Scrolling on Instagram, I stumble upon a clip of a 25-year-old guy from Chicago walking by the water after finishing work at his finance job. He tells us that he’s on his way to his downtown apartment, where his girlfriend and his new puppy are waiting for him, and that later he plans to go get beers and watch college football with his friends. “And I gotta say, I don't think life gets much better than this,” he concludes, brimming with positivity. “It's mid 70s, the sun is out … Is this peak? I think I'm peaking right now.”

What a lovely reminder to be grateful for life’s little things, I think to myself. Inspired, I share the video with my wife, because I want her to peak, too. She replies, “LOL, is this real?”

The biggest art story of the week is about John Galliano, a fashion designer who was convicted of antisemitic and anti-Asian hate speech in France in 2011, and has once confessed his love for Hitler. This week, he pulled out of an exhibition at The Met’s Costume Institute after public and donor outcry. Until three weeks ago, I had no idea who Galliano was. I guess I’m not a big Vogue reader. If I had a time machine, I’d zap myself back to the day before I found out. 

But you take the good with the bad. Next month, I’ll be rounding out my first year as editor-in-chief. I think you'll enjoy what we have planned for this fall. I’m blessed with an excellent team. 

Meanwhile, tensions between a hostile barista and me reach a boiling point when a glass bottle falls on the floor and shatters. She’s been giving me the stink eye for weeks while a poster behind her declares, “ICE Is Not Welcome Here.”

Out on the street, I find myself feeling jealous of a concrete mixer truck. It's constantly processing what’s inside, never letting any of it harden. I watch an interview with 99-year-old American painter Alex Katz. “Get outside yourself and move,” he tells the reporter.  

On my way home from work, I get hit with a sudden urge to make a detour onto Orient Avenue. A large park reveals itself and I go in for a stroll. I see people jogging or walking their dogs. Others are playing tennis, basketball, or squash. Skaters swing up and down in the air. One guy on a bench is halfway through Anna Karenina; two others are typing on their laptops, but by the looks of them, they must be completing manuscripts. The voices of merry children in the playground rise up to the sky. It's upper 70s; the sun is still out; and I gotta say, I don't think life gets much better than this.

—Hakim Bishara, editor-in-chief

News

• The British fashion designer John Galliano withdraws his upcoming exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, set to run concurrently with the 2027 Met Gala, after intense criticism of his past racist behavior.
• The National Park Service deinstalls an iconic 24-foot-tall sculpture by late artist Joel Shapiro from the grounds of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.  
• The British Museum hosts Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel for a VIP viewing of the Bayeux tapestry, drawing concerns among staff.
• Following this week’s news of Yayoi Kusama’s passing, artists, galleries, museums, and fashion houses around the world take to social media to reflect on the seismic loss. 
• Thieves make off with a platinum and diamond necklace from the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna.
• Demolitions at the Rike Park Music Theatre and Exhibition Hall in Tbilisi, Georgia prompt outcry from local community members and the architects.
• A new exhibition in NYC celebrates Snoopy’s enduring influence on art and fashion.
• Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich demands that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu order the dismantling of 40 Palestinian memorials in the Occupied West Bank.
• Art Movements: Mildred Howard wins the Artists’ Legacy Foundation Award, artists receive funding from the Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants, Art Gallery of Ontario director steps down, Alex Katz on PBS, and more.

From Our Critics

Features

Guides

Community

• A View From the Easel: printmaker and self-proclaimed “mountain ultrarunner” Hilary Lorenz transforms paper into boats, books, and weavings in the studio she built herself.
• In Memoriam: we honor Geles Cabrera, a sculptor who explored the body; Helch, a street artist who upset Queen Elizabeth; Jay Maisel, a commercial photographer who shaped the medium, and others.

Opportunities This Month

Christine Sun Kim's archive of deafness in pop culture, Guadalupe Rosales's East Los Angeles memoir, Kent Monkman's pulls back the curtain on a Vermeer painting — it's choose your own adventure in art books this fall. We've got far too many novels, catalogs, essay collections, and photography books coming out over the next three months to pick from, but these 15 caught our eye. Read on for a story within a story, an artist's take on Moby-Dick from our resident Mellville fan, Associate Editor Lisa Yin Zhang, and much more. Happy reading! —Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor

East of the River: A Memoir of Los Angeles Girlhood by Guadalupe Rosales | One World, September 8

