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 guidedimensions 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/shapesattain 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

Altadena , 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.

By Samantha Hull

Artists have been inspired by nature as long as art has been created. Humanity has been captivated and inspired by the natural world since the dawn of time. 

Three internationally acclaimed artists, Foad Satterfield, Kristine Taylor, and Federico Uribe, have been brought together to draw inspiration from nature at the Studio Shop Gallery in Burlingame, California. From landscapes, wildlife, and organic matter, The Shape of Nature is an immersive exhibition that mimics the natural world while celebrating its beauty and wonder, further captivating our imagination and awe. 

Adorning the gallery walls are large-scale paintings by the artist Foad Satterfield. Satterfield, who was born on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, developed early on a respect for nature’s stillness and extremities. His paintings strive to capture an emotional essence of place, immersing the viewer in a moment of stillness. While appreciation and awe are trademarks of his paintings, Satterfield’s brushstrokes evoke the duality of the natural environment–stillness meets chaos–with a calm color palette contrasting with deep and often erratic brushstrokes. Respecting nature’s paradox of serenity and destruction is imperative to Satterfield’s artistic practice, especially in today’s climate woes. Nature’s complexity–its beauty and danger–is on full display, anchoring the exhibition’s sculptural artwork by fellow exhibiting artists Kristine Taylor and Federico Uribe. 

Taylor’s unique ability to capture each animal's innate idiosyncrasies ensures its quiet dignity is front and center. Elephant is a charming celebration of the beloved, sensitive creature. Taylor successfully captures the elephant in a seated pose that invites compassion, endearment, and cuteness overload from the viewer. Hare and Empress evoke each creature’s personality while successfully portraying movement unique to each species. The animals are alive on their pedestals, remaining curious about who’s looking–all while standing tall as pinnacles of grace. 

Colombian artist Federico Uribe's everyday sculptural renditions of wildlife add a lively engagement within the exhibition. Uribe takes everyday materials such as colored pencils, nails, bullet shells, and barbed wire, transforming them into realistic, complex animal forms. Originally a painter, Uribe set aside his paintbrush and embraced everyday objects that evoke a playfulness and aliveness in his practice. Uribe’s sculptural animals, full of life, invite the viewer to touch as their three-dimensional form offers volume, texture, and color–embracing the novel and inviting excitement. 

The Shape of Nature’s curatorial success lies in its installation. Each artwork is juxtaposed in conversation with the others, adding a playful interpretation of the natural environment. Foad Satterfield’s Mysterium anchors Federico Uribe’s mixed-media sculptural wildlife, Screwed Panda and Silver Squirrel. 

Made of everyday materials such as screws, Screwed Panda appears to be in motion, slowly traversing up the wall, mimicking the natural environment created in Mysterium. On the left side of the painting, Silver Squirrel, made entirely of finishing nails, climbs speedily up the gallery wall, slightly ahead of its panda counterpart. This evocative installation design invites the viewer to witness Uribe’s sculptural creatures in Satterfield’s abstract landscapes, bringing the natural environment into the gallery space. 

In contrast, Taylor’s Macaw and 3’s A Crowd share space with Foad Satterfield’s Ulysses, as if each creature is part of the natural landscape. The diversity of blue hues at the center of Ulysses evokes a running river, with light brown-yellowish vegetation surrounding the environment. You can almost hear the sounds of the Macaw, and 3’s A Crowd against the rushing water–bringing the viewer outside of the gallery and immersed in the natural environment. The installation encourages visitors to enjoy a moment of serenity and peace. 

Throughout the exhibition, the three artists are displayed in conversation with one another, celebrating the beauty of the natural environment while honoring the artists’ sincere tribute to the planet we call home. Satterfield’s Blue Diptych Between Space & Home commands the wall while Uribe’s bird mixed-media sculptures–Tropical Bird on Driftwood, Cardinal, Falcon, Woodpecker, and Green Parrot on Driftwood–anchor the dramatic diptych painting. Just to the side, on two pedestals, are curious domestic critters. Taylor’s bronze sculpture Empress and Uribe’s colored-pencil sculpture, Standing Puppy, bring to life a vibrant scene of sound, texture, and color, as one would find in the natural world.

The Shape of Nature reminds us not only of the incredible beauty that surrounds us, but also of its ability to bring joy and fulfillment to all living creatures. This exhibition brings together three artists who share a deep appreciation and respect for the natural world, resulting in a cacophony of life in the traditional white-cube gallery space. It is a feat not only of curatorial vision and creativity, but also of bringing the voices of nature and wildlife to life with keen sincerity. Studio Shop Gallery gives space for each artwork to sing. 

By John Felix Arnold

As I take my first steps into gather tender night, Diedrick Brackens’ solo exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts curated by  Eugenie Joo, something remarkable happens. I am engulfed by an alluring indescribable power emitted from the mixture of colorful fibrous textures and free standing wooden structures. I find a resonance, not just of the human spirit, but the energy we are created of. In the midst of Brackens’ work I feel the complex ingredients of existence collaborating to remind me that we are woven together in a wondrous cosmology. gather tender night allows me to feel uncontained, floating and sinking, submerging and climbing through an unfolding material narrative that weaves worldly tactility into a threshold for the mythological and fantastical.

I have to agree with Bay Area artist and arts writer Sarah Hotchkiss, that the immensity of this particularly massive gallery within YBCA can make curating exhibitions challenging, having the propensity to swallow art alive. Its high ceilings feel like they could allow for simulations of human flight. This show not only isn’t swallowed by the space, it works it, fills it, asks questions of it, invites it to play. Brackens and Joo quietly fill our hearts with transcendent visions that bring the space to heel. The curatorial choices and layout carry my eyes and feet through the space, allowing for minimal architectural lines to calmly direct the expanses of tapestries, creating pathways and spacious openings through which to wander. The work and its presentation allows for immensity to feel accessible without reducing impact. Together they create a beautiful paradox, an expansive intimacy.

Exhibition installation views at YBCA

The exhibition comprises work made from 2020 to 2026. It envelopes us with stories that confront rifts in the collective psyche while simultaneously offering powerful visions of healing, movement, Blackness, Queerness, love, and connection. Brackens’ aesthetic universe presents questions and balm that he has found within himself and the natural world, something our society so imperatively needs to accept. In soft, dark, demigod (2021), a Black silhouetted figure engages in a satisfying forward arching stretch, touching their hands to the ground as an offering amongst a vibrant pink and red zone of delicately woven roses, draped freely from a wooden tent-like structure. This depiction of sensual embodiment ripples through my cells, reminding me to feel myself alive in my own body. I imagine Brackens at the loom, his arms and legs and head and torso all moving in great gestures, casting spells as he weaves us like a conductor through the gallery and into his layered storytelling. 

With 15 large scale textiles lining the walls, hanging from the ceiling, and draped from free standing structures, Brackens turns the gallery into a portal of sumptuous color fields, animist invocations, material memory, and layered narrative symbolism. Remembrance and becoming meet exploration and immersion through images of flora, fauna, water, and shore in works like undergrowth understory (2025), wider than feeling (2025), commitments (2025), and help is available (2025). Pairs of Black silhouetted figures connect with their environments, share green energy orbs, bend, kiss, climb, rest, evade, and embrace in a garden protects the dreamer (2026), the crawling stars (2021), and ceremonies (2024). Reimagined folkloric and mythologic devices play with mysticism on the viewer’s consciousness and relationship with the work. The act of seeking becomes transmitted through the exhibitions’ soft woven textures. 

Blood Compass (2023), Brackens’ largest work to date, cascades down into the space at 245 inches tall, completely wrapping me in lavenders, muted violets, browns, calming yellows, ochres, and Black. The darkness is a place of exploration where the tides, the shore, the wafting humid dark air, geese in flight, and two Black silhouetted figures wading languidly in transition between the ocean and the land, connect through the fibers. One of them seems to look up at the geese, pointing to their symbolism as “a hopeful metaphor for the history and future of Black migrations across the United States”, as stated in the exhibition’s press release. A light house stands as the only human-built structure in the landscape. The figures come ashore and wade back into the waters of creation, perhaps eluding the surveillance of the light house that posits itself a sentinel in the natural confluence. For me, Brackens invites us into this space as witnesses to the beauty and eros of this journey that exists in the shadows. I am transported back to the American South. I can taste the salty air at night, feel it cling to my skin, hear the slow movement of the tide. I imagine Brackens taking a trip from his home of Mexia, TX to the Gulf Coast, wading into the dark waves at night with his companion, into nature’s rhythmic respite away from a world constantly surveilling them. As I walk around the back side of the work the whole piece becomes a bright yellow day, save for the light house and geese. The figures become hidden, escaping the gaze as they continue their journey together in secret through the darkness, bending time and space.

‍ ‍Diedrick Brackens, blood compass, 2023 (front and back), woven cotton and acrylic yarn, 245 x 202 1/2 in., Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery 

To create his luminous tapestries, Brackens works a loom with hand-dyed cotton fiber and acrylic yarn. His process channels material, narrative, craft, and art historical influences from around the globe. Something specific that pulls me even further into his practice is the depth of his ongoing dialogue with the work of legendary Harlem Renaissance artist and educator Aaron Douglas. Brackens has created a formative conversation with this iconic figure, taking Douglas’ powerful, stern, unwavering murals depicting the march toward liberation and inviting them to experience a new found vulnerability in material, process, subject matter, and gesture. One where rest, healing, Queerness, and connection continue Douglas’ spirit towards love and Black liberation in an agile and sensuous progression, amidst a nation where many still do not accept their history and the suffering they continue to create. 

(L) Diedrick Brackens, we dreamed our burden was dreams, 2026, woven cotton and acrylic yarn, 100 x 100 in., Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery  (R) Diedrick Brackens, through the unburnt and blameless, 2020, woven cotton and acrylic yarn, 98 x 96 in., Collection of Christopher M. Brant 

The gallery’s large windows set the exhibition against the backdrop of San Francisco’s downtown skyscraper corridor. A bright red piece that sits at the furthest point back, parallel to the windows, through theunburnt and blameless (2020), sees two Black figures dancing or stepping with large gestural movements through fiery blue portals. I imagine these figures stepping even further through the portal of the windows, traveling through dimensions. The exhibition cannot be separated from the context of the cityscape, a place that Brackens knows well as a C.C.A. alumnus and professor. He explains, “I came to San Francisco nearly 15 years ago to refine my nascent art practice. I am excited to share this work at YBCA, and re-introduce my work to a community and city that I cherish.” This sentiment is felt as the spectacular journey unfolds through Brackens’ process of material myth-making. 

The physical framing of a room or home stands in the gallery, drawing me toward and into it. Built with construction lumber it supports the crawling stars signal (2021) and if you have ghosts (2024). It also houses a new sculptural work, clearing (2026), comprising a bed covered in a woven blanket with a reed basket on top from which spills a pile of Dial soap bars. A place of restand revival in conversation with the tapestries that line the gallery walls and the framing. A small window frame next to the bed looks out further to the windows of the gallery. Flowers, shells, sand dollars, crystals, all are placed here like ritual moments that bring the world of the tapestries into a tangible memory of place. The wooden framing becomes a dwelling and a narrative map, an art historical mechanism, a container of material memory. It reminds us that the human world exists as part of nature, echoing a trope that carries through all of the works. It evokes a meditation on the idea of place across perception and time. The framing becomes a means to frame meaning, as it presents allusions to the world that exists beyond the gallery, a reality that is interwoven through Brackens’ life experiences. The scene asks viewers to reflect on what this all means to them. 

The work titled, to soothe a myth (2023), brings us an example of Brackens’ interventions into art history and canonical mythologies. In the tapestry, a Black silhouetted figure comes into connection with a Unicorn, a symbol often used throughout history as a metaphor for the natural world, the wild, the presence of magic. The figure reaches out to touch, to soothe the mythological creature in a gentle moment as it rears up on its hind legs. Here, I read Brackens as intervening in the narrative of oppressive violence that runs throughout The Hunt for the Unicorn series, an iconic set of tapestries made in Europe during the late medieval period. However the mythical beast and the figure have come into contact with one another, whatever journeys they have experienced or aided one another in, there is a sense of liberation from the bondage each has endured throughout history. A sense of aliveness expands in the vertical scale of the piece as the two create a transcendent connection, interrupting art history as a mechanism to reach beyond time and soothe its ruptures. 

gather tender night centers me into a space that meets our current moment with a deafening quiet confidence, penetrating the hard facade of violence, power, and denial we see thrust at us daily. Brackens has given us radical acceptance and transformation in a way that challenges the viewer to consider what we are each holding back, what we barricade inside, either denying the world its truth or denying our own. What keeps us from caring for others and ourselves, from honesty, restfulness, joy, empowerment, from grief, from love, from our history, from plurality with the natural world and one another? Brackens’ brings us to a place where the past that is not past, as explained by Christina Sharpe, pulls us into every tapestry and fiber. He tunnels inward, toward the future, so that we can be immersed in his cosmic entanglement of creation, Queer joy, Black resonance, and new myth-making. His fears, strengths, and pleasures allow us to think how we might find more vulnerability and bravery to meet the world each day. Diedrick, thank you for enacting your ritual that brings each tapestry into the world, moving with all of your limbs, body, thoughts, and heart at the loom in a dance of creation. You become a guide who asks us to look at our own reflections through your honest visions, a guide and healer of the human spirit.

Diedrick Brackens, you'll never get to heaven if you break my heart, 2026, woven cotton and acrylic yarn, 100 x 100 in., Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery

gather tender night is on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through August 23rd, 2026, Y.B.C.A., 701 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103, Open Weds-Sunday 11am-5pm

For more information, please view their website https://ybca.org

Photography - Charlie Villyard 

Photos courtesy of YBCA

By Erik Recendez

Dream Recital, at CAMi Gallery, is crisp and seemingly effortless. Towering Prussian Blue cyanotypes, a method that uses ultraviolet light-sensitive chemicals, immerse viewers in memory and abandon. The images may appear impromptu, but that illusion depends on a rigorous preparedness. Artist Elaine Nguyen's career operates in much the same way. Artists like Nguyen know that having an art practice today takes more than making a compelling pièce de résistance. Dream Recital is the product of building relationships, marketing savvy, and fiscal infrastructure as much as it is the result of studio time. In that sense, Elaine Nguyen exemplifies the contemporary artist's role in the Bay Area and how it has expanded today.

Each watery composition in Dream Recital portals the distance between where an artist begins and where they hope to arrive. Nguyen says, “Early on, no one wants to see the artwork, so you have to be scrappy.” Applying incessantly to open calls, often without knowing where those applications could lead, can be discouraging. “You ask yourself, what am I doing?” she reflected. Before curators and gallerists began filling her inbox with requests, Nguyen spent years doing tedious administrative tasks like scouring the internet for grants and perfecting her resume and website. Eventually her persistence would transform her encounters. Applications once met with rejection became invitations to participate in exhibitions on the level for whom her younger self had only the highest hopes.

Today, visibility is a crucial element to master. “I never liked Instagram at all,” Nguyen admitted. "But being public-facing is part of the job." This is at odds with her quiet contemplative style. Crafting her public-facing presence extends beyond social media to an interest in documentation. When CAMi Gallery photographed Dream Recital, Nguyen was dissatisfied with the results. “Cyanotypes can be difficult to photograph,” she explained. “I wanted to create images that were truer to the artwork’s color in real life.” Ultimately, she rephotographed the exhibition herself. She didn’t compromise the way she would be perceived long-term. Preserving a moment is not only a concern within Nguyen’s practice; it also describes the conditions through which her creativity circulates.

