of his exile—a photo taken almost a quarter century after Wojnarowicz’s untimely death from AIDS at just thirty-seven years of age. In Stanley Stellar’s “Cherry Grove Kiss, Fire Island” (1990), the man’s entire face emerges from the sand in anticipation of an impassioned kiss. Where Mogutin trades dirt for pebbles, Stellar trades it for sand, making the burial feel elective and impermanent. Made at a time when the AIDS crisis was still looming large, it effectively sublimates the unthinkable trauma of carrying such an insidious burden into not only erotic, but manifestly romantic pleasure.

Slava Mogutin
Stone Face (Brian), NYC, 2015 Offset print, 20 x 27.5 inches Edition of 10 

Stanley Stellar
Cherry Grove Kiss, 1990
Archival analog tinted silver gelatin print
15 x 15 inches, 16 x 20 inches frame
Artist Proof 

Held both literally and figuratively by the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, My Romantic Ideal implores us to define romanticism on our own terms, knowing that in the process of queering the heteronormative parameters, we normalize our queerness. He is glitching the hegemonic system, à la Legacy Russell, with an unabashed proposal to reexamine our assumed notions of tenderness, intimacy, and beauty. These images represent a disparate yet equally valid selection of possibilities for romantic encounters, both with others and with self. They are safe spaces that are not safe for work, and at times, I can’t help but blush at the thought of sharing them. Some of them are too risqué even for the press kit, like Quil Lemons’s “Untitled (Penetration)”—which is reason enough to see the show in person if you live in New York. Others, like Carter Peabody’s “Bastian Floating,” lean into dreamy ecosexual escapism with an Adonis-like figure floating in sea grass-lined, turquoise waters. “I have only known shame when it comes to love” says Peabody, “For me, romanticism is freedom from heteronormative oppression. The bodies floating in my pieces are unattached to the strict norms of our world and free to feel, explore, and play with the sensuality of the sunlight and water surrounding them. There is an innocence and wonder that takes hold when we become our inner child in search of love, and the judgement of our subconscious just melts away.” Here, romance is imbued in everything surrounding the act of love, rather than in the act itself.

 

Carter Peabody
Bastian Floating, 2025
C-print on Metallic Paper
23.5 x 31.5 inches
Edition 1/12 

 

Benjamin Fredrickson’s “Self-Portrait with Lillies” features the artist sitting nude in a brutalist wooden chair, peering out of a floor-to-ceiling window that reveals a verdant forest. He props his feet on the identical chair facing him with an enormous vase of lilies placed tightly between his legs. If we deign to inquire, we cannot help but notice that he is gently indulging himself with just the tips of his fingers. This sensual, autoerotic moment feels utterly unimpeachable. 

Benjamin Fredrickson
Self-Portrait with Lillies, 2019
Chromogenic print
15x19 inches image, 16x20 inches sheet
Edition of 3+2APs 

Bruce LaBruce’s “Hunk with Sneaker” might be having an autoerotic moment of his own. Then again, he might just be testing that theory about guys with big feet. Berlin-based American photographer Matt Lambert presents us with two new pieces from his forthcoming book If You Can Reach My Heart You Can Keep It. Luridly graphic in content, these images leave us only to imagine what kind of tantric infrared technology he is patenting in his dark room/dungeon. Pierced and penetrating, his figures find themselves interlocked in full coitus with mysteriously luminescent erogenous zones. Berlin-based Spanish photographer Gerardo Vizmanos says, “I have a complicated relationship with the term ‘Romanticism’—I see it as both something we enjoy and something that restricts us … which is why I focus on love and desire instead. They offer a more radical, utopian force—one I strive to capture in my photography.” His dancer performs a preposterously blasé hamstring stretch, his entire body giving rise to the kinds of questions often inspired by an ample-when-flaccid endowment.

Bruce LaBruce
Hunk with Sneaker, 2008
Digital C-print
11 x 14 inches
Edition of 1/5 

Gerardo Vizmanos
Dancer, 2024
Archival Pigment Print
8 x 10 inches
Edition of 7 

Matt Lambert
Warm Amour, Paris, 2017
Thermal Imaging C-print
20 x 24 inches
Edition 1/5 

Of course, no collection of photography on the subject of Queer romance would be complete without the work of Paul Mpagi Sepuya. His intimate studio portraits meditate on the vulnerable interplay of sensuality and performativity between artist and subject—that ineffable power dynamic inherent in every nude portrait since time immemorial. In all of these artists, we see an earnest motion to decouple our fantasies with any notions of shame or fear—to let them not only be conspicuous but copyrighted in our names. 

 
 

My Romantic Ideal is on view through August 31 @ The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division 208 West 13th Street Room 210, New York

A Democratic Eye On London: Dennis Morris @ the Photographers’ Gallery

 

Dennis Morris, Johnny Rotten, backstage at the Marquee club, London, 1977 © Dennis Morris.

 


text by Poppy Baring


Known mainly for his celebrity portraits and coverage of stars like Bob Marley, Oasis, the Sex Pistols, and other early punk and reggae icons, Dennis Morris’s new solo exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery in London also features his lesser known reportage work. Music + Life is a three-floor presentation of Morris’s life documenting everything from the pride and resilience of post-war Black British culture to the rarefied inner sanctum of the music industry. 

These pictures don’t have an angle they’re attempting to make plain. Instead, they provide us with a rare and personal glimpse into the lives of mega music stars in their youth. They are candid images taken between friends. Morris thereby reveals naturally occurring gems of moments that are refreshing, intoxicating, and remarkably at ease. His approach was nothing more than knocking on a door; the door would open, and he would go from there. 

 

Dennis Morris, Oasis Backstage in Tokyo, 1994 © Dennis Morris.