In Guadalupe Rosales’s practice, the archive documents “what it feels like to hold something that is so meaningful.” That feeling is at the fore of her memoir, where images and other ephemera plumbed from the Los Angeles Chicana artist and educator’s personal archive are inseparable from the experiences that occasioned their capture. Rife with images of family, teenage friends, lowriders, and party flyers similar to those that appear in her portal-like, multi-media installations, this memoir stresses the importance of telling one’s own story, especially for those for whom the existing archives do not speak. —Phillip Pyle

Christine Sun Kim: Deaf Material | Primary Information, September 15

Christine Sun Kim has range — her drawing, installations, and video work are bitingly acidic, wickedly funny, and heartwrenchingly moving. With more than 600 photos of deaf imagery in mainstream culture — think memes, advertisements, disability signage, art, and more — that Kim has either taken or found, this book is not only a corrective to a lack of a comprehensive archive but also a glimpse into the mind of one of the most interesting artists working today. —Lisa Yin Zhang

Signals Across Vast Distances: Essays and Tales by Elizabeth Alexander | W. W. Norton & Company, September 15

Few books have stuck with me as poet, scholar, and Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander’s The Light of the World has. Published in 2015, three years after the sudden death of her husband, artist Ficre Ghebreyesus, the poetic memoir was pinpricked with the  devastating details of grief — shared recipes, an empty chair, a found acrostic. I’ll be first in line to read Signals Across Vast Distances, a collection of essays exploring a question artists have always chased: What is our role? —Lakshmi Rivera Amin

Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza by Fady Joudah | Milkweed Editions, September 22

One heart-rending photo from Gaza. Two, three, hundreds, thousands. In many, we see starved children walking around all day with empty pots instead of toys, begging for food. There's no school. No summer camp. No warm bath. No cozy bed. No storytime before sleep. No Pokémon cards or Spider-Man outfits. No roof to sleep under. No future in sight. Just grief and rubble all around.

This moving collection of photos, poems, and essays by National Book Award finalist Fady Joudah tells their stories. Words by him and others express how the greatest chapter of Palestinian resistance and survival is now being written by the children of Gaza. —Hakim Bishara

Excavation efforts are set to begin within the next two weeks for President Donald Trump’s controversial “Great Triumphal Arch,” according to a statement Interior Secretary Doug Burgum posted on X on Thursday, September 3. The announcement was made before the project has even received the green light from a federal review panel.

The National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), which evaluates design proposals throughout Washington, DC, preliminarily approved Trump's project on July 9, but issued several comments the president must address before earning the committee's final approval. The NCPC's primary concern is the height of the 250-foot-tall structure, which could violate the 130-foot cap imposed by the 1910 Height of Buildings Act and obstruct the sightlines of dozens of historical landmarks.

"This will be one of the Great Pieces of American Architecture, honoring the history and significance of Arlington Cemetery and befitting the most powerful Capital in the World," Burgum added in his post on Thursday, a month before the NCPC's next scheduled review on October 1.

Sitting on the highly trafficked Memorial Circle near Arlington National Cemetery, the white granite-clad arch will include a “Military Observation Deck” and be topped by two statues of gold eagles and one of a golden winged figure. While the project has been presented as a celebratory marker of the country's 250th anniversary, Trump has also dedicated the monument, which many have deemed the “Arc de Trump,” to himself.

LOS ANGELES — After nearly two decades of planning and construction, a spate of layoffs, and staffing controversies, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will open its doors to the public later this month in South Los Angeles’s Exposition Park. This week, members of the press were invited to tour the new institution and get a taste of the random and facile smorgasbord of art that awaits visitors. 

Founded by filmmaker George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, co-CEO of Ariel Investments, the reportedly $1 billion building designed by Ma Yansong/MAD Architects houses their collection of 40,000 works representing what they call “visual storytelling.” These include illustrations, history paintings, comic art, films, murals, and other genres that “have not always received the respect they deserve,” as press materials explain. The five-story, undulating, spaceship-like structure sits on an 11-acre campus of rolling green hills designed by Mia Lehrer of Los Angeles’s Studio-MLA, who also designed the building’s green roof.

“For thousands of years, that was the only way you could tell a story, with pictures,” Lucas said during a press preview on Wednesday, September 2 (seemingly disregarding traditions of oral histories or song). “Pictures and stories are very powerful. Put them together, and those two elements make a society.” 

“Narrative Art creates groups of people with common belief systems, which allows them to work together and not kill each other,” he continued, as if to finally resolve the question of what Narrative Art is, exactly, a query that has surrounded the museum for years.

