Installation view: Sterling Ruby’s “Atropa” at Sprüth Magers in New York. Photo: Genevieve Hanson
American artist Sterling Ruby has long engaged not only with the chaotic condition of our human present but also, more broadly, with that primordial chaos from which everything originates. His work engages with entropy, expressed both through physical and organic decay and as a social, psychological and institutional condition. Ruby has consistently embraced abrasion, erosion and chance in his artmaking, allowing images and forms to emerge through processes that follow or evoke the organic evolution of matter itself.
This fundamental dimension of his practice is particularly evident in “Atropa,” his latest exhibition at Sprüth Magers in New York, which presents a new body of work shaped by his ongoing engagement with transformation, fragility and dissolution. Drawing its title from Atropos, the Greek Fate who cuts the thread of life, the show places vegetal life at its center, reflecting on the paradoxes it embodies. Plants exist in a state of constant tension: delicate yet resilient, parasitic yet generative and often lethally toxic yet medicinally valuable. Their existence unfolds at the convergence of destruction and restoration, at least from a human perspective, revealing the inseparability of decay and renewal.
“The idea of entropy is a good way to describe what I’m trying to do with the work,” Ruby told Observer shortly after the exhibition’s opening. “I keep attempting to construct that in-between space: I want the art to represent that tension between expression and repression, law and lawlessness, reality and fantasy, and of course the industrial and the natural.”
Sterling Ruby. Courtesy Sterling Ruby Studio
It is within this liminal terrain, between human and nature, construction and collapse, that Ruby locates his practice. For him, the most generative space is not stability but instability: the indefinable zone where collapse becomes inevitable and transformation begins. His new body of work embraces an even more fluid conception of matter, shaped by forces and energies that remain only partially visible. The works on paper, which span graphite drawings, pen-and-ink gestures and expressive watercolor collages, depict flora in various states of emergence and dissolution. They feel at once delicate and raw, like traces of a direct and unmediated exchange between mind, hand and material that arises equally from memory, imagination and embodied experience.
The origin of these works lies in a flower garden Ruby began cultivating in his studio years ago. Nurturing a space of botanical life within an industrial architecture exposed the fragile and improbable possibility of coexistence between organic and constructed environments. “As things grew, died off and grew back again, it became something I observed constantly while working,” he recalled. “It reminded me of the history of symbolism in still life and of memento mori—remember you must die…”
Located in Vernon, an industrial zone outside downtown Los Angeles, Ruby’s studio exists in a landscape defined by heavy manufacturing and environmental contamination. “Yet here I am, with this garden that has attracted bees, hummingbirds, finches, butterflies,” he said. Over time, it evolved into an ecosystem, and with the addition of water and food sources, even coyotes and hawks began to appear. “It feels like the studio is a place of transformation, not only for me as an artist, but for all of these other living things. It is inspiring to think of it as a habitat.”
Over time, Ruby’s studio has become a habitat not only for artistic production but also for other living forms. Courtesy Sterling Ruby Studio
While his works on paper are largely drawn from memory, Ruby often incorporates photographic documentation into his collages, as well as dried flowers that he scans or translates into cyanotypes, collaborating directly with natural processes and allowing matter itself to participate in image-making. In SPLITTING (2025), the fluid distortion of these monochromatic collaged images of nature evokes the endless cycle of natural transformation, a continuous metamorphosis into new states as part of a vital and necessary process. Flowers and the vitality of vegetal life are suggested in delicate watercolors, where stains unfold into blooming fields of energy, like buds emerging from winter dormancy to renew the landscape.
The bronze sculptures represent perhaps the most lyrical articulation of this inquiry. Installed within the intimate domestic architecture of the townhouse, they appear less as monumental objects than as spectral residues, ghostly relics that quietly evoke mortality and impermanence. Each originates from a living flower cultivated in his studio garden, cut, dried and directly cast in bronze through a process that borders on the alchemical. The burnout stage incinerates the organic matter entirely, leaving behind what Ruby describes as “a bronze ghost of the original.” In this transformation, from living specimen to ash to enduring metal, the subject is not annihilated but transformed into another order of being. “The bronze flowers feel the most delicate and raw to me; it’s like the process of cremation.” The geometric bars, gates and funnels function as conduits through which molten bronze enters the flower, infiltrating its structure before solidifying. “What I’m left with, if the cast survives and the detail remains true, is this object that’s organic and fragile, like a memorial being held up by an armature.”
While earlier in his oeuvre Ruby’s practice extended toward broader institutional and societal critique, confronting the structural violence, alienation and systemic “ugliness” embedded in American life, “Atropa” feels more intimate. It is a deeper meditation on his own position as a time-bound, earth-bound entity existing within larger cycles of gestation, decay and transformation.
Across drawing, collage and sculpture, Ruby allows organic processes to shape form, positioning matter itself as an active collaborator in image-making. Photo: Genevieve Hanson
After more than 20 years of art-making, Ruby’s relationship to his work has changed. “Everything tends to be more elegiac now,” he said, reflecting on how his practice has become quieter and more introspective. “The notion of truth—whether constitutional, scientific or data-driven—has ceased to be a stable marker by which fundamental rights and sovereignty are upheld. In the past, I needed to project the ugliness of America onto the work to expose the oppression, alienation and violence that this country conceals. But now I can’t imagine what I would do to mirror the everyday distress and ongoing hatred that is so unmistakable.”
Instead, he seeks to create work that responds to the present condition without becoming didactic: “I want my work to respond to the world at large, to the human condition, to time itself, without prescribing meaning. I don’t believe these things are simple—they are complex and abstract.” Yet he remains convinced that art still offers something distinct from political discourse, a different kind of truth, one that operates through metaphor, sensation and form. “That’s my dilemma,” he said. “What does that look like? How do I make something sincere, abstract, or almost spiritual that can capture the time in which we are living?”
Ruby’s latest works articulate a quiet but profound reflection on mortality and the evolving condition of being. Genevieve Hanson
For much of photography’s history, male portraiture preserved a degree of emotional distance, presenting men as stoic, authoritative and restrained. Dean Majd has spent the better part of a decade pursuing a more nuanced portrayal of masculinity in photographs that capture men in moments of profound vulnerability and mutual dependence, chronicling friendship and conflict with great candor and empathy. His subjects are his peers and friends, and his images carry the immediacy of lived experience, unfolding in bedrooms, bathrooms, skateparks and other spaces where genuine moments of revelry and collapse unfold.
Born in Queens to Palestinian immigrant parents, Majd is self-taught, and his practice has been deeply shaped by the city that continues to anchor his work. His photographs have appeared in publications including the New York Times, New York Magazine, GQ Middle East, Aperture and Dazed, and he has exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of the City of New York. Editorial commissions—from photographing Zohran Mamdani for Vogue to Kareem Rahma for the New Yorker—signal a growing recognition of his distinct visual sensibility.
Most recently, his debut solo exhibition, “Hard Feelings,” opened at BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York—a stunning series of portraits of intimacy, grief, tenderness and pain among young men. Majd’s use of light and shadow recalls the dramatic chiaroscuro of Baroque painting, isolating gestures and faces with theatrical precision while also heightening the humanity of his subjects.
Prompted in part by the sudden death of a childhood friend, the series traces the lives of a tight-knit group of young men as they navigate the full emotional continuum of human existence. Majd allows affection, confusion and fragility to occupy the frame without restraint, expanding the emotional register available to male portraiture, particularly for men of color whose interior lives have historically been flattened or erased. If the exhibition’s photographs feel unusually intimate, it is because they are not constructed from observation alone but from proximity, trust and shared history. In this conversation, Majd reflects on the emotional stakes of that closeness and the visual language he built to contain it.
Your work resists the flattening gaze often directed at men, and men of color in particular. What visual or ethical principles guide your representation of these subjects?
I began making this work with the goal of creating a record of truth, images that would only exist for my friends and me. I had not seen anyone who looked like us in popular media, or even social media, really. I felt like we were outcasts in a way. We built our own world, this special world that no one else had access to. We were everything, so I felt the need to document it in the most authentic manner. Just for us and nobody else. I respect my subjects, and the images were borne out of love. The only way they can be made is if there is trust between us.
I never went in with ideas of what images should be made. I just photographed what I saw and who I spent all my time with. Everything needed to be candid or impromptu. I wanted to photograph the good, the bad, the happiness, the pain and everything in between. I rarely held back, even in the hardest times. And I did the same with myself, too. I documented myself in my hardest times, putting myself on the line as well. It was my life and my story to tell. And the images I did not take are the ones I remember the most; they genuinely haunt me. It’s better to take the photo and discuss if it should go out in the world than to never make it at all.
I never want to present people as perfect. These principles, over time, created a natural, authentic range of the masculine experience, especially that of men of color.
Dean Majd, suba (sunshower), 2020. Archival pigment print, mounted to dibond, framed 46.25 in. x 31.25 in. x 1.75 in. Copyright and courtesy Dean Majd
Has your own identity informed your image-making? Or do you prefer to approach your practice more broadly?
I allow my feelings and my interests to lead my image-making. My work is oftentimes driven directly by what is occurring in my life at the moment. I’m concerned with understanding people, specifically those who have been subjected to violence, state-sponsored or otherwise, because my community and I have been subjected to so much of it.
Being Palestinian, I experienced grief at a very young age and learned that empathy and grief go hand-in-hand. That grief helped me develop an infinite well of empathy, and that empathy has become the foundation of my practice. I resist the notion that I have to make work about my identity because I’m Palestinian-American and Muslim, but being Palestinian is the reason why I can make the work I make, regardless of the subject matter.
What inspired “Hard Feelings”?
I didn’t actively pursue this body of work at its inception. Even the title of the series was named on a whim very early on, and somehow has manifested so much truth in our experiences. There was no real inspiration for the project itself, other than my friends and the people around me. In many ways, it feels like it was given to me. My mother gave me a camera when I was seven, and I still haven’t stopped taking photos. I grew up without parental supervision, so I ended up in the graffiti and skate scene in Queens in middle school and high school, and stepped away from the world to pursue a degree in International Relations. I never believed I could succeed as a photographer, so I began taking it seriously for myself as a teenager, and in 2015, I began seriously attempting to make art out of making images in my life.
In 2016, I reconnected with a childhood friend, James, at our local skatepark in Astoria. I took his portrait, and a week later, he tragically passed away in a subway accident. Through his passing, I became close to his predominantly male friend group who were part of Queens, New York’s graffiti and skate scene. We became close through the grief, and I instantly was thrust back into the world I grew up in. They were the first people to encourage me to take photos and pursue photography, and by the end of the year, they gave me full access to their lives.
In my pursuit of a record of truth for my friends and myself, I would take thousands of photos and reflect on them afterward. I realized I was documenting brotherhood, masculinity, male-female relationships, but really, violence, substance misuse, loneliness and self-destruction, including my own. I created a space of vulnerability for men who are often told they need to be invulnerable to survive, a space for my friends and me to face our own shadows. When the work became more public and attracted more attention from strangers, I realized it had the same effect on viewers. It became a mirror for all of our experiences.
Dean Majd, ivan crying in my bedroom, 2021. Archival Pigment Print, Mounted to Dibond, 31.25 in. x 46.25 in. x 1.75 in. Edition 1 of 3 + 1 AP. Copyright and courtesy Dean Majd
There’s a striking use of light and shadow throughout the series. Can you speak to that—do you feel that builds intimacy from the point of view of the viewer?
The aesthetic nature of the work is defined by the subject matter, specifically the lifestyle of my friends and me. The world of graffiti (and skating) largely takes place at night, and can be very violent, toxic and fueled by drugs and alcohol. I’ve always loved the tableaus of Baroque painters, specifically Caravaggio, and filmmakers who work in a kinetic, raw style like Andrea Arnold and John Cassavetes, as well as surrealists and extremists like David Lynch, Gaspar Noé and Lars von Trier. In many ways that seeped into the images themselves, but really, it was serendipitous. My interests and the lives we were living blended perfectly.
At night, my friends are more free and open with themselves. It was almost as if our emotions and actions reached their highest and lowest points when the sun went down. It was most certainly magnified by our collective grief and the substances we were consuming. I was very non-technical at the time; I only really knew how to make images with point-and-shoot cameras.
I had to learn to take photos with very little light, and only used the on-camera flash in small, specific instances. Because of my constant image-making, the nature of candid, impromptu image-making and our trust, the boundaries between us and the camera melted away. My friends could be the most honest and vulnerable within the images. I find that vulnerability cuts through the viewers, allowing them to be vulnerable as well.
The work is an honest representation of my friends’ lives, but I needed the images to be truer than true. The visual language—the intense shadow and illuminating light—created a surreal nature to the images, which would form “representational truths.” The “representational truth” of the images speaks to something greater; allegories, mirrors, that can connect to viewers to grander subject matters around masculinity, violence and hopefully allow them to face their own shadows, face complicated repressed emotions that my friends were facing through the lens. I studied Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic style and her use of allegory in relation to violence and faith. It deeply influenced how I sequenced and presented my images. At the same time, I really frame “Hard Feelings” around the idea of an odyssey: these masculine rites of passage. I wanted to elevate these unseen, unregarded lives to the place of mythology, biblical stories and high art. I wanted to create a legacy for those who are told their lives don’t matter. If the photos were made in a more hard photojournalism style, they’d be more difficult to connect to and overall less universal.
You’ve described your friends as both subjects and collaborators. How do you navigate trust and authorship when photographing people so close to you?
I rarely call my friends subjects. It’s hard to even consider them that; I really see them as family. I often say that these images were given to me as gifts by the people in them. There is an awareness that I’m the recordkeeper, archiving and constructing the narrative of our lives. In a way, they co-author the images, but also release them to me to do what I want with them, to tell their story accurately and respectfully. It requires immense trust.
That trust exists because of my complete openness with the people who end up in front of the camera. After I make the images, I sit and show them the images, oftentimes in person. There would be many times when I would invite them over to my apartment, and I showed them the work like a slideshow. We have constant conversations about whether and when the images will be shared way before they’re put out into the world. My friends bare their souls to me; it’s the least I can do. Because of my openness, I’ve never been denied making images. Whenever someone is uncomfortable with me sharing an image, I respect that decision, and it’s always the right choice. There have been times in which people told me they weren’t comfortable being photographed anymore, and it made our friendship stronger.
Photography is inherently voyeuristic, but I attempt to have a practice that is anti-voyeurism. This is my story and my people. We have gone through so much together. There’s so much pain, so much happiness and everything in between. We share everything with each other. I’m also photographing myself at the best and worst moments of my life, putting it all on the line just like them. We’re very much in this together.
Dean Majd, bohemian rhapsody, 2017. Archival pigment print, mounted to sintra, framed 37 in. x 25 in. x 1.5 in. Copyright and courtesy Dean Majd
Have you dealt with similar issues when photographing subjects you’re less close to in other series?
For years, I had crippling anxiety around photographing strangers, or even people whom I wouldn’t consider loved ones. When I began to make special editorial projects or be commissioned for editorial work, I forced myself to fight through that anxiety. I have learned to build trust with strangers pretty quickly, even if some people resist opening up. I used to think I could only make good images because I was photographing my friends, and because they’re so special. I realized, through my deeply empathetic nature, that I can connect with strangers on that level as well.
The downside is that I absorb people’s pain. It’s the alchemic exchange I have to make; I get to create these intimate images, but I hold onto their emotions for months, oftentimes years. I’ve learned that I need a lot of time to decompress; a lot of alone time of intense exercise, journaling and meditation, just to release the pain. Even with strangers, it all stays with me. The closer I am to the person, the longer the hurt lingers.
There are images in “Hard Feelings” taken before the pandemic—looking at those now, what feelings do they evoke?
Overall, those images feel way more free, way more uninhibited. Intense, but not burdensome. I yearn for that time when things were simpler. Less complicated and more authentic. I’ve inadvertently documented the change of the city and how men of color have been affected by it. In the spectrum of things, it wasn’t that long ago, but it feels like a lifetime. I was also much younger, still in my 20s. The images after the pandemic began are so much more serious and way more melancholy.
Finally, we have to ask. What was it like to photograph Mamdani?
An absolute pleasure. He’s a consummate gentleman and a real-deal New Yorker.
Nunu Hung at Nunu Fine Art Taipei. Courtesy Nunu Fine Art
In a city like New York, where cultural capital is theoretically abundant, the gallery world can still feel like a closed system, calibrated for insiders already fluent in its coded language. What makes Nunu Fine Art stand out in that crowded ecosystem isn’t just its program, which is rigorous and international in scope, but the warmth with which visitors are received and the seriousness with which their curiosity is treated. There is a generosity to the space and to its founder, Nunu Hung, who operates her gallery less as a transactional environment and more as a place for sustained engagement, where the art of conversation is as important as the art on the walls.
Hung founded the gallery in Taipei in 2014 after seeing how local audiences were often cut off from meaningful engagement with global contemporary art. In particular, it was the lack of exhibitions featuring internationally established artists that motivated her to create a gallery that could connect those audiences and artists to the global art discourse. Her commitment to cultural translation quickly became the gallery’s defining characteristic, as Hung introduced American and European artists to Taiwan while simultaneously helping Taiwanese and Asian artists more broadly achieve widespread recognition.
She expanded into New York almost three years ago, with a 3,000-square-foot space on Broome Street, becoming the first Taiwanese dealer to establish a permanent gallery presence in the city. Today, Hung is candid about her priorities. “Part of why I came to New York to open the gallery is because I wanted to place my artists within the museum system,” she said when I visited the gallery last month to catch up and walk through “Mia Westerlund Roosen: Then and Now” (which closes this weekend). I also wanted to see the tightly curated Project Space presentation showcasing four Taiwanese artists—Chiao-Han Chueh, Guan-Hong Lu, Shida Kuo and En-Man Chang—whose work has recently entered museum collections. “Mia and Rona Pondick, for example, built careers through museums, through the curatorial ideas, and so I’ve spent a lot of time and energy visiting museums, speaking with curators and developing exhibitions that can help position our artists within that institutional context,” she added.
Mia Westerlund Roosen’s Heat (background) and Conical (foreground), both from 1981, installed at Nunu Fine Art. Photo: Martin Seck, courtesy the artist and Nunu Fine Art
It’s a strategy that requires patience, but also one that tends to pay off, and that long view is evident in the gallery’s roster, which spans generations and continents, from established figures like Petah Coyne, Rona Pondick, Peter Zimmermann and Kees Goudzwaard to emerging and underrecognized artists whose work complicates dominant narratives of contemporary art. The gallery’s 2026 programming reflects Hung’s intellectual ambition. After the Westerlund Roosen show, the New York space will host a three-person exhibition organized in collaboration with Sonnabend and Ubu Gallery that places Hans Bellmer’s psychologically charged photographs alongside Bruce Nauman’s videos and Pondick’s sculptures, tracing a lineage of artists who have used the body as a site of both formal and political inquiry. Subsequent exhibitions will highlight Nancy Bowen’s materially layered investigations of craft and myth, Yu-Wen Wu’s meditations on migration and identity and Madeline Jiménez Santil’s sculptural interventions into systems of cultural meaning and displacement.
Hung is always quick to emphasize that while selling is important, galleries should function not just as commercial spaces but as platforms for experimentation and, more importantly, dialogue between artists and audiences who might otherwise never encounter one another. What follows are insights into how this year’s programming came together and what the gallery is doing to support and amplify artists beyond the shows.
In New York, you created an all-women program for 2026. What prompted that decision, and what conversations do you hope it inspires?
