Related Articles

In Radiant Paintings and Beaded Extravaganzas, Jeffrey Gibson Remixes Native American Histories

Pierre Huyghe Takes on AI and Nonhuman Evolution in Venice

All the Icon artists in this issue, to a greater or lesser degree, have had to wait for the world to be truly ready for their work—in essence, to catch up with them. For Fred Eversley, it took half a century for discrimination against Black artists to fade, to enable him to produce his parabolic sculptures on a large scale. The art world had to evolve to acclaim ceramics, a medium that was often associated more with craft, before Arlene Shechet saw her artworks positioned on a global stage. Joan Snyder practiced patience until ambitious painting by women began to earn appreciation the same way that men’s did before she started to draw the attention she deserves. And Shahzia Sikander’s miniature painting awaited recognition as an avant-garde approach before she could begin to expand her practice.

In the meantime, these artists didn’t wait at all, of course: they made work, got it shown, and, slowly but surely, produced the change they hoped to see. The profiles of these artists all showcase one essential trait for iconic artists: a profound perseverance.

As we celebrate these towering figures, we mourn another: the sculptor Richard Serra, who died in March. Serra’s works were the most aggressive, imposing, and deeply memorable of the Post-Minimalists. In an Appreciation of the artist, Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, a curator at Dia Art Foundation, writes that the scale of Serra’s famous Torqued Ellipses “is more than can be fully comprehended, and their materiality attracts a kind of bodily engagement that is entirely their own.”

Finally, to mark the 150th anniversary of Impressionism, art historian Kelly Presutti offers readers a Syllabus of lively and informative books—including recent volumes that expand the scope of the movement that changed painting forever and launched a thousand blockbusters. Study up, and you might just be ready for the latest one: “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism,” which runs through July 14 at the Musée d’Orsay.

FEATURES

Hide and Seek
Jeffrey Gibson puts Native American culture on poignant display in the Venice Biennale’s US Pavilion.
by Andy Battaglia

Don’t Box Her In
On the eve of a career retrospective, Shahzia Sikander continues to elude categorization.
by Eleanor Heartney

Full Circle
In 1967, Fred Eversley left a job with NASA to become an artist. Now, he’s finally realizing ideas 50 years in the making.
by Emily Watlington

Work Hard Play Hard
Eccentric sculptor Arlene Shechet makes her recalcitrant materials feel fresh and alive.
by Glenn Adamson

Painting the Roses Red
Joan Snyder’s searching canvases cast her as an uncompromising creator both in and out of control.
by Barry Schwabsky

DEPARTMENTS

Datebook
A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Hard Truths
An artist rues downsizing his studio, and another wanders into unwanted political territory. Plus, an interactive quiz.
by Chen & Lampert

Sightlines
Multidisciplinary creator Miranda July tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton

Inquiry
A Q&A with Joyce J. Scott about her pointed and playful provocations.
by Andy Battaglia

Object Lesson
An annotation of Tomashi Jackson’s Here at the Western World (Professor Windham’s Early 1970’s Classroom & the 1972 Second Baptist Church Choir).
by Francesca Aton

Battle Royale
Italy vs. Greece—two summer vacation art destinations face off.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on Impressionism.
by Kelly Presutti

Appreciation
A tribute to Richard Serra, a sculptor without peer.
by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi

New Talent
Singaporean photographer and filmmaker Charmaine Poh confronts trade-offs between visibility and protection.
by Clara Che Wei Peh

Issues & Commentary
AI imagery is inciting widespread paranoia. Can art historians help?
by Sonja Drimmer

Spotlight
Mexican painter María Izquierdo is finally getting the attention she deserves.
by Edward J. Sullivan

Book Review
A reading of Claire Bishop’s Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today.
by Emily Watlington

Cover Artist
Jeffrey Gibson talks about her artwork featured on the front of A.i.A.

REVIEWS

Lagos
Lagos Diary
by Emmanuel Iduma

New York
The 2024 Whitney Biennial
by Emily Watlington

“Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning”
by Jenny Wu

Metz
“Lacan, the exhibition. When art meets psychoanalysis”
by Brian Ng

Venice
“Pierre Huyghe: Liminal”
by Eleanor Heartney

Cape Town
“Esther Mahlangu: Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting”
by Nkgopoleng Moloi

To read of the circumstances under which Dennis made the pieces featured in “Houses and Hotels” is gratifying. These large, complex architectural sculptures  were pieced together in the limited space of her New York studio, sometimes lying on the floor under the artworks. But the challenge wasn’t only logistical. The works are also documentation of something far less timebound: the struggle to balance life—relationships, as well as practicalities like housing and money—with creative work. Like anyone fully engaging in creative activity, Dennis had to decide along the way where she would compromise in her life to make her art. As it should go without saying, it was harder during those years for a woman to do such a thing than it was for a man. Ironically, if it weren’t for one man in particular, she might never have kept her diaries in the first place.

Born and raised in the New York City suburb of Westchester, Dennis attended Carleton College in Minnesota in the early 1960s, then moved to Manhattan, amongst a social circle of fellow Carleton graduates like the late critic Peter Schjeldahl and the late painter Martha Diamond. Dennis, who was also a painter at that time, shared with the two of them an ambition that was apparent from the start. Another of their peers, the poet Anne Waldman, recalled in a New York Times obituary of Diamond earlier this year, “When you feel it with people who have this conviction already, it’s very much in them, and I felt that with Peter at an early age, and with Donna and with Martha.” Others in their social circle were poets, like Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan, the latter of whom Dennis fell into a romantic relationship with. It was that relationship that gave birth to her journals. Arguably, the end of that relationship gave birth to her career.

