Since attending the inaugural edition of the Brooklyn Fine Art Print Fair (BFAPF) at Powerhouse Arts last year, I've been eager to witness how this young event evolves in real time. Braving New York’s spring art fair season for a second year, BFAPF is anchored by a global community rooted in passion, partnership, and an inextinguishable fervor for pushing the envelope.

Open through Sunday, April 12, the second iteration of BFAPF has expanded to include over 60 local, domestic, and international exhibitors including independent print shops, prominent publishers, academic printmaking departments and clubs, self-represented artists, and established galleries. A mix of returning participants and debut exhibitors, a curatorial focus on both timely and timeless work, and experimental mixed-media practices expanding the horizon line of printmaking made the fair feel simultaneously fresh and familiar.

Like a literal moth to a lamp, I gravitated toward a curiously glowing display at the Shoestring Press booth. Conceptualized by Gaelyn and Gustavo Aguilar of TUG Collective, executed by Shoestring Press's Allison Carter-Beaulé, and custom-framed by the team at Griffin Editions, “Shape Shift” (2026) is a layered screenprint on several sheets of plexiglass illuminated by an LED light.

The collective told me that the work, which is part of an ongoing series begun this year titled Don't Forgive My Hands, was inspired by veteran and poet Yusef Komunyakaa's Warhorses (2008) — a collection of poems  trying to capture how humans have weaponized objects for violence.

The source image depicted men on horseback with their steeds fashioned in heavy combat equipment, though the horses themselves have been removed from the composition. Of the men's bodies, only the appendages remain, emphasizing that they're the instruments harnessing horsepower and developing technology to enact harm.

Comprised of eight layers of plexiglass, the work invokes the Seventh Generation principle — a Haudenosaunee philosophy rooted in considering the impact your choices will have on the well-being and sustainability of the seven generations that will succeed you.

“That eighth layer is what's  left up to us as individuals engaging with this piece,” Gaelyn told me. “This is a piece that is dealing with history. What is the responsibility that we as individuals are going to take to make sure that this history is not erased? What are the choices we are going to make to prevent the perpetuation of violence?”

Equally salient, both visually and conceptually, were Maryland sculptor June Linowitz's molded abaca paper renditions of extinct and critically endangered animal species. Hanging ominously at the edge of the booth for Reading Road Studio, based in Silver Spring, Maryland, Linowitz's dangling paper sculptures “ are meant to look like trophy rugs or roadkill,” as she put it, made in response to the loss of biodiversity worldwide.

Artist and curator Helen Frederick, who opened Reading Road in 2016, told me it was the studio's first time presenting at the fair and noted that it was a “very strictly juried event” this year. Frederick brought a variety of mixed-media prints and paper art that expanded my understanding of the craft’s limits, including Randi Reiss-McCormack's paper pulp paintings with needlepoint adornments.

Book art and the science of paper are highlighted during this year’s BFAPF, which I appreciated, as I've often found paper to be relegated as a mere substrate during most fairs ... including Art on Paper.

The makings of The Papermaker’s Suite (2026), a new collaboration between master printer Ruth Lingen and Reginald Dwayne Betts, a 2021 MacArthur Fellow and a practicing lawyer focused on prison reform advocacy, stood out to me the most. At the shared booth between Lingen's Line Press Limited and Brooklyn Inc., the master printer paged through the blank sheets that she made from socks, sweatpants, towels, and other used materials sourced from Betts's incarcerated friends. Betts's poetry was affixed to different pages on printed acetate, soon to emblazon the macerated fabrics associated with the formerly incarcerated writer’s own time in the system.

On the opposite table was Iranian-American artist Golnar Adili's “A Thousand Pages of Chest in a Thousand Mirrors” (2024), simultaneously functioning as a book and a diptych. From a stack of prints depicting her breasts, the artist carved out the valley between them and glued that excised paper together, forming a shape that resembles the sloping silhouette of the Azadi Tower in Tehran. The excised “flesh” nestles back into Adili's body when the book is closed, making her chest whole again.

Shaking off any initial caution from last year’s beta test, the BFAPF has charged forward and made itself a space to showcase the radical history and present of printmaking. Work about Palestinian liberation, Venezuelan national pride despite American intervention, and protest art about ICE were front and center at the Brooklyn Inc. side of the booth. 

While I loved that the independent sellers’ booths had walls for their displays this year, I wished that they and the academic departments were more integrated with the other fair exhibitors, as they were in the inaugural edition. That sense that they were equally as important as larger commercial publishers made the event feel special. 

Nevertheless, the number of return exhibitors was as heartening as the fair’s growth. At Austria’s Viadukt Screen Prints booth, I asked Michael Wegerer how he felt about the fair this year.

“There’s a reason we came back,” he said.

Anyone who has taken an introductory art history class knows about Marcel Duchamp. Let me restate that, actually: Anyone who’s encountered contemporary art in any form knows about Duchamp, whether they realize it or not. 

In 1917, the French-born artist infamously flipped a urinal upside down, signed it, and called it art. As it’s often told, that single gesture forever changed the trajectory of aesthetic history. No longer was art judged by skill, craftsmanship, even beauty — it could be anything an artist called art. That opened the door to conceptual art, process art, and so much more yet to come. He’s the reason art today can be gloriously inventive, wonderfully permissive, mystifyingly experimental, beautifully opaque.

This Sunday, April 12, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is opening the first comprehensive United States exhibition in more than 50 years on this fascinating artist — a craftsman, appropriator, trickster, perhaps even, in modern parlance, troll. 

Yesterday, I spoke over Zoom with Belgian critic and scholar Thierry de Duve, who’s been mulling over these vexing contradictions in the artist’s work for a half-century now, from his light-filled Manhattan apartment. De Duve edited The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp (1993) and wrote Kant after Duchamp (1998), Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade (2005), and many, many more books and articles, and yet sometimes claims not to be a Duchamp expert. Read our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, below. 

Hyperallergic: As a Duchamp expert, can you tell us why he fascinates you?

Thierry de Duve: I guess, by regular standards, yes, I am a Duchamp expert. But the interesting thing is, I thought I was not a Duchamp fan. I thought I was done with Duchamp. I thought I was bored with Duchamp. And I must say that the show at MoMA rekindled my love. 

I have always, since the 1970s when I discovered Duchamp for real, had mixed feelings about him. There is something esoteric, deliberately mystifying about Duchamp that I don’t like. And a lot of his objects are, to me, stranded in a sort of 19th-century Symbolist aesthetics. 

But I have been fascinated by the extraordinary intellect of this man, and also his contradictions. For example, Duchamp, the inventor of readymades — who has been the Duchamp I’ve investigated most in my writings — and Duchamp the craftsman. 

The “Large Glass” is an incredibly well-crafted object. That contradiction I have always found interesting, pulling me in opposite directions — “like” and “dislike,” in a way, but definitely triggering my intellectual curiosity. 

H: So you must have liked the painting part of the show, then? 

TD: Oh, no. The painting part of the show is the weakest part of the show. But it’s very interesting. That is why I am saying that Duchamp is not the greatest artist of the century, but he may be the most intelligent artist of the century. 