 

Starting at the age of eight, and landing his first cover on London’s Daily Mirror at just eleven years old, it is clear that Morris had a strong passion for photography early on, as well as the determination to take it places. His remarkable career started when St. Mark’s church in Dalston, where he sang in the choir, started a camera club. Influenced heavily by reportage photography, which was a favored style at the time, Morris began photographing his environment in East London. In 1973, this progressed into skipping school so that he could take photos of Bob Marley as he entered sound check. Almost straight after, when Morris was just fourteen, Marley asked him to join and document the Catch a Fire tour. Young Dennis Morris accepted and, as they did for several artists, his photographs became key to the marketing and making of Marley’s career.

Dennis Morris, The Abyssinians, outtake from the photo shoot for the album Arise, 1977 © Dennis Morris.

While these authentic photographs of famous musicians provide a behind-the-scenes look into the lives of stars past, his exploration into London’s Hackney in the 1970s surveys another fascinating world. Although areas like Dalston and Hackney are now sought-after places to live, the pictures taken in his early career show just how much London has changed in the last fifty years. Morris explains his approach, saying in his interview, “If I’m in the studio, it’s like I’m on the street; if I’m on the street, it’s like I’m in the studio.” Overall, this creates a nice balance to the exhibition—one which raises East London to stardom and renders celebrity as rather quotidian.

Music + Life is on view through September 28 at the Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, London, W1F7LW

Dennis Morris, Untitled, 1970s © Dennis Morris.

Bogotá Rising: Notes on Resilience, Conviviality, and Experimental Art

San Felipe neighborhood skies

text & images by Perry Shimon

Colombia’s art scene is in the midst of a dynamic resurgence. After a prolonged lockdown that temporarily stalled the country’s cultural momentum, activity is ramping up again in anticipation of the fall season, anchored by Bogotá’s ARTBO fair, and two biennials in Bogotá and Medellín. Despite longstanding infrastructural and political challenges, the country has maintained a vibrant landscape of artist-run spaces, project-based initiatives, and strong public engagement.

In this mountain-wreathed brick city with a breathtaking theater of clouds, I had the great pleasure of seeing and meeting much of Bogotá’s cultural ecosystem. In May of this year, I attended a curatorial intensive organized by Mahazabin Haque (All About Curating, Berlin) and The Art Dome (Miami / Bogotá), which brought together artists, curators, and researchers, with warmth and conviviality, for a tightly packed itinerary of visits across studios, institutions, collections, archives, and impromptu social spaces. What emerged was a portrait of a cultural landscape with unique presence, community, improvisation, and resilience.

Telecom Building, student graduate show

One of the most memorable visits was to the dilapidated Telecom Tower—a relic of privatization now reimagined as a vertical commons. After organizing a group exhibition in the building in 2024, Linda Pongutá, William Contreras Alfonso, and Maria Leguízamo went on to occupy several floors, establishing studios, residencies, site-specific exhibitions, and performances. They also began developing an initiative to create a rotating museum showcasing works by the building’s members. During our visit, one floor hosted a student show, several artists graciously welcomed us into their studios, and independent publisher David Medina was at work on a new book project. In the elevator, the partisan resistance anthem Bella Ciao played on loop.

Gloria Sebastián Fierro Castro

Artist and teacher Ana María Montenegro gave a tour, describing a conceptual performance in which she was visiting each of Bogotá’s eighty notaries to have officially notarized a simple and rather philosophical promise: that she would be someone different tomorrow than she was today. Artist Juan Betancurth, who administers the artist residency program, gave an impromptu tour of his studio where he sculpturally assembles found objects into disquieting meditations on power, desire, and art. Nearby, Gloria Sebastián Fierro Castro showed us their haunting textile and tar works, drawn from a family archive that traces their transition from rural life to running a gas station—a stark emblem of modernization in a sepia-toned desert landscape.

Curator Nicolás Gómez Echeverri at Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia

The archive loomed large in other ways. At the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia, curator Nicolás Gómez Echeverri walked us through a collection tour that will soon be dismantled and rethought under his guidance. The planned rehanging will confront the colonial scaffolding of the existing display, seeking ways to integrate Colombia’s extensive institutional holdings into a narrative that accounts for omissions and regionalism. Among the exceptional paintings of Fídolo Alfonso González Camargo, Obregón, and Cárdenas Arroyo, was a series of anonymous 18th-century convent funerary portraits: powerful images with uncertain authorship, quietly haunting and unsettling the canon.

Hadra Waheed’s Hum in Doris Salcedo’s counter-monument

At Fragmentos, artist Doris Salcedo’s “counter-monument” to Colombia’s armed conflict, we walked across a geographic-feeling topography of thirty-seven tons of hand-hammered metal tiles made from weapons turned in after the FARC peace agreement. In the adjacent courtyard, a deteriorating colonial ruin serves as the setting for Hum, a multi-channel sound installation by Canadian artist Hadra Waheed, which gathers protest songs from across the world into a reflective, almost devotional field. 

Juan Cortés Studio Visit

Memory was also the subject of a project we encountered in the studio of Juan Cortés, who shared a recent collaboration initiated by the Colombian president: a digital map of “houses of memory”—community archives, cultural centers, and alternative institutions preserving regional histories. The ambitious and exemplary project is part oral history, part visual archive, part social cartography, and a model for a new possible infrastructure for collective memory.

María Adelaida Samper giving a tour of Gabriel Zea’s Mystic Capital at the Al Romero gallery

Elsewhere, in San Felipe, Gabriel Zea’s Mystic Capital, at the Al Romero House Gallery, staged capitalism as a religion. Tarot-inspired AI works illustrated symbolic systems of belief in the market, as well as its impoverished aims and overdetermined meanings. An accompanying video installation collaged cartoonish bull and bear imagery into frenetic and tumultuous booms and busts. Zea’s collective, Aliens, curated the show with María Adelaida Samper. It both estranged the givenness of our cosmologically proportioned faith in markets and situated it in a longue durée continuum of numerology, mysticism, superstition, power, and grave consequences.