Ironically, there is very little narrative at all in the Museum of Narrative Art, at least curatorially. The collection is spread throughout 100,000 square feet of gallery space, divided into 30 or so thematic galleries — Adventure, Romance, Motherhood, Civic Life, Science Fiction, Comics, Sports, and others — with a few dedicated to individuals such as famed fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, and Norman Rockwell, whose specific brand of folksy Americana can be felt throughout. Artworks are displayed free of context or even any wall text aside from shiny, metal letters announcing each section. The thematic arrangement mashes together artworks of different styles and eras, linked by the flimsiest of threads, as if to say “Look, we’re all the same: we play sports, we work, we raise children!”, with little interest in exploring the specific cultural or social conditions from which they emerged.

Welcome to the 353rd installment of A View From the Easel, a series in which artists reflect on their workspace. This week, Rujuta Rao carries a foldable studio wherever she goes, a poetic embrace of her life between continents and mediums.

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.

Rujuta Rao, New York City

How long have you been working in this space?

I've had this itinerant studio since January. I usually set it up in public spaces in New York City.

Describe an average day in your studio.

I tend to work on multiple projects in a circular manner, moving from one to another, working incrementally on each until I feel I've worked on them enough. I learned as a child that this way of working supports my swiftly moving attention and sustains my interest in each project. I work until 4am every day, and I enjoy talking to my family and friends in India while I work late. That is our time together.

How does the space affect your work?

My studio is presently portable, modular, and itinerant. I carry it around and set it up in public spaces. Each space and the people in it affect my work. The modular parts that compose my studio are also utilized in my performances and working with them in a studio context is a way to practice activating them in performance. The parts alternate between becoming work surfaces, bar-like interfaces to engage with people, and screens that create a sense of privacy in public.

This September in partnership with New York Textile Month, Scandinavia House presents the third iteration of NORDIC TEXTILE TAKEOVER, an exhibition, workshop series and symposium highlighting contemporary Nordic Textiles. This year’s program, THE COLD STITCH, celebrates textile art as a living and evolving practice deeply rooted in the cultures of the North, where a strong tradition of working with textiles as an art form exists as stitching continues to mend, preserve and reimagine the world around us.

On view from September 4-16, the exhibition brings together artists from across the Nordic region whose practices engage with textiles as both a material and language. These include Margrethe Aanestad (Norway), Valgerður Bergsdottir (Iceland), Ellen Dynebrink (Sweden), Ragna Froda (Iceland), Heidi Hankaniemi (Finland), Ingunn Fjóla IngÞórsdóttir (IS), Lee Jensen (Denmark), Andrea Magdalena Jonsdottir (IS), John K. Raustein (NO), Randi Samsonsen (Faroe Islands), Sunna Sigfríðardóttir  (IS), Nora Martine Hjelle Strand (NO), Thórunn Elísabet (Tótalisa)  (IS), Josabet Werkmäster  (SE), Mette Winckelmann (DK) and Kiyoshi Yamamoto (NO).

Through quilting, patchwork, collage, weaving, hand embroidery, sculptural textiles and visible and invisible stitching, the exhibition explores how textile traditions have continued to evolve within contemporary art. A stitch binds fragments together while allowing histories, emotions, reflections on the political climate, and personal narratives to remain visible. Echoing this feature, many of the works in the exhibition embrace reuse and transformation, giving discarded fabrics, garments, yarns, and textile remnants new meaning through the artistic process.

THE COLD STITCH Event Schedule

• Sept 5, 2pm: Curator Walkthrough led by Ragna Froda
• Sept 8, 5:30pm: Basket Weaving Workshop with Leila Bacch 
• Sept 12, 2pm: Artist Talks with Thórunn Elísabet (Tótalisa), Nora Martine Hjelle Strand, and Ingunn Fjóla Ingfiórsdóttir
• Sept 12, 4pm-6pm: Curator Walkthrough and Reception
• Sept 13, 12pm – 4pm: Stitching Circle Workshop with Thórunn Elísabet (Tótalisa), Nora Martine Hjelle Strand,and Andrea Magdalena Jónsdóttir
• Sept 16, 3pm – 6pm: Artist Talk and Workshop with Heidi Hankaniemi
• Sept 16, 6pm: Final Curator Walkthrough

GALLERY HOURS

Sept 4-15: Tuesday-Sunday, 12pm – 6pm
Sept 16: Wednesday, 12pm – 8pm
Free Admission

Organized by the American-Scandinavian Foundation (ASF), THE COLD STITCH is co-organized by Ragna Froda (IS/U.S.), director of New York Textile Month, and Emily Stoddart (Canada), manager of exhibitions and community programs at Scandinavia House. The exhibition is curated by Ragna Froda. All events take place at Scandinavia House, 58 Park Avenue (b/w 37th & 38th Streets), NYC.

