2025 Annual Exhibition @ The Campus, Hudson, NY - A platform for expansive thought and free-ranging artistic expression

2025 Annual Exhibition

The Campus, Hudson, NY

Through October 26, 2025

The Campus presents its second annual exhibition, on view through October 26, 2025. Organized by Timo Kappeller, this exhibition stretches over 35 rooms and the surrounding grounds of the former Ockawamick School in Claverack, NY, newly revived as a dynamic venue for contemporary art. As in the 2024 edition, The Campus seeks to build community and foster dialogue in upstate New York, and many of the included artists have ties to the region. Performances and programming are scheduled throughout the run of the exhibition.

A diverse group of artists has been invited to respond to the spatial rhythm of the site and layer new meaning atop existing associations and touchstones. Thirty solo and duo full-room installations anchor the show alongside focused group presentations of painting, photography and ceramics. These site-responsive activations, recently created artworks, and historical reevaluations were developed through a yearlong process-led and artist-driven curatorial strategy. Rather than situating these works within a thematic framework, The Campus functions as a platform for expansive thought and free-ranging artistic expression.

Selected highlights:

Recent large-scale paintings by Rita Ackermann take earlier work as a starting point to reexamine a scene from multiple angles. Relationships between bodies of work, camera and picture plane, and abstraction and figuration are layered in a state of continual flux.

Corydon Cowansage’s murals and paintings suffuse a former classroom with hypnotic color and sensual shapes, straddling the space between biological and botanical imagery.

Rarely seen sculptures by Ming Fay explore the symbolic resonance, shape, color, and texture of fruits, seeds, seashells, and other nature-inspired hybrid forms—enlarged to invite both encounter with and appreciation of the natural world.

Katharina Grosse, known for large-scale site interventions, has conceived two adjoining silk-draped rooms in visual dialogue with mirrored works by Daniel Buren and improvisational sculptures by Arlene Shechet.

Exploring the unknowability of his own body, Naotaka Hiro presents a bronze sculpture along with a pair of new paintings—maps of a body’s workings as it grapples with the painting’s surface from above and below.

Char Jeré’s layered installation draws on Afro-fractalist theory, her own autobiography, and a background in data analytics to examine the ways in which the built networks of our world enact a complicated relationship between race and technology.

A group of vibrant soft sculptures by Marta Minujín epitomize her ongoing pursuit of a radically dynamic and temporal art, implicating the body of the artist, the viewer, and the body politic.

Drawing sessions hosted by Oscar Murillo Studio took place throughout the opening weekend (end of June), and visitors of all ages were invited to draw freely on canvases in a celebration of collective spirit. The canvases will go on to become part of a collaborative artwork for the 36th São Paulo Biennial.

Naudline Pierre debuts new paintings and works on paper in a large former classroom, inviting viewers to step into her immersive and otherworldly landscapes that situate personal mythology and transcendent intimacy alongside canonical narratives of devotion.

Dana Schutz and Ryan Johnson—partners in life and studio—present an exchange between their practices, combining Schutz’s paintings with Johnson’s sculptural forms in a spirited interplay.

Kiki Smith’s dreamlike photographs, sculptures, and textile works illustrate a multifaceted reflection on how the literal and symbolic meanings of light and sight affect the human condition.

A compelling group of sculptural wooden wall works by Richard Tuttle, recently made in New Mexico and on view for the first time, offer insight into the artist’s ongoing investigation of material and form.

An immersive, museological display by Francis Upritchard features sculpture and works on paper that tread the line between realism and fantasy, fusing her idiosyncratic blend of references from literature, ancient sculptures, burial grounds, science fiction, folklore, miniatures, and frescoes.

Participating artists include: Rita Ackermann, Lisa Alvarado, Jean Arp, Tauba Auerbach, Trisha Baga, Ranti Bam, Ernie Barnes, Huma Bhabha, Blinn & Lambert, Katherine Bradford, Daniel Buren, William Copley, Corydon Cowansage, Sarah Crowner, Carmen D’Apollonio, Michael Dean, Mark Dion, Hadi Falapishi, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Ming Fay, Jason Fox, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, Vanessa German, Ann Gillen, Jan Groover, Katharina Grosse, Nicolás Guagnini, Daniel Guzmán, Maren Hassinger, Cynthia Hawkins, Paula Hayes, Lena Henke, Naotaka Hiro, Marcus Jahmal, Xylor Jane, Ann Veronica Janssens, Char Jeré, Ryan Johnson, Allison Katz, Byron Kim, Zak Kitnick, Andrew Kuo, Alicja Kwade, Dr. Lakra, Jim Lambie, Liz Larner, Margaret Lee, Fernand Leger, Richard Long, Liz Magor, Sylvia Mangold, Marta Minujín, Oscar Murillo, Aliza Nisenbaum, Mary Obering, Virginia Overton, Paul Pfeiffer, Naudline Pierre, Charles E. Porter, Nancy Rubins, Dana Schutz, Nancy Shaver with Wolf, Arlene Shechet, Dana Sherwood, Elias Sime, Skuja Braden, Kiki Smith, Monika Sosnowska, Vivian Suter, Toshiko Takaezu, Cynthia Talmadge, Richard Tuttle, Francis Upritchard, Nari Ward, Lawrence Weiner, Jordan Wolfson, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung.

The Campus is owned and operated by a consortium of six galleries: Bortolami, James Cohan, kaufmann repetto, Anton Kern, Andrew Kreps, and kurimanzutto. 

The exhibition is curated by Timo Kappeller, Artistic Director of The Campus. Curatorial team: Jesse Willenbring and Shira Schwarz. Embracing a collaborative model, the galleries have turned an abandoned former school building into a platform for cultural exchange.

THE CAMPUS 

341-217 Hudson, NY

www.thecampusupstate.com

2025 Annual Exhibition @ The Campus, Hudson, NY, June 28 - October 26, 2025

Jangueando: Recent Acquisitions, 2021-2025 Exhibition @ El Museo del Barrio, New York

Jangueando: Recent Acquisitions, 2021-2025 

El Museo del Barrio, New York 

August 28, 2025 — Summer 2026 

Laura Aguilar

Plush Pony #25, 1992

Gelatin silver print 

Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York 

Gift of the Acquisitions Committee

Photo by Matthew Sherman 

william cordova 

2 tienes santo pero no eres Babalawo, 2023 

Mixed media 

Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York 

Gift in memory of Rudy Perez

Danielle De Jesus 

Loyalty like this doesn't exist anymore, 2021 

Oil on linen 

Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York

Gift of Noah Roy 

Photo by Dario Lasagni

Mundo Meza 

Kuikuro Jakui Flutes, 1976 

Acrylic on canvas 

Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York 

Gift of the Estate of the artist 

Photo by David Frantz

El Museo del Barrio in New York presents Jangueando: Recent Acquisitions, 2021–2025, a dynamic exhibition showcasing 39 newly acquired works by 36 artists that reflect the Museum’s ongoing commitment to representing the cultural vibrancy and complexity of Latinx and Latin American communities. This exhibition marks a bold and celebratory moment for El Museo’s evolving Permanent Collection.

