What are the bodily characteristics that make a city? That is what I was thinking about while walking through the Bronx Documentary Center's exhibition Martha Cooper: Streetwise. Martha Cooper is perhaps best known for documenting New York City’s graffiti and breaking culture in the early 1980s, though this exhibition offers a survey of her career from the late 1970s through 2010s in New York, Baltimore, Tokyo, and the South African Township of Soweto. Still, I found myself drawn to Cooper's images of the city, because they inspired me to think deeply on the physical experience of living here. 

One of the works that opens the exhibition is “Cops patrolling on the number # 1 line Harlem” (1981), among Cooper's best-known. It showcases the gritty romanticism of New York City during the 1980s: Two cops patrol a subway car while a woman sits in a collage of dilapidated grays, colorful advertisements, and graffiti. Even though one cop looks directly at the camera, it is the gaze of the woman sitting who connects with the viewer. Her eyes are more alert than theirs, and the red coat that adorns her tense body induces a flash of caution greater than the police uniforms, which almost blend in with the scenery. Yesterday’s New York, much like today’s, was a time of hyper-vigilance for residents. 

The section “Street Play” centers on Cooper's documentation of the Lower East Side between 1978 and 1980. I was struck by these images. Growing up in New York City is about making do and having the world as your playground. We have parks, but we also have fire escapes, fire hydrants, streets, rooftops, windowsills, alleys, and vacant lots on which to unleash our energy. All these spaces and objects, combined with a childlike imagination, instill a sense of limitless potential for the uses of public space in our city. They reminded me so much of depictions of midcentury youth by photographers such as Helen Levitt and Arthur Leipzig. It made me realize that photographers like Cooper and her contemporary Jamel Shabazz do not get enough credit for continuing this legacy of photographing urban youth.

Cooper’s famous photographs of hip hop’s infancy are a main feature in this exhibition, set in clubs, streets, and trains. These works showcase the intensely physical relationship between the youth and the city: breaking down boxes to dance upon, spray-painting on walls and subway cars, and climbing on and dangling from public transit. This was an era when architecture and infrastructure literally and figuratively spoke the city through words and color, and its inhabitants spoke back to it through physical gestures. 

This symbiotic relationship was especially evident in Cooper’s photographs of the work of Bronx artists Rigoberto Torres and John Ahearn. Torres and Ahearn make live cast portraits of people in their Bronx neighborhood and attach them as 3D murals onto the building walls in their community. In one photograph I particularly loved, Cooper captures a group of friends playing double dutch below a mural of the same friends playing double dutch. I was mesmerized by how beautifully this photograph documents Torres and Ahearn's murals as careful and compassionate commemorations that seamlessly engage with the physical presence and identities that inspired their work.

Streetwise is a crucial visual and psychological analysis of the eclectic ways people physically express and assert themselves in New York City. These photographs are not purely nostalgic or romanticizing works — rather, they are a love letter to the landscape that invites us to contemplate the ways we choose to make it our own in turn through creative expression.

Martha Cooper: Streetwise continues at Bronx Documentary Center Annex (364 East 151st Street, Melrose, Bronx) through June 14. The exhibition was organized by the institution.

Welcome to the 339th installment of A View From the Easel, a series in which artists reflect on their workspace. This week, Rachelle Mozman Solano films, cuts paper, and paints in the solitude of her Brooklyn studio of over two decades.

Want to take part? Check out our submission guidelines and share a bit about your studio with us through this form! All mediums and workspaces are welcome, including your home studio.

Rachelle Mozman Solano, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn

How long have you been working in this space?

Twenty-three years.

Describe an average day in your studio.

I work on several projects at once but organize my days so I can shift into the different works. There is some transition time needed to change gears when switching projects. Sketching and writing helps a lot to organize. I usually begin time in the studio gathering my thoughts and looking through notes. I often listen to political interviews while working. It also depends what the work is, because there are times it can be too distracting.

How does the space affect your work?

My space is narrow and this has an impact on how large I can work. The narrowness determines if I need to rent a shooting studio when making video work where there are multiple characters.

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

My studio is in Bedford-Stuyvesant near Pratt. I know there are many artists around, but I rarely run into people.

What do you love about your studio?

I love that over the years I have learned how to make the most of the space. The light over the seasons can be very beautiful.

What do you wish were different?

Wider, I wish the space were wider.

What is your favorite local museum?

The Brooklyn Museum. It's a short bus ride away and I try to go often.

What is your favorite art material to work with?

I would say over the past decades my material has been light, but more recently it's been cut paper and paint.

Since 2016, the VH AWARD has served as a global platform for emerging media artists whose work engages with the diverse contexts of Asia. Organized by Hyundai Motor Group, the award supports artists in addressing critical contemporary issues through audiovisual experiments that transcend disciplinary and cultural boundaries. Individual artists or collectives of Asian descent, based in Asia, or of the Asian diaspora, can submit their proposal for a new work suitable for a single-channel video presentation.

The 7^th VH AWARD continues its commitment to fostering a sustainable creative environment with enhanced opportunities for the artists. For this edition, five finalists will receive an increased production grant to create a new work and participate in an online residency program newly developed in collaboration with Ars Electronica, the renowned media art institution in Linz, Austria. This residency will feature masterclasses and workshops specifically designed to support the finalists’ artistic development.

A notable addition to this edition is the "Honorary Mention" category. This new category aims to recognize a wider range of promising artists, providing them access to selected components of the residency programs to support their professional growth. In June 2027, one Grand Prix recipient will be announced and awarded an additional $30,000 to support their future artistic endeavors.

Applications are open through July 21, 2026. Proposals will be reviewed by an international jury. The resulting commissioned works will be presented across global platforms, including Hyundai Motor Group’s Vision Hall in Korea, HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Switzerland, the Ars Electronica Festival in Austria, and Singapore Art Week 2028. Interested artists can submit their applications through the VH AWARD official website.

For more information, visit vhaward.com.