Learn more at scandinaviahouse.org.

Ever shed a tear in a museum? You’re not alone, my friend. There’s something cathartic about that rare moment, when you find yourself in front of a work of art that seems tailor-made for the very grief or joy or uncertainty you’re experiencing. Critic Lavinia Liang tries to locate this emotional connection with art — or a lack thereof — in Ann Patchett’s new novel, Whistler, which follows a single family’s unraveling and reunion bookended by the halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Our reports on ICE’s seizure of 22,000 smuggled artifacts in Florida, coverage of the Chinese Pavilion’s withdrawal from the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea in protest of the Taiwan Pavilion, guide to Upstate New York art shows this month, and more in this edition.

—Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor

SPONSORED

“Radiant Geometries” Opens at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts

Contemporary Indigenous and Latin American artists illuminate the convergence of math, metaphysics, and art in this new exhibition opening September 4.

Learn more

News

• ICE seizes over 22,000 ancient artifacts in Florida as part of a trafficking probe as the agency and Trump administration face criticism for escalating violence and threats to cultural heritage.
• China withdraws from South Korea’s Gwangju Biennale just nine days after event organizers restored the title of “Taiwan Pavilion” to a group show featuring Taiwanese artists.
• Art Movements: Mildred Howard wins the Artists' Legacy Foundation Award, artists receive funding from the Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants, Art Gallery of Ontario director steps down, Alex Katz on PBS, and more.
• The High Museum of Art in Atlanta will mark its centennial this October with nearly 200 acquisitions and reinstallations of its American and African collections, including a section dedicated to 20th-century Nigerian art. [Atlanta Voice]
• Christie’s and Bonhams both hiked their premiums — the fees buyers pay on top of a work’s hammer price. [Artnews]

From Our Critics

Member Comment

Hyper Links

• Researcher and cultural theorist Flavia Dzodan writes about the need for art institutions to center “duration and longevity” in their conception of care, noting that she is “increasingly intolerant of ‘care’ as cultural programming” without tangible support.
• Nerd out with this riveting anatomy of a somewhat cloudy Edgar Degas self-portrait by the Getty Museum’s conservation team.
• In a tender new review of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You" for Pitchfork, Lily Goldberg writes, "I hear a simple yet radical answer to this question in Dolly’s version of 'I Will Always Love You': Loving people, even flawed people, can be its own self-rewarding, freeing act, a choice that need not be at odds with cultivating self-respect or demanding respect from others."
• Inconvenient truths: Is printmaking better than painting?

From the Archive

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

A Major Milestone for Mildred Howard

The Artists’ Legacy Foundation announced that Mildred Howard is the recipient of its 2026 Artist Award, an unrestricted $25,000 prize bestowed annually to a major painter or sculptor whose work “shows evidence of the hand.” Known for her public art across the Bay Area, alongside a diverse practice spanning assemblage, collage, sculpture, and installation, Howard has inspired countless people by salvaging objects and their histories to convey moving stories about the Black American experience. She has also been a beloved mentor and a pillar of her community for generations of local artists. “The journey is nothing without taking someone along with you,” Howard told Hyperallergic in 2023.

In a statement about the award, Howard said that it “was a complete surprise and it comes at the perfect time.”

“The award will assist in helping me to continue my practice,” she said. “To be able to have support in these unsettling times is crucial to most artists.”

Previous recipients of the Artist Award include Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Howardena Pindell, and Suzan Frecon, among many others.

Art Gallery of Ontario Director Steps Down

Stephan Jost is departing from his role as director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) after a decade. Among his achievements, Jost helped secure over $500M in gifts of art and funds and led a major expansion of the museum's modern and contemporary exhibition space, according to a press statement. His tenure is also marked by major controversies and upheaval, including labor strikes and allegations of censorship after AGO reneged on a joint acquisition of a Nan Goldin artwork because of her public support for Gaza.

Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants

Over two dozen women, transgender, and gender-nonconforming artists received nearly half a million dollars in funding for 27 projects in the fifth cycle of the Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants. Among the recipients are Mary Mattingly, Reniqua Allen-Lamphere, Alex J. Bledsoe, Tamara Cedré, Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga, and Fawn Douglas; see the full list here.

The award, announced by Anonymous Was A Woman and the New York Foundation for the Arts, provides one-time grants of up to $20,000 for projects such as Minnesota-based Ifrah Mansour's work centered around the hand-woven Somali nomadic dwelling known as aqal. “My work draws on the tools of the past to heal the present and to design the future,” Mansour wrote in an opinion for Hyperallergic. “It is rooted in radical imagination; in abundance, in kindness, and in collective care.”

What Else Happened?

• Cuauhtémoc Medina was named the curator of the 25th Bienal de Arte Paiz, held in Guatemala City and Antigua, Guatemala from November 2027 to February 2028.
• Margarita Lizcano Hernandez was appointed curatorial and programs associate at The Latinx Project.
• Leilah Babirye is now represented by Salon 94 in collaboration with Gordon Robichaux and Galerie Max Hetzler. The artist will have her first solo exhibition with Salon 94 next spring. 
• Edouard Kopp, chief curator of the Menil Drawing Institute, was named the next director of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.
• David Zwirner gallery announced that it will display the final works of Yayoi Kusama in an exhibition next spring. The artist passed away last week at the age of 97.
• David Nolan Gallery is opening a new 6,000-square-foot space in Tribeca on September 9, with a solo exhibition of works by Valerio Adami.

Wildcard

Alex Katz, who just celebrated his 99th birthday, joined PBS News Hour's Senior Arts Correspondent Jeffrey Brown for an interview from his home and studio in Maine. When asked about his contrarian streak, which saw him pursue graphic figuration in NYC at a time when Abstract Expressionism was the talk of the town, Katz responded, “Something deep inside tells me not to go with the other guys. I think Jackson Pollock might be the best American painter ever, and I ain't like Jackson Pollock at all, you know?”

Of his forthcoming exhibition Le silence de la peinture, which will pair his works with those of Henri Matisse at the French artist's namesake museum in Nice, Katz said, “Matisse is, in 400 years of European-American painting, the best technical painter, period. So I’ll put my paintings up there and see if they’re any good.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized over 22,000 ancient artifacts in Florida last month, including Greco-Roman coins, terracotta and glass vessels, jewelry, and mosaic frames, yielding the largest object recovery in the department's ongoing probe into antiquities smuggling in the state.

Dated between 1,000 and 5,000 years old, the objects are said to have originated from sites across Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, Africa, and the Levant. The Tampa Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit partnered with archaeological specialists and researchers at the University of South Florida and the University of Pennsylvania to authenticate, contextualize, and conserve the objects yielded during the seizure.

ICE and its parent entity, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), continue to wage a campaign of brutality against immigrants in the United States that has also had consequences for the country's cultural heritage.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), under which ICE and HSI operate, came under fire this April after the Customs and Border Protection crew erecting Donald Trump's border wall “inadvertently disturbed” the millennium-old Las Playas Intaglio in Arizona, ultimately damaging a quarter of the Native American archaeological site with heavy machinery.

DHS followed up in July by waiving a majority of environmental, public health, and historical preservation barriers to expedite the construction of border barriers from the Big Bend region to Amistad Reservoir, Texas, threatening over 400 archaeological sites in the area.

China withdrew from South Korea's Gwangju Biennale this morning, September 3, just nine days after event organizers restored the title of "Taiwan Pavilion" to a group show featuring Taiwanese artists. The announcement, which was first reported by the Korea Times, comes two days before the scheduled opening of the 16th edition of the biennale.

Rifts between Taiwan, China, and event organizers surged in mid-August after the biennale axed the name of “Taiwan Pavilion" in their promotional materials and replaced it with the English acronym for the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, “NTMoFA.” Organizers initially refused the name reversal demanded by Taiwan's Ministry of Culture and participating artists, who condemned the change as political censorship, but later reversed their decision on August 25.

Responding to the name reinstatement, Chinese curator Ruan Yuelai announced the China Pavilion’s unanimous withdrawal during a Thursday morning press conference. 

“The Gwangju Biennale’s use of an incorrect name concerning the participation of the China and Taiwan regions has brought about a situation in which political factors intervene in the domain of art," Ruan said during the press conference.