“I was in kind of a major romantic thing with the poet Ted Berrigan, and Ted kept a journal,” Dennis told writer Nicole Miller in 2019. Dennis, too, started keeping a journal in the late ‘60s. Not surprisingly, it opens with a lot of talk of Berrigan: “While Ted is away I am drawing self-portraits”; “I am beginning to feel anxious about missing Ted.”; “I feel that maybe I’ve lost my mystery for Ted”; “I said to Ted, “It’s spring!”; “In the past week I’ve felt I really have come to understand what Ted was trying to tell me last year.”; “Ted says an artist never lets money come between him and his art.” She wonders who she is supposed to be at any given time: “One side of me wants to be so sensible & sane and respected that way—the other side of me wants to be weird and shocking—but not really that—more than that. One side of me wants to be a witch—a mystic, to be burned at the stake, to see the horrors of the universe, the vastness—to be a vehicle for that power—a vessel through which that power flows & makes itself manifest.” But then it’s back to Ted: “I am beginning to feel anxious about missing Ted.”

It’s only after the breakup with Berrigan that Dennis seems to come into herself. She reads The Feminine Mystique (“It’s changing my life at a time when I am open to change in a major way.”) She meets feminist critic Lucy Lippard. She joins a feminist consciousness-raising group, goes to marches. She has an affair with a woman artist (“Bisexuality appeals to me as an idea. Loving a woman seems a way to throw off the hurt and futility and bad habits of loving a man.”) She refreshes her wardrobe (“Bought dungarees today. Change in lifestyle.”) She enters the ‘70s with guns blazing (“finished The First Third by Neal Cassady. Sweet guy like Kerouac. Find myself envying them for their pleasure at their time (the ‘50s). Hope I’m getting as much from my time (the ‘60s) but no, I’m absolutely certain that this whole decade— the ‘70s—is mine—more than the ‘60s ever were.“) She finds her voice, her style: she starts making sculpture inspired by buildings she sees in the city, as well as in photographs by Walker Evans and George Tice, and in paintings by Edward Hopper.

The ‘70s were of course the heyday of second wave feminism in New York and artists were at the vanguard. The decade opened with Linda Nochlin’s famous article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists” in ARTnews; a group of downtown women artists, alongside critic Lucy Lippard, started a consciousness-raising group and the quarterly journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. It is all too easy to rely on sweeping accounts of how feminism changed things for women artists; it is much more affecting to read of the particulars. Dennis’s diary captures her real-time revelations both personal (“I like myself more and more because I accept myself as a woman more and more.”) and art-historical, the latter recorded in all-caps: “NOW I REALIZE HOW I’VE FELT CONTEMPT AT BOYS FOR SHUTTING ME OUT. FOR YEARS I’VE BEEN HAMMERING ON THE DOOR TO THE ROOM THE MEN LIVED IN (WITH MATISSE, PICASSO, KANDINSKY, CHOPIN). I’VE BEEN MANEUVERING MIRRORS TO ATTRACT THEIR ATTENTION WITH FLASHES OF THEIR OWN (SUN) LIGHT REFLECTED. “

She also sees the movement’s contradictions in action: “Everyone, it turned out, felt grotesquely fat and had treated their bodies horribly at times. No one is really fat. It seemed quite a devastating revelation that everyone was such a slave to a false conception of themselves, and yet—what ensued? A great ‘girl’ talk session on diets, hairdos, exercise, in fact a further acceptance of the horrors turned up.” And she notes the movement’s limitations. At one point, she faults her feminist consciousness-raising group for not being political enough. It’s “tainted by psychotherapy,” she writes. “I do not want to have to defend myself as a fucked-up person. I want to be able to give my testimony as an exploited female.”

Elsewhere in the diaries, however, she grapples with the demands that politics seem to put on her to choose sides: she takes her slides in for consideration for the Whitney Biennial, then learns that a group protesting the lack of women and people of color in the art world planned to pressure artists who participated in it. “Shit! The issue is having women’s work seen,” she writes. “So, what’s the point of intimidating women, anywhere, anytime, anyhow, who get a chance to show. I feel quite disturbed that a group for artists’ rights would take such a stand. Unless they were to organize an alternative show. I feel that this is going to be a year when women show their incredible power as artists. Power of demonstrations paltry compared with the power of the work. Once it is seen no one will ever be able to discuss women artists (or black artists) again in the same way.”

Dennis wasn’t making art whose subject matter was overtly feminist; she was innovating architectural sculpture alongside the likes of Alice Aycock. Nevertheless, the influence of feminism becomes apparent in the way she thinks of her work, leavened by her unique sense of humor: “The door is also a kind of vagina and I’ve always thought of my works as kind of mantraps,” she writes. “So it’s a woman’s joke on men. The works are my size (height). The scale of my works once they started coming into the room (marked by the birth of the box) has always been measured and determined by human scale. The painted world behind the box was 10′ × 7′, designed to engulf the viewer (who I REALIZE I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT OF AS MALE). I wanted to overwhelm him. So I see now I’ve developed a sense of confidence and humor on the subject of male/female relationships.”

If being an artist in downtown New York during those years sounds romantic, the diaries reflect that. In one memorable entry, Dennis finds ways around the police not letting her take photos of a structure at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel that she is using as inspiration for a sculpture. In another, she cries at the sight of Matisse’s sketches for the windows at Venice cathedral.

But the entries are also filled with banalities. Dennis takes care of her cats, cleans and “de-roaches” her apartment; she moves her bed so she can hear the street sounds at night. She wonders how she will pay December’s rent. She takes menial jobs that pay $2.00 an hour. She starts and leaves a department store job, all in one day, in an account that serves as a time capsule of ‘70s Manhattan:

“[H]ad a great night. Did a really good, new drawing. Slept a couple of hours. Got up, went to Bloomingdale’s totally shot. It was horrible. Thirty of us in a tiny claustrophobic classroom that reminded me of the worst first days in high school. The teacher referred to women as “girls.” Then she started asking people to get up in front of everyone and gave them problems to work out on the computer-register. The first person shook so much she could hardly touch the keys. My mind went numb (it already was pretty much so) and I just waited for lunch. By then I was in a daze. Went to Bonwit’s in the rain (my umbrella wouldn’t open right), called my answering service—the two freelance jobs I’d been hoping for hadn’t materialized. Cashed a bad check for $10. I’d spent my last money the day before. Ate lunch at MoMA. (I hardly could.) Walked around trying to figure out what to do.”

