Art people struggle when they have to discuss the work of popular artists. They don’t want to come off as snobs, and most probably have positive thoughts about increased museum attendance. Plus, you never know how the pendulum is going to swing in these matters. In this bear art market, one of the artists to have an unexpected uptick in interest at auctions is Bob Ross, the television painter of those “happy little trees.” Just wait until the kids on TikTok discover the work of Thomas Kinkade.

“Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum is the institution’s bid to drag Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961) out of the greeting-card rack and back into some arguments. Anchored by 33 works from SAAM’s own decade-long collecting spree and organized by Leslie Umberger and Randall Griffey, it makes the case for Grandma Moses as a breakthrough figure. Here’s an unschooled farmwife who picked up a brush in her late seventies, was 80 when the émigré dealer Otto Kallir gave her a first show in 1940. She became the most famous American woman painter of her day—adored by the public, marketed onto cigarette tins and Hallmark cards. She was despised by Clement Greenberg’s New York, which pitted her against Jackson Pollock for the title of top celebrity artist and lost. Staged in Washington against the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it frames a life spanning Lincoln to Kennedy as a parable of the nation.

Maybe she was the kind of artist that we deserve. She was very simple, after all. Take Calhoun (1955), which shows the Dudley farmhouse where the Moseses lived for eight years in Virginia, with the neighboring farm of the title just across the road. On a green field drained of enthusiasm it shows 12 white farmhands picking and processing cotton with a late-model gin. Moses and her husband went south in 1887 because there were jobs to be had after emancipation. Another artist might have shaded some darker overtones into this work, but there’s little to indicate that these horrible men are working hard for the first time in their life. The cotton springs from the ground begging to be picked, while pleasant trees and varied homes of the farm conjure prosperity. This isn’t propaganda, it’s just how she and many people saw the world.

The subject matter may be similar in The Plantation (1952) but it has more three-dimensionality and a different feel. It would mostly be made of rolling green hills, were it not for the black holes in each building that suck your eye in with their mystery. This likely shows Selma, a Greek Revival plantation house she could see from her last Virginia farm, whose owners reported a resident ghost, a Confederate soldier killed inside by a Yankee. Moses painted it for Harry Truman and gave it to him personally when he left office. “Truman is a country boy like my own boys,” she said, of the only person to authorize the use of nuclear weapons, twice.

Yes, it’s possible she knew more than she let on. A Fire in the Woods (c. 1940) is a remarkable, expressionist take on the subject matter. She captures the chaos of the event through detailed attention to the different kinds of fire, the orange that licks the undergrowth, the blood red that devours the monoliths. She pays no less attention to the kinds of smoke. It’s some of her best work, and remarkable in her oeuvre for having no people in it. Perhaps she would have been more universally adored if she’d built her career out of painting angry large trees.

More exhibition reviews

• At Marianne Boesky, Sanford Biggers Rewrites the Rules of Material Storytelling

• What’s Left to Learn from Marcel Duchamp?

• In Dancehall and Reggaetón’s Evolution, MCA Chicago Charts a Global Awakening

• Our Take On “Lucas Samaras – Sitting, Standing, Walking, Looking” at the Art Institute of Chicago

• Cy Twombly’s Drawing and Discovery

• Why You Should Catch “Bellezza e Bruttezza” at Bozar in Brussels

Next week, Kate Kraczon begins her new job as chief curator of the Montclair Art Museum. Founded in 1914, the New Jersey institution was among the first in the country to organize itself around American art, an area of study that now affords many opportunities. Kraczon, who arrives from the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, takes over a post held since 1994 by Gail Stavitsky, and joins incoming director Todd Caissie at a moment of big transition for the museum. We caught up with her to hear about her plans for the next chapter.

Congratulations on the new job. What excited you most about this role when you first heard about it?

Beyond its incredible collection and exhibition history, MAM has a devoted audience and is a leader in accessibility and education programming. I was also intrigued by the unique history of the Montclair Art Museum School of Art (Yard School of Art), which merged with MAM in 1999, and how that can be a provocation for both curators and artists.

You’re succeeding Gail Stavitsky, who held the chief curator post since 1994. What’s it like stepping into a role someone shaped for three decades?

Gail shaped a strong collection and exhibition history that I hope to build on, a program and acquisition strategy that is inspired by and honors that history. I have always loved the idea of revisiting thematic exhibitions and curatorial propositions decades later as a generative form of exhibition making and a way to extend a museum’s unique curatorial and scholarly legacy.

You’ll be working closely with incoming director Todd Caissie, and you’ve said his vision resonates with your own. What are some dynamics of that partnership that you’d like to establish in these early months?

Todd and I share a truly joyful approach to what we do. We simply love spending time with artists, and with people who also love artists, and want to share this passion for the arts with the widest audience possible. Coming in as a new chief curator to a museum is also a moment to think radically and ambitiously about how your exhibition program can live within the already thriving institutional ecosystem at MAM and the arts ecosystems of northern New Jersey and the wider region. I believe Todd feels similarly that this moment is an opportunity to envision the future of MAM.

Your appointment announcement describes your practice as “deeply collaborative,” as seen in your ambitious commissions, such as Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson’s Easternsports (2014) at ICA Philadelphia. Can you tell me more about that project? What do you enjoy about working with living artists?

Easternsports was an example of how a curator can amplify the strengths of an artist’s practice, particularly strengths that may not be object-based (and therefore as market-friendly). I loved Jayson’s writing and Alex’s videos, and I knew they wanted to collaborate. What contemporary museum commissions allow are spaces for artists to experiment without the pressure of sales. The majority of the projects I have commissioned have been long-term conversations over time. Elisabeth Subrin and I began the conversation about what would eventually become The Listening Takes (2023) nearly a decade before the installation opened at The Bell.

Montclair was founded in 1914 as one of the first American museums to focus on American art, and it built a serious collection of works by Native Americans early on. Works by Jeffrey Gibson, Wendy Red Star and Edgar Heap of Birds sit alongside John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent. How does a contemporary, artist-focused curator like you approach a collection with that kind of range? Are you looking to create dialogues there?

Absolutely! That MAM has a curator of Native American art—the brilliant Laura Allen—devoted to Native and Indigenous works in the collection, as well as commissioning new artist projects and curating exhibitions, was a significant factor in my decision to join the museum. I’m looking forward to developing a program alongside Laura that centers Native and Indigenous practices while allowing the tensions within a historical collection to be responsive to our contemporary moment.

At ICA Philadelphia, you organized Ree Morton’s first major U.S. retrospective in over three decades. Was it gratifying to bring an artist like that back into focus? Might you like to tackle similar projects in Montclair?

As someone who often focuses on platforming underrecognized artists, most recently a survey of Bay Area octogenarian Franklin Williams, projects like the Morton retrospective are meaningful in both honoring the artist and in bringing that work to a more expansive audience. Gallery size was a limitation at Brown University, and I am thrilled to be able to develop survey and retrospective exhibitions with ample gallery space. I am already in conversations about major retrospectives in development with curators who work similarly!

You were a founding board member of artist-run spaces like RAIR in Philadelphia and FR MOCA in Fall River. What lessons have you learned from your experiences with these organizations that you might bring to a larger institution?

Working directly with artists to found an arts organization, whether a residency program like RAIR or an exhibition and education space like FR MOCA, has been transformative for me. It offers access to and understanding of what artists need and value when they are able to set priorities, and unsettles your own understanding of how museums and larger arts institutions can better support artists.

At the Bell, you built collaborations with international institutions like Performa, Nottingham Contemporary and MACBA in Barcelona. Do you intend to pioneer similar collaborations at Montclair?

Absolutely! The Bell was a true kunsthalle program in both spirit and size: there was just over 3,000 square feet of gallery space. MAM’s galleries are exponentially larger and quite lovely in proportion, with high ceilings and an excellent architectural flow. This will allow me to curate and collaborate on much larger exhibitions than I was able to at Brown, as well as bring touring exhibitions organized by other museums to the New York Metro region that otherwise wouldn’t find a home on the East Coast or even within the United States.

Last question: Pork roll or Taylor ham?

Scrapple! I grew up in Pittsburgh but have spent more of my adult life in Philadelphia than any other city. The only aspect of Philadelphia culture I refuse to embrace is the Flyers. Let’s Go Pens.

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The last book by the late New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, The Art of Dying (2024), begins with a bang. Told that he is dying of cancer, Schjeldahl has a unique reaction: he organizes a trip to Madrid, for the sole purpose of spending a significant amount of time at the Prado. After you think about it for a while, it begins to make sense. There you will find the richest collection of paintings by Francisco de Zurbarán, Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya and El Greco. It’s relatable to anyone whose greatest pleasure in life is looking at stuff, though personally, I wouldn’t have brought Steve Martin on the trip. He’s too funny; it would be a distraction.

With “Zurbarán” at the National Gallery in London, you don’t need to go to Madrid to luxuriate in the works of this master. The exhibition represents the first major show the U.K. has ever given Zurbarán (1598-1664), and features more than 40 paintings, drawn from the Prado, the Louvre, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Cleveland Museum, the Norton Simon and the Gallery’s own holdings. The show spans a career that ran from Seville—then one of the richest cities in Europe, its port wired directly into the trade of the Americas—through a brief, prestigious stint painting for Philip IV in Madrid.

This last bit produced one of the weirder—we can say “more unique”—works in the show. Hercules and Cerberus (1634) emerged from an invitation that Zurbarán received to help decorate the Buen Retiro, Philip IV’s new pleasure palace in Madrid. This work turned out to be his only royal commission, his only classical subject and his only significant engagement with the male nude. Amid all the scenes of Spanish battle and portraits of the royal family, this painting feels particularly raw. Hercules’ every muscle is on display as he hauls the three-headed hellhound up out of the underworld on a rope, his club at the ready—the labor was to drag the beast out alive, not to kill it. And look how it smolders, the deep blacks shot through with the fiery orange of the underworld behind him. He’s absorbed the hard, naturalistic style of Caravaggio’s followers into something more direct and more strange. An outlier in the oeuvre, and yet unmistakably his. Even at a royal palace, this means a Hercules who is effortful rather than cocky.

Fashion must be central to any exhibition staged these days, and there’s a room at London’s National Gallery that makes the case for Zurbarán as Spain’s first fashion designer. Saint Casilda (c. 1635) would be a good example of this. In a background that might as well be theoretical, she is like one of those overly elaborate cakes from a televised baking competition, a toothsome tower of silk, taffeta and brocade. Her dress is elaborate enough to be a tapestry, and the coloring is outré. This was almost a trend of the era, with the preacher Bernardino de Villegas complaining that such saints were “dressed so profanely” that they read less like figures from heaven than “ladies of the world.” It’s possible he was just jealous of her lovely red skirt.

The Agnus Dei (1635-40) gathers up everything else in the room. You can lose yourself in the details of the work—the tangled and snowy fleece of the lamb rendered so realistically, but like a mountain, the shadows on its curved horns so subtle, is its face being blasted with divine light?—that you may not even notice that this lamb is about to be slaughtered. Zurbarán looked life square in the face, and saw in it all its beauty and viscerality.

More exhibition reviews

• At Marianne Boesky, Sanford Biggers Rewrites the Rules of Material Storytelling

• What’s Left to Learn from Marcel Duchamp?

• In Dancehall and Reggaetón’s Evolution, MCA Chicago Charts a Global Awakening

• Our Take On “Lucas Samaras – Sitting, Standing, Walking, Looking” at the Art Institute of Chicago

• Cy Twombly’s Drawing and Discovery

Earlier this month, the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts announced that museum director, curator, artist and writer Séamus Kealy would serve as its new director. Kealy comes to the institution from Oakville Galleries in Ontario, where he served as executive director since 2023. Kealy’s diverse career has led to a unique perspective on many of the questions facing heads of institutions these days. We caught up with him to hear his thoughts on these and the RHA’s future.

Congratulations on the new gig. This appointment marks a return to Ireland after more than a decade abroad, most recently leading Oakville Galleries and the Salzburger Kunstverein before that. What changes have there been in the Irish contemporary art landscape since then?

Thank you, it is a thrilling moment for me. It has been my desire to return to Ireland for some time, and yes, I have kept an eye on the Irish art scene these last years. I have also returned to Ireland regularly to visit family and friends—as well as artists and colleagues working in the arts. You are right, so much has changed. A significant challenge is the lack of artist studios in Ireland, and the housing strain as well, which we are observing ourselves as we search for a new home. I believe much more is to be done to ensure that artists living in Ireland can produce their work and simply get by. The closing of The Complex in Dublin is an unwelcome change. On the other hand, almost every week, I am asked about Ireland’s Basic Income Scheme for Artists. This is naturally very inspiring for artists around the world, and it could very well be that this progressive venture by Ireland will influence other regions to emulate its intentions and obvious positive impact, and not only for artists.

I continue to follow the careers of many Irish artists, and I have seen how their work has evolved. Some of these artists I have invited to exhibit or collaborate with since my last time in Ireland. I have observed some institutional changes in Ireland these last years, where notable shifts have happened with Annie Fletcher taking up the helm at IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art), and with the Crawford Gallery in Cork undergoing a major development presently. Smaller institutions such as EVA in Limerick, the Kunstverein Aughrim or the Douglas Hyde Gallery are punching above their weight, and I keep a close eye on their programming.

