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23/11/25

Val Lee @ Hayward Gallery, London - 'The Presence of Solitude' Exhibition

Val Lee

The Presence of Solitude

Hayward Gallery, London

Through 11 January 2026

Val Lee

Buenos días mujeres (2019)

Photo by Yollotl Alvarado, courtesy the artist

Val Lee

Charting the Contours of Time (2023)

Photo by Takuya Matsumi, courtesy the artist

The Hayward Gallery, in partnership with the RC Foundation, Taiwan (R.O.C.) [*], presents Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude. This is the first solo exhibition in the UK by Taiwanese artist Val Lee and the fourth exhibition in the RC Foundation Project Space Exhibition Series, which showcases the next generation of emerging international artists.

Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude takes place in the HENI Project Space in the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery – a space that offers the opportunity for audiences to see exhibitions from emerging international artists for free.

Val Lee

The Landless Events (2022)

Photo by Chen Etang, courtesy the artist

Val Lee

The Landless Events (2022)

Photo by Chen Etang, courtesy the artist

Bringing together film, photography and costume, the exhibition highlights Lee’s longstanding exploration of isolation and solitude. By creating disjointed and ambiguous narratives with unidentifiable figures, her work makes viewers feel as though time and meaning have been displaced. This feeling of alienation encourages us to think about how our personal experiences and collective memories are shaped by state and political systems.

The exhibition features new iterations of two existing works: Valley in the Minibus (2024) and The Sorrowful Football Team (2025). Valley in the Minibus explores the concept of ‘non-places’, defined by French anthropologist Marc Augé as transitory spaces that people pass through (such as airports, motorways, shopping centres) and become anonymous. Building on the original work and live event that took place over several weekends, a group of strangers travel through a winding landscape in a van with a creature-like masked and costumed figure. A new video commission introduces the same masked figure DJing completely alone in an anonymous space. Three full body, long haired costumes and veiled masks used in the work are on display as part of the installation. Present but disconnected from the audience, the presentation highlights the artist's interest in creating connections and intimacies through isolated experiences.

Val Lee

Valley of the Minibus (2025)

Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist

Val Lee

Valley of the Minibus (2025)

Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist

Val Lee

Valley of the Minibus (2025)

Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist

Reimagined for the exhibition as a slide projection, The Sorrowful Football Team (2025) depicts a blind football team playing a match in the snow in Northern Japan. Blind football is an organised sport designed for players who are blind or visually impaired. Here, Lee utilises it as a metaphor to reflect on the impact of political repression experienced under the White Terror rule in Taiwan between 1947-1987 as well as the possibility of finding light in solitary darkness.

Val Lee

The Sorrowful Football Team (2025)

Courtesy the artist

Val Lee

Valley of the Minibus (2025)

Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist

Val Lee

Valley of the Minibus (2025)

Photo by Pitzu Liu, courtesy the artist

Val Lee

The Sorrowful Football Team (2025)

Courtesy the artist

Yung Ma, Senior Curator of the Hayward Gallery, says: “Straddling visual and live art, Val Lee has embraced different principles to forge an artistic language that invokes various experiences, past and present. While the exhibition explores the deeply felt presence of solitude in her recent works, it is ultimately a hopeful gesture about finding connections in the most unexpected places.”

Val Lee says: "Presenting this work at Hayward Gallery allows me to further explore ambiguous fields—where collectivity is not given, but quietly rehearsed in the blank spaces of perception. I’m glad to share this piece in London at Hayward Gallery - where form, time, and relation can stay in flux."

Previous artists who have exhibited in the HENI Project Space include Huang Po-Chih, Heecheon Kim, Amol K Patil, Thabiso Sekgala and Hicham Berrada. The exhibition marks the fourth iteration of The RC Foundation Project Space Exhibition Series and makes up an important part of the Southbank Centre’s vast array of free programming for all to enjoy.

Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude is curated by Hayward Gallery Senior Curator, Yung Ma, and Curatorial Assistant, Felix Choong. Additional support provided by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan (R.O.C.).

Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude is presented alongside Gilbert & George 21ST CENTURY PICTURES at the Hayward Gallery, as well as Teresa Solar Abboud’s Mother Tongue: a monumental new public art commission, outside the gallery.