“Jangueando embodies El Museo del Barrio’s unwavering commitment to artists whose work captures the complexities, resilience, and brilliance of our Latine culture. In this moment of heightened threats, this exhibition becomes more than a celebration—it asserts the power of gathering—of hanging out—as a form of resistance, healing, and transformation.” —Patrick Charpenel, Executive Director, El Museo del Barrio.

The title is a play on words. It looks to janguear, Puerto Rican slang for socializing with friends. From hanging out to hanging art, here it uses the museum context to create a space of dialogue and gathering. At a time when many of the communities represented by El Museo del Barrio are under attack—through immigration raids, backlash against DEI initiatives, and the cancellation of federal grants—these multiple interpretations imply both solidarity and a political call to action through holding space and kinship.

Hiram Maristany

The Gathering, 1964/2022

Silver gelatin print

Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York 

Museum Purchase

Carlos Motta with Higinio Bautista 

Shaman Boa, 2023 

Carved wood 

Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York 

Gift of the Acquisitions Committee 

Benjamin Muñoz 

Contract Labor, 2024 

Chine collé woodcut on paper 

Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York 

Gift of Benjamin & Julianna Muñoz

Jaime Muñoz 

Metal Only, 2022

Acrylic, glitter, paper, and velvet on wood panel

Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York

Gift of Lio Malca

El Museo del Barrio’s Permanent Collection of more than 8,500 artworks was shaped by the Museum’s unique history as an artist-led, community-focused institution from when it was first established in 1969. The founding community of the Museum faced extreme racism and economic hardship and insisted that art had the power to help communities connect in the face of these trials and, together, imagine alternative ways of being.

Jangueando brings together 39 works by artists at various stages in their careers, representing a range of generations, cultural perspectives, and media—including painting, photography, sculpture, and video. Organized into thematic clusters, select groupings build on the museum’s historical strengths, such as Puerto Rican and Nuyorican portraiture, Latinx photography, and printmaking. The exhibition also highlights the evolution of the museum’s collecting strategy, with renewed focus on queer artists and those of Indigenous descent.

“Ever evolving, El Museo del Barrio’s distinct Permanent Collection stands as a testament to the artists, cultural workers, donors, and community members who have helped build and shaped it over time,” says Susanna V. Temkin, Interim Chief Curator, El Museo del Barrio. “Jangueando marks an exciting new chapter in the Museum’s evolution as a collecting institution—serving not only as a platform to debut new acquisitions, but also as a reflection of our shared, collective spirit. The exhibition offers both a framework and a provocation to what is at stake in being together.”

Juan Sánchez 

Still from Unknown Boricua Streaming: 

Nuyorican State of Mind, 2011 

Video, color with sound, 8:09 mins 

Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York

Gift of Javier Lumbreras

Ethel Shipton 

Change Cambio, 2020 

House paint and vinyl on wooden panel 

Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York 

Gift of the artist and Ruiz-Healy Art 

Daiara Tukano 

Hori, 2023 

Acrylic on canvas

Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York 

Gift of Daiara Tukano and Millan

Artists whose works are on view in the exhibition include:

Eduardo Abaroa (1968, Mexico City, Mexico; lives in Mexico City)

Laura Aguilar (1959, San Gabriel, CA – 2018, Long Beach, CA)

José Alicea (1928, Ponce, Puerto Rico; lives in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico)

Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903, Lagos de Moreno, Mexico - 1993, Mexico City, Mexico)

assume vivid astro focus (formed in New York, NY in 2001)

Myrna Báez (1931, Santurce, Puerto Rico – 2018, Hato Ray, Puerto Rico)

Higinio Bautista

Eloy Blanco (1933, Aguadilla, Puerto Rico – 1984, New York, NY)

Luis Carle (1962, San Juan, Puerto Rico; lives in New York, NY)

Los Carpinteros (formed in La Havana, Cuba in 1992)

Manuel Chavajay (1982, San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, lives in San Pedro La Laguna)

william cordova (1971, Lima, Peru; lives in North Miami Beach, FL)

Abraham Cruzvillegas (1968, Mexico City, Mexico; lives in Mexico City)

Danielle De Jesus (1987, Brooklyn, NY; lives in Brooklyn)

Sandra Gamarra Heshiki (1972, Lima, Peru; lives in Madrid, Spain)

Luis Gispert (1972, Jersey City, NJ)

Matías González Chavajay (b. 1959, San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, lives in San Pedro La Laguna)

Pedro Rafael González Chavajay (b. 1956 in San Pedro la Laguna, Guatemala, lives in San Pedro La Laguna)

Julia Isidrez (1967, Itá, Paraguay; lives in Itá)

Antonio C. Ixtamer (b. in 1968 in San Juan la Laguna, Guatemala, lives in San Juan la Laguna, Guatemala)

Lidia Lisbôa (1970, Guaira, Brazil; lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil)

Marepe (Marcos Reis Peixoto) (1970, Santo Antônio de Jesus Bahia, Brazil; lives in Santo Antônio de Jesus)

Hiram Maristany (1945, New York, NY – 2022, St. Petersburg, FL)

Maria Teodora Mendez de González

Mundo Meza (1955, Tijuana, Mexico - 1985, Los Angeles, CA)

Carlos Motta (1978, Bogota, Colombia; lives in New York, NY)

Benjamin Muñoz (1993, Dallas, TX; lives in Dallas)

Jaime Muñoz (1987, Los Angeles, CA; lives and works in Pomona, CA)

Paula Nicho Cúmez (1955, Comalapa, Guatemala, lives in Comalapa)

Miguel Pou y Becerra (1880, Ponce, Puerto Rico - 1968 San Juan, Puerto Rico)

Juan Sánchez (1954, Brooklyn, NY; lives in Brooklyn)

Ethel Shipton (1963, Laredo, TX; lives in San Antonio, TX)

Valeska Soares (b. 1957, Belo Horizonte; lives in Brooklyn)

Laureana Toledo (1970, Ixtepec, Mexico; lives in Mexico City, Mexico)

Rigoberto Torres (1960, Aguadilla, Puerto Rico; lives in New York, Puerto Rico, and Florida)

Daiara Tukano (1970, Guaira, Brazil; lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil)

The exhibition is organized by the Curatorial Department of El Museo del Barrio: Zuna Maza, Lee Sessions, and Susanna V. Temkin, with María Molano Parrado.

EL MUSEO DEL BARRIO, NEW YORK

1230 5th Avenue at 104th Street, New York, NY 10029 

www.elmuseo.org

Reza Aramesh, Nicola Samori, Hugo Wilson @ Nicodim Gallery, New York - "Mondegreens and New Understandings" Exhibition - With Text by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler

Mondegreens and New Understandings

Reza Aramesh, Nicola Samorì, Hugo Wilson

Nicodim Gallery, New York

September 2 – October 4, 2025

In death, in tragedy, in grief, in heartbreak, one’s recollections of the Before Times are often rose-tinted. Hindsight is not always 20-20; the moments before a fall are remembered with a false clarity, a nostalgia for the era prior to the Bad Thing that brought us to our current moment of despair. After the initial shock of the passing of a parent, the planes hitting, the papers being served, memory softens the years before whatever allegorical or literal bomb dropped. We subsequently highlight and reconfigure the way things were into an architecture that befits the narrative we wish to convey, like a eulogy strung together from slightly—sometimes severely—misremembered song lyrics.