One of the things the paintings at the beginning of the show demonstrate is that he was not a very good painter. Matisse and Picasso, to take two of his contemporaries, are definitely much greater painters than Duchamp. But Duchamp, early on, had the intelligence to understand that he was not. He turned into something else and became a great artist, in spite of not being a great painter. Which is part of the thing that makes him so fascinating today, as we live in a supposedly post-medium era. 

H: Do you feel, in this so-called “post-medium era,” his work is more interesting? Or do you feel like he simply sowed the seeds for this era?

TD: That would be too long an answer. That’s the subject of my whole book, Duchamp’s Telegram. “Post-medium art” is not my expression. My expression is the “art-in-general” system. And my thesis is that he is not the creator, is not the author — is not the agent, even — of the passage from the old system to the new art-in-general system, the “old” system being the fine arts system. He is merely the messenger of a passage that happens even before his birth. 

The art world changed — not in the 1960s, but in the 1880s. And Duchamp’s “Fountain” is the message that brings us the news. The news that we no longer live in an art world where, in order to be an artist, you have to be a  painter or a sculptor, or a poet, or a composer, or a playwright, or a novelist, you name it. 

That is what the term “post-medium art” refers to. Which is where I disagree with the name, because it suggests that you cannot be an artist if you are in a medium. And as we know from today’s art world, there is still painting around, and a lot of it, there’s still sculpture. And there are new categories, like readymades. Without Duchamp, we probably wouldn’t have that category. 

Installation art, performance art — these are new categories, new media. But we can also make things that have no name yet. It’s going to be hard after Duchamp, but it’s still possible.

H: How did “Fountain” deliver the news that you didn’t have to work in a specific medium to become an artist?

TD: “Fountain” was supposed to be exhibited  at the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. That society was modeled after the Société des Artistes Indépendants in France,  which was created in 1884, and the statutes of the French Society and the American Society are identical. 

The novelty of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in France was that there was no jury. Why is that important? Because in France, in the 19th century, you could not live as an artist if you had not exhibited at the salon. The gallery system, the dealer system — it was minimal. The rare galleries that were in existence would not select you unless you had success at the salon, you see? 

So creating a non-juried exhibition and society of artists basically amounts to creating a society of self-proclaimed artists. That was the novelty. 

To cut a long story short, the Beaux Arts system, the French version of the fine arts system, collapsed at the end of the 19th century — in 1880, actually. And Duchamp brings us that news — that you can be an artist without being a painter or a poet or musician, etc. That is my interpretation of what “Fountain” encapsulates. 

He puts that message in the mail in 1917, but the message only arrives in 1960. I mean, Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage — they got the message around 1950, but they were fast. The bulk of the artists who received it arrived in the next generation.  The generations of Pop artists, Conceptual artists, Minimalist artists, Fluxus artists, Arte Povera artists, etc., etc., who emerged in the 1960s.

And that is why, since the 1960s, we speak of a “post-Duchamp” art world. We don’t speak of a “post-Picasso world.” 

H: At the press preview, one of the curators mentioned that Duchamp had a very good view of museums and curators. What was his relationship with museums?

TD: Museums are an invention of the 18th century. The idea of the museum goes hand-in-hand with the idea that art belongs to the people. Not physically, economically, financially, but ideologically, culturally. The idea that museums ought to be public repositories for art. 

Since the 19th century, at least, ambitious artists knew that if they were going to be successful, their art would land in the museum. And from then on, “What kind of museum do you want to be in?” becomes an interesting question for every artist. 

I’m not going to go into a long explanation of the critique of the institutionality of museums. But suffice to say, Duchamp knew that if he was going to be successful, his art would be in a museum. 

Now, interestingly enough, he had to wait until he was 75 to get a museum retrospective. His first was in 1963, at the Pasadena Art Museum. But then this is Duchamp’s typical genius. He anticipated the museum by making his own museum — a portable museum in the 1940s. That’s “La Boîte-en-valise” ["Box-in-a-suitcase" (1931–71)]. 

I think one of the great things about this exhibition at MoMA is the fact that they have, I think, seven boîtes-en-valise, not just one. They show that — how should I say this — the fetishization of art that’s an inevitable byproduct of the existence of museums was anticipated by and played with in advance by Duchamp. I think he anticipated the logic of the museum. He played with the logic of the museum and produced a miniature version of how his collection would be seen in a museum. So it’s only natural, in a way, that honoring that gesture, the curators of this show would show not one, but several. 

I think Duchamp plays with that fetishization, and if we were to pursue that conversation, we would have to rethink what we mean by “fetishization.” And whether a fetish can, at the same time, be an antidote to a fetish, in the same way that a vaccine is the antidote to the malady. By injecting the malady, you provoke a reaction in the body. I think Duchamp — and not only Duchamp, but a lot of modern artists — practice the vaccine strategy. 

The variations [in the same artwork] enhance the connection between aesthetics and fetishization. Whether it’s in a critical way or not, I would rather leave open. And whether we should think it’s in a critical way or not, I would also rather leave open. 

H: If you could ask Duchamp one thing, what would it be?

TD: I would ask him whether he was conscious of what he did with the urinal, or not.

There’s something special about visiting an art fair when New York is on the cusp of spring.

On Thursday night, April 9, well-dressed patrons marched into the Park Avenue Armory for the newly renamed International Fine Prints and Drawings Association’s (IFPDA) annual Print Fair that kicked off the city’s spring fair season. 

The fair, which started in 1991 and returns to the Upper East Side fortress, has become a favorite among the city’s wealthy collectors and everyday print enthusiasts alike. IFPDA’s atmosphere is far more intimate than its counterparts at the autumn art fairs, but another main draw is the comparatively lower pricing. 

“I think there’s a comfort level with collectors. There's a place to find a price point that fits,” Temma Nanas, partner at Santa Monica-based Leslie Sacks Gallery, told Hyperallergic. “Print is a more democratic medium.”

With more than 80 galleries, print studios, and publishers from Europe, Asia, and the Americas, the fair is brimming with intriguing offerings from leading contemporary artists, including Julie Mehretu, David Hockney, and Yayoi Kusama.

Visitors could pretend to be a member of NASA’s Artemis II crew by beholding Kiki Smith’s hand-painted watercolor, “Wooden Moon” (2022), at Boston-based Krakow Witkin Gallery’s booth. The 12-foot-long (~3.7-meter-long) work is her largest to date, according to IFPDA staff. Viewers could also dive into Japan’s ukiyo-e tradition from the 19th-century Edo period with masterworks by Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige at the booth of New York’s Scholten Japanese Art. 

Around the corner, David Zwirner offered artist Louis Fratino’s eye-catching portrait of a man in a colorful garden with a sleeping dog. Elleree Erdos, the gallery’s director of prints and editions, said Fratino studied several Picasso etchings and applied them to his process. She appreciated that the fair allowed people to see both artists’ work at Zwirner and nearby John Szoke Gallery and compare their techniques.

“People often ask, ‘How was this made?’” Erdos said. “That’s unique to the print fair. It is always the first greeting you get.”

At the back of the armory, IFPDA President and Old Masters gallerist David Tunick’s inviting booth featuring Amedeo Modigliani’s “Cariatide Rouge sur Fond Noir” (c. 1914) and several delicate Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec works drew crowds. Toulouse-Lautrec’s “La Clownesse Assise” (1896) and the “Divan Japonais” (c. 1892) advertisement for a Parisian musical establishment, two of his most recognizable lithographs, transported onlookers to a romantic Montmartre cabaret. 