Throughout the journals the reader accompanies Dennis on visits—sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend or lover—to the apartment studio of her friend, the Russian-born Social Realist painter Raphael Soyer, who, in his 70s, serves as a kind of mentor figure. Dennis admires his work ethic (“Raphael pointed out that he is in his studio every day by 9:30 and leaves at 5:30. Even New Year’s Day and Jewish holidays, he said! So there’s my inspiration. “) They discuss the status of the artist. “At Raphael’s today we talked about the place of the artist in our society,” she writes, “We agreed that the artist has a very small, inconsequential place in society today. Most people get along without it. I mentioned commercial art, films, TV. Warhol is really the least romantic of us all. The artist today must be a star rather than a workman. Warhol and his ordinary ‘stars.’ Raphael says he can respect his cynicism.”

At the same time, the Soyer sessions prompt revelations about how women’s art might be important to all women: “After some silent musing, I told Raphael that I felt that art could mean a lot to people just beginning to discover themselves. Really, I was thinking of women. Nearly every woman who is becoming aware is watching, waiting, listening to see who we are. What we are like. And so, for a woman, women’s art (unless it tries to be men’s art) is of everyday importance.”

As much as he’s a wise elder and a sounding board, Soyer also provides a kind of mirror for Dennis as she evolves. In 1981, she writes of a visit to him, ““You’re a very strong woman,” he said. He said I seemed “very lost” at one time. Not quite but certainly I was troubled and have come a long way.”

The struggle of the starving artist is present in these diaries; throughout the book, writing bad checks is almost a running gag. But so is impostor syndrome, a condition that came out of a scientific study in 1978 and was first named in an article called “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention.” “Just wrote a bad check and got another pass for MoMA. I showed a Xerox of a review to prove I was an artist. And suddenly I got the tightness in the pit of my stomach and the shaky hands were upon me again. Jesus. I hate it. Must have something to do with my sense of myself. Do I feel like an imposter? That I don’t deserve to be me? That I’ll be found out to be not what I seem. So hard to throw off all the fears and inadequacies.” Like a lot of women in the ‘70s, she goes into therapy. She reads Gail Sheehy’s 1976 bestseller Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life and reassesses her relationship with her parents.

Things happen that bolster her confidence: she gets grants, gallery shows, representation with a prestigious dealer (Holly Solomon). Gradually the talk about men is replaced with talk about her own work that is no longer vaguely about inspiration but that is very specific: about scale, logistics, materials, revisions, her struggle to make a two-story structure, (“I should go to Coney Island on the elevated tomorrow and just revel at the second-story views.”) She spends years in courts trying to protect tenants’ rights—including to remain in her own downtown loft. (She finally sold it a couple years ago; she now lives and works near Hudson, New York.)

But some of the most poignant moments in the book are when Dennis attempts to balance romantic relationships with artmaking. After Berrigan, she has a six-year relationship with a male artist that leads to talk of having a baby, but eventually breaks up. Its fault lines track with changes taking place in society at the time. “He said he wanted to marry me,” she writes, “& I, sort of incredulous, laughed, said no, I didn’t believe in it.” Among Dennis’s set in New York, roles are shifting. “Funny, seems that the men … can declare their feelings these days more easily than the strong women who have bought their independence at tremendous personal expense.” She marvels—who hasn’t?—at how similar the state of total absorption in one’s work is to limerence. “[H]ere I am again without a man, getting more involved with my work. Is it because the particular state of mind I put into my work is interchangeable w/ the one I slide into when I think: I love you, I love you, I love you and get all soft and warm inside? Is it really possible that I can’t be happily in love and happily at work at the same time?”

In a happy coincidence, Dennis’s diaries are being published the same week the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale opens. The Biennale is known as the art world’s Olympics—a make or break moment for an artist’s career. The diaries conclude with Dennis’s inclusion in the Biennale of 1982. “VENICE BIENNALE,” she writes in all caps. “Judy Pfaff is going too. Neither of us can quite believe it. Fickleness of the art world and all. Yet I’ve felt ready for this for years.”

At O’Flaherty’s, I asked Dennis what it was like to re-read her diaries in preparation for publishing them. “It’s almost like it’s another person,” she said. “I’m very proud of her though. I was brave and determined. I went through huge financial hardships. The writing helped me figure out what I was doing.”

“Donna Dennis: Houses and Hotels” runs at O’Flahertys until April 28.

The five pieces set to go on view are Repetition Nineteen I (1967), a series of 18 bucket-like forms, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Area (1968), a group of rubberized forms Hesse made for critic Lucy R. Lippard’s landmark traveling exhibition “Soft and Apparently Soft Sculpture,” that is on loan from the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus; Aught (1968), a four-part piece on loan from from the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives in California; Augment (1968), a related four-part piece on loan from Glenstone Museum in Maryland; and the monumental 13-panel Expanded Expansion (1969), which stands 10 feet tall and 30 feet across, on loan from the Guggenheim Museum in New York. None of the pieces is for sale.

The show, which is organized by Hesse estate adviser Barry Rosen, with art historian Briony Fer, opens May 2 at the gallery’s 22nd Street location in New York, comes complete with a publication (Eva Hesse: Exhibitions, 1972–2022) and a Hesse symposium, and features speakers including art historian Élisabeth Lebovici, and Hesse’s sister Helen Hesse Charash, with whom Hesse fled Nazi Germany when they were children.

The show will stop first at California’s Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in October, then the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, in September 2025. While those venues were originally slated for the exhibition, the American Federation of Arts, which travels exhibitions to institutions throughout the United States, has taken on the show and is now set to put it on an extended tour.

The exhibition was born as a book. Collector Komal Shah, who has been on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list with her husband Gaurav Garg since 2018, had steadily been collecting work by postwar and contemporary women artists like Joan Mitchell, Suzanne Jackson, Joan Semmel, and Kay WalkingStick when she decided to make a book from the collection in order to bring more visibility to the artists.

The book, Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection, was published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. last year, and includes essays by curators like Mark Godfrey and Katy Siegel. Shah then organized an exhibition, curated by High Line Park curator Cecilia Alemani, who was the curator of the 2022 Venice Biennale, an edition notable for its high percentage of artworks by women. The show that resulted from the book runs in New York through March 23.