Tienda de Esperanza, San Felipe

Chuco Candela in Lavamoa Tumba

Tienda culture emerged as one of the more poetic and socially alive throughlines of the trip. These ubiquitous corner stores often moonlight as salons, exhibition spaces, and places of convivial gathering. Artist Chuco Candela’s intervention at Tienda de Esperanza turned an already beloved Macarena landmark into an exhibition space for his and his friends’ often meme-themed ceramics. Later, in San Felipe, his second location hosted a massive street party with fireworks for its opening. He later invited us to visit his most recent exhibition in his ongoing Lavamoa Tumba project—enormous, sprawling group shows in condemned buildings, this edition featuring 150 artists, and overflowing with energy, humor, and street-rooted practices.

Trepesitos fashion show at Odeon

After a fashion show by Trepesitos at the majestic theater-turned-exhibition space and artful community center Odeón, we ended the night in a tienda playing bolirana, a barroom sport that fuses pre-Columbian tradition with contemporary nightlife, popular with both Reggaeton and contemporary artists. It is perhaps to bowling what ping pong is to tennis and invites loud and playful sociality. Odeón’s Tatiana Rais and Juan Sebastián Peláez, formerly of the Miami Gallery and Carne Collective, began sharing insights about Colombia’s commitment to public art funding and the system of rotating independent art professionals who administer allocations for artist projects and spaces. While there is not a strong enough local market to support the many practicing artists, this type of public funding supports the scene to some extent and underwrites less commercially oriented works. 

María Morán at Cooperates

Charlie Mai exhibition and talk at Plural

We visited artist-run Cooperates studios and residency in Chapinero, anchored by the painter and teacher María Morán, and the communal Plural project—part art space, part kitchen—where Chinese-American artist Charlie Mai was showing an installation with a series of performances reflecting on Chinese capital, North/South American labor, transportation infrastructure, and hybrid identity. We were sad to miss the closing party with a durational cowboy performance, Chinese dragon dancing, and DJ set by underground club hero DJ Bclip.

José Darío Gutiérrez at Espacio El Dorado

At Espacio El Dorado, José Darío Gutiérrez gave a highlights tour of his impressive collection of overlooked political Colombian art and their marginalization through Cold War-era collecting policies imposed by major Western foundations. During our visit, a young scholar from Buenos Aires working on a curatorial project about political photographers and left-wing conferences overheard the conversation and joined our group, offering a recently published dissertation called “The Cultural Cold War in Colombia: Oil and Washington’s Policies for ‘Pacification’ of Art in Conspiratorial Times” by Christian Padilla Peñuela that Jose was coincidentally trying to place with a publisher. As we were leaving I noticed the young man and Jose in a deep thoughtful conversation, Jose generously retrieving books from his collection to give as gifts. 

Taller Arte Gráfico

Subachoque

Perhaps the most moving experience of the trip was a pair of visits to Taller Arte Gráfico and Sextante, founded by Luis Ángel Parra and María Eugenia Niño fifty years ago. They welcomed us warmly to their Bogotá gallery and country atelier in Subachoque and let us marvel at the breathtaking collection amassed over a lifetime of artful collaboration. They described their printmaking and publishing practice as a ‘love story’ and shared how they met fifty years ago, moved in on that very same day, and have been together ever since. We learned a few days after our visit that sculptor Hugo Zapata—a dear friend of theirs, whose works were on display in the gallery—had passed away, making the visit a poignant and beautiful parting gift.

Subachoque

Hugo Zapata

There were countless other stops: Liz Caballero’s impressive three-story SKETCH Gallery, La Casita’s misleadingly named sprawling intergenerational and dialogic collection, Casa Hoffmann’s austere kinetic and music themed program, NC-Arte’s gorgeous design villa, Desborde Gallery’s anarchic installation and performance works by Alfonso Aguas Negras, a tour of artist duo Eduard Moreno & Andrea Marín García studio and upcoming works for the Medellín biennial, perhaps the world’s most significant pre-Columbian metalwork collection at the Oro Museum, and a very moving studio visit with the young Bogotá-born-and-raised painter Angie Vega, whose extraordinarily skillful intimate portraits of her Tunjuelito neighborhood familiars had garnered her invitations to apprentice with master painters in Europe and Saint Petersburg. The lingering impressions from this vibrant and flourishing art ecosystem were its warm hospitality, generous sociality, and a sense of experimentation that felt neither reactionary nor utopic, rather present, responsive, and open.

SKETCH Gallery

Daniela Acosta Parsons and Danilo Roa’s studio

Jeronimo Villa at La Casita

Angie Vega

Lia García in her studio

Camilo Bojaca at Galería El Museo

Miller Lagos in his studio

Studio of Andrea Marín García & Eduard Moreno

Mauricio Gallego in his studio

.

Alfonso Aguas Negras at Desborde Galería

Hugo Zapata at Sextante

Theatron

Cloud theater

Put On A Face, Any Face: Read An Interview of Kenny Scharf & Curator Shai Baitel

Courtesy of Roger Davies

It’s not often that an artist and a curator connect the way Kenny Scharf and Shai Baitel do. Emotional, the biggest show of Scharf’s career, didn’t come out of a typical museum timeline or curatorial trend. It came from Baitel’s urgent feeling of injustice that the art world hadn’t given Scharf the recognition he deserved, and he wanted to change that. When we spoke, Scharf joined the Zoom call straight from his studio, answering questions with a paintbrush in hand. It felt intimate and telling: Scharf doesn’t separate art from life. His world is constantly in motion, fueled by color, feeling, and spontaneity.