Paula Rego’s series of abortion etchings at Cristea Roberts Gallery stood out as another fair highlight. The late Portuguese artist, whose series was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023, demonstrated the psychological toll that underground, often dangerous terminations had on women and helped bring about abortion’s legalization in the country in 2007.

Fans of William Kentridge had plenty to see, too. Hauser & Wirth’s booth included his poignant etching, “Refugees (You will find no other seas)” (2018), which was inspired by a shipwreck of refugees off an Italian island in 2013, continuing his exploration of oppression and injustice. He also had an etching available at Krakow Witkin and two $4,500 lithographs, whose captions indicated that they were created to benefit the Print Center New York and the arts in South Africa.

Several guests appreciated reconnecting with the fair’s longtime vendors. Judith Solodkin, a printmaker and founder of SOLO Impression print publisher, greeted several women at her booth after returning for the first time since 2023. “Don’t you know she’s famous?” one of her friends boasted.

Solodkin exhibited several fabric works, including a lovely Judy Chicago piece, “What if Women Ruled the World?” (2023), and a digital embroidery collaboration with artist Ceceilia Vicuña, “Tara: the eye of compassion,” that included an image of the earth in the pupil of an eye. 

For a certain New Yorker, nothing is as alluring as the city itself. Some of the largest crowds congregated at a booth for The Old Print Shop, which featured antique maps, historic prints of street scenes, and drawings of the city’s skyline that spanned the colonial era to the 21st century. 

Harry Newman, whose family has run the Manhattan print shop for three generations, said interest in early maps and the Revolutionary War period was high as the nation prepared to celebrate its 250th birthday. But he also loved a rare Emily Trueblood print of a black-and-white, close-up view of the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge’s stanchions.

“We did several editions, and we’re just about out of them,” he said. “That might be one of the last ones.”

CHICAGO — Between the scores of working artists, underpaid arts administrators, and wealthy, often well-meaning arts hobbyists with cash to burn on $40 tickets and $7 bottles of Dasani, the question burns: What does Expo Chicago (and its orbit of adjacent fairs) actually do for the local arts community? 

The obvious answer is the boring one. Art fairs sell art. But in actuality, that purpose fractures into something messier. Perhaps the most interesting way to experience fair week in Chicago is as a vivisection of the Midwestern arts ecosystem, exposing our pulsating, bleeding heart innards.

At Expo proper, a tighter fair reveals both the joys and pain points of Chicago’s current creative environment. In a shining statement by local artist Melissa Leandro, Andrew Rafacz Gallery displayed stunning canvases covered in glimmering embroidered textile foliage. Leandro has been with the gallery for over 10 years, finding the coveted steady support that countless artists seek in representation. “As an artist, I think the gallery relationship can be awkward, but they never make me feel that way. They care about my long-term career,” she told Hyperallergic. 

Corbett vs. Dempsey also presented the work of an artist with ties to the city and longstanding ties to the gallery. The solo booth of new Gabrielle Garland paintings and drawings, depicting warped dreamscapes of American domestic architecture, had a promising opening day, with several drawings selling for $2,000 a piece and a larger canvas for $20,000. 

Leandro and Garland represent classic success stories for hopeful creatives — paths that, despite rising costs, still feel possible in Chicago. Both came up through the city’s arts degree-granting programs, with Garland catching the attention of gallerist John Corbett while still in school at the University of Chicago. Leandro built momentum by showing her work in alternative venues, like cafes and public libraries, until she was approached by Andrew Rafacz. It’s no certain journey, but at least it remains viable. 

This fragile optimism rests uneasily beside Expo’s institutional presence. It’s curious that the Obama Presidential Center was granted so much real estate in the fair when nearly all other Chicago nonprofits have been cut (a product of the nixed Special Exhibitions section from years prior). Situated in its own curated section and represented by a large booth featuring sample materials from artists participating in the Center’s commissioned public art program, the overt display decision by Expo points to what does and doesn’t get attention in the city. 

The Center’s presence is certainly an effort to stir up attention ahead of its grand opening in June. It can also be read as a legitimizing effort amid years of protest, particularly among South Side residents, who fear gentrification and displacement as a result of the new campus. Despite this, Virginia Shore, the curator of the Obama Presidential Center Art Commissions, has hopeful visions for the organization’s arts programming. “Art has so many benefits for people,” she told Hyperallergic. “It makes them feel welcome, it makes them feel like there’s possibility.”

It’s true that many of the artists featured in the booth (and soon, the Center) are socially engaged and tied to the city, like Chicago stars Theaster Gates and Richard Hunt, alongside emerging voices like recent School of the Art Institute graduate Lindsay Adams. But two truths can exist at once: Public art can, and often does, inspire belief in possibility, even as the institutions behind it threaten the communities they aim to serve. 

Outside of Navy Pier, Barely Fair, a satellite staple, represents what the most optimistic among us hope an art fair can achieve. With its miniaturized scale, it’s easy to write off the program as a gimmick, but lower costs to exhibitors, intentional partnerships, and relative freedom from market pressures ensure it constantly pushes the needle of artistic evolution. “Giving people a chance to do something really terrible is important,” said co-founder Roland Miller. “We always want to have a full range of possibilities, so that it’s always unexpected.”

Across town, the Other Art Fair and the newly minted Neighbors present opposing models. The Other Art Fair feels more like a maker’s market — an affect some might scoff at. Still, the program offers artists a way to sell works directly to audiences, with a bigger pay cut (82% of sales) than most galleries can offer. Chicago-based artist Joe Kraft is a repeat participant in the fair, finding it an important avenue to increase visibility: “Here, the artist is representing themself, and so there are these in-person interactions that get to happen that are super special,” he praised. 

Neighbors, housed in a gilded Gold Coast residence, is a bit too literal to the sin of uneven wealth concentration in the art market. However, it did make some room for subversive voices. Shanghai Seminary, run by Chicago-based artist Qiuchen Wu, presented a playful installation by local sculptor Caitlyn Min-Ji Au, composed of foam constructions with openings to view plushies and water dripping from impossible angles. With their cumbersome size and use of moving water, the works seemed delightfully impossible to sell. But as Wu argued: “If you can hire someone to take care of plants, why can’t you hire someone to take care of an artwork?”

Back at Expo Chicago, the clearest demonstration of the fair’s value, at least in terms of supporting artist visibility and local creative communities, might be tucked into the Artists in Public Schools booth. The Chicago nonprofit offers paid residencies for local artists to integrate into the public school system and facilitate art experiences with students. Resident artist Jonathan Michael Castillo’s photography and video works are accompanied by handmade books by the ESL students of Bernhard Moos Elementary School, one of Castillo’s partner schools, documenting their families’ difficult immigration journeys. The installation commands attention — stark and challenging amid a sea of safe, commercially viable works. 

Artists in Public Schools sees Expo as an important opportunity for its resident artists to exhibit work and raise money through any sales. But the few exhibiting nonprofits still had to pay thousands for their crucial Expo spots, a clear demonstration of the precarious balance between financial risk, exposure, and arts infrastructure.  