Artists and authors are taking the Year of the Horse quite seriously. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey hit theaters this summer, featuring the classic Trojan horse and all it stands for: things both passed down orally and things unspeakable. And just a month before that came Ann Patchett’s Whistler, her 10th novel for adults, which also takes this year’s zodiac quite seriously — the book is named for a horse in a story within the story.

Patchett is known for her character-driven tales, and for writing literary fiction that remains accessible. She is perhaps best known for her 2001 breakaway hit Bel Canto, based on the Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Peru from the late 1990s, and for The Dutch House, published in 2019. She has become something of a model within American fiction, with some characterizing her books as “beach reads” and others following Patchett’s relationship-centered style. In Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent (2025), Patchett herself even features as a minor character.

Whistler opens with a chance encounter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Daphne has not been in touch with her stepfather Eddie in 44 years. He and her mother suddenly divorced when she was nine, following a disastrous car accident that Eddie and Daphne both miraculously survived. While they waited for help in their smashed-up car, Eddie told Daphne the story of Whistler the horse, allegedly a tale he once received as a book pitch on his desk. (Eddie was an editor; Daphne became a high school English teacher for an all-girls private school in Manhattan.) Years later, Daphne still blames herself for Eddie’s sudden banishment from their family.

Now 53 years old, Daphne is wandering the galleries with her husband, who spots an “old man” following them. The Met reappears only one other time in the book — at the very end, when members of the family conveniently make another trip there. But the museum, and the effects of art on memory and grief, hover over the entire story; another narrative thread involving a collection of rabbit paintings makes this preoccupation clear. This first serendipitous encounter at The Met, in the Contemporary wing, no less, is referenced again and again — Daphne’s first chance to reconnect with the only father figure she had ever had. The significance of their reunion is such that Daphne’s husband, watching her cry upon seeing Eddie again — before Charles Ray’s sculpture “Two horses” (2019) — and “understanding none of it … [still knew] the big reveal should not have come here, in front of art.”

That may be the book’s most central, crucial line. Eddie is the anchor, a center of gravity, for the broken family’s appreciation of the arts — of anything beyond pure survival, really. When the adult Daphne finally tells her mother about their run-in, she replies, “At the museum, that makes sense. Eddie had a great eye for art … Anything I know about art today is something Eddie taught me.”

September welcomes the rituals of renewal — back to school! — and recognition, as the end of the year approaches. While the seasonal light and shadows cast dramatic beauty across the Hudson Valley, galleries and museums match the mood with robust exhibitions. This month, Shaker Outpost features graceful ceramics by Paula Greif, and September presents a survey of artworks by the self-taught Black Arts Movement artist Reginald Madison. Dynamic fabric pieces by Holly McCabe take over the tattoo studio and gallery space at Distortion Society, while the Hessel Museum at Bard College presents the work of legendary gallerist, poet, and artist Betty Parsons. The Kleinert/James Center for the Arts at Byrdcliffe features older works by four generations of Avery family artists, and Troutbeck presents bright and bold collages by Delano Dunn. The thriving art scene in the Hudson Valley welcomes all to experience the glory of Mother Nature at her finest, as summer moves into fall! 

Paula Greif: Baskets & Buckets

Shaker Outpost, 4 Depot Square, Chatham, New York
Through Sep. 20

The Shaker Museum in Chatham’s new building is scheduled to open in 2028, but in the meantime, it is hosting a series of pop-up exhibitions at its Shaker Outpost location. Baskets and Buckets features new works by ceramicist Paula Greif, whose work is a joyous exploration of these functional items in clay. Aptly titled pieces such as “Black Circle Basket” (all works 2026) and “White Porcelain Stick Basket” highlight Greif’s alignment with the Shaker principles of simplicity and quiet beauty. “Ovals Bucket” is an exquisite white form with blue shapes on its indented sides, while “Tree of Life Basket” is a graceful stoneware rendering of this sacred motif. Greif collaborated with local artists Doug Newton to create the handles and Nadia Yaron to fashion the wood grips on select artworks. Amid an eclectic career in art direction, album cover design, and commercial television, Greif’s exquisite ceramics are a pleasure to behold. 