The dynamics between Scharf and Baitel set the tone for a conversation that highlighted the reverent partnership between them, whose collaborative spirit is at the heart of the exhibition. What initially started as an interview about an art show quickly turned into a rhythmic conversation about friendships, personal stories, timing, and how things can easily fall into place when two people believe in the same thing.

Scharf came up in the late seventies and early eighties in New York, rubbing shoulders with Basquiat and Haring, bringing a psychedelic, cartoon-fueled energy that set him apart. He paints like he’s channeling something from another planet, but also something deeply familiar and simple. Emotional is more than a retrospective—It’s a long-overdue celebration of a singular voice in contemporary art. Read more.

Rick Owens' Retrospective Is A Paean to the Designer's California Roots @ Palais Galliera in Paris

Rick Owens, Temple Of Love is a meditation on romance, beauty, and diversity. It archives one of today’s leading designers, transforming the museum into a shrine to creativity.

 

Courtesy of Palais Galliera

 

text by Kim Shveka

Rick Owens, Temple of Love is the first exhibition in Paris dedicated to fashion designer Rick Owens, which he creative directed himself. The massive retrospective features collections from his beginning in Los Angeles through his most recent theatrical runways in Paris’s Palais de Tokyo.

With his radical fusion of Gothic Romanticism, Brutalism, and Minimalism, which often provokes social and political themes on his runways, Rick Owens has long been known as fashion’s avant-garde designer. His aesthetic challenges conventional notions of beauty, gender, and form, often occupying a space between fashion, performance art, and architecture.

In the exhibition, we gain rare insight into the designer’s creative inner world, understanding how his references come to life and the ideas that lie behind his work. Gustave Moreau, Joseph Beuys, and Steven Parrino were among Owens’s sources of inspiration, resonating with his embrace of destruction as creation, the usage of art as a vehicle for criticism, and the glorification of beauty through excess. The exhibition also focuses on the central role played by his lifelong wife and muse, Michèle Lamy, whose presence is always felt through Owens. We get an intimate glimpse into the couple’s private world through a recreation of their California bedroom, designed using pieces from Owens’ furniture line. Just beyond the wall, their closet room is unveiled, with dark garments loosely folded next to a packed bookshelf. This section of the exhibition feels like a genuine invitation into their daily lives, where we are meant to truly feel their presence. The air itself is infused with Rick Owens’ signature scent, activating all five senses for a complete journey through their rituals.  

 

Courtesy of Palais Galliera

 

In another room, plastered with “No photos please” signs, stands perhaps the most Rick Owens-esque piece in the exhibition: a towering statue of Rick himself, mid-urination. It reads as the most cynical, provocative fountain since Marcel Duchamp.

The exhibition is extended throughout the entirety of the Palais Galliera campus, as well as the outside garden, wherein California-native plants and vines surround thirty brutalist cement sculptures. Above the garden is the building of the exhibition, whose windows display three colossal statues of Owens covered head to toe in gold. Owens saw the importance of finishing his retrospective with his origin, California. As a designer whose presence casts a looming glunge shadow over the City of Light, it’s easy even for him to overlook his roots in the Sunshine State.

Courtesy of Palais Galliera

Rick Owens, Temple of Love is on view through January 4, 2026 at Palais Galliera, 10 Av. Pierre 1er de Serbie, 75116 Paris

The Art of Impossible Perfection: Demna’s Final Couture Statement at Balenciaga

“I have come as close as possible to being satisfied in this endless pursuit of impossible perfection,” writes Demna in his farewell to Balenciaga couture, marking the close of a transformative decade at the helm of one of fashion’s most revered maisons. The 54th Couture Collection is not merely a finale; it is a culmination—a poetic, exacting thesis on craftsmanship, silhouette, and legacy. Shot across Paris and laid bare in both look and making, the collection fuses the radical spirit of Cristóbal Balenciaga with Demna’s own uncompromising vision for the future of fashion: personal, sculptural, and exquisitely strange.

A corresponding film directed by Gianluca Migliarotti—known for his documentary O’Mast on Neapolitan tailoring—offers rare access into the meticulous inner workings of the House’s couture ateliers. In it, premières, tailors, and designers narrate the multi-layered labor behind each garment. The documentary traces the making of corseted gowns, reconstructed archival silhouettes, and collaborations with legendary artisans like Maison Lemarié, William Amor, and fan-maker Duvelleroy. It is a film not just of fashion, but of devotion—a love letter to the human hands that define couture.

The collection opens with a tribute to “La Bourgeoisie,” a term once synonymous with conformity, now mined for its elegance and severity. Tailored jackets bear tulip lapels that frame the face like armor; high collars evoke both Medici nobility and Nosferatu’s haunting grace. In Demna’s hands, bourgeois tropes are recoded—pierced with irony, elegance, and a commanding silhouette. “Garments are sculptural and intricate in their construction,” he notes, “while embracing minimalism and reduction in their architecture.” This paradox—maximal form through minimal means—runs like a seam throughout the collection.

Corsetry, once an instrument of feminine discipline, is reengineered for comfort across ten different looks. An airy pink debutante dress in technical Japanese organza, a diva gown encrusted in black sequins, and a draped one-seam gown conjure Old Hollywood glamour as seen through a funhouse mirror. These are not nostalgic recreations—they’re cinematic hallucinations. A “mink” coat made from embroidered feathers, worn by Kim Kardashian as a tribute to Elizabeth Taylor, is paired with the actress’s actual diamond pendant earrings, on loan from Lorraine Schwartz. Over 1,000 carats of custom jewelry glimmer throughout the collection—white diamonds, Padparadsha sapphires, and canary yellow stones—turning the runway into a constellation of light.