At the center of Matthew Campbell’s The Man Who Stole the Gods (2026)is British dealer Douglas Latchford, accused of trafficking looted Cambodian antiquities on a massive scale before his death in 2020. To Latchford, Khmer sculpture was a luxury asset to be exploited, an “intense hobby” that turned into “a real business.” Latchford’s success depended not just on criminal networks that supplied and transported these objects, but on the willingness of museums, dealers, collectors, and scholars to accept fragmented or problematic provenance so long as the objects themselves retained the aura of rarity and beauty. Statues were decapitated and dismembered, stripped from their sanctuaries, yet somehow these objects arrived immaculately and spiritually deodorized in New York galleries and London auction houses.

Campbell portrays Latchford as a charismatic product of a global appetite for beautiful things, who was deeply embedded within the elite institutional structures that enable the movement of looted cultural objects into the legitimate art market. Latchford benefited from the particular privileges and geopolitical circumstances of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, which allowed wealthy Western expatriates to build lives in “exotic” postcolonial settings while cultivating close relationships with political and social elites. His social and cultural capital as eventual member of the “inner circle of the true expatriate elite,” Campbell writes, allowed him to move comfortably among the exclusive worlds of diplomacy, collecting, and high society, further legitimizing both himself and the objects he handled.

As a result, Latchford built close relationships with collectors, dealers, museum curators, and academics around the world, which “served him for decades.” For years, he provided them with a “steady supply of freshly stolen objects.” Among his clients was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Latchford’s most powerful marketing tool.”

He attempted to assert himself as a “giant of his field” through his publications with American scholar Emma Bunker. These books proved a useful way to establish fabricated provenance and support the sale of the objects it contained. However, things fell apart when these books allowed experts to connect statues stolen and sold by Latchford with pedestals remaining in situ in Cambodia.

There are moments in The Man Who Stole the Gods when the narrative leans heavily into the conventions of investigative thriller writing through its pacing, cliffhangers, and dramatic reveals. However, Campbell’s sensitivity toward the irreversible loss caused by these thefts is what distinguishes this book from much of the other reporting surrounding “Dynamite Doug,” as Latchford is often called. Campbell’s description of the physical violence of looting is particularly empathetic: He refuses to romanticize either the objects or the institutions that claim to protect them, resisting the sanitizing language of the art market, which tends to describe them as beautiful pieces of Asian art rather than sacred deities violently looted from communities of origin and trafficked across borders to be sold to the highest bidder. Campbell treats the statues as evidence of absence, with severed sandstone feet still anchored in Cambodian soil as spaces haunted by violent extraction and greed.

Through this imagery, Campbell’s main argument is that art market bureaucracy is an effective laundering mechanism for looted cultural heritage. He insists that cultural heritage cannot be separated from the conditions under which it circulates. The polished language of acquisition, donation, and collection management of the art market obscures layers of violence and inequality upon which it functions. Associated provenance records, such as shipping manifests, expert authenticity statements, auction catalogs, and conservation reports, facilitates this laundering process by fabricating a plausible story that the art market is happy to accept without question. In short, they are evidence of institutional complicity.

The repatriation of objects linked to Latchford remains ongoing, driven in large part by the investigative efforts of lawyer Bradley Gordon and his team. Campbell frames this as a partial repair, as it cannot undo the decades of extraction and desecration. But the returns do challenge the longstanding assumption that the Western museum is the rightful endpoint of these sacred objects.

Campbell’s book reveals the broader systems that continue to shape cultural ownership: the lingering authority of Western institutions to determine their own legitimacy without accountability. Ultimately, Campbell asks readers to reconsider what museums are protecting and whom they serve. Hopefully, The Man Who Stole the Gods will encourage a more critical interrogation of museums, galleries, and auction houses as sites of power, where cultural value is constructed through deeply unequal histories of commodification that continue to shape the art market today.

The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy (2026) by Matthew Campbell will be published by Porfolio on June 2 and available online and through independent booksellers.

Art Movements, published every Thursday afternoon, is a roundup of must-know news, appointments, awards, and other happenings in today’s chaotic art world.

Wolfgang Tillmans Wins Big

Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans is the winner of this year's Roswitha Haftmann Prize, established in 2001 in honor of the Swiss art dealer and administered by the Kunsthaus Zürich. At CHF 150,000 (~$191,361), it is Europe's largest monetary award for living visual artists. Past recipients include Cindy Sherman, Sigmar Polke, and Cecilia Vicuña. The German artist is recognized for “the entirety of his artistic oeuvre and for his social commitment,” according to a press statement.

Cheryl Finley Gets the Driskell Prize

The Spelman College professor was named the 2026 recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize, the High Museum of Art's $50,000 award dedicated to honoring contributions to African American art and art history. Finley, the director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective at Spelman, has also co-organized Black Portraiture[s], a global academic conference dedicated to African diasporic art, since 2013.

What Else Happened?

• El Museo del Barrio will honor Isabel and Agustín Coppel, J Balvin, and Estrellita Brodsky with its Tony Bechara Legacy Award.
• Art Basel has announced the more than 200 exhibitors in the fifth edition of its Paris fair, taking place this fall.
• The Art Bridges Foundation in Bentonville, Arkansas, has acquired Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s “C. Jane Run” (2005), according to Ruiz-Healy Art, the gallery that represents the artist.

Fell in Love With a Sculpture

I fell in love once and almost completely ... 🎶 As a teenager, I remember reading that before the White Stripes made it big, frontman Jack White worked as a furniture upholsterer and would hide copies of his records by stitching them beneath layers of fabric. So it came as little surprise (but no less of a delight) to learn that the guitarist, singer, songwriter, and literal jack-of-all-trades is also a visual artist with a committed material practice. Jack White's found-object sculpture, design, interactive pieces, and installations will go on public view for the first time at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery starting on May 29. Who needs a bass player?

