There are places we remember more beautifully than they probably ever were. The light is softer, the water clearer, the flowers more abundant, and whatever discomfort may have existed has quietly fallen away. Chris Hayman’s paintings in Fragmented Horizons at Studio Shop Gallery feel a little like this. They are a feast for the eyes without the gluttony, more sophisticated picnic than banquet, as though someone planned a birthday around the theme of a spring garden adventure. Bodies of water appear between passages of color, pathways seem to lead somewhere just beyond reach, and fields of flowers stretch into spaces that are recognizable without belonging to anywhere in particular. Hayman is not offering us a landscape so much as the feeling of one, the way we might want our best memories to appear after time has softened their edges.

Paired with Hayman is Rob Strati, whose work produces a surprisingly similar longing through an almost opposite visual language. Where Hayman’s landscapes loosen and dissolve, Strati’s feel precise, calculated and geometrically astute. Fragments of antique and vintage porcelain become the starting points for elaborate ink drawings that extend their existing imagery far beyond the broken edge. The result can feel like a three-dimensional rendering of a place briefly imagined, strangely tangible despite never having existed. Together, the artists make an unlikely but convincing pairing. One allows a landscape to drift toward memory while the other builds outward from what remains of something broken, yet both leave us wanting to enter the worlds they have made. In Fragmented Horizons, place becomes less about where we have been than where we imagine ourselves being.

Hayman’s relationship with landscape is unsurprising considering that she lives on a farm in Northern California, surrounded by livestock and the natural environment that continually feeds into her work. Before turning her attention primarily to visual art, she trained as a classical pianist and was involved in theater and dance, influences that perhaps still surface in the rhythm and movement of her compositions. She earned a B.A. in Art History from the University of Maryland and an Art Education degree from the University of Nevada, Reno, where she began what she has described as her “investigation in painting.” Working in oil on canvas, Hayman is particularly interested in space and in the energy created between forms, often using thick texture and contrasting color to push and pull areas of the painting. She has described landscape as entering her work intuitively, which feels important here. These are not places meticulously recorded from observation. Nature provides the vocabulary, but Hayman rearranges it according to feeling.

Landscape’s Rapture stretches across six feet of canvas, giving Hayman enough space to create a landscape that feels expansive. Oil paint is worked across the surface with varying degrees of pressure and weight; thicker passages sit beside areas that feel pulled, scraped or quickly brushed into place. The marks remain distinct enough that we can follow the movement of her hand. Greens push into flashes of pink and yellow, blue opens up what appears to be water, and white brings moments of light and relief. Hayman does not use these elements to tell us exactly where we are. Instead, they behave more like the pieces of a place we retain after leaving it. A patch of sunlight, the color of flowers, the shimmer of water or the density of a garden can survive in memory long after its layout has been forgotten. The painting seems to understand that distinction. Its beauty comes not from clarity, but from giving us just enough to feel that we have been somewhere like it before.

There is something even more enveloping about Earthly Delight. Hayman builds the painting through accumulation, but the surface never feels labored. Marks overlap, disappear beneath one another and re-emerge elsewhere, giving the impression that the landscape is still growing while we look at it. Her use of oil is important here. Its physical weight allows some forms to rise from the canvas while other passages remain loose and open, creating a sense of depth without relying on conventional perspective. It makes looking at the painting feel less like standing before a view and more like being somewhere within it. Perhaps that is where the “delight” lies. There is no urgency to understand what every mark represents, only the pleasure of wandering through them. A clearing can become water, a cluster of paint can become flowers, and then both can return to being paint again. Hayman leaves enough uncertainty for the viewer to finish the experience themselves, and in doing so taps into something familiar: our tendency to make the places we love a little more beautiful each time we remember them.

If Hayman allows the landscape to loosen until feeling takes precedence over place, Rob Strati approaches that same uncertainty from the opposite direction. His Fragmented series began with an accident, when a porcelain plate inherited from his wife’s late mother was broken. Unable to throw it away, Strati eventually began drawing outward from what remained, extending the plate’s existing imagery beyond its fractured edge. That impulse has since developed into a practice using broken antique and vintage porcelain as both material and starting point. Strati studies the imagery already present on each fragment and continues its visual language in ink, sometimes with an almost obsessive precision. Yet the process is less predetermined than the finished works suggest. He does not begin knowing exactly where these scenes will lead. The fracture establishes a boundary, but also an opening, and it is from there that Strati begins to imagine what might exist beyond it.

That expansion is particularly striking in Fragmented in Blue with Fishermen, Astronomer and Scholars and the much smaller Dreams of Blue Delft, Windmills and Dutch Sailing Ships. In both, the original porcelain occupies only a fraction of the finished composition, yet somehow establishes the scale of everything around it. In Fishermen, Strati carries the blue decoration outward into an improbable world of boats, water and architectural forms, eventually sending the drawing upward into increasingly sparse lines, symbols and shapes. Below, water spills from the broken plate as a waterfall, as though the scene held within the porcelain has quite literally escaped its boundary. Dreams of Blue Delft performs a similar trick on a far smaller scale. A fragment of blue-and-white porcelain opens into windmills, sailing ships and water, its imagery continuing so naturally into Strati’s ink drawing that it takes a moment to determine where one ends and the other begins. There is extraordinary precision in both works, but their appeal is not limited to technical skill. Strati takes something physically small and broken and gives it distance, atmosphere and seemingly endless possibility. The empty paper becomes part of that illusion. It is not a void to be filled, but room for these little worlds to breathe and, perhaps, for us to imagine what else might exist beyond them.

Fragmented in Blue with Flying Dragons, Pandas and Cranes in Mountains and Fragmented in Red with Minarets, Felucca and Griffin in Flight push this relationship between object and imagination further. Here, separate pieces of porcelain appear almost suspended within the drawing, with Strati using ink to bridge the physical gaps between them. In Flying Dragons, creatures and mountainous forms move between fragment and paper while fine lines shoot outward from the broken pieces, giving the composition the strange depth of a three-dimensional rendering. Minarets creates a different atmosphere in red, its sailboat, palms and distant architecture extending from the porcelain into a scene that feels both historical and invented. What is fascinating is that Strati never tries to hide the damage that made these works possible. The jagged edges remain plainly visible; wholeness is not restored so much as reconsidered. There is something quietly spiritual in that gesture. A break, usually understood as an ending, becomes the point from which another world begins. Looking closely, the fragments start to feel less like remnants of something lost and more like portals, carrying a small piece of one place into another that could only exist through imagination.

Perhaps the most curious thing about Fragmented Horizons is how quickly the actual places cease to matter. Hayman gives us landscapes that feel remembered before they have been lived, while Strati builds worlds from objects whose first lives have already ended. Somewhere between the two is the peculiar human habit of filling in what is missing. We improve a memory, imagine what lies beyond a path, reconstruct what has broken, or become nostalgic for somewhere we have never been. By the time you leave the exhibition, the horizon in its title feels less like a line in the distance and more like that restless space between what is there and what we add ourselves. Hayman and Strati leave plenty unfinished. Thankfully so. A world completely explained is rarely one worth getting lost in.

Paintings for Lou is an exhibition of Michelle Fernandez’s paintings currently showing at And Friends, an art gallery and shop in the Pleasure Point neighborhood of Santa Cruz. Across the exhibition, borders, stars, and abstract shapes appear again and again. Working with oil, primarily oil sticks, and adding sand to several pieces, Fernandez moves between works that are quiet and controlled and others that are dense and overwhelming. Despite these differences, the paintings feel very connected, in part because of the shapes and symbols that repeat throughout the show.

The title piece, Painting for Lou, a 36 x 48 inch work in oil stick and sand on canvas, splits into two distinct areas.  On the left, a large enclosed area sits inside a black-and-white checkerboard border, holding several oversized, simplified forms. The large blue shape could be a wave, or perhaps a river or path moving through a landscape. On the right, a grid of smaller compartments holds its own shapes and colors, some are possibly plants, trees or mobiles akin to those that Alexander Calder is known for, while others are more resistant to identification. There is something naive about these forms without them being immature; a sense of playful innocence perhaps? The checkerboard border separates the large forms from the smaller, compartmentalized ones and gives the piece the feeling of things being sorted and kept.  The title names someone the viewer doesn't know, without explaining the relationship to Fernandez. It suggests something personal, while leaving enough unknown for the viewer to find their own meaning in it.

Overflowing Gently #2, a 24 x 30 inch oil-stick painting on canvas, handles the same idea but from a different angle. Twelve irregularly shaped color blocks are arranged into a loose grid, each holding a single simplified form, maybe a bird or plant, and other geometric shapes, are rendered in bold, varied color. The grid holds its form without feeling rigid, again embodying a sense of playful naivety. The blocks are uneven, the borders slightly off-true, the forms inside them not quite flush with their edges. The title's apparent contradiction, overflowing, yet gently, is reflected in the painting itself: controlled without being rigid, full without spilling over.

Burn Out abandons containment almost entirely. The 12 x 16 inch work in oil stick and sand on paper is dense with overlapping shapes.  Reds, blues, greens, yellows, pinks, and oranges press directly against one another with no dividing structure between them. Forms surface and vanish, making it difficult to separate one shape from another. The painting feels less ordered, as if Fernandez returned again and again to the same surface, adding and covering as she went. The title works, to some degree, against the visual energy of the piece. Burn Out implies depletion, but the painting feels energetic and almost restless. Perhaps the title refers less to a loss of energy and more to a loss of control. There is a freedom in that disorder that feels very different from the more contained works in the show.

That accumulation reaches its clearest form in Killing Time, an oil painting on paper, 9 x 12 inches. The painting is made up of swaths of impasto in varying colors, some solid, others mixed and transitioning from one color to another. The surface is almost entirely covered in hundreds of small, thick marks, no single one significant on its own, but together making up the whole image. There’s no picture to extract from the surface, only the process of making it, one mark after another. The title brings another possibility into the work. The accumulation could come from restlessness, from having time and not quite knowing what to do with yourself, so you keep making. But repetition can also be meditative. The same action performed over and over can quiet the mind and become soothing in itself. Set beside Painting for Lou, the contrast is clear. One separates its forms into bordered compartments, while Killing Time allows everything to build and blend together. One contains, while the other accumulates.

Across the show, Fernandez returns to stars, borders and familiar geometric shapes without giving them a fixed meaning. A star can simply be a star, or it can hold something more personal; abstraction leaves room for both. There is something charming and whimsical about these repeated forms and the boldness of her color, but there is also a deeper feeling beneath them. The paintings move between order and disorder, the recognizable and the abstract, leaving enough unexplained for us to make our own connections. Paintings for Lou is playful without being slight, and personal without shutting the viewer out. It is a show that rewards spending time with it, allowing the shapes, textures and small details to slowly reveal themselves.

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Ian Kimmerly exhibits over a dozen large paintings at Dolby Chadwick Gallery ranging in size from 38 x 44 inches to the two largest 72 x 120 inches (double panels), with most of the works measuring 60 x 72 inches. The oil on canvas paintings are immediately compelling and showcase an aesthetic style Kimmerly has been exploring for a number of years, seen here in his fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, where representational and abstract processes are integrated to make the fully realized works of art. 

Looking closely at the paintings one can see identifiable figurative imagery sitting beneath the layers of abstraction. Large swaths of paint cover images Kimmerly has rendered, then arranged, in a collage-like manner. While the source of the imagery isn't easily discernible, one cannot help but feel as if they're looking at something familiar. Parts of faces, landscape traces, and other images are intentionally placed, in some cases compartmentalized throughout the backdrop. The countenances peer through layers of paint on the canvas, giving the viewer an impression they are watching an old film reel through an oblique lens, one that has been compromised with age. An involuntary nostalgia is triggered as one thereafter looks at the whole and imagines testimonial elements communicating with the fresh, final layer of bold paint. 

In “Changeable Like The Sea” (oil on canvas, 50 x 60 inches, 2026) Kimmerly presents discernible faces and people striding along a boulevard. In “An Overview” (oil on canvas, 72 x 120 inches, 2026) we see hands, fingers, and human visages, evoking architectural features. “Words Also Vanished” (oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches, 2024) offers us glimpses of terrain. And in “Turning The Sky” (oil on canvas, 46 x 40 inches, 2024), Kimmerly presents us with the closest he gets to a traditional landscape, with clouds and building structures on the top and bottom of the canvas. The latter, where the colors are muted yet prominent against representational elements, conveys a clear demonstration of time and place, linking the composition to what feels like a particular day, ensconced in nature.

What does it mean to render representational images behind dominant abstract marks? In many respects it allows narrative to cohabit, as the obliterated familiar is partially erased and thereby lost. It tells us that we live in simultaneous moments and places, because the past coexists with the present, and we shouldn't be able to solely focus on one. In most cases there is a haunting effect in how Kimmerly’s imagery is blurred, reminiscent of Gerhardt Richter’s exploration of visual perception. Kimmerly works within multiple layers of paint, the first apparently consisting of the images he has sourced from various magazines and the like. The complex and textured layering creates a richness in service toward the final composition, integrating the disparate painting components into something intentional and necessary. Any ambiguity opens a subjective relationship to the work of art. There are liminal spaces between each layer inviting an unsettling yet transformative emotional quality to arise. In some cases the visages portrayed and which are still discernible are quite emotive. Somehow they evoke known people and places where the viewer stands as a witness before a moment comprising wholly of chance. Kimmerly invites us to consider the multiplicity that constitutes a single life. 

Impermanence and the interpretation that pertains to visual awareness is implicated in these art works. How fleeting moments can be captured by photography, then rendered onto a canvas, then obfuscated to communicate the unsettling nature of being. Kimmerly’s paintings are a response to the prevalence of mass media images, with the essential conceit being his reappropriation of them for his own accord. Somehow he makes them more authentic and participatory by offering them to us in this reconfigured way and in the process offering us a dreamlike narrative or landscape in which to ponder our relationship to everything around us.

The thick, bold brushstrokes of paint are placed last on the canvas in a method lacking strict symmetry. There is usually a wandering stroke visible which suggests uncertainty and invites speculation. The eye searches for meaning darting between representational and abstract forms. These paintings have a lasting quality with a sophistication achieved precisely because they are not overtly balanced. They both convey the emotion and architecture of paintings by Franz Kline. But Kimmerly's visual mashup offers us something less calming and zen-like and more akin to modernity’s chaos. The askew-marks make the paintings. They convey humanness. They reveal a painter messing with a surface, trying to push it to share a collective consciousness, at a time of intense social upheaval. 

The exhibition title is taken from the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk. In her 2019 Nobel Lecture, Tokarczuk presents the idea of a “fourth-person” perspective which deemphasizes what are often insular, individual viewpoints in favor of something elevating the whole. She offers a perspective involving a narrative which can simultaneously embody the viewpoints of each character thus offering a broader and more comprehensive understanding of how a story is interconnected. Tokarczuk writes "all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us." Like Tokarczuk, Kimmerly invites the viewer to experience a holistic “fourth-person” perspective when viewing these paintings. “Some quieter melody” is Kimmerly’s nod to the calming effect a fully-realized narrative can deliver. 

Life is a series of choices and accidents. Peering toward visual clues Kimmerly scatters throughout, and underneath the composition, he leaves the overpaint of abstractions to announce an impediment that both invites interpretation and seeks resolution. During a life well-lived, we each collect snapshots we store in our memory, composed of something akin to short, yet meaningful, episodes. Regardless of the source material, the viewer tells the story they see and feel, and thus, Kimmerly’s images convey something of the human experience as they promise reconciliation with the past. 

Ian Kimmerly’s “Some Quieter Melody” runs through September 26, 2026 at  Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco.

We often forget that the process is an important creative act. We hyperfocus on the final product, what it signifies or carries. The medium is simply a vessel to tell this story; to usher meaning and finality to any work of art. 

Acts of Making on view at Pamela Walsh Gallery in Palo Alto, CA, celebrates and asks us to bear witness the artwork’s gestation as much as the final product. Three guest artists accompany seven gallery artists in conversation about materiality and how the physicality of a work of art carries as much significance as its ephemeral vision. We are asked to pause, sit closely with each work, and celebrate its becoming.

Upon entering the warm and bright gallery space, the texture and depth of the two-dimensional artworks on view are apparent. There is a luscious quality to the work on view while simultaneously showcasing the artists’ manipulation of material, commitment to craft, and the art of making. 

For gallerist Pamela Walsh, it is important to bring together artists driven by experimentation and the physical act of making. Many of the artists in the exhibition use identical materials to achieve polar opposite results. Brought together, the seemingly opposite works of art complement and play off one another in the space. It is a joyful parade of artful making, pleasing to the eye and evoking a curious childlike wonder. The crux of the exhibition is a belief that creation, its laborious process, is inevitably tied to the finished work. 

Take Land&scape (V 4.0), oil on canvas, by Miguel Gelabert. From afar, the hushed tone of a horizon hangs in the background of the work. Upon closer inspection, the brushwork, a deliberate method of making a gestural stroke with every turn of the brush, creates a hazy, dreamy landscape. Gelabert pays homage to his coastal hometown, Blanes, Spain, crafting paintings that depict nature as an extension of the spiritual realm. The glow and hazy horizon are achieved through a beautiful, repetitive brushstroke, creating illusion and depth. An act of making as much as seeing, Gelabert’s wavy brushstrokes and disappearing horizon do not serve as a backdrop–instead, they are a meditation on our internal world–a place where memory, emotion, and perception emerge. 

Gustavo Ramos Rivera’s Pedazos de Cielo (Pieces of Heaven), oil on canvas, utilizes paint as a method for evoking memory and nostalgia. Ramos Rivera’s abstract works are deeply connected to his personal iconography of family, nature, and community from growing up in a small Mexican border town. The language he’s created, utilizing paint on canvas to create abstractions, is heavily influenced by his Mexican heritage and postwar abstraction.

Beyond oil on canvas, several artists on view manipulate material to showcase the depth of their process. Dying Light 15, 2024, a mixed-media work by Miles Bennett, showcases craft–the art of the loom–in full display. As if hung off the loom itself, the slacked thread holds exuberant color and depth. Never intended to be stretched, Bennett celebrates the material by displaying it softly against the wall, hanging gently so each thread woven creates an illusory tapestry of color and texture. Committed to exploring the intersection of gesture and the inherent properties of any given surface, the final product is the process.

Continuing this throughline, Raul de la Torre’s Of Such Frail Thoughts Its Thread Is Often Broken, 2020, acrylic and embroidery on canvas, deconstructs painting down to its core. By deconstructing the surface, he weaves embroidery through its center, adding depth and structure. The lines are blurred between painting and object, dismantling a traditional canvas and creating a surface for repair. Like Bennett, the process of making–from destruction to rebirth–is the root of the artwork’s ethos.

Pushing the boundaries of what paint can be is front and center for Australian artist Craig Waddell. Down the Way - Self Portrait, 2019, involves layer upon layer of paint. Thick, deep, guttural brushstrokes dominate the surface of the soft linen canvas. Waddell’s passion for the tangible characteristics of paint is on full display in Acts of Making , showcasing oil as a medium in and of itself: heavy, vibrant, and powerful. Although painting landscapes and flowers were not part of his practice for many years, since the passing of two dear friends, the depiction of flowers is heavily prevalent in his work, demonstrating a commitment to honoring those who have passed while serving as a memento mori for the living. 

Immediately to the left after entering the gallery, stands a small mixed-media work, Jubilee by Fresno-born and raised artist Fernando Reyes. The formation of paper cut-outs throughout the white canvas is a tribute to the methodical act of making art. As each cut-out is placed and adhered to the canvas, the work slowly becomes alive. Each fragment is a significant component of the overarching materiality of the final work. Reyes shows us that the act of making is an art form in and of itself; an often playful, bright, and expansive aspect of the creative process.

Each artwork on view ties together the sheer beauty and awe of the act of creation. As each artist experiments, manipulates, or interrupts the medium, a playful yet intentional message underlies each: the final artwork cannot be without the process. Therefore, the process of making is the truest form of artistic creation. Acts of Making reminds us to enjoy the physicality of the artwork as much as its meaning. 

Performance stills: Copyright © Dread Scott 2020, photographer: Soul Brother. The work on this page is not licenced by Creative Commons and may not be used without permssion.

White Male Running is part of a billboard project organized by Art At a Time Like This and Save Art Space

Dread Scott is a visual artist whose works is exhibited across the US and internationally. In 1989, his art became the center of national controversy over its transgressive use of the American flag, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. President G.H.W. Bush called his art “disgraceful” and the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed this work. Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied the federal law outlawing his art by burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. He has presented at TED talk on this.

His work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Walker Art Center, Cristin Tierney Gallery, and Gallery MOMO in Cape Town, South Africa, and is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, The National Gallery of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. He was a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and has also received fellowships from Open Society Foundations and United States Artists as well as a Creative Capital grant.

In 2019 he presented Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a community-engaged project that reenacted the largest rebellion of enslaved people in US history. The project was featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Christiane Amanpour on CNN, and highlighted by artnet.com as one of the most important artworks of the decade.

Artist Dread Scott, Interview By Hugh Leeman

Propelling History Forward

Hugh Leeman: Dread, in preparing for our interview today, I came across different instances where you said some version or another of "I make revolutionary art to propel history forward." After nearly four decades of making art, what does forward mean to you now, and how has your understanding of what art can actually propel changed?

Dread Scott: Well, that's a good question, and I'll say guilty as charged — that's been my tagline for a while. I do think it's really important to have a vision of a radically different future, and my work hopefully helps people envision that. The world as it is has a tiny handful of people that control the wealth and the knowledge that humanity as a whole has created. It doesn't have to be that way, and it's causing a tremendous amount of suffering. In short, capitalism is a nightmare, and America and its particular vision of it is causing tremendous horror. Right now we're seeing a war in Iran that the United States and Israel launched. We've seen a livestreamed genocide in Gaza that without U.S. backing wouldn't actually be happening. We've seen cuts to USAID that have led to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths. And you could go on and on — and this is just very recent history in a country that was founded on slavery and genocide.

So looking at the United States and the world as it is — and knowing it doesn't have to be that way — I make art to help people confront the horrors that are at the root of this society, not just America, but America as a particular concentration of it, and then imagine how the world could be radically different and far better.

As for what art can do to propel history forward, I think that's a question a lot of people need to confront: both how history moves forward, and how art can play a role in that. For progressive or radical or revolutionary people, the world we have now is not the one that those of us who participated in Black Lives Matter, or in the "we are the ninety-nine percent" moment, were hoping and dreaming for. And certainly for those with roots going back to the sixties and seventies — the Black Panther Party, revolutionary organizations — this is not the world people were fighting for. There's a real question of whether you can get to a better world, a world without exploitation and without oppression. I think that's possible. I don't think we're at the end of history.

These are particularly tough times, particularly dark days, and it may get worse. But there hasn't been a period in history where artists haven't tried to stand for a better future and fought for it. In the midst of rising fascism, Picasso did Guernica in direct response to the fascist bombing of a civilian population. Billie Holiday did "Strange Fruit" in the midst of tremendous racial oppression, and it became a harbinger of the civil rights movement. Art at its best has heralded a future that's better for humanity — though not all art does that, and not all artists. And you have to get a little bit of synchronicity and luck for when your art can align with social movements that can actually change things. I don't think it's the art by itself that changes the world, but there also hasn't been any social movement of progress that I've known of that hasn't had art as a vital component of it.

The Questions Confronting Humanity

Hugh Leeman: You've said there are key questions you ask yourself about what is confronting humanity, and that this becomes a kind of guideline for what you create. What are those questions?

Dread Scott: One of them, which has been an arc of what I've done for a while and that I'm coming back to, is patriotism and nationalism. Those are increasingly coming to the fore. The question of who is and who isn't an American — the United States right now is waging a war, splitting up families, deporting people who have been productive members of society for decades. It's targeting ordinary people and driving a wedge between those it claims should be here and those who shouldn't. It's attacking LGBT people, with a special edge on attacking trans people, saying, "You're not really part of the body politic. You're not real Americans." So the question is: do you view America as basically a force for good, or as a historic problem? As I said, it's a country founded on slavery and genocide. The founding ideals and conception of this country are not something liberatory.

Now, many of my friends, my audience, my colleagues don't share the view that America is fundamentally the problem. A lot of people right now are trying to get Democrats elected, hoping that can stand up to the fascism Trump is consolidating, hoping for a return to some ideals — progressive liberal democracy or something. I think we should dream a lot bigger than that. If our dreams are rooted in founding documents written by enslavers and friends of enslavers, that's actually not that visionary. It's not that lofty. And if we're rooting for a society that at its base has capitalism — private ownership and accumulation of wealth determining what gets produced, not whether people need housing, clothing, medical treatment, or education, but profit — then I think people have to look beyond that to get to a society we actually want to live in.