Chicago’s fair week is a microcosm of the churning, tense, contradictory discourse surrounding art and its support networks in the city. It’s a time where major institutions, genuine community work, and earnest local artists are pulled into the same orbit. To be sure, it sells art — a key function to the survival of artists, whether we like it or not. But more than that, it exposes the terms under which art gets to exist here, and the negotiation required to thrive.

Artist, archivist, and performer Agosto Machado, an original who defied easy categorization, died on March 21. Private and introverted, as he put it, he was a beloved constant presence in New York’s downtown arts scene. I was not in Agosto’s inner circle. I was a satellite in his universe, a filmmaker working in clubs. But I would prefer to present myself in the way Agosto described himself in relation to his crush Joe D’Alessandro: “Join the club, I was at the end of the line.”

One of my memories of Agosto captures how he was not just an artist but also an archivist, a keeper of queer history. In 2009, we needed Agosto’s help to reach out to his longtime friend, one of Andy Warhol’s “superstars,” Mario Montez. We wanted to invite him to participate in the second edition of LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World, taking place in Berlin. Described as a monumental gathering of over 50 international artists, academics, and friends of the late legendary filmmaker, the event became a raucous, glamorous, campy thing, where Jack Smith was simply “Jack,” as we all claimed our own version of him. Even Warhol’s rarely seen 1964 Batman Dracula, starring Jack, was sneaked out of the vault by Callie Angel, then in charge of the Whitney Museum of American Art's Warhol Project.

It was into this maelstrom that we had to persuade Agosto to reach out to Mario Montez, who had appeared in Jack’s major experimental films Flaming Creatures (1962–63) and Normal Love (1963–65), for the event’s keynote panel. “The dear indispensable Agosto Machado,” in the words of Marc Siegel, one of the Berlin organizers, “a wonderful performer and Montez’s longtime friend ... Agosto the Keeper of the Secret of Montez’s Florida whereabouts for almost thirty years.” With Agosto as intermediary, much negotiating took place, and we convinced Mario to participate.

But throughout my conversations with Agosto, I found myself wanting to know more. Agosto had been one of Jack Smith’s muses, and I had been Jack’s friend since I met him in 1976 until he died of AIDS in 1989. Both Agosto and I had one thirteenth of Jack’s ashes. With Berlin in sight, Mario and Jack’s relationship seemed crucial gossip, if not legacy.

After much prodding and cajoling, Agosto finally revealed to me that Mario and Jack were lovers when they lived together. Feeling proud of myself for getting Agosto to share this important piece of queer cultural history, I told Marc Siegel, who then asked Mario onstage during the much-awaited keynote panel. A successful coup! But thinking back on this as I write, Agosto was always the protector, the trusted keeper of secrets. He very likely had to be telling Mario all our backstage goings-on, and the two of them worked out that we planned the reveal. After years in seclusion, Mario was back on the scene, performing and giving interviews, in part thanks to Agosto, who was always behind the scenes, always a connector.

I first met Agosto at the East Village performance club Chandelier in 1985, introduced by Uzi Parnes in 1985. But it was not until November 2018 that I visited his apartment for the first time. Uzi and I were there to interview Agosto for the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Walking into “The Forbidden City,” as Agosto called it, felt for me like entering history. It looked like an artist’s nest. A narrow path led into a tight space crammed with covered boxes, stacked paintings on the floor, on the walls, framed photos, posters, show boxes crammed with ephemera, sequins, shoes everywhere … If objects have a presence, this was a repository of emotional memory. 

As Agosto told it, he was often unhoused, a self-described street queen who came into being in 1959, using libraries to stay warm, and walking the city to find out what was happening. Vividly describing the ’60s happenings in Greenwich Village, he spoke of the blurring of art and life. “With the art downtown, the spontaneous nature of it is what also touched me. These people were doing all this work and not necessarily wearing makeup or any of that,” Agosto said. “They talked to friends, and they went out, and walked the streets, and blended in and everyone downtown, whether we were singing by the fountain in Washington Square Park … that was so real and wonderful.”

I did not know Agosto had been working on installations, collages, and memorial shrines quietly for years. Yet throughout our conversations, he alluded to a new, broader definition of art, one that would encompass his world. Agosto would send an annual holiday card, a portrait with a personal handwritten message. In the last one he sent, there is a prescient caption: “To be continued in 2026.”

When Michael Bullock asked Agosto in 2024 what it was like to live in an apartment with the ghosts of so many loved ones, Agosto’s response distilled his ethos of perpetual community.

“That’s a good question. I think all these people are still giving me energy, light, and confidence — their lives, their friendship, and wonderful memories,” Agosto said. “Some friends think I’m living in the past, but I’m not. I’m experiencing a reflection of what was and what continues, until we meet again."

SÃO PAULO — It wasn’t long after the dust settled at the Oscar Niemeyer Pavilion in Parque Ibirapuera, home to the 36th São Paulo Biennial, that it opened again on April 8 to Latin America’s largest art fair. With 180 exhibitors, the 22nd edition of SP-Arte, on view through the weekend, is a bit smaller than last year’s, though the showing of Brazilian galleries remains strong.

Among the visitors perusing booths on opening day was Brinda Kumar, associate curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She told Hyperallergic that she was in São Paulo for the first time, drawn by its “South-South artistic links, with Brazil as a connector for transcontinental relationships.” A visit to Rosana Paulino’s studio, organized through the fair’s Latitude program, created in 2007 to promote Brazilian art, was one of the highlights of her trip so far. “It allowed me to see art in the context in which it was made,” Kumar said.

In a sense, SP-Arte may seem paradoxical: It stands at a global nexus, yet feels decidedly regional. To dealers such as Felipe Dmab, a partner at Mendes Wood DM, which started in São Paulo and now has locations in New York, Paris, and Brussels, this is not so much a contradiction as a strength. While foreign dealers and visitors may see Brazil as a bubble, Dmab said that the success of galleries like his lies in remaining intensely local, navigating Brazil’s complex culture, while expanding overseas. 

At the fair this year, in addition to works by Paulino, the gallery brought landscape paintings infusing nature with geometric or surrealist motifs by Brazilian and foreign artists, including Patricia Leite, Edgar Calel, and Peter Shear, creating a coherent vernacular across different geographies.

According to Hena Lee, a partner director at the Brazilian gallery Almeida & Dale, SP-Arte plays a pivotal role in strengthening the local ecosystem, while international fairs “help shift the perception of Brazil from a peripheral market to an active interlocutor.” 

The gallery’s booth ranged from Guga Szabon’s abstract textiles in felt and Marina Woisky’s visceral prints on mixed media to the limpid oils on brown paper centering race and urban space by Maxwell Alexandre, who has a parallel solo show at the gallery. Maya Weishof's expressionistic erotic portraiture was also on view at the booth and at that of London-based gallery Lamb, dedicated to Brazilian art and back at the fair after closing its São Paulo operation during the pandemic.

Lamb is among a growing number of foreign galleries seeking to expand their collector base in Brazil, despite the unofficial consensus that the country is an expensive place to sell art. That challenge was recognized by SP-Arte’s founder Fernanda Feitosa, who told Hyperallergic that more than tariffs, “what collectors feel is the combined tax burden” — federal and state taxes can increase the cost of an artwork by up to 45%, she said. While tax abatements consistently drew blue-chip galleries like Gagosian and White Cube to the fair in the 2010s — both were gone by 2015 — Feitosa said incentives “were not guaranteed every year, not uniform across all transactions, and often limited in scope.” 