For the New York Review of Architecture, Thomas de Monchaux grapples with the ethics and complexities of the newly unveiled Studio Museum in Harlem and the Princeton University Art Museum, both designed by David Adjaye:

In light of the biographies of their architects, we who are obliged to use buildings cannot easily cease that use—ask anyone stuck with an authentic Philip Johnson. But nor can buildings be fully understood in ignorance, willful or otherwise, of the circumstances of their designing. “When the abuser is a publicly known, creative person, there is an added layer of complication,” wrote Daniela Soleri in the 2017 Medium essay in which she alleged a longtime pattern of abuse perpetrated by her late father, the cultish and visionary architect Paolo Soleri. (The accusation was reported further in a 2020 article in The Guardian.) She continued, “The work itself argues against you, is a source of power for him. You are challenging his successes and everything his work means to anyone who has gained from affiliation and decided that he and his work are essential to their own identity.” This possibility applies an unusual moral burden to any discussion of work by anyone subject to such imputation, especially when—as is the case with David Adjaye—the allegations are ongoing and may never be civilly or criminally adjudicated. As I write and you read, shall we stay aware of how the mere fact of these words, regardless of their content, may, in Daniela Soleri’s formulation, energize the works as such a source of power?

For Harper's Bazaar, Kaitlyn Greenidge interviews Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat, one of the finest novelists working today, about the allure of writing ghost stories and her daily process:

You wrote one of my favorite craft books ever, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, a book where you look at death in literature. Can you talk a bit about why you chose to write a craft book about this?

In 2007, I published a memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, about my uncle dying in immigration custody in 2004 and my father dying of pulmonary fibrosis soon after. I really had two fathers. My uncle helped raise me in Haiti. When I was writing the book, my mother explicitly told me to leave her out of it. It’s their book, she said. So after she died of ovarian cancer in 2014, I decided to write about her.

How do you write about someone who doesn’t want to be written about? How do you write about death at all? I started rereading some of the books I love with that question in mind.

Patagonia is going after drag queen Pattie Gonia, and the public is not happy about it. Archie Mitchell has the story for BBC:

Wyn Wiley, who performs as Pattie Gonia, said the firm was threatening "the erasure of my name, my advocacy, my community" and the livelihoods of those employed by the drag queen and climate activist.

"If Patagonia wants to celebrate Pride Month this year by taking a queer climate activist to federal court, then I'm here to fight for myself," Wylie said.

Hundreds of detainees at an ICE prison in New Jersey are on hunger strike, with crowds of supporters gathered outside its walls. For the Guardian, José Olivares and Julius Constantine Motal report on the strike and ICE's violent response:

As nighttime approached on Tuesday, a line of ICE officers, armed with guns, batons, Tasers and pepper spray, stood outside the facility gates, occasionally pushing the crowd back so official cars and vans could enter and exit the property.

This followed a hectic weekend of demonstrations and clashes. On Monday, a number of Democratic lawmakers, including New Jersey senator Andy Kim and Governor Mikie Sherrill, had attempted to enter the facility. Kim has made several visits inside the facility in his congressional capacity and has declared conditions “inhumane”.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the parent agency of ICE, and its department secretary, Markwayne Mullin, accused the Democratic politicians of “spreading smears” about ICE and denied the strike was taking place.

Mia Sato reports for the Verge about the AI oversight fight between union workers and management at the New York Times:

Unionized staff with the Tech Guild say Times management has refused to provide the union with information related to how the company has used AI, its plans for AI use in the future, and how it will affect employees’ jobs and workflow. (The union filed an unfair labor practice charge earlier this month.) The Tech Guild, a NewsGuild of New York unit of around 700 software engineers, designers, product and project managers, and data analysts, also filed grievances saying Times management violated their collective bargaining agreement when it started using two internal AI tools that track and evaluate employee performance and activity.

Apparently, 19th-century French youth afflicted with le mal du siècle walked so Gen Z could run, scholar Emily Herring explains in Aeon:

Musset was not the first to articulate the idea of the mal du siècle. Some decades earlier, François-René de Chateaubriand had expressed his own generation’s malaise, warning of the ‘unsettled state of the passions’, the ‘tedium of the heart’ and the ‘secret inquietude’ of young people whose environment offered no outlet for their intense feelings. ‘With a full heart,’ he sighed, ‘we dwell in an empty world.’ The Romantic novelist Jean Paul helped give conceptual form to a similar idea by popularising the German term Weltschmerz, or world-weariness, the sense that suffering arises from the very order of the world. As the first decades of the 19th century unfolded, a number of other writers, not least Musset’s lover and principal interlocutor Sand, theorised and dramatised the moral malady of their age. Of all the expressions of the mal du siècle, however, the one Musset presented in the story of his alter ego Octave proved the most emblematic and enduring.

Defector's Brandy Jenson on the long-awaited mini series about Mary, the unsung Bennett sister in Pride & Prejudice:

What is most winning about this production is what it does not do. It does not attempt to modernize the material by having Mary make cutting quips directly to camera, or making her waltz to a Doja Cat track. Nobody in this show has noticeable veneers. We are spared the indignity of being treated like morons who need to be fed the medicine of 19th-century social critique by putting it in a spoonful of TikTok-ified honey.

Instead, the narrative itself feels fresh, simply by virtue of its interest in Mary’s development as a woman unsuited to the demands of her time, but nonetheless living in it. Don’t make the mistake of overlooking The Other Bennet Sister. She is worth paying attention to.

Matt Bernstein never misses (and the fact that someone thought this was a good idea is so bleak):

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I knew Sam Altman reminded me of someone:

@philsnotchill Chatses #chatgpt #parody #comedy #lordoftherings #gollum ♬ original sound - Phil Gillen

Summer pup cup!

@maplethechocolatesausage Summer days 🍦#summer #heatwave #puppies #dogsoftiktok #sausagedog ♬ original sound - Ms.Kly - Klyracapinig✿🍒𐙚

Required Reading is published every Thursday afternoon and comprises a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

A few months ago, in the middle of a studio visit with the painter, sculptor, and critic David Humphrey, he showed me a plan on his computer for his upcoming exhibition of works on paper, Anecdote, at Kate Werble Gallery. He explained that he was going to transform the gallery into a room by painting a sofa, plant, cocktail table, standing lamp, and other pieces of furniture and decoration onto the walls. 