During her undergraduate studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), she blossomed within Baltimore’s thriving scene of local artist-run spaces. For her Master of Fine Arts, she attended the University of California, Davis. Because the program was fully funded, she took two years off work and devoted herself to the studio. Those years reshaped her trajectory. Beatriz Cortez guided her to better articulate her message. After graduating, she received an educational fellowship at Root Division, a San Francisco arts nonprofit. "I think Root Division was a really soft landing,” Nguyen said. “I’m from San Jose; San Francisco was a place I knew, but it was also unfamiliar, so Root Division launched me into everything and introduced me to the world here. Being backed by an institution is important,” she said. “It doesn't have to be a college, but it could be a place like Root Division.”

“Through my work, I am able to make money and still be in the art world as well. No matter what, I am able to contribute to the arts," she explained. Nguyen teaches drawing and painting and manages educational programming at a major San Francisco music organization. As a hybrid studio practitioner and academic administrator, Nguyen is fully interwoven in a creative network. Dream Recital marks another significant step in her professional life. A solo exhibition at a commercial gallery signals recognition from the commercial art world. After soaking in ultraviolet rays and staining the surface with fiery sunlicks, the cyanotype produces an image fully formed and ready for admiration. Like her cyanotypes, Nguyen is ready to step into the next stage of her career.

Visitors entering CAMi Gallery see expansive fields of quiet beauty. Cyanotype is a medium shaped by chance, time, and persistence, reflecting Nguyen’s own path as an artist. What visitors don't see are the years of labor and undying conviction of self-worth. Dream Recital isn't simply a showcase of art—it's a receipt for an experience compounded over time.

Life with P. continues Hauser & Wirth’s significant collaboration with the Philip Guston Estate and the artist’s daughter, Musa Mayer, on archival publishing projects relating to her and her parents, connected with fresh exhibitions of her father’s work. Walking through the New York show on 18th Street, Guston’s Two Hearts (1978) was hands down the standout work. I couldn’t ever recall previously seeing even an image of it (neither had John Yau in his Hyperallergic review). 

On an unusual (for Guston) colored light, greyed out teal background, a large red heart has a smaller black shriven heart slumped atop it with crudely drawn Guston arrow(s) piercing through them. There are nails(?) or studs , nearly rhinestone rivets in appearance, all round the top edges of the black heart, almost as if it is a beat up case, like an old gypsy guitar player might use, banging round from town to town. Which is apropos for the accompanying publication, a gathering of Guston’s wife Musa née McKim’s personal journals from 1966 to 1976, a great majority of which cover periods of travel including Mexico and Italy/Greece as artist in residence at the American Academy in Rome, time spent at artist residencies and visiting artist lectures, all alongside semi-isolation with their self-removal from the city to their rural Woodstock home, marked with intense periods of nonstop work, Guston in his newly built art studio and Musa in her own writing room.

These years were pivotal in the Gustons’ personal relationship. Musa’s journals open amidst the singular occasion when Philip separated from her for a brief period after falling in love with a younger photographer he had met, and close as Musa begins to slide into ill health due to atrial fibrillation followed by a stroke in 1977. These years also cover Guston’s final shift in his work; moving back towards the figurative from the Abstract Expressionist period in which he had firmly solidified his place in the New York painters’ hierarchy. This artistic move caused no small  controversy, his show of new work at the Marlborough Gallery in October 1970 was met with broad derision from friends and critics alike. 

Guston shifted back to the figurative by paring down to the barest of essentials: the singular line, or mark, in black crudely yet implicitly put down on white. From there he extended out to adding further marks towards possible identifiable forms. A set of four works in the show demonstrate his process: a pair of clouds or eyebrows perhaps; an extended arch ending with what might be a foot firmly placed; a half circle of what might be a sunrise or sunset; a partial box or floorplan divided by a line with another partial mark extending down into one section.    

From these minimal, stripped-down-to-basics, gestural forms, Guston began painting the world of larger forms. Buildings, cars, various bric-a-brac of a life lived began making regular appearances.    

Within a short time, the now infamous “hoods” appeared, easily, (perhaps too easily, reminiscent of the Klu Klux Klan, which during the most recent Guston retrospective led to much, far too much, controversy. Not surprisingly, the Hauser & Wirth show had no paintings of hoods up. They do, however, receive mention by Musa: “a most strange denouement, where the cone people—the little bastards, as P. calls them—turn out to be the painter. There he is, in a hood, painting one of the little bastards.” (June 1, 1969). Alluding to one of the works where the painter himself appears under the hood painting a “self-portrait” of himself at work. Guston explained that placing himself under the hood was his way of acknowledging nobody’s free of responsibility for the horrors of the world. We’re all “little bastards” running about our business.

Reading Musa’s journals the hoods are rather clearly minor characters in Guston’s overall endeavor during this final shift in his work. What I’ve always found far more compelling are the onslaught of abundant everyday forms in endless accumulation. Things literally just pile up: bricks, blocks of wood, legs, shoe soles (sometimes attached to legs), nails, pipes, buildings, etc.      

Reading Musa’s entries on plants with her ponderous observations, provides some inkling of how she and Guston jointly encountered things in the world.  “The first tiger lily. What a gorgeous display. Here’s when you wish you knew the names of the parts that curl back, that stick out, that are hinged.” (Tuesday, July 29, 1969). She may be writing about a plant yet how frequently in Guston’s painting appear a preponderance of things which "curl back, stick out, that are hinged.” It’s as if she’s writing a catalog essay for one of his shows. Musa herself was an artist as well. Reproductions of her artworks are scattered throughout Life with P., including the dual WPA murals the couple completed at the United States Forest Service (Forestry Building) in Laconia, New Hampshire in 1941—her accounting of a visit they took to view them some thirty years later also appears here. 

With the foundations of their relationship grounded in art, the Gustons clearly shared in keen-eyed observation of their surroundings. In February 1971, traveling by bus on the western coast of Sicily, Musa records: 

“Blond rows, potato fields, going right down to the sea. Ocean close, wall of cactus, sun in the middle of a cloud—P, says like a fuzzy egg. Stopping half an hour or more in Gela. We buy formaggio e panini. The sea at the end of every street. We find a patch of sun to stand in. […] Great fruit stands, fish, chunks of marble, cactus, two centuries to build such hedges, going everywhere. Nothing could equal this—farms on top of the world, cattle, industry, but beautiful structures.” 

A record of visual stimulus that aligns with the frequently-produced jumbled cityscapes that Guston would create, makes for a decorative framing for a poem written by Musa during the same trip to Italy. This is seen in one of Guston’s poem-pictures (as they have been called); a collection of works executed by Guston for a range of poet friends such as Clark Coolidge and Bill Berkson.   

Musa’s journals deliver intimate, often humorous insight into Guston’s own peculiar quirks. For instance, his definite penchant for opposing physical exercise:   

“We cut the grass yesterday—at last. It took a minor crisis to get P. into shape for it, and then he flared up a few times at first—at minor-nothing-incidents—then leveled off. Afterwards—getting dripping hot and taking a shower—he felt invigorated. Said something about seeing the value of exercise. He’ll dream about being in that state but doesn’t have the heart for the routine. In fact, he distrusts it.” (Friday, September 10, 1971)

Despite any “distrust” of a regular exercise routine, Musa makes numerous mentions of how Guston was unfazed by all-night marathon painting sessions out in his freshly constructed Woodstock studio. Despite her concern for the extremes he pushed himself to, he obviously was driven by the intensity of the demands these sessions placed upon him, and was satisfied by their results.   

“P. painted until I don’t know what time, going out there after dinner. Then got up about 5a.m. and went out again. He came in about 8a.m. with that sort of foolish expression he has when a painting is finished, looks at his hands as if at an accomplice, gets some coffee. I say, ‘sit down.’ He sits down. His eyes are bloodshot and red-rimmed. He starts to comment on what he has just been through or on the nature of creation in general but stops, evidently feeling no need to explain—or even comment on anything—yet needing to babble a little. He says, ‘Let’s go out on 28 for breakfast.’ I’ve had my breakfast but that isn’t it: ‘You need to go to sleep.’ I feel if I get out of the way, he will think of getting under the covers himself. If I stay here, he will only ramble and babble—very slowly, and with looks into his inward territory, with his red-rimmed eyes, he won’t move—like going to bed. So I come in here and close my door. To get the good out of the best part of the day. I hear him not going to bed but going out the door. And pretty soon I hear him starting up the car. So he’s gone off for breakfast.” (Wednesday, February 23, 1972)

After a few years of these on and off intense nonstop work sessions, Musa does report at least one period of time where they seemed to reach a state of manageable agreement, balancing their time as well as giving each other space.  

“We have devised a great scheme of ‘being away’—staying right here, but with phone off, etc., and each working any hour, leaving the other alone, although generally eating dinner together. Except on the first day of P. being on a new picture. I ate first tonight about 7:30p.m. P. came in for a drink, went back. Came back for a second drink and dinner. […] It’s a great system. P. takes a break doing something; I go out and get booze, milk, eggs, etc.” (Wednesday, June 16, 1976)

Musa remained constantly needed as both companion and muse for Guston. He had painted both her and their daughter (also Musa) in early works, yet she ever-increasingly appears in the later works, represented by her looming forehead with parted hair hovering  over the work as both subject and onlooker. As her journals prove, they were endeared to each other throughout these closing years of their relationship.

2026 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony

SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide by Cannupa Hanska Luger
Winner of the 2026 PEN/Jean Stein Award

Photo courtesy of the artist and PEN America Literary Awards

2026 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony

SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide by Cannupa Hanska Luger
Winner of the 2026 PEN/Jean Stein Award

Photo courtesy of the artist and PEN America Literary Awards

2026 PEN America Literary Awards Ceremony

SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide by Cannupa Hanska Luger
Winner of the 2026 PEN/Jean Stein Award

Photo courtesy of the artist and PEN America Literary Awards

Future Ancestral Technologies: New Myth

Cannupa Hanska Luger, 2021

Photograph by Gabriel Fermin, courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

Future Ancestral Technologies: New Myth

Cannupa Hanska Luger, 2021

Photograph by Gabriel Fermin, courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

Cannupa Hanska Luger: New Myth, Solo exhibition at Garth Greenan Gallery, 2021. Image courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery, NY

“SON OF THE STAR”, “FOUR BEARS” AND “TWO RAVENS”, Arikara, Mandan and Hidatsa Chiefs. Each sculpture measures 9 feet tall and is welded corten steel with stone carved faces. Artist: Kathy Elkwoman Whitman, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist

Portrait of Carl Whitman Jr. (Cannupa Hanska Luger’s grandfather), date unknown, still from A/V Presentation: Past, Present + Future of FB Res, 2025, digitized slides and audio from the Whitman Family Archive and archival images. Image courtesy of the artist studio

Cannupa Hanska Luger is an award-winning artist and cultural innovator whose expansive creative and philosophical practice introduces new methodologies, ideas, and speculative technologies that reflect Indigenous innovation and shift collective thinking.

Born on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara) and Lakota. His bold visual storytelling offers new ways of seeing our shared humanity while centering an Indigenous worldview.

With a socially engaged, interdisciplinary practice spanning public art, large-scale installation, ceramic sculpture, performance, time-based media, writing, and land-based actions of repair, Luger’s work blends critical cultural analysis with Indigenous advocacy and deep respect for the diverse materials, landscapes, and communities he engages.

Luger’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Times Square Arts Midnight Moment (New York, NY), the Sharjah Biennial 16 (Sharjah, United Arab Emirates), the 81st Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (Shanghai, China), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), the Gardiner Museum (Toronto, Canada), Kunsthal KAdE (Amersfoort, Netherlands), the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights (Atlanta, GA), among others.

Luger’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC); the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, MI); the Nordamerika Native Museum (Zürich, Switzerland); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco, CA); and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA).

His award-winning book SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide is published by Aora Books, an imprint of Ayin Press. Eden Pearlstein is the cofounder of Ayin Press (Cannupa's childhood friend). 

Cannupa Hanska Luger: Artist & Storyteller | Interview by Hugh Leeman

A Field Manual, a Father, and a War Lived in Obscurity

Hugh Leeman: Cannupa, you recently published Surviva, a future ancestral field guide. Its existence is inspired by your father, credited in no small part to your partner, and a collaboration with your brother. Tell me the story of your father, and how this book came into existence.

Cannupa Hanska Luger: My dad is a veteran from the Vietnam War, and he carries certain traumas from that experience. I never really learned anything about his time there — just brief little snippets here and there. I once met up with a friend of his from that period in Washington State, and I heard more stories from him than I ever did from my old man. That part of his life lives in an obscure space.

This field manual — a survival field manual that my wife found at an Army surplus store and brought to me — was from the same period and generation as his enlistment. There was something about it. I kept seeing pieces of him somewhere in the original text, in this story of a period of his life that lives in obscurity in my memory in relationship to him. He's a cattle rancher. He lives in Fort Yates, North Dakota, which is where I was born, on the Standing Rock Reservation. Something tremendously traumatic had happened to him that silenced that whole period of his life.

For me, this was a way to engage with the fact that everything I knew about his time in Vietnam existed in the space that he survived it. Not that the survival manual was the credit to his survivance of that experience — but exploring the text, I started from the place of: look, this is everything I know about my dad and Vietnam. He survived it. That was the anchor for engaging with Surviva.

Hugh Leeman: As I understand it, the actual field manual — issued to soldiers during the Vietnam War by the Department of War — was effectively a survival guide cataloging Indigenous knowledge: plants, medicine, how to build shelter behind enemy lines. Then one day your partner Ginger gives you this book as a gift, and instead of writing, you start omitting parts of it so the book tells a new story. Is that a fair contextualization?

Cannupa Hanska Luger: Yeah. The generic, government-issue version of these field manuals — sans serif, Helvetica text, bold black on white paper — I have an affinity for that aesthetic. All the flourish removed, and it just being the book. My wife was in Portland, Oregon — I think it was a Christmas gift — and she went to an Army surplus store and found these field manuals from the 1950s through the 1970s. She found one that said Survival, and the baseness of the aesthetic against the depth of what it was presenting was just ironic. Bold, plain text: this is survival. The other book she got at the same time was titled Booby Traps — that's what it said on the cover. The combination of those two very serious, very direct books, titled Survival and Booby Traps, tickled everything in me that I like about aesthetic and juxtaposition. Ginger nailed it with that gift. I'm not an easy person to buy for.

I opened the survival manual just because I thought it was hilarious, and as I went through it, they don't really credit Native people or Indigenous knowledge at all — except that they suggest you act like the natives in whatever environment you find yourself marooned in, or behind enemy lines. There were so many bits and pieces of traditional ecological knowledge embedded in the plain aesthetic of this book without any acknowledgment of where the source material came from.

That was the point where I thought, I need to mess with this book. It already exists in a place of omission, so the technique I used to peel my story out of the existing text was one of redaction. The classic 1980s "I learned it from watching you, Dad" model of repair — maintaining a story out of the source material.

Indigenous Speculative Fiction and a Community That Can't Afford Your Work

Hugh Leeman: So you had this book for years, sitting with it, wanting to transform it. How did that finally happen?

Cannupa Hanska Luger: I had this book for about ten years, thinking, I want to mess with this book — but I didn't understand how I wanted to transform it, except that I wanted to. This is where my brother from another culture comes into play. He's the editor of the book, the founder of the press we put it out through. Within that ten years he started this publishing company, and he asked me, if you ever want to write a book, let me know. And I thought, oh shit — I have a book I've been sitting on.