Reginald Madison: New Slant Old Story

September, 4 Hudson Street, Kinderhook, New York
Through Sep. 27 

The late Reginald Madison, a self-taught artist from the South Side of Chicago, was a pillar of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and ’70s. A youth spent surrounded by jazz musicians, and the discovery of a discarded box of paints, inspired his lifelong devotion to painting. September’s survey New Slant Old Story brings together some of Madison’s earliest works, many shown for the first time. Several portraits of nuns reflect the beginnings of his mature expressionistic style, including “Sister Veronica Marie” (1988) and “Choir Boys” (1992), featuring a nun between two exaggerated yellow figures that appear to be in the middle of belting out hymns. “Rude Nude Voodoo” (1979) is a curious scene with two demons engaging each other within hazy crimson environs, one with a pronounced erection. “The Dance Lesson” (1980), painted on salvaged panels, is a wild display that includes nuns cavorting with semi-nude figures with flames below, a devilish creature at the top, and angels flanking the spectacle on all sides. 

Ellen K. Levy: Displaced Tears in the Fabric of the Universe

68 Prince Street Gallery, 68 Prince Street, Kingston, New York 
Through Sep. 27

After receiving a NASA art commission in 1985, Ellen K. Levy remains fascinated by the space program, appropriating iconic images from the space age into swirling technological landscapes with a sci-fi edge. Displaced Tears in the Fabric of the Universe, curated by Alan Goolman at 68 Prince Street Gallery, presents a series of Levy’s works layering acrylic over digital collage on paper. “Transmission” (2019) includes a small floating astronaut at left, mathematically engineered structures in the middle, and detailed renderings of spacecraft toward the right. In “Space Nets” (2026), we hover above the Earth amid a jumble of satellites and other manmade structures in a heap of colliding space junk. Her sculptural installation “Astronaut Tears: In, On, and Through” (2026) offers a poetic vision of human tears, which, in zero gravity, act as miniature planets floating across the universe. 

Elisa Pritzker, Echoes of the Ancestral 

Arts Society of Kingston (ASK), 97 Broadway, Kingston, New York
Sep. 5–27

Elisa Pritzker honors her Argentine roots in a series of artworks at Arts Society of Kingston. Across recent 2D and 3D mixed media artworks, Pritzker explores legacy through her dynamic arrangements of fabric, ribbons, and other natural elements. “Ceremonial Stick” (2025) is a slender wood stick wrapped in patterned textiles and poised for ritual, while the chunky painted “Power Stone” (2026) rests atop a black wood base with crisscrossed fabric. Pritzker’s two tondos, “Geologic-era Fish” (2025) and “Ancient Ornament” (2025), contain sacred abstract and organic shapes that border on figurative, while her “Ancient Fishes” (2025) sculpture is a personal interpretation of this ancient image of two fish as symbols of fertility and abundance. 

Trump’s National Park Service nonsensically removed a bright-blue Joel Shapiro sculpture from outside the Kennedy Center yesterday without stating a reason. The late artist is known for his quasi-abstract, dynamic stick-figure artworks that could not offend your most politically questionable uncle, but our president will find a way. Was it too happy? Too person-shaped? Or even better … “woke”?

Teju Adisa-Farrar’s must-read piece on Black American natural dyeing traditions is an antidote to cultural erasure. In the latest of our series on underrepresented craft histories, researched and written by the 2025 Craft Archive Fellows in collaboration with the Center for Craft, Adisa-Farrar traces the ways in which plants and organic fibers yielded a kaleidoscope of pigments whose histories are worthy of preservation and revival.

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News

• The National Park Service deinstalls an iconic 24-foot-tall sculpture by late artist Joel Shapiro from the grounds of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.  
• Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich demands that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu order the dismantling of 40 Palestinian memorials in the Occupied West Bank.
• A new exhibition in NYC celebrates Snoopy's enduring influence on art and fashion.
• Venice Biennale Foundation President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco defends the decision to include Russia in the 61st Venice Biennale this year despite pushback from the Italian Culture Ministry and the European Commission.
• The Smithsonian’s board of regents has voted to house the fledgling National Museum of the American Latino in its existing Arts and Industries Building, bypassing congressional approval for a new site. [NYT]
• The Gwangju Biennale Foundation has agreed to allow the name “Taiwan Pavilion” after artists called the erasure of Taiwan “a threat to freedom of expression and the global art community.” [Gwangju Biennale]

In Memoriam

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Hyper Links

• Shoutout to our friends at Hell Gate for this impeccable hate piece on the ubiquitous NYC street “art” of @7SoulsDeep. “It cleaves its audience into two camps: People who have clapped when their plane landed, and everyone else,” Hell Gate writes. Chef’s kiss.
• Radio presenter Zach Mander added Karl Marx quotes to Richard Scarry illustrations and it’s making us all want to rise up against the bourgeoisie in this busy, busy town.
• Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed had the perfect retort to Fox News’s out-of-touch defense of billionaires.
• Did you know that 20% of your DNA comes from an unknown species? Welcome to the mysterious world of “ghost DNA.”