While Humphrey’s casual, playful setting did not make the actual works on paper better or worse, it did do something unexpected: It made this viewer rethink the paintings I had looked at in his studio, the drawings I had previously seen, and his work as a whole. For most of his career, critics have been perplexed by Humphrey’s work, because here was a postmodern artist who did not fit into any of its well-documented categories. His art did not rely on appropriation, citation, parody, and irony. By focusing on how Humphrey fit into postmodernism, which had started to coalesce by the time he was beginning to exhibit in the late 1970s, critics overlooked that his skepticism, sense of the absurd, and criticism of well-known tropes such as the masculinity of painting, were essential to his approach to art. 

His work is funny and absurd, and he neither takes himself too seriously nor pursues a signature style. Rather than narrowing down, he embraces the use of what he called, in an interview with Jennifer Samet in this magazine, “different pictorial languages that work with each other dynamically.” Free-floating collision and juxtaposition lie at the heart of his work, reflecting the exterior and interior cacophony of our daily lives under late-stage capitalism. What makes it endearing is his humor, which pulls us into a tumultuous world of consumer choices, fluid identities, strange geography, and feelings of dislocating futility, while never expressing superiority either between or over his male and female subjects. I now see Humphrey as a gadfly, quietly and insistently challenging the status quo not by trying to knock the train of postmodernism over, echoing the heroic mode, but by being slyly subversive, as if placing pennies on the track.

Within the uncluttered loft-like space full of generic furniture that Humphrey imagines for us, art and life are inseparable. Drawings are pinned to the wall in clusters, isolated as single examples, and equally spaced in a row. In one drawing, we see a fully dressed man sleeping on a couch. Is he a surrogate for the artist or a collector or, perhaps, both, since artists are collectors of images and things? How are we to see a group of drawings, pinned to a trompe l’oeil structure that recalls an empty billboard? Has the border between outside and inside dissolved? Are our apartments still sanctuaries? Or is that an illusion?

Many of the drawings are gems. Within the black, outlined body of a horse whose legs are open tubes, we see a crouching hunter shooting a rifle, the trajectory of the bullet culminating at the animal’s asshole. Meanwhile, the horse is looking down at what appears to be a red molecular structure. Another drawing actually consists of two drawings Humphrey has pinned together. On the left, a shapeless woman in a matching floral bathing cap and bathing suit points at a realistically drawn young woman, who occupies the other sheet. That woman is sitting on a board, with her clawed hands and prehensile feet bound, looking disdainfully at the first open-mouthed woman. By abutting the two drawings, Humphrey makes the juxtaposition a visible, physical act. And in still another drawing, an outlined horse with a short black mane and orange erection stares into the open black window of a shed. If we take the horse as a substitute for the viewer, then Humphrey is bringing voyeurism and pornography to the act of looking.

There are many ways to look at and think about Humphrey’s open-ended exhibition, which includes both a multitude of drawings and multiple, shifting contexts in which to see them. But mostly, his work brings us back to the fundamental questions of art: What do we use it for? How is it part of our daily life?

David Humphrey: Anecdote continues at Kate Werble Gallery (474 Broadway, 3rd Floor, Soho, Manhattan) through June 6. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

Jay Milder, founder of City Gallery and painter of bold abstractions that interpreted New York City life, has died at the age of 92. The news of his passing was announced by Eric Firestone Gallery, which has represented the artist since 2022. 

Milder passed away in his beloved city on Wednesday, May 27, from a stroke, according to the gallery.

Born in Omaha in 1934, Milder moved from Nebraska to New York after graduating from high school. In the decades following his arrival, Milder carved out a space for himself in the downtown art scene as a bold Figurative Expressionist and cooperative gallerist who championed informal and improvisational works.

"Jay was at the center of something,” dealer Eric Firestone told Hyperallergic in an email. “He moved through the world the way he painted: with total commitment, and on his own terms.”

Milder co-founded City Gallery, an artist-run space, with Red Grooms in 1958 at the friends’ shared Flatiron loft. The gallery, which was only open through the following year, held some of the first New York shows of works by the now-revered Swedish-American sculptor Claes Oldenburg and Abstract Expressionist Jim Dine. Its roster also included Mimi Gross, Lester Johnson, and others.

The gallery marked a new age of urban, anti-establishment experimental art that punctuated New York City's art world in the late 1950s and ’60s. Melissa Rachleff Burtt, author of Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City (2017), interviewed Milder in 2013 and 2015.

“I vividly remember him describing frustration with the Tenth Street co-op scene, how the gallery he joined refused to have Claes Oldenburg as a member,” Rachleff recalled in an email to Hyperallergic. “But that frustration prompted Jay [and others] to start the City Gallery in a loft Grooms and Milder shared in Chelsea. They were savvy about getting press, and about having a large group show with established artists included.”

In 2015, Burtt visited Milder’s studio in a large building in Pennsylvania, where she viewed his abstracted subterranean portrait series Subway Runners (1960–64), which debuted in a 1964 exhibition at Martha Jackson Gallery. The warped, emotive faces were shown again in 2022 in a solo exhibition at Eric Firestone Gallery.

“The figures were schematic characters [with] lots of personality, people crushed together somewhat incongruously,” Burtt recounted. “Exactly what the subway feels like even now.” 

After moving to New York City as a teenager, Milder traveled to Paris, Chicago, and Provincetown in the 1950s. In France, he studied with the Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine and Cubist painter André Lhote and recruited Ed Clark, who would become a pioneering member of the New York School, as an informal mentor. When he returned to the United States, Milder studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, meeting his future gallery partner Red Grooms during a summer he spent in Massachusetts. 

Works by Milder, now associated with a “second-generation New York School” Figurative Expressionism, according to Eric Firestone, are held in the collections of major institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum and the New Museum.