Mondegreens and New Understandings is an exhibition of Starbucks lovers wrapped up like a douche while Tony Danza holds us closer in the bond that will bring us together. 

Reza Aramesh, Nicola Samorì, and Hugo Wilson’s respective practices build monuments to the act of tailoring recollections and reminiscences to suit one’s sense of self, in addition to personal and empiric legacies still being written and reconsidered. 

With Bactrian II, Wilson reappropriates a baseline symbol of Britain’s Orientalist duplicity with a rendering of a shaggy camel moulting its wool in a manner that recalls 18th century jewels of the crown like George Stubbs and John Wootten. The Bactrian breed is famously domesticated, but Wilson’s muse is flamboyant, unbridled, and sure-footed as he proudly trots through a greenish negative space that smirks of English school pretense. The camel is isolated, imperfections magnified—no gods, no masters. He’s almost winking at us, asking (and borrowing a mondegreen from Nigel Tufnel), “what’s wrong with being sexy?”

Aramesh’s Action 211, Site of the Fall: Study of the Renaissance Garden, At 12 noon, Monday 15 July 1968 presents a striking male figure carved in marble, either bound and stripped to be tortured, or slowly disrobing in anticipation of carnal fireworks. The work’s title is evasive in its specificity, the artist gives us an event, place, time, and date, inviting the viewer to speculate on the nature of the scene. Is this David in Calvin Klein preparing for la petite mort or the grand one? The artist’s staging of the human body challenges the viewer with questions of vulnerability and agency, but he alone knows the words to his song.

Samorì’s untitled oil-on-wood-with-copper-leaf piece features a man raising his arms above his head and craning his neck toward the heavens. The brushwork, palette, and subject are reminiscent of Caravaggio or Mario Minniti, but the medium itself is poetically deformed by Samorìs hand—he has peeled the figures arms off, exposing reflective copper leaf on its underside, the hanging “flesh” obscuring the subject’s face and torso. His positioning evokes both the ecstasy of a spiritual awakening and the agony of his dismemberment. If the medium is massaged back to wholeness, will the bodies contained within truly be restored?

In dialogue with one another, Aramesh, Samorì, and Wilson forge new pathways in the way we understand and interpret art history inside our present bubble. There are no fixed positions within the wonky salon of Mondegreens and New Understandings, but rather three unique practices which actively engage and manipulate the ever-evolving subjectivity of observing, reinterpreting, and misremembering the world through art and art in the world.

— Ben Lee Ritchie Handler

REZA ARAMESH (b. Iran) lives and works between London and New York. He received an MA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths University, London, in 1997. Aramesh reimagines scenes of global conflict through sculptural reenactments, stripping them of overt signs of war, violence, and historical context. The resulting works are caught between beauty and brutality, and question the representation of the male body in relation to race, class, and sexuality. Exhibitions include Mondegreens and New Understandings: Reza Aramesh, Nicola Samorì, Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, New York (2025, forthcoming); Fragment of the Self, Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2025, solo); Foreigners Everywhere, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice (2024); Asia Society Triennial: We Do Not Dream Alone, Asia Society Museum, New York (2021); 12 noon, Monday 5 August, Asia Society Museum, New York (2019, solo); Action 180, Leila Heller Gallery, New York (2019, solo); Like Life: Sculpture, Color and the Body (1300–Now), The Met Breuer, New York (2018); Sculpture in the City, London (2021); Frieze Sculpture Park, London (2017); Art Basel Parcours, Basel (2017); At 11:57 am Wednesday 23 October 2013, Ab-Anbar Gallery, Tehran (2016, solo); and The Great Game, 56th Venice Biennale, Iran Pavilion, Venice (2015). His works have been staged in performative contexts at institutions such as the Barbican Centre, Tate Britain, and ICA, London. Aramesh’s practice is held in numerous public and private collections worldwide, including the Tate, UK; MOCAK, Poland; Rodin Museum; Versaille Palace Collection; Hugo Voeten Foundation; and the Zabludowicz Collection.

NICOLA SAMORI (b. 1977, Forlì, Italy) lives and works in Bagnacavallo, Italy. His work was included as a part of the Italian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. Exhibitions include Mondegreens and New Understandings: Reza Aramesh, Nicola Samorì, Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, New York (2025, forthcoming); La bocca di Berlino, Galerie EIGEN+ART, Berlin (2025, solo); The Ballad of the Children of the Czar, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2024); KAFKAesque, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague (2024); Blend the Blind, Nicodim, New York (2024, solo); DISEMBODIED, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2024); Luce e sangue, Duomo di Napoli, Neapel (2023, solo); Luce e sangue, Chiesa di Santa Lucia alla Badia, Syrakus (2023, solo); Medea, Antico Mercato, Syracuse (2023); Joshua Hagler, Devin B. Johnson, Nicola Samorì, Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2023); DISEMBODIED, Nicodim, New York (2023); Le Ossa della Madre, Villa d’Este, Tivoli (2022, solo); On the Wall, Building Gallery, Milan (2022); MONO, Galerie EIGEN+ART, Lipsia (2022, solo); Sfregi, Palazzo Fava, Bologna (2021, solo); ROMA (Manuale della mollezza e la tecnica dell’eclisse), Monitor Gallery, Rome (2021, solo); Danae Revisited, Fondazione Francesco Fabbri, Pieve di Soligo (2021); 141 – Un secolo di disegno in Italia, Fondazione del Monte, Bologna (2021); Black Square, Fondazione Made in Cloister e Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples (2020, solo); In abisso, Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin (2020, solo); Lucìe, MART- Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Rovereto (2020, solo); Stand 1D08, Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin (2020); Collective Care: A House with Many Guests, M WOODS, Chaoyang, Beijing (2020); Cannibal Trail, Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art, Caotun (2019, solo); Solstizio d’Inferno, Biblioteca Classense, Ravenna (2019, solo); Metafysica, Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, Tønsberg (2019); Preparing for Darkness – Vol. 3: I’m Not There, Kühlhaus, Berlin (2019); Iscariotes: Matteo Fato/Nicola Samorì, Casa Testori, Milan (2018, solo); Malafonte, Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin (2018, solo); BILD MACHT RELIGION: Kunst zwischen Verehrung, Verbot und Vernichtung, Kunstmuseum, Bochum (2018); Begotten, Not Made, Ana Cristea Gallery, New York (2014, solo); The Venerable Abject, Ana Cristea Gallery, New York (2012).

HUGO WILSON (b. 1982, United Kingdom) lives and works in London. His work has been exhibited at the The National Museum, Stockholm, Busan Metropoli­tan Art Museum, the National Por­trait Gallery, and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Wilson is collected by the New York Pub­lic Library, the Deutsche Bank Col­lec­tion, the Janet de Bot­ton Col­lec­tion, the United States Library of Congress and many others. Exhibitions include Mondegreens and New Understandings: Reza Aramesh, Nicola Samorì, Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, New York (2025, forthcoming); The Raft, Galerie Judin, Berlin (2024, solo); SIRANI, Galerie Judin, Berlin (2023); Whatever Gets You Thru the Night, Nicodim, New York (2023, solo); Joshua Hagler, Devin B. Johnson, Nicola Samorì, Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2023); Carnal Agreement, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2022, solo); Hollow Moon, Nicodim, New York (2021); Hugo Wilson, Parafin, London (2020, solo); Coincidental Truths, Galerie Judin, Berlin (2020, solo); When You Waked Up the Buffalo, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2020); Iconic Works, The National Museum, Stockholm (2020); Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Museum, Helsinki (2020); Crucible, Galerie Isa, Mumbai (2019, solo); Skin Stealers, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2019); Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2018, solo); Dialogues / New Paintings from London, GASK, Kutná Hora Museum, Czech Republic (2018); Frieze Sculpture Park, Regent’s Park, London (2018).