AFA director Pauline Forlenza met Shah in San Francisco in 2019, when AFA was touring “Black Refractions,” an exhibition of artworks from the Studio Museum in Harlem collection. Shah had just started work on the book. When Shah opening the pop-up exhibition in New York, Forlenza went to see it.

“I was extraordinarily impressed,” Forlenza said in an interview. “Throughout its history AFA has done work in terms of telling artists’ stories, and elevating the work of underrepresented artists. There are so many stories in ‘Making Their Mark.’ We had traveled the exhibition ‘Women Artists in Paris 1850-1900.’ It was difficult at that point to be a woman artist. Fast forward to today, and women are still seeing difficulties.[Komal and I] began talking about the possibility of the exhibition, or a subset of it, going to regional museums across the country.”

Shah was keen to collaborate. AFA’s exhibition committee approved the show, and things moved forward.

The checklist and participating institutions for the traveling version of the exhibition are still being drawn up. Alemani will remain the show’s curator, but will collaborate with curators at the individual institutions, as she is doing with Margot Norton at the Berkeley Art Museum and Sabine Eckmann at the Kemper.

“I am thrilled about our partnership with the American Federation of Arts, as it will  amplify our mission to celebrate excellence by women artists and rechart art history to be inclusive of these singular talents and practices across the nation,” said Shah. Citing the more than 500 K-12 students and 125 teachers who have visited the show in Mew York, she added, “Personally, I also look forward to learning from and working with the museums to inspire students and make a long-lasting impact on local communities.”

“For decades, the editors at Artforum have ensured that this historic magazine has remained a trusted and indispensable resource for conversations about contemporary art and its role in the broader culture,” Ryan said in a statement. “I look forward to extending their legacy by working closely with and supporting the artists, critics, and other members of the arts community who are expanding and deepening that conversation.” 

Ryan, 40, earned her BA in art history from Harvard University and PhD from Columbia University. She joined the Buffalo AKG Art Museum’s curatorial team in 2017 after serving as a curatorial research assistant at in the modern and contemporary department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 2021, working with scholar Paul Vanouse, she curated “Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art,” a show that included Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Stephanie Dinkins, Sondra Perry, and other rising artists working in digital mediums. The following year, as the museum was gearing up to open an expansion, she created “Peer to Peer,” an online exhibition done in collaboration with the digital art platform Feral File. The project had an unusual format: the artworks included were sold to raise funds for both the museum and Feral File.

“Peer to Peer” was widely praised, with Charlotte Kent writing of it in the Brooklyn Rail, “we need shows like Peer to Peer where the curator engages meaningfully with the values that crypto art has tried to espouse, like equitable market participation, as well as those exhaustively expressed by art historians, like a rigorous tie between design and concept.”

Ryan began writing art criticism during her graduate studies, and continued to do so regularly as she became a curator. In an interview with Cornelia magazine in 2019, Ryan noted, “I was a critic before I was a curator … I thought that writing criticism would be a fun way for me to work on a much shorter time frame [than academic writing], and also a way to get some of what I was working on out into the world.”

She has been a contributor to Artforum since 2013, and, in the interview with Cornelia, specifically noted her work for the magazine: “Writing for Artforum is, in many ways, very different from writing for a general public as a curator, but it’s closer than academic writing.” Among the pieces she has written for Artforum is a 2023 essay about NFTs, which she defended as being artistic gestures worthy of study, contrary to the opinion of most critics at the time.

On X/Twitter, Ryan has gained an audience for her posts about the artistic merit of NFTs and for stumping for digital art and blockchain more broadly. In 2022 Artnet News put her on its “Innovators” list, citing her as someone who is “broadening curatorial practice to accommodate digital art, initiating the kinds of robust, nuanced conversations long afforded to more traditional media.”

She has said of her writing and curating, “I want to make things accessible without dumbing them down.”

Of her pivot from the museum world to a magazine, Ryan told Vogue magazine, which broke the news of her appointment at Artforum, “I think at this particular moment … it feels incredibly urgent to carry forward the torch of deeply researched, carefully crafted, passionate argumentation. And that is precisely the kind of writing that Artforum has always excelled at supporting and finding audiences for … [W]hat we really need are models of what it looks like to think critically, and experience deeply. And I think encountering art objects actually can be a way of training oneself to lead an examined life, to become open to and empathetic toward other perspectives.” She told Vogue that one of her goals at Artforum is to expand the magazine’s digital offerings.

Artforum publishers Danielle McConnell and Kate Koza said in a statement that Ryan is “uniquely positioned to uphold the magazine’s reputation for publishing the highest quality long-form criticism, while also contributing to a dynamic vision of audience expansion via continued digital growth and live events.”

Ryan takes the helm following David Velasco, who was fired as editor-in-chief this past October after Artforum published a version of a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza that was signed by thousands of artists. McConnell and Koza said that the publication of the letter “was shared on Artforum’s website and social platforms without our, or the requisite senior members of the editorial team’s, prior knowledge,” and that doing so “was not consistent with Artforum’s editorial process.” Velasco claimed the publication had “bent to outside pressure.”

A press release from Artforum about Ryan’s hire emphasized the magazine’s commitment to editorial independence alongside “a set of established standards and protocols that center a rigorous editorial process, contextualization, and clear authorship, ensuring that the magazine’s fundamental integrity and editorial tenets are upheld.” In their statement about Ryan’s hire, McConnell and Koza added, “the ideas that inform artistic practice are the focal point of our work, and the magazine has long been, and will continue to be, a place in which activism and advocacy by artists and writers are proudly elevated. We want to underscore that Artforum will remain an environment of dialogue and examination of the issues that face our world through the lens of art.”

Ryans, in her interview with Vogue, promised to continue the tradition of “activism and advocacy” at the magazine, saying, “given the multiple ongoing crises that we’re facing, and that are impacting many people in the arts, I think Artforum really needs to continue to be a platform for that kind of work as part of its overall project of highlighting the conversations that are really defining contemporary art.”