Burtt recalled learning that Milder’s grandfather was a Jewish mystic, who exerted an undeniable influence on his craft. He often invoked Kabbalistic, or Jewish mystical, numerology in his paintings. “This mysticism, this spirit of seeking, is fundamental to Jay, as well as his playfulness and love of urban places,” Burtt said.

Curator and Milder's close friend Martha Henry remembered Milder as "funny and generous," quipping that the painter enjoyed "dancing to reggae and salsa, despite knowing none of the steps."

"He believed that painting was a spiritual and regenerative act," Henry told Hyperallergic. "That view may seem almost quaint today because it is so distant from the cynicism and loss of faith that permeate contemporary life."

Assembled over decades, the late abstract artist Frank Stella's breathtaking collection of textiles made by Diné women enters the spotlight for the first time in a New York City presentation ahead of its upcoming sale. Stella developed the selection of 40 weavings from the 19th and 20th centuries according to his personal taste for bold color palettes and dynamic geometric patterns, shirking the typical collecting benchmarks for Diné textile scholarship.

Organized by antique rug and textile expert Peter Pap, Stella's collection is on display through June 10 at Arader Galleries on Madison Avenue alongside a rare selection of the artist's early geometric drawings, establishing the connection between Diné weaving history and Stella's own visual language. The selection will also be presented at Pap's store in Dublin, New Hampshire, later this summer.

Harriet McGurk, the artist's wife, said in a phone call with Hyperallergic that Stella acquired the bulk of his collection in the mid-1960s through artist, dealer, and curator Tony Berlant, to whom he was introduced by fellow artist and Navajo textile collector Donald Judd. Berlant even included one of Stella's acquisitions in Navajo Blanket (1972), a traveling exhibition he co-organized with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's textiles curator Mary Kahlenberg.

Aside from Navajo Blanket, McGurk specified that Stella never really exhibited his beloved collection.

“ He would wrap himself up in one in the living room when it was cold, and we hung another up in our house, but they were not on display to other people,” she said.

“ What Frank admired so much was the workmanship and the artists who made them, because their sense of geometry resonated a lot with him,” McGurk continued. “They were just so natural and so direct, but really inspired. Frank liked more of the design, the look, the feel, and the idea of the person who made it, rather than the condition.”

The exhibition is bolstered by new research by Jill Ahlberg Yohe, a leading Navajo textiles scholar and curator at the Cafesjian Art Trust Museum, who noted that Stella's holdings diverged from the cultural and historical benchmarks that inform most other private and institutional collections, as the artist preferred examples of creative innovation.

Ahlberg Yohe said that most of the objects were categorized as Transitional Period/Era weavings (c. 1880–1910). These are marked by a period of major change in Diné life and artistic tradition due to the emergence of an Anglo market through trading posts, the importation of synthetically dyed yarn, and the consumer shift to rugs, wall-hangings, and decorative pieces over the intertribal preferences for classic blankets known for their durable and meticulous craftsmanship.

“Weavers of this era created textiles with novel design combinations, bold new colors, and illusionistic play, and the varieties of individuality,” an excerpt from Ahlberg Yohe's research reads.

“This originality has confounded Navajo weaving scholars for more than a century,” the text continues. “Diné textile scholarship — built in anthropology rather than in art history — looks for cultural generalization and material-based technique over creative impulse. The more unusual and individualistic a textile is, the less attention it gets paid.”

Many pieces in Stella's collection have been identified as Germantown-style blankets and Eyedazzler textiles — two incredibly significant shifts in Diné weaving defined by bright, saturated colors and pulsating zigzag patterns that functioned as optical illusions. These styles emerged during the aftermath of the government's deadly deportation of the Diné from their ancestral homelands to the Bosque Redondo reservation in 1864. Having killed off a majority of their sheep and livestock in the scorched-earth method of ethnic cleansing, the government provided the Diné with synthetically colored ply yarn spun in Germantown, Pennsylvania, after the treaty that conditionally recognized the Navajo Nation was enacted in 1868.

“This era and [the textiles] in Stella’s collection defy established categories and analysis, leaving them outside of the reach of canonical scholarship and further depriving them of their rightful place in art history and in important collections,” Ahlberg Yohe said in her research essay.

Once the show moves to Pap's business location in Dublin, New Hampshire, Ahlberg Yohe will lead an onsite symposium with Jamie Powell, the Hood Museum of Art's Indigenous Arts curator, about the role of Diné textiles in the Western art canon, on Sunday, July 12.

VENICE — If you’re Eurocentric by disposition, confident that the West is the single source of high art and ideas of progress, then don’t visit Koyo Kouoh's exhibition In Minor Keys at the 2026 Venice Biennale. 

If you bristle at the mention of White colonizers, this show is not for you, though it might be partly about you. 

Moreover, if you’re convinced that what’s happened in Gaza over the last three years looks nothing like a genocide, you’re in for boatloads of protest signs and solidarity statements that tell you just how dead wrong you are. 

This posthumous exhibition, the crown jewel of a momentous biennale, is a triumph of the historically dispossessed and overlooked, the proud and beautiful “wretched of the earth.”

It’s a solid hymn to the billions who carry melancholy and riotous joy in the same heart. Those with a generational short fuse but endless endurance. Those who swim in grief, but throw the best parties. 

Call them the Global South, or Global Majority. Call them Black and Brown people. Call them the “developing world.” Call them whatever you want. 

If you count yourself among them, you’ll get what this exhibition tries to achieve with a snap of the fingers. But you don’t have to be one of the historically disenfranchised to let your heart fill up with its soulful hums.

In Minor Keys boasts work by 111 international artists with a strong, perhaps unprecedented, representation of artists from Africa, the Caribbean, and their diasporas.

Ever so tenderly, the show strums the chords of the heart, leaving a gentle, lasting resonance. It’s an exhibition informed by poetry, ritual, mourning, struggle, and beauty. It sets rage and retribution aside, relaxing the oppressed’s clenched fist for a moment of calm, centeredness, and self-forgiveness. 

“Take a deep breath, exhale, drop your shoulders, close your eyes,” instructs Kouoh in a curatorial statement she wrote before her sudden death last year, just weeks after she was named the curator of the international exhibition.  