From the Archive

In an exclusive interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Venice Biennale Foundation President Pietrangelo Buttafuoco stood by the decision to include Russia in the 61st Venice Biennale this year despite pushback from the Italian Culture Ministry and the European Commission.

The Venice Biennale Foundation faced immense criticism, calls for boycotts, and a widely circulated open letter demanding revision after it announced this March that Russia would return to its pavilion for the 61st edition amid the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, stating that the Biennale administration “rejects any form of exclusion or censorship of culture and art.”

Buttafuoco told Corriere della Sera that he would do “everything” again if he had to, adding that his handling of the pavilion was “more than fair and proper to the institution [he] preside[s] over” and that there was “not a single comma that violates laws and regulations.”

Italian Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli had asked the Venice Biennale Foundation to provide all correspondence with the Russian Federation to evaluate the pavilion installation's compatibility with the European Union's sanctions regime. The European Commission also condemned Russia's inclusion, threatening to freeze its €2 million (~$2.3 million) culture grant to the Foundation over the matter.

In April, the Biennale's award jury announced its intention to omit Russia and Israel from consideration for the Golden Lion awards, and Giuli publicized his intent to forgo the Biennale's preview dates over Russia's inclusion. Ahead of the Biennale's opening, it was revealed that Buttafuoco and the Foundation's administrators worked with the Russian pavilion curator as early as June 2025 to ensure that Russia's participation played by the rules. Ultimately, the pavilion would remain closed to the public for the Biennale's run after the vernissage dates.

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

Geles Cabrera (1926–2026)
Mexican sculptor who explored the expressiveness of the human body

She explored the expressive potential of the body when muralism dominated Mexican art, moving fluently between figuration and abstraction, gesture and sensuality. In 1966, she founded Museo Escultórico, an exhibition space in Coyoacán, where she showed her work for decades. In 2024, she received the Bellas Artes Medal in Visual Arts, Mexico's highest artistic honor.

Helch (c. 1991–2026)
British street artist

The anonymous British street artist painted his tag, "HELCH," across public infrastructure in London. He famously upset Queen Elizabeth when he tagged a railway viaduct in view of Windsor Castle, the royal residence.

Yayoi Kusama (1929–2026)
Japanese artist who channeled infinity

The irreverent Japanese artist channeled hallucinations and other psychological phenomena into kaleidoscopic, polka-dotted paintings and sculptures that transfixed millions around the world. Her influence can be seen in key art historical moments from Minimalism and Pop Art to experiential art. Revelations about racist comments she made in her 2002 autobiography have tarnished her image in recent years.

Read the obituary

Christina Gascoigne (1939–2026)
British ceramicist, photographer, and philanthropist

She made and sold ceramics from a studio on the Thames, and her photography appears in multiple television series, including one on British castles. In 2014, she and her husband, the author and television presenter Bamber Gascoigne, transformed a home they inherited into the 700-seat Grange Park Opera in West Horsley, England.

Jay Maisel (1931–2026)
Photographer who reshaped commercial photography

Across a seven-decade career in magazines, advertising, and cultural institutions, the influential photographer is perhaps best known for the cover of Miles Davis's 1959 classic album Kind of Blue. He has been honored by the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, American Society of Media Photographers, and the International Center of Photography.

Laura Spector (1954–2026)
Artist of invasive species

Using Asian bittersweet, an invasive species, as her medium, she crafted artworks, furniture, lighting, and more, making pieces for luminaries like Joan Baez and Sting. In recent years, she began making Photoshop collages called her Identity Series, featuring a recurring red-haired figure she called "Laura dolls."

David Thauberger (1948–2026)
Canadian painter and sculptor

He shaped the way the art world perceived the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, depicting many of its modernist and brutalist buildings in his paintings. He was inducted into the Order of Canada, one of the nation's highest honors, in 2008, and received the Lieutenant Governor's Saskatchewan Artist Award the year after and the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 2012.

Ally Van Tillo (d. 2026)
Founder of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt

Inspired by the American Names Project Memorial Quilt, he coordinated the making of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt by grieving friends, lovers, and families, honoring more than 600 lost to the disease. This month, the quilt will go on full display in Tramway, Glasgow.