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  • In Its Best Week Since 2021, Sotheby’s Hit $1.173B With a $54.7M Kahlo Finale

    On November 20, Sotheby’s generated a combined total of $304.6 million between the Cindy and Jay Pritzker Collection, Exquisite Corps and Modern Evening sales. Julian Cassady Photography / Ali

    Of the $1.6 billion of art expected to change hands during this year’s November sales, $1.1 billion was secured by Sotheby’s when the evening sales concluded on the 20th. When tallied with the Day sales the following afternoon, the auction house’s fall marquee week sales had generated a total of $1.173 billion—the second-highest total ever after the $1.33 billion achieved in November 2021 at the height of the contemporary and ultracontemporary markets.

    Following the success of the Leonard A. Lauder sale, which delivered a $527.5 million Evening total and a clean 100 percent sold rate for the $3.8 million Day sale offering (est. $3.2 million), Sotheby’s completed a full white-glove, three-sale marathon. It opened with The Cindy and Jay Pritzker Collection Evening Auction, which totaled $109.5 million, followed by the $98.1 million Exquisite Corpus sale and a $97 million Modern Evening auction. Driving many of the lots was strong participation from Asia, which accounted for 30 percent of total bidding, a reminder that Asian collectors respond enthusiastically when true quality comes to market.

    Most importantly, if 2021 belonged to the contemporary and ultracontemporary frenzy, these marquee sales showed a clear pivot. Buyers turned toward art-historical touchstones by the most established names in Modern art or toward figures long overlooked and now undergoing reassessment. Across the November sales, Sotheby’s sold $843 million of Modern works, the highest total ever for the category in a single season. Prestigious provenance and strong storytelling were key in this inaugural auction round at the Breuer building for Sotheby’s, with single-owner collections accounting for 72.5 percent of the week’s total ($828,244,220 of $1.173 billion). And in the contemporary segment, it was the artists with the strongest institutional foundations who rose to the top.

    “After years of uneven seasons, this week’s results demonstrate that the often quoted cliche of the three D’s (death, debt and divorce) powering the art market has never been truer,” Mari-Claudia Jimenéz, partner and co-head of Withers Art & Advisory, confirmed. For the industry’s seasoned expert, the abundance of fresh-to-market, extraordinary-quality estate properties inspired buyers to return with gusto to chase the best-in-class works with impeccable histories.

    Sotheby’s evening marathon on November 20 began with the collection of Chicago’s Cindy and Jay Pritzker, who are best known for founding the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979. The sale immediately set the tone of the night, generating $109.5 million across just 13 works against a pre-sale estimate of $73.5 million to $88.5 million.

    Leading the auction was Vincent van Gogh’s Romans Parisiens (Les Livres jaunes) (1887), a radiant still life from the artist’s Paris period in which a stack of yellow-bound books becomes a portrait of his voracious intellect and humanist curiosity. Boasting an extensive exhibition history, the canvas was pursued for at least seven minutes by five bidders and sold for a record-setting $62.7 million, well above its estimate of around $40 million and setting a new benchmark for any still life by the artist.

    Deep bidding also accompanied the sale of Wassily Kandinsky’s musical watercolor “Ins violett” (Into Violet) from the height of his Bauhaus period, listed as No. 188 in his handlist. Sought by five bidders in a spirited exchange, it more than doubled its high estimate, fetching $2,368,000 (est. $700,000-$1,000,000).

    Other Modern masterworks in the Pritzker collection prompted intense competition. Camille Pissarro’s Bords de l’Oise à Pontoise, dating to the beginning of the artist’s second sojourn in Pontoise in 1872, was pursued by four bidders and achieved $2.5 million against its $1.2-1.8 million estimate. Félix Vallotton’s poetic domestic scene, Femme couchée dormant (Le Sommeil), triggered an animated battle between six collectors on the phones and in the room, pushing it above its $1.8-2.5 million estimate to sell for $2.8 million. The canvas had been acquired by the Pritzkers from Wildenstein & Co., New York, in 1985 and remained with them ever since, as did most lots in the sale.

    Lot 10, the Cubist Nature morte by Fernand Léger, also sparked back-and-forth bidding from five contenders, driving the work to $2,214,000, nearly double its $800,000-$1.2 million estimate. This was followed by a $9,200,000 result for Max Beckmann’s classics-inspired canvas, sought by five bidders, and Joan Miró’s uncanny sculptural reinterpretation La Mère Ubu, which achieved $5,052,000 after a battle between four bidders, landing near the midpoint of its $4-6 million estimate. The bronze had been acquired by the couple in 1980 from legendary dealer Pierre Matisse in New York.

    Another highlight, Henri Matisse’s Léda et le cygne, sold for $10.4 million, meeting its high estimate with fees. One of the very few architectural pieces by the artist—the majority of which are in public spaces or museums—and the first of its kind to appear at auction, the unique work was commissioned in 1943 by Argentine diplomat Marcelo Fernández. Last exhibited publicly during the 1984-85 Matisse exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, it was acquired the following year by the Pritzkers from Feingarten Galleries in Los Angeles. But Paul Gauguin’s La Maison du Pen du, gardeuse de vache from his Nabis period failed to find enough bidders to meet its $6-8 million estimate, selling instead at its reserve for $4,930,000.

    Frida Kahlo’s $54.7 million record

    The evening continued with a section entirely dedicated to Surrealism, as the movement continues to gain momentum, further ignited by the major Surrealist show that has just opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and as its unsettling aesthetic resonates uncannily with the chaos, sentiments and desire to exorcise it that define our time. In only one night, Sotheby’s placed more than $123 million of Surrealist works, the highest total for Surrealist art ever sold in one evening at Sotheby’s.

    A painting by Frida Kahlo shows a woman sleeping in a yellow bed while a skeletal figure lies on a second bed stacked above her against a cloudy sky background.A painting by Frida Kahlo shows a woman sleeping in a yellow bed while a skeletal figure lies on a second bed stacked above her against a cloudy sky background.
    Frida Kahlo’s El sueño (La cama) from 1940 achieved $54.7 million with fees, becoming the most expensive work by a female artist. Sotheby’s

    The dedicated single-owner sale Exquisite Corpus offered works from one of the most distinguished private Surrealist collections, accumulated over four decades, yet kept rigorously unnamed in keeping with the movement’s aura of mystery. Nonetheless, given that many of the lots appeared in the Guggenheim’s 1999 exhibition “Surrealism: Two Private Eyes,” which celebrated the collections of Daniel Filipacchi and record producer Nesuhi Ertegun—who together assembled the most important grouping of Surrealist art in private hands—we can reasonably speculate that the consignor is most likely the Ertegun estate, especially once noticing that several works list in their provenance that they were acquired from the Parisian dealer Daniel Filipacchi, ruling him out as the consignor. Artnews reached the same conclusion, reporting that the 1940 Kahlo was consigned by the estate of Selma Ertegun, who built the collection with her late husband Nesuhi Ertegun. The session closed with a white-glove result of $98.1 million, with 67 percent of works selling above their high estimates.

    The undisputed star of the collection was Frida Kahlo’s masterpiece of mystery and spirituality, El sueño (La cama), which ignited spirited international bidding before hammering at $47 million, or $54.7 million with fees, to Anna Di Stasi, Sotheby’s senior vice president and head of the Latin American art department. The result not only set a new record for the artist but also for any woman artist at auction, surpassing the previous $44.4 million benchmark set by Georgia O’Keeffe in 2014. The mystical canvas had been purchased by the consignor at Sotheby’s in 1980 for $51,000 and remained in the collection since then, marking a return of roughly 107,000 percent.

    Depicting a skeleton floating above the artist as she lies in her bed—herself suspended midair as a fragile terrestrial vessel—Kahlo visualizes what art historian Whitney Chadwick describes as the “Mexican belief in the indivisible unity of life and death.” Considered a key work in Kahlo’s career, where she reached the height of her symbolic and psychological resonance, the canvas boasts a major exhibition history, having appeared in “Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti” (1982-83) at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Haus am Waldsee in Hamburg, Kunstverein Hannover, Kulturhuset Stockholm, New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City. It also featured prominently in the Guggenheim’s 1999 show “Surrealism: Two Private Eyes,” and in the Tate’s landmark Kahlo survey in 2005, which later traveled to the Walker Art Center and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007-08.

    We will see this masterpiece again soon in a slate of upcoming exhibitions, including “Frida y Diego: The Last Dream” at MoMA in New York (March 22-September 7, 2026), “Frida: The Making of an Icon” at Tate Modern in London (June 25, 2026-January 3, 2027), “Frida Kahlo—The Painter” at Fondation Beyeler in Basel (January 31-May 17, 2027), and “The Autonomous Gaze” at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Kunstmuseum Basel, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art and BOZAR Brussels (December 2026–July 2028).

    Another standout of the evening, Salvador Dalí’s jewel-like Symbiose de la tête aux coquillages, captivated several bidders with its hallucinatory power, reaching $4,198,000 (est. $2-3 million) on the phone with an Asian bidder. With a distinguished exhibition history—from the Hayward Gallery’s Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (1978), to Centre Pompidou’s “Salvador Dalí: rétrospective, 1920-1980 (1979-80),” to the Guggenheim’s “Surrealism: Two Private Eyes (1999)”—the work was acquired from Daniel Filipacchi in Paris in 1977 and remained with the consignor ever since, meaning they were also responsible for these museum loans.

    The market for Paul Delvaux also remains strong, with his haunting Composition reaching the high end of its estimate and selling for $3.8 million (est. $2.5-3.5 million).

    Female Surrealists remain a bright spot. First exhibited in 1953 as part of her solo show at Alexander Iolas in 1958 and formerly in the collection of William N Copley, Dorothea Tanning’s otherworldly Interior with Sudden Joy sold for $3.2 million (est. $2-3 million), setting a new record for the artist. Her previous record, Endgame (1944), achieved $2.3 million at Christie’s last May.

    hanting image of women dressed in white dresses in the darknesshanting image of women dressed in white dresses in the darkness
    Dorothea Tanning’s otherworldly Interior with Sudden Joy sold for $3.2 million (est. $2-3 million), setting a new record for the artist. Sotheby’s

    Highly coveted among collectors are the extremely rare paintings on masonite by Remedios Varo. Created shortly after Varo fled war-torn Europe, marking a pivotal shift in the artist’s storied practice, her Sans titre from 1943 approached the million mark after fees, landing at $952,500 (est. $500,000-700,000). Her current record, Revelación, was set last May at Christie’s at $6.22 million, surpassing her earlier $6.19 million record for Armonía (Autorretrato Sugerente) in 2020. Reflecting the growing curatorial effort to decentralize Surrealism beyond Paris, the recent major survey celebrating the movement’s centenary dedicates its final room to a compelling dialogue between Varo and Leonora Carrington.

    Another striking leap came for the French artist, illustrator and long-underrecognized Surrealist insider Valentine Hugo, whose Le Crapaud de Maldoror climbed to $825,555 after seven bidders pushed it far beyond its $150,000-200,000 estimate. And for those who enjoy the footnotes of Surrealist intrigue, the piece dates from the period when Hugo was also romantically entangled with André Breton.

    New attention to Surrealist influences in Latin American modernism also propelled Óscar Domínguez’s La Machine à écrire, which more than doubled its high estimate and sold for $3.7 million (est. $1-1.5 million). More broadly, as institutions work to broaden the canon, overlooked figures outside Surrealism’s Parisian core are gaining the long-overdue recognition they deserve.

    One of them is Austrian-Mexican artist Wolfgang Paalen, a member of Abstraction-Création from 1934 to 1935, who joined the Surrealist movement after relocating to Mexico in 1935 and remained a significant figure until 1942. His revelatory, surreal landscape, Fata Alaska, set a new auction record for the artist at $1,016,000 (est. $350,000-450,000).

    Another double record arrived courtesy of Hans Bellmer, who broke his auction record twice in one night. First, his uncanny gouache Main et Bras achieved $508,000 (est. $100,000-200,000). Then, a rare and intensely erotic oil on canvas—a medium he rarely used, being far better known for his photographs of dolls—nearly reached the million-dollar mark, fetching a record-setting $942,000 (est. $300,000-400,000). “The starting-point of desire, with respect to the intensity of its images, is not in a perceptible whole but in the detail,” Bellmer wrote in his anatomy of image. “The essential point to retain from the monstrous dictionary of analogies/antagonisms which constitute the dictionary of the image is that a given detail, such as a leg, is perceptible, accessible to memory and available, in short, is real.” It is a reflection that perfectly encapsulates the tension between fascination and horror, erotism and violence that animates all his seductive yet unsettling work.

    A $97 million Modern Evening

    The evening concluded with the core offering of the Modern Evening auction, which across its 29 lots generated $97 million, surpassing the pre-sale estimate of $71.1-101.9 million. One of the evening’s most anticipated lots, René Magritte’s Le Jockey Perdu, led the sale, achieving $12.3 million after fees. The exquisite gouache encapsulates Magritte’s signature play with visual paradoxes, maintaining the sense of spatial disorientation and uncanniness—alongside the sly playfulness—that runs through his entire oeuvre. First conceived as a papier collé in 1926, the motif was quickly followed by an oil of the same title, which headlined the artist’s first one-man exhibition in 1927 at Galerie Le Centaure in Brussels. Evidently fascinated by the theme, Magritte returned to the image of the lost jockey in multiple gouaches and oils throughout his career. The work came from the collection of the late real estate magnate Matthew Bucksbaum and his wife Carolyn, whose group of works in the sale brought a combined total of $25.2 million.

    Despite the nearly three-hour marathon, the Modern session opened energetically with Joan Miró’s oil-on-burlap panel, Personnages et oiseau devant le soleil, also from the Bucksbaum Collection. It prompted a dynamic bidding battle between seven contenders, rapidly pushing it far beyond its $400,000-600,000 estimate to land at $2,368,000. The couple had acquired the work in 1998, when it last appeared at Sotheby’s, consigned by Perls Galleries.

    Other top results of the evening included Georgia O’Keeffe’s Large Dark Red Leaves on White, which landed at $7.9 million, just shy of its high estimate. Jean Dubuffet’s Restaurant Rougeit II sat comfortably within its range, selling for $7.5 million. Degas’s pastel of three ballerinas, Trois danseuses, was chased by five bidders and fetched $5.8 million.

    A forest with a man on the horseA forest with a man on the horse
    René Magritte’s Le Jockey Perdu led the Modern Evening sale, achieving $12.3 million after fees. Sotheby’s

    A Modern sale would be incomplete without Monet. One of his famed Impressionistic views, capturing the shifting light around Rouen Cathedral, more than doubled its low estimate, selling for $7.4 million after a lengthy bidding war among six bidders in different geographies. The painting was practically fresh to auction, having remained in the Schlumberger collection for over 60 years, and appeared at auction for the first time last night.

    Another artist who inspired strong interest was Childe Hassam, one of the leading American Impressionists and a central figure in what became known as the “Ten,” the group that broke from the Society of American Artists to champion a more progressive, modern approach at the turn of the 20th century. His Newport, October Sundown from 1901 was fiercely pursued by four bidders, achieving $2,002,000 above a $1.8 million high estimate. The painting came from the Sam and Marilyn Fox Collection, two prominent patrons and civic leaders from the St. Louis region, whose group generated a total of $2.7 million, exceeding its high estimate of $2.4 million.

    As MoMA finally pays overdue tribute to the work of Cuban artist Wifredo Lam with a show that opened earlier this month, his Ídolo (Oyá/Divinité de l’air et de la mort) drew strong attention in the room, selling for $7.4 million and marking the second-highest auction price ever achieved for the artist. The renewed institutional spotlight clearly reinforced market confidence, positioning the canvas as another highlight of the evening and Lam as a name we will likely see rise further at auction in the coming seasons.

    While the Modern section closed with white gloves, several lots still fell below their low estimates. Arthur Garfield Dove’s Rose and Locust Stump, backed by a guarantee and irrevocable bids, sold for $681,000, nearly half its low estimate, despite its extensive exhibition history. Andrew Wyeth’s dark landscape, East Waldoboro, also sold below expectations at $3,588,000 (est. $4-6 million). Jacques Lipchitz’s sculpture Baigneuse assise went for half its low estimate at $381,000, despite its prestigious provenance from the Geri Brawerman Collection, which generated a total of $16.7 million during the night.

    Sotheby’s continued with its day sales on November 21, which delivered an additional aggregated total above $51 million, between the $46,404,999 of the Modern Day Sale and the $4,912,868 for the Exquisite Corpus Day session. Sotheby’s Contemporary day sale, held a few days earlier, generated $111.4 million, the highest total ever for a Day sale at Sotheby’s. The white-glove offering for the Lauder day session brought the total for the Lauder collection to $531.3 million.

    Ultimately, Sotheby’s was the clear winner this round, generating a solid and unequivocally successful $1.173 billion with its Evening and Day sales. Meanwhile, Christie’s fall marquee sales totaled $965 million, while Phillips brought in $92,139,589 across its various sessions. In total, across all three auction houses, the November marquee sales have generated more than $2.2 billion, a number that suggests the market has rediscovered some of its energy. Miami, however, will be the real litmus test of the season, because what we saw in action and at auction this week was only the very top of the market.

    In Its Best Week Since 2021, Sotheby’s Hit $1.173B With a $54.7M Kahlo Finale

    Elisa Carollo

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  • Sphere’s ‘The Wizard of Oz’ Walks an Uneasy Line Between Cinematic Enchantment and A.I. Slop

    A.I. restoration makes landscapes sharper, but it also pushes Dorothy, her friends and especially the extras toward an uncanny smoothness that feels oddly post-human. Photo: Stephen Garrett for Observer

    Anyone unimpressed with Glinda’s newly gifted vehicular spherical globe in Wicked: For Good might follow the Yellow Brick Road to Las Vegas and its own magic bubble. James Dolan’s Sphere, known mainly for hosting live concerts, is currently the home of a wildly distended, dazzlingly supersized and grotesquely manipulated version of 1939’s classic film The Wizard of Oz.

    All the action unfolds on a 160,000-square-foot LED screen with 16K resolution, dominating its viewers with an image over 300 feet high. (IMAX, eat your heart out.) Capacity for the event is 10,000 for each screening, and audiences have been coming in droves since it opened on August 28. The initial run-through, scheduled to end on March 31, has now been extended through May.

    Not quite the cinematic reinterpretation that the pair of Wicked films offer, this newly bedazzled curio—known formally as The Wizard of Oz at Sphere and presented in 4D—is, in its own way, just as subversive, if not downright corny. Brace for a teeth-rattling tornado sequence with actual wind machines blowing debris all around while your haptic seat shakes and quivers! Dodge the Styrofoam apples that fall from the ceiling when the sentient trees throw their fruit at Dorothy! Feel the Great and Powerful Oz thunder his declarations while white flashes and bursts of flames pop around the venue’s perimeter! And are those mannequin-sized drones buzzing overhead doubling as flying monkeys?

    The butchery is undeniable: This Sphere-ified Oz is 75 minutes long, nearly 30 minutes shorter than the beloved classic. Hope you’re not a big fan of the Cowardly Lion, because his song about being the King of the Forest is totally gone. Other nips and tucks include less time with the villainous Almira Gulch, a truncated visit to Professor Marvel, shortened conversations with Glinda the Good, a condensed version of “Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead,” plus abbreviated introductions to the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion.

    A dark, stormy sky hangs over a massive fortress-like castle as a line of uniformed guards marches across a bridge toward its gate, evoking the Wicked Witch’s castle from The Wizard of Oz.A dark, stormy sky hangs over a massive fortress-like castle as a line of uniformed guards marches across a bridge toward its gate, evoking the Wicked Witch’s castle from The Wizard of Oz.
    Sphere’s version heightens every iconic sequence, amplifying the story’s visual drama far beyond the original. Photo: Stephen Garrett for Observer

    But there’s more than enough spectacle to impress. The film is literally expanded in all directions, giving a truly immersive dimension to Hollywood’s adaptation of Frank L. Baum’s fairy tale. You think the Tin Man gets buffed and shined in the Emerald City? This Oz is digitally zhuzhed and A.I.-enhanced beyond belief, with beautifully crisp landscapes and buildings that feel uncannily real.

    Sepia-toned Kansas is even more starkly handsome, with razor-sharp bales of hay, lifelike barnyard chickens and cows and an expansive copper sky overhead. When Dorothy sings about happy little bluebirds in “Over the Rainbow,” one of those chirping warblers is now soaring above to match her upward gaze.

    And when that twister uses its gale-force winds to lift up Dorothy’s house, we’re no longer on the inside looking out; now we’re in the eye of the storm, watching not only the house fly by but also swirling bovines, airborne men in a rowboat and—in an extended version of the iconic sequence—a bicycling Ms. Gulch transformed into the broomstick-riding Wicked Witch of the West. (Look straight up at Sphere’s domed ceiling, by the way, and you can see right out of the tornado’s cylindrical form and notice a perfectly calm circle of sky.)

    One set piece after another amazes. The Yellow Brick Road looks newly-paved in its bright canary hue; the merry old Land of Oz has vast rolling hills and picture-perfect mountains; candy-colored Munchkinland is an absolutely vibrant village; the Haunted Forest has a vividly menacing darkness; And the Emerald City, with extended towers and ornately expanded walls, shimmers in all its Art Deco glory. The Wizard’s vast, dark green Chamber now has a skylight; the Wicked Witch’s castle looms with extra wickedness. And the ruby slippers shine with vibrant intensity. The glammed-up production design is absolutely astounding.

    There’s only one problem, and it’s a big one: the cast. No amount of digital wizardry (yet) can convincingly re-render actual 1939-era actors into a 2025 production. You can only upconvert the visual resolution of the film’s characters so much—completely wiping away the film grain eliminates skin pores, leaving faces eerily smooth and plastic.

    Dorothy and her trio look like they’ve been peeled off the impeccably revivified Yellow Brick Road and then placed back, like sticker-book figurines. There’s a loss of gravity to their movements. At times, they even seem to be floating. Toto, too, with his shock of matted fur, seems digitally fuzzy. And other people have garish enhancements: the Wicked Witch suddenly has a hugely prominent black hair growing out of the mole on her green chin.

    Even worse are the background actors. The main reason why so many scenes were trimmed and cut from the original film wasn’t necessarily to tighten up the running time; it was also to cannibalize the Extras and reinsert them on the left and right sides of the newly extended, digitally enhanced scenery.

    So Munchkinland now has crowds of people standing behind Dorothy, in an A.I.-sweetened loop where they rock back and forth, waving their arms or shifting their weight endlessly in a computer-generated spell that prolongs their screen time. Some of the Extras’ faces look smeared and oddly deformed, due to those same A.I. enhancements. More than a few times, they even stare, with dead-eyed smiles, straight into the camera. It’s deeply unsettling and more than a little distracting.

    A giant projected head with greenish skin and glowing eyes looms over fiery bursts of red smoke, representing the exaggerated Wizard figure in Sphere’s reimagined version of the film.A giant projected head with greenish skin and glowing eyes looms over fiery bursts of red smoke, representing the exaggerated Wizard figure in Sphere’s reimagined version of the film.
    A.I. augmentation brings new clarity and scale to the film’s world, even as it introduces uncanny distortions. Photo: Stephen Garrett for Observer

    Intriguingly, many scenes have less editing in them: instead of cutting between the Tin Man’s solo dance and a shot of Dorothy and the Scarecrow watching him, for example, all three of them now share the same enormous frame—the Tin Man in the middle, Dorothy and the Scarecrow on the right. Thanks again to A.I., the Tin Man’s entire dance routine is seamless. But now Dorothy and the Scarecrow’s sight lines don’t match. Dorothy actually looks a bit bored, and seems to be staring off into the distance.

    Worst of all is how A.I. has compromised the film’s emotionally poignant climax. In the original film, when Dorothy says goodbye to her companions, the camera fills the frame with them one at a time for each tender farewell. At Sphere, all three stand in a row, waiting for Dorothy to talk to them. Weirdly, each one is slightly out of focus—and each only comes into focus once Dorothy starts to talk to them. When she stops talking to them, they stop emoting and go back out of focus. Then, like the Extras, each one goes into a powered-down mode, shifting back and forth as though in a trance.

    As an example of cutting-edge technology used to turn a national cultural treasure into a gloriously kinetic thrill ride, The Wizard of Oz at Sphere is certainly great and powerful. As a tool for enhancing the power of human connection through storytelling, it needs to keep waving its magic wands. We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore, but we still have a long way to go before we get to Oz.

    Sphere’s ‘The Wizard of Oz’ Walks an Uneasy Line Between Cinematic Enchantment and A.I. Slop

    Stephen Garrett

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  • Manhattan’s Jewel Box Celebrates 95 Sparkling Years

    New York’s grande dame, The Pierre, knows how to throw a soirée. Last night, the elegant Taj Hotel celebrated 95 years as a beacon of Upper East Side glamour with a ‘Red Diamond’ gala that brought together residents, diplomats, stars and influencers for an unforgettable evening of vintage Manhattan magic.

    Nearly 500 guests, from silver-haired luminaries to fresh-faced Gen Z tastemakers, donned black tie finery to toast The Pierre’s storied history in its famous ballroom. Sipping champagne beneath glittering chandeliers, partygoers were transported to a more gracious era, when the hotel played host to everyone from Elizabeth Taylor and Aristotle Onassis to Audrey Hepburn.

    The entertainment was a love letter to old New York: A Marilyn Monroe impersonator cooed while Deanna First sketched partygoers and professional ballroom dancers swirled across the stage in a swish of satin and sequins. Historic treasures, like archival photos and a $195,000 0.6-carat pink diamond, were displayed without fanfare (or security).

    Getty Images Deanna First.

    But while the gala paid homage to The Pierre’s glamorous past, the crowd reflected its vibrant present. Among those spotted in the sea of tuxedos and gowns: hotel residents, foreign dignitaries, reality TV stars, Instagram celebrities and even the odd baby or two nestled in couture-clad arms. The evening proved that after nearly a century, The Pierre can still create indelible Manhattan moments.

    Courtesy of Lola Tash Lola Tash and Jessica Wang.

    “I was transported back to the galas of the Gilded Age,” Lola Tash told Observer. The Canadian actress and brains behind the satirical, relatable meme account My Therapist Says was “reminded once more why New York is magical.”