The charismatic Cameroonian-Swiss curator died of liver cancer at age 57 while she was still in the early stages of putting together this show. She left behind a heartbroken artistic team of close friends and colleagues — Rasha Salti, Marie Hélène Pereira, Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Siddhartha Mitter, and Rory Tsapayi — who were required to pull themselves together and get the job done. Salti is a veteran curator who lives between Beirut and Berlin; Pereira is senior curator at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt; Feijoo is a film curator and scholar based in London; Mitter, who edited the exhibition’s catalog, is a prominent art writer; and Tsapayi is a researcher who specializes in Black histories. Together with the Biennale’s leadership and Kouoh’s family, they decided to continue with the exhibition according to the deceased curator’s vision and outlines. The conceptual framework of the show had already revealed itself to them. The list of artists was pretty much set. Though she’s no longer among us, it’s still very much Kouoh’s show. Her spirit is everywhere.  

It’s particularly present at the main pavilion in the Giardini, where you’re welcomed by a plumed and beaded Mardi Gras costume by Young Seminole Hunter tribe Big Chief Demond Melancon, a leading figure in New Orleans’s Black Masking tradition. It’s glorious, and it sets the tone for dedicated “shrines” to Issa Samb (Senegal) and Beverly Buchanan (US), two artists whom Kouoh admired. Samb, who died in 2017, was also a poet, thinker, and pillar of Dakar’s art community. The show juxtaposes him with Marcel Duchamp, adorning the walls with his paintings, objects, tools, and charms. Buchanan, who passed away in 2015, also looms large with her depictions of the shacks and shotgun houses of the American South, architectures haunted by the lingering ghost of chattel slavery. 

María Magdalena Campos-Pons (Cuba-US) provides a bigger spectacle in her tribute to Kouoh, in a colossal painting that depicts her standing alongside Black American novelist Toni Morrison, surrounded by sculpted flowers on the floor. That, too, can be called a shrine. (Campos-Pons also led a moving procession in the Giardini in memory of the late curator). Also unforgettable are Daniel Lind Ramos’s (Puerto Rico) anthropomorphic bricolage sculptures, assembled with found objects — fabrics, pieces of tarp, trash can lids, drums — and emoted by history.    

In the Arsenale, which hosts the lion's share of the exhibition, Australian-Lebanese artist Khaled Sabsabi, who was hounded by an aggressive Israel lobby after he was picked to represent Australia at the Biennale, wraps you up in a beguiling digital installation with phantoms moving behind a large, round canvas that made me feel like I'd entered Plato’s cave. Kader Attia (France-Algeria), a remixer of colonial legacies, walks you through a labyrinth of dangling robes and shattered mirrors as videos of shamans play on the wall. Kaloki Nyamai’s (Kenya) suspended, monumental canvases drip with ancestral memory. Guadalupe Maravilla’s (El Salvador-US) sculptural thrones — consisting of lufa, cotton, and straw among other materials — appear both protective and menacing. Thania Petersen’s (South Africa) stunning tapestry maps the migration of Sufi music through Afro-Asia, drawing from her Cape Malay heritage. 

Another cartographic tapestry by Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon reimagines the map of their homeland, Ireland, by highlighting sites of harm to women, such as Magdalene Laundries, punitive colonies for unmarried, ”promiscuous,” and sexually abused women. Walid Raad (Lebanon-US) creates a memorial to the surprising paths of history through palettes used for weapons shipments after Lebanon’s Civil War, which had been painted with copies of famous Arab and Turkish paintings. Annalee Davis (Barbados) presents a living herbarium sourced from the former plantation where her family has lived for generations. 

Earth, its offerings, and embedded histories, are a major theme in the exhibition. Michael Joo (US) brings actual fossils of sea lilies to the show. They hang from a mobile and vibrate according to the movement of people around them. Dan Lie’s (Germany) abstracted floral wreaths, hung with ropes and drawing on local histories in Venice, are arresting in their simplicity, and Linda Goode Bryant (US) builds a fully-functional vegetable farm at the Giardini, modeled after her farming initiative Project Eats, which encourages sustainable production of organic food in Black and Brown neighborhoods.          

I could go on and on, but after all the above, don’t let anyone tell you this exhibition isn’t political enough. 

In addition, massive protests and a historic strike, led partially by the artists in the show and quickly integrated into their art, became an inseparable part of this biennale. Proponents of the status quo took all this political action — including the resignation of the award jury — as the “collapse” of the biennale, while these developments in fact made it the most truthful and relevant biennale in a long while. 

On a much deeper level, In Minor Keys successfully plugs into the unseen recesses of political resistance — that subterranean quietude and focus that allow for centuries of endurance. That’s the sound of the strength and confidence of people who see themselves as part of the soil and fauna of their native lands. It’s an ancestral frequency that no foreign colonizer can tune into, not even after ages of settling a land that isn’t theirs.  

One of the artists in the exhibition that stuck with me most is Gaza-born painter Mohammed Joha, who’s been living in Marseille, France, in recent years. He overlays fabric and cardboard onto canvas to create outstanding abstract collages that recall the tents and tin shacks that people from Gaza have to live under after being robbed of their homes. The series is heartbreakingly titled No Shelter. 

I met Joha at one of the protests. He told me that his mother was slain in her sleep as the whole house collapsed over her head. His twin sister, her husband, and all of their children were killed at once in another Israeli airstrike. He then went on to deliver an impassioned speech in front of thousands of protesters, seemingly unbroken. In this show, artists like Joha have a voice. Sometimes it’s a thunderous roar, and other times, it comes in minor keys. 

VENICE — Last year, Lebanese-born, Sydney-based artist Khaled Sabsabi was chosen to represent his country at the 2026 Venice Biennale by Creative Australia, the country’s chief arts funding organization. Within a week, the government intervened to override that decision, based on claims that by including a blurred image of a former Hezbollah leader in a video from 2007, Sabsabi was a supporter of terrorism and an antisemite. In response, Koyo Kouoh, the curator of the biennale’s main exhibition, In Minor Keys, stepped in, inviting Sabsabi to the show. Outcry within the arts community and an independent review led to Sabsabi’s reinstatement to Australia’s pavilion. 