When I opened my first gallery in Taipei in 2014, my inaugural exhibition, “Holy and Profane,” featured six women artists from around the world, each at a very different stage in her career. This show set the tone for what would become a core part of my curatorial identity and my mission at Nunu Fine Art. As a Taiwanese woman working within the global arts landscape, it has always been crucial to me to not only highlight women artists, but also a cross-section of emerging and established voices from diverse cultural backgrounds.
This perspective naturally informed the decision to dedicate our 2026 program to women artists. It’s not a shift in direction so much as an extension of the gallery’s longstanding commitment to showcasing multicultural, intergenerational and diverse artistic viewpoints. The program brings together artists with whom we have already formed deep, ongoing relationships, such as Rona Pondick, whose work we’re excited to recontextualize in a new light, alongside artists we are collaborating with for the first time, such as Mia Westerlund Roosen and Madeline Jiménez Santil.
Rona Pondick in her studio. Courtesy of the artist
How did you approach selecting the artists for the 2026 lineup? Are there threads, conceptual, historical or material, that connect their practices across generations and geographies?
This will be Nunu Fine Art’s third year in New York, and we wanted each exhibition to have a strong curatorial focus and concept. Each show demonstrates that the relationship between art and identity is complex. The artists draw on personal histories, lived experiences and broader social and cultural narratives to engage with many rich topics, including the body, migration, identity and decolonization.
For me, the connection between these artists is not grounded in any single conceptual or material similarity. Rather, each artist meaningfully engages with the world around her in a way that is singular and thought-provoking. Their work sparks ideas and conversations that I find invigorating, and given that my primary goal as a gallerist is to foster dialogue, I was compelled to present them within the stimulating intellectual context of New York.
The program spans generations; what does this generational range let you say about women’s contributions to contemporary art?
The generational span indicates that the quality of women’s artwork has not changed. Women artists have made and continue to make challenging, exciting work that stimulates and enriches our cultural conversation. The primary difference, particularly when looking at recent history, is the visibility these artists have been afforded. Women artists are only now being given the exposure necessary to showcase their exceptional work, and I am very excited that Nunu Fine Art has the opportunity to work with these brilliant artists.
The program opens with a solo exhibition of Mia Westerlund Roosen and closes with a show of Madeline Jiménez Santil’s work. What inspired you to bookend next year’s program with those artists in particular?
Though Mia Westerlund Roosen and Madeline Jiménez Santil seem to have distinct concerns, they engage with space in similar ways. They share an interest in exploring how the body navigates and responds to objects. Westerlund Roosen provokes visceral reactions in the viewer by using highly textured materials, manipulating scale and referencing human body parts, either obliquely or directly, through her forms. Meanwhile, Jiménez Santil investigates the relationship between her own body, surrounding space and geometry.
Nancy Bowen’s From the Deep will be on view in the gallery in June. Courtesy the artist and Nunu Fine Art
Including Boston-based Taiwanese artist Yu-Wen Wu feels timely, given everything going on in the U.S. right now. What drew you to include Wu in the 2026 program, and how do you see her work conversing with the other artists in the season?
Yu-Wen Wu was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the U.S. at a young age. Wu’s immigrant experience is central to her practice, which, in her words, creates “an intersection of personal narrative and global discourse.” As an immigrant myself, living and working between Taiwan and the U.S., this exhibition feels deeply personal, especially given that our gallery on Broome Street is located just steps from Chinatown. Wu’s work resonates deeply with our local community and gallery visitors, many of whom are Asian or Asian American. Now, more than ever, it is crucial for me to support artists whose experiences are shaped by immigration.
Yu-Wen Wu’s exhibition will also complement our Project Space, a dedicated space on the gallery’s lower level that highlights experimental voices from Asia and the Asian diaspora. I’m honored to share that many of our Asian artists, such as Chiao-Han Chueh, Shida Kuo and En-Man Chang, have recently had their works acquired by major museums, ensuring their work will reach even more diverse audiences.
How does the New York Project Space program there expand or contrast with the main gallery’s 2026 curatorial direction?
I’ve been thrilled by what Project Space has accomplished thus far. We inaugurated the space with an exhibition for the contemporary art collective Alchemyverse, a duo of artists from China, who explored how natural forces have shaped human perceptions of time, materiality and life itself through a multisensory installation that transformed their research into drawings, photographs and an immersive platform at the center of the room. In the first year, we showed artists such as Taiwanese painter Guan-Hong Lu and Mimian Hsu, who was born and raised in Costa Rica.
Most recently, we presented Indigenous Taiwanese artist En-Man Chang’s work, “Mapping Snail,” which is a continuation of her project shown at documenta 15 in Kassel in 2022. Combining video and embroidery, the exhibition explored the impacts of urbanization on Taiwan’s Indigenous communities through the motif of the Giant African Snail, offering a socially and politically resonant reflection on displacement, land sovereignty and cultural resilience.
Building on the momentum of Chang’s show, we plan to feature more artists whose work brings visibility to critical social issues that often go overlooked. With Project Space now past its one-year milestone, we are also looking ahead, with the goal of expanding and diversifying the artists we present, reaching across a wider range of geographies in Asia.
Nunu Fine Art Taipei is reopening with a renovated space—what can you tell us about that?
The Taipei gallery underwent a months-long renovation, and we are thrilled to inaugurate the new space with an exhibition by Manila-based Filipino and Spanish artist Jose John Santos III. I first visited the studio that he and his wife, Pam, shared in 2011, and Pam was one of the artists featured in the inaugural exhibition of my Taipei gallery. It feels truly full circle to now present John’s work in celebration of our new space.
Following Santos, we will host an exhibition by German artist Peter Zimmermann. We presented his first exhibition in Asia in 2015, and I’m honored to mark that anniversary with an exhibition of his new work in our renovated space. The response to his work in Asia has been tremendous. Audiences have deeply connected with his evocative epoxy resin images. As the first gallery in Taipei with a distinctly multicultural outlook, we have been honored to play a defining role in introducing artists from around the world to Asian audiences. Over the past decade, our Taipei space has premiered the first solo shows in the region for Peruvian textile artist Ana Teresa Barboza and Cuban artist duo Ariamna Contino and Alex Hernández Dueñas, among others.
What do you hope audiences understand about the gallery’s identity when they look back on the full arc of the 2026 program in both Taipei and New York City?
At its core, Nunu Fine Art is both a multidisciplinary and multicultural community, an identity reflected in our 2026 programs across both galleries. The program is more than simply a series of individual exhibitions that end once they are deinstalled, and when audiences look back on the full arc of the year, I hope they see a space deeply committed to intergenerational, intersectional and global narratives. I’ve been thinking about how we can continue to support and amplify these artists beyond the exhibition itself, and how we can keep conversations alive by placing artists in dialogue with one another, whether through gallery events or printed publications.
In support of this longstanding commitment to multidisciplinary and cross-cultural storytelling, our gallery publishes a quarterly print publication titled Nupaper. Each issue provides an in-depth introduction to the gallery’s current exhibition, a behind-the-scenes exploration of the artist’s process and supplemental essays by writers and art historians. Looking ahead, we also hope to pursue a more rigorous publication program, building on the innovative biographical catalogue we debuted for Rodney Dickson’s exhibition “PAINTINGS” in 2024. This past year, we also launched a monthly event called Writer’s Stage, which brings writers, artists and other creatives into the gallery to share their literary work and engage in thoughtful discussions with audiences.
The catalogue for “Bellmer Nauman Pondick: Material Desire.” Courtesy Nunu Fine Art
Rahaal unfolded across three pavilions (an exhibition space, a salon and a library) in the historic nature reserve of Zekreet, Qatar, just miles from Richard Serra’s monumental East–West/West–East. Photo: Sebastian Boettcher
Sometimes there are stories so extraordinary they feel more like a romance. The one we’re about to tell, in particular, closely mirrors what Paolo Coelho described in his memorable book The Alchemist, where the protagonist leaves the Western world to embark on an improbable journey into the desert in a process of unlearning and rediscovery. As in Coelho’s narrative, this journey is less about the destination than about attunement and finding meaning through movement, disorientation and pause.
In Qatar, in a tent in the middle of the desert—yet not far from Richard Serra’s monolithic installation East–West/West–East (which became an Instagram must for Art Basel Qatar visitors) and only about an hour’s drive from Olafur Eliasson’s monument for cosmic connection—an unexpected exhibition invites visitors to rediscover a contemplative relationship with nature. It posits the universality of this need across cultures and latitudes through work by a diverse group of artists from different parts of the world. They speak very different visual languages, yet all draw inspiration from the earth.
At the heart of the initiative is Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani, one of the youngest member of the ruling Al-Thani family, who now resides in New York, where he founded the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art (IAIA). He, along with acclaimed designer William Cooper founder of William White, conceived Rahaal, a temporary nomadic museum unfolding across three pavilions erected in the historic nature reserve of Zekreet, Qatar, and mounted the show, which is on through February 21, 2026.
“It was very important to be in a place that genuinely speaks to the idea of community-building around nature,” Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani told Observer when we met in the desert. Getting to Rahaal is no simple matter—our driver got lost a couple of times, despite having been there a few days earlier, as the desert itself is in continuous motion. When we finally arrived, more than an hour late, Rashid Al-Thani welcomed us casually, smiling, inviting us into the majjii pavilion to sit on colorful cushions covered in Moray textiles he had arranged to create a large, welcoming sofa. Almost immediately, his staff served coffee and tea with dates.
William Cooper and Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani. Photo: Sebastian Boettcher
The idea for Rahaal came to Rashid Al-Thani after seeing William Cooper’s New York studio—a room entirely wrapped in shirting fabric and cotton, creating an atmosphere both contemporary and deeply resonant. That use of fabric carried a powerful sense of familiarity for Rashid Al-Thani, evoking regional traditions in which textiles aren’t confined to interiors but extend outward, most visibly in tents covered in wool. The shared aesthetic inspired a playful imaginative exercise between them in which they envisioned a traveler from New York journeying to the small nation of Qatar. “Imagine they take this journey by water through Europe, via Istanbul, and onward toward the Gulf, culminating in a desert crossing,” Rashid Al-Thani illustrated. Passing through the Saudi border at Zekreet, the travelers pause to rest, asking if they can stop there. “Of course,” an Arab answers.
“That’s what Arabs do; we build community around nature,” Rashid Al-Thani explained. “That’s how the idea came together. As you drive here, you see encampments everywhere. It doesn’t matter who you are—every single person I know in this country understands that instinct.”
He added that many families in Qatar still keep a tent in the desert, and people are accustomed to driving out to gather and meet there on weekends. “If you know that someone has a tent, you know you can go there—you can join anytime, without formal invitation.” While today permits are required to build one, the desert itself is still largely understood as a shared space. There is no absolute ownership. The project takes its name from the Rahaal (رحّال), which translates as traveler or nomad—someone who moves across land rather than settling in one place, a desert figure accustomed to crossing vast, open landscapes. “When they saw a tent, they saw a community. They saw a place to rest, a place of refuge. That is what we wanted for people coming to the country: to feel there is a temporary place of connection.”
Qatar, now one of the world’s major global stopover hubs, still embodies this idea of continuous transit. What often gets lost, however, is the opportunity to connect with the place itself while passing through. “People arrive, visit the major museums and leave without sensing it,” Rashid Al-Thani reflected. “What we wanted was for visitors to experience what you’re experiencing now—the same feeling you would have in my parents’ home or any other tent or family home in the desert.”
Traditionally, those tents were always open, welcoming people and expanding into temporary communities. “It creates a deep sense of connection. It can be formal or informal, private or public—it depends on the person and the occasion,” he said, noting how in the Western world, that dimension often doesn’t exist anymore, as hospitality has become something separate, often associated with spaces outside the home. This is particularly felt in big cities, particularly after the disappearance of “third spaces” that once facilitated fluid transitions between private and social life.
Rahaal was conceived as a site where nature, culture and art converge. Photo: Sebastian Boettcher
Drawing from the traditions of Qatar’s essentially nomadic culture and the heritage of the majlis, Rahaal was conceived first and foremost as a platform for human connection and multicultural encounter, both between people and with nature. It is a site where nature, culture and art converge as part of a single, transformative experience that reflects centuries of Arab rituals rooted in community-building, shaped around natural cycles and rhythms.
That sense of openness—of arriving without announcement—is what Rashid Al-Thani and Cooper sought to capture with Rahaal. He recalls that just earlier, Perrotin had stopped by and asked whether he knew they were coming. The answer was no, but they were welcomed all the same. “What mattered was that people were received generously. That was the core idea,” he said, noting how different this is from the cultural paradigm in the U.S. In New York, hospitality exists, but Rashid Al-Thani misses the immediacy of hospitality in his culture, where it’s not a courteous performance but deeply embedded in ancient traditions.
For this reason, he has tried to recreate it in his own home in the West Village. “I tell my friends, ‘Just call me. I’m there. My coffee is ready. My tea is ready. My dates are ready.’ And now they actually do it every weekend,” he shared. “They call and say, ‘We’re in the West Village—can we come by?’” For him, the answer is always yes. “I wake up, prepare the coffee and tea, set out six cups, and whoever comes has a home—a place of refuge, even if just for that moment. That’s what we hoped to translate here.”
The central pavilion, Al Ma’rad, hosts the inaugural show, “Anywhere Is My Land,” curated by Rashid Al-Thani with work by contemporary artists from diverse geographies, all imagining landscape not as a depiction of place but as fragments of memory carried within the traveler—seen, altered and remembered in motion. The notion of constant movement informed the exhibition’s title, inspired by Antonio Díaz’s series Anywhere Is My Land, created while he was in exile in Italy. “The idea of land, and where you find it, becomes very powerful—especially here, where land is understood as a common space,” Rashid Al-Thani reflected.
Al Ma’rad served as the central pavilion of Rahaal, hosting its inaugural exhibition “Anywhere is My Land.” Photo: Sebastian Boettcher
Featuring both established and emerging artists, the exhibition leaves viewers with a sense of feeling at home—even in the desert—through the possibility of reconnecting with natural scenes that resonate differently with each person’s background and memories. Collectively, the works affirm the universality of humanity’s need for contemplation of nature as a way to reattune to the most primordial truths of our existence within a broader cosmic order. All hanging, Salon-style, in a vibrant constellation against the fabric-lined walls, the works on view range from the poetic, endless starry night of Vija Celmins and material collaborative connections with the prime elements of Arte Povera masters Giuseppe Penone and Pier Paolo Calzolari, to the lyrical, more abstract, synthetic visions of artists from the region such as Etel Adnan and Huguette Caland, and the archaic, archetypal reappearances of Simone Fattal, among other names.
“Everything in life feels so linear. Even museums are linear: you move from one point to the next,” Rashid Al-Thani explained. “The desert interrupts that. It forces you to think differently. Sometimes it gives you a moment of reflection. Sometimes you find yourself only when you’re lost. I know it sounds very poetic, but every time I come here—except maybe once, when I went straight through—I feel like I lose my way, but I find something else.” It is from this specific relationship with the desert—one that requires humility and receptivity in the face of nature’s infinite and overwhelming force—that the development of astronomy in Islamic civilization emerged. It was born from the need to locate oneself and find direction, because Arabs were always on the move.
In this sense, Rashid Al-Thani may have found an even more resonant interpretation of “Becoming,” deeply rooted in a place and its traditions, but openly encouraging all those in transit through Qatar to exit their Western culture-shaped comfort zone and “get off the road,” get to the desert and embrace the culture.
The response, not only from people visiting Art Basel Qatar but also from locals, has been incredibly telling. “Someone messaged me and said, ‘I’ve been here for 15 years, and I’ve never experienced something like this.’ That kind of response is exactly what we were hoping for,” he said. “If anything is going to change how people perceive one another, it has to be through connection.” It was that search for connection that brought him to art in the first place, and it’s a deeply humanist approach that he has embraced.
Despite the fast paced development of modern architectural hubs in the Arab world, ties to past traditions remain strong. Photo: Sebastian Boettcher
Since its founding in 2017, his Institute of Arab and Islamic Art has been focused on changing the perception people have of Islamic and Arab culture by creating occasions for meaningful encounters through the showcasing of contemporary and historical art from the Arab and Islamic worlds. “I felt a growing exhaustion being boxed in as ‘the Arab.’ I wanted people not to be scared when they encountered someone like me,” Rashid Al-Thani said, recalling how, when he moved in 2014, fear and misunderstanding toward Islamic culture were very present in the U.S., fueled by a political agenda.
“It is about normalizing what it means to be Arab or Muslim by placing it within a broader contemporary practice, whether that’s design, art or architecture,” he said. “Without those moments of connection we shared, my perspective might never have reached a wider audience, and the same is true for his. But connection is absolutely central to both of us. It’s what we’re deeply invested in, and I believe it’s precisely what has made this project successful.”
Over close to a decade in New York, the IAIA has helped facilitate broader international recognition of several key figures of Arab art, including Ibrahim El-Salahi, Behjat Sadr and the now-rising Huguette Caland, among others. The IAIA presents both exhibitions and site-specific interventions, each thoroughly researched and curated to open up complex narratives about art from the Arab and Islamic worlds. The institute highlights historically significant artists who have been underrepresented in global contemporary art discourse and aims to challenge stereotypes about Arab and Muslim cultural production.
To encourage spontaneous encounters with Islamic culture, the IAIA launched its inaugural Public Art program last fall with Big Rumi, a sculpture by Ghada Amer, marking the artist’s first public art installation in the United States. On view through March at 421 6th Avenue in New York, its latticework is shaped in space by the repetition of the Arabic quote attributed to the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi, which, translated into English, reads: “You are what you seek” or “What you seek is seeking you.”
As U.S. institutions increasingly turn their attention toward the Islamic segments of America’s multicultural population, works previously exhibited by the IAIA have entered the collections of major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In a world—and a country—ever more divided, Arab culture, from the rise of the Gulf to the election of New York’s first Muslim mayor, is increasingly central to public discourse, the IAIA’s mission and Rashid Al-Thani’s welcoming approach to exhibiting art feel not only timely but deeply resonant.
IAIA recently launched its inaugural Public Art program with a sculpture by Ghada Amer, Big Rumi, on view on 421 6th Avenue in New York through March 2026. Courtesy Institute of Arab and Islamic Art
Under Francesco Bonami’s direction, By Art Matters has embraced a curatorial model that favors instinct, experimentation and intellectual risk. Photo: Qingshan Wu, courtesy of By Art Matters
Late last year, I had the privilege of visiting Hangzhou, China, as the guest of By Art Matters, a remarkable museum that opened in 2021. The museum is situated in a sprawling complex designed by Renzo Piano, and across several floors and two buildings, it takes an innovative approach to curation, both in the subjects it tackles and in the way exhibitions are organized. Located just an hour by train from Shanghai, it is truly a must-visit for anyone traveling in the region. At least part of its success can be attributed to the work of curator Francesco Bonami, who serves as its director. I caught up with Bonami in Shanghai to learn more about how this one-of-a-kind institution came to be.
In person, you told me a little bit about how you came to know By Art Matters through your friend Renzo Piano, who designed the complex it occupies in Hangzhou. I’d love to hear more about these early stages. How did the institution’s curatorial ethos evolve?
My friendship with Renzo Piano began through a book, Dopo tutto non è brutto (After All, It’s Not Ugly), which included a chapter on one of his buildings. That text amused him enough to get in touch, and a genuine connection followed. When Lilin later asked Renzo to design the Ooeli campus, she also asked whether he knew anyone who could help with the art space that would become By Art Matters.
The name was proposed as a contraction of the phrase “by the way, art matters.” Even without a literal meaning, it conveyed the essential message: a place where art always matters more than the strategies built around it. That principle reflects Lilin’s philosophy, one shared fully from the outset.