    Getty Images Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe.

    “The Pierre is my American Home away from home,” Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe told Observer. His godmother lived in The Pierre, the prince said, noting “the happiest of my memories are right here” and calling the historic property “the hotel love of my life.”

    Courtesy of Grace Aki Grace Aki.

    Experiencing the hotel’s cinematic history firsthand was a highlight for Grace Aki. The gallery of treasures glowing behind glass displays made the night “all the more special,” Aki told Observer.

    “Like stepping into history,” was how Viola Manuela Ceccarini described the event. “The elegance, the legacy and the energy in the room—witnessing generations of excellence converge under that red diamond, a symbol of timeless prestige and the enduring spirit of New York.”

    Courtesy of Lori Altermann The star of the show poses with Lori Altermann.

    “Everywhere I turn, I see New York’s elite—beautiful celebrities and even Marilyn Monroe!” quipped Lori Altermann. “The fashion, the food, the hotel—everything is fabulous!” Altermann told Observer. “It’s a celebration of luxury,” said Namani Shqipe.

    Getty Images A Rolls-Royce awaits.
    Getty Images Guests enjoyed ice-cold Grey Goose Altius.
    Getty Images
    Getty Images Monica Danae Ricketts.
    Getty Images Evie Evangelo.
    Getty Images
    Getty Images Daria Matkova.
    Getty Images ‘Queen of Versailles’ Jackie Siegel.
    Getty Images Lorna Luft and Jill Martin.
    Getty Images Ramona Singer.
    Getty Images Andy Yu.
    Getty Images Sara Fivessi.
    Getty Images Kate Saucedo and Dymond Veve.
    Getty Images

    Merin Curotto

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  • A Juvenile Triceratops and Francis Bacon Heat Up Phillips’s $67.3 Million Evening Sale

    Phillips’s New York Evening Sale closed at $67.3 million—a 24 percent increase from last November. Photo: Jean Bourbon

    The auction results of the past few years have confirmed it: dinosaurs are on trend. And not just as prehistoric relics or tools of scientific inquiry, but as symbols of timelessness and taste. More and more, fossil skeletons are being treated as investments—something that is, in some cases, more emotionally and symbolically resonant than contemporary art with which it might share the auction block. Is it the return of Jurassic Park? Or perhaps simply that most of us are captivated by dinosaurs in childhood? In any case, as nostalgia increasingly drives purchasing decisions across collectibles markets, dinos are unquestionably riding the wave.

    Phillips has been strategically attuned to this shift—likely thanks to a younger cohort of specialists in its ranks. Instead of competing head-to-head with Sotheby’s and Christie’s single-owner sale narratives, the house has leaned into a different storytelling and marketing strategy, enhancing the symbolic power of artworks not through tales of glamorous collectors but by connecting the works to deep time.

    Last night, CERA—a juvenile Triceratops skeleton dated to 66 million years ago and the first of its species ever to appear at auction—fetched $5,377,000 in the Out of This World auction (a specially curated section of the house’s November Modern & Contemporary sales). While that figure may seem modest when measured against the marquee masterpieces of the season, spirited bidding pushed it far beyond its $2,500,000-3,500,000 estimate and confirmed demand for this type of collectible. It also brought Phillips an audience that may never have engaged with the auction house otherwise; representatives confirmed that the skeleton sold to a private American collector new to the house, though global interest had poured in ahead of the sale from both private buyers and international institutions.

    According to Miety Heiden, Phillips’ chairman for private sales, the result is a powerful testament to collectors’ evolving tastes. “More than ever, we’re seeing a desire for works that spark curiosity and transcend traditional categories. People are looking for objects that bring wonder and dialogue into a collection,” she said. “This result underscores the appetite for rare and extraordinary pieces that challenge convention and expand the boundaries of what collecting can be.”

    At this year’s Frieze Masters—the only segment of the global brand typically reserved for million-dollar modernist and Old Masters works—two of the opening day’s first sales were paleontological. David Aaron placed a Triceratops head from the Late Cretaceous (circa 68 million years ago) within the first hour, followed later by a complete saber-toothed Nimravidae skeleton from the Oligocene (circa 33.7-23.8 million years ago), which sold for a strong six-figure sum. And no one has forgotten the Stegosaurus Apex, which shattered records at Sotheby’s in July 2024, hammering at $44.6 million—more than seven times its $4-6 million estimate—to billionaire Ken Griffin.

    Phillips’s Evening Sale on November 19 achieved $67,307,850 across 33 lots, with a robust 94 percent sold by lot (only two passed) and 97 percent sold by value. It was a strong result, particularly considering the momentum already shown by Sotheby’s and Christie’s earlier in the week.

    Leaving behind the cutting-edge but highly speculative ultra-contemporary works that once dominated its auction offerings, the evening’s turnout—up 24 percent from last November—was driven by a pairing of institutionally recognized blue-chip artists of the past century with recent market consolidations, presented for the first time alongside natural history highlights under the Out of This World label. The top lot was the highly anticipated Francis Bacon Study for Head of Isabel Rawsthorne and George Dyer (1967), which sold for $16,015,000—neatly within its $13-18 million estimate. Just after came Joan Mitchell’s monumental Untitled (1957-1958), a densely gestural canopy of color from her New York years, which brought in $14,290,000.

    Another high-profile lot, Jackson Pollock’s dynamic 1947 work on paper, sold for $3,486,000—just below its high estimate. Mark Tansey’s Revelever (2012) sparked a competitive seven-minute bidding war that carried it to $4,645,000 against its $2,500,000-3,500,000 estimate. The hypnotic, conceptually loaded composition creates an optical push-pull that immerses viewers in a moment of driving toward a mountainous horizon, almost tasting the crisp air in its ultramarine haze.

    Meanwhile, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Exercise (1984), a loosely composed, surreal tangle of hallucination and paint, achieved $3,852,000 after a $3-4 million estimate. Another Basquiat from 1982 followed close behind, selling for $1,225,500. Camille Pissarro’s late Impressionist Le pré et la maison d’Éragny, femme jardinant, printemps (1901) surpassed its high estimate, closing at $1,900,000. Max Ernst’s Dans les rues d’Athènes (1960) doubled its expectations with a $1,534,000 result, riding the continued momentum for Surrealism. Rising Colombian artist Olga de Amaral also saw strong results. Her luminous golden textile Alquimia 62 (1987) soared to $748,200, well above its $300,000-500,000 estimate. A few lots later, a red composition from the same series met its estimate midpoint, hammering at $516,000.

    Firelei Báez set a new auction record—if only briefly. Her Daughter of Revolutions brought in $645,000 over a $300,000-500,000 estimate before being surpassed by a $1,111,250 result at Christie’s later that evening.

    Women artists once again delivered some of the evening’s most compelling results. Amid growing recognition for Alma Thomas, her Untitled collage from 1968—a blueprint for her signature mosaic-like abstractions—sold for $477,300 over a $250,000-350,000 estimate. Ruth Asawa’s Untitled (S.230, Hanging Single-Lobed, Five-Layered Continuous Form within a Form) opened the sale with a burst of energy, doubling its $400,000-600,000 estimate to achieve $1,006,200 as her MoMA retrospective opened. Others performed well too: a Martha Jungwirth fetched $516,000 (estimate $200,000-300,000), and Lucy Bull’s Light Rain (2019) exceeded its high estimate at $490,200.

    One of the night’s more surprising passed lots was a vivid 2022 abstraction by record-setting enfant prodige Jadé Fadojutimi, whose $800,000-1,200,000 estimate may have been too ambitious. Also unsold, despite its uniqueness and luxuriousness, was The Thunderbolt, the longest gold nugget ever discovered. Weighing 3,565 grams and measuring 50 centimeters, the 114.6-troy-ounce gold formation was estimated at $1.25-1.5 million but failed to find a buyer. Dug up by accident at Hogan’s Find in Western Australia, the rare natural formation was revealed by sheer chance.

    According to Robert Manley, Phillips’s chairman for modern and contemporary art, the success of the evening was due in part to the house’s new priority bidding system, which helped secure early commitments and interest on most lots. That contributed to 91 percent of works selling within or above estimate. “The enthusiasm was made especially clear by the fact that we had 27 times the number of early selling bids for this sale as we had last November, partly a result of our introduction of Priority Bidding,” he told Observer. The results, he said, confirmed not only the enduring draw of blue-chip artists but also the market’s resilience and ongoing global demand. “With strong participation from collectors worldwide and competitive bidding across Impressionist, Postwar, Contemporary and Natural History offerings, tonight’s outcome reaffirms confidence in the long-term strength of this market.”

    A Juvenile Triceratops and Francis Bacon Heat Up Phillips’s $67.3 Million Evening Sale

    Elisa Carollo

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  • The Top Collections (and Their Top Lots) Headlining the $1.6 Billion November Sales

    The collection of Robert F. Weis and Patricia G. Ross Weis has an estimate in excess of $180 million. Christie’s

    The November marquee sales in New York are among the most anticipated events on the global art calendar and the final litmus test of the market’s health after the London and Paris fairs and auctions. Leading the $1.6 billion New York auction week this November is a concentration of high-end, big-name collections, as single-owner sales have become an increasingly important tool for auction houses to secure major consignments and build momentum around a notable name and provenance. “A well-known individual definitely drives interest,” Elizabeth Siegel, vice president and head of private and iconic collections at Christie’s, told Observer.

    Over the past decade these types of sales have accounted for 15.6 percent of total value, according to ArtTactic, reaching a peak of 31.3 percent in 2022 with the Paul G. Allen Collection. In the first 10 months of 2025 they continued to outperform with white gloves and records, reaching 18.5 percent of global auction value. In the final week of November in New York alone, single-owner sales are estimated at $706.8 million of total auction value. “A single-owner sale totally elevates prices. It gives them a real boost,” Lisa Dennison, chairman of Sotheby’s Americas, confirmed.

    As New York’s fall auctions approach, here is a breakdown of the most anticipated collections set to appear as single-owner sales or within the marquee offerings, along with the top lots that have made headlines in the months leading up to this pivotal week for the art market.

    The Leonard A. Lauder Collection at Sotheby’s

    Klimt’s dazzling full-length portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, her figure shimmering against a dreamscape of Asian-inspired motifs and ornamental splendor.Klimt’s dazzling full-length portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, her figure shimmering against a dreamscape of Asian-inspired motifs and ornamental splendor.
    Gustav Klimt, Porträt der Elisabeth Lederer (Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer), 1914-16. Estimate in excess of $150 million. Courtesy of Sotheby’s

    The $400 million Leonard A. Lauder: Collector sale on November 18 is one of the most anticipated auctions of the season, with Sotheby’s presenting a 24-lot evening sale at its new Breuer Building headquarters. Following Lauder’s passing last June, both Christie’s and Sotheby’s reportedly competed to secure what is considered one of the year’s most important consignments. Sotheby’s ultimately won the mandate, securing 55 masterworks from one of America’s great collectors and philanthropists, longtime Whitney patron Leonard A. Lauder, which will be split between the dedicated evening sale and a day session the following morning.

    The undisputed star of the sale is Gustav Klimt’s Porträt der Elisabeth Lederer, estimated in excess of $150 million and poised to surpass the artist’s current auction record of $108.8 million (£85.3 million), also set at Sotheby’s with Dame mit Fächer (Lady with Fan) in London in 2023. Executed between 1914 and 1916, the portrait is among Klimt’s most refined full-length depictions, portraying the young Elisabeth Lederer, daughter of two of his greatest patrons. It epitomizes Vienna’s Golden Age, a moment when youth, beauty, color and ornamental splendor merged into a vision of pure elegance, while also revealing the influence of fin-de-siècle exoticism. The composition’s flattened perspective and sinuous lines echo Japonaiserie and Chinoiserie, visible in the Asian-inspired motifs floating around Lederer’s Poiret-style gown, a nod to Klimt’s fascination with Chinese and Japanese art and textiles. Confiscated by the Zentralstelle für Denkmalschutz in 1939 and restituted to the Lederer heirs in 1946, the painting was later acquired from the family by Serge Sabarsky, an early advocate of German and Austrian modernism in the United States, before entering Lauder’s collection in the mid-1980s.

    Other exceptional Klimts in the sale are Blumenwiese (Blooming Meadow) (1908), an exquisite example of the artist’s floral-period landscapes with an estimate in excess of $80 million, and Waldhag bei Unterach am Attersee (Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee) (1916), a depiction of an undisturbed lakeside idyll that reveals Klimt’s growing affinity with Van Gogh’s expressive brushwork, estimated in excess of $70 million. The number and high-quality works by artists from the Vienna Secession in the collection can be attributed to Leonard A. Lauder’s connection with his brother Ronald S. Lauder, one of the most notable collectors of the movement and co-founder and president of the Neue Galerie in New York. Both were sons of Estée and Joseph Lauder, founders of The Estée Lauder Companies.

    Additional highlights include an emotionally charged, psychologically complex Edvard Munch, Sankthansnatt (Johannisnacht) (Midsummer Night) (1901-03), estimated at $20 million, six bronzes by Henri Matisse expected to realize a combined $30 million and an immaculate graphite grid by Agnes Martin, The Garden, exemplifying her mastery of geometric precision and meditative restraint.


    The Collection of Robert F. and Patricia G. Ross Weis at Christie’s

    Bright abstract yellow orange and red paintingBright abstract yellow orange and red painting
    Rothko’s No. 31 (Yellow Stripe), 1958. Estimate on request, in the region of $50 million.

    Over more than 50 years, Patricia G. Ross Weis and Robert F. Weis assembled a collection that reflected not only the evolution of 20th-century art between Paris and New York but also the life journey they shared. The 18-lot single-owner Collection of Robert F. and Patricia G. Ross Weis sale on November 17 is expected to generate between $92.35 million and $136.7 million, accounting for more than half of the collection’s total estimated value of $180 million, which includes another 80 works that will be distributed across additional auctions and categories.

    The top lot is a vibrant yellow-and-orange Mark Rothko painted in 1958, the same year the artist completed his monumental murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan’s Seagram Building. Acquired by the couple from PaceWildenstein in 1995, the work boasts an extensive exhibition history, including its inclusion in the important AbEx show the Beyeler Foundation staged in 1989. Estimated at around $50 million and backed by a third-party guarantee, the canvas stands as one of Rothko’s most powerful expressions of American abstraction, its layered chromatic fields pulsing with contained, tormented energy and sublime atmospheric depth.

    Another star lot in the collection is Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red and Blue (estimate: $20-30 million), signed and dated “PM 39-41.” This rare-to-auction painting belongs to the artist’s transatlantic period, as Mondrian began it in Europe and completed it in New York between 1939 and 1941. Its distinguished exhibition history includes “Mondrian: Nature to Abstraction” at the Tate in 1997. The work exemplifies Mondrian’s rigorous balance of line, color and luminous white ground, an essential yet conceptually intricate dialogue at the heart of his practice.

    Other anticipated works include an early Fauvist landscape by Georges Braque, Henri Matisse’s lyrical Figure et bouquet (Tête ocre) from his Nice period (estimate: $15-25 million), and Pablo Picasso’s La Lecture (Marie-Thérèse), a portrait of his muse estimated in the region of $40 million. Another exemplary work, one that justifies the sale title “A Tale Between Two Cities,” is the bold gestural abyssal composition Pierre Soulages painted in Peinture 161 x 200 cm, 14 novembre 1958, offered at $5-7 million, which resonates with the essential black marks on a white ground in Franz Kline’s Placidia from 1961 (estimate: $10-15 million).

    Robert F. Weis made his fortune as chairman of Weis Markets Inc., a family-run food company founded in 1912 in rural Pennsylvania, where the couple lived. A lifelong learner and avid reader, he developed a deep appreciation for art. Patricia Weis, born in New York City, shared his passion for art, architecture and design, an interest first sparked by an uncle in the fashion industry. She began collecting after meeting Lucie Rie and Hans Coper on a trip to London. Together, the pair became prominent philanthropists supporting educational, cultural, civic and medical institutions: Patricia served on the boards of Bard College and Franklin & Marshall College, while Robert was a Sterling Fellow at Yale University and sat on its Committee on Buildings and Grounds. They also championed Jewish causes and supported the Lown Cardiovascular Research Foundation, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the Metropolitan Opera.

    The Cindy and Jay Pritzker Collection at Sotheby’s

    Van Gogh’s Romans Parisiens (Les Livres jaunes) hangs in an ornate frame above a stone mantel, flanked by blue-and-white vases, with bookshelves framing the scene.Van Gogh’s Romans Parisiens (Les Livres jaunes) hangs in an ornate frame above a stone mantel, flanked by blue-and-white vases, with bookshelves framing the scene.
    A $40 million Vincent van Gogh, Romans Parisiens (Les Livres jaunes), leads this Sotheby’s sale. Photo: Michael Tropea | Courtesy of Sotheby’s

    The other major consignment Sotheby’s has secured for November is the Cindy and Jay Pritzker Collection, which is expected to generate a total in excess of $120 million. Known for founding the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979—often called the “Nobel of architecture”—the Chicago-based couple extended their devotion to creative excellence beyond the built environment, assembling a collection that reflects the breadth and rigor of their cultural philanthropy.

    Headlining the November 20 Cindy and Jay Pritzker Collection sale, which immediately precedes Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction at 7:30 p.m., is Vincent van Gogh’s Romans Parisiens (Les Livres jaunes) (1887), a radiant still life from the artist’s Paris period in which a stack of yellow-bound books becomes a portrait of his voracious intellect. Estimated at $40 million, the painting was acquired by the Pritzkers in 1994 through Richard L. Feigen & Co. and boasts an extensive literature and exhibition history spanning major institutions across Europe and the United States, including the show “Van Gogh à Paris” at the Musée d’Orsay (1988), “Vincent van Gogh Paintings” at the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam (1990), and “Vincent van Gogh and the Modern Movement, 1890-1914” at Museum Folkwang, Essen, and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (1990-91). The work last appeared publicly in “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South” at the Art Institute of Chicago (2001-02), “The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2010), and “Van Gogh’s Bedrooms” at the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). The preparatory painting for this canvas is held in the Van Gogh Museum’s permanent collection.

    Comparing the present work to Piles of French Novels in the Van Gogh Museum, scholars have described it as particularly revealing of the artist’s stylistic transition. If the earlier study, flatter in tone and more monochromatic, reflects his fascination with Japanese prints through its block-like composition and restrained palette, the painting in the Pritzker Collection reintroduces depth and vitality through rhythmic dashes and loose strokes of the Neo-Impressionist style Van Gogh adopted in his final Paris months.

    Among the other highlights of the sale are Henri Matisse’s sensuous triptych Léda et le cygne (1944-46), estimated at $7-10 million, and Paul Gauguin’s La Maison de Pen du, gardeuse de vache (1889), painted during his Pont-Aven period and carrying a $6-8 million estimate. Additional highlights include Max Beckmann’s Der Wels (Catfish) ($5-7 million), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Hallesches Tor, Berlin (1913, $3-5 million), a large-scale outdoor sculpture by Joan Miró ($4-6 million), and a lyrical Camille Pissarro landscape from his second Pontoise period ($1.2-1.8 million).

    The breadth of the Pritzker holdings will extend beyond the November sale, with further lots offered next month in Sotheby’s Books and Manuscripts, Sculpture and Works of Art, Chinese Works of Art, and Design auctions. Together, the ensemble is expected to bring tens of millions of dollars across multiple sales.

    The Elaine Wynn Collection at Christie’s

    Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park #40, an abstract composition of intersecting geometric planes in turquoise, ochre, and coral hues, evoking the light and structure of the California coast.Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park #40, an abstract composition of intersecting geometric planes in turquoise, ochre, and coral hues, evoking the light and structure of the California coast.
    Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #40 (1971). Estimate: $15-25 million. Christie’s

    Christie’s also secured the remarkable collection of Elaine Wynn, the late philanthropist and “Queen of Las Vegas,” who passed away this April. Celebrated for her discerning eye and the remarkable assemblage she built both alongside and independently of her former husband, casino magnate Steve Wynn, her estate is estimated at over $75 million. Nine of the top works will be featured in the 20th Century Evening Sale on November 17, two in the 21st Century Evening Sale on November 19, with the remainder to follow in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale.

    The highlights from her collection span centuries and movements yet share the same standard of excellence that defined Wynn’s collecting ethos. On the Modern side, the top lot is Richard Diebenkorn’s transcendent Ocean Park #40, which will be offered in the 20th Century Evening Sale with an estimate of $15-25 million. The work returns to the rostrum just as Gagosian announces its representation of the Diebenkorn estate and inaugurates a dedicated exhibition at its Upper East Side gallery. Wynn acquired the painting at Sotheby’s in 2021, when it achieved a then-record $27.3 million. Diebenkorn’s auction record now stands at $46.4 million, set by his 1965 Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad at Christie’s New York in November 2023, placing the current estimate well within range yet poised to surpass it amid renewed market attention following Gagosian’s endorsement. Before its last sale, Ocean Park #40 was featured in the traveling museum exhibition dedicated to the series at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Orange County Museum of Art (2011-2012), as well as Acquavella Galleries’ 2018 show pairing Diebenkorn’s California scenes with those of Wayne Thiebaud.

    Other top lots include J.M.W. Turner’s poetic Ehrenbreitstein (estimate: $12-18 million) and a refined Parisian scene by Georges Seurat. On the postwar side, headline works are Lucian Freud’s late self-portrait (estimate: $15-25 million) and Joan Mitchell’s sunflower-hued explosion of color and gesture (estimate: $12-18 million).

    The Edlis|Neeson Collection at Christie’s


    Interior view of the Edlis|Neeson Collection featuring works by Andy Warhol, including The Last Supper in yellow and black on the left wall and Skull in pink and green on the right. A Patina-inspired diptych by Rudolf Stingel hangs between them above a polished Art Deco cabinet, with small bronze animal sculptures displayed below. The highly reflective surface of the central table mirrors the surrounding artworks, enhancing the room’s sleek, modern atmosphere.Interior view of the Edlis|Neeson Collection featuring works by Andy Warhol, including The Last Supper in yellow and black on the left wall and Skull in pink and green on the right. A Patina-inspired diptych by Rudolf Stingel hangs between them above a polished Art Deco cabinet, with small bronze animal sculptures displayed below. The highly reflective surface of the central table mirrors the surrounding artworks, enhancing the room’s sleek, modern atmosphere.
    More than 40 groundbreaking works of art and design from Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson’s Chicago residence will go on the block. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, ARS 2025; © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025; © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025; © Jeff Koons; © Richard Prince; © Ron Mueck; Diego Giacometti © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © Michael Tropea

    Also presented as part of Christie’s 44-lot 21st Century Evening Sale on November 19, the Edlis|Neeson Collection is described by the auction house as a rare example of a carefully curated ensemble of postwar icons that together trace the evolution of modern and contemporary art. Austrian-born American collector and philanthropist Stefan Edlis and his life partner Gael Neeson began assembling their collection in the 1970s, gradually filling their landmark apartment on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile with works that James Rondeau, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, once called “one of the most important collections of modern and contemporary art in existence.” In 2015, the couple donated 44 works to the Art Institute, a gift the museum described as transformative. Born in Vienna in 1925, Stefan Edlis fled Nazi-occupied Austria for the U.S. in 1941 and later founded Apollo Plastics Corporation. In 1974, he met Gael Neeson, and together they began a lifelong pursuit of art collecting, mentored by Chicago collector Gerald Elliot. Their first major acquisition, Piet Mondrian’s Large Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow (1977), marked the beginning of a collection that evolved toward Pop, Conceptual and contemporary art, featuring icons like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, as well as a later generation similarly engaged with Pop and mass culture, including Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Ugo Rondinone.

    One of the top lots is Ed Ruscha’s How Do You Do?, coming to auction amid strong market momentum for the artist following MoMA’s major retrospective last year. Part of Ruscha’s coveted mountain series, this laconic phrase floats diagonally rather than horizontally, suspended over a meticulously rendered alpine landscape, each ridge and summit bathed in deep blue light. Acquired directly from Gagosian in 2004 and shown that same year in the Aspen Art Museum’s Ed Ruscha: Mountain Paintings, the work makes its auction debut with an estimate of $5-7 million, secured by a third-party guarantee.

    Another highlight is Andy Warhol’s The Last Supper (Yellow) (1986), acquired from Gagosian in 2002 and now estimated at $6-8 million, also backed by a guarantee from Christie’s. The auction house describes it as the culmination of Warhol’s career, a meditation on the dualities of mass media and mortality. Created just a month before his death and first exhibited in Milan’s Palazzo delle Stelline, directly across from Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, the series was Warhol’s way of “making Leonardo exciting again.” The work reflects his lifelong fascination with the iconography of images, their power, repetition and eventual loss of aura through mass reproduction. As more than 3,000 visitors attended the Milan show, The Last Supper came to embody Warhol’s own final self-reflection, a farewell from the artist who became as famous and as mythic as the masters he reinterpreted.

    Also featured in the sale are Warhol’s Skull (estimate: $800,000-1.2 million), which will open the Evening Sale, and his Oxidation Painting (Diptych) (1978), acquired from Skarstedt Gallery in 2017 (estimate: $900,000-1.2 million, guaranteed). Other highlights include a Diego Giacometti bronze table (estimate: $3-5 million), Richard Prince’s Double Nurse (estimate: $3-5 million), and Jeff Koons’s Gazing Ball (Courbet Sleep) (estimate: $600,000-800,000), acquired from Gagosian in 2015. The sale also includes works by Cindy Sherman, George Condo, Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselmann, alongside two Giacometti library tables.

    Perhaps the most provocative work from the collection, although not for sale, is Maurizio Cattelan’s Him (2001), which will be viewable by request during the November pre-sale exhibition, a haunting reminder of the collection’s daring and thought-provoking spirit.

    The Max N. Berry Collections at Christie’s

    A rough-textured bronze bust of a man with a gaunt, elongated face and hollow eyes, emerging from a heavily worked base that blurs into his shoulders.A rough-textured bronze bust of a man with a gaunt, elongated face and hollow eyes, emerging from a heavily worked base that blurs into his shoulders.
    Alberto Giacometti, Buste d’homme (Diego), conceived in 1959/cast in 1960-1961. Bronze with brown patina, height: 15.3/4 in. (40 cm.), estimate $5-8 million. Courtesy of Christie’s

    Debuting in the 20th Century Evening Sale this November, the collection of connoisseur Max Berry brings to auction one of the season’s most wide-ranging and valuable encyclopedic consignments. Spanning more than 30 categories, the collection, which is expected to generate tens of millions of dollars across several years of sales, reflects Berry’s lifetime of passionate and discerning collecting, driven more by curiosity than by market fashion.