His two installations — “khalil” in In Minor Keys and “conference of one’s self” in the Australia pavilion — use painting, sound, and moving image to reflect on ideas of identity and collectivity, drawing upon his own life story and his interest in Tasawwuf (Sufi) teachings. Sabsabi migrated to Australia in 1976, at age 11, because of the civil war in Lebanon; living through that war left him with PTSD that he still deals with now, at age 60. In the 1980s, he became a hip-hop artist under the name “Peacefender,” backing up the Beastie Boys and Ice Cube on tours. He combined music with a sense of social justice, conducting workshops in community centers, prisons, and detention centers, only becoming a visual artist in 1998.

“khalil,” the first work you encounter at the Arsenale, is a 40-meter (~132-foot) canvas-cum-screen shaped in a spiral; the viewer enters the space to see a mesmeric, flickering, light- and color-filled projection that complicates our perception of the painting underneath. “a conference of one’s self” is its inverse: an octagon created by eight separate paintings, around which the viewer walks. Together, writes the curator, Michael Dagostino, they form “a proposition towards an idea of a shared humanity,” informed by  “migrant experiences, journeys, and encounters.” 

I spoke to Sabsabi about his work on May 10 in Venice. The interview has been edited and condensed.

Hyperallergic: I would love to start with your contributions to the Biennale. 

Khaled Sabsabi: I see both works as one body, offered as a way to understand ideas around “inner” and “outer.” The installation in the Australia pavilion is titled “conference of oneself.” It’s informed by a 12th-century Sufi poet, Farid ud-Din Attar, and his work “The Conference of the Birds.” The poem looks at a multitude of birds of various species coming together in search of one common leader. There is disagreement until the hoopoe bird says, “You need to find the Simorgh [a mythical being], which means you will have to go on a quest, a treacherous journey, and not everyone will make it.” 

Some of the birds decide that it’s not for them. But the others go on to this quest, and when they get to the final valley, there is no one there. The Simorgh doesn't exist. “Simorgh” is a Farsi word which means “30 birds.” And by this time there are 30 of them left. And they realize they are the Simorgh — that leadership is a collective endeavor. 

Here, it’s a conference of oneself. It’s a contradiction — how can the self have multiple beings? The work is a space where you're able to understand the multitude of beings within yourself — the self as a kind of collective. 

H: Tell me about the setup in the pavilion.

KS: The pavilion is essentially a square. I turned it into an octagonal space, an 8-pointed star — two overlapping squares. Both four and eight have symbolic and numerological meanings in relation to the story of the Simorgh. As you enter, there are four tapestry pieces that form either an entry or an exit — it’s up to you to decide which one to go through. And then again, there's a negotiation: How do I cross this threshold? What's behind it? Someone might be coming out at the same time — so there's a moment of interaction, a moment of recognition of the other. 

You see the octagonal object, which is made of eight canvases. Do you walk around it in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction? Up to you. By the time you get to the end, you realize you're back at the beginning. It’s all about the idea of learning and unlearning. 

H: We see paintings, but not just paintings. 

KS: Yes. I do a lot of public projects — community festivals and so on — that involve outdoor projection. With this work, I wanted to bring those technologies and possibilities within a gallery context. 

So, there’s the canvas, obviously — the painting. And then the painting is photographed and projected onto itself. But then, while it's projected onto itself, I take the primary colors of the painting, and I vectorize each of them. And then I insert video images [a procession in Lebanon, a football match in Australia, and so on] into those layers. That’s what’s giving you this optical illusion: Is it real? What am I seeing? Am I seeing the canvas or something else?

The technologies for both “conference of one’s self” and “khalil” are similar. The soundscapes are similar with both works, too. They sprung out of the same time — they came out of the same world. 

H: How did you alight on this set of technical maneuvers? 

KS: I’ve always been a maker. I've gone from an analog era to a digital era. I went from cutting tape and making samples during my career in hip hop to the digital era of workstations. 

But I love the handmade, and even with the move to digital I find things I can connect with.  [Art] has to have accessible moments for the viewer — it can't be just technology for technology's sake. 

H: This piece, your whole project in fact, seems to really be about thinking about how we operate or exist as subjects. 

KS: I am a Lebanese Muslim man whose parents migrated in the late ’70s due to civil war to Australia — a land that's been colonized and settled and hasn't reconciled with its history and its First Nations people. So, there is that lived experience.

But then, the world is in a really difficult moment — not just war and conflict, but also, what does it mean for a collective humanity? Where are we going? As art makers, it would be great if we could contribute to that conversation. I’ve always said that I believe in the fact that the people hold the power. Eventually, we're going to have to sit down and have conversations. 

H: Your path to the Australia pavilion seemed to be determined by some people’s refusal to have conversations, or wanting to shut down certain discourses or your voice in particular. Did that affect how this all came together? 

KS: Regardless of what was happening around the invitation, I've always believed in the work and what it stood for — coming into and reflecting upon our ideals of the self, but also walking away with some possibility and openness and recognition of the other. 

“khalil” came to me in a dream. I was at the American Academy in Rome at the time. Maybe it was influenced by Rome's antiquities. Maybe I took that, and then it reignited and became a vision. 

Michael [Dagostino, the curator of the Australia pavilion] and I — we've always believed in the power of the work. So, we decided that I needed to make it. I needed a bigger space than my western Sydney studio — large enough to paint a 40-meter [~44 yards] canvas. I reached out to friends and artists in our network, and a friend offered me their studio in Bangkok. 

When I finished “khalil” I had another dream — to stay on in Bangkok and make eight more paintings that are an inverse of “khalil.” 


H: So, when the Australians came back to you with the reinstatement, you already had these eight paintings in your pocket. 