NICODIM GALLERY 

15 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013

www.nicodimgallery.com

Elmgreen & Dragset @ Pace Gallery, Los Angeles - "The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome" Exhibition

Elmgreen & Dragset

The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

Pace Gallery, Los Angeles

September 13 – October 25, 2025

Pace presents The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, Elmgreen & Dragset’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles—and their fourth with the gallery. This immersive two-part presentation will occupy the main exhibition space and the adjacent south gallery, exploring themes of scale, perception, and psychological distortion through enactments of doubling and resizing. The show follows Elmgreen & Dragset’s recent solo presentations at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul, and it coincides with the artists’ thirtieth anniversary of working as a duo and the twentieth anniversary of their famed "Prada Marfa" installation, which was unveiled in Texas in 2005.

Renowned for their subversive sculptural interventions, Berlin-based artists Elmgreen & Dragset often examine questions of identity and belonging in their collaborative practice, and they are particularly interested in radical recontextualizations of objects and new modes of representation in sculpture and large-scale installation.

In The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, the artists explore how scale influences our understanding of reality. For this presentation, the duo plays with the physical features of Pace’s Los Angeles gallery, using the architectural division of the gallery as a framework for doubling and resizing. Each artwork is presented in full scale in the main gallery, while exact half-size versions are shown in the adjoining space, which the artists have rescaled into a half-size replica of the main space. This spatial reduplication and resizing is inspired by the neurological condition called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, or Dysmetropsia, in which shifts in perception, often triggered by fatigue, alter one’s experiences of distance and scale.

The first work that visitors will encounter in the exhibition is a hyper realistic sculpture of a female gallery assistant slumped over the reception desk, seemingly asleep. The surreal presentation that follows in the exhibition spaces, where objects appear out of scale, could be a vision or dream playing out in her mind, in which visitors are the protagonists.

The main gallery space will feature new sculptural works and wall pieces—works from the duo’s Sky Target series—that probe the boundaries of the real and the reflected, the seen and the sensed. In their circular Sky Target paintings, fragments of clouds drifting across blue skies are rendered on mirror polished stainless steel disks. The skies are partially obscured by reflective surfaces, allowing viewers to glimpse themselves within illusory “heavens.” Each Sky Target is named after a specific location that the artists have visited. Two circular wall works, which the artists refer to as “stripe paintings,” will also be on view. In these works, vertical bands revealing airplanes and their contrails in the sky alternate with equally sized bands of mirrored strips, creating a rhythm of image and reflection. The tension between transparency and opacity, and representation and self-awareness, is heightened by the viewer’s shifting position within the space.

Two figurative sculptures carved in marble will be presented on the floor of both the main and adjacent galleries. One of these works depicts two young men, both wearing VR goggles, embracing—physically close but mentally elsewhere. The other shows a young man seated with headphones, absorbed in his own auditory reality. These figures embody the contemporary condition of disconnection, amplified by digital mediation. The immateriality of the digital experiences represented in both works is contrasted with their medium, marble, a historically significant and physically durable material that is deeply rooted in the tradition of sculpture.

The Alice in Wonderland Syndrome invites visitors into a mise en abyme of visual and spatial contradictions. While much of our reality has been compressed into the format of an iPhone screen, Elmgreen & Dragset continue their investigations into how physical environments shape our sense of self and how bodily presence still plays an important role in the way we interact with our surroundings.

ARTIST DUO ELMGREEN & DRAGSET

Elmgreen & Dragset (Michael Elmgreen, b. 1961, Copenhagen, Denmark; Ingar Dragset, b. 1969, Trondheim, Norway) pursue questions of identity and belonging and investigate social, cultural, and political structures in their artistic practice. They are interested in the discourse that can ensue when objects are radically re-contextualized and traditional modes for the representation of art are altered. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are based in Berlin and have worked together as an artist duo since 1995. They have presented numerous solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide including Kunsthalle Zürich (2001); Tate Modern, London (2004); Serpentine Gallery, London (2006); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (2009); ZKM - Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany (2010); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2011); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2013–14); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015); UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2016); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2016); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2018–19); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (2019–2020); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2022); and Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2023–24). In 2009, they represented both the Nordic and the Danish Pavilions at the 53rd Venice Biennale. They are renowned for large-scale public installations including Short Cut (2003), an installation comprising a Fiat Uno and a camper trailer, which appear to emerge from the ground; Prada Marfa (2005), a full-scale replica of a Prada boutique installed along U.S. Route 90 in Valentine, Texas; and Van Gogh’s Ear (2016), a gigantic vertical swimming pool placed in front of Rockefeller Center in New York City.

Their work is held in public collections worldwide, including ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj, Denmark; Art Production Fund, New York; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Hamburger Bahnhof, Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin; Kistefos Museet, Jevnaker, Norway; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others.

PACE LOS ANGELES

1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles

www.pacegallery.com

Africa Past, Present, and Future: Celebrating 65 Years of the MSU African Studies Center @ MSU Broad Art Museum & MSU Main Library, Michigan State University

Africa Past, Present, and Future 

Celebrating 65 Years of the MSU African Studies Center

MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing

Through January 18, 2026

MSU Main Library

Through December 19, 2025

Tijani Sitou 

See My Henna (Regardez-mon henne), 1983, printed 2006 

Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, 

Michigan State University, purchase, 2009.41.2

In celebration of the 65th anniversary of Michigan State University’s African Studies Center (ASC), the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (MSU Broad Art Museum), the MSU Museum, MSU Libraries, and the ASC have partnered on a series of exhibitions marking this milestone year. Africa Past, Present, and Future: Celebrating 65 Years of the MSU African Studies Center invites reflection on the power of collections and object-based learning to expand our understanding of global cultures and our place within them.

“The MSU Broad Art Museum and the ASC have enjoyed a longstanding partnership over the years, and it is our pleasure to shine a light on their important work during this momentous anniversary year,” commented Steven L. Bridges, senior curator and director of curatorial affairs at the MSU Broad Art Museum and co-curator of the project. “As part of the university’s commitment to working with different communities from the African continent, as exemplified by the work of the ASC, the Africana collections on campus and here at the MSU Broad Art Museum have grown to be some of the most important in the United States today. Through these objects we continue to advance teaching and learning at the university and within our wider communities, connecting different peoples and cultures across time and geographies.”

Drawn from the extensive Africana collections of the MSU Museum, MSU Broad Art Museum, and MSU Libraries, these exhibitions explore the University’s deep and evolving relationship with the African continent through art, artifacts, and archival materials. The exhibitions highlight how collections continue to support research, teaching, and public engagement around African cultures.