As part of his new representation, the Johannesburg-based artist will continue to show with Goodman Gallery in South Africa and the UK, and with Galleria Lia Rumma in Naples, Italy, but he will no longer show with Marian Goodman Gallery, his dealer for over two decades.

Kentridge is known for a prolific and wide-ranging practice anchored in prints, drawings, and animated films that often reference the history of South Africa. The move to Hauser & Wirth is not wholly unexpected; in December 2022, Kentridge mounted an exhibition with the gallery for which two large-scale sculptures were installed in the gardens of the Gstaad Palace, in Gstaad, Switzerland.

“Marian Goodman has been steadfast in supporting my work for the 25 years I have been with her gallery,” Kentridge told ARTnews in an email. “She and her team have been vital to my practice and have forged connections between me and a range of institutions, curators and collectors. I cannot thank the gallery enough for their support. After much careful consideration I am excited to begin the next chapter, working with my existing galleries Goodman Gallery and Galleria Lia Rumma in collaboration with Hauser & Wirth. I very much look forward to working with [Hauser & Wirth co-presidents Iwan [Wirth], Manuela [Wirth], Marc [Payot] and the team.”

Kentridge’s practice extends far beyond object-making. Over the past decade, he has expanded his studio in Johannesburg into a space for workshops and mentorships, becoming one of the largest local cultural employers.

While he has created theatrical performances beginning in the 1990s and has worked on operas since the early 2000s, he has recently ramped up his work on large projects. Recent theatrical productions that have appeared in theaters and festivals around the world include Waiting for the Sibyl (2019), The Head & the Load (2018), and Ursonate (2017). In 2022, his film, Oh To Believe in Another World, made to accompany a performance of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, premiered at the KKL Luzern Concert hHall and has since been performed in multiple venues worldwide.  

Emily Jane Kirwan, a partner at Marian Goodman gallery, attributes Kentridge’s change of representation to this shift. “I would say it is a transitional time for William,” she told ARTnews in a phone interview. “We have supported all his critical initiatives, including recent exhibitions at the Broad, the Royal Academy, and a major exhibition upcoming at an East Coast institution. His practice has become focused on extremely large theatrical performances, stage productions, and, more recently, films that have appeared in film festivals and have different distributions.”

Marian Goodman Gallery is itself currently in a transitional period. In 2021, Goodman, who is in her mid-90s and was at that time stepping away from day-to-day operations, revealed a succession plan for her gallery that involved appointing four partners. Kentridge told ARTnews last fall that over the period he was represented by the gallery, “my conversations were almost entirely with Marian.”

During his years with Marian Goodman, Kentridge has formed a reputation as a museum artist rather than a market artist. His current auction record stands at $1.5 million for a bronze piece sold at Sotheby’s in 2013, modest for such an accomplished talent of his generation, but since the ’90s he has had solo exhibitions at just about every important art museum in the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Louvre.

Established in the early 1990s in Switzerland by Iwan and Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser, Hauser & Wirth has expanded substantially over the past 15 years and currently operates spaces in New York, London, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Somerset, and the island of Menorca. The gallery has added numerous artists to its program over the past decade, including superstars like Cindy Sherman, Pat Steir, and Firelei Báez; its roster now numbers 103 artists and estates.

In a statement, Iwan Wirth, who also serves as the gallery’s co-president, said, “It is a true honor that William Kentridge has decided to join our gallery. William’s virtuosity as an artist, thinker, polymath and mentor of others sets him apart as a creative luminary of our time. Through the diversity, courage and sheer power of his work, he interweaves themes that are both universal and personal to lead us through the mazes of politics, mythology, literature and art history. In this way, William has created something simultaneously epic and ephemeral with his art, always finding new approaches to expressing the most challenging ideas.”

Wirth’s statement continued, “We are also profoundly inspired by the spirit of collaboration so deeply embedded within his process: in founding the Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, he has created a wonderful home for collective experimentation and cross-disciplinary practice and set an example for communality. We look forward to working in close collaboration with Goodman Gallery—a ‘home’ gallery to William for 30 years— and Galleria Lia Rumma and to furthering the mission to expand global awareness of, engagement in and appreciation for Kentridge’s art and values.”

There are echoes of Semmel’s story in that of another figure of her generation, Chicago artist Alice Shaddle. As Jeremy Lybarger writes in this issue’s “Spotlight” column, Shaddle struggled, living in the shadow of her art impresario husband—a contemporary critic who characterized her as “one of those riley, resentful ladies”—but was similarly determined, and in 1973 cofounded the feminist art co-op Artemisia Gallery.

Women artists of the past and present are benefiting from rehangs of museums’ permanent collections, a topic that Alex Greenberger explores elsewhere in this issue, with the Museum of Modern Art’s 2019 rehang providing a template. More institutions rotating artworks more frequently—and being more inclusive in the process—is exposing audiences to a more generous art history, one that no longer ignores the contributions of women and artists of color.

Rewritten histories influence art made by younger artists and the kinds of work that is curated into major exhibitions. This spring is a good time for a litmus test: the Whitney Biennial opens in March and the Venice Biennale in April. (Our “Battle Royale” feature pits the two iconic events against each other—and provides a cheeky guide to both.) One of the Whitney Biennial artists, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, is featured in a profile by Maximilíano Durón in this issue’s “New Talent” section, where he describes a work he is making for the Biennial with amber secreted by trees, a material he sees as a healing agent. In a remark that could just as well describe the limited canon the new art history is trying to expand, Aparicio tells Durón: “That’s how memory works, how time works: you forget about it, archives are erased or destroyed.”