Artist Val Lee

Val Lee (b. 1981, Taipei) is a director and visual artist working across expanded cinema, performance, and moving image. Trained in Filmmaking and Sociology at SUNY, Lee founded the art collective Ghost Mountain Ghost Shovel in 2008. Their work constructs temporal scenarios that reframe space, spectatorship, and perception, often exploring systemic violence, war, and affective states through nonlinear, disorienting environments. Lee’s works have been shown internationally including the 13th Gwangju Biennale, Grand Palais, HKW Berlin, MEP, MOCA Taipei, and others, with performances at TFAM, Kyoto Art Center, and the Taiwan National Theater. Honours include the Taishin Arts Award in 2017 and support from the Asian Cultural Council and C-LAB.

RC Foundation, Taiwan (R.O.C.)

Founded in 1995 by Rong Chuan Chen, RC Foundation has been a visionary force in promoting Taiwanese contemporary art on the global stage. An active champion in fostering cultural and artistic exchanges, RC Foundation has been supporting artists, curators and independent art spaces from Taiwan through grants and partnerships, both locally and internationally. These long-term relationships have nurtured and enriched numerous artistic projects from different perspectives, generating invaluable connections between Taiwan's contemporary art practitioners and their global counterparts.

HAYWARD GALLERY

Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London

www.southbankcentre.co.uk

Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude

Hayward Gallery, London, 7 October 2025 - 11 January 2026

28/10/25

View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection @ Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

October 28, 2025 – May 3, 2026

Délio Jasse (Angolan, born 1980)

Untitled, from the series "Terreno Ocupado", 2014

Cyanotype

Sheet: 22 1/16 × 29 15/16 in. (56 × 76 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation

Luo Yongjin (Chinese, born 1960)

Oriental Plaza, Beijing, 1998–2002

Inkjet print

Unrolled: 14 9/16 in. × 13 ft. 10 15/16 in. (37 × 424 cm)

Box: 3 3/4 × 17 5/16 × 3 15/16 in. (9.6 × 44 × 10 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation

The Metropolitan Museum of Art presents View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection, a preview of a landmark promised gift of photographs from Artur Walther. Assembled over three decades and across five continents, Walther’s vast collection of over 6,500 photographs and time-based media is regarded as among the finest in the world. The 40 works in View Finding introduce his landmark gift and considers how artists across the globe use the camera to navigate shifting terrain.

“This remarkable promised gift from The Walther Collection marks a watershed moment at The Met,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO. “View Finding’s carefully curated selection brings iconic works into conversation with new and emerging artistic voices. We are deeply grateful to Artur and his foundation for this gift that profoundly expands our ability to tell a global history of photography.”

Jeff L. Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs, added, “At The Met, The Walther Collection will become an essential resource for scholars and museum goers. Introducing its phenomenal range of works, this exhibition situates the camera as a powerful tool for social critique, reflection, and change.”

Aida Silvestri (Eritrean, born 1978)

Awet. Eritrea to London by car, boat, lorry, train

and aeroplane, 2013

Image: 34 7/16 × 24 13/16 in. (87.5 × 63 cm)

Text: 11 × 8 1/8 in. (28 × 20.7 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation

Kohei Yoshiyuki (Japanese, born 1946)

Untitled, from the series "The Park", 1971

Gelatin silver print

Image: 12 5/16 × 18 3/8 in. (31.2 × 46.7 cm)

Sheet: 15 7/8 × 19 13/16 in. (40.3 × 50.4 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation

The modern and contemporary photographs in View Finding highlight photographic practices across Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. Both inventive and politically urgent, these projects engage the pressing issues of their time. Responding to transformations of the landscape and built environment, they investigate the effects of architecture and spatial planning on identity and social order. In apartheid-era Johannesburg, as in industrializing Shenzen and post-colonial Dakar, they register and reshape environments in flux, looking anew at how we traverse them.

The exhibition introduces many new artists to the Museum and celebrates their Met debut. Works by Santu Mofokeng, François-Xavier Gbré, Luo Yongjin, and others expand and enrich the collection and testify to the dynamic role of the camera in contemporary art making across the globe. Much of their work serves an intermediary role and reflects broader histories of creative work: Delio Jasse reprises the 19th-century cyanotype process to make new views of industrializing Angola, and Aida Silvestri stitches embroidery thread into her prints to chart the perilous migratory paths of Eritrean refugees. In a time-based media presentation, collaborators Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse explore an infamous Johannesburg apartment building as an emblem of apartheid and its aftermath. Artur Walther commissioned their 12-channel slideshow, Windows, Ponte City (2008–11), which appears at The Met in a bespoke installation.