“These exhibitions are a tribute to the legacy and future of the African Studies Center, as well as to the powerful role that objects play in expanding our understanding of cultures across time and space," said Kurt Dewhurst, curator at the MSU Museum and co-curator of the project. “The MSU Museum is honored to contribute its collections and expertise to this meaningful celebration.”

The exhibitions include textiles, ceramics, carvings, and photographs, and are shaped by a broad team of curators and scholars, including representatives from the MSU Museum, MSU Broad Art Museum, MSU Libraries, and African Studies Center. Materials on view reflect MSU’s longstanding partnerships on the continent, including its foundational role in the establishment of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

“As we celebrate 65 years of the African Studies Center at MSU, we honor a legacy of transformative scholarship, partnership, and impact across Africa and right here in Michigan. It is a special honor to mark this milestone with exhibitions that build on our longstanding collaboration using art and cultural objects to teach about Africa’s diverse histories, peoples, and cultures,” remarked Leo Zulu, director of the African Studies Center. “This exhibition is not just a celebration of our past—it’s an invitation to imagine the future with us. I warmly invite everyone to visit, bring your families, and help spread the word, and I thank our partners at the MSU Museum, MSU Libraries, and the Broad for making this shared vision a reality.”

MSU BROAD ART MUSEUM

MSU MAIN LIBRARY

Michigan State University

broadmuseum.msu.edu

lib.msu.edu

Africa Past, Present, and Future: Celebrating 65 Years of the MSU African Studies Center

MSU Broad Art Museum, July 19, 2025 – January 18, 2026

MSU Main Library,  August 18, 2025 – December 29, 2025

Show & Tell @ Walker Art Center, Minneapolis - An interactive exhibition designed specifically for children

Show & Tell

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

November 20, 2025 – April 5, 2026

The Walker Art Center will open an interactive exhibition designed specifically for children ages four to nine, inviting one-of-a-kind play and learning among some of the museum’s youngest visitors. Titled Show & Tell, the exhibition features artworks from the Walker’s renowned collection that connect with kid-friendly subjects such as animals, alphabets, food, miniature worlds, and imaginary creatures. Among the artists included are Fischli/Weiss, Katharina Fritsch, Jeffrey Gibson, Cas Holman, Caroline Kent, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Yinka Shonibare, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Presented in a vibrant, specially designed environment, the exhibition emphasizes participatory, hands-on exploration and encourages kids to engage their senses and imaginations. 

Show & Tell continues the Walker’s approach to leveraging its growing collection to engage audiences in new and compelling ways. It follows the institution’s multi-part presentation Make Sense of This, which featured collection works and invited visitors to provide feedback on content that they might like to see in the galleries, and the complete reimagining of the Walker’s collection galleries, under the title This Must be the Place. The new collection galleries, which opened last summer, took learnings from Make Sense of This and grounded the presentation in accessible and resonant themes relating to the idea of “home.” Show & Tell also reflects the Walker’s commitment to cross-disciplinary collaboration, with the exhibition resulting from the joint efforts of the institution’s Visual Arts, Moving Image, Design, and Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact teams.

Show & Tell engages young visitors through distinct zones, designated by lively graphics that empower kids to have fun and create meaning on their own terms:

● FIND: This zone is anchored by a bespoke wall, which invites visitors to discover artworks by peering through an array of porthole windows, behind which artworks are installed in cavities within the wall. The wall engages with surprise and gameplay, allowing kids to move between the portholes to encounter a range of works, including sculptures, videos, and sound works by artists, including Mark Bradford, Katharina Fritsch, Claes Oldenburg, Yinka Shonibare, and Daniel Spoerri.

● READ: This zone focuses on the power of storytelling. Featuring comfortable seating, READ includes a selection of illustrated children’s books that families can listen to or read together. Interactive activities in the space as well as artworks by Julie Buffalohead, Andrea Carlson, Amy Cutler, and Jacob Lawrence encourage families to imagine and tell their own stories.

● PLAY: This zone focuses on hands-on interaction through two major installations: Mama Critter (2024) by Cas Holman and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled 2006 (pavilion, table, and puzzle representing the famous painting by Delacroix La Liberté Guidant le Peuple, 1830). Mama Critter is an arched structure that invites crawling, sliding, and building, as well as engagement with smaller elements called “Baby Critters” and “Thingies” that are moveable and alter the playscape in real time. Tiravanija’s large-scale work allows families to sit together at a picnic style table to work on a monumental jigsaw puzzle.

● MAKE: Taking a cue from colorful abstract works in the exhibition by such artists as Jeffrey Gibson and Caroline Kent, this zone includes a play table with color transparencies that allow kids to experiment with composition, color, and light. An interactive projector in the space makes it possible for the young artists to project their creations onto the gallery walls. Additionally, this zone features an interactive installation, in which visitors, inspired by the artist Erwin Wurm’s drawings, are invited to transform themselves into “one-minute sculptures” by donning colorful, oversized sweaters and using their bodies and the clothing to create new forms and poses.

● WATCH: This section offers a kid-friendly cinema space with a curated selection of films from the Walker’s Ruben/Bentsen Moving Image Collection, which includes more than 1,000 titles. With generous seating for children and their adults, the space offers a place to relax and engage in family-friendly films that range from short narratives to animations. 

Access and comfort ground the experience of Show & Tell. The majority of artworks are presented at low heights, and multi-sensory discovery is prioritized. Ample seating, an open floorplan, and phone charging locations consider the needs of parents and caregivers within the space. An audio guide narrated by local elementary school students offers a unique exploration of the exhibition, while the labels and family activity guide help prompt kids to connect their own experiences to the artworks on view. Label copy is also offered in English, Spanish, Hmong, and Somali to accommodate different family needs.

CURATORIAL TEAM:

Visual Arts: Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director of Visual Arts, and Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy; Moving Image; Patricia Ledesma Villon, Assistant Curator of Moving Image.

Show & Tell is organized jointly by the Walker’s Visual Arts, Moving Image and Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact staff members including Amanda Hunt, Head of Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact, Sarah Lampen, Associate Director of Learning and Accessibility, Janine DeFeo, Manager of Interpretation, La’Kayla Williams, Manager of School and Gallery Programs, Hannah Novillo Erickson, Manager of Lifelong Learning and Accessibility.

WALKER ART CENTER, MINNEAPOLIS

walkerart.org

Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals @ Tate Britain, London

Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals

Tate Britain, London

27 November 2025 – 12 April 2026

J.M.W. Turner

Self Portrait, c. 1799 

Image courtesy of Tate

John Constable 

by Ramsay Richard Reinagle c. 1799 

NPG 1786 

© National Portrait Gallery, London

Tate Britain presents the first major exhibition to explore the intertwined lives and legacies of Britain’s most revered landscape artists: JMW Turner (1775–1851) and John Constable (1776–1837). Radically different painters and personalities, each challenged artistic conventions of the time, developing ways of picturing the world which still resonate today. Staged across the 250th anniversary years of their births, this exhibition will trace the development of their careers in parallel, revealing the ways they were celebrated, criticised and pitted against each other, and how this pushed them to new and original artistic visions. It will feature over 170 paintings and works on paper, from Turner’s momentous 1835 The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, lent by Cleveland Museum of Art and not seen in Britain for over a century, to The White Horse 1819, one of Constable’s greatest artistic achievements, last exhibited in London two decades ago.