FEATURES

Recycled Art
As the planet fills with trash, artists reconsider the ethics of making work from scratch.
by Emily Watlington & Andy Battaglia

Sheida Soleimani     
The Iranian American artist talks about how simple gestures inform perceptions. A special pull-out print accompanies the article.
by Tessa Solomon

Painting Pleasure
In her prismatic portraits, Joan Semmel builds feminist worlds.
by Emily Watlington

Perpetual Motion
No longer static monuments to an outdated art history, museums’ permanent collection displays are more dynamic than ever.
by Alex Greenberger

Witnessing Grief
Käthe Kollwitz’s melancholy works, the subject of a MoMA retrospective, capture the sorrow of daily life in wartime.
by Faye Hirsch

Nature Is Mind Made Visible
German exhibitions celebrate Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th birthday and his iconic visions of people confronting nature.
by Kelly Presutti

DEPARTMENTS

Datebook
A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Hard Truths
A gallerist pines for press, and an aspiring curator ponders a “curatorial intensive.”
by Chen & Lampert

Sightlines
Curator Kathleen Ash-Milby tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton

Inquiry
A Q&A with Kay WalkingStick about her layered landscape paintings.
by Alex Greenberger

Object Lesson
An annotation of Hayv Kahraman’s Loves Me, Loves Me Not.
by Francesca Aton

Battle Royale
Whitney Biennial vs. Venice Biennale—two banging biennials face off.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on Indigenous art.
by Christopher Green

Appreciation
A tribute to Pope.L, a trickster-artist who offered lessons as to what was and was not real.
by Christopher Y. Lew

New Talent
Sculptor Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio captures the materiality of disappearance and resistance.
by Maximilíano Durón

Issues & Commentary
Why is Thomas Heatherwick the architect most beloved by billionaires?
by Andrew Russeth

Spotlight
Chicago artist Alice Shaddle was hard to classify—and all the better for it.
by Jeremy Lybarger

Book Review
A reading of Legacy Russell’s Black Meme: The History of the Images that Make Us.
by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

Cover Artist
Joan Semmel talks about her artwork featured on the front of A.i.A.

REVIEWS

Shanghai
Shanghai Diary
by Emily Watlington

Montreal
“Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia”
by Barry Schwabsky

Miami
“Charles Gaines: 1992–2023”
by Maximilíano Durón

Los Angeles
“Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom”
by Liz Hirsch

Munich
“Meredith Monk. Calling”
by Emily McDermott

Sarasota
“Juana Valdés: Embodied Memories, Ancestral Histories”
by Glenn Adamson

Minneapolis
“Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s”
by Alex Greenberger

With 2023 now in the rearview mirror, it’s time to look ahead to what should be a busy and tumultuous year for the art world. The Venice Biennale returns this spring, along with a full slate of art fairs as the two giants of the space—the Endeavor-owned Frieze and MCH Group–owned Art Basel—square off in an increasingly packed calendar. Meanwhile, all eyes will be on the auction houses, after Christie’s and Sotheby’s saw their reported sales totals take a dip greater than 10 percent in 2023, and Phillips finds itself in a possibly difficult financial position.

To kick off 2024, we asked more than a dozen art world figures, from dealers to art advisers and beyond, for their predictions for the new year. Here’s what they had to say:

Allan Schwartzman, art adviser: In 2024 the urgency to own will not feel as urgent for collectors as it very recently did. One should expect much more volatility in the market for emerging artists than we’ve seen for decades: greatness is not produced at the rate that the recent appetite for it would seem to dictate. My wish for this year is that new businesses are created to develop a sustainable secondary market to accommodate the coming resale overflow for contemporary art and to break our overdependence on current institutions, which produce under-reported and skewed statistics for art sales.

Alex Glauber, art adviser and president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors: After 2023 finally saw the art market correction many had expected for years, there is cause for greater optimism in 2024 as the Federal Reserve has indicated it will cut rates at least once next year, and likely more. The psychological and practical implications of this will drive greater demand among collectors and in turn, discretionary selling as people feel more optimistic about the market. 

However, the broader health and sustainability of the art market, specifically the primary market for contemporary art, remains less clear. So much of the primary market has become beholden to art fairs as a venue to meet new buyers and urge them to transact. As much as we like to think that every artwork is bought by a “collector,” art fairs wouldn’t continue to be such an important part of the market if that were the case. It’s the casual buyers and shoppers, often unreliable as long-term clients, that absorb the majority of new material and keep things going. 

If operating and logistic costs don’t come down that will put a lot of pressure on galleries already operating on tight margins. The added variables of geopolitical unrest, the forthcoming presidential election, and broader cultural divisiveness mean that there is likely to be further consolidation among smaller and midsize galleries. 

Benjamin Godsill, curator and art adviser: Only a fool would publicly make predictions, where’s the upside? Well, I never said I was wise: reading the tea leaves gives some positive and some negative indications of what might transpire in the business of art over the next year.

First the bad: exposure to the rocky markets (art and otherwise) over the past couple of years have made art buyers much more aware that connoisseurship and selectivity are important. They have realized that in an unstable market, works of scarcity and quality hold their value much better than other works. This is great for smart collectors (or those smart enough to hire true art adviser/curators) but it’s not so great for galleries, especially small and medium-size shops. The sad reality is that I think we will see the loss of more great galleries than we would like, and we may even be surprised by a couple of well-regarded shops that may be forced to close.

On the positive side, I think the market will continue to “discover” (in a financial sense) artists from historically marginalized/underrepresented groups and give them new exhibition platforms as well as market momentum. I think we are going to hear a lot more about the living legend Howardena Pindell as well as other senior female artists of color. I am also keen to start seeing a lot of artists from Indigenous North American backgrounds being given their due. In particular, I am excited to have a lot more people learn about the work of painter Julie Buffalohead, as well as the sculptor and weaver Jeremy Frey.

Charles Stewart, CEO of Sotheby’s: In 2024 we will see continued price separation between “the best” and “the rest” when it comes to quality of the works, as collectors exercise discerning judgment. We will also see demand for a greater range of artists who have historically been underrepresented at auction, such as Indigenous American and Chicano artists. Finally, women artists will continue to rise at the top end of the market. Sales of female contemporary artists at over $1 million has more than doubled since 2018, led by Joan Mitchell and Yayoi Kusama, but there is much more room to go.

Marc Glimcher, president and CEO of Pace Gallery, which is set to open Pace Tokyo this spring: 2024 will see the continued resurgence of Japan as a global art world hotspot. Artists, collectors, and dealers will once again make Tokyo a “must go” destination. 

