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."

Inset display “The “Freelancer” Life”. Float-mounted objects including a cast Virgin Mary, a Gatorade bottle of yellow liquid, a rusted Chef Boyardee can, a BuzzBallz “Biggies,” prescription bottles, hand tools, and a skull in a helmet.

By Chad Abbley

The gallery lights weren't on. A black curtain covered the doorway to keep the daylight out, and behind it, in the dark, a skeleton sat on a red Vespa next to a small CRT portable television from the nineties. The skeleton was wearing a helmet — California state law when operating a motorcycle — and the helmet had a microphone and a speaker mounted on it. You could speak into the microphone and it would transmit whatever you said back out through the speaker, with a layer of reverb added.

Future Relics: Curatorial Edits from 4087 — Artifacts from the Berkeley Time Rift was Oliver Hawk Holden's solo exhibition at 120710 Gallery in Berkeley, which closed July 19. The darkness of the main gallery gave way to the entrance of another, smaller gallery built inside it — this one lit with enough light to make you squint until your eyes adjusted. A white cube, the perfect encapsulation of the modern art gallery. Diffused panels in the ceiling, stark white smooth walls. The doorway had been built to standard dimensions and then widened to double the size by breaking away the drywall, the rough edges of the destruction left visible. There were additional holes that looked like they could have been punched out by someone's fist, or maybe a baseball bat. Punched-out drywall has a specific aesthetic.

Holden is an SFAI alumnus known for kinetic sculpture and new media installations — carved wood reliefs, found objects, lo-fi video, hand-built moving parts, often with an intentional DIY aesthetic.

Inside, the dark gray painted box carried a texture across its entire exterior, and the contrast between the dark outside and the bright interior was immediate. The finished interior walls were smooth and presentable, undistracting, the light falling on a set of three inset coves where objects were mounted to look as if they were floating on the wall. A lemon-lime Buzzballz "Biggies," a staple in any liquor store worth its weight in the Bay Area. A twenty-ounce Gatorade bottle filled with a mystery yellow liquid that looked as if it may have come from a dehydrated person — the irony is not lost, since this person probably did not consume the beverage that was originally in the bottle. A rusted can of Chef Boyardee beef ravioli. A cast metal Virgin Mary, about twenty inches tall, with screws around her entire radius. A vintage Oakland Tribune, its paper yellowed from decades of degradation, headlined "Earth Gravity Pulls Apollo 11 Homeward." A gold-plated Pokémon card.

Inset Display, “Gods and Deities of the Past.” Includes a painted portrait of Bill Clinton, a 1969 Oakland Tribune, a MAD magazine, a Michelin Man figurine, and a painted panel of four United States maps.

The evenly diffused lighting from the drop ceiling presented the space as polished, and forced you to reconsider whether these objects — some of which you might find in the trash — were more important than you first considered. The space in which they live generates their value. It is the same arrangement as the artifacts of the past. Ancient pottery never thought of ending up in a display case behind glass in a museum. What would those people have made of this? How weird would they think we are for doing it? What is trash to us now may be a priceless object someday.

"The Rotational Scan" took the interactive elements further and made the person viewing the show part of it. A foot pedal snaked out of a hole punched in the wall; a webcam and a small battery were zip-tied to a wooden dowel driven by an electric motor, and the resulting scan was projected onto a screen mounted just outside the entrance to the built gallery. Whoever stood in the center and worked the pedal became the subject. The viewer is an active participant and apparatus inside the show. The text accompanying the work talked about how we are never able to see our own faces, which made me think about how we need technology in order to see ourselves at all — whether it is a mirror made from melted sand or a camera assembled by hands I will never see. Cameras record our every move, marketed as a way to capture our memories, a personal memento to hold onto forever, and then stored inside a cloud server somewhere.

It's hard to see what is happening while it's happening.

A mannequin in the enclave on the right-hand side wall of the exhibition cube. Dressed in a blue-collar outfit with hat and glasses, seemingly nondescript aside from the chainmail headwear. A cordless handheld bandsaw and catalytic converter sat mounted next to it. The mannequin refers to life as a gig worker in modern society, the essential practice of so many in the art space — the workers who bring to life the ideas of the dreamers and visionaries who were anointed the role of curator and taste maker.

I find myself looking at the way things are installed when I visit art museums. The barometers in the corners of the room measuring humidity. The security clips on the hanging hook attached to the D-rings on the back of a Rothko. The routing of the cables on the pedestal connected to a slide projector. I have become my own installation crew on every occasion I have had a show. Here, the trade became the artwork. Most of the shows I see fall within a certain range of production, the gallery dictating the environment — an unassuming blank slate, maybe some vinyl lettering, a wall painted a solid color, some site-specific embellishment. The focus usually lands on whatever ends up on the walls. In this show the focus became the environment instead. I know Oliver to be a preparator, and those skills were used here to make something that goes further than I think most artists would be able to; it feels honest to use the skills that pay the bills. The inset displays and brazed wire float mounting gave the feeling of a museum display, but the small scale of the space rattled the illusion. The full ceiling of diffused lighting was something out of a science fiction movie. Galleries don't usually opt for that treatment.

What worked about the show is that you don't need much context to get something out of it. It feels more universal than most exhibitions I have been to. A lot of artists either ignore narrative completely or shoehorn their practice into whatever trend is currently winning grant applications, and I didn't feel that here, which was a welcome relief. But I keep returning to the skeleton at the entrance, the first thing you encounter. Mortality. When you put the pieces together and rip the bandaid off the art world, or more broadly the larger system we're all cogs in, some suppressed feelings tend to bubble up. The art world as the same crushing system as any other, disguised as culturally enriching — a wolf in sheep's clothing. What will be left behind when we are all gone? What server will it live on?

Red Flags ran July 1-July 30, 2026. All photos by the author.

By Carlos Alcalá

I can’t say that the work of Andy Goldsworthy goes unappreciated. The New Yorker recently did a nice piece on him. Out in the world, though, his work does seem to go under the radar. It feels hidden in plain sight.

While the lucky Bay Area art lover may have to wait in a crowd for an unobstructed view of Morisot or Kahlo or Vermeer at a blockbuster show, an equally lucky visitor to one of Goldsworthy’s nearby site-specific works may find themself in solitary meditation with a sinuous rock wall, a towering cypress spire or a winding eucalyptus path.

When I’ve visited his Stone River at Stanford University, I have often been the only person taking in the marvelous piece – carefully constructed from sandstone by master masons and winding snake-like between trees and dry grass.

Perhaps paradoxically, his most-seen work in the area goes largely unrecognized. Last year, more than 840,000 people visited the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. The majority of them walked on, or even sat on, Goldsworthy’s Drawn Stone at the main entrance. I’d wager many of those had no idea that the crack in the sandstone walkway was his art. I certainly was unaware of it on my first visits to the rebuilt de Young.

My current musing is occasioned by a visit to Red Flags, Goldsworthy’s latest temporary installation, through July at Fort Mason in San Francisco. When I visited mid-month, midweek, I was again nearly alone. There were only three other visitors in the cavernous pier, aside from me and my wife.

Why?

A friend, with whom I first encountered Goldsworthy’s work, suggests it may be because this is an artist who defies “showiness.” His work is the antithesis of shiny, oversized Pop baubles created by big names. It is of nature, for nature, and frequently in nature. 

It is unobtrusive. Instead of grabbing attention, it rewards reflection.

Red Flags is simply 50 flags dyed with dirt from the 50 states of the USA. It is almost monotonous when seen as one flag after another, arrayed in chronological order of statehood. It runs from Delaware, 1776, to Hawaii, 1959. (However, they are not labeled. Visitors can pick up a list.) The colors range from a pale tan to a dark, rusty red (think Richard Serra), but with 50 flags, many tones seem the same, or nearly so.

It is not, at a glance, the most visually rewarding of Goldsworthy’s works. It demands reflection and careful attention, and perhaps that’s what these flags are signaling. They signal a need for observation and, at the same time, the installation enables reflection, attention and observation. 

The inability to sustain attention in the face of micro-media and fast commerce is a modern bugaboo. Currently, there’s also a vogue for looking at a single artwork for a specified amount of time in order to fight that demon; in order to practice observation and build attentional muscles. I don’t recommend looking at one of Goldsworthy’s flags for 10 or 20 minutes. I’m not sure it would be particularly rewarding.

Instead, the installation embodies what the Bay Area artist and writer Jenny Odell has called “the architecture of nothing.” Red Flags, to use Odell’s words, “holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit and familiarity.” It frees us to do nothing and allows us to observe closely. Odell has credited the 2017 Goldsworthy film, “Leaning into the Wind,” with helping her to crystallize her ideas, expressed beautifully in her 2019 book, “How to Do Nothing.”

The sameness of the flags offers an opportunity to look, not longer, but differently. One needs to observe groups of flags, fragments of flags. One should be conscious of the different angles from which they can be seen. In that context, the largely white shell of the pier building becomes a part of what is there to be seen, or perhaps the negative space that frames the flags.

Intentionally or not, the flags put me in mind of Josef Albers, who juxtaposed squares of color to show that color is not absolute. It is a product of relationships. With Red Flags, we have rectangles of similar colors, juxtaposed to show nuance of difference, but also the sameness of the 50 states. It cannot be understood without thinking about the relationships.

How are the states the same, how are they different? Goldsworthy, an Englishman, establishes American common ground with a 51st flag, pigmented by combining native soils of all 50 states.

All of Goldsworthy’s work is about relationships. At very least, it ponders the relationships between the art, the artist and the site, but often about more. Each visitor needs to find their own connection with Red Flags.

I always enjoy Goldsworthy projects because I find in them an enormous respect for nature and materials and a high level of thought and craft.

Here are other Bay Area Goldsworthy pieces I’ve seen in recent years, with their locations and years of creation:

Stone River, 2001: A snaking sandstone wall, near Stanford University’s Cantor Center, created with stone salvaged from Stanford buildings destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.

Drawn Stone, 2005: A crack running through sandstone at the entrance to the de Young Museum. It echoes the earthquake that forced the museum to be rebuilt.

Spire, 2008: A rocketing spire of rough, Monterey cypress trunks, high on a hill in San Francisco’s Presidio.

Wood Line, 2011: A romantic, wavy path-sculpture in the Presidio, delineated with downed eucalyptus branches.

Tree Fall, 2013: Great, reaching branches within the Presidio’s small Powder Magazine – the ceiling and branches covered with cracking clay. (Currently closed)

Earth Wall, 2014: A sphere of eucalyptus branches interred within a rammed-earth wall and then partially excavated. At the Presidio’s Officers’ Club.

Geophagia, 2022: a dining table covered with kaolin clay which cracked. The name echoes a medical term for clay eating, but also suggests how we are destroying our environment. The piece was a collaboration between Goldsworthy and Heath Ceramics. (Short-term installation for For-Site’s “Land’s End” show at the former Cliff House.)

MAESTRAPEACE, mural on The San Francisco Women's Building, 18th and

Valencia Streets, Juana Alicia, Edythe Boone, Miranda Bergman, Susan

Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton and Irene Perez, © 1994, 2000, 2010.

Juana Alicia is a muralist, printmaker, sculptor, illustrator, painter, and educator whose career spans more than four decades. Working in a style rooted in magical and social realism, she addresses social justice, gender equality, environmental crisis, cultural memory, and resistance. Her honors include a Fulbright Fellowship, a Windcall Residency, Precita Eyes’ Master Muralist Award, and a California Arts Council Legacy Artist Award.

Her public artworks appear throughout California and in Mexico, Nicaragua, and Pennsylvania. Major projects include SANARTE at UCSF Medical Center, SANTUARIO at San Francisco International Airport, LA LLORONA’S SACRED WATERS in San Francisco’s Mission District, MAESTRAPEACE at the Women’s Building, and GEMELOS in Mérida.

A longtime professor, she founded Berkeley City College’s True Colors Public Murals program. San Francisco State University recently awarded her an honorary doctorate in Fine Arts. She divides her time between the Bay Area and Mérida, Yucatán, and continues developing community-based public art projects.

Portrait Photo of Juana Alicia by Alexa Treviño

Muralist, Educator, Activist | Interview by Hugh Leeman

Paper Dolls on the Kitchen Floor

Hugh Leeman: Juana, you've described your first memories of art making as cutting out paper dolls with your mother, and sitting on butcher paper on the kitchen floor drawing figures with your mom and sister. How did that early domestic, collaborative form of art making shape the way you approached murals, public art, and collective image making?

Juana Alicia: What you learn in the home as a young child is very important, and my mother always really encouraged my creativity. It's good to be embedded in family when you do that. I do that with my grandchildren now — a lot of projects with them.

Learning to work not just with family but with community, to create something in a group, is really important. I struggle against this ivory tower artist image all the time. Even though I work on my own a lot in my studio, I'm always standing on the shoulders of my ancestors and my mentors, and held by my communities — large circles that inform my work.

My mother also took me to the Detroit Institute of Arts, where I saw the Rivera murals on the Detroit automobile industry from a young age, and that made a very strong impression. My grandmother took me to the public library, where there was a Rodin sculpture out front and a mural inside by LeRoy Foster, Black Muralist, Detroit Public Library Damned, Doomed and Drowned (film title). At the Art Institute I was exposed to artists like Romare Bearden, the Black Arts Movement.

And from my high school days, I was very impacted by my art history teacher, who became my godmother and guided me throughout my life. She died a week after her hundredth birthday this year, on March 8th. She was a sculptor and an art historian — Dr. Cledie Collins Taylor. She ran the longest-living Black arts gallery in the Midwest for over fifty years, called Arts Extended, and she had a plethora of students and godchildren she taught and mentored and supported throughout our lives.

Tomorrow at the Museum of Modern Art, I'm going to be talking about her, because I did a couple of portraits of her for an organization called As We Grow Older, sponsored by the nMetta Foundation. I'll be in dialogue with Fabiana Rodriguez, a wonderful public artist here in the East Bay, and she'll be interviewing me about that portrait. So during my childhood I had those wonderful influences — mother, godmother.

Hugh Leeman: It's beautiful to think about how someone can enter your life that way and influence the direction your career has taken. You've also mentioned Käthe Kollwitz and Rivera.

Juana Alicia: Absolutely. And during the seventies and eighties, I was blessed to make friends with several Mexican artists from a little after Rivera's generation — maybe the era of La Ruptura in Mexican painting, but they were actually very active before that, in the 1930s, in the graphic arts workshop, El Taller de Gráfica Popular. That was Alfredo Zalce and Alberto Beltrán. They became friends and mentors, in the sense that their friendship was an example of how you can work as an activist and contribute to your community, and work internationally — because the TGP worked in solidarity with the Spanish resistance against Franco, they did a lot of international work. It was a beautiful thing to have those Mexican mentors as well.

Struggling Against the Ivory Tower

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned that you struggle against the ivory towers of the art world. What is that struggle?

Juana Alicia: It's a very colonial imposition of a role upon the rest of the world, in terms of what the model for creativity is. In so many cultures across the globe, and in Indigenous cultures, people work together to make art — they collaborated and cooperated. And then there's this whole notion that it's one individual genius.

People like the Guerrilla Girls have been really great and instrumental in dispelling that, too, with the idea of feminism — that a more horizontal, transparent, democratic social structure fosters a different kind of culture. And artists are part of making that.

The Farm Workers Union and an Education on the Ground

Hugh Leeman: You have a backstory that sets your career in motion. In your twenties and thirties, you were a farm worker with the United Farm Workers Union, and you were part of picket lines. How did those experiences impact you?

Juana Alicia: That was the most foundational education I could have received. Wonderful training by working-class intellectuals from Mexico who were participating in the United Farm Workers Union — from everyday workers, people who had immigrated mostly from central Mexico, Michoacán, Jalisco, during those years.

Such an amazing learning experience in terms of how to organize, how to create victories with the union model. There were many flaws in the approaches of all of the movements born in the 1960s and 70s. The Black Power movement was a model for all of us. It was the Black Panthers, which I was familiar with growing up as a teenager in Detroit — I attended meetings, and I was also part of the anti-Vietnam War movement. But the farm workers was really a total immersion, on-the-ground training for how to gain rights for workers. And artists are workers as well.

Reclaiming La Llorona

Hugh Leeman: There's a scholarly article I came across about your mural La Llorona's Sacred Waters, describing your reworking of that tragic folk legend from victim or scapegoat into a Mother Earth figure — a heroic actor. How do you approach transforming culturally inherited myths that have been used to discipline or blame women into images of agency and resistance?

Juana Alicia: I was fortunate to be influenced by the writings of someone like Gloria Anzaldúa. I participated in her first book, This Bridge Called My Back, feminist writings from Latinas — writings and artwork. There was a very important seminal, or ovarian, article by two Chicana feminists about this particular theme: reworking and reclaiming La Llorona, La Chingada, La Malinche — those myths that were formed by a patriarchal mentality — and reclaiming them as Chicana feminist myths. I didn't do this on my own. I came to this through other writings by Chicana feminist writers.

Another way I came to reworking the Llorona story was through my teaching at UC Davis. I had a marvelous class on the border economies of the Southwest, with some fabulous students. I'm a Freirean-based educator, so I believe in students and professors being equal partners in research. All of us did a lot of research, and one of the big issues this class helped me research was water — water issues in the Southwest and how that affects economies.

One of the readings I required was Vandana Shiva's Water Wars. These struggles are international. Also the film that Arundhati Roy played a big role in, Drowned Out, about the struggles around the Narmada River Valley and the dam first proposed by the World Bank, then abandoned after great international criticism — but the project went forward under other auspices. There were a lot of resources I tapped in creating that image for La Llorona's Sacred Waters.

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned you're a Freirean-based teacher. Is this referential to Pedagogy of the Oppressed?

Juana Alicia: Absolutely. Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and many other books. And not just him — he worked with Augusto Boal in theater, and there were other arts movements influenced by Freirean thinking. Freire's daughter continued the legacy as well. The idea is that everyone comes to the learning situation with a source of knowledge and information, that everyone's experience is welcomed into a group of people who come to share those experiences and enrich whatever we're learning.

Maestrapeace: Seven Women and a Five-Story Wall

Hugh Leeman: You talk about the power of collaboration and collectivity. There's a very large mural in San Francisco you worked on — the Women's Building mural, Maestrapeace. The collaboration among seven women artists was described as being as important as the image on the wall itself. How did that project change your understanding of authorship, ego, trust, and collective power?

Juana Alicia: There were two murals most transformative for me on that question.

The first was in Nicaragua in 1985, when the artists from Balmy Alley were invited by Ernesto Cardenal, the great Nicaraguan poet. He had visited Balmy Alley, and he invited us to go to Nicaragua to paint a mural in solidarity with the Nicaraguan revolution. Four of us went — myself, Miranda Bergman, Arch Williams, and Ariella Seidenberg — to Managua during the Contra War, to paint this mural in collaboration with ANDEN, the National Teachers Union, whose headquarters is located in El Parque de las Madres in Managua. We were one of a series of invited international solidarity murals in that park. Across the way there's a mural by LA artists Yreina Cervántez and Barbara Carrasco.

That collective empowerment — working with the teachers' union, working with people who were sent into a war zone to do literacy education — was a very, very scary time, and a very productive time, and a time of flowering in terms of the Nicaraguan revolution. We know it wasn't entirely successful, but it was an amazing example of collaboration. We interviewed the teachers, we worked with the teachers, and we created that mural along with the teachers and the whole community.