Other garments are grounded in quiet subversion. A silk bomber jacket becomes as featherweight as tissue; a summer taffeta blouson transforms into businesswear via sleight of hand. One standout detail: 300 kilometers of tufted embroidery used to create trompe-l’œil corduroy pants, a feat of excess that reads as effortlessness. “They’re the first ‘corduroy’ pants I want to wear,” Demna says, with a wink toward comfort as luxury.

A standout thread in both the show and its documentary is tailoring—specifically the collaboration with four family-run Neapolitan ateliers. Nine suits, developed as “one-size-fits-all” garments measured on a bodybuilder, are modeled on a diverse cast of bodies. “It is not the garment that defines the body, but the body that defines the garment,” Demna writes. This democratic inversion of couture’s traditional ethos suggests a radical inclusivity. Migliarotti’s camera captures the intimacy of fittings, the choreography of needle and cloth, the philosophy of hands that have stitched for generations.

Heritage and transformation are braided throughout. A 1957 floral print from Cristóbal Balenciaga’s archives resurfaces on a sequined skirt suit. A replica of a 1967 houndstooth look once worn by Danielle Slavik, one of the house’s original muses, becomes the “Danielle” suit. Each is a memory made tactile. The finale gown—a seamless guipure lace sculpture shaped using millinery techniques—embodies the house’s entire language in a single garment: restraint and drama, memory and innovation, body and architecture.

The accessories deepen the message. Logos on bags are replaced by the wearer’s name, subverting the idea of branded status. Duvelleroy fans, recreated over nearly 200 hours of craft, flutter like time machines: one from 1895, another from 1905. Flower brooches are crafted from discarded tissue paper and silk, offering waste a new role as adornment. Even the couture sneaker—handmade using traditional shoemaking techniques—feels like a manifesto: this is couture for the street, couture for now.

Demna’s voice is not the only one heard. The soundtrack of the show features the names of his team—an act of collective authorship, a rare moment of ego dissolution in a field known for solitary genius. This final gesture is perhaps the most emotional: a house, after all, is not built alone.

As Demna departs Balenciaga couture, he leaves behind not a collection, but a philosophy. Couture is not anachronism—it is resistance. It is an art of slowness, of refusal, of obsessive care in a time of disposability. “This collection is the perfect way for me to finish my decade at Balenciaga,” he writes. “The ultimate minimal sculptural gown…represents everything this House stands for.”

What does Balenciaga stand for now? In this collection: freedom, contradiction, legacy, reinvention. A house haunted by its past, electrified by its present, and—through the ghost stitch of every seam—already dreaming of what comes next.

Encounters at the Barbican: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha

Special Guest Star, 2016. Huma Bhabha. Clay, wood, wire, t-shirt, acrylic, tin, paint brush, White Tailed Deer horns, and steel. Overall: 39 3/4 x 94 x 13 3/8 inches. Image credit: Kerry McFate. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

text by Poppy Baring

The Barbican’s Level 2 gallery reopened in May with a joint exhibition featuring sculptures by Alberto Giacometti and Huma Bhabha. Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha features works, some of which are nearly a century old, that explore the human figure, the trauma it faces, and the process of survival. This ‘dialogue across time’ allows viewers to examine the artists’ responses to human vulnerability, violence, and displacement, and is the first time Bhabha has exhibited her work at a public London gallery.

The entrance upon arrival is currently home to four titan-aged bronze sculptures made by Bhabha. Debuted in New York last year, where the artist currently lives, these figures are being displayed in Europe for the very first time. Continuing inside, visitors encounter The Glade” (Composition with nine figures), created in 1950 by Giacometti, a small tabletop sculpture that marked a significant shift in Giacometti’s practice. These supremely thin, isolated figures were created to capture people as they were, vulnerably themselves, on the street. 

Alberto Giacometti holding Three Men Walking, 1940s, Photo: anonymous, Silver print on paper, 11.9 x 17.2 cm, Archives Fondation Giacometti. © Succession Alberto Giacometti / Adagp, Paris 2024


Giacometti’s observation of individuals “coming and going...unconscious and mechanical... each having an air of moving on its own, quite alone,” inspired how Bhabha approached the composition of the exhibition. She sets sculptures up as groups and allows visitors to potentially cross paths with these works, as though the space were a public street, bringing a sense of life and interaction to the statues. The message becomes progressively clearer, as phantom-like, vulnerable figures gradually replace fragmented works. Collectively, both these artists’ work point to conflict and highlight its effects as human life becomes increasingly disfigured.

This exhibition is entirely suited to the Barbican. As far as Giacometti is concerned, he made some of his most significant pieces at the same time as the Barbican was under construction. Art and architecture made in this post-war period are often considered a response to the brutality of the Second World War, and both Giacometti’s work and the gallery, at that time, proposed a new (not so fresh) perspective on what it means to live and be human. The non-materialisticness of the work and the space that surrounds it creates a mass of meaningful beauty that explores a way of thinking where art is deemed crucial to living.

The Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha exhibition is on view through August 10th 2025 at the Barbican, Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS.

 

What Should it Be, 2024, Huma Bhabha. Painted and patinated bronze and concrete pedestal. 44 3/4 x 31 x 31 inches. Photo credit: Kerry McFate. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery


 

Paris Couture Week Predictions Through the Lens of Charles Worth's Current Retrospective @ the Petit Palais

Unlike other fashion, Paris moves through layers of history and a continuous dialogue between tradition and change. But in today’s challenging and ever-changing economic and political climate, what can we expect from this trendsetting city next?