Philip Hoffman, art adviser: I am optimistic about 2024. The Miami art fairs and the November auctions in New York demonstrated that the art market is far more resilient than people had anticipated, particularly when the works on offer are of high quality. In 2024 we will see a continued weeding out in the ultracontemporary category, alongside a deepening of the market in established positions.

Anthony Meier, art dealer and president of the Art Dealers Association of America: The adjustment of the 2023 appetite took a while to be a new norm. Now, with this recalibration, 2024 can only be more nourishing and active.

Ana Sokoloff, art adviser: I think we are entering a slower market; however, true quality will always have a following among collectors and will sustain value over time.

Lawrence Van Hagen, art adviser and curator: As we enter 2024 against the backdrop of global inflationary concerns and geopolitical unrest, I think we’ll continue to see an ongoing correction in the global art market. This means a general shift away from the experimentalism of yesteryear toward selectivity and regionalism: Galleries may consider doing fewer fairs and may present more curated solo booths when they do take part; a reduction in international travel to art fairs especially as costs rise and sustainability issues loom on the horizon (major fairs have become very regionally focused in any case); collectors are also likely to focus on art fairs and artists in their region.

Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, collector: The art market showed remarkable resilience in 2023, even amid financial uncertainties and geopolitical challenges. I believe—and hope—that many of the dynamics of recent years will continue, with a particular focus on women artists and artists from marginalized communities.

Mary Sabbatino, vice president and partner at Galerie Lelong & Co: With wars, a huge increase in unhoused people and the criminalization of immigration in the United States, reproductive rights sharply curtailed, and an election that threatens to return an autocratic and criminal leader to power, it is hard to look forward to 2024 with anything but dread. However, collaborating with artists brings insight and hope that keeps me optimistic as an art dealer. I am hopeful that 2024 will bring more equity for women artists, artists of color, and Native artists. I’d like to see the number of sales of women artists—11 percent of institutional acquisitions as quoted in the 2022 Burns Halperin report—move sharply upward. Two trends will continue, in parallel: the market will continue to reward the iconic and rare, following the trends we saw at the auctions in November, and there will continue to be interest for new discoveries, artists of color, and Indigenous artists. I predict that the increase in important exhibitions of Indigenous artists seen this year—“Indian Theater” at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art, “The Land Carries Our Ancestors” at the National Gallery of Art, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at the Whitney Museum—will increase acquisitions in private and public collections.

Phyllis Kao, vice-president of client strategies, and auctioneer at Sotheby’s: I believe globalization, through technology and increased access, and the subsequent globalization of culture and status signifiers, will continue to mold how our clients build collections and acquire treasures. We’ve said it for a few years now, and I think the phenomena will continue to gain traction in 2024: cross-category collecting, and global collectors’ redefining and eschewing collecting rules will continue, and at a higher pitch. (I can’t tell you how many times I was surprised this year by who was bidding on what, in terms of cross-pollination!) This particular evolution of how collectors consider acquisitions, and how they appreciate objects and art, will continue. 

Leo Xu, senior director for David Zwirner in Hong Kong: Following 2023, I believe there will be even greater international visibility for artists from Asia. Asian creativity across mediums from art to music and cinema will continue its momentum in having a major influence on global culture. Secondly, I believe there will be an important repositioning of the Chinese market on the global art market as well. It will continue to be a dominant region, but I think there will be a more sensitive understanding of its nuances and trends in the next year.

Magnus Renfrew, co-founder of ART SG, Taipei Dangdai, and Tokyo Gendai: Asia will continue to assert its position within the global art world. The framing of “international” being synonymous with “European and American” will continue to be revisited as the art market follows the institutional lead in increasingly recognizing the importance of the cultural output of artists beyond the Euro-American bubble. In addition, Asia will be recognized as a key and expanding buying audience for global contemporary art.

Raymond J. McGuire, collector: During 2024, and in a world filled with challenging uncertainties, artists and their gifts of genius and heightened sensitivity will continue to provide us with hope and promise. They will inspire us to reflect upon, strive for, and perhaps even attain our best selves. With their courage and vision, curators will persist in enlightening and guiding us. They will uphold their all-important mission of acknowledging and exhibiting artists who have historically been excluded, but who are now central to the canon and taking their rightful place on the art landscape.

Late last month, I found myself on the outskirts of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in the town of Diriyah, standing in front of the recently opened Museum of Contemporary Art (SAMOCA) and looking out at a vista that, as one local arts professional observed, captures what the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is all about. Before me, I could see the tranquil Wadi Hanifah valley where the locals of Diriyah gather for leisure activities, all the way to the distant towers of the $10 billion King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) development in central Riyadh. SAMOCA is situated in Diriyah’s JAX District, a creative hub of warehouses that now hold art and film studios but, until recently, was home to car repair shops. Diriyah itself, considered the historic birthplace of the kingdom, is a $63 billion development that will feature multiple museums and hotels. It all makes for a dizzying layer cake of past, present, and future.

I was in Riyadh for the opening of the third annual edition of the two-week-long Noor Riyadh, a citywide festival of artworks involving light by both Saudi and international artists. The festival couldn’t help but illuminate the array of projects currently underway as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s sweeping Vision 2030 initiative to reduce the country’s reliance on oil and diversify the economy.
 
Weeks before my arrival, news broke that Riyadh would likely host the 2034 World Cup. On the day I arrived, it was announced that the city would host the World Expo 2030. In Paris, Laurent Le Bon, president of the Centre Pompidou, and Amr Almadani, CEO of the Royal Commission for AlUla, signed a formal agreement to collaborate on a new contemporary art space to open in AlUla in 2027. Early this coming February, the third edition of Desert X AlUla opens, as will, a few weeks later, the second edition of the Diriyah Biennale, KSA’s first art biennale, in Riyadh. Then, in two to three years, Wadi AlFann (“Valley of the Arts”), a 40-square-mile site featuring monumental site-specific permanent land artworks, will open at AlUla. At his studio in the JAX District, Saudi artist Ahmed Mater showed me renderings for his project for Wadi AlFann, an enormous structure that produces a mirage.
 