A slightly different question from national identity is race, racism, and racial oppression, which has been a consistent thing I've looked at. You can't understand America without understanding race and racism, and you can't understand the modern world without it. The position of Black people in U.S. society, but also globally, raises huge questions. You can look at it through the prison system, through the police force, and through the amazing culture Black people have created. The culture that so many people appreciate — that I've benefited from tremendously and been part of — is Black culture. So looking through the lens of race, racism, and white supremacy, but also the tremendous culture that has been forged, is something my work looks at a lot.

And there are other foundational questions. As fascism gets consolidated, the position of women in society is increasingly to the fore. The U.S. government has made it very difficult for women in many states to have access to reproductive care. That's a huge question. I haven't addressed it a lot in my work, but it's something I think about, and I ask myself whether it's something I need to focus on more.

The Professional Troublemaker

Hugh Leeman: A thread that runs through so much of what you've done is summed up in a word — the troublemaker. You've joked that you're a professional troublemaker, that you get paid to be one. What's the value to society that comes from the troublemakers?

Dread Scott: If you have a society based on exploitation and oppression, it's good to have people trying to change that — to be fearless and courageous in standing up to it. There were court jesters who had the freedom to make fun of the king. This is somewhat apocryphal — I don't know the real history of court jesters in medieval European society — but the story is that if other people said what the jesters said, they might lose their heads, while the jester, if he played it correctly, could shine a light on society.

I also think people like Richard Pryor, or musicians like The Clash, cause trouble for oppressive ruling classes but are vital for people raising their heads and asking, "Do we have to continue to live like this?" The Clash and Public Enemy saved my life. I never met Joe Strummer. I was fortunate enough to meet Chuck D when I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. It wasn't the personal relationship that mattered — it was having musicians saying, "Look, you're not the one who's crazy. The society is messed up." That was really important to a young me.

It is largely young people who change the world. Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King were kids. Malcolm X was young when he was leading people into the streets to change systemic oppression that had been around for centuries. People thought that was crazy, but that vision enabled millions to stand up. Marx and Lenin were young when they changed the world. It's not that older people don't play a role — I've got gray hair, and I hope to contribute what I can — but historically it's young people who look at the world and say, "Things need to change. We do not want to inherit the world our forefathers gave us." And people who say that, at whatever age, cause trouble for those trying to maintain society the way it is.

Right now there's tremendous focus by the government on shutting down dissenting ideas, because they matter. There are pro-Palestinian students facing deportation, students who've been imprisoned. There's a Latino immigrant who did absolutely nothing wrong and ended up in prison in El Salvador, and said, "I've done nothing wrong. I've appeared in your immigration courts." He sued the government — Kilmar Ábrego García — and the government kept coming after him, because it was making trouble for them to enforce a program that has some support but that a lot of people are upset by. It's why in Minneapolis people stood up. When ICE was going into Minneapolis, they didn't back down voluntarily — they backed down because people stood up. That was a lot of trouble for the government, but it's the kind of trouble that inspires other people to stand up and say, "We don't want to live in a society where people have guns pointed at them in their cars for asking to see a warrant." That's the kind of trouble that's needed when a society is moving in an authoritarian and fascist direction.

More Aspirational Ways of Being

Hugh Leeman: You compare the artist to the court jester — presenting new ways of being that are more aspirational than simply getting some Democrats elected. What are some of those other ways of being, as you see them?

Dread Scott: I look at a world where there's tremendous wealth and an opportunity for everybody to have a decent life — relative freedom of movement, health care, shelter, clothing, food. And the thing standing in the way of it is capitalism. Something as simple as insulin doesn't get to people, not because drug companies can't produce it cheaply, but because it's profitable to keep the prices high. America spends more per capita on health care than any country in the world, yet the health outcomes are worse. That points to a profit motive baked into the way the American system delivers health care. Everybody knows that's not a good thing, except the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies, and some of the politicians.

You could provide health care for people. You could provide food. There's food left to rot because it's not profitable for the growers to get it to people. It's actually profitable to have the corn rot in the fields — and that's criminal. There are people who are homeless while buildings sit vacant, and more affordable homes could be built but aren't. I don't think it would be easy, but it would be very possible. England has been a capitalist society for several hundred years, but seventy years ago they created the National Health Service, which meant that if you got sick, rich or poor, you could see a doctor. That doesn't happen here.

There are people who have literally walked to the United States from Honduras. They work hard, they contribute to their families and to society. They build the buildings we're in, they cut the lawns, they cook our food, they bus our tables. And they're under threat just because they crossed a line drawn in the sand. That's nuts. The aspiration is a society where everybody could contribute what they can and take what they need. That would be a wonderful society to live in — one increasingly working to overcome the differences between mental and manual labor.

Humanity has reached a point where a lot of the ways we're living are outmoded and obsolete. Wars are being fought over strips of land — and it's not just the U.S. Russia is bombing Ukraine, Israel is attacking Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, and you can look at Congo or Sudan. It's so that small groupings of people can control wealth and knowledge that humanity as a whole created, and it's causing tremendous suffering. We could get to a world where humanity is caretaker of the planet. The first couple hundred years of industrialism damaged the planet, and now we're facing a tremendous ecological crisis. How do we collectively solve that — in a way that overcomes the differences between societies, rather than telling people in the Maldives or the Amazon that they're just going to have to suffer? The people in Brazil and Peru didn't cause the problem, but they're suffering directly from it. How do we say, "We all live on earth, and we're responsible as sentient beings for making the planet better," including for the other species affected by our decisions?

What Is the Proper Way to Display the U.S. Flag?

Hugh Leeman: You've tapped into the contentious nature of this moment in one of your most controversial works, What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, where the audience didn't just observe the work — they had to negotiate an American flag laid on the ground, stepping on it or around it, and there was a book where people could write their response. When you go back and look at those responses, do you see them as documentation of the artwork, as a separate collective work, or as an archive of how Americans understood patriotism at a particular historical moment?

Dread Scott: It's kind of the latter, but also something slightly different. That work is an installation for audience participation, and the audience is actually part of the medium — part of the artwork. The responses people have, both physical and written, are part of the work, so the audience that came before is part of the artwork for the people who come after. It is a window into what people think of the United States at the particular moments when it's been shown. The work was made in 1988 and became the center of controversy in 1989, with exhibitions around 1989 and 1990. It's a window into what people thought of the United States, of patriotism, and of conceptual art made by an unknown art student.

But it's more than a window. The work gives ordinary people — whose ideas about the United States are normally written out of the conversation — a place to speak. At the time I made it, there was a lot of talk about patriotism; George Bush was literally campaigning in flag factories. People were starting to wear flag pins. But the people in the housing projects, the ghettos, and the barrios didn't have their views made part of the evening news. In What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, you had all sorts of people — including those who felt victimized by the United States, as well as visitors and immigrants — able to talk about it.

For example, one woman wrote, "I'm a German girl. If we Germans carried on about our flag the way you all do, we'd be called Nazis again. I think you make too much trouble about your flag." That's an insightful comment from someone looking at the United States from the outside. Or someone from the housing projects who wrote that the police shot their brother and then kicked over his body to make sure he was dead, and said, "Thank you, Dread Scott, for this opportunity" — that the U.S. flag stands for oppression, and that the cop wore a flag patch on his arm. Those voices — people who are the victims of American policy — don't often have the freedom to talk about patriotism the way George Bush did. This work put those voices forward. Not my voice, but the voices of all sorts of ordinary people — including people who wrote that I should be killed and that my family should be made to pay for the bullets. There were very proud, patriotic Navy SEALs who literally threatened my life. These books talk about all of that. The work is a record, and I'm glad it exists — but it's also a living, breathing, functioning artwork that, when it's shown again, has some of the same force it had when it was first made.

Courage, Luck, and the Boundary of What's Necessary

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned the threats to your life. In a widely circulated TED Talk you gave years after the piece, you spoke about courage, luck, vision, and the boldness of action — describing how you continued with a photo shoot while people protested outside and threats were being made against your life. How has your calculation of that boundary of what's necessary changed from that young artist to today?

Dread Scott: First off, I'm still trying not to be a martyr. I don't want to get killed for my art, and so far so good. But the important thing is that there's a lot of untimely death in this society — some of it for people's views, but a lot of it just because this society is unjust. Look at the Sean Bells, the Trayvon Martins, the George Floyds of the world — people going about their business whom the police killed. Look at people who are victims of someone who can get a gun and walk into a school or a house of worship. Look at people who die because they can't get access to health care, food, or shelter — immigrants who died not because they were deported by ICE, but because they were left out in subzero temperatures in summer clothing. This is an unjust society that causes tremendous suffering.

I look at it as vitally important for those of us with relative freedom. I was a middle-class kid; I got trained as a middle-class person. I know how to read books and think about the world, and as an artist I have the relative luxury to read, look at movies, listen to music, think, and make art about it — and to have a disproportionate effect on society. So if you recognize that the world is unjust and you have this relative freedom that most people in the world don't have, do you stand by and say, "Isn't it cool that I have the freedom to make art — maybe I can make enough for a nice car"? Or do you say, "It's an accident of history that I am who I am, and I'm going to use my work to help people change the world"? I've chosen the latter.

But if you criticize the United States in a way that becomes threatening to it, this country reacts with violence. Look at how it attacked the Black Panther Party. Look at how certain artists were hounded — not necessarily directly killed by the government, but their lives made very difficult. Or something not as innocent as how Basquiat was treated, where people around him thought it was great to have this young Black dreadlocked genius and kept giving him drugs even as he was falling apart, because they could keep making a profit. The government didn't directly kill him, but the logic of the art world snuffed out a brilliant artist far too young.

So I have to speak truth to power as best I can and, hopefully, keep my courage when threats come. When I made A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday and it was shown at Jack Shainman Gallery, the gallery and I received threats. Other works have brought threats too. I keep saying, "I stand by the work" — but getting galleries and museums to also stand by the work is a challenge. Coming back to What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, I think that work is profoundly relevant right now, but it hasn't been shown in the United States for about twenty years. I've tried — including with museums that own my work — and we haven't been able to find a place willing to do it. Honestly, any institution that did would quite correctly understand that this president would probably be criticizing them and calling for them to be defunded, and there would be people who'd try to harm the museum, including the docents, security staff, and curators. So it's not a light decision. It's not just me saying, "I'm willing to stand for my work, come what may." I need sections of the art world willing to take those risks too — and sometimes they're even more on the front lines than I am, because the people sitting in the gallery are the easy targets while I might be in another city. It requires conversations with a range of people to have this work out there. But I think it's vitally important to society.

Room to Dissent: A Question for Younger Artists

Hugh Leeman: You've talked about censorship and the threats around this work — financial and physical — and about the historical importance of young people in movements. Do you think younger artists today have enough economic and institutional space to dissent genuinely, or has professionalization made it harder to take the kinds of risks your generation could take?

Dread Scott: Every generation finds a way to rebel, to speak out, to dissent. It's certainly more economically challenging to make art now than when I was in my twenties and thirties — but when I was in my twenties and thirties, it was harder than for the generation before. There are interviews with Richard Serra where he talks about living in a loft in SoHo, walking out one day, seeing a ton of used tires, and hauling them up — a year's worth of art-making materials. That New York doesn't exist; it didn't even exist when I moved here in 1992. You hear about how Warhol and Basquiat lived — that wasn't there when I arrived. There was a certain freedom people had. But let's not be overly romantic about it. You read Baldwin, and he talks about being really poor while doing some of his best writing.

A lot of young people in New York are probably living with three, four, five other people — in Williamsburg, Bushwick, the Bronx, Washington Heights — and working forty or fifty hours a week, which doesn't leave a lot of time to make art. But they'll figure it out. The bigger question for young people, whether they're visual artists or musicians or poets or theater makers, is: where do you stand? Do you plant your feet among the people and figure out how to make art that speaks to these times? Can you do it powerfully? And can you get lucky enough to reach an audience? You have to make good art, but then you also need a little luck. When What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? was made, it was always a really good work, but it required a specific alignment of the stars to become the national touchstone it became.

There are young people making really interesting work, but I'm old — I don't know them that well. There are young rock and rebel musicians doing interesting things, but there isn't the cultural zeitgeist there once was — no Jimi Hendrix or counterculture, no Public Enemy, no intellectual avant-garde like the one that gave rise to the Constructivists or the Mexican muralists. I don't see that right now. But that just means the twenty-five-year-old who's going to change the world hasn't changed it yet. This system is creating people who are making interesting work about these times, and they're not people with gray hair like me. I haven't given up — I'm going to do everything I can — but there are young people doing kick-ass stuff, and I just don't know yet what it is, because it hasn't become the thing.

Being a Father, and the Urgency of the Work

Hugh Leeman: You're at a transformational stage in your own career. In a 2016 video discussing police killings, you said, "I have a son and I fear for him," and made clear the concern extended beyond your own family. How has being a father affected your sense of what is urgent in your work, and the kind of future you want art to help make possible?

Dread Scott: Being a dad is a much more direct connection to trying to make a different and better world. You see through a different lens the world you're leaving to younger people. When the Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown killings happened, and there were potential trials for the murderers, I had to sit with my kid and say that I both couldn't tell him how to survive an encounter with the police and couldn't promise there would be justice if he were killed. That was very painful. In the midst of that, Bruce Springsteen came out with "American Skin (41 Shots)." It was painful to feel something of the horror that Mamie Till, Emmett Till's mother, felt knowing her child was going to the South before he was lynched — knowing your kid is going to an area where they do not value Black life, that he could be lynched, and that the horrors I knew about America could be visited on my child. You have to admit you can't protect your kid. And that's very hard.

There are people all over the world who've feared for their children throughout millennia — disease, hunger, war. We're not special in that. But where preventable death isn't common anymore, having the state be responsible for hunting people with Black skin is really tough. It creates more urgency for making art and contributing to political movements that make a better world. There was a real desire to look more directly at the horror that is America and help other people understand it — and understand that the world hasn't always been this way and doesn't have to remain this way forever. That kind of change in history sometimes takes perspective, stepping back.

Being a father, I've also learned from seeing the world through my kid's eyes. My kid graduated from college right during COVID and was entering a workforce where nobody was getting a job — where the few people working were "essential workers," basically people who weren't wealthy enough to avoid high-risk employment. My kid was initially working in a grocery store with a lot of exposure. I've seen how their generation looks at questions of gender differently than when I was growing up. And I've learned from how younger people look at the activism my generation did. A popular refrain among younger activists is thinking about self-care. I think that can sometimes go a bit overboard, but older people can learn a lot from younger people saying, "You guys got burned out, and it became a toxic environment because everything was all-on, everything was the most important thing in the world, and you didn't take care of your emotional and physical needs." Some younger people, including my kid, recoiled from that even as they were dedicated activists during Black Lives Matter — not wanting to repeat the mistakes they thought my generation made.

Defending the Flag: The New Work at YBCA

Hugh Leeman: You've got a show coming up in San Francisco, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — The Body Politic — and they've commissioned a couple of works. What are the new works, and in particular, tell me about Defending the Flag.

Dread Scott: Defending the Flag is one of the main pieces. It's not the first time I've returned to U.S. patriotism and the flag, but it's the most significant return to that question since What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? When I made that earlier work, I thought I basically got the question right and didn't need to come back to it. And yet, both what's going on in the world and how I'm looking at it now make me want to return to this question more directly.

Defending the Flag is a performance piece with a U.S. flag on a pole, guarded by a person dressed in military uniform holding a replica of an M4 carbine — the standard-issue rifle the U.S. military uses. It will be a prop weapon, but it will look very much like the real thing. If an audience member gets too close to the flag, the guard will assertively take control of the situation and tell them they need to step back, that they're defending the flag. It'll be a jarring experience, because when you go to an art gallery you're not used to seeing soldiers, and you're not used to them interacting with you. You might see a docent, who's supposed to be quiet — this is the opposite of that. There's an element of violence in it. Even though we absolutely know neither the performer nor the audience will resort to violence and no one will be harmed, it's a meditation on what patriotism is and how people look at the flag, the state, and the government. At the end of each performance — it'll probably be performed twice a week during the run — the flag will be ceremonially folded and placed inside a safe in the gallery.

Part of the motivation is that when What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag? was the center of controversy, a lot of veterans claimed they had special access to patriotism and to the flag — that their forefathers had died for the flag — and they were, in effect, defending it in trying to suppress my artwork. So I figured, let's literally physicalize the absurdity of defending the flag: not talking about the rights or the society we'd want, but the absurdity of mounting a military defense of the U.S. flag. I'm taking that experience from almost forty years ago and addressing it directly.

That's not the only work in the exhibition. There's another new commission called Life, Death, America, a set of body prints — about twenty-eight to thirty of them, the way David Hammons did body prints — assembled into a big mural that'll be fifteen feet by thirty-six feet. Each person is individually printed and then assembled into the mural: people of different ethnicities, nationalities, sizes, genders, and ages. Some look very small because they're young; some look much bigger because they're old. Some are in suits, some look like artists, some like athletes. It's a diverse cross-section of society that lives in the United States and has ties to places around the world — some of the people are Iranian, some are Palestinian. Because of the printing technique — a residue of the person on canvas, coated with powdered graphite — everybody becomes a similar tonality. If somebody has dreadlocks, those remain as cultural signifiers, but all of our skin pigmentation becomes black or dark gray. So the piece reduces our differences even as those differences remain visible for the observer.

I'm making it at a time when the background of so much conversation is death — the million-plus people who died of COVID in the United States, people worried about being killed in a mass shooting, people with family in Palestine, people from Iran facing a U.S. war, people worried about family separations in a way that almost feels like death because they may never see their loved ones again. Death is the background of what a lot of this work is about. Because of the technique, the figures have an ethereal, almost ghostly quality. So the work shows both the strength and vibrancy of a diverse, complicated, nuanced society, and the fact that people are thinking about death.

Hugh Leeman: Dread Scott, thank you so much for making time to share these ideas.

Dread Scott: I hope you got something usable. As I said, I do tend to talk in paragraphs — you may have to cut this down. But I hope you enjoyed the conversation, and I hope we talked enough about the art, and not just the politics, to get something interesting.

Entering Birdcage Cafe, you are met with a flourish of emotive works by Jiayue Li. They appear almost immediately among the warm light, small tables, plants, trinkets, vinyls and everyday movement of the café. Hung at different intervals and scales, the works do not command the space so much as inhabit it. Li’s figures, gather, read, stare outward, and fold into one another, their expressions moving between introspection, amusement, melancholy, and something harder to place. There is a quiet familiarity to them. Without the physical and psychological distance of a conventional gallery, they begin to feel less like figures placed on display and more like people already present: friends at another table, someone half-listening to a conversation, or even fragmented reflections of oneself. The intimacy of Birdcage seems particularly suited to Li’s world, allowing its surreal distortions to feel strangely grounding.

Born and raised in Chengdu, China, Li began drawing at the age of six, encouraged by an early art teacher who took her students into fields, villages, and parks to draw from life. She later studied at the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University in Shanghai before completing an MFA in Design at the School of Visual Arts in New York, developing a practice that moves between art, illustration, and design. Her work has frequently been described as dreamlike and surreal, qualities immediately recognizable here in the repeated faces, disembodied heads, shifts in scale, and unique relationships between figures and objects. Yet there is a precision beneath the strangeness. Working in mediums including colored pencil and oil paint, Li’s practice has explored womanhood, identity, and emotion, while her softness of line and palette allows otherwise ordinary moments to slip gently away from reality without ever becoming entirely unfamiliar.

Carousel makes Li’s interest in multiplicity clear. A procession of female heads replaces the horses of the familiar amusement ride, each similar enough to suggest the same person yet subtly altered in expression, orientation, and mood. Li has described these faces as representing different sides of being a woman, but the repetition also captures something more universal: the many versions of ourselves that coexist, contradict, and continually circle back upon one another. This becomes more intimate in Alter Ego, where three closely related figures press into the same small frame. Whether companions or versions of the same person, their closeness blurs the distinction between them. Together, the works suggest that identity for Li is neither singular nor fixed, but something continually negotiated between who we are, who we imagine ourselves to be, and the versions of ourselves that others encounter.

Midnight Reading draws Li’s surreal world back toward something quieter and immediately relatable. A woman lies immersed in a book while a cat rests across her body, its weight and warmth almost tangible despite the exaggerated proportions within the piece. Her elongated legs extend beyond the frame, but the mild distortion feels less important than the intimacy of being awake with a book and an animal while the rest of the world sleeps. Seen within Birdcage, that familiarity becomes even more pronounced. The work feels less like a scene being observed than a private moment one might recognize from one’s own life, reinforcing how easily Li’s figures slip between imagined characters and reflections of ourselves.

Recollection II turns memory itself into a collection of fragments. Scattered across the page are planets, a key, fruit, beads, a feather, a pair of lips, an eye, and other small forms, seemingly unrelated objects given equal weight by the simple act of remembering them. Memory rarely preserves a complete picture; instead, it holds onto random details while allowing others to disappear. That same logic seems to inhabit At Dusk, where two figures overlap so closely that their bodies and faces almost begin to merge, as though one person is being remembered through another. Together, the works suggest recollection not as an accurate return to what happened, but as something continually reconstructed, where people, objects, and emotions become entangled with the way we remember them.

Perhaps what makes Li’s work feel particularly at home at Birdcage is that it is allowed to exist alongside life rather than apart from it. Over breakfast or coffee, her figures become strangely companionable, like friends pulled into conversations dissecting the night before: a date, too many drinks, something said, something regretted, something still being worked out. There is humor, melancholy, and self-consciousness in these women, but also enough ambiguity to recognize something of ourselves in them. Li’s surrealism does not remove us from the everyday; it bends the everyday just enough to reveal how strange our inner lives already are. At Birdcage, surrounded by conversation, companionship, and the movement of people coming and going, that distance narrows further. Her figures are not simply being looked at. For a little while, they seem to be sitting among us.

Jiayue Li’s exhibition at Birdcage Cafe remains on view through September 30.

Lipman has exhibited her work internationally at such institutions as the Ringling Museum of Art (FL), ICA/MECA (ME), RISD Museum (RI), Milwaukee Art Museum (WI), Gustavsbergs Konsthall(Sweden) and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (DC). Her work has been acquired by numerous museums including the North Carolina Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art (NY), Kemper Museum for Contemporary Art (MO), Smithsonian American Art Museum (DC), Jewish Museum (NY), Norton Museum of Art, (FL), and the Corning Museum of Glass (NY). ReGift, a site specific installation investigating the life of Florence Scott Libbey, is on view at the Toledo Museum of Art.

Lipman has received numerous awards including a USA Berman Bloch Fellowship, Pollock Krasner Grant, Virginia Groot Foundation Grant, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Alturas Foundation, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s Arts/Industry Program, and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Recent works include Living History, a large scale site-specific commission for the Wichita Art Museum (KS) that investigates the nature of time and place and Belonging(s), a sculptural response to the life of Abigail Levy Franks for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (AR).

A Conversation with Artist Beth Lipman | Interview by Hugh Leeman

Into the Still Life Through the Back Door

Hugh Leeman: Beth, you said you came into the still life tradition "through the back door." You've talked about food's importance within it as a universal thing we all share, before realizing years later that you'd circled back to the still life that hung in your childhood home. Can you tell that story to start us off?

Beth Lipman: Sure. Though it wasn't actually a still life hanging in my home — it was all of the still lifes in the library of books my mom had. I'm sure there were still lifes hanging in the home too, but they were probably in a folk art tradition, or hand-stitched by my grandmother, that kind of thing.

I fell in through what I think of as the back door, because we had all these representational images of food. My mother was a folk art painter, basically a self-trained decorative arts person. She had a small business that supported our family making tole ware. I grew up in Pennsylvania Dutch country, in this heyday of craft fairs and colonial revivalism in the eighties. In the midst of discovering her own path, she amassed this incredible library of books, a bunch of which I now have.

That was going on simultaneously with growing up in a household that was always talking about food and the next meal as we sat down to eat the meal we were having — fantasizing into the future about the next time we'd get to eat. Every day was like that. That was really the crux of the zeitgeist of our house, the three of us — my mom, dad, and I. So looking back, it's a very familial and personal approach to this grand tradition.