View Finding explores a spectrum of photographic practice, from the formal to the applied. The show features street scenes by Lisette Model and Nobuyoshi Araki, and cool-eyed conceptual projects by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Günther Förg, and Thomas Ruff. The work of these lauded practitioners keeps company with that of emerging artists and endeavors far outside the realm of fine art—among them, views by French and American photographers for hire and NASA dispatches from deep space. Such vernacular materials are a recent focus of The Walther Collection, and their inclusion here testifies to the scope of the medium’s artistic, scientific, and commercial aims.

“When Artur Walther began to acquire photography, he aimed to expand the parameters of the field,” said Virginia McBride, Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs. “In turn, View Finding presents international perspectives on hyperlocal subjects. With inventive eyes, the photographers in View Finding study the sidewalks of Nairobi and storefronts of Fifth Avenue. They search public parks from Tokyo to Tangier. In private bedrooms, parking lots, and other places easy to overlook, they focus in, finding—here and there—unlikely sites of self-reflection and social change.”

Santu Mofokeng (South African, 1956–2020)

Winter in Tembisa, 1991

Gelatin silver print

Image: 14 15/16 × 22 13/16 in. (38 × 58 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation

François-Xavier Gbré (Ivorian, born France, born 1978)

Salle des avocats, Palais de Justice, Cap Manuel, Dakar, 2014

Chromogenic print

Image: 39 3/8 × 59 1/16 in. (100 × 150 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

Promised gift of the Walther Family Foundation

The Walther Collection Overview

The Walther Collection is principally known for its photographs by 20th-century and contemporary artists from across the African continent. Walther conceived the collection to explore how photographers documented the enormous social change that has unfolded over the last century. Highlights include photographs by Santu Mofokeng and Yto Barrada, whose works are shown in View Finding, along with Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé, Samuel Fosso, Zanele Muholi, Lebohang Kganye, and J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere. These and other artists in the collection use the camera to explore shifting roles of identity and interrogate experiences of migration, colonialism, war, and industrialization. The collection holds superb photographs by the most prominent African photographers in South Africa, Namibia, Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Congo, Uganda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Morocco.

The Walther Collection is equally rich in late 20th-century and contemporary photographs and video from China. These works show the widespread adoption of the camera by successive generations of Chinese artists after the Tiananmen Square events of 1989. The photographers respond to transformative changes not only to the urban landscape but also to social relations and everyday life. Notable examples include works by Luo Yongjin and Weng Fen, whose works are presented in View Finding. Other preeminent practitioners include Ai Weiwei, Hai Bo, and Yang Fudong. The collection also includes a significant group of Japanese photographs, with large holdings of works by Nobuyoshi Araki, whose intimate visual diary of Tokyo appears in the exhibition.

Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, active 1959–2007)

Grain Elevators, 1982–2001

15 gelatin silver prints

22.17 x 18.23 x 1.1 in. (56.3 x 46.3 x 2.8 cm), each

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

Promised gift of Artur Walther

Walther first began to build a collection of photographs from his homeland of Germany. A key early acquisition—an outstanding typology by Bernd and Hilla Becher—is featured in View Finding, illustrating a visual framework that would come to shape his subsequent interests. The conceptual legacy of the Bechers runs through the collection and the exhibition.

In 2010, The Walther Collection presented its inaugural exhibition, Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity, organized by the late curator Okwui Enwezor, at its newly designed museum campus in Neu-Ulm, Germany. Since then, the collection has organized nine major thematic and monographic exhibitions at its museum. Several of these exhibitions traveled widely, including to museums in Europe, Mexico, and West Africa. From 2011 to 2021, the Walther Family Foundation also operated The Walther Collection Project Space in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood, introducing photographers from Africa and Asia to American audiences for the first time through solo and thematic exhibitions, public programs, and symposia co-organized with Columbia University and New York University. The collection co-published 20 books with Steidl, all of which have broadened the scholarship about modern and contemporary photography by spotlighting artists who have made a substantial contribution to the history of the medium.