 

Worth & Bobergh, Robe à transformation, vers 1866-1868.
Faille verte et tulle de soie. Philadelphia museum of Art, États-Unis d’Amérique.
© 125th Anniversary Acquisition.
Gift of the heirs of Charlotte Hope Binney Tyler Montgomery, 1996, Philadelphia museum of Art.

 


text by Kim Shveka


As Haute Couture week descends on Paris, the city reasserts its place as the center of gravity in fashion, the stage where elegance is both performed and consumed. The newly opened Charles Worth exhibition, Worth, Inventing Haute Couture, at the Petit Palais deepens this position, reminding us that Paris’s fashion dominance is not merely current. It is layered with history, narratives, and unbreakable foundations that were built since the 15th century. Worth is cited as the father of Haute Couture; he altered the way to view fashion, from practicality to a status of art. He created a system that is defined by exclusivity, artisanal craft, and aesthetic authority that helped distinguish Paris as a city where fashion is understood not only as clothing, but as culture. The aim was not just beauty, but distinction—an aesthetic nationalism that still echoes in the way French fashion is marketed and perceived today. From this foundation, figures like Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent built empires not only by introducing new silhouettes but by shifting the paradigm of femininity, luxury, and modernity. The designers didn’t just reflect French culture; they directed it to the rest of the world.

The other fashion capitals each carry their own codes. London is where fashion is pushed to its most conceptual edge. New York delivers commercial clarity and cultural speed. Milan prizes structure, refinement, and a family-driven approach to legacy. But Paris continues to present itself as the stage where it all connects—the final act, the definitive voice. Its claim to be the capital is not just symbolic; it is structural: the power, the history, and the industry still move to the Parisian rhythm. And yet, that same stage is now caught in a cycle that resists disruption.

Alongside the grandeur of the maisons and the ritualistic anticipation of the shows, there’s an unsettling pattern repeating itself in the background. In the span of a few months, many of the major houses in the fashion industry have appointed new creative directors, reshuffling the same names that have long been in circulation. With every season, the game of musical chairs intensifies, and what once felt like an exciting leap now looks more like a closed loop. The question is no longer who gets the chair but whether there are any chairs left for those who have never had the chance to sit in one.

This past year has seen dramatic shifts across the Parisian landscape. After years of dominating Balenciaga with a confrontational, minimal lexicon, Demna left the house and was swiftly appointed at Gucci. In his place, Pierpaolo Piccioli, formerly of Valentino, took over creative direction at Balenciaga, signaling a sharp pivot from shock to softness, from provocation to romantic craft. At Dior, Jonathan Anderson, who had already proven his capacity for reinvention at Loewe, was named creative director for the entire house, including menswear, womenswear, and couture, a role no one has held since Christian Dior himself. Sarah Burton, once the artistic director of Alexander McQueen, made her debut at Givenchy with a recalibrated take on femininity anchored in tailoring and strength. Meanwhile, Glenn Martens, already at Diesel and Y/Project, was announced as the new face of Maison Margiela following John Galliano’s departure, with a highly anticipated debut planned for tomorrow.

 

Gazette du Bon ton, Entre chien et loups, 1912. 24,7 × 19,2 cm. 
Palais Galliera, musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris. CCØ Paris Musées / Palais Galliera, musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris.

 

On the surface, this looks like change. But beneath the headlines and the hashtags, it’s the same logic that’s been quietly driving the industry for years. None of these appointments were about discovering an unheard voice or matching a designer with a house based on his aesthetic affiliation; they were about bankability. The equation is simple and cynical: if a designer has already succeeded commercially, they can probably do it again. A recognizable name promises brand buzz, social media traction, and a fast return on investment—all in a fragile market where luxury sales are under pressure and leather goods are expected to do the heavy lifting.

This tendency has made the creative director role more of a function than a vision. It has also made the path to that role narrower than ever. The doors that were once open for young designers with new ideas are now closed by default. It is not that the industry doesn’t want new voices; it simply doesn’t leave them enough space to develop, to fail, or to prove themselves beyond a single collection. With every appointment handed to a designer who has already made it, another seat is taken from someone who hasn’t.

The expectation is that each new director will immediately stabilize revenue, secure brand loyalty, and carry the weight of legacy while still offering something “fresh.” But freshness is difficult to fake, and even harder to maintain when everyone is rotating between the same houses. The result is a kind of creative fatigue. Consumers may still buy, but the cultural impact of each new collection grows weaker.

 

Worth, Manteau de cour porté par Franca Florio, 1902. Palazzo Pitti / Galleria del Costume , Florence, Italie. 
© Museo della Moda e del Costume, Palazzo Pitti, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence. Ministero della Cultura.

 

John Galliano’s recent departure from Maison Margiela deepens this dilemma. His Artisanal Spring 2024 was arguably the most talked about in years, precisely because it evoked a time when a fashion show was true art, when fashion shows aimed to move, not sell. Yet, such significant shows appear so rarely now. And with the latest wave of appointments, they seem even less likely. Why, then, are even the most profitable luxury houses struggling to produce that level of artistry? Can a system so driven by metrics and performance indicators ever make room for true creative vision again? These new directors may bring efficiency, consistency, or even spectacle, but they don’t replace what the industry is truly missing: a sense of forward motion. The biggest luxury brands carry immense responsibility; they dictate trends and set the standard. Yet, they consistently fail to raise the bar, to truly innovate, and to genuinely make us feel something.

This is the paradox Paris finds itself in. The city still holds the world’s attention, but it is no longer opening doors the way it once did. Couture Week is the moment when fashion is meant to step outside of commerce and return to craftsmanship and conceptual purity. But even here, the same logic applies. Trust is placed in those who have already delivered profits, not in those who could shape the future if only given the platform.

What is missing is not talent. It is the willingness to take a risk on someone who is not already on the circuit. The problem is not just that the chairs are constantly changing; it’s that they are being filled in a closed room. The game is being played by the same few, while others wait in the wings for a door that may never open.