JMW Turner 

The Burning of the Houses of Lords 

and Commons, 16 October 1834, 1835 

Cleveland Museum of Art. 

Bequest of John L. Severance 1942.647

John Constable 

The White Horse, 1819 

© The Frick Collection, New York 

Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr

Born only a year apart - JMW Turner in London’s crowded metropolis and John Constable to a prosperous family in the Suffolk village of East Bergholt - their contrasting early lives will begin the exhibition. JMW Turner was a commercially minded, fast-rising young star who first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1790 aged just 15, and created ambitious oil paintings like recently-discovered The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St. Vincent’s Rock, Bristol, before he turned 18. By contrast, largely self-taught John Constable undertook sketching tours to create early watercolours like Bow Fell, Cumberland 1807 and demonstrated a fierce commitment to perfecting artistic techniques, not exhibiting at the Royal Academy until 1802. Having both emerged amid an explosion in popularity of landscape art, the two were united however, in their desire to change it for the better.

The exhibition explores how both artists developed distinct artistic identities within the competitive world of landscape art, spotlighting their methods, evolution and overlap. Constable built his reputation on the Suffolk landscapes of his childhood, opting to sketch in oils outside amid the vast views of Dedham Vale and the river Stour, which often recurred in his work. Tate Britain will include his painting box and sketching chair, with visitors able to chart the development of Constable’s skilful draughtsmanship and radical handling of paint to add ‘sparkle’. A group of Constable’s cloud studies will be brought together for the exhibition. Reflective of his belief that the sky was key to the emotional impact of a painting they are now one of the most celebrated aspects of his output and underpinned the powerful skyscapes in the artist’s monumental six-foot canvases. Late works such as Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow 1836 will illustrate his deft interweaving of personal and historic memories.

JMW Turner 

The Passage of Mount St Gothard from the centre 

of Teufels Broch (Devil’s Bridge), 1804 

© Abbot Hall, Kendal (Lakeland Arts Trust)

By contrast, Turner travelled widely across Britain and Europe filling sketchbooks with quick pencil studies. This offered creative inspiration, influencing sublime Alpine scenes such as The Passage of Mount St Gothard from the Centre of Teufels Broch (Devil’s Bridge) 1804, as well as commercial opportunities to have prints made after his watercolours. The exhibition explores how Turner developed original ways to apply paint and depict light, capturing the raw power of nature. Some of Turner’s most celebrated late works will feature, including Ancient Italy – Ovid Banished from Rome, first exhibited in 1838 and not shown in London in over 50 years.

John Constable 

Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, c. 1829

Image courtesy of Tate

By the 1830s, both Turner and Constable became recognised for taking landscape painting in bold new directions. The stark differences between their work spurred art critics to pit them against one another and to cast them as rivals. In 1831 Constable himself played into this, placing his and Turner’s work side by side at the Royal Academy exhibition. This showing of Turner’s Caligula’s Palace and Bridge next to Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, prompted a flurry of comparisons between the sun-drenched heat of Turner’s mythical Italian scene and Constable’s damply atmospheric Britain; they were ‘fire and water’. Now placed head-to-head at Tate Britain, the artists’ most distinctive and impressive paintings will highlight how, despite their differences, they made landscape a genre worthy of grand canvases and prime importance.

Creators of some of the most daring and captivating works in the history of British art, Turner and Constable changed the face of landscape painting with their two competing visions, elevating the genre with their recognition of its endless potential to inspire. The exhibition will end with a new film featuring contemporary artists Frank Bowling, Bridget Riley, George Shaw and Emma Stibbon reflecting on the enduring legacy of Turner and Constable.

TATE BRITAIN

Millbank, London SW1P 4RG

www.tate.org.uk

Sliced Tropics & Cosmic Dancers @ Luhring Augustine Gallery, NYC - Lygia Clark, Sarah Crowner, Mark Handforth, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Rezac, Philip Taaffe

Sliced Tropics & Cosmic Dancers

Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York

September 12 – October 25, 2025

Luhring Augustine presents a group exhibition that highlights the work of Lygia Clark, Sarah Crowner, Mark Handforth, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Rezac, and Philip Taaffe. These six artists share a kindred interest in disrupting of familiar forms, employing unique strategies such as manipulations of lines and planes – folding, pinching, slicing, splicing – and radical shifts in scale to reshape and reimagine recognizable and quotidian motifs. 

ARTISTS BIOS

Lygia Clark (b. 1920, Belo Horizonte, Brazil – d.1988, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) is one of the preeminent artists of the twentieth century, whose pioneering body of work reimagined the relationship between audience and the art object. A founding member of the 1950s Brazilian Neoconcretist movement, Clark proposed a radical approach to thinking about painting by treating its pictorial surface as if it were a three-dimensional architectural space. Her iconic Bichos, or sculptures constructed out of hinged metal planes, allowed for the audience to exercise authorship through participation. Clark’s reliance on the viewer to steer her sculptures through many possible configurations not only jeopardized the autonomy of the art object itself, but also reconfigured her art as a performative, time-based event.

Sarah Crowner (b. 1974, Philadelphia, PA) explores the spaces where geometry abuts gesture, materiality merges with composition, and the graphic confronts the handmade. Her sewn canvases initially appear pristine in their composition, however closer inspection reveals the various slippages, imprints, and nuances of hand-painted surfaces constructed from separate yet related elements. Architecture plays a significant role in many of her works; her site-specific wall pieces transform spaces into three-dimensional experiences in which the viewer processes the environment as one autonomous artwork. The patterns in her work, drawn equally from the natural world and historic sources, create an entryway between the art object and the context, enabling the viewer to be enveloped and literally step inside her work.

Mark Handforth’s (b. 1969, Hong Kong) works are interventions in space: offering novel engagements within existing environments and asserting new perspectives on familiar fixtures. His sculptures displace quotidian objects and recontextualize their forms in unexpected articulations. In some of his iconic works, the bodies of stars, streetlamps, and traffic signs whimsically buckle, twist, and droop. The seemingly defunct and defeated contortions in these forms are countered by a gracefulness imparted by Handforth’s meticulous craftmanship; this incongruity imbues the works with a wry humor and an endearing pathos. His works reference a post-punk aesthetic and utilitarian minimalism, while the capricious scale and juxtapositions draw on the legacies of Surrealism and Dadaist absurdism.

Elizabeth Murray (b. 1940, Chicago, IL – d. 2007, Granville, NY) was an artist at the forefront of American painting for five decades and is considered one of the most important postmodern abstract artists of her time. Her drive and determination produced a singularly innovative body of work characterized by a Cubist-informed Minimalism and streetwise Surrealism. Throughout her career, she reveled in the physicality of paint and approached her work through the constructive vocabulary of sculpture, warping, twisting, splintering, and knotting her canvases. In the 1980s Murray introduced three-dimensionality to her canvases, bringing about a complete break from traditional, flat, rectilinear compositions. Muddied, moody, and gestural, these paintings blazed a course of international recognition and notoriety.