During an early visit to Hangzhou, the site was little more than a tent with chickens wandering around. Renzo immediately grasped the location’s orientation and potential and, over lunch, sketched the concept with his signature green Pentel marker. That was around 2014, and the core idea of that drawing remains visible today in how millions of visitors move through the campus each year. Credit belongs to Renzo for a vision that extends far beyond architectural “hardware” into long-term spatial experience.
Curator Francesco Bonami. Courtesy of By Art Matters
When I had the pleasure of visiting Hangzhou, By Art Matters had just opened an innovative retrospective showcasing the work of Inga Svala Thorsdottir & Wu Shanzhuan. I also took in the previously opened exhibition featuring outfits from every collection by Martin Margiela. How do these diverse shows reflect the vision of By Art Matters?
By Art Matters maintains a deliberately flexible approach to programming. There is a conscious avoidance of following the usual strategies of the art world—partly out of conviction, partly out of a desire for a more direct, fresh and even naïve attitude. Projects are considered individually, and choices are made based on what resonates most strongly at a given moment rather than on external expectations or positioning.
What are some of your favorite shows that you’ve done with By Art Matters, and why?
The first exhibition, “A Show About Nothing,” was especially successful. Other highlights include “Mind the Gap,” a long-distance conversation between Li Ming and Darren Bader, as well as “360 Degrees Painting.”
You’ve programmed high-profile shows across the globe. How do you try to balance geographic specificity with making an exhibition that will resonate with someone in the international art world? How has that been demonstrated at By Art Matters?
Finding that balance remains a challenge, since audiences differ significantly across contexts. Assumptions that feel natural to a Western curator can be far from obvious to younger curators or local teams. Working through those gaps—often by questioning what is taken for granted—has been an ongoing and instructive process at By Art Matters.
You’re known for dispensing insights about the broader art world on your Instagram. Could you speak about some trends you’ve noticed in recent years, ones you either endorse or do not care for?
Following or responding to trends is risky, since by the time they are acted upon, it is often already too late. Instinct—one’s own or that of trusted collaborators—matters more, along with a willingness to risk mistakes rather than chase relevance.
If you had to offer advice to a young artist starting out today, what would it be?
Work toward success, but remain a servant to personal ideas rather than to the ideas of others.
What have you learned about Chinese audiences in your time working with By Art Matters?
The most striking quality is the openness and flexibility of mindset. Growing up in a Western context often meant being asked “why?” repeatedly, with long delays before a project could be realized, if at all. In China, the response is more often “why not?” followed by rapid realization—sometimes almost too rapid!
Mia Westerlund Roosen’s Heat (background) and Conical (foreground), both from 1981, on view at Nunu Fine Art. Photo: Martin Seck, courtesy the artist and Nunu Fine Art
Multidisciplinary artist Mia Westerlund Roosen’s early career unfolded against the backdrop of Minimalism’s heyday, but her work diverged sharply from the austere, industrial ethos of contemporaries like Donald Judd and Robert Morris, whose machine-informed processes and commitment to art for art’s sake. Where their work was polished, rigid and cold, hers, while similarly monumental, was organic, sensual, tactile and emotional, referencing or evoking geological forms, flesh and other earthly materials.
For another week, you can see some of her work at Nunu Fine Art in New York (including pieces first shown in 1982 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, where she was shown alongside Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Bruce Nauman). Most striking are the monumental horns arching up from the floor at the back of the gallery: Conical (1981), the smaller of the two, appears to have been excised, perhaps violently, from its source, and Heat (1981), which seems to protrude intact from the floor, as if heralding the arrival of some massive beast. Postminimalist to the extreme, both exude a viscerality that invites one to imagine where these objects have been and what their purpose might be now.
The same is true of Sac (2019), a smaller-scale piece that resembles nothing so much as a deflating penis on first glance, hinting at the fragility of humanity. Yet the sagging flannel and resin are only a conduit into a dense concrete cave-like core. What, one wonders, is this thing; why is it here and what is it for?
Mia Westerlund Roosen, Untitled Drawing 2, 1975. Oil stick, pastel, and charcoal on paper, 13 x 7 in. / 33 x 17.8 cm., Framed: 17 1/4 x 13 1/4 in. / 33.7 x 43.8 cm. Courtesy the artist and Nunu Fine Art
Westerlund Roosen’s practice, of course, encompasses more than sculpture. The exhibition includes rarely shown drawings that offer a glimpse into the artist’s ongoing exploration of materiality. Some of the most compelling appear at first to be preliminary sketches of her large-scale works but were actually rendered after the sculptures they reference were complete—portraits of the material properties of her three-dimensional pieces. Similarly, the drawings in her Gray Series I–V explore asphalt, concrete and fiber, capturing the physical realities of these materials in two dimensions with profound depth. “For her, it’s kind of like building something,” Nunu Hung of Nunu Fine Art told me during a tour of “Mia Westerlund Roosen: Then and Now.” “She has chalk or a pencil, and she just keeps putting layers on, and building out the work just like making a sculpture.”
Now in her 80s, Westerlund Roosen continues her material experimentation, splitting her time between a home upstate near the Massachusetts border and a studio in New York City that I was lucky enough to visit after walking through the exhibition. There, I was able to see more of her work: Column I and II and the vulvular Marble I from 2019 and pieces from her striking and unsettling Box series. Much like her creations, the artist is equal parts engaging and inscrutable, telling me she prefers to let her pieces do the communicating. “After all,” she said, “if you could talk about it, you wouldn’t make it.” But talk we did, and she was gracious enough to answer my questions about her early experimentation, her process and her newest work.
You emerged as a sculptor in a period dominated by Minimalism. What compelled you to resist the prevailing industrial, geometric norms to pursue a more organic, embodied visual language?
For me, rigid geometries and perfectly straight lines resist emotion, while I was in search of a more emotional response, albeit through reductive form. I felt that my process-based works were, in a way, antithetical to Minimalism, because they were more expressive. My work seeks to engage the senses directly, rather than the intellect.
Your pieces often evoke tension between presence and absence or weight and collapse. What is it about these contrasts in particular that fascinates you?
The paradoxes inherent in those pieces are always exciting to me. The interplay between the blatant and the poetic, or the aggressive and the humorous, sparks curiosity that keeps them continuously intriguing. For example, Heat is simultaneously aggressive and humorous; humor plays a huge role in my work, and it is the unexpected combination of those two qualities that I hope engages the viewer, as well.
Mia Westerlund Roosen, Maquette for Baritone, 1983. Concrete and lead, 12 x 15 x 6 in. / 30.5 x 38.1 x 15.2 cm. Photo: Martin Seck, courtesy the artist and Nunu Fine Art
Many of the drawings in the show aren’t preparatory studies but two-dimensional renderings of sculpture already brought to life. How do you approach the relationship between sculpture and drawing in your practice?
I think in three dimensions first. My preparatory studies are in clay, and those are often later translated into larger pieces, while my drawings are generally a separate yet related practice. Sculpture for me is the investigation of different densities in terms of material and perception, as well as trying to endow the material with a sense of aliveness or agency, and I often am looking for the same qualities in my drawing. Whether through encaustic, charcoal or pastel, I’m attempting to capture depth and layers beneath the surface.
You’ve sometimes resisted being overly explanatory when it comes to underlying themes in your work. Why?
My personal feeling is that over-explanation from the artist can come across as heavy-handed or didactic, and suppress the mystery and poetry of a work. I would rather the viewer feel what I’m trying to get across, rather than think it.
Looking back on your long career, what do you hope contemporary audiences take away from seeing works from different decades in dialogue with one another?
I feel that my practice is very generative in the sense that many works will come directly from the previous one. While I’m varying the forms, one idea will often come from another, and I hope that viewers can sense the common threads between those differing bodies of work.
Are there particular themes or materials you plan to explore more deeply in future work?
I’m working on new pieces that push the idea of absence and presence via process or chance-based expression, in a similar vein to my sculpture Sac from 2019, which is in the exhibition. I think the combination of the translucent skin of the resin-soaked flannel and the weighty concrete is an area where I can push scale further and bigger. This new series is large-scale and rooted in the earth, but it still utilizes translucent materials that play with light and allow light to penetrate the surface. I’m very inspired by Richard Serra, and often think of how I can use that method of engaging with the body and space, but make it a little bit softer.
At Donum Estate, art, wine, and land are conceived as a single living system shaped by stewardship, regeneration, and long-term vision. Photo Robert Berg | Courtesy Donum Estate
As California’s viticulture has matured—understood not merely as agricultural production but as a cultural, scientific and ecological practice—a generation of wineries in Sonoma and Napa began to reimagine the estate itself as a space where wine, hospitality and contemporary art could coexist, grounded in terroir-driven storytelling and aesthetic ambition. The Donum Estate was among the first to pioneer this convergence in a deeply intentional way, forging a sensory connection between land, wine and art.
The estate’s name—Donum, from the Latin for “gift”—reflects its ethos. Everything produced here is considered a gift of this extraordinarily fertile land that must be stewarded and protected. Its history traces back to Anne Moller-Racke, a German-born viticulturalist who came to California in 1981 and later led Buena Vista Winery, planting the estate’s original vines. When the family sold Buena Vista in 2001, they kept the Carneros vineyards and renamed the property the Donum Estate. In 2011, Danish entrepreneur Allan Warburg and his wife, Chinese-born art collector Mei Warburg, acquired the property and began transforming it into a site where contemporary sculpture and ecological stewardship would become inseparable from the wine experience.
While the estate’s viticulture has since earned acclaim—producing single-vineyard Pinot Noir and Chardonnay on over 200 hectares of regenerative organic land—what sets Donum apart is its world-class, open-air collection of monumental art. With more than 60 sculptures sited across its hills, it is now one of the largest accessible museum-grade private collections of outdoor sculpture in the world. These works are not static decor, but active participants in a living ecosystem, drawing on the land’s energy and shaping the visitor’s relationship to scale, time and movement.
That ethos of harmony extends beyond the vineyards. A regenerative organic-certified lavender field, olive grove, plum orchard and culinary garden compose a living laboratory of sensory and ecological exchange. Yet the art remains the emotional and spatial center of it all—quietly guiding the experience. What began as a vineyard has evolved into a rare cultural landscape, where sculpture and soil shape one another in real time. Donum is less a winery with art than an open-air museum embedded in the land, where every element—natural and made—serves the same purpose: to cultivate a deeper attunement to beauty.
A polyurethane fountain by Lynda Benglis. Photo Robert Berg | Courtesy Donum Estate
“It’s about the energy that emerges from the interplay between art and the land,” said Angelica de Vere Mabray, CEO of the Donum Estate, when Observer visited during FOG Design + Art. (Located just over an hour from San Francisco, the estate should be an essential stop for any art enthusiast visiting Fog City.) This year, for the first time, Donum officially partnered with the fair and SFAW, underscoring its commitment to supporting art and culture across the Bay Area.
De Vere Mabray welcomed us to the art-filled Donum Home, the estate’s hospitality center, which was redesigned and renovated by award-winning Danish architect David Thulstrup. Its light-filled interiors blend Scandinavian sensibilities with Eastern harmony, all rooted in California’s materials and natural beauty.
Greeting visitors at the entrance is a towering Yayoi Kusama Pumpkin. Inside, major works from the collection appear throughout the space: an expansive tapestry by El Anatsui flanks the wine display, while overhead, a floating “cloud ceiling” by Tomás Saraceno hovers beside Jeppe Hein’s colorfully playful balloons. A large canvas by Liu Xiaodong anchors a grouping of works by prominent Chinese artists from the post-Tiananmen generation, including Yue Minjun and Zhang Huan. In another room, a glass cylinder encases Ai Weiwei’s hand-painted Sunflower Seeds—originally created for his iconic Turbine Hall commission, in which he filled the space with more than 100 million individual porcelain seeds to draw attention to the artisanal labor behind mass production and the mythology of conformity in China.
Zhang Wang’s Artificial Rock. Chip Allen 2016
Beyond expansive glass doors, the estate’s lush greenery foregrounds California’s mountains and San Francisco Bay, in a landscape punctuated by monumental artworks. On the terrace, a pink-tinted polyurethane fountain by Lynda Benglis flows with shifting currents, its organic form constantly in motion. Farther down the path, a head by Jaume Plensa towers, while a more recent work by William Kentridge appears downhill in dialogue with Zhang Wang’s Artificial Rock No. 28.
Dated 2001, Zhang’s sculpture was the first installed at the Donum Estate. The artist used stainless steel to create a handmade, three-dimensional rubbing of natural Jiashan stone, embodying a tension between organic formations and human-made imitations. “That connection is really intentional. The ideas of healthy soils, regenerative agriculture, responsible stewardship and farming are core to our belief system. They’re deeply integrated into how we think about the art, the wine and everything else at Donum. All of it reinforces that bond between the land and the experience,” emphasized de Vere Mabray.
Allan and Mei Warburg now live full-time in Hong Kong, while maintaining homes in Beijing, Shanghai and San Francisco. Allan Warburg, born in Denmark, frequently traveled to Asia with his parents and studied Chinese in college before enrolling at Yunnan University. He began his career in the trading industry, ultimately settling in China, where he met Mei. The two shared a passion for both art and wine and began collecting early—particularly works by the emerging Chinese artists of the time. “When they purchased Donum, they brought that first work by Zhang Wang with them, without any concrete plan to build what would eventually become one of the world’s most significant contemporary sculpture collections,” de Vere Mabray said. “Everything else unfolded organically from there.”
The estate was originally founded in 2001 as a winery, with no plans for hosting visitors. It wasn’t until nearly a decade later, as artworks began to arrive, that the property began evolving in a new direction. The Warburgs started collecting large-scale sculpture in 2015, and soon after, they began intentionally dedicating works to the estate, collecting not just for themselves but for the land and its future. Still, it was only in 2019, with the arrival of de Vere Mabray as CEO, that art became strategically embedded in Donum’s identity. “We start thinking much more intentionally about programming and how people experience Donum not just through wine, but through the intersection of art, land and place,” de Vere Mabray explained. “At that point, the collection comprised around 40 works; today it has grown significantly, and continues to shape how the estate is experienced.”
Louise Bourgeois, Crouching Spider, 2003. Photo Robert Berg | Courtesy Donum Estate
Today, it’s home to nearly 60 artworks, with new additions installed at an irregular pace, depending on the artists’ schedules and production timelines. Nearly half the pieces are site-specific commissions by artists who’ve spent time on the property, engaging with its environment and responding to the land. The curatorial direction is guided not by an external consultant or brand identity, but by the Warburgs’ taste, affections and personal relationships with the artists.
Although they’ve kept a low profile and chosen not to brand the collection under their name, the Warburgs still make all key decisions. “In most cases, they’ve built real friendships with the artists, who are involved in choosing the precise location of each work,” de Vere Mabray said.
She gestures to a sculpture by William Kentridge as a clear example. “He came to Donum a few years ago with his wife while he was at Berkeley for a symposium. He walked the property, spent time here and chose this specific location for the work,” de Vere Mabray recounted. “That’s generally how it happens. When they acquire something, there’s a real conversation with the artist about where it belongs and where the energy is right.”
Before venturing deeper into the green hills of the estate, we stop at a pavilion dedicated to Louise Bourgeois’s iconic Crouching Spider. This particular work is one of the few the artist created using metal construction materials she gathered in New York before fusing and welding them by hand. Due to its sensitivity, the sculpture requires an indoor, climate-controlled environment for proper preservation. In the same room, her The Mirror presents a distorted reflective surface, seemingly devoured by the vital interplay of predator and prey, winner and victim—the very dynamics that shape every ecosystem.
In the Sensory Garden, Yang Bao’s site-specific installation reimagines land damaged by disease as a living soundscape shaped by wind, humidity and movement. Photo Robert Berg | Courtesy Donum Estate
Just outside, Mikado Tree by Pascale Marthine Tayou rises from the landscape. Another signature site on the property is the Vertical Panorama Pavilion, conceived by Olafur Eliasson’s studio in collaboration with architect Sebastian Behmann. An immersive architectural and emotional experience, the rainbow-hued structure functions as a multisensory instrument—inviting visitors to reconnect with nature and recalibrate to its rhythms. Its conical canopy acts as a kind of calendar, centered on a north-facing oculus and glazed with 832 laminated glass panels in varying hues. Each panel corresponds to data gathered at the estate by Eliasson’s design studio, representing annual averages of solar radiation, wind intensity, temperature and humidity.
“His studio flew from Berlin to install it. A concrete pad was poured here; the work was fabricated and assembled in Berlin, then brought to Donum and reconstructed on site,” de Vere Mabray shared. “Olafur was standing right here with Sebastian Berman, and he pointed out that when you stand here, you’re shoulder-width apart, fully grounded—literally planted in the earth. You have a 360-degree view, and while you’re standing here, you can smell the soil, hear the grasses moving, and hear the birds. It’s deeply immersive and completely rooted in this place.”
Doug Aitken’s Sonic Mountain (Sonoma) transforms the Carneros breeze into a resonant instrument. Photo Robert Berg | Courtesy Donum Estate
Indeed, much of the art is organically and symbiotically rooted within the land. A particularly moving example is the estate’s Sensory Garden, which has been completely reimagined through Yang Bao’s immersive multisensory installation HYPERSPACE. Designed to blend seamlessly with the natural environment, the work responds to and converses with its surroundings: encircling a central pyramid, nine sculptural elements generate a spatial soundscape—a site-specific composition by Bao that shifts with wind, temperature and humidity.
Donum grows three lavender varietals, and each summer, an entire hillside blooms into an ocean of purple. Originally, the estate’s lavender was planted on the very site where Bao’s installation now stands. But repeated failures led the Donum team to consult botanists who diagnosed Phytophthora—a soil-borne pathogen that attacks lavender roots coping with poor drainage. Instead of fighting the land, the team relocated the lavender to higher ground, where it now thrives. The cleared site became the foundation Bao—who is both a chemist and a composer—used to reimagine the terrain, helping it heal through art.
There’s a spiritual dimension running through many of the artists’ installations at Donum, according to de Vere Mabray. One such work is Doug AItken’s Sonic Mountain (Sonoma), located in the Eucalyptus Grove. Measuring 45 feet in diameter and composed of 365 chimes—one for each day of the year—the sculpture is a living instrument activated by the Carneros breeze, one of Donum’s most persistent natural forces. While Aitken has engaged environmental themes in recent projects—most notably in his 2025 exhibition at Regen Projects—this installation marks a subtle and unexpected shift. Rather than addressing ecological urgency through overt imagery or a conceptual framework rooted in institutional critique, the artist operates here in a more spiritual register, privileging sensation and attunement.
Anselm Kiefer, Mohn und Gedächtnis, 2017. Photo Robert Berg | Courtesy Donum Estate
The land speaks to the art just as the art speaks to the land—there’s a clear dialogue between the two. “It’s incredibly powerful, De Vere Mabray said. “That’s really what we hope people take away: an understanding of that possible exchange of energy between art and landscape.” Seen in person, sculptures feel embedded in their environment, not simply installed on it. Rather than functioning as a curated series of standalone works, the collection operates as part of a larger, site-specific system in which form, material and placement respond directly to the terrain.
This sense of integration runs throughout the estate. Sculptures are situated with intention—some echoing the contours of the land, others drawing attention to its shifts in light, texture or scale. The same attention applied to cultivating Pinot Noir and Chardonnay is visible in how artworks are commissioned and positioned. The result is not just aesthetic harmony, but a layered visitor experience that bridges visual art, agriculture and landscape. Here, art doesn’t compete with the landscape, and the landscape doesn’t merely serve as a backdrop. Each reinforces the other, creating a rhythm of encounter that feels designed to sharpen awareness—not just of the estate, but of the viewer’s own place within it.