My mom would take me to museums up and down the East Coast, so I was absorbing all these different genres of art, this love of objects and material culture, without hierarchy. That was happening at the same time as helping my mother at craft fairs — setting up the booth, selling to customers, breaking it down, wrapping all the objects. So it was this applied-art experience combined with a kind of high-art experience at these cultural institutions, plus this obsession with food. It was almost inevitable I'd fall into the still life tradition.

But I really focused on it fully for the first time when I was invited to make a work in response to anything in the Brooklyn Museum in 2000. I created a still life with fruit after Severin Roesen. That was the first intentional, full-frontal approach to addressing the genre head-on. I gravitated toward that painting because I loved it, I had a visceral reaction to it — but it also felt like home, something I knew I was going right back to. After that first step, I just fell into the morass of still life: this constant unfolding of relevance that the tradition holds, how it's timeless and yet evolves to meet us as humans through every generation. I think it's a fascinating, endless genre to dip into.

Is the Still Life Becoming Irrelevant?

Hugh Leeman: There's something interesting there — you say there's a timelessness to it. We have hundreds of years of still life, arguably thousands going back to ancient Egypt. But in a conversation we had previously, you wondered aloud whether still life was perhaps becoming irrelevant at this point in history. Tell me more.

Beth Lipman: Did I say that last time? Thanks for reminding me. It's interesting. We're living in such a virtual age, and the digital revolution is obliterating — or compensating for — our need for the tangible by allowing us to live vicariously through the virtual world instead of in real life.

I think about this a lot. My daughter's friends are watching TikTok and fulfilling the need to make something by watching someone else make something. It's like, oh, it's done, now we can move on in this thirty-second clip — I've gotten the gratification I needed from watching someone else do something with their hands. That may be adjacent to the question of whether we even need to have objects around us — objects that are also compensatory, that reaffirm our identities, our status, our devotion and attention. And now we have this thing that fills all needs, at least for now.

But I also think we might run into a backlash quite quickly, where people do a hard pivot and start to look at objects again, look at the environment they surround themselves in. I think we're in a pendulum swing.

Hugh Leeman: You bring up such an interesting point — that it becomes compensatory. And it's not just with making things, but with connecting with another human being. It gives us this simulation. Even in the early days of Facebook, we used "friends" as a name — I have seven hundred friends on Facebook — and the reality is we're being deceived in some ways. There are studies that seem to contradict one another, but you have younger generations starting to move toward, no, I just want a flip phone, and the importance of actually having your hands in the dirt. The thing that's always stuck out to me most is the academic Jonathan Haidt saying we've grotesquely overprotected our children in real life and under-protected them online.

Beth Lipman: Great writer and thinker. Living in the morass of it. But do you think we're truly deceived, or does it just not matter because we're satiated anyway? Do people really believe they have seven hundred or fifteen thousand friends, that everyone likes them? It is interesting — it fills a very primal, almost biological reaction.

Hugh Leeman: I was listening to an academic talk about The Matrix — why it became so popular. His point was that it fulfilled something deeply repressed in us as a society: this idea that some larger system is controlling us. But the big takeaway was that these systems aren't really controlling us — we're deceiving ourselves by thinking there's something larger. How crazy would it be to just put it down and walk away from TikTok? To bring it back to still life — so much of material culture is being replaced by virtual and digital culture. In Spanish-speaking Latin America there's a phrase that the smartphone allows the people far away to feel close and the people close to feel far away. You're at dinner and everybody's on their phone.

Beth Lipman: I was thinking, while you were talking, about the premise of human behavior — how we're essentially connected, functioning as a unit. I wonder if it's more of a reaffirmation in a different format that we're completely interconnected, like a hive, this kind of eusocial behavior — that we're essentially that way as a species. The problem for me is the lack of agency in it. Of course we can put it down, you're right. But it's the way it's controlled by a very few number of people, and that's problematic when it's not egalitarian. Although you could argue eusocial behavior doesn't equal egalitarian at all — there's always a hierarchy. We're going somewhat far off topic, but it's interesting because we're talking about the commonality of art and how art fits into that equation, and what we get from it when we experience it.

What the Smartphone Would Do to the Table

Hugh Leeman: When we spoke, you mentioned that one thing you typically don't put into your three-dimensional sculptural still lifes is the smartphone. What's the thinking behind that?

Beth Lipman: I tend to veer away pretty heavily from any form of new technology, because I find it to be the very first thing that's going to become old and dated. I'm constantly striving toward a universality so that even a hundred years from now — God knows if we're all still here, we have plenty of existential threats to worry about — if someone approaches the work, they couldn't say, oh, that's the iPhone 17 with the rounded corners.

But to that point, books are looking quite old at this point to many people too. I use books all the time in my work, but that technology is so much longer — the actual span on a book, and the idea of writing going back to Sumerian times. Not books per se, but what they represent. So maybe it's a form of romanticism.

A smartphone just marks it — it's a time mark that stops the transcendence into whatever else you're thinking about within the relationship between all those objects in a composition. It's like a mirror. The moment you see that technology, you cannot resist it. It's sitting right next to me while we're Zooming. So if you see it in a composition, does it dominate the experience of the sculpture, or can you take it in relation to the entirety of the piece? I don't know — maybe I should start including it.

Hugh Leeman: What I'm deducing is that it becomes almost a distraction to the greater whole when you see it in the piece. And that's kind of what the phone is — you've got a group of people together at dinner, but no one's really there. You hold a deliberate line around staying inside Western visual language, so as not to further what you've called the imperial impetus of the culture. Can you talk about that restraint as an ethical choice?

Beth Lipman: There's a history of imperialism and colonialism in Western culture, and you can argue the still life genre is squarely in keeping with that — from its inception in the late 1500s and 1600s. The things you'd see within those paintings weren't necessarily plundered, but they were sticky in terms of their commercial trade implications. When you look into Orientalism and all these different threads — there's beauty in it too. It's not a critique so much as eyes wide open: this is part of what the culture is. Everything is being assimilated now; everything is fair game.

But I try to stay in my lane, because for me it comes back into a commercial space. If the work is acquired and I've been compensated for a composition that includes objects from an Indigenous culture, or a culture that's been historically or currently marginalized, I find that problematic — taking money for something represented that isn't mine, unless I'm going to give that money directly back into that culture, which I'm open to. But the conversation becomes really sticky, and I tend to deal with issues that are more zoomed out — mortality, natural sciences, deep time. I don't want the conversation to get stuck on the fact that I've appropriated a ritualized object from a culture I have no relationship to.

I'm perfectly comfortable with Judeo-Christian religious objects. Funnily enough, I did a work that's on view right now at the Jewish Museum in New York, in their permanent collection. I was asked to include references to some of their permanent collection works, which I loved. The curator kept saying, can you make this more personal? And I said, well, I don't really make work like that — hyper-autobiographical. And then I ended up making something super personal, with objects not just from their collection but from my own family, despite having no intention of doing so.

I don't need to consume everything visually and intellectually and iterate it as an object with my name on it. I feel that way about using actual animals or insects in work too — I don't want to censor artists who do that, but I personally never would, because everything just defaults to your ego, your name on this object. You're subsuming another person's culture or another life force. Those aren't areas I'm interested in dipping into.

The Jewish Museum: An Accidental Autobiography

Hugh Leeman: The piece at the Jewish Museum ended up incorporating things from your life and became somewhat biographical. What was the autobiographical portion?

Beth Lipman: I was raised a Reform Jew in south central Pennsylvania. As I was looking through the collections, I started putting in moments that were very specific to my parents. The thing that was really interesting was that there were so many objects in the Jewish Museum that were totally exotic to me — I had no idea what they were or what they were used for. I didn't recognize them at all.

It made me start to think about my identity within that culture. I'm very secular, not a devout religious person, but I was like, wow, I don't even know that much about Judaism or some of these rituals. I grew up going to temple and did all the things, but I had no idea what some of the objects were. After I read the label, I'd think, oh, it's a matzo roller — that's how you make it, that's a great object. Things associated with rituals I didn't even know about.

Occasionally in my work I'll do that — it's deliberate and intentional, but it's arrived at in a non-conscious way, more of an amassing of things. I'll include things from my environment or my family's environment, or things that refer to work I've made in the past or will make in the future. I'm constantly sifting through cultural and personal references. I've made a few pieces that are very specifically personal — objects from my immediate domestic environment.

A Stratigraphic Layer: What They'll Read Off Our Tables

Hugh Leeman: You referred to your work as a stratigraphic layer that humanity will leave on earth — still life as a larger understanding of the whole. When you picture someone excavating our era far into the future, what do you want them to read off of your tables?

Beth Lipman: That there was abundance. Most of the compositions are in glass, at least partly — sometimes ceramic, sometimes metal. The materiality becomes really important, because some materials will completely not be available. If we're talking a thousand years into the future, you'll be able to understand a shape of glass — an apple in glass, a vessel. But a lot of other things don't last as long. Maybe it's post-apocalyptic — what are these objects? We are dealing with vessels, with many things.

There's an abundance in our lifetime, in our generation, that's just unfathomable to previous generations — even just the amount of trash we make. So I think that would be one of the first things they'd read. Obviously I have no idea what a future human might be thinking. They might use it to bludgeon someone who's about to attack them — just grab the heavy thing and throw it. I have no idea.

Hugh Leeman: You bring up such an interesting point, because it hits on this fear of scarcity and anxiety we have amidst a time of incredible abundance. Do you hope the autobiographical pieces preserve you — so someone in the future can say, oh, Beth was a such-and-such, she was trying to tell us something about herself?

Beth Lipman: I just wonder what kind of information is even going to be available. This is very dystopic, but I don't think that level of information is even going to exist — I could be totally wrong. Ian McEwan's new book that I just finished — What We Can Know, I'm paraphrasing the title — is about a history professor far into the future rediscovering a poet's life. Everyone should go read it, it's incredible.

Who's going to care, really? You'd have to care very deeply to get that granular about me personally. Of course there's a tremendous amount to know from any object — its creator, the environment it's from. That's material culture. That's the interesting thing: where is the sculpture generating from? What is the society that has afforded the possibility of creating something that is, on one hand, not essential?

I don't deliberately embed myself, other than as a conceptual exercise to figure out something I want to know. I certainly feel the work is an extension of my thought process, and it's great if someone else gets something from it — that's sliced bread right there. But the original impetus is more about a conceptual exercise of trying to figure something out.

Hive Mind: Stepping Outside the White Cube

Hugh Leeman: So much of your work has used glass. But you did a piece recently at Iowa State University titled Hive Mind — your first permanent outdoor work — and you said it left you wanting to work in metal outside all the time. What cracked open there?

Beth Lipman: I'm very spatially related. A lot of times I need to be embedded in a space, with the weather. Up until that point it was interior spaces, where being in the space unlocks my imagination to understand what the next thing is that needs to happen — that's going to respond specifically to the institution I'm in.

To have Hive Mind embody so many things that have happened and will happen over the years at Iowa State, and then be situated in the center of campus where everyone traverses to get to their buildings and the cafeteria — to have it in conversation with the architecture, and to understand scale and the content of objects in relation to these more monumental iterations of human endeavor. And then to just have this work be something people are passing constantly, no matter what.

Not because I need everyone to look at it all the time, but you have to choose to go into a museum or gallery. Whereas this journeying, this migrating that happens as humans — you catch it out of the side of your eye while you're biking across campus, or talking with friends, or on your phone. It was really exciting to engage in an outdoor environment. I'd dipped into outdoor things before, but nothing permanent. It was so much fun to create something that functioned in a different way, outside of a white cube or a house museum.

Perseverating: Anxiety as a Tool

Hugh Leeman: You've mentioned a dystopian future a couple of times — this undercurrent of anxiety in society. In our conversation you taught me a new word: perseverating. You described pacing around the studio, worrying the same points over and over. Does that anxiety feed into your artwork or fight against it?

Beth Lipman: I definitely use it as a tool. I'd like to think it makes me very sensitized to detail — everything has to be exact. I'm not a hyper-controlling person, but in terms of bringing my practice to closure, I do have that precision. Perseverating would be an apt description of what I do when I'm really locked into my work or an exhibition. It's a way of worrying something into existence. I don't mean that negatively — it's like chewing the fat.

Hugh Leeman: Do you think it's similar to the hive mind effect — that it's not just you feeling this, that lots of people are feeling these fears, and that's being influenced into your work?

Beth Lipman: That's fair. When you zoom out, we can either directly address the zeitgeist of now, or try to transcend it. Sometimes with artists, I think we can be prescient — we tap into something that hasn't fully bloomed in the collective consciousness yet, and it arrives roughly at the same time as the hysteria of everyone else. All we can do is follow the thing we're most passionate about, the next thing we're doing. It's tricky to respond to a moment directly as it's happening.

We're a slow-moving species, in a way. If it's a fire, we can put it out. But a slow-moving disaster — climate change, singularity to a certain extent — how are we going to stop that? We're not. I'm not saying this fatalistically, but if you learn from history, we're just not hardwired to meet that. As an artist, I filter all of that through my work, and I constantly check whether what I'm making is what I really need to be making right now.

Making Something as a Political Act

Hugh Leeman: You've said that simply making something is a political act — a way of saying, I'm here, I'm a voice. That could date all the way back to cave paintings. Can you expand on that?

Beth Lipman: To make anything at all is radical. There's not much in this world supporting anyone in their attempts to make anything — if anything, it's the exact opposite. The level of death by a thousand cuts in just living. So to make a mark of any kind is a radical act, and therefore a political act, because you've asserted something into a social discussion that wasn't there before. It doesn't have to address the body politic directly, but it's essentially political in that it expresses yourself.

This is another problem with the digital revolution: of course many people are providing content, but there are far more people ceding their voice to watch other people's content, and an even smaller number making a lot of money on all that free content. So it's a really interesting time to think about making something.

Hugh Leeman: You've raised the possibility that the digital revolution is doing something to human consciousness bigger than even the Industrial Revolution — that we may be sliding back toward oral history, losing writing and reading. As someone whose practice is about what gets left behind, what worries you most?

Beth Lipman: The dissolution of society. Although oral history lasted a very long time, so that worked out quite well. My tech relatives are going to eye-roll if they ever hear this, but it feels like devolving — from a scientific standpoint of natural growth and decay, have we peaked and are going back into a devolving way of being? How fragile is this system if we're not writing and reading anymore? What happens if the internet goes down for two weeks? What happens to that information?

Hugh Leeman: So much of society has been formed over thousands of years by showing people images and telling them stories — that's the basis of religion in many ways. And now we have a machine that can do those things. Even if you're writing the next great novel, it gets buried under an avalanche. I wondered if there's something anti-authoritarian in what you're saying — because the nature of authoritarianism is that you don't have a voice; your belief is what we tell you it is.

Beth Lipman: It's subsumed. And we're voluntarily ceding to it right now. Really interesting time to be alive, though, right, Hugh?

The Double: Two Sides of the Coin

Hugh Leeman: You've said you're obsessed with the double of things — the other side of the coin, the contradictions we all have. Half of us can believe one thing and the other half its opposite. What's surfacing in your work now?

Beth Lipman: That's front and center in everything I'm thinking about right now — the pairing of two sides of the coin, the double. I'm doing it with objects, within the storytelling of still life. It relates to truth and untruth, and where truth lies within that. It's not just about the doubling; it's about the perspective of the two sides — not just the similarity, but the discrepancies, and the times where there's slippage into both, a porosity between the two sides.

I'm thinking about the doubling of the body, societal doubling, natural doubling, the artificial and the real — the copy, authenticity and fake. There are so many ways to think about the double and pairing. It's most likely where the work is going to go for quite a while, because it starts with the premise you know, then understands what happens when you depart from it — when you jump off the cliff from what you know into what's on the other side.

I've been circling doubling and copying pretty much my adult life. I weirdly also had identical twins, which made me think — wait, did that happen because I was so super-focused? It's been a preoccupation in one way or another my whole art practice, but often subordinated to other things. Right now it feels like, oh, this is the moment we're looking at two sides of something. That feels like it could carry me for a long time. There's just so much information there.

The Permanence of Volatility

Hugh Leeman: In some ways what you're talking about is perception and belief, intimately intertwined. Zooming out to religious belief systems — thousands of years of, if you don't believe in the sun god, my people come over the mountain and decimate yours. We're almost incapable of considering that I might actually be wrong, that my reality might not be the one. To pull things full circle: we've been talking about volatility and the challenges society is going through. If that volatility lifted and you could dream in any direction, where does your imagination want to go next?

Beth Lipman: The whole premise is interesting — this idea that volatility, or change, is in a way a permanent state, isn't it? I don't feel my practice is solely circling a nexus of volatility. I love talking with you about all these ideas, but the practice is the practice. There are things that seep in that are really relevant right now and could be less relevant in twenty or fifty years.

Inherently, I believe the study of material culture is something my imagination will keep doing probably my whole life, because we only have one or two really, really good ideas our whole entire life. We're human — we have these objects we use, that we choose to surround ourselves with, that we're entrenched or burdened with, or choose to live with. I don't know what the next step is, but I trust it's going to arrive and I'll meet that moment. I don't have a place I'd rather be than where I am now, because I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing in my work. I don't know what the next step is, but I trust I'll know it when it presents itself.

Hugh Leeman: In some ways the volatility you're speaking of is inherently human. What creates technology is effectively necessity, and what we're experiencing now is the human volatility to all this newness being created around us — and you become a documentarian of that volatility. It doesn't go away. That's part of the reality we all experience.

Beth Lipman: It'll be something else soon. I find it fascinating how locked the conversation has been on AI for so long — even though it just started. Maybe AGI is here, maybe it's not; maybe singularity is here, maybe not, who knows. Given how fast our attention span shifts, it's surprising how long this conversation has gone on. We're not talking about climate change that much right now, Hugh, which I find devastating and problematic. But it's definitely not the top discussion for most people I see.

Things will continue to change. That's what we don't know. My good friend Sandro Montanari — an incredible geologist — said, you want to not know, because the moment you know, it's always bad. He's studying all of this, and he said it's better not to know, because if you don't know, there's still hope. So, better not to know. If you know, it won't be good.

Face to Face, and the Backfire to Come

Hugh Leeman: You bring up an interesting point about the hyper-focus on AI, lamenting that we're not talking about climate change — and the two are intrinsically intertwined right now with the energy consumption around this. It goes back to what you were saying about a networked system that isn't egalitarian, where very few people control the narrative. A couple of years ago I was in a discussion group and a guy came in I'd never heard of — Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI. Someone asked what he was worried about, and he said the subtle nuance of day-to-day misinformation AI is capable of giving to someone who may already have a predisposition to a mental health issue, and it convinces them of a whole other alternate reality. That's already manifest. And you were talking about the obsolescence of books — now you have a machine that can make information specific to you, specific to me.

Beth Lipman: The real consequence is that we won't be able to trust anything except actual face-to-face, in-person conversations. Even the conversation you and I are having could be modified. I think there's going to be huge backfire to all of this — a major backfire people aren't reckoning with. You can tax the system with misinformation and artificial slop for only so long before the hive mind turns away and says, this is not useful anymore, it can't be trusted. There'll be a wholesale rejection of communicating in this way, because it becomes not efficient or utilitarian. If you can't trust anything, or the content you share becomes modified and out of your control, why would you continue to do it?

We're generally, even though slow-moving, somewhat logical sometimes — if something does such harm, it's going to break. Do you think so?

Hugh Leeman: I feel a lot of concern, and I think a lot of people do. I was in an Uber yesterday and there were bill posters around a construction site — hundreds of them — that said, "Got anxiety about AI and your future?" with a phone number underneath. So much of us base not just our social identities but our deeply embedded psychological identity on our repetitive behaviors, and for most of us that's our job — I'm an architect, I'm a salesman. The potential of that going away leaves an entire society going, I have no idea who I am. And the other side of identity, going to your work and still life, is what we consume — I am a such-and-such because I drive this car, I have this watch. If that purchasing power goes away, you've got a whole demographic that's like, I have no idea who I am. Even in the short term, if you have an implosion of the stock market — I was reading that seven companies comprise about forty percent of the value of the entire S&P 500. If that's a bubble and it collapses, that's where we're really going to have an issue with jobs.

Beth Lipman: It's all so interconnected, and it feels vulnerable and fragile. Many people think we're in a bubble right now. We also need correctives — that's part of continuing to be a society that can move forward and be robust. I obviously don't want the stock market to collapse, if solely for selfish reasons, because it'll impact the arts immediately.

There's a belief system that all these systems we have in place to create a functional capitalist society can withstand these violations or attacks. But after a period of time, what's the turning point where things start to fold? What happens if an innumerable amount of people lose their jobs? Or — I know this is a pivot — you can't trust the food system, can't eat lettuce forever. All these systems are okay, they're resilient, until they're not resilient anymore.

There will probably be a natural corrective to the age of AI, because we still have the autonomy to walk away from it — some people more than others. It could lead to a huge renaissance of all the things we've been talking about: the need for interconnectedness, the need for the tangible, the need for putting your hands in dirt. At the same time, I'm super grateful we can have a Zoom together and hang out. Technology is miraculous too.

I think we're inherently in need of making things and creating things — that's part of who we are as humans. And being with other people, even though I consider myself an introvert. I don't think all the adjacent virtual ways of feeling in touch will actually scratch the itch we have as humans.

Are we in a weird bubble right now? I do think so. I think about energy consumption all the time. Before I ask Claude anything, I think, is this worth the electricity, this question? And sometimes I'm like, well, hello, Claude, I have a question I just can't answer on my own. But I really try not to default to using it, because of the energy consumption — and also I don't want my brain to rot out.

Hugh Leeman: Beth Lipman, thank you so much.

Beth Lipman: It's totally my pleasure. Thank you for this.

By Jonathan Curiel 

The colorful blobs of paint have coalesced onto thin, plastic rods, and they now form abstractions of people you love to hate. Or not. No specific names are attached to the men and women on display inside the viewing chambers of Chris Dorosz's new art exhibit. In fact, there's no wall text at all with any of the artworks, leaving the viewer to imagine who these people are exactly. Is that woman in the yellow dress and the camera on her shoulder an "influencer" who peddles her vacuous views to millions of TikTok followers? Could that tall blond man possibly be Donald Trump in an awkward pose? What about the 18 other people whom Dorosz has lined up to be inspected from all available angles? 

The only clue from Dorosz at the gallery is his artist statement, which says the people we see in his "Stasis" series are inspired by "figures from media streams of people driving the social, technological, and political forces shaping our reality." For anyone who spends more than a minute following the news or engaging in social media posts, Dorosz's art will resonate in intensely visceral ways — including from Dorosz's method of choice: He squeezes these figures into small corridors of clear plastic, where the men and women line up side by side, as if trapped inside a surreal tomb that froze their movements into a single, unguarded pose. Their existence is a kind of selfie hell, where — Sisyphus-like — they're condemned to be seen without their phones, their smiles, and their actual identities. Instead, they live in a world of melted abstraction, where their bodies are just slivers of plastic rods that form shapes we recognize as human. Look closer and you see the rods in unison, spaced apart enough to reveal the individual reeds of plastic and paint that compose these 20 men and women. 

"The medium is the message," Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan famously wrote in the 1960s, and that edict helps illuminate Dorosz's "Stasis" series, which deliberately upends visitors' need for precise and concise explanations. If television is about bursts of moving images that addict viewers to constantly changing scenes of drama and intrigue, and if the internet also follows that mode of quick-paced visual movement, then Dorosz's "Stasis" work is an attempt at slow-motion impermanence. Depending on the angle you take to view each work in the series, the scene changes a bit. Up close, they are obvious collections of rods and paint. From a distance, they're delineated people. Nothing is fixed. This "inside-outside" perspective has a long tradition in the art world, whether it's Chuck Close's colossal portraits of people's faces or George Seurat's pointillism that inspired generations of artists in France and across the world. In his seminal 1964 chapter, "The Medium Is the Message," from his book Understanding Media, McLuhan pinpoints Cubism as an art-world example of something that provides "instant, total awareness" without resorting to illusion. Dorosz's "Stasis" art is both awareness and illusion — his use of a post-McLuhan, post-modern medium that is neither pure sculpture nor pure painting.

What we encounter are what I'd call pop-culture echo chambers since the figures stand inside their see-through containers like embryonic collectibles that didn't quite evolve into their final form and are now nameless, universal stand-ins for everyone. You see what you want to see but you can't really know the figures. It's impossible. There's no touching them. There are no knowable backstories. Nothing except Dorosz's on-site explanation (tucked inside a binder) that says the figures "resist a fixed reading. This reflects how identity is mediated and circulated through pervasive image culture."