Richard Rezac’s (b. 1952, Lincoln, NE) abstract sculptures, rooted in a studious consideration of the history of art, architecture, and design, quietly connote everyday sources, leaving the viewer with a sense of familiarity and closeness. Exceptionally precise in their execution, with each decision carefully considered by the artist, the pieces are made to be looked at and thought of with absorption. Their human scale and careful placement (the height on the wall, the distance they hang from the ceiling, etc.) initiates a dialogue that demands time, the works revealing themselves slowly. This combination of exquisite craft and spatial intentionality imparts a knowing presence to the sculptures, lending an ostensible sense that they are full of concealed information. Taciturn, earnest, and magnetic, they toggle between congruence and dissonance, space and form, lightness and solidity.

Philip Taaffe’s (b. 1955, Elizabeth, NJ) practice is distinguished by its elaborate sampling of techniques and symbols that merge iconography, design, and art historical and cultural motifs to generate something authentically new. Celebrated for his ability to build intricate and contemplative compositions culled from this wide-ranging lexicon of imagery, Taaffe produces transfixing works rife with geometric forms and interwoven complex patterns that call into question traditionally accepted definitions of realism and abstraction. The visual vibrancy and dynamism that underlie his work reveals the convergence of the optical and the conceptual, the decorative and the narrative, the natural and the man-made, as well as the ancient and the modern. 

LUHRING AUGUSTINE CHELSEA

531 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.luhringaugustine.com

Koak, Ding Shilun, Cece Philips @ Hauser & Wirth London - "Interior Motives" Exhibition

Interior Motives

Koak, Ding Shilun, Cece Philips

Hauser & Wirth London

22 August – 20 September 2025

Enter interior worlds imagined by contemporary painters Koak, Ding Shilun and Cece Philips at Hauser & Wirth London. The exhibition explores how these artists engage with the interior both as a physical space and a psychological construct. Through distinct painterly vocabularies, each artist interrogates the architectural and domestic environments we inhabit, revealing how these frameworks shape our sense of self, memory and belonging. ‘Interior Motives’ is part of an ongoing initiative at Hauser & Wirth that champions emerging and mid-career artists beyond the gallery’s roster. Produced in collaboration with Union Pacific and Bernheim Gallery, this exhibition reflects a shared commitment to a sustainable arts ecosystem.

Depicting figures in dreamlike domestic interiors, Koak’s painting practice questions the societal expectations and roles of women within the home as well as the traditional portrayal of women by male artists. With a graphic aesthetic that borrows from Japanese and European animations, Koak uses familiar iconography of the home—windows, soft furnishings, flowerpots and vases—to build alternate interiors in which her figures are liberated and given agency. Her contemporary take on art historical depictions of domestic scenes is achieved through a vibrant color palette that blurs the distinction between the imagined and real, between inner and outer worlds, her female gaze highlighting both the emotional and physical experience of her figures.

Inhabiting imaginary worlds, the characters in Ding Shilun’s paintings are often an embodiment of the artist himself, the emotions he feels and the thoughts inside his mind. His worldbuilding relies on everyday objects found in domestic spaces to enable viewers to identify with the characters depicted and emotions evoked. With a style inspired by Japanese manga and traditional Chinese painting, the artist’s interiors include fantastical and mythological elements that question viewer’s perception of reality. Influenced by both global historical events, current affairs and his own experiences, Ding Shilun’s manifestation of his interior realm doubles up as a visual representation of the absurdity of daily life.

The architectural tropes characteristic of household settings, from windows and doorways to hallways and walls, act as visual framing devices in Cece Philips’ paintings. Radiant light is a hallmark of her practice, drawing viewers into the work and leading them through the interiors, yet they are never part of the scene, observing like a flaneur. Like paintings of everyday, domestic life from the Dutch Golden Age and by Félix Vallotton, a narrative is implied—one in which Cece Philips leaves the viewer to fill in the details, encouraged by their imagination and own inner worlds. The use of color adds a layer to the narrative by suggesting a psychological reading, reflecting the figures’ mood and internal realities, as well as that of the viewer. This exploration of interiority is at once about the subject and the viewer, observation and introspection.

ARTIST KOAK

Koak

Courtesy the artist and Union Pacific

Koak (b. 1981 in the US) is known for work that portrays the complex duality of identity and human nature through a mastery of the line which extends across drawing, painting and sculpture. Rendered with exquisite technique, her emotionally charged figures and landscapes are imbued with a profound agency and inner life. Her work challenges historical portrayals of femininity, depicting figures that shift between boldness and vulnerability, resisting fixed definition and embracing emotional depth. Regardless of subject, each piece is approached with the intimacy of portraiture, suggesting a metamorphic state—a dream of becoming something beyond the self: a body becoming a lake, a flower or a landscape. In this way, painting becomes an act of defiance—a feminist gesture that resists enclosure, imagining identity as something fluid.

Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘The Window Set,’ Charleston in Lewes, UK (2025); ‘Lake Marghrete,’ Perrotin, Paris, France (2024); ‘Letter to Myself (when the world is on fire),’ Altman Siegel, San Francisco CA (2023); ‘The Driver,’ Perrotin, Hong Kong (2022); ‘Return to Feeling,’ Altman Siegel, San Francisco CA (2020); and ‘Holding Breath,’ Union Pacific, London, UK (2019). Selected group exhibitions include: ‘Infinite Regresse: Mystical Abstraction from the Permanent Collection and Beyond,’ Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City MO (2024); ‘I’ve got a feeling,’ Musées d’Angers, Angers, France (2023); ‘I’m Stepping High, I’m Drifting, and There I Go Leaping,’ XIAO Museum, Rizhao, China (2022); ‘Familiars,’ Et. Al Gallery, San Francisco CA (2022); and ‘New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century,’ Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley CA (2021), amongst others.

ARTIST DING SHILUN

Ding Shilun

Courtesy the artist and Bernheim Gallery 

Photo: Will Grundy

Ding Shilun (b. 1998 in Guangzhou, China; lives and works between London and Guangzhou) harnesses his heritage, current events and a global history of art to create large and detailed pictorial works depicting the absurdity of daily life. His unique concurrence of the mythological, the historical and the everyday allow the emergence of an imaginary world with a representation of himself within our seemingly homogenous society. Rooted in pictorial references such as Gustav Klimt or Kai Althoff intertwined with interpretations of Chinese literature—namely a collection of Chinese legends, translated as ‘In Search of the Supernatural,’ written between 220 – 589 AD—Shilun’s characters inhabit imaginary worlds that serve as allegories for human experience and emotion. The precision of the details is used to contrast the different textures found in the paintings, sometimes resembling watercolor, as well as playing on a combination of co-existing perspectives, which question the distinction between real and surreal.

His recent solo shows include ‘Janus’ at ICA Miami, Miami FL (2024); ‘Invites: Ding Shilun,’ Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK (2023); ‘Paradiso,’ Bernheim, Zurich, Switzerland (2022); and ‘Mirage,’ Bernheim, London, UK (2024). Shilun’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami FL; The Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Collection of Contemporary Art, Dallas TX; High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA; Rose Art Museum, Waltham MA; Guangdong Museum, Guangzhou, China; Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Museu Inima De Paula, Below Horizonte, Brazil; Asymmetry Art Foundation, London, UK; and Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas TX, among others.