Rodrigo González, who opened RGR Gallery in Mexico City in 2018 after moving there from Venezuela, told Hyperallergic that he was motivated to show at SP-Arte by the affinities between Venezuelan and Brazilian abstract art. His booth included works by one of the pioneers of Latin American kinetic art, Jesús Rafael Soto; Mexican feminist artist Magali Lara; and young Chinese abstract painter Wang Yi.

That proximity also attracted Piero Atchugarry, based in Uruguay and Miami, whose gallery displayed monochromatic sculptures by modernist sculptor Pablo Atchugarry alongside works by younger artists. New to the fair was Ruth Benzacar, a 61-year-old gallery from Buenos Aires. Its texturally striking booth showed iridescent panels by Tomás Saraceno, layered acrylic and oil paintings by Alejandra Seebel, and acrylic and latex paintings on canvas and gypsum debris by Catalina Léon, all three artists capturing the possibilities of mundane subjects.

Overall, RGR’s venture into Chinese art felt particularly fresh — and relatively rare in Brazil’s commercial sector. China is Brazil’s most important economic partner, yet, according to Tereza de Arruda, a Berlin-based Brazilian art historian and curator also working in Asia, Chinese artists in Brazil are exhibited mainly in institutional contexts. (Cao Fei’s impressive retrospective at Pinacoteca Contemporânia, in 2023–24, comes to mind.)

Among other notable international infusions was Baró, established in São Paulo in 1999. The gallery later opened spaces in Palma de Mallorca, Paris, and Abu Dhabi. It’s back at SP-Arte for the second consecutive year with a series of mixed-media works based on Iranian folklore by artist-duo Mamali Shafahi and Domenico Gutknecht, as well as acrylic paintings by Berlin- and Tokyo-based artist Ayako Rokkaku.

One of the fair’s most elegant small booths belonged to the nine-year-old Lisbon-based Galeria Foco, with its suspended geometric textile sculptures by Portuguese artist Maria Appleton, a current resident at the Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut. Both the artist and the gallery were participating in SP-Arte for the first time. 

Artists such as Yuli Yamagata, whose playfully macabre multimedia works were displayed by the São Paulo-based Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, and the renowned ceramist and sculptor Megumi Yuasa, in local gallery Gomide & Co.’s booth, underscored Brazil’s vast Japanese diaspora and its role as a transcontinental connector.

Elsewhere, the darkly ironic drawings of Denilson Baniwa at A Gentil Carioca challenged the very idea of cosmopolitanism — in Brazil, a concept historically rooted in the colonization of Indigenous people and land, slavery, and European cultural hegemony. Based on archival research in American and European ethnographic museums, Baniwa’s drawings play on stereotypical Western notions of Indigenous practices, such as cannibalism, a nod to the theorist Oswald de Andrade’s influential 1928 “Manifesto Antropófago.”  

Considered together, this year’s fair reflected the strength of Brazilian art not only in its renewed proximity to its Latin American counterparts, or intermittently yet steadily growing links to art-market centers, but also in its distinct regional dialects. 

In Kyoung Chun’s creative practice moves between painting and site-specific installation. Interactive works extend the language of painting beyond the canvas, inviting viewers into environments that challenge perception and encourage connection.  

As an immigrant artist, Chun reflects on the shifting sense of home — both safe and fragile, stable yet impermanent. Transparent houses, suspended structures, and intimate paintings serve as metaphors for belonging, suggesting neighborhoods that are open and inclusive. By blurring boundaries between interior and exterior, personal and public, her work builds shared spaces where fragility and resilience coexist, and where the act of looking becomes an act of belonging. Her art constructs safe, quiet, joyful spaces in a turbulent world — propositions about how we might live with one another — then opens them up to bring the viewer inside. 

In Kyoung Chun is a multidisciplinary artist born in Seoul, South Korea, and currently based in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has been exhibited in numerous galleries, institutions, and platforms, including Poem 88, HiLo Press, Dashboard, The New Gallery, Emory University, Sumter Gallery, Stove Works, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, NADA, Yi Gallery, Asian Art Contemporary, Swan Coach House Gallery, and an upcoming exhibition at Institute 193. Chun’s works are included in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, Goat Farm Arts Center, City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, Atlanta Public Library, Georgia State University, and in numerous private collections, including that of the late master Larry Walker. Chun was a finalist for the Atlanta Artadia Award in 2025. She recently completed her three-year-residency at the Atlanta Contemporary and attended the Virginia Center for Creative Arts’ residency at le Moulin a Nef in France.  

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston School of the Arts provides a multidisciplinary laboratory for the production, presentation, interpretation, and dissemination of ideas by innovative visual artists from around the world. As a non-collecting museum, we create meaningful interactions between adventurous artists and diverse communities within a context that emphasizes the historical, social, and cultural importance of the art of our time. Our exhibitions are free and open to the public.  

In Kyoung Chun: Make Room is on view at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston through July 25, 2026.

The exhibition is funded in part by the South Carolina Arts Commission, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts and is funded in part by a generous award from the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund of The Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina. 

To learn more, visit halsey.charleston.edu.

Welcome to the 332nd installment of A View From the Easel, a series in which artists reflect on their workspace. This week, artists blend painting and dancing and work inside a former yarn factory.

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.

Katya Granova, Leipzig, Germany

How long have you been working in this space?

I moved in May of 2025, but I’ve been away for quite a bit.

Describe an average day in your studio.

I usually wake up around 8am and start working at 10am, finishing somewhere between 4pm and 6pm. My hours depend on daylight, as I don’t like working under artificial light. I normally have three-four canvases in progress simultaneously, and when I feel stuck with one, I switch to another or do something smaller, like a watercolor. A lot of time in studio goes into non-painterly activities — creating color schemes, washing brushes, stretching canvases, etc. During painting itself, I usually listen to music that stimulates movement, such as various rock or metal. I mostly listen to stuff in French, German, Russian, or Ukrainian. When doing more technical or repetitive tasks like cleaning brushes, I tend to listen to podcasts on philosophy, politics, or history, as well as audiobooks.

How does the space affect your work?

Daylight and sufficient space are essential for me. When these conditions are met, my movements become broader and freer. This studio is almost ideal, and here I have been able to make my largest works to date. Large scale allows me to involve my whole body in the process of painting, bringing it closer to dance, which supports my concept of speculative intrusion into the past, condensed within an old photograph. Enlarging my base photographs to this scale makes them not windows, but portals in the past.

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

Spinnerei is a huge, ex-German Democratic Republic abandoned yarn factory, converted into galleries, studios, a Boesner art supply shop, libraries, and an event space, so this environment is hard to ignore. But I can’t say I’m fully integrated socially yet. Many people around speak English, but you won’t really get deep in the community without the local language, and I still have only quite basic German level. But I see many interesting artists around me and am gradually getting to know them individually. There are also artists of an older generation who are closely connected to the interesting history of the place, but they usually do not speak English at all.

What do you love about your studio?