I have also heard great things about the new Visiting Curators program in Ireland, and I see the good work that Culture Ireland continues to achieve internationally. I have heard that matters of governance for arts organizations have become more prominent and I am happy to observe this. Overall, Ireland’s contemporary art landscape is rich, diverse and evolving. I see my work at the RHA as deeply involved in advocating for artists and providing a strong platform to showcase contemporary art and its discourses.

The RHA was founded in 1823. What is it like to inherit a place with two centuries of identity? How do you balance that with the demands of new audiences?

I was fortunate enough to direct the Salzburger Kunstverein for over nine years. It was founded in 1844, so in that case, I had to negotiate a long and complex history. One can imagine the different permutations in that context, too, where the institution was initially founded by a prince with the local bourgeoisie, and then later housed in the historic Künstlerhaus in 1885, where it still resides to this day. It is a beautiful and iconic building—painted all in red, quite a visual statement—and at a central point of the city. The Salzburger Kunstverein has a deep and meaningful relationship to the local population. Over its two centuries, it went through dramatic changes that reflected the cultural and political context. The most dramatic of course was during the Nazi era, where the institution was usurped for Nazi propaganda and Nazi-approved art. To this day, you cannot escape this history; it is palpable in the urban geography and informs all aspects of society, from education to language to social policy to art production.

Following that dark period, the Salzburger Kunstverein eventually returned to its roots as a site for exhibiting contemporary art and celebrating artists. It later also became an exciting locus of discourse and progressive ideas—hence the red color. When I arrived in 2014, it seemed to be at a turning point. The public’s desire for the Salzburger Kunstverein’s transformation—for something different to take effect—was real. Many people there were curious that a non-German-speaking Irish-Canadian was appointed, but I was warmly welcomed nonetheless. And it was important to integrate. I learned German fluently, many friendships were made, and we became embedded in the local community. Both our children were born there. The program and atmosphere I then developed there was international but also reflected local and national tendencies in contemporary art. I felt I had to balance a very long tradition—one with some unimaginable histories and then later very politicized programming—with new impulses that were received positively by audiences and stakeholders alike. The board, which was made up mostly of artists, was very supportive. Artists came to hang out there.

The Salzburger Kunstverein’s activities grew significantly during my time, as did partnerships, new programming and new visitors. It was thrilling. Indeed, during my tenure it became more of a nexus point for immigrants, newcomers to Austria, refugees, university students and youth, the L.G.B.T.Q. community as well as artists and arts enthusiasts. We had performances, concerts, artist residencies, a new film festival I founded, art awards and at the heart of it all was an exhibition program that resonated locally, nationally and internationally. I spoke about these experiences with the RHA Council before I was offered the directorship. I found there to be compelling parallels—not only in terms of admiring long, important traditions, but also in balancing these traditions with a spirit of transformation and internationalism. These tendencies should complement, not contradict, one another.

Your tenure at Oakville Galleries involved leading a major capital project. Did you enjoy that part of the job? What lessons about fundraising will travel with you to Dublin?

This is certainly an intense part of the job, but equally also very rewarding. I was lucky enough to also lead a capital development at The Model in Sligo previously, where I was able to apply some of that experience to the ambitions in Oakville. You are right in connecting the fundraising responsibility here, as a capital project is heavily involved with patronage and building relationships with stakeholders. I do enjoy it immensely, as you find so much good will out there, and when individuals share excitement about the future vision of an art institution with a world-class ambition, friendships are made in tandem with commitments. The joy of collaboration simply leads the way. I think I will bring that along with me back to Ireland: a deeper understanding of how meaningful it is to have many people involved in building an institution’s potential and believing in the good it brings to a city and its people.

You studied photography under Jeff Wall at UBC and have continued working as an artist alongside your curatorial career. How does maintaining your own practice shape the way you build exhibitions and relate to the artists you program?

I had earlier paused my artistic career to focus completely on directing institutions and curating. When COVID happened, as with many people, I found myself picking up something new, or in this case, painting again. I was lucky enough to be invited for a few exhibitions after that. These days, I don’t find enough time to make paintings on a regular basis, but to answer your question, yes, maintaining my practice does shape how I work with artists. But it always did, even when I wasn’t actively painting. I think artists can have a different approach to running an art institution, such as the RHA, which is fundamentally artist-centric. Having empathy for artists is important, but it goes well beyond that. Artists know that my way of working with them flows with their practice and their needs, and that I respect their work inherently. It was flattering, for example, that when the RHA announced its search for a director, artists reached out to me and asked me to apply for the job. Perhaps they trusted me to take on this role. I would attribute my artist background to being a large part of that sense of trust.

Your appointment release describes your approach as “artist-centered,” a phrase institutional leaders often use. What does it actually mean in practice for you, in terms of how a program gets built and how artists are treated through the process?

Yes, as you suggest, sometimes one hears platitudes about being “artist-centered” without much effort behind this. I think what I was touching upon earlier is leaning into this question, though. I feel that my directorship of institutions is artistic—just as an artist works in a studio, I work in an office. In a similar way, my curatorship is also artistic but moreover artist-focused, meaning that when I work with artists, I am at their service. Curating, for me, is actually a modest role. The word “curate” is from Latin, meaning “to care,” as we know. This is in part the care for the artwork during its exhibition, as well as encouraging the audience’s reception and conversation around the artwork. But for me, it is also really about caring for the artist. This is simply an attentiveness towards their work and their way of working. I don’t think this can be taught—one has to learn it by being around artists and working with them. Sometimes the children of artists understand this sentiment straight away. Many of my dearest friends are artists, and neither do I think this is a coincidence nor do I think it unimportant to running an art institution. I think artists who know me know that I am always in their corner.

The RHA offers free admission at a moment when many institutions are consolidating revenue around memberships and timed tickets. How central is free access to your vision for the place, and how do you plan to defend it as operating costs keep climbing?

As an art student and even as an artist, I would often not enter museums because I felt the ticket entry was expensive. Free access to art and culture for everyone has long been an integral part of my approach to directing institutions. As with every role, one finds means of bringing in stakeholders, relevant funding, patronage, partnerships and new forms of income into the mix. In my three previous roles, I was able to do that according to each context. Admission costs to the programming were never a question for me. I know that public museums with ticketing often find creative ways—such as free Thursday evenings—and this is a positive step. However, I feel that an institution such as the RHA would not be the RHA anymore if it were to commence ticketing.

What do you want the RHA to look like in 10 years?

When I travel to certain cities, there are essential places to drop in to. But moreover, there are essential places that are meeting points and where I want to hang out and get to know what is going on. This is what I wish the RHA to be. I remember as an art student standing in front of a contemporary art museum and feeling intimidated by its architecture. I felt this was not a place for me. Eventually, I entered, and I loved it, of course. I have taken this initial sentiment with me, though—this memory of feeling estranged from the “museum”—and I have always applied everything in my power to help ensure people feel welcome by the programming and the atmosphere of the institutions that I direct. This is already tangible with the RHA, because it is loved and admired, and it has a meaningful and beautiful history. When the former director, Patrick Murphy, reached out to me to congratulate me, I told him that there are big shoes to fill and that I always admired his program and his style. So in many ways this is about continuity, and it will be about new impulses.

Ten years from now, the RHA should have a vibe of being the place to be. When someone asks where artists, art students and those curious about ideas and people gather in Dublin, one definitive answer will be the RHA. As much as a place for people to gather, I like the idea of the RHA being a haven for sharing and developing ideas of making the world a better place. The exhibitions will be an enormous draw that way, showcasing international and Irish artists and thematic exhibitions from the zeitgeist. The RHA will have meaningful links with other cultural energies in Ireland and abroad—both institutional and grassroots—which can put it further on the global map as well. Central to this vision is the work of and the relationship with artists, providing them support and resources at all stages of their careers. All programming and operations of the RHA are to be achieved with a standard of excellence, with a collaborative and hospitable culture. It is my hope that people of all backgrounds will want to hang out there.

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I had the pleasure of interviewing Dame Tracey Emin back in 2013, when I was a cub reporter with this outlet. The occasion would have been a gallery show, the motivator a pushy PR motivated to help sell the bronzes, neons and drippy body-oriented paintings that had recently come to define her mid-career output. I didn’t know much about her work beyond My Bed (1998), but my admiration for it was enough to make me want to talk to her. This was peak Tumblr era and I couldn’t believe someone could make something so personal and without affectation. She cocked an eyebrow at me when I sat down at our table in the restaurant at the Standard under the High Line. “I’m a much healthier influence, say, than Sylvia Plath,” she told me, of her legacy. “I am alive.”

This sui generis personality takes center stage at Emin’s largest survey, which just opened at the Tate Modern. Its title, “A Second Life,” mostly refers to what art has given her, and it’s possible that going through the exhibition one could come to know her just as well as if one had met her in person. The show was conceived in close collaboration with the artist, and gathers more than a hundred works across painting, video, textile, neon, sculpture and installation—four decades, from the tiny photographs of destroyed art-school paintings through to recent canvases and bronzes shown for the first time.

But the show is organized into two halves, a first life and the second that followed the artist’s public battle with bladder cancer and the radical surgery of 2020 that removed her bladder, womb, urethra, parts of her intestines and lymphatic system, and half of her vagina. Emin would encourage the reminder of these details, even when discussing the first half of the exhibition, the centerpiece of which are two extremely personal installations. First there’s Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), which records the three weeks Emin spent shut inside a Stockholm gallery, working naked, trying to reconcile herself to painting after six years of refusing it after the experience of an abortion. It has the canvases, the easel, the bottles, the bed. You could read it as the evidence of a breakdown, but let’s remember that the resulting work was in no way the last painting she ever made.

Then there is My Bed (1998), the Turner Prize-nominated installation that consists of a messy mattress complete with pantyhose, cigarettes, condoms. When it first debuted the tabloids affected all kinds of moral panic about drinking and casual sex, but now that it’s more or less a seminal work of British art you can see what it’s really about: the minor pleasures and major hassles that come with having a body. The body’s absence is made more present by what the Tate has installed nearby, a neon sign that reads, “It’s Not Me That’s Crying It’s My Soul” and a bronze of a one-limbed female torso. Emin’s post-90s work has been much more compelling than that of other Young British Artists, and the Tate has done a good job of showing us the throughline, which might be considered the healthy influence that Emin has had on herself.

More exhibition reviews

• At Marianne Boesky, Sanford Biggers Rewrites the Rules of Material Storytelling

• What’s Left to Learn from Marcel Duchamp?

• In Dancehall and Reggaetón’s Evolution, MCA Chicago Charts a Global Awakening

• Our Take On “Lucas Samaras – Sitting, Standing, Walking, Looking” at the Art Institute of Chicago

• Cy Twombly’s Drawing and Discovery

• Why You Should Catch “Bellezza e Bruttezza” at Bozar in Brussels

Next week, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut will launch the inaugural Aldrich Decennial, an exhibition in the style of other recurring surveys that is intended to take place every 10 years. The Aldrich has long been celebrated for its taste in the avant garde, offering numerous important artists the opportunity to stage major shows, and the first Decennial seeks to do this on a broader level. Titled “I am what is around me,” the show emerged from over 100 studio visits by chief curator Amy Smith-Stewart and curatorial and publications manager Caitlin Monachino. We caught up with Aldrich director Cybele Maylone to hear more about the exhibition, and how it fits into the institution’s broader programming and ethos.

We’re used to institutions organizing themselves around biennials and triennials. What does a decennial framework allow you to see that a two- or three-year cycle doesn’t?

The Aldrich Decennial is the brainchild of the Museum’s Diana Bowes Chief Curator Amy Smith-Stewart. Amy worked on Greater New York during her time as a curator at MoMA PS1, so she is really attuned to the idea of place-based recurring surveys. As a result, I think Amy knew when conceiving of the show that a two- or three-year cycle wouldn’t make sense for an exhibition of this kind, which examines the cultural community in a much smaller place and a place that doesn’t have the same kind of population change that a city does. Connecticut is very much the land of steady habits, so choosing the 10-year cycle made the most sense.

You’ve been at the Aldrich long enough to have left your mark on it. How would you say it’s changed the most in your eight years at the helm?

We’ve really expanded the Museum’s community during my tenure, and that’s something I’m incredibly proud of. We have grown our Board of Trustees significantly and have also doubled our membership. It’s been really gratifying to see how much enthusiasm and support there is for the Museum from individuals of all walks of life, from serious collectors to young families in our community. In addition, we renovated our Sculpture Garden to create a more inclusive and accessible space for art and the public, which opened at the end of 2024. That was a huge project for everyone at the Museum, from our Board to our staff, and created a free public space for art and nature for all of our visitors.

The art world spent years rewarding scale: bigger attendance numbers, bigger capital projects, bigger global visibility. What are the advantages of a smaller institution?