Within that same ten years, I developed a part of my practice that's a kind of Indigenous speculative fiction. It's called Future Ancestral Technologies, and it looks at traditional ecological knowledge, cultural maintenance — all these components of the survivance of Indigenous people under the weight of a world radically changing around them. The Indigenous experience presently is one of sci-fi, of literary efforts toward apocalypse. How do you survive apocalypse? We have. So I thought this survival manual could be a great way to address what survival could actually look like.

The manual itself is interested in the survival of the individual. I was interested in the survival of culture. The organism alone is not a complete person — it's the relationships that they have. Culture has always been that part: maintaining the taboos and protocols of place.

When my brother Eden reached out — I've known him since seventh grade, we're family at this point — I realized I could use this book to address another problem I was experiencing. With success, my audience grows, but my community remains the same. The people I'm most bound to, the people I want to speak for and with — that remained the same. But my audience was growing, and the value of my work was increasing, and suddenly my community couldn't afford the work I was creating. They don't get pieces of Future Ancestral Technologies.

So what I decided to do with Surviva was imagine that I'm a person in a future place who happened to find this survival guide. I removed everything obsolete from the narrative by reduction — blocking out entire pages of text — and then wrote over the top of those blacked-out pages, or illustrated on top of them. Where the sci-fi comes in is that the author is pretending to be in a future space, so that the object of Surviva becomes the ethos in which Future Ancestral Technologies is developed: how to maintain culture into the future, and retain what's valuable from the past — the plant medicines, the traditional ecological knowledge, building shelter, all these basic things — entangled with the importance of maintaining a relationship to place, people, and environment. That relationship is equally as important for survival as food, water, and shelter.

The book became a book-shaped art object, part of Future Ancestral Technologies, that was accessible. How do I use the systems of today to mass-produce something accessible to my community? It has illustrations from various regalia pieces I've built and films I've worked on. So it becomes an artifact from the future. Within that ten years my career expanded, and this became the catalog of that imagined future space.

Sending the Book to a Cowboy

Hugh Leeman: You've said your father remains largely outside the art world, and the book is connected to experiences and traumas he rarely discusses. What did your first conversation with your dad about the completed book reveal?

Cannupa Hanska Luger: I had it just this summer. I literally just sent him the book — I don't even know if he's got it yet. One of my sisters had told him I'd written this book and that it got an award. But he's a cowboy. None of the art world stuff has any significance in his life. Knowing what's happening in New York or LA or San Francisco — feed the cows. That's his basic necessity. What do I gotta do today? Cut hay, feed cows, fix fence.

So our first conversation about it happened this summer, and it was brief. Mostly it was, can I see the book? And I thought, shoot, I should have brought one. So I sent him one. I don't know what his experience will be looking through it. It would have been great to be there, but I actually think allowing him to move through it without anybody watching is probably the most genuine way he'll experience it. So we'll see what he thinks.

Make-Believe Older Than His Teeth

Hugh Leeman: You've spoken about experiencing imposter syndrome when your first book received recognition at the PEN Awards, while your brother reminded you that you'd invested as much labor as any other writer there. How has that changed the way you understand yourself in relation to the identities of artist, writer, editor, storyteller?

Cannupa Hanska Luger: I've always had a hard time categorizing what I do. I know I work in the world of art and art-making, but honestly — I make believe. I make-believe as a career. I've been doing that since before I could walk. Me making believe is older than my teeth.

So on one hand, the imposter syndrome kicks in, because what I've been doing, I've been doing innately since I was an infant. Simultaneously, that's 45 years of practice. There was a period where I didn't want to be called artist — I thought of myself as a social engineer. There are also components of my practice embedded in cultural maintenance, which is a primary part of Indigenous art-making. The aesthetics were developed through applied practice over generations. That's true for any artist, any craftsperson — we're all part of a continuum, building off previous ideas and pushing them to the edge.

Maybe that's where craft and art delineate. Art allows the craft to fall apart by pushing the boundaries of what's possible. I have a lot of craft in my practice — knowing what works and doing it over and over hones the muscle memory, the ability to communicate it, to teach it to the next generation. But art-making takes all those lessons from craft and asks: this is how everybody does it — how can I push it to the edge in a way nobody else has? Failure is 70% of the outcome of that effort. But the 30% success is what sparks awe and inquiry in the audience.

His Mother's Career as a Field Manual

Hugh Leeman: You spent school years moving with your mother as she pursued her own artistic career, and summers on the Standing Rock ranch with your father. How did moving between those two worlds shape your ideas about artistic labor, economic risk, and what it means to be home?

Cannupa Hanska Luger: In all honesty, while there's a recognition that my father went to Vietnam with this same field manual, Surviva is probably inspired more by how I grew up with my mom. My mom, as an artist, moved the possibility of choosing an artistic career into the realm of the possible. Without that influence, I don't think there's a chance I would have chosen this career.

We traveled and moved around, ended up in the Southwest, where there was an art market for Native artists — my mother being a Native artist. Then we ended up in Phoenix, Arizona. She was raising five kids alone. We actually didn't get as much support from my dad as I'd have wanted — later in life I'm like, you could have done better — thinking about the difficulty of a single mother raising five kids on an art career. But she did it.

In the world of me writing a book about survival — that was more proof than anything my old man taught me. A mother feeding, clothing, and sheltering her kids with an art career. By the time I chose art as a profession, I thought, I've got a lot of things going for me that my mom didn't. Number one, I'm a man. Number two, I don't have five children. Number three, I'm in a stable, healthy relationship with my partner. If my mom could do it, it's not possible for me not to be able to.

Some of the lessons of watching her career move — there were instances where, because of her effort, I could choose the opposite. It gave me a guideline. If you want to talk about a field manual, my mom's career coming up in this world was a field manual for me to survive the art world, to navigate spaces — because I knew what was down certain paths. So oftentimes I chose the unknown. What happens if I zag instead of zig here?

Hugh Leeman: Tell me about your mom's art. What was she making?

Cannupa Hanska Luger: My mom was just creative. She had a background in painting — she still paints to this day — but what gave her a leg up and made her name was stone sculpture. Because there were few female stone sculptors, she had a niche, even with the difficulty of a masculine art practice. She still painted, but she's pretty agnostic when it comes to materials, and I definitely learned that versatility from her.

Her career as a field manual for me was really around versatility — being able to work in a number of mediums. She picked up jewelry because it was a bread-and-butter practice; she could put food on the table with some jewelry sales. She got into fashion for a minute. She got into using recycled materials — collecting aluminum cans, processing them, building sculptures out of pieces of aluminum cans.

It's funny, I never really thought about her career as a field manual for my life until we started talking about it right now. Her influence on my practice, even though our aesthetics are vastly different, falls in the capacity to do what it takes to survive. Even a lot of Future Ancestral Technologies as an ethos is about building a society and maintaining culture using the byproducts of our present. Thinking about those aluminum can sculptures she made, I can see the direct influence — just because somebody calls it waste doesn't mean it's garbage. If you can imagine an application outside of the material itself, then what's actually being presented is craft, practice, imagination — as the primary value, rather than the material.

A Relationship Isn't a Thing — It's a Process

Hugh Leeman: How does your relationship with your mother differ, in the way she experienced Surviva?

Cannupa Hanska Luger: I have five siblings, and I'm the only one who went the direction of art. My mom is proud, pays attention, reaches out. We have a relationship where we regularly check in. So she was there and present through the whole process, because she was checking in — how you doing, what are you up to? She's also in the world I'm in, in the same way I'm in it: as a generator of ideas, forms, images, shapes in space. She relates to the ironies and absurdities of the art world firsthand, rather than stepping out of her normal space. So talking with her about it didn't feel like anything but Tuesday. Just us talking about what I'm up to, because she's interested, because she's my mom.

That relationship with my dad, even though we spent summers with him, is primarily an employee-employer relationship on the ranch. He's dad, but he's also boss. As a kid, my desire for his approval wasn't about what I did in my life, but how I finished the job at hand — chasing cows, fixing fence, baling hay. The approval reward I've grown to expect from him is just: how'd today go? I don't seek approval from him outside of that. He'd probably be more involved if I were more involved, sharing what I'm up to, searching for that paternal validation. But I've learned not to expect that, and to just appreciate him in the moments I hang out with him, rather than live in a place of expectation for him to do something I don't think he ever would.

Hugh Leeman: You're a father now. You've described the boundaries among family, studio, and public practice as extremely porous — Ginger helping direct the studio, your children participating in performances and wearing regalia you design. How has parenthood changed the way you approach collaboration, validation, and the long-term connection of making art?

Cannupa Hanska Luger: Me and Ginger — my wife, mother of my children, studio director — she was raised by her dad, and I was raised by my mom. So even the gender-role responsibilities in the household are blurry. She sits stronger in the position of disciplinarian, but I do not get to be mom. I've got that dad energy.

What I've learned in the years up until today — and it can change — is that a relationship isn't a thing. It's a process. That's also true with kids. Right now my kids are 12 and 14, going through biological changes affecting their psychology. Puberty is powerful. Navigating that, being nimble enough to adapt to those changes, is the valuable understanding: a relationship isn't a thing. It's constantly in flux. And because my art practice involves all of us, it's like that too.

I'm making sculptures right now that look completely different from the last body of work. I wrote a book, worked on theatrical productions, played music. The variables go back to this idea of versatility — the capacity to adapt to radical change without falling apart. As a father, I'm applying that to raising a couple of boys: sit in this place of adapting to change. They'll have their own therapist to talk to in the future, I'm sure, but right now it feels like I'm doing a good job.

Hugh Leeman: They're going to make their own survival book one day.

Cannupa Hanska Luger: Yeah, exactly.

The Countdown That Started in 1975

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned a Future Ancestral Technologies entry log documented on the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation — your ancestral homeland. In the video, I hear your grandfather's voice as narrator, saying: "The countdown has already started to a crisis that will occur in the very near future, and that will affect your very survival. By knowing about it, you can do something about it." What is the crisis that is coming, and what should we do about it?

Cannupa Hanska Luger: What's amazing is that transcript comes from a recording made in the 1970s. That's when he orated that statement. My grandfather was an orator — a brilliant, brilliant, self-taught guy across all these disciplines. We just brought home a big chunk of his library. Ginger and I are trying to stabilize the family archive. His books are so funny — they range from 23 Boats You Can Build at Home to 99 Things You Can Do With an Oscilloscope. The first radio I ever had, he built — leather and plywood with circuit boards.

He was on Tribal Council, part of the governing bodies of the three affiliated tribes — Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. He went on trips to Washington, D.C. to lobby for our tribe. Our tribe was flooded back in the late '40s, early '50s, to build a dam on the Missouri River. It flooded about 42% of our reservation. Entire towns had to be moved. The house I'm salvaging and trying to stabilize the library from was put on trucks around 1947, '48, and hauled out of a town called Elbowoods to where it presently is.

He tried to lobby to protect our community and our lands, and it didn't work. Eminent domain was too powerful. The government making our tribe reliant on it was too powerful. He'd gone to Washington — pomaded hair, a suit — to the places of governance to lobby. None of it worked. And what he found was that the most important thing he could do was go back to the land and try to rebuild our cultural practices after the dam tore our community apart.

Elbowoods was the town that was flooded, and it was the cultural center for the three affiliated tribes. All our systems of self-governance held place there. After it flooded, families got dispersed on either side of the river, or put into the Relocation Act, which relocated Native families to urban centers. That broke up our clan systems, so many things we'd held onto. So my grandfather went back to the land and tried to reestablish those culturally significant models of self-governance.

In the process, he became an orator, always asked to talk at events, at these different doings. That recording comes from a powwow around 1975. You have to consider — at this time, the American Indian Movement is happening, civil rights movements are happening. The change he was talking about was self-determination of tribal communities — recognizing that the traumas we were inflicting on each other were imposed by an external government, and that we needed to be self-determined. He also worked in the education system: we might not be able to teach the parents or grandparents, because they may be stuck in their ways, but if we can seed these ideas into the youth, something else can change.

My use of his story was — it's 2026, and I'm having the same conversation in different ways that he was presenting before I was born. It was a way to acknowledge the blurriness of time, time being non-linear. Transcribing that recording was a way to present the permeability of time. It also comes from this family practice of maintaining the archive — we've been digitizing cassette tapes. We recorded everything on cassette: talks with his friends around the kitchen table, powwows, events, little interviews, philosophical stuff. This one felt significant because of its relationship to Future Ancestral Technologies and the idea of change being constant.

New Myth: Who Are the Monsters?

Hugh Leeman: There's a project you did, New Myth, that parallels your grandfather's oration. You write: "Monster slayers found in every culture set out and sacrificed their life for the continuation of existence. Today, we are once again plagued by monsters. It's time to be the human beings. Each of us must be aware of what we can do, and the place that we stand, so that a far future that remembers this era of monsters can sing the songs and dance the stories of our ability to come together and become monster slayers." Who are the monsters that plague us today, and how do we become monster slayers?

Cannupa Hanska Luger: What's funny is that New Myth is actually a really old myth I was just re-presenting. Mandan stories have twin monster slayers. Down here in the Southwest, the Diné also have twin monster slayers. I have a Kiowa buddy, and they have a story of a singular monster slayer split in two who became two. This reoccurring archetype of pluralistic or dualistic effort was interesting to me.

In our stories, the monsters had a certain aesthetic and certain powers, but those felt archetypal. There was one called the Devourer. One called Flame Around His Ankles, or fire moccasins. One that was a giant beaver that wiped out entire forests with the swing of its tail. There was an ogre-ish woman with a basket that, if you looked into it, would draw you in.

I told these creation stories to my kids, and I started seeing the parallels between what we described back then and what's relevant today. Generating that story anew is an opportunity for people to consider: who's your monster? What does it look like? The beaver is extractive industries. The ogre with the basket — that's media. Come look at the basket, get drawn in. The Devourer is corporate greed, consumerism — us as participants. Flame Around His Ankles would run around communities creating fires, not to burn people but to generate panic — and that feels like our current policing models, driving uncertainty and concern.

I see these monsters in our present society, and I see that it's us giving them power. So slaying monsters isn't like the myths, with Perseus and a mirrored shield going against Medusa. It's simpler than that. It's: what do you choose in your life? How do the choices you make feed the monstrous? And can we, as a society, imagine or choose alternatives?

My concern is that we don't pay attention to myth and storytelling the way we used to, where it was a guide to learn from — a field manual on what can be done or what should be avoided. We've deemed myths as simply pretend. And in being just a pretend story, they lose the power of what's actually true embedded in them. The truth embedded in a myth is a far better place to store important knowledge than any server farm we could build today. A good story holds information for generations. We don't have a storage unit like that, other than our biology. So presenting New Myth was a way to acknowledge the importance of old myths, and to put in motion a way to value that as source knowledge rather than just a story.

Hugh Leeman: Cannupa, thank you so much for sharing these ideas — about myth, family, and your projects. It's beautiful to hear and learn from you.

Cannupa Hanska Luger: Thank you. I enjoyed it.

By Jonathan Curiel

The stories we tell ourselves — about our upbringings, our families, our feelings — often change with time, especially with the passage of decades. It's a surreal realization, isn't it? 

In early 1980, Janet Delaney used her burgeoning photographic skills to document the doings of her salesman father as he made his rounds of Los Angeles-area beauty salons. Growing up, Delaney had decidedly mixed feelings about her dad's profession in a business that she said represented an "oppressive hold" on women's lives. In that era, an increasing number of women mirrored that view, saying their self-image shouldn't be beholden to the male gaze and certainly not to capitalism's commercial pressure to look pretty. "Growing up in the 1960s and '70s under the aura of second-wave feminism," Delaney has written, "I had a disdain for the products my father peddled." 