This studio is one of the best I have had in my life. It is large, bright, high, just by the art materials shop, and located in a place with such a special spirit and history that it even has its own museum. Spinnerei is a former yarn factory that has lived through the Third Reich, the division and reunification of Germany, and the economic troubles of the '90s. There are high ceilings, rusty pipes, endless corridors, and old industrial lifts, so you start feeling like you're a part of some big mechanism.

What do you wish were different?

Perhaps a truly perfect studio would also have skylights and be located by the shore of a warm sea. It would be populated by my best friends from all the different countries, all my favorite artists, and lots of cats and dogs!

What is your favorite local museum?

Leipzig is known more for classical music and its underground art scene, but the main museum, the Museum der bildenden Künste, is quite solid. There is a rather special and weird collection of some German Democratic Republic paintings with workers — quite realistic, but with some unexpected, a bit homoerotic vibes, as well as many classical painters from the 16th to 19th centuries. It often has compelling contemporary art exhibitions as well.

What is your favorite art material to work with?

I work with oil, oil sticks, watercolor ink, and oil pastels. I also occasionally use light-sensitive emulsions for photo transfers, such as Van Dyke, which requires turning the studio into a small chemical lab, but it is not particularly eco-friendly, so I do it quite rarely. I sometimes do ceramics and screen printing, but in recent years, I’ve mainly focused on oil painting.

Billy Biondi, Corvallis, Oregon

How long have you been working in this space?

Eleven months.

Describe an average day in your studio.

I usually come by in the afternoon. I tend to work on one piece at a time. I like to start out making quick sketches to loosen up. I consider my art to be visual music, so I always have music in the background. I sometimes dance when I'm working.

How does the space affect your work?

I moved from a hidden studio space to a public-facing one. I am much more motivated to create quality work, as everything, including myself, is on view. The downside is I need to keep it neat!

How do you interact with the environment outside your studio?

I am a member of the Willamette Abstract Group (WAG), an organization of like-minded artists committed to sharing ideas and supporting each other. I am also involved with the Corvallis Arts Walk, which happens the third Thursday of each month.

What do you love about your studio?

My studio has areas for painting, printmaking, framing and client meetings. The location allows me to interact with the public and with other artists in the building.

What do you wish were different?

I wish I could get there more often!

What is your favorite local museum?

Portland Museum of Art.

What is your favorite art material to work with?

Oil crayon. It feels alive to me.

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

Oluremi C. Onabanjo Heads to The Met

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a new curator of photographs: Oluremi C. Onabanjo, a scholar with a deep commitment to African and Black diasporic histories of the medium. Born in London and raised in Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and the United States, she heads to The Met from the Museum of Modern Art, where she's held curatorial roles in the photography department since 2021, working on exhibitions of Ernest Cole, Ming Smith, and others. Among her celebrated publications is Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos (2022), centered on the Brooklyn photographer's chronicles of a historic 1977 Pan-African art festival. Onabanjo was the inaugural recipient of the Vilcek Foundation Prize for curatorial work, awarded in 2025.

A Boost for Queens Artists

A whopping 129 Queens-based artists, collectives, and nonprofit organizations will get $493,350 in grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs. Among this year's Queens Arts Fund recipients is artist Adelle Yingxi Lin, pictured above. “This funding makes possible a connection between ecological observation and cultural practice — translating water quality data from Newtown Creek, a recovering Superfund site, into multilingual calligraphic textiles created with the communities who live alongside it, making environmental conditions visible and personal,” Lin told Hyperallergic. See the full list of awardees here.

What Else Happened?

• Melissa Chiu will step down from her role helming the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, to join the Guggenheim Museum in New York City as its new director. Read more at Hyperallergic.
• United States Artists announced the awardees of its $50,000 Knight Arts + Tech fellowship: LIZN'BOW (Liz Ferrer and Bow Ty), Miguel Novelo, Rhonda Holberton, Taeyoon Choi, and Wes Taylor.
• 47 Canal, the 15-year-old gallery known for bolstering the careers of artists including Anicka Yi, Josh Kline, and Janiva Ellis, is moving to Chelsea, where it will share a space with Marlborough Gallery heir Max Levai's new venture. Will 47 Canal become 529 West 20th? Unlikely. (The gallery has relocated before, but it's always kept its name.)
• The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art has selected Bryan Collier as its artist honoree for this year's Carle Honors, which recognizes important contributions to the beloved and formative art form.

Wildcard

British artist, paint mixer, and provocateur Stuart Semple is celebrating 10 years of his “pinkest pink” pigment by giving away signed editions for free to anyone except Anish Kapoor. That's right: If you add the paint to your cart on Semple's website, you must confirm that you are not Kapoor, who controversially holds exclusive artistic rights to the world's blackest black since 2016. The ultra-bright, fluorescent-pink powder can be used to create watercolors, acrylics, oils, and more. Most importantly, Semple says, it shows Kapoor “how nice it feels when you share your colours.”

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City has appointed Melissa Chiu as its new director, starting September 1. Bookending her 12-year tenure at the Smithsonian Institution's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, Chiu will make her return to New York at a particularly challenging period for both museum networks.

Chiu's appointment is part of Guggenheim Foundation Director and CEO Mariët Westermann's restructuring of the institution's global leadership team ahead of the opening of a controversial Abu Dhabi outpost, scheduled for later this year. According to a press release, Westermann will hand the reins of the flagship Manhattan museum to Chiu in order to oversee the foundation's international outposts, leaving the latter in charge of the Guggenheim's artistic direction, programming, day-to-day operations, and finances.

Chiu will enter the Guggenheim amid an extended period of fiscal instability attributed to a long-term revenue slump induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, a problem many museums say they are facing. The Guggenheim has undergone three rounds of controversial staff layoffs in the last six years — two during the final years of former Director Richard Armstrong's polarizing tenure, and one under Westermann in early 2025 that sparked fury within the museum's labor union.

As negotiations stall for the next three-year contract, the union recently picketed outside of the Guggenheim's opening reception for the Carol Bove retrospective in March.

In its announcement today, Westermann praised Chiu's track record of arts leadership, noting that she “transformed the Hirshhorn with the international and local disposition that is so special to our institution.” According to the statement, Chiu increased fundraising at the Hirshhorn by 75% and secured two multimillion-dollar gifts for the museum. She is also credited with doubling the museum's attendance in three years, establishing new visitor experience technology programs, and leading the revitalization project for the Sculpture Garden on the National Mall.

Under Chiu's leadership, the Hirshhorn acquired 175 artworks by artists including Theaster Gates, Mika Rottenberg, Laurie Anderson, Dread Scott, Danica Lundy, and Mary Anne Unger in the year leading up to the museum's 50th anniversary in 2025. She also partnered with MTV and the Smithsonian Channel for a Hirshhorn-based reality TV show competition called The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist (2023), which was fun in theory but missed the mark in practice.

“Melissa has guided the Hirshhorn with thoughtfulness and purpose, strengthening its role as a national museum while supporting artists, scholars and the public,” said Lonnie Bunch III, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, in a press statement regarding Chiu's departure.

Chiu's exit from the Hirshhorn coincides with an already difficult time for the Smithsonian, which is currently being scrutinized by the Trump administration through targeted executive orders threatening to cut federal funding over content, programming, and research that promote “race-centered ideology” and inclusive gender identities.