On the heels of that, a few years later, two of us from that project — myself and Miranda Bergman — applied for the commission on the Women's Building, which became Maestrapeace. We applied to a call for artists, and five other sisters in paint were selected. We were in an arranged marriage. Not all of us had worked together, or even knew each other. I had done a couple of murals with Susan Cervantes, so we were already work wives. I knew Irene Pérez from Mujeres Muralistas. Yvonne Littleton was a new friend. Edythe Boone I knew as a friend but had never worked with. And Meera Desai I was meeting for the first time.

The seven of us got together and did a drawing in a few months, and it was extremely harmonious. A beautiful experience. We each did our own concept drawing — and we decided right from the outset that although the Women's Building had told us we had a certain section of the wall on 18th Street, when the seven of us got together, even at that point in our careers we had over a hundred years of mural painting experience among us. And we said: we're going to do the whole building. And surprise them. There wasn't the budget for it or anything, but we did it. We designed the whole building. Each of us took a wall and did the drawings, then we came together and negotiated the imagery to all of our liking, and presented it at a huge meeting. Everything was analog at that time — surveys sent out to the community on paper. People came to this big community meeting to see our drawings, and we shocked and surprised the Women's Building with the design for the whole building. They embraced it, but then we had to do a lot of fundraising after that.

That experience of working with those women was so beautiful. We had a hundred women volunteers who came and worked with us, whom we supervised. Some were already really accomplished, like Jane Norling and Xochitl Nevel Guerrero. It was an incredible group effort. We all ate lunch together, sat on the sidewalk together. The building is five stories high — we had to haul our water up five stories. A few of us worked at the top; people were a little afraid of that.

There were parts of the drawing I made that other people painted. Miranda Bergman did the sketch of Rigoberta Menchú; I painted her; Susan painted her huipil. We mixed it up so all of our styles combined and it wouldn't look like anybody's style was dominating.

It was an amazing lesson. We also had to fight the city, because they paused our project. They said they couldn't go forward because it was on a historical building, and there were mutterings about us destroying a historical landmark. There was a lot of racism and sexism behind that. We tried to win it through local politicians — Art Agnos and others — and when that didn't work, we had to take it to the press. We won our struggle in the press, and the city released the funds. They had been withholding funds for all mural projects in the city because of our project.

So there were a lot of struggles we had to confront together, and we really had each other's backs, and we've had a lifelong relationship since. We did a book together — the Maestrapeace book, produced by Heyday Books. It's out of print now, but you can still get it online. It has a foreword by Angela Davis, and poetry by Genny Lim, Alice Walker, Naomi Quiñonez, devorah major. We're talking about poet laureates here. It documents our process and our relationship — because we've maintained this sisterhood for several decades now. Each woman has a section in the book of her own work.

Hugh Leeman: It's inspiring that you were able to work together against a bureaucratic system using the free press to get those funds released.

Juana Alicia: The press is not so free anymore either. But we're on different platforms.

Dolores Huerta, Corbis, and a Precedent-Setting Lawsuit

Hugh Leeman: There's another name you haven't mentioned yet who has been a hero to so many people — Dolores Huerta. Who is Dolores Huerta to you personally?

Juana Alicia: Dolores Huerta is a friend. She's a role model for sure. I hope I can be dancing the way she is in my nineties. Her recent revelations sort of shook the earth, but were not so surprising in many ways. I have tremendous admiration for her.

I worked with her from afar when I was a farm worker. I didn't know her personally, but I saw her a lot, because she would come to meetings and rallies, and I went on marches. I saw her as a young organizer and mother, and I was a young mother too — well, at the end of my stint as a farm worker. I had to quit after my son was born.

Dolores was part of a claim that the Maestrapeace collective and Susan Cervantes and I — as authors of the murals on César Chávez Elementary School, where Dolores's portrait is huge — brought against Corbis Corporation, which was then the world's second-largest photo stock corporation, owned by Bill Gates. We asserted claims against Corbis for violating our copyright on both the Women's Building and César Chávez Elementary School, and the portraits of Dolores, without her permission — using photos of the murals without crediting the mural artists. We had some intense meetings with Corbis’ CEO up in La Paz, near Keene, California and now a National Historic Site.  Dolores and UFW leaders ourselves, and we succeeded. With our incredible lawyer, Brooke Oliver, we set industry precedent: credit for artists is now mandatory for a photographer when they're photographing artwork online. You can't just credit the artwork to the photographer. At a minimum, photo stock shops now typically provide a warning when they license a photograph that third party (artists) consents may be required before use. And we got a settlement that allowed us to pay off our credit cards.

I've seen Dolores on many occasions. She's very accessible. She's been supportive of many struggles around LGBTQ+ issues, around lots of issues in the Bay Area. She's not a one-issue person. She's an international and national emissary for so many human rights causes.

Modifying the César Chávez Murals

Hugh Leeman: In a recent conversation, you told me you're in the process of modifying murals that had previously been commissioned to celebrate César Chávez. What has that process been like, amidst this recently revealed history brought forward by Dolores Huerta and other women?

Juana Alicia: We're just beginning the process. Susan Cervantes met with the school district in my absence, and now we're having a conversation with the community about what they want in terms of the images on César Chávez Elementary School. The school district is going to rename the school as well.

There's this issue about erasing such a powerful figure from history. I don't think they should be erased. But I do think they should not be celebrated in the way they've been celebrated. Like Jefferson, like so many others whose statues need to be removed and put in a special place where we talk critically about history. I don't think erasure is good for the history — or herstory — of humanity. But I do think telling the truth about sexual violence, about what's been done to women, matters. We cannot allow a mask of progressive politics to deny women's rights.

I think the Latino and Latinx community has stepped forward in a way that very few other communities have. Women have almost unanimously had Dolores's back, and these other women's backs. Since I was approached by the press as soon as it erupted, I needed to read all of the articles — from the LA Times, the New York Times — to inform myself about what had been done, how valid the research was, how valid the interviews were. So as not to just jump on a bandwagon of erasure, but to understand what actually happened, so I could take a position that was ethical.

Hugh Leeman: What are some of those early conversations about what the community wants — not just what it should be named, but how this should be treated?

Juana Alicia: We haven't had that meeting yet. I will say that here in Berkeley, for the César Chávez Park out at the Marina, my friends Santiago Casal and Beatriz Leyva-Cutler did a whole community survey among the Latino community — very in-depth data gathering about what people wanted in terms of renaming the park. Then they brought it to the Planning Commission. And someone on the Planning Commission, whose wife had another idea, was allowed to step forward and basically negate the research those two community leaders had done with a massive amount of people. I don't know where that's going. But I do know it's important to do research in the community — and then have that research respected.

Get Out: On Statues, Erasure, and Context

Hugh Leeman: This idea of erasure — we saw it as a society, particularly with art and murals in early COVID: well, we'll just get rid of them, paint over them, take down the statue. That form of erasure becomes a pretty dark act in and of itself.

Juana Alicia: Let me show you an image. During that time I did a piece called Get Out.

Hugh Leeman: So we have Donald Trump as a statue being torn down. Can you describe it?

Juana Alicia: The background is a dark-windowed White House. In the middle ground is one of the street protesters with a tennis or badminton racket, hitting a smoke bomb toward the viewer — toward the statue, actually — which is in the foreground. It's a statue of Donald Trump in colonial clothing, with the Constitution in his hand, or some document. And he's being dragged off the pedestal. There's a big rope around his torso that one can imagine is attached to some kind of hoist, and the rebar connecting the statue to the platform is torn apart. There are clouds of tear gas all around him.

It's an allusion to the George Floyd protests, to all of the street protests going on, and an homage to the removal of colonial images, enslaver images, that need to come down — because those are terrorizing images for Black children in the South, for children of any color who understand their impact on their life, their history, their family history.

So I'm not against taking those statues down. Like I said, the question is: where do they go, and how are they contextualized? Because in the middle of Dixie, where we have all of these statues still remaining — with the gerrymandering, the voter control, the destruction of the Voting Rights Act — all of those statues are like visual enforcers of this retrograde return to the Jim Crow South.

Who Replaces a Portrait Thirty Feet Tall?

Hugh Leeman: How have you creatively thought about a mural where Chávez needs to be taken out, but he's still part of history?

Juana Alicia: What has come up in conversation is talking about the movement instead of an individual protagonist. But in the case of something that's clearly a portrait — and there's a huge thirty-foot-tall figure in the mural at César Chávez Elementary — we have to think about who that figure is going to be. It's not a movement symbol. It's going to be a human person.

I don't know who that will be. It could be Philip Vera Cruz, one of the Filipino farm worker organizers. Selecting a man can be very dicey as well if we're not properly vetting their history. Not that women are totally innocent, but the likelihood they're going to have that same kind of history is much smaller.

This is a point for historical research. There was a woman who helped co-found the UFW, and then she was sort of disappeared from history. Lori Coyle, a local filmmaker who's quite recognized, made a film about her — Adiós Amor: The Search for Maria Moreno, broadcast on PBS VOCES, and it won an Imagen Award. Maria Moreno was red-baited by the union, because there was red-baiting going on in the union as well.

The union had some dubitable associations, and some tragic defenses of the AFL-CIO's position on undocumented workers — of not having their backs, of going along with the AFL-CIO line when César Chávez and the union made agreements with Jerry Brown about farm worker rights in California in the 1970s. There were problematic positions taken on the rights of undocumented workers. There were political issues that arose in the union, and one of the people excluded was Maria Moreno.

She might be a person we would consider celebrating — especially in this era where the Democratic Party has shown to be extremely ineffectual and in many ways corrupt, and there's a rising movement of working families and democratic socialism, and the idea that socialist ideas are part of a democracy and can be part of a democracy. To restore the image of someone who was red-baited could be a nice thing to do.

Hugh Leeman: Educate me — she was red-baited. What does that mean?

Juana Alicia: That means you're called a communist and you're disqualified from participation in so many organizations. We're talking about the UFW being formed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, on the heels of McCarthyism in the United States, where so many Hollywood people, so many intellectuals, so many workers were either imprisoned or had to escape to Mexico or go other places because they were accused by the Committee on Un-American Activities of being communists. And that is not a crime. That is not a crime.

Murals as Memory When the Community Is Displaced

Hugh Leeman: In writing about Mission murals and displacement, the writer Mauricio Ramírez asked how murals can remain if the communities that made and protected them are displaced. How do you think about murals as cultural memory when the people represented on the walls are being pushed out of the neighborhoods?

Juana Alicia: Big ups to Mauricio. I really appreciate his writing. He was actually my student at César Chávez Elementary School when we did the murals there — he participated as a fifth grader on the murals inside the school. And now he has his PhD from UC Santa Cruz and is an eloquent writer, particularly on the history of Central Americans in the Mission.

My daughter's mural Mission Makeover on Balmy Alley is a direct critique of gentrification in the Mission. She was assisted by my husband, and a little bit by me, but by a lot of people — it's her authorship, Lucía Ippolito González. That mural speaks directly to that issue.

It is difficult, because we can't erase or invisibilize the people who still remain in the Mission — we still have a strong Latino presence there. In fact, Lucía produces an event once a year called Lover's Lane on Balmy Alley, a huge community celebration, very much Latinx-based, with artists and massage therapists and activities for children, low riders — it really brings out the community. We have the Paseo Artístico, led by Paul Flores and Acción Latina. We have important cultural organizations in the Mission that we're working in coalition with on this Balmy Alley project — Calle 24, Acción Latina, El Tecolote, and Brava for Women in the Arts is our fiscal agent. We came out en masse to support the Mission Cultural Center when the city was about to shut it down. And we're about to inaugurate the restored Mission Library in October, where I'm doing a fused glass mural window. So we have to continue to celebrate our existence in those places.

But the truth is, yes, we've had a mass exodus. There's been the biggest transference of wealth in the history of the world with Donald Trump's administrations — and it didn't start there. The whole financial bailout of 2008, the propping up of the auto industry and the banks in particular. Neoliberalism created the fertile ground for this transference of wealth, as well as the security state and the empowering of the NSA.

We have been forced out of our neighborhoods. Even here in Berkeley, where I live, there's been huge gentrification in my West Berkeley neighborhood. I had to leave the Mission because I couldn't afford to live there anymore. We were able to buy a home here in the early nineties, which I couldn't afford to buy today. And really, I can't afford to live in the Bay Area — we live in Mexico for at least half the year, a little more. We're both retired seniors living on a fixed income, and the Bay Area does not accommodate our budget.

The Spiral Word: A Mural Inside the Ivory Tower

Hugh Leeman: I'm thinking of The Spiral Word, which differs from many of your street murals because it exists inside Stanford's El Centro Chicano y Latino — yet it still functions as critical pedagogy. How does the meaning of a mural change when it moves from the street into an elite educational institution?

Juana Alicia: I've taught at Stanford on many occasions, so I'm very familiar with how Latinos and other BIPOC people are challenged to survive in that kind of institution.

When I conceived the mural, I worked with the janitors, the students, the professors, and the graduate students at El Centro Chicano to come up with a narrative. Same thing at UC Santa Cruz, where I did the mural La Promesa de Loma Prieta: Que no se repita la historia — the promise of Loma Prieta, that history not repeat itself — in 1992. I had the same kind of community process with the workers, the students, and the professors.

So the research doesn't change. And the critical perspective of the students was key to maintaining the edge, the critical thinking — to not becoming like a Mexican restaurant that has to adapt its mole to the flavors of the gentrified neighborhood. We don't do that, even if it moves into the elite institution.

I had a bit of a tussle with Stanford over that, because I wanted to do a mural on the exterior of El Centro Chicano, in ceramic. They wouldn't go for it. They would not approve public art on their plaza by a Chicana with our themes. What I was proposing was a big nopal cactus — an idea birthed in collaboration with my husband, Tirso González Araiza — putting the names and images of Latino authors from all over the world on the pencas, the paddles, of the nopal. It would have been a big bas-relief cactus covering the facade of El Centro Chicano. I'd already done the big murals at UCSF Medical Center on Parnassus — I made a thousand ceramic tiles for that — and Tirso and I had done a bas-relief mural weighing several tons for the Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana in Mérida, Yucatán. So I had plenty of experience doing exterior bas-relief murals. But Stanford would not go for it. So we had to work on the interior.

In terms of compromising content, that didn't change. The mural is called The Spiral Word, named by a poet laureate — there's a poem about it, and the title is by Juan Felipe Herrera. It's about passing the voice on through history: the oral tradition, the literary tradition. The students and the other people I consulted said they wanted me to tell the story of the past, present, and future of Latino lives. And I thought — that's a small calling.

What I created was in part inspired by my dear friend Dr. Francisco Vásquez, because he'd been asking me for years: can you do a mural that's a timeline of our histories? So that's what this became, particularly the codex mounted on the frieze. On the main large panel there's a Mayan scribe, a young woman, writing on a codex, sitting among urban ruins — maybe the Bronx — with a recovered Mayan stele in the background. She's telling the story, and the story evolves onto the codex as a timeline in five panels: Genesis, colonization and slavery, resistance and revolution,  the twins, and the future.

Hugh Leeman: The twins — you're referencing the Maya origin myth, the ones who navigate the underworld?

Juana Alicia: Correct. The story begins with Genesis from the Popol Vuh, where the jaguar's breath is breathing the story, and the princess Ixquic is reaching her hand toward her slain lover's face — his head is hanging from a tree, and he impregnates her by his saliva dropping into her hand. She becomes pregnant with twins. Her lover is a twin as well — Hun Hunahpú and Hun Ixbalanqué are the original twins. Then she has another set of twins who are the protagonists who bring corn to humanity from the underworld. To shorten the story extremely.

That's the first panel of the codex. And then the fourth panel is where the twins appear again — I have an actual reproduction in the background of the twins from the murals of Bonampak in Chiapas, Mexico, and in the foreground, the Gangbanger and the Dreamer, who are the twins, with tattoos referring to their stories on their bodies.

La Xtabay: An Erotic Horror Story of Ecofeminism

Hugh Leeman: Juana, I want to open up the field a bit here. What are you working on now, around these ideas of mythology?

Juana Alicia: Thank you for asking. My most recent work, which I'm just completing now, is a collaboration with my husband, Tirso González Araiza, who is a tremendous muralist, graphic artist, and sculptor — a visual artist principally.

He's been telling me this story, which I've heard many times living in the Yucatán, where I have lived for the last twenty years. Everybody in the Yucatán knows about this female entity. She could be a deity. She's a mythical spirit who represents and embodies — and sometimes transforms into — the sacred ceiba tree of the Mayan peninsula. There are ceiba trees all over Central America and the Caribbean, and it's a very sacred tree to Indigenous peoples. In Cuba, Zenaida del Río has beautiful paintings about the ceiba. So it's not just in the Yucatán, but this story is of the Yucatán.

There are similar stories, like La Ciguanaba from El Salvador, where the woman actually has a horse's head. But in this story, La Xtabay is a beautiful Mayan woman with long black hair to her waist, dressed all in white, who appears to men in the rainforest — basically to philanderers and drunks who are losing their way home in the low jungle. And she seduces them. When she gets them in her embrace, her thorns — which are part of the ceiba tree, in its masculine form only; the female version doesn't have thorns — her thorns come out. And she spines them to death. She pierces them and leaves them to die at the foot of the tree, on the roots of the tree.

She's got a pretty big bad-girl reputation, as you can imagine. The story's a little longer — she's one of two twins, the bad girl and the good girl. But everybody's got an Xtabay story, even in our colonia where we live in urban Mérida. People have seen her. And it's very difficult to escape her, and you should never look her in the eye — because it's over for you, brother, if you do.

A ninety-year-old tía of ours who lives on our street in Mérida tells the story of her brother seeing La Xtabay on the railroad tracks in our neighborhood, running home and escaping — and when he gets home, his mother says to him, why didn't you just throw your shoe at her? That'll get rid of her. There are all these urban legends. And rural legends. Tirso and I did a lot of research, going to villages and interviewing people, and everybody has a story.

Tirso had been telling me the story of La Xtabay for several years, and I finally said to him: write that shit down. So he did — and he's an amazing literary voice. He wrote this incredible story, and it's more of a contemporary erotic horror story, which to me has ecofeminist overtones. He doesn't like that term, but I think it's there.

He and I were going to illustrate it together, but I started illustrating it, and when he saw my illustrations he said, you know what? You do it. He liked what I was doing and how I had interpreted his story.

So there are over fifty illustrations. If you go to my website under illustration and go to La Xtabay, you can hear the audio of the story in segments, interspersed with music by John Santos, in English, Spanish, and Maya. And you can see most of the images from the book. The book is for sale, but at a price only collectors and museums can afford — it's a hand-printed, handmade book.

It's had three museum shows. It was exhibited at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, and for almost nine months at the Museum of Anthropology in Mérida, Mexico. The book is a beautiful art object. When we did that mock-up — the art book — nobody knew it would become what it did. It's segments, but it's fifty-two feet long. It's a huge codex with a lot of illustrations, and it's the story. It's good enough.

But I kept adding more and more illustrations, because I couldn't keep up with the story as he had it. So now we're ready to look for a commercial publisher, where we can make the book accessible across borders to Mayan and non-Mayan communities — because the book is in English, Spanish, and Yucatec Maya.

It is the recapturing of this feminine spirit, this female icon, and giving her a more heroic presentation. Or at least it's a depiction of the conflict between modern civilization and Indigenous tradition, male and female, masculine and feminine, and issues about the environment. But it is not didactic. It is not pamphletic. It is an erotic horror story.

Lighting Others, Not Passing the Torch

Hugh Leeman: As a final question — you recently received an honorary PhD, you're in your seventies, and you're still getting up on scaffolding, still making murals. What keeps you inspired amidst the social challenges of our times?