How Delaney came to terms with this disdain is one of the many provocative throughlines of Too Many Products, an all-encompassing exhibit at EUQINOM Gallery that challenges the viewer to confront their own feelings about the beauty business, and asks viewers to witness a time of American culture that was on the verge of profound changes. The beauty salons that Delaney's dad frequented weren't glamorous. With names like Sakura House of Beauty and Delberts Hair Stylists and Barber Extraordinaire, they put women in old-fashioned hair rollers, sat them under heat lamps that resembled convoluted Star Wars Fleet Trooper helmets, and surrounded them with dated wood paneling that made the salons seem like basement dwellings. And yet: Women kept coming back, and so did Bill Delaney, who worked strictly on commission. No sales meant no money to feed his family, pay for the family's housing, and support his children's education. 

Bill Delaney's profession doesn't exist anymore — at least not in the way that he practiced it, where he'd drive his Plymouth from one neighborhood place to the next, with his "office" essentially the belongings he had in his car. So the images of his movements, his interactions with salon workers, and of customers getting beautified or leaving the premises with a newly coifed hair style reveal a time when the beauty business was much less upscale, much less commercialized, and much less photographed at the working-class level. That's why Too Many Products is such a profound time capsule: It pinpoints an almost-primordial time in beauty culture, when the hurried pace of smart phones and the internet were nonexistent, and when an awareness of fully-maturing feminism was seemingly nowhere to be found in beauty salons — unless it snuck in through the lens of a photographer named Janet Delaney.

Many American feminists still see the beauty business, and by extension beauty salons, as an instrument of society's unbridled pressure on women to chase the unattainable: a level of attractiveness that lasts not just year-round but for a lifetime. The women in Delaney's photos are mostly middle-aged, which was the age that Betty Friedan was when she published her landmark 1963 book, "The Feminine Mystique," which criticized cultural expectations that sequestered women into the roles of housewives and mothers. In its first pages, "The Feminine Mystique" highlights as evidence a "vacuous" woman who proclaimed in a popular advertisement, "If I have only one life, let me live it as a blonde." The only famous blondes in Friedan's era were beauty-salon blondes, and in the decades since Friedan's book came out, other notable feminists have argued that the beauty industry and its embedded outreach — including the kind of beauty salon posters and women's magazines seen in Delaney's Los Angeles photographs — re-indoctrinates women into undergoing expensive treatments. In her 2015 book, "Feminism Is for Everybody," author and social critic bell hooks lambastes "appearance obsession" and says that, despite feminism's progress, "until feminists go back to the beauty industry, go back to fashion, and create an ongoing, sustained revolution, we will not be free." 

To accompany Delaney's photos, EUQINOM Gallery is displaying analog magazines like Cosmopolitan, a 140-year-old publication whose website now proclaims it to be, "The Women's Magazine for Dating Advice, Relationships, and Celebrity News." In the culture at large, so much has changed — and hasn't — since Delaney followed her father around in 1980, 

Delaney may be best known for her "South of Market" photos from the 1970s and '80s, when she documented the economic and cultural gentrification of San Francisco's SOMA neighborhoods, where areas populated with residence hotels gave way to downtown skyrises, pricey condominiums, and other manifestations of a changing city. As it happens, a photo from that series is on display at a separate gallery exhibit just feet away from EUQINOM Gallery. Fraenkel Gallery's group exhibit, Slice of the Pie: Fourteen Bay Area Galleries & What Makes Them Different, features a 1981 Delaney photo of a man walking along Howard Street in an atmosphere that I'd describe as "concrete aloneness." Construction barriers line one side while a construction crane rises on the other side as the man moves in the street where cars usually go. Because he's walking away from the viewer, with his dark-clothed back his most visible part, the scene could be something out of a looming apocalypse, where everything is on the verge of disappearing — which is a motif that also underpins Too Many Products, which runs through August 22.  

The disappearing is not just the small-town feel of the beauty salons. It's also in the life of Delaney's father, whose professional life was on the verge of ending. Older women often talk about becoming "invisible" in a culture that glorifies younger females. The older women in Delaney's photos are battling that phenomenon, but Bill Delaney is also battling the end of his professional relevance. Among the photos we see are Bill Delaney at home — hugging Janet's mom but also taking a bath by himself, where he's lying on his back as he looks lost in thought. Is that a look of depression we see? Contemplation? It's hard to tell, but we know this from the companion book that accompanies the exhibit: After retiring, Bill Delaney experienced several heart attacks, suffered a stroke, then had dementia for many years, which eventually prompted Janet's mom, Connie Delaney, to put him in a nursing home. He died 19 years after the photos we see in Too Many Products, which capture Bill Delaney at his jovial best as he engages in conversation with salon owners. 

The accompanying book, which was published last year, is really a digital element of the exhibit since the publisher uploaded an online video (at https://deadbeatclubpress.com/pages/janet) that includes Bill Delaney talking about his work and his life. Janet Delaney recorded the audio during her 1980 project. "Working in a beauty shop is not the most masculine thing," Bill Delaney says in the video. "In fact, it's very difficult to find men that can go into a beauty salon and handle themselves properly, and not think that every girl wants to be patted here and there and making eyes at him and whatever." 

Bill Delaney's use of the word "girl" is a telling embodiment of his views about women. Even in 1980, feminists would have scolded him for that word choice, but Bill Delaney — at least in the exhibit's accompanying audio — is heartedly welcomed into salons by staff that he's engaged with for years. The women seem to love him, not just for his affable nature but for the exclusive products that he has access to. Today, salon owners can get their products at specialized stores or online. And that's another aspect of the exhibit that commands attention: Its focus on salons as places of business that empowered its women owners. Janet Delaney changed her views about beauty salons after visiting them with her dad. "I saw how this business offered women economic independence," she writes in the accompanying book. "And though still questioning the idea of store-bought beauty, I began to understand the feeling of warmth and community beauty shops could provide." 

Based in Berkeley, Janet Delaney published these words 45 years after initiating her project, so she had the benefit of time to rethink her views about her dad, the beauty business, and her own aging vis-a-vis Too Many Products. As a photo exhibit, her project absolutely had to feature explanations about the subjects she encountered and explanations about her own thinking. Without that additional context, Too Many Products is just a collection of old photos that show us the hair fashions of the time (as with the woman who sports a Farrah Fawcett cut) and show us other salon doings that feature a balding, graying, mustachioed man. The man had a name. And he had a daughter who, I'm sure, made the women in her photos smile more widely at being captured for posterity, as if they were fashion models on the cover of a popular woman's magazine. 

By Taylor Snowberger

Art can be a chore. Do you lately find yourself exhausted by the display of personal vivisection in digital content, or with your eyes glazing over, unable to take in the opaque babble of terse works from antiquity? As you undertake the mirthless rigor of trying to find something valuable, you begin to question yourself, the artist, and the institution — until something redeeming comes along. If this describes you, harken, friend — Et al. has the medicine. Past the stacks of lovingly thumbed used books lies a simple labyrinth of galleries, one of which contains a splendidly unironic and mirthful exhibition by Rainen Knecht in her show, Alive! With pleasure. Under the warm sunbeams emanating from the skylight, Knecht fills the room with a collection of fairy-tale warmth, neither saccharin nor bitter. Like Goldilocks taking to a bowl of porridge, you’ll perhaps declare it “just right.” 

Knecht describes her studio as situated in the only way proper to a Pacific Northwesterner: proximal to a creek, at the bottom of a butte, about 20 minutes from her home in East Portland. Here, she fabricates playful frames from wood, appliqued with clay, baubles, and hand-beaded spiderwebs. These wreathe her figurative paintings. “Children’s literature and fairytales are a huge influence, like Mother Goose-style nursery rhymes,” she says, recalling the words to Old Mother Hubbard, one of her daughters’ favorites:

Old Mother Hubbard,

Went to the Cupboard,

To give the poor Dog a bone;

When she came there,

The Cupboard was bare,

And so the poor Dog had none

During her time in school in the early aughts, representational painting was treated as passé, superseded by new media. She wondered whether she might have preferred illustrating children’s books. It took a decade for her fine arts training and love for the sweet-macabre world of children’s stories to coalesce, but the themes are present in her motifs: people living in boots, apples, the aforementioned dogs and spiders, to name a few. 

After a long stay in the Bay and then a stint in Los Angeles, Knecht returned to the PNW in 2014, when her mother became sick with cancer. The transformation of her mother’s body as a result of the chemotherapy inspired a return to the figure, a ‘stubborn yet transformative object,’ reads her artist’s statement for the show. Shortly after her mother passed, she became a mother herself, forging work between her baby’s bedtime and midnight in the garage. During our phone call, she is explaining that her practice slowed to a halt when first becoming a parent, and how she discovered that she works best when she has a deadline, until she breaks away from the conversation for a moment. She is pausing to explain to her inquiring daughter, Freddy, who is home for the summer, that she is preoccupied for a few minutes more. Reflexively, she tends to the smorgasbord of life surrounding her in perfect verisimilitude, a tendency reflected in the feast of media in her work.

Knecht doesn’t pretend to exist in a vacuum. She cites her education at SFAI from 2001-2006 as a site of inheritance of regional traditions. Influences like Joan Brown, David Park, and Manuel Neri of the Bay Area Figuration movement were passed from teacher to student. Bay Area Funk artist Roy DeForest also plays into her pedagogical lineage. Add this to the fact that she has been a studio assistant to sculpture artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins for 8 years, and her technical ability to form a flush, solid structure from an unusual cast of archival characters paints a picture of technical expertise and carefully applied aesthetic logic.

Clayton Schuster describes Bay Area Funk in an article for Hyperallergic as “ugly rather than beautiful, rough rather than refined, and funny rather than respectful.” While I certainly wouldn’t call Knecht’s work ugly, it does emanate a color palette like a spoiled Fauvist still life. Starring figures with exaggerated, witch-like features, she renders the subjects with a decrepitude incongruent with their joy — they are smiling, embracing, looking into each other’s eyes. Decisive brush strokes of swirling greens are punctuated with sudden shocks of pink—Knecht says of her technique that she completes paintings rather quickly, and tends to spend a lot of time stepping back and looking. 

The repeated approach to found object assemblage framing of the figurative paintings creates an irresistible approachability to the work — upon close inspection, the frames are expertly fabricated. A truck is appliqued with sheets of flush enameled copper, bolted down in carefully measured intervals; a toy telephone is stretched over with vintage floral fabric, not a wrinkle to be found in its facade; a rotten tooth is painted like a fresco, with witch fingers and elusive faces appearing between inlaid pearls and bits of blood-red fringe. I am taken with the beaded spiderwebs that stretch across a repurposed shelf that Knecht found in her daughter's room, which she decided to repurpose when she realized there was no use for it on account of the converted attic’s vaulted ceilings.

Jackie Im and Aaron Harbour, the co-curators of Et al. for 15+ years, are similarly charmed with these particular aspects of the work, saying, “Going in, we could never have guessed, more or less expected, the incredible attention to framing and materials of these new works, and that potential for surprise is the best part of Et al. for us.” When asked why they included this work in their roster of exhibitions, Harbour said, “We consistently drive our decisions about what to exhibit based upon our personal interests, relationships, and what we come across looking at art locally and beyond. We've loved Rainen's work for ages…Our curatorial choices revolve around providing opportunities to artists, curators, writers etc we are interested in, and then letting the exhibitions we host be driven by these people.’

Et al. is an oasis of sincerity in an art world that sometimes struggles in its preoccupation with genuflection to academia, palatability, or crowd appeal. Naturally, at the same time as Knecht’s show, Et al. hosted the annual SF Art Book Fair, one of the local artist community's favorite events of the year. Before ‘community’ started being thrown around like an HR department’s safe word, the Bay Area’s art scene simply was a community. Knecht’s work doubles down on the approachability of Et al., and the lack of self-consciousness between the two acts as a balm. You can visit the works of Alive! With Pleasure at Et al. gallery on Mission between 24th and 25th St., until its deinstallation on August 31.

Noah Charney holds master's degrees in art history from The Courtauld Institute and the University of Cambridge , and a PhD from the University of Ljubljana. He is Adjunct Professor of Art History at the American University of Rome and at University of Ljubljana, and is the founder of ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a non-profit research group on issues in art crime (www.artcrimeresearch.org).

His work in the field of art crime has been praised in such forums as The New York Times Magazine, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, BBC Radio, National Public Radio, El Pais, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Tatler among others. He has appeared on radio and television, including BBC, ITV, CNBC, National Geographic and CBS, as a presenter and guest expert.  He is in constant demand as a lecturer.  He has given popular TEDx talks, was a finalist for the main TED event, and teaches a Guardian Masterclass called "How to Write About Art." He is also one of the founding editors of The Journal of Art Crime, the first peer-reviewed academic journal in the field, and of The European Review of Poetry, Books and Culture (www.versopolis.com), an online cultural magazine funded by the European Union.

Charney is the author of hundreds of academic and popular articles, contributing regularly to The Guardian, the Daily Beast, Atlantic, Salon, The Art Newspaper, The Washington Post, Esquire and many others. His first novel, The Art Thief (Atria 2007), was translated into seventeen languages and was a best-seller in five countries. He is the editor of academic essay collections, Art & Crime: Exploring the Dark Side of the Art World (Praeger 2009) and Art Crime: Terrorists, Tomb Raiders, Forgers and Thieves (Palgrave 2016). 

Art Crime Historian & Author | Interview by Hugh Leeman

The Kid Who Wanted to Be Indiana Jones

Hugh Leeman: Noah, you're the founder and trustee of the internationally respected ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art. You've given TED Talks viewed collectively by millions, and authored dozens of books and peer-reviewed papers. And it's interesting, because all of this starts at a very early age — your college admissions essay focused on your dream of becoming Indiana Jones. In some ways you've done that, but in the art world. How did you know so early on, and who inspired that path?

Noah Charney: That you did so much homework you found the subject of my college admissions essay — that's awesome. So, it got started when I was 16. I'm American, but I went to a boarding school, which is kind of exotic for us Americans. It was called Choate, and they had abroad programs. Lots of Americans go abroad, but usually their junior year of college — I was lucky to do it my junior year of high school. I lived in Paris in an exchange program with a French family. There were 15 of us from the boarding school, and every afternoon from 2 to 4 p.m. we went out with an art history professor, walking around Paris, going to museums and churches and castles, seeing the art in person. That makes it much easier to fall in love with. Part of it is the association with living in Europe, which I knew I wanted to do and have done for the last 20 years.

Studying art history at that point seemed like a cool thing to do, because I wasn't sure which field I wanted to study, and in art history you get to do a lot of different ones through the lens of an object — an object you can visit, in most cases. In archaeology, I had trouble imagining from the ruins or shards of pottery what used to be there. Whereas with art history, you have the object in front of you. And it was easy for me to get into it because I particularly like studying iconography — the study of symbols in art — treating artworks like a visual puzzle or riddle we need to solve. To me, that's got the fun of a detective story. That's how I first got into it at 16.

The Museum of Lost Art

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned lost art. As I understand it, you propose that of all the old master works we can go see in a museum, that's about a third of the total output — the other two-thirds has been lost, stolen, or damaged. That's an astounding number.

Noah Charney: It's hard to know exactly, but to give one example: the older the artwork, the less likely it is to have been preserved. If we look at Lysippos, the most famous sculptor of the ancient world — according to Pliny, he sculpted around a thousand works during his career, and only one is extant out of all of those. That's a very low batting average in terms of what survived. But for old masters, we know of a lot more works than we can point to, than are extant — which is the fancy art history way of saying we know where they are, that they've survived.