If you want to start an argument within your family or even among a group of strangers, bring up the subject of "image culture" and its impact on just one level of society: politics. Because of "image culture," reading levels have plummeted overall, with a YouGov survey showing that 40 percent of Americans didn't read a single book last year. Not one book. Meanwhile, the average American spends more than two hours a day just on social media, never mind the other offerings (news sites, music channels, etc.) that beckon on the internet. Because of these parallel developments, political leaders traffic in slick, quick messages for the short-attention-span environment that pervades everyday culture. More than ever, people's momentary perceptions become embedded as permanent evidence that explains complicated issues that would ordinarily require Socratic debates to understand. Stasis, indeed. 

(L) Woman Front View, 2026 Acrylic paint and gel medium poured into industrial staples on canvas 16 x 19 inches

(R) Stasis 153, 2026, Acrylic paint on plastic rods, 12.5 x 32 x 8 inches

Dorosz's "Person Painted People" exhibit at Scott Richards Contemporary Art, which continues through September 26, is a rousing success except for one aspect: his second series of works called "Staple Paintings," which are grids of staples filled with poured paint. Also abstract portraits of people that change perspective depending on your distance, these figures are of those Dorosz knows, but the works' contours don't approach the mesmerizing level of his "Stasis" series. The humans we see in the "Staple Paintings" seem too obfuscated and too uninviting — puzzles more than people. And they don't have the inherent humor of the "Stasis" works, which trap their figures in catacombs of plastic that are surreal and absurd. Almost Monty Python absurd. You can easily imagine these figures screaming to get free from their viewing chambers. But Dorosz doesn't let them speak, which means these nameless men and women are the antithesis of internet influencers and political big shots. Instead of a cacophony of blabbing, there is silence all around them. Pure silence that lets you clear your mind and think of people you'd want to see trapped in these same absurd holding cells.

The issue facing many artists today: What will become of their work, or their friends’ work, after their deaths? Even artists of limited means or access to “power players” in the Artworld can still work to preserve conserve, document, promote, and place their own artwork, and that of friends, collaborators, and mentors, during their lifetimes and then after they’ve died…

Preventing artwork from becoming mere flotsam, tossed to the curb or dumpsters, is an uphill battle in general. Natural disasters and wars; the fragility of paper, canvas, panel; obtuse or even unsympathetic family/heirs, or blind fate—all mean a Van Gogh-like posthumous superstardom is the exception, most posthumous careers must begin, if at all, during the artist’s lifetime. New obstacles…include the decluttering, anti-hoarding mania, a lack of appreciation for the relics of the past (“brown furniture”), instagram and texts replacing letter-writing, etc.

I wrote this in 2019 for my website, but nothing has changed, likely only gotten worse, given the implosion of the commercial gallery world, and art school closures, as described by Enrique Chagoya in his recent insider perspective interview in Roborant. Mid-tier galleries are disappearing, leaving international blue chip galleries with bankable stables and estates, or, at the other end, small galleries and pop-ups. 

I had a foreshadowing at the beginning of my career. Phil Linhares, chief art curator at the Oakland Museum of California, groused that artists’ families were constantly trying to get the museum to take their late relatives’ artwork. Therese Heyman, the photography and print curator at OMCA, remarked that “it takes three generations (for artwork to establish value).” However, Heyman persuaded Dorothea Lange’s husband, after her death, to donate her archive of negatives and prints to OMCA, a coup, and Heyman’s name in silver letters is on the gallery wall at OMCA dedicated to Lange’s work.

The Vincent Van Gogh phenomenon was engineered by the brilliant widow of Theo Van Gogh, the art dealer and Vincent’s brother, who died shortly after Vincent’s suicide (or murder as some have claimed.) Jo Van Gogh-Bonger is unknown to all but art historians, but she carefully marketed and placed the work, even relocating to France for more contact with influential critics and writers. She shrewdly determined the significance of the sunflower series of paintings and placed them carefully to ensure their enduring status.

No one will likely ever top her success, but Stephen Koch, the executor of photographer Peter Hujar’s estate who died this year at 84, deserves runner-up status. As described in the March 18, 2026 New York Times obituary, Koch discovered his calling orchestrating the Hujar apotheosis. Koch had been a professor in the writing program at Columbia and elsewhere, was a longtime reviewer, novelist, and a study of Andy Warhol’s films. He’d written a review of Susan Sontag’s work, who then befriended him, and introduced him to Hujar. Hujar was impoverished in his lifetime, his only published work Portraits in Life and Death, featuring friends like Sontag, John Waters, and Fran Liebowitz, and photographs of the mummified remains in the Palermo, Sicily catacombs. (My Oct. 8, 2024 review in the Bay Area Reporter, Peter Hujar’s Portraits in Life and Death Photo Book Reissued Nearly 50 Years On, lauds it. )

Hujar, dying of AIDS at 53, invited Koch to his Lower East Side loft, and asked him to be his executor: “…he turned to Mr. Koch and said, ‘I have decided that you should have the pictures. You’re no good, the acerbic Mr. Hujar added. But you’re the best I have’.” Becoming the executor of the photographers’s artistic estate changed Mr. Koch’s life. Following Mr. Hujar’s death that fall, he began a long mission to ‘usher his art into posthumous fame…He relentlessly badgered  galleries, dealers, and museums, at first to little avail’.” I can attest personally to his reputation— at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City, on a mission on behalf of Richard Caldwell Brewer, the Collections Manager mentioned him with a mixture of awe and annoyance. 

Eventually, galleries and museums came around, sales followed, and now the burst of Hujar-mania: the reissuance of the Portrait book, with introductory essay by Benjamin Moser (author of a recent Sontag bio), two shows at the Morgan Library, including a show of contact sheets and Speed of Light in 2017, books including Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World that Almost Was, the story of Hujar’s relationship with artist Paul Thek, and the upcoming biography by John Douglas Millar, Nude Opera: A Life of Peter Hujar, due 2029. Not to mention the masterful movie Peter Hujar’s Day (2023), by director Ira  Sachs, based upon a conversation between Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz, who asked Hujar to narate Dec. 18, 1974. Both were 40 at the time. Ben Wishaw plays Hujar and Rebecca Hall Rosenkrantz. Westbeth, the famous artist coop on the Hudson River, stands in for her East 94th Street apartment.The tape is long gone, but a transcript was found, printed, and discovered by Sachs. Wishaw talks and talks, describing his relentless pursuit of money and difficulties with an Allen Ginsberg shoot, chain smokes, snacks and drinks, and Hall listens and questions sympathetically, the perfect friend.

Amanda Fortini profiles the 91 year old Rosenkranz in her May 13, 2025 T: The New York Times Style Magazine profile:  “…their friendship was essential to her work, too. Indeed, as the both the book and film make clear, the shared dialogue that bound them together in life has continued, through their art, into the present, nearly four decades after Hujar’s death. What speaking with Rosenkranz over several months revealed to me is that for every well-known artist who dies, especially those who die tragically young, there is a friend, a writer, a keeper of the flame, maybe an executor, who has kept the memory of that artist alive. ‘No matter who you are, whether Peter Hujar or Robert Rauschenberg, if no one is there to mind the story, you are going to be forgotten,’ says the writer Stephen Koch, 84, the executor of the Hujar estate. And the role of the minder, is, in its unassuming way, as important as—and perhaps more noble than—that of the star whose name is in lights.”

Another notable example of posthumous legend-making is the elevation of Francesca Woodman 1958-1981) to the canon. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, and photographed herself and others, often nude, in mysterious and blurred settings, but jumped from a loft window in New York City, over rejections and disappointments in her personal life and work. Her mother, the well-known ceramic artist Betty Woodman, set about to promote her work, and was wildly successful. Francesca, now represented by Gagosian Gallery, is in museum collections all over the world, even paired with Julia Margaret Cameron at the National Portrait Galley in London in 2024. Woodman and her painter/photographer husband George Woodman were featured at Charleston, Bloomsbury’s legendary home of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, now a museum. The surviving son and heir, Oakland resident Charles Woodman initiated the Woodman Family Foundation to manage holdings and exhibitions of his parents and sister.

Locally, there are some notable, even improbable, successes. San Franciscan Roy Ragle (1944-2014) was largely unknown outside printmaking circles, but Robert Flynn Johnson, curator of the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gave him a two person exhibition at the Legion of Honor in 1988, and Ragle’s visibility increased at galleries and print shows. He was virtually confined during the last years of his life to his apartment on Fulton St., opposite Golden Gate Park, suffering with Crohn’s disease, which lead to his death. He documented his physical changes and the effects of medical treatments in his work. His dark subject matter, and preference for black and white, meant an audience and collectors more likely to be connoisseurs and institutions than decorators. His friends helped him print his woodcuts, and he accomplished his immense masterwork, Self-Examination Series, Part II  (1987-90), the woodcut triptych portrait of his wife Carol, his therapist, also with Crohn’s, and himself. The subjects were inked and then pressed onto plywood, leaving impressions which he meticulously carved at home. The entire piece, composed of three individual sheets, spans 48”X108.”

Artist Herlinde Spahr (recent solo show, After the Storm, of drawings on formica at the Museum of Northern California Art in Chico) and artist Art Hazelwood have spent years promoting Ragle’s work, and Spahr accomplished acquisition of the triptych by the Los  Angeles County Museum of Art, which included it in their BEFORE YOU NOW: The Self in Portraiture, traveling to several museums in 2024-25, while LACMA’s building was under construction. Ragle’s work stole the show, even overshadowing Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman.

A contemporary of Ragle is artist/professor/editor Sylvia Solochek Walters. A longtime professor of printmaking at San Francisco State University, co-editor of California Society of Printmakers, One Hundred Years, 1913-2013, with Maryly Snow, her work is housed in many museum collections such as the Achenbach, and with her alma mater, the  University of Wisconsin, Madison, Chazen Museum of Art.

Walters’ description: “Vince’s Horn draws attention to the dramatic disappearance of African rhinoceros populations due to the illegal ivory trade and habitat loss. All its formal elements including the melancholy colors, low-growing toxic flowers, curling roots and crawling insects, and the deep red accents, are designed to highlight the story of another wild animal losing its war with human venality. The print is named after a white rhinoceros who was shot and killed for his horn in a private animal reserve.”

CHURN and TRANSITIONS:

Traditionally, many galleries survived by “selling out of the back room,” the resale or secondary market. Dana Reich Gallery in San Francisco, during the 1970s and 80s, was notable for showing fresh MFAs, and a few more established artists like June Felter, in the main showroom, at out of-the-gate prices, but his rent was likely covered by selling Diebenkorns and others from the back room. Claire Carlevaro tried her hand at the resale market by opening Art Exchange in Berkeley, and then San Francisco, taking pieces on consignment and splitting sales proceeds. She took over, briefly, the eponymous Charles Campbell Gallery in one of its many iterations post-Campbell, and featured Walter Snelgrove, relatively unknown now but included in the seminal 1957 OMCA Bay Area Figurative show. Auction houses have long been a venue for art from private collections and deacquisitions. Free viewing, too. Butterfields was a venerable mainstay in the SOMA Design District, before sale in 1999 to eBay, and then purchase by London-based Bonhams in 2022, becoming part of their global operation. Clar’s Auction gallery in Oakland partly fills the void, with gems amidst the dross. Clar’s is also de facto the Emmy Lou Packard (1914-1998) gallery, her work appearing in almost every monthly sale, five pieces in April and also May.

More important than the dust-up by heirs over leftovers from the Feinstein estate at Clar’s in May making national news was the appearance in the same sale by Chiura Obata (1885-1975) with his immense (82”X151”) four panel screen—entitled Monterey Cypress in the auction catalog, the proper title is Beauty (or Glory) of Struggle. The imagery suggests a roiling figure.The screen was commissioned by the UC-Berkeley Chancellor Clark Kerr and his wife Kay, and, noted in the catalog, the screen hung in the Kerr dining room where  Kay Kerr and her friends Sylvia McLaughlin and Esther Gluck, founders of the Save the Bay movement, strategized.

Timothy Anglin Burgard, Curator of American Art at the FAMSF, organized the Great Nature: The Transcendent Landscape of Chiura Obota in 2000, the final show at the de Young Museum before demolition. Burgard describes Obata as “the Bay Area’s most prominent practitioner of the modern nihonga (Japanese Painting) movement, which sought to reconcile traditional Japanese and contemporary European schools of art.” Obata was an art professor at UC-Berkeley, before he and his family were placed in Japanese internment camps during WWII. He was released early after suffering a severe beating in the camp, and returned to teaching after the war. Fortuitously, the surviving children of Obata’s youngest daughter, Lillian Yuri, have taken up the mantle. Kimi Kodani Hill gives illustrated lectures promoting Obata and other previously overlooked Asian American artists, leads Obata-related tours of UC-Berkeley, makes trips to Yosemite to promote his well-known depictions of the landscape to young people, and the family has placed significant artwork in their possession with prominent museums, often resulting in shows.

Richard Caldwell Brewer (1923-2014) is my personal legacy project, which began after we met at his Top Floor Gallery show in 1979, and when he was in his mid 50’s. My husband and I promoted and documented his work, which continues. After his death in 2014, with myself as his executor, we placed his papers (including his My History diary) and many works on paper at the UC-Berkeley Bancroft Library, paintings and works on paper of his and by his model/muse/fellow artist Steven Krstich at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, and paintings at the One Archives at USC Libraries in Los Angeles. We await developments, inquiries—Legacy Land has its own timeframe. (I wrote Rediscovering Richard Caldwell Brewer: Bay Area Gay Painter may finally get his due, Bay Area Reporter, June 2, 2024.) Lost Art Salon in San Francisco gave Brewer a solo show in 2019. Their business model is to buy in quantity from artists’ estates, and sell retail, and they’ve done a brisk business with Brewer, including internet sales.

Hanging by a Thread

Some artists and writers come within a hair’s breadth of oblivion, erasure. Perusing the contents and advertising in an old art magazine shows how fleeting reputations can be.

The outsider artist Harry Dodger (1892-1973) was unknown before moving into a nursing home shortly before his death. His landlord and an artist helper, clearing out his apartment, were amazed by what they found. The Chicago nanny/photographer, Vivian Maier (1926-2009) is now acclaimed, the results of efforts of John Maloof and others who discovered her work after her storage locker contents were auctioned off for non-payment. Augusta Rathbone (1897-1990) had a late surge when the Annex Gallery print dealers found an etching of hers in an Arizona antique shop, and started selling and showing her work. I met Rathbone in her 80s while she was living in a Tenderloin studio apartment and wrote about her in the 2025 Volume 49:4 Journal of the Print World.

The intriguing Samuel Steward (1909-1983) would likely have disappeared without a trace were it not for the detective efforts of writer Justin Spring, who published Samuel Steward: Secret Historian in 2010. Steward was fired from his professor job in Chicago, had a lifelong friendship with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas who called him “Sammy,” was a tattoo artist favored by the Hell’s Angels in Downtown Oakland (with “poverty, crime, police brutality, racial tension, and conflict”), lived in the “slums of Berkeley” at 2019 9th St., was a pornographer (the Phil Andros series, with covers by Tom of Finland), a friend and subject of Alfred Kinsey, the sexologist, who filmed him being assaulted by a sadist, and suggested he compile his Stud File, a 50 year record with some bold face names like Rock Hudson, Rudolph Valentino, Lord Alfred Douglas, and Thornton Wilder, and snippets of pubic hair. His small cottage was a “stinking, densely packed mess.” Luckily, his back-up executor (the first died of AIDS), was a librarian and carefully packed up and organized cartons of his papers, but then ran out of steam, storing them above his Castro St. garage. Some of his papers were at prestigious institutions like the Beinecke Library at Yale, but no one before Spring had asked to see them. Because of their content, bureaucratic procedures, and rules regarding the privacy of living people, even the Kinsey Institute made accessing his records difficult. 

Ragle and Steward might object to the comparison, but both are sui generis, and hard to imagine many followers, or a school.

Novelist Dawn Powell (1896-1965), chronicler in her sophisticated, satirical way, of mid-century Manhattan, friends with types like Edmund Wilson, and then out of fashion, was buried in an unmarked potter’s grave in the Bronx. But an essay in the New York Review of Books, Nov. 5, 1987, by her friend Gore Vidal revived her career, creating a “cult-like following,” reissuance of her books, and a biography by Tim Page. The Golden Spur, her last and best book, is set in the art world of a fictionalized Cedar Tavern, hangout of the Abstract Expressionist crowd.

In summation: Make hay while the sun shines, don’t count on a Van Gogh-Bonger, Koch, or Spring to accomplish posthumous recognition. Have a narrative of your life and work. Don’t be ashamed if you have a lot of inventory to deal with—it means you’ve worked. I’ve had friends who only produce for an upcoming show, maybe why they’re silent these days. Catalogue your work, make a will or set up a trust, commit money for practical uses like conservation, storage, cataloging, placement, after your passing. Find someone to agree to be your estate or art executor, and have back-ups. Place as much of the work as you can, while you’re alive and kicking, in places where it will be cherished and not just languish in cold storage or—horrors!—deacquisitioned. 

Artists Einar and Jamex de la Torre present wildly colorful images, sculptures and installations inspired by ancient and contemporary art. Influenced by living in both sides of the U.S. Mexico Border, the brothers imbue their work with subtle political references and in-your-face challenges to our preconceptions about art. 

Their exhibition, which includes blown glass, ceramic work and lenticular images, examines the concept that built-up pressure can become so powerful that it ultimately alters our world. For the de la Torre brothers, that pressure is cultural, political, environmental and spiritual. Their art draws on influences from pre-Columbian forms, Catholic iconography, colonial history, border culture, popular media and consumer life. They explain that throughout the history of art, such appropriation has often been employed. They also quote from artist Pablo Picasso who said, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." 

At first glance, the show’s main installation, “The Dining Table,” 2026, a 304-inch long banquet-length table, replicates a lavish dinner scene. Situated against a background of intricate colorful wallpaper, the table is a wildly inventive collection of elegant dinner dishes, with each place setting holding a pink plastic Kewpie doll bathed in a syrupy red liquid. Wine glasses and bottles are everywhere, some spilling out gold coins, several splattering liquids. while glass and ceramic statuary line the table’s center. These include “Capitalist Pig,” 2026, a pink pig on wheels with a crown, a top hat, a dollar sign on its side and golden coins embellishing it; and ‘Ricci Mosca,” 2026, a ghoulish dark figure that stares ominously at the table. The wallpaper, they explain, helps to create the environment, so that viewers are inside of the artwork, as opposed to just seeing it on display. 

Three chandeliers are above the table. Two with six arms each, hold lights; the third one is decorated with beads and money bags. Lining the walls are cherub sculptures playing instruments, and several taxidermy animals, including a giraffe, a ram, and a boar, each wearing a gold chain with a dollar sign hanging from it. Also on the walls are paintings including the lenticular “Oedipus Christi,” 2023, a Catholic inspired work with an intrusion of “Madonna with Child” images. An elaborate, colorful rug, affixed to the table’s bottom, is reflected by a mirror on the floor, creating greater depth to the room.

This complex, immersive installation addresses our society’s fascination with wealth, abundance, consumption, and participation in systems of excess. The endless gold coins spread on the table—and throughout the entire show—along with golden eggs affixed to the walls, evoke images of the Oval Office, currently decorated with numerous gold objects and tchotchkes. 

When questioned about the proliferation of gold, the brothers respond, “Successful art addresses the human condition.” The genesis of the de la Torre Brothers' work and artistic philosophy began when they were kids in Guadalajara, where they used modeling clay to make toys that their family could not afford. (Einar was born in1963 and Jamex  was born in 1960.) Their family also traveled throughout Mexico, including to Michoacán and Oaxaca. The vast variety of vernacular crafts they saw on these trips contributes to the variety of detailed cultural symbols that permeates their work today.

The brothers, who moved to the USA as teenagers, have been collaborating since the 1990s, their sibling relationship and shared experiences serving as powerful influences leading to their complex, multilayered work. They describe their process as, "a continuous dialogue that goes back and forth,” adding, “We have so much in common in subject matter, aesthetics, and in the use of material. Over the years, our work got more layered and complex." They also describe glass blowing as a practice often requiring help from others. “When we go into our studio to do mixed-media work, collaboration becomes a natural process.” 

Regarding surrealist influences in their work, they explain, “We relate surrealism to the complexities of everyday life, and to the bizarre juxtaposition of images around us.” They explore the idea that absurdities and contradictions in the religious world inspire their work of exceptional creativity, much of it with surreal aspects. Examples include “Instagram de la Muerte,” 2021, a black hooded figure staring at a small pink object that is likely a phone. “Reunification of Church and State,” 2024, is a sardonic representation of a clerical figure wearing a religious robe. The more conceptual “Plunder of Catholic Kings,” 2017, features a skeletal figure emblazoned with gold coins, standing on top of an Olmec head. These and many other sculptures in the show contain figures that seem to glower at the viewers. “Some have called us devil worshippers,” Einar remarks. But this comment, the demeanor of many sculptural pieces, and the proliferation of gold in the show, are expressions of their dismay at the state of our world today.

Reflecting that dismay is the installation, “Ship of Fools,” 2025; the title describing a dysfunctional group of passengers on an ocean going voyage. Their ship features an arrogant orange glass pig, a Ku Klux Klan member, a money bag with arms and legs, a cannon with a hand reaching out from within, several small dolls dressed as British aristocracy from the eighteenth century, and ceramic shoes that might have been worn by that aristocracy. There are also numerous golden coins throughout the ship. 

Installing “The Tipping Point” was more labor intensive than was any previous exhibition at the museum. A staff member explains that creating it took seven staff members two and a half weeks—with the direction and assistance of the de la Torre Brothers. The show ultimately transforms the various pieces and installations into a colorful and bizarre world that speaks to the viewers’ hearts, political proclivities and spiritual sensibilities.

“The Tipping Point” runs through January 24, 2027 at Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California.

Rick Lowe is a Houston-based artist trained in the visual arts who has spent more than three decades bridging art-world institutions and community-based practice.

In 1993, he founded Project Row Houses, an arts and cultural community in a historically significant Houston neighborhood. He has exhibited internationally at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Gwangju Biennale; the Venice Architecture Biennale; the Nasher Sculpture Center; and Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens.

His community projects include the Watts House Project in Los Angeles, the Borough Project for the Spoleto Festival, Transforma Projects rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and Trans.lation: Vickery Meadow for the Nasher Sculpture Center.

His honors are extensive. He was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University, received the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, and won the Creative Time Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change. In 2013, President Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Arts, and in 2014 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. He holds honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute College of Art and Otis College of Art, along with the University of Houston's President's Medallion Award.

Since 2016, he has taught as an associate professor of art at the University of Houston.

Artist & Founder of Project Row Houses | Interview by Hugh Leeman

Why He Stays in the Third Ward

Hugh Leeman: Rick, you've lived through an extraordinary transformation of Houston's Third Ward and have continued to call it home, even as your career became increasingly international with numerous shows at Gagosian around the world. What does staying geographically connected to one place give you that moving continuously through the international art world cannot?

Rick Lowe: Comfort. Houston has become an easy place for me, and I think that comfort and familiarity give me the room and space I need to be risky, to do things, to play around. The adventure I need, I get through travel — but when it comes to work, I like the stability of being in a place I'm familiar with. People know me, and I have access to things that are a little more challenging in different places.

Don't Gentrify the Image

Hugh Leeman: In preparing for our conversation, I came across a talk where you described being in the studio and catching yourself thinking, "don't gentrify this image." That's a powerful connection between aesthetics and urban change. What does it mean visually to gentrify a painting?

Rick Lowe: Oh, I have one right behind me right now. I like to work with a combination that I consider the combination of life — the duality of life. There are beautiful things, messy things, refined things, rough things in all aspects of life. Nothing is just one way.

It took me a while to understand that within the community development work I was doing, neighborhoods that have been disinvested in deserve investment. And investment has a tendency to place properties in a more refined position — it gets upgraded. There's nothing wrong with that to some degree; everybody wants to live in a place that makes them feel good and looks nice. But then when it starts flooding over, you have to go back and say, wait, wait, we've got to keep balance. For me, the low-income communities I work in will never become perfectly manicured suburban neighborhoods, because the resources aren't there. So there's a certain comfort in knowing I can make things that are a little do-it-yourself — I can have a little DIY up here — but I also want some professional stuff too.