We are very lucky because being small is baked into The Aldrich’s DNA. The Museum’s original building—now home to our offices—had small galleries and the idea was that visitors could come to The Aldrich and have intimate, personal experiences with works of art. When our new building opened in 2004, domestically scaled galleries were key to the new design in order for intimate experiences to remain core to seeing art at The Aldrich. My older daughter went to Paris last summer and came back with a picture that I assume everyone takes at the Louvre—50 people standing between her and the Mona Lisa. That’s not The Aldrich experience.

The Aldrich has maintained a reputation for experimentation while also becoming more institutionally established over the last decade, two things that don’t always coexist comfortably. How have you maintained that balance?

Again, it goes back to that foundational commitment. While The Aldrich was built to create intimate experiences with works of art, it was also designed to be risk-taking and to give meaningful first opportunities to emerging and underrecognized artists. I am always motivated by our founder Larry Aldrich’s vision to put such a forward-looking museum devoted to contemporary art on the Main Street in small-town New England. We have a history of showing artists long before their work was widely known—Eva Hesse, Jeffrey Gibson, Elizabeth Peyton and Huma Bhabha all had early career presentations at the Museum. That said, we certainly want our work to be recognized in a larger conversation, which is driven by a desire to build a larger audience, consideration and awareness of the artists in our program.

A lot of institutions talk about “community” in ways that can feel abstract and performative. The Aldrich is located in a small town so the community probably feels quite close. What can you tell me about that community and how it’s evolved over the last 8 years?

The town of Ridgefield is central to who The Aldrich is. I come back to Lonnie Bunch, the Secretary of the Smithsonian, who said that museums shouldn’t be community centers but centers of community. Sure, there are things that we could do that 100 percent of people in the town would love (free ice cream!) but we are committed to our risk-taking mission while also taking the steps needed to make our community feel welcomed. Our Sculpture Garden project was driven by this in many ways—it was a gesture and an invitation to our local audience to join us and I think it has had the desired impact. In addition, this is a small town and I live here. I’ve worked at institutions in New York City where a certain significant segment of the audience is international tourists. Not so at The Aldrich! Our audience includes my kid’s teacher and they are going to tell me what they think of the new sculpture we installed on Main Street.

In addition, Ridgefield, and Connecticut as a whole, changed significantly during and after the pandemic with a large influx of new residents. This is something Amy really understood when conceiving of the Decennial. The new energy in the state will certainly be reflected in the exhibition and is definitely a part of The Aldrich’s growth over the last few years.

You spent most of your career prior to the Aldrich in New York City. What’s something that might surprise New Yorkers about Connecticut’s art scene?

That it exists! I grew up outside of Chicago in Evanston, IL and lived in New York City for many years—Connecticut was not a place I knew well at all. So it’s been incredible to learn about the state and understand not just how rich the artist community is here now, but how significant it’s been for centuries. While the Decennial will allow us to shine a light on just how vibrant the landscape is here today, we’re also trying to put the exhibition in a larger context about the state over time. There is a long list of important artists who have called Connecticut home.

The Aldrich is well known for giving artists their first institutional solo shows. Do you ever feel the weight of that responsibility? You have the potential to change an artist’s career overnight.

Absolutely. Artists place so much trust in the Museum when we work together. I know that Amy feels that responsibility deeply and takes great care of the artists we work with, and that commitment is shared by everyone on our team. That said, I think our focus is on supporting artists and encouraging them to take risks and try new things, as opposed to thinking about what a show will do for their “career.” We are really honored when an artist commits to working with The Aldrich, and we want to do everything we can to make the experience a positive and significant one.

Looking back, are there decisions that you’ve made that have felt relatively minor at the time but ended up permanently shifting the museum’s direction?

Maybe decisions related to hiring? I’ve promoted several excellent people during my time at The Aldrich and was also lucky enough to lure a former colleague from the City to join our staff, but with new hires and people you already know stepping into new roles, it can feel like rolling the dice and it’s hard to estimate just how significant their impact will be. Thankfully, these decisions have really paid off and the excellent team of people currently working together at The Aldrich has really helped to change the Museum for the better.

What do you hope audiences take away from the Decennial?

As with all exhibitions at The Aldrich, I hope our audience will leave the Museum with a sense of discovery. Amy and Caitlin Monachino, who is co-organizing the Decennial with Amy, did over 100 studio visits while putting the show together. The participating artists’ ages range from 30-80 and a number are showing in a museum for the first time. In addition, they live and work in places around the state and around a quarter were born outside of the United States. So, in addition to discovering artists, I am hopeful that the show will expand our audiences’ understanding of Connecticut as a place.

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In New York it’s desirable to have some kind of a relationship with your neighbor, but not one that’s too close. A few years ago there was some kind of gas leak in my building. When the burly Italian firemen showed up to save the day—with pictures of saints taped to their oxygen tanks—they asked me if the couple across the hall was in the apartment or at their home upstate. I said I didn’t know, so the firemen crowbarred the door open to make sure that they weren’t. The next time the male half of the couple was in town he buttonholed me in the stairwell to complain about the damage to his doorjamb. This struck me as overly familiar. It wasn’t as if I really knew the guy. I had merely tried to save his life.

“Mrs. N’s Palace,” a new show at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, takes its name from a permanent installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), the title of which references Nevelson’s nickname with her own neighbors in the city. Nevelson was a pioneer of installation art and best known for assemblages of debris that come to look like monochrome artifacts from the future. You can imagine the stairwell conversations. While the Met work doesn’t appear in the Metz exhibition, the new show borrows from other impressive collections for what is her first European retrospective of this scale, 50 years after she last showed in France.

Though she came to be associated with inhuman monoliths, Nevelson’s artistic impulses began with the body. She studied eurythmy for two decades and revered Martha Graham. These concerns inform her Moving-Static-Moving Figure series from around 1945, in which a small stack of terracotta elements are strung on a rod so that they can pivot like a dancer. It might be here that she first came to be interested in the color black, for these often were painted that color, which she called “the silhouette, essence of the universe.” These works are nothing but mutable shadows.

Among her blackest pieces has to be Homage to the Universe (1968), a bass note for the show. This wall piece is nearly nine meters wide, a grid of open boxes crammed with turned wood, finials and offcuts. This discarded carpentry of New York might have been burned in a very precise fire, for it is in the thrall of a singular and consistent matte black. Up close it might be garbage. Far away its penumbras turn to inverted stars, with a good tension that feels in conversation with the Color Field painting being done by people like her friend Mark Rothko.

The exhibition recreates three of her landmark environments, Moon Garden + One (1958), her first white work Dawn’s Wedding Feast (1959), and her only gold one, The Royal Tides (1961). From this last installation comes An American Tribute to the British People (1960-64), a gilded wall on loan from Tate. There’s mannered grandiosity in this work but it’s of the Nevelson signature variety. The vertical and symmetrical qualities of it make the gaps between the junk feel like the flares of a column. As for the gold, it doesn’t feel precious. Nevelson insisted that color came out of the earth, and this does feel like it has more in common with the sun than it does with jewelry. The work glows and vibrates without insisting upon itself. I wouldn’t mind living with it, or indeed down the hall from it.

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My long and varied media career includes a stint at LIFE magazine. Time Inc. had been trying to revive the property as a slideshow-oriented web 2.0 venture that paired new pictures with deep dives into the rich archives. Often we would present old photos alongside new interviews with the photographers or subjects of the photos. I couldn’t believe the stature the magazine still held for many Americans. One time Aretha Franklin called me from Detroit while she was making tortilla soup.

In 1953, LIFE ran a feature called “Mystic Painters of the Northwest,” the headline that serves as the inspiration for “Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest,” a newly opened exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum that seeks to reframe a certain reputation that has followed the region ever since. LIFE’s story anointed four Seattle artists—Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan and Guy Anderson—as the faces of a unique brand of Modernism that embraced the “overwhelming forces of nature which surround them,” as well as “the influence of the Orient whose cultures have seeped into the communities that line the U.S. Pacific Coast.” The Seattle Art Museum’s show, which features 150 paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures, builds on the ideas of the LIFE article through the expansion of its ideas.

Its first good idea was to bring in some artists who are actually Asian. Kamekichi Tokita’s Bridge (1931) would seem to demonstrate the degree to which LIFE’s summary of the region’s styles was an oversimplification. Tokita said his goals were “found in Cézanne and developed through the methods used by Sesshū,” and all this is evident in Bridge. It shows the Seattle waterfront in early stages of strangulation by the new trusses thrown up to carry rail and road. It’s a formal experiment more than a seascape. His calligraphic training is evident in the ironwork and personifies the iron as an obnoxious neighbor.

The exhibition recasts the movement’s love of nature as closer to the contemporary green movement, seen well in the work of Callahan and Graves, two of LIFE’s four. Callahan’s Evening Mist in Mountains (c. 1940) has the feeling of Twin Peaks because it pairs a postcard Northwest landscape with a crime scene, in this case the untidy stumps of hewn trees. Graves’s Logged Mountains (ca. 1935-43) is even more didactic, and reminiscent of the show’s notorious black and white episode from The Return—a ruined landscape of black and grey ooze.

It’s too austere to be surreal, though the exhibition ties other artists to that movement, and to Abstract Expressionism, pairing them with real examples by Salvador Dalí and Georgia O’Keeffe. Drift No. 2 (1936) by Malcolm Roberts is a perfect representation of this part of the show because it feels like something Dalí would have painted had he visited the region. A weather vane pierces a pink, claw-footed bathtub through a fallen tree near a cracked pitcher in the sand. That sounds busy but it’s actually less complicated than the way Dalí would have done it, and demonstrates the clean way in which this group of artists was uniquely and locally deranged.

“Beyond Mysticism: The Modern Northwest” is on view at the Seattle Art Museum through August 2, 2026.

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Art that involves children can be complicated to absorb when you have none of your own. My press pass gave me one of the earliest looks at the Venice Biennale last week, and I would never have predicted that the Japanese pavilion by Ei Arakawa-Nash would be such a hit among my colleagues, because it involves hauling a heavy-looking baby doll to various stations around the room. But it turns out that many people really like babies, and grant them all kinds of aesthetic and behavioral leeway. My own taste favors stuff more like the installation by Paula Rego (1935-2022) that appeared in the 59th Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, “The Milk of Dreams,” which featured mirrored images of childbirth and child abuse, alongside a menagerie of grotesque and traumatized dolls.

“Dance Among Thorns” at MUNCH in Oslo is the first comprehensive museum presentation of the Portuguese-British artist in the Nordic region, and Rego’s largest survey since a 2021 Tate Britain retrospective. The exhibition brings together over 140 works across seven decades of practice, from early abstract political collages to the grotesque papier-mâché tableaux of her final years. A central section traces a previously undocumented engagement with Edvard Munch: curator Kari J. Brandtzæg noticed compositional and thematic links between Rego’s The Dance (1988) and Munch’s Dance of Life (1898-1899), among other works.

The Dance is one of Rego’s best-known works, a masterpiece in which a group of compelling and varied characters dances on a moonlit seaside cliff. Their clothes, faces, proportions and coloring are all strange in compelling ways. This is especially true for the woman in white on the far left, who is larger than the others and who dances alone. It is likely a self-portrait of Rego, whose husband Victor Willing died while she was painting it. This aspect looms even larger when you compare it to Dance of Life, which Rego saw at the Tate in 1951 at age 16. In it, two figures swirl together, almost consumed by a red dress, the intensity of their love standing in relief against the lonely, lascivious people surrounding them. They live in their own world, much the way these two painters did.

The exploration of the links between Munch and Rego led to the discovery of Drought (1953) by Rego’s son, Nick Willing. This never-before-exhibited work is impressive for an 18-year-old, and owes much to Munch, particularly his Inheritance (1897-99), “which shows a seated woman crying with a skeleton child, all painted green, in her lap,” per a 1951 letter by Rego to her mother in which she calls it her favorite in the Tate show. Drought borrows the subject but has more in common with The Scream (c.1910), for it features chunky strokes of red and yellow, and twisted alien features.

Also in this show is Rego’s monumental Oratorio (2008-09), a three-meter-high wood cabinet with eight pastel panels surrounding a tableau of handmade papier-mâché orphan dolls. This was the work I saw in Venice so many years ago, and it has only grown more relevant since 2022. How nice it would be to exist in a world of consensual, everlasting love where children are always cherished.

“Paula Rego: Dance Among Thorns” is on view at MUNCH in Oslo through August 2, 2026.

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Should you end up visiting the fair this weekend, you should set your gait to saunter and make your own discoveries. But also be sure not to miss mine.