Prior to joining the Smithsonian, Chiu held multiple roles at the Asia Society Museum in New York from 2001 to 2014. Arriving at the Big Apple from Australia, she served as the museum's first curator of contemporary Asian and Asian American art for three years before being appointed as director in 2004.

Chiu spearheaded the Asia Society's contemporary Asian art collection in 2007 in an effort to complement the institution's traditional holdings, kicking off the collection by securing a gift of 28 new media works. In 2010, she became the senior vice president of global arts and culture programming — a role through which she developed programming for the Asia Society and Museum's Houston and Hong Kong locations and initiated the institution's Arts and Museums Summit.

“I look forward to ensuring that the Guggenheim in New York remains a place of joy and learning about art and artists for all who visit,” Chiu said of her upcoming institutional return to the city.

Aaron Seeto, deputy director at the Hirshhorn, will serve as the museum's interim director upon Chiu's departure.

When the David Prize recently asked if I could record a segment of What’s the Big Idea, a series that asks leaders about their visions for New York City, mine was crystal clear: a Materials for the Arts (MFTA) in all five boroughs. 

A program of the Department of Cultural Affairs, MFTA is New York City’s largest reuse center supporting nonprofits with arts programming, public schools, social justice and social service groups, and City agencies across all five boroughs with free art supplies. We were founded by visionary artist Angela Fremont in 1978 under the leadership of commissioner Henry Geldzahler during Ed Koch’s mayoral administration. Almost half a century later, Materials for the Arts remains a beloved and celebrated program.

My ambitious vision for expansion, although hypothetical, opened a floodgate of social media comments, requests, and even a few complaints (not enough parking). Offers came in to host an MFTA in nonprofit spaces around the city; questions about when, where, and how folks could help trickled in; and now, we’ve gotten requests for parking reimbursement on shopping days (see: not enough parking).

This enthusiasm underscores the value of our program for those in New York City’s arts and cultural sector, from art and design students from Parsons, Pratt, and the Fashion Institute of Technology to elementary school teachers from schools like PS91X in the Bronx and PS135 in Queens; from sculptors, painters, and cultural workers in the Whitney Museum’s Education Program and Martha Graham Dance Company to the Laundromat Project’s artist cohort.

Based in Long Island City with a staff of 20, MFTA supports a membership base of over 4,500 organizations, providing unconventional art materials and tools of many trades like mannequins, fabric, frames, paper and vinyl, paint, plinths and pedestals, hardware, and lighting equipment. Over the past two years, MFTA diverted over eight million pounds of materials valued at over $40 million dollars from landfill, re-allocating these items to the arts, education, and cultural communities across NYC. We offer two shopping days each week and late-night shopping for teachers, many of whom lack the funding and support to source supplies through their school districts. Our special liquidation events open off-site warehouse spaces and give away incredible inventory from film, television, and Broadway productions (through a partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment), while an online marketplace connects donors directly with recipients to provide large, unique items that never even touch the warehouse floor. MFTA supplies have featured in Abigail DeVille’s critically acclaimed sculpture “Light of Freedom” (2020) at Madison Square Park; Machine Dazzle’s stunning 2022 costume exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design; Malinxe (2024) starring Marisa Demarco and Jeffrey Gibson, which premiered at the Prototype Festival; and Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya’s installation “Tender Commons” (2025) at the Museum of Modern Art, among other works of art.

Even so, our work fulfills only a small fraction of the city’s needs. New York is currently facing a devastating affordability crisis, one that is animating the work of Zohran Mamdani’s administration and is rightly driving so much of our collective conversation, particularly with regard to arts education and the skyrocketing costs artists face.

In this challenging landscape, many artists and organizations rely on programs like MFTA to survive. Several like-minded organizations and leaders from around the world, such as Creative Chicago Reuse Exchange, RINNE for City of Tokyo Founder and CEO Sachiyo Kojima, Art Gallery Burlington in Ontario, and Hanseatische Material Verwaltung in Hamburg, Germany, have visited our 35,000-square-foot warehouse to see our city program’s far-reaching impact.

With crises of affordability and climate change affecting communities around the world, our mission is more urgent and relevant than ever. The future seems to point to not only expanded possibilities for MFTA across the five boroughs, but also what the country and world might look like with affordable, sustainable supplies for artists in every major city. Until then, we will continue to sustain the local cultural landscape while keeping millions of pounds of artistic tools out of our landfills. 

“I can’t help but think of the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Called by aliens, the main character sculpting the mountain over and over again.”

This is how Fia Backström describes her experience of West Virginia in The Great Society, on view at the Queens Museum. The comparison echoes a long history of Appalachia being framed as strange and backward.

For Backström, West Virginians might seem alien. For me, they are family and friends.

I am writing on behalf of GRIT, a collective of artists raised in economically disadvantaged rural communities, the majority from West Virginia. We offer a counternarrative to Lauren O’Neill-Butler’s “How to Tell the Story of Extraction in Appalachia,” which praises Backström’s work as a model for representing communities living in poverty. We disagree. The exhibition continues a long tradition of recklessly extracting trauma from Appalachia for cultural capital.

Both O’Neill-Butler and the Queens Museum position Backström as an authority on West Virginia, though her engagement with the state is limited. However, the issue is not simply about duration. Appalachians are rarely given space to tell our own stories. Instead, our narratives are shaped by people like Backström, a European artist operating within elite art institutions. That positionality matters, as time alone does not dissolve systemic power structures.

Power shapes what stories are seen, told, and believed.

Both Backström and O’Neill-Butler flatten the complexity of West Virginia, casting the state in a singularly negative light. The exhibition focuses on Buffalo Creek, the site of a 1972 extractive disaster, but draws indiscriminately from other tragedies, creating a swirling montage of suffering. According to O’Neill-Butler, Backström learned from her visits that the region is a “nexus of environmental degradation, disaster capitalism, and intergenerational poverty.” This framing collapses the region into a narrow set of crises, reinforcing a reductive image.

Appalachia is a complicated place that embodies pride, humor, stubborn self-determination, deep community ties, and fierce attachment to place. These realities do not negate hardship, but they resist the idea that hardship is our only story.

In The Great Society, complexity is stripped away, replaced by a visual and narrative language that reduces the region to a site of suffering. Though the exhibition is filled with photographs and videos, not a single image includes a person. This absence is framed as ethically corrective, a move away from exploitative War on Poverty imagery. But you can remove bodies and still construct a spectacle of devastation. When sludge, crumpled-up paper that looks like trash, aggressive security fencing, and ruin dominate the visual field, the viewer is left with a singular impression: There is nothing but misery here.

Backström intensifies this effect by inverting photographs, rendering the landscape ghostly and unfamiliar. Rolling hills, forests, and rivers look surreal and eerie, leaving a sense of decay and desolation. This framing filters the region through the artist’s discomfort rather than through the eyes of locals, who take great pride in the region’s natural beauty.

And it is not only through aesthetics that Backström reinforces a narrative of trauma. In wall text composed of fragmented interview excerpts, an unidentified individual provides insight into the artist's state of mind: “You spoke about the photos with the dirty kids. Yes, there were dirty kids. I was one too. We didn’t realize we lived in shacks, everyone did.”