About Artur Walther

Artur Walther began collecting photography in the late 1990s, initially focusing on German modernist photography before expanding to contemporary photography and video. In 2010, he established the Walther Family Foundation. The foundation, which operates a large exhibition space in Neu-Ulm, Germany, presents thematic and monographic exhibitions drawn from the collection’s expansive range of photography and media art, including African, Chinese, Japanese, and European holdings of modern and contemporary works, 19th-century photography from Europe and Africa, and vernacular lens-based artwork from across the globe. Walther is the recipient of the 2016 Trustee Award from the International Center of Photography (ICP) and the 2021 Kulturpreis of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie (DGPh). Born in Neu-Ulm, Germany, he received his MBA from Harvard Business School and was later a partner at Goldman Sachs.

Displays in The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing and Tang Wing

Select works from the promised gift have been integrated into The Met’s reimagined galleries for the Arts of Africa, part of the redesigned Michael C. Rockefeller Wing. Concurrent with View Finding, an inaugural display explores self-portraiture in the work of artists including Seydou Keïta, Zanele Muholi, and Samuel Fosso. In his acclaimed African Spirits series (2008), Fosso pays tribute to heroes of the African diaspora by adopting the personae of Martin Luther King Jr., Tommie Smith, Angela Davis, Patrice Lumumba, Léopold Senghor, and Aimé Césaire, among others.

Works from The Walther Collection will also be featured in the forthcoming Tang Wing, where they will enrich presentations of modern and contemporary art from around the world. Designed by architect Frida Escobedo, the 126,000-square-foot, five-story wing is set to open in 2030, with more than 70,000 square feet for the presentation of art and approximately 18,500 square feet of outdoor space spread across the fourth- and fifth-floor terraces.

View Finding: Selections from The Walther Collection is co-organized by Jeff Rosenheim, Joyce Frank Menschel Curator in Charge, and Virginia McBride, Assistant Curator, both in the Department of Photographs.

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, New York

Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography, Gallery 851

www.metmuseum.org

24/10/25

Richard Misrach @ Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco - 'Rewind' A Retrospective Exhibition

Richard Misrach: Rewind

Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

October 30 – December 20, 2025

RICHARD MISRACH

Self-Portrait, 1975

RICHARD MISRACH

Cargo Ships (January 8, 2025, 7:13 am), 2025

With Richard Misrach: Rewind, Fraenkel Gallery presents a retrospective look at the artist’s career, spanning more than five decades. The exhibition is organized in advance of a full-scale survey of Misrach’s work at museums in the U.S. and Europe, planned for 2027 and 2028. Presented in reverse chronological order, the exhibition ranges from Cargo, Misrach’s newest series exploring the impact of global trade, to Telegraph 3 A.M., his earliest project, documenting street culture in Berkeley, California in the early 1970s. Highlighting ideas and themes that have consistently driven his work, the exhibition presents photographs made with an array of materials and techniques. Using everything from 35mm film to large-scale digital prints, the show traces Misrach’s development across the forefront of the medium. Fraenkel Gallery has shown Misrach’s work since 1985; this is seventeenth exhibition with the gallery.

Whether photographing subjects as disparate as environmental disasters or cloud studies, Misrach has always pursued beauty. “I’ve come to believe that beauty can be a very powerful conveyor of difficult ideas,” says Richard Misrach. “It engages people when they might otherwise look away.” The exhibition begins with a 2025 sunrise view of a freighter ship in the San Francisco Bay, printed at more than 5’ x 6’. Composed in vivid shades of pink, blue, and violet, the image from Cargo addresses the complex economic systems that shape modern life, and their far-reaching consequences. Other seductive but charged images document the U.S.-Mexico border wall, from the series Border Cantos; Louisiana’s highly polluted Cancer Alley, from Petrochemical America; and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, from a series shown here for the first time, 20 years after the storm. Several photographs come from Desert Cantos, Misrach’s long-running series examining humans’ multifaceted relationship with the landscape of the American West.

Since the start of his career, Richard Misrach has moved seamlessly between social concerns and more philosophical, experimental questions. “My work…has been about navigating these two extremes—the political and the aesthetic,” Richard Misrach writes. His first series Telegraph 3 A.M. used a medium format camera on a tripod. Working during the day and at night, Richard Misrach made portraits recording the effects of drugs and poverty in the wake of the Berkeley counterculture movement. In the series that followed, Richard Misrach began photographing in the desert, shooting at night but using a strobe to reveal the otherworldly shapes of cacti and sagebrush. The richly black, split-toned prints he made depict a near-mystical landscape visible only to the camera.