Ai Weiwei, Circle of Animals Zodiac Heads, 2011. Photo Bob Berg | Courtesy Donum Estate
Artist Anita Lam didn’t set out to reinvent the zoo, but after reading John Berger’s Why Look at Animals?, she found herself rethinking the joy they’d once brought her. Questions began to take shape in her mind: What does it mean to confine an animal for human spectatorship? What do our structures of display say about how we view other species and ourselves? These and other inquiries eventually gave rise to “Happy Zoo,” a conceptual art series developed through ALAN (Artists who Love Animals and Nature), the Hong Kong–based nonprofit Lam co-founded and now directs.
There are no cages in Lam’s zoo. No bars or barriers between ‘us’ and ‘them’. And no living creatures on display. Instead, each iteration of the adaptive multimedia xhibition—”BLUTOPIA” in 2023, “Spirit of Sumatra” in 2024, “Wild Togetherland” currently on view at GATE33 Gallery in Hong Kong and “Snowmelt,” which is in development—exists to invite empathy with animals in nature and in human-built environments. At the heart of “Wild Togetherland” is an intriguing question: Where do we belong in the ecosystem of a city?
Lam’s work sits at the intersection of art, ecology, technology and philosophy, but far from being overly academic or depressingly pessimistic—as environmentally focused art shows often are—her approach is playful and, at times, mischievous. Collaborating with artists like Ruby Maky, Stickyline and Carnovsky (Francesco Rugi and Silvia Quintanilla), she builds exhibitions that encompass everything from immersive installations and playable video games to sculpture and interactive works.
Stickyline, Urban Animal Fables. Courtesy ALAN
There are no dry manifestos printed on the walls, no proclamations of doom. She’s not here to scold or convert. Instead, “Happy Zoo” nudges visitors toward ecological awareness through whimsy, novelty and play because, for Lam, emotional connection is the first step toward behavioral change. In “Wild Togetherland,” stories of urban animals pushed to the margins of human life illustrate how people might better coexist with other species, and many works in the exhibition—including The Collective’s interactive game Toilet Training and Stickyline’s Urban Animal Fables—use humor to expose the absurdity of expecting animals to conform to human-imposed order. Observer caught up with Lam to learn more about the exhibition, how “Happy Zoo” has evolved and why finding common ground with animals matters now more than ever.
ALAN stands for “Artists who Love Animals and Nature.” Broadly, what responsibility do you feel artists bear when it comes to environmental issues?
I think being environmentally conscious is something we all share responsibility for—it’s not just one group or profession. That said, artists have a special role to play. We’re naturally expressive, and we tell stories through what we create. There’s often a lot of emotion, experiences and warmth in art, and that makes it a powerful way to connect with people. Rather than telling the public what they should or shouldn’t do, art opens up space for reflection. It invites curiosity and encourages people to think for themselves. When someone feels emotionally connected, understanding grows naturally, and from that place, people can make their own choices.
Environmental issues are complex, and there isn’t one right way to approach them. Art allows us to explore those complexities, to think differently and to imagine new possibilities. At its heart, it’s about creativity—about stepping outside the usual frameworks and offering room for thought, dialogue and change.
What inspired the “Happy Zoo” exhibition series?
Both Andy, the co-founder of ALAN and I have always loved animals. Growing up, we spent a lot of happy time in zoos and aquariums—it was our way of feeling close to them. Those places are filled with childhood memories, family outings and a sense of wonder, so it’s not easy to suddenly question that experience.
A turning point for me was reading Why Look at Animals? by John Berger. One line really stayed with me: “Everywhere animals disappear. In zoos, they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.” It made me pause and see zoos from a completely different perspective. It wasn’t about rejecting those memories, but about questioning how our culture, our values and our relationship with animals have been shaped over time. At its core, it became a reflection on humanity itself.
I started to see our relationship with animals as a starting point—a lens through which we could look more deeply into humanity and into the more philosophical aspects of how human nature and development are connected. That’s when a simple but challenging question began to form in my mind: can we reimagine the future of a zoo?
Then the pandemic happened, and it became a shared global experience of confinement. Many people struggled mentally and emotionally, and for the first time, we could truly feel what captivity is like. At the same time, nature began to recover as human activity slowed down. That contrast stayed with us. It felt like an important moment to reflect and perhaps the right time to introduce “Happy Zoo.”
“Happy Zoo” isn’t about copying a traditional zoo or recreating nature through technology. Instead, we use art and interactive technology to explore new ways of reconnecting humans and nature—through emotion, imagination and curiosity. It’s about asking questions rather than offering fixed answers. Hong Kong is a small city, and land is always limited. So instead of building a massive zoo, we approach “Happy Zoo” one chapter at a time, each focusing on different themes and ideas. This way of working has brought unexpected benefits—it makes the project more flexible, scalable and adaptable to different cities and communities, while allowing us to keep learning as we go.
This is the third installment in the series. How has the vision evolved since the first show, and what new territory are you exploring with “Wild Togetherland”?
The first two chapters were more geographically grounded—one focused on the ocean, the other on the rainforest. They allowed us to explore specific ecosystems and the beauty and fragility within them. As we began shaping this new chapter, we paused and asked ourselves: if we’re creating this journey from scratch, why should we follow the layout or logic of a traditional zoo at all? That question opened up new directions. We started looking toward more complex and sometimes uncomfortable topics—ones that feel much closer to our everyday lives.
“Wild Togetherland” focuses on wildlife in the city. It’s a global issue, but it plays out locally, differently in every place. As cities continue to expand, encounters between humans and wildlife become more frequent. Sometimes those encounters are beautiful, but more often, they turn into conflict. This led us to think more deeply about power and imbalance in the societies we share—who holds space, who is given a voice, who is considered a minority and who is silenced.
Urban wildlife becomes a quiet mirror. It gently asks us to reflect on our role in this shared environment—who we are today and who we want to be going forward. “Wild Togetherland” is not meant to give answers, but to offer a shared space: a place to shift perspective, to start conversations or simply to spend time and experience the work.
Alizé, A Mobile of Coexistence. Courtesy Roni Wong, presented by ALAN
Many of the works use play, absurdity and silliness to provoke reflection. Why do you feel it’s important to strike a balance between humor or joy and urgency when addressing serious environmental themes?
We’re very aware that the world already feels heavy. Many people are overwhelmed by daily pressures, constant information and ongoing crises. In that context, we see humor as an invitation. Something light can open a door where something serious might push people away—especially when the topic itself carries weight.
For us, laughter is a way to draw people in, absurdity sparks curiosity and makes space for engagement. Once curiosity is there, people often want to look closer, ask questions and stay with the work a little longer. Staying curious keeps us open and alive. That sense of play and openness sits at the core of our creative approach.
Can finding empathy with animals within ourselves reframe how we relate to each other as humans?
That’s a really important question, and in many ways it goes straight to the heart of what “Happy Zoo” is about. I often think of a quote by Gandhi: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” Animals are the silent majority, and the way we share this planet with them becomes a mirror of how we function as a society. Humans have shaped most of the world into cities. Many wild animals simply can’t adapt to these environments—just as most humans couldn’t survive in the wild. In that sense, animals represent those with less power in a shared system, while humans have become the powerful minority on this planet. Life has never been completely fair or equal and maybe it never will be—but it can be more just.
When we lose awareness of these power dynamics, especially as we redesign the world to be increasingly human-centric, it raises deeper questions. Are we unknowingly accepting a system where only the strongest or most adaptable get to thrive? This kind of mindfulness doesn’t only apply to how we treat animals—it reflects how we relate to one another as humans as well.
As technology continues to advance, empathy becomes even more essential. Knowledge and technology are not the problem; they are tools. What truly matters is how we choose to use them and that requires consciousness. With A.I. developing at a speed we’ve never experienced before, its potential to help or to harm is immense. Without empathy, it’s easy to slowly lose awareness—like frogs in warming water—while power becomes concentrated in the hands of a few who know how to control these tools.
For me, empathy and consciousness are not abstract ideas; they are core human values. If we want to sustain ourselves—not just as individuals, but as a society—we need to actively hold on to them. Finding empathy with animals may be one of the most honest ways to remind ourselves how to care for each other.
How did you select the participating artists and collectives? Was there a guiding principle or shared ethos that tied them together?
Each chapter begins with a clear theme, which gives us an overall structure and sense of direction. Within that framework, we look for artists with distinct voices, practices and ways of thinking. Rather than asking them to fit into a fixed format, we want their individuality to come through—while still sharing a common tone that feels playful, open and inviting. The only real consideration in our collaborations is quite simple and honestly not difficult to meet: that an artist’s past work does not involve harm or abuse toward animals or others. Ideally, they have a natural sensitivity toward animals and nature—but it’s not about whether they love animals. For us, it’s really about respect.
With that in mind, it’s been very meaningful to hear visitors describe our journeys as having warmth—having a kind of “temperature.” Not just depth or critical thinking, but something that feels human and emotionally present. We often think of the process like cooking. Each artist is an ingredient, bringing their own flavor and character. Our role as curators is like that of a chef—not to mask those flavors, but to understand how they work together. When the balance feels right, each artwork can stand on its own, yet something new emerges when they’re experienced together.
For example, our fourth chapter, “Snowmelt,” is an immersive theatrical circus journey premiering this April. It’s a performance-based experience created in collaboration with acrobats from different disciplines, exploring ideas of resilience and agility in nature. Just as nature develops its own “superpowers” to survive crises and change, we believe humans do too. Each of us carries hidden strengths that help us adapt to unexpected challenges. The goal isn’t uniformity, but chemistry. When the works begin to speak to one another, they form a layered journey—one that feels cohesive, while still honoring the richness of each individual voice.
Have you brought or would you consider bringing the “Happy Zoo” series to other urban geographies?
Yes. Absolutely. Bringing “Happy Zoo” to other cities is very much our long-term vision. Almost every city in the world has its own zoo or aquarium, and in a way, that shared structure became our starting point for imagining how “Happy Zoo” could travel. While the themes we explore are global, every city carries its own context, challenges and relationship with nature. That’s why local collaboration is important to us—as an added layer to our existing content. By working with local artists, collectives and communities, each chapter is enriched with new perspectives and can respond more directly to its surroundings, making the experience feel grounded, relevant and connected to place rather than simply transplanted.
In a sense, it’s a reversal of the traditional zoo model. Instead of moving animals across borders, we invite ideas, stories and artworks to travel. Through art, we create a kind of cultural exchange—one that celebrates diversity without captivity. Each city adds a new layer to the project, widening the spectrum and enriching the overall journey. If done well, “Happy Zoo” doesn’t just arrive in a city—it grows with it.
What advice would you give to young artists who want to engage with conservation but aren’t sure how to begin?
First, I really believe it starts with finding what you genuinely care about. Find the topic that moves you—something that feels truthful to your own experience and values. Without that connection, the work can easily become hollow. I once had an artist friend who said he doesn’t like seeing students make art about sustainability simply because it feels “correct” or earns them more recognition. Often, you can sense when there’s no real heart in it, and I think that’s very true.
What’s the point of creating work only to match what society expects or to collect approval if there’s no passion behind it? Art, at its best, should challenge norms and shift perspectives. I often tell my team that people can feel the difference—they can sense whether a work comes from the heart or is created just to exist. To truly engage with conservation, you have to care enough to observe deeply, to question and to understand before responding. From that place, you can raise meaningful questions or offer new perspectives, rather than simply repeating messages or creating something that feels like propaganda. Most of us already know, for example, that using plastic is harmful—but the real question is why and what complexities sit beneath that fact. There are always multiple sides to every story.
I also think this applies beyond conservation. Personally, while I care deeply about the natural world, I’m equally interested in exploring themes like power, bullying and politics within corporate culture—questions such as why “winners take it all.” These interests come directly from lived experience, and they shape how I think and create. For me, honesty in subject matter always comes before choosing a “correct” topic. Without genuine care and curiosity, the work risks becoming superficial—and audiences can feel that immediately. Passion isn’t just an added bonus; it’s the foundation.
Those art aficionados who aren’t in Doha this week are likely in Mexico City for ZONAMACO. Every year during Mexico City Art Week, kurimanzutto, the city’s most prestigious gallery, stages an ambitious exhibition at its sprawling space in San Miguel Chapultepec, and this year’s, “oscar murillo: el pozo de agua,” brings together 15 years of work by the superstar painter. We caught up with the artist to hear more about the show, which is a can’t-miss if you’re in CDMX this week.
The press release for this show opens with a poem that makes reference to the “sedimentation of time.” What does that line mean for you, and how does it tie into the rest of the show?
Sedimentation of time references Frequencies as an index, an encyclopedic library, a universe in how I view the world—perhaps a gesture toward how different historical temporalities, experiences and layers of meaning settle and accumulate over time. It suggests history is not linear, but rather a coexistence of multiple, overlapping layers (structures, behaviors, events) that operate at different speeds, like a Flight drawing, the act of drawing at the speed of flight—say, at 600 mph or, differently, let’s say a 14-year-old child in a school in Singapore taking six months to contribute to the Frequencies database in 2014.
This show collects work from the last decade and a half of your practice. What’s it been like to see all of it together at the same time? Did you learn anything about yourself?
Time exists differently; it is not linear. So it is not a survey of time as your question suggests. Like the work, Telegram, it comes together through the sedimentation of time. Or like The water well, which is a moment of pause before you enter the exhibition. I think of it as a container of thought or a library of material and experience; it is not chronological.
How would you describe your relationship to the surfaces of your work? How has that evolved over the years?
These surfaces register marks and energy. I don’t have an obsessive relationship to the surface in the plastic sense of painting, but I do think about intensity both in the physical and psychological sense.
I liked your work at this fall’s São Paulo Biennial, wherein you placed surfaces around the building for others to mark. How did you come to this idea and how does it relate to the rest of your practice?
In many ways, Social mapping is an evolution of Frequencies with a very short performative tempo, as well as a different performative structure for the general public. In the context of a cultural institution and the streets themselves, it is also a device to record the passing of the masses, through the simple act of making a mark. On the other hand, Frequencies is a global network, it attaches itself to the framework and infrastructure of the school, and it collaborates with children as vessels. Social mapping coincides with this moment of censorship and turbulence we are living through, wherein layers upon layers of marks reveal the thoughts that people are freely recording and sharing, however trivial or profound.
Oscar Murillo, manifestation, 2023-2024. Oil, oil stick, spray paint, dirt and graphite on canvas and linen, 240 x 250 cm., 94 1/2 x 98 3/8 in. (detail). Photo: Tim Bowditch and Reinis Lismanis. Courtesy the artist. Copyright Oscar Murillo
When you were first starting out, you fast became a market darling. How does that experience inform the art you’re making today?
Your question is somewhat sensationalist. I am not a star of anything, I don’t recall such a time. I do remember continuous focus and experimentation in the studio.
What are the differences between how your work is received in Latin and South America versus elsewhere in the world?
Ideas in the work are borne out of a shifting global order that is currently under threat. Social mapping is perhaps a response to this. It is my way of being in the street as a witness.
Do you have a favorite work in the show? One that resonates with you for personal reasons?
The installation of The water well in the patio of the gallery space. It acts as a kind of encyclopedia. It contains fragments of material that have occupied space in my studio over the years. They are witnesses to my process. A fragment of material from my show “Espíritus en el pantano” at Museo Tamayo filled with marks from the public occupies one of the walls of the structure, for example. There are also large black canvas flags that I presented more than 10 years ago at the 56th Venice Biennale titled “All the world’s futures,” curated by Okwui Enwezor. There is a sound piece that is an account of my father’s migration from Colombia to London that is recorded in 18 different languages.
In this sense, The water well is a resource from which memories and material are extracted. Like a library, the visitor can come and consult it before viewing the paintings on show.
Morgan Buck, We’re the Only Winners, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 31 inches. Photo: Mario Gallucci; Courtesy the artist and ILY2
These days, Morgan Buck doesn’t make paintings that look like paintings. With their airbrushed surfaces and grainy, digitized haze, his canvases look like screenshot shitposts pulled from the weirder corners of the internet—and I mean that in the best way possible. Buck doesn’t do lazy nods to digital culture, and his work is meticulously crafted. His recent solo show, “Instantly & Effortlessly,” at ILY2 in New York—the artist’s second with the gallery—demonstrated just how far he’s willing to go in his engagement with the visual detritus of our algorithm-fed lives, marrying the deliberate labor of painting with junk images in something that shines a light on the promises and the pitfalls of both.
Here’s where I should probably cop to personally loving the weirder corners of the internet, where Buck’s process begins. He scavenges screenshots, video captions, A.I. outputs and stock imagery, manipulates them digitally and uses them as raw material for paintings that are at once funny and deeply uncanny—think deep-fried memes, but more refined. Buck riffs on themes of attention, automation and absurdity while grounding each piece in the technical rigor of photorealistic airbrushing.
It’s shitposting with a twist: conceptually agile, technically sophisticated and, like the best absurdist memes, sneakily moving. There’s humor and a sense of depravity, along with a real tension between image and object, intention and accident, meaning and nonsense. Some of Buck’s paintings draw you in with their oddness and keep you there with an undercurrent of melancholy. Others are just plain fun to look at.
Buck can be as irreverent as his paintings suggest, but while he talks about his practice with a casual bravado, there’s an undercurrent of disciplined artistic self-awareness that comes through when he talks about his work. He is, you might say, serious about not being too serious. His paintings are smart without being didactic, technically impressive without being self-important and prompt questions about how we engage with both art and the internet. His work is the most fully realized—and amusing—blurring of high and low culture I’ve seen in a long time, and I caught up with Buck as “Instantly & Effortlessly” was closing to talk about artificial intelligence in the arts, the allure of the airbrush and painting with a sense of humor.
The title of your exhibition “Instantly & Effortlessly,” which closed at ILY2 late last year, felt like a critique of digital-age gratification. How did you choose it, and what was it meant to signal?
I thought it was a funny and attention-grabbing title that related to the streamlining of art production with A.I. Ultimately, I’m an artist very interested in process and ideas of labor in art. I have an MFA in craft, so it’s part of my background to be interested in these topics. Part of my goal with my process is efficiency, so having A.I. in the mix is a dream come true. Using A.I. as an artist is pretty much like banging creative heroin: it gets you to the best results without trying. Just instant and effortless. No pain, just gain.
You use an airbrush technique that intentionally suppresses brushstrokes and painterly “texture” and also obscures subjects. What motivates that choice, and how does the technique support the conceptual underpinnings of your work?
Honestly, there’s not really much of a “concept” behind it. It’s more of a scam to make people take digital art seriously without them necessarily knowing it’s digital. People seem to want effort from artists for some reason. They don’t want to just see that someone walked up to a machine and pushed the art button. I also think painting translates the digital image into something that reads more human in a more visceral way. Originally, when I started airbrush painting, it was mostly about trying to make the painting look like a digital print.
A few years before the airbrush came into my practice, I was a painter who painted with heavy brushstrokes and a palette knife and all of that jazz. That painterly materiality gets to the point where it’s just a default filter that says, “I’m a painted painting painted by a painter” in every piece of art one makes. It’s a very boring effect when you think about it, and it’s also not effortless either. If anything, it’s trying way too hard.