As the week unfolds and the collections are unveiled, Paris will once again claim its position at the center of fashion. But unless the industry begins to create space for new perspectives, it risks becoming a hall of mirrors. The reflection is beautiful, but it does not move.

 

Nadar, La comtesse Greffulhe, 1886.
Procédé photomécanique, 29 × 16,8 cm.
Palais Galliera, musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris.
CCØ Paris Musées / Palais Galliera, musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris.

 

Worth, Inventing Haute Couture is on view through September 7th at the Petit Palais, Av. Winston Churchill, 75008, Paris.

The Arrival of Untitled Art Fair In Houston Reveals A Hidden Historical Art Scene

Mark your calendars for September 19. The Lone Star State is an up-and-coming art destination.

The Menil Collection, Modern and Contemporary galleries. Photo by Caroline Phillipone


text by Karly Quadros


Houston may call to mind NASA, BBQ, and hurricanes, but just beneath the surface of one of America’s most diverse cities, a vibrant art scene is emerging.

On track to become the third-largest city in America within the next decade, Houston is a city on the rise—quite literally. It’s a place where bigger is always better and change is constant. Leaving very little in the way of historical architecture, the city finds itself perpetually busy building the next bigger and better thing. There’s no single racial or ethnic majority. Instead, the city attracts everyone from French art collectors to Sudanese refugees, a fact that’s produced a richly diverse food scene.

But it’s Houston’s art scene that’s attracting international attention. With Untitled Art, Houston making its debut in Houston on September 19, director Michael Slenske and executive director Clara Andrade Pereira are bridging the gap between the city’s historic institutional art world and contemporary audiences.

Half a century ago, a booming oil industry fueled Houston’s art scene while the rest of the country was sinking into recession. Two significant investments in the city’s institutional art infrastructure—the construction of the Contemporary Art Museum Houston and a multimillion-dollar renovation to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston—signaled a push to establish Houston as one of America’s artistic centers. A local art scene cropped up around the Lawndale Alternative Art Space at the University of Houston (now the Lawndale Art Center), founded by sculptor James Surls. Meanwhile, other standout artists, such as Julian Schnabel and Robert Rauschenberg, were developing their distinctive styles in Texas. Then a mid-80s oil bust interrupted the scene’s boom. Now, there’s a renewed effort to finish what Surls and Harithas started and put Houston on the international art world’s map.

The Menil Collection campus. Photo by Grant Gay

The foremost underpinnings of Houston’s art scene stem from one family. Billionaire collectors and patrons of the arts, Dominique and John de Menil, formed the backbone of Houston’s fine art world, encapsulated in the Menil Collection. The couple’s story reads like something out of a spy novel: Dominique, an oil heiress to an oil company, married John, an investment banker from a family ennobled by Napoleon, only to be forced to flee their home in Paris through a Spanish port on a steamer bound for Cuba in 1944 when the Nazis invaded. The couple eventually settled in Houston, a small city on the Gulf of Mexico with a barely nascent art scene. Dominique credited the lack of art in the city as the exact reason why she began collecting in the first place.

The de Menil’s private collection reflected an adventurous and forward-thinking mindset. As early champions of Max Ernst, they mounted his first solo museum show in the US (Ernst’s portrait of Dominique, done when he was still an unknown artist in Paris, hangs in the first room of the Menil Collection to this day). 

The collection reflects their diverse and eclectic tastes, encompassing everything from Surrealism to Pop Art to ancient artworks from Africa and Oceania. From Magritte to Man Ray, Henri Matisse to Joan Miró, and from Hans Bellmer to Bruce Davidson, the Menil Collection, which became a museum in 1987, rivals any private art collection across the country. In a city that is notoriously concrete and sprawling, its campus is a cool and calm patch of green space in the heart of Montrose, a walkable neighborhood humming with the trill of cicadas and the chirps of grackles. In addition to its core collection, the campus is also home to the Menil Drawing Institute, the Cy Twombly Gallery, and the Dan Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall.

Dan Flavin Installation at Richmond Hall. Photo by Sarah Hobson

The Menil Collection is notably abutted by the Rothko Chapel, a nondenominational worship space featuring fourteen Rothko murals rendered in solemn purples and blacks that were characteristic of the artist’s final years before his death. Initially intended for the Catholic University of Saint Thomas, the church’s streamlined result, with its octagonal structure and moody ambiance, was a little too modern for their taste and became a much more expansive space, serving as the backdrop for everything from human rights award ceremonies to a music video by Solange Knowles. The space, like much of Rothko’s work, possesses a timeless quality and a nearly endless capacity to encourage reflection, inward movement, and calm.

In any other city, it would be hard to match the Menil Collection, but the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) is a standout, not just regionally, but globally. Stretching over three sunlight-filled buildings, the museum houses works from nearly every ancient, modern, and contemporary art luminary imaginable (really, I eventually gave up on taking notes after several pages listing iconic pieces from Impressionism to Surrealism to Pop Art and everything in between). 

James Turrell, Caper, Salmon to White Wedgework, 2000

Even the walkways between buildings are works of art. You can easily escape the humidity by stealing away between galleries in a luminous light tunnel designed by James Turrell. Patrons can pop between multiple immersive art exhibitions, including a Yayoi Kusama infinity room and the pulsating Chromosaturation MFA by Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, before tucking in for a Michelin-starred lunch courtesy of chef Alain Verzeroli at Le Jardinier, the museum’s fine dining alcove, which overlooks a sculpture garden created by Isamu Noguchi.