To me, what was interesting was what I call survival bias — the idea that we think the works we can still visit in museums or churches are more important than the ones that didn't survive history. But that's really because we can visit them, and lots of people write about them and photograph them, so they have disproportionate visibility. Back when they were first made, there might have been works that were more important. My book The Museum of Lost Art looks at the works that didn't survive but were very important — more so, in many cases, than works that have survived to this day.

Stealing Hitler's Favorite Painting: The Ulay Story

Hugh Leeman: There's a project that stands out — a story you'd later become a part of. The renowned performance artist Ulay steals one of Hitler's favorite artworks from a museum and hangs it in a working-class immigrant home. Years later, you interview Ulay for several hours for a book on the theft — in what turned out to be the last year of his life. Can you tell the story of the performance piece, the interviews, and how it led to your connection with his former partner, Marina Abramović?

Noah Charney: Sure. Like me, Ulay married a Slovenian woman, and he was living in Ljubljana at the end of his life. I met him randomly at a dinner party thrown by Slovenia's most famous rock musician — kind of like the equivalent of Bruce Springsteen having you over for dinner and bringing a famous artist. He was a super lovely guy, a really nice vibe, very warm, with a sort of Tibetan-monk-guru aura around him. We became friendly. I can't say we were friends, but we spent many days together, him telling me stories. I would steal Marlboros from the pack he kept on his desk. It was a really lovely dynamic.

The first thing I did that was publicly visible with him was when he was having legal arguments with Marina Abramović. He claimed she was trying to erase him from their history of joint works, and that she owed him royalties. I occasionally write for The Guardian, and they broke an article I wrote — basically that Ulay was suing Marina Abramović. I figured she'd want nothing to do with me because of this, but it turned out she didn't seem to mind at all. She was really lovely — we'll get back to that.

Ulay and I spent a lot of time together and had an idea to do a book. I recorded about ten hours of interviews with him. The idea was going to be behind the scenes in the contemporary art world — he had funny stories, like making potato cut-out artworks the way you do in kindergarten, dipping a cut potato in paint, with Iggy Pop. We probably didn't have a book's worth, but he told me play-by-play about this theft in 1976, which is probably his most famous solo performance work — one I studied in my Art History 101 class as an undergraduate.

In 1976, he planned the theft as what he called an "aktion" — an action, in German. He didn't think of it as a performance art piece, but as a political statement. He planned to steal a painting that had been called Hitler's favorite, called The Poor Poet by Carl Spitzweg — a cheesy romantic picture of a poet so poor that he's living in a garret apartment with a leaky roof, holding an umbrella over his bed so he doesn't get rained on. He stole it in a pre-planned heist. He wrote out the plan, studied all the aspects, and filed all of it with his lawyer ahead of the theft — including his intention never to permanently deprive the Berlin museum of the work. He was going to take it as a political action and hang it on the wall of an immigrant family's home in Kreuzberg, which today is hipster central and very expensive in Berlin, but used to be a down-and-out immigrant neighborhood.

Marina Abramović was his girlfriend and creative partner at the time, and in this action she was photographing. He had a getaway van, and he hired a filmmaker to film him. He cased the joint first, then goes into the museum on the day he's planning to steal the painting. There are two security guards nearby. He has wire cutters in his pocket, and the work is hung by an alarmed wire. To get the guards away from the painting, he goes to the other side of the room and starts giggling maniacally while looking at a different painting. They think this is a weirdo, and they go over to ask what the deal is — and he sprints across the room, snips the wire, which sets off the alarm, grabs the Spitzweg, and heads for the door. He knew the doors automatically lock when the alarm goes off — except it's a fire hazard to have no exit, so there was one fire exit he was able to burst through. Marina was hiding the camera so no one would confiscate the photos. He sprints outside — it's snowy — the van is idling because it's so old and clunky he's afraid it won't start. He reaches the van, drives off, and the security guards are grasping at the door handle trying to get in. And he zooms off.

This is all captured on film, which you can see in museum exhibits. The van itself is, as we speak, on display in Ljubljana at a contemporary art gallery. He drives to the other side of town, takes the painting out, hangs it in the home of this immigrant family, and calls the museum director to tell him where he can pick up the work. The museum director understood what it was about — that he wasn't a criminal, he was making a political point, and the painting wasn't harmed — and he got a slap-on-the-wrist punishment.

It was a fascinating work that combines the subject I study, art crime, with art history. It was very cool that I got the full story from him. He'd beaten cancer once, then it came back, and he passed away. I had the idea to do a monograph about this one incident. The book of mine that came out this spring is called There's a Criminal Touch to Art, and it's got a chapter that is, word by word, how Ulay described the theft to me — and then a chapter, word by word, where Marina Abramović described it from her perspective. Originally it was going to be co-authored by the three of us, but I wound up writing all of it. It's in collaboration with the Ulay Foundation and the Abramović Institute. It was a particular thrill to do a project with these people who are real artistic heroes of mine.

Hugh Leeman: What was the interview process like? As I understand it, his illness cut the project short, and you had to improvise how to put it out to the world.

Noah Charney: It does. We didn't know at the time that he'd get sick so suddenly. We were doing the interviews with a different book in mind, but then I wrote his first-person account of the theft for a magazine called The Observer — that was about one hour of the ten or so hours we did together. I also had to write an essay for a big exhibit of his work in Frankfurt, part of the exhibition catalog. So I had a couple of destinations in mind for just that story.

The thing with him is he traveled a lot, his health waned, and we'd be in touch periodically. When we got together, it would usually be for a one- or two-hour block in his kitchen overlooking the Ljubljanica River, and then his energy would fade. So we did it in little spurts. He also wasn't someone who would sit and write part of a book, but he was happy to tell the stories.

After he passed, I was in touch with his widow, and then with Marina Abramović, because she was coming to Ljubljana for a big monograph exhibit of her work. The original concept was that we three would be co-authors — a posthumous project they'd do together. In the end it made more sense published with me as sole author, because they just told me the stories. But the concept was a beautiful one: that after death, he'd still be doing a collaborative project with Marina.

The Fourth Pillar: AI Enters the Authentication Game

Hugh Leeman: I want to turn to a current project — AI used for authenticating multi-million-dollar masterpieces. You're an expert advisor to the company Art Recognition, and there's a great story around Caravaggio's The Lute Player. There are three versions. One was bought at Sotheby's for around 71,000 pounds as by a "follower or circle of Caravaggio," and then a Swiss algorithm says it's the real thing. How did you first get pulled in?

Noah Charney: Back in 2015, I wrote a book called The Art of Forgery, which has been called the definitive book on art forgery — I'd be delighted if that's the case. I actually just finished a 10-year edition coming out later this year. I was interested in the history of how forgers have fooled the art world, and part of that is how art has been authenticated, historically and today.

Historically, there are three ways art is authenticated. One is connoisseurship — the personal opinion of people who consider themselves experts. The second is provenance research — the documented history of an object; is it logical and plausible that the object could be by the artist we think it's by? The third is material forensics — what a conservator looks at in a lab, using multispectral imaging like X-rays, ultraviolet, and infrared to look beneath the surface, testing the age of organic materials. Provenance research really only kicked off after World War II, out of concern for the estimated five million cultural heritage objects that changed hands illegally during the Nazi era.

Now there's a fourth one — I call it the fourth pillar. And I want to be clear: at no point will machines take over from humans in authenticating artworks. What we have is a new tool available to human experts, just like X-rays and infrared were decades ago. Those made experts nervous at first and are now part of everyday work.

The fourth pillar is AI image analysis. It's important to know what it is and what it shouldn't be. You don't go onto Claude or ChatGPT, upload an image, and say, is this a Caravaggio? The problem with any open-source system is it has the entire internet available to it, which is full of incorrect information.

The way Art Recognition does it — which is why I agreed to become their art history advisor — is that they have a very strict, carefully built, closed AI system they programmed themselves. It takes two to three weeks to teach their system to recognize the hand of any new artist. They begin with a catalogue raisonné, which should be every known work by the artist, plus lists or descriptions of lost works, plus derivative works. They feed all that into their closed data set. Then they feed negative or counter examples — forgeries, copies, derivative works, works by followers — to teach the AI what not to be fooled by. They also generate synthetic images: they'll have an AI make a "Caravaggio" painting and feed it in, saying, this is AI-generated, this is what you should not be fooled by. Then you can upload a high-resolution image of a painting and ask, is it by one of the artists Art Recognition has taught its AI to recognize — and the software gives you an estimated probability. I've been testing it, and it's remarkably accurate.

I actually launched a podcast last September called Is It? In each episode, I invite an art expert to pick any painting, and I have Art Recognition test it against the artist we think it's by. The Caravaggio was an early episode. This version of The Lute Player divided scholars — one scholar in the US thinks it's definitely not Caravaggio, and lots of others think it is. It's a question of which equally decorated experts you believe. The AI thought it was by Caravaggio, and it had been acquired for 71,000 pounds. It could be worth $71 million now that it's authenticated.

What's cool is that in the same examination we looked at two other Lute Player paintings also attributed to Caravaggio. The one everybody agrees is his — and the AI agreed — is at the Hermitage Museum. Another, part of the Wildenstein collection, was deemed not by Caravaggio according to the AI. So it's a really good additional tool, actually a pretty good first line of defense. Right now AI is used as a last line of defense — when experts can't agree and the forensic tests look okay. Forensics are very good at telling you if the object is from the correct era, but not good at telling you who the artist is. So you get stuck: it's the right age, from the right part of the world, the provenance makes sense on paper — but equally famous scholars say it is or it isn't. At the moment, AI image analysis is a tiebreaker, because it's new and people don't know what to make of it yet. The art world is slowly seeing it's not something to be scared of, but a useful tool.

What AI Adds to a Case a Connoisseur Already Built

Hugh Leeman: The art historian and dealer Clovis Whitfield had already done the archival detective work on this piece. What did AI actually add to a case a connoisseur had already built?

Noah Charney: Good question. The issue is that there was one scholar in the US, disproportionately influential, who said there's no way this is by Caravaggio. And even as evidence rose to the surface that it probably is, scholarly ego gets you stuck in place. Scholars do not like to say, you know what, maybe I was wrong. That's a rarity. We should all have more of a sense of humor about these things, because we get things wrong all the time.

Clovis built up the case forensically, like a lawyer, step by step. AI didn't add something new to his argument, other than bringing in an objective, scientific analysis that confirmed what his old-school scholarly research had suggested. It's a union of the two. I don't think you ever want only AI. Most of the time we only have scholars trawling through archives, and that's it. Sometimes you get forensic tests, but the market is quite resistant to them. If you have both — the scholarship agrees, the forensic tests agree, the provenance agrees, and now an AI image analysis agrees — that's quite a compelling combination.

What Does "85.7% Caravaggio" Actually Mean?

Hugh Leeman: For this piece, the probability analysis I read was 85.7% likelihood it was a Caravaggio. When you say a painting is 85.7% Caravaggio to a general audience — what do you want them to hear, and what do you worry they might actually hear?

Noah Charney: This is exactly what I've told Art Recognition, because it's potentially confusing — I had to have them explain it to me as well. It could be interpreted a couple of ways. One is that 85% of the painting is by Caravaggio and 15% is not. And actually, that's preferable to a machine saying flatly "it is" or "it isn't" — because that's so black and white, and the way art was created until the 20th century doesn't work that way.

Caravaggio is a bit of an outlier, but most old masters worked with a big team of assistants and apprentices. If you said a work is by Rubens — who famously had an illegally high number of assistants — it means there are a lot of artistic hands in the finished product. The idea that you're only going to find Rubens's hand in it is absurd. So what are we looking at? We're comparing it to other works confirmed by the hand of the artist that everybody agrees on, and it comes up with a probability.

One of the other studies Art Recognition is doing looks at the statistical probability their AI suggests for works nobody doubts. Basically, any probability from about 65% and up is a safe bet that it's by the artist. There was a painting suspected to be by Monet — when they tested it, it came back not by Monet. But then their team of real art historians found in an archive that a large patch in the center had been restored. When they told the AI to omit the restored central part, it immediately said, this is definitely by Monet. So it's important to understand that different parts of a work can be subject to restoration, even within the original artist's studio.

Upgrades and Demotions: The Van Eyck Surprise

Hugh Leeman: In some ways the machine becomes a kingmaker — like Antiques Roadshow, the thing on Grandma's wall is actually a such-and-such, it's official. But it can do the opposite. There's a piece — the Wildenstein version — that the same analysis demoted.

Noah Charney: It can go both ways. Everybody's happy when it upgrades something, and not everybody's happy when it demotes. In this case, it confirmed the Hermitage version is authentic, confirmed the ex-Badminton one Clovis Whitfield researched is by Caravaggio, and confirmed the Wildenstein is not. That's not a big surprise, because Guy Wildenstein himself had written that when he acquired the work, it wasn't listed as by Caravaggio. But the same influential scholar who thought the ex-Badminton one wasn't Caravaggio thought the Wildenstein was.

We had another example. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, there's a painting I studied as an undergraduate — Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, attributed to Jan van Eyck — and it turned out it's not by Jan van Eyck. There's a Turin version, and that turns out to be by him. That was another podcast episode, then reported in a newspaper, and then the scholar who was my guest published a peer-reviewed academic article looking at both, with the AI analysis in mind. So yes, it can upgrade and downgrade. The advantage is that it takes a long time for a grown-up company like Art Recognition to teach its AI to recognize an artist — but once it's taught, any new work can be tested quickly and inexpensively.

There are lots of firms that say they'll do AI image analysis, and the question is how sophisticated and grown-up their method is. It doesn't work well with an open-source model — too much irrelevant, misleading information. So you have to do your homework and pick a company that feels like the grown-ups in the room.

How the Loudest Skeptic Became a Collaborator

Hugh Leeman: It's a fascinating act of transformation — how does the loudest skeptic end up becoming the collaborator?

Noah Charney: I was not part of the Art Recognition team when this took place; I joined relatively recently. But as I understand it, the scholar — Tilman Borkert, one of the most famous Van Eyck scholars — had read about Art Recognition and AI in general. Art Recognition is the oldest firm doing this and the leaders in the field, so they get the most attention. He didn't like the sound of it, but he didn't fully understand how it worked.

Then Carina Popovici, one of the founders of Art Recognition, reached out to him — and it's to her credit that she does so. In these academic worlds, you can make enemies who can't stand each other, hurling insults at conferences, and that doesn't help anyone. Instead you can say, maybe there's a way we're misunderstanding each other. To his credit, he was open to the conversation. They had an extensive dialogue and wound up publishing a peer-reviewed article together. That's been the case for quite a few scholars. There will always be perennially grumpy folks who think this is no good, and that's fine, that's normal. It's so new that it's probably a decade or so before it becomes part of the everyday language — just like multispectral image analysis freaked people out at first and is now totally normal.

The Problem With the Single Connoisseur

Hugh Leeman: Throughout your career you've argued the art world leans too heavily on the single connoisseur to say "this is a such-and-such," and we all go along with it. How does AI fix that — and does it just install a new oracle owned by a company?

Noah Charney: A couple of ways to answer this. One thing that always surprised me is there's no objective determination of whether someone is an expert in a field of art history. If you're an expert in wine, you have to pass courses and blind tasting tests. In karate, you work your way up through colored belts and demonstrate to existing black belts that you can do what a master does. Art doesn't have that. You can have a PhD, or even two, in Rembrandt, and it doesn't mean you can recognize Rembrandt's hand.