Sarah Sze, Badlands (2026)

• Gagosian

Many years ago, I profiled Sarah Sze (b. 1969) for this publication. Digging into her work and personality, I found her to be a bona fide genius—she was later named an actual genius with a MacArthur Grant—but I found myself wondering what it would be like to collect her. The question was answered not long after that year, at the home of collectors Michael and Susan Hort, at the annual party they throw at their Tribeca loft showcasing their collection. Somewhere in an upstairs bedroom, Sze had taken over a linen closet, utilizing thread, light, cotton and, as I recall, some toilet paper to create a miniature universe. Very cool, but sometimes guests are coming over, and you need to replace the hand towels. May I offer you a more practical solution at the Gagosian booth? This remarkable new mixed-media piece remixes photographic elements, as if a tropical getaway were attacked by a torrent of paint. As with all her work, there are conspiratorial lines of plot to follow if you’re looking for that, but I think it’s more fun to relax your eyes and let it wash over you. For me, the overall effect is akin to when a vandal cracks those video advertisement screens in the subway, which is to say it’s terribly beautiful.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #686 (2025)

• Hauser & Wirth

Some years ago, I was in the VIP lounge at a New York art fair during an afternoon champagne toast, and there I asked director John Waters if he’d seen anything good while perusing the fair. “I enjoyed the Cindy Shermans,” he said, then looked around the room conspiratorially. “Actually, I’m enjoying the Cindy Shermans that I’m seeing right now, live and in color.” Obviously, this forever changed the way I interact with the work of Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) at art fairs, where both men and women compete over who can do the dumbest stuff to themselves via surgery and couture. This new photo is one of her finest in years. So often in her self-portraits, Sherman turns herself into a monster, or a creature so melodramatic that you’d cross the street to avoid it. Here she is positively snuggly, beckoning to you with a mitten in a way that says, “I gotta be me.” There doesn’t appear to be a real sepia filter on the photograph, but the fake tan and gold amplify the orange of the inundating tiger print to create a universe of richness and comfort. A welcome respite from the more traditional Shermans who prowl the surrounding fair.

Yeni Moa, fig 21.7 lossy (2023)

• Sargent’s Daughters

The press materials call these works by Yeni Moa (b. 1971) “cyborg assemblages,” and indeed, it is the blend between the organic and technological that makes this floor piece compelling. At the center is a bubble of greenish mercury glass, which seems to animate it. Despite the firm, reflective nickel-plated steel that constitutes the majority of the piece, you can feel the natural return in the loose shape and the welding on the other side. It begins to feel like there’s nothing Moa could do to make this work feel unfriendly. The spikes at the far end feel decorative, inviting, as though this creature only wishes to reach out to you in a greeting. It’s nice that the artist found a way to be cyberpunk that neither uses neon nor references the internet. If you buy this work, you should probably install it in the tool shed so someone mistakes it for a device with a real purpose.

Joe Andoe, 3/20/26 (2026)

• Almine Rech

This oil on linen work is a painting in reverse, an exercise in removal by Joe Andoe (b. 1955). “His painting technique is almost comically casual,” Deborah Solomon has written, in that he uses mostly his thumb and a bit of cloth to remove paint from the canvas until the design emerges. Andoe is said to be a favorite among his cohort, folks like Ed Ruscha and Richard Prince, and this painting demonstrates why. The leaves, stems and buds of these flowers all have a unique identity despite being made in the exact same way. The way that he has signed and dated this work right in the middle of it is punk rock in a way I enjoy. It goes well with the color. One should not assume the background to be an afterthought, either. There’s a great deal of movement there. If it were just a monochrome from which Andoe had removed nothing, it would probably still be compelling.

Akinsanya Kambon, Oya—Goddess of The Wind (2015)

• Ortuzar and Marc Selwyn Fine Art

In his review of the Venice Biennale, Jason Farago noted that curators these days tend to favor artists’ biographies over their output. This is true, but it’s hard to separate the life of Akinsanya Kambon (b. 1946) from work like this. Kambon came to embrace a particular strain of Pan-Africanism after serving as a Marine Corps infantryman and combat illustrator in Vietnam. He joined the Black Panthers and traveled to Africa conducting oral histories about anti-colonial struggle. He brings all his research and talents to bear in this piece. You can see his talent for drawing at the base of the goddess’s dress, which seems to depict a merging of birds and leaves on branches. The dress continues up in a curious pale blue with designs of satisfying texture. The figure’s features are strong and compelling, but here we notice most of all the quality of the patina. Her skin looks ridiculously realistic, owing to Kambon’s ceremonial attitude about kiln firings, which incorporate eucalyptus leaves and sawdust. This work feels like a vivacious artifact.

It’s art week in New York, and while this week is all about the fairs, next week all eyes will be on the auctions. A certain kind of art history head will no doubt be visiting Christie’s this weekend, eager for their last chance to see highlights from the collection of Marian Goodman, one of the greatest dealers in the business, who passed earlier this year. We caught up with Johanna Flaum, Christie’s Vice Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art, to hear more about this important group of works and how they will be sold.

Congratulations on landing this banner consignment! Breaking Ground is structured across three sales: the Evening Sale on May 20, the Day Sale on May 21 and a 53-lot online auction running May 8-22, with the whole group estimated at around $65 million. How did the three-tiered structure get decided, and who decides what goes where?

We’re really excited for this collection. Marian Goodman played such a crucial role in shaping the landscape of contemporary art today, so we felt it was important to present her collection in a way that felt authentic and personal to her life and legacy. We decided to take a multipronged approach in constructing the sale. First, we focused on the Richters. Gerhard Richter and Marian Goodman had a decades-long partnership, and his works were the core of her collection and her home for nearly half a century. Richter’s artworks were the pieces that Ms. Goodman chose to live with, more than any other artist. We felt it was critical to recognize that with a headlining moment in our 21st Century Evening Sale on May 20.

The second element we took into consideration was the composition of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on May 21. Through this platform, we wanted to provide a comprehensive look at a wider range of what Ms. Goodman chose to surround herself with, and a more nuanced feel of artists she collected over time. One fantastic example from the Day Sale is a painting by Franz Kline. In the early 1960s, Ms. Goodman organized a fundraising exhibition for her children’s school—which was in fact her first foray into selling art. She asked Franz Kline, who was a friend of her father, to donate an artwork for the auction. To mark the occasion, Kline then gifted her with this work, which she held on to and cherished for the rest of her life.

The third and final piece we wanted to bring in was the story from Marian Goodman’s earliest years in the art world as a co-founder of Multiples, Inc. This was a company founded in 1965 with a mission to make art accessible, democratizing the distribution of blue-chip names through printing in editions. Our online sale is a tribute to this, with a fantastic selection of prints and editions quite reasonably priced.

Eight Richters, spanning 1982 to 2009, will open the Evening Sale, with Kerze (1982) carrying a $35 to $50 million estimate. These candle paintings are scarce. Christie’s specialists have put the total at 27, with some destroyed and several in museums. What does it take to organize a Kerze sale in 2026, given how rarely they trade?

Created during the brief period from 1982 to 1983, the paintings in Richter’s candle series are exceptionally rare and are certainly his most sought-after. It has been 15 years since a candle painting has come to auction. The quality and rarity of the series, in conjunction with the superb provenance, is what sets the example we are selling apart; it is truly singular. Kerze was acquired by Ms. Goodman in the 1980s, just a few years after it was painted. It represents both her foresight and understanding of Richter, a testament to her faith in his practice and a premonition of the vast global resonance his artwork would ultimately achieve. In the years and decades that followed this acquisition, Marian Goodman’s influence as a gallerist grew exponentially, and Richter became an icon of the contemporary era; he is now regarded as the greatest living artist of our time. We’re so thrilled to be offering such a seminal masterpiece.

The collection includes a striking range of works from artists Goodman never represented. Warhol Flowers, three Lichtensteins, Rosenquist, Jasper Johns, a Morandi still life, Venini and Angelo Lelii lighting. What does her personal collection tell you about her eye that the gallery roster didn’t?

Quite a few of the works you’ve mentioned—the Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist and Johns—are editions, and these offer a real glimpse into Marian Goodman’s origin story and the incredible work she did with Multiples, Inc. Along with her co-founders, she was able to democratize art collecting by selling blue-chip names at reasonable prices in the 1960s. As recently as 2021, Ms. Goodman revisited this aspect of her personal history with a project at her eponymous gallery in London that honored Multiples, Inc. and its legacy with an exhibition of seminal editions published between 1966 and 1992, shown for the first time together. The Venini and the Angelo Lelii lamps in the online sale add another layer to the collection as a whole. Both Italian designs from the 1940s, these lighting pieces are a testament to her great taste in everything she surrounded herself with. This speaks to Marian Goodman as a truly great collector, someone who appreciated authenticity, aesthetic and great craftsmanship coming from artisans across the world.

Goodman began representing Richter in 1985, when his U.S. market was still underdeveloped. The strategy was to place key works with major institutions and hold others back. Looking at the eight paintings you’re now offering, was there a logic to her personal collection that’s distinct from what she sold along the way?

The works in Marian Goodman’s personal collection demonstrate both Richter’s evolution as an artist and the history of their collaboration over the course of four decades. As you mentioned, the dates of the works range from 1982 to 2009, and the examples included in the sale really are a visual timeline of the shows that the two put on together. Marian Goodman had both the instinct and the prescience to acquire a truly great example from each exhibition they collaborated on, and this collection is the result—beautifully charting the pivotal periods of the most important artist of our time together with the definitive professional relationship that guided him.

Barbara Gladstone’s estate came to market at Sotheby’s last May, and now Goodman’s lands at Christie’s. Are dealer estates from this generation performing differently from other single-owner consignments?

Each of these sales is a great collection that has come to market telling a story larger than the art market. It’s representative of a generational shift—the present generation is undergoing a wealth transfer unlike those of past eras. We’re seeing new types of estates, with different collecting interests, including more contemporary. Historically, older generations collected the art of their time, and now, between Marian Goodman, Hank McNeil and Aggie Gund, we are seeing great collectors’ estates come to market that focus on the Postwar and contemporary sphere.

The online sale runs deep into the gallery’s editions side. Multiples, Inc. material from the 1960s and 1970s, including Beuys, Oldenburg, LeWitt, Man Ray and the Ed Ruscha artist’s books. That’s the publishing venture Goodman started in 1965, before the gallery existed. Can you talk about the market for this material? Does Multiples, Inc. hold a special place in the hearts of collectors of editions?

Editions make collecting accessible to more people in their very nature, which was a foundational principle central to Multiples, Inc. and something Marian Goodman believed in for the entirety of her career. Multiples, Inc. was never a print publisher in the traditional sense; it stood as a defining platform of the time, allowing artists to experiment with what an “edition” could be. Rather than conceiving artworks as single objects, artists conceived with an intention of creating in editions and, for this reason, began to experiment with new materials and manufacturing techniques. Works published by Multiples, Inc. certainly hold a special place for collectors of editions; it has a scholarly weight and an institutional credibility that very few edition publishers can match. The market for the material consistently remains strong, engaging both seasoned buyers and sellers and those looking for entry points into collecting. Our online sale comprises 53 exemplary editions, sculptures, design objects and conceptual works of art that reflect both the ethos of Multiples, Inc. and capture the spirit of Marian Goodman’s singular collecting sensibility.

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I arrived in Venice for the 61st Biennale Arte on Sunday, early enough for the opening reception at Palazzo Diedo on Monday evening. I’ve visited a number of other Venice Biennales, though it was my first time being there for the opening, and over Bellinis at Diedo I asked a European dealer whether I should tackle the Arsenale the next day or the Giardini. I’d heard the latter would be crowded come Wednesday. Oh no, she said, I had to go to the Giardini on Wednesday because that was the day for which all the protests had been planned. I didn’t have the heart to explain that I needed to prioritize the art, because I am from New York City, where conflict is nothing remarkable. It’s just a part of your daily routine, like coffee.

But art and politics need not always be in such obvious opposition, as explored by “Star-Crossed Rendezvous,” a newly opened exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles that brings together two works by Haegue Yang (b. 1971) in the context of the composer Isang Yun (1917-1995), whose work blends Western modernism with Korean traditional music and has been performed by the L.A. Phil New Music Group for the exhibition.

In 1967 the South Korean government’s intelligence agency abducted Yun from West Berlin and charged him with spying for the North. International pressure secured his release after two years of captivity, but he never returned to Korea. At MOCA, Yang offers two pieces in dialogue with Yun’s music: Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun (2024), her first work directly addressing Yun and the centerpiece of her recent Hayward Gallery survey, and Sol LeWitt Upside Down—K123456, Expanded 1078 Times, Doubled and Mirrored (2015). In 2024, Yang told Artnet on the occasion of the Hayward show, “It has been a long-time wish for me to ‘exorcise’ Isang Yun out of me.”

The Yun installation does feel like relief. Yang’s classic medium of aluminum venetian blinds arrives here in burgundy, ochre, blue, olive and silver, suspended in stacked, terraced volumes that ascend in rough steps—a conceptual stepped pyramid. Two theatrical spotlights move across the work in choreography timed to the full 35 minutes of Yun’s Double Concerto (1977), which loops with 35 minutes of silence, the kind that comes from being able to stop thinking about something, at last.

The LeWitt piece on the other side of the gallery rhymes with all this by reintroducing neurosis. Here Yang has taken a 1997 LeWitt cube structure, doubled and mirrored its pyramidal stack, and rebuilt it from monochromatic white blinds lit by overhead fluorescents that nod to Dan Flavin. She’s explained what she does in the title, but that can’t really capture the way that it does more and less at the same time. The blinds collapse LeWitt’s meticulous geometry into something that’s dense and secretive, cleaner but less expressive by being more complex. In the context of this exhibition it emphasizes the minimalist impulse for dissent, and demonstrates how one doesn’t need to stage a protest to be a revolutionary.