For this reason, I became tired of painting, and for a year and a half, I didn’t paint. I just thought painting was for poseurs. This is when I started focusing on digital images that I made with my cell phone panorama. I’d pull up Google Images with a bunch of weird thumbnails and do a screenshot with the panorama distorting the images into a surreal, blurry glitch collage. They had cool compositions and really looked like paintings, but weren’t. I’d print the images and exhibit them like photography. Pretty instant and effortless.
Morgan Buck, I Don’t Even Know the Word Philosophy, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 28 x 22 inches. Photo: Mario Gallucci; Courtesy the artist and ILY2
However, the problem with that work was that people needed an explanation for what they were looking at, which is ultimately what made it a fail for me. In 2017, I did an artist residency in Leipzig, Germany, and didn’t really have much access to a printer, so I began to paint the digital images. I had a relapse. I became a total conformist poseur again. It felt great. All of a sudden, no explanation was necessary. It’s a painting. People get that. I came back home to Portland and wanted to blur the line between the digital prints and the painting materials even more. That’s where the airbrush really clicked. Airbrush, with the atomization, can create photographic effects much more efficiently than the paintbrush. It’s a flat surface like a sheet of paper. I’ve been painting with the airbrush exclusively since 2018, and it’s been my default for so long that I don’t even think about it as a novelty like most people do. I just think it’s the only relevant way to paint, period.
Your paintings often stitch together images sourced from digital overload, from social media debris to A.I. fragments; how do you decide which images deserve to be slowed down and transformed into the physical space of painting?
I think it’s important to mention that it’s not all digital overload, social media and A.I. The captions are always from my rigorous art practice of sitting on the couch watching TV and movies and taking screenshots of captions that I like, usually while drinking beer. I also use some of my own photos from my real life, so it’s more about a full range of visual experience and not quite as solely tech-focused as your question suggests. To answer your question, though, I often decide using tech.
I’ll post the digital images on my Instagram stories, and usually I will already know which ones I want to focus on, but if one I’m on the fence about gets a ton of likes, specifically from followers I know have good taste and know me personally, I will usually focus on those. Mostly, I’ll know because it will already look like a good painting, and the caption frames the image in a way that adds to its narrative in a funny or interesting way.
You’ve spoken about humor, depravity and immediacy in quick-scroll culture; where does your own sense of humor come into play when you’re assembling and recomposing these scenes?
My sense of humor often comes in when I’m choosing which caption to use. Sometimes the picture is the joke, and the caption is the punchline. The best part is the fat is an example of that. I had DALL·E Mini generate a flesh-tone Jell-O, and that weird waxy cube is what it came up with, and then I had that caption that I mentioned in my collection of captions from Iron Chef Japan. Sometimes it’s an idea that happens on site. The painting I mean he’s a genius as far as I’m concerned was like that. I was in Kauai looking at that twin waterfall everyone likes and instantly imagined an Alec Monopoly mural on the wall of the cliff there. I follow him on Instagram, so his luxurious high-roller genius is drilled into my mind daily. I took photos knowing I was going to make that painting. I don’t have a set order of how it happens. It’s all nebulous. The A.I., photography, digital appropriation, etc., it’s essentially just like how a normal artist would draw. It’s just my version of draftsmanship.
Your work engages with the idea of dopamine, reward systems and the psychology of attention; do you think painting can counter or rewire the attention habits shaped by digital culture?
A hundred percent I know it can. My paintings are way more powerful than Mark Zuckerberg. Every time I pick up my airbrush, he starts sweating uncontrollably. He trembles in fear that his reign will all be over soon. Only my paintings can do that. He knows it.
Seriously, though, I embrace social media and all of the dopamine reward systems. I’ve gained so many opportunities and friends from social media. Where would I be without it? The algorithms and filter bubbles are a problem, though. However, if I were to speculate, I’d bet power and money will continue to win at the expense of ethical concerns even long after my paintings hit gallery walls. I doubt any damage to the attention economy directly linked to my art will be reported.
I also want to say that with A.I., it’s easy to get tired of the common, easily prompted A.I. art and deepfakes that we see on our Instagram and TikTok reels. That aspect is super annoying to me. However, people forget we have a once-in-a-species opportunity to reinvent our idea of human creativity. A.I. is a tool that is not human that collaborates with you. It’s hard to understate the significance of that. It will only become more unlimited. You can decide how much or how little, which A.I. model for this part of the image or that part of the image, etc. The artists who don’t want to touch it because they think it’s clip art are really just missing out, in my opinion. Do you really think you’re going to make more interesting art with a piece of charcoal? There are so many unconventional ways of using A.I. I just want to encourage other artists to begin the journey and open their minds more.
How do you hope people will engage with the work that was in “Instantly & Effortlessly” moving forward? Do you want them to laugh, cringe, reflect, feel nostalgia or question their own consumption of images and attention?
I want people to enjoy the work, think it’s funny, interesting and well executed, but really I’m not an artist who is focused on clear communication goals. Each piece is just data from my process that I’m presenting to the audience. There’s a stream of consciousness there that people can certainly draw meanings from: critiques of capitalism, technology, pretentiousness, cringe and so on. What it means all together is simple. Buy all of my paintings right now. That’s it. Easy.
Steven Drozd, the former co-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist of the Flaming Lips, has given his first interview on his sudden exit from the band. He told FOX23 News Tulsa’s Nathan Thompson that his departure followed a decision to retire from touring and spend more time with his family. “Wayne [Coyne] and I disagreed on what I should do moving forward,” he said, noting that he would have liked to remain on as a studio member. “So we just kind of agreed that I would step back, and then step back turned into not coming back.”
Further details on the split remain vague. When Drozd broke the news last December (in a since-deleted reply on Threads), Coyne said his former bandmate’s explanation—that the group was “done with” him—was a lie. “The reason he left is sad, and infuriating,” Coyne added. “It is HIS responsibility to tell everyone what happened.”
Last March, Rolling Stone Japanpublished an interview with Coyne about Drozd’s absence from the band’s Japanese tour lineup, stating he’d been been concerned about his bandmate’s drinking and drug use. “It never really affected his performance, until the end of the tour last September and October, when he couldn’t even play at all,” said Coyne, according to Pitchfork’s translation of the article. The frontman added, “I really thought if the band continued as it was, he might not survive. But now that it seems like he’s gotten through the worst of it, I think we made the right decision at that time, though I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
In the new interview, Drozd alludes to “some personal crisis things” at the end of the Lips’ 2024 tour with Weezer. (He was absent from the band’s subsequent tour dates, including the Japanese run, but returned for a string of U.S. shows.) “People know some about it,” he said, “but I don’t wanna get too much into that.” He added that he “blundered” by revealing the news on Threads, not realizing it would spread so quickly.
Asked if the decision to part ways with the band was mutual, he responded, “I’d just keep it at mutual. Part of me hoped I could be a guy that doesn’t tour but is still in the band. I think that can work for some bands—I guess it worked for the Beach Boys…. but that just seemed like an odd fit that wasn’t gonna work. After 33 years, moving on felt kind of right.”
He also poured cold water on hopes of reconciliation. “I’m working on a record […] that will probably come out in the summer,” he said. “I’m working with some people, but it won’t be the Flaming Lips.”
Last month the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) announced that Cornelia Stokes would serve as the inaugural Assistant Curator of the Art of the African Diaspora. The job will have her working “across both institutions to develop new scholarship on contemporary art from the African Diaspora, and support a range of exhibitions and public programs, as well as SFMOMA’s work to diversify its collection.” It’s a huge mandate that promises to delve into some of the thorniest questions facing the art world at a time when galleries and museums are trying to find new ways to engage with audiences. We caught up with Stokes to hear about her new position and its responsibilities.
Congratulations on the new position! It’s a very unique one. How did you find yourself coming to this job? How was it initially pitched to you?
I originally discovered the role in 2023 and was instantly captivated by the intentionality and collaborative spirit of the position. As I began to understand more about the role, it was the idea of being connective tissue and building frameworks that could support long-term curatorial thinking, scholarship and public engagement for both institutions that drew me in.
You’ve been positioned as a bridge between these two unique institutions. I know you’re just starting your job, but could you speak a little about each of their individual strengths, and how you’ve initially envisioned their long-term collaboration?
MoAD has the ability to be more responsive in its programming. They are unapologetic and unafraid to foreground lived experience and cultural specificity. SFMOMA offers the scale, resources and global visibility of a major modern and contemporary museum, along with a deep commitment to collection-building. My thinking around the collaboration is less about merging identities and more about sharing influence, knowledge and resources without flattening difference.
You come to this job from Emblazon Arts LLC. What kinds of work did you do there? What lessons did you learn there to prepare you for this position?
Emblazon Arts is an independent curatorial and cultural strategy practice I founded to support artists and institutions working inside and outside traditional frameworks. Through Emblazon, I curated exhibitions, developed public programs, advised on collections and archival projects and helped build sustainable infrastructures for artists—often with limited resources but expansive vision. That work taught me how to be rigorous and responsive at the same time. To be flexible and fluid.
You’ve worked previously, too, as a research assistant for the beloved artist Amy Sherald. What did that position entail? What was it like working for her?
Working as a research assistant for Amy Sherald was and is inexplicable. Amy is a force who approaches her work with extraordinary discipline and care. Being part of that process taught me how deep research, compassion and patience are embedded in strong artistic practice. For me, it also reinforced the importance of protecting artists’ time and vision—something I carry with me into curatorial work.
Part of this job involves working with SFMOMA to help diversify its collection. What are some of the challenges to that task, historically and currently?
Diversifying a collection isn’t simply about adding works; it requires rethinking the frameworks of value, ownership and art-historical narratives. I have yet to encounter any challenges, but I think, as a new curator at a new institution, the challenge will always be entering a dialogue already in progress.
This position has a three-year tenure. How will you know you’ve done your job at the end of that time? What personal benchmarks will you have met?
I’ll know I’ve done my job if the collaboration between SFMOMA and MoAD provides a framework for someone else to continue evolving beyond my tenure. That can look like meaningful collaborative exhibitions, published scholarship and public programs that reflect the breadth of the African Diaspora without flattening its complexity. On a personal level, success means supporting artists and colleagues in thoughtful, ethical and generative ways. If I can look back and see that the work expanded possibilities—for institutions, for artists and for audiences—then I’ll feel the role has done what it set out to do.
On a chilly December evening, the sounds of Lucy Liu’s filmography echoed through an upper Manhattan cineplex. Liu had arrived for a post-screening Q&A in support of her new movie, Rosemead, only to hear dialogue from Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (a special project that combines parts one and two of Quentin Tarantino’s revenge thriller) emanating from a nearby theater. “I couldn’t believe it. I just happened to walk by, and I heard what sounded like my voice,” Liu tells Vanity Fair. “I walked over and it was that scene.”
You know the one. Liu and Uma Thurman play rival sword-wielding assassins who battle to the former’s death in a snow-covered, blood-soaked blowout. It is one of many impressive moments from Liu’s lengthy career, which has seen her turn a successful late-’90s run on Ally McBeal into a diverse oeuvre of action (two Charlie’s Angels movies, two Kill Bill films), intrigue (seven seasons of the network whodunnit Elementary), and romance (Netflix’s Glen Powell springboard, Set It Up). In 2000 she became the first Asian woman to ever host Saturday Night Live, and nearly two decades later, Liu became only the second Asian American actress to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, following in the footsteps of Chinese American actress Anna May Wong, one of the few Asian performers to break through in Hollywood’s golden age.
Liu is one of the most recognizable Asian women in film history, but grows weary when reminded of it. “I would love to get rid of the hyphenates. I would really love to just be an artist. I find it really strange that I have to have a title before my craft. I think it’s very limiting,” she says. “I don’t know that anyone’s saying, ‘This is an Australian actress’ or ‘This is an English-slash-Spanish [actor].’ It’s kind of like if you’ve been attached to somebody, and then you have to carry their last name because you were married to them.”
As Liu, now age 57, explains: “I find it to be very imprisoning. Not for me, but for them. Because I don’t walk around looking at myself and saying it out loud. I’m proud of who I am, but I don’t need to always label myself as something.”
Liu’s recent double feature seems to have paid off: Rosemead generated more than $50,000 in ticket sales from a single venue during that aforementioned weekend, netting one of the biggest per-theater openings of last year. Based on a 2017 Los Angeles Times column by Frank Shyong, the film dramatizes the tragic true story of a single Taiwanese American mother named Irene, who secretly undergoes cancer treatment while navigating her teenage son Joe’s (Lawrence Shou) recent schizophrenia diagnosis. Rosemead, which she also produced, marks a rare dramatic leading role for Liu, who adopted a Mandarin accent and shrunken physical posture to play a terminally ill Irene.
Installation view: “Aiza Ahmed: The Music Room” at Sargent’s Daughters. Photo: Nicholas Knight, courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters, New York
In a year defined by market calibration—especially on the ultra-contemporary front—very few young artists have truly emerged. One of the rare exceptions is 28-year-old Pakistani and New York-based artist Aiza Ahmed, who in 2025 achieved rapid, sustained recognition across two key regions: the art world’s center in New York and the rapidly expanding cultural ecosystem of the Gulf. Her enthusiastically received debut solo at Sargent’s Daughters closed only weeks ago, yet she is already preparing for the inaugural edition of Art Basel’s Qatar in February, where she will be one of the youngest artists featured in the fair’s curated exhibition format led by artist Wael Shawky. Although she completed a year-long residency at Silver Art Projects, Ahmed has temporarily traded her downtown Manhattan studio views for the MENA region’s most prestigious residency at the Fire Station in Doha, also directed by Shawky. She spoke with Observer from that studio, where she is working on the major installation she is preparing for her next milestone moment in Doha.
This continual movement between countries and cultures is not new to Ahmed, whose life has been shaped by constant geographical crossings. Her grandparents were originally from Calcutta but left India for Pakistan after the 1947 Partition, beginning a migratory trajectory that has threaded through the family ever since. Born in 1997 in Lahore, she spent a brief period in Karachi before relocating to London with her family at a young age. Ahmed spent her adolescence in Dubai before moving to the U.S. for her undergraduate studies at Cornell, followed by an MFA in painting at RISD. Now a decade into living in the States, she acknowledges that her life—and by extension, her art—has been defined by inhabiting the in-between, switching between cultural contexts governed by different social codes. That instability has sharpened her acute spirit of observation of the humanity around her, from which all her work originates.
Upon entering her solo at Sargent’s Daughters, what stands out is not only the maturity of her visual lexicon but also the clarity of her world-building instinct. Ahmed moves fluidly and inventively across mediums, shaping entire narrative spaces from the moment she traces a face or draws the psychological contour of a figure, then expands that gesture outward into the room as a potentially ever-evolving story.
Aiza Ahmed in her studio. Photo: Leo Ng
“I’ve been drawing and working with my hands for as long as I can remember,” Ahmed tells Observer. Her parents say she was always making things or engaged in some kind of craft. But it was around year seven or eight—early in high school—that her interest began to take real shape. “I had a favorite art teacher who I credit so much—she supported me from the beginning and would leave little notes in my journals, encouraging me. They were just drawings I used to do, but she really saw something in them,” she recalls. “I also recently found these caricatures I made when I was about ten, these political cartoons, and looking at them now, I can see the threads. The seeds were already there—this instinct for humor, for drawing the line.”
Ahmed’s style, in fact, isn’t straightforwardly figurative. Her figures remain suspended in an unfinished state—between dimensions, between figuration and something surreal or even abstract—rooted more in the emotional and psychological space of her characters than in the synthesized volume of their bodies. At the same time, her sharp, confident line work grounds the compositions in a tradition that evokes comics, political satire and caricature. As seen in the work of French satirical artist Honoré Daumier or the German George Grosz, Ahmed’s caricatural style exaggerates posture, expression and behavior with a few quick, incisive strokes, distilling personality or social type into its most telling gestures. She readily acknowledges her connection to this lineage. “I’m really drawn to the face. I feel like I’m a keen observer of people, especially having lived between so many worlds and having to assimilate—from Pakistan to London to Dubai to the U.S.” she reflects. Across all those moves, she adapted in an ongoing process of code-switching—first observing, then imitating, learning to fit in without losing sight of who she was or where she came from.
Drawing gives Ahmed a space for unfiltered, intuitive expression—a way of seeing that precedes the expectations of society or culture. “When I draw, it’s quick and raw,” she explains. “It’s the first mark that comes out. I don’t erase. It’s whatever is coming through me in a stream-of-consciousness way.”
Ahemed’s practice contends with borders, migrations, public histories, and private archives within diasporic identities originating from the Indian Subcontinent. Photo: Nicholas Knight, courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters, New York
Notably, most of the characters Ahmed brings to the stage are men—often exaggerated in their grotesque appearances and postures, whimsically distorted in their grinning or perverse expressions, or revealed in moments of fragile vulnerability beneath a masculine performance of power.
The artist admits she only recently realized that, over time, she has consistently drawn or painted male figures. “I didn’t notice it at first, but recently I was like, okay, in my studio it’s just all these men of different types and me,” she reflects. Earlier in her graduate studies at RISD, she had been thinking a lot about uncles, she adds. “My whole practice is me trying to trace where I come from, the ancestry I didn’t know, the histories and displacement of my own country that I wasn’t taught until really late in my upbringing.” In more recent series, however, something has shifted—or perhaps she has simply become more aware of the deeper reasons behind her recurring male subjects.
Growing up, and even after she left Pakistan, she returned every summer to visit grandparents, aunts and cousins. During those visits, she became attuned to what she calls the grammar of men. “In public spaces, all you see are men. Women are usually inside, or covered,” she recalls, noting how her visual field was filled with authority, corruption and performance. Even after moving to New York, she found the dynamic not so different—only more indirect. “I can’t walk from point A to point B without feeling the male gaze. It’s uncomfortable. It’s charged. At first, I thought it was just Pakistan, but it’s everywhere I go.”
Portraying men, then, becomes a kind of role reversal. “As a young woman, I’m looking at men. In art history, it was usually the opposite: men looking at women, and no one questioned it,” she reflects. Still, she admits she sometimes feels sorry for her subjects. “The way I draw these border guards, they look clunky, short, stout, almost fragile. And then I’m like, wait, why do I feel sorry for them? It’s all very layered,” she acknowledges.
Ahmed enacts, through her art, a sharp human and cultural diagnosis—exposing the hypocrisies and paradoxes embedded in socially coded, gendered behaviors. With her cartoonish figures, she deciphers patterns of authority and performance. Aiza Ahmed observes society as a system shaped by power dynamics—and claims art as a space to imagine different ones.
Ahmed constructs theatrical narratives that unsettle fixed ideas of nationhood, masculinity, and belonging. Photo: Nicholas Knight, courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters, New York
When asked if she remembers being particularly drawn to political satire in newspapers or to the language of comics more broadly, she says she probably was not looking at anything specific. “I used to read the newspaper because my father would tell me to—just to know what was happening in the world,” she says, recalling how she often found it difficult and would flip straight to the illustrated sections. “It’s funny—I never connected that until now. Maybe that planted something,” she acknowledges, adding that she loved Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake and grew up watching a lot of Disney. “The Disney aesthetic really shaped me,” she reflects, describing how she recently discovered a Disney encyclopedia series in an antique shop in Doha. “One volume was called Great Leaders. It listed all these men and maybe two women—like Queen Victoria. It was fascinating, and the illustrations were unlike anything I’d seen,” she says. The find feels serendipitous, almost luminous, given the direction her work is now taking.