Connoisseurship has become almost a naughty word in the last few decades — the sense that certain people have a maybe-even-supernatural ability to recognize an artist's hand, and they just know because they know. Art has an elitism problem, and people who establish themselves as experts like to keep a sense that they're gatekeepers and nobody else's opinion is of value. I have a book called The 12-Hour Art Expert whose primary goal was to knock down the elitism around studying art history, because I think it's silly and unhelpful. Experts who authenticate works like to have — it's not a monopoly, but an oligopoly — within any one artist there'll be just a handful of go-to experts around the world. They do know what they're talking about. But anyone can raise their hand and say "I'm an art expert," and there's no objective way to demonstrate it.

I studied for one of my master's degrees at a place in London that's one of the last places on Earth that teaches connoisseurship, because it's seen as old-fashioned, almost like a magic trick. The better focus is on provenance research and material forensic testing. Now, if you bring in an AI image analysis firm, it's no different from hiring a conservation lab. They do the tests, they're as objective as possible, they give you results, you're paying for a service. They don't own any of the objects, and there's no benefit to them in saying yes or no.

Whereas connoisseurs traditionally — most famously Bernard Berenson, the most famous connoisseur of all — Berenson used to get a percentage of the sale price for every work he authenticated that was sold by Sir Joseph Duveen. There's a famous stage play, I think called Old Masters, a two-man play about an argument Berenson and Duveen had over whether an Adoration of the Shepherds now in the National Gallery in London was by Giorgione or Titian — if it's by Giorgione, it's much more valuable, because he has fewer extant works. Berenson got a percentage, so it was in his interest to overestimate. Part of the problem is the art trade is geared so that people want to be told an object is legitimate and authentic, because then you get the maximum price.

There have been law cases around this. There's a case called "the American Leonardo" — a version of La Belle Ferronnière owned by a family called the Hahns, who claimed it was an original Leonardo. Duveen and Berenson publicly said they didn't think it was by Leonardo, and the Hahns sued them for damaging the value of the object. Then in the 1930s there was the Wacker–Van Gogh trial, where a dealer named Otto Wacker was found guilty of selling forged Van Goghs. It was the first trial where two experts couldn't agree which paintings were genuine. When they couldn't agree, and there was no provenance because Wacker refused to say where he got the works, they brought in a tiebreaker — a Dutch chemist named Martin de Wild, who used chemical analysis and found the paintings had pulverized lead and resin mixed with the oil paints to speed up drying, which don't appear in Van Gogh originals. That's what solved the case.

In each of these steps, we tend to prefer scientific evidence over personal opinion, especially when experts disagree. Material forensic testing is like having eyewitnesses in a murder trial and then bringing in DNA evidence — the DNA is more compelling. AI image analysis is like the DNA evidence for works of art you might put on trial for authenticity. Ideally it's an objective way to bring in something that feels more scientific than human opinion.

A New System, Not a New Oracle

Hugh Leeman: It calls to mind a medieval Catholic priest — if there's something I don't know, it's because God doesn't need it known — this "believe me because I said so" pedestal. And you seem to be building a new framework. There's this loop: your podcast Is It?, the Caravaggio episode, then The Guardian and The Times pick it up. Are you creating a new system that could replace the single connoisseur?

Noah Charney: I don't ever actually want to get rid of anybody. The individual expert having an unhealthy influence is not good. But the nature of scholarship is to bring experts together and force them to prove what they conjecture in a public forum — that's where peer-reviewed academic journal articles come from. You write up your argument, submit it, they decide if it's good enough to publish, and then the 27 other scholars in your field read it with a skeptical eye. They'll challenge your supposition, or you might bring them over to your view. That's the testing ground, which is why it's important that anything like this is included in peer-reviewed journals — which Art Recognition does. They publish their methodology in computing journals, so it's not a black box. And scholars include the research in peer-reviewed journals too. Tilman Borkert, one of the most famous Van Eyck scholars, just published an article a few weeks ago using the AI image analysis in his interpretation of the Philadelphia and Turin paintings.

So we should have a collaborative effort by human scholars who now have, in addition to provenance research and material forensics, this new tool — AI image analysis — without it ever superseding them. I like the idea that lots of scholars have new things available as ways of testing and exploring the world. The individual scholar who says "my opinion is the only valid one" — that's not good for anyone.

Hugh Leeman: If the AI verdict and your own art historical judgment ever flatly disagreed — the machine says yes, your eye says no — which goes to the public, and which do you actually believe?

Noah Charney: I get to cheat a little, because I'm a generalist, a pop art historian, without deep expertise in any individual artist. That's why I get a free pass and why I'm more open to this. I've been privileged to have access to Art Recognition's testing facilities. I've been surprised on a number of occasions. There's one very big surprise I'm not allowed to say yet — I was sure it was by the artist in question, and they tested and retested it from different angles, and it definitely isn't. The most famous scholar in the world of that artist totally convinced me it's by them, and I believed him — and it just appears that it's not. To me, that's very exciting.

It's important not to have an ego with this. You know what you know. If something comes up that changes your mind, then cool — rather than getting stuck and saying, in a stroppy way, no, I said this first. Unfortunately, it's human nature. We don't like to volunteer that we were wrong. But for me, that's part of the fun.

A Coming Demotion the World Will Hear About

Hugh Leeman: To close us out — you're trying so hard not to say the name. When will we know, and why the secrecy?

Noah Charney: There's a simple explanation. We're going to reveal it in a way that's more of a media event. It'll be enough of a surprise that it'll probably be covered all over world media. We'll do it as one of the Is It? podcast episodes, probably later this fall. We want to make sure everything is lined up so that when we reveal it — and it's going to make some waves — we have all our ducks in a row and feel entirely confident the results aren't some attempt at grabbing media attention, but part of a thoroughly developed, grown-up approach to demoting a famous work, with good follow-up answers to the questions that will inevitably follow.

There's a responsibility to this. If it's a work nobody's heard of, that's one thing. If it's a work lots of people have heard of, you really want to make sure you have everything set up right. The last thing I want is to do something that feels attention-grabbing but hasn't been thoroughly thought out. Some people are going to have feathers ruffled, and that's expected — but you have to back up your argument in a variety of ways. Hence I'm being coy.

Hugh Leeman: Noah Charney, it's fascinating. Thank you so much. I look forward to learning more about the demotion of this painting — a fascinating field you're in.

Noah Charney: Thanks. You did a lot of good research ahead of interviewing me — very impressive. Thank you for having me.

Robert K. Wittman joined the FBI as a Special Agent in 1988 and was assigned to the Philadelphia Field Division. Through specialized training in art, antiques, jewelry, and gem identification, he became the Bureau's foremost investigative expert in art and cultural property crime.

During his 20-year career, he recovered more than $300 million worth of stolen art and cultural property, resulting in the prosecution and conviction of numerous individuals across the globe.

In 2005, Wittman was instrumental in creating the FBI's rapid deployment Art Crime Team (ACT) — the first of its kind. Named the ACT's Senior Investigator, he trained its founding members in cultural property investigation techniques and represented the United States in more than 20 countries, instructing international police and museums in investigation, recovery, and security.

The Wall Street Journal called him "a living legend." The London Times dubbed him "the most famous art detective in the world."

Find Robert K. Wittman at https://x.com/RobertWittman

Founder of the FBI Art Crime Team | Interview by Hugh Leeman

Bob Clay: The Alter Ego Who Was Really Himself

Hugh Leeman: Bob, you founded the FBI's Art Crime Team, working undercover around the world under the identity Bob Clay, recovering everything from Rembrandts and Rodins to Goyas and even Geronimo's war bonnet. Beyond sharing the same first name — what about Bob Clay was like you, Bob Wittman, and what was different?

Robert Wittman: As an FBI undercover agent, you have to keep everything as close to being true as possible. The reason is because if you're working a case, you might be working it for six months, a year, two years. And if you have to remember lies you told two years ago, you can get caught up very easily in a mistake. So Bob Clay really was my alter ego. He was the same guy I was, but with a different name — one you couldn't check up on. That's basically how it worked. I had the backstopping, or what we call the credentials, to prove Bob Clay was a human being. So it was the same guy. Bob Wittman and Bob Clay were the same person.

Hugh Leeman: In your book Priceless, you wrote: "The physical and mental demands of going undercover can be overwhelming. It's easy to lose touch with reality and let the lies and deception take over." What was it like to experience that?

Robert Wittman: I never actually did that. I never lost touch with reality, because I always kept it real. But that was a problem some undercover agents had. You could fall in love with the lifestyle. Depending on the situation, you'd be driving really expensive cars, running around with expensive jewelry, wearing very nice suits — or you might be riding a Harley-Davidson way out of your price range, working motorcycle gangs. All these things have a way of bringing people in.

There was a point in the FBI, back in the 1980s, when individuals started to take their alter egos too seriously and try to become those things. They started spending money, losing money, not keeping track. So it became very important to maintain your reality — which is that you are an FBI special agent working on a case. You're not that day-tripping rich guy on a yacht playing a game. That's not who you are. The reality is who you are.

Hugh Leeman: It sounds like, with the targets you're looking to bring down, you're trying to get a read on their fears and their desires, so you can reflect that back and put yourself into their world. Is that fair?

Robert Wittman: One of the techniques of ingratiating targets is to mirror — mirror their actions, their ideas, their thoughts. People who agree with you are much more likely to want to work with you, especially when it becomes criminal activity. So you're mirroring what they're saying and thinking, and that makes them more comfortable.

A big smile is worth a lot when you meet someone. That's very disarming for many people. And silence is a fantastic leverage tool — letting them speak, hearing what they have to say, really listening. It makes them feel comfortable and powerful. Those are techniques we used, and still use today, to bring people into your sphere of influence.

The Psychology of Infiltration

Hugh Leeman: Amidst your near-recovery of the $500 million Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, you wrote: "I'd spent nine painstaking months undercover, luring Sonny and Lawrence, ingratiating myself with them to win their trust. And today's entire ruse on a leased yacht was a near-final step in that process, designed to prove to them beyond a doubt that I was a serious player." What is the psychology of infiltrating a criminal network?

Robert Wittman: You have to bring them in and make them believe you are who you're supposed to be. You have to convince people you are that person — to the point of actually creating situations where they feel comfortable coming into them.

We used a yacht down in Miami, in the harbor, and we had a party on the yacht where I delivered five paintings, supposedly, to a drug lord — for his girlfriend or wife's birthday. We had a group of FBI agents there, acting as girls dancing on the yacht — all undercover agents. And we were able to convince these targets that we were who we said we were: a $30 million gallery owner who had the ability to get these paintings back, which were valued at $500 million.

Hugh Leeman: It seems like it created an incredible sense of inner tension and anxiety, with multiple undercover players and career criminals always on the lookout for exactly this.

Robert Wittman: That's true. Working undercover in law enforcement is probably the most stressful job any investigator has. It doesn't matter if you're a local PD guy working drugs or an FBI agent working art theft.

In law enforcement, one of the major things is having control. You pull a car over, you tell somebody to give you a license and registration — that's what they have to do. Working undercover, you're not doing that. You don't know how people are going to react. So you have to create a situation where a person wants to do what you're asking them to do. You're not ordering someone — you're having them do it at their own pace, in their own way, because they want to do that with you. And that's ingratiation.

You never know what's going to happen. You don't know if it's going to work out, or if they're going to find out something about you that's not true — or true. Or you might make a mistake and say the wrong thing. That's why it's so important to keep everything truthful. If you have three kids, you say you have three kids. If it's two boys and a girl, you say two boys and a girl. Because you're not going to be able to remember what you said a year from now.

To give an example: if you grew up in a city like Baltimore, you don't want to tell someone in Denver that you grew up in Chicago — because that person may have come from Chicago, and you're not going to know the town like you should. If you grew up there, you should know it like the back of your hand. So you'd say, I grew up in Baltimore, because that's the city I know. You don't want to bring in lies for the sake of lying. You have to stay close to the truth.

Hugh Leeman: That "close to the truth" idea — it seems like it could push you toward a real element of danger.

Robert Wittman: It could. You're not going to tell truths that are going to be dangerous for you. To a certain degree, you can make things up if you have to. I remember a case involving stolen objects where the person wanted to come to my house — visit me at my home. And I said, I would do that, except I have a problem with my mother. My mother's an alcoholic, and I don't like the fact that if we walk in there, she might be lying on the floor. It's not something I want anybody to see.

People understand that. It's funny — criminals are criminals, but you talk to them and they're like anybody else. Everybody has their own human problems — children on drugs, parents who are sick. It's all human structure. So if you go to that level, generally people understand nobody wants to be involved with something like that, and it doesn't happen.

The Motto You Violate to Uphold

Hugh Leeman: There's a case where a criminal you brought down, who trafficked Native American art, wrote you a sincere letter thanking you for the good times you shared — good times he was referencing to Bob Clay. And you wrote: "FBI agents are trained to uphold our motto — fidelity, bravery, integrity. Working undercover, we violate every tenet of that creed. We are disloyal, we act cowardly, we lie." How did you manage that emotionally?

Robert Wittman: The way I did it was I always kept my eye on the ultimate goal — to recover a stolen piece of art or stop a looting network. But as you go through, you have to identify criminals' good traits, because everybody has good and bad traits. In order to do the job, you have to focus on those good traits.

And sometimes, at the end of a case, it's very difficult to put that all aside and ruin somebody's life. That's basically what you're doing. You're ingratiating, and then you're turning them in. After six months, nine months, a year of working with somebody — you got to know their families, you got to know who they were — and then when it's over, you're turning them in, and you're not helping their family, so to speak. Sometimes that was difficult for me.

Hugh Leeman: After that man wrote to you about how much he cared about you as a friend, you responded — in real life and in the book — "This was the hardest case I had, because I really like you and your family. Call me anytime." Whatever came of that?

Robert Wittman: He never called. He went to court. I also said in that note: get a good attorney, and keep your head up, because this will pass. That's the best advice I could give anybody who's been involved.

Here's what you have to understand. Because someone does something against the law doesn't make them a bad person. It just means they broke the law. There are statutes Congress passes, and we have to uphold them. But human beings are human beings, and because they did something illegal doesn't make them evil. It just means they made a mistake in their life, and maybe they need that little awakening to stop doing it and turn it around.

That individual actually ended up getting in trouble again, on a fraud case after this one, where he defrauded a judge in New York State.

Why Risk Your Life for This?

Hugh Leeman: You describe the dangers of the job: "You were dealing with people who killed snitches and undercover cops. I always called my wife in the last moments before an undercover deal. I'd say, I love you, and she'd say the same." And on that yacht in Miami, you asked yourself, amidst all the madness: why am I risking my life for this? What did that reasoning sound like in your head?

Robert Wittman: It's what I elected to do — become an FBI agent and do criminal investigation. That was my work. So you accept the danger as part of doing business. Police officers every day strap on a gun and a badge and go uphold the law. That's the job they choose. If something untoward happens, that's what you chose to do, and you have to accept the consequences of your choices.

That doesn't mean you don't ask in your own mind, is it worth it? Is this what I want to do? But the answer was always, yeah, this is what I chose, and so I have to put my game face on and go for it.

Hugh Leeman: You'd come home to two boys and a young girl. Did they have any idea what your job was?

Robert Wittman: They knew I was in the FBI, and that I was working on cases. I wasn't home, so I was obviously working somewhere. But they didn't know the plans, the situation, the recovery, or who the bad guys were. They knew the general parameters of what Dad did for a living, but I don't think they even knew I was an undercover guy. They probably just thought Dad went to the office every day and came home at night — and when he didn't, he was out somewhere working, doing what he was supposed to do.

Hugh Leeman: That could be seemingly quite isolating.

Robert Wittman: It is, in that you don't talk about your work. But I think a good undercover agent is kind of a loner anyway. He's even a loner in his world as an FBI agent, because there are very few agents in the FBI who are really undercover people. It's such a stressful job, and not everybody's cut out for it.