Within the painting process, I love color. I love playing with color. Color has a tendency to get luscious and sweet, and it can take your mind into just the beauty of color. But I also want to pull people back to the nature of where the paintings come from — this experience of the messiness of the urban environment. So I have to go back and mess it up a little. If the color's too luscious, too sweet, then it's too gentrified, so I have to go in and scuff it up. And then sometimes I get overly scuffed, and it's like, oh God, this thing is really messy and not good. So I need to create balance. I acknowledge that balance in both the community-engaged work and in the painting and the objects I make.

Could an Artist Create Solutions?

Hugh Leeman: I want to go to that idea of the community-engaged work, which really transcends the boundaries of simply image-making. There's a familiar origin story of Project Row Houses, and it begins with a young person asking why an artist couldn't create solutions. Looking back now, was the most consequential part of that question really the word "solution," or was it the challenge to reconsider who art was even supposed to be serving?

Rick Lowe: Well, first of all, when that young person had the gall to throw that question out, I was young enough and stupid enough to think I could answer it. But the essence of it for me at that time — being a young person with unlimited optimism about the possibilities of society becoming better and more just — I was looking for solutions. That was the driving force. I thought the most poignant part of the question was, can you create solutions? And that has driven a big part of my work for a long time.

The Ticker That Measures a Community

Hugh Leeman: Beyond Project Row Houses, there's the Black Wall Street Journey, and it turns a neighborhood's own social and economic information into something that resembles a financial market ticker tape. What happens conceptually when these instruments normally used to measure markets and corporations and value are redirected toward measuring the well-being of a community?

Rick Lowe: The physical structure of the ticker is one thing, but the real thing is the data and information collected. The big questions for me are: who's collecting it, and even more important, why are they collecting it — and third, for whose benefit?

I found myself moving into the academic world of research, meeting those people, understanding how and why they do what they do. What they do in their research is very legitimate. But the one thing I challenged them about is that once you start to learn who gets to use that data and who it's used for, it's for the information makers, the narrative makers of the world. They pull on that data so they can say, we have data to back up what we're saying. And so much of the data pulled from low-income populations and minority groups — particularly Black groups — is used against those populations. It's used for dominant cultural and economic forces that have an interest in keeping those groups in a more diffused state, in their capacity to utilize data to propel their own interests.

Empowerment, Not Empathy

Hugh Leeman: In learning more about the Black Wall Street Journey, there's a part where you say that what you're most interested in is an empowering narrative, as opposed to one that simply seeks empathy. Tell me more about this.

Rick Lowe: That's been a line through the growth of my work over time. Early work spoke about particular issues — police brutality, poverty, and so on — that led that young person to ask me why I couldn't create solutions. There was a way of believing that empathy in others would help us improve things for those the empathy is put toward. But later, I started to realize that the power comes from within the group, and we have to figure out how to not rely so much on outside sources to move things. We have to figure it out for ourselves.

When I started Project Row Houses, that was all about creating a narrative that empowered a community from inside, not something happening from the outside. And that continues now into the Black Wall Street Journey. Because of the nature of engaging with researchers, you have to expand what that community is — there are allies and folks doing work who are very interested once they know. What I found about the group I've been working with at the University of Michigan is that most of them, when I started challenging them about the deficit model their research was projecting, they started to think about it. It was very easy for them to start thinking about how to deal with this data in a way that could be used differently than the traditional way of selling it off to the big pollsters.

What the Deficit Model Does

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned the deficit model. Can you give a bit of context about what the deficit model is?

Rick Lowe: Most of the information we hear about us, Black people in particular, is a deficit. Our conditions are always explained in the context of a deficit — a deficit in relation to other ethnic groups, particularly whites. What I found through this research group at the Institute for Social Research at Michigan — what they helped me understand — is that they're trained to look at things in relation to each other, not within a particular group.

We could say Black people have made progress in many, many ways. Education has been a huge gain for Black people. But when you put it in relation to whites, Asians, Latinos, we may be in a deficit, particularly to whites. As a person who is struggling to find something to feel good about, to build my self-esteem around, I'm going to do that a lot better by looking at the possibility of saying, wow, we've come this far in the last sixty-something years — we're moving — as opposed to something always telling me I'm lagging behind. I don't have any research to substantiate this, but as a person and as an artist, I'm interested in knowing: how is it possible that Black people are able to keep moving forward and not be acknowledged for that?

Hugh Leeman: It sounds like in some ways the deficit model puts forth a petitioning for empathy. It's saying, things are bad here, so the way out is to petition for empathy from the very people who are recording this data. Whereas what you're saying is constructing a narrative from within the community that says, I'm not seeking external empathy, I'm doing something internally. Is that fair?

Rick Lowe: Yeah, absolutely — you stated it much clearer than I did. You want to be able to generate things for yourself. I was just listening to — I think it was James Baldwin, in one of his interviews, maybe repeating James Brown: "I don't want anybody to give me nothing. Open up the door and I'll get it myself." That's really putting yourself in a place of being empowered and not having to rely on someone else to empower you.

A light went off for me when we were honing the Project Row Houses mission statement some years ago. We settled upon language — I can't remember the exact thing — but the project would be a catalyst for the empowerment of community. The point was that it was to be a catalyst for empowerment, not to empower. And that was a big discussion within the organization: shouldn't it just be that we empower the community? And it's like, no, you can't empower the community. You can be a part of it, you can be a catalyst for it, you can contribute to it. But you can't empower people. People empower themselves.

A Non-Traditional Route

Hugh Leeman: I want to get to your show coming up at the museum, but to back up — this idea of self-empowerment coming from within. You have a very interesting path through life. From the outside you might say this guy was destined to be a superstar artist showing with Gagosian. But you started out playing basketball, then became an artist, and now you've brought academia into your world. How did you empower yourself along this path that seems very windy on the river of life?

Rick Lowe: People gain power in many different ways. I was one of those people who was unfortunate in American history to be in a situation where — my family being Southerners in rural Alabama, sharecropping Alabama. A lot of people don't know what that really means. What it means is that families are a unit; they work for the person who owns the farms. And when I say working, it means everybody worked, seven days a week. So if you're working, you're not going to school all the time — you're missing school. I was one of those people who missed that opportunity for formal educational training. So I had to figure out how to train myself to do the things I wanted to do.

I have a non-traditional route to where I am. I have no academic credentials. I have a high school diploma, but it was basically just given — that's kind of what they did to poor Southern Blacks in particular. You just get them through the system. So I had to work around the traditional ways of doing things that are set up to empower you. I didn't have it. So I had to figure out how to empower myself, how to educate myself academically, how to function in a society that I didn't have any part of when I was growing up.

Hugh Leeman: How did you do that? What's the recipe? I realize it's not as simple as A plus B equals C.

Rick Lowe: Curiosity. Just wanting to know what's out there in the world. Wanting to go places, seeing what other people are reading and doing and thinking, and saying, I want to do that. And constantly being curious. On some level, as I understand the dynamics of things, it also takes a bit of courage — courage to go into unfamiliar territory. All these places I was going were very unfamiliar territory. It would have been very easy to say, I'll just get a job and work at the factory like the rest of my siblings and everybody else. That's one thing to do. But for some reason I was able to muster up the courage to say, I can read philosophy. I know I can somehow — I just had to find the right people who could teach me how to do it.

The Easy Classes That Changed Everything

Hugh Leeman: There's an interesting tension because you're talking about the narrative — just work at a factory, get a job, this is your lane, stay there. How did you work through this somewhat invisible system that's trying to place you in a certain box? Were there family saying this is absurd?

Rick Lowe: Stumbling upon art was the key for me. I started out with a basketball scholarship to one of the small universities in Alabama, and that was what I thought was my way to fulfill my curiosity, to get out of Alabama. But one of the things suggested to me by the people in the athletics program was that I should take some easy classes, because I'd be spending a lot of time in the gym. And I took an art class. At some point, all the energy and focus I was giving to basketball transferred to art. Being in that environment — it's an open platform for people.

I've been working on a book project with a friend, interviewing people who've been part of community-engaged art programs. One of them was saying how much a program did for her life, how it opened things up — she was the first of her family to go to college. I was listening to how wonderfully smart she was, and I said, you probably would have done something interesting even if you'd gone to a sports camp instead — because you have it in you. And she said, yeah, I probably would have done something successful, but it wouldn't have been as thoughtful as the things I bring now.

So we used this example. We said, I wonder what would have happened if Clarence Thomas had gone to a really nice arts environment program. He went to all kinds of programs getting ready for his professional life — what would have happened if that kind of person had an art program in their life? It might have made him a little more empathetic toward others, more open and curious about things in different ways. I give all the credit to the arts, because otherwise I don't think I would have had exposure to that kind of diversity of thought and desires and approaches.

Hugh Leeman: It was the easy classes that changed the direction of your life.

Rick Lowe: Yeah, it was very easy. Sometimes — when I used to play dominoes with one of my mentors, such a great philosophical mind, he'd say, dominoes is so great because it's one of the most inconsequential things you can do with your time, but it matters. It has all the importance in the world, when you're making connections with people and friends and family. It's the simple things that can take you really deep.

The High Aspiration of the Michigan Show

Hugh Leeman: So I want to go toward the simple things that take you deep. The exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art culminates a multi-year residency with the university's Institute for Social Research, where you collaborated with researchers, data scientists, faculty, and dozens of students. Your research included engagement with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the anti-Black index, and the residency involved a two-year course sequence you taught. This clearly goes far beyond a traditional art show. What's the high aspiration here?

Rick Lowe: The high aspiration is to somehow impact the sources of information that come out — and that's through impacting the researchers who gather data, helping them find different avenues and vehicles through which they can talk about this data, so they can actually be agents in the dissemination of their data. Particularly nowadays, there are all kinds of platforms. It's not like it used to be, where you get all your news from the six o'clock evening news. There are other things for them to do, but they have to become aware that the research they're doing, they're doing for particular people with particular interests. I want to expose them to the opportunity to think about what their interest is, how they want to use that data, how they want to make it available. The folks at Michigan have been generous enough to make that available to me as an artist through an exhibition. Hopefully it'll expand to others with even more popular platforms.

Hugh Leeman: In some ways it sounds like you're doing for others what was done to you in the best way possible — expanding your horizons through curiosity.

Rick Lowe: Oh, absolutely. When you gain opportunities — this is just the way I grew up — you make those opportunities available to others. That's probably more ingrained in the minds of people from the lower end of the economic spectrum, because they understand how important it is. Whereas people at the upper ends kind of take it for granted, because the institutions all work for them and everything is designed for them. When you're coming from the bottom, you know you have to work within the ecosystem of where you are, and you have to make sure you replenish.

What a Financial Ticker Says About Black Progress

Hugh Leeman: At the center of the project is the Black Wall Street Journey ticker tape — this roughly forty-foot-long LED installation modeled on a Wall Street financial ticker. One will appear on the roof of the university's building facing a major thoroughfare, while a second is planned for the atrium of the Institute for Social Research. What civic discourse do you hope this sparks?

Rick Lowe: The idea of the ticker was always much more about getting people to think about Black people in a way that there are things we're doing that are worthy of discussion. The ticker becomes a platform for that. Most tickers are very abstract for people who aren't familiar with the data. When I look at the Bloomberg ticker, I don't know what it means — I just see lots of numbers going. But what I do know is that the mere idea that there's a Bloomberg ticker says to me there's something powerful happening in the economy. That's what we're hoping to get from the public — to see this ticker where, once in a while, something goes across it that says stuff about Black progress. People won't know exactly what it is, but they'll know it's something dealing with Black progress. That's a win.

Then in the Institute for Social Research — they have over seven hundred researchers. Having those people walk through the doors and see there's an alternative platform for this research, hopefully that'll excite them. We're focusing on African Americans in that Panel Study, but you could break that study down many ways — women, immigrants, many groups. If you're interested in what I'm interested in, which is finding points of inspiration that encourage you — if I'm interested in running a marathon, I don't need to see all the data that says people my age never run a marathon. I need to see data that says, let's focus on these twenty-five people worldwide who are doing it. That gives me a sense of possibility. It's been done. I can do it.

Kinship Networks and the Unicorns

Hugh Leeman: You have a project that's part of the same exhibition — Kinship Networks. How does it investigate the exhibition's themes of relationships and social structures?

Rick Lowe: Within the exhibition, there are paintings I'm doing that comment on the process — me, as a non-researcher, seeing how research happens and where the holes might be. You'll see some graphs that look normal, but then something goes way off track. I guess we call them nowadays the unicorns — the things that just happen that nobody expected. Those things are real, and they need to be accounted for, because they help people understand that, yeah, you can go to outer space. Everybody doesn't do it, but it happens.

Looking at how researchers use graphs, the Panel Study uses them to show family trees — we end up calling them kinship networks — to show how these families start and grow. I use those in some of the paintings to draw attention, but also to acknowledge the familiarity of things for the researchers. I want researchers to be able to go to this exhibition and stumble around and find hints of things — oh, that's what we do, that's our work. They'll have to work to discover it, and hopefully get some chuckles on the graphs and charts that go a little haywire.

Data as Sculpture: From Where Is the Middle East?

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned holes in the data, and you've spoken of yourself as the outsider here, which can be powerful because it brings a perspective that hasn't been inculcated to "this is how we do it." What are some of the holes you're seeing?

Rick Lowe: First of all, the way questions are asked creates lots of holes. The researchers helped me understand that — they have the data, but how they ask questions of the data gives you different answers. But I also think, just in general, the whole way of doing comparative analysis leaves a huge hole. That's the core of this whole project. By only doing comparative, you don't get to see the growth within. That's a huge hole, because people need to see their growth as well as the deficits.

So much of it, though — if you think about how the world of research and data operates, we like to think of it as just objective. Oh, this is just objective information. Well, objective from where? That's the question. I was listening to something the other day, and someone from the so-called Middle East said that always frustrated them — middle of, from where? When the British were there, India was the Far East for them, and the Arabic nations were in the Middle East. But that assumes England is in the center of the world. Who said that? The same with how global maps are looked at. Someone set the standards for global maps that we just assume, we just use because it's normal. There are countries inflated in size and others not proportional. So there are many places where there are holes in research — it comes from historical references in how we do things, and some comes from intentional manipulation.

Hugh Leeman: It seems like one of the things you're focusing on is the way data is effectively a sculpture in and of itself — that it's forming a society, forming perceptions. How is data already sculpted by the institutions that decide what gets counted and who gets counted?

Rick Lowe: Oh, it is. It almost seems predetermined now, because it's so codified and accepted. That's what this project is pushing back on. So many things are rooted in it — police brutality and all these things are rooted in notions that are just acceptable. Oh, it's much more likely that a Black person is going to commit a crime than a white person. Probably not. The whole thing about Black-on-Black crime — there's not as much Black-on-Black crime as there is white-on-white crime. There are so many things we've come to accept, and it shapes the world and our psyche around those things.

That goes back to the conceptual framework that inspired me early on — Joseph Beuys's concept of social sculpture. If we thought of the world and everything that happens in it as a piece of sculpture, we're all sculpting it. Which means anything can be a sculptural form — politics, community organizing, any aspect of shaping, whether physical or intellectual or mental. And there's been an incredible sculptural perspective of Black people in this country that is just not legitimate, as far as I'm concerned.

Public, Community, and Neighborhood

Hugh Leeman: Over the years you've made an interesting distinction among the public, a community, and a neighborhood — with neighborhood being geographically defined, while community can extend far beyond geography. When you begin a project, how do you determine which of those constituencies you feel accountable to?

Rick Lowe: In general, projects come about in a few different ways. One is that I'm invited by some entity — an art institution or a community group. Those have very different opportunities and challenges. An art institution is helpful in a lot of ways — it'll generate financial support that going into a community-based setting will not, for artists. But it also has serious drawbacks in terms of how art institutions are seen within community contexts. Generally they're not sustained efforts, and people end up feeling like they were used.

The community process can be both good and bad too. You're invited by a particular community, so you start with community buy-in and support. But it's harder for artists to generate the resources necessary outside the art-institutional context. When we decided to do housing, it was of a scale we couldn't rely on private money from the arts sector — we had to get public funding. It was very challenging and difficult. It took us a while, because people didn't see artists as the responsible group that would actually do something meaningful.

But the way I really love is being self-driven, self-initiated. The Black Wall Street Journey project is something I've just been pushing because it's something I'm interested in, which allows me to move the project in the direction where there may be resources and capacity to advance the work. It started in Chicago, and the research university we engaged with was the University of Chicago, which didn't have a strong social science research identity. So I did that long enough to find out it wasn't going to get me what I needed, and then I could move it to another context. That's the way Project Row Houses was founded — not through the invitation of any institution. It was initiated from within me and the people around me who were working toward it.

Housing for the People Who Live There

Hugh Leeman: I want to come back to a powerful word you used — the sustainability of a project. But first, there's an interesting tension. When you set up Project Row Houses, the idea from the outside was, we should have artists in residence, bring artists in from different places to do their thing and show people how exciting this can all be. And you pushed back on this. Why?

Rick Lowe: I was learning at the time, and part of the learning process is being a good listener — really trying to hear what people have to say, in a real way. Not that kind of, oh, let's have the community meeting, give people a chance to say what they want, and then you go out and just do what you do. Just listening. People were saying what they liked about what we were doing, but also what they desired and needed within their community. They said, we love this art thing you're doing, and you're doing great stuff with the children, but this neighborhood needs housing. What are you guys going to do about housing?

It didn't make any sense to import artists to live in housing that people in the neighborhood would normally live in. If we could renovate those houses, they should be for the people who live there. There were twenty-two houses; we were taking ten for art programming and five for youth education. We at least owed it to the community to do the housing thing, if that's what people found meaningful.

It was a challenging move for an art group to say we're going to do housing, but it's not going to be artist housing — it's going to be housing for young mothers. That was a hard thing to sell thirty-plus years ago. But it worked. Now, because of that, the project has about a hundred-something units of housing that grew out of that effort. It's not solving the housing problem, but it's symbolic in a good way. It speaks to the fact that this is a community with a history, and there are people who have history with this community, and some of them are still here, and they will be there as long as the project is there.

Hugh Leeman: That's a powerful shift you brought about through questioning the status quo — and in some ways it came from being the outsider.

Rick Lowe: Well, to be genuine, I also have to mention that I spent a lot of time being a person in the grassroots community-activism context, being mentored by seasoned activists doing interesting stuff. I'd hear it all the time — they understood, from the political standpoint, that politicians always want to know what you think and what you want, but they're rarely willing to work to get you those things. So it was very easy for me to see that. I'd seen it so many times. This is what people are saying they need — so how dare we say, yeah, we know that's what you say you need, but this is what we think should work. That's not the way to do it.

On Sustainability

Hugh Leeman: As a final question — years ago you questioned the pressure placed on socially engaged projects to become "sustainable." After seeing Project Row Houses move from an experiment to an institution, how do you think about sustainability at this point in your career?

Rick Lowe: I think sustained effort is an absolute. In all issues, there has to be sustained effort. But I also understand that life moves in different ways, so things have to sustain themselves differently at different times. A project may play a significant role in a particular place at a particular time — that doesn't mean it has to play that same role forever. It may move out of that because it loses touch with the times. Things just happen.

I always tell people there are great short-term projects that are every bit as powerful as long-term investment projects. It's the same as with paintings — paintings aren't good because they're big. There can be small paintings that are great and big paintings that are not good. It's about the quality of the experience, whether it's really hitting the mark at that particular time, because it's never going to be that way forever.

Even with something sustained like Project Row Houses — I used to make these charts, a circle of projects, drawings showing at what point on the circle the project is an equal amount of aesthetic and practical impact. At some points it's like, oh, this is a magical moment where it's beautiful, everything feels good, the impact is great. And then it slowly moves out of that — it becomes very artistic and poetic, but it's not really connecting with the issues. That's okay, that happens. But then you have to work to move it back toward that nice combination of both. And sometimes it moves the other direction, where the art part is completely lost but it's very mundane and practical — which is fine too, because the practical elements are the whole point of doing it as well. So I see it move even within the sustained projects. Sustainability over many lifetimes — it's just what it's doing at the moment that it's doing it.

A Bird's-Eye View

Hugh Leeman: Rick, behind you is an incredible colorful linear artwork. Take me through this — what are we looking at?

Rick Lowe: This one is, strangely enough — I don't do a lot of commissions, I generally stay away from them, but our airport here in Houston wanted to commission me to do a painting. So I did this piece for the people flying into the airport, because when you fly in, they have that new digital mapping stuff you can look at in front of your seat — the flight map. I love looking at maps. I look at them all the time, and I love the ones I'm familiar with. I know which way we come into Houston, which way you go. So this is actually a map of Houston — you don't see the whole painting; it goes out further, but there's a loop here, an outer loop, and that little airplane thing you always see is the only representational thing in the painting. It's a bird's-eye view.

Hugh Leeman: A bird's-eye view of your passion for maps. A beautiful thing. Rick Lowe, thank you so much for making time to share.

Rick Lowe: You're very welcome, and I enjoyed it. Thank you.

By Jan Wurm

The impulse to make art may begin with a marking of an experience; it may begin as an effort to make visible emotion, growth, or change. A manifestation of oneself in relation to family, love, loss, birth and death – art can mirror the surface to reveal internal shifting tides. At times, the reach moves beyond – outward to reflect the social, the cultural, the political, indeed even the geography and nature of the world. Graciela Iturbide holds her camera to mirror her vision in a continuum streaming from the self to the world.

A personal lens through which the world is viewed is molded, ground, polished, and adjusted with an angled tilt to focus with a precision that renders a perspective unique to the individual. Long before teachings, mentoring, and collegial persuasions, deeply rooted influences form a foundation of sympathies and empathy, qualities and equivalances.

Fundamental to decades of photographic work, the graphic renderings of Graciela Iturbide rest upon commitment to cultures, relationships and, in particular, the inner strengths of women. The eldest of thirteen children within a Catholic family in Mexico City, early exposure to ritual and iconography can be seen to provide an architecture for her development as a photographer of indigenous cultures, religious practices, and nuanced identity. It proved an attitude and framework that could shape travel and an understanding whether working in the Sonora Desert, East Los Angeles or India.

Iturbide, though dancing on the cusp of anthropology in her black and white depictions of indigenous people, becomes immersed in the lives and livelihoods of women who are central to their families, their homes, and their businesses in the marketplace. With time, a willingness to await trust and revelation, the photographer and her camera gain access through shared identity of womanhood, motherhood, and eventually, aging.

Death and the loss of a child is a tragedy that is nearly unsurmountable. For Graciela Iturbide, the death of her young daughter was a devastation with which she grappled in the streets following funerals, in her vibrant dreams, and in the darkroom processing imagery. Her self-portraits search for a visual language for her anguish. Snakes, snails, and birds –the desperation to make visible the inner torment rises to the surface in a serial search.

Even in the daily, in the uneventful and the routine, Iturbide frames patterns in brickwork, in fish stalls, in animal carcasses. Images vibrate in light and dark rhythms. Patterns are then broken by the striding leg aligned with the lines of the pavement or the outstretched arm against the array of fish – the pattern is arrested, the movement takes a beat.

The amassing of forms, the spiraling aggregation beyond count, can carry the burden of weight, or a promise of plenty, or the sheer beauty of the immense. The photographer gives us an edge-to-edge blanketed sky of birds in flight. As a seamless covering, the birds fill the sky to create an experience of sky no longer infinite but with dimension and measure of space.

There is an ease the photographer has with her subject, whether lush garden or harsh conditions of desert, whether women in their village or gang members posing their shadows for the camera.

Iturbide is not walking the streets surreptitiously shooting from the hip or riding subways with hidden cameras. Fully engaged, she may even conspire with her subject. Posed and primed, these portraits present the sitter’s face to the world. A photograph, Magnolia, appears in two separate prints in the current exhibition, Graciela Iturbide: Between Two Worlds, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The first view of Magnolia is mounted on a wall with other portraits. A full length standing figure holding a mirror to reveal a contemplative state, the portrait carries feelings of illumination that contrast with more somber surrounding images of single figures posed in a centrally-framed forward view.

A wall reproduction of enlarged contact sheets exposes more than the photographer’s eye in selection, cropping, or printing. What is glimpsed is the manner in which a session unfolds – an open exploration of self-presentation. Magnolia, non-binary, muxe, shares delight in makeup, dress up, and posing – the trying on of different dresses, attitudes, and relationship to the camera reveals a warm coquetry.

Taking time. The care given to process also extends the perspective on rituals.

Undertaking a representation of the ritual slaughter of thousands of goats raised specifically for sacrifice, Iturbide manages to convey the power of belief, the importance and value reaching deeply into the social fabric. Recording an annual cycle that binds a people – instilling connection across generations – the graphic documentation in black and white drains the reality of blood to evoke wonder. Iturbide conjures the magic beyond reason, beyond grasp.