The fact that Ahmed constantly oscillates between caustic social indictment and a playfully theatrical or carnivalesque register pushes the grotesque into the realm of the fantastical and hallucinatory. As James Ensor once did, Ahmed’s line exaggerates expression to the point of derangement, using humor, absurdity and the grotesque to surface moral and psychological undercurrents, as well as the paradoxical fragility at the heart of today’s crisis of masculinity and the masculine-led world these performances of power seek to uphold. Applying the inverse of a more gentle, compassionate feminine playfulness, Ahmed’s work unsettles fixed ideas of nationhood, masculinity and belonging.
After all, it is playfulness and humor that often allow satire to resonate. They soften the critique just enough for the viewer to enter, while sharpening the underlying point. The best satire lets you laugh and wince at the same time.
This is why Aiza Ahmed’s work often takes on a theatrical presence, as she stages human drama within the space, suspended in dreamlike atmospheres. This was particularly evident in her solo debut with Sargent’s Daughters. Drawing its title, “The Music Room,” from Jalsaghar (The Music Room), Satyajit Ray’s mesmerizing 1958 film, Ahmed translated the movie into spatial terms through a multimedia installation of shifting characters rendered in monumental paintings and wooden cut-out figures. An original composition by historian, composer and guitarist Ria Modak further shaped the mise-en-scène, transforming the gallery into both a soundscape and a theater where these narratives unfolded with unsettling resonance in the present.
Evoking the film’s psychological portrait of India’s zamindar class, propped up under British colonial rule before facing dissolution amid land reforms and shifting politics in the mid-20th century, the music room here similarly becomes a stage for hollow rituals of nostalgia and masculine display. Ahmed’s figures appear as ghostly presences, drawn with raw, essential lines that balance humor and pallor, exposing the paradoxes and slow decay of any myth of masculinity. Crucially, in another act of inversion, she imagines a music room authored by women, turning their gaze back onto patriarchal and colonial power.
A similar impulse shaped her Spring Break Art Show presentation last May, where she first drew wider attention with a booth curated by Indira A. Abiskaroon, a curatorial assistant at the Brooklyn Museum. There, Ahmed reimagined the Wagah-Attari border ceremony, a daily ritual established in 1959 that draws thousands to watch soldiers from India and Pakistan march, gesture and parade as mirrored adversaries in a choreography that has long fascinated her for its oscillation between fury and restraint, rivalry and camaraderie.
Installation view: Aiza Ahmed’s “Border Play” at SPRING/BREAK Art Show in 2025. Photo: Leo Ng
In her installation, she amplified the spectacle to expose its built-in theatricality: bugle calls and Kishore Kumar’s bright vocals led visitors through hot pink drapes and onto a red carpet flanked by wooden soldiers, toward an imagined stage where painted and sculpted figures performed their own exaggerated version of the ritual. Within this draped, cardboard mise-en-scène, the soldiers’ postures, uniforms and expressions became social masks—revealing not only the codes through which authority and masculinity are enacted, but also the fragility those performances attempt to conceal. Her presentation at Art Basel Qatar will continue this narrative; she is currently working on new paintings, a suspended muslin work and a series of wooden cut-out soldiers for the installation.
Ahmed’s visual and narrative approach is not far from the narrative strategies used in commedia dell’arte, which established the idea of fixed “characters” representing social types, each defined by a mask and exaggerated behavioral code—or pantomime, which strips these roles even further, reducing gesture to language and expression to narrative. Ahmed’s suspended storylines operate in a similar register. Much like in Pirandello’s work, she uses playful role-playing and seemingly naive humor to generate immediate empathy while simultaneously revealing the fragile, absurd theater of human existence and the drama of identity.
Thus far, Ahmed acknowledges, two main sources have shaped the origins of her work. One is her personal observation of societal rituals—weddings, funerals and ceremonies that exist in a liminal space between the public and the private, where she has been both observer and participant. The other is the India-Pakistan border, which she has studied in depth. Still, she notes, the overarching theme that continues to emerge is the spectrum of masculinity and the attempt to understand its psyche. What is going on in their heads—and how has that interiority hardened into a social rule that has long shaped a shared sense of reality?
When asked if her work is political, Ahmed says that every action can be a political act. “Even if you don’t voice it, you’re making a statement. Being a brown woman is already a political act. There are endless layers you can add to that,” she argues. And endless, too, are the dimensions in which Ahmed’s powerful imagination can evolve, as she continues to translate her both empathic and critical observations of the world around her.
After Beth Morrison earned her bachelor of music at Boston University and a master’s of music at Arizona State University, she moved to New York City with limelight ambitions. What she encountered were like-minded creatives grousing about the entertainment industry’s indifference, which she set out to remedy by earning an MFA in theater management/producing at Yale School of Drama. Returning to New York in 2005, she set up Beth Morrison Productions and resumed grumbling over industry indifference.
Since then, BMP has become the country’s premier hothouse for new opera, staging more than 50 productions, including Pulitzer Prize winners Angel’s Bone by Du Yun and Royce Vavrek and p r i s m by Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins. A Grammy nominee, BMP has four titles nominated for 2026, including Adoration and Trade / Mary Motorhead. Starting tomorrow, the company celebrates its quarter-century anniversary with the 2026 Prototype Festival, which this year will mount six productions at venues in Brooklyn and Manhattan. “I’ve been working for this change,” Morrison tells Observer. “It’s why I got into what I do in the first place, to create this new kind of opera. And I think we’ve done that. We have 15+ seasons in our history showing that, and we’ve inspired others as well.”
Fans will find inspiration in the BMP: Songbook Concert and Celebration (Jan. 7-8), a performance pulling together their greatest hits, with 14 arias culled from the company’s storied history and sung by the original artists. (If you can’t make the show, pick up the album, a double-disc vinyl set featuring 60 arias. It goes well with the BMP Songbook Anthology, a 500-page coffee table book celebrating the company’s history.)
HILDEGARD is the brainchild of composer Sarah Kirkland Snider. Production photos by Angel Origgi
Precipice takes to the boards Jan. 8-11, the story of a young woman’s struggle set against the epic backdrop of the mountainous West. Leaping from a tall cliff, she awakens mute in the wilderness, where she must fight to recover her voice. Set to Rima Fand’s folk-inspired score, Precipice incorporates sounds from nature, singers, string quintet, piano and mandolin.
Hildegard makes its New York City premiere Jan. 9-11 and 14. This must-see opera by the incomparable composer Sarah Kirkland Snider is named for the 12th-century German nun Hildegard of Bingen, a mystic, visionary, writer, composer, philosopher and medical practitioner. The world premiere in Los Angeles last November drew superlative reviews on both coasts. “I’m so proud of her,” Morrison said at the time. “It’s been totally a labor of love. She loves Hildegard so much, the historical figure, and she’s written such a beautiful piece.”
If you can’t make it to Brooklyn, try Times Square on Jan. 11 for The All Sing: Hwael-Rād (Whale-Road) and join the choir for this world premiere choral work bridging the gap between humanity and our ocean-dwelling friends. “It’s this goth-industrial music meets classical,” is how Morrison describes the world premiere piece by composer Jens Ibsen. “We’ll have music up on the website, and anyone can download it and learn it and come and sing with us.”
The New York premiere of the comedic post-rock opera What to Wear (Jan. 15-18) by Michael Gordon and the late avant-garde theater icon Richard Foreman draws from the latter’s original staging. A collaboration between BMP, BAM and Bang on a Can, this acerbic commentary on society’s superficiality features a cameo by St. Vincent. “Already we’re selling out and had to add a performance. It’s going to be the hardest ticket to find. It’s a huge lift because it’s raising a lot of money in a short period of time to get it done, and it’s a complicated production,” says Morrison. “It’s crazy and amazing, it reminds me of Einstein on the Beach. It’s a spectacular show, truly one to blow people’s minds.”
On Jan. 16-17, submerge yourself in Art Bath, a cross-disciplinary experience highlighting female voices and genre-bending music and opera, theater, puppetry and visual art. Also not to be missed is Tiergarten on Jan. 16, a Weimar cabaret in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Carroll Street. Directed by Andrew Ousley, it explores historical moments of societal madness, featuring music by Handel, Verdi, Dean Martin, Max Richter, William Byrd, Brecht, Weill and songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the form of opera, classical, jazz, ballet and burlesque.
Over the years, BMP has expanded to a staff of 14 and launched its Next Gen program fostering emerging opera composers. From it, one is offered a commission for an evening-length work as well as a world premiere production. BMP’s partnership with LA Opera has resulted in 17 shows in 10 years. The Prototype Festival has only been in existence for 15 years, relying mainly on the generosity of individual donors, including the Mellon Foundation, a major backer whose agreement with BMP runs out in 2028—something that has sent Morrison scrambling.
HILDEGARD had its world premiere in Los Angeles last November. Production photos by Angel Origgi
“If we don’t replace it, what does that mean? What will the festival look like? That’s our challenge now. I’m someone who’s a very pragmatic dreamer. I’ve got a couple of big ideas that I’m working on right now to bring a lot of partners together to create something larger than ourselves, exploring opportunities,” she says, lamenting, like so many arts institutions, the loss of NEA money after 560 grants totaling over $27 million were cut last May.
“A lot of foundations have left the arts that were really holding it together or have changed their priority in how they fund the arts. And a lot of individual donors who have propped up the non-profit performing arts for decades are aging out. A lot are dying, and there isn’t anybody coming up and taking their place,” she says. “It’s not easy, but it’s never been easy. It’s harder than it’s ever been. We’re announcing thirteen commissions over the next five years. It’s a big campaign for us. We’ve never done a campaign like this before, but it’s exciting. There’s a lot of amazing work being done here that people should feel good about. We’re just trying to create a conversation about what opera can be in the 21st Century.”
The architect behind landmark cultural projects at the British Museum and the AlUla Contemporary Arts Museum discusses reimagining museums as evolving, participatory spaces. Kimberly Lloyd, Courtesy of LG—A
Lina Ghotmeh, recognized on this year’s Art Power Index, is changing the global conversation between art, architecture and place. Based in Paris and raised in Beirut, Ghotmeh has emerged as one of the defining voices of a new architectural sensibility rooted in sustainability, memory and cultural dialogue, rather than spectacle. Her recent and forthcoming projects span continents and histories: the British Museum’s sweeping Western Range redesign, the AlUla Contemporary Arts Museum in Saudi Arabia, the Jadids’ Legacy Museum in Uzbekistan and Qatar’s Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Each project, in her words, sits “at the crossroads of this transformation—where local narratives meet global dialogues.”
Ghotmeh’s approach, which she refers to as an “archaeology of the future,” treats architecture as both excavation and invention, a process of uncovering the social, material and emotional layers of a place before imagining what comes next. This philosophy took shape in her acclaimed Serpentine Pavilion in 2023, a table-like structure that beckoned visitors to sit, share and converse, turning architecture into an act of gathering.
The shifting power dynamics in the art world, from the rise of voices across the Global South to the integration of technology and A.I., are redefining cultural institutions. Ghotmeh envisions museums as “living environments” that immerse audiences in the creative process and connect them to the broader human story art continues to tell. For the architect, buildings are never neutral containers but vessels for dialogue, resilience and renewal. In reimagining how and where art is experienced, Ghotmeh is rethinking culture itself as a space for belonging, continuity and care.
What do you see as the most transformative shift in the art world power dynamics over the past year, and how has it impacted your own work or strategy?
Over the past year, I’ve felt a profound shift in both voices and geography within the art world. We are finally witnessing the rise of influential perspectives from the Global South and other historically underrepresented regions. This expansion of voices is not only reshaping who gets to speak but also how and where art is being shown. It signals a move toward a more plural and inclusive understanding of art as a critical platform—one capable of engaging with the most pressing social, cultural and environmental questions of our time.
This shift deeply informs the type of work I pursue and aligns with a trajectory I’ve been committed to for years. Projects such as designing Qatar’s National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the Jadid Museum in Uzbekistan, and the AlUla Contemporary Arts Museum in Saudi Arabia all sit at the crossroads of this transformation—where local narratives meet global dialogues.
Similarly, reimagining the British Museum as a vessel for a truly global art history offers an opportunity to rethink cultural institutions as spaces of exchange rather than dominance. It’s an invitation to reframe how we tell the story of humanity through art—decentering traditional hierarchies and embracing a more interconnected, equitable cultural landscape.
As the art market and industry continue to evolve, what role do you believe technology, globalization, and changing collector demographics will play in reshaping traditional power structures?
Art not only reflects culture but actively shapes it, serving as both a social force and an economic driver. As collector demographics shift, we’re witnessing new modes of collecting and new ways of constructing cultural narratives—ones that move beyond Western-centric frameworks and embrace more diverse and interconnected perspectives.
Technology, particularly A.I., is playing a transformative role in this process. It enables new kinds of artistic experiences and provides tools for reinterpreting and visualizing data in ways that were previously unimaginable. In our recent work with A.I. artists, for example, we’ve been exploring ways to visualize art histories from the Arab world. This process begins with the crucial task of collecting and structuring data that has long been overlooked or rendered invisible. Through this, knowledge and cultural memory that were once marginalized are reemerging, allowing for a more inclusive understanding of global art histories.
In this sense, technology and globalization are not merely reshaping the market—they’re redistributing cultural power, enabling new voices, narratives and regions to participate in defining the future of art.
Looking ahead, what unrealized opportunity or unmet need in the art ecosystem are you most excited to tackle in the coming year, and what will it take to make that vision a reality?
I’m deeply interested in rethinking how we show art and in reaffirming its central role within society. I believe museums and cultural spaces should evolve into living environments—places that not only exhibit art but also immerse audiences in the creative process itself. Spaces where people can experience how art is made, why it matters, and how it continues to shape our collective consciousness.
Art has accompanied humanity since its very beginnings—it is how we have sought to understand ourselves, substantiate our existence and give meaning to the world around us. Yet many institutions still treat it as something static or distant. The opportunity now lies in transforming museums into dynamic ecosystems of learning, participation and dialogue—bridging artists, communities and new technologies.
Realizing this vision requires rethinking institutional models, fostering collaboration across disciplines and embracing innovation in both curation and architecture. Ultimately, it’s about restoring art’s fundamental purpose: to connect us more deeply to one another and to the shared human story we continue to write.
You grew up in Beirut, a city with a complex history of destruction and rebuilding. How has that background shaped your approach to sustainability, resilience and place-making?
Living in a city where buildings are constantly collapsing and rising again, you understand that architecture is never only physical—it’s social, emotional and deeply tied to survival. Sustainability, for me, comes from that consciousness: to build with care, to use what is available, to adapt rather than erase. In Beirut, you see nature reclaiming ruins, and people reinhabiting them with extraordinary creativity. That taught me that true resilience lies in continuity, in working with the traces and resources already present. Every project I design begins with that same listening to place, so that what emerges feels born from its ground rather than imposed upon it.
You coined the term “archaeology of the future.” How do you balance uncovering historical traces and designing something genuinely new?
“Archaeology of the future” is both a method and an ethic. It means that before drawing, we excavate—not with shovels, but with research and attention. We study a site’s geology, its crafts, its human stories, its past uses. But this act of uncovering is not nostalgic. The goal is to let those traces inspire something that speaks to today and tomorrow. In Stone Garden, the innovative technique of hand-plastered façade carries Beirut’s collective memory, echoing natural forms found in the city and belonging to the ground, yet its vertical form points to regeneration. The building rises as a novel form anchored in its place. In the Bahrain Pavilion for Expo 2025, we drew on traditional boatbuilding to create a light, demountable timber structure, entirely new but rooted in cultural memory. The past is not a model; it’s a fertile ground from which the new can grow.
How does that translate when designing spaces meant to hold art—objects that carry their own histories and spiritual weight?
Designing for art demands humility. These are spaces of encounter, between artworks, viewers and time itself. Architecture must offer silence and presence at once. The space should talk about the place where we are. Building in AlUla, for example, is an invitation to think of the galleries as earthly structures warmly welcoming art, all while framing nature. At the British Museum, we are working within a building dense with history, yet our aim is not to add another layer of authority but to open it up—to allow light, porosity and new readings of the collection.
The architecture becomes a mediator, a frame that encourages reflection rather than spectacle. Some new spaces we are designing restore a lost feeling of openness, of sky, the use of local stone for the finish reminds us about the place we are in. I like to think of architecture as a vessel for dialogue, where both the art and the visitor can breathe, all while allowing us to dream.
Many contemporary buildings feel imposed rather than born of their surroundings. How do you resist that tendency in your own work?
A building is not an exercise of style; it is an extraordinary place that needs to be inhabited. With my team, I begin each project with listening, to the land, the resources, the crafts, the wind, the people. Context is about an environment; it is not a constraint; it’s the material of the work. I try to design buildings that feel as though they could not exist anywhere else if they are meant to stay still in their place. In Normandy, the Hermès Workshops were built with bricks made from the site’s own earth. We worked with local brick makers and revived an artisanal work present for decades in the region. These gestures root the project in its environment. I think architecture should belong to its place as naturally as a tree grows from soil—it should feel inevitable, not imported.
In redesigning major cultural and arts institutions, you are dealing not just with architecture, but with narratives, audience behaviors and institutional purpose. What can you tell us about the experience of collaborating with curators, conservators and communities?
Architecture is the art of collaboration. It begins with an idea—a concept rooted in a place and informed by its history and context. From there, it becomes an act of orchestration: a dialogue among disciplines, a collaborative process in which all voices are heard, allowing the building to embody and integrate diverse perspectives and skills.
In Qatar, we are currently working on several museum and exhibition projects. These are developed in close collaboration with curators, whose experience across different institutions brings depth and richness to the work. The community is also ever-present, through the ways people will use these spaces, the possibilities they create and the processes of making itself. I believe architecture is a means to guide knowledge and empower people through creation.
What do you see as the most under-addressed challenge or challenges in cultural architecture at this moment?
We still design too many cultural buildings as static monuments rather than evolving ecosystems. This risks alienating art and cultural spaces from the public, rendering them inaccessible, even though art is essential to our humanity and part of everyday life.
The future demands openness and flexibility: spaces that can adapt to changing programs, technologies and communities. Another challenge lies in the diplomatic role of cultural spaces: in a world that may grow increasingly divided, museums and cultural institutions can serve as bridges between people, reminding us of our shared humanity while celebrating our differences as a source of richness. They are platforms for critical questions and spaces for meaningful dialogue.
As Bruno Latour reminds us, “We have never been modern,” and this insight urges us to reconsider the artificial separation between culture, nature and technology. Cultural buildings must embody this continuity: becoming living, relational environments that connect human, material and ecological realities.
Moreover, the ecological dimension of cultural spaces is an ever-growing concern. Museums remain among the most resource-intensive building types. We need to rethink how we conserve artworks, how we build, reuse and manage energy, all without compromising the sensorial and human experience of art.
You often operate at the intersection of architecture, national identity and culture with projects like the Osaka Expo 2025 Bahrain Pavilion or the AlUla Contemporary Arts Museum in Saudi Arabia, slated to open in 2027. How do you think about the role of architecture in articulating both place and global aspiration?
Architecture has the power to express identity while remaining open to the world. In Bahrain, the pavilion embodies the island’s maritime heritage—its wooden craftsmanship and its relationship to the sea—yet it also speaks of shared ecological values with Japan. In AlUla, surrounded by desert and archaeology, the Contemporary Art Museum will be a dialogue between landscape and art, history and the future. It suggests that the museum become a series of open pavilions, intertwined and interacting with nature. For me, global aspiration should not mean universality through sameness, but connection through specificity. The more rooted a building is, the more it resonates beyond its borders.
When you imagine the art spaces of the future, what do they look and feel like?
I imagine future cultural spaces like a kitchen—alive with cooks and guests in constant interaction. They thrive outside the box, in lively places where texture, light and life unfold intensely.