Juana Alicia: Well, my scaffolding climbing is sort of reduced. I'm still doing it, but not very high — not because I can't, but because I just don't want to anymore. But I love being on the street. I love being with people. I'll be painting the Romero panels here in my studio, then taking them to the street to finish them up.

I need my nap every day. I work out every day. I keep very physically active. I have an amazing partner who does the same. We have an incredible family, very talented children, and five grandchildren. Those are all inspiring people. And then we have this amazing community — a lot of my ex-students who are now my colleagues are great inspirations.

I feel so happy and relieved that I'm not passing the torch — I'm just lighting others, as Gloria Steinem says. I'm so glad there are so many young muralists out there just kicking ass. Cece Carpio, Josué Rojas, Keena Romano, the Few and Far women's collective, Trust Your Struggle Collective — of which I'm a participating partner. My ex-students and I did the murals together on the West Oakland Youth Center a few years ago. So I feel a little bit like Carlos Santana, doing collaborations and duets with our daughter and the generations of students we've had the pleasure of working with.

And the social movements around the world. We're very involved in social activism, both here in the Bay Area and in Mérida, Yucatán, where we're part of a consortium of community organizations — from the Frente Campesino to a group organizing around water control, to something called Café Ciudad, an urban-planning-based group that meets once a month to talk about local issues around water, earth, Indigenous rights, city planning, accessibility.

Right now, because so many governments of the world have swung so hard to the right and are so repressive, our real hope is in community collaborations — as it always has been, in grassroots movements. It was the grassroots movements building before the George Floyd assassination that came together and created the Black Lives Matter movement, which was created by several Black women leaders previous to that assassination. People at the grassroots need to work in coalitions together. Nobody can build a movement on their own. We're way beyond the days of the single charismatic leader.

The principles of feminism — horizontal structures, transparency, collaboration and not competition — all of those are going to lead us forward to deal with our climate crisis, which is the most pressing of all issues, because if we don't resolve that, we won't be here.

What's most inspiring is to see all these grassroots movements. The Concilio Maya in the Yucatán, where a collective of different Mayan groups across the peninsula are working together to resist the contamination of the cenotes, the pig farms, the cancer alleys these pig farms are creating. The grassroots movements working in coalition are the future. And that's very inspiring, because there's a lot of that all over the world.

Hugh Leeman: Juana Alicia, thank you so much for what you do, and thank you for sharing about it today.

Juana Alicia: My pleasure, Hugh.

Footnotes courtesy of Juana Alicia

The earliest Chicana feminist writing on La Malinche emerged during the 1970s and early 1980s. Key feminist scholars and poets dismantled traditional patriarchal views of her as a "traitor". They reclaimed her as a survivor, a victim of colonialism, and the foundational mother of La Raza. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

The foundational writings include the following pivotal essays and poems:

• "Malintzin Tenepal: A Preliminary Look into a New Perspective" (1974)
  Published by Adelaida R. Del Castillo in the journal Encuentro Femenil, this is widely considered the first major academic essay by a Chicana dedicated to reinterpreting La Malinche. Del Castillo argues Malinche was an intelligent, strategic actor navigating a brutal colonial reality, rather than a willing betrayer of her people. [1, 2]

• "Como Duele" (1973)
  This poem by Adalijza Sosa-Riddell is celebrated as one of the first literary texts to address the Chicana experience by reclaiming the "Malinche" label as a badge of surviving marginalization. [1, 2, 3]

• "La Malinche" (1978)
  Published by Carmen Tafolla, this widely read poem directly challenges the 1967 Chicano Movement poem "Yo Soy Joaquín" by writing from Malinche's own perspective. Tafolla frames her as an invincible survivor and a clever linguistic bridge rather than a screwer of her people. [1, 2, 3, 4]

• "Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios" (1983)
  In this groundbreaking book, Cherríe Moraga critically examines how the myth of La Malinche was used to enforce silence and suppress the sexuality and independence of Chicanas. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

By Bob Dunlap

In July 1870 the Franco-Prussian War began, a conflict that would redraw the map of Europe, end the French Second Empire, create and then crush the Paris Commune, and unify Germany into the Second Reich.  Beyond the vast military and political implications, the war reverberated throughout French society, shifting cultural norms across economic, philosophical and artistic realms.  Many artists (Monet, Pissarro and Cezanne) fled Paris, taking refuge in London or remote parts of France to evade the war (and its draft).  Others joined the army (Renoir, Rodin and Redon), and still others fought in the National Guard.  Enter Edgar Degas.

Born in Paris on July 19, 1834, Edgar was the eldest of five children born to the union of Auguste De Gas, a banker of French-Italian descent, and Marie Celestine Musson, a French Creole born in New Orleans in 1815.  The unexpected death of Marie’s mother in 1819 prompted her grief-stricken father, Germain Musson, who had fled the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution in 1805 and relocated to New Orleans, to relocate again to Paris.  It was there Marie, 17, wed Degas’s father in 1832.

Edgar enjoyed a privileged background (though at a young age changed the spelling of his last name to its less pretentious form), earning a baccalaureate in literature in 1853 while continuing to pursue his passion for painting.  In 1856 he went to Italy, spending three years copying masters such as Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael.    Returning to Paris in 1859, he began copying paintings at the Louvre.  In 1865 his “Scene of War in the Middle Ages” was exhibited at the Salon, where he continued to exhibit annually until 1870, when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, prompting Degas to enlist in the National Guard.  During rifle training, it became apparent Degas’s eyesight was impaired, which he attributed to the rigors of the war, especially the hardships imposed by the Siege of Paris.

Degas, no stranger to adversity, thrived there.  He was at an artistic crossroads, both substantively and stylistically.  Venturing away from his classical roots, he shifted from historical paintings to depictions of modern life.  Even his paintings in the aftermath of a monumental war were focused not on battlefields but on the starvation and deprivations the Siege inflicted on the citizenry, such as the haunting “Woman at the Window” (1871–1872).

Degas remained in New Orleans for five months, producing eighteen oils and other pastel drawings.  Family life both rejuvenated him and became the focus of his art.  His famous “A Cotton Office in New Orleans” (1873) depicts the office where the men in his family worked and became his only painting acquired by a museum in his lifetime.

Degas also reconnected with his cousin, Estelle Musson, whom he had first met ten years earlier in Paris when she and her mother fled New Orleans during the American Civil War to escape the chaos of Union occupation.    Estelle was pregnant at the time and recently widowed, her husband, Joseph Davis Balfour (the nephew of Confederate President Jefferson Davis), having been killed in the Battle of Corinth.  By the time of Degas’s visit to New Orleans, Estelle was married again, to her cousin/Degas’s brother, René, and pregnant again.  She was also nearly blind from a hereditary eye disease, likely a form of macular dystrophy, the first indication that Degas’s visual impairment may have been genetic.

Estelle and Degas’s reconnection culminated in “Portrait of Estelle Musson Degas” (1872), weaving together many strands of Degas’s life at the time.  It depicts Estelle, nearly sightless, arranging a vase of colorful flowers by feel.  Clearly pregnant, a pink chrysanthemum suggests a protruding navel framed by her swollen belly.  The background wall is drab brown, with a hasty, unfinished quality, the canvas visible in areas.  So too the brown table Estelle is working at and her black dress – a dark palette reminiscent of the “Dutch Dark” of Degas’s earlier, classic-copying phase. By contrast, vibrant green foliage (mirrored in a light green wash outside the window) and resplendent red, orange and pink flowers brighten the center of the scene, seemingly pulling Estelle out of the darkness, or at least partially so, with half of her face (and one eye) lit, the other half in shadow.

In March 1873 Degas returned to Paris, bringing his new style with him.  His loose brushwork, use of natural light, and efforts to capture modern life in fleeting moments were major tributaries in the river of Impressionism that swept over the art world.  Degas was a driving force behind the movement, participating in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibits between 1874 and 1886.

Degas was the only notable French Impressionist to visit the United States.  His time in New Orleans transformed him personally and professionally, allowing him to heal from the war and explore a new artistic path, a path he remained on until his death in 1917, with France once again at war with Germany in WWI.  His eyesight continued to worsen in his later years, contributing to an ongoing debate among art historians whether failing eyesight among Impressionists such as Degas, Monet, and Cassatt contributed to their looser style.  Perhaps Degas put it best: "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."

As for Degas’s portrait of Estelle, the painting passed through his family for decades.  In 1965 the Delgado Museum in New Orleans sought to purchase the work, but the cash-strapped organization was hard-pressed to meet the $190,000 price tag.   A groundswell of local support – a telethon,  fundraising by schoolchildren, poboy luncheons – helped finance the purchase.  The civic pride generated by the effort, as well as the cachet the piece lent to the museum, helped it survive and evolve, becoming the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1971, a hundred years after the Franco-Prussian War.  New Orleans had changed Degas and Degas had changed New Orleans.

Medieval and pre-Renaissance Christian paintings, as one observes in artistic representations of humans looking upward and terrified at an omnipotent deity, had a simple message. Humans are plagued by a cosmos that exceeds comprehension. The cycle of birth and death can only be overcome by an orientation to eternity that requires denouncing the world, disciplining the body, and preparing oneself for life after death. Earthly gardens only promised momentary nourishment and reprieve. To the idyllic Garden of Eden, there is no return. As a theme in Western art, gardens flag something we have lost but also aristocratic power, royal hegemony, and leisure: an attempt to overcome alienation.

Thomas Murray’s exhibit “This is Our Garden” consists of twenty-one oil paintings. His work touches on many classical themes in the history of Western art. There is a peculiar gravitas to Murray’s paintings. The title of the exhibit is an invitation to the viewer and visitor to enter the realm of fantasy, one unmediated by techno gadgets that promise freedom but entrap us in endless cycles of passwords, confirmation codes, and dual authentication. Via art, take a moment to breathe and enter paradise, Murray seems to be saying. Lush life and bodies are on display. The facial expressions on the human figures are pensive and serene. The faces are seductive, sensual and welcoming. But also uncanny, haunting, and mysterious.

In aggregate, Murray’s work positions itself in relation to narratives of birth, beginnings, flux, death and innocence. Themes prominent in Christian and Renaissance art. Shame and guilt do not haunt Murray’s work, though. In many of the paintings, human bodies (female, male, non-binary) are unclothed, exposed, and naked. The images, but also the titles of his works, illustrate the connection to a broader classical tradition of fine art: “Adam”; “Prince”; “Eve”; “Thinker”; “Trinity”; “Sentinel”; and “Witness.”

In terms of the influences of other artists streaming through his work, one can detect the subtle presence of Albrecht Dürer (“Adam and Eve”), Titian (“Venus of Urbino”), and Henri Rousseau(“The Dream”). Murray extends the powerful theatricality of their paintings into the contemporary moment.

Tibetan, Florentine and Persian design thematics are evident in many of Murray’s pieces. There is an ambience, a peculiar atmosphere and weightlessness in his paintings, magically surreal.Murray’s technical mastery is evident in all the paintings on display, but thematic content takes precedence over observable brush strokes. The edges of some of the art pieces nonetheless bare the trace of the human hand and fingers holding a paint brush.

Murray’s paintings are influenced by Christian themes. But he is an artist beyond good and evil via the transformation of Christian iconography. His invitation to reclaim “our” garden indicates as much. Our garden is one without Christ, guilt, shame, piety, discipline, and self-denial. Murray depicts “our” garden that welcomes everybody and flags shared humanity, not my garden surrounded by a gate, cameras and attack dogs. Gardens and earthly life are eternal, Murray seems to be saying. In a strange but obvious way, humans are also gardens.

Murray is not an academic artist. He is not in search of disciples and followers who will imitate the master. Traces of authority in his pieces are undermined. Aesthetically, Murray dwells in a world that is open and inviting to everybody. A world that calls into question the aesthetic impoverishment of commodity culture, Christian asceticism and rigid definitions of art in institutions of higher learning. Murray’s “This is Our Garden” is an aesthetic representation of redemption and sharing in the age of popular interest in sasquatch, backyard cage fighting, Joey Chestnut hot dog gluttony events, monster truck rallies and wrestling matches. In this sense, Atlantic City is somehow an ideal location for this exhibit. 

Sometimes Murray takes his aesthetic message and artistic prowess to inmates at South Woods State Prison in Millville, New Jersey, where he frequently teaches. South Woods is not a garden but a 1.3 million square foot correctional complex. Murray’s work with inmates implies that they are invited into our garden. Murray also teaches art at Rowan University. Through art, Murray asks what is our relationship to nature and ourselves? “This is Our Garden” is also a way of asking “what and where is our garden”?

Thomas Murray lives in Glassboro, New Jersey, with his partner, Donna Sweigart, professor of art and design, and their son, Truxton Donnally Murray.

Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, educator and curator whose paintings, drawings, and sculptures draw the minimalist grid into the register of domestic and handmade labor. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art and Senior Chair of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught since 1996, with additional appointments at Yale, Cranbrook, Bard's Milton Avery Graduate School, UW–Madison, and Skowhegan. In 2014 she became the first practicing artist selected to co-curate the Whitney Biennial, and served as inaugural artistic director of FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art in 2018; she also curated the 2016 Portland Biennial. With artist Brad Killam she founded and co-directs the nonprofit spaces The Suburban and The Poor Farm. Her work is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, MUDAM Luxembourg, Daimler Contemporary Berlin, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, with museum surveys at MOCA Cleveland and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, she was elected a National Academician in 2019.

Artist, Curator, Educator | Interview by Hugh Leeman

Mr. Perez and the Switchboard in the Utility Closet

Hugh Leeman: Michelle, I want to start with Mr. Perez, your high school art teacher. Who was he, and can you tell the story of how he impacted your life?

Michelle Grabner: Sure. We'd have to go back to the late seventies, Appleton, Wisconsin — Appleton East. Just a little note: I don't think he makes a big deal about it, but Willem Dafoe also went to that high school. We didn't overlap, he was a little older.

As a high school student, I hung out in the art room. There are a lot of students who find their way into learning, into understanding the world, into thinking about how to be social, through the art world. I was also just upstairs from the band room, where I hung out as well.

Mr. Perez taught painting and drawing. I remember he put me in a utility closet and had me paint the switchboard — the electrical switchboard — hard-edge. That made sense in the eighties. I think about that now: it's a little poppy in its feeling, a little industrial. It was clean, it was flat, it was graphic.

He also taught us about history. When I was in high school, I was naive enough to think Perez was French, because I thought all artists came from Paris at some point. He corrected me on that.

But he said something that was important. He had a daughter a little older than I was, who went down to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where I ended up. He said, they have a good art program there, you should think about it. And he was very pragmatic and said, you can teach high school art as well. That was a way of thinking about an art career. It never occurred to me. It never would have occurred to my family that that would be a place I landed. But in his ability to see that this was a place I wanted to be, a place I wanted to live — my body understood the work I was doing, and it would give me a lifetime of joy — he pointed me in that direction.

Repetition, Constraint, and the Overproduction Critique

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned the hard edges of what he had you painting. I want to go to your own practice. In your early works, there's domestic pattern painting, and you've said there's a capturing of routine and orderliness — not simply domestic or middle-class signifiers. How has your relationship to order changed as your work moved from painted patterns and gingham into public sculpture and large-scale everyday objects?

Michelle Grabner: That's a super big question. I'll start with process, repetition, and the attention that repetition requires.

Repetition is important in terms of how I think, and come to learn and know the world. But my ability to log in that hard work in the studio — the tedious reproducing of images, whether that's copying, or making dot after dot, grid after grid — really has changed.

As you know, I have three kids. The first was born in '87, and Seal, my youngest, was born in '02. So we've had a household of children for a long span of time, and they require attention. The household requires attention. That was really quite wonderful, because I had to work within — I'm going to call them constraints, but they were joyful constraints — serving and helping the family structure, the needs of children at different developmental stages, while at the same time finding tracts of time to do my own work.

Just recently, my daughter went off to college. And while my husband, God bless him, has profound emotional loss and gets weepy all the time, I'm almost responding in a pathological way to this openness of time. I don't need to be there. She's in college. She comes home during winter and summer. But I'm really grappling with an excessive amount of time that was given over for decades to helping my children.

So you're catching me at a kind of frantic time in my overall practice — not only continuing the work I do, thinking about process and repetition in form and image, but also at a time when I've been making a lot of sculptural work. Different processes, different techniques, a different relationship to making, because I can spend time in different studios to make that work.

And as you know, I've been a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute since 1996. I started out part-time doing grad advising; that turned into a full-time job, which turned into chair of the painting and drawing department. Being at an institution that long does offer you some privileges. When we started out as a young little family, buying a home in Milwaukee for twenty-seven thousand dollars — as economies change, household economies change, and a relationship to those ideas about the domestic changes as well.

Hugh Leeman: That word "constraints" is interesting — constraints often get associated with creativity. When you have no constraints, infinite openness becomes an impediment in itself. Now that those constraints of mothering aren't there, how are you dealing with it?

Michelle Grabner: Sometimes I worry about myself. It's become a little pathological in the amount of production. So I've been shifting my thinking to: what does it mean to be somebody who overproduces? Almost as a critical platform.

I think about it two ways. One, that the overproduction of work is actually critical within the art world, and particularly its marketplace. There's no rarity to my work. That's really important. The idea of repetition — a kind of sameness. Yes, there are slight material differences, but for the most part, again and again and again, being pulled and curious about those minute shifts from one red gingham painting to another. That compels me. But it's also a really interesting and strangely profound critique of rarity within the art world, and how we put value around that which is unique. That's really interesting to me to think about, particularly right now.

The other goes back to attention — my own need to set up a different kind of discipline with this richness of time, cut loose from those typical household experiences. Those two things are haunting me right now. Are either of them true? Are they both true simultaneously? Probably. And there are probably other conditions going on.

Then there's education, right? Being involved in education, thinking about those shifts on all kinds of levels — whether it's a governmental push to undercut education, or how does the art school survive now. Does it take up more of my time? Not so much, but it's fascinating to think about. And I'd like to think about it with the same imagination and possibility — being curious, trying something that maybe will fail — as opposed to being on your back heel all the time. That's how I feel our school, as well as many other schools, is just kind of pivoting to these outside forces. That lack of power is problematic, and it does take up some of my headspace.

The Layer Cake: Curating the Whitney Biennial

Hugh Leeman: I'd like to focus on your curatorial practice. As a curator for the Whitney Biennial, you said in the exhibition catalog that you wanted artists to speak with other people rather than have critics explain from the outside. What was the inspiration?

Michelle Grabner: The 2014 Whitney Biennial was the last biennial in the Breuer Building before it moved to the Piano Building downtown in the Meatpacking District. It was co-curated, but Donna De Salvo called it a layer cake — everybody got a floor. That's very different from past biennials, or biennials since, where there may be multiple curators but it's really hard to get a sense of who's selecting whom. We drew straws and we all got a floor. If you went up to the fourth floor, you knew that work was my selection. The third floor was Stuart Comer, and Anthony Elms was responsible for the second floor. So it was made very clear what kind of ideas, what kind of selection process, each curator was engaged in.

For the catalog, I asked each living artist I included to have a conversation with somebody else. In some cases it was their wife or their partner. In some cases it was a reverend, a person of spiritual capacity. Sometimes it was a fictional person — there was an artist who talked to somebody who was a made-up name.

That was important in terms of breaking away from curatorial authority. I did not have to be the person who teased out not only the meaning of the work, but the arc of an artist's thinking. I did that by selection — and selection is always the hardest part of curating for me — and by a loose organization of the layout of the fourth floor. I really wanted artists to contextualize themselves. They have their own interests. They want to have conversations not just with curators, not just with art critics, not just with art historians, but with other people, other disciplines, other ways of being in the world.