ARTIST CECE PHILIPS

Cece Philips

Courtesy the artist

Photo: Rory Langdon-Down

Cece Philips (b. 1996 in London, UK) is a London-based painter whose luminous compositions explore ideas of spectatorship and voyeurism. Embodying the role and spirit of the flaneur, or flâneuse, her works draw on a multitude of sources, from the archive, film stills, found imagery and memory she weaves together historical and contemporary influences to interrogate ideas of interiority, desire and loneliness. Framing is a recurring device in Philips’ paintings, though windows and doorways, barriers and veils are constructed to challenge an easy reading of her female protagonists. Palette, attention to light and space all lend psychological and narrative depth—details that lead us through and beyond the work and activate the viewer’s own imagination.

Cece Philips held her debut solo exhibition ‘I See in Colour’ at HOME in London, UK, in April 2021. Subsequent solo shows include ‘Between the Dog and the Wolf’ at ADA Contemporary, Accra, Ghana (2022); ‘The Night Has a Thousand Eyes,’ Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany (2022); ‘Walking the In-Between,’ Peres Projects, Seoul, South Korea (2023); and ‘Conversations Between Two,’ Peres Projects, Milan, Italy (2024). Recent group exhibitions include ‘The Painted Room,’ curated by Caroline Walker at GRIMM, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2023); ‘Digestif,’ a two-person show with Hettie Inniss at Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy (2024); and ‘The Shed’ at Berntson and Bhattacharjee, London, UK (2025). Her most recent solo presentation, ‘The Wall: Cece Philips,’ was held at Almine Rech, Brussels, Belgium (2025). Cece Philips completed her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2023 and was awarded the Fribourg Philanthropies Prize the same year.

HAUSER & WIRTH LONDON

23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET

www.hauserwirth.com

Infant: Banned Skills @ Whitney Online Gallery space for Internet and new media art - artport

INFANT: BANNED SKILLS

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

2025 - artport - Online Gallery

INFANT

Still from BANNED SKILLS, 2025

© INFANT

The Whitney Museum of American Art launched BANNED SKILLS, a digital art project by artist duo INFANT, sidony o’neal and Bogosi Sekhukhuni, on artport, the Whitney’s online gallery space for Internet and new media art. Commissioned for artport, the work serves as the portal to engage with INFANT’s evolving conceptual framework, XENOFORMALISM. The artists designed BANNED SKILLS as an interactive entry point to explore new speculative understandings of formal systems like math, science, and design. The project reveals how seemingly contrasting ideas can align to generate new aesthetic or ideological orders.

BANNED SKILLS is a nonlinear aesthetic narrative that prompts viewers to consider various aspects of humanity and established understandings of objects or histories. Unfolding along two distinct paths, the work’s primary navigation tool utilizes the psychological phenomenon of the bouba-kiki effect. The phenomenon, first presented in the 1920s, reflects deliberate associations between speech sounds and visual shapes with the word bouba often associated with smooth, rounded shapes and kiki with sharp, angular ones. Within BANNED SKILLS, users begin their experience in a “NEST” where the kiki and bouba forms exist, selecting one of the two shapes to take them along different paths. Along these journeys, users interact with a range of artifacts from art, architecture, design, and sound to explore cultural representations through unexpected groupings, placing the objects in conversation with one another. Encounters with juxtapositions of cultural artifacts—from the Gameboy Advanced SP Tribal Edition to the necklace made from precisely designed whale bones—invite users to gain new perspectives and draw connections. In the top-left corner of the screen, an interactive virtual music device lets users toggle between the kiki- and bouba-coded soundscapes, further emphasizing the visual juxtapositions. After users explore both spaces, a final third environment will appear.

“BANNED SKILLS hopes to use participation as a way around the problem of ‘talking at’ the viewer, working with, not against, postures of engagement from the early 2000's gaming boom that feel familiar and nostalgic simultaneously,” said David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney. “This is the first artport project that dives into this cross-section of the post digital and is a form of practice that garners attention because of its utility across levels of understanding. Considering the intersections of art and design have become a prominent narrative for emerging forms of contemporary engagement.”

The artists designed the virtual experience of BANNED SKILLS as a starting point for exploring their concept of XENOFORMALISM (XF). The prefix “XENO,” meaning strange or foreign in Greek, suggests an unfamiliar type of formalism. XF can be imagined as a category of filters to guide users in unpacking and connecting histories of visual aesthetics, sonic landscapes, and science. The work offers an aesthetic approach to new understandings of cultural representations, using histories of science fiction and digital culture—including gaming and computer graphics—as speculative introductions. The branching sequences INFANT has formed in BANNED SKILLS encourages viewers to reexamine how meaning is formed and reinforced within art, art history, design, science, and science fiction, and how these fields shape and contribute to collective cultural memory.

INFANT’s BANNED SKILLS was organized by David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum, and commissioned for artport, the Museum’s online gallery space for Internet and new media art commissions. artport is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney. 

ARTIST DUO INFANT

Sidony O’Neal (b. 1988) is a conceptual artist whose work and interdisciplinary research is informed by mathematics, architectural systems, and the histories of objects, from 15th Century locking mechanisms to plastic industrial pallets. Their works explore human relationships to objects, labor, and technology.

Their work has been featured in exhibitions at Et al., San Francisco, CA; Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ; Dracula’s Revenge, New York, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; Veronica, Seattle, WA; Third Born, Mexico City, Mexico; ICA at Maine College of Art and Design, Portland, ME; and Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY. O’Neal has had residencies at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; and Banff Centre, Banff, AB, among others. Their performances have been featured at Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Volksbühne Berlin, and Performance Space New York. O'Neal is the recipient of awards and fellowships including the Oregon Arts Commission's Joan Shipley Award and a Hodder Fellowship from the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. In 2023, they were awarded a Hallie Ford Fellowship. O'Neal is co-founder of design firm INFANT.

Bogosi Sekhukhuni (b. 1991) is an artist and designer who reflects on cultures and histories of technology. Working across a range of media such as sculpture, video, set design, furniture design and performance, Sekhukhuni suggests ways to think about the mechanics of futurity.

Since 2012, Sekhukhuni’s work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions, including Role Play, Fondazione Prada, Milan; Age of You, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; Art in the Age of Anxiety, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics, New Museum, New York; Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Foxy Production, New York; Rencontres de Bamako, African Biennale of Photography, Mali; and Simunye Summit 2010, Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg. They have been awarded the Prix Net Art Award, Rhizome, New York (2017). Sekhukhuni is a founding member of the artist group NTU and has worked closely with CUSS Group. Sekhukhuni is co-founder of the design firm INFANT.

ABOUT ARTPORT

artport is the Whitney Museum’s portal to Internet art and an online gallery space for net art and new media art commissions. Launched in 2001, artport provides access to original commissioned artworks, documentation of net art and new media art exhibitions at the Whitney, and new media art in the Museum’s collection. Recent commissions include Ashley Zelinkskie’s Twin Quasar (2024); Maya Man’s A Realistic Day In My Life In New York City (2024); Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s xhairymutantx (2024); Nancy Baker Cahill’s CENTO (2024); Peter Burr’s Sunshine Monument (2023); Rick Silva’s Liquid Crystal (2023); Auriea Harvey’s SITE1 (2023); Amelia Winger-Bearskin’s Sky/World Death/World (2022); Mimi Ọnụọha’s 40% of Food in the US is Wasted (How the Hell is That Progress, Man?) (2022); and Rachel Rossin’s THE MAW OF (2022). Access these and more projects at whitney.org/artport.

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City