These spaces will also extend into immaterial worlds. With the rise of digital platforms, we are invited to experience art in a new, hybrid dimension—one that merges the virtual and the physical. This deepens the need to intertwine both realms, to strengthen the sensoriality of the physical while embracing the possibilities of the digital.
Museums and cultural spaces of the future will be lighter, more open and deeply connected to their environment. I imagine buildings that breathe—filled with natural light, porous thresholds and a tactile sense of material. Spaces that invite people to gather, not only to look. They will reuse what exists, evolve over time and dissolve the boundaries between art, nature and daily life. Above all, they will cultivate presence: places where people feel grounded, inspired and connected to one another through beauty and thought.
Bradley Cooper, Will Arnett, Laura Dern and Andra Day at a special Q&A panel at Angelika Film Center in advance of the film’s theatrical release. Photo by John Nacion/Getty Images for Searchlight Pictures
A flailing relationship is no joke—unless you’re Alex Novak (Will Arnett), who stumbles into personal salvation by cracking wise in front of a live audience. Multi-hyphenate Bradley Cooper’s latest film c?, now playing in theaters nationwide, traces this journey, which begins with Alex’s spur-of-the-moment impulse to get up in front of a crowd and emotionally unload. “It’s the first time that he talks about what he’s going through,” Arnett told Observer. “It’s kind of the first time he admits it to himself.”
What triggers the confessional is a still-fresh separation from longtime wife Tess (Laura Dern), after 20 years of marriage (and 5 years as a couple before that). A quarter-century together will change anyone—moving to the suburbs, having kids, sacrificing professional goals for familial stability. The real question is how to acknowledge that change in each other without falling apart.
Arnett, who co-wrote the script with his writing partner Mark Chappell and Cooper, came up with the idea for the film after hearing the origin story behind British comedian John Bishop, who unexpectedly started his career in comedy—and saved his marriage—by turning his estrangement from his wife into comic fodder that became a catalyst for personal change.
“It’s a midlife catharsis, not a crisis,” explained Cooper at a press screening before Is This Thing On?, which premiered as the Closing Night Film of the New York Film Festival. “This movie’s not about a guy who’s unhappy in his profession. It’s that he’s not really comfortable with who he is.”
Arnett echoed the sentiment during his talk with Observer. “We don’t see Alex at work, for instance,” he said. “We don’t see any of that stuff. What was important to us was really getting down to him trying to find his voice. And by that I don’t mean his comedic voice, but his voice as a person—to see him start to connect the dots and be able to actually speak.”
Is This Thing On? is both a thematic continuation and a pivot for Cooper, whose trajectory as a writer-director-actor-producer includes his splashy Lady Gaga vehicle A Star Is Born and the ambitious Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro. Both of those were big-budget productions that, at heart, were relationship dramas writ large. Is This Thing On? compresses that canvas and trades studio spectacle for low-budget intimacy.
Intrigued by the story’s possibilities, Cooper—who has known Arnett for almost 30 years and even was his roommate in L.A. as their careers were getting off the ground—offered to join Arnett and Chappell to explore the script’s characters further with a rewrite. He then added himself to the cast (in a small role as a Falstaffian goofball buddy nicknamed Balls) and brought together a terrific ensemble, .including Academy Award winner Dern; Andra Day as Balls’s frustrated wife; Arnett’s Smartless podcast cohost Sean Hayes as his newlywed friend (coupled with Scott Icenogle); plus Christine Ebersole and Ciarán Hinds as Alex’s parents. Amy Sedaris and Peyton Manning pop up in smaller roles, and stand-up legend Dave Attell even makes an appearance.
Cooper and his collaborators pulled together the film very quickly and shot almost entirely on location in New York last spring over 33 tight days, getting it edited in time to premiere at the NYFF in the fall. “New York is a treasure chest and very, very little was shot on a stage,” said Cooper, a native Philadelphian who relished being back in the downtown neighborhood where he spent time as a grad student in places like the Comedy Cellar and Bar Six (both of which play key roles in the film). Alex’s apartment is on 12th between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, right on the same street where Cooper got his MFA at the New School.
“It was a small budget,” said Cooper, who often served as his own camera operator. “That shot of him crossing Sixth Avenue? I’m on a seatbelt on a dolly handheld with nothing shut off from the street. That’s all actual traffic. And there’s just the cop there. We’re like, ‘Is it okay?’ ‘Yeah, you got ten minutes.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, okay!’”
But that run-and-gun indie vibe was inspirational for the cast. “It’s like Christmas on steroids!” said Dern at the NYFF press screening, and then invoked her longtime professional relationship with David Lynch. “Inland Empire was the only other experience I had where my director was right there with the camera. Bradley, as an actor and as our family, knows us so well and feels the instincts with us in character. The most fun of your life is to be in it and feel an instinct as an actor that you catch up to after the take is done, and you go, ‘Oh man, maybe I should try this…’”
Arnett was even further in uncharted territory, handling a dramatic role while surrounded by Oscar-caliber talent. “For me, that was a lot of the work,” he said. “To just be present in those moments and be open and vulnerable. These kinds of roles never came my way,” said the actor best known for indelible turns like being Job in Arrested Development or the voice of Lego Batman. “But, also, I did it to myself. I’ve heard people say that I got typecast. Well, I didn’t have to do all the things I did. I had fun doing them—but certainly to do something like this is much closer to what I’d always wanted to do.”
Day, an Oscar-nominated actress better known as a Grammy Award-winning singer, plays a small but larger-than-life role in the film as Christine, an unhappy wife simmering with marital discontent. She has a seminal scene with Arnett when Christine hilariously confronts Alex about the rage she feels toward him. “She tells him straight up, ‘I despise you because I hate myself. You remind me of me’,” she told Observer, laughing. “Let’s see what you’re going to do now with that truth!”
But that interaction speaks to a greater truth: the film has no villains, only people who are adrift and unable to communicate with each other. “She’s not a victim,” said Day about her character. “She’s not blaming everyone else. She’s like, ‘What am I passionate about? What do I love? Well, shit, maybe I’m pissed at myself!’ You know what I mean? I love that the movie talks about this theme of grace. We have to transform as people in order to actually have a pulse and be alive. We need to have grace to allow other people to transform.”
Dern echoed those same feelings at the NYFF press screening. “The film finds the unbelievable complexity of relationships. I hadn’t seen a script or a film allowing us to know that we don’t know how we got here. Because most of us don’t, in moments of despair, in one’s self and in relationship.”
And for Arnett, as the lead in this marital reckoning, Is This Thing On? was truly transformative. “It was a difficult task for me,” he said. “I did have to recalibrate and remember why I started doing this in the first place. Making a movie like this was how I always envisioned my life going when I was a young man. For me, it was kind of like a rebirth in a way, as opposed to a new thing. It was just reconnecting to something I always wanted to do.”
A candid look at modern bakery economics from one of NYC’s most watched shops. Alexander Stein
This Q&A is part of Observer’s Expert Insights series, where industry leaders, innovators and strategists distill years of experience into direct, practical takeaways and deliver clarity on the issues shaping their industries. In a New York food scene defined by relentless turnover and algorithm-fueled hype, Radio Bakery stands out for a different reason: it has built genuine staying power.
Led by chef and co-owner Kelly Mencin, Radio Bakery has become one of the city’s most consistently buzzy—and influential—bakery brands. With locations in Greenpoint and Prospect Heights, Radio is known for its seasonal pastries, savory-forward menu and lines that seem to materialize regardless of weather, press cycles or platform trends. The bakery has earned praise from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and daytime television alike, but its real achievement may be cultural rather than critical: Radio feels embedded in its neighborhoods rather than extracted from them.
At a moment when many food businesses chase virality, Mencin has built Radio around repetition, rigor and restraint. Menu innovation is constant, but never at the expense of execution. Scarcity exists, but as a function of space and process, not manufactured exclusivity. Social media plays a role in visibility, yet the brand’s identity is grounded in what happens on the floor: the rhythm of service, the confidence of the team and the reliability of a loaf of bread that tastes the same every day.
In this conversation, Mencin unpacks the business of running a modern bakery at scale—what it takes to sustain demand in a trend-saturated market, how systems and leadership protect creative integrity and why community collaboration remains central to Radio’s growth strategy. From managing hype and seasonality to navigating post-pandemic shifts in consumer taste, Mencin offers a pragmatic look at how durable brand equity is built in hospitality, one batch, one service and one neighborhood at a time.
Chef and co-owner Kelly Mencin oversees Radio Bakery’s culinary direction, with a focus on systems, seasonality and long-term sustainability. Courtesy Radio Bakery
Radio Bakery has become one of those rare New York spots that consistently draws a line around the block. Beyond great pastries, what are the key ingredients that create that kind of sustained enthusiasm and loyalty?
Consistency and passion. One of our neighbors down the street at our Greenpoint location comes in every single day for a loaf of our seeded bread. Every day. He has come to expect that the bread will be the same, if not better, every day, and if it’s not, he will let us know! I say passion, but what I am really trying to convey is energy. When you walk into Radio, the energy from the bakers, sandwich cooks and servers is palpable. You can feel the heat from the ovens, smell the croissants, watch the cookies being scooped. The music is on, the staff is chattering. It just feels good to be in the space. People want to be around what makes them feel good.
Radio is known for its seasonal “drops” that feel both curated and consistent. How do you balance creativity with consistency, especially when developing new or seasonal items that customers now expect to sell out?
We have a few factors we look at. The two biggest ones are scalability and execution. Anyone can make something perfect once. The biggest test is making 60 to 180 of that same item, perfectly, every single time—and not letting it wreck service. Then, that perfect execution needs to be taught to our bakers. Can they all pipe perfectly? Maybe not. Can we teach them to? We’ll try our hardest. If it can’t be executed at a high level, we won’t run the item.
New York’s food scene moves fast, and trends turn over even faster. What’s your strategy for staying relevant without chasing every new flavor or format that pops up?
Simple, delicious food will always be relevant. We focus on seasonality more than anything else and let the ingredients speak for themselves.
From your vantage point, how has the business of bakeries evolved post-pandemic? Are there lasting shifts in consumer behavior, operations or expectations that you’ve had to adapt to?
I am still in awe of how many bakeries keep opening up every season since the pandemic! New York City has no shortage of sweet tooths. The biggest shift, in my opinion, is in people’s taste. More and more, I am seeing bakeries put savory pastries on the menu or sandwiches. We have been lucky enough that our model has worked for us extremely well. From the start, we were making savory croissant-based pastries and different focaccias and sandwiches. People want to come in and get a savory item and a sweet item, more often than not.
Social media has played a role in Radio’s visibility. What’s your philosophy around online storytelling? How do you translate something as sensory as a pastry into digital moments that resonate?
I knew from the start that I wanted our Instagram to be a platform for inspiration, not only for industry vets but for food lovers in general. I think our page resonates with so many people because it isn’t too manicured. There’s a good range of professional photos, behind-the-scenes videos of our processes and staff faces.
You’ve built a model that embraces scarcity without leaning on exclusivity. How do you think about managing hype, especially around holiday drops or social-media-driven surges in demand?
To be honest, the “hype” aspect of radio bakery is still a hard pill for me to swallow. We didn’t create Radio Bakery as a “hype” or “viral” bakery. Radio’s intention has always been to create simple, craveable food. The scarcity aspect only comes from the fact that our baking spaces are so small—there is a limit to how much production (or people) we can fit in each space. When it comes to managing the hype, we try to remind guests that most items take three days to make, we are making as much as we can and that if they miss out on one drop, there will always be another. We will never sacrifice quality for quantity.
Radio Bakery has become a cultural touchpoint as much as a culinary one. How intentional has that been, and what role does community play in your brand strategy?
Community has always played a huge role in how radio functions. Radio started as a pop-up. We reached out to industry friends who ran our favorite businesses (Mel the Baker, Bonnie’s, Claud) and literally popped up in their spaces selling what we were testing. It created an amazing community pocket in each area of the city. Once we opened Radio, we decided to make it a point to continue to do pop-ups and collabs with other like-minded people. It allows us to connect in a meaningful way with other people and businesses we’re excited about, keeps us learning and it keeps our guests engaged.
Many hospitality founders talk about the challenge of scaling without losing soul. As you’ve expanded from Greenpoint to Prospect Heights, what have you learned about growth and maintaining a distinct brand identity?
Radio wouldn’t be able to grow as successfully as we have if we didn’t have a strong management foundation. Each bakery relies on a “Bakery Chef”—think of it as a Chef de Cuisine—that runs the back-of-house operations at each location. They each bring their own management style, ideas and culture to each bakery. We learned early on that I, personally, cannot help radio grow and thrive if I am deep in the day-to-day operations. Instead, I’ve taken on the role of culinary director, essentially working with the bakery chefs side by side, creating new menu items, dialing in the current menu and looking ahead. Nina, our general manager, also goes back and forth between both bakeries, helping to oversee the FOH operations and the overall growth of the bakeries. It’s true what they say—teamwork really does make the dream work!
nside Radio Bakery’, where compact production spaces, open kitchens and steady rhythm shape both the guest experience and daily operations. Alexander Stein
Consistency is a constant challenge in high-volume bakeries. What systems or team philosophies help you maintain Radio’s quality and creative integrity at scale?
The biggest lesson we learned this year was creating SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) for everything! From how we build our sandwiches to how we create a weekend special. Even then, we look at all of our recipes and SOPs as “living documents.” Some of our recipes have three to five different versions of them all saved in our library.
Having updated recipes is only the first part of the consistency challenge. Proper communication between managers and staff is the other part of it. We’re all learning and teaching in real time.
The holiday season also puts a spotlight on leadership, especially in a high-pressure, high-visibility business. What practices help you lead your team through those peak periods effectively?
It’s going to sound simple stupid, but I am so big on getting enough sleep, eating healthy meals throughout the day (instead of just snacking on sugar) and making time for myself to either run or go for a walk. I am lucky that I am able to carve out time for myself during the workday to step outside, get some sunshine and go for a run. It gives me a reset during a busy day and lets me keep showing up positive for my team.
It’s been a learning curve, but I have also come to realize that leaders “bring the weather” with them. I try to hit the ground running when I come into work, exude high energy and positivity and give out a LOT of affirmations.
From menu innovation to brand identity, what’s your process for deciding when to iterate and when to hold onto a core classic?
We are constantly iterating, refining and tasting our menu, from the core classics to our seasonal items. Radio’s menu was designed with several aspects in mind: flavor (a cinnamon item, a citrus item, a vegetarian savory, a fruit item), texture (chewy, crunchy, soft, sticky), and shape (pinwheel, claw, round, square). So, whenever we choose to change an item, it has to fit into its specific category. As far as seasonal items, we retest and taste and tinker with whatever we ran the previous year before deciding that we will run with that again. If we want to try something new, it has to be better and more craveable than what we have previously run.
Looking ahead to 2026, what does thoughtful growth look like for Radio Bakery? Are there ways you’re thinking about expanding the brand—or protecting its essence—as demand continues to build?
Right now, I am trying to focus on two big-ticket items: one, mentoring and growing our team and two, developing systems that make everyone’s job more streamlined. As unsexy as that sounds, the team and our systems are a big reason for Radio’s success. Having a team that loves to teach and mentor translates into bakers and servers who are knowledgeable and confident. Having the right systems in place allows us to scale up production while still making crazy delicious product. Tangible growth-wise, I am so excited that we are expanding our production space at our original Greenpoint location with the hope that we can have more diverse offerings throughout the day.
A classic croissant from Radio Bakery, where laminated dough is treated as both a technical discipline and a foundation for seasonal variation. Alexander Stein
The founder of Arts Economics discusses how globalization, new wealth demographics and online sales are reshaping the balance of power in the art world. Paul McCarthy, Courtesy of Arts Economics
Clare McAndrew, featured on this year’s Art Power Index, has done what many thought impossible: she quantified the art market. As the founder of Arts Economics and author of the annual Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report, McAndrew has become the industry’s de facto oracle, translating the art world’s opaque dynamics into data points, patterns and insights. When her report lands each spring, its results ripple across the market—from charting the health of global sales, identifying emerging regions and revealing the settlement behind the numbers.
Over two decades, McAndrew has redefined how the art trade understands itself, applying the rigor of economics to a sector often governed by instinct and perception. Her analyses have shown how concentrated wealth, demographic change and globalization have remodeled the market’s power structures, and how resilience increasingly comes from its peripheries, not its peaks.
This past year was a pivotal one for the global art economy, marked by softening sales at the top end, a surge of activity in the sub-$50,000 segment and a generational shift driven by Gen Z and women collectors. New technologies, direct-to-artist sales and global diversification are transforming the market’s infrastructure, she reports, while also questioning how the boundaries of art are defined as luxury goods and collectibles enter the fold. McAndrew has emerged as an economist who helps markets evolve by revealing how confidence, perception and access shape value in ways that pure data cannot.
What do you see as the most transformative shift in the art world power dynamics over the past year, and how has it impacted your own work or strategy?
Sales in the art market for many years have been driven by an intense focus on a very small number of artists at the high end, which has escalated their prices, while creating higher barriers to entry for new artists and a winner-take-all type market scenario, where the works of the most famous artists are demanded the most, while emerging artists and the galleries and businesses that support them find it harder to generate sales and build careers. Alongside this, as most of what the mainstream media reports on is the multi-million dollar sums paid for this very small number of artists’ works, new buyers are led to believe that the art market is out of their reach, and that you can only get a quality work of art if you have a budget of over $1 million or so, when in fact there are so many other less publicized artists and works available at much lower prices.
These really high-priced sales were critical in driving the recovery of the market from the pandemic, particularly sales of ultra-contemporary and contemporary art, which outperformed other segments by a significant margin. However, a significant shift over the last year is that these are the two areas that have now slowed down the most. The segment of artworks sold for over $10 million has softened both in terms of volumes and value, and some of the bigger businesses have come under more pressure than some of the smaller ones. While this might not radically transform the market’s power dynamics overnight, it has at least shifted the focus away from that very narrow high end and the tiny share of artists it supports. Although some of the recent narrative around the market has been negative—focusing on a lack of eight- and nine-digit sales—there have actually been a growing number of transactions taking place, albeit at lower price levels, which is a positive development.
As the art market and industry continue to evolve, what role do you believe technology, globalization and changing collector demographics will play in reshaping traditional power structures?
My latest report on global collecting highlights the increasingly significant presence of female artists in the market and the growing influence of women as collectors, facilitated in part by shifts in the distribution and growth of wealth. Our research also uncovered the growing dominance of young Gen Z collectors, who were the most active across many of the fine art and collectibles segments. As wealth shifts towards these segments (including large vertical and horizontal transfers of inherited wealth), their preferences will become more dominant and how they want to buy and engage with the market will have a greater impact.
In terms of globalization, one of the key factors supporting the current size and ongoing development of the market is its increasingly global infrastructure, with sales of art literally all around the world and the emergence of a number of new art markets developing over the last 20 years in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and other regions. The global distribution of the art market has altered substantially.
From the 1960s, when Paris lost its central position in the art market, the U.S. dominated sales alongside the U.K., with London and New York accounting for at least three-quarters of the market during the 1980s and 1990s. One of the biggest changes came around 2004/2005 when China emerged as a global player, and with a huge boom in sales there while the rest of the world was suffering in the fallout from the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), making it (temporarily) the biggest market in the world in 2011 (albeit by a small margin). This was made all the more remarkable by the fact that until the death of Mao in 1976, it had been illegal to even own or exchange works of art in China. This injection of sales and the much more global nature of the art market have really protected its aggregate value from downside risks and helped it bounce back much quicker from crises and recessions.