Later series push further into sublime encounters between nature and the camera. Starting in the 1990s, Richard Misrach photographed the Golden Gate Bridge, capturing variations in atmosphere and color that border on abstraction. Working from a single vantage point, Richard Misrach waited for the light and composition to align in front of his camera, an approach he returned to with On the Beach, his study of the ocean’s infinite surface, and most recently with Cargo. Abstraction in nature is also at the center of the series Notations, exploring the surreal hues found in color photographic negatives, digitally rendered. In these images, Richard Misrach inverts the tonalities of clouds or desert scrub brush, creating delicate studies of texture and form.

Richard Misrach (born 1949) has been photographing the American West for more than 50 years. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others. Border Cantos, a collaboration with the composer Guillermo Galindo, opened at the San Jose Museum of Art in California in 2016 and continues to travel throughout the U.S. His work has been featured in more than a dozen books, including Telegraph 3 A.M., Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West, Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach, On the Beach, Destroy This Memory, Petrochemical America, Border Cantos, Blind Spot Folios 001: Nancy Holt & Richard Misrach, On Landscape and Meaning, Notations, and most recently, Cargo. His photographs are held in the collections of major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards including four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

FRAENKEL GALLERY

49 Geary Street, San Francisco, CA 94108

fraenkelgallery.com

22/10/25

Sebastian Errazuriz @ Philadelphia Art Museum - 'Double Take' Mid-career Survey Exhibition

Sebastian Errazuriz: Double Take

Philadelphia Art Museum

November 22, 2025 – August 16, 2026

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Lightning Strike Lamp, 2025

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Chicken Lamp III, 2014

Edition of 12

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

The Represented Self, 2020

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

The Represented Self, 2020

The Philadelphia Art Museum presents Sebastian Errazuriz: Double Take, a mid-career survey by artist and designer Sebastian Errazuriz (b. 1977, Chile). The exhibition explores Errazuriz’s multi-hyphenate practice spanning art, craft, design, and technology, from antiquity-inspired furniture to multimedia work informed by artificial intelligence.

Alongside the exhibition, Sebastian Errazuriz will be honored with the 39th Collab Design Excellence Award. Collab is the museum's affinity group for modern and contemporary design and has celebrated diverse international designers who have made important contributions that advance all disciplines of design. Collab was established in 1986 and presents the award annually. Previous awardees have included Florence Knoll Bassett, Naoto Fukasawa, Zaha Hadid, Ingo Maurer, George Nakashima, Gaetano Pesce, Patricia Urquiola, and Marcel Wanders, among others.

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Magistral Chest, 2014

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Bust Shelf Green Marble, 2018

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Bust Shelf Green Marble (Detail), 2018

Errazuriz’s creative imagination challenges upheld ideas of what design should be and, moreover, asks what it could be. Embracing humor and appropriation, his limited-edition and unique pieces often have a subtext that goes beyond form or function to include personal narratives, political messages, and cultural commentary. While many of Errazuriz’s pieces are functional, his work upends a number of conventions established within the design industry, including the notions that form should follow function, or that materials should be used where most appropriate.

Sebastian Errazuriz: Double Take presents over 20 years of making, including early conceptual works that take nature and existing found objects as sources of inspiration. The exhibition features furniture, mirrors, and other products that the designer creates from appropriated and digitally manipulated Greco-Roman antiquities from museum collections. Also on display will be a range of the designer’s “kinetic” cabinets, defined by their moveable elements. Errazuriz is interested in disrupting the idea that cabinets must consist of a box with two front doors, regardless of their design. Instead, objects in Double Take propose a dynamic way of living with furniture that rotates, spins, and fans out in different directions.

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Piano Shelf, 2014

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

IMAGINE, 2025

A final, monumental installation features a full-wall graphic made up of drawings that Sebastian Errazuriz has created through the use of artificial intelligence. Overlaid is a new work, which spells out the word “IMAGINE” in neon lights, the letters flashing in alternating patterns to alight only “AGI” at certain points. Unlike current AI models which are trained for specific tasks, the concept of AGI, or artificial general intelligence, involves systems possessing human-like cognitive abilities, allowing them to learn new skills, adapt to novel situations, and demonstrate common sense and creativity without explicit pre-programming. This focal point of the exhibition explores Errazuriz’s fascination with, and apprehension about, the potential impact of AI on artists, designers, and culture more broadly.