“Haegue Yang: Star-Crossed Rendezvous” is on view at MOCA Grand Avenue in Los Angeles through August 2, 2026.

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In April, the De Pont Museum in the Netherlands announced that Maria Schnyder would serve as its new director. The De Pont is a celebrated Dutch museum showing contemporary art, located in a former woolen mill in Tilburg. The museum’s collection is built around living artists, with the emphasis on the quality of the work over any other criteria. Schnyder joined De Pont in 2013 and spent the last four years as deputy director, which means she’s taking over an institution whose daily rhythms she already knows intimately. Observer recently caught up with her to discuss her new role and the unique challenges of governing an institution with such a strong artist-first ethos.

Your predecessor, Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen, arrived with decades of outside experience at the Stedelijk and the ICA—a more typical external-hire trajectory. What advantages do you see in rising from within rather than coming from outside?

I worked very closely with Martijn, and I have been deeply invested in and fully supportive of the direction in which the museum has been evolving. I can ensure continuity as a matter of course—which is essential in the case of De Pont Museum and its long-term relationships with artists—while also having a clear and critical understanding of where its untapped potential lies and how, with a small but decisive organization, we can take it to the next level.

De Pont Museum has 7,000 square meters of exhibition space, yet the entire organization amounts to only 18 full-time employees. This demands synchronization and alignment: it must operate as a well-oiled machine in order to consistently realize exhibitions of international scale and ambition.

In announcing your appointment, board chair Taco Dibbits framed De Pont’s artist-first commitment as especially urgent “in an era in which societal and audience-driven agendas are increasingly setting the tone in the museum sector.” That reads as a bit of a shot at what some of your peers are doing right now. Do you share his concerns in this regard?

I don’t think it was intended as a critique, but rather as a reflection on the exceptional position of De Pont Museum. The foundation is financially independent, allowing the museum to put artists first without being bound by other agendas. Rita McBride once described De Pont Museum as “an artist’s dream”—and that is exactly what we strive for. It does not always make the museum the easiest place for visitors, but it does make it a unique space to experience an artist’s practice in its undiluted form.

Rather than opposing other approaches in the field, it is about recognizing that De Pont Museum represents a model that is no longer self-evident, and exactly because of that, remains highly necessary in today’s cultural and political climate. It is a model I am committed to carrying forward.

The former Thomas de Beer wool mill that houses the De Pont Museum has an almost mythic status in the museum-architecture conversation—by some accounts, it helped shape the thinking behind Tate Modern. Dibbits specifically cited your “emphatic kinship” with the space in his statement. For a curator, what does the building make easy, and where does it complicate matters?

The building has a unique patina, and its spaces are very different from more conventional gallery rooms. They range from 12 small cabinets—each with two doors, originally designed to ventilate stored wool—to a vast central hall of 35 by 35 meters, where the massive wool-spinning machines once stood.

It has an open floor plan with long sightlines, meaning everything is interconnected. There is no possibility of creating closed circuits; temporary exhibitions and collection displays inevitably intertwine in the visitor’s experience. I am used to thinking in rhythmic sequences across different spaces rather than in distinct chapters. For each exhibition, we select the galleries that resonate with the works we want to show, meaning that exhibition routes are never the same.

Over the years, I have learned the various ways in which the building is generous to the art, and when it can be somewhat more capricious. Above all, I have learned to embrace it as an ally. Once you have internalized its cadence, it becomes an exceptional playground, challenging artists in the best possible way to reconsider what truly matters in the presentation of their work and inviting them to discover uncharted territory.

Your academic background is a hybrid—French literature and linguistics alongside art history at Fribourg, then the research master at Groningen. Linguists and curators don’t always work with the same tools. Has the literary-linguistic side of your training actually made its way into your curatorial practice?

For sure, though more as a kind of underlying baseline than as something that translates into explicit discourse. Linguistics has made me understand how language both reflects the world and structures how we experience it, and how different languages and cultures carve up experience in distinct ways.

From literature, I learned the value of staying with difficulty. It has instilled in me an existential sense of reward in remaining with works that do not immediately yield themselves, but demand effort and sustained attention. That sensibility has very much carried over into my curatorial practice.

Where do you see De Pont’s position within the regional landscape, and within the wider Dutch museum landscape, where the biggest names and budgets sit in the Randstad? Or is it your goal to program for the wider art world?

De Pont Museum is a destination museum—a place for those willing to make the effort to encounter contemporary art on the artist’s own terms, within an exceptional architectural setting. With regard to the regional landscape, I think we need to move beyond a binary Randstad-versus-province logic and foster a more genuinely international mindset. Tilburg is as close to Brussels and Düsseldorf as it is to Amsterdam. That geographical reality should be reflected in how we think and operate as an institution.

Hendrik Driessen set a collection philosophy of depth over breadth—follow a small number of artists over many years, acquire key works within a body of work, skip the comprehensive-coverage approach. What are the advantages of this tactic? What are your favorite pieces in the collection?

The collection has no predetermined focus on artistic lineage, social discourse, geographic origin or thematic orientation. It is about bringing contemporary voices together that resonate with, reframe and challenge one another. Personally, I tend to think of it as a gathering around a long table. When I think about further developing the collection, I imagine conversations between artists that are already thriving, those that call for a new impulse and those that have yet to emerge. And from time to time, this evolving constellation calls for a voice that resists its existing order, instead disrupting and unsettling it. In any case, inviting a new artist to join the collection signals a long-term commitment to their practice.

The collection philosophy of depth over breadth is a direct consequence of De Pont’s artist-first approach. By following an artist’s work over time and building a meaningful body, the museum is able to convey their position with both conviction and nuance. In collection displays, this results in a more concentrated viewing experience.

The focus on depth has, over the years, resulted in many exceptional ensembles that set our collection apart. I think of Thomas Schütte, for instance, a personal favorite, with Grosser Respekt as an absolute masterpiece. But also more recently acquired groups of works by, for example, Ragnar Kjartansson and Laure Prouvost are without any doubt of international significance.

De Pont remains a privately funded foundation built on Jan de Pont’s estate, without structural government subsidy. With public budgets under pressure across Europe, that independence looks increasingly like an asset. What kind of advantages does such a structure offer your institution? Is America doing it right by providing our museums with basically no public funding?

I think it is very tricky to compare the European and the American situations, but essentially, I believe that public art institutions should be part of a country’s core infrastructure. In the case of De Pont Museum, it was from the very beginning a matter of collegiality for the foundation not to apply for public funding. The idea was that if, as a private foundation, you add something to the existing institutional landscape, you should not then draw from the available public funds, but be able to sustain your own position.

Today, that financial independence allows us to remain fully committed to an artist-first mission and to carry that forward into the future. At the same time, it requires a very clear sense of direction and sharp focus. As mentioned, the organization is lean, and the museum concentrates on solo exhibitions developed in close collaboration with artists. There is no capacity to facilitate academic research or publishing programs. Our acquisitions budget is fixed, and each choice carries consequence: to select one work is to forgo another. So while De Pont enjoys full autonomy, it is within a clearly defined financial framework that demands discipline and a strong sense of focus.

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Alfred Hitchcock’s notion of “pure cinema” drew on his education in the era of silent films, but you can see it resonate across his filmography. He thought that a movie should be able to be enjoyed on mute, because the key images—the birds flocking on the telephone wires—tell the story as much as the dialogue. You can imagine what he would have thought of the films of Wes Anderson, in which every scene in every movie involves two people telling very clever jokes at each other while moving as little as possible.

“Wes Anderson: The Archives” at the Design Museum in London is the first major museum show devoted to the filmmaker, and offers a context for appreciation outside of his movies. The exhibition features over 700 pieces of ephemera related to his films, including costumes, props, stop-motion puppets, miniature models, paintings, Anderson’s own spiral-bound notebooks and storyboards. These are drawn from a personal archive he has built up since Rushmore (1998), when he started writing into his contracts that everything made for his films would belong to him, following the sale of certain items from Bottle Rocket (1996). The exhibition is a collaboration with la Cinémathèque française in Paris, where it premiered last year, and has been expanded by some 300 additional objects for London.

It makes sense that Anderson’s archive would be so vast because a great deal of work goes into the objects that build his universe. The painting Boy with Apple is a MacGuffin in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) by a fake artist called “Johannes Van Hoytl the Younger.” In fact it was painted by a fellow named Michael Taylor, but art directed by Anderson down to the kind of fur that appears on the costume and the mysterious piece of paper in the background. A London dancer was the model for the boy but his hand position on the stem is lifted from the 16th-century Fontainebleau School portrait of Gabrielle d’Estrées holding her sister’s nipple. There are enough bespoke idiosyncrasies for it to read as a pretty believable portrait of a young Renaissance noble, even in a brief flash onscreen.

I’ve heard the argument that Anderson’s best films are the ones more explicitly for children and the stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) allowed Anderson to animate his fetishes. Mr. Fox is just one foot tall, a ball and socket puppet covered in mohair, alpaca and goat hair, but like the rest of Anderson’s objects he is convincing. His corduroy suit is tailored the same way a human’s would be and his face is malleable for acting. The same is true for the dogs in Isle of Dogs (2018), though the heads of the humans were swapped.

The location for Asteroid City (2023) is described in the catalogue as “not a city, but rather a grand-scale artwork moonlighting as a hamlet on the edge of the Arizona desert (‘Pop: 87’).” If conceived of as a giant installation with moving parts, a.k.a. people, then its engines might be the bespoke vending machines that offer anything from real estate to martinis. The catalogue also notes how the research for these involved looking at real vending machines for meat, bread, stockings and eggs from the early post-war years. The result is a series of personality-filled props that entertain as they exude profound Americana. Anderson may control his actors rigidly but his objects are afforded great range.

“Wes Anderson: The Archives” is on view at the Design Museum in London through July 26, 2026.

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This week, New York City sees the launch of a brand new art fair: CONDUCTOR, at Brooklyn’s Powerhouse Arts. In an art world that seems to be reevaluating all its previous business models, CONDUCTOR is one to watch, “featuring individual artists and galleries across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Oceania and Indigenous Nations around the globe, foregrounding critical perspectives from the Global Majority at a decisive cultural moment.” More remarkable is the fact that some of the work for sale this weekend will have been made on site. The fair was curated by Adriana Farietta in collaboration with Powerhouse Arts, and we caught up with her to hear about the practicalities of this ambitious model.

The onsite fabrication model is a major structural innovation at CONDUCTOR, one that has become increasingly prescient in recent weeks as global trade has become a vulnerability for all kinds of investment. Could you walk us through what that actually looks like for a gallery coming from Dhaka or São Paulo? Who makes what, where and how far in advance does the conversation start?

This is one of our main strengths at CONDUCTOR. Powerhouse Arts has uniquely robust fabrication facilities all housed within one facility: three premier print shops, a state-of-the-art ceramics program and an ambitious Public Art department that supports artists fabricating large-scale, technically ambitious artworks, all in a more cost-effective way than most other facilities. These resources offer an incredible opportunity to vertically integrate and fabricate work locally—mitigating a host of shipping, logistics and customs contingencies.

As the fair is in its very early stages, we’ve had the benefit of working on fabricating one presentation this year: a limited-edition print for artist duo Bugarin + Castle to support the interactive video installation Sore Throat, which they will display in the Special Projects section. That conversation started months ago, back in the fall of 2025. In the future, galleries and artists who plan to exhibit with CONDUCTOR should consider speaking with our fabrication teams 6 months in advance. We recognize that this means galleries and artists will need to commit a bit earlier to the fair, but the upside is worthwhile.

A fair centering artists from Palestine, the Amazon, Indigenous nations and the wider Global Majority is opening into a U.S. moment defined by tightened visa rules and aggressive border policy. How has that environment shaped planning, and have any participating artists had trouble getting into the country?

As we organized the fair over the past year, stressors from the administration, whether policy based or rhetorical, added new challenges and vigor to the fair’s mandate. Many of the regions we sought to welcome were facing new travel restrictions and visa limitations. These barriers to entry inspired us to double down on the opportunities we were affording through our platform. PHA wrote several letters in support of visa applications for galleries and artists seeking to participate. I personally know several artists who were denied entry to the country based on their gender identity. As of early 2025, U.S. immigration policies required visa applicants to use gender markers matching their sex assigned at birth, effectively blocking many international transgender artists whose documents show their identifying gender.

Twenty-eight galleries plus 20 Special Projects across Powerhouse’s facility is a serious buildout. What’s the operational problem nobody sees from the VIP line—the logistical issue you’ve been proudest to solve on this first time out?

PHA is no stranger to ambitious build-outs. Over the past year, the organization hosted two art fairs and a multi-month performance festival that at one point transformed the space into a skatepark, followed by an 800-person theater. I am fortunate to be working with their talented Operations team. That being said, for CONDUCTOR, we are contending with artworks composed of a wide range of materials: textile and fiber, organic materials, found objects, digital media, bronze and metal, etc. If you also consider that many of these works are monumental in scale, traditional art handling logistics certainly amplify.