It can be difficult to remember what entity oversees which project in KSA. SAMOCA, an 18,000-square-foot kunsthalle, is a project of the Museums Commission, which is run by the Ministry of Culture. So is the still-in-development museum for modern and contemporary art that, with its permanent collection, will dwarf SAMOCA. The Diriyah Biennale Foundation, also under the Ministry of Culture, is partnering with real estate developer ROSHN, a company set up by the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund to increase home ownership across Saudi Arabia to 70 percent by 2030. Noor Riyadh, meanwhile, falls under the public initiative Riyadh Art, which is overseen by the Royal Commission for Riyadh City, whose board chairman is bin Salman. It takes an org chart just to keep track it all.
 
And there is more: directly across the street from the JAX District, during Noor Riyadh, the ATHR Foundation opened the eighth and largest edition of its Young Saudi Artists Exhibition, showing 25 emerging talents drawn from an open call. The ATHR Foundation was set up last year by the founders of the Jeddah-based ATHR gallery, one of KSA’s most prominent commercial spaces, with a mission to help artists navigate the art system, as well as to advise local private and public entities on their cultural endeavors. The exhibition took place in a residential building called ETHR, which is part of the ATHR mission to help arts professionals (both homegrown and international) seeking access to the JAX resources.
 
The majority of the pieces in Noor Riyadh were brand-new, and several were spectacular, but, for me, the one that stole the show was older: Fühlometer (Feel-o-meter), a 2008 piece made by German artist Julius von Bismarck in collaboration with experimental designer Benjamin Maus and filmmaker Richard Wilhelmer. On the roof of a building in the KAFD, von Bismarck had installed a 26-foot-high smiley face illuminated with fluorescent tubes. Visible from miles away—and a nice diversion while stuck in traffic on one of the many highways that loop around the city—the face changes its expression using software that analyzes peoples’ expressions gathered from surveillance cameras set up around the area. The face smiles when the city smiles, frowns when the city frowns, and displays every emoji-able expression in between. The artwork would seem to be a direct reference to KAFD’s rapid development as a smart city: it was reported in September that Orange Business, the French telecom company that has moved aggressively into big data and AI, had closed a deal that will see it building geolocation-based sentiment analysis of social media and other features into the existing KAFD digital infrastructure.
 
Another poignant piece in Noor Riyadh was in the tranquil Wadi Hanifah park, where French artist Bruno Ribeiro erected a 65-foot-high sculpture of an oil derrick on which foreboding light patterns coordinated to the sound of an ominous booming techno soundtrack. The piece was called All Is Well.
 
It was only as I was leaving KSA that I realized how close I’d been, in the JAX District, to a space dedicated to showing the Saudi public scale models and computer renderings of The Line, a 110-mile-long “linear smart city” that is part of the futuristic $500 billion, 16,000-square-mile sustainable living giga-project NEOM. Unable to visit, I watched a video presentation of The Line on my phone on the way to the airport, thinking how easy it was to chalk it all up to some kind of utopian—or perhaps dystopian—sci-fi fantasy. The project is proposed to have some 9 million people living in a car-less urban area serviced by a high-speed rail system. But then, at the airport, I spoke with a UK-based adviser/contractor at a Starbucks who claimed to be working on The Line. He’d seen trucks there, he told me, he’d seen materials. He said “it’s real.”
 
If, instead of heading back to New York, I had taken a two-hour flight east, to Dubai, I would have arrived just in time for the start of the UN Climate Summit. In the weeks that followed, the Saudi contingent at the conference went on to lead a group of major oil exporters in resisting a deal calling for a complete phaseout of fossil fuels. (In the end, a compromise deal was reached that, while still historic, calls instead for “transitioning away from fossil fuels.”) The New York Times, in a story on the negotiations, pointed to what analysts say is an obvious paradox: “Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is spending tens of billions of dollars to try to diversify the Saudi economy, investing in industries like renewable energy, tourism, entertainment and artificial intelligence. Paradoxically, that means the government needs oil revenue to fund its plans for life after oil.”

“I developed an interest in Ambera’s work and, in discussions with her, and then with Sophie [Morner, the owner of Company Gallery], I thought [collaboration] would serve the artist better, as well as support a gallery that is doing a great job in New York,” Hauser & Wirth co-president Marc Payot told ARTnews.

Morner, who opened Company in 2015, said of Wellmann, that “a joint partnership will be the strongest way to support her career right now.”

Wellmann, who is in her early forties and whose paintings depict abstracted bodies intertwined in erotic scenarios, joined Company in 2020 and had her first solo show there the following year. Since then, she has had solo exhibitions at Pond Society, the Shanghai space run by collector Yang Bin, the Metropolitan Art Centre in Belfast, Ireland, and, last April, at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, a private museum founded by collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in 1995.

Morner said she was attracted to the idea of a closely collaborative representation because she’s been interested in new gallery models and how younger galleries like her own can continue to work with artists as they grow.

“If anyone is going to change these gallery models, it’s the galleries like Hauser & Wirth,” Morner said. “If the bigger galleries start thinking outside the box about what is best for the artists. Because it’s not always best for the artists to leave a young gallery for a big one.”

Company has proved to be one of the more ambitious spaces to open in New York over the past decade. In 2021 Morner moved Company from its original modest space in downtown Manhattan, to a 4,000-square-foot, stand-alone space on Elizabeth Street nearby in Chinatown. She said she sees her gallery as “constantly growing and expanding.” At the same time, at least one artist has departed. The new space opened with an exhibition of work by Barbara Hammer, curated by gallery artist Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Shortly afterward, McClodden left Company for a larger gallery, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, and then an even larger one, White Cube.

Payot characterizes the collective impact initiative as an “entrepreneurial model” that he hopes will “support an ecosystem,” before adding that he would be happy if it is copied by other large galleries.

“I don’t see myself as having created something that unique. It hopefully will change some structures within our system,” he said.

Payot added that working with Nicola Vassell on Uman, the first shared artist in the initiative, at last week’s Art Basel Miami Beach fair “went incredibly well, and that in itself is a message true to the art world that things can maybe done a little bit differently.”