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Fan Cabinet, 2014

SEBASTIAN ERRAZURIZ

Narcissus Bowl, 2022

“The diverse body of work by Sebastian Errazuriz conveys imagination and cleverness, while also bewildering those who encounter it. The pieces are meant to be lived with, but, at the same time, are provocations. They have an air of mystery around their function and meaning,” said Tiffany Lambert, The Lisa Roberts and David Seltzer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Design. “This survey exemplifies one way to understand and challenge how design can impact our daily lives.”

PHILADELPHIA ART MUSEUM

Alter Gallery (Gallery 276)

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

www.visitpham.org

19/10/25

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is now the Philadelphia Art Museum

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is now the Philadelphia Art Museum

Philadelphia Art Museum

Photo by Rob Cusick

Philadelphia Art Museum

Photo by Rob Cusick

The Philadelphia Museum of Art reintroduced (October 8, 2025) itself to the city, the nation, and the world as the Philadelphia Art Museum.

The museum has unveiled a new brand that places Philadelphia front and center, celebrating the city's grit creativity, and industrial heritage. Developed with Gretel, a nationally renowned branding, strategy, and design studio, the new identity reflects the museum’s transformation into a more engaging and expansive institution.

Philadelphia Art Museum

Photo by Rob Cusick

Philadelphia Art Museum

Photo by Rob Cusick

Every design choice deliberately embraces Philadelphia's independent spirit—from custom typography that merges the museum’s institutional heritage with the city’s visual language to reviving the iconic griffin in the logo as protector of the arts. The new brand identity captures Philadelphia’s vibrant culture, reflecting how art influences everyday life and resonates across the city’s diverse communities. It embodies the mission to bring art into the everyday, making the museum accessible, relevant, and deeply connected to the people it serves.

“The Philadelphia Art Museum has long been the cultural heart of the city, and it’s our duty to maintain that role,” said Sasha Suda, George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Philadelphia Art Museum. “Our focus and vision are unabashedly Philadelphian; we’re opening our doors to become more collaborative and future-focused for all.”

New Philadelphia Art Museum merch

Photo by Rob Cusick

New Philadelphia Art Museum merch

Photo by Rob Cusick

The Philadelphia Art Museum is a local, national, and international treasure that belongs to the city. The rebrand reinforces the museum’s commitment to engaging Philadelphia’s communities and visitors from around the world in dynamic conversations about art and life.

“This project is the result of more than a year of research, collaboration, creative development and iteration,” Ryan Moore, Executive Creative Director and Partner at Gretel, said. “Our main objective was to ‘come down the steps’ by putting the museum in dialogue with its community, which is and always has been the city itself. This new identity reflects the future of the institution: more engaging, more dynamic, and more inviting to new audiences.”

Philadelphia Art Museum

Social Media Social Stickers

PHILADELPHIA ART MUSEUM

2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19130

www.visitpham.org

18/10/25

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective @ MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

October 19, 2025 – February 7, 2026

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

The Museum of Modern Art presents Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective, the first major museum exhibition to fully consider every aspect of the artist’s expansive, groundbreaking practice, on view in the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Center for Special Exhibitions. Coinciding with the centennial of the artist’s birth, the exhibition includes some 300 objects that highlight the core values of experimentation and interconnectedness pervading all dimensions of Asawa’s practice. The retrospective spans the six decades of Asawa’s ambitious career, presenting a range of her work across mediums, including wire sculptures, bronze casts, paper folds, paintings, and a comprehensive body of works on paper. Artworks are accompanied by a rich array of archival materials—photographs, documents, and ephemera—that illuminate her public commissions, art advocacy, and meaningful, lasting relationships with members of her community. The exhibition follows a loose chronological arc, interwoven with thematic sections elaborating on the artist’s inspirations and methods.

“What’s exceptional about Asawa’s practice is the multiplicity of her artistic pursuits and the marvelous ability to turn the simplest things into subjects of lifelong creative contemplation,” said Cara Manes. “The exhibition aims to offer multiple points of entry into her work, reflecting what Asawa described as the ‘total act’ of artmaking.”