    Among the top lots hitting the rostrum during the November marquee evening sale is Calder’s Acrobats (1929), a seminal wire sculpture estimated at $5-7 million. Composed of two delicately balanced figures mounted on a wooden base, the piece dates to the artist’s pivotal Paris years when he began transforming his toy-maker’s ingenuity into formal sculptural language. Acrobats is directly linked to Calder’s famed Cirque Calder (1926-31), the hand-built miniature circus that anticipated his lifelong fascination with movement and performance. Its appearance at auction coincides with the Whitney Museum’s centennial tribute “High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100.”

    Also included in the sale is Berry’s Alexander Calder Untitled (1938), a rare yellow hanging mobile estimated at $1.5-2 million. Evoking the artist’s childlike sense of wonder, the sculpture’s continuous motion, no matter how still the air, epitomizes Calder’s mastery of balance, rhythm and levity. Completing the lineup of modern masters from the collection are Giacometti’s Buste d’homme (Diego), a bronze portrait of the artist’s brother, cast and signed 2/6 with an estimate of $5-8 million, and his still life Nature morte (1938), estimated at $1.5-2 million, a testament to the artist’s existential and essential synthesis of form and psychological depth.

    Additional works from Berry’s collection, including Judaica, American art and Chinese art, will be offered in stages through 2027, underscoring both the scope and scholarly depth of a lifetime spent collecting with intellect, passion and humanity. As Berry told Observer in a recent interview, his ultimate wish is that the works are enjoyed, whether by private collectors or in institutions. “It will be wonderful if a museum acquires some of them and makes them public, where they can sit alongside other objects of a similar nature to tell the story of their artistry and their times.”

    The Schlumberger Collection at Sotheby’s

    Claude Monet’s Vue de Rouen depuis la côte Sainte-Catherine, an Impressionist landscape painted in luminous tones of lilac, rose, and gold, depicting the Rouen Cathedral emerging softly through mist at sunset.Claude Monet’s Vue de Rouen depuis la côte Sainte-Catherine, an Impressionist landscape painted in luminous tones of lilac, rose, and gold, depicting the Rouen Cathedral emerging softly through mist at sunset.
    Claude Monet, Vue de Rouen depuis la côte Sainte-Catherine, 1892. Sotheby’s

    Similarly eclectic is the Schlumberger Collection, which Sotheby’s secured for this season. It debuted in Paris during their Surrealism and Its Legacy auction, with additional lots now scheduled to appear in New York during the Modern Evening Auction on November 20 and Modern Day Auction on November 21. Further works will be in the Important Design, Fine Jewelry and Fine Books & Manuscripts sales held between November and December 2025. This singular ensemble, bridging centuries of art and design and reflecting the legacy of one of Europe’s great industrial and cultural dynasties, was founded by brothers Conrad and Marcel Schlumberger, whose pioneering work in geophysics revolutionized the energy industry. The family also became renowned for its refined patronage of the arts. That legacy continued through Marcel’s daughter, Anne Schlumberger, whose discerning eye was shaped by her lifelong engagement with Surrealism, architecture and design.

    Among the works coming from the collection is Claude Monet’s Vue de Rouen, a luminous and atmospheric canvas painted at the dawn of his famed cathedral series and set to be one of the top lots in Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction. Fresh to the block with an estimate of $3,000,000-4,000,000, this iconic Monet embodies a pure luminous atmosphere as the artist focuses on the transitory phenomenology of light and color, reaching a level of abstraction close to raw sensorial perception before any codification or formalization. The other highlight of the collection is François-Xavier Lalanne’s Hippopotame Bar (1976), a pièce unique and the first and only example the artist created in copper, serving as the prototype for his later bronze editions.

    Property from the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art at Christie’s

    Claude Monet’s Nymphéas (1907), a luminous vertical depiction of waterlilies at Giverny, where sunlight ripples across the pond’s reflective surface in soft tones of green, violet, and gold.Claude Monet’s Nymphéas (1907), a luminous vertical depiction of waterlilies at Giverny, where sunlight ripples across the pond’s reflective surface in soft tones of green, violet, and gold.
    Claude Monet, Nymphéas. Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 29 in. (92 x 73.6 cm.). Christie’s

    Christie’s added another major institutional consignment to its marquee sales with the Property from the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art collection. The museum, long celebrated for its distinguished holdings of Western art, is deaccessioning eight masterpieces by some of the most significant names in Impressionism and Modernism. Presented as a dedicated group in the 20th Century Evening Sale on November 17, with further works to follow in the Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale and the Post-War & Contemporary Art Day Sale, the offering marks a pivotal moment in the museum’s history.

    For more than three decades, the works resided in Kawamura’s purpose-built museum near Tokyo, where they brought international visitors face-to-face with the great masters of modern art. Following its closure in March 2025, the institution announced plans to divest around 280 works through auctions and private sales, aiming to raise at least ¥10 billion (approximately $68 million).

    Leading Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale from the museum’s collection is Claude Monet’s Nymphéas (1907), one of the artist’s most dazzling depictions of his Giverny waterlily pond, estimated at $40-60 million. Acquired in 1970 from the Estate of Albert J. Dreitzer through Sotheby’s, the painting has been a cornerstone of Kawamura’s galleries ever since, its vertical composition capturing the pond’s luminous surface in an almost abstract symphony of reflection and light.

    Other highlights include Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Jeune femme arrangeant des fleurs (estimate: $8-12 million), Marc Chagall’s Le Rêve de Paris (estimate: $4-6 million) and Henri Matisse’s Femme au chapeau bleu (estimate: $3-5 million), which will also be offered in the 20th Century Evening Sale.

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  • Onassis ONX Celebrates Five Years of Bridging Art and Technology With a New Space

    After five years in the Olympic Tower, this hub for artists merging X.R., A.I. and performance is set to move to Tribeca. Photo by Ed Lefkowicz.

    Launched in 2020 by the Onassis Foundation and NEW INC, the incubator of the New Museum, Onassis ONX Studio has evolved into one of New York’s leading hubs for artists working at the intersection of extended reality (X.R.), A.I. and performance. Closely connected to Onassis Stegi in Athens, the two organizations form a dynamic international channel for creative exchange within the broader Onassis Foundation ecosystem. In New York, Onassis ONX provides an accessible acceleration space for ambitious productions, while at Onassis Stegi—founded in 2010—the focus is on education and professional development, nurturing a rapidly expanding arts-and-technology scene. Rooted in Greece’s long tradition of theater and dramaturgy, this has inspired compelling intersections of theater, dance and technology.

    To mark its fifth anniversary, Onassis ONX has announced its relocation from its original venue in the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue, just above the Onassis Foundation’s U.S. headquarters, to an expanded 6,000-square-foot space in the heart of Tribeca at 390 Broadway, which also houses PPOW and Matthew Brown Gallery. Set to open in January, the new facility will continue to operate as a hybrid residency, research lab and production studio, offering additional space for exhibitions and public programming that extend the reach of the work developed within the organization.

    The new studio includes a motion-capture stage twice the size of the previous one, a three-wall seamless projection room designed for museum-scale installations and an expanded sound studio—four times larger than the original—equipped with a high-fidelity system for immersive sonic environments. It also features enhanced computational infrastructure, including a new server array designed to support A.I. and generative media.

    A visitor stands in a green-lit room facing large dual projections filled with vivid neon outlines of faces and geometric patterns, creating an immersive and otherworldly digital environment.A visitor stands in a green-lit room facing large dual projections filled with vivid neon outlines of faces and geometric patterns, creating an immersive and otherworldly digital environment.
    Onassis ONX is the Onassis Foundation’s global platform for digital culture, championing artists who push the boundaries of new media through the creation, exhibition and circulation of immersive, technology-driven works. Photo: Mikhail Mishin

    “It’s been amazing to see how much interest, focus and support for art and technology has expanded in New York City and around the world,” Jazia Hammoudi, program director of Onassis ONX, told Observer ahead of the announcement. “It’s been a long journey for many of us, but witnessing this evolution now feels incredibly rewarding.”

    Created as an arm of Onassis Culture—the cultural branch of Greece’s leading philanthropic organization, which has championed “aid, progress and development” since 1975—ONX quickly became central to the foundation’s mission as a cultural innovator and supporter of contemporary art. From the outset, the foundation has operated from a deeply humanist perspective, Hammoudi explained. “It’s an organization that takes its lead from artists rather than dictating from the top down, continually looking to understand what’s actually happening across the cultural and intellectual landscape. It’s about paying close attention to what artists and audiences are thinking about, interested in and in need of. That same responsiveness to artistic and technological innovation is what inspired the foundation’s expansion in both New York and Athens.”

    At its core, ONX is first and foremost an accelerator. Its foundation lies in the production space, tools and technical consultation it provides—but beyond that, it functions as an aesthetic and intellectual incubator. “We offer extensive creative consultation and curatorial support to artists, so they’re not only producing work here but also developing its conceptual and public trajectory,” Hammoudi added. “An artist can come to ONX, build their work and we’ll help them find the right platform for it—whether that’s a festival, an exhibition within our own programs in New York or Athens, or through one of our partner institutions.” Onassis ONX also helps artists secure additional funding, either through internal seed grants and commissions or through its global network of partners.

    A man observes an installation of stacked CRT monitors displaying synchronized video portraits, illuminated by intersecting red light bars against a black gallery wall.A man observes an installation of stacked CRT monitors displaying synchronized video portraits, illuminated by intersecting red light bars against a black gallery wall.
    “Tribeca Immersive” is the Tribeca Festival section co-produced by Onassis ONX. AI Ego | Photographer: Mikhail Mishin

    Since its founding, ONX has supported an impressive roster of artists and collectives redefining the intersection of performance and technology, including LaJuné McMillian, Peter Burr, Stephanie Dinkins, Sutu (Stuart Campbell) and Jayson Musson. Projects developed at ONX often blur the boundaries between theater, gaming environments, installation and live performance—echoing the Onassis Foundation’s broader mission to explore the future of culture and human experience through technology.

    “Our goal is to provide holistic support for artists working in new media because we recognize that many traditional museums and cultural institutions weren’t designed to meet their needs,” Hammoudi said. “Our work is twofold: to provide artists with the resources and infrastructure they need and to help institutions evolve into what 21st-century creativity actually looks like.”

    ONX currently supports about 85 member artists worldwide who have full access to production facilities, seed grants, funding opportunities, internal open calls and ongoing staff consultation. This membership model ensures long-term, sustained support for artists working in new media. “We know that this kind of work takes time—and often requires many different minds and kinds of intelligence to bring to completion,” Hammoudi explained. “As advocates and field builders, we see these ongoing relationships with artists as essential to the growth and vitality of the field itself.”

    The new space will also enable the organization to deepen and expand its global partnerships. As part of its mission as a field builder, Onassis ONX collaborates with international partners to develop residencies, exchange programs, fellowships, exhibitions, funding initiatives and distribution channels.

    An overhead view of an installation featuring a glowing horizontal screen framed by soil and wooden branches, projecting the silhouette of a human figure intertwined with digital circuitry patterns.An overhead view of an installation featuring a glowing horizontal screen framed by soil and wooden branches, projecting the silhouette of a human figure intertwined with digital circuitry patterns.
    Onassis ONX supports artists and creative teams through capacity-building programs, research and incubation initiatives, acceleration services, seed funding, exhibitions, fellowships and collaborative partnerships The Power Loom | Photographer: Mikhail Mishin

    For example, Onassis ONX is a partner on Lincoln Center’s Collider Fellowship, runs a residency exchange with MIT’s Open Documentary Lab and maintains a core partnership with NEW INC, where artists track work within the ONX space. Looking ahead, Hammoudi said the goal is to continue expanding these partnerships to support a growing cohort of artists. “It’s important for us to maintain a deep, ongoing connection with our 85 member artists while also creating ways to offer short-term, project-based support to those who come to us with a specific challenge or need. This expansion allows us to do both.”

    Notions of hybrid identity beyond biological, mythological and digital limits

    Inaugurating Onassis ONX’s new space will be “TECHNE: Homecoming,” an exhibition uniting six visionary artists whose multimedia installations explore hybrid identity shaped through biological, mythological and digital kinships. “The show reflects our belief that technology can deepen the ways we connect—with one another, with our histories and with the stories we choose to tell about the future,” Hammoudi said.

    The artist lineup embodies the kind of interdisciplinary, cross-knowledge collaboration the foundation has long supported, featuring works that range from Andrew Thomas Huang’s two-channel video installation and sculptural environment—rooted in a Buddhist folktale and informed by his collaborations with Björk and FKA Twigs—to Tamiko Thiel’s Atmos Sphaerae, a video installation tracing Earth’s atmospheric evolution from primordial void to Anthropocene through a poetic translation of molecular data into visual form that collapses conventional timescales. Meanwhile, Damara Inglês’s “phygital” installation reimagines the afterlife of Queen Nzinga of Angola through the lens of Cyber-Kimbandism, merging Bantu cosmology, A.I. and 3D design to position technology as both a spiritual conduit for ancestral connection and a tool of anti-colonial resistance.

    A surreal digital forest scene featuring a humanoid figure crouched near a vividly colored animal resembling a feline, both rendered in iridescent tones amid glowing trees.A surreal digital forest scene featuring a humanoid figure crouched near a vividly colored animal resembling a feline, both rendered in iridescent tones amid glowing trees.
    Miriam Simun, Contact Zone (Level 2), 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Onassis ONX

    In a similar spirit, Natalia Manta’s looping animations, digital tombs and hybrid sculptures oscillate between the archaeological and the alien, provoking transhistorical reflections on human time across geographies and collective memory. Sister Sylvester presents Drinking Brecht, an experimental work of automated theater and performance-as-installation that functions as a Marxist-feminist laboratory. Finally, Miriam Simun’s generative three-channel projection Contact Zone Level 2 brings the Swiss Alps into collision with the artist’s own intestines beneath an A.I.’s gaze, continuously reconfiguring to explore the symbiosis between organic and artificial life—a visionary intersection of nature, technology and consciousness beyond human perception. “Technology becomes the mediator for this imagining, allowing a hybrid being—a new chimera—to emerge between nature and self. It’s a wild and deeply thought-provoking work,” Hammoudi said.

    In each case, technology enables artists to construct more expansive worlds around their practice, extending the reach of their bodies and presence while dissolving the traditional genre boundaries that once defined art-making. “Those old taxonomies—this artist does that, that one does this—are becoming almost irrelevant,” Hammoudi noted, emphasizing that many of these works use digital tools not as spectacle but as instruments for expanding how we sense, perceive and experience reality—or move beyond its human limits.

    A long table of participants lit by warm lamps engage in a live performance or workshop, with projected black-and-white visuals of hands and the words “Follow Instructions” on the screen behind them.A long table of participants lit by warm lamps engage in a live performance or workshop, with projected black-and-white visuals of hands and the words “Follow Instructions” on the screen behind them.
    An installation view of Sister Sylvester‘s Drinking Brecht (2024). Courtesy of the artist and Onassis ONX.

    The exhibition will be part of the annual Under the Radar Festival, which this year includes two Onassis ONX performances—We Have No Need of Other Worlds (We Need Mirrors) by Graham Sack and ¡Harken! by Modesto Flako Jimenez—as well as MAMI, a mainstage production conceived and directed by Mario Banushi and commissioned by Onassis Stegi. Together, these works underscore the foundation’s multifaceted support for artists working at the intersection of performance and new technology—an ever-expanding field as creators increasingly experiment with digital embodiment, exploring performance, the shifting boundaries between analog and digital and what it means for the body to exist in real time and space within contemporary digital culture.

    Balancing studio production and public programming

    Looking ahead, Onassis ONX will continue to balance its mission of providing a dedicated workspace for artists with a growing commitment to public engagement. Beginning in 2026, ONX will host two in-studio exhibitions each year—one in January and another in the fall—along with quarterly public programs developed in collaboration with organizations such as NEW INC, Pioneer Works, Rhizome and Lincoln Center. The foundation also plans to continue its major annual off-site exhibition each June, following last year’s presentation at Tribeca Immersive. “This model allows us to keep the studio primarily a development space while maintaining a consistent public presence through exhibitions and thought-leadership events announced on our website and newsletter,” Hammoudi said.

    A visitor moves through an indoor installation resembling a lush, overgrown meadow filled with tall grasses and wildflowers, integrating natural elements with digital and video art components.A visitor moves through an indoor installation resembling a lush, overgrown meadow filled with tall grasses and wildflowers, integrating natural elements with digital and video art components.
    The move from Midtown to Tribeca doubles the studio’s square footage and puts Onassis ONX at the center of downtown New York’s dynamic contemporary scene. There Goes Nikki | Photographer: Mikhail Mishin

    In Athens, the focus remains educational, with ongoing incubation programs such as ONX Futures and the annual A.I. Summer School each July. The Athens space will also present an ONX showcase in May and contribute to the foundation’s broader cultural calendar, which includes the Borderline Festival in April. The foundation also produces Plásmata, its large-scale digital art biennial in Pedion tou Areos Park. Held every two years, it is one of the few outdoor digital art biennials in the world, combining large-scale installations, performances and music with works by both Greek and international artists, including recent participants such as John Fitzgerald, Jiabao Li, William Kentridge and Johan Bourgeois.

    Ultimately, ONX’s mission—across both New York and Athens—is to expand the understanding of art and technology not only as mediums but as frameworks for examining how we live today. As traditional genres continue to dissolve, the foundation remains committed to supporting artists working at these frontiers, where art and life increasingly intersect.

    Audience members sit in a dark theater watching a panoramic multi-channel projection of black-and-white portraits overlaid with animated purple roses and subtitles, blending personal memory with digital imagery.Audience members sit in a dark theater watching a panoramic multi-channel projection of black-and-white portraits overlaid with animated purple roses and subtitles, blending personal memory with digital imagery.
    “TECHNE: Homecoming” is presented as part of Under the Radar Festival, which this year includes two Onassis ONX performances and one mainstage production commissioned and produced by Onassis Stegi. Photo by Ed Lefkowicz

    Onassis ONX Celebrates Five Years of Bridging Art and Technology With a New Space

    Elisa Carollo

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  • Meet the Collectors: Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu Share the Passion and Vision Behind Magazzino Italian Art

    “Arte Povera” at Magazzino Italian Art in Cold Spring, New York. Photo by Marco Anelli/Tommaso Sacconi

    Nancy Olnick might never have dedicated herself to Italian art without meeting Giorgio Spanu and Spanu might never have entered the world of art collecting—or reconnected with his homeland—if it weren’t for Olnick. Had the two not come together around this shared passion for art and culture, Magazzino Italian Art would likely not exist. Since its founding in 2017, the institution has become the leading U.S. platform for Italian art and a catalyst for its study and appreciation worldwide.

    To learn more about their collecting journey and the institution’s history, we met the two collectors and patrons on a late-autumn day in Cold Spring, where Magazzino rises from the luxuriant Hudson Valley landscape. The clear, geometric volumes of Miguel Quismondo’s redesigned warehouse and the Robert Olnick Pavilion, created by Quismondo with Alberto Campo Baeza, stand in striking contrast to the surrounding greenery.

    Since they met 32 years ago, Olnick and Spanu have shared a passionate journey in collecting—one that has accompanied their relationship and ultimately led to the creation of Magazzino. Olnick describes this journey as “very organic for their life.”

    Five individuals stand together in a white gallery space beneath a wall text reading “STAND HERE YOU ARE ART,” with one person elevated on a wooden pedestal.Five individuals stand together in a white gallery space beneath a wall text reading “STAND HERE YOU ARE ART,” with one person elevated on a wooden pedestal.
    (l. to r.) Magazzino Italian Art director Adam Sheffer; Rosalia Pasqualina di Marineo of Fondazione Piero Manzoni; Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, cofounders of Magazzino; and Nicola Lucchi, the museum’s director of research and education. Alexa Hoyer

    From the start, collecting for Olnick and Spanu was about more than simply buying and possessing. It has been a process—one that began with learning and naturally evolved into sharing their passion with others. “For us, it is much less about possessing than it is about engaging and educating—that’s what motivates us,” Olnick tells Observer.

    From day one, Olnick and Spanu set a rule never to purchase anything before educating themselves. “We learn, we collect and we’ve been gathering books and research materials for as long as we’ve been collecting art,” Olnick explains. “That’s what made it interesting: it wasn’t just about acquiring, it was about learning. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

    The expansion of Magazzino Italian Art with the new Robert Olnick Pavilion was driven largely by a desire to move beyond merely displaying part of their collection—focused primarily on Arte Povera—in the existing 11,000-square-foot L-shaped warehouse. Their goal was to integrate exhibitions with educational and public programming, just as they had always envisioned for the museum and to advance their mission of fostering appreciation for Italian art and culture while making a tangible impact on the local community.

    As Spanu explains while guiding us through the new building, before they even began designing it, they made one thing clear to the architect: two dedicated spaces, one for research and one for education, had to be part of the project.

    Magazzino now houses a Research Center with a library of more than 5,000 volumes on Italian art and culture. This hub serves scholars, students and curators studying Italian art in an international context and is complemented by a fellowship and research program dedicated to postwar and contemporary Italian art—particularly Arte Povera, a movement still largely underappreciated internationally despite the relevance of its ideas and practices today, as evidenced by last year’s exhibition at Pinault Collection’s Bourse de Commerce.

    Aerial view of Magazzino Italian Art showcasing the expanded Robert Olnick Pavilion, a minimalist concrete complex set amid the green Hudson Valley landscape.Aerial view of Magazzino Italian Art showcasing the expanded Robert Olnick Pavilion, a minimalist concrete complex set amid the green Hudson Valley landscape.
    Magazzino Italian Art completed its Robert Olnick Pavilion expansion in 2023. Photo by William Mulvihill

    The local response has been enthusiastic, particularly among schools that lack such opportunities across the river and in nearby communities. What Magazzino offers is entirely free, driven by Olnick and Spanu’s commitment to expanding cultural access and creating opportunities for the community—especially for underserved schools in the surrounding area.

    “We have the town of Philipstown and some of the surrounding communities coming here to learn how to do art-centered object teaching,” explains Spanu, gesturing toward works in the classroom. “Those programs have been oversubscribed with waitlists, so we now have two of those coming up, so that our program can become part of the curriculum on a regular basis.”

    This focus on education and research has profoundly reshaped not only the museum’s mission and local impact but also its internal structure. Previously, Magazzino had a single director overseeing programming and operations for the warehouse, with only limited external initiatives beyond the Arte Povera collection on view. Last September, however, Magazzino announced a new leadership team to guide its growth, naming Adam Sheffer as director, Paola Mura as artistic director, Monica Eisner as chief operating officer and Nicola Lucchi as director of education at the Germano Celant Research Center.

    The creation of the education center also made room for a new lower-floor design gallery. “From the beginning, I wanted to expand our mission to include Italian design,” Spanu explains, introducing us to the work of Japanese-born, Venice-based glass artist Yoichi Ohira, currently on view in the space. Long overlooked but collected for years by the couple, Ohira developed a distinctive aesthetic that merges Japanese ceramic traditions with Venetian Murano glass mastery.

    The couple has followed Ohira’s work since 1996 and he was among the first artists they collected as part of their extensive Murano glass holdings, which began around 1992. Over the years, they have assembled one of the most comprehensive collections of works by Murano-based artists and designers, focusing on contemporary reinterpretations of glass rather than traditional Murano production.

    Dark-walled gallery displaying rows of illuminated glass vessels in various shapes and vibrant colors arranged along two perpendicular shelves.Dark-walled gallery displaying rows of illuminated glass vessels in various shapes and vibrant colors arranged along two perpendicular shelves.
    “Yoichi Ohira: Japan in Murano” at Magazzino Italian Art. © Marco Anelli/Tommaso Sacconi

    The couple began seriously collecting Murano glass after visiting a major exhibition dedicated to it in Venice during one of their trips to Italy. Olnick had just started to take an interest, occasionally browsing postwar Murano glass in New York—particularly pieces from the 1950s that had made their way to the U.S. after the war. Then a serendipitous moment changed the course of their collecting: on a flight to Milan in 1992, they spotted a small notice in an in-flight magazine about a show in Venice at Fondazione Cini Stampalia. They decided to make a detour, and the experience opened their eyes to the artistic depth and diversity of Murano glass.

    They began collecting in earnest between 1993 and 1994, when they gained access to an important trove that would become the heart of their collection. “I was pregnant. I still remember—it was February 1994, and we suddenly had access to an existing collection of glass that had been put together by an American,” Olnick recalls. Through a chance phone call with a friend, she learned that a warehouse in the Hamptons held an entire collection of Murano glass that had just become available. She and Spanu, guided by friends from the Barovier family, visited and found themselves “like kids in a candy store,” discovering what turned out to be the collection of Muriel Karasick. With her New York gallery, Karasick had introduced Murano glass to American collectors and artists alike. “Warhol used to go to her store. She was also a photographer and had started a great collection of Mapplethorpe. In fact, Mapplethorpe started collecting Murano glass thanks to Muriel, who showed it to him for the first time,” Olnick explains. Acquiring that group of works marked the true beginning of their deep engagement with glass.

    In 2003, their glass collection was presented at the Museum of Arts and Design—then still the American Craft Museum—in New York. “The show happened just organically,” recounts Olnick. A friend from high school called her after decades, saying she had seen some glass they had loaned to Montreal and wanted to organize an exhibition of their collection. “We had never even thought of it as a collection—you know, it was just things we liked. We never had that mentality of being ‘collectors,’” Olnick admits. She recalls how, on opening night, she turned to Giorgio and asked, “Who do you think is going to come see this?” “It was packed,” she says. “It reminds me of when we first opened in Cold Spring. That first day, I thought, ‘Who is going to come all the way to Cold Spring to see Arte Povera?’ Well, at first it was slow, but now people from all over come to visit.”