Yayoi Kusama, Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity, 2009. Courtesy of the museum and Yayoi Kusama

Just a two-minute walk away is the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Currently on view until March 29, 2026, is Across the Universe, by Houston-born artist Tomashi Jackson. Rooted firmly in archival and historical research, Jackson excavates the troubled histories of democracy, exclusion, and law in the South. Incorporating a wide range of techniques across painting, printmaking, fiber art, and sculpture, she employs juxtapositions of color and material such as dust from Greek marble quarries, voting pamphlets, and river soil to interrogate the calcified layers of history. In 2026, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston will host a four-decade-long survey of conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll.

The Menil Collection, main building galleries. Photo by Hung Truong

Despite the institutional dominance in the city, Houston is also home to one of the most innovative art residencies in the country: Project Row Houses. Founded by a small collective of Black artists and community leaders and helmed by MacArthur Genius Award winner Rick Lowe, the logic of Project Row Houses is simple: strong communities and great artwork are only possible when people’s basic needs are met. Lowe and his collaborators restored thirty-nine shotgun houses in Houston’s Ward back in the ’90s. They award fellowships to artists who live and work in nine of the houses for a period of one year. Tomashi Jackson had a formative fellowship there, as did Sam Durant and Whitfield Lovell. Beyond the residencies, Project Row Houses offers a residential program for young single mothers, after-school programs, and entrepreneurship programs to encourage Black-owned businesses. The entire enterprise is what Lowe calls “social sculpture,” an artistic practice that’s inextricable from political action and community engagement.

A new generation of artists and community organizers has taken up this mantle, including Amarie Gipson, founder of The Reading Room. This hybrid space combines a library, community center, and art gallery. The Reading Room celebrates Black visual culture in all its forms, from art and design monographs to film screenings to community conversations. It includes everything from literary salons devoted to Octavia E. Butler to documentaries on West African cultural repatriation.

Other fixtures, like Adam Marnie, are making waves in the independent publishing world with F Magazine and its accompanying art gallery and indie publishing house, also called F. The gallery has showcased Houston contemporary art stalwart Mark Flood and even collaborated on a sprawling monograph titled The Origin of Mark Flood (2022). Marnie’s wife, Rebecca Matalon, is a curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum, where she is currently working on the Mary Ellen Carroll retrospective.

Meanwhile, lovers of outsider art have no shortage of things to explore. There’s the Orange Show, a carnivalesque fever dream devoted to the restorative power of citrus, created by postman Jeff McKissack in 1956. Or there’s the Beer Can House, a folk art installation created in the late ’60s by John Milkovisch, who adorned the exterior of his home with flattened beer cans and caps. Why? “I got sick of mowing the grass,” he once said.

Houston is a town of endurance. In a city beset by extreme weather and perpetual change, the art that crops up around the city is a testament to the creativity of Houstonians. As Untitled Art Houston approaches in the fall, it’s important to remember John de Menil’s response to a New York friend who once decried Houston as a cultural wasteland.

“It’s in the desert that miracles happen.”

The Menil Collection, Allora & Calzadilla's Graft. Photo by Caroline Phillipone

Stitched in Place: Do Ho Suh at the Tate Modern

The Genesis Exhibition Do Ho Suh at Tate Modern © Tate Photography (Jai Monaghan)

text by Poppy Baring

Do Ho Suh’s first major London exhibition at the Tate Modern showcases decades of his work that touches on themes that bring the importance of home back into audiences’ hearts. The title of the exhibition Walk The House derives from the Korean expression Hanok regarding a traditional house that can be packed up, transported and re-assembled across space and time. Originally from Seoul and now living in London, Suh has lived and worked across many continents. Walk The House involves impressive ghostly fabric structures, time-worn graphite rubbings, and intricate drawings that are to be experienced physically but also ask viewers to look introspectively at their own inner worlds.

The overwhelming size of some of these works contrasts against meticulous drawings and delicate watercolors and while the former risks overshadowing the latter, this contrast is precisely the point. By juxtaposing the grand with the intricate, Suh shows that memory does not exist at a single scale. We remember our homes and their rooms, while also holding onto the small elements that fill them. Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul 2024, presented for the first time, demonstrates this well and is at the heart of this emotional experience. Here, Do Ho Suh outlines his current home and partners this with architectural features from previous spaces he and his family have inhabited. 

Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home, 2013–2022 is the first and one of the most powerful works exhibited. Newly reconstructed but made over several months, the large-scale wall installation was created using a practice which in itself is meditative. The artist’s childhood home was covered with Hanji (mulberry paper) and gently rubbed with graphite capturing its structure and all its blemishes, which were enhanced by the elements the paper was left exposed to. This process mirrors how we recall our own homes—not as exact images, but through textures, sensations, and fragments of detail.

Do Ho Suh Nests, 2024. Courtesy the Artist and Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro. Photography by Jeon Taeg Su © Do Ho Suh

Visitors continue to move through the colorful corridors of Nests, 2024, where Suh stitches together rooms, hallways, and entryways from buildings in Seoul, New York, London, and Berlin. These liminal spaces, often passed through without thought, become the focus, transformed into a fluid architecture that defies the logic of solid buildings. These in-betweens embody the shifting nature of memory and migration, like walking through the echo of a home that never fully was, but somehow feels known.

Suh’s films: Robin Hood Gardens, 2018 and Dong In Apartments, 2022, underscore the ever-changing layout of cities like London and Daegu. They show built environments as malleable living things that continue to be loved, destroyed, rebuilt and changed alongside the rest of us. This rich and colorful exhibition and the themes it touches on are as relevant as they have ever been with pieces reflecting on how political unrest coat our memories of time and space. Home is something to be reminded of and while some reviews have suggested the exhibition feels overcrowded, perhaps that is not far off from most people’s lived experience of where and how they live their lives.

The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House is on view through October 19th 2025 at the Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1 9TG.