Installation view of the 1992 ritual slaughter of prized white goats raised for annual religious sacrifice in the Mixtec Indigenous communities in Oaxaca.

In an exhibition that spans decades and continents, peoples and landscapes, photographs touch the children and elders. Quince años, Juchitán presents us with the girl dressed now as a young woman, face forward with direct gaze, and, looking away from the camera, in profile, the old seated woman who has lived this life. Graciela Iturbide renders a mirror of her self, and through her compassion, a mirror to life, a mirror of the world.

Graciela Iturbide: Between Two Worlds

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

July 11 – November 28, 2026

By Vrushali Anil Dhage

Open Geometry for Emotional Use is Russell’s second solo at the Nelson Duni, San Francisco. Remarkably, all but three of the works in the show, including at least one canvas of mural-sized proportions, date from 2026. The three small pictures from the 1960s act as anchors for the artist’s trajectory, attesting to Russell’s consistent vision and her unwavering belief in abstraction as an artist. 

From impasto that builds up, or layers that can be visually excavated, colors that radiate, or strokes that guide dimensions, engage the viewer. Spaces that seem to be both mental and physical, emanating forms, and some constricting lines are possibly suggestive of the ‘emotional’ from the show’s title.

Flying Through a Dream, 2026, presents what could be a collective, collated story of circular and other connecting shapes. Charcoal lines transition from laying out the composition into structural components that hold the colors to forms. Complementary hues embody a sense of playfulness and a spontaneous possibility of movement, as though a stage is set for a performance.

In Forming, Russell’s bold, solid flat spaces/shapes attain balance. Each part of the canvas, blank, layered, colored, or flat, eludes the idea of centrality or a focal point. Every element contributes to a sense of tandem and harmony.

Untitled (Scripps aerial view), ca 1967, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 in. Image Credit: Nancy Mona Russell

Untitled (Scripps landscape No. 2), oil on canvas, 20 x 20 in. Image Credit: Nancy Mona Russell

Forming , 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 36 × 36 inches (91.4 × 91.4 cm). Image Credit: Nelson Duni

Works from the 1960s , 1967–72. Acrylic on poster board on board, 32 × 19.5 in. Image Credit: Nelson Duni

Russell’s engagement with nature, observing and experiencing has clearly been innately inspirational. The glorious golden luminosity of Southern Californian skies, the idyllic landscapes in and around Scripps College, the sea mist seen from Pacifica’s beaches, and the clouds of San Francisco are some of the experiences reflected in Russell’s pictures. The Dark Afternoon, with its bright yellows and a contrasting shadowy side, evokes light and shadow. In contrast, Cirque and Saddle capture a frostiness, as heavy strokes of white are transformed into powdery light floating dust.

Confluence of Possibilities, 2026. Acrylic on linen, 84 × 132 in. Image Credit: Nelson Duni

Big Dream, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 62 × 108 inches (157.5 × 274.3 cm). Image Credit: Nelson Duni

The two large works of the show, Confluence of Possibilities and Big Dream, seem radically different from each other yet still related. In Confluence of Possibilities, colored masses coalesce across the horizontal axis. Underlayers of nearly concealed colors can be seen through the white boldly stroked around the perimeter. Similarly, Big Dream expresses the freedom with which Russell structures her paintings. Akin to human emotions, the paintings possess a sense of spontaneity and caution. Colors, forms, and their intended (im)balance characterize the works and their artistic identity. Further, these works could be considered as stories, if one may say, of a different kind. Where the expressive and the concealed do not engage in telling or representing, but aim for the experiential. 

Psychedelic mammatus clouds, known for preceding storms, halo a hyper-real American Bison. Fur ripples over its musculature, its body rearing over a gallery of feral animals. Some appear to be domesticated escapees, others laboratory runaways, all cavorting in the parking lot of a burning JCPenney, wearing expressions of derangement, serenity, or oblivious rapture. All are complicit in a crime with which they are unquestionably pleased. The ground is littered with evidence, food court fare and thriving flora. Nearby, a kitten rears up to high-five a rat, a glimpse of brief camaraderie absolving their age-old rivalry. Overhead, a pigeon resembles an archangel, brandishing a Rocket Pop and a slice of pizza in its talons, its neck ringed by a pink doughnut. A vacant eyed Chihuahua begs, a Rhesus Macaque basks, and a Monarch Butterfly alights upon a gas can in the foreground. Like the scholars of Raphael’s School of Athens, each figure draws the eye in a new direction.

"Doomscrolling" may be a modern term, but for inhabitants of organized society, street-corner prophets have always wailed reminders that the end is nigh. If you were to close your eyes and imagine a post-doomsday America, what would you see? Perhaps something akin to Eugène Delacroix's The Liberty Leading the People, replacing Lady Liberty with a Terminator-esque robot brandishing a Star-Spangled Banner, a jumble of wounded figures in red hats flailing beneath her. Or maybe Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, switching out thwarted French sailors for sobbing office workers clinging to the floating remnants of an AI billboard. For even the most self-effacing of us in the digital age, these images might prove a little gratuitous. What if we were to instead take comfort in the silver lining of our demise? I implore you to flock to Moth Belly Gallery's current exhibit, The Big Buffet in the Sky by Andrea Bergen. Her alternative vision for an apocalyptic future occupies all the fetishistic maximalism of Baroque art, paired with the emotional indulgence of the Romantic period, softened by a pop-art color palette to bring the pyramidal compositions of our forebears into a contemporary timeline.

"It’s my way of confronting the horrors of climate change," Bergen says of her work. "I’m not trying to preach. I take steps in my personal life to reduce my impact, but I’m thinking about the irony of making this work, and trying to come to terms with the fact that I can’t do anything about what I’m seeing because of the system that's been created around us. I am constantly processing that my existence is itself harmful."

At the show's opening, attendees flit around Bergen, asking questions about her process and giving due credit for the staggering exhibition. Of the 40 or so works packed into the gallery, consisting of suspended papier-mâché animals clutching processed foods, meticulous collages ranging from person sized to computer monitor sized, some with three-dimensional frames shaped like candy bars and hot dogs, almost everything is already demarcated with the red dots of ownership by 7:30 (the show opened at 6:00). Bergen is inside chatting amiably, taking the time to speak with everyone who approaches her. I have to stand stock-still to avoid bumping into a four-foot-tall, three-foot-diameter hamburger topped with a tabby cat, his defined butt cheeks clinging to its sesame seed bun. Enchanted by his dilated pupils, salivating tongue, and the can of soda exploding from his right paw, I spend a lot of time with said cat. I have no choice; the gallery is packed, and there is nowhere else to stand. On close observation, a very specific picture of America comes into focus.

Much of this show focuses on processed food and animals, but throughout Bergen's oeuvre, a kaleidoscope of America's unique brand of excess emerges: clown hotels, monster trucks, Waffle House, Dolly Parton, and the Sonoran Desert. This collection of imagery creates an index of experience usually confined to sardonic critiques. Bergen, however, is anything but cynical. While she has lived in the Bay Area for (almost) her entire life and hasn't done an extensive cross-country road trip, her travels to places like Las Vegas and Gatlinburg have inspired her worldview.

"I revel in that aesthetic," Bergen explains. "There is this tacky, joyful thing that America does well. When I visited Gatlinburg, I felt like I was inside of a cuckoo clock. What I do is like a visual shorthand for the culture we have created. My work has a bit of tongue-in-cheek irreverence, but it isn't supposed to be ironic. I do actually enjoy experiencing these places."

While Bergen takes a macro view of the U.S. of A., hailing from the Bay Area had major influence. She had a solid elementary art education, took regular trips to art museums with her mom, and attended CCA in San Francisco in the early 2010’s. However, it wasn’t only art institutions that influenced her. Of her childhood, Bergen says, 

"I went to all the museums when I was a kid. My mom would take me to the Oakland Museum, the de Young, and the Legion of Honor, the MoMA, all that stuff. I also had this amazing, classic nurturing elementary school art teacher, Mr. Hershcopf, who I still think about sometimes. But also, my mom would take home sick animals and we would attempt to nurse them back to health or take them to the humane society. We also spent a lot of time at Joaquin Miller Park or visiting the Lindsay Wildlife Museum. I know this sounds kinda weird but they had a program where you could actually rent guinea pigs and rabbits for the weekend, so we did that, too.”

Bergen, in other words, is kind of like if Andy Warhol, Lisa Frank and Jane Goodall decided to raise a child in the Louvre together, and taught her to say ‘hella’. It needs to be noted that Bergen's work has deep foundations in art history. Her compositional know-how is grounded in a serious acumen, and her understanding of color theory rivals any household name in pop art. Alongside the chops, Bergen is a softie. She loves animals, color, sugar, and kitsch Americana. She knows her way around a pair of scissors, and she’ll tell you all about it if you just walk up to her and ask nicely. She’s got her hand on the pulse of the planet, and the other hand in a box of carefully selected construction paper, occasionally tapping out of one or another to pet her cat. If you want to know what that ends up looking like on paper, her show will be up at Moth Belly Gallery until the end of September, but a couple other opportunities you’ll have for learning more about her or snagging a piece of art for your apartment are on the horizon. On August 22 from 1-6, she’ll be doing an on site technique demonstration. The gallery will also be hosting a print release on September 5th from 6-9. Moth Belly is just off the corner of Larkin and Geary and has open gallery hours on Fridays and Saturdays from 1-6 p.m and by appointment. 

By Tamsin Spencer Smith

Bay Area Artist Kate Haug’s takeover of the Sebastopol Center of the Arts immerses viewers in a layered contemplation of popular culture by resurfacing historic moments and forgotten icons from the last American century. Collaborative Practices presents a march through high points of social activism, the downsides of technological progress, and complexities of womanhood and mother-daughter relationships.

The exhibition unfolds as a series of installations that chronicle the arc of Haug’s career as a conceptual artist. History, news, and physical objects that hold personal and collective memory form the throughline of her work. This is not a rarefied gallery show. Haug has taken and continues to take her art to the streets and even the skies. 

On November 6, 2024, Haug hired a plane to fly a trailing banner that read “We Hold Democracy Together” down the Hudson River and around Ellis Island. In an age in which American access news through increasingly narrow information pipelines, Haug turned to an old-school marketing method to literally and figuratively rise above the digital chatter with a message to the masses.

“Public Post” forms another of the artist’s effort to punch through political and commercial noise. 

It’s a collaboration from 2004, in which Haug and artists Veva Edelson and Ivan Uranga covered Valencia Street in San Francisco with wheatpaste posters. Fully of playful but cutting commentary around the impact of technology on social cohesion, Haug effectively reclaims the “public” aspect of public space to circumvent the cultural disaggregation of the internet. 

In an installation titled “The Feminist Memory Shop,” Haug creates a thrift shop that looks like just the sort of defunct enterprise that gentrification would have pushed out of the Mission District before the first dot-com bubble burst. To stock her imaginary marketplace of ideas, Haug scoured eBay for genuine relics that remain powerful emblems of resistance and faith that the governing system could be transformed. Though largely discarded to the dustbin of history, this collection of cast-off ephemera have a haunting, tallismanic effect. 

Community-authored zines from across the country are displayed with pins, posters, and newspapers covering the efforts of Second Wave feminists to secure advances in maternal health, affordable childcare, equal pay, reproductive autonomy, and freedom from violence. What is the value of these physical reminders if they have no strict retail value? Does the human blood, sweat, and tears that they emblematize no longer hold relevance? 

In a corner of the shop, emanating from an old boxy TV set, we hear the eloquent voice of Barbara Jordan speaking on the rule of law at the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon. Jordan was the first woman descendant of American slavery elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. She was from Texas, a former Confederate state. Her words: “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total” evoke a sensation more precinct than nostalgic.

William Faulkner’s famous quote echoes throughout this show: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” This resonance is particularly painful in the installation “News Today: A History of the Poor People’s Campaign in Real Time.” Haug presents archival AP photos interspersed with commentary from activists, reporters, and other individuals involved in Martin Luther King’s final and largely forgotten protest campaign. A key aspect of this call for economic parity was the erection of a Resurrection City encampment on the National Mall. After King’s assassination, it became the nexus point of a huge protest against economic inequality that lasted 420 days. 

It’s all too easy to attend an exhibition, read the walls, and step away as if the story was someone else’s. But Haug and her collaborators produced a take-home newsprint catalogue detailing all the work from the original 2016 installation. It has the look and feel of a vintage Life magazine and is hard to hold in one’s hands and not feel proximate to and responsible for the ongoing failure to achieve economic justice. Particularly for one living in the Bay Area, it’s impossible not to feel that things are only getting worse. 

Haug’s effort to make history today’s news is far from disempowering, however. She is known locally in West County Sonoma as an active and effective voice on local issues. Public programming for the exhibition extends beyond the gallery walls with a performance piece entitled “Water & Sewer Ratepayer’s Town Hall.” On August 28, Haug will chronicle her efforts to understand why her water bill suddenly spiked. That three-year effort led to a civil grand jury investigation, which found the city of Sebastopol should reform its long-range planning process, repay improperly allocated funds, and employ stronger financial oversight.

This is one of several aspects of the show in which personal and collective history are interwoven. Haug’s newest work “Mothership” is indicative of her ongoing interest in co-creation. A community drawing event, zine workshop, clothing swap, and motherhood mandala drawing studio all form parts of the “Mothership”. It also includes a piece made in collaboration with mother-daughter artists Yoko OK and Helen Oji. 

Haug has a gift for making issue of broad civic import and the most intimate moments of an individual’s life into opportunities for consideration and action. A final, unexpected installation greets visitors to the women’s bathroom at SebArts. It’s a reading nook adjacent to the stalls. From a loud speaker over the nook’s chair float the voices of women reading snippets from a variety of sources. On a small side table sit hardbound copies of “THE LITTLE RED(DIT) BOOK,” a compilation of quotes collected from the 2025 Reddit thread r/Menopause. Some of the entries are hilarious, others sobering in their truths about gender bias in medical education, research, and training. 

Through this provocative exhibition, Haug leads with a sense that none of us is alone and that now is hardly the time to abandon all hope. Hers is a mission of shared purpose. It’s all there in the title of the show, Collaborative Practices. We need each other to nurture civic life. The struggles of the past are not the property of those who came before us. They are signposts of where we are heading. We trash them at our peril.

Through this provocative exhibition, Haug leads with a sense that none of us is alone and that now is hardly the time to abandon all hope. Hers is a mission of shared purpose. It’s all there in the title of the show, Collaborative Practices. We need each other to nurture civic life. The struggles of the past are not the property of those who came before us. They are signposts of where we are heading. We trash them at our peril.

Suzanne Lacy is renowned as a pioneer in socially engaged and public performance art. Her installations, videos, and performances deal with sexual violence, rural and urban poverty, incarceration, labor and aging. Lacy’s large-scale projects span the globe, including England, Colombia, Ecuador, Spain, Ireland and the U.S. 

In 2019 she had a career retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at Yerba Buena Art Center. Her work has been reviewed in major periodicals and books and she exhibits in museums across the world. Also known for her writing, Lacy edited Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art and authored  Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974-2007. She is a professor at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California and a resident artist at 18th Street Arts Center. 

Artist & Pioneer of Social Practice | Interview by Hugh Leeman

Cinderella in a Dragster, Fifty Years Later

Hugh Leeman: Suzanne, your work Cinderella Redux returns to Cinderella in a Speeding Dragster fifty years later, shifting its original investigation of speed, time, and identity toward endurance and artistic longevity. Walk me through these projects and what inspired the return half a century later.

Suzanne Lacy: In 1976 I did a performance that came out of the feminist perspective at the time. I've always enjoyed doing things that men do — as a carpenter, in the kinds of jobs I took on. I liked being able to handle the physical world.  I thought it would be funny to drive a race car as a woman named Cinderella.  It was also as a comment on my working-class origins and our relationship in California to cars, which is profound. We don't have public transportation systems, we have cars. And it was about motion and speed, and a psychological trajectory in my sensibility about movement. I think that's California-based as well — a sensibility of forward movement. We're on the edge of the Continent; we knock down a building and build a new one the next week. 

At 30, I was a young performance artist in LA, and each week I was flying to San Francisco, driving from LA to San Diego and back. I was teaching in three cities every single week. Around the same time, I did a project called Prostitution Notes — essentially a cartography of Los Angeles, the sites where prostitution of various kinds occurred. Unlike other women artists at the time, my relationship to sex work was not to become one with it, to become a prostitute for a period, but to position myself as a subjective anthropologist, finding out the layer of culture right beneath the surface of Los Angeles's normal life. In both cases I was signifying movement — my movement across LA and, in the dragster project, my movement across the state as a performance artist.

Hugh Leeman: In Cinderella Redux you adopt the persona Cindy, who aspires to become the world's fastest rookie performance artist. What does that persona allow you to say about ambition, aging, and femininity?

Suzanne Lacy: I don't know yet — that's exactly what I'm exploring now.  I have come to that piece with ambivalence. The first Cinderella was about being a performance artist, and how, as a performance artist, you live in fantasy. You create fantastic worlds, you inhabit them for a while, then you knock them down and build up the next. It's a comment on temporality as an art form. At that time, it was unusual for a woman to be driving a drag car — there were a few in California, like Shirley Shahan, who grew up in the same area I did, and was just a few years older than me, but it was rare. In the performance, I drove onto campus, delivered a rapid-fire monologue, and tossed a glass slipper out as I drove off.

I'm looking at my archives now, thinking about how to manifest past work into present visual standards that would allow my work to be collected. I thought, “I'd like to make a race car” as an object representing the first work. Then I thought it would be funny to drive a race car at my age. It started as a one-liner a humorous work. For me it is a slightly an ironic commentary that at my age I'd be learning to drive a car over 100 miles an hour — one that could blow up at any moment.

But it also indicates this time in my career.  At 80, I'm invited to do more projects than exhibitions. My visibility is built on doing long-term projects. The Performance Art Museum was being created here in Los Angeles, x and its exploration of High Performance, the magazine Linda Burnham started in 1978, was underway. (The two-year project is with The 18th Street Art Center, The Getty Research Institute, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.) Since I was the first cover girl on the magazine, I thought I’d do a performance about that original performance.

The only reason I'd ever create a performance redo —I've done it a couple of times — is if the performance contends with a radically different social context. I did The Crystal Quilt in Minnesota in '87, then Silver Action at Tate Modern in 2013. Both were structurally the same project, but in England we referenced a different history of activism and a different current social context for aging and gender. With Cinderella Redux, I thought it would be interesting to look not so much at aging, though that's part of it, but at my life as a performance artist — the development of fantasy, the desire to travel, to create new worlds. The way I work now is quite extensive and long term. Cinderella Redux is a reduction in a way, going back to the personal body and the experience of the artist. And that brings up the subject of aging.

The Pressure of the Market vs. the Pressure of Being an Artist

Hugh Leeman: Is there a continuing pressure to prove oneself in the art world?

Suzanne Lacy: I don't think so. The way the art world operates is there's a continuing demand to produce. Once the production moves into the art market — the cycle of exhibitions and articles and sales — it's self-replicating. Of course, there's always the need, particularly now with social media, to be visible, present. But that has to do with the market. There's not a pressure on being an artist, except for your relationship to that system, to the market, and your need to earn a living.

Hugh Leeman: In the 1976 performance, your autobiographical monologue moved from your childhood in Wasco through journeys in San Francisco, LA, and San Diego, ending with the discarded glass slipper. Which parts of that younger woman's story still belong to you?

Suzanne Lacy: Definitely movement — and by movement, I mean physical movement. Travel, and the exponential aspect of traveling long distances. When I first launched this piece, the next week I went to Qatar for two days — a 16-hour flight each way. That's indicative of how performance artists and contemporary artists operate. Some of us are a tremendous user of travel, fuels, airplanes and so on.

Now, where I'm at right now — doing this piece and pausing before I go into other projects (if I do go into them) — it's a moment of considering whether there limits to movement for me? Does movement take another shape? I think if I can think and move, I’ll make things or write. But do I want to start a project in Liverpool with prisoners? Do I want to go to Qatar and start a project with young women? Or do I want to sit here in one spot and write? The urge to keep moving is built into my body. I walk fast. I don't like impediments. I used to climb over things instead of going around. And that body consciousness- in the first performance I talked about shaving my legs and how much time it took. The sense of time is still with me. I have a really strong sense of time. How long do I have left to live, and what do I want to do with it? I've had a keen awareness of death since I was very young.

Hugh Leeman: Where did that awareness of death from such a young age come from?

Suzanne Lacy: I don't know. It could have come from a childhood friend who died when I was 10, but that's maybe a slightly superficial answer. If you look at Rainer Maria Rilke, at Dostoevsky, at Tolstoy — all the things I read in high school and college — there's a kind of depressive mentality some artists have, those drawn to the awareness of mortality. Performance artists, I think, are often philosophical-- thinking about the meaning of what they're doing and how their embodiment of an artwork reflects their own life process. That's true of California performance artists of my generation. Sitting around trying to understand non-existence is, I think, a deeply spiritual issue.

The Bullring: Men Reading Women's Letters

Hugh Leeman: This idea of violence recurs in your projects. De tu Puño y Letra began with some 10,000 letters in which Ecuadorian women described experiences of violence — an unanswered appeal for action. How did you decide what artistic form could answer those letters?

Suzanne Lacy: That project was a year-long process of going back and forth from California to Ecuador, meeting with people. We talked about violence against women in Ecuador, especially family-based violence. In Catholic societies (I've also worked in Madrid), it was different than in the United States. Domestic violence was more visible as a critique of the important family system. 

Tim Kroeger, a man who was working with men on violence was an integral part of the Letters from Women project, co-created by a German foundation, GIZ, and the UN Women organization. The letters were collected in Ecuador, then two other South American countries. The Ecuadoran archive of letters was stored in one of the City Museums. The question of involving men and how these letters could serve a process of empathy building, and become an instrument of communication, came together with the idea of men reading the letters in public.

One of the big decisions was the form of the work. At first, I thought that we could emphasize numbers by having men stand as individuals on a street corner reading a letter, another man down another corner, building social impact through repetition and mass. But the people who commissioned me wanted a large-scale theatrical event. That led us to consider different sites for the performance— thinking about the relationship to masculinity in a sports site, a jail, and eventually a bullring.

Hugh Leeman: The work placed men inside a bullring — a space associated with masculinity, violence, and domination — reading women's accounts of sexual assault, domestic violence, and femicide. What did the discrepancy between the speakers' bodies and the survivors' experience reveal about patriarchal power and empathy?

Suzanne Lacy: I don't think it revealed patriarchal power. There were hundreds of letters used in the performance — probably 300 to 500 — and about 300 men, so each man had his own letter. We built workshops on masculine violence for men into the project, directed by Tim Kroeger. Pretty much every man in the performance went through at least an hour workshop, and some went through two- or three-day workshops on deconstructing violence.

The metaphor was very much about empathy — male empathy for women, but more importantly, about men being able to step into the limelight of public discourse with a sense of authority. Men often don't know how to become part of a public conversation on violence. It's kind of like Black Lives Matter, which allowed white people to become part of the conversation supporting anti-racism in a public manner. Men think, well, I didn't do any violence, and it could be a challenge, did I do something? What we were doing was demonstrating the bravery of those men to step into a bullring and publicly read letters sympathizing with a woman’s point of view.

After they read, individually and collectively within the bullring, all 300 went into the audience. The soundtrack repeated, "Can I read you a letter? Can I read you a letter?" They sat down with a candle and a small group of people, read their letter, then went to another spot. So, it turned from representational theatricality into a collective conversation in the audience, through the vehicle of these letters.

Hugh Leeman: Before those letters existed, what was the catalyst for a woman to write one?

Suzanne Lacy: It was a German foundation — GIZ was the acronym. They started a letter-writing campaign, working all over Colombia. They'd go into workshops with women, talk about violence, get the women to write anonymous letters, then set up a little box at the post office where you could drop a letter. It was so successful they took it to Peru and one other country near Ecuador. In Ecuador it was given to the city, which controlled six museums, and the person in charge invited me to do the project, so it wasn't hard to access the letters.