KS: “khalil” was the work that I initially proposed for the pavilion, and now it was going to be in the main exhibition. So with the pavilion, it felt like there was a possibility to really extend the interrogation of outer and the inner, and extend the nuances of longing, geography, distance, living in and out of culture, and so on. 

We speak about the duality of being. For a while now, I no longer think within a duality of existence. I think there's a third space, an undefined space. That’s what this work is looking for.


Editor's note 5/28/26 10:34am EDT: A previous version of this article stated that Khaled Sabsabi's “khalil" (2026) is 40 feet (~12m). It is actually 40 meters (~132 feet). The article has been updated.

In Memoriam is published every Wednesday afternoon and honors those we recently lost in the art world.

Paula Kamps (1990–2026)
German painter

Her paintings, often featuring fragmented figures, flowers, and scenes of daily life, bridge watercolor and drawing, with hazy and brilliant stains of color and arcane symbology. She held solo exhibitions at Galerie Christine Mayer in Munich, M. LeBlanc in Chicago, and Sans titre in Paris, and more; taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and her work is held in permanent collections of institutions such as the X Museum in Beijing.

"Paula Kamps was an artist of rare sensitivity," sans titre, her representing gallery, said in a statement. "Her work will remain with us, not only through the exhibitions, projects, and moments we shared, but through the lasting presence it continues to hold in the lives of those who encountered it."

Eric Alan Hirt “Eson” (d. 2026)
Miami graffiti legend

A prolific urban tagger and member of the Miami Style Gods (MSG) crew, he was known for traversing treacherous urban landscapes to tag street infrastructure. The artist appeared in the 2018 VICE documentary, Miami’s Graffiti Style Gods, in which he describes his passion for street tagging, which has been viewed more than 6 million times.

Read the obituary

Lucy Edwards (1928–2026)
Master ceramicist, potter, painter, and educator

The master artisan specialized in clay platters, pots, and animals, and taught at the Long Beach Foundation of the Arts and Sciences, the Community Arts Center in Wallingford, the Main Line and Wayne Art Centers, and more. She was a founder of the Haverford Guild of Craftsmen and a longtime member of the Pennsylvania Guild of Craftsmen.

Anna Kafetsi (1954–2026)
Greek historian and founder of the National Museum of Contemporary Art

A foundational figure of Greece's contemporary art scene, she established the National Museum of Contemporary Art, its first national institution of contemporary art, and led it for 14 years. As curator of the 20th-century collections at the National Gallery–Alexandros Soutsos Museum in Athens earlier in her career, she organized a landmark exhibition on the Russian Avant-Garde, as well as others on modern art.

Tess Jaray (1937–2026)
Abstract painter and educator

Her abstract works consisted of flat, painted dramas of shape and color, and emotionally charged symbols. She took on public commissions such as the floor of the Victoria Station in the London Underground, was an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and taught at institutions including the Hornsey College of Art and the Slade for decades.

John Marion (1933–2026)
Sotheby's auctioneer

Long considered the greatest auctioneer in the United States, he oversaw many record-breaking sales, serving as the public face of Sotheby's for more than three decades. He sold pieces like Vincent van Gogh's “Irises” (1889), Pablo Picasso’s “Self-Portrait: Yo” (1901), and Andy Warhol's collection of cookie jars.

Ben Morea (1941–2026)
Artist and counterculture icon

Living on the Lower East Side in the 1970s, he published the counterculture magazine Black Mask and led Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, a team of runaways, dropouts, and artists who hosted community meals, ran a free clothing store, and assisted Vietnam War objectors. He was also an abstract painter who showed at White Columns and other major galleries.

Rainy Naha (1949–2026)
Hopi-Tewa potter

Known for hand-coiled white ware pottery, she infused Hopi-Tewa aesthetic traditions with her own individual touch. She won many awards including the “Best of Pottery” prize at the Santa Fe Indian Market in 2007, and signed her work with the traditional feather hallmark also used by her mother, Helen “Featherwoman” Naha.

Margot Wellington (1934–2026)
The woman who saved Grand Central Terminal

As director of the Municipal Art Society, she helped save New York City's iconic Grand Central from demolition, helping establish landmark preservation law. She also led groundbreaking campaigns to create historic landmark districts and rescue other endangered buildings like Radio City Music Hall.

Taking photographs, perusing cultural heritage sites, and visiting art museums could slow aging, according to a new study published earlier this month in the journal Innovation in Aging.

Led by psychobiologist and epidemiologist Daisy Fancourt and a group of researchers at University College London, the study claims to provide the first-ever evidence that engaging with arts and culture can decelerate biological aging or even have anti-aging effects.

 "These findings contribute to growing evidence that arts engagement, alongside exercise, diet, sleep, and nature, is a fundamental pillar of health," Fancourt told Hyperallergic.

UK Research and Innovation, a public funder, supported the research alongside the University of Florida’s EpiArts Lab. The study is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Florida school and University College London to investigate the impact of the arts on human health, Fancourt said.

The study analyzed the arts and cultural activities of 3,556 adults in the United Kingdom, measuring their relationship to seven "epigenetic clocks," or markers of biological age, found in participants' blood samples between 2010 and 2012. The researchers also studied the impact of physical exercise on the same epigenetic markers, finding that both arts engagement and movement yielded age-defying results.

Participants who engaged monthly in cultural activities, defined as both participating in performing or visual arts and observing them as spectators, were 1.02 biological years younger than those who only interacted with the arts once or twice annually. The study also found that making or observing art is associated with slower aging in biological categories linked to disease morbidity and mortality.

"We are essentially all born with our set of DNA, but our lifestyles can affect which parts of our DNA get read out. A bit like a recipe book, the recipes are all there when the book is printed, but we only choose to make some of them," Fancourt explained.

She also said she is hopeful that as the global population ages, these results could contribute to interventions that would help increase individuals' “healthspan,” or the time they spend “free from diseases, physically fit and functioning.”

The new findings build upon a body of scientific evidence suggesting that interacting with art can positively impact human physiology, including by reducing cortisol levels and alleviating symptoms of depression.