    Gallery view showing several abstract mixed-media wall pieces composed of woven fibers and wood in warm earthy tones.Gallery view showing several abstract mixed-media wall pieces composed of woven fibers and wood in warm earthy tones.
    Cinema in Piazza is Magazzino Italian Art’s annual film series, held in the museum’s “piazza.” hoto by Alexa Hoyer. Courtesy Magazzino Italian Art.

    Most importantly, the show resulted in a catalog—now in its second edition—that remains one of the few publications to map and examine this vital side of Italian design, exploring its connections with international creators and the dialogue between tradition and contemporary innovation. “That book became the beginning—not only of collecting together, but of realizing that as much as we were showing this work to teach others, we were also teaching ourselves,” Olnick reflects. Publishing catalogs alongside each exhibition has since become a core part of Magazzino’s mission.

    The story of how the couple assembled one of the most significant collections of Italian art unfolded in much the same organic way—not from a fixed plan, but from curiosity, chance encounters and a shared willingness to follow their passion wherever it led.

    Before Olnick met Giorgio, she was collecting American Pop Art. “I was born and raised in New York, so Pop Art was my era, my environment,” she reflects. Yet as an avid reader and lifelong art lover, she was also, as she puts it, an Italophile. “That was always part of me—just as you asked how I started. But Italy pulled me in. I went as often as I could, immersing myself in the music, the food and the culture,” she explains.

    Portrait of Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu standing together in front of a concrete wall, dressed in black.Portrait of Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu standing together in front of a concrete wall, dressed in black.
    Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, cofounders of Magazzino Italian Art. Photo by Marco Anelli.

    After marrying, the couple moved with their daughter to Rome for a few years, eager to learn more about Italian culture and its contemporary artists. Through friends, Spanu and Olnick met Sauro Bocchi, a gallerist deeply connected to Rome’s artistic circles, who introduced them to postwar Italian art and, in particular, Arte Povera. As the couple recalled in a post on Magazzino’s website announcing his passing, “Bocchi didn’t want to follow trends and gave an opportunity to many women artists such as Giosetta Fioroni, Cloti Ricciardi, Lisa Montessori and Maria Lai, which was not easy at the time.” When they asked him where to begin learning about Arte Povera, he advised, “Go to Torino, go to Castello di Rivoli and then come back and we’ll talk.”

    As Olnick remembers, it was an Arte Povera exhibition curated by Rudi Fuchs, the celebrated curator from the Stedelijk. “We walked around like people walk around Magazzino now—completely taken aback. We went back to Rome and sat down with Sauro. He asked us what we liked and we said, ‘We liked everything.’”

    Spanu admits that without Nancy, he might never have embraced Italian art. Having spent more than a decade in Paris working in communications and marketing, he was steeped in the art of the great Parisian avant-garde and pioneering postwar movements. “She’s the one who brought me back to Italy,” Spanu says. “I was very much a Francophile. My love was for Klee, Dubuffet, Picasso, Matisse. I really didn’t know much about contemporary Italian art—probably less than Nancy.”

    Together, the couple began to study, visit galleries, ask questions and learn. Another of their earliest mentors was gallerist Mario Pieroni, who played a fundamental role in shaping their taste and collection. From him, they acquired their first six Arte Povera works—one each from the key members of the movement still alive at the time. They soon developed close relationships with several of the artists but have recently watched with sadness as many of them have passed away, often without receiving the international recognition they deserve. This has made their mission feel even more urgent, deepening their commitment to preserving and honoring these legacies.

    Still, Spanu and Olnick remain intent on broadening their mission beyond a singular focus on Arte Povera, dedicating themselves to the reassessment and proper presentation of other figures in Italian postwar and contemporary art—as seen most recently in their thoughtful surveys of Maria Lai and Lucio Pozzi. At the same time, they are eager to revive their program for on-site commissions by younger Italian artists.

    The couple admits they came late to acquiring works by other postwar Italian masters such as Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, whose pieces they collected when possible, though they often couldn’t afford the most significant ones.

    A contemporary gallery space features a long wall timeline marked with years from 1958 to the early 1960s, glass display cases, and a white cube-like structure with a glowing yellow interior. One monochromatic artwork hangs on the far wall.A contemporary gallery space features a long wall timeline marked with years from 1958 to the early 1960s, glass display cases, and a white cube-like structure with a glowing yellow interior. One monochromatic artwork hangs on the far wall.
    “Piero Manzoni: Total Space” presents a focused exploration of one of the most radical artists of the postwar avant-garde in Italy. Photo Credit: Alexa Hoyer

    The couple was recently recognized for their dedication with a major gift of two significant works by Piero Manzoni, donated under a joint decision by the artist’s foundation and Hauser & Wirth. The works are two room-size immersive environments conceived but never realized by Manzoni in 1961, shortly before his death at age 29. Far ahead of his time, Manzoni envisioned immersive installations decades before the idea of “immersive art” entered mainstream discourse. These environments represent the culmination of his radical exploration of the “dematerialization of art,” paired with an emphasis on the viewer’s experience and co-creation, serving as a sharp critique of authorship and the commodification of art.

    These visionary projects by Manzoni first moved from concept to reality for his 2019 museum-quality exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s New York and Los Angeles galleries. Afterward, they went into storage—until now, when they found their ideal permanent home at Magazzino Italian Art. “She felt Magazzino was the perfect place to receive these works, to keep them alive and to ensure they could one day be shared again,” says Magazzino’s director, Adam Sheffer. “She did not expect us to move so quickly.” In fact, Magazzino responded that they intended to stage a show in September. The foundation initially assumed she meant 2026, but Sheffer clarified it would be September 2025—just six weeks away. Despite the ambitious timeline, there was a shared determination to make it happen.

    Two minimalist monochromatic artworks hang on a white gallery wall. The piece on the left features textured white paint on a rectangular canvas with a gray border, while the one on the right consists of horizontal folds or ridges on a white surface.Two minimalist monochromatic artworks hang on a white gallery wall. The piece on the left features textured white paint on a rectangular canvas with a gray border, while the one on the right consists of horizontal folds or ridges on a white surface.
    Piero Manzoni’s Achrome, 1958 (left) and his Achrome, 1958-59 (right), on view in “Piero Manzoni: Total Space.” Photo Credit: Alexa Hoyer

    To honor and celebrate this major donation, Magazzino Italian Art is presenting “Piero Manzoni: Total Space,” on view through March 23. The exhibition reintroduces these visionary installations to the public, alongside exceptional examples of his Achromes from the late 1950s on loan from American collections. As Manzoni conceived them, one room is filled with light, immersing the viewer in an experience of pure dematerialization, transience and disorientation; the other is completely dark, its walls covered in fur, heightening the viewer’s physical awareness and sensory engagement. To contemporary audiences, both installations seem to anticipate—decades ahead of their time—the complexities of our relationship with the virtual and the tangible.

    A woman in a black top and purple skirt walks through a small, enclosed room bathed in vivid green light, her figure blurred slightly in motion.A woman in a black top and purple skirt walks through a small, enclosed room bathed in vivid green light, her figure blurred slightly in motion.
    At the center of the current show are two immersive environments conceived by Piero Manzoni in 1961: the Stanza fosforescente (Phosphorescent Room) and the Stanza pelosa (Hairy Room). hoto Credit: Alexa Hoyer

    Meet the Collectors: Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu Share the Passion and Vision Behind Magazzino Italian Art

    Elisa Carollo

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  • At Salon Art + Design 2025, Innovation, Form and Function Meet Market Enthusiasm

    Salon Art + Design’s 14th edition runs through Monday, November 10, 2025. Miguel McSongwe/BFA.com

    Beautifully curated and seamlessly uniting art and design, Salon Art + Design 2025 unfolded once again within the grand setting of the Park Avenue Armory, offering a natural elegance few fairs achieve. It’s an event that never feels forced or overly eclectic; here, 50 global exhibitors assembled a calibrated and elegant mix celebrating craftsmanship at the crossroads of tradition and innovation. The fair maintains the thrill of discovery, offering rare and exquisite objects that require no connoisseur’s credentials to appreciate—especially when the Upper East Side crowd begins shipping champagne. As former director now Chairwoman Jill Bokor told Observer “The atmosphere of the Park Avenue Armory is perfect for an event like Salon, because it, in itself, is a curated work of design.”

    At opening night on November 6, that atmosphere—along with the fair’s hallmark elegance—was palpable in every corner, from the Art Deco treasures at Bernard Goldberg Fine Art radiating the charm of the Belle Époque across continents (several of which sold by the opening night) to the ancient South Arabian and Byzantine pieces at Ariadne, which extended the fair’s reach far beyond the 20th Century into the timeless spirituality of the ancient world.

    Although design and furniture have been among the collectible categories most affected by Trump’s tariffs—some of which are set to rise to 50 percent in January 2026—dealers at Salon are still presenting an impressive array of modern and contemporary design from across geographies. Several gallerists admitted that their participation was possible only because their pieces had already been imported, noting that the U.S. market is likely to feel the full impact of the new duties in the coming months. Under the executive order signed by Trump on September 29, a 25 percent tariff applies to wood imports and derivative products—including upholstered furniture and kitchen cabinets—effective starting October 14. Imports of softwood timber and lumber face a 10 percent rate, while upholstered wooden products incur a 25 percent duty. Kitchen cabinets and their components are likewise taxed at 25 percent per order, with rates set to climb in January 2026 to 30 percent for upholstered furniture and 50 percent for cabinetry and related parts. This comes at a moment of remarkable strength for the market for collectible design and decorative arts: according to ArtTactic, the category grew 20.4 percent in 2025 to reach $172 million, up from $143 million the previous year.

    Visitors seated around a large wooden table amid warm lighting and vintage furniture during Salon Art + Design 2025.Visitors seated around a large wooden table amid warm lighting and vintage furniture during Salon Art + Design 2025.
    Salon Art + Design showcases the pinnacle of design, presenting the world’s finest vintage, modern and contemporary pieces alongside blue-chip 20th-century artworks. Miguel McSongwe/BFA.com

    High attendance at Salon Art + Design’s opening night reaffirmed not only the enduring allure of the fair’s finely curated intersection of art and design but also the growing breadth of its audience—one increasingly active within this more fluid and inclusive space where disciplines meet. The evening drew an exceptional roster of collectors, curators and tastemakers, described by many as “a who’s who of design and art.” The aisles buzzed with familiar figures from the worlds of culture and collecting, including Jeremy Anderson, Paul Arnhold, Alex Assouline, Jill Bokor, Elizabeth Callender, Rafael de Cárdenas, Lady Liliana Cavendish, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Linda Fargo, Alessia, Fe and Paola Fendi, Douglas Friedman, John and Christine Gachot, Monique Gibson, Nathalie de Gunzburg, Maja Hoffmann, Mathieu Lehanneur, Dominique Lévy, Ben and Hillary Macklowe, Lee Mindel, Carlos Mota, Dr. Daniella Ohad, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Claire Olshan, Bryan O’Sullivan, Nina Runsdorf, Irina Shayk, Robert Stilin, Sara Story, Indré Rockefeller, Emmanuel Tarpin, Jamie Tisch, Nicola Vassell, Stellene Volandes, Emily Weiss and Charles and Daphne Zana, among many others.

    In one of the first rows, Converso Modern’s booth paired Alexander Calder’s vibrant tapestries—crafted in Guatemala and Nicaragua—with a tribute to Pennsylvania’s New Hope Modern Craft Movement, the 1960s community that bridged traditional craftsmanship with modern design. Highlights included sculptural metal and carved wood pieces by Phillip Lloyd Powell and Paul Evans, shown alongside the elemental modernism of George Nakashima.

    Awarded this year’s Best Booth, the London-based Crosta Smith Gallery presented a moody, cinematic homage to 1930s Art Deco—refined, atmospheric and irresistibly elegant. Marking the centenary of the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, the defining event of the Art Deco era, the gallery presented a selection of impeccably preserved works in wood, lacquer and galuchat celebrating a century of decorative mastery. Each piece reflected the sophistication of the 1920s and 1930s, including exquisite creations by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Katsu Hamanaka and Clément Rousseau. Particularly striking was a pair of lacquer panels by Hamanaka depicting Adam and Eve dancing in nature with quintessential Deco elegance—the sinuous lines and subtle symbolism balanced by the sensual tension of intertwined snakes. Equally rare was Ruhlmann’s méridienne in amboyna burl wood, gilt bronze and silk bourrette upholstery—a unique variant of the Marozeau model commissioned by the Borderie family, epitomizing his sculptural refinement. Founded in 2018 by Marine Edith Crosta and Daniel Smith after collecting Art Deco while furnishing their home in the south of France, the gallery is now participating in all leading design fairs, including PAD London.

    Crosta Smith Gallery’s Art Deco installation at Salon Art + Design 2025 featuring lacquer panels of Adam and Eve, vintage furniture, and soft lighting.Crosta Smith Gallery’s Art Deco installation at Salon Art + Design 2025 featuring lacquer panels of Adam and Eve, vintage furniture, and soft lighting.
    Crosta Smith Gallery at Salon Art + Design 2025. Crosta Smith Gallery

    Nearby, Downtown-based Bossa Furniture continued to serve as a bridge between the U.S. and Brazil, showcasing the warmth of modernist Brazilian design through an intergenerational dialogue between Joaquim Tenreiro—one of the founders of modern Brazilian design—and contemporary designer Lucas Recchia, accented with a vintage stool by Lina Bo Bardi. Returning for their second year at the fair and fresh from Design Miami/Paris, Bossa sold a unique chaise by Joaquim Tenreiro during the preview, priced at $90,000, along with two pieces by Recchia.

    Many exhibitors adopted a curatorial approach that seamlessly integrated art and design, blurring distinctions between collectible furniture, fine art and historical masterpieces. At Incollect, a captivating juxtaposition paired modernist and contemporary design with an Anish Kapoor reflective sculpture and playful Picasso ceramics, creating a lively dialogue between modern icons.

    Elsewhere, Galerie Gabriel skillfully paired modern design with works by Sam Falls, while several booths leaned fully into fine art. Opera Gallery, with its global presence, offered an interior-friendly selection of blue-chip names designed to appeal to Salon’s broad audience. Standouts included a striking George Condo drawing priced around $100,000, a sensuous Picasso work on paper and sculptures by Manolo Valdés—among them a wooden reinterpretation of his Menina series inspired by Velázquez. Another highlight was Carlos Cruz-Diez’s optically mesmerizing Physichromie Panam 112, shown alongside pieces by Juan Genovés, Thomas Dillon, Keith Haring, Cho Sung-Hee, Jae Ko and André Lanskoy.

    The 60-year-old Galerie Gmurzynska, specializing in 20th-century modern and contemporary classics, impressed with a monumental Louise Nevelson work, City Series (1974), spanning an entire wall and exemplifying her mature phase of assemblage sculpture. The booth also included three mixed-media collages by Nevelson, a rare early wood panel by Robert Indiana from his Coenties Slip period and Yves Klein’s F 48 (1961), a luminous piece from his Monochrome und Feuer exhibition. A rare surviving box construction by Dan Basen from the 1960s New York avant-garde rounded out the presentation. “We love taking part in Salon Art + Design. The blend of art, design and jewelry is truly exceptional, a great experience. The opening was extremely well attended, and we have sold one work so far,” said gallery director Isabelle Bscher, who represents the third generation of the Swiss-born Gmurzynska family at Salon Art + Design 2025.

    New York-based Onishi Gallery, known for championing contemporary Japanese art and design, presented “Clay, Iron, and Fire: The Bizen and Setouchi Heritage,” a striking tribute to Japan’s enduring craft traditions. The exhibition celebrated the intertwined legacies of Bizen ceramics—born 900 years ago from the region’s iron-rich clay and revered by tea masters for their organic textures—and Osafune swordmaking, famed for its refined curvature, subtle grain and balance. With works ranging from a $2,900 sword to ceramic masterpieces priced between $30,000 and $50,000, the booth embodied Japan’s devotion to transforming natural materials into lasting beauty, infused with the timeless aesthetics of wabi-sabi and ichi-go ichi-e.

    Similarly devoted to the Japanese spirit of craftsmanship, the minimalist, clean booth of Ippodo Gallery explored the meeting point between Eastern sensibility and Western material practice, featuring Ymer & Malta’s pioneering resin light sculptures (Paris), Akira Hara’s intricate Murrine glass works (Venice) and Andoche Praudel’s tactile ceramics (Loubignac). Examining materiality as a universal language, their works dissolved the boundary between art and function, finding beauty in tactile intelligence. By the close of opening day at 9 p.m., the gallery had sold more than $60,000 worth of art. “The preview event drew a large number of enthusiastic visitors, and it’s clear that the fair has grown and evolved since last year,” Churou Wang, the gallery’s associate director, told Observer. “We’re looking forward to seeing how the coming days unfold.”

    Minimalist gallery display with neutral walls, ceramic vessels on white pedestals, and soft organic lighting at Salon Art + Design 2025.Minimalist gallery display with neutral walls, ceramic vessels on white pedestals, and soft organic lighting at Salon Art + Design 2025.
    Ippodo Gallery. Courtesy Ippodo Gallery

    On the contemporary design front, London’s Gallery FUMI stood out with a presentation celebrating its new representation of San Francisco-based artist and designer Jesse Schlesinger, coinciding with his first-ever design exhibition, Pacific, at the gallery’s London flagship. Ahead of a dedicated presentation at FOG Design + Art in San Francisco, FUMI showcased Schlesinger’s sculptural furniture—works merging nature, philosophy and material consciousness. A second-generation carpenter deeply rooted in the Bay Area, Schlesinger crafts with locally salvaged wood, blending ceramics, bronze, glass and wood into meditations on texture, surface and function.

    London’s Charles Burnand Gallery, which specializes in collectible design and lighting, presented a captivating booth that reflected the growing shift in taste toward design rooted in organic sensitivity and material depth. Its curated presentation, “Liminal Monuments: The Edge of Becoming,” unfolded as an elegant choreography of designers across geographies, exploring form in a state of becoming—continuous growth, evolution and transformation. Every object in the booth felt interconnected and evocative of natural structures, from plant life to geology, offering a contemporary design language that draws inspiration from nature to rediscover the soul of materials and humanity’s relationship with them.

    Particularly outstanding among the booth’s luminous creations was Midnight Tulip by Ian Milnes—a meditation on the transience of beauty, capturing a fleeting moment suspended between bloom and disintegration. Inspired by the 16th-century phenomenon of “broken tulips” and crafted from sycamore, walnut, cherry and resin, its marquetry petals appeared to drift outward in slow motion, their blackened, watercolor-like surfaces evoking both bloom and decay—embodying a space where fragility and radiance coexist. Equally striking were the organically graceful, cocoon-like wire-crochet lamps by Korean designer Kyeok Kim, floating in the corner like luminous cellular formations that connected the micro- and macrocosmos through shared patterns and order. Handcrafted from fine metal mesh, these sculptural lights existed in a liminal space—both soft and metallic, airy yet architectural—expressing fragility and endurance in perfect balance.

    Gilded bronze Roman bust displayed in Phoenix Ancient Art’s booth at Salon Art + Design 2025, surrounded by classical sculptures and reliefs.Gilded bronze Roman bust displayed in Phoenix Ancient Art’s booth at Salon Art + Design 2025, surrounded by classical sculptures and reliefs.
    Alexander the Great as Apollo, 1st century B.C.-1st century A.D, presented by Phoenix Ancient Art. Gilded bronze, obsidian and gypsum alabaster eyes. Photo: Elisa Carollo

    And as always, Salon Art + Design offered museum-quality treasures at the top tier of the market. A standout among them was Alexander the Great, presented by Phoenix Ancient Art—a gilded bronze Roman sculpture from the 1st Century with obsidian and alabaster eyes that radiated the aura of a rediscovered world. Believed to be one of only two known portraits of Alexander—the other housed in Herculaneum—the work was a rare masterpiece of ancient craftsmanship.

    Todd Merrill Studio’s booth also bridged designers across geographies, uniting leading artists from North America, Europe and South Korea, reaffirming the gallery’s reputation for material innovation and sculptural form. Highlights included Amsterdam-based Maarten Vrolijk’s Sakura Pendant Lighting—a luminous evolution of his Sakura Vessels—and German artist Markus Haase’s new bronze and onyx works, including a monumental chandelier and reimagined Circlet series pieces that merged sculpture and illumination through exceptional craftsmanship.

    While some of the biggest names in collectible design—Carpenters Workshop, Friedman Benda, Salon 94 and Nilufar—were absent this year, likely due to the proximity of the Paris and Miami fairs, their absence was hardly felt. Instead, Salon Art + Design 2025 unfolded with a rare sense of cohesion and restraint, offering a stage where eras and disciplines engaged in a fluid dialogue that held at its center a timeless sense of beauty born from the convergence of material awareness, craftsmanship and innovation—qualities that defined the fair’s most striking functional yet evocative objects.

    A gold-walled booth at Salon Art + Design 2025 featuring sculptural lighting, curved cream sofas, abstract paintings, and collectible design pieces.A gold-walled booth at Salon Art + Design 2025 featuring sculptural lighting, curved cream sofas, abstract paintings, and collectible design pieces.
    Todd Merrill Studio at Salon Art + Design 2025. Miguel McSongwe/BFA.com

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    At Salon Art + Design 2025, Innovation, Form and Function Meet Market Enthusiasm

    Elisa Carollo

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  • Memory, Matter and Minimalism: Inside Dia Art Foundation’s 2025 Fall Night

    The Dia Art Foundation’s annual Fall Night was a celebration of Melvin Edwards and Meg Webster. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    For more than half a century, Dia Art Foundation has redefined how art can be supported, exhibited and preserved—particularly when it comes to large-scale, long-term, or site-specific works that fall outside the confines of traditional museums and commercial galleries. On Monday (Nov. 3), its annual Fall Night once again celebrated that mission with an elegant dinner that drew a remarkable number of artists—far more than most New York institutions can claim—reminding everyone that artists remain firmly at the center of Dia’s vision.

    Observer spotted an impressive roster of artists shaping the language of contemporary art today, including a particularly smiling and socially engaged Marina Abramović (currently preparing for a major exhibition at the upcoming Venice Biennale), alongside Doug AItken, Tony Cokes, Mary Corman, Jung Hee Choi, N. Dash, Torkwase Dyson, Miles Greenberg, Rachel Harrison, Tehching Hsieh, EJ Hill, Anne Imhof, Suzanne Jackson, Vera Lutter, Nate Lowman, Jill Magid, Tyler Mitchell, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Kent Monkman, Camille Norment, Precious Okoyomon, Nicolas Party, Howardena Pindell, Alan Ruiz, Martha Rosler, Gedi Sibony, Haim Steinbach, Amy Sillman, Pat Steir, Richard Tuttle, Cheyney Thompson and William T. Williams.

    The evening began with a cocktail reception and exhibition viewing at Dia Chelsea, where guests admired 12 + 2—Duane Linklater’s first major U.S. commission. His monumental clay animal forms inhabited the space, evoking a primal connection to matter. These gigantic creatures seemed to emerge from an elemental prehistory, before and beyond civilization’s structural and rational constraints. In one of the rooms, a circular wall relief of swirling clay channeled a sense of cosmic gesture—an improvised cosmology unfolding in earthy motion, connecting the microcosm of human making with the broader entropic order that regulates all forces between energy and matter.

    The galleries at Dia Chelsea, 537 West 22nd Street, were also open for guests for a special viewing of an exhibition of work by Duane Linklater.The galleries at Dia Chelsea, 537 West 22nd Street, were also open for guests for a special viewing of an exhibition of work by Duane Linklater.
    The galleries at Dia Chelsea, 537 West 22nd Street, were open to guests for a special viewing of an exhibition of work by Duane Linklater. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Guests then moved to 547 West 26th Street, where long, white linen-decked tables awaited. Dinner began with welcoming remarks from Nathalie de Gunzburg, chair of Dia’s board. Next, a radiant Jessica Morgan, Dia’s director, then took the dais. “Paris was a blast,” she said, beginning her speech with genuine enthusiasm following her just-concluded art week abroad, where she opened “Minimal” at La Bourse de Commerce in Paris. The show, a collaboration between the Pinault Collection and Dia, brought part of Dia’s holdings to Europe for the first time, pairing them with a rarely seen selection of works from the French magnate’s collection. The show celebrated the aesthetics and philosophy of Minimalism while tracing its global evolution and enduring influence.

    The night’s honorees, Melvin Edwards and Meg Webster, both hold deep significance for Dia. Their concurrent presentations Upstate spotlight how each pioneering practice anticipated many of today’s most urgent artistic concerns. Artist Sanford Biggers delivered a heartfelt tribute to Edwards, reflecting on their shared Houston roots and the profound emotional and artistic bond between them. His remarks captured how Edwards has imbued the rigorous formalism of his welded metal assemblage—steel, chain, barbed wire, machine parts—with a uniquely human and political charge: abstract forms that pulse with the weight of history and memory, between oppression and liberation.

    Next, architect Steven Holl paid homage to Webster, tracing how her practice infused Land Art and process-based sculpture with a prescient ecological consciousness. Merging nature and culture, matter and energy, her works embrace the entropic principle of impermanence and transformation while prompting reflection on sustainability and humanity’s relationship with the earth. Webster’s art—poised between the elemental and the formal, the human-shaped and the naturally evolving—feels particularly timely today, as she enjoys a long-overdue moment in the international spotlight, from Dia’s Beacon presentation to her installations currently on view in the frescoed rotunda of La Bourse de Commerce.

    De Gunzburg (with her husband, Charles de Gunzburg) and Morgan were joined by trustees Sandra J. Brant, J. Patrick Collins, Carol Finley, Jahanaz Jaffer, Dana Su Lee, Sara Morishige and Cordy Ryman. The crowd also included collectors, philanthropists and cultural figures such as Amy Astley, Stewart Butterfield and Jen Rubio, Lynne Cooke, Lisa Dennison, Fairfax Dorn, Michael Fisch, Molly Gochman, Steven Holl, Stephanie Ingrassia, Hiroyuki Maki, Courtney J. Martin, Sukey Novogratz, Monique Péan, Loring Randolph, Scott Rothkopf, Axel Rüger, Salman Rushdie, Bernard and Almine Ruiz-Picasso, Olivier Sarkozy, Ivy Shapiro, Allan Schwartzman, Akio Tagawa, Ann Temkin, Helen and Peter Warwick and Sara Zewde.