In the market recession in the early 1990s, when it was so solely dominated by the U.S and Europe, it took almost 15 years for the market to get back on its feet, but post-GFC and post-Covid, the bounce back has been much quicker as sales are diversified across so many different regions and segments.
Looking ahead, what unrealized opportunity or unmet need in the art ecosystem are you most excited to tackle in the coming year, and what will it take to make that vision a reality?
There are so many interesting questions to look into about where the market is going, but from a methodological point of view, for my research, one of them I’m trying to focus on going forward relates to defining the boundaries of the market.
I have concentrated most of my research on the traditional art businesses (auction houses and dealers), but there are now a lot more agents involved in the market—artists are selling more directly, with disintermediation enabled through social media and online selling, collectors selling directly to each other, plus other platforms and agents outside of galleries and auction houses. How we account for and measure these sales will become increasingly important in understanding the activity in the sector as a whole, especially when we’re trying to assess its economic and social impact.
There are also continuing changes in what’s being sold in the “art” market, with an expanding range of collectibles and luxury products being sold by dealers and at auction houses, or even within “art”—new digital mediums and channels for accessing these works. The traditional mediums still dominate by value for now, but that could change in the future, and how we measure and expand those boundaries will be a continuing focus for my research in collaboration with academics and experts in the art market over the next few years.
What inspired you to want to bring greater transparency and reliability to a field often described as opaque, mysterious or relationship-driven?
When I first started out, my earliest reports focused on artists, looking at ways they could build better careers (or even just earn a viable income) and how government policies might help or hold them back. I uncovered early in this research that one of the best ways for them to succeed financially was to have a healthy and active market for their work, so my research pivoted to the art trade.
It became clear from working with dealers and auction houses that when they were approaching governments asking for help or changes in regulations to boost the trade, the first questions they would get asked were things like how big is the market, and how many people does it employ. There was a glaring lack of any of this objective industry benchmarking data to answer those questions, which inspired me to try to fill those gaps.
While there is some good, large-scale public data on auctions and exhibitions, many of the transactions in the market are private, so we have to use a very mixed methodological approach, relying heavily on surveys, sentiment testing and other qualitative research methods (alongside quantitative analysis) to build a better picture of the market.
I have increasingly embraced the importance of more qualitative methods and subjective expertise, which is quite different than when I came out of academia and believed that quants, data and econometric modelling could solve most of the market’s problems.All of the metrics and analytical tools that have been developed in the last decade or two in the art market are very useful, as is the increasing amount of data available, but their practical applications in guiding specific decisions have real limits, especially for collectors. There is still nothing really to replace the much more subjective advice you might get from an artist or dealer or advisor to guide the choice of one work over another, so expertise and relationships are still important.
After years of analyzing cycles of boom, correction and resilience, what have you learned about how confidence and optimism—or lack thereof—shape the art market differently than traditional financial markets?
Confidence is critical in the art market, and it relates to one of its most important features—that it is essentially supply-driven. Even if there is really strong demand around, there will only ever be a limited number of total works available on the market at any particular point in time, for all deceased artists, but for living artists too, where there are limits on how much they can really “make to order” in the short run. Rather than being driven by the costs of production or the availability of inputs, art prices are driven by their scarcity value—the factor that increases their relative price based on their low or fixed supply. And because of this scarcity in the market, prices for certain works can catapult up to really high levels when they come onto the market, as buyers try to grasp the really limited opportunities to acquire them.
Things like commodities are traded virtually every second, but in the art market, it’s much slower, and many works have a long market cycle. It can be 20 to 40 years before a work appears again, and some never do. The fact that opportunities to purchase certain works are so limited adds to the scarcity value, and works that are fresh to market or have been kept in private collections for years, for example, can spark a frenzy of interest and generate huge prices when they come up for sale. Increased supply (works coming up for sale) can have a positive, upward effect on prices (and the value of aggregated sales), which is obviously very different from other asset markets where increases in supply drive prices downward.
What this means is that vendor confidence and optimism about the market is key—how potential sellers view the state of the market and whether or not they should put works up for sale really often determines what happens as much as or more than prevailing demand.
On the secondary art market, supply is often generated by some exogenous event (like one of the famous “d’s”—divorce, disaster, death or debt), but where there’s a choice on the timing of the sale, it will often be down to perceptions of the strength of the market. The market can literally talk itself in and out of cycles to some extent.
The top end of the art market is increasingly polarised, with a very small number of artists capturing a large share of value. What risks does this concentration pose for the long-term resilience of the broader market?
This has been an ongoing issue in the market with an intense focus on a very small number of artists at the high end, which has driven up their prices, while creating higher barriers to entry for new artists and a winner-take-all type market scenario. One way to reduce risk and search and validation costs for those buyers unfamiliar with the market is to only purchase well-recognized works or those by really famous artists.
By doing that, you’re basically relying on the established preferences of previously successful buyers who have already bought that artist’s work, reducing their risks and insecurities about relying on your own taste in making the right choice. Collectively, these risk-reducing techniques tend to reinforce the “superstar phenomenon” in the art market, whereby the works of the most famous artists (living or dead) are demanded the most and achieve by far the highest prices in the market, while emerging artists face ever higher hurdles in gaining entry. This isn’t new, and it’s not only in the art market.
In the 1980s, American economist Sherwin Rosen pioneered the study of the economics of superstars and believed that some superstar artists or ‘masters’ reached their position justly because they were more talented, but the differences in their talent versus those less successful were much less than the differences in success. He also felt that some were, in fact, no more talented than their less-recognized peers, but their greater success was driven by the need of consumers for common tastes and culture or to “consume as others are consuming.” The problem associated with the superstar ethos in the art market is not just that it drives up prices, but also that it can deprive other artists of the opportunity to work by concentrating demand.
Alongside this, a lot of the media focus on art is just on the multi-million dollar sums paid for a very small number of artists, so a lot of new buyers can think that the art market is out of their reach, and that you can only get a quality work of art if you have a budget of over $1 million or so, when in fact there’s a huge range of prices and great works available at much lower levels.
I have been looking, in my research, on collecting at the parallel issue in the infrastructure of wealth. In the art market, like other luxury goods, discretionary purchasing power is enabled by greater wealth, and that in turn empowers growth in sales. Over the last couple of years, more wealth has been concentrated in the top 1 percent of society and greater wealth inequality is often linked to stronger purchasing in luxury markets across regions and over time. A higher concentration of wealth in the top percentiles has been a key factor driving strong sales and rising prices at the top of the art market in the past.
While this is most obviously linked to more purchasing by the wealthiest in society, who are more active in luxury markets, inequality can also shift demand in lower wealth tiers. In some cases, more unequal societies can create heightened status competition and anxiety as people become more sensitive to their position in the social and economic hierarchy. This can lead to greater ‘conspicuous consumption’ among those in lower-wealth tiers too, as people try to keep up, or bridge the gap, by imitating the lux spending habits of the wealthy. While this can boost sales in the lower end of art and other luxury markets, it has a range of potentially negative complications, not least being more consumer borrowing and debt accumulation.
As inequality becomes more pronounced, it can also lead to giving up, rather than keeping up, if the perception of upward mobility seems less hopeful or just less attractive. In the extreme, increases in inequality could endanger the market’s potential for long-term development. If consumers in wealth tiers below the very top engage less—or never even start collecting—the market could narrow further and value concentrate more at the top, and this is a segment that recent years have shown to be highly susceptible to wider risks and growth limitations.
On a positive note, while the aggregate figures show that the market has declined by value for two years, the most positive developments have been the growth of sales at the lower and more affordable ends of the market, with the number of artworks sold for prices in the sub-$50,000 expanding, and evidence of success by both dealers and auction houses in reaching new buyers, giving the market a broader and more diversified base for sales. This doesn’t really get focused on, though, in the press, which tends to only look at the big figures, which are so skewed by the tiny, narrow high end.
With the rise of digital channels, new collectible categories and luxury products entering the ‘art’ market—and younger collectors looking beyond traditional fine art, do you have plans to adapt your research and reporting frameworks to capture these newer forms of value and transaction?
Yes, I’m going to be starting new research on the secondary collectibles market that I’m hoping to publish in 2026. It’s a huge market and there’s strong evidence of an expansion in interest in this area over the last few years, especially with young collectors. In my recent research on HNW collectors, about 60 percent of their spending by value over the last year was on fine art, and 40 percent was on collectibles. For Gen Z collectors, just over half of the average spend was collectibles, and their levels were more than five times any other generation group on things like collectible luxury handbags and sneakers.
While some of the diversification in spending might be a reaction to the uncertain environment we’ve been in, it’s also part of a longer-term shift in what people buy, but also how they access the market. Within the art market, we’ve seen a big advance in digital sales following the pandemic, with e-commerce increasing from 9 percent of total sales by value in 2019 to 25 percent in 2020. Although this did settle back a little, the change seems to be more permanent, with a share of 18 percent last year, below the peak, but still double the share of 2019 or any year prior to that. It’s interesting as this is coming alongside greater art fair attendance and gallery exhibition visits compared to prior to the pandemic, so while collectors still want to visit exhibitions and see works in person, when targeting a specific work to purchase, they have become increasingly comfortable with doing so online.
Online channels are key entry points to the market for new buyers too. They have been consistently identified as the main source of new buyers for auction houses, and almost half of the sales dealers made online in 2024 were to new buyers. The expansion of the volume of transactions over the last few years has been facilitated by greater reach through e-commerce, despite the fact that the highest-value sales remained offline.
Outside the traditional art market, there are also more sales taking place directly with artists, on artist-based platforms and between other private agents. Dealers are still the most used channels for buying art in the surveys we conducted on HNW collectors, but there was a big gain in direct sales with artists, with over a third having bought directly from the online, through social media or through a visit to their studios.
Zoë Buckman’s “Who By Fire” is at Mindy Solomon through January 10, 2026. Photo: Zachary Balber
Brooklyn-based Zoë Buckman has made her name through a bold approach to textile and embroidery—a medium long associated with subordinate female labor—transforming it from a vessel of generational memory into a stage for broader sociopolitical commentary and denunciations. In her work, embroidery moves from the domestic sphere into the political, turning traditionally feminized labor into a mode of testimony while also celebrating and crystallizing intimate moments as representations of broader, universal human states.
Buckman’s practice has long centered on gender disparities, challenging representations of women by asserting—through her authorship—not only control over the historically masculine gaze but also the autonomy of expression and self-definition that emerges through an inverted dynamic empowering her subjects in both their physical and emotional realities. With her latest show, which opened during Art Basel Miami Beach at Mindy Solomon Gallery, the artist shifts toward a wider lens, seeking to claim the dignity of—and elevate—the Jewish community she belongs to, moving beyond stereotyped portrayals and addressing the discrimination and isolation it has faced amid the ongoing backlash to the war in Gaza.
Buckman’s background was initially in photography, she explains to Observer as we walk through the show. Photography remains the starting point for these embroideries, allowing her to capture the humanity of her subjects as it manifests in the moment.
Zoë Buckman in her studio. Photo: Abbey Drucker
“I started in photography. That was where I got my art education,” she explains, noting how she still goes everywhere with her little film point-and-shoot camera. “I’m always looking for that genuine, authentic expression beyond any kind of structure—the moment: these authentic moments between people in my life,” Buckman adds. “Sometimes it’s between me and someone close to me, or sometimes it’s just a moment when humanity happens to manifest.”
Drawing its title from Leonard Cohen’s haunting reinterpretation of the Jewish prayer Unetaneh Tokef, the exhibition’s themes of mortality, judgment and spiritual reckoning and reawakening echo through Jewish ritual and lived experience. Each subject is depicted in a moment of inner reawakening—confronting emotional fragility and vulnerability while also embracing the expansive potential of their inner life. They share this richness deliberately, even when such imaginative and psychological responses run counter to the rational systems of productivity and functionality that dominate contemporary life—a society that, in doing so, appears to have lost one of its most profound values: empathy and the awareness that we are all interconnected in a network of vital interdependencies beyond racial, religious or social categories shaping today’s divisions and deepening polarization.
Based on photographs of family and community members in intimate, domestic settings, these works invite us to recognize shared humanity beyond classification. In the process, the artist undertakes a deeply personal exploration of Jewish identity through cultural and material rituals that preserve intergenerational memory and embody collective resilience—while also probing the universality of these private moments and emotional states.
Drawing its title from Leonard Cohen’s haunting reinterpretation of the Jewish Unetaneh Tokef prayer, the exhibition invokes themes of mortality, judgment and spiritual reckoning. Photo: Zachary Balber
Throughout her practice, Buckman employs an original visual lexicon that combines ink and acrylic painting on vintage domestic textiles, which she then hand-embroiders. Sewing and stitching these threads around the images to help those moments materialize with emotional warmth is a time-intensive process—one that inherently reflects the dedication and care required by all genuine and meaningful human encounters.
Combining introspection, tenderness and radical presence, the raw sensual symbolism and materiality of these works operate as both mirror and balm. “When I first started, I was celebrating the tradition itself—the craftsmanship, the legacy of women, the history behind embroidery and appliqué,” Buckman explains. Sewing becomes a way to retrace that thread, reconnect with that legacy and keep it alive, as the textile work regains its ancestral function as an archive—a repository of personal and collective memory and storytelling. The textile and embroidery medium absorbs experience like skin: soft enough to bear wounds, yet strong enough to endure handling, mending and reconfiguration. Still, the way threads come loose or begin to fall away gestures toward a different reading, as Buckman notes. “It’s a question of what exists beyond the tradition. Are these figures emerging, or are they disappearing?”
Thread holds time; becoming presence and figure, each stitch marks a moment, a choice, a return—an accumulative record of presence that resists erasure. Yet Buckman also makes room for disintegration. The undone quality that defines her work allows for imperfection and visible labor, acknowledging and honoring the fragile humility of human history in all its ephemeral, transient nature.
Zoë Buckman, knock on my consiousness, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Mindy Solomon
“There’s this tension in the thread: it looks like it’s holding everything together, but it’s also coming apart,” Buckman observes. “I’m playing with that moment where the image feels like it’s either dissolving or coming together—precisely that space.”
Much of Buckman’s recent work, as she admits, has centered on grief, spirit, and connection, with her artistic practice becoming a means of maintaining bonds with those she has lost. She sews her trauma directly into fabric, as the slower tempo imposed by sewing, stitching, and embroidery allows her to pause and interrogate deeply personal experiences and transitions. Only by entering that space of introspection and meditation—stepping outside the relentless flow of modern life—can one begin to process emotional change and, ideally, find a space for healing. Here, memory becomes something physically and emotionally metabolized through the hands.
For the first time, Buckman includes a work in this show that also depicts a man. “My work about my relationships with men has usually focused on the difficult experiences I’ve had—things that were said or done to me,” she notes, acknowledging the piece as a possible step toward a more tender place of reconciliation, healing her conflict and painful resentment with the masculine. The man in before they became an outline (2025) is actually a gay friend, she explains. The image distills a moment of genuine admiration and affection between two friends, where the feminine side nonetheless remains the center of emotional and psychological attention and tension.
Zoë Buckman, before they became an outline, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Mindy Solomon
The male figure is looking down toward a blonde woman in his arms, the threads flowing around her body. “That’s Katie. She’s the woman who has appeared most often in my work,” Buckman explains, expressing deep admiration for someone who defies stereotypes: a nurse and two-time cancer survivor who has endured countless challenges yet still holds a powerfully seductive and magnetic presence. “She lost her mum when she was 18, so we share that grief of not having our mothers around. She’s been through similar experiences to mine when it comes to power, to assault,” Buckman explains. “She’s the most audacious, so sexy. When you meet her, when she walks into a room, she commands the space. She’s really a muse for me: she’s endured so much, and yet she’s radically attractive.”
The subject of a woman with red hair in trace your ridges (2025) similarly claims, fearlessly and unapologetically, all the attention her energy and beauty demand. One of the very few self-portraits Buckman has made, the piece is based on a photograph taken by her boyfriend, she explains. She had never previously allowed that kind of dynamic into her work. But by doing so now, she reclaims the image, folds her own perspective back into it and reconciles with the memories it carries. The female figure remains at the center, now asserting full ownership of the sensuality that once drew the potentially abusive masculine gaze. She is still the axis everything revolves around.
At the same time, with this show, Buckman appears to shift her focus more toward a broader, collective experience of intergenerational trauma—still unprocessed and once again denied the space for reflection and recognition that true healing requires.
Zoë Buckman, trace your ridges, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Mindy Solomon
“I think it’s also important to note that when I started this series, there were works that were taken off the wall or sent to an art fair and then not exhibited because of the apparently hostile climate in the art world, in the aftermath of the Gaza war,” she notes. “These are my Jewish family and I, and these works were somehow censored just as there was a piece with a little gold Star of David. This raises new questions about who is represented in art today and how entire communities are still erased.”
This question of representation is also what brought Buckman to engage directly with art history in some of her subjects. smells like light (2025), for instance, was inspired by a painting she saw at the Henry Taylor retrospective at the Whitney, which had itself been inspired by a work by Richter and could be linked further back to Vermeer. “That was his interpretation—his version—of a Richter painting and I loved how Henry Taylor was appropriating it to speak about his own community, about who gets left out of the canon of art history,” Buckman notes. Her version shows a woman in profile, her body turned away from the viewer, her head wrapped in a striking golden-yellow headscarf rendered with soft folds and highlights that echo the sinuous movement of her robe, covered in dense, vivid red floral embroidery that creates tactile depth and vital motion. “I wanted to create something that looks at a Mizrahi, modern Orthodox Jewish woman, because I also feel that these are also people and identities that are left out of the canon of art history.”
This is also why all the works are made on repurposed textiles using traditional techniques; her canvases are bed sheets and tablecloths that have often been passed down through generations. “They all already hold stories, carry memories; they revive the legacy of other women for me,” she reflects.
Zoë Buckman, smells like light, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Mindy Solomon
Already embedded in these materials are stories of intergenerational trauma, resilience and resistance. These textiles function as a site of repair, where Buckman tries to pull the threads together again—mending memory without concealing what is broken, allowing the chaos and hardship revealed by the falling strands to remain visible. “I get to build upon the stories that were already there, the ones we don’t know about. Were these textiles treasured? Were they discarded? We don’t know,” she says. “We don’t know who the women were who handled them. Discarded or cherished, they still carry something forward.”
The only text-only work in the show underscores the connection between thread and text, as these textile pieces become vessels for preserving both individual and collective memory. “& still women will tell a woman or what remains of her bones that they are lying,” reads the blue embroidery in crows on the tracks (2025)—a cryptic, poetic allusion not only to the historical tragedy of the Holocaust but also to the ongoing erasure of domestic violence, both past and present. While Buckman has long addressed this denial in her work and public presence, she created this piece during a period of reckoning with how deeply Holocaust denial and the gaslighting of antisemitic experience continue. “One of the most heartbreaking and disappointing things I’ve witnessed in the last two years has been seeing women—feminist women, highly educated women, activist women—denying the rape and sexual assault that happened to people in my community. Immediately, even now, it gets rejected. Jewish women are told they’re making it up.”
In the threads of Zoë Buckman’s dense emotional storytelling, trauma—both individual and intergenerational—is not erased but held. It is rematerialized as witnessed emotion and reconfigured into powerfully dramatic images that affirm the profound humanity within each scene. Through the visible labor of sewing itself, the gesture of repair becomes more than a metaphor—it becomes a vital part of the story.
Zoë Buckman, crows on the tracks, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Mindy Solomon