And this is important: biennials, or any group show — even monographic shows, even survey shows — they are not the truth of a full artist's work. They can never present that truth. So if I can empower artists to have a conversation with somebody, maybe we're getting at a truth we wouldn't typically get at in a catalog essay written by an expert or the curator.

Disappointment and What Institutions Forget

Hugh Leeman: There's something intimate about that, which pulls away from commodification. You've said artists are disappointed all the time, and the curator should be more transparent with them. What would a kinder curatorial process look like?

Michelle Grabner: I did say that artists are often disappointed, though the disappointment may not be directed at the curator — I have had loads of disappointment directed at me. We participate in these big public-facing exhibitions as artists, and we have an expectation of a kind of success that has been waning with the biennial, particularly the Whitney Biennial these days. But I also think we're disappointed that it doesn't yield that fullness — the fullness of artists within their making or within their ideas. A group show cannot yield that fullness when you're represented by one or five pieces. That's a tiny sliver of what somebody was thinking about.

What I really regret about the biennial is simply that I didn't have more conversations with the artists about what their expectations were. Not that I could change those expectations, but to hear them, to understand the context. They may have been highly personal. Artists later in their career really wanted this opportunity to yield a different kind of success than just being included. Helping them understand some of the limits of what the 2014 biennial at that point in culture could actually offer.

And then to do some follow-up. Actually have a debrief with the artists. There's a lot of upfront work — everybody who does curatorial work knows that. Both the compensation and the amount of work mean you do it, but it doesn't allow for these other conversations. In my case, once I was done, I just needed a big breath, and I moved on to another project. I didn't do the follow-up. I'm in touch with a lot of artists I included — we've become really good friends, or they were friends going in — but I will argue that institutions should start building conversations with artists as soon as the work comes down, a year after the work comes down.

The Whitney Museum of American Art — the work I did for them, I would do all over again, because I learned so much and I hope artists learned as much. But I still have to pay for annual membership. They've forgotten I was even there in 2015. So let alone how they forget the artists who participated in those exhibitions. It's not only a problem with curators. It's a problem with institutions.

The Churn: Why the Biennial's Pull Is Waning

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned the waning interest in the Whitney Biennial. What do you make of that?

Michelle Grabner: That's the art market and how institutions are intertwined with the marketplace. There's a need for the new. The market always needs new material, so it churns quickly.

Exhibitions like the Whitney Biennial depend heavily on galleries to help support framing or production, because the budget for the biennial is relatively small compared to other exhibitions they mount — and this is the case with most major biennials or group exhibitions. So there's a dependency on the market to support that artist if they have representation. That entanglement allows for this churn.

There are also conversations within the institution, to be perfectly frank. We had some of those in 2014 about how do we think about America, the Americas, the United States? How do we think about artists who are no longer with us? How do we think about younger artists? Since 2014, the biennial, with a few exceptions, has really pivoted to younger artists, with a couple of well-respected or overlooked artists — again, who are no longer with us or have had a lifelong practice — but that's getting farther and farther aside. The institution is letting the curator be responsive to the culture at hand. But we've been so frothy lately within the marketplace — it's coming to a bit of a halt now, but the frothiness of recent years really led to that quick turnover, that burnout.

Can I tell you one thing I really love? It was kind of the only public piece in the 2014 biennial — a commission by Tony Tasset, a Chicago-based artist. It's basically multicolored panels with lists and lists of names etched in them — maybe five thousand names of artists, many who had been in the biennial, many who'd had studio visits by biennial curators, many twentieth-century artists. He called it Monument to Artists, because he was acknowledging that hardworking artists do not always land in those exhibitions. He was trying to honor them in a kind of memorial. And paradoxically, he installed it right along the Hudson River in Chelsea — far away from the Breuer Building on the Upper East Side. It was a funny place to drag that conversation, that critique, into the project. That was really meaningful to me, because it did speak to the question you're asking.

FRONT, Cleveland, and the Regional Triennial Problem

Hugh Leeman: You recently published an article in Artforum where you noted your work on FRONT, the Cleveland Triennial. You wrote: "My work on FRONT taught me that for regional triennials to succeed, they must unambiguously reflect, represent, and elevate the self-image of local and regional communities, as well as partnering institutions that support those communities." You go on to note that triennials tend to buckle financially when they don't follow this. So what incentivizes the curatorial reach to not follow the model of representing local communities?

Michelle Grabner: That would be a conversation broader than the hyperlocal. Those conversations are the thing that may connect artists from a different location in the world to Cleveland, or to Milwaukee. Those ideas may be abstract. They may be about ideas of power.

I'm a big fan of the comparative. Putting an artist whose work deals profoundly with figuration and the identity of that subject next to somebody doing that locally — juxtaposing those two works — one starts learning a lot about the subtleties of difference, of place, and of artists. We can think about artistic style and how that shifts, or artistic language and how that shifts. To be comparative is really important.

I get frustrated with that first resentment — that they are not in — as opposed to: what am I going to learn from this work that's coming to my city? Where does it overlap? Where is that difference? Using comparative structures to analyze one's own practice as well as the work coming in. I'm a big believer in those big ideas. That's why I'm attached to art, art-making, artists, and its history — those bigger ideas, and seeing them shift, change, mutate, seeing vocabularies be responsive to that artistic imagination.

But it's exhausting. I was just talking to a friend, a former student, who last year started a biennial in Wisconsin. The first flush of the local audience was: who are you including, and why isn't it more of us? That's disparaging, because there's something to be learned. And it suggests something really important — that the audience, the artists in these regional places, including myself, believe that inclusion in an exhibition like this is a credential. As opposed to some comparative learning going on, to understand a value system, a vocabulary that's in my studio, and have that reflected or sorted out with the work coming in.

I really believe what I said in that Artforum piece. Though as an aside — the most generous and lovely individual who started FRONT International, Fred Bidwell, probably challenges me a little on that. We did represent Cleveland artists, Cleveland-area artists, Midwestern artists. This assessment wasn't new to me. But frustratingly enough, it still wasn't enough. It wasn't that we turned our back on local and regional production — that was threaded in. But it wasn't the premier pillar of the exhibition.

The Unromantic Truth: Jobs, Debt, and Studio Life

Hugh Leeman: I want to go back to being on the back heel. Art education is something you've dedicated decades to. You've spoken practically about jobs, insurance, family, studio life, and you tell your students that having a job doesn't weaken their art practice. When you talk about the less-than-romantic parts of the art world — and we could add incredible student loan debt — how do those conversations go?

Michelle Grabner: With our graduate cohort in painting and drawing, we take the second-years — those about to graduate — on a professional practice retreat. We go to Ox-Bow, an exceptional residency school in Michigan. We take the bus there, we're all staying together in the beautiful wilds along Lake Michigan, and we have people pop in, mostly via Zoom. Sometimes it's a terrific tax person who tells you how to manage your taxes and what's deductible — that's so pragmatic and important. We have collectors talk about what they're collecting. We had a former student who teaches at a community college, because community college teaching is as important and virtuous as teaching at a Research 1 institution. Giving them opportunities to think about how to be in the world with an MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

That's a responsibility institutions have these days, especially as we're moving to the new policy where graduate students and undergrads alike — whether you're at Yale or the Art Institute — will have to meet a threshold of income if the schools that produce them want to continue receiving financial aid. That's heavy, heavy on professional practice.

In short, what I end up saying is: you find a way. If you've taken out student loans, you find a way to pay back those student loans. You find a way to pay for your life — whether that's a studio outside your living space, or a studio within it, whether it's healthcare, whether it's the supplies you need. You find a way outside of the art marketplace to pay for those things.

I say that because the capriciousness of the marketplace does not yield an interesting engagement with your own making, with whatever you're thinking about, whatever your practice is. It has a tendency to skew that thinking so it participates within the marketplace. So if you have to be a barista, or if you have to carry the mail, you do that. You don't want to be so precarious — that art market, which we know is precarious, can really undo a relationship to your life, and then you can't practice anymore. So find out what that economic base is. And God bless you if you can develop it right now, because we know that's difficult. But do not entangle the art market into what you need to get your work done, or how you need to live day to day.

How Art Schools Might Change

Hugh Leeman: What if we look at this from another angle — how might art school models be changed to improve outcomes for their students?

Michelle Grabner: There is that pivot to building a curriculum that exposes students to cultural work — whether it's being an art handler. And again, that's precarious, as we know, within culture and within our institutions. There's a lot of support being pulled away because our patron class is changing.

But I don't think this is radical, though maybe it seems unusual to say right now: by having honest conversations with students about the importance of ideas and history and theory and positions — exposure to techniques that have purpose, but not a purpose in the practical world; what they actually have is a deep purpose in elevating the passions of the individual. That's a big swing, which not many institutions are doing right now — toward the virtues of what happens in humanities departments, or the kind of thinking that has happened in art school.

But you have to have an honest conversation by saying: you, student graduating with an MFA — where I had a path to teach in higher ed, that path for you is likely not there. It's thinking through not just betterment itself, but betterment through the humanities: collective thinking, thinking expansively, thinking critically. If those things go away, we're in trouble. But if you're going to art school for a job — as we're hearing and seeing in all kinds of disciplines, people are just forgoing it. They're going right to the workplace, because the statistics tell us you can earn as much money going to a trade school, probably more, than hustling out of school with that MFA and knocking on the door of the market.

Schools should do what schools can do, and that is teach critical thinking, teach relationships to ideas, teach histories. Those things are still hugely important. And clearly not everybody can afford them — so let's just blessed hope that schools start to understand they've overbuilt, and that tuition is obscene and needs to be walked back.

This is where my husband teaches at a community college in DuPage County, just outside of Chicago. That place is flourishing, and he's able to teach art — ideas, foundations, techniques. The majority of his students will not be artists, but it's still important.

Hugh Leeman: If we made a comparative model — the School of the Art Institute costs X, community college costs Y — what are the differences in the education you're receiving?

Michelle Grabner: I'm somebody who's always said those early foundational classes should be taught when one is a junior and a senior. Simple 2D design, simple material processes. So often we get students at the Art Institute who had a really great high school education, an AP background. They come to art school wanting to express themselves, and they do not want to settle into all those foundational languages they feel they may have had in high school. But those are languages. Those are the foundations we carry in our studio every single day. Those are things in the cliché of the toolbox we will never get away from. So I would love for us to revalue those foundations, as opposed to putting them early on where students quickly move through them so they can finally get to those upper-level undergrad classes where they can express themselves. I'd love to flip how schools think about a curricular trajectory through the visual arts — foundations all the way through, or foundations at the end.

We have a lot of students at SAIC who, instead of paying four years of undergrad tuition, are transfer students. They'll go to College of DuPage for two years and transfer to the Art Institute for two. I remember reading a piece in the Times years ago about how prudent it was for a student to take two years at their local community college and then go to Cornell for their junior and senior year — and they have a degree from Cornell University. That's starting to really ramp up. It's a conversation that's always around community colleges: how they think about transfer, the classes they teach, how they'll be accepted into other schools. That seems quite smart.

Complicity, Compliance, and the Federal Loan Changes

Hugh Leeman: The Trump administration recently made major changes to federal direct loans — graduate borrowing limits, Pell eligibility, repayment rules — that will majorly affect art schools, with a stated goal to make schools less debt-heavy and more accountable to students' long-term success. The counterpoint is that it could make graduate art school less accessible, less experimental, more careerist, and more dependent on private wealth. What are the conversations you're having with faculty and students around this?

Michelle Grabner: Right now, our administration is deeply, deeply looking at how to be complicit with these changes. How do we acknowledge and change curriculum so we're in compliance? That's coming from the top.

To be perfectly honest, outside of a few faculty, nobody's bristling. There's fear. There's a "what do we have to do to keep the doors open" situation. And that is exactly what administrations want.

What it ends up doing — these are policies from the feds that want to undergird our economy in traditional ways. If you're spending this money to go to school, and there's debt, but you're not able to then take those credentials back into the workforce and elevate the overall economy, why are we going to subsidize your education? I have huge problems with that. Education and learning — that's an abstraction and a value that has to be embraced. I really bristle at all of these conversations.

I just wish I heard even a little utterance of the alternative. I was reading a review of a new Black Mountain College book coming out. It talks about how these alternative schools — as Black Mountain was, or some of these profoundly liberal arts schools that are barely opening their doors, Hampshire, well, gone — had alternative pedagogy, alternative learning structures. And in the review: the more alternative and the more compelling, and thus when we look back the more importantly historical in terms of a cultural movement — the faster they fall. So there's that working against the whole argument I'm pushing, that these are the things we should strive for. So maybe, hopefully, the smallest institutions can be noted, seen, and supported by the big foundations — the Mellons, the Fords of the world — to really buoy them up and give them a place so they can be adjacent, at least, to what's happening in traditional schools.

Hugh Leeman: The Department of Education frames these loan changes as a way to stop over-borrowing and push schools to lower cost. Is there a version of that argument art schools should take seriously?

Michelle Grabner: Absolutely. Administrative bloat — it's everywhere. On the other side, which is very important, are all those adjuncts who dedicate their lives to teaching but do not hit the hierarchy of full-time status. Godspeed — they've unionized. That means institutions have to be accountable for those faculty who do the good service and the good teaching, to compensate them, to recognize them. That's very important, but it's also very expensive for these institutions that are vulnerable.

So without taking away from our colleagues who are adjuncts and lecturers the protection they deserve and earn — how can we think about a new structure? SAIC should really be doing that. This goes back to the back heel. Instead of being defensive, I want to know where the imaginative thinking is going on. How can we restructure so we can bring those costs down, so we don't have to have that exorbitant tuition? We're just going to have to get smaller — that's maybe what I'm hearing the administrators say. That seems pragmatic, but I'm wondering if there are other ways. Hopefully we're going to start having these conversations this academic year about being imaginative. What does it mean that we can serve our students, not burden them with excessive debt, and still be excellent in terms of thinking about the arts, making, history, and so forth.

Hugh Leeman: You said we're going to have to be smaller. Does that mean layoffs?

Michelle Grabner: Indeed it does, if we're not making our enrollment goals. And right now we're not making our enrollment goals — very simply because our international students are having a very difficult time getting here. They're not being awarded visas. If students aren't being awarded visas, our classes aren't filling. If our classes aren't filling, we're going to have to cut those classes, or move some students into another class, and there will inevitably be faculty who are not able to teach.

Hugh Leeman: And the difficulty with visas for international students is also due to the current administration's policy changes?

Michelle Grabner: Yes, absolutely.

The Myth of Early-Career Income

Hugh Leeman: One critique is that these rules measure the value of art education through early-career income. What is that myth about how artists actually build their lives?

Michelle Grabner: Yes — and it's not okay. That's the policy coming from the feds. But there are other economies we engage in day to day doing the same thing. The art blogs. The marketplace.

The question is: how can one feel — I'll use the word success — fulfilled in the world as an artist, engaged with art, their own making, the past of art-making, the future of art-making, the full range of that potential engagement?

There are so many industries that entwine. Art school being one. The residency industry — the pay-to-play to go somewhere. Even the critical apparatus, which isn't really critical, it's barely journalism, but the constant announcement of ridiculous things like Daniel Arsham's houses for sale — a massive, beautiful home in Manhattan. We're comparing ourselves to these rare exemplary figures who command this attention. You get this in all aspects of culture. So school is a problem, but there are other industries built around the frothiness of the marketplace that burns out very quickly. Social media and Instagram being another one. How does one have all this influence just by being seen through a virtual tiny bit of digital color?

I'm old enough to understand how a museum show, or being in legacy collections, and critical assessment, and the marketplace, and teaching — they were all entwined. They all depended on one another. And now they're atomized. It's all over the place. This is what's really difficult to teach with my grad students. They're always bringing me somebody they found on Instagram that they're really striving toward. But that alone will not yield satisfaction in the fullness. Artists want to be public-facing. That is a kind of public face, but it's not with the object itself.

All of these typical markers used to be entwined, and now they exist all over the place. So what does that mean? It means artists are going to have to first feel very, very comfortable with how they're developing work, how they're thinking about their work. Their daily practice has to feed something so they can create the structure of how they succeed. And that just may be: I logged in eight hours today in the studio, and I also went to my job. That right there is a kind of success. If we start letting all of these industries from the outside shape that, we're going to be perennially disappointed.

Yes, it's great to have professional practice classes. But really starting to have these conversations about how one can integrate this passion we have, this skill set, this craft we honed, into our day-to-day and value that — I think that's the first step. And it's very, very hard, because I can't wake up in the morning without doing this. Everybody has this moment of: what about me? Ridiculous. But that's very hard to navigate — those powerful, all-prevalent industries within culture.

Hugh Leeman: Is the "what about me" the attention economy you're referring to?

Michelle Grabner: Yes — and this is where I'm highly critical of how many schools, maybe our own, think about critique. It's not really critique. Critique is its own discipline. It has its own history. And often — there are a lot of exceptions — I'm concerned that critique is simply a bunch of eyes on work, and that's successful enough, or that makes the artist we're looking at feel okay, that the attention we're giving it is all that's necessary. And schools are sadly calling that a crit. It is not. We may all gather around a work, but there's something else that has to be done. History needs to be given. There are so many forms of critique that can be overlaid. Critique has to be taught. Critique honors the work and the artist, its own discipline, and the work of culture. That's a rigorous kind of attention. I would like a more rigorous kind of attention.

Boredom, Limitation, and the Pale King

Hugh Leeman: As a final question — you've talked beautifully about boredom, even calling positive boredom a kind of contentment. What does boredom do for creativity?

Michelle Grabner: There's a terrible cliché Picasso quote that's maybe a terrible cliché, but it's kind of good — something about inspiration and work. Dedication and work: in that frame is where inspiration often comes from. It doesn't come from above, and then one does the work. There's something inherent. That's not all artists, obviously — people have different relationships to how they manifest a thing or an idea.

This goes back to what we were saying about limitations. Repetition, process — there's something that's going to change. The body will change it. Culture will shift. Conversations and politics will shift, and inevitably, even within the most basic, repetitive making, one will understand it differently. There will be a shift that happens in there.

So boredom. All these academic books about boredom came out — I'm putting a pin in around '08, after the economic collapse. It's what we didn't have. We were revving up with our screens and social media and the speed of the digital world. So boredom was the other to that. This is the cultural condition — what is the other to that? Boredom. And all of a sudden there's lots of interesting writing on boredom and the conditions of boredom and how that yields and plays within creativity.

So in short: limitations and boredom — I see them as two structures that help one slow down and linger and assess within their thinking, within their practice, within their making. And boredom — David Foster Wallace, I always bring him up — he really did tease that apart, particularly in the novel he was writing when he died, thinking about being an IRS agent in Peoria.

Hugh Leeman: Or is that Infinite Jest?

Michelle Grabner: No, Infinite Jest — he set the stage with Infinite Jest, and that was absolutely no boredom. Everything — whether it was a drug, or tennis, or Canadian militants — it was always about distraction. That was about a life of distraction. The Pale King was the other. They're the beautiful bookends.

Hugh Leeman: Michelle Grabner, thank you so much.

Michelle Grabner: Hugh, thank you. And thank you to anybody listening to this, putting up with my babbling. You're a delight. It was great to talk to you.

By Liz Goldner

This summer’s Pageant of the Masters, with its theme, the “Greatest of All Time,” celebrates six centuries of art masterpieces, presenting work from many different eras and styles. The theatrical spectacle features 40-plus renowned paintings and sculptures, most with real people inhabiting their artistic counterparts, on the stage.

The Pageant evolved organically in the art colony of Laguna Beach, which attracted artists from all over the country and beyond. Artists moved there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for the magnificent weather, coastal scenery, landscapes as subjects of their artwork, and especially for the camaraderie with like-minded creatives. As the town evolved, performances became important occurrences at get-togethers and gallery openings, leading to the Pageant of the Masters.