    And of course, no Dia gathering would be complete without members of the gallery world who have long supported the foundation’s mission: Paula Cooper, Lucas Cooper, Arne Glimcher, Alexander Gray, Carol Greene, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, José Kuri, Dominique Lévy, Alex Logsdail, Siniša Mačković, Ales Ortuzar, Sukanya Rajaratnam, Thaddaeus Ropac, Almine Rech-Picasso and Kara Vander Weg were all among the evening’s guests. Below, we offer a glimpse into the night’s most memorable moments.

    Precious Okoyomon, Vidar Logi, Miles Greenberg and Marina Abramović

    Precious Okoyomon, Vidar Logi, Miles Greenberg, Marina Abramović.Precious Okoyomon, Vidar Logi, Miles Greenberg, Marina Abramović.
    Precious Okoyomon, Vidar Logi, Miles Greenberg and Marina Abramović. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Dominique Lévy and Sanford Biggers

    Dominique Lévy and Sanford Biggers. Bre Johnson/BFA.com

    Steven Holl

    Steven Holl paid his tribute to Meg Webster.Steven Holl paid his tribute to Meg Webster.
    Steven Holl. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Meg Webster

    Meg Webster.Meg Webster.
    Meg Webster. Bre Johnson/BFA.com

    Howardena Pindell and Ann Temkin

    Howardena Pindell and Ann Temkin. Bre Johnson/BFA.com

    Amy Astley

    A blonde woman in a dinner.A blonde woman in a dinner.
    Amy Astley. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Molly Epstein and Hugh Hayden

    Molly Epstein, Hugh Hayden.Molly Epstein, Hugh Hayden.
    Molly Epstein and Hugh Hayden. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Nicolas Party

    Nicolas Party.Nicolas Party.
    Nicolas Party. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Maynard Monrow, Julie Hillman and Lucas Cooper

    Maynard Monrow, Julie Hillman, Lucas Cooper.Maynard Monrow, Julie Hillman, Lucas Cooper.
    Maynard Monrow, Julie Hillman and Lucas Cooper. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Axel Rüger, Cathy Ho Lee and Scott Rothkopf

    Axel Rüger, Cathy Ho Lee and Scott Rothkopf. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Arne Glimcher, Milly Glimcher and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso

    Arne Glimcher, Milly Glimcher, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso.Arne Glimcher, Milly Glimcher, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso.
    Arne Glimcher, Milly Glimcher and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Scott Rothkopf and Shelley Fox Aarons

    Scott Rothkopf, Shelley Fox Aarons.Scott Rothkopf, Shelley Fox Aarons.
    Scott Rothkopf and Shelley Fox Aarons. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Olivier Sarkozy, Eva Lorenzotti and Charles de Gunzburg

    Olivier Sarkozy, Eva Lorenzotti, Charles de Gunzburg.Olivier Sarkozy, Eva Lorenzotti, Charles de Gunzburg.
    Olivier Sarkozy, Eva Lorenzotti and Charles de Gunzburg. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Eliza Ravelle-Chapuis, Michael Fisch, Brooke Lampley and Sukanya Rajaratnam

    Eliza Ravelle-Chapuis, Michael Fisch, Brooke Lampley, Sukanya Rajaratnam.Eliza Ravelle-Chapuis, Michael Fisch, Brooke Lampley, Sukanya Rajaratnam.
    Eliza Ravelle-Chapuis, Michael Fisch, Brooke Lampley and Sukanya Rajaratnam. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Li Xin and Thaddaeus Ropac

    Li Xin, Thaddaeus RopacLi Xin, Thaddaeus Ropac
    Li Xin and Thaddaeus Ropac. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Marisa Murillo, Azikiwe Mohammed and Tiona Nekkia McClodden

    Marisa Murillo, Azikiwe Mohammed, Tiona Nekkia McClodden.Marisa Murillo, Azikiwe Mohammed, Tiona Nekkia McClodden.
    Marisa Murillo, Azikiwe Mohammed and Tiona Nekkia McClodden. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Akio Tagawa and Karen LaGatta

    Two asian looking people in a dinner.Two asian looking people in a dinner.
    Akio Tagawa and Karen LaGatta. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Sarah Gavlak

    Sarah Gavlak.Sarah Gavlak.
    Sarah Gavlak. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    David Israel, Maynard Monrow and Julie Hillman

    David Israel, Maynard Monrow, Julie Hillman.David Israel, Maynard Monrow, Julie Hillman.
    David Israel, Maynard Monrow and Julie Hillman. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Joost Elffers and Pat Steir

    Pat Steir, Joost Elffers.Pat Steir, Joost Elffers.
    Joost Elffers and Pat Steir. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    William T. Williams and Alexander Gray

    Alexander Gray, William T. Williams.Alexander Gray, William T. Williams.
    William T. Williams and Alexander Gray. Bre Johnson/BFA.com

    Paul Richert-Garcia, David Lewis and Barry X Ball

    Paul Richert-Garcia, David Lewis and Barry X Ball. Bre Johnson/BFA.com

    Dana Lee and Heather Harmon

    Dana Lee, Heather Harmon in front of a clay animal sculptureDana Lee, Heather Harmon in front of a clay animal sculpture
    Dana Lee and Heather Harmon. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Vanessa Yoa and Brandon Chen

    Vanessa Yoa, Brandon Chen in front of a clay sculpture.Vanessa Yoa, Brandon Chen in front of a clay sculpture.
    Vanessa Yoa and Brandon Chen. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Maynard Monrow and Stephanie Ingrassia

    Maynard Monrow and Stephanie Ingrassia. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Alex Magnuson, Jacob Proctor and Jillian Brodie

    Alex Magnuson, Jacob Proctor, Jillian Brodie.Alex Magnuson, Jacob Proctor, Jillian Brodie.
    Alex Magnuson, Jacob Proctor and Jillian Brodie. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Tehching Hsieh and Hiroyuki Maki

    Tehching Hsieh, Hiroyuki Maki.Tehching Hsieh, Hiroyuki Maki.
    Tehching Hsieh and Hiroyuki Maki. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Jessica Morgan

    Jessica Morgan. Madison McGaw/BFA.com

    Memory, Matter and Minimalism: Inside Dia Art Foundation’s 2025 Fall Night

    Elisa Carollo

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  • Devin B. Johnson Paints the Space Between Memory and Motion

    Devin B. Johnson, Crossing, 2025. Oil on linen, 80 x 90 x 2 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim gallery

    Devin B. Johnson’s paintings emerge on the canvas like ghostly, dreamlike apparitions—visual remnants that withstand the slow erosion of memory. His scenes exist in suspended tension between figuration and abstraction, between the sensory intensity of trauma and the blurred contours of a dream upon waking, when the self begins drifting away from the oneiric realm where the subconscious speaks. In his hands, paint becomes a means of reattuning and reconstructing that space; the white canvas, a stage on which to confront it.

    “My interest is in memory and the subconscious; that’s why the paintings feel articulated in fragments,” Johnson tells Observer as we walk through his new exhibition “Crossing,” on view at Nicodim Gallery through November 8. For Johnson, painting is a way to think about nostalgic space. That’s where his muted tonal range comes from: the grays, the desaturated chromatic colors, the atmospheric haze. Blending realism with surreal gesture, his work becomes a poetic act of recollection and reconnection or an attempt to retrieve what lingers beneath the surface of consciousness and the past. With his paintings, he navigates histories of representation, urban movement and diasporic trauma, moving fluidly between the personal and the collective, the remembered and the forgotten. “They evoke that phenomenon of recollection—how remembering actually works,” he says. “When you remember something, especially something emotionally loaded, it’s always fragmented. It’s never a perfect replay of how it happened.”

    A man wearing a black blazer and durag stands confidently in a studio space with large canvas backs leaning against the wall.A man wearing a black blazer and durag stands confidently in a studio space with large canvas backs leaning against the wall.
    David Johnson. Courtesy of the artist

    Johnson instinctively manipulates both subject and surface, allowing shifts in texture and color to translate psychological and sensory transitions. Yet his scenes are intentionally never fully resolved, either pictorially or narratively. They remain open, as if capturing memory and history still in motion, still forming. Fragmentation becomes a strategy: opening an event or image to multiple readings and avoiding the authority of a single interpretation. “Leaning into that fragmentation is how I like to think about reality itself: how it falls apart or reforms in this hazy, almost musical way. Memory isn’t linear; it dissolves and recomposes,” he explains.

    What Johnson evokes in many of the works on view is also something profoundly specific: the daily psychological, cognitive and emotional reality of living in a city like New York: a continuous crossing of narratives, languages, cultures and perspectives that defines the urban condition. The city, always in flux, holds the potential for constant reinterpretation but also the risk of overexposure, where experience multiplies faster than we can process or reflect and meaning slips through the cracks of noise and speed.

    “All of us who’ve walked the streets or subway stations can recall how certain walls or corners slowly change over time. That speaks to a kind of kinetic, haptic memory embedded in any metropolitan space,” Johnson reflects. “There are always people moving through it, navigating it. That movement creates a constant layering of memory.”

    In this sense—aligned with Situationist thinking, which calls for a creative and critical interpretation of urban space that reclaims agency—the city becomes a palimpsest of visions and sensations. It is a living surface upon which we build our daily reality and our idea of self within and between the interrelational fabric of existence that a metropolis intensifies.

    “My work really comes from walking the streets—an observational way of looking,” Johnson continues. “I’m constantly moving through the city with my head turning, watching how the urban environment comes together.” For him, beauty can be found anywhere: in a garage, an alley, a wall. “If you’re open to it, you can glean beauty from the most ordinary places.” His paintings speak to this practice of observation, contemplation and attunement and of locating beauty within the chaos of urban life.

    Close-up painting of two men standing next to a white car in an urban setting, one leaning on the car door and the other gesturing while speaking.Close-up painting of two men standing next to a white car in an urban setting, one leaning on the car door and the other gesturing while speaking.
    Devin B. Johnson, All Behind, 2025. Oil on linen, 80 x 90 x 2 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery

    At the same time, these works often describe and inhabit a state of transition: a conversation just beginning and left suspended, a movement in the street not yet resolved, a possible encounter merely suggested. The viewer is invited to imagine its unfolding. “The liminality of going from one point to another—that in-between state—is central to my work,” Johnson says. The exhibition title, “Crossing,” speaks directly to that threshold: the moment when there is an A, but the B has not yet revealed itself. “It’s the space of transition, of becoming, and painting becomes a way to simulate that threshold.”

    Here, we can also read Johnson’s effort to push against the static nature of painting, suggesting instead a physical and psychological reality of being that is always in flux. “That’s often my entry point: creating figures walking through emotional and psychological space,” he explains. From this interrelational, ever-moving condition arises the universality of his scenes. “These could be New York City, Paris, Africa or anywhere,” he observes. “There’s a kind of universal ‘somewhere’ we all recognize, even if it’s not tied to a specific location.” It is a place where humanity manifests in an epiphanic moment of revelation.

    In the two largest paintings in the show, Crossing (2025) and All Stay Behind (2025), this internal tension becomes fully visible: a friction between the precise rendering of figures and the intuitive eruption of sensation, which disrupts any linear narrative and opens the image to the kinds of contradictions that shape our perception of reality: the gap between what we experience, what we are told and what we can articulate within the limits of language and reason.

    Johnson explains that these two paintings were the first he made for the exhibition and they set the heartbeat of the entire show. He usually begins by working through ideas slowly, often without fully understanding what he is trying to do, but each painting helps him tease out the direction, the energy and the questions that the body of work will confront. “You can see what I’m speaking about—this navigation through space, this kinetic energy. It’s not only in the dripping of the paint, but also in the way energy clusters across the canvas,” Johnson notes. The painting he refers to, Crossing, is one of the largest he has ever made and the central work from which the exhibition takes its title.

    This monumental canvas depicts a vast urban street in flux, traversed by multiple lives, their stories possibly intersecting or weaving together for an instant or missing each other entirely. Several Black men walk past a white car, or perhaps it is one subject duplicated, suggesting motion and psychological multiplicity. White doves hover and drip overhead, producing a layered image that evokes movement, memory and simultaneity within the city. “This painting is also about configuration and tension—pushing paint, pushing material and at the same time allowing the material to act freely,” he says. “Letting the paint drip makes the work feel like it hasn’t fully arrived yet. It’s still becoming. That unfinished quality feels truthful to me, like memory, like movement, like life in the city itself.”

    A spacious white-walled gallery with several large figurative paintings hung in a row, and a person walking past the artwork on the left.A spacious white-walled gallery with several large figurative paintings hung in a row, and a person walking past the artwork on the left.
    An installation view of David B. Johnson’s “Crossing” at Nicodim Gallery in New York. Courtesy of Nicodim Gallery

    Yet Johnson is equally interested in inserting anchors—symbolic presences that connect fleeting urban moments to a larger human history where psychological and historical patterns recur. Unsurprisingly, he has recently been drawn to the thinking of Carl Jung. “What’s been interesting for me lately is using symbols as anchors,” he notes. “Jung talks about iconoclastic symbols or totems—forms that can point to personal, individual meaning. I started incorporating symbols that hold significance to me personally, but can also open the painting to other interpretations.” In the central painting, cars and pigeons serve as archetypal symbols. “Pigeons aren’t considered majestic, but I like linking them back to the Renaissance dove as a symbol of freedom, flight, love,” Johnson reflects. “Here, they become part of these New York scenes, glorifying the everyday things we move through and overlook.”

    Although rooted in the daily crossings of a chaotic city like New York, Johnson’s paintings are equally grounded in art history, particularly the Renaissance pursuit of structure, perspective and order within flux. His compositions reveal an impulse to locate balance amid motion, to stabilize chaos through pictorial intelligence and to insert contemporary life into the long lineage of painting as a record of a society in continual becoming. Still, he resists the mathematical precision of Renaissance masters. Blurring the lines becomes his way of acknowledging the imprecision that emerges from psychological experience—the same human clumsiness early painters sought to perfect but that modern thinkers like Freud and Jung compelled us to confront. “It’s more like the flutter of a thought or a memory—something fleeting that can’t be fully held. That’s what the pigeons or doves represent to me: the impossibility of completely capturing memory. I’m trying to strengthen my compositions and see where the work can stretch,” he reflects. For Johnson, the show marks five years of work reaching a sharper vision while opening into its next phase.

    A minimalist gallery with wooden floors and white walls displaying two large figurative paintings on either side of a central white column.A minimalist gallery with wooden floors and white walls displaying two large figurative paintings on either side of a central white column.
    “Crossing” is a study of histories of representation, urban movement, and diasporic memory as refracted through the mind, heart, and hand of Devin B. Johnson. Courtesy of Nicodim Gallery

    Notably, although Johnson may draw inspiration from both personal and collective archival photographs, he never ties the final painting to a single image. “I use photography as a starting point, but then I shift away from documentation,” he explains. He recently started using A.I. to direct his own visual world instead. “I build scenes from memory, music and intuition. That way, I’m not bound by copyright or another photographer’s vision; I’m building my own. That’s how I begin finding my own narrative,” he says. “The real decisions happen in the painting. There’s always a tension between control and surrender, between structure and improvisation. I think that fight is visible in the work.”

    The emotional, often intuitive character that shapes his images and their memories remains far more crucial for Johnson and it emerges through the dialectical tension between elements. “I’m following the emotional logic. The feelings of the figures are essential and that’s where slowness comes in. I want you to eventually read the emotion on the surface of the painting, in how the figures interact.”

    Painting becomes a site of discovery—a blank space in which he teases out what truly matters to him: color theory, space, bodies, rhythm, materiality. “I’m always asking, how does the paint feel for the viewer? How do I stay generous with texture, gesture and surface? How do I tell my story?” Movement and blurring in Johnson’s imagery reveal his effort to capture both the sensory and the psychological, the physical world and the inner world, simultaneously. Even when his figures are not overtly interacting, they remain engaged in conversation—with themselves, with their surroundings or with time.

    Recently, Johnson has been reflecting on the notion of the subaltern—the voiceless. “How do we give voice to the voiceless?” he asks, revealing his interest in peripheral scenes, people moving through life half-seen. “Those references sit in the back of my mind as I paint. Who gets to speak? Who gets seen? How does a painting hold space for them?” This question—how to choreograph a human moment that is both physical and psychological, interior and exterior—sits at the core of his painterly inquiry. What fascinates him is that even when people are together, they remain alone. “That’s the nature of the city: we move side by side, but internally we’re somewhere else,” he says.

    A painting of women sitting in a row with solemn expressions, surrounded by dark tones and ghostly brushstrokes.A painting of women sitting in a row with solemn expressions, surrounded by dark tones and ghostly brushstrokes.
    Devin B. Johnson, Doo Wop Thang, 2025. Oil on linen, 36 x 24 x 1 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery

    “You can see her waiting. You can see her contemplating. You can feel that she’s thinking about something,” Johnson says, pointing to the painting Doo Wop Thang (2025), in which a woman sits in profile, head resting on her hand, eyes half-closed in deep thought—a suspended psychological space of introspection. Rendered in muted grays and browns, with soft highlights on her skin, the figure appears both present and distant. Behind her, two other women sit in shadow, silent witnesses to this inner drama yet unable to enter it. “That’s what I love—these paintings are complicated because everyone in them is thinking, everyone is on their way somewhere. They’re not performing for us, they’re not concerned with being seen. They’re in their own space, in their own thoughts. That inner world is what interests me.”

    What’s especially notable about this particular painting is that it’s the only one in the exhibition where the figure actually has pupils. “That’s new for me. Usually, I leave the eyes more abstract, more anonymous,” Johnson explains. “But here, I gave her pupils very intentionally, because I believe the eyes hold so much of a person’s soul.”

    A pair of smaller works on the same wall—Harmony & Discord (2025) and The Middle (2025)—share the same psychological density as the rest of the show yet stand apart visually. They are the only paintings with a noticeably brighter palette and a more structured, cinematic composition, evoking a scene that could have been filmed in the American South, as suggested by both the light gradient and the subjects themselves. “In these two paintings, the colors have shifted,” Johnson acknowledges, explaining that they were the last works completed while preparing for the exhibition. “The compositions become more tethered to natural light, creating atmosphere. A lot of this is new for me—even the symbols,” he notes.

    In one of the paintings, a group of Black men dressed in suits stands in an open field beneath a vast sky, their expressions solemn, introspective, almost ceremonial—as if they are about to play or speak or process together. The entire scene hums with quiet, anticipatory tension, a sense that something is about to happen. “I started thinking about drums—not literally, but as a metaphor for rhythm,” Johnson explains. In the same way, rhythm structures the paintings themselves: sharp, staccato marks like percussive beats and long drips of paint that act as sustained, resonant tones.

    A vertical painting of two men in formal attire at an outdoor event, one in a suit and one in a shirt and tie, surrounded by a blurred crowd.A vertical painting of two men in formal attire at an outdoor event, one in a suit and one in a shirt and tie, surrounded by a blurred crowd.
    Devin B. Johnson, Harmony & Discord, 2025. Oil on linen, 36 x 24 x 1 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery

    Johnson admits there may be connections to the Great Migration and his own upbringing, even if they surface only subconsciously in the work. “My grandparents were from Louisiana. I grew up in the Black Baptist church. I remember sitting in the pews—hearing the piano, the swell of voices, the thump of the kick drum hitting your chest,” he recalls, pondering how those deeply physical sensations of sound might be translated into paint. The question—and the catastrophe—of painting lies in attempting to convert such multisensory, fleeting experiences into image. “Those memories swim through my mind. They shape how the work feels even if I’m not illustrating a specific memory,” he reflects. People often read these scenes as processions, jazz bands and church gatherings, but he resists tying them down. “I’d rather the question stay open,” he says.

    Here we understand that the rhythm Johnson describes is not only musical—it is also temporal and psychological. It is the oscillation between past and present, reality and fiction, memory and imagination that animates the surface of his paintings. That constant movement is what keeps the images alive and porous, capable of returning, dissolving, reforming—just as memory does in the mind.

    For this reason, Johnson agrees, his work is best understood as a kind of psychological figuration. The figures are recognizable, but the space around them is intentionally fluid. “My interest is in the middle ground between figuration and abstraction—where the painting lives in a state of becoming and undoing,” he explains. “That in-between is the subconscious. That’s where memory, identity and image collide.”

    What ultimately emerges from these works is the persistence of memory beyond the present moment: the possibility of archetypal patterns reappearing in open, unfolding narratives. In this sense, Johnson’s paintings are timeless and universal in their ability to acknowledge the fluid nature of existence as part of a vast, interwoven chorus of cyclical forces—emotional, cultural and historical—that shape human life across time and space.

    Alt text:A gallery corner with two small abstract yellow-brown paintings on the left wall and a large figurative painting on the right wall depicting three seated figures in dark red and gray tones.Alt text:A gallery corner with two small abstract yellow-brown paintings on the left wall and a large figurative painting on the right wall depicting three seated figures in dark red and gray tones.
    “Crossing” becomes an ode to the presence and opacity of mark-making, the history of painting and Johnson’s lived and inherited experience. Courtesy of the artist and Nicodim Gallery

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  • In Times Square, Yvette Mayorga’s Candy-Pink Carriage Confronts the American Dream Beyond Its Sparkle

    Yvette Mayorga’s Magic Grasshopper is on display in Times Square, Broadway Plaza between West 46th and 47th Street. Phoyo Michael Hull. Courtesy Times Square Arts

    Cuteness is often deployed in contemporary visual culture as a disarming veneer—something that attracts attention, is broadly appealling and quietly conceals harsh truths beneath its polished surface. Fairy tales and toys like dollhouses employ the same strategy, serving as metaphorical devices that prepare children for the inequities and power structures of adult life. This symbolic logic defines the visual lexicon of Yvette Mayorga, a Chicago-based artist who has just transformed Times Square with her commission for Times Square Arts: a 30-foot-long kinetic pink carriage that appears to have rolled straight out of a fairytale. Beneath its candy-colored façade, adorned with Hello Kitty backpacks and lowrider gold rims, lies a far more complex story that confronts U.S. migration policies, feminine labor and the fractured illusion of the American Dream.

    The monumental work marks the culmination of two years of development, a period during which both Mayorga’s practice and U.S. politics have evolved, rendering the project all the more poignant. The artist is a first-generation Mexican-American whose family migrated from Jalisco, and the commission is not only a milestone in her career but also a vital moment of visibility for the community she represents. “It feels even more important to have a piece like this in Times Square, such a heavily trafficked site visited by people from all over the world,” she told Observer before the unveiling.

    “When I was invited to imagine a sculpture for that setting, I really wanted to play with the idea of Times Square as the ultimate symbolic site—a place so many people first think of when they picture the U.S. and especially New York. For tourists, it stands alongside other iconic American landmarks.” Mayorga sought to engage with that visibility and with the dense layers of commercial imagery that saturate the space and the values of contemporary America.

    Yvette Mayorga stands in her studio surrounded by large pink sculptures, including a suspended figure, a decorated bicycle, and whimsical carousel-like forms, all echoing her candy-pink aesthetic.Yvette Mayorga stands in her studio surrounded by large pink sculptures, including a suspended figure, a decorated bicycle, and whimsical carousel-like forms, all echoing her candy-pink aesthetic.
    Yvette Mayorga. Photo Marzena Abrahamik

    Camouflaging her work in a candy-pink aesthetic, Mayorga transforms cuteness and innocence into ingenious visual snares—accessible and inviting yet laden with stories of inequality and surveillance she has lived through. Beneath the sugary surface lies diasporic trauma and commentary on the underpaid labor of Latino communities in the United States.

    Drawing on her mother’s work as a baker, Mayorga devised a singular technique: using cake nozzles and piping bags to sculpt acrylic paint. This process allows her to weave her family’s narrative into her art while, more broadly, addressing the condition of the Latino working class—so often tasked with strenuous yet poorly compensated labor—through a method that both mirrors and reimagines the artistry of confectionery work performed by her mother and other migrant women.

    The fairytale references, especially the carriage, evoke childhood memories and conjure a more magical world, though for Mayorga, they are no escape from reality. “This is also a metaphor for life—happiness and grief happening at the same time,” she reflected. “I’ve always been around that, and I’ve learned to accept it as the reality of life. To stray from it makes us less human, right? These things will always move in tandem.”

    Sitting with grief recently—anticipated grief, collective grief, all of it—pushed her toward deeper introspection, nurturing a new maturity that now informs and resonates through her work. At the same time, this archetypal and symbolic imagery transcends the present, serving as a reminder that history moves in cycles and that the ghosts of the past can easily return as the demons of the present if we fail to remain vigilant and allow memory to fade.

    Featuring an opulent carriage drawn by carousel-style horses and loaded with ’90s nostalgia, Magic Grasshopper expresses critical narratives of migration, feminized labor, and colonial histories. Courtesy Times Square Arts

    The image of the carriage carries multiple layers of meaning, but it first emerged when Mayorga learned that Times Square served as a carriage meeting point in its early days. Further inspiration came from the 19th-century Mexican carriages of the First Empire, which she encountered in 2018 at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City, their interiors lavishly adorned with Louis XVI decorative motifs. The title of the work, Magic Grasshopper, references Chapultepec (which means “on the hill of the grasshopper”) and draws attention to a place that was once an Aztec settlement and later overtaken. “By combining this history with a carriage fitted with carousel horses carrying backpacks, I wanted to imagine an object that can transcend space and time, tying together histories of decadence, colonial legacy, and Latinx identity, while continuing the investigation and reclamation at the center of my practice,” she explained.

    At the core of Mayorga’s aesthetic is a concept she coined, Latinxcoco, which fuses Latinx and Rococo sensibilities—Versailles-inspired grandeur entwined with Mexican symbolism and architecture. Her earliest encounters with Baroque and Rococo came through their Mexican iterations during childhood visits to her family’s hometown in Jalisco. As she recalls, she was particularly captivated by the Churrigueresque, or ultra-baroque, the Spanish Rococo style that emerged in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries and was later reimagined in Mexico. The style was intended to overwhelm the viewer with dense ornamentation like broken pediments, undulating cornices, reversed volutes, balustrades, stucco shells and garlands. Yet in Mexican hands, it evolved further, its exuberance amplified and infused with local symbols, transforming an imported language of domination into a vibrant expression of cultural resistance.