The motto of the FBI is fidelity, bravery, integrity. And when you go undercover and you're lying to criminals, telling them you're somebody you're not, you have no integrity, and you're supposed to be a criminal. It goes against the grain of who you are.

I'll never forget — whenever we'd go to court, one of the first things a defense attorney would ask you on the stand was: Agent Wittman, do you lie? Are you a liar? And of course the answer was, yeah, of course I was a liar. I did lie to the defendant. I told him I was somebody I wasn't. But I only do it when I'm working a case in an undercover operation. Otherwise, I don't lie. A lot of agents are not cut out for that. They're more comfortable being overt — doing interviews, executing search warrants, wearing the letters on their raid jackets — than going out and doing undercover work.

Not Wanting the Role to End

Hugh Leeman: On the other side of the coin, you write: "It's kind of weird. Sometimes when I've slipped into a role, I really don't want it to end. Which is why when a case does end, I always feel a bit deflated." Despite that deflation, what kept you coming back for more?

Robert Wittman: As Bob Clay, the undercover guy, I was who I said I was — because I kept everything truthful. When I was doing a case, I would be that role, to the point where I would actually believe I was that guy while I was doing it. If I was buying a piece of art playing a professor or authenticator, I'd play that role, to the best of my knowledge, as if I was actually that person. If I was conspiring with a criminal to buy fakes to sell to my close clients, I'd actually believe, in that moment, that I had clients I was going to sell fakes to.

The only way to convince people you are who you say you are is to believe it yourself. If you say something and you don't believe it, you're not going to convince them to come into your circle. So I would actually be involved in these operations, these business deals, and I'd believe I was actually doing it.

As a result, when it was over, it's like anything else — when a big game's over, you have a letdown, because that one's done and you have to move on to the next. It's like a tiger by the tail. When you're doing an investigation and you grab that tiger, and it's running around, taking you all over different countries, you're hanging on for dear life. And when you capture the tiger and it's over, it's a big letdown for a few moments, because you have to start all over again.

The Turning Point: A Car Accident and an Indictment

Hugh Leeman: All of this perhaps doesn't happen if not for you overcoming a life-challenging event. You wrote: "I had a choice. I could go into a funk of self-pity and ride a desk for the rest of my career, or I could come out swinging. Either way, the accident and trial would mark the turning point of my life and my career." If not for the darkest hour of your life, perhaps the Art Crime Team never gets started. What are your thoughts?

Robert Wittman: That's probably true. You're talking about the car accident I had in 1989. My partner, who was with me that night, succumbed to his injuries. And ultimately I was indicted by the state of New Jersey for DWI. I went to trial and proved I was innocent — it wasn't the case.

For the five years I was under that indictment, I was still working at the Bureau, still making cases. But I could have gone into a shell and decided to play it out and get my pension — what we call RIP, not "rested" but "retired in place." I decided not to do that.

I learned a lot, Hugh, from being a defendant, believe it or not. Most FBI agents are always the prosecutors, never the defendant. But I learned there are a couple of things really important to a defendant. One of them is to have hope. Throughout the rest of my career, if I could offer hope to a defendant — make a deal, work out some way to do the best for their sentencing — they'll usually grab at it. That stood me in good stead for the next twenty years. A lot of cases, in the end, you bring people in, you speak to them, you offer them some hope, and that would be enough to bring them around to testifying for you and taking a plea.

I learned how it feels to be a defendant — the hopelessness of having the system against you, and what a defendant is really looking for. I turned that around and used it for the next twenty years.

Hugh Leeman: From what I could deduce, the trick in the case was that the blood test tubes had gotten mixed up — yours confused with your partner's, whose blood alcohol was well past the legal limit, while yours was well under. Is that right?

Robert Wittman: We were right next to each other, and when they took the blood, they sent them both down, and we had the exact same number — the exact same blood alcohol number, which is impossible. Two people of different height, different weight — you can't have the exact same number to the fourth decimal place. So obviously it was the same test tube tested twice. It wasn't being kept for evidentiary purposes; it was for medical purposes. My numbers were nowhere near what they said. My partner was fine — he could have as many drinks as he wanted, because he wasn't driving. I was. That's why I didn't have drinks.

Hugh Leeman: What an incredibly crushing circumstance. And your wife, Donna, was steadfast by your side.

Robert Wittman: I wouldn't have been the person I am today, or at that time, if it wasn't for my wife. She's been the strong person throughout my whole life — always supportive, behind me a hundred percent. I used to go do these undercover operations around different countries, and before I left I'd give her a big hug and tell her, I'll be back. And she'd look up at me, hug me, give me a kiss, and always say: did you pay for the life insurance?

Hugh Leeman: Wow.

Robert Wittman: No, I'm just kidding. But she was always my support.

The Lost Leonardo and the $450 Million Question

Hugh Leeman: You appear in the documentary The Lost Leonardo, casting doubt on whether the $400 million Salvator Mundi is an authentic Leonardo da Vinci. What first led you to believe it might be inauthentic, before those questions hit headlines around the world?

Robert Wittman: Because I looked at the situation. It sold for something like $15,000 at an auction in Louisiana, came out of nowhere. And if you look at the before-and-after photographs and see the in-painting they've done to create the Salvator Mundi — they've added actual parts to that painting that weren't in it. It's been so overdone and conserved that whatever's left of it being da Vinci is very little.

To me, it doesn't seem like it would be worth $450 million. It could be a da Vinci — it could be a piece that's got part of his work in it. But it just doesn't ring true to me. Then again, I'm not a da Vinci expert. I just have an opinion, and that's all it is. I think it was hyped, and people overpaid.

Hugh Leeman: We now know it to be MBS, the Saudi Crown Prince, who purchased it for $400 million plus a $50 million tab to Sotheby's. In the same documentary, you talk about transferring funds from a free port to redeploy the money elsewhere. Can you explain what that means?

Robert Wittman: You're not really redeploying the money elsewhere. The point is you can buy artwork and clean money. One of the ways of money laundering is to buy art, and then you can show you have an object worth X amount of dollars. The money becomes clean when you sell that artwork.

They put them in free ports because otherwise they'd have to pay tax. A lot of artwork gets bought and stuck into storage in a free port — no taxes paid, no VAT, nothing. Those are ways to get around paying extra money and to clean money that you want to show a receipt for, to show where it comes from.

As far as the da Vinci, I don't think that was money laundering. I think MBS just has enough money he can pay anything he wants. A lot of times people buy artwork and it's a vanity piece. Somebody buys a $20 million Picasso and puts it on a wall in their apartment because it looks nice with the colors. Justin Sun, the crypto billionaire, bought a banana for $6 million at one of the auction houses and ate it. It's just because they can. I see that happen quite often.

A Gun to a Knife Fight: The Corsican Mobsters

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned in Priceless there was only one time you carried a weapon during a deal — around two stolen Picassos, when a group of Corsican gangsters proposed that Bob Clay was in fact an FBI agent and threatened to kill you. How did you deal with this, especially as you were nearing retirement?

Robert Wittman: These guys were saying they were going to kill me. They told me they use knives instead of guns, because when you're sitting in a car, it's really easy to be stabbed — sometimes you can't get to a gun. They had put out a hit based on the recovery of those two Picassos, which were recovered in Paris, right by the Louvre, worth about $60 million. But the information came from two Corsican mobsters in Miami.

So I met with them. We talked, and I was able to convince them that I was not involved in the recovery with the police — because it was the Parisian police — and that they must have had a wiretap on them, and that's how they heard about it.

When I was meeting them, I was in a bar in South Beach. They were sitting across from me in a booth with a couch. I was on the outside of the booth, and they were on the inside, together. And I had a gun in my pocket. I figured, well, if they bring the knife out, they'll bring that knife to a gunfight, and we'll see how this works out. At that point, you put your game face on and do what you've got to do, because you're a law enforcement officer, and that's your job.

I convinced them. And I always said the best weapon to have in any undercover deal is a good mind. Use your mind, use your mouth to speak — talk people into and out of things. Because by the time you get into a fight, you're a loser. If I had one pinky broken in an undercover deal, I'd be a loser, because I'd have to suffer with that. The best thing to do is have a good mind, have it clear, and be able to talk your way out of things. That's your best weapon.

Breaking the One-Case Rule

Hugh Leeman: Under the FBI's strict undercover rules, you're only supposed to work one case at a time. You wrote: "I never followed that rule." What effect did breaking it have on your career?

Robert Wittman: I was the only really legitimate undercover agent working art cases at the time. So we'd have a case open in Paris, another in Madrid, one in Santa Fe, another in New York — and these offices would be calling me to go in and do these operations. I didn't have the luxury of doing one at a time, because I was the only asset they had. So I was doing four or five at a time.

The impact was trying to keep everything straight. I'd be at a cookout in my neighbor's backyard during the summer, and I'd get a call on my undercover phone from a guy in Florida about a $5 million painting — and meanwhile I'm hitting emails to criminals in New York about fake Basquiats. So it was just keeping everything straight, trying not to mix things up. That was the most challenging part.

Why Steal Art You Can't Sell?

Hugh Leeman: You note that art thefts total well over $6 billion annually, ranking fourth among criminal enterprises by value, behind drugs, money laundering, and illegal arms. Yet you say the true art of art crime is not the theft, but the sale. If it's so hard to sell stolen art, what continues to incentivize criminals to steal it?

Robert Wittman: Back in the mid-20th century, there was a bank robber named Willie Sutton, notorious for robbing banks. When he was finally caught and led off to jail, a reporter yelled, "Willie, why'd you rob banks?" And his response was: because that's where the money is.

What's happening today, because of the value — you mentioned $450 million for the da Vinci. It's not just the da Vinci. A Mickey Mantle rookie card recently sold for $12 million at auction. An original Mario Bros. game just sold for $3.1 million. A Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton last week sold for $51 million. All of these things are now highly valuable and collectible, and the criminals read the papers. They think, if we can cash in, maybe we can get a billion or two.

And if you steal a baseball card out of a collection, that's not a federal crime, even if it's $12 million — as long as you sell it and keep it in the state you stole it from. Now, if you steal it from a museum, it is. But from a private collection, it's not. So the local police get the call. I'm in Philadelphia — if you call the Major Crimes Division and say somebody stole my baseball card, they're not going to take it very seriously, no matter how much it's worth. They're investigating serial killers, bank robbers, aggravated assaults, car theft. That takes precedence.

That's why criminals get involved. But the problem is, once they have the object, they have to sell it. And that's where we usually recover these stolen objects — when it comes to market, when they try to monetize it. In the U.S., you can't pass good title on stolen property. So it's a fraud, and that's a federal crime. In the end, you're selling to an undercover agent, or to someone who's going to find out it's stolen, at which point it gets recovered.

That's the part they don't understand — you can't sell it. Criminals steal cars and chop them up, and you can sell the parts sometimes for more than the car was worth. But with artwork, you can't chop it up. And most of these criminals aren't art thieves. They're involved in many types of criminal activity, and the art theft is just one opportunity. They don't really know the market.

Criminals, Informants, and Treating People Like Human Beings

Hugh Leeman: Now that these stories have come out — the talks, the bestselling book — what have been your concerns about criminals seeing you gain accolades amidst what was their plight?

Robert Wittman: You know who criminals really hate? The informants. As an FBI agent, it's my job to catch them, and as criminals, it's their job to not be caught. It's a cat-and-mouse game. When they're caught and find out I'm an FBI agent, they accept that. They're not mad at me, because it's my job. But they're very upset with informants.

The truth is, whenever I was involved in a case, I treated people like human beings. I wouldn't say kind, but I'm the type of person who looks at them as a person who maybe made a mistake — not someone to be looked down upon or menaced. I looked at their humanity and tried to treat them that way. As a result, there's not a lot of hard feelings between me and the people I caught. It was my job to catch them.

Hugh Leeman: To what extent does the FBI edit or have approval over what gets published in a book like Priceless?

Robert Wittman: They have the ability to do a first read. You have to pass it through their publication process. They ask you to remove — and they have to tell you why — any part that might divulge classified information. But almost everything I talk about is criminal cases, so they're all in the courthouse, all public information. You can go to any courthouse I was involved in, get the case file number, and see all the testimony. So 99% of my book is not classified. The parts that were, I didn't put in. When you talk about methods, you try to stay away from that — the fact that you have a camera in a room is on every TV show you ever watched, but I don't say what kind of camera or where it was hidden. There's nothing in there that's classified.

Reading the Craquelure: How to Authenticate a Rembrandt

Hugh Leeman: There's a point in the book where you're recovering a small Rembrandt self-portrait on copper, and you'd memorized the crackle pattern in the glaze, because criminals will sometimes fake a stolen painting. Can you talk about that?

Robert Wittman: One way to authenticate an old master, or any painting that's been varnished over the years, is to look at the craquelure — the crackle pattern the varnish takes as it ages. What you'd do is look at a good photograph of the painting, check one small portion to see the pattern of the craquelure, then take your jeweler's lens and look at the actual piece to see if you can identify the same spot. If it's the same, it's almost impossible to replicate in a new artwork. So you can say this piece has the same craquelure as the original — a very good possibility this is the original. You can't say 100%, but very good.

In the Rembrandt deal you're talking about, it was a $35 million self-portrait that Rembrandt did when he was 24, in 1630. A very nice little painting. It belonged to the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm and was stolen at gunpoint by three individuals.

With that painting, I wasn't checking the craquelure so much as a series of screws in the back of the frame that held the painting in. I was checking how those screws were turned, because the angle of the turns — I had a good photograph from the museum — told me these guys had never taken the painting out of the frame, because the angle of the screws was the same. So I could assume the Rembrandt was still the original. In fact, I said to them, you never took this out of the frame, did you? And these two guys said, of course not — it's a Rembrandt. It made me laugh, thinking, oh, these guys are art lovers, aren't they? And they said, we just want the money.

The Aura of Objects: The Moche Backflap and Geronimo's War Bonnet

Hugh Leeman: Throughout your career you're very pragmatic, yet something mystical makes its way through one case — an ancient Moche backflap, worn over the back of a warrior in the Moche culture 1,500 years ago, made of gold. You wrote: "The backflap seemed to haunt all who touched it. The grave robber who discovered the tomb was later killed by police. The first wealthy Peruvian to obtain it died mysteriously. The second went bankrupt. The son of the Miami smuggler Mendez was born prematurely and lived less than two months, and as his infant lay dying in his arms, Mendez swore his shriveled face resembled the decapitator god engraved on the backflap." What did you make of this?

Robert Wittman: All those things were true. They were all part of the provenance, the history of that stolen golden object — the largest piece of gold ever found in a tomb in the Americas. It went underground for over ten years before we were able to coax it out of hiding and recover it for the Peruvian people.

All those individuals who died, possibly as a result of a curse — it could be part of it. It could have just been coincidence. But when three, four, five things happen, it's usually more than coincidence. Maybe one or two. And I can tell you, I recovered it and gave it back to the Peruvian people, and nothing's happened to me. So I guess it wasn't mad at me.

But there is a certain aura around some of these objects, because they've been around for hundreds of years. Stealing them and doing things to them is a very bad idea.

I remember one piece we recovered was an eagle feather war bonnet worn by Geronimo. It was being offered for sale, and it's illegal to sell eagle feathers in the U.S. When we recovered it, it was looking pretty bad — stuck in a steamer trunk for years, the feathers beat up. Then we got a call from a local Lenape tribe, asking if they could come in and bless the war bonnet. Eagle feathers are sacred in Native American culture — they're considered the telephones to the gods, because the eagle could fly between the earth and the sky.