Performed for two months every summer, the Pageant combines fine art with intricate theatrical engineering, and with volunteers who pose as characters in classic, modern and contemporary paintings and sculptures. The models inhabiting the living pictures or “tableaux vivants” wear elaborate make-up, wigs, headpieces and cleverly constructed clothing to facilitate their art personas.

Supporting these volunteers are detailed background scenes from the original paintings, created by professional artists. With models posing in front of these scenes, re-creations of well-known works of art, framed, with stage lighting, are produced. When viewed from the Pageant’s expansive Irvine Bowl amphitheater, the audience beholds astonishing larger-than-life pictures that overflow with vibrancy. This aspect is also true of the sculptural pieces. Completing the complex production is a large construction crew, a live orchestra, and narration detailing the stories behind the art pieces.

These two-hour performances are derived from amateur theatricals performed during the Victorian era. These events featured party-goers posing as their favorite art characters within large picture frames. In the original 1932 Pageant, titled “Spirit of the Masters Pageant,” volunteers posed as “Mona Lisa,” “Whistler’s Mother,” and other well-known subjects. The volunteers walked down Laguna Beach streets, holding large frames around themselves, leading onlookers to the newly formed Festival of Arts. The Pageant evolved to become a complex production, presenting works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Bruegel, da Vinci, Botticelli, Manet, and modern and contemporary paintings. 

The “Greatest of All Time” Pageant theme hearkens back to its roots, featuring world-famous art pieces. The show begins with sculptures by Michelangelo and paintings by Johannes Vermeer (“The Music Lesson,” 1665, and “Art of Painting,” 1668). Marble masterpieces, including a stage-wide re-creation of the majestic “Trevi Fountain,” 1762, in Rome, are accompanied by music by Ottorino Respighi: “Pines of Rome,” 1924. 

These are followed by masterful Impressionist artworks: “Le Déjeuner sur L’herbe” by Claude Monet, 1866; “The Dance Foyer at the Opera,” 1872, by Edgar Degas, with live models holding complex dance poses; and “Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881,” by Pierre-August Renoir. When the latter painting is displayed, a French accented voice, representing the artist, says “To me, a painting should be something pleasant and pretty, yes pretty.” The work, on view at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., is a colorful, sunlight-infused work of a party on the Seine River, embodying the quintessential Impressionist style, and lifestyle during the Belle Époque. 

Vincent van Gogh’s “Morning, Peasant Couple Going to Work,” 1890, is an expression of the artist’s reverence for rural laborers. One of his most luminous paintings, “The Starry Night,” 1889, depicting the view of the sky andstars from his asylum room during a sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village, is featured. A magnificent replication of the work is displayed across the Pageant’s entire screen. 

Pablo Picasso, one of the most prolific painters who ever lived, according to long-time narrator Richard Doyle, appears on the Pageant stage by an actor playing him, with voice-over by a Spanish-accented man. He talks about his celebrated paintings and about his several wives and lovers. When discussing his tumultuous relationship with his wife, Russian ballet dancer, Olga Khokhlova, an elaborately dressed woman, personifying her, dances vibrantly onto the stage.

Special attention is given to Picasso's 1907 “Les Demoiselles D’Avignon,” in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Presenting five sex workers, with African, Iberian and tribal-inspired masks, in a red-light district of Barcelona, it was one of the artist’s first paintings to employ fractured spaces. As one of Picasso’s most famous works, its cubist style influenced artists for many decades. 

Picasso’s iconic 1937 painting “Guernica” is then thrillingly displayed across the show’s entire screen. Representing the fascist bombing and obliteration of an ancient Basque town during the 1937 Spanish Civil War, the anti-war painting conveys fractured versions of injured bodies, abstract horrified faces, bulls, horses, and birds. The bombing of Guernica was carried out by Nazi German and Fascist Italian forces supporting General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces.

The Pageant’s second act begins with an actor playing the world-renowned 20th century artist Norman Rockwell in his art studio. As he talks about his inspiration from common people for his art, four of his Saturday Evening Post” covers, 1917-21, are depicted. With the titles, “Boy in the Mirror,” “Champ,” “Necessary Height,” and “Rivals,” they artfully present the insecurities of pre-adolescent and adolescent boys, 

His “Picasso vs. Sargent,” 1966, in his finely wrought realistic style, illustrates the contrast of 1960s female styles and tastes. One woman in a black coat and heels is perusing a traditional painting by John Singer Sargent. Alongside her, a younger woman in jeans and boots is admiring a more contemporary Picasso painting. 

Rockwell’s “Glen Canyon Dam,” 1970, illustrates the Arizona dam that severely damaged the Colorado River’s ecosystem, altering the Indigenous Navaho landscape, its farming and herding capabilities. The artist included in this Western-style painting a Native American family observing the project’s detrimental impact on their people. President Ronald Reagan is quoted as saying, “Norman Rockwell painted the people and events of six decades of American life with compassion and humor.” 

Other art pieces in the second act include a stage-wide rendition of the “Lincoln Memorial,” 1922, designed by Daniel Chester French; Winslow Homer’s “Snap the Whip,” 1872, of nine young boys playing in a field; and David Hockney’s “Portrait of an Artist,” 1972, of Hockney staring at a man in a pool. Frida Kahlo’s “The Love Embrace of the Universe, The Earth (Mexico), Myself, Diego, and Señor Xolotl, 1949, is deeply symbolic and surreal, as it conveys many layers of entwining embraces. The Earth (Mexico) is holding Frida Kahlo, who is compassionately holding a nude Diego Rivera who is sleeping blissfully in her arms.

The Pageant’s concluding art piece, “The Last Supper,” 1495-1498, by Leonardo da Vinci, is a continuation of a decades-long tradition of presenting it at the Pageant. But an aged da Vinci first appears on the stage, questioning if the painting is worth showing. Then Andy Warhol, who silk-screened “60 Last Suppers” 1986, appears on the stage, encouraging him to exhibit it. This dialogue by two art superstars, who lived millennia apart, connects Renaissance devotional art to modern art and celebrity culture—a feature epitomizing this production’s expansive theme.

The curtains open to reveal a magnificent living rendition of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” with heavily made-up actors, set to the music “Meditation,” about a spiritual awakening, from the opera “Thaïs” by Jules Massenet. As the audience leaves the Irvine Bowl, they are reveling in the glory of having seen and heard about the details of some of history’s greatest artworks. Many people I spoke to were also captivated by the production’s unique pageantry of marrying art history with theatrical illusion.

The Pageant of the Masters Director is Diane Challis Davy. Dan Duling is the scriptwriter. Richard “Butch” Hill is the Technical Director. The show runs nightly until September 4, 2026.

By Hantian Zhang

There are two ways to read the title of the exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco: an exhibition about the craft of making moving images, or one about what craft has made of the moving image. The first reading is not a stretch, as editing, color timing, and the physical labor of slicing and splicing footage are all forms of embodied, specialized knowledge; a show called Video Craft could easily have been about them. Video Craft turns out to be an exhibition of the second kind. Across its galleries, moving-image media keep getting pulled into craft’s orbit: a sixteen-millimeter documentary turns into a quilt, home movies get cut up and rewoven as patchwork. For a culture that lives increasingly on TikTok and Instagram, an exhibition like this reminds us that craftsmanship still has a claim. To the extent that video gets included, it is for demonstrating ways it gets reconfigured through craft.

Among the works that literally feed video into craft, Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Arts and Crafts in American and Peruvian Weaving (2016/2025) exemplifies this one-way flow by weaving strips of 16mm polyester film into a square quilt. The films are two documentaries from the 1980s, one about arts and crafts in America, the other on Peruvian weaving, both thematically apt for their new use. The artist cut the film into segments of different lengths and then threaded them together using translucent polyester thread in a courthouse-step pattern, a quilt pattern of blocks of symmetrical stripes on alternate sides of the center square. As one film was brown-tinted and the other blue, the artist placed the film segments in a symmetrical pattern, mimicking the color alternations of a real wool quilt. When the film quilt is backlit, the images on the film become visible, and the work resembles finer needlework: each frame is almost identical to its neighbor except for small alterations, together creating an intricate, tessellating pattern. In making use of the film’s color and image this way, the moving image disappears into the craft object.

A few other artworks play on similar ideas. In RGB (2021), Sarah Rosalena weaves red, green, and blue yarn into a rectangular piece of fabric, mimicking the fundamental building blocks of digital color and display. Greg Climer’s Animated Quilt Film (2016–2022) extends this logic to motion, assembling thirty-six cotton quilts, eighteen of which are on view at the show, to animate five seconds of animation showing two men kissing in a park. The contours of the figures arise not from drawn lines but from patches of color, and the imprecision is part of the point: the embrace registers first as shape and hue, only secondarily as the two men it depicts. The theme of the movie resonates with the history that the medium carries: quilting has long served as a vehicle for queer memorial, most visibly in the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Climer’s work inherits this association even as it puts quilting to a new use.

This pattern of rendering the digital, or the moving, in craft’s terms gives the exhibition its coherence. While first appearing as a counter example because it is not a craftwork but a video, Ahree Lee’s Bojagi (Memories to Light) (2015) actually shows what this logic would look like when taken to its limit. The artwork is a fifteen-minute video. In it, the artist assembles archival Asian American home movies into a digital bojagi, the traditional Korean patchwork wrapping cloth used as gift wrapping in weddings and in Buddhist rites, often gifted from mothers to daughters before marriage. The footage is cut and recombined, borrowing its editing logic from Korean textile piecing. The result no longer reads as film in the usual sense: the screen is divided into four quadrants, each further divided into four, simultaneously showing the same imagery distorted and flipped left to right and top to bottom. The final work is an abstract, kaleidoscopic dynamic that refuses any coherent narrative. What is lost here is legibility itself: the imagery is no longer recognizable as imagery, not merely unplotted but unseeable as the footage it once was. The artwork is thus not a counterexample to the exhibition’s dominant logic but a case of the logic’s complete realization. Here, craft’s reorganization of video does not just borrow the moving image’s material; it dissolves the image’s claim to being an image at all.

Lauren Kalman’s to have or to hold … (2021–2024) would also look like a counterexample at first glance, as both craft and video are constituents of the artwork. A group of six large ceramic vessels sits on black pedestals at chair height, each bearing strange distortions on its surface. An accompanying three-channel video reveals their origin: the artist presses her body against the unfired clay, distorting its form before firing. The finished vessel also gets rotated in the video, allowing the viewer to trace the contact points between body and clay. The video here is thus mostly documentary, with no formal ambition of its own; it is not, any more than the others, an instance of video’s craft coming into view. Without the recording, the objects appear enigmatic; with it, they become traces of a specific encounter between body and material. The ceramic needs the video to disclose its process, and the video needs the ceramic as its subject. In forming one pillar of the mutual dependence, Kalman’s video deviates from the one-way-flow logic not by reversing it, but by entering into dialogue with craft.

On this point, Kalman’s work recalls a passage in Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in which the cultural critic describes the imprint left by a hand in clay as emblematic of artisanal production, the trace bearing an unmistakably individual mark that lends the craftwork its aura. Benjamin contrasts this with mechanically reproduced media such as photography and film, whose images can be endlessly replicated and thus detached from their original context. Yet Benjamin was equally fascinated by the camera’s ability to disclose aspects of reality inaccessible to ordinary perception. What Kalman’s work achieves is to hold both observations and retain the best of the two media: vessels preserve the aura of bodily contact, while the video reveals what that contact looked like. The vessels retain the physical trace of the encounter with the body, and the video captures and keeps its temporality. 

Here, the show’s prevailing one-way logic turns out to be not an oversight but an expression of where it is being staged. A craft museum is built to notice craft. Kalman’s vessels suggest what a fuller dialogue between video and craft might look like, but even there, the dialogue tilts toward craft’s terms: it is the ceramic, not the video, that remains the true subject. Given that video and the image have become so pervasive these days, the show’s one-way logic starts to look like craft’s insistence that touch, slowness, and the trace of the hand still have a claim. Benjamin watched cinema unsettle the conditions of artistic production; Video Craft suggests that craft, a century later, still finds ways old and new to hold its ground.

Oscar Villalon is the editor at the San Francisco literary journal ZYZZYVA, winner of a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize in 2022. His writing has been published in Stranger’s Guide, Freeman’s, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, Lit Hub, and elsewhere, including the anthology There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis (Penguin Random House).

Managing Editor, ZYZZYVA | Interview by Hugh Leeman

What Is ZYZZYVA?

Hugh Leeman: Oscar, for people who may not know, what is ZYZZYVA, and can you share a bit of its history and background?

Oscar Villalon: ZYZZYVA is an independent nonprofit literary journal headquartered in San Francisco, publishing since 1985 — that's when the first issue came out. It was founded by editor Howard Junker, and its intention was to publish poets, writers, and artists living on the West Coast, which was defined as Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii.

The reason was that Howard and like-minded people — the people who would eventually be on the board, the donors — felt that folks living out here just weren't getting the attention they merited from publications outside the region, namely New York, but just in general. Attached to that was a sense of necessity: we needed some sort of journal out here in which all these different people in the literary community could see each other. A platform for all the incredible writers and poets and artists out here.

Why a Literary Journal Matters in the 21st Century

Hugh Leeman: There's a nobility in that 1985 idea of giving props to people who, by a simple tyranny of geography, aren't near New York. But bringing it to today — what is the importance of a literary journal in the 21st century?

Oscar Villalon: It still functions the same way. The idea is to create a platform for a literary community to get their work published, seen, and appreciated, and therefore to support them. A journal like ZYZZYVA is so regionally specific — and now even more so. Originally the idea was to platform West Coast poets, artists, and writers; now it's to platform California poets, artists, and writers. We still publish people from all over, but in the main we want to highlight folks from the Golden State.

Why? It's important for people to see what's happening around them — to see what they're already a part of, the richness of their community. So the mission of a literary journal is not only to support the people you publish by bringing them to readership, but also to enrich the lives of the readers, so they can see what's happening around them. Art is being made all the time. Literary art is being created all the time. This is exciting. You are part of an evolving thing, and I think that can be greatly beneficial.

Hugh Leeman: With that shift from Alaska-down-to-Hawaii toward focusing more on California, is there still inclusion for someone from Iowa or Texas?

Oscar Villalon: Yes, we do publish them. But here's the idea: it's not just about publishing you, it's about supporting you in other ways — events. We do a lot of events, probably more than any comparable literary journal. So far in 2026 we're almost up to a dozen events, and we're still in July. The next step to supporting you is bringing you out to a reading and putting you in front of an audience, literally building some sort of fellowship, some communion, with our readers where we live.

So we absolutely will publish people from outside, but I can't extend to you the full benefit of being published in ZYZZYVA if you're in search of community. When we publish people from outside the region, they tend to be a little more established — they already belong to a literary community. It's like inviting a special guest to the party: look who's dropping by, what a special visit from so-and-so who normally lives in New York but is stopping by to hang out with us today. It's not that we don't want to publish people outside the area — it's that I feel we can't fully support you as well if you're outside the region.

Hugh Leeman: So you're creating a community about genuine connection, as opposed to simple publication. Is that fair?

Oscar Villalon: Yes — though I'm not creating it so much as surfacing it. It's there. The community just needs to see each other to coalesce. My thinking is that ZYZZYVA becomes a locus around which the community can gather, see itself, and hopefully thrive and drive further. We're certainly not the only organization making things happen, but every little bit helps.

The Values Behind the Journal

Hugh Leeman: In a previous conversation you told me a literary journal is a small marker of what you value. What are those values?

Oscar Villalon: Possibilities. In terms of values, I'd say what we'd call the humanist values — empathy, rule of law, self-knowledge, self-awareness, the pursuit of enlightenment. But in terms of the idea behind it, it's one of possibility. The idea of becoming. The idea that we are evolving, that things aren't static, that they need not be the way they appear right now. What literature does is open your mind to the possibilities — literally, other ways of living, other ways of being, other ways of seeing the world.

Taking Over and What Had to Change

Hugh Leeman: Several years ago you took over as managing editor. When you took over, what were the things you said, "this needs to stay the same," and what did you say, "we need to change this"?

Oscar Villalon: When I became managing editor, I was working for the editor, Laura Cogan. We were on the same page about what needed to change. Where ZYZZYVA was when we were tasked with running it, and where we wanted it to be, came down to the variety of writing, maybe even the quality of the writing — it felt to us like it was lacking in excitement. We wanted to reshape it in our image. That's why you don't necessarily want the same editor running a journal for years and years with their stamp on it — sometimes you want someone who sees things differently, to shake things up. Times change. Different leadership.

One of the big things we did was introduce interviews — lengthy interviews. We didn't do those before. We also opened it up to outside contributors; it had been very strictly West Coast writers. Going back to the analogy of the party, we wanted to invite people in whose work our readers would enjoy, even if they didn't live on the West Coast. And the events — so many events. That was by far the biggest change once Laura Cogan became editor and I was managing editor. At one point we were averaging nearly twenty-four events a year — at least two a month — while publishing the journal three times a year and doing fundraising, with just three full-time staffers at the time. A lot of work, but important, necessary work.

The Ideal Reader in a Rent-Controlled Apartment

Hugh Leeman: You've described the ideal reader to me before as someone living in a rent-controlled apartment, who knows that's how it's going to be forever — an aspiring writer or artist, maybe a social worker, maybe working for a nonprofit. That's a very specific ideal reader. What inspired the focus on them?

Oscar Villalon: Because I don't think of literary community, or the pursuit of a literary career or literary interests, as something that should be tied to income. I don't like the idea of creating something where people feel they're pressing their nose up against the glass, aspiring to get in — not in terms of quality, like "one day I could write a story good enough for the journal," but in terms of class. Another class of people, one I may never be part of, for a variety of non-negotiable reasons: your ethnicity, your race, your degree, what field you work in.

What I want to do — and I hope this resonates — is create a journal for people who made a value choice: the reason I'm living in the rent-controlled place, the reason it's sometimes a financial struggle, is because I've chosen one thing over another. I chose, let's say, meaning over lucre. It's a way of saying, I recognize you as a fellow bohemian, and I want to create a journal I think you would like. Because for me, San Francisco — in spite of all the wealth, all the shiny things, all its outsized power — its beating heart is still the bohemian one. It's about beauty, about culture, still very much about possibilities. I want to recognize that.

Hugh Leeman: Given the massive displacement of the creative class over the last ten years or so — the artists, writers, poets, dancers — do you see your target audience dwindling?

Oscar Villalon: No, and I'll tell you why. Even though those are the people I'm thinking of when I put out the journal, there are so many more people who, out of economic necessity, have to take jobs that pay well — because they have a family to support, or crushing needs that can only be addressed financially — who would also very much like to be part of that. The journal is open to them too. It's for the people who had to take that route, understandably, who have to work for a living to make a good amount of money because they're trying to create wealth and comfort for their family. I get it. But at the same time, recognize that life is elsewhere — that this isn't the sum of it, that there's more going on.

Hugh Leeman: In other words, the sum of life is not the accumulation of cash.

Oscar Villalon: Right. You do that to take care of your material needs, but what are you going to do about your spiritual, intellectual needs? Hopefully a journal like ZYZZYVA becomes, for those San Franciscans, a balm — something that reminds them of their humanity, reminds them of their agency, reminds them that our time is short, but that the world is still incredible and mysterious.

Naming the Place Where It Hurts

Hugh Leeman: We spoke before about how Western civilization is under incredible pressure of change — in the shadow of catastrophe, of authoritarianism, of fascism — and that people want answers at these times. What are the answers people are looking for?