    A playful pink sneaker sculpture and cartoon-like pink flowers sit on fake grass beneath the carriage, while the legs of the carousel horses are visible in the background, highlighting Mayorga’s whimsical details.A playful pink sneaker sculpture and cartoon-like pink flowers sit on fake grass beneath the carriage, while the legs of the carousel horses are visible in the background, highlighting Mayorga’s whimsical details.
    Magic Grasshopper mirrors its site’s spectacle, scale and sense of possibility while transporting us into deeper conversations about identity, immigration and belonging. Phoyo Michael Hull. Courtesy Times Square Arts

    This choice carries an unmistakable allusion to the present. Rococo flourished amid excess and opulence, just before collapse and revolution. Likewise, today’s America faces an alarmingly widening economic divide, where the disappearance of any middle ground has deepened the chasm between the extremely wealthy and the poor—now on a global scale. History has shown where that trajectory can lead.

    Placing such a message in Times Square—perhaps the ultimate emblem of America’s promise of prosperity through consumerism and media—only sharpens its edge. The carriage looks ready to embark on the so-called American Dream: suitcases strapped to the roof, horses outfitted with Hello Kitty backpacks, and a smiley-face flag fluttering with near-absurd optimism. Beneath it, gold-rimmed, tricked-out wheels turn slowly in an homage to lowrider culture rooted in Chicago’s Mexican-American communities, where Mayorga’s family settled after migrating from Jalisco and still lives today. Across the carriage’s body, painterly scenes of migration unfold, weaving European art-historical tropes with personal and collective narratives.

    Yet Mayorga deliberately leaves interpretation open, creating an installation that, like fairy tales or cartoons, shifts meaning depending on who encounters it and how they read the evolving landscape of today’s Americas.

    At this stage in her career, after numerous public commissions and gallery and museum exhibitions, Mayorga is acutely aware of the assumptions her work provokes through its pastel palette and seemingly innocent aesthetic. “I already create with that in mind, knowing there are so many different entry points,” she said. “With public work especially, that’s what excites me most: not everyone who sees it is ‘well versed’ in art history, but they can still experience it, and I hope it intuitively does something for them, makes an impact in some way.”

    For this commission, scale itself was essential. “The scale is so massive it’s almost impossible to miss, whether you’re commuting to work or visiting New York for the first time. I hope even a passing glimpse catches someone’s eye and offers a moment of joy—just a small pause of color and playfulness in the middle of everything else going on.”

    The full 30-foot pink carriage installation stretches across the plaza in Times Square, with gold-rimmed wheels, green turf, and surrounding crowds set against towering LED screens and skyscrapers.The full 30-foot pink carriage installation stretches across the plaza in Times Square, with gold-rimmed wheels, green turf, and surrounding crowds set against towering LED screens and skyscrapers.
    Magic Grasshopper will be on view free and open to the public 24/7 through December 2, 2025. Phoyo Michael Hull. Courtesy Times Square Arts

    In Times Square, Yvette Mayorga’s Candy-Pink Carriage Confronts the American Dream Beyond Its Sparkle

    Elisa Carollo

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  • Zheng Chongbin’s Dialogue With the Golden State

    Side by side, Golden State (2024) and Turbulence (2024) strike a stunning dichotomy; both are abstracted landscapes, but while one appears composed of sunlight, the other is composed of shade. Courtesy of Zheng Chongbin

    Ut supra, sic infra. As above, so below. This is the ethos of Zheng Chongbin’s design philosophy. Based in San Francisco’s Bay Area, Chongbin creates paintings by layering swaths of ink and paint upon one another, transforming canvases into topographic elements. He lets his canvases breathe; he lets them react naturally to the paint—his work is peeling, pitting, cracking, seeping into the canvas. His paintings bear likeness to natural formations from mountain peaks, riverbeds and fault lines to blood capillaries, skin matrices and synapses. They bear witness to the viewer as much as the viewer does to them. Chongbin furthermore embraces the entropic movements of the paint upon the canvas and, in doing so, instills his work with an interiority that, although invisible to the viewer, is instinctually felt by them.

    Through his holistic practice spanning painting, light-and-space installation and digital media, Chongbin has graphed ecologies and vitality across his work, muddling our perception of sentience and life. In “Zheng Chongbin: Golden State,” his solo exhibition at LACMA, he casts his eye upon California’s expansive geography. Comprising the artist’s earlier works alongside newer offerings, the exhibition is a systematic symphony of image and composition that privileges experience and temporality over didactic interpretation.

    “It’s an environment I’m dealing with. It’s a living thing,” Chongbin told Observer, explaining how his practice revolves around the unique, organic quality behind each subject. “My sensibility—in extension to [art]—is it feels like a part of your body… not in the traditional way, but the habitual way, in a way that you interact with your body extensions. And so you feel like dealing with and collaborating with living things… You’re not the protagonist. You are actually facilitating what happens.”

    A still from Chimeric Landscape (2015), which renders a particularly social vision of blood cells as they migrate and mingle. Courtesy of Zheng Chongbin.

    Born in Shanghai in 1961, Chongbin was brought up during China’s Cultural Revolution and thus trained in classical Chinese art forms, particularly within the ink tradition. In 1978, China’s Open Door Policy allowed an influx of Western ideas, materials and art forms that had previously been forbidden. Among these Western art traditions, Chongbin was most influenced by Abstract Expressionism, German Expressionism and the Light and Space movements, along with specific artists such as the visceral figuration of Francis Bacon, the conceptual installations of Robert Irwin and the sculptural forms of Larry Bell. 

    These inspirations are easily perceptible in Chongbin’s work, which shares a visual kinship with modern Western art movements while maintaining dialogue with the ink traditions in which he was classically trained. In this vein, Chongbin intentionally grants his work its own psychology, allowing art to have its own internal world that extends beyond himself, the peripheries of art movements and the borders of countries, and instead arrives directly in front of the audience, whomever and wherever they are. His physical practice, of course, reflects this dynamic—his final pieces, regardless of medium, are often beset with texture and kineticism. They share a palpable lifeblood.

    One of Chongbin’s few paintings to utilize color, Golden State (2024), with its bright yellow swaths of color, by strokes of black, gray and white, represents the intense sunlight of California, banded with belts of trees, rain fog, fire scars and earthquake fault lines. For this painting, Chongbin chose to paint on shrimp paper, a light material made from the bark of sandalwood, and in doing so gave Golden State a unique, breathable quality. Chongbin gives his materials agency, allowing the paint to crack and fissure as new layers are applied while still maintaining its bold presence and—in the case of Golden State—its brilliant color.

    “It feels like ecologies,” Chongbin said, recalling the effect of the paint penetrating microfibers, coursing color through the paper’s delicate veins. “Everything [that goes] through is my skin… things not only happen on the top, but also happen in the middle of space [and] into the other side. It’s very much a living organism. The space changes and the surface becomes a space… You have this kind of indexical trace of the classic methodology of the work.”

    Though, as noted, Chongbin rarely paints with color, his paintings are often in dialogue with one another, not only in form and context but in composition as well. Turbulence (2013) and Golden State are operational foils of one another. While Golden State primarily looks to the skies of California, reproducing its dappled sunlight through elements of nature, Turbulence looks to the earth; its bands of black paint, puddled by various ink blots, resemble mountain basins, rocky ridges, igneous extrusions and cooling magma. Both paintings, as well as most of Chongbin’s work, consider the spatial experience of the environment. Both are monumental pieces, climbing eight, nine or ten feet high, enveloping the viewer in the sublimity of their ecologies.

    “I always explore… what’s happened on the surface [and] what’s happened underneath,” Chongbin said. “All of those bold lines are a cast of what’s happening underneath. The water is actually like rushing down through the themes, through the slope and goes underneath and pushes out. I want to instantiate nature rather than depicting it.”

    His light-and-space installation Mesh (2018) filters natural, medical and abstract imagery through refracted light. Courtesy of Zheng Chongbin.

    Chongbin regaled us with stories of his adventures on hiking trails in the foothills of Marin County and wandering the steely beaches of Northern California. He saw “the dead things come alive.” His installation, Chimeric Landscape (2015), was inspired by one such encounter. Chongbin described looking at a sand dollar awash on the shore and seeing a multitude of lifeways. He remarked with wonder at the creature’s iridescence as it shimmered in the sunlight. He marveled at its respiration—its “millions of little lights flickering” as the sand dollar’s velvety matrix of pores undulated gently.

    With Chimeric Landscape, he weaves short clips of water, ink, cell functions and other ephemera into Euclidean geometries that twine and break only to reform again. The installation celebrates the little breaths of life that these inanimate objects take while deconstructing their spatial differentiation. “The structure of Chimeric Landscape is obviously a non-linear narrative,” he explained. “The one visual dominance that we encounter is the ink flow, it’s used as the symbol of the water, but water is reflected in a lot of the formations and the emerging qualities that I think are essential elements for everything—our bodies and the earth.”

    This natural essence echoes throughout the work in the LACMA show, invoking atmospheres that range from the monumental to the microscopic. Whether constructing a cosmos out of ephemera or a simulacrum out of geographies, Chongbin places equal emphasis—equal importance—on his art and his viewer. He collaborates with both material and mind, allowing one to inform the other, ensuring that what lies above reflects below.

    “Zheng Chongbin: Golden State” is on view in LACMA through January 4, 2026.

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    Zheng Chongbin’s Dialogue With the Golden State

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  • 48 Hours of Art in Chicago: CXW, Museums and Monuments to Come

    Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, better known as the Bean. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    I was going to kick this off with a fun anecdote about my daughter walking into my office to ask whether I knew there was a guy trapped inside the Bean, followed by my inevitable dive into the Man in Bean movement (including Sarah Cascone’s wild dissection). Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate is the kind of artwork people love to hate while still lining up to slap their greasy palms on it to get the same warped selfie everyone takes. And while I usually enjoy a good dunk on that sort of thing, it feels a little tone-deaf given what’s happening in the Windy City right now—from ICE patrols to the arrival of National Guard troops.

    The idea that Trump could deploy those troops in Chicago—invoking the Insurrection Act in the process—feels dystopian and doesn’t track with my experience of the city at all. Does Chicago have crime? Yes, Chicago has crime. So does every city. More people, more problems. Is Chicago, as the president has claimed, the “world’s most dangerous city”? Please. Not even close. It’s just a city—and from everything I saw during a trip that took me from the Loop to Streeterville, from East Village to Washington Park and the Fulton Market District—it’s a pretty chill one. Sure, I only saw a sliver, but to echo the words of U.S. District Judge April Perry, I saw nothing resembling a “danger of rebellion.”

    What I do see while I’m here for Chicago Exhibition Weekend (CXW) is beautiful in the way most urban places are beautiful—full of hard edges paired with softness and united by the widely held conviction that art is the solution to a range of challenges. Chicago’s artists—and their champions, from patrons to gallerists to curators—are as open as they are unfiltered. When I ask Scott Speh, founder of Western Exhibitions, what makes the Chicago art scene different from, say, New York or L.A., he’s quick to tell me how much he hates that question, then launches into a perfectly clear-eyed answer: “I think everywhere, people want to put on good shows. It doesn’t matter what city they’re in, they want to put forward interesting artists.”

    Alexander Calder, Flying Dragon, 1975. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    That’s what he’s been doing for 21 years (“Chicago would be a far less interesting art city if Scott wasn’t doing what he was doing,” artist Stan Shellabarger told The Chicago Reader in 2024), and he’s in good company. Speh might resist boiling it all down, but if I had to try, I’d say Chicago’s is a scene grounded in and by the people who are in the thick of it. “In Chicago, there’s a really good ecosystem because it’s not too small and it’s not too big either,” Sibylle Friche, Document gallery partner, tells me. “You don’t get bored—there’s always enough going on.”

    Enough, and then some—as is the case with Chicago Exhibition Weekend, now in its third year. Around 50 galleries and creative spaces citywide mounted shows and everything from panel discussions and artist meet-and-greets to collector tours and an art-and-tennis mixer. The whole thing is the brainchild of Abby Pucker, Gertie founder and Pritzker family scion—yes, that Pritzker family. But despite her association with big bucks and big names (Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is a cousin), Pucker is—as I find out in conversation after conversation, including with the woman herself—simultaneously down-to-earth and committed to lifting others up.

    I’m here for CXW, of course, but also to figure out what makes Chicago’s art world tick. Pucker deserves serious credit for rallying next-gen patrons and collectors through Gertie’s EarlyWork program of curated cultural events. Still, she’s one voice in a glorious chorus of artists, curators and civic-minded supporters—all of whom, it seems, are ready to invite outsiders like me in.

    Day 0

    It’s just around lunchtime when I touch down at O’Hare, but I’m thrilled to find my room at Chicago Athletic Association already ready when I arrive after an uneventful ride on the Blue Line. I can see Cloud Gate from here, or at least glints of it between the leaves of Millennium Park’s many trees, which means I’m also near Jaume Plensa’s ever-smiling crowd-pleaser, Crown Fountain. It’s hours before I need to be anywhere, and my home base is just steps from the Art Institute of Chicago (the second-largest art museum in the United States, after New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art), which feels like the perfect way to start an unfamiliar city fling with art.

    The Stephen Alesch painting in my hotel room. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    In the elevator, someone cheerfully asks if I’m headed out to see the Bean. “Sure am,” I answer—and I guess I’m just that suggestible because suddenly I feel compelled to make that my first stop. Close up, it’s filthy, covered in smeary handprints and streaks, but from a distance, framed by the city skyline, it’s pure sculpture drama. I take selfies from afar but resist the urge to touch it since I left my sanitizer back in the room—rookie mistake.

    Marc Chagall’s America Windows at the Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    On a normal trip, I’d budget at least five hours for the Art Institute, but this isn’t a normal trip, so I decide to focus on the heavy hitters: Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Van Gogh’s The Bedroom. Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Grant Wood’s American Gothic. My all-time favorite Cézanne, Basket of Apples. I’m waylaid early on by the Elizabeth Catlett show, “A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,” a fantastic career survey on view through early next year and absolutely worth the flight alone. In Gallery 262, everyone is clustered around Nighthawks, which is probably among the least interesting paintings there—though it’s definitely bigger than you’d expect. Far more captivating are Peter Blume’s weirdly brilliant The Rock (commissioned for Fallingwater but rejected for being too big) and Kay Sage’s deliciously desolate In the Third Sleep. There’s even an early cubist-expressionist Pollock, which feels like spotting a celebrity before their glow-up.

    Kay Sage, In the Third Sleep, 1944. Oil on canvas. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    And so it goes. The Art Institute of Chicago is home to paintings we’ve all seen a hundred times on mugs, tote bags and in movies—you can absolutely have your Ferris Bueller moment in front of the Seurat—but it’s the lesser-known gems that really sparkle. There’s a stellar selection of Georgia O’Keeffe’s works (Ballet Skirt or Electric Light is a standout) and Alma Thomas’ Starry Night with the Astronauts. Other highlights: William Zorach’s Summer, Marsden Hartley’s Movement, Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones’ Shop Girls and Mary Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath.

    Elizabeth Catlett, Head of a Negro Woman, 1946. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    Time-bound as I am, I feel like I’m jogging through the galleries. (Fun fact: Large as the museum is, less than 20 percent of the collection is on display at any given time.) I pause for a late lunch at the café—great food—and sit in the garden for a charming little reset before diving back in. Monet’s stacks of wheat remind me what repetition can achieve. There are Van Goghs here you haven’t seen on a million mugs, but don’t skip the Pissarros. I breeze through the Greek, Etruscan, Roman and Egyptian galleries but somehow miss the entire Asian art collection. I cap off my visit at Marc Chagall’s America Windows and leave feeling artistically overfed yet hungry for more.

    Andi Crist’s Precautionary Measures. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    After a stop back at the hotel, where I freshen up and check out Andi Crist’s Precautionary Measures, a site-specific installation that transforms symbols of caution and containment into a new visual language (then installed at Chicago Athletic Association), I hop on the train toward 400 N. Peoria. It’s the hub of CXW and the site of “Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City, 1984–2015,” a special exhibition curated by Gareth Kaye and Iris Colburn and presented by Abby Pucker’s Gertie.

    The weather is perfection—so close to ideal it’s practically invisible. But I’m off to an inauspicious start. My GPS goes haywire, and I’m spinning around River North in a mild panic, trying to figure out where the hell I am. And once I do, I’m unfashionably early—as in, they’re-still-setting-up-the-bar early. But someone lets me in, and the bartenders take pity on me, which is how I score a private preview of the show. I spend an embarrassingly long time standing in the room where Jordan Wolfson’s hypnotic Perfect Lover (2007), one of my favorite works, is playing on a loop.

    An installation view of “Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City, 1984–2015
” at 400 N. Peoria. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    As the gallery fills, I’m still feeling untethered. I spot Tony Karman. I eavesdrop on conversations, playing a game of Artist, Collector or Scenester? I linger by Wendy Jacob’s Untitled (1988), watching it breathe, then lose myself in Rashid Johnson’s Remembering D.B. Cooper (2013), until Ellen Kaulig, chief of staff at the Chicago Reader, saves me from myself by introducing me to Pucker. In a relatively quiet spot under the stairs, she tells me how Chicago Exhibition Weekend evolved over three years and where the idea for “Over My Head” came from.

    “It’s a bit of a double entendre—being a flyover city, right? People don’t often attribute movements like conceptual art to Chicago, but it is an amazing nerve center of that,” she says, calling the planning phase a whirlwind. “We talked to these absolute icons. People like Karsten Lund, Helen Goldenberg, Laura Paulson, John Corbett and Jim Dempsey… just people who have been integral to this area for so many years.” Chicago’s art elite were, she said, excited to share, and the resulting show collected work from Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Dara Birnbaum, Rosemarie Trockel, Martin Puryear, Tony Lewis and others.

    “They don’t think so highly of themselves that they’re detached from reality,” she adds. “They’re around. I think sometimes that might work to our detriment, because it’s hard to brand something as cool when it’s so inviting—but it’s fucking cool to be invited.”

    Rashid Johnson‍, Remembering D.B. Cooper, 2013. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    That word—invited—comes up again when I talk to Chanelle Lacy, Gertie’s director of art initiatives, about the crossover between CXW and EarlyWork: “We want to lower barriers to entry. We try to demystify things because once you actually get into it, it’s not that scary. The art world just looks a little intimidating from the outside. We want to expose people to the finer side of things and be a lifeline. And everything is very serious—it’s just about making it more approachable, so people feel invited into the experience.”

    The exhibition dinner is where I meet Friche, along with Carla Acevedo-Yates (if the name’s familiar, it’s because she’s on the documenta 16 curatorial team), several dealers and a cadre of arts-friendly businesspeople and politicians. I stay and schmooze for as long as I can before exhaustion sets in.

    Molly Zuckerman-Hartung‍, Notley, 2013. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    Day 1

    I’d planned to follow one of the curated routes that the CXW team had Chicago artists, gallerists and creatives put together, but last night Friche hand-drew me a one-of-a-kind mapped itinerary—and really, how could I possibly say no to that? But Chicago’s art museums don’t open until 10 a.m., and the galleries open even later, so I decide to wander toward Lake Michigan. I get sidetracked by the absolute unit of a fountain in the distance—it’s Clarence F. Buckingham Memorial Fountain—and I start heading that way, thinking it can’t be too far. And it’s not, technically, but its sheer scale plays tricks on your senses. I know I’m close when I pass Turtle Boy and Dove Girl and the North Rose Garden, which must be stunning at the height of summer, and then I keep going for a quick peek at Magdalena Abakanowicz’s leggy Agora.

    Clarence F. Buckingham Memorial Fountain. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    I haven’t even officially started my day, but I’ve already clocked more than a mile—according to Friche’s map, in the wrong direction. After an about-face, I get plenty of lake views on my three-mile walk to the MCA Chicago, which is showing “City In A Garden: Queer Art and Activism” and “Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me,” along with “Collection in Conversation with Pablo Helguera” across all three floors of the museum’s stairwell galleries. Like the Art Institute, MCA Chicago is a feast, but a much more digestible one. You can see everything in a couple of hours, which is ideal because my weekend itinerary is threatening to become an endurance sport.

    Nick Cave’s Sound Suit (2008) in “City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago” at MCA Chicago. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    First stop: Patron Gallery for Bethany Collins’s “DUSK,” which is nuanced but underwhelming as presented—or maybe I’m just too overstimulated post-museum to process it properly. Next up: Western Exhibitions, Document, Volume Gallery and David Salkin Creative, which all share a floor at 1709 West Chicago Avenue. Friche is in, and she tells me the neighborhood is a hub for emerging contemporary art, but you’ll also find heavy-hitters like Mariane Ibrahim Gallery and Corbett vs. Dempsey. “It definitely concentrates a lot of the scene,” she says. “And it feels pretty supportive—we each have our own identity. I think it’s hard to find programs in Chicago that resemble each other. I’m not saying anything negative about New York, but sometimes you go to Chelsea and see the same kind of painting shows over and over. I feel like here, you don’t have that.”

    Journie Cirdain’s Chandelier Dewdrops (2025), part of “The Gloaming” at Western Exhibitions gallery. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    Unlike Scott Speh, she’s more than happy to talk about what makes Chicago’s art scene unique: “Because our overhead is manageable, it’s more accessible to open spaces and experiment. Eventually, you get a bit more constrained by the commercial aspects—if you want longevity, you do need to sell some art. That affects your choices. But there’s still a bit more breathing room here than in the coastal cities, given how unaffordable things have become in San Francisco and New York.”

    Kiah Celeste’s Four Shores (2025) at Document. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    I linger over Kiah Celeste and Gordon Hall’s work at Document and Journie Cirdain’s “The Gloaming” at Western Exhibitions before briefly popping into “Porfirio Gutiérrez: Modernism” at Volume Gallery. Then I’m back out on the streets, where I’m spoiled for choice but already flirting with art fatigue. Sadly, Monica Meloche gallery isn’t opening its Luke Agada and Braxton Garneau show until tomorrow, so I make my way to Mariane Ibrahim for “Yukimasa Ida: Flaming Memory.” It is, in a word, transcendent. I stand for a long time in front of each painting, hypnotized by the massive brushstrokes and thick layers of paint that blur into half-remembered faces—like fragments of a dream fading faster than I can hold on.

    I think about squeezing in a few more galleries, but once again, I’ve grossly underestimated Chicago’s distances—and I’m hitting the wall. In a way, it’s a happy accident: I return to my hotel to the news that the iconic Agnes Gund has passed away, and her obit is waiting in my production queue. I edit, publish and then dash out to gape at the Chicago Picasso before hopping on the train to yet another neighborhood: Washington Park.

    Darius Dennis, SEEN. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    I’m here to see a different side of the art scene and join the large crowd gathered at the Green Line Performing Arts Center for a tour of the imagined Washington Park Public Art Corridor. In several batches, a trolley ferries us to Amanda Williams’ Other Washingtons at 51st and S. King Drive, the future site of Breath, Form & Freedom, created by the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials Foundation to honor victims of police torture, and Arts + Public Life’s Arts Lawn for a preview of Yvette Mayorga’s City Lovers in Paradise. I learn more about Chicago’s recent history in a few hours than I could’ve gleaned from a week of reading—and not all of it’s pretty. Back at the arts center, there’s live music, dance and collaborative art-making with artist and teacher William Estrada, who’s brought his Mobile Street Art Cart Project to the Art Lawn.

    When I ask Estrada about the art scene, he’s frank. “There are a lot of spaces where not everyone is welcome, and that’s the worst part of it,” he says. “But the best part is that there’s a lot of art in Chicago, and you can see it across 77 neighborhoods. That’s the part I get really excited about—because you get to experience different art in different communities, and actually engage in conversations about what that art means and who made it with the folks who are being affected by it or get to experience it directly.”

    Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    And that’s exactly why I’m here—not just for CXW (which is fantastic) or the city’s world-class museums (also fantastic) but to understand what makes Chicago’s art pulse so distinct. Back in the Loop, I stroll around Millennium Park waiting for a text from Wilma’s letting me know my barbecue is ready. The evening is gorgeous—warm, breezy and humming with life. Kids are splashing in Crown Fountain, musicians are playing on the sidewalks, and the whole scene radiates that beautiful combination of grit and charm. I can see why so many people love it here.

    Day 2

    If you have limited time in Chicago—say, you’re breezing in for a weekend of art and, like me, you’ll be operating without wheels—you need to think hyper-locally. This is a city of neighborhoods, each with its own cultural flavor and art offerings. Hyde Park has the Smart Museum of Art, the Renaissance Society, Hyde Park Art Center and the Logan Center Gallery (plus the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures Museum and the DuSable Black History Museum in nearby Washington Park). Lincoln Park has the DePaul Art Museum and Wrightwood 659. Ukrainian Village and West Town boast a cluster of commercial galleries, along with the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art and Intuit Art Museum.

    The Chicago Picasso. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    If there are specific museums or galleries you’re determined to hit, book a spot somewhere central. Because if you’re coming from New York and assuming you’ll just zip between neighborhoods like you’re downtown, you’re in for a rude awakening. Chicago is about ten times the size of Manhattan in terms of land area—which is why, during my final hours in town, I’m speedwalking the South Loop’s Wabash Arts Corridor. (Sidenote: I consider myself a hotel gym connoisseur, but I racked up so many steps during my two-day stay that I never once made it to the Chicago Athletic Association gym. No regrets.)

    Crisscrossing streets so eerily empty of cars they feel post-apocalyptic, I admire murals not just on walls but also on doors, alleyways and parking lots. Initiated by Columbia College Chicago in 2013, the Wabash Arts Corridor project has brought more than 100 murals to the neighborhood, including We Own the Future by Shepard Fairey. I’m especially charmed by Marina Zumi’s Impossible Meeting and the candy-colored Moose Bubblegum Bubble by Jacob Watts, and wish I had more time to wander—but I need to get back to Chicago Athletic Association for my final art experience of the trip: the “City as Platform” breakfast conversation.