We were a little worried, because they were going to bring in incense and burn it, and I didn't want the alarms going off in the federal building in Philadelphia. But we let them do it. And I'm telling you, Hugh — as they were doing the blessings with the incense, the eagle feathers literally started to perk up. They looked fluffy, much better. They changed right in front of our eyes. There were four or five FBI agents standing there watching. It looked to me like they were happy to be back in an environment that looked at them as sacred instruments.

I've had a few experiences like that with recovered pieces. These things have an aura beyond just a golden object or a feather — something imbued by humans for centuries.

Hugh Leeman: There's something mystical to these pieces, like the Moche backflap and Geronimo's headdress.

Robert Wittman: Right. And then again, there's other times where I recover Rolex watches, and there was nothing to them. So it all depends.

The One That Got Away: The Gardner Heist

Hugh Leeman: I want to finish with the biggest unsolved art heist — the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, half a billion dollars of Rembrandts and Vermeers. You had them right in your hand in Europe, and it fell apart amidst a clusterfuck of people wanting credit for the case. One person you mention, FBI agent Jeffrey Kelly, went on the record earlier this year stating he knows who stole the pieces, that the two men were killed within a year of the heist, and that he's confident the paintings will be returned. What are your thoughts?

Robert Wittman: I think it's great that he knows who did it. I know Jeff well — he's a good guy. When we were working this case back in 2007, he was a fairly new agent, only had a few years on the job. He wasn't around in 1990 when the paintings were stolen. I was actually an agent at that time, so I was involved with it for many years, up until Jeff got into it.

I think it's great that Jeff thinks he knows, or says he knows, who the thieves were. As far as I'm concerned, my goal throughout my career was to recover the art, more than to catch the thieves. I was more interested in recovering the material than locking somebody up. So I hope he's right. I hope we can get these pieces back. Right now there's a $10 million reward for information. So if any of your listeners have any idea where these paintings are, they should get in touch with you and me, and maybe we can help them out.

Hugh Leeman: Bob Wittman, thank you very much.

Robert Wittman: Hey, Hugh, it's great to talk to you.

By  Robert Brokl

San Francisco artist Emmy Lou Packard, along with her artist husband Byron Randall, packed up and moved to the charming but somewhat down-at-the-heels North Coast California lumbertown of Mendocino in 1960. She and the town were both in transition, and each subsequently impacted the other. Packard was moved to lead the efforts to save the town from commercial development, while making a life for herself and Randall there for nine years, depicting the architecture and landscape.

In 1960, she was 46, middle-aged, and mid-career. Her first husband, Burton Cairns, an architect she had met at UC-Berkeley, had died in a tragic car accident in 1939, and their son, Donald Cairns, was mid-twenties. Packard was an established, well-integrated artist, along with Randall, of the artistic, progressive community centered around the legendary Montgomery Block Building. She also was longtime close friends with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, whom she’d known from childhood in Mexico, where her leftist father worked as an agronomist. Later Packard worked as their studio assistant in Mexico and with Rivera on murals in San Francisco, and she shared their socialist political views—the ones she’d inherited. Rivera inserted a portrait of her at work, wearing baggy blue jeans and sandals, easel in hand, in his 1940 Pan American Unity Mural, lent by City College of San Francisco to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for their 2022 Rivera Retrospective.

She and most likely Randall were both members the Communist Party USA, and at the height of the Red Scare era in the McCarthy post-war period, she had been ordered to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, although she publicly challenged the summons and was never forced to appear. But Packard and Randall assumed commissions would dry up after the summons, and leaving San Francisco, her home since 1941, seemed wise, according to the definitive (to date) monograph on Packard by Gallerist John Natsoulas. The monograph was updated in 2022 in connection with the long overdue retrospective of her work at the Richmond Art Center the same year, scheduled to coincide with the Rivera show. 

They bought the 1882 Victorian on 44860 Main St., establishing a gallery, B & B inn, and their studios. (The house more recently, before reverting to private use, was Didjeridoo Dreamtime Inn.) The English Gothic 1868 Presbyterian Church is directly across the street, and was often depicted by Randall in his rough-hewn, expressionist style.The church’s Preston Hall contains a Packard painting of children, Peace and Brotherhood to all Nations, used for promotion by UNICEF. Located behind their house is the Luna Restaurant, built by her as a studio to create an installation piece of large paintings for the Fresno Convention Center.

Watertower aka tankhouse depicted by Packard occupies the lot next door. The town was built on the headlands, a bluff, and while the sea is literally at your feet, the water supply is dependent upon shallow wells, hence tankhouses that store water pumped to the tanks at the top, gravity fed for plumbing and irrigation. She also portrayed the nearby Masonic Temple, now a bank, with the sculpture Time and the Maiden above the cupola. 

Mendocino ca. 1960 was no longer a bustling lumbertown with a prominent lumber mill on the bluff. Other than the demolition of the mill, in anticipation of the sale of the property by the local Union Lumber Company to Boise Cascade, the town itself was an intact Victorian-era village, with austere structures mostly either clad in weathered shingles or painted stark white with black trim, almost Shaker in their simplicity. Mendocino had thrived on the fur, lumber, and whaling industries, the inconvenient Pomo Indians had either been killed or uprooted to reservations in what is described as one of the worst genocides against native Indian tribes in the entire country.

Viewers of the 1955 East of Eden movie, with its anachronistic James Dean lead, may not be aware the town is a substitute for the Salinas of the Steinbeck novel, providing glimpses of the buildings on Main St. later demolished on the bluff. The elaborate Victorian Preston Mansion, home of the Dean character’s patriarchal father, subsequently burned down in 1956, and is now the site of the Mendocino Art Center and the repository of Packard artwork gifted by her son. The founding director of the Center, Bill Zacha, is said to have convinced artist friends such as Packard and Randall to relocate. 

By branding the town, lovingly depicting every building in her View of Mendocino from Highway 1, she is in the company of American artists making icons of their surroundings—Georgia O’Keefe with New Mexico, Edward Hopper with Truro, Cape Cod, and Marsden Hartley with Maine. View’s potency perhaps derives partly from Packard’s fidelity to detail but also the view from afar, as if discovered by someone coming upon it for the first time. In 1960, inspired by the new visual material, Packard was on a roll, and many of her most notable prints date from then.

Packard’s concentration on linoleum or wood cut prints was part of her democratizing aesthetic and orientation. She said she’d sold, at affordable prices, over 4,000 prints in her lifetime. She never produced numbered editions—the staple of the fine art press production business, which prioritizes scarcity. She was a skilled painter and draftsperson, but the print medium allowed her to produce multiples from the same fixed matrix, and she employed young artists like Rick Tejada-Flores, who helped organize the Richmond show (along with Robbin Henderson and Art Hazelwood), to help her print. She experimented with colors and other effects during the printing process, so the prints are varied.

Packard was quite the colorist, as in Surf Fishing, Mendocino Coast, with vivid turquoise sea, salmon shore, and red sun, or the almost lurid shades of pink in the commissioned prints of tide pools and coral. She had detailed instructions about colors for her prints in a notebook since lost. Her use of black and white is also formidable. No available sources explain her unusual, exaggeratedly vertical or horizontal formats, but early panoramic photographs have that horizontal format, and several are on view at the nearby Guest House Museum in Fort Bragg. (The Guest House Museum is a 1892 Victorian built by a lumber magnate, its redwood interior created with locally harvested lumber. A large, vertical  linoleum Packard print of oxen teams hauling logs hangs in the grand stairwell, and the museum features the lumber industry.)

You have to look afield to someone like Kathe Kollwitz to find a woman artist who made her mark specializing in printmaking. Notable, too, is Packard’s lifelong Type 1 diabetes. One reason her mother, a nurse, encouraged her choice to pursue art was her belief her daughter didn’t have long to live. Indeed, insulin derived from pig pancreases was new, ground-breaking treatment, and  Packard was one of the first to benefit. Tejada-Flores said she carried supplies of fruit juice in her car, in case her blood sugar plummeted. According to Natsoulas, “Throughout her life, she was plagued by health problems stemming from this disease, including vision problems that led to eye surgery. She noted later in life that, ‘I’ve often wished I had a limp, or more ‘visible’ physical handicap. Diabetes doesn’t show. When insulin lowers your blood sugar too much you simply begin to sound like you’re only half-witted, and people begin to wonder what in hell is wrong with you.’“

Unfortunately, description regarding Packard’s artwork is woefully inadequate, and more scholarship in general would be welcome. She often combined wood and linoleum blocks in prints, but descriptions often omit this fact, despite the obvious contrast between the fine buttery lines possible with linoleum and the abraded textures of plywood, which co-exist in Watertower, Masonic Temple, etc.

Before she left Mendocino in 1969 to return to San Francisco, her marriage to Randall ending, she led the ultimately successful effort to prevent development on the Headlands bluff, resulting in the creation of the state park and the entire town placed on the National Register of Historic Places, preserved in time like Siena, Italy or Ouro Preto, Brazil. Today, Packard is revered in Mendocino, almost as a secular patron saint. With her preservation activism and her affiliation with the Peace and Freedom Party, Packard embraced a form of practical, pragmatic, and not explicitly political “sewer socialism,” now championed by Zohran Mamdani and others.

SFMOMA lacks even one Packard in their permanent collection, and the Oakland Museum of California has her large Mirabeau Restaurant Kaiser Center concrete sculpture Peaceable Kingdom, The Garden Before the Fall of Man, from 1967, in storage needing restoration. But other venues to see Packard artwork include auction houses, speciality print galleries, the internet, and, by appointment, her pieces in the collection of the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. 

The 2022 retrospective was a recent highwater mark for Packard, but she’s yet to receive the belated acknowledgment and distinction of other formerly marginalized Bay Area artists like Ruth Asawa and Bernice Bing.

July 8–September 6, 2026

By Elizabeth Johnson

     Valerie Huhn's sculpture and painting exhibition at the Hunterdon Art Museum, The Wound Is The Place Where The Light Enters You, joins two important topics: being educated about the empowerment of marginalized people during her formative years in San Francisco, and reconciling her own troubled history with a grateful and creative present. In her teens, Huhn suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. For years, she was intermittently institutionalized until she was properly diagnosed and started medication. After achieving independence and becoming an artist, she took a wrong turn––literally––that led her back to a former hospital parking lot. "I started to search myself for the large unhealed wound that needed care,” she says. “That was when I realized I was talking about myself in my art."

     Mixing ritual, magic, science, and literature, Huhn represents the DNA nucleotide bases (A, T, C, G) by fastening four acetate holepunch circles painted with the print of her right forefinger to hundreds of pins. She inserts the colorful fingerprint pins into books and personal objects, creating auras or personality clouds that both attract and repel, are beautiful and dangerous. Counterbalancing the aggression of voodoo dolls and pain with the healing of acupuncture, metal pins pierce tiny, delicately embossed acetate discs, expressing an intensely focused intellect at work. Her work reminds me of making an insect collection: the year-long process of trapping and pinning, where the seasonal timing of insect emergence determines the project's overall pattern and meaning. Huhn's creative system becomes a time-sensitive taxonomy of thought and feeling about shared human identity.

Fingerprint Mural (2007) is a diary of Huhn painting her fingertip with multiple ink colors and pressing once or more on a giant scroll à la Agnes Martin. Each tiny print is different, and when she gets multiple printings from a single finger-load of ink, the sequence stutters cinematically. As I draw closer at the piece, I realize that what looked like a scumbled charcoal line between pointillistic rows of fingerprints is a monologue written in immaculate miniscule longhand, an unbroken date stamp recordingthe days she worked. I admire how the large mural seems to float and flow from the wall, gently asserting monk-like serenity. Fingerprint Mural reminds me of Howardena Pindell's multimedia pieces of pinned numbers and circles that bucked the use of small red dots separating Black people's glasses and dishes during Jim Crow, though Huhn says she was first inspired by Andy Warhol's Ben Day dots. 

     In books by some of the best contemporary writers, who turn vulnerability into strength, Huhn chooses quotes by leaving space around them. The quotes stand out in contrast to continuous pinning below or between the two facing pages. To honor all the words, she is careful to not pierce them. She takes a sleight-of-hand approach to structure. She carves out space underneath the featured pages and then inserts foam to make pinning easier. "I chose to leave quotes bare that I felt carried a kernel of meaning representative of the work,” she told me, “and of meaning that reverberated with me long after I set the book down. Each quote also carried a shared interaction within the book's contents.” The line in bell hooks's All About Love––"There can be no love without justice"––inspired Huhn's All About Love (2026). Huhn said, "I read this part of her book and just couldn't let it go. I read and then reread each book as well as listened to the ones I can get access to via the Libby app. I spend hours and days poring over the book's contents and its language in search of a sentence or two that convey a truth and beauty that wraps itself around my heart and mind and echoes within me."

     (back) Fingerprint Mural, 2007, ink on paper, 120” H x 55” L. (front) On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, 2025, repurposed copy of OceanVuong's On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, ink, acetate, pins, 2.5” H x 9.25” W x 12.25” L. with Wood Swing, 2026, sedona stain, hardware, glitter, paint, ink, acetate, pins, monofilament .75” H x 8.5” W 18”L. (photo credit Valerie Huhn)

Several books in the exhibit are presented on suspended wooden plank and plastic chain swings, the chains wrapped to mimic DNA double helixes with fingerprint pins that have been individually tied and twirled together with quilting thread or monofilament. Huhn's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2025) transforms a copy of Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by pinning around "There were colors, Ma. Yes, there were colors I felt when I was with him. Not words––but shades, penumbras." Huhn says Vuong's "sentences are instantly accessible, ripe with intensity and feeling. Vuong's writing is so lyrical. Almost anyone who has ever loved knows what this feels like. The words are so rich."Her The Fire Next Time (2026) fingerprint pins around a quote in James Baldwin’s eponymous novel: "To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world." She says, "I held my breath when I reread this sentence, its honesty adroitly carried the weight of history and its meaning." 

Against the Loveless World (2025) alters Susan Abulhawa's novel Against the Loveless World, which also celebrates Baldwin's phrase, by pinning Abulhawa's text continuously without piercing the words. This piece and Huhn's treatment of Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl are displayed inside mirror boxes made of one-way glass, which Huhn encountered when she was hospitalized. The boxes create ephemeral reflections of natural and artificial light throughout the day and night. These pieces read as miniature, hermetically sealed weather systems, the surveillance glass opaque from the captive or internal side and clear from the perspective of freedom: the authority and the viewer.

      In Percival Everett’s novel James, based on Huckleberry Finn, the enslaved character Jim privately calls himself James and is taught to read and given a stolen pencil. By cleverly carving out white space in a line break as a compartment for an actual pencil, Huhn's James (2025) expands this symbol of literacy into an equal sign between author and reader. 

     Fingerprint Pin Ladder (2025) offers a Baroque memorial to the day that Huhn donned running shoes and escaped from a Philadelphia mental hospital. A ladder composed of custom-made, unbreakable safety sporks and spoons floats off the wall, wafting plant-like threads of hot glue, evidence of its assembly. The ladder seems to dissolve under the weight of helix spirals of magnetic fingerprint pins and a pair of trainers titled Fingerprint Pin Shoes (2025). Huhn recalls, "Running away from hospital was the only time I truly knew I made the right decision."

      Supplying the opportunity to feel the terror of what Huhn calls "a brain injury where a person never comes back" and "the shock of being able to focus, remember, and read again," The Wound Is The Place Where The Light Enters presents hands-on collaborations with specific ideas of some of our best contemporary writers. Happiest in fluid intimacy with authors about the life truths of vulnerability, self-regard, and love, she says, "I'm half German and a quarter Asian with a smattering of Romanian, Austrian, and Celtic ancestry. One of my grandparents hails from Mongolia. Now more than ever, I'm a part of the art I make."