My father grew up in similar conditions and he spoke of that time as the happiest of his life. But Backström codes these children as neglected and dirty, while positioning herself as clean and modern. If working with the same material, an artist from the region might recognize that experience as complex rather than deficient, and not introduce shame into it.

In the video Mud Wave, Backström describes being denied entry into a mine for lacking required safety certifications. Her mention of this exclusion is followed by what I can only describe as a tantrum: “mine mine mean mine… nine miners mine minds of mud.” Backström reduced their reasonable precautions into a demeaning play on words, taunting that they have minds of mud, reaffirming stereotypes that Appalachians are dumb.

A community quilt illustrates the imbalance at the heart of Backström’s project. Appalachian quilting is a deeply rooted cultural tradition, yet here it is filtered through the lens of an outsider who assumed authority over the process. The community’s thoughtful, skilled work is mounted on black fabric with digitized stitching, producing a somber aesthetic aligned with the exhibition’s narrative. Participants were not compensated, and the final work primarily benefits the artist. Under these conditions, collaboration looks less like solidarity and more like extraction.

These are only a few examples of an exhibition rife with pain, and the GRIT collective is frustrated by the lack of a counter-narrative. We took our concerns directly to the Queens Museum and Backström, engaging in sustained dialogue over several months. This included an in-person meeting last December, covering the history of Appalachian extraction and the exhibition’s impact. Despite this, no public acknowledgment of harm or commitment to repair has been made, a silence that makes the uncritical framing of O’Neill-Butler’s article especially troubling.

Ultimately, I want those who have seen the exhibit to understand that the working class is not powerless. My father was a coal miner, and he took immense pride in his work. It was the one thing he could hold onto when the world offered him very little else. But Backström’s work wiped that away and recast him as a victim. He is no longer someone who chose hard work to care for his family, but an object to be pitied. That is profoundly disrespectful.

Moving forward, Appalachians must have space in cultural institutions to tell our own stories, and the art world must confront the barriers created by class and institutional power.

Paige Phillips, on behalf of the GRIT collective: Jenny Fine, Julie Rae Powers, Ali Printz, and Amy Ritter.

When a woman artist is among a milieu of more successful men, the comments often go like this: “She’s just as good as them.” Or, for an artist couple, “she was his inspiration.” Gabriele Münter, the Berlin-born modernist who co-founded the German Expressionist group The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) in 1911, isn’t exactly overlooked; she’s had multiple institutional surveys, and her former home in Murnau, Germany, is now a museum. Yet in the United States, she lacks the name recognition of her male contemporaries, in particular her partner of 10 years, Wassily Kandinsky. 

In fact, Kandinsky is a phantom presence in the Guggenheim’s current Münter retrospective, Contours of a World. Not only is he in some of her paintings, but the museum’s founding collection includes over 150 of his works and only one of hers — a gift, not a purchase. We can chalk that up to a single, powerful person who overlooked her: Solomon R. Guggenheim.

This line of thought crossed my mind when I visited Contours of a World, a beautiful tour through Münter’s creative life installed in the museum’s fourth- and fifth-floor side galleries rather than its majestic ramp. I heard at least one “she’s as good as them” while I was there. I’d counter that she more than equaled her celebrated counterparts. As a driving force of The Blue Rider, her timeless talent arguably surmounted the other members’ formal innovations. 

The title comes from Münter’s explanation of her process (quoted in the wall texts): “The forms gather in outlines, the colors become fields, and contours — images — of the world emerge.” And it is her world: her home, her landscape, her family and friends, portrayed in figurative images that can feel miles away from her contemporaries’ modernist abstraction. What she accomplished is more radical than the subject matter suggests. Münter’s art is a masterclass in the phenomenological experience of seeing. Her images are windows into a scene, but her visual strategies redefine the static act of viewing art as something dynamic, as if her world is moving around us, demanding our perception to focus and refocus.

That act of viewing structures the gorgeous “Breakfast of the Birds” (1934). A figure seen from behind (probably the artist) sits at a table in front of a window that looks out onto a wintry, bird-lined tree. The sitter is a version of the Rückenfigur, a stand-in for the spectator. The device was made famous by Caspar David Friedrich, who wanted audiences to contemplate the sublime vistas he recorded. Münter trades Friedrich’s grandeur for intimacy and warmth; we’re contemplating a table with what I like to think is tea and a slice of gugelhupf, and a glimpse of nature dominated by resting birds on a spindly tree. Diverging from Romanticism’s open space and dramatic lighting, she creates depth by layering elements: The centered figure sits lowest in the pictorial space, in front of the table, followed by the wall and then the tree. The composition positions the museum-goer as another element in the sequence, while curtains framing the window evoke a theatrical stage, as if we’re watching a play.

Münter’s landscapes can be more dizzying. “House with Fir Trees in the Snow” (c. 1938) crowds vertical elements — thin trees in the top half, two posts bookending two boulders at the bottom — into a vertical canvas. A house just below the center sits on a slightly diagonal horizon line. Its gabled roof reflects the shape of both the boulders and the white lines of snow on the trees. The whole feels vertiginous, as if Münter is stretching our gaze upward, while the boulders have a Rückenfigur effect, heightened by the house’s windows that look back at us like eyes. Another winter scene, “Snowy Landscape with a Red-Roofed House” (1935), seems like it’s about to slip off the canvas, its curving diagonal lines cutting through the snow and rushing out toward us. Meanwhile, the showstopper “Living Room in Murnau (Interieur)” (1910) turns an unoccupied room into a cacophony of saturated lime green and ocher, sharp angles, and bold diagonal lines; on the far left, a figure — Kandinsky — reclines in the flattened space of an improbably small bedroom. It all somehow feels both small and large. (I’ve been there and my memory of it is as skewed as the painting’s geometry.) Looking at the image made me feel like I was in motion.

Münter’s colors are spectacular — vibrant, contrasting, some so luscious you could almost eat them. (The crimson coat in “Portrait of a Young Woman in a Large Hat” from 1909 is practically visceral.) For this reason, her art is often compared with that of the Fauves and the Nabis, and a year spent in France when she was 20 (1907–8) certainly influenced her aesthetic. However, a gallery of her black and white photographs predating the paintings, from a two-year visit to the United States (1898–1900), bear out the visual logic of her later work. The photographs and paintings share the artist’s attention to contrasting tones and dynamic compositions. More significantly, the immediacy of photography grounded Münter’s artistic maturation in active perception, as opposed to the stillness of painting. Embodied sight is embedded in her creative vision.

“The Letter” (1930) is among the show’s subtler works, rendered in soft floral hues, but it fuses photography’s time-based principles and painting’s image-based ones into an exceptionally elegant whole. The layered composition depicts a reading woman in a chair, turned away from us, adjacent to another woman lying in bed with her head propped up, facing us; behind them, we see a grass-green wall and white curtains moving with the breeze from an open window. The motion of nature and people, oceanic color, shifting focal points, and fluid brushwork cohere into a moment in time, soon past. It is a graceful testament to Münter’s brilliance, and an invitation into her world.

Gabriele Münter: Contours of a World continues at the Guggenheim Museum (1071 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through April 26. The exhibition was curated by Megan Fontanella; the photography section was curated by Victoria Horrocks.