While booth exhibitors will present in the traditional walled booths, the Special Projects section sprawls out across the Grand Hall, Lobby and other public spaces at Powerhouse Arts. PHA’s Operations and Curatorial team has worked tirelessly to find the best spaces to celebrate these works across the building, with the added challenge of navigating the integrity of the building’s extant graffiti-clad walls and poured-concrete passageways. It has taken many innovative minds and ingenious rigging systems to display the out-of-the-box, ambitious projects mounted at PHA. It’s a good thing we have an industrial hoist that can lift sculptures directly into the 3rd Floor Grand Hall, if need be.

Powerhouse Arts President Eric Shiner has described CONDUCTOR as a PHA-exclusive fair, meaning it stays put at Powerhouse rather than traveling or scaling into a convention-center model. What does that permanence enable curatorially?

The idea to have a fair centered around Global Majority artists sprung from a need that I identified when I served as deputy director of the Armory Show. We received an abundance of applications for the “young” sections of the fair (the most affordable), and our committees often selected only the more established and well-known applicants, leaving so many out of the game.

CONDUCTOR is not revenue-driven, but curatorially-driven, which I think is a positive byproduct of being produced by a mission-driven nonprofit like Powerhouse Arts that is so committed to access, equity and a healthy dose of radicality in the arts. During the course of CONDUCTOR’s planning, I have had the pleasure of working with Diya Vij, prior to her appointment to NYC’s Department of Cultural Affairs, and Jackie Veliz, PHA’s Program Manager, to program the fair’s Conversation Series, for example. The team felt it imperative that we undertake programming that was rigorous and additive to the narrative about the Global Majority—programming that created a scaffolding for the public to engage with the Global Majority in an informed, thoughtful way.

Recently, Liz Munsell, VP of Curatorial and Arts Programs, and PHA’s Associate Curator Constanza Valenzuela joined the team, adding yet another layer of curatorial oversight for the Special Projects section and contributing thoughtful institutional critique. And it goes without saying that having a built-in community of artists, arts workers, fabricators and enthusiasts already working in and around the organization (committed to this mission) allows us to debut to a values-aligned public from the onset. This is an all-hands-on-deck program for Powerhouse Arts, and the fair is in great hands

Annalee Davis and Tammy Nguyen are in the 2026 Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, and Beya Gille Gacha is in the Cameroon Pavilion—all three are also showing at CONDUCTOR. Was that overlap actively sought out, a coincidence of timing, or something in between?

We actually have six artists at CONDUCTOR participating in Venice this year. Across the leadership of the fair, we had some insider intel as to what artists and galleries were generating a buzz ahead of the Venice Biennale announcements. With artists like Tammy Nguyen and Ebony G. Patterson, PHA has had a longstanding relationship and the pleasure of collaborating in other capacities in the past. The organization had already been in discussions with them about forthcoming projects, and thus the connection to CONDUCTOR came very naturally.

With others, like RojoNegro (María Sosa and Noé Martínez), Beya Gille Gacha, Bugarin + Castle and Annalee Davis, the Venice Biennale connection was serendipitous. We were already seeking the best and the brightest to represent their respective regions, so it was a welcome validation that they were identified as ambassadors on such a global level through Koyo Kouoh and the Biennale. Between Eric Shiner and I, we were able to secure three artists who will go on to represent their countries in Venice! I believe this speaks to the rigor we’ve undertaken in seeking out artists whose works resonate fundamentally across borders.

ARTnews described CONDUCTOR as offering work at “approachable price points.” What range should collectors actually expect on the floor, and how does that square with having Biennale-bound artists in the mix?

Because our artists are intergenerational both in age and in market, we will have works ranging from the thousands to the high five figures. What I love about this concept is that emerging collectors will not be shell-shocked by prices. I wanted to create an environment where people like me can afford to buy a work before an artist’s prices double or triple. If you consider that these escalating prices typically result from galleries exhibiting at international art fairs that can cost upwards of $40,000 for a booth (not to mention international shipping and logistics), CONDUCTOR’s price points are evidence of the power of keeping entry costs low.

The 2025 preview included work made through Powerhouse’s Artist Subsidy Program, including Khaled Jarrar’s piece and Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya’s installation fabricated with the public art team. What did that preview teach you about this model ahead of the first proper edition of the fair?

Perhaps first and foremost, in planning the 2025 preview, it became clear that PHA as an organization has a global reach already. Even before CONDUCTOR materialized, the organization had been undertaking its Artist Subsidy Program, committed to artists of color or self-identifying as LGBTQI+, to lower barriers to entry for traditionally underrepresented voices. This allyship attracted diverse artists from the onset and was how the relationship with Khaled Jarrar was established. With artists like Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, PHA’s Public Art team had collaborated with them in the past and thus immediately knew the fit would be right for a fair like CONDUCTOR.

The preview was almost solely curated from within PHA’s community of artists and friends, alongside my extended network of international galleries. In contrast, this inaugural edition required a significant, global R&D campaign that involved ample travel and new discovery, expanding our knowledge of the Global Majority significantly. The preview also taught us that we don’t need to be on the same schedule as all the other fairs competing for the same 200 top collectors. Most collectors that I know are not purely market-driven and enjoy having real conversations with gallerists and meeting artists, but in the frenzy of going to all the fairs, that can be lost.

Differentiating ourselves in terms of our timeline has also welcomed other collaborative opportunities that may not have arisen during the saturated fair weeks. I’m excited that PHA is hosting the Association of Art Museum Curators’ 2026 Art Curator Conference, which will coincide with CONDUCTOR on Thursday, April 30 and provide curators a forum to see work from these broad geographic regions in one place in New York. We will also have Noah Horowitz, the CEO of Art Basel, speaking on a panel.

What are you hoping that other art fairs learn from CONDUCTOR?

We hope to serve as a pipeline for real discovery, fostering connections for these artists and galleries not just with collectors but with curators, arts workers and the arts ecosystem in NYC. We want to act as a conduit for galleries from these regions and help them enter the U.S. markets. I think some of the larger fairs have forgotten that their clients and main stakeholders are the exhibitors and ultimately the artists. It’s no doubt a costly undertaking to produce large art fairs, but they’ve become hyper-focused on sponsor partnerships and not on the actual spirit of discovery that should be at the heart of the art and programming.

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May is a major art month in the New York art world, with a host of fairs on the docket and one of the two most important auction seasons in the world. But it’s also a great season for art even if you aren’t looking to buy, because of the way the market and aesthetics tend to be intertwined, and this is the relationship explored by art historian Valentina Castellani in her new book Trading Beauty: Art Market Histories from the Altar to the Gallery, which debuts May 1 (pre-order here). Castellani brings authority to the subject, having held leading roles at Sotheby’s and Gagosian, and we caught up with her to hear more about the book and her thoughts on our curious market moment.

Massimiliano Gioni‘s foreword frames the book as a map of the art world’s “operating system,” and the title pairs “trading” with “beauty”—two words many in the field still prefer to keep in separate rooms. What convinced you that the market isn’t a footnote to art history but the through-line of it?

What convinced me was, quite simply, the evidence of history itself. The more closely one examines how artworks are created, circulated and endured, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the notion that the market is merely a secondary layer—an afterthought appended to a purer, autonomous history of art. It is, rather, intrinsic to that history, woven into its very structure. Indeed, as Massimiliano Gioni writes in the foreword, every object we revere today has also been “a line item in a contract.” Art has never been produced in a vacuum, and in my book, I examine the different market models within which works of art have been created during different epochs. Each model was shaped by specific social, political, religious and cultural circumstances. As a result, the criteria by which art is valued have also varied across time.

If we think of the major turning points—from the Church as the primary patron in the Middle Ages, to the emergence of a more open market during the heyday of the Dutch Republic, to the decisive role of dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel, who was responsible for the critical and market acceptance of the Impressionists—it becomes clear that the question is not whether a market existed, but how it was structured and how it operated. To take a concrete example, the remarkable paintings in the exhibition dedicated to Raphael now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York were not created as expressions of the artist’s inspiration, but in response to commissions from patrons—popes, wealthy citizens, members of the aristocracy.

This is what I seek to explore in my book—not to reduce art to economics or to diminish its meaning, but to better understand the conditions within which it was made. Indeed, as I suggest in the conclusion, the true wonder lies in the fact that, even within the constraints imposed by patrons, the shifting demands of different publics or the exclusions of race and gender, artists in every epoch have always been able to create works that are sublime, moving and profoundly meaningful.

Chapter 11 draws most directly on your 11 years as a director at Gagosian in New York, using “Picasso: Mosqueteros” and the Manzoni retrospective as case studies. What does writing about those shows from the perspective of a historian reveal that wasn’t necessarily apparent to you from inside the gallery at the time?

Writing about those exhibitions from the perspective of a historian allowed me to grasp how flexible the art system truly is and how porous the boundaries between roles have become. When I was working on shows such as “Picasso: Mosqueteros” or the Manzoni retrospective, the focus was—necessarily—on execution: securing loans, working closely with estates and collectors, shaping the installation and ensuring the highest scholarly and visual standard. It is only in retrospect, when I started teaching my course on the history of the art market at NYU, that I could fully recognize these exhibitions as part of a broader historical shift, in which galleries are no longer simply commercial venues but have become producers of knowledge, capable of mounting exhibitions that rival those of major museums.

Can you detail some of the logistics that went into organizing such ambitious museum-quality shows at a gallery?

As for the logistics, these exhibitions were complex and rigorously conceived projects, extremely demanding to execute and very costly. “Picasso: Mosqueteros,” which was the first show I worked on in 2008 dedicated to the master, grew out of a path the gallery had already established of mounting historical exhibitions, though we significantly elevated both the scale and the curatorial ambition. It was devoted to the late work of the artist, a period long neglected by critics, the public and the market. The last major institutional exhibition had in fact taken place in 1984 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, so the project became a true rediscovery, restoring centrality to a phase that had until then been considered minor.

We invited John Richardson to curate, whose personal knowledge of Picasso brought extraordinary gravitas. The exhibition was anchored by the crucial collaboration with Bernard Picasso, who generously lent most of the works, some of them never shown to the public before. Annabelle Selldorf designed the exhibition installation. The response from both critics and the public was extraordinary. On Saturdays, there were long lines of people around the block in Chelsea where the exhibition was held. “Mosqueteros” contributed, without any doubt, to a reassessment of Picasso’s late production and had a significant impact on the market of the artist’s late works.

The Piero Manzoni retrospective was very much my own initiative, based on two complementary considerations. On the one hand, Manzoni, one of the most important figures of postwar art, who anticipated conceptual practices with works such as Base of the World, Artist’s Shit and his signing of models as Living Sculptures, had never had a retrospective in America, and he still has not. On the other, the gallery had not yet operated in the Manzoni and broader postwar Italian market, which at the time was on the rise.

I built on a longstanding relationship with the Archivio Piero Manzoni and brought in Germano Celant, the leading authority on the artist’s work. The exhibition was conceived with a museum-level rigor and opened in January 2009, at a moment when the world was in the grip of the financial crisis. Yet I felt that Manzoni’s utopian optimism and playfulness—do not forget that he died at only 29—about the idea that art could change the world or at least make it a better place permeated the show, transforming it into an unexpected oasis of reflection that inspired and drew large audiences, including many artists.

I would also emphasize that spearheading these exhibitions was an intense and demanding process—I spent months with the Manzoni catalogue raisonné and Picasso books on my kitchen counter—but also profoundly rewarding on a human level, shaped by extraordinary collaborations. With John, and in close dialogue with the Picasso family, we went on to organize four further exhibitions—each focused on a different period of Picasso’s work—and we quickly developed a deep and close friendship. I met him when he was 84 and he was 95 when he passed away. He not only taught me about Picasso, but showed me that one can remain curious, open and thirsty for life at any age. We had a lot of fun and laughed a lot together. We would gather to work in his large Fifth Avenue apartment—a world unto itself, between a Wunderkammer and a bazaar—where, from time to time, the most curious characters would appear. I still think of those times and of John. I miss him.

The same collaborative spirit defined my work with Bernard and Annabelle—whom I invited to design several subsequent projects and who are both dear friends. Michael Cary, still at Gagosian and now a leading organizer of historical exhibitions, was also part of this “dream team.” I loved working with Germano so much that after the Manzoni retrospective we organized together in 2012 a major and spectacular exhibition devoted to Lucio Fontana’s Ambienti Spaziali. Germano’s death from COVID in 2020 was a profound loss, both personally and for the wider art community. He was a true visionary.

Chapter 13 quotes Richard Serra comparing building East-West/West-East in the Qatari desert to “meeting the Medicis in the 15th Century.” You take that comparison seriously but also consider the broader implications of the Saudi Vision 2030 project, the human-rights concerns around Saadiyat Island and the cultural-diplomacy framing of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. What do you make of the latest developments in the Gulf? Do they portend the end of such Gulf optimism?

