Anyways, with the advent of multiple exhibitions that have been opening with a focus on intersection of art and fashion (especially Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis at the Museum at FIT), I figured I’d share an excerpt of my master’s thesis. This was research and written in 2019-2020, a perfectly horrible time to sink my teeth into a juicy topic as the one I chose. I was working with limited resources because of the pandemic and wish this was stronger, but it’s an interesting piece for me to look back. My research interest have evolved, but this also helped clarify what areas of the subject matter researched here I’d like to spend more time with in the future. Looking back on old writing is embarrassing, but revisiting the past often helps clean the eyes to see a better path for the future.

The articles of clothing imagined by the Surrealists often materialize the concepts described in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical findings. For Freud, quotidian and utilitarian items can become expressions of underlying fears that linger deep within the subconscious mind. His gendered theory of the fetish inspired the works of both Meret Oppenheim and Elsa Schiaparelli. The veiled horrors of castration, the “double,” and blurred distinction between the familiar and the unfamiliar are present in the fashion objects they created throughout the late 1930s. The gloves, belts, and shoes designed by Oppenheim and Schiaparelli mimic the body parts they were intended to adorn. These accessories modify the body to actualize the uncanny by bringing unconscious fears to the surface of the skin. This paper will discuss the fashion object as a manifestation of the fetish and uncanny, as seen through the eyes of these two women.

The New Woman emerged from the ruins of World War I and caused a shift within a destabilized society. Dressed in unconventional styles and with her face painted with cosmetics, the New Women constructed an unabashedly garish caricature that highlighted “the construction of femininity.” The ostentatious presentation of self in combination with a sexual assertiveness that was previously only acceptable for men generated an unforeseen gender fluidity, with women taking on masculine traits while maintaining a hyperfeminine appearance. Caroline Evans notes that male power was confronted with this unfamiliar form of gender fluidity brought about by the newfound independence of women. The expression of this modern lifestyle allowed women to customize their self-presentation through clothing, performing more fluid gender identities, and their own fantasies. Schiaparelli became aware of Oppenheim’s fashion designs through one of her friends. Once Schiaparelli saw Oppenheim’s work, she promptly commissioned a piece of jewelry from the artist. Oppenheim constructed a fur-covered brass bracelet for the Italian fashion designer. The inspiration for the bracelet occurred during winter; fur soon became Oppenheim’s preferred material to incorporate into her designs. She created two bracelets from materials acquired from a hardware store: two pieces of light brown fur and a hollow brass tube. Schiaparelli ultimately purchased the version presented to her for the equivalent of 30 francs. With their appearance and function, accessories can subtly alter recognizable body parts into unnerving phenomena envisioned in dreams. The body parts Oppenheim and Schiaparelli emphasized through the accessories they designed highlighted a sensation of fear. They produced fetishistic objects such as belts that reinterpret the castration-complex as severed and displaced hands that wrap around the waist of the body, black gloves embellished with extraordinary nails, and shoes decorated with animal hair that allude to the plush “fur and velvet” that conceal a woman’s genitals. These accessories were intended to decorate parts of the body that have a strong sexual connotation. The hands, waist, and feet… These accessories draw the gaze, and with it the mind, to a place of fantasy and desire.

When asked about her interest in taking part in scandalous activities, Meret Oppenheim declared that scandals have been a source of liberation from the traditional course life takes. A “scandalous life” is not chosen to cause controversy: it is the result of veering from the pre-determined path set by a patriarchal society. Her proximity to Surrealism afforded her the ability to live her life outside of what Jacqueline Burkhardt has called “moral and aesthetic categories.” With a belief that women have consistently fueled the minds of men in the form of commodities for creative consumption, Oppenheim reclaimed her body by designing fashion objects. Both Oppenheim and Schiaparelli turned the gaze toward their own bodies, surfacing fetishes and fears projected onto them by their male peers. The fashions they designed turned bodies into harbingers of subversion, contesting the confines of gender imposed upon them through the desire-coated lens of the male gaze. They employed fashion to mold the body beyond the objectified, consumable figure. According to Jennifer Sweeney-Risko, “in the context of Surrealism, fashion fused the Surrealists’ fascination with the commodity form to their interest in the body, marking a potential unification of the two.”

It is unclear how close Oppenheim and Schiaparelli’s relationship was or how many pieces they collaborated on; however, the commission of a fur-covered bracelet changed the course of Surrealism and the history of modern art forever. This bizarre accessory launched the creation of Oppenheim’s masterpiece titled Object. In every account of Object’s inception, its life cycle started with the bespoke Schiaparelli bracelet. As the story goes, Oppenheim was out to lunch with Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso at the Café de Flore in Paris and the conversation turned toward the eye-catching item circling Oppenheim’s wrist. Drawn to the unique construction of the accessory, Picasso remarked that nearly anything could be covered in fur. Oppenheim famously stated that the cup and saucer sitting on the table in front of them could easily be adorned with fur, and soon afterward, the sculpture shook audiences and the Surrealists. Thereafter, in keeping with Surrealist aesthetics, Oppenheim began to alter and elevate quotidian items into uncanny or fetishlike objects. While the majority of her designs were never materialized, even in the form of drawings, they convey her ideas and can provoke an anxious state.