Ruth Asawa at Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective View,

San Francisco Museum of Art, 1973

Photograph by Laurence Cuneo

Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) was born in Norwalk, California, and raised on a farm. In the wake of Executive Order 9066 signed in 1942, the teenage Asawa and her family were unlawfully incarcerated in war relocation camps along with thousands of people of Japanese descent. After the end of World War II, Asawa enrolled in the experimental Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, where she explored the artistic possibilities of ordinary materials. There, she developed a technique for looping wire informed by Mexican wire basketry, which she had observed firsthand as a student volunteer in Toluca. This invention would lead to her most consequential contribution to abstract sculpture in the 20th century: a radical body of suspended, intricate looped-wire sculptures. The exhibition begins with a selection of works from her time at Black Mountain College, including explorations of materials, color, and shape in drawings, collages, and prints such as Untitled (BMC.145, BMC Laundry Stamp) (c. 1948–49).

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Ruth Asawa continued her material experimentation in wire and paper following her 1949 move to San Francisco, the city that would be the center of her artistic activities for the rest of her life, and where she established a tightly knit family and community. Shortly after her arrival there, she articulated the key motifs and shapes in her looped wire forms in works like Untitled (S.535, Hanging Five-Lobed Continuous Form within a Form with Spheres in the First and Fourth Lobes and a Teardrop Form in the Third Lobe) (1951), on view in the exhibition. She also expanded her range of techniques in drawing, printmaking, and paperfolding, while taking on various commercial design commissions and exhibiting regularly at the Peridot Gallery in New York. In the early 1960s, Ruth Asawa discovered a new method of working with wire by tying and splaying it in ways that evoke organic structures, as seen in works like Untitled (S.390, Hanging Tied-Wire, Double-Sided, Center-Tied, Multi-Branched Form with Curly Ends) (1963).

Ruth Asawa

Untitled (S.390 Hanging Tied-Wire, Double-Sided, Center-Tied,

Multi-Branched Form with Curly Ends), 1963

Copper wire. 20 × 20 × 20 in. (50.8 × 50.8 × 50.8 cm)

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center,

Gift of Rita Newman

Installation view of Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective

on view at The Museum of Modern Art

from October 19, 2025, through February 7, 2026

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Ruth Asawa

Poppy, 1965

Lithograph. 30 1∕16 × 20 9∕16 in. (76.4 × 52.2 cm)

Publisher and printer: Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles

Edition: proof outside the edition of 20

The Museum of Modern Art, New York,

Gift of Kleiner, Bell & Co., 1967

Ruth Asawa continued to experiment with natural forms during a residency at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1965, where she produced a portfolio of diverse, formally rigorous and experimental prints. Drawing from MoMA’s collection, a concentration of works from this portfolio are included in the exhibition, many of which are on view for the first time.

Parallel to her artistic experimentation, Ruth Asawa dedicated herself to her lifelong quest to integrate arts education and practice. One of Asawa’s most transformative projects was the Alvarado Arts Workshop, which started as a grassroots initiative and grew to a momentous movement that embedded vital arts-education programming in San Francisco Bay Area public school systems. Galleries in the exhibition feature archival material related to Asawa’s civic engagement, teaching practice and numerous collaborative public art projects, including Japanese American Internment Memorial (1994) commissioned by the city of San José. Focus on Asawa’s visionary pedagogy extends to the exhibition’s public programming.

Ruth Asawa

Untitled (PF.293, Bouquet from Anni Albers), early 1990s

Ink on paper. 40 × 26 in. (101.6 × 66 cm)

Private collection

A final gallery in the exhibition highlights the last decades of Asawa’s life, which were marked by a renewed dedication to a daily drawing practice. Ruth Asawa tenderly documented her surroundings, paying particular attention to the botanical forms around her, as seen in works such as Untitled (PF.293, Bouquet from Anni Albers) (early 1990s).

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospectiveis an exhibition partnership between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). The exhibition is organized by Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA and Janet Bishop, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA; with Dominika Tylcz, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA; and Marin Sarvé-Tarr, Assistant Curator, and William Hernández Luege, Curatorial Associate, Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA.

The exhibition was on view at SFMOMA (April 4 – September 2, 2025). After its presentation at MoMA, it will travel to Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (March 20 – September 13, 2026); and Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland (October 18, 2026 – January 24, 2027).

MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

www.moma.org

10/10/25

Il Color Exhibition @ THE POOL NYC, Palazzo Fagnani Ronzoni, Milan - First chapter of the exhibition "Times of the Gaze. 90 Years of Italian Photography in Two Acts"

Il Color

First chapter of the exhibition "Times of the Gaze. 90 Years of Italian Photography in Two Acts"

THE POOL NYC at Palazzo Fagnani Ronzoni, Milan

October 8 – December 20, 2025

Mario Cresci

From the serie A Tutto Tondo, 2007

Vincenzo Castella

Monte San Giacomo Salerno, 1982

THE POOL NYC at Palazzo Fagnani Ronzoni in the heart of Milan's historic center (Via Santa Maria Fulcorina, 20) presents the exhibition Il Colore, the first chapter of the series I tempi dello sguardo. 90 anni di fotografia italiana in due atti (Times of the Gaze. 90 Years of Italian Photography in Two Acts), which features two exhibitions at different but consecutive times, bringing together a total of 194 works by 55 Italian and international artists who have shaped the history of 20th-century photography.

The project's title alludes to the artists' ability to mark an era, a "time" in our history, with their gaze, and at the same time invites us to rediscover the time—away from the excesses of today's visual production—to rediscover the extraordinary talents that have made Italian photography unique, even internationally.

The first event, curated by THE POOL NYC, presents the experiences of those masters who have made the use of color one of their most characteristic features.

Luigi Ghirri

Olanda - Otterlo, 2009

Luigi Ghirri

Parma, 1984

Franco Fontana

Paesaggio - Italia, 1995

The exhibition, comprising 115 photographs, features, among others, works by Luigi Ghirri, master of light and quiet, by Giovanni Chiaramonte who travels to Venice to capture the city's most hidden corners, and by Franco Fontana who shapes the landscape through colour, from the geometric urban visions of the 1970s to the abstract sensuality of the Piscina series, to Italian landscapes transfigured into fields of colour.

Guido Guidi

Pomposa, 1983

Mario Schifano

"Arte istantanea – 3000 fotografie di Mario Schifano"

22 Aprile - 19 Giugno. Foto-n 2403, 1994

Mario Schifano

"Arte istantanea – 3000 fotografie di Mario Schifano"

22 Aprile - 19 Giugno. Foto-n 2413, 1994

The exhibition continues with Guido Guidi who makes photography an act of waiting, with Mario Schifano, irreverent and experimental, who works with the same creative freedom with which he interpreted painting, while Paolo Gioli , the alchemist, although starting from sensitive photographic material, considers it a "material" to be shaped and manipulated.

If on the one hand, Leonardo Genovese captures fragments of dreams through a fierce and revealing light, the Lucanian “controra”, which cuts into bodies and deforms appearances, Rita Lintz, on the other hand, transforms waste into relics: rags become carpets and waste becomes beauty.

Jiang Zhi 蒋志

Rainbow n 2, 2006

The first act of the exhibition is completed with photographs by international artists, including Denis Brihat, Wim Delvoye, Claus Goedicke, Béatrice Helg, John Hilliard, Tracey Moffatt, Jiang Zhi, Wang Qingsong .

During the exhibition period, Palazzo Fagnani Ronzoni hosts a series of collateral events, such as meetings, talks, book presentations, and themed evenings with artists, historians, and photography critics.

Artists : Denis Brihat, Vincenzo Castella, Giovanni Chiaramonte, Mario Cresci, Wim Delvoye, Cosimo Di Leo Ricatto, Franco Fontana, Vittore Fossati, Andrea Galvani, Leonardo Genovese, Luigi Ghirri, Luca Gilli, Paolo Gioli, Claudio Gobbi, Claus Goedicke, Guido Guidi, Béatrice Helg, John Hilliard, Jiang Zhi, Luisa Lambri, Rita Lintz, Marcello Mariana, Tracey Moffatt, Brigitte Niedermair, Wang Qingsong, Mario Schifano, Davide Tranchina, Luigi Veronesi, Cuchi White, Silvio Wolf, Marco Zanta.

The second episode, scheduled from January 16 to February 28, 2026 , will be dedicated to Black and White , with works by authors such as Renato Di Bosso, Alfredo Camisa, Mario De Biasi, Mario Giacomelli, Antonio Biasiucci, Franco Vaccari, Mario Cresci, Luigi Erba, Andrea Galvani, in dialogue with international photographers, including Elliott Erwitt, Jan Groover, Horst P. Horst, Michael Kenna, William Klein, Minor White.

The Pool NYC | Palazzo Fagnani Ronzoni

Via Santa Maria Fulcorina, 20, Milano

www.thepoolnewyorkcity.com