Let me begin by saying that I am deeply horrified and saddened by the tragic loss of life and devastation this war is causing. It is difficult to think about art when confronted with such images of suffering. To answer your question: inevitably, this conflict and the shifting balances in the Middle East make an already complex situation more fragile, and will, in one way or another, also affect the cultural landscape of the Gulf. I would not read the current moment as the end of Gulf optimism, but rather as a moment of transition that will inevitably bring changes, though it is not yet clear in which direction they will unfold. The extraordinary ambition that has defined the region over the past decade—from large-scale institutional projects to the cultivation of a global cultural presence—will, I believe, remain in place.

In the book, I quote the comparison made by Richard Serra between working in Qatar and “meeting the Medicis in the 15th Century” precisely because it captures the scale of patronage and cultural investment. At the same time, as with the Medicis in 15th-century Florence, such moments are never purely about art: they are embedded in broader structures of power, diplomacy and historical contingency. The Louvre Abu Dhabi, for instance, is as much a cultural institution as it is an instrument of international positioning. If anything, the present moment underscores that art systems, like all systems, are shaped by external shocks. They do not disappear; they adapt.

The book charts an enormous run-up in the market for ultra-contemporary women artists and African American artists, then cites Rachel Corbett’s reporting that the Black portraiture market dropped sharply in 2024 amid “anti-woke sentiment.” How should a reader distinguish a genuine historical correction from a speculative bubble dressed up as one?

The distinction is rarely visible in real time—which is precisely what makes these moments revealing. What we call a “correction” and a “bubble” often look identical on the surface: rapid price escalation followed by contraction. The difference lies in the depth of underlying validation. A speculative bubble occurs when prices surge without institutional and larger critical approval: when sentiment shifts, the contraction can be abrupt because the supporting structure is thin. A genuine correction, by contrast, unfolds within a broader process of reassessment—museum acquisitions and exhibitions, curatorial attention and scholarship. Prices may fluctuate, but they rest on a thicker system of validation.

An example of how market and critical revaluation reinforced each other is Kerry James Marshall, whose Past Times sold for a record price of $21.1 million (from an estimate of $6-8 million) at Sotheby’s New York in May 2018, following his 2016-17 traveling “Mastry.” As I argue in my book, I consider this price a turning point in the historical reassessment of African American artists, precisely because Marshall, born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, belongs to an older generation shaped by profound racial exclusion. However, the renewed attention to historical figures was first initiated by the rising market for a younger generation of African American artists.

A similar dynamic underlies the reassessment of women Surrealists, where critical recognition and the market have undoubtedly converged. Cecilia Alemani’s 2022 Venice Biennale “The Milk of Dreams,” titled after a book by Leonora Carrington, exposed these artists to a contemporary audience. Their work resonates today because, alongside the exploration of the unconscious shared with their male peers, it engages deeply with questions of identity and gender, often grounded in unconventional lives. Carrington’s $28.5 million auction record in May 2022 confirmed this growing interest—which, in my opinion, is a lasting shift rather than a passing bubble.

Chapter 13 describes your involvement with 291 Agency and notes that in 2023, artists occupied the top 10 slots of ArtReview’s Power 100 for the first time, with Peter Doig leaving Michael Werner the same year. Is the gallery’s gatekeeping function actually eroding, or just being unbundled across more players?

I would argue that the gallery’s gatekeeping function is not eroding so much as being redistributed across a wider set of actors. What we are witnessing is less a disappearance of power than a reconfiguration of where it sits and how it operates. Symbolic shifts—such as artists occupying the top positions of the Power 100 list or figures like Doig asserting greater control over representation—point to a change in influence, but not to the disappearance of intermediation. Galleries, in my opinion, remain crucial, especially in the early stages of validation, providing financial backing, intellectual context and access to major collections. What has changed is that this role is now shared with a wider range of actors, while social media has transformed how information is accessed and circulated. The system has become more flexible, but the need for validation has not disappeared—it is simply redistributed.

The book argues that Damien Hirst’s 2008 Beautiful Inside My Head Forever auction weakened his secondary market by bypassing the validation function galleries provide, and it’s hard to argue that he’s had a good time since then. That said, many artists—like Josh Kline, in his popular recent essay in October—are questioning the gallery model. How do you think galleries can evolve to be more responsive to artists’ needs?

The 2008 auction Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, in which Damien Hirst consigned more than 200 works directly to Sotheby’s, remains a pivotal moment in the history of the art market. By bypassing his galleries, Hirst staged a radical act of disintermediation—one that, in my opinion, was as conceptual as it was commercial, a deliberate intervention into the very structures through which art circulates. What makes Hirst particularly compelling—I consider him one of the most important artists of his generation—is the way his practice operates simultaneously on multiple fronts. On the one hand, his work challenges established norms of taste while engaging with themes deeply rooted in the history of art: life and death, permanence and decay. On the other, he turns the mechanisms of the art market itself into material, testing and exposing its conventions.

Precisely for this reason, his 2008 auction is so instructive: it shows that bypassing the gallery does not eliminate the need for validation—it simply destabilizes it. That said, the questions raised by artists today—including figures like Josh Kline—are both legitimate and necessary. Galleries will remain relevant to the extent that they evolve from gatekeepers into genuine long-term partners. The model is not obsolete, but it can no longer rely on exclusivity alone; its future lies in being more open, adaptive and aligned with the long-term interests of artists rather than the short-term rhythms of the market.

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Polaroid photography is one of those pieces of analog life that Gen Z has decided to embrace, despite the fact that it wasn’t very good. As with wired headphones, the technology was impressive when it debuted, but unlike vinyl records, there are more drawbacks than benefits. Important to remember, too, is that when your favorite artists were using Polaroids, they were doing so because they found the medium to be futuristic. Andy Warhol would go around parties with his Big Shot, and Diaries has a woman in 1980 asking him, “When are you going to Xerox me, darling?”

“Lucas Samaras: Sitting, Standing, Walking, Looking” at the Art Institute of Chicago makes the case for Samaras (1936-2024) as one of the most inventive of Polaroid’s artistic converts. Drawn largely from the museum’s own collection, supplemented with recent gifts from the Samaras estate, the show assembles more than 40 works, with photographs displayed alongside select sculptures, paintings and drawings. It also covers the arc from his earliest AutoPolaroids of 1969-70 through to the enormous Sitting tableaux of the late 1970s and his sliced-up Panoramas of the mid-1980s.

A standout piece from the show is Samaras’s grid of AutoPolaroids (1969/70). These precede Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977) by a good margin and are seen as an influence, sharing their playful exploration of identity as the artist dons wigs, makeup, expressions and props to conjure a host of diverse characters in black and white. But the Polaroid offers a different flavor from Film Stills. Those were deeply concerned with photography, supposedly shot by people like Richard Prince and Robert Longo, and featuring Hollywood-style set design and framing. Samaras’s are more about that feeling of going insane in your apartment alone.

Like the AutoPolaroids, his Photo-Transformation 11/6/73 (1973) emphasized the strengths of the medium. Here, Samaras manipulates the 20 layers in a piece of Polaroid film with his fingers or a stylus in a performance that yields something intense, damaged and surreal in the perfect way.

But New Yorkers are interested in real estate as much as we are in transcendence. In Still Life (1978), the artist captures the cluttered kitchen table in his studio. Paint brushes mingle with Café Bustelo, plants and a planning shot for the finished photograph we now regard. This piece emerged following Polaroid’s invitation to test a new 8×10 camera. This larger format meant he couldn’t manipulate the emulsion the way he did with the SX-70 prints, so Samaras had to make the transformation happen in front of the camera rather than on the print. The result is a disembodied head that seems to be growling, a ferocious piece of clutter among all the others that vie for your attention. No wonder Peter Schjeldahl called him the “artist laureate of narcissism.”

“Lucas Samaras: Sitting, Standing, Walking, Looking” is on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through July 20, 2026.

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Audioguides at institutions can be hit or miss. They can be plodding, patronizing or somehow make the material before you dull. I would recommend the one narrated by John Stamos at Graceland, though it is mandatory, and the one at the Neue Galerie in New York. The voice for the tour of the latter collection of pre-1945 art from Germany and Austria is none other than that of Ronald Lauder, the man who collected it. As he says on the tour, he has three levels of art that he likes: “oh,” “oh my” and “oh my god.” He only collects the last one.

There was a lot to be impressed with coming out of the region in that period, which is the subject of “Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin,” a new exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The show brings together over 70 paintings and sculptures from the collection of the national museum of 20th-century modern art and places a special emphasis on the interplay between art and politics during these difficult decades in Germany. And there’s still plenty of “oh my god” to enjoy if you’re a bit tired of the recent vogue for political interpretations of art.

Take Curt Querner’s Self-Portrait with Stinging Nettle (1933), in which the scowling painter holds the toxic plant between two pinched fingers. Sure, there’s an easy analogy there for the threat of National Socialism. Querner was a dedicated Communist responding to a Party meeting in a bowling alley in Dresden, on January 25, 1933, that had ended in a shootout with police, leaving nine of his comrades dead and 11 seriously injured. But it would be a mistake not to admire the painterly aspects of this work. Querner was a student of the great Otto Dix and this work shares his talent for strange yet deeply empathetic facial expressions. His hands are in an odd but defiant position and his clothes may not fit but there’s no doubt how he’s feeling. Behind him the door opens onto an attic—in fact the attic of his parents’ house in the village of Börnchen, where the picture was painted—as vague as his look is sharp, contributing to the precise dread of the New Objectivity movement.

George Grosz was an artist who hopped around styles, including New Objectivity, and his Pillars of Society (1926) is a great example of this sampling. The title is borrowed from Henrik Ibsen’s 1877 play and deeply ironic, with all of liberal Weimar gathered at a bar to vent their multifarious frustrations. At the front sits an earless judge clutching a beer, his head sliced open to reveal sketchy, surreal fantasies of his cavalry days. Behind him a bar-room crony with a dueling scar and a swastika on his tie rides shotgun. Nearby the press baron—bearing the features of newspaper czar Alfred Hugenberg—wears a chamber pot for a hat and offers a palm of peace stained with blood, while a parliamentarian’s brain literally steams from his exposed skull. Bringing up the rear, a military chaplain preaches with outstretched arms above the cartoonish atrocities of the Reichswehr. What unites them is bloodlust, which in moments like our current one can feel monolithic. Grosz gives their unique motivations a horrible texture.

Reaching back even further it’s easier to admire the paint rather than the politics. Max Pechstein’s Seated Girl (1910) shows a woman with a come hither look and an extruding bottom that borrows much from Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin but adds a German feel to the style four decades before the painter’s country would try to conquer France for the second time. Her skin offers more color texture than the other masters would have used, and it is a less intellectual portrait. She may be a prostitute, but her intense makeup blends with her face in a way that seems to ask if the border between real and imagined is necessary—which is just as well, given that Pechstein built this seductive adult figure on sketches of a nine-year-old neighborhood girl named Fränzi Fehrmann, then posing for several of the Brücke painters. The fiction on the canvas is the fiction; the studio facts are uglier and have generated their own debate since Fehrmann was identified in the 1990s. The catalogue notes that the painting was later featured in a collage equating Expressionism with Communism by the Nazi theorist Wolfgang Willrich, in his 1937 book Säuberung des Kunsttempels (Purge of the Temple of Art). This time period has much to teach us, especially when it comes to the nefarious mingling of art and politics.

“Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin” is on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art through July 19, 2026.

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About a month ago, the beloved New York nonprofit Creative Time announced that Jean Cooney would serve as its new executive director. Cooney replaces Justine Ludwig, who served as Creative Time’s executive director since her appointment in 2018, and arrives from the Times Square Alliance, another major institution that stages ambitious public art in the city. Cooney worked at Creative Time before Times Square Arts, and we caught up to hear more about her new job and thoughts on public art in general.

You’re returning to Creative Time after nearly seven years at Times Square Arts. I can see the ways in which the two jobs are similar, in that they both program ambitious public art, but what would you point to as the major differences between the two organizations?

Creative Time and Times Square Arts are each iconic in their own right! Both programs are built around inviting artists to think big, push the boundaries of their practices and respond to the landscape of our city as well as the contemporary cultural moment. I feel grateful that across these very different organizations, I’ve been able to work with artists and champion the realization of bold, ambitious and timely projects for the broad and diverse publics of New York City.

Times Square is an extraordinary place that sees on average 250,000 people in one day, where you truly can make no assumptions about anyone’s interest in art, which really inspired me to expand my thinking around audience and accessibility. Alternatively, Creative Time follows artists, moving throughout the city and occasionally beyond (and in one case, even into outer space), to bring their visions to life—a practice that I’m excited to dig back into, push even further and interweave with my learnings from Times Square.

At Creative Time you helped realize Nick Cave’s HEARD•NY (2013) in Grand Central Terminal, Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014) at the former Domino Sugar factory and Duke Riley’s Fly By Night (2016) at the Brooklyn Navy Yard—three of the most beloved pieces in recent memory. What makes a great Creative Time piece?