Sigmund Freud was a critical influence on André Breton and the Surrealists. Freud’s work was challenging to access, as translations into French did not become available until 1922. As Surrealist artists began to delve into the unconscious for inspiration, they looked to Freud for insight into formulating the unrealized visions and obsessions lingering within their unconscious minds. The themes in Freud’s essays “Fetishism” of 1927 and “The ‘Uncanny’” of 1919 emanate powerfully in Surrealist work when the human body is the focus. The body’s sexual interpretation permeates the imagery depicted in their works, especially the organs that bring life into the world. In “Fetishism,” Freud theorizes that the fear of castration haunts young boys who have witnessed their mother’s lack of a penis, as they presume they may face this violent act in the future. Freud argues that this information is difficult to comprehend since the belief that a penis still exists remains in their minds despite the proof that it is untrue. The reward for fighting against the fear of castration is a repressed and complicated relationship to the female genitalia. Objects resembling the phallus may serve as logical substitutions for the missing appendage; other bodily forms in proximity to the genital region build an intrinsic bond that allows the anxious individual to satisfy his needs. Freud describes how the fetish is directly connected to the foot: “Thus the foot or shoe owes its preference as a fetish – or part of it – to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy peered at the woman’s genitals from below, from her legs up, fur and velvet – has long been suspected – are a fixation of the sight of public hair, which should have been followed up by the longed-for sight of the female member…”The movement of the gaze upward toward imagined phallus is blocked by the presence of an undergarment, allowing for a final moment in which the boy preserves his belief in the existence of the female phallus. The uncanny possibility of a woman having a phallus is intensified by her clothing choices. The mystery lingering beneath the undergarments is as important as the shoes she chooses to captivate the attention of those around her, who speculate on her possible castration. The individual in contact with the undergarment is both protected from what lies, or does not lie, beneath the fabric and may also assume castration as the reason for the concealment. For Freud, the fetishism, in its development and realization, comes full circle in its ambivalent treatment of the fetish as both a sacred obsession and internalized repulsion. The application of the fetish to clothing develops from the familiarity of everyday items that awaken deep-rooted connotations imposed by fears associated with specific body parts.

In Freud’s essay titled “The ‘Uncanny’” of 1919, he describes the underlying sensation of repressed fear housed in the unconscious. He writes, “Our conclusion could then be stated thus: An uncanny experience occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.” In both texts, “Fetishism” and “The ‘Uncanny,’” Freud expresses an interest in the “castration complex.” This purportedly unshakable fear awaiting in the dreams and anxieties of young men is reinforced by fictive stories from childhood. According to Freud, this immense fear saturates the boy’s mind as he projects dreams and fantasies onto reality. He notes that, “what is uncanny is frightening because it is not known and familiar. Naturally, not everything that is new is unfamiliar and frightening; the relation cannot be inverted.” The uncanny surfaces strangely familiar memories, bringing them to light. A semblance of rational judgment is necessary to define the uncanny, to rationalize the likelihood of these imagined scenarios coming to fruition. The connection the individual has to objects or memories generates the veiled anxieties that inhabit the unconscious.

The depiction of the female body through the male gaze often features a woman stripped of her clothing to reveal her “castrated” body to the world. One of the artists who presented the uncanny female body in his work is Man Ray. His portrait of Schiaparelli, taken in 1933, splices together a photograph of her head with a photograph of a mannequin with missing arms, so that her head hovers over the neck of the plaster torso. Her short hair is carefully coiffed around her face, its exact length obscured as it is wound into delicate swirls. Shadows soften the torso’s features, blurring the contours created by the mannequin’s chest and abdominal muscles. Man Ray captured Schiaparelli in a state of gender ambiguity with cropped hair and a faintly defined body. In addition to suppressing her feminine features, her cropped head and missing arms demonstrate the castration complex in practice. Man Ray was not portraying Schiaparelli herself: he captured her as his unconscious mind wanted to see her.

In a stark reversal from the image of Oppenheim in masculine attire May Ray’s photo series titled Érotique Voilée (Veiled Erotic) depicts her as a femme-enfant as she retrospectively put it. These images are a projection of Man Ray’s fantasy, as Oppenheim adamantly declared that she was mature beyond her seventeen years at the time this series was taken. These photographs were featured in the May 1934 issue of Minotaure, as illustrations for Breton’s essay Erotique voilée.58 Breton noted that convulsive beauty would be “veiled erotic” in L’Amour fou; the veil in the context of these photographs can also be read as Oppenheim’s own performance of Man Ray’s vision of these images. In the original publication, the image was cropped to hide the erotic augmentation below her waist. In one of the photographs, Oppenheim stands nude with her right hand on the wheel of the printing press as the back of her left hand presses against her forehead to expose her ink-covered palm and forearm. The black ink on Oppenheim’s hand functions as an accessory on her naked body. In the place of a glove, her embellished hand appears laminated in patent leather. Upon first glance, her hand hides in plain sight as her naked body leans against the printing press that dominates the frame. Other accessories in this photo include the thin black necklace encircling her neck and the printing press’s handle, placed so that it becomes a substitute for Oppenheim’s (missing) penis. Oppenheim’s hand recedes as the handle of the printing press monopolizes the photograph. Her hand is erased by the smeared ink from the tips of her fingers down through her forearm, signifying the erasure of her own identity in the image. The effacement of her hand emphasizes that this work is not hers to identify