When I first heard about it — a UN Women project done with this foundation — I thought, ugh, artists have done that forever. Feminist artists have been getting women to write letters and archiving them since the 70s. Mary Beth Edelson did it. It's a well-worn trope of political art. I thought, interesting, but I'm not interested. But the more I thought about it, and when the idea of the men came up, it made a lot of sense — as a kind of Indigenous image coming out of that culture. I wasn't simply adopting it and putting it on a wall like I'd go do my own mural. With my colleagues — and there was a very tight group of artists, activists, and curators, so everything's vetted collectively — we thought this was an interesting way to use actual letters, but reconfigure them into something that explored masculinity, male culpability, and male opportunity to be part of the discourse.

The Mill: A Shared History Across a Railroad Track

Hugh Leeman: There's a project I saw at SFMOMA as part of your retrospective, We Are Here. Based in England, it examines the disappearance of the textile industry and how that contributes to the separation of white and South Asian communities that had once worked together in the same Lancashire mills. Give us some context — what does the viewer see, and where did the inspiration come from?

Suzanne Lacy: I was invited to a project by Super Slow Ways, a producing cultural agency, and In-Situ, an arts organization in this small town of Brierfield, in Northwest England. Two cultures were living there — a Pakistani-heritage, mostly Muslim population, and an indigenous white British population. The cultures were divided, as in urban areas. The high schools were either for Muslim kids or white kids; they lived in different places. There was a mill being renovated where the people who invited me were making art exhibitions. The mill was gorgeous, and it represented the defunct industrial underpinnings for the entire region — which was impoverished and separated. The mill was being built into condos for middle-class people from Manchester to commute back and forth from the city. It was divided from the rest of the city by a railroad track — ironically, on one side of the tracks, the planned urban population, with the on the other, the Muslim Pakistanis

I saw these issues of race and class being played out in relation to the demise of the industry. As I talked to people, it became apparent the cultures had been together at one time when they worked in the mills. They never did a lot of socializing — Pakistanis didn't hang out in pubs, didn't go to church and so on — but the mills brought them together 8 to 12 hours every day. There was a respect for labor. The Pakistanis were invited to do this work because they had skill sets and worked hard.

Most of the Pakistanis came between the 50s and 70s. Later waves of recent migration found more isolation and less acceptance. There was no gainful employment in the region. At that time there was the Ariana Grande concert bombing by a Muslim radical, and a lot of fear in all of England. Fear rises when you don't know people, when you don't have daily contact. The only place I saw Muslims and white people together was in the lines at their version of Walmart…And they weren’t talking. I started bringing in community representatives, and we found a group of Sufis interested in reaching out and working alongside white people for social change. We built that constituency over time to 500 people, bringing them back together for a dinner that culminated our performance in the mill.

Hugh Leeman: How did you acknowledge the mill as a place of shared history without romanticizing the labor conditions, the racial divisions, or the economic structures that shaped it?

Suzanne Lacy: I don't think we dealt with it as anything other than a historical fact. We didn't ask people to talk about how great it was. Those people you saw on the small monitors — we interviewed 75, and we were very specific with our questions: What do you think about race and racism here now? What do you think about the economy now? What is the future of this place to you? We dealt with their thoughts about the current situation, not romantic tales.

Accountability, Whiteness, and the Willingness to Be Wrong

Hugh Leeman: A recent critic asked how work emerging from white second-wave feminism can remain accountable to intersectional blind spots. How has your understanding of your own position and authority changed across the decades?

Suzanne Lacy: It has. First off, I start projects with listening.  I'm very curious about other people's realities. If you're carefully listening and you put what you're hearing into a political context formed by those with whom you are working, there is a level of respect and collaboration that is key to any organizing. 

Secondly, you become accountable by being humble enough to be humiliated: to be wrong, to admit it. If you strive for transparency, frame the project as co-learning, and you're conscious of what you represent to others, that can establish trust. I've always been aware of what I signify as white, mitigated slightly by class — I'm working class — and slightly by gender. A lot of the Black people I worked with were older Black women, and at a particular historical point in the US there was, along with righteous anger, a willingness to forgive but also to teach.

I tell my students: if somebody says they think something was prejudiced, you probably should listen, because you're not the experiencer, you're not aware of that context. Sometimes you'll run into people who just have it in for you because you're white — that's been the case occasionally. Even as a kid, there was a young woman, Veta, who always wanted to beat me up. I was afraid of her but also aware she was placing something on me about my whiteness. I might also have just been aggravating to her, I don't know. But the willingness to listen, to be taught — if your interlocutor is kind enough to teach you — and the willingness to be wrong, to step inside somebody else's reality to the extent you can, those are the ways you can bridge the gaps. It's not perfect. But I generally talk very frankly about race, class, and gender and that invites conversations.

Hugh Leeman: What lessons from generous friends who taught you things have stayed with you?

Suzanne Lacy: I remember Judy Baca — one of my best friends — telling me: “I know you're an organizer, but when you go into a Latino family, don't sit down and get right to the point. You sit, and you listen, and you talk to them about their family. That's the communication form.” I've been humiliated by saying something clearly wrong and having to back down, like an event on performance where my friend, Meiling Cheng, said, “Well, it was prejudiced, what you said.” 

I came out of an era that was deeply prejudiced. I understood that Black people and Latino students were being oppressed — I went to people's houses, I knew their social situation was different than mine — but I didn't have the contextual understanding of why their houses were different than mine. I hadn’t been taught about redlining, slavery, the whole history of Blacks in the US. Same with Jewish people; there were none in town that I knew of. I got a lot of my awareness from Life magazine, looking at pictures of lynching, and hearing my dad's stories of anti-Semitism from the Second World War. It starts with sympathy. But sympathy is not enough — it's a starter. Then there's empathy, and listening, and learning, and then understanding the whole historical context, like the 1619 Project the New York Times revealed. You must make it your business to understand that.

Museums, the Market, and Working Within the System

Hugh Leeman: You've argued publicly that museums continue to have a function, and that artists working inside institutions can both change them and learn how their systems operate. What structural changes would make museums genuinely accountable to the communities whose histories and labor they exhibit?

Suzanne Lacy: First, I understand the tear-it-down sensibility, the protest sensibility. But I've mostly chosen to work within systems, so that makes me more moderate. You could say burn it down, get rid of the art market — that wouldn't be bad, to my way of thinking. But if you want a profession of art there must be ways to sustain it. A museum at this moment is the repository of visual culture. I'm sorry that's the case. When I began, I assumed writing and film, the documentation of ideas, would be sufficient — and it isn't now, because of the art market. Museums collect things.

You could critique the relationship of museums to the art market. Board members and collectors sit on museum boards and influence programming — when SFMOMA did Jeff Koons's first big retrospective, that was a board member supporting the show and loaning works that, of course, increased in value by being shown. But having said that, at this moment museums are the vehicle for the preservation of visual culture. The reason I wrote so much is to influence ideas about art - that art can have meaning in public settings as well as in art ones. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, was about how you change the way we frame a particular kind of art practice, not by media but by its engagement with social contexts; how you pull together ideas, call them a collection called social practice, even though one person paints and another does sound work. How do these artworks get looked at through the lens of their relationship with audience? The same could be said of education, of government, of art institutions. I've worked within those sectors to challenge how things are thought of, and to support a move toward thinking about things differently. But that's not the same thing as revolution.

Hugh Leeman: We're at a moment of incredible political polarization, censorship pressures, shrinking public resources, declining trust in institutions. What can socially engaged art still accomplish — and what responsibility should artists refuse to claim for themselves?

Suzanne Lacy: I'm not sure we can do a lot. We — meaning me and other artists who work like me — don't have a lot of resources. We can change what's considered art, like a community process, but the market still wants a thing that goes on a wall. There are of course lots of projects that do enact small changes in communities and artists lives over time, but I don’t think it caused a lot of large-scale change.

For sure, feminists have changed the way we think about gender, and about violence. Have they changed violence? I don't think so. They've changed the way we think about it, and therefore the structures we might create to handle it better. But there's no evidence we've stopped violence against women. We have changed social attitudes, and for sure artists have changed what is known as art, and museum exhibition practices. When I started, there were very few women shown, and even fewer people of color. Now there's a much more extensive practice of exhibiting women and people of color, a robust dialogue on the role of race and gender in art.

It's when you get to the hardcore political sphere that you can talk about mass change. Feminists changed the abortion law in this country when I was a teenager — of course now we've gone back on it. That's massive. We slowly, over 50 years, changed attitudes toward violence — and yet today, political leaders are told it's a family problem, go home and handle it. It's two steps forward and one step back. You keep doing it because you need to, because you believe in it, not because you think it will cause social change. But for sure it causes individual change and is part of a larger social and political effort to change the way we look at things. 

What Art Education Fails to Teach

Hugh Leeman: You've worked in education for years — taught, developed curricula, led art schools, created public practice programs. What is art education currently failing to give students, particularly as they prepare to work with communities amid AI, political conflict, and economic precarity?

Suzanne Lacy: Here I'm slightly negative about the possibilities. I believe very strongly in higher ed — I'm a working-class kid, neither of my parents went to university, and I've been in it for decades, as a faculty or a student. It dramatically changes your ability to operate, to think critically. But higher education for the arts in the US costs a lot of money, so it's unattainable for most except through philanthropic funding. Naturally I think college ought to be free, all the way through to a master's at least — and particularly free for people coming from the working class, of whatever race, because it enables them to become a more productive citizen.

Particularly recently art education pays lip service to social practice. Students come in wanting to do social practice, wanting relevance in their work, wanting to do performance. I tell them: if you want to live in this industry, you must make things for the market or find another way to survive. I counsel kids that they can go into state park systems, recreational systems, educational systems, political systems as creative forces — but that doesn't get you into MoMA. And if you're not in MoMA, it's hard to sell your work. 

What art schools don't do is educate much on professional practice issues.  And if you're inclined to do social practice art, they don't teach you diddly-squat about how to do it. Kids come out of a critical theory course saying, I can't work in that community, I don't know enough. And I say that you're not going to know enough unless you work in that community, because you'll learn from the people you work with. You must have a certain kind of personality to handle the level of critique you'll get working cross-culturally, because there can be a lot of critique.

Hugh Leeman: What personality type does one need to sustain and confront that critique?

Suzanne Lacy: You must be deeply committed to learning, to know how others experience the world. You must be willing to learn about others' experience of alienation and oppression. You need the ability to handle critique, and you need to learn not to leap to protect your identity. I know I'm a stand-in for whiteness in South America. In Ecuador, some people called me La Gringa — I represented American imperialism to those who didn’t know me. You must learn not to defend yourself against that. Because I am La Gringa.

Hugh Leeman: Suzanne Lacy, thank you for sharing so candidly at a time when it's very common to filter and put up screens. I appreciate your candid, honest vulnerability.

Suzanne Lacy: Thank you.

By Kelly Jean Egan

Unruly Inland Scenes, Isaac Vazquez Avila’s fifth solo exhibition with pt.2 Gallery, is a noticeable departure from the dense, graphic language that has characterized much of his earlier work with the gallery. Across fourteen new works, Vazquez Avila loosens his hold on recognizable imagery and allows something quieter and less certain to emerge. Horizons, bodies of water, vegetation and suggestions of interior space drift in and out of paintings that sit somewhere between landscape, abstraction, observation and memory. It is not that place has disappeared from his work, if anything, it has become more present, only now less as something to be pictured than something to be experienced.

Born in Mexico City in 1983, Vazquez Avila moved to the United States as a child and eventually settled in San Francisco, where he now lives and works in Bernal Heights. He received a BA in Latino/a Studies from San Francisco State University before earning his MFA from UC Berkeley in 2016, where he has since taught studio courses, alongside teaching at California College of the Arts. His practice has moved freely between painting, sculpture, sign painting and mural work, with exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Guerrero Gallery, Tlaloc Studios in Los Angeles and numerous Bay Area spaces. He has also conducted research in Mexico City through UC Berkeley’s Global Urban Humanities Initiative, examining the relationship between art and urban life, an interest in place and lived environment that continues to surface throughout his work.

Across his previous exhibitions with pt.2, Vazquez Avila’s work has undergone a gradual loosening. Earlier paintings were often hard-edged and densely constructed, drawing on sign painting, urban imagery, memory and explicit Latinx iconography, while his sculptures brought together found and altered materials with a greater sense of improvisation. By Como Siempre in 2024, daily walks through Bernal Heights had become an integral part of his process, with visual observations and collected materials finding their way back into the studio. Last year’s Letting Go marked a more significant change, as Vazquez Avila began painting over recognizable imagery and resisting predetermined compositions. Unruly Inland Scenes feels like the next step in that progression: rather than rejecting recognizable forms entirely, he now allows fragments of landscape to surface without requiring them to fully resolve.

That uncertainty is particularly present in mello meadow and a sense of place that is familiar, two works whose compositions continually tempt the eye toward recognition without ever quite satisfying it. In mello meadow, deep greens, reds and passages of blue begin to suggest hills, water, architecture or vegetation, while a sense of place that is familiar offers an even denser accumulation of forms that seem momentarily recognizable before slipping away. Looking at them feels similar to remembering a dream: the certainty that you saw a particular person, object or place remains, but its edges have softened and its details have blurred, no longer easily reconstructed. Vazquez Avila leaves enough detail for the mind to attempt completing these images, but not enough to accurately say exactly what they are. Their familiarity comes less from recognition than from the strange sensation of remembering something you cannot fully retrieve. This allows the viewer to create a personal narrative with the work while simultaneously recognizing another’s emotion within it; there is an attachment and disconnect all at once. A skill Vazquez Avila has honed and thoughtfully shared with us.

Condition of a solitary bird pushes this ambiguity further. Its large fields of yellow, green and black initially read more abstractly, yet the title immediately changes how we look at it, prompting the mind to search for a bird among its loosely formed shapes. The dominant yellow carries its own associations, recalling the yellow ducks that are among the first birds many children learn to recognize, an almost instinctive visual shorthand that makes identification possible even where representation is absent. Again this draws a nostalgia and perhaps even a melancholy from the viewer without providing an obvious prompt toward it. Sculpture sits somewhere between these ways of seeing. Painted sections of brilliant blue, green and red occupy one half, while the other shows the scars, holes and weathered surface of what appears to be found wood. Here Vazquez Avila’s accumulated observations become physically present. The work brings something of the material world encountered on his walks into the gallery, allowing the viewer to experience not only an image of his surroundings, but something that appears to have lived within them. This becomes a more direct view into his experiences and process, as though he has taken us with him on one of his city walks; an eclectic urban tour guide perhaps? 

This movement between remembered, observed and physically experienced place expands dramatically in Slow Burn, Vazquez Avila’s new mural on the second floor of SFMOMA. Part of Bay Area Walls, the museum’s ongoing series of commissions and site-responsive projects by local artists, the sprawling work brings together Pacific sunsets, the cityscape surrounding his Bernal Heights home and studio, and memories of his birthplace, Mexico City. Here the suggestive forms of Unruly Inland Scenes become more culturally and geographically explicit: a Mesoamerican stepped-fret motif appears alongside birds referencing Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide, while hand-painted signage and the weathered surfaces of public murals inform its texture. At this larger scale, Vazquez Avila’s accumulated experience of place becomes almost environmental, allowing locations separated by geography and time to occupy a single horizon resulting in a piece that feels quintessentially Vazquez Avila.

What emerges across these works is a practice in which heritage and daily life are not separate sources, but parts of the same continuously accumulating experience. Mexico City, Bernal Heights, childhood memory, a familiar stretch of landscape or something noticed on a walk can all enter Vazquez Avila’s visual language without needing to announce where they came from. For the viewer, this allows the work to become strangely personal. We may not share his memories, but we recognize the experience of carrying places with us, of remembering them imperfectly and allowing the past to quietly alter how we see the present. Vazquez Avila captures not so much what a place looks like, but the emotional residue it leaves behind, and in doing so creates space for our own memories to enter alongside his.

Caledonia Curry, known as Swoon, is a contemporary artist and filmmaker recognized around the world for her pioneering vision of public artwork. Through intimate portraits, immersive installations, and multi-year community based projects, she has spent over 20 years exploring the depths of human complexity, and asking how art can fundamentally re-envision the communities we live in towards a more just and equitable world.

She is best known as one of the first women Street Artists to gain international recognition in a male-dominated field, pushing its conceptual limits and paving the way for a generation of women Street Artists. Her critical engagement with issues of social and environmental justice have positioned her at the forefront of the emergent discourse around socially-engaged art practices.

Curry has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in major museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Skissernas Museum, Lund, Sweden; MIMA Contemporary Art Museum, Brussels, Belgium; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Oaxaca, Mexico. Her first museum retrospective was The Canyon: 1999–2017 at the CAC Cincinnati. Her work is held in public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and MASS MoCA. 

In 2021, Curry premiered The House Our Families Built, a major public art commission in collaboration with PBS American Portrait. She is currently developing a full length narrative movie which will bring together drawing, immersive installation, stop motion animation and her collaborative work, with the traditions of storytelling through film. 

Artist Caledonia Curry (Swoon) | Interview by Hugh Leeman

The Beauty of Decay

Hugh Leeman: Caledonia, your early street portraits were printed on fragile newsprint and then intentionally left exposed to the elements. How did watching those figures deteriorate and disappear affect your understanding of art, authorship, and control?

Caledonia Curry: I intentionally made those pieces that way, and I loved the process of decay, because there was always something really fun and unexpected happening — the way the paper would curl and tear and yellow. It just seemed to be alive.

At the time I was really excited by Gordon Matta-Clark, who was one of my heroes — he would take these abandoned buildings and cut them into shapes, knowing the building was going to be destroyed. Or Tibetan sand mandalas. I was looking at a lot of temporary art pieces and thinking about the way there was something precious about that fleeting moment.

A Truck Full of American Stories

Hugh Leeman: The first time I ever bumped into your work was walking down the streets in Manhattan, and later I saw a piece here in San Francisco, and also in the West Bank in Palestine. There's a project I'd love to hear your thoughts on — The House Our Families Built. It transformed the back of a truck into a mobile domestic diorama, populated by painted figures and everyday objects, with actors performing stories about American identity and family legacies. What did mobility and live performance contribute to the work's exploration of inheritance and belonging?

Caledonia Curry: I've always been drawn to mobility. The rafts were also mobile. Even the street pieces in their way, because they were prints — there was this way they could travel and appear in places. But with The House Our Families Built, I was working with PBS American Portrait.

As Americans, there are a lot of really big questions these days about what it means to be American, who we are, and what we want our values to be. Working with PBS American Portrait, there were thousands of people sending in these stories about their lives, and it was this idea that you can find out who we are — not through the horrible, divisive rhetoric that's going around, but through people's everyday tales about what's important to them. That was how the project started. I collaborated with them by working through a sound bank they'd created of thousands of stories. And because all these stories came from all over the country, the truck could travel and drive and move. It felt like a sort of lock-and-key kind of logic — that they made sense together.

The Third Thing: Art as a Precursor to Healing

Hugh Leeman: There's a project you did, Five Stories with Swoon. It brought together people who were incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, or receiving addiction treatment, through portraiture, art therapy, and storytelling. How did the participants' ability to author and share their own stories impact you and your role as an artist?

Caledonia Curry: To take a step back — that project began because I started collaborating with somebody who helped me tell my own story. I felt so empowered by their encouragement. They live in the Bay, a couple called the Million Person Project, and the way they brought me through this storytelling process helped me believe that telling my own story wasn't just some indulgent exercise, but something that could actually help me and help other people in the process.

I started doing it, and I started seeing that happen, and I realized there's a real power in this. I wanted to share that experience with people who were going through some of the similar things my family had gone through my whole life — addiction, coming out of addiction treatment, incarceration, various ways of getting stuck in negative cycles. I felt so transformed by that experience that I wanted to share it, so I ended up working with Philly Mural Arts and inviting the Million Person Project, all together in a way that could share this art of finding your voice.

Hugh Leeman: You've dedicated so much to incredible projects. One of them is in Kensington Avenue — for anyone who may not know, it's an area of Philadelphia that's long been home to the unhoused and those majorly impacted by the fentanyl crisis. You drew directly out of your own history and your family. How did that personal proximity change the way you entered the neighborhood and interacted with the people living there?

Caledonia Curry: The way people were describing Kensington at the time, it was the largest open-air drug market on the Eastern Seaboard. It was really a difficult place, and the level of suffering was beyond anything I had ever seen — and I moved to New York in the 90s. So it was a very extreme and intense place.

There was a tendency, when arriving in a neighborhood like that, to see people as a mass, and not as individuals. But I knew, because my parents had been those people, and yet they were my parents, and I loved them, and I knew their individuality deeply. So I had enough of a foothold to know from experience that every single person in that situation is just a person, like anyone you know and love, who just happens to have gotten so far down the ladder of addiction and crippling choices.

The thing I was learning — that somehow I didn't learn when I was a teenager — is that nobody ends up in that situation without usually having had a pretty serious history of trauma. If people are moving from a deep well of pain and then being exploited by the Sacklers and other corporations, punishment is not really a viable option. If we're working from suffering, the answer is not more suffering. My whole life, I didn't fully understand that until I was in my 30s. And then it became important to find ways to talk about that, to work with people who embrace that philosophy.

Philly Mural Arts had something called the Kensington Storefront, which I thought was one of the most brilliant and humane things I'd seen. In that area, next to the church and the needle exchange and the rehab and all the other actionable things, they found that not everyone is really ready to make such a big step — and that a thing that's deeply useful in a space like that is just a room where people can make art together. You can wash your hands, sit down, have a cup of tea, pick up a paintbrush, and talk to somebody casually while you paint a bird. There's something about making art together that soothes and grounds in such a way that it becomes a precursor to other forms of healing.

Hugh Leeman: Say more about that — this idea of it being a precursor to other forms of healing. It seems like one of the greatest returns on investment art poses for society is not in the art markets, but something like what you're describing. What's so special about sitting down and drawing a bird together that it leads to other forms of healing?

Caledonia Curry: It's such a great question. I don't know the answer, but I'll talk around it. The first thing is that we're sitting together, and we're not focusing on ourselves or each other — we're focusing on this third thing. And somehow that third thing touches into something very young, but it's low-pressure. There are certain kinds of conversations that can't happen if they're too high-pressure, but when we have this third, constructive, lovely thing we're doing together, it opens up a space for a different kind of connection and sharing. One of those famous quotes around addiction research is that the opposite of addiction is actually connection. So art-making gives us structures to connect with each other.

The other thing — I grew up in a family with severe narcotics addiction until I was about 5, and then alcoholism and psychosis and all kinds of other things after that, with intermittent stability. When I was about 10, things leveled out, and my mom took me to an art class. It was this first moment in my life where things were chill, we could breathe — and all of a sudden I'm being given this way to center, to calm, to ground, and to gain self-esteem, which I direly needed. There's something still unstudied in what the focus of making art does for the nervous system. I think of it like it gets my ducks in a line. When all this chaos is happening, if I sit down and draw a portrait, I need every single part of me to make it happen, so it has a way of calling me into one place. The mental health value of being united with yourself can't be understated.

Hugh Leeman: I love this idea of the third thing. It seems connected to the idea that it's not instantaneous — it starts to shut off part of that prefrontal cortex, where you're not going to that monkey mind of thinking, am I doing this or that, do people view me this way or that. And once that starts to turn off, you see someone go to a deeper layer of themselves and want to connect.

Caledonia Curry: I remember one woman in one of the programs loved to paint circles, and for her it was about this connection of mind and body together, the tactile relationship with the materials. But thinking of the third thing in a different way — some of the exercises we'd do were mask-making or myth-telling, and those function as a third thing differently. I was drawing on my own therapeutic experiences. I remember a therapy session where I became able to say some things through the character of Strawberry Shortcake that I was not able to say as Callie. It was like Strawberry could have seen this thing that I didn't see, because I wasn't allowed to see it. We don't really understand the brain science behind what happens when we tap into a myth, but something happens at those deeper levels of consciousness — where we start to describe things in terms of Jungian archetypes, where we don't even have the language at a neurological level, but we know something profound is happening.

I Went to the Dark Place and Found This Pearl

Hugh Leeman: In preparation for our conversation, I came across one of the most deeply personal and touchingly vulnerable talks I've ever heard. At the start, you get up and say something like, "Oh my god, guys, I'm so nervous," and I thought, oh, this is just another person saying they're nervous to speak in front of people. But it was profound. This was 2019 — you're on stage sharing all the dark challenges of your family's history, and their influence on your artwork. You talk about psychedelics and healing in a conversation with the renowned psychologist Gabor Maté and an underground therapist. How did you prepare for this talk, and summon the courage to share so vulnerably?