    Jacob Watts’s Bubblegum Moose Bubble, one of the Wabash Art Corridor Murals. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    On my straight-line power walk back to my hotel, I marvel at Chicago’s abundant parking—a downright shocking sight for a New Yorker—and pause to peer into the windows of Elephant Room Gallery, one of many I didn’t make it to, which is showing Darin Latimer’s solo exhibition “Rhinoceros.” Other things I don’t do in Chicago: participate in the “Throw your phone into a body of water!” activation by Weatherproof, which invited art lovers to toss their phones into any handy body of water on September 19, 20 or 21 whenever the numbers on a clock added up to four in military time (e.g. 0400 or 2200)—though I was sorely tempted. Attend the Improvised Sound Making at The Franklin. See “Alex Katz: White Lotus” at GRAY. Visit the National Museum of Mexican Art and the National Veterans Art Museum.

    Cheri Lee Charlton’s Curious Bunny. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    Before the talk—an engaging conversation between Kate Sierzputowski (artistic director of EXPO CHICAGO), Nora Daley (co-chair of the Chicago Architecture Biennial), Christine Messineo (Frieze director of Americas) and, no surprise, Abby Pucker, who greets me warmly, by name, when I check in. As Sierzputowski notes when the convo kicks off, the panel “reflects the best of what Chicago has to offer: collaboration across sectors, deep civic commitment and a shared mission to place the city’s cultural work on a global stage.” Daley calls CXW a “cultural palooza” and declares that “Chicago shows up,” which is something I see in action, over and over, during my short time here. “I think it’s who’s in the room at these dinners is what makes this work,” Sierzputowski agrees—whether that’s gallerists, artists, curators, museum directors and civic leaders or, as Pucker reminds us, engaged corporate entities committed to supporting the arts in Chicago.

    “City as Platform,” one of the Chicago Exhibition Weekend talks. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    “The creative economy contributes massively to city revenues, yet the people in power often don’t see or understand it,” she says. “We’ve seen perception hurt Chicago. Every city has problems—but if the media only amplifies those, we lose people. Art and culture can bring them back.”

    Ironically, the end of the conversation marks the close of my 48 hours of art in Chicago. As I ride the Blue Line back to O’Hare, mulling over everything I’ve experienced, it hits me: as thrilling as it is to be here during Chicago Exhibition Weekend, there’s just too much on the CXW agenda and not enough time to do it. What I experienced in two days was barely a teaser of what this city has to offer. So with that in mind, Abby, if you’re reading this, I have three words for you: Chicago Exhibition Week. Think about it.

    Strreet art by Doc Mosher. Photo: Christa Terry for Observer

    48 Hours of Art in Chicago: CXW, Museums and Monuments to Come

    Christa Terry

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  • Gymkhana, London’s Top Indian Restaurant, Wants to Make a Statement in Las Vegas

    Gymkhana Las Vegas. Courtesy MGM Resorts

    Gymkhana, the only Indian restaurant in London with two Michelin stars, understands the assignment when it comes to opening in Las Vegas. The goal, of course, is to bring the best of London’s Gymkhana to the Vegas Strip while adding new dishes and new dazzle for festive only-in-Vegas nights.

    On December 3, Gymkhana will make its United States debut with a 170-seat outpost at the Aria casino-resort. (Reservations are now live.) Gymkhana, known for dishes like tandoori lamb chops, venison keema naan and pork cheek curry, will serve beef for the first time when it opens in Las Vegas. New dishes will include a short rib pepper fry and wagyu keema naan, alongside an exclusive-to-Vegas goan lobster curry. Cocktail service will include Gymkhana’s first punch bowls.

    Gymkhana, as always, will upend the idea of fine dining and what guests might expect at a two-Michelin-star restaurant. 

    “Maybe their perception is it’s going to be stuffy,” Pavan Pardasani, who recently joined Gymkhana parent company JKS Restaurants as global CEO, tells Observer. “It’s going to be formal. I’m going to have to dress a certain way. And that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

    Gymkhana is here to introduce Indian food to a wider audience. This is a restaurant that celebrates family-style dining and wants guests to rip and dip bread into curries. Gymkhana is where you’re totally fine grabbing a lamb chop with your hands. You can build a meal around vegetarian dishes or you can savor biryani and tandoori kebabs made with wild game. As always, the best nights in Las Vegas are about choosing your own adventure.

    Tandoori masala lamb chops. Courtesy JKS Restaurants

    “The truth of the matter is, you don’t need to love Indian food to love Gymkhana,” Pardasani says. “What you need to cherish and love and seek out is a really great night out, a really great culinary experience that’s about how we present, execute and deliver that food.”

    In London, Gymkhana is a tightly packed 100-seat bi-level restaurant inside a Mayfair townhouse. In Las Vegas, there will be 170 seats, but Pardasani and JKS founders Jyotin, Karam and Sunaina Sethi are focused on preserving the warmth, coziness and conviviality of London’s Gymkhana. The new restaurant at Aria will weave together the jade-like green (what JKS calls Gymkhana green) and the kind of dark wood, metallic elements and plush seating that makes the London location feel like an elite private club.

    “You have to understand that this opening was a big part of what sparked my brain and my heart and my passion to join JKS,” says Pardasani, who is the son of Indian immigrants and grew up in New York City. “Because otherwise, you would define me as your traditional coastal elite. I’ve spent 43-and-a-half of the 46 years of my life living in L.A. and New York, except for two-and-a-half years when I lived in Las Vegas.”

    That time spent in Las Vegas, when Pardasani had a leadership role at Hakkasan, gave him clarity.

    “Las Vegas truly reflects and represents America,” he says. “Living there and immersing myself in the community there and meeting people that come from different parts of the country with very different ideas, thoughts and worldviews taught me that Las Vegas is really the gateway to America.”

    And at a moment when high-end Indian food is popping off in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, bringing it to Las Vegas is a no-brainer for Gymkhana. This isn’t just about opening a top-tier restaurant. This is about changing the culture.

    “I see the strengthening of Indian concepts and I see that operators are thinking outside of just New York,” Pardasani says. “I hope that people experience us in Las Vegas and they take their love and their passion and their joy for our food back to where they live. Maybe it will inspire them to tell their local community that they need an Indian restaurant. Maybe it will inspire people to pursue what we’re doing. Let’s break down the myths and the barriers people might have about our food and make it part of the great cuisines that are available all over America.”

    Gymkhana is part of a major JKS expansion into the United States. JKS is opening another glamorous Indian restaurant, Ambassadors Clubhouse, in New York’s Flatiron neighborhood. The JKS portfolio also includes chef Kian Samyani’s Berenjak, a Persian restaurant in London that just opened a location at Soho Warehouse in Los Angeles.

    Even among top hospitality groups around the world, JKS stands out for its range and deep belief in the diversity of great food. JKS, which also has buzzing London restaurants that serve Sri Lankan, Thai, Spanish, British pub and modern European food, started with the Sethi siblings wanting to celebrate their heritage in London. Now it’s time to do the same thing in America.

    Pardasani is excited to show guests in Las Vegas that bar snacks like samosas and pappadam are very much a part of the experience at Gymkhana.

    “Typically in Indian culture, you don’t drink without eating,” he says.

    Pardasani is also looking forward to serving guests who want vegetarian options like flavor-packed daal, chana masala and tandoori broccoli.

    Amristari shrimp and scallops. Courtesy of JKS Restaurants

    “It’s very common in Indian families to have a day or days of the week where you’re vegetarian,” Pardasani says. “The representation of vegetarian food within India is some of the best. You don’t have to give up on taste.”

    But perhaps most of all, Gymkhana is ready to showcase the wonders of family-style dining.

    “I grew up in an Indian household where we ate Indian food every day,” says Pardasani, who has visited India 20 times and fondly remembers dishes his late mother and grandmother made. “And what that entailed, always, was sharing. It was never, ‘This is my food. That is your food.’ And I think Gymkhana presents this opportunity where you don’t want to just eat one dish. The way to achieve that is to share.”

    Gymkhana wants you to understand that Indian cuisine is food for everyone. And you’re very much encouraged to put multiple dishes onto your plate and just let everything blend.

    Gymkhana, London’s Top Indian Restaurant, Wants to Make a Statement in Las Vegas

    Andy Wang

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  • The Business of Bagels: How New York’s Most Iconic Food Fuels a Culinary Economy

    From small bakeries to global brands, New York’s bagel makers are shaping a cultural and culinary economy rooted in tradition and reinvention. Courtesy Utopia Bagels

    There are few foods more synonymous with New York City than the bagel—a simple ring of boiled and baked dough that somehow embodies the spirit of the city itself. Equal parts humble and iconic, the bagel has risen from its immigrant origins on the Lower East Side to become a global culinary symbol. Today, bagels are fueling a thriving cultural and economic ecosystem that stretches from Brooklyn bakeries to international markets, generating billions in annual revenue while preserving the heritage of craftsmanship that first defined the New York bagel.

    From immigrant bread to city symbol

    The story of the bagel is the story of New York. Brought to the United States in the late 19th century by Eastern European Jewish immigrants, the beygel found a new home in the tenements and bakeries of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Early bagel bakers, organized under the Bagel Bakers’ Local 338 union, were fiercely protective of their craft, hand-rolling, boiling and baking every piece with care. By the early 1900s, New York had nearly 70 bagel bakeries, and the bread had become a staple of working-class life. By the mid-20th century, the bagel had evolved into an American breakfast essential. Industrial innovations like the rotary oven and the Lender brothers’ mass-produced frozen bagels made it a national phenomenon. Today’s artisan revival—driven by hand-rolled, malt-boiled, crusty bagels—reclaims the authenticity that first made the New York bagel famous.

    “Bagels are a New York staple,” says Jesse Spellman, co-owner of Utopia Bagels in Whitestone, Queens. “They always will be. Keeping our recipes and traditions consistent for over 40 years gives people a taste of the New York culture of the past.” Spellman’s family has been hand-rolling, kettle-boiling and baking bagels in a 1947 carousel oven since 1981, and their commitment to heritage has made Utopia one of the city’s most celebrated institutions

    Two balloons, one representing a bagel with a white hat that reads "Lender's Bagels" and one representing cream cheese with Philadelphia brand logoTwo balloons, one representing a bagel with a white hat that reads "Lender's Bagels" and one representing cream cheese with Philadelphia brand logo
    Mascots Len and Phyl nod to the brands that industrialized and popularized bagels nationwide, transforming a regional staple into a household breakfast. Courtesy of BagelUp

    The bagel economy

    New York remains the undisputed bagel capital of the world, home to hundreds of specialty bagel shops across the five boroughs. Iconic institutions like Ess-a-Bagel and H&H Bagels have evolved from family-owned shops to major producers and franchised brands. Ess-a-Bagel recently opened a 7,500-square-foot manufacturing facility in Harlem, while H&H plans 70 new franchise locations across the country. 

    “The economics of the bagel business is the same as the rest of the restaurant industry,” says Craig Hutchinson, chef and owner of Olmo Bagels in New Haven, Connecticut. “But the difference is how willing you are to be transparent with your guests and your team. We stress the importance of making guests feel seen and special. That free kindness helps our guests justify the rising costs of living in 2025 and beyond.” For Hutchinson, community and hospitality are part of the recipe. “We embraced the community and used the bagel as our hospitality vehicle. We all fell in love with the fast-paced bagel industry and never looked back.”

    That sentiment is echoed by Jimmy Stathakis, founder and CEO of Bagel Market, who has reimagined the traditional shop through modern design and digital innovation. “The bagel is a cornerstone of New York life: fast, familiar and full of character. It reflects the city’s diversity and resilience. At Bagel Market, we see ourselves as part of that cultural fabric, offering a space where heritage meets contemporary taste.” He adds, “Margins remain challenging in the food service industry, particularly in New York City, but strong brand positioning and operational discipline create room for growth. We focus on scalable systems, efficient supply chains and consistent quality.”

    In Maine, Jeremy and Marina Kratzer, owners of Dutchman’s Wood Fired Bagels, bring a small-town perspective to the same story. “Being as smart as you can on labor, and really managing the food costs, are keys to success in today’s ever-changing industry,” Jeremy explains. “Building relationships with your purveyors is a great way to ensure that you have someone to trust and look out for you when you need things.”

    Across the Pacific, Talia and Kelly Bongolan-Schwartz, owners of Tali’s Bagels & Schmear in Hawaii, share a similar struggle, but their story is a testament to dedication. “Hand-rolling bagels is very labor-intensive,” says Tali. “It’s always difficult to balance that with pricing, payroll and profit—especially living in Hawaii, where all ingredients are imported and rent is at a premium.” Despite these challenges, they’ve built a loyal following: “About 90 percent of our customers are regulars.”

    Adding to the evolving economics, Orly Gottesman of Modern Bread & Bagel underscores how growth comes from multiple lanes: “Margins in retail food are generally tight… Growth potential exists if you find ways to diversify revenue. We supplement our retail business with direct-to-consumer shipping, retail mixes and catering.” 

    Assorted bagel sandwiches cut in half on a tray with pints of flavored cream cheeseAssorted bagel sandwiches cut in half on a tray with pints of flavored cream cheese
    The modern bagel economy blends tradition and trend: hand-rolled classics served alongside inventive flavors designed for a global palate. Courtesy Utopia Bagels

    From the Pacific Northwest, Brittany Erwin of B’s Bagels & Butters points to where revenue concentrates: “In Washington there is definitely growth potential, but not in the form of a traditional bagel shop… any growth is in the form of sandwiches or catering.” Erwin adds, “In Washington there has been a bagel explosion in the last 3 years, and the majority of shops are leaning away from NY style.  Most of them are leaning towards the sourdough bread craze and serving airy, hard crusty bagels.”

    Nationally, the U.S. bakery sector worth over $60 billion with bagels maintaining rapid growth. The global bagel market reached $5.58 billion in 2024 and is projected to hit $7.35 billion by 2030, growing at nearly 5 percent annually. Europe and Asia have embraced the bagel as both a fashionable food and a cultural export. 

    In Denmark, Emily Bridges, founder of Bagel Belly in Copenhagen, is part of that international wave. “For Americans living in Copenhagen, bagels are an everyday food; they’ll grab one on the way to work or stock up for the week. For Danes, it’s more of a special and unique treat, and something fun to enjoy on weekends or share with friends” she says. “For many of my customers, my bagel is the first bagel they’ve ever tried, which is always exciting and a big responsibility!”

    The bagel as cultural currency

    More than just a breakfast, the bagel carries deep symbolic weight: of identity, comfort and connection. Declared New York’s official state bread in 2008, it remains a culinary shorthand for the city’s diversity and drive. “NY bagels are iconic because of their long-standing history in a busy, busy world,” says Hutchinson. “We realized that the real secret wasn’t just the bagel itself, it was dedication to community, to early hours and to always baking fresh. Those are the shops that become staples.”

    Stathakis adds, “New York bagels have a texture, flavor and history that are unmatched. The secret lies not only in the city’s water but more importantly in its culture: the precision, the pace and the pride of generations who perfected this craft.”

    For Yero Rudzinskas, owner of Baltik’s Bagel in Richmond, Virginia, the story has gone national: “The bagel has outgrown the five boroughs and occupies a special place in the imagination of Americans broadly. Of course, the bagel is one of the most recognizable New York culinary exports, but at this point, everyone has the right to expect a freshly baked bagel close enough to enjoy every day of the week.”

    From Copenhagen to Honolulu, the New York bagel’s DNA travels well, even as it adapts. “People are hungry for bagels all over the world,” says Bridges. “A bagel transforms any time it’s made in a new location: ingredients, taste, even the malt syrup, but the soul stays the same. The soul of a New York bagel is rooted in tradition but never stops evolving.”

    Modern Bread & Bagel’s Gottesman frames that tradition through inclusion. “Bagels are one of NYC’s most culture-centric foods… contributing to that identity meant making our version open to everyone, those avoiding gluten and those who just want a delicious, authentic bagel, so people don’t feel like they’re giving anything up.” 

    And in Washington State, Erwin sees the culture expanding via social buzz and community ritual. “The bagel boom has spread to TikTok which means bagels are trendy for all ages,” she says, noting that what began as a treat has become a daily staple for many regulars. 

    Two workers wearing latex gloves and blue Mark's Off Madison t-shirts arrange bagel samples on a trayTwo workers wearing latex gloves and blue Mark's Off Madison t-shirts arrange bagel samples on a tray
    At BagelFest, veteran bakers showcase the enduring art of New York bagel-making—boiled, baked and served with a side of nostalgia. Courtesy of BagelFest

    The new wave: festivals, global influence and social impact

    The modern bagel is no longer confined to the five boroughs. It’s a global connector. The rise of BagelFest, founded by Sam Silverman in 2019, has elevated the humble bagel into a worldwide cultural event. Hosted annually at Citi Field, with this year’s event on November 16, the festival attracts thousands of attendees and dozens of competing bakeries, each vying for the title of “Best Bagel.”

    Silverman’s mission extends beyond the event itself. Through BagelUp, he and his team are teaching bagel-making to new audiences and using food as a bridge between cultures in New York, one of the most diverse cities in the world. BagelUp offers immersive hands-on classes where locals and international tourists alike can learn the art of crafting authentic New York bagels. These classes draw aspiring bakers from around the world eager to experience the city’s culinary traditions firsthand.

    BagelFest partners are spreading that same spirit of connection globally. Among the most inspiring collaborations is between BagelUp exhibitor Olmo Bagels, which has partnered with Oído, a nonprofit culinary school in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula led by Chef Gabe Erales, the winner of season 18 of Top Chef. Together, they’re building cross-cultural culinary programs that celebrate craftsmanship and community, from New York kitchens to Mexico’s rural classrooms.

    “Many of these kids have never had the means to travel outside their community,” Erales explains, “but through food they can connect to the world. When they see the cultural tie between bagels and New York, it’s like a window into another culture. Earlier this year, we took a group of students to Oaxaca to visit a friend’s cooking school. It was their first time on a plane, and for them, it was like going to Disneyland.”

    A bagel judging competition at BagelFestA bagel judging competition at BagelFest
    At BagelFest, bakers and enthusiasts gather to taste, rank, and celebrate New York’s most iconic food that has grown into a $7 billion global market. Courtesy of BagelFest

    The taste of tomorrow

    As New York continues to evolve, so does its most famous food. The next generation of bakers is blending tradition with innovation: experimenting with sourdough starters, regional grains and globally inspired toppings while honoring the heritage that made the bagel a symbol of community.

    Gottesman sees the future in “continued diversification: more dietary-inclusive options, more direct-to-consumer retail products and technology integration for ordering and fulfillment,” alongside neighborhood shops that “combine excellent product with smart operations.” Erwin is blunt about the operational direction: “More sandwiches… in this economy we need to be building bigger check averages,” she says, while hoping quality won’t slip as the category scales.

    “I think the bagel business is heading in a strong direction,” says Spellman. “It’s one of the few foods that everyone, across ages and backgrounds, continues to love. It’s hard on the outside, soft on the inside—like a true New Yorker”.

    From the bustling counters of Queens to the teaching kitchens of Quintana Roo, the bagel continues to unite people across borders. Whether in New York, New Haven or Mexico, it remains more than bread. It is a bridge between cultures, a testament to resilience and a rising symbol of how simple food can inspire extraordinary connection.

    The Business of Bagels: How New York’s Most Iconic Food Fuels a Culinary Economy

    Olga González

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  • Austin’s Formula 1 Weekend Was a High-Octane Rodeo of Speed and Spectacle

    Race winner Max Verstappen of the Netherlands and Oracle Red Bull Racing. Mark Sutton – Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images

    Formula 1 is back in Austin, the “Home of Horsepower.” Instead of riding bucking broncos, the world’s fastest drivers are revving 1000 horsepower V6 engines around one of the year’s trickiest tracks.

    During race weekend (October 17-19) in Austin, the city is plastered with F1 imagery, from posters of Lando Norris’ face alongside 6th Street to the full range of Pirelli tires that adorn the lobby of the Thompson Hotel.  

    It’s the one weekend in Austin where lines around the block aren’t solely reserved for BBQ restaurants. Instead, Formula 1 fanatics queue for fans zones set up around the city like, the Atlassian Williams Racing Fan Zone where they can drive esports simulators, Lewis Hamilton’s Plus 44 store pop-up and former F1 driver Daniel Ricciardo’s Enchanté pop-up.

    Matthew McConaughey participates in the grid tour before the start of the United States Formula One Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. AFP via Getty Images

    Digital luxury lifestyle concierge service Velocity Black is the official luxury lifestyle partner of the Aston Martin Aramco Formula 1 team, and members get access to some of the weekend’s most exclusive offerings, including the team’s hospitality suite in The Paddock Club, a hot lap, garage tours, pit lane walks and a lunch at the Aston Martin House, where drivers casually walk by as you munch on brisket croquettes and local tostadas.

    “Whether it be VIP hospitality, garage tours and hot lap access at F1 races, fine dining experiences or exclusive entertainment, we are committed to unlocking truly unforgettable moments across the globe,” says Sylvain Langrand, CEO of Velocity Black. 

    Malin Akerman and Brittany Snow attend the Uber One Rodeo. Getty Images for Uber

    Off the track, there was a private dinner at the iconic Franklin Barbecue with an intimate live performance by Grammy Award-winner Gary Clark Jr. And should members want to beat the Austin traffic, Velocity Black  arranges helicopter transports to and from the circuit.

    “F1 and Austin have acclimated to each other,” legendary BBQ pitmaster Aaron Franklin told Observer at a private dinner for Velocity Black members. “Now, people come here specifically for F1, and are more interested in the local scene and local culture. We had the McLaren team here last night, and they’re all just a bunch of really cool nerds. I love meeting people during race weekend that I wouldn’t normally have the chance to meet.”

    Roller coasters dot The Circuit Of The Americas (COTA) and it seems like the mandatory dress code is cowboy hats and boots. When cars aren’t rounding the circuit, musical performances throughout the weekend include Kygo and Garth Brooks, Turnpike Troubadours, as well as local Austin talent.

    This year, Austin was a sprint weekend, meaning there was an extra mini-race with more points on the line for the championship battle. Track temperatures weren’t the only scorching hot thing on Saturday, as the sprint race was off to a spicy start. The crowd gasped as both McLarens made contact, forcing them out of the sprint race and any chance at points. Overall, a bad day for Oscar Piastri, currently leading the driver’s championship, as he only placed P6 in qualifying, while his teammate and championship rival, Lando Norris, came in at P2.

    Glen Powell on the grid during the F1 Grand Prix of United States at Circuit of The Americas. Formula 1 via Getty Images

    And on race day, COTA was hot as H-E double toothpicks, but celebrities still lined the track, including Matthew McConaughey, Glen Powell, Malin Akerman and Adele. Max Verstappen dominated, winning the race with Lando Norris coming in second and Charles LeClerc third. There were plenty of overtakes and on-track action, but no red flags. Although the race wasn’t as exciting as the sprint, it was consequential for the driver’s championship, with Lando narrowing the gap to Oscar Piastri by 14 points.

    And as the sun set on Austin, the city was electric with bars packed with F1 fans, and private events and parties, like the Esses Magazine one-year anniversary party with two special guests, as the Visa Cash App RB drivers Isack Hadjar and Liam Lawson made an appearance. At the One Party by Uber, a musical performance by the Zac Brown Band opened with a traditional Texas rodeo.

    While partaking in a BBQ dinner, another Texas tradition, Jak Crawford, an F2 driver and Texas native told Observer, “My favorite thing about race weekend in Austin is the food. The brisket, it’s so good here.” While he hasn’t raced here yet he says, “I can’t wait to drive here, it can be a really tricky circuit.”

    Austin’s Formula 1 Weekend Was a High-Octane Rodeo of Speed and Spectacle

    Katie Lockhart

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  • Shara Hughes’s Luminous Landscapes Open Portals into Life, Death and the Sublime

    Shara Hughes’s “Weather Report” is at David Kordansky Gallery in New York through October 18. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

    Shara Hughes is one of those names that surged during the pandemic, when demand for her paintings spiked and prices climbed quickly, culminating in her record sale of $2,940,000 at Christie’s in May 2022. Yet interest in her work has not waned. Her lush, vibrant visions of nature continue to strike a universal chord, speaking to the human condition and our connection to the world in ways that move beyond market trends.

    Her new body of work, unveiled in “Weather Report” at David Kordansky Gallery during Armory and New York art week, demonstrates Hughes’s painterly command and the existential weight her practice has taken on. Each of the nine large-scale canvases on view unfolds as a dense world of thought and feeling, of self-reflection and experimentation, the outpouring of an artist confronting a pivotal moment in both her life and her creative path.

    “Over the past year or so, I’ve just become more connected to myself, and that kind of growth happens naturally as we get older,” Hughes says when we catch up after the fairs, reflecting on the many shifts in her life recently—her parents aging, her marriage, her friends having children—and how these changes inevitably shape how she sees and makes work. “I’m getting into middle age, and it feels like those kinds of things are becoming more real,” she adds. Questions about the afterlife, about the fleeting and fragile nature of emotions and existence, surface in waves, not constantly but with force when they arrive. “Last summer, I did lose someone in my family, and even though we weren’t especially close, her death jolted me into thinking, what if that were me? It pushed me into those spiritual questions: what is the afterlife, is it really so scary?”

    Shara Hughes stands in her studio wearing denim overalls, surrounded by her brightly colored paintings.Shara Hughes stands in her studio wearing denim overalls, surrounded by her brightly colored paintings.
    Shara Hughes. Portrait: Mary Inhea Kang, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

    While Hughes did not set out to make this show a meditation on existential themes, they inevitably shape the works. Her approach to the canvas remains instinctive, driven by an intuitive response to what colors and gestures suggest. Brushstrokes build layer by layer, forming compositions of vibrant tones and painterly currents that resist conventional representation, instead settling into an unorthodox balance.

    “The way I work is really abstract. At the beginning, I might just throw down a few colors and then respond to them, letting the painting guide me more than me directing it,” Hughes admits. “In that sense, it’s very intuitive and reactionary to both the canvas and myself,” she adds. “I’m not trying to illustrate anything specific; the painting shows me how I feel.”

    A viewer looks at two vibrant Shara Hughes paintings side by side, one filled with tropical foliage and the other with surreal trees against a blue sky.A viewer looks at two vibrant Shara Hughes paintings side by side, one filled with tropical foliage and the other with surreal trees against a blue sky.
    Hughes uses dizzying brushwork, vibrant colors and shifting perspectives to make paintings that defy many of the existing conventions associated with the landscape genre. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

    For this reason, Hughes often describes her works as psychological and emotional landscapes: the progressive layering of paint and shifting colors mirrors the complexity of how we process and elaborate the surrounding reality through our senses. Her image-making follows and echoes the meaning-making process we all undergo in “being-in-the-world,” something that precedes any linguistic or symbolic codification. “Often I start without a clear goal, and the painting ends up teaching me—showing me I’m thinking about something or still upset about something agitating inside.”