Oscar Villalon: It boils down to one question: why do I feel the way I do? Let me frame it a little. We go through life thinking things and feeling things, and we lack the vocabulary to express them to ourselves, let alone to others. What the literary arts do is provide you with that vocabulary. So you can name the place where it hurts. You can name that itch, and now you know where to go and scratch.

In these times of utter confusion — of astonishment and bafflement and anger and sadness and fear — it's more important than ever to be able to express what you're thinking and feeling. This prevents you from falling into the traps of other people who are going to express it for you, who are going to say, "here's what's wrong with you." Spending time with a novel, or with poems, or with a collection of lyrical essays gets you closer to something true, which reminds you of your humanity. And when we talk about possibilities, with possibility comes hope. If you're reading, say, the literature that came out post–World War I, or post–World War II, particularly in parts of Europe and the Americas, there might be something in there to help you make sense of all this.

The other thing it does is remind you that you're not alone. Part of that process of providing vocabulary is through examples of people who've gone through what you've gone through, felt what you've felt, seen what you've seen — that indeed nothing is new. It only seems new if you don't know about other lives.

Hugh Leeman: That idea that you're not alone is powerful — in the shadow of the loneliness epidemic, and thinking back to the Spanish Civil War, where I believe Franco banned people from gathering in coffee shops, because that's where revolutions begin. On the flip side of that: if you really want to control people, you make them feel isolated. Like, no, you're the only one feeling that.

From Irrelevance to Relevance

Hugh Leeman: An undercurrent to everything we're discussing is relevance. You told me that when you took over, you wanted to make ZYZZYVA relevant again. What did that journey from irrelevance to relevance look like?

Oscar Villalon: By that I meant increasing the readership, making it something exciting people would want to see again. What happens is you get caught in a rut — the last issue looks a lot like the one before it — and you risk losing their attention. You could get to the point where you're serving the same meal. So you want to create surprise. Not that the high quality is the sameness — it's asking, are we repeating things? Are we not trying anything different, in terms of people writing in different styles? Can we mix it up, so that when readers encounter the journal, they walk away having engaged with something they otherwise never would have.

The other thing I meant by relevant: we have such a high caliber of poets, writers, and artists in our region — San Francisco, the Bay Area, California. It's an embarrassment of riches. Let's showcase them. Let's show people all these amazing talents working right now, writing about this shared experience of life, that they may not otherwise know about, or that they may find validating. That's what I mean by relevant.

Hugh Leeman: That implies ZYZZYVA is not a monologue but a dialogue. What have readers taught you that changed how you edit or what you publish?

Oscar Villalon: They don't teach us directly — we don't do polls. But what they've shown is increased patronage. For the last two years or so, our subscription numbers have steadily gone up. It's a trickle, but they're going up, in a way they hadn't in a while. Our events are very well attended — and we're seeing something really remarkable and hopeful: young people at our events. That's how we read them, and we say, we must be doing something right.

At the end of the day, we judge the reader because we think of the reader as ourselves. Between myself, our senior editor Manjula Martin, our associate and assistant editors — Andrew David King, Annie Dominici, Chiara Bercu — we create the vibe, along with our production designer, Justin Carter. That's important to mention: yes, I'm the editor, but this is in collaboration with all the journal's other editors. We put our heads together, we figure out what we think is going to be good, and we trust each other. In some ways it works like a band — everyone contributes something, and hopefully the sum is greater than the parts.

The Border, Belonging, and the Value of a Citizen

Hugh Leeman: Turning to your own writing — in your piece on Aida Hernandez, you described the border as something that can make a person fully part of a community and yet alien to it, while asking whether the story of the undocumented is really about the value placed on Mexican American futures. How do you see that idea applying today?

Oscar Villalon: That question has become more urgent, and the answer more stark, than ever. Let me back up. When you think of what ICE has been doing, when you think about the wages of Latinos compared to other US demographics, when you think about their near invisibility in popular media — Mexican Americans alone are thirty-five million people, that's ten percent of the country, and if you include Latinos as a whole it's closer to twenty percent — yet we barely register as a blip on the radar of US popular culture. In English, I should say. We certainly have our own popular culture, which is bountiful and commercially successful. But in US popular culture in general, we're hardly there.

This raises the question: what exactly is the value to us of being a US citizen, compared to other groups? When you're living in a constant state of what feels like siege — worried about the birthright citizenship ruling, with all these things coming at you — it forces you to think about what it means to be an American. The Black experience in this country is very helpful in figuring out what that might mean: what does it mean to be essentially a second-class citizen? That's something still worth thinking about when your schools are so poorly funded, when folks doing agricultural work are exposed to all kinds of pesticides and develop cancers. How much are we valued? Is my citizenship worth as much as yours?

This administration has made pretty clear what they believe our status to be — that at best you're going to be second class, if they have it their way. There'll be some exceptions, maybe if you're Christian evangelical they make room for you, but even then I don't buy it. I don't think you'll be fully, quote-unquote, one of them.

Hugh Leeman: In your El Paso essay, you address Mexicanos, Chicanos, Latinx directly, shifting between English and Spanish. What does that bilingual prose allow you to say emotionally, politically, even communally, that English alone does not?

Oscar Villalon: It becomes an opportunity to explore, on the page, different ways of being. In this case, it allows you to reflect how you actually think. The biculturalism, the bilingualism — it's not so much code-switching, not turning a lamp on and off where you're this or you're that. It's actually a combination, and the percentages vary. Sometimes when you're very upset, that combination can be at least fifty-fifty, if not seventy-five/twenty-five Spanish. Other times it's the opposite.

I also wrote it that way because I wanted to present what felt to me like an honest accounting of the emotions many of us were going through at that moment. In the wake of that horror, unabashedly embracing one's Mexicanness — and then the surprise: yes, I may speak the King's English, but how about that, I'm also this. We're complicated. Complex, I should say.

Precarity, Wealth, and the False Protection of Money

Hugh Leeman: Years ago you wrote a piece titled "Letter from San Francisco," addressing abandonment, economic fear, undocumented labor, and illness — a sense that there's no real net underneath people. How do you see that condition of precarity today, especially in San Francisco with the after-effects of the pandemic, housing instability, and economic inequality?

Oscar Villalon: It's even more extensive — and add to that precarity not just the economic one but the political one. The anxieties felt around that time are exponentially greater now. With all the vast wealth coming in from AI, it only further heightens how many people are struggling. What might have changed is that we're not looking at it anymore, the way we did some years ago. I think we've perhaps normalized it.

But when you look at the success of all these democratic socialists elsewhere in the country, people are seeing what they're seeing. In San Francisco it's harder to say — the gleam does blind you, if you choose to let it blind you, from what's actually there. What's important is that my fellow San Franciscans recognize that with every leap in quote-unquote progress — which seems to only mean filling somebody's coffers with gold — we still have a lot of work to do. We have to start considering what it looks like to work together, to be in community, to sustain a good society — to give a nod to Lyndon Johnson. And I think this is true for the whole state of California: things like healthcare, education, and housing are not things you should ever be skimping on. Those should be non-negotiable.

Hugh Leeman: You've mentioned alternative ways of being throughout our conversation. Tell me more about what those look like.

Oscar Villalon: Chief among them: how do I want to use technology? What does it mean to contribute to society? When we talk about other ways of being now, they all boil down to other ways of being a good citizen, other ways of being helpful to your community. What's going on now doesn't seem to be fruitful, so what are other ways of improving where I live? That idea — that meaning is found in being of service to others, not just in doing what's quote-unquote good for you — might be the paradigm being looked at. If there's a paradigm shift, it might be from "I acknowledge it's a dog-eat-dog world, so I will accrue as much wealth and power as I can to protect myself and mine" — to instead: maybe the best way to address that is to help others as much as I can, to be in service to others as much as I can. That's how we get out of any dire straits we're in. And once you do that, your entire outlook changes.

Hugh Leeman: It's really hard to ask oneself to be in service to others when your worldview, since childhood, has been to accumulate capital and strategically leverage debt to your own benefit.

Oscar Villalon: Absolutely. Here's the thing. Life is nothing if not about moments of love, of fear, of sadness, of pain. These are the ingredients that shape a life. And anything you do to avoid those things in an extreme, destructive way deforms you. "I can't feel love, because love compromises me, love means I'm loyal to people, and that'll mess up my ambitions." "I can't feel pain, because pain means I'm weak" — but if you never feel pain, you never grow. Sadness, same thing. Fear, same thing. If you never allow these things to humanize you, it deforms you. You can't live under that sort of protection. It's a false protection. Money seemingly allows for it, but it really doesn't.

If your whole point is to accrue wealth so you'll be sheltered and comfortable — that's the most superficial step. Protect you from what? That's why when you look at someone like MacKenzie Scott, you think: you can reach a certain level of material resources where you're set, and after that it doesn't matter. That's why you see someone like her giving away all that money. You don't need all that. It's not going to make you happy. It seems so obvious. And this is why the literary arts can be an affront to others — because it's a very low-budget, low-fi way of questioning what your worldview may be all about. And not only questioning it, but maybe making you feel some conviction that what we're talking about might be a better way to live. It's being conscious of how you're living, the choices you're making, and what you might be sacrificing.

Those Children Are Your Children Too

Hugh Leeman: You mention wealth as a superficial boundary, but it does reinforce challenges here. The San Francisco Unified School District is deeply challenged even on a national scale, and yet we're in an extremely wealthy city. To some extent, once I pull Junior out of the public schools and into private school, I have no vested interest in seeing the public schools thrive. If I can afford bespoke medicine, what do I care if others can't afford health insurance? Wealth creates insulation, and a potential blindness that borders on sociopathy.

Oscar Villalon: It can, absolutely. But this is the part that's so isolating: you are part of a society. Those children are your children too, believe it or not. Because those children are going to grow up, and one day they will encounter your child — and then what? There's no getting out of this. Like the man said, five to one, one to five, no one gets out of here alive. You cannot be apart from your fellow man. You think you can, but you cannot. It's going to boomerang back.

You know a good way to combat fascism? A highly educated populace. How do you do that? Put some money into public schools, where the vast majority of kids are going to go. Those are your future voters. Otherwise you're creating an anti-democracy. So here's how I'd look at it: if you want to send your child to a private school to get the finest of the finest, fine — I don't begrudge you that. But your wealth should also be such that you can pay your taxes to keep the public schools going and nice — meaning a solid education, great facilities, teachers who are paid and happy to be there. You need to do both. It's not one or the other. And I guarantee you, if you do both, there's no problem.

Young People and Physical Media

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned young people picking up ZYZZYVA more and more, which is a holy grail across the arts — everyone from museums to galleries says, "I have no idea how to engage young people." There was a report under the Biden administration on the loneliness epidemic, and one fascinating finding was that some of the loneliest people were those in positions of power, because everyone around them only pretended to be their friend — our relationships had devolved into a transactional nature.

Oscar Villalon: I don't think it's just us. I'd expect this to be happening to other literary journals too. As a general observation, young people are gravitating more toward physical media. We're a print journal. This is strictly anecdotal, but every time I visit family in San Diego County and we stop by a Barnes & Noble, it's packed — always — and mostly with young women, who seem to be having a great time. Something's going on.

I could see how, if you were in your late teens or early twenties, being quite sick of it all and wanting to find other mediums to be entertained or to make sense of things — why not through books, printed journals, or even physical media like DVDs, LPs, CDs? All these things that take you offline. It's important we don't forget that everything we call wonderful and exciting and new was created by people who are definitely not young anymore. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook when he was just a lad — he's no longer a lad. The children born into this world have no investment in any of it. This is as incredible to them as television was to me. And how did I feel about TV? It sucked. At some point I just stopped watching, because it's brain-dead. I could see the same happening with young people and technology — social media, streaming — where they say, I'm just not completely jazzed about this. What else is out there?

Look at the success of movies like Weapons and Sinners — they had an internet route to them, audiences knowing the directors through YouTube, but where did they go see them? Not online. In movie theaters. Sold out. Blockbusters, both of them, theaters packed with young people who enjoyed the experience of being crammed together in one place, which is communal. Something may be afoot, Hugh. ZYZZYVA may be one of the beneficiaries, I hope — but it's definitely not limited to us.

The Owl of Minerva Flies at Dusk

Hugh Leeman: As a final question — I read that you value writing that relates to the present while touching on ideas of love, death, work, children, parenting, "eternal things." What current predicaments are you most interested in seeing writers illuminate now?

Oscar Villalon: Two things. One: one's own culpability in the state of things. And two: one's own hopes and ambitions and perceptions of how things could get better. Both at once. There's a lot to explore. As the old saying goes, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk — wisdom only manifests after the disaster, and in the aftermath is where we try to sort out what went wrong. What was my role in this? And how can we prevent it? I don't mean strictly as a policy paper, but in terms of the human condition. What is it about us that makes us vulnerable to predation, to fascism, to authoritarianism? What is it about even those who would be opposed to all these things — their own failures, personalized? People you'd otherwise look up to, the César Chávezes of the world.

That kind of serious examination is what I'd hope to see more of, because we need more of it. But it requires a certain erudition, in terms of what books you're reading, what research you're doing — a certain mindset in how you engage with the world. It's the trick of being both here, in the present, in the specific, and at the same time inhabiting the universal — seeing how other people live, how they think, or where we sit in history. This boils down to your own life: you weren't just born and the world started. We're part of a continuum. Things happened way before you got here, and you'll spend your life trying to make sense of that and how it's affecting the way you live now. And at the same time you have to live your life, experience all these things, and figure out how you're contributing to a future, or how you're making sense of what a future might be like.

What can we do? This is why I talk about possibility. What little tweaks can we make — if not on a social scale, then on a personal scale — to be better? To find some sort of peace, to find the ability to live within your own skin. There's a parallel between being able to live within your own skin and being able to live within your own society. We don't want to keep deluding ourselves, lying to ourselves to make it to the next day, that everything's going to be okay if it's not. And if things are not going to be okay — whether personal or public — what can we do about it? Is there anything we can do? Literature is often asking questions, not providing answers, but even asking them is important. To have that conversation — this is why we see each other, why we gather, why we go to readings and author conversations, why we're all here. We're all trying to suss these things out. I think that's the nature of life. I really do.

Hugh Leeman: Oscar Villalon, thank you so much. I appreciate what you've shared, and thank you for what you do.

Oscar Villalon: Thank you, Hugh. I appreciate it.

By N Stern

You've walked this path a thousand times, off the zen reverie and cradle rock of the El, down the rusted honeycomb steps, over rain-specked sidewalk, past the patinated bronze lions, gatekeepers of the dreaming. You once shot b-roll on these steps - permitless - because that's the Chicago way - the cinematographer grinning, the actor in shades, lest he tempt the lenses of the Japanese tour group obsessed with his early, funny dance/dance revolution. 

In your past, the Arts of Asia gallery is a transitional artery, five millennia never touched by contemporary art - you're either ascending toward Chagall's stained glass harlequin - or descending from O'Keeffe's Sky Above Clouds IV. 

Honey blonde wood, a rail yard glimpse of the Millenium Park skyline, a diorama of a city within a city. A university classmate used to save on train fare by hopping the freight line and riding the rails to the switchyard below. The ghost of Woody Guthrie taps your shoulder and you stop in your tracks.

It's not supposed to be there, Starbursts of color, shimmering hoards of gold and silken green and deep-dyed cerulean.  You sense movement in the corner of your eye - or is it trompe l’oiel.  A landscape, no a dreamscape, in 70mm Cinemascope, where birds alight, trees sway in slow disco, verdurous, serpentine, as invasive as Jeff VanderMeer’s terroir.  

100ft+ wide, 21 panels of automobile enamel firework glimmering over acrylic liner on gemstone-imbued gesso. Raqib Shaw's PARADISE LOST (2009-25). Framed by Buddha(s) and the Goddess(es) Durga, Kali, and Hariti. Your spider sense tingles, your hand reaches for your camera, but iPhone algorithmic color cannot touch Shaw's palette. You are shoulder to shoulder with the instagram masses who drop the veil of selfie stick Narcissus and just..

Breathe.

Wisdom of the crowds.

There are no accidents - Shaw's work in conversation with O'keefe's. On Sky Above Clouds IV she writes:

“I painted a painting eight feet high and twenty-four feet wide—it kept me working every minute from six a.m. till eight or nine at night as I had to be finished before it was cold—I worked in the garage and it had no heat—Such a size is of course ridiculous but I had it in my head as something I wanted to do for a couple of years.”

21 years in creation, for Shaw it was an art school dare then a single panel, then a saga:

"It was just a flight of fancy, but then as they say words do have their own spirits"

PARADISE LOST whispers in conversation with O'keefe (and Hockney, and Bosch and Edo screens.)

It screams over the formal tomb-silence of limestone and bronze, yet never monopolizes the conversation - you are beckoned into the hospitality of Abraham's tent, opened on four sides, anointed by the scent of mint tea, and candied delights - stuffed dates and Nankhatai, Nutty atta laddoo that stains gold leaf across your tongue.

Milton’s Paradise Lost never (quite) fades, never leaves the party early or for long. Not in psychology, nor socio-political predicaments of state. Orlando Reade's "What in Me is Dark" (Astra House, 2024) shouts out Milton's influence upon Jefferson and Eliot and Heidegger and Arendt.

It's the atheist's favorite codex.

Never out of style, Reade notes how "Satan contemplates his minions’ prospects in hell “like a tech chief executive contemplating child labourers in a mineral mine”.

It's no wonder Roger Avary has announced an AI film adaptation. 

Shaw's panels are both sequential and oblique - you flashback to a screening where filmmaker Michael Haneke (Cache, The White Ribbon) dismissed the linear tale, the geometric directness of a Newton's cradle strike - praising instead the elegance of the "banked" billiards shot.  The clack of wood and chalk on resin echoes through Shaw’s mise-en-scene, offering eras past and present, kaleidoscopic and pixel keen.

Shaw's tales a paean to the lives never lived and the lives best lived. A middle-aged yearning to understand and a punk youth fever to belong. “This is not just my story,” Shaw explained. “It is the story of each of us, and the story of our times.”

His enemy is complacency and puny thought.

His enemy is your old boss at a comic book company who thought graphic novels and movies were identical in form and perception.

(No - film unspools in axis of time and defined space - the graphic novel grants permission to linger.)

Shaw invites you to linger. To sit on carved wood or the window beam. Traverse 20 years and dynastic Mahabharata tales. Peter Brook's version runs 9 hours on stage, 3 on screen. 

Shaw entreats you to take your time.

You (and he) instantiate the Main character energy painted into every frame. You are the monkey king you are the trickster you are the deceived. You are then and now and never (and forever.)

You are the train at every station (and the one that never stops.)

For every paradise lost /another found.

In Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale," urban scions seek to construct a bridge to the future - Shaw has succeeded where your dog-eared paperback failed.

Exit, pursued by a Kashmiri Himalayan black, Ursa mosaiced into this epic.

Your eyes narrow in the peak Midwestern sun, skyscrapers as high as an elephant's eye.

Keep passing the open windows.

And don't awaken the lions. 

Raqib Shaw, Paradise Lost, 2009–25, automobile enamel, acrylic liner, and gesso on panel, 21 panels, more than 100 feet wide. Curated by Madhuvanti Ghose, Alsdorf Associate Curator of Indian, Southeast Asian, and Himalayan Art, Arts of Asia. Alsdorf Galleries (141–142), Art Institute of Chicago. Generous support provided by Usha and Lakshmi Mittal. On view through Nov. 15, 2026.