A very Creative Time project is when you can really feel the alchemy between a visionary artist, a bold idea and the space in which their project is sited. Our artists’ projects can take many shapes and forms, but ultimately they’re unexpected, involve risk and experimentation and push us to see ourselves and our world in new ways. And they leave an indelible mark—I can still smell the sugar melting in that giant warehouse; hear the swishes of raffia and booming drums in Vanderbilt Hall; and see the lights taking shape in the night sky over the East River, with the ringing of the bell calling the birds back home.

Last year the Thomas J Price sculpture in Times Square became a lightning rod after Fox News went after it. How did that controversy shape how you think about public art in these political end times?

This experience only reaffirmed for me the necessity of public art and artists who are opening up dialogues around our most urgent, unresolved social and political issues, especially in this divisive climate. Artists like Thomas J Price create space for difficult conversations, forcing us to grapple with the tensions between multiple truths and finding new entry points to take on the most polarizing topics. Presenting his work in Times Square and the responses it received ultimately became a psychological portrait of our ongoing and historical relationship with race, gender and identity, and held up a mirror to who we are and what we value, as individuals and as a society.

The experience also crystallized the challenges and potential of a public dialogue online and in person, and how the two can intertwine. In this case, hate-fueled chatter online sparked an outpouring of solidarity and celebration around the work, which ultimately resulted in rational, critical dialogue on social media, in the press and on the ground. Along the way, our public art ambassadors were having measured and increasingly meaningful conversations with visitors in Times Square.

You’ve worked with both Anne Pasternak, who was artistic director and president of Creative Time, and Nato Thompson as chief curator, each a major figure in the art world. What did you take from each of them as leaders, and where do you intend to diverge from them?

Those were incredibly formative years for me, and really shaped who I am and how I see the world. Working under such charismatic leadership and with the visionary artists of that period of Creative Time opened my eyes to the possibilities of public art, the ways in which artists can become agents of change within our society at large and how to foster an artist-led organizational culture. My learnings from each of them and so many of my talented colleagues from that time period continue to inspire me and drive my mission to take on the full spectrum of Creative Time magic in this next chapter—from the bold, beautiful and arresting to the socially engaged and subversive.

I have no doubt that an astounding amount of bureaucracy goes into the operation of both Times Square Arts and Creative Time. Does working with the red tape invigorate you or is it something you’ve just learned to navigate with minimal sweat?

Is it weird to say that I’m invigorated by red tape? Because at this point I really do relish a challenge, and at the core of every seemingly impossible project is some kind of bureaucratic feat—from navigating our city’s municipal codes and civic structures to the strategic negotiations and partnerships that can stretch them, and the delicate politics and nerve-wracking moments that live in between.

Since Creative Time is often reactivating or opening up spaces in novel ways for our artist commissions—whether it’s bringing the public into a 130-year-old abandoned sugar factory or staging a politically-themed haunted house in a former army terminal—the process usually entails a lot of stamps and approvals behind the scenes, and a very high-stakes visit from FDNY’s Fire Marshall moments before an unveiling. I’m still trauma-bonded with my colleagues who worked to secure all of our temporary permits of assembly; and I’ll never forget taking a call from the Federal Aviation Administration on opening night of Fly By Night to discern if the aerial height of the pigeons’ performance would interfere with the flight paths at LaGuardia; or the many hours spent in the Health Department’s mobile food vending inspection facility in Maspeth, Queens to certify Spencer Finch’s solar-powered ice cream truck. Ultimately through all of these experiences you build relationships and a constellation of people to call when you’re facing your next challenge.

You got your start doing one-night artist installations at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. What’s stayed with you from that experience?

This was such a special time, and in retrospect, had all the makings of what I continue to love about my work now. We were dreaming with artists, bending the rules a bit, and thanks to the bureaucratic navigation of my friend, collaborator and DJ-turned-Episcopalian priest, we were staging site-specific temporary installations inside a Gothic-style cathedral each month, playing music and throwing parties. At the time I remember thinking, “I don’t exactly know what this is, but I know I like it, and need to do more of it.”

Creative Time has been around since 1974. How do you think it’s managed to stay fresh? How do you intend to position it so that it remains relevant in the coming decades?

Letting artists lead is how Creative Time has continued to stay relevant and chart ground-breaking paths forward. By lifting up visionary artists who are speaking to the issues of our time and letting them dream big, you’ll always find yourself ahead of the curve. As we gear up to continue that work for another 50 years, Creative Time will need to stay nimble, responsive, willing to embrace the unexpected and game to take real risks with our artists, partners and the public.

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Last month, the Watermill Center in Water Mill, New York, announced that Charles Chemin would serve as its new artistic director. The announcement follows the death of Watermill’s legendary founder Robert Wilson last summer, and it was difficult to picture what the institution would look like without the legendary director and playwright. Chemin steps into big shoes, but seems particularly well-suited to fill them, as a protégé and longtime collaborator of Wilson’s. Observer caught up with him to hear about his experience with Wilson and plans for his new job.

Your history with Robert Wilson was long and remarkable. Could you explain why the two of you used to bark at each other like dogs? In what other unique ways did the two of you communicate?

I have known Bob Wilson since I was born. In the months before I could speak, he would sometimes call home, ask my parents to talk to me, bark over the phone, and I would answer by barking back. This non-verbal communication could take a while. It was pure playfulness and an escape from rationality. A common practice in Wilson’s world. We often used it in our collaboration, with a similar purpose, during the rehearsal process while co-directing works together, and even on-stage once while performing together. Sometimes, it was simply about making the moment more special or rerouting the attention. Sometimes it had a more precise purpose, like to de-escalate a disagreement, express doubt or encourage a bolder approach. A lot of his communication with his collaborators was non-verbal. His silence was as revealing as words, and not only by the negative. In most cases, it was a constructive silence. One could grasp a lot of meaning in it. We also used the eyes. Bob and I were usually understanding each other’s thoughts by sharing a glance. And then, either one of us would simply say “I get it,” with a mischievous smile.

You grew up in a deeply creative household—your father is an actor and director, your mother a costume designer and your sisters became a painter and an opera soloist. Was there ever a moment you considered doing something outside the arts, or was it inevitable?

I thought about doing other kinds of work, but it was always somehow linked to the arts. I didn’t try very hard to escape. More seriously, I owe my parents a lot. While being modest, they offered us an incredible exposure to groundbreaking artists, whether they were famous or completely unknown. They brought us to museums, theatres and operas. We sometimes traveled to see an exhibition in another country. We had no TV for a good part of our childhood and mostly watched artists’ movies. My father taught me a lot about theater, and I worked hard with him. I was 10 years old when I went to the Watermill Center for the first time. I stayed there for a while, without any family, working with Bob Wilson and other great professionals on a new production. Thinking about it now, I find my parents incredibly free-spirited. They allowed me to live an experience that most parents would have feared.

In 2015, you directed the world premiere of an opera at Cuba’s unfinished National Art Schools, using the actual buildings as scenery. You’ve staged work at Columbia University for the Performa Biennial, Avignon Opera and Théâtre de la Ville. What are the challenges and rewards of programming somewhere unconventional, like Watermill?

I’ve always been interested in the impact of the frame on a work. When I was 21 years old, I was performing in the French national company, Comédie-Française, and at the same time, I was enjoying performing in alternative spaces or working as a lighting technician on tour. As a director, I had the opportunity to work in conventional theatres and play with the incredible possibilities that well-funded institutions bring. But in-situ explorations also shaped me. They allowed me to question the form and theatrical vocabulary in a deeper way. This is what we offer at the Watermill Center: a laboratory where artists can immerse in a stimulating, singular environment and create the works that they would not, or could not, have created in a conventional space. It is also very interesting to bring works that existed in theatres or museums and witness their growth or anamorphosis at Watermill. Often, we welcome the first steps of works that will be created in more conventional places afterward. It’s like building free-standing bridges, so that the forms find their truth, regardless of the context.

You just completed Wilson’s unfinished production Seven Solitudes at the National Kaunas Drama Theatre in Lithuania—a piece you’ve described as being shaped by the experience of standing beside a departing companion. How did you navigate the line between honoring Wilson’s vision and asserting your own direction? When did you know you were making a Charles Chemin decision versus a Robert Wilson decision?

We started Seven Solitudes together with Bob Wilson and a precious team of long-time collaborators. As always, he began with images, references and making drawings, while I was diving into the concepts stemming from the text materials. By the time we started the first short stage of rehearsals, he knew that his days were numbered, and yet he doubled his efforts to initiate this first sketch for the piece, as a gesture projected beyond death, like an artistic testament. I sat next to him, knowing that he would not see the creation of the work, and without the possibility of sharing it with my colleagues. Once he passed away, I reoriented my adaptation of Milosz’s texts and continued the direction, with the aim to render tribute to Wilson’s poetic definition of theatre and reinvention of the relation to space and time, which found an incredible echo within Milosz’s poetic and metaphysical texts.

At some point in the creation process, it became clear that there was only a certain extent to which I could fill the frame that he had left. Because there is only one Robert Wilson, some of the work I’d do would be a sort of imitation of his style, which inevitably would end up being a pale copy. Wilson often surprised us collaborators, the audience and even himself, by confronting and transcending his own iconic style. He has also often liked being surprised by what I could bring to his works.

Therefore, I started to impact his form with more personal and singular aspects, like counterpoints, which brought the work to be a form of dialogue between his work and my particular approach. The decisions in making a hybrid work of that sort were very natural to me. They were activated by my understanding and admiration for what Wilson brought to the world, while being nourished by my reaction to his work and reflection on art in general, my age, our times, the evolution of approaches and renewal of forms.

I feel lucky. To prolong a 42-year-long, almost filial relation and 33 years of work companionship in a form of artistic dialogue beyond death is a chance that very few people get. This piece is Wilson’s ultimate artistic gesture offered to the world, and it is also the artistic gesture that we, as long-time collaborators, offered him.

Could that answer be applicable to questions about the future of Watermill?

This dialogue is totally applicable to Watermill. We will continue to highlight Robert Wilson’s unique vision, but also the openness that Watermill carries. This openness is the motor of a renewal that will ensure that our path to artistic creation remains vibrant. For this, I am inspired by the reinvention that Wilson regularly conducted in his work and practice. The dialogue between diversity and singularity, in all forms, will serve as a compass, as well as the dialogue between next generations and groundbreaking figures. Of course, there is a sadness that comes with such a profound loss. But this is a moment I want us to hold with both tenderness and celebration. We owe that to Bob, to Watermill, to our alumni and to the generations of artists still to come.

Wilson chose you for this role before his passing last August. What were those conversations like? Was there a formal moment where the succession was discussed, or was it more of a gradual understanding between you?

There was a gradual understanding over several years, punctuated by several formal discussions, more and more precise in the last months. For many years, we functioned with complementarity, in the theater like at Watermill. He was a very strong figure and there was no ambiguity about his leadership. But over the last years, he shared more responsibilities and enriched his vision with several collaborators. For example, he was not as imperious in creating his famous lighting design in the last years, but relied much more than in the past on another lighting designer. Similarly, our work relation was rich and complex. I would construct the concepts for the works with him, the dramaturgy of the direction and a lot on the actors’ direction. There was a continuity of a similar nature with the Summer Program when I took charge of its artistic direction.

You co-directed and served as dramaturg on more than 20 Wilson productions, and then directed Wilson himself in Krapp’s Last Tape. What was that like?

Krapp’s Last Tape was a pretty unique experience, symptomatic of something that happened in a few works: playing Wilson younger. In rehearsals, I was on-stage playing his part, so that he could direct me in place of him. In the final stretch, we exchanged, and I had to direct him, from the perspective of playing the role. The younger was then driving the elder. Like in an infinite loop between two generations, that echoed Beckett’s play incredibly well, as we toured this work for nearly 10 years. In each city of the world we went to, in Asia, South America, the United States, all over Europe, I had to play him again, with his make-up, wig, costume, a fake belly, and then exchange again. It was also an extraordinary learning experience to direct him in this work, where he had to learn and execute precise moves, recite text aloud, impersonate a character, even if an abstract one, be consistent and convincing every night. It was a challenge and it took me a few cities to find my path to directing him and obtain something strong from him. It reinforced our trust and connection.

Since 2020, you’ve been artistic director of Watermill’s International Summer Program. This residency brings 20 artists from diverse disciplines together each July and August. What’s the most fun part about that aspect of your job?

Taking charge of the Summer Program was a beautiful evolution of my relationship with Watermill. I deal with fewer logistical tasks now, but I still dive into the artistic part of the Summer Program with a lot of pleasure. With the help of several advisors, and out of many applicants, I selected a group of artists, close to 30 now. They come to Watermill for a month and create works individually and together that we present at our summer festival, alongside more established guest artists. It is like a curation of possibilities. It is so different every year. We imagine the links across artistic fields, age differences, nationalities, cultures, levels of achievement, and lay out possibilities for them to create works together, and they still always surprise us by inventing new forms and collaborations that we didn’t expect. It is the most rewarding feeling: we are only creating possibilities, and these artists find their freedom no matter what. Their works are strikingly original, and the artistic friendships formed at Watermill will last many years for some of them.

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