    Although these works may appear semi-abstract, they represent something very real for Hughes—the reality of the psyche, and the intricate interplay of senses, emotions, and psychological, even pre-cognitive, experience. “Every single thing I paint feels deeply connected to my own experience,” she clarifies. “I hate when people use the word ‘fantasy’ to describe my work because these aren’t fantastical places; they’re real to me, part of my lived experience. They’re very much grounded in reality.”

    Hughes often describes her works as autobiographical, though they are less about recounting events than translating moods and emotional atmospheres. “‘This is how I feel about this event.’ It’s more about filtering my feelings through the idea of landscape,” she explains.

    An expansive gallery installation displays multiple Shara Hughes canvases, including a large tree-like composition at the center.An expansive gallery installation displays multiple Shara Hughes canvases, including a large tree-like composition at the center.
    Hughes’s process rarely involves reference images; instead, she transposes the psychological complexity of her interior world into lush and layered compositions. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

    Her recurring choice of landscapes and nature as sites to project and reflect her feelings is tied to her upbringing in Atlanta, Georgia. “I wasn’t in wild nature every day—it was the city—but I lived on a lake, so I spent a lot of time outdoors,” she recounts. “My family also had a tree farm about two hours south, and I’d go there often with my brothers and friends. I did a lot of camping and backpacking, so I always felt a connection to nature.” Interestingly, Hughes only began painting landscapes after moving to New York, perhaps as a way of longing for the lush environments that had long shaped her life and imagination.

    What immediately strikes viewers in this new body of work is its heightened luminosity, which expands the canvas into surrounding space with an auratic, almost epiphanic presence that extends beyond the physical surface. If Hughes’s paintings have always had the ability to channel the very energy of the landscape, this series feels animated by a deeper animistic spirituality, suggesting an intensified awareness of the need to emotionally reattune with our environment and reconceive ourselves as part of broader ecologies of interdependence and symbiotic relations.

    Hughes recalls visiting Niagara Falls last summer and being overwhelmed by the sheer force of nature and the vitality of its primordial energy. That same sensation flows through these canvases, where she seeks to capture the generative power that art-making can unlock. Works such as The Good Light (2025), The Rift (2025) and Niagara (2025) transpose onto canvas the relentless vitality of flowing water and the radiant energy of sunlight colliding with cascading drops that dissolve into air before beginning their cycle anew.

    Two large Shara Hughes canvases depict radiant landscapes, one in fiery reds and oranges and the other evoking cascading waterfalls.Two large Shara Hughes canvases depict radiant landscapes, one in fiery reds and oranges and the other evoking cascading waterfalls.
    Each of the nine large-scale works on view encompasses a world of thought, feeling, self-reflection and open-ended experimentation. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

    For Hughes, these paintings are less about the afterlife than about a larger current of energy that surpasses us. “It’s the cycle of life, for sure, but also the force behind it—something hopeful and exciting we can lean on,” she reflects. In Mama (2025), for example, she sought to express nature as a quilt or a hug—something stable and generative, a maternal presence, the timeless archetype of Mother Nature. “It could be a mound of flowers larger than life, or a rock that transforms into a figure you might go to for stability or even worship, like a Madonna figure,” she explains. “All of these elements are part of nature, but also part of the psychological landscapes I’m always exploring.”

    Hughes’s paintings humanize and personify nature, giving it the presence of characters. In Bigger Person (2024), the interwoven visual field between foreground and background becomes the stage for a tension between figuration and abstraction, between human and nature, which ultimately coexist in a generative exchange of forces. “Often I use trees, plants and flowers to suggest a human presence, a self-portrait or even a portrait of someone. In that way, the landscape imagery allows me to connect with everyone,” Hughes reflects. Nature becomes, for her, a platform to contemplate human existence beyond categorization and individuation, reaching instead for universality. “A tree doesn’t need to be labeled as female or male or given a certain skin color or age. It becomes universal.”

    Other paintings, like Pearl Gate (2025), appear to inhabit a liminal space beyond both the sensory and human world, evoking an archetypal and magical dimension of landscape, one historically acknowledged and embraced through symbols and rituals, often in opposition to anthropocentric, rational or scientific narratives.

    A vivid Shara Hughes painting in red, orange, and purple hues fills a central wall in a pristine gallery space.A vivid Shara Hughes painting in red, orange, and purple hues fills a central wall in a pristine gallery space.
    MaMa (2025), an eight-foot-tall forest scene is dominated by a luminous field of red, orange and yellow that cascades down from the sun-like head of a flower anchoring the composition’s top edge. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

    In this sense, Hughes’s approach to landscape echoes that of Romanticism, which treated nature not simply as a subject to be depicted but as a privileged arena for probing the essence of the human condition in relation to immensity. For the Romantics, landscape was never mere scenery but rather a stage on which to confront mortality, transcendence and the fragile limits of human power against overwhelming natural forces. Hughes recognizes this legacy, acknowledging that her paintings respond to the same Romantic notion of the “sublime”: a vision of nature that provokes wonder and terror, awe and unease in equal measure.

    Ultimately, while Hughes insists on grounding her works in sensorial and emotional human perception, these syntheses of color, light and natural elements—offered to the human eye yet absent of the human subject—gesture toward more-than-human realms and beyond human time. They suggest alternative ways of feeling, perceiving and embracing the vital entanglements of life forms and cosmic phenomena on which our existence depends.

    Hughes’s works exist in and are nourished by this liminal space, poised between the sensorial and the psychological, the earthly and the unearthly—a threshold only color and paint can traverse. “I think I’m always contradicting myself in the work, and that’s important,” Hughes says. “What does continue to grow, though, is my connection to the work and my confidence in it, and maybe that comes through in the expansion of approaches and how many different types of painting are in the show.”

    Yet these luminous landscapes also function as portals between worlds, suggesting that the longing for transcendence can be satisfied by contemplating nature. In doing so, they invite us to accept both the limits and possibilities of our human position within it while rediscovering nature’s spiritual and energetic force once we reattune ourselves to its primordial powers of creation over destruction.

    An expansive gallery installation displays multiple Shara Hughes canvases, including a large tree-like composition at the center.An expansive gallery installation displays multiple Shara Hughes canvases, including a large tree-like composition at the center.
    In open-ended experiments in image-making, Hughes depicts kaleidoscopic visions of flora and fauna in processes of constant evolution. Photo: On White Wall Studio, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery

    More in Artists

    Shara Hughes’s Luminous Landscapes Open Portals into Life, Death and the Sublime

    Elisa Carollo

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  • Mapping Asia Society Texas’ Place in Houston’s Global Art Identity

    Asia Society Texas in Houston. © Timothy Hursley

    For those in Houston this week for the city’s first edition of Untitled, a must-see stop is the Asia Society Texas Center, located in the heart of the city’s Museum District. One of Houston’s landmark cultural venues, the Asia Society Texas Center is housed in an architectural masterpiece designed by Japan-born, Harvard-educated Taniguchi & Associates. At the crossroads of East and West aesthetics, it combines the rigor of contemporary international museum design with the elegance and serenity long associated with Asia. It’s the architect’s first free-standing structure in the U.S., a project that followed his celebrated expansion and renovation of MoMA in New York City a decade earlier.

    With 40,000 square feet spread across two stories and a basement, the building showcases meticulously chosen materials. Jura limestone blocks, quarried and hand-selected by Taniguchi from Germany’s Black Forest, date back more than 150 million years to the Jurassic period. American cherry wood, over a century old, panels the Fayez Sarofim Grand Hall and the Brown Foundation Performing Arts Theater, chosen for its rich color and fine grain to create a warm, serene environment that greets visitors upon entry. Basaltina, the volcanic Italian stone once used by the Romans for roads and monuments, forms the ground flooring, its gray tone imparting both durability while linking the building to a lineage of monumental architecture. Appalachian white oak flooring extends throughout, adding natural warmth that balances the coolness of stone and glass.

    Interior view of the Grand Hall with stone walls and wood paneling, lit by natural light through a high window.Interior view of the Grand Hall with stone walls and wood paneling, lit by natural light through a high window.
    Asia Society Texas’s Grand Hall. Photo: Chris Dunn

    The building’s character lies in its seamless integration with its surroundings—a hallmark of traditional Japanese architecture later embraced by modernists such as Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. Its low-slung profile establishes harmony with the residential neighborhood, avoiding empty monumentality in favor of openness and accessibility. Expansive glass windows reinforce this effect while functioning as structural elements engineered to meet Houston’s building codes, designed to withstand winds of up to 110 miles per hour. Outdoor spaces extend the architectural dialogue, offering environments of harmony and beauty while hosting both temporary and permanent installations, including Lee Ufan’s sculpture on the upstairs terrace.

    Exterior view of the Asia Society Texas Center with mist rising from the building’s roofline against a bright sky.Exterior view of the Asia Society Texas Center with mist rising from the building’s roofline against a bright sky.
    Its low-slung profile fits comfortably into its residential surroundings. Photo: Paul Hester

    Founded in 1979, Asia Society Texas was created to celebrate the vibrant diversity of Asia and to champion art and dialogue as tools to counter bias and foster a more inclusive society. That mission carries particular resonance in Houston, a city that—especially in the post-war era and following the Vietnam War—welcomed a significant wave of immigrants from across the Asian diaspora. Today, Houston is home to large Chinese and Vietnamese communities, alongside growing Korean, Japanese, South Asian and Indian populations.

    Visitors walk through the Fayez Sarofim Grand Hall, framed by cherry wood paneling and limestone walls.Visitors walk through the Fayez Sarofim Grand Hall, framed by cherry wood paneling and limestone walls.
    Asia Society Texas Center is an architectural marriage of east and west. Photo: Paul Hester

    The idea for a permanent home did not take shape until the mid-1990s, when the Asia Society Texas Board of Directors recognized that if the then-16-year-old organization was to thrive, it needed a space of its own. In 2004, Taniguchi was chosen to design the building, and construction on the $48.4 million building began in January 2010, reaching completion in fall 2011. The resulting structure now supports a multidisciplinary program spanning visual and performing arts, language courses, lectures, culinary classes and other events designed to foster dialogue and appreciation for the cultural richness and diversity of Asia and its diaspora.

    Interior view of the Grand Hall with stone walls and wood paneling, lit by natural light through a high window.Interior view of the Grand Hall with stone walls and wood paneling, lit by natural light through a high window.
    The building immediately draws the eye. © Timothy Hursley

    “We pursue this mission through four main program areas: performing arts, visual arts, business and policy discussions and educational activities. Together, these platforms allow us to engage audiences in a wide variety of ways—from live events to interactive learning,” Owen Duffy, curator and director of exhibitions, told Observer. As he guides us through the building, he gestures toward six interactive stations that are part of the “Explore Asia” project, where a blend of visual, textual and audio materials invites visitors to immerse themselves in the histories and cultures of five different Asian countries.

    Duffy’s exhibition program follows the same principles while embracing a broad scope that spans Turkey and the Middle East through Central, East and South Asia. As he notes in our conversation, Asia Society Texas hosted 46 exhibitions last year alone—an impressive achievement for a regional institution whose program already includes collaborations with other Asia Societies across the U.S. and abroad. “We’re a global network. We’re a family,” Duffy explains.

    Gallery installation view showing a dimly lit room with five abstract and semi-abstract paintings by Hung Hsie displayed along gray walls, with warm wood flooring and a glowing central corridor framing a large, luminous ink work in the adjoining space.Gallery installation view showing a dimly lit room with five abstract and semi-abstract paintings by Hung Hsie displayed along gray walls, with warm wood flooring and a glowing central corridor framing a large, luminous ink work in the adjoining space.
    An installation view of “Hung Hsien: Between Worlds.” © Alex Barber

    The current exhibition, devoted to the long-overlooked oeuvre of Chinese-born, Houston-based artist Hung Hsien, was produced in collaboration with Asia Society Hong Kong, where it will travel after the Houston presentation closes at the end of the month. The first U.S. museum survey of her extensive body of work, the show pays overdue tribute to her luminous, transcendent visual language that fuses postwar abstraction with traditional Chinese painting, evoking the mysteries of the cosmos and the unseen forces that shape the flow of all things.

    Also on view is “Memory Place,” an exhibition by Japanese artist Umiko Miwa. Conceived as a sculptural scavenger hunt throughout the building, the show prompts visitors to notice and value overlooked corners and details as they search for her hidden works. “She calls them Daphnes,” Duffy says. “These works resemble a kind of radical ikebana—delicate, whimsical flowers designed to wilt and dry. Visitors are given maps to help them locate and experience these pieces as they explore the space.” Inspired by Japanese traditions of animism and ancestral reverence, Miwa’s fragile interventions appear like fleeting epiphanies—ancient in archetypal resonance yet alive and organic, as if drawn directly from the flux of natural events. Rooted in the principles of Japanese aesthetics while speaking across cultures, Miwa’s exhibition engages audiences of all kinds, resonating particularly with children.

    A delicate flower stem leans against a reflective glass wall, its reflection extending downward onto polished stone; outside, a gravel courtyard stretches into the background, evoking fragility and quiet stillness.A delicate flower stem leans against a reflective glass wall, its reflection extending downward onto polished stone; outside, a gravel courtyard stretches into the background, evoking fragility and quiet stillness.
    An installation view of “Umico Niwa: Memory Palace.” © Alex Barber

    The project exemplifies a site-specific approach, with artists invited to respond directly to the space—a principle that has also guided Asia Society Texas’s residency program, which was paused this year after running for five years. “It originally began as a response to COVID, at a time when no one was coming into the building. Now feels like the right moment to recalibrate the program for a different context and set of needs,” Duffy explains, noting that the team is considering evolving it into a more holistic fellowship program, one that better reflects current realities, supports artists in a broader and more sustained way, and deepens connections with the local community.

    An exhibition program shaped by Houston’s diversity

    According to Duffy, the program is always developed in dialogue across teams so the visual art side aligns with other activities. “Before any show goes on the calendar, I discuss it with colleagues. I lead the exhibitions committee, and I also work closely with our president, Bona Poll,” he says. “When it comes to artist selection, the balance is crucial, but the first and most important criteria is mission alignment: will this exhibition enhance our mission? Will it engage Houston audiences? Does it address a region, topic, or theme of strategic importance, especially in light of current events? And is it telling a story that needs to be told?”

    Audience diversity is always central. “Our audience is really diverse—it reflects Houston itself. Some attendees are attracted by the cultural specificity of the program, while others simply come because they’re passionate about the art form. We also offer language courses—right now we’re running Korean classes, which have grown in popularity with the rise of Korean culture—and that draws in another segment of Houston’s community at large.”

    A family interacts with digital touchscreens and colorful neon signs inside the Asia Society Texas Center’s “Explore Asia” exhibition.A family interacts with digital touchscreens and colorful neon signs inside the Asia Society Texas Center’s “Explore Asia” exhibition.
    “Explore Asia” at Asia Society Texas. Photo by Chris Dunn.

    A few times a year, Asia Society Texas stages large festivals that bring all its strands together. In November, for example, the entire parking lot and front lawn are transformed into a night market. “We close the street, welcome about 10,000 people and spotlight AAPI-owned businesses, vendors and food. Events like that really bring everyone out,” Duffy says.

    Its geographic location within the city also plays a role. Positioned on the edge of Houston’s Fifth Ward and Third Ward—both historically Black communities—Asia Society Texas sits at a natural crossroads. “With neighbors like Project Row Houses just down the street, the full diversity of the city naturally finds its way through our doors at some point.”

    Yet everything ultimately circles back to the mission: soft power, cultural exchange, education and diplomacy. “Our goal is to create a more interconnected world—one where audiences can better navigate our shared future between Asia and the rest of the world.”

    As such, Asia Society Texas occupies a distinctive position compared to organizations that focus on a single country or community, such as the Chinese Community Center or the Japan-America Society of Houston. “We celebrate the full range of Asian cultures. That means cultural partners can reach new audiences.” A Chinese partner, for instance, may find fresh engagement from visitors also drawn to South Asian or Japanese traditions.

    Students sit on the floor observing a light-based installation of small wooden blocks at an Asia Society Texas exhibition.Students sit on the floor observing a light-based installation of small wooden blocks at an Asia Society Texas exhibition.
    Asia Society Texas celebrates the vibrant cultures and diverse perspectives of Asians and Asian Americans through innovative programs in arts and culture. Photo: Chris Dunn

    The building remains one of Asia Society Texas’s greatest assets. “Walking through it, you immediately sense that it’s a work of art in its own right. It offers potential partners and audiences a sense of a new and inspiring platform.”

    As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Asia Society Texas receives little government funding, relying instead on private donors, corporations, foundations and earned revenue. “We sell a lot of tickets to events and exhibitions, so it’s a healthy mix—really no different from most museums,” explains Duffy. “We do have good revenue streams, but like any nonprofit, we still depend on donor dollars and partners. Support comes not only through donations but also through our fundraising events—like our annual gala, the Tiger Ball. It’s considered by many the best party in Houston,” he adds, describing how the parking lot is transformed with tents and decorations. “Our staff even hand-tie silk flowers to all the trees, creating a truly spectacular atmosphere.”

    The role of Asia Society Texas in Houston’s art ecosystem

    Despite the specific mission guiding Asia Society Texas’s programming, the institution remains closely tied to Houston’s broader cultural landscape. “Other institutions often come to us for partnerships—whether performing arts organizations or other cultural groups—because they see us as a platform that can help extend their reach,” Duffy says.

    Reflecting on Houston’s art community, Duffy—who recently relocated from New York for this role—describes it as multilayered and spread across different hubs. “Houston is often described as a ‘multi-centered metropolis,’ meaning it doesn’t have a single dense downtown but rather a series of hubs where people live and gather. Its art scene just reflects that.”

    A projected text reading “The idea of community through diversity” appears over a silhouetted crowd inside the Asia Society Texas Center.A projected text reading “The idea of community through diversity” appears over a silhouetted crowd inside the Asia Society Texas Center.
    As an educational institution, Asia Society Texas advances cultural exchange by sharing Asia’s vibrant diversity. Photo by Chris Dunn.

    A few distinct art districts stand out in the city: the Museum District, where Asia Society Texas sits alongside major institutions, and areas like Silver Street Studios, which support independent local artists. “What I find fascinating is the way artists live and work here. It’s not the stereotypical starving-artist-in-Bushwick model,” Duffy says. “Instead, you might have an artist living with their family in a three-bedroom house in Sugar Land, working out of a garage studio in a suburban development—yet showing internationally. There’s more space here, and the cost of living is lower, so it’s easier to own a home or even maintain a multi-generational household.”

    At the same time, Houston’s geography poses challenges for visibility and accessibility. “The city is sprawling, with very few natural barriers, so creating a cohesive art map for visitors can be difficult,” he acknowledges, noting that this sprawl is both an obstacle and an opportunity for institutions seeking to connect across disparate communities. These dynamics—and the difficulty of building a cohesive network—are among the reasons the city’s scene has historically been overlooked, despite its steady growth.

    Now, three years into living in Houston, Duffy sees a city in transition. With rapid population growth and new arrivals, the art scene is still finding its identity. “With Untitled launching in Houston, people are optimistic that it could create something like an art week here.”

    Performers in colorful costumes and animal headpieces act onstage during a theatrical production at the Brown Foundation Performing Arts Theater.Performers in colorful costumes and animal headpieces act onstage during a theatrical production at the Brown Foundation Performing Arts Theater.
    Dress rehearsal of The Big Swim, a one-act opera commissioned by Houston Grand Opera in partnership with Asia Society Texas. Photo by Chris Dunn.

    In that spirit, Asia Society Texas Center is participating in Untitled’s inaugural edition with a booth presenting new and recent paintings by Houston-based artist Gao Hang. His post-digital works, shaped by pop culture and filtered through retro video game aesthetics, resonate especially with younger and millennial collectors. Proceeds from sales will directly support Asia Society Texas’s exhibitions program.

    Hang’s work will also appear in the upcoming exhibition “The House of Pikachu: Art, Anime, and Pop Culture,” opening in October. As one of the first institutional exhibitions in the U.S. to examine the long-standing and far-reaching influence of Japanese animation on contemporary art, the show will bring together a diverse group of artists from Japan, Brazil, China, Mexico, Côte d’Ivoire, Texas and beyond—underscoring the truly global reach of anime. Among its highlights will be Yoshitomo Nara’s larger-than-life sculpture Your Dog, which is expected to draw significant crowds.

    Mapping Asia Society Texas’ Place in Houston’s Global Art Identity

    Elisa Carollo

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  • Agnes Gund, Relentless Arts Patron and Supporter of Justice-Impacted Artists, Dies at 87

    Agnes Gund. (c) 2013 Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

    There are many signs that the art world has reached the end of an era, and the passing of arts patron and philanthropist Agnes Gund on Friday, September 19 is one of the most definitive. Her death marks the departure of an entire generation of committed collectors, leaving the industry to grapple with who will step into their place and sustain a system that has grown vast and unwieldy.

    Gund died at age 87, as reported by the New York Times. The cause has not been disclosed, though her daughter Catherine Gund confirmed her passing.

    A relentless supporter of art and culture, Gund was among the most influential U.S. patrons of the past half-century (even taking a spot on our 2023 Business of Art Power List). As president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, where she served as president for more than 11 years, she played a transformative role in expanding the museum’s reach and collection, directly helping raise the funds that made its most recent expansion possible.

    She sat on numerous boards, supported generations of artists and championed art as a tool for education, equity and systemic change. She reportedly gave away two-thirds of her assets each year to sustain New York’s cultural life and was a fixture at galas, including those of El Museo del Barrio, YoungArts, The Kitchen and MoMA PS1, where she was seen this summer.

    Her collection included some of the greatest names of the past century—artists she not only supported but knew personally. Masterpieces by Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Jasper Johns, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Yayoi Kusama and Louise Bourgeois (and the list just goes on) formed part of an encyclopedic collection that spanned the breadth of contemporary art across media and styles.

    Gund had already donated hundreds of works to MoMA, which honored her with the exhibition “Studio Visit: Selected Gifts from Agnes Gund,” showcasing around 50 of the more than 800 works she gave. In total, over 900 artworks from her collection have been gifted or promised to public institutions nationwide. As for what’s left, it remains to be seen which auction house will secure this trophy estate.

    She was also a longtime advocate for arts education and social justice. In 1977 she founded “Studio in a School,” an innovative program that placed professional artists in New York public schools, inspiring tens of thousands of children. She extended her civic influence by serving on the New York State Council on the Arts and as chair of the Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission of New York City.

    In 2017 she sold her beloved Roy Lichtenstein Masterpiece to hedge fund investor Steven Cohen for $165 million to launch Art for Justice, a catalytic six-year fund targeting the racial inequities of mass incarceration. The fund sunsetted in 2023 after distributing more than $127 million in grants. “Agnes is not done,” Helena Huang, Art for Justice’s project director, told Observer at the time, noting Gund’s growing focus on reproductive rights and her enduring concern for the state of the world.

    In November 2023 she sold another Lichtenstein, directing more than $2 million to the Groundswell Fund, which advocates for reproductive rights, and to Michigan’s Reproductive Freedom for All ballot measure. “She would say that there’s less art to sell,” Huang commented, when asked whether Gund would continue parting with works for charity. “But she’ll continue to leverage everything that she has.”

    Who was Agnes Gund?

    Agnes Gund was born on August 13, 1938 in Cleveland. Her father, George Gund II, built a fortune in real estate, brewing and investing and served as president of the Cleveland Trust Company, Ohio’s largest bank. After his death in 1966, she inherited a substantial trust and soon purchased a Henry Moore sculpture, beginning what would grow into a collection of some 2,000 works.

    Her passion for art began in childhood with visits to the Cleveland Museum of Art and deepened at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Conn., where she enrolled after her mother’s death in 1954. “I had a magical art history teacher who didn’t just give you the artist’s name and the date of the picture; she showed you how to look at artwork,” she told Lifestyles magazine in 2010.

    Gund graduated from Connecticut College for Women (now Connecticut College) in 1960 with a degree in history. Three years later she married Albrecht “Brec” Saalfield, a private-school teacher and heir to the Saalfield Publishing Company. The marriage ended in divorce, as did a second marriage to Daniel Shapiro, a lawyer and teacher. She had four children with Saalfield—Catherine, David, Anna and Jessica—and is also survived by her brothers Gordon and Geoffrey Gund, her sister, the theater producer Louise Gund, and 12 grandchildren.

    The passing of Agnes Gund leaves a profound void in New York’s art world and beyond, sharpening the question of who will carry forward the work of her generation and ensure the future of cultural patronage.

    Agnes Gund, Relentless Arts Patron and Supporter of Justice-Impacted Artists, Dies at 87

    Elisa Carollo

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  • Five Museum Shows to See During Houston Art Week

    • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
    • Through September 21, 2025

    Immersive exhibitions in today’s art world are most often synonymous with pop-aesthetic displays or tech-driven entertainment. A.A. Murakami’s exhibition, however, offers something altogether different. Here, the immersivity of the multi-sensory experience and the artworks that expand into entire environments invite viewers into a more spiritual and contemplative dimension.
    A.A. Murakami—the Japan-based duo of Alexander Groves and Azusa Murakami—are pioneers of what they call “ephemeral tech,” employing cutting-edge technologies to create fleeting encounters where visitors engage directly with technology, unmediated by screens or keyboards. In contrast to the infinite replication and storage that defines our digital age, their practice draws on naturally transient materials such as smoke, bubbles and plasma to shape moments that exist only in the present, demanding a heightened awareness of beauty’s fragility and impermanence. Rooted in Japanese philosophy and aesthetics, “Floating Words” unfolds as a sequence of immersive, sensory landscapes where technology conjures natural phenomena, opening space for slow contemplation of their elusive beauty and mystery.
    In this exhibition marking their U.S. institutional debut, A.A. Murakami act not simply as artists but as orchestrators of impermanence, architects of experience who bring visitors back to the most genuine, universal sense of awe and wonder that nature can still awaken, inviting a creative and generative connection with it.

    Elisa Carollo

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