Caledonia Curry: I needed help, actually. How it began is I was in Istanbul on the day my mom passed away. I woke up from this incredible dream where I knew she had passed away. I'd known she was sick, I'd already said goodbye, but I was still planning on going back home — and then I woke up and I knew. I thought, I'll just wait for my sister to call, and I'll do my day, because there's nothing really to be done.

In that time period, I met these people — we were giving a presentation at a place in Istanbul — and they said, our work is that we help people tell their stories within the context of their work. Something about just losing my mom, being so raw and disoriented — I saw this woman say this and I was like, I need this. I need to tell this story. So I went and grabbed her and said, I think I have a story that needs to come out, and I don't know how to do it. And I started working with them.

I truly don't think I could have done it by myself. There are talks where I got on stage and said, I feel like I'm going to throw up. And I don't even mind public speaking — I like public speaking. But I was having full-blown panic attacks before giving these talks, because the family taboo, the social taboo, everything you go through in those experiences weighs on you to not talk about them. I needed structure. I needed someone to coach me through the idea that to do something like this was actually an act of leadership, not some humiliating exercise.

One of the things they were so good at is they said, you're not just up there for yourself. You've learned something from this experience, and you're going to get to what you've learned, and then you're going to get to what you hope. So I'd get up and say, this is the family I came from, and I've never been able to talk about it, but the fact is, I'm an artist, and I now believe this thing about human resilience and human nature as a result of having been through these things. My belief in human dignity is not some fluffy shit that came out of nowhere — I went through the trenches and I still think this. Here's where I got this. I went to the dark place, I found this pearl of wisdom, and I'm bringing it back to you because I still believe in humanity.

Being taught that you can share your most vulnerable experiences in the context of what they have taught you and what you now hope for humanity is a very different thing than just standing up and sharing for no reason. Trauma throws you out of rhythms, out of patterns, out of networks, out of the sense of the world. Standing up on a stage and saying, I've been through this, and here's the sense I made of it, and here's the sense I hope we can make of it together — that's like saying, I want to restitch myself back into the sense of the world, in a new way. It's not just exposing vulnerable things, it's asking to be refolded back into a different kind of world.

Hugh Leeman: During the talk, you say — and I may be paraphrasing — "unconscious and buried pain is the only path to great art."

Caledonia Curry: Sorry — I don't think I did say that. Unconscious and buried pain is the only path to great art? No. I would never say that.

Hugh Leeman: Okay — tell me more, then, because part of my curiosity was thinking, my goodness, it seems like there might be other paths.

Caledonia Curry: Maybe I said it isn't the only path?

Hugh Leeman: It could be. What spoke to me about my interpretation of that quote is that unconscious and buried pain seems like a lot of what you had been doing before — before Strawberry Shortcake, before asking for help. There's a point where you talk about going back after therapy sessions and looking at your art and saying, oh my god, that was me dealing with this situation with my mother.

Caledonia Curry: I definitely don't think it's the only path to great art at all. But if we're talking about how it connects to great art, which it does — I almost think of unconscious and buried pain like a coiled spring. A jack-in-the-box. It's this tremendous energy shoved into a very tight space. Most of the time, all that stuff does is ruin your life. I'm not out here advertising for unconscious and buried pain at all. But it is true that every once in a while, under the right conditions, with enough resources and care, and enough of that pain directed in the right way through and into certain materials, you can get a situation where that coiled-up, high-impact energy actually becomes able to move through a medium and create great art. In my case, a lot of what I was doing was powered by the force of what I was running from. The urgency contained within it was the urgency of somebody who couldn't stand to sit still or be inside their own skin. There's a silver lining there sometimes.

From "Why the Addiction" to "Why the Pain"

Hugh Leeman: There are mentions of the renowned therapist Gabor Maté. For myself, he was the first person I ever heard give a talk on trauma and addiction, and that idea that the opposite of addiction is connection really resonated. You mentioned transforming a question that had long been in your life — from "why the addiction" into "why the pain" — and that it helped you reconsider your mother's life and reconnect with her before her death. How did that movement from judgment toward compassion transform the artworks you made of her?

Caledonia Curry: If we're speaking specifically to the artworks I made of her — the only time I ever made an artwork of her before this was one time in my teenage years, and I thought I was making a surrealist painting. When my mom looked at it, she said, why did you put me in jail? And we both had this uncomfortable feeling, like some unconscious memory or desire or anger was coming out. I really shied away from making work about her after that.

It wasn't until she was sick with cancer, and I was working through all this stuff, that I really needed to lean into making work in that way that saves you — especially for me, because I already had this well-worn path of holding onto the world via the artistic process. When she was sick, I started to make art featuring her, and since then she's showed up in a lot of my work. Unpacking her life, unpacking our relationship, trying to find a compassionate way to see this heavily traumatized and addicted person has been a big part of the core of my work.

One of the projects that's occupied my last many years is a narrative world called The Sibylline Sisters — it's a novella, exhibitions, an oracle deck, an in-progress film. It's essentially a fairytale fictionalization created around a moment when my mom had a psychotic episode when I was 7, and I needed to make sense of it as an adult. Since my mom's death, and since that ability to see her really compassionately, that desire to show who we are at our core — often through sharing stories of my relationship with my mom — has really been the core of my work.

What to Share, What to Hold: The Light After

Hugh Leeman: Your experience at your mother's death eventually led you to research shared-death and near-death accounts, and to create a project called The Light After. When you translate such an intimate experience into the public realm, how do you decide what to share, what should remain private, and what should remain unresolved?

Caledonia Curry: A lot of it is instinct. But when I'm really going to share something in public — and maybe this is just me, I don't think every artist has to do this — I tend to share things that are a little bit processed through. Making the work helps me process them emotionally. As a matter of personal preference, I like people to land in a space where they're being held a little bit. Even if I'm sharing something really difficult, I like the current that runs through the work — the beauty of the images, the dignity of the portraits, the colors, the sense of safety within the piece — to be like a basket that holds you, so you can experience this otherwise difficult thing within a felt sense of safety.

With The Light After — that one was such an unusual experience that only a handful of people truly knew what I was talking about, and those people would come up to me at the show and tell me very personal stories. There was a woman who'd been hit by a bus and almost passed away, and she had a near-death experience. She came into the room and shared what it was like, and how connected she felt to what was happening in the room. There are so many ways people can receive an artwork, but when you have those moments where people receive it so fully, it's always really special.

Slowly, Slowly, Then All at Once: Healing Chronic Pain

Hugh Leeman: A through-line here pulls me back to something from one of the talks — you were speaking about chronic pain, and overcoming it. How did that happen for you? It's obviously not some simple recipe.

Caledonia Curry: I'd had chronic pain for years, and it got much worse after my mom's death. I put out a post — please, can anyone recommend me something? I was going through physical therapy and doctors. A friend clocked the connection: Callie's pain just got much worse, and her mom just died. She sent me a message: my friend was scheduled to get back surgery, then read this book, healed herself through it, and now she's a runner and never got the surgery. And I was like, give me this book.

It was the work of Dr. John Sarno. As soon as I read it, I was like, I really think this could be me. I was still skeptical, so I read all his books, did a visit with NYU at the pain hospital where the person who took over his practice was. I was really thorough, because I didn't want a fluffy answer — I wanted a medical opinion. He called it Tension Myoneural Syndrome, but he said, the name could change, our understanding can change. My contribution is just pointing it out and helping people heal. And he helped thousands of people heal from it.

What he pointed out is that he'd been a back-pain doctor at NYU for years, and he kept noticing his patients all had the same personality — they'd come in so nice, focused, perfectionists, caring about everyone, working really hard, trying to do good. He started to put together that there's something about this high-perfectionist, high-driving personality where the pain ends up in the body through the brain. Then he realized buried trauma can be another layer.

It took me three months of doing the workbooks, making doctor visits, doing all the things — and keep in mind, I hadn't started therapy at this point. I was doing the work for three months and seeing no results, but I kept going because I knew this was me. And then one morning I was meant to go on a trip, and I woke up from this horrible nightmare about two men fighting, dragging each other across the concrete, covered in blood. I missed my train, couldn't take the trip, was a total mess. And then by that afternoon my pain had started to go away. Within a couple of days I was 90% pain-free. So it was almost like — slowly, slowly, slowly, and then all at once — via this emotional breakthrough of what was essentially a resurfaced memory about some kind of violence from when I was a kid.

It can happen all different ways for people. Another friend read one paragraph and started to feel better. Mine was really deeply buried, and I needed some work. But it's such a hopeful thing. I'm 48, and I'm going to go surfing when we get off this call — which I couldn't have done in my early 30s because I felt so crippled by pain. I'm healthier now than I was then, via just an emotional process.

Hugh Leeman: Was there a pathology — a bulging disc, a torn disc, a ligament cyst — that went along with the pain?

Caledonia Curry: It was all the usual suspects — sciatica, carpal tunnel, all those things. Here's what's wild about Dr. Sarno's work: he says those don't cause you a lifetime of pain. Bulging discs are just gray hairs of the spine. You see them, they show up, but if a nerve is actually being pressed on for months at a time, it'll just die. That pain is actually created by the brain and kept alive via the nervous system. The fact that they seem connected is one of those processes of the body, but often it's random. They'll x-ray somebody for the liver and be like, did you know you have three slipped discs? And the person's like, no, I don't feel it at all. We've connected something that isn't actually connected, and that fixation becomes a pathway for the pain.

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned John Sarno as the author. What was the name of the book and the workbooks?

Caledonia Curry: He wrote three books. I started with The Mindbody Prescription, but I did the others too — Healing Back Pain and The Divided Mind. And the workbooks — there's a guy named David Schechter who did the mind-body workbook. A lot of other doctors have taken on his practice since John Sarno passed away — Nicole Sachs, maybe, and David Schechter — doctors who were patients of his and now practice the same style of medicine.

Cleaning the Attic of the Mind: Medea and the Switchboard

Hugh Leeman: I want to come back to a project you did — Medea. It centers on a house splitting apart, with portraits of women across generations of your family, and an audio switchboard representing dissociation. How did the combination of the architecture, the portraiture, and the sound allow the installation to hold conflicting histories that couldn't be contained in imagery alone?

Caledonia Curry: That installation started because I had a vision when I was 15. It was one of those blips of wisdom from my unconscious that I had to put on a shelf for 20 years before I could even understand it. It was this image of myself as a switchboard with all the wires scrambled — and I even knew at the time, these wires are scrambled to connect cause from effect and emotion from cause, so that I could hide how much I feared and hated the people that I also loved and depended on, which was my family. I wrote it in a journal and set it aside for many years.

Later, when I was finally ready to confront my family's history — and it wasn't just the addiction, it was also pretty serious mental illness, dissociative identity disorder among close members of my family, schizophrenia, suicidal depression. It was a very scary thing. My family were people full of love who wanted to do right, but really struggled. Growing up as a child of those people, my whole teenagehood I was just waiting — it's going to hit me, I'm going to get mine. And somehow, through art, through care, through luck, I was in good health, I left for New York, I became an artist. But those thoughts were plaguing me. I remember crossing my late 20s and being like, whew, okay, I made it — there's always this sense of having made it into another decade.

When I became ready to work with that stuff, I thought, okay, switchboard, what were you trying to tell me? There are sounds in a switchboard, so I put different sounds in it — a journal entry, this, that. Working with the idea that there are multiple channels. My own sense of dissociation happened like a fracturing or splitting, where you split off different parts of yourself and hide them and forget about them. The memory of my mom's psychosis, I buried it for many years, and it returned as a teenager. This idea that you can fracture and split off and hide — this multiplicity to the brain that's a function of dissociation. To go from something where the channels are split apart, and try to bring it back toward one single coherent story, felt like cleaning the attic of my mind.

The Last Stop on the Train: Museums as Container

Hugh Leeman: I want to bring things full circle. You initially felt apprehensive about entering museums after building so much of your practice outside institutions, but you later concluded that institutions can be a container for creativity — as long as they're not the only one. What possibilities and limitations do you see in museums, and what would they need to change to become more meaningfully civic?

Caledonia Curry: I love that idea, meaningfully civic. I was just in Virginia at the Taubman Museum in Roanoke, and it seemed like every day they'd bring me down and say, here's this class where we work with this group — and there were so many community groups they were working with, people with different sets of needs, different sets of skills. They had teachers, they'd give classes, they'd take people through the exhibitions and build a lesson out of that. The museum became not just a public resource but a teaching institution. On the opening, they had street performers, face painting for kids, happening outside on the street and inside. There are definitely some really great institutions around the world trying to answer that question.

My gold standard for how art can interact with community — I guess it's not an institution — is Philly Mural Arts. It's always art, always focusing on something, creating something together, but the way they work in all different communities all over the city, addressing all different sets of needs. My project with them was at the Kensington Arts Center, but at the same time they'd have a project in the next neighborhood over planting gardens — because maternal nutrition was low, pregnant mothers weren't getting high enough nutrition, so they'd work with families to plant sweet potatoes in abandoned lots. The variety of ways of addressing needs, and doing it creatively, was unlimited.

Don't get me wrong — I love the hallowed halls, the textbook nature of an institution. I've actually learned to love that now that I understand what it is. When I was a teenager, I was like, wait, this is all art can be? No way. And now I see they do this really invaluable thing of protecting things that would otherwise not be protected. When I view them that way, I can celebrate the quiet, spare, weatherproof interior they've got going on, while keeping in mind that that's almost like the last stop on the train.

Do One Thing Badly

Hugh Leeman: I love that — the last stop on the train — because it implies the destination is not nearly as important as the process and the journey. And I think that's testament to your life. Listening to you, and thinking about your talks, there's something that recalls Joseph Campbell and the hero's journey — that you've been pulled on this epic, crushing journey, and that you're an alchemist who's turned that lead into gold. If you had a magic button, and anyone who reads or listens to this could push it and do the thing you think would be most enriching — what should people do?

Caledonia Curry: That's such a good question. For some reason, the thing coming to my mind is a little more individual, maybe because I've been thinking about this a lot this week — asking myself, what does it take to go from idea to action, and why is it so often blocked for people? A lot of people feel a distance between the dreams they have and the ability to bring them into the world.

So, weirdly, what I'm going to say is that people should do one thing badly. Allow yourself to think of a thing you want to do, for no reason — it doesn't even make sense, you just want to do it. Maybe you just invoked Joseph Campbell, so what I'm saying is: follow your bliss.

I imagine there's a kinked hose — the free flow of love and creative expression that can come from all people — and then there are the ways our hoses are kinked. One of the ways we unkink that hose, that we begin to let the free expression of whatever is inside us flow — because a world in which each person is following their bliss, allowing that free expression of their best self, is naturally a better world.

I'm somebody who's always pursuing excellence, always trying really hard, wanting everything to be perfect — back to John Sarno. But one of my little magic secrets of early life was that I did this book, The Artist's Way, when I came out of college. She talks about just following that one first impulse. You want glitter, but you're not making anything with glitter? Just pick up the glitter, it doesn't matter. You feel like you want to make a pile of leaves? Go collect the leaves. You don't need an excuse. Stop overriding yourself — like what you were saying about the prefrontal cortex stopping you. Do one thing where it's just a pure desire, and you don't override yourself, and you just let yourself do it. And that's enough. And just see where it goes from there.

Hugh Leeman: Caledonia Curry, thank you for being the alchemist who proves to us that lead can transform to gold. It's incredible and inspiring. Thank you.

Caledonia Curry: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

By Gabrielle Selz

There is something seductive and faintly disquieting about GaHee Park's paintings. Their colors are muted but rich—dusty pinks, grays, greens, and yellows—and their surfaces have an almost decorous calm. Flowers sit in vases, fish lie on tables, women recline, cats watch, insects crawl. Then you begin to notice what else is happening. A body doubles. A shadow develops a presence of its own. An eye appears where it shouldn't. What initially resembles a still life or portrait slips into something erotic, uncanny, and increasingly strange. The longer you look, the less stable the picture becomes.

GaHee Park: Behind the Curtain, curated by Dorothy Dávila at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is the Seoul-born, Montreal-based painter's first solo institutional exhibition in the United States and brings together work from the past five years. Park has created a pictorial world entirely her own, populated by women, animals, insects, flowers, food, landscapes, shadows, and disembodied parts. Still life, portraiture, landscape, eroticism, and psychological theater trade places with one another until the categories stop holding.

The exhibition's title provides a useful way into these paintings. Curtains appear repeatedly in Park's work, revealing and concealing at the same time. They are theatrical: something is always about to appear or disappear. A curtain is a flat surface that implies depth behind it—a plane that promises a room, a body, a scene it doesn't actually show. Park's paintings operate in much the same way. They offer themselves to the eye and then resist being completely understood. Again and again, Park sets up the expectation that looking will reveal something, only to make looking itself unreliable.

That tension has roots in Park's childhood. Raised by strict Catholic parents in Seoul, Park has described filling her sketchbooks with drawings of nude figures and genitalia, then gluing the pages shut so her mother wouldn't find them. When her mother did discover a set, she burned them. That impulse to hide has never entirely left her work. Desire is rarely announced directly. It hides in fish, fruit, fingers, shadows, and folds. Even when the subject is plainly sexual, violent, or strange, the painting remains strangely composed. Nothing in Park's muted palette or controlled surfaces signals alarm. Concealment, in other words, isn't only something she depicts; it's built into the way she paints.1

In Still Life with Tired Moth (2025), the seemingly innocent tradition of flower painting carries this history of concealment. The bouquet can be both subject and decoy. Park borrows from the vanitas tradition of seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting, in which flowers, food, insects, and luxury objects reminded viewers of decay and mortality. In Park's hands, the old memento mori into new territory. The familiar symbols are there, but Park makes them slippery. Mortality is folded into sexuality, secrecy, appetite, and humor.

Dream with Still Life (2022) makes that connection especially clear. The composition retains the compressed space of traditional still life, but a sleeping woman has entered it. Beside her lies the carcass of a fish, while a snail makes its slow passage and a cat watches the scene. The woman is at once sleeper, dreamer, body, and one more object in the arrangement.

Animals in Park's paintings often function as voyeurs. Cats stare. Insects creep through scenes. Creatures occupy the edges of human encounters as if they know something we do not. But Park never allows the position of voyeur to remain stable. We watch the woman; the cat watches her too; the woman may be looking back at us; somewhere else an eye appears without a body attached to it. Looking circulates through these paintings without ever belonging securely to anyone.

Park's women may be exposed, fragmented, reclining, doubled, or partially hidden, yet they rarely seem passive. Eyes wander, detach, and appear in unexpected places. A face can seem to look in two directions at once; a reflection does not necessarily confirm the person standing before it. The morePark gives us to see, the less certain our position as viewers becomes.

Park's unstable reflections bring to mind Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, when an infant recognizes itself in a mirror and begins to form a sense of a separate self. But that supposedly unified self is first encountered as an image—a flat representation.

Park's mirrors refuse to provide that reassuring correspondence. Her doubled eyes, disembodied faces, shadows, and reflections fragment rather than complete the figure. The reflection becomes a kind of visual short circuit: instead of extending the illusion of pictorial space, it calls attention to the fiction of the painting itself. Like the curtain, the mirror appears to offer access to another space while remaining stubbornly flat.

The martini glass is another recurring motif, a small emblem that signals the onset of an altered state—the hour when composure loosens and the subconscious starts to surface. Dusk similarly becomes a threshold, a moment between day and night when perception becomes less reliable. In Table at Dusk (2025), the domestic table becomes a stage. Food suggests appetite, and appetite tips easily into desire.

In Woman with Shadow and Ants (2024), even the shadow seems to acquire an identity of its own. Ants introduce another scale of existence, seemingly indifferent to the woman beside them. Likewise, in Fish and Ants on a Table (2024), human, animal, insect, and food occupy the same visual ecosystem. 

(L) Woman with Shadow and Ants, 2024. Oil on linen. 38.1 x 45.7 cm, 15 x 18 in. Courtesy the artist and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

(R) Fish and Ants on a Table, 2024. Oil on linen. 45.7 x 38.1 cm, 18 x 15 in. Colm John Lannigan. Photo by Paul Litherland. Courtesy of Jack Cohen and Perrotin.  Colm John Lannigan. Photo by Paul Litherland. Courtesy of Jack Cohen and Perrotin. 

What Park has built is a private grammar out of sex, food, death, beauty, sleep, appetite, the act of looking, for which she won't supply a key. The same flower that conceals a body in one canvas can simply be a flower in the next; a fish is sometimes a corpse, sometimes a stand-in for flesh, sometimes just dinner. Nothing in her vocabulary carries a fixed meaning. Its sense depends entirely on what surrounds it, which is another way of saying these paintings aren't meant to be decoded so much as entered.

Park gives us enough information to make us curious. And curiosity, in these paintings, is its own kind of desire. We don't want to solve the mystery behind the curtain so much as remain transfixed.

 1. Numéro (Éric Troncy, "Who is GaHee Park, painter of ambiguity and eroticism," published Nov 2024, updated July 2026): https://numero.com/en/art-design/art-en/ambiguous-eroticism-and-spectator-voyeur-the-enigmatic-canvases-of-gahee-park/ and It's Nice That (Ayla Angelos, "Exaggerated figures and oddly placed genitals: meet artist Gahee Park," Sept 2019): https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/gahee-park-art-300919

By S Anne Steinberg

At around eleven years old, I dreamed–briefly–of being an archeologist. I imagined I would dig up mysterious, well-formed artifacts, then ponder their former function and the long-lost world from which they came. The outcome of my work would look a bit like “Tropic of Cancer reading room,” Ben Peterson’s current Colpa Press-curated show at Et al. Gallery (through August 30).

What a thrill digging up any of the three wall-mounted pieces with simple, repetitive geometric patterns would have been. Made of romantically peeling plaster on porcelain plates, the works’ muted, mostly pink, blue, and gold color scheme appears to have been adopted from Wes Anderson. The pieces have irregular edges and interrupted patterns, both of which make them feel like fragments. Because of their weight, the works are mounted using visible, L-shaped brackets.

Three wall-mounted works with conventional, rectangular forms are also included in the show. These pieces are plaster on wood panel and feature a color palette extending that of the previous works to green, orange, and light brown. Rather than resembling bits of floor or wall, these pieces are portraits. The inanimate objects that are portrayed have rounded sections and straight parts and sometimes they look a bit like US mail collection boxes. But the objects have no real counterparts in everyday modern life. 

Two sculptures mounted on pedestals in the center of the room appear to come from the same object family as the portraits. One mostly clay-colored sculpture has squiggly, decorative markings that may be text on its borders and four pale green panels, each with a slot above it, on its front. The second, speckled sculpture consists, on one side, mostly of space: two large, empty bays. The forms of both of these sculptures suggest a storage-related function.

A large fresco on two pieces of drywall leans against the gallery’s back wall. The work’s repeating geometric pattern has black panels that echo the slots of one of the central sculptures. There is a slightly irregular color arrangement amongst the work’s recurring shapes. As a result of the fresco technique, the piece has a smudged, glowy surface unlike that of the other repeating pattern works in the room.

Rectangles of colored construction paper, each bearing a text message in a strange font and, sometimes, a companion drawing, have taken over another wall, pushpinned into a quilt-like grid. The bizarre fonts used for the text make it mostly indecipherable. The drawings include repeating decorative motifs and cartoon characters.

A vintage wooden shelf near the gallery entrance holds tiny structures made from cereal boxes and other packaging material. There is also an art book “Tropic of Cancer” published by Colpa Press (for sale copies are stored at the front desk). “Tropic of Cancer” sports a corrugated cardboard cover and pages filled with eccentrically arranged photos and drawings, all depicting contraptions similar to the sculptures at the center of the gallery. 

The show’s magic lies in the synthesis, made by the viewer, of these artifacts into a new world. A world that is located–I’m guessing–somewhere in the Tropic of Cancer. The multiple media used and the way that themes–plaster, modularity, containerization, hieroglyphics–recurr across media facilitates the viewer’s synthesis. The world has a framework, governing rules.

Modesty is a feature of the show’s world that, because it is becoming rare in our contemporary existence, increases the world’s appeal. The artist’s hand is almost never seen in the exhibition’s works. Instead, the pieces appear to have arrived fully-formed, perhaps from the head of Zeus. The materials used are simple and, often, old-fashioned. The inclusion of repeating patterns aligns the works with craft rather than fine art. 

A second alluring quality of the show’s world is mystery. The internet seems to know it all, and robots may soon be able to do everything. But google all you want: the meaning and any function of the strange sculptures at the center of the gallery will remain opaque. These works induce the imagination, and if you allow that facility to run a little wild, it might feel a bit like being an archeologist.