I was strolling through Asheville, North Carolina, as one does in the slow-rolling southern states where heat, history, and memory seem to rise from the sidewalks, and wandered into Momentum Gallery. Inside, a group exhibition titled What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience unfolded like a quiet chorus of voices. Among them, the works that stopped me cold were by Pam Longobardi: fiercely painted environments that speak to the collision between the natural world and global consumer culture. Her deliberately “messy” brushwork becomes a call-to-action, reminding us of the labor still required to clean up our planet. The narratives threaded through her paintings urge us to recognize our responsibility to the imperiled landscapes we inhabit. She asks us the question: Will society face the financial burden of the environmental crisis and will each of us fully own our responsibility? 

What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience asks us to consider our responsibility to artistic practice in a world under strain. The six artists here move through themes both intimate and expansive—environmental stewardship, inner landscapes, the passage of time. Their works invite viewers to look closely and enter into conversation, finding echoes of their own experience within each artist’s narrative and conceptual frame.

Eremocene III (transmute) churns with turbulent, painterly forms, evoking catastrophic cycles of weather.

Not included in this exhibition is one of Longobardi’s installations composed from the ocean plastics she gathers. In 2006 she founded the Drifters Project, her global, community-driven art initiative, after coming upon immense amounts of plastic washed onto remote Hawaiian beaches and other distant shores. Since then, she has mobilized thousands of participants to reclaim and reposition tons of debris, transforming it into the raw matter for her gallery and museum installations. Ocean plastic becomes the substance through which her activism is released. Longobardi suggests that art’s purpose is not only to make us see but to make us care…a call to attention and empathy in the face of accelerating ecological crises. The interiority that drives making abstracts is different from the public, collective processes of gathering plastic and building installations, work that demands managing people, physical labor, accumulation, and ecological witnessing. She describes making paintings as an “antidote” to the challenges of work with the Drifters Project. Yet the message running through both practices remains aligned. 

"I view the paintings as an antidote to the plastic work, but still wholly part of the Drifters Project. They are visualizations of vast forces of collision between natural processes (such as chemical patination of copper) and industrial human-made products (like plastics, acrylics, resin, and oils) that are happening around the world, all shrunken to the manageable scale of a painting space. Through these works, I’m able to control the outcome and nature always comes out on top." - Pam Longobardi

Longobardi also showed a handful of tiny collages made from devalued currency…a shift in pace and scale. These miniature worlds feel controlled and intimate. They carry a quiet poignancy unlike her larger, more turbulent works.

(L) Island of Refuge (red spire underground electricity); devalued currency collage on paper, 11 x 14 in., 2017 (R) Island of Refuge (purple waterfall green fossil); defunct and devalued currency collage and paint, 11 x 14 in., 2017

Pam Longobardi’s practice moves fluidly among painting, photography, and installation, all in service of examining the psychological ties between humans and the natural world. Her work unfolds within a larger conversation about globalism and conservation. Based in Atlanta, she recently retired as Regents’ Professor and Distinguished Professor of Art at Georgia State University.

The What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience exhibition reminds us that art is both a mirror and a mandate. The works press us to see our own entanglement with a world under strain. Pam Longobardi’s practice makes that entanglement unmistakable. Her interactions with the world are physically and emotionally difficult, yet they reveal how creativity can shoulder responsibility…how it can turn witness into action. We’re asked not only to look, but to reckon with the mess we’ve created, and find ways to solve it.

Works by Pam Longobardi and the other artists in the What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience exhibition are showing at Momentum Gallery, 52 Broadway Street, Asheville, North Carolina through August 29, 2026.

By Liz Goldner

During the Golden Age of Hollywood (early to mid-20th Century), an important aspect of filmmaking was the painting of scenic backdrops, especially for picturesque movies. As the producers desired those backdrops to appear as “real” places, the film studios intentionally concealed the fact that they were created by hired artists. Most of the artists, who worked long hours on them, often on high scaffolds, were not credited for their work. 

Those circumstances resulted in tensions between the workers and the film studios, and ultimately in strikes, including the 1945 Hollywood Bloody Friday, by artists who resented the poor working conditions and inequities in wages and recognition. Conditions improved somewhat over the years, as they continued devoting their talents to the industry.

A magnificent example of the artists’ contributions is the painting of an Austrian town, “Backdrop for The Sound of Music” (1965). This 18-by-25-foot scene is displayed along a gallery wall in “Staging California.” The backdrop contains several majestic buildings and churches, nestled among the mountains, along with translucent materials inserted into the building windows, allowing light to shine through. Yet only Los Angeles artist Emil J. Kosa Jr. was credited for this work, even though five other artists had worked around the clock to create the scene.

The contributions of these talented artists, who were trained in the techniques of French and California Impressionism, became essential aspects of filmmaking during Hollywood’s Golden era. Indeed, this exhibition contains several movie clips featuring scenes painted by artists. These include “The Wizard of Oz,” 1939, with Dorothy dancing along the Yellow Brick Road, surrounded by the magical painted Land of Oz; and Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest,” 1959, with Cary Grant viewing the hyper-realistic Mount Rushmore. As the National Park Service would not allow the filming of actors climbing Mount Rushmore, the scene was so deftly constructed at MGM Studios in Culver City that many viewers believed they were seeing the actual monument.

Local artists also transported moviegoers, via painted backdrops, to locations as diverse as the Swiss Alps, Siberia, the South Sea Islands, the Sahara Desert and the New England Coast. Many artists were well acquainted with foreign landscapes thanks to their immigrant backgrounds, international travels, or art education in Europe.

Most studio painters had been fine artists before they worked on films. But unable to make decent livings with their art, they obtained studio employment for financial stability. They continued to work on their own paintings in their spare time, exhibit them and even win awards. 

The acquisition of many magnificent paintings in this exhibition occurred last September when the UC Irvine Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art merged with the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA). Events preceding the merger began in 2017 when the celebrated Gerald E. Buck Collection of 3,200 19th and 20th century California artworks were donated to UC Irvine. Dr. Stephen Barker, formerly dean of UC Irvine’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts, proclaimed back then that the Buck Collection, with art by Larry Bell, Tony DeLap, Lorser Feitelson, Gilbert Lujan, Helen Lundeberg, Agnes Pelton, Peter Voulkos and many others is, “The greatest collection of California art that nobody has seen.” 

The University soon resolved that the Buck Collection, along with the Irvine Museum's collection of California Impressionism (that had also been gifted to them), would become the genesis of a UCI museum, with a building to be erected on its campus, to be called the Institute and Museum of California Art 

In spite of valiant efforts, a museum structure to house those valuable works did not materialize, and the UCI collection was displayed for several years in a 6,000 square foot gallery in Irvine. Then last June, to the surprise of many in the art world, a proposed merger of Langson IMCA and OCMA was announced, with the expectation that the new entity would be located in the OCMA building in Costa Mesa. After months of plans and negotiations, the merger went through, and “Staging California” is the new venue’s first exhibition containing many pieces from the Buck Collection. Of the 50 art pieces on display, there are also works from the former Irvine Museum collection, from OCMA’s permanent collection and from loans. 

The exhibition reveals the talent and technical expertise of artists who made their livings at film studios. “Untitled,” after 1932, by Paul Grimm (who painted virtuosic versions of clouds and overcast skies for films) is in this show. The painting illustrates sunlight and shadows illuminating a mountainous landscape. It contains detailed brushwork of the dessert foliage leading to the mountains, and the ridges and striations of the mountains, which are visually echoed by the sky and clouds above. Its luminous atmosphere captures the spirit of classic California Impressionism. 

Dong Kingman’s background—he was born in Oakland, CA, raised in Hong Kong, and lived in both countries—and his work painting scenery for films including “Flower Drum Song,” 1961, influenced his personal artwork. While his paintings often contained cultural influences from the U.S. and China, his watercolor, “Along the China Coast,” 1965, is located in his beloved Hong Kong. As a major piece from the Buck Collection, it contains boats and people nestled among bushes and trees, with a village in the background, and a luminous body of water. The painting reflects the type of detailed graphic artwork that Kingman engaged in for the film industry.

Arthur Grover Rider’s “Untitled (Taos New Mexico),” after 1918, also from the Buck Collection, expresses magical Southland light, which is endemic to California Impressionism. Yet the painting captures a classic Taos scene with its scorched earth, low-slung adobe buildings and hillsides. Two other paintings in this show, expressing the grandeur of California’s purple-appearing mountains, are Warren Newcombe’s “Winter Ploughing California, Calabasas,” 1931, and Emil J. Kosa Jr’s “How Marvelous Thy Works,” after 1928. 

A surprising piece in this show is George Gibson’s “Marche de Fleurs, Nice,” 1943-45, likely painted during a trip abroad. This depiction of a village in Southern France, with people, homes, shops and potted flowers, is closer in technique and subject matter to classic French Impressionist paintings.

“Staging California” is a diverse and delightful exhibition, presenting an amalgam of film clips and paintings from a highly creative period in Southern California. It reveals how early Hollywood’s compelling and popular films depended in part on fine artists’ work shaping the viewers’ perceptions of our world. The show has further importance, as many paintings from the Buck Collection, now on display, have been in storage for years, with art lovers yearning to see them. The exhibition at UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art runs until October 4, 2026.

“…I try to believe in The Cross.

…But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.” -Anne Sexton, 1962

By Grey Dey

When I walked into Moth Belly Gallery for Joel Hernandez's At Least We’re Damned Together, I felt like I was walking into a really fun, sassy party. There on the walls were so many delightful and startling characters, sculpted in paper mache, looking right back at the viewer and, at times, even playing a kind of peek-a-boo. Faces emerge from masks and eyes peek through clouds and over water. So many characters and stories in exuberant colors, and faces full of lively expressions, greet you like entering an ebullient masquerade. But after my initial impression of celebratory color and charming style, I began to see the layers of interiority and critique. Childhood memory and innocence, magic and shapeshifting, and adult pleasure and demise, all intermingled throughout this playful exhibition.

     I was fortunate on a recent visit to San Francisco to catch up with Hernandez on a day when he was available for visitors to the gallery. I was able to spend a considerable amount of time with him discussing the show. Hernandez grew up in a Mexican border city, Nuevo Laredo, in the state of Tamaulipas, directly west of Lorado, in lower Texas. After some years in Indiana and Texas, he ultimately settled in San Francisco for the last 11 years, building his studio practice in the Mission District.

Fun video of the artist playing with the work in the studio: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZ5UFPfITE9/

He told me of the powerful impression made on him in his childhood by the local artists of Nuevo Laredo, who set up shop just as you cross the border from Texas. These artists were heroes for Hernandez and reappear in his ongoing mastery of hand-crafted paper mache and color palette. His personal takes on many of these regional, cultural themes and subjects carry these influences and artistic traditions forward into contemporary contexts, without sacrificing the value of personalized work made with care by hand. We see Hernandez honoring one of these artists in the piece, Hungry for Food. The title is echoed in his Instagram comment referring to this piece and another similarly constructed piece, Hungry for Riches.

“The golden statue was inspired by all of the AI billboards around town that try to convince you to not hire humans. I wanted to create two people at different spectrums. One that is happily creating art, culture and color. The other, encouraging you to not hire humans therefore stopping human growth, creativity and all things only humans can make… -The artists are hungry for food and the CEO is hungry for wealth.”

Hernandez told me that the faces in the pedestal represent the many individuals in today’s world who are aspiring to those riches and trying to climb to the top. The figure cloaked in gold is hiding the opportunist individuals behind this corporate AI takeover who disregard the global and societal harm in its wake. We never see the people behind the onslaught of AI content.

In Hernandez’s art we see the ubiquitous influences of Catholicism infused into Indigenous and regional Mexican visual traditions. But that cultural colonization is subverted through Hernandez’s critique of religious and cultural dogmas that do not allow for his contemporary, multicultural,  Queer experience. Queer liberation and self realization often facilitates additional  insights around other agendas of institutionalized oppression such as racism and classism. In Two Little Homos Whispered In My Ear, Hernandez flips the metaphor of having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. This time, the (Queer) subject is reclaiming society’s demonizing, rejecting the moral binary, and choosing for themself who they will choose to listen to. As Hernandez said to me, “we control the narrative!” 

In the title piece, we see the empowered, flippant disregard of hegemonic threats. Like the quote above from Sexton’s poem, With Mercy for The Greedy, religious metanarratives fail to maintain their stranglehold in modern contexts. Today it is difficult to reconcile these colonial and contradictory belief systems with the atrocities witnessed everyday. We are left to create our own world views that reflect our experience today. From an interview with Brandon Joseph Baker he states:

"The title [At Least We're Damned Together] was inspired by a piece that I made a long time ago where a snake swallowed two men, but the men inside the snake were relaxed and smoking a joint. It’s about the idea that we can find silver linings in difficult moments. I think that’s the mantra that we’re all in right now, trying to find the upside and the positives in a dark moment in society."

We see another example of this critique in Learning When To Quit. The palmistry hand is painted with a board game template, replacing life-line wrinkles, that warns of ambitions for success turning to excess and ruin. We see a gay couple optimistically beginning their life together to create a loving home. To continue playing beyond that goal includes ignoring warnings to “stay here” and “turn back!” The journey then slides into the pathos of temptation and self destruction, sacrificing time and simple pleasures to the unquenchable desire for more. This results in ultimately losing everything. The yellow brick road need not go all the way to Oz.

The game and the hand are decorated with milagros (small, golden charms that serve as placeholders for prayers, hopes, and gratitude,) Loteria (a Mexican game similar to Bingo but sometimes used as an oracle) and Tarot cards, along with other symbols representing the mysterious forces that often complicate our life choices and confound our worldview. The sleeve cuff morphs into a collar and the hand stands in for the head, revealing the pressure and confusion of sorting all of this out.

While other works also incorporate milagros, several works reference iconography from contemporary global pop culture, layering them into historical Mexican cultural contexts. In Aye Carumba, we see a heart shaped face of a Mexican man emerging out of a stylized Bart Simpson head. The title of the piece confronts how U.S. audiences need comedic, slapstick, and often dehumanizing filters to process non-eurocentric and non-white-supremist references, in order to consume them as entertainment. In The Simpsons, a layer of innocence-as-camouflage is added in the form of a young boy co-opting the Spanish exclamation. All the while, we are reminded of the origins of the phrase through the winking Hispanic face. In Happy Gooble, we see an adult face, (probably a self portrait,) peeking through a beloved childhood TV character covered in toy replicas of Gooble’s friends on the show. The face is remarkably emotive, expressing the simultaneous feelings of nostalgia for uncomplicated youth, and gratitude for friends throughout the trials of adulthood. 

Inserted, now and again, are paintings, the subjects no different from the paper mache sculptural pieces that populate most of the show. Hernandez told me that they were portraits of previous sculptures he would have liked to have seen in this show of works made during the past year. He told me that he identifies as a painter and sculptor, but primarily as a storyteller. We can plainly see the narratives in some of the pieces mentioned above. But for some, it helps to see the pieces installed in relationship to one another to recognize a story. For example, in the pieces Remembrance, Quopo, and Blue Devil, Hernandez commented on Instagram that:

“With these three in particular, I wanted to make a triptych of what it felt like being stuck between nostalgia and being carefree. Living in the now and living in the past.”

At Least We are Damned Together is an emotional body of work. Not in a manipulative or pedantic way, but in a more honest and generous sharing of a spectrum of feelings shared with the viewer. A holistic offering from an artist capable of acknowledging this range within himself. Again, the overall impact on me entering the space was one of delight, but ultimately bringing to mind a quote from The Drama of The Gifted Child, by Alice Miller, "The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.” Let Hernandez’s work inspire us all to continue making art as resistance to our perilous times. As he relates in his artist statement:                 

“I like to think that there are better days ahead, but I’m also too aware of the difficult shared emotions we’re all going through given the chaotic times in which we live. Anger and despair can sometimes feel like waves crashing over our heads, and at the same time, joy and love can feel equally strong and important in these moments. In a time that feels like we’re facing crisis after crisis alone, I want people to know we are experiencing this together, and to hold on to loved ones. All we have is each other.”

‍ ‍At Least We are Damned Together is a powerful example of an artist’s ability to reclaim the language of the colonizers, and transform the violence of the oppressors. In Hernandez’s deft hands, these injustices become resistance through humor, beauty, and care that refuses to forget who we are and the communities we are a part of.

Through July 25th

All photos, @brandonjosephbaker brandonjosephbaker.com courtesy www.mothbelly.org

Enrique Chagoya is a Mexican-born American painter, printmaker, and educator whose work has become a major voice in contemporary political art. Born in Mexico City in 1953, he studied economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico before earning a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1987 to 1990, he directed San Francisco’s Galería de la Raza, and he later became a professor in Stanford University’s Department of Art and Art History. Chagoya is widely recognized for codex-inspired works, prints, and paintings that remix Mesoamerican imagery, pop culture, colonial history, and political satire. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, election to the National Academy of Design, Stanford’s Dean’s Award in the Humanities, and a Tiffany Fellowship. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, LACMA, the Whitney, and other major institutions.

Artist & Educator Enrique Chagoya | Interview by Hugh Leeman

The Closing of Anglim Trimble and a Perfect Storm

Hugh Leeman: Enrique, after years of being represented by Anglim Trimble Gallery, the gallery has recently closed. What was the reasoning, and what effect has that had on you as an artist?

Enrique Chagoya: It's a series of events that have been taking place in the context of the art market in general, and with this gallery in particular. The original owner, Paula Anglim, passed away about ten years ago. She left her son Philip in charge, and thanks to him the gallery stayed open, along with some of the people who had worked with Paula — in particular Ed Gilbert, her gallery director for many years. It was doing okay, though it was hard to sustain through various changes. They moved from Geary Street downtown to Minnesota Street Projects, which was a big move, and eventually took a second space downstairs. It was doing well from around 2016 until it closed last year.

Ed Gilbert died around COVID, in 2021 or 2022 — he got cancer, unfortunately — and he left the gallery in charge of Shannon Trimble. So the name changed first from Paule Anglim to Anglim Gilbert, and then, when Ed passed away, to Anglim Trimble.

Then things began to happen with COVID especially. COVID was a major storm in the art world. Suddenly galleries had no traffic, hardly anybody was buying art, the economy went down. Museums lost attendance, restaurants closed, all businesses were down. It was a huge storm, and that was one element complicating the market.

This is my personal opinion, but every time there is a recession, there is a concentration of wealth in fewer hands. Many businesses go bankrupt and are absorbed by larger ones — the big fish eats the small fish. That happened with COVID, and it happened in 2007 and 2008, when all the financial institutions needed to be bailed out. I felt it myself. My sales went down big time. I used to make as much income from art as from teaching at Stanford, and that changed in 2007 — it went down to maybe a third, and very spotty. The economy never really recovered from 2007 to 2009, and all of this has created an unstable situation in the art market. A lot of the middle-market or mainstream galleries went out of business around then.

But business has been very good for the high end, and it still is — especially for auction houses. A few auction houses in the US, Europe, and China — less than a dozen altogether — control about fifty percent of all global art sales. The rest is managed by private galleries or dealer networks. Thirty years ago, people could live off their work. Today, I admire artists who live off their work alone, because it has to be super stressful. The market goes up and down even if you're a branded artist. It's not stable for anybody.

Hugh Leeman: As an established artist, how did the Anglim Trimble closing specifically affect you?

Enrique Chagoya: All of these contexts created a perfect storm. Many galleries closed. Anglim Trimble closed — the director, Shannon, was exhausted, he complained all the time that he was tired and didn't have the energy to keep it going, especially because the times were more demanding. But in pretty much the same week or month, Rena Bransten Gallery also closed, or became more of an online gallery. Jack Fischer closed. Altman Siegel closed. Four galleries all of a sudden.

The way it affected me is the way it affected most artists in any of these galleries. Suddenly there's a surplus of artists and less supply of galleries able to sell art. This is my wild guess, because I haven't seen research on it, but it's a matter of numbers — fewer galleries, more artists whose work is perfectly acceptable for the middle-of-the-road market. At this point, because the market isn't great, it's very hard to find a replacing gallery. You'd be very lucky to have your work accepted by a gallery you find respectful of it — a gallery that really promotes the artist and pays you on time. I have friends who lost money from galleries. Some lost money and art when the gallery went bankrupt and never got either back. Horror stories.

The Most Invisible Censorship Is the Market Itself

Hugh Leeman: Let's talk about this, because it's beyond just local. In a previous conversation I mentioned to you that the gallery system, from my perception, has always been unfair, and no one wants to talk about it because they're afraid of being canceled socially by that very system. So they prefer to stay in a bad relationship because that's better, in their opinion, than being single. And you said, yeah, I agree with you. For someone who has shown at museums around the world, can you give listeners context? How does the gallery system function, and what's so unfair about it?

Enrique Chagoya: It's hard to generalize, and I'll be careful not to, because there's a spectrum of galleries from scary and terrible to amazingly great — with the amazingly great being the minority, and I'm talking from the artist's point of view, not from the perspective of profits.

I was extremely lucky to have somebody like Paule Anglim, because she knew a lot of collectors of difficult art. Not all galleries deal with difficult art — especially today, they prefer safe art, art that doesn't have a political opinion or a sense of humor, because they have to pay the rent. The more eccentric collectors are a minority.

To answer your question — in general, it's a fifty-fifty partnership on sales. In an ideal relationship, the gallery represents the artist's interests, promotes the work to collections, museums, and biennales, stores the artwork, sells year-round, and connects the artist to curators. For that, they keep their fifty percent. It can be a beautiful partnership in an ideal world. But one thing is the ideal world, and another is an economy that goes up and down.

Some galleries are run by independently wealthy owners who don't worry so much about sales — they pay attention to the quality of the art. Paula had many artists who didn't sell, but she liked the work, and eventually those artists became big names — like Lynn Hershman Leeson. Paula believed in the art. That couldn't happen with a gallery that needs to sell every show to stay open. I remember Paula trying to promote my work to other galleries in New York, and they wrote back admiring her for taking risky art. I love Paula forever for that. Reaching out to other galleries is an unusual move — most galleries don't do it. "Some even resent artists finding another gallery out of state, and they demand a cut of the fifty percent of the other gallery's share of the sale. Paula didn't do that, except a small ten percent on the first show, then she left me alone with my gallery in New York, George Adams, and my gallery in Phoenix, Lisa Sette."Paula was the exception. It's a very tough world for making a living as an artist from art sales alone.

And you don't want to be painting things you'd hate. As an artist, you might not want to do anything you don't feel passion for, regardless of whether it sells. But if you start calculating whether something will sell, whether it will alienate people, you're going to be a very unhappy artist — especially if you start selling what you don't like to paint.

Censorship, Bias, and the Frida Kahlo Record

Hugh Leeman: You mentioned the "safe artist," and you've never been that. You've been censored not just in the United States but in France. There's even a circumstance where your artwork was destroyed by someone who broke into a museum and took a crowbar to it because it bothered them. What are your thoughts on censorship in the arts and freedom of speech today?

Enrique Chagoya: There are many forms of censorship — and maybe some people don't talk about this much, but I think the most invisible type is actually the art market. If you study what sells, who sells it, for what prices — which artists, women or men, artists of color, European white artists, African American artists — you're studying what sells and for how much.

Just to give an example: the recent Frida Kahlo painting that sold for fifty-four million dollars was a record price for any female artist ever. Yet people weren't celebrating it, because male artists from the same period — say, a Surrealist of similar quality and the same size — sell for at least twice, if not three times, more than Frida Kahlo's painting. That's a bias from the collectors themselves, who tend to be male, maybe business people. I don't want to stereotype who buys art — it could be somebody money laundering, I have no idea.

Hugh Leeman: Do you think, in Frida's case, we're looking at a self-supporting, vicious cycle? That a lot of the people buying are an investment class, and if Frida Kahlo doesn't sell for as much, it's harder to inflate the value and manufacture more value in it, compared to a Mark Rothko — so it becomes a hard cap ceiling on some artists?

Enrique Chagoya: Exactly. The market itself shows biases — and not only in auction houses. Any artist who makes a big statement gets it in the face. Think of Daumier, who went to jail more than once for making funny cartoons of the king. He was censored by the art market and by the king. But I'm beginning with the most invisible one, that hardly anybody thinks about. People say, oh, that's just supply and demand. It's not just supply and demand. Supply and demand is affected by branding. Some brands bring more demand even if the art itself is no better or worse. If you have a handkerchief where Picasso made a doodle, it's a hundred thousand dollars because Picasso did it. If I make a masterpiece on a handkerchief, nobody's going to pay a hundred thousand dollars, no matter how great it looks."

The branding is biased. Whether an artist shows in the Venice Biennale, which is a branding biennale — the Biennale in Havana is not going to bring an artist to a Gagosian Gallery. There are branded galleries. A mega gallery in New York versus a community gallery here — a solo show in each has nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the work and everything to do with the branding value of the name. And because there's unequal branding in gender, cultural background, and content, there's a selection, and it tends to be unidirectional. By definition, discrimination means choosing. So if it's choosing one type of art over another, my question is: is that censorship? It feels like censorship to me. The thing is you're just left out. And then you can go to more direct censorship, where you're left out by more direct means.

Hugh Leeman: It seems like the art world is, in some ways, inherently a world of gatekeeping — and that gatekeeping is what allows this very unique economic engine to function, in which it manufactures objective value on a subjective quality like beauty, for a product that has no real value. Canvas and paint has no value, but you can make it worth millions if you get enough people believing in it.

Enrique Chagoya: "Yes — the aesthetic value versus the exchange value. They're opposites. The aesthetic value is something spiritual, for lack of a better word, because I'm not religious — an element of subjectivity from the inner world of a human being that is invested in the work. Most artists really invested in the work don't even think about sales; it's the last thing they want to think about, because it's alienating and takes over your practice. The material part is the opposite — idealism versus materialism. They can be a partnership, but it's delicate, and the main power is the material world.

Frida Kahlo never sold anything close to a few thousand dollars in her lifetime, let alone fifty-four million. Even her estate doesn't benefit from it. Same with Van Gogh, who barely sold anything, and now a Van Gogh goes for a hundred nineteen million. He was a struggling artist most of his life, supported by his brother Theo. There's an unequal exchange between power and creativity, where the artist gets the short end.

Back in 1973, the collector Robert Scull bought many Rauschenberg paintings for a thousand or two thousand dollars each, then flipped them a few years later for hundreds of thousands — one he'd bought for two thousand he flipped for a hundred fifty thousand. He made a few million; Rauschenberg didn't get a penny. When Rauschenberg complained, Scull just laughed and said, "I made your art more valuable, be thankful." And Rauschenberg answered — I saw it on video — "Well, you buy my next painting, okay?" Of course that never happened. He and James Rosenquist tried to get a bill through Congress requiring artists to receive royalties from all sales. The auction houses lobbied against it and it lost by a few votes. But in 1977 California created the Royalty Act, giving artists five percent on sales in California. That was the practice for a few years, until an appeals court struck it down in 2018. So we don't have that benefit anymore. In other creative industries, artists get royalties — if somebody writes Harry Potter, the writer becomes a millionaire from royalties.

Retiring from Stanford and the Weight of Academia

Hugh Leeman: After years of teaching at Stanford, you've decided to retire at the end of this academic year, summer of 2026. What was going on at Stanford that influenced you to retire?

Enrique Chagoya: Things change over time, especially the amount of commitments academia takes from you. Stanford was very supportive of my work — it gave me an amazing studio. When I started thirty-one years ago, in 1995, it was before the internet exploded. Email was just beginning. We had one faculty meeting every three months, just six or seven of us over a lunch break, and then I had the rest of the week to work on my exhibitions in my studio space. It really supported my career.

But there's a point where things began to happen, and moving fast forward to today — I have at least double the work, maybe triple, that's how it feels. Monthly faculty meetings, joint faculty meetings. Sometimes we have meetings to prepare for the meetings. We have to be on many committees — promotion committees, DEI committees, committees for murals on campus — because that's part of what you do to get promoted, from tenure track to tenure to full. You have to play more roles. Some of us become director of the art practice area, some become chair. Imagine all that administrative work where you don't have time to make your art. By the time you get to the beautiful studio, you don't have the energy — or even the time — to do the work.

Hugh Leeman: Were all these extra meetings enhancing education outcomes for the students?

Enrique Chagoya: Some of the meetings are productive, I have to say. But we're biting off more than we can chew. And now there are more cuts. This was maybe not news publicly, but the university endowments got their taxes catapulted. Endowments are what bring new faculty, pay for medical and technological research, and pay tuition for our grad students — our grad students don't pay tuition, they're paid for by an endowment. All these endowments used to pay one percent taxes. This administration raised them to twenty percent. That, in itself, is another form of economic censorship to me.

Hugh Leeman: So the raising of endowment taxes has a clear effect on the university's financial capability. You mentioned Stanford has started laying off adjunct teachers. Is that connected?

Enrique Chagoya: Yes, one hundred percent connected — less money to hire people. We had to get rid of quite a few lecturers. Many adjunct faculty could not be reappointed. People on scholarships, PhDs — I worked with somebody from neurosciences to prepare one of my classes, and the PhD student lost their scholarship. I ended up paying them from my research account, otherwise I couldn't have taught the class. All of this happened because the taxes were raised and the NEH grants were eliminated. Grants for the sciences, for medical and neurological research, were basically cut. There's an ideology that the sciences are too threatening to the values of the new monarchy trying to develop in this country. They don't want science — they want conspiracy theories, religion, extremism. They see universities as places where independent thinking is too threatening, including the sciences, even though the sciences benefit everybody, including the people doing the censorship.

So censorship is happening through economic measures that punish people who don't align with the government's policies and cultural brainwashing — and from there into actual censorship, like what happened with the Smithsonian and the Kennedy Center. The Smithsonian censored a painting by Amy Sherald, where she painted a trans figure as the Statue of Liberty. I'm glad she refused to have a whole show based on that kind of censorship. That's another layer. Beyond the economic censorship there's cultural censorship — the culture wars against LGBTQ people. And what are they replacing DEI with? The opposite. Non-diversity. Inequality and exclusion. I don't know why the Democratic Party doesn't call it what it is.

Hugh Leeman: When you say they're becoming "woke" themselves — who is "more pure than thou" in this case?

Enrique Chagoya: The conservatives are being more pure than the liberal-minded. Because if you recall, the term "woke" was born from the left, criticizing other leftists who were too politically correct — more politically correct than you, that's very woke. That's how it started. And now the ultra-right is appropriating the language of the left to attack the left, which is very skillful. But the problem in our political system is that the Republican Party is already appropriated by the MAGA crowd — loyalty to the president like a cult of personality — and the other party has become Republican-light, always wanting to reach across the aisle, not wanting to be too radical.

The Devastation of CCA, SFAI, and the Bay Area Art Scene

Hugh Leeman: You've connected the funding cuts at Stanford, the laying off of adjuncts, and your own decision to retire. That's not getting the same headlines as the closures of CCA and SFAI. What are the long-term implications at Stanford, and adding the closing of CCA and SFAI, what are the implications for the Bay Area art scene?

Enrique Chagoya: They are devastating. There are fewer artists coming out of the Bay Area now. The closing of the San Francisco Art Institute and CCA was also affected by COVID. The Art Institute was already in financial trouble before COVID because it overexpanded with a building at Fort Mason, and when COVID arrived they had no students, especially foreign students from Asia and Latin America, and no income. That was a major blow. That's when people wanted to sell the Diego Rivera mural — I protested that sale. It created a conflict within the faculty and staff that ended tragically with the school closing a couple of years later. Same with CCA, little by little running out of money, affected by a bad economy and a shift toward programs pushed by parents paying astronomical tuition who want their kids in professions that can make a living. Not the arts, because the arts are now riskier than ever.

It's a cycle that affects the supply of artists and the culture in the Bay Area. I hope I'm wrong — I'd love to be wrong — but I think a lot of people now go to the East Coast to study art, and artists are moving out of the Bay Area because things are getting very expensive with the new tech boom and the AI explosion in San Francisco. I see it in graduate applications, where the art really lacks strength on concept and development, unlike other years, because a lot of artists are no longer coming from places like CCA or SFAI. So the quality of artists arriving in academia seems affected by all of this.

I hope it eventually shifts, because art existed before art markets. There's an industry that comes from art, but without artists there would be no auction houses, no galleries, no art historians, no art programs in academia. Without the artists, none of this art industry would exist.

Art as a Way to Keep Your Humanity

Hugh Leeman: In our previous conversation you mentioned a sense of hopelessness, even beyond the art world — a hopelessness in the world right now. What do you tell your students, and what would you tell people, to reclaim their sense of hope?

Enrique Chagoya: What I've been saying lately is: you have to see the arts as a way to keep your humanity. Not necessarily a way to make a living, but a way to develop your creativity as a human being who, among other things, makes art. As humans we're a complex of many versions of ourselves — writers, curators, theoreticians, some into economics like myself, or cultural anthropology. Eventually everything connects to your creativity, to your art. That's what I tell my students.

Even if you go into mechanical engineering or computer science, the only thing that's going to save you from AI Armageddon is the humanities. Because we think not only with our head but with our gut — they say the gut is the second brain — and that's nothing you could create in a robot. You cannot create the living experiences we have as social beings. Our consciousness is an experience, like language — we didn't invent language, we inherited it from our social experience. In your lifetime you get heartbroken, you get super happy, you lose a friend or a relative to illness, you grow older, you lose and gain many things. That drama affects the way you think, the way you invent, the way you discover new knowledge. If you work in computer science and don't study all of this, you'll create a boring, mechanical way of thinking. You might get all the information written about a subject when you ask a question — including the conspiracy theories, all mixed together — and AI is going to be a sycophant. It's always going to agree with you. It's never going to say, I don't know. It just makes up stuff. It sounds really good, but it's not informed by the life experience we have through biology. I don't know if we'll ever program that, because we'd have to give biology to a machine — a heartbreak, a family, children.

Hugh Leeman: We've become obsessed with efficiency, and forgotten that the most profound things in life are not efficient — love, human connection, creativity. I want to read something you said to me: "You have to feel that you need to make art as it humanizes us. Being a poet, a painter, a musician, you have to do it because there is an element of joy. If you feel guilty, even better. Focus on the benefits of thinking visually. The arts are about improving our neuroplasticity." Tell me more about this neuroplasticity, and the benefits of the process.

Enrique Chagoya: The humanities improve everything we do. Even in mechanical engineering or computer science, you'll make more complex work — the creativity is in the planning. Arts develop that creativity, and that develops what's called neuroplasticity. I learned this teaching a class on art and neuroscience last year in collaboration with a neuroscientist, Clara Bacmeister, a fifth-year PhD student. I did a lot of research and found a book called Your Brain on Art, by two writers from Johns Hopkins who have a neuroarts lab (Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross). They research very seriously the effects of art on stressful mental conditions and the role of art in healing — how art can be a way to deal with anxiety, depression, PTSD. Though I caution my neuroscientist friends that that's true as long as you don't have a deadline, because once you have a deadline it becomes very stressful — you can't even sleep.

We visited places like Creativity Explored in San Francisco and Creative Growth in Oakland, and saw the exhibitions at SFMOMA that included their work, along with NIAD from Richmond — artists who made amazing art. These places in the Bay Area were some of the first in the whole country, if not the world, to use art to give meaning to the lives of people who are neurodivergent. We loved it. One of my students from that class is now going to work at Creativity Explored — Sisely DeLisi, a great student.

Neuroplasticity is something we all have, and it develops with experience. It's a condition we have for life, so we can keep learning and absorbing new experiences, hopefully until the end. It affects our whole human health, because it connects to all our systems. When you have a healthy mind, you have a healthy body.

So I designed exercises connecting color to meaning. For instance — don't think about it — what would be your color for pain?

Hugh Leeman: Red.

Enrique Chagoya: Red, okay. And your color for joy?

Hugh Leeman: Yellow.

Enrique Chagoya: Great. And neutral?

Hugh Leeman: Green.

Enrique Chagoya: Green, okay. I gave a list of these binaries — fear, courage, neutral; noisy, quiet — and everyone made a chart of colors. Then I play mostly contemporary music with no lyrics, music that isn't popular, because I don't want anybody recognizing it, so I did a lot of work to find something new. Then we all — including myself — make compositions translating the sound into a color that reflects the emotion the tone gives you. We did this collaboration across two classes, and both times it was like a meditation experience. We all enjoyed the practice and ended up doing really interesting work.

The Profundity of Uselessness

Hugh Leeman: I love this idea. So much of what we've talked about circles around negativity and hopelessness — and so much of that is market-driven, connected to making a product. What you're describing now is the profundity of process. There was art long before there were art markets. I think of our deep ancestors making images on cave walls, most of which weren't even being seen — deep in caves. There was something ritualistic about it, allowing people to connect not just with each other and themselves but with something bigger than the self, that we might today call God. And this idea of color with emotion is almost like synesthesia, translating sound to a color, to a human connection.

Enrique Chagoya: Exactly. I even talk about synesthesia because I have it — with the days of the week. To me this is why we make art. Not only because it makes us feel good, but because it's healthy for your mind, and that's why it makes us feel good. There's a point where you get hooked and you cannot stop doing it. It pays you back. That's why we make art. If somebody's suddenly interested in showing or selling your work — okay, that should be the byproduct, but not the end of the art or the artist. And if that never happens, you'd better find another way of income. We all have to. A second job — teaching, being a curator, an art critic, an art historian. Or inventing a new way for art to be distributed beyond the art market, which would be a good creativity challenge for all of us.

There's a reason we make art, and it's very positive. It's about play — play without being self-conscious, without expecting anything. If you don't like what you did, paint other things on top of it until suddenly it happens. In my case, I make satirical images that make me laugh, and I don't care if they don't sell. I should care! But I hope I don't get canceled for that. The other thing I've been doing is the art with my students, which has no purpose — it's for no museum, no gallery — but it ended up making a beautiful statement of color. We studied abstraction, like Sonia Delaunay and her circles, and did something in that direction, but without thinking about anybody or making any statement — just listening to music and translating it into whatever subjective colors we feel.

With my own synesthesia — you could ask me ten years from now and it's the same — Sunday is a Kelly green, dark but bright. Monday is a light creamy yellow. Tuesday is a dark red, red red. Wednesday is yellow. Thursday is an earthy orange. Friday is a bright orange. Saturday is white. I think there are connections to my childhood — Sundays were the park, so I see green. Saturday was the only day I took a shower, so it's white. Monday is like the moon — in Spanish it's lunes, and luna is moon. Martes is Tuesday, and Mars is Marte — so I imagine Mars red, the red planet. Miércoles would be Mercury, Wednesday — though Mercury isn't yellow, somehow it became yellow. Thursday is Jueves or Jupiter. Viernes, Friday, I think is Venus. Saturday would be Saturn, and I don't have a reason to make Saturn white. But again, all of this is useless.

Hugh Leeman: Enrique Chagoya, I love the uselessness of this — and I connect it to the idea of play. Maybe the profundity of life is uselessness, and the absurdity of our marketplace is its obsession with usefulness. Thank you so much, Enrique.

Enrique Chagoya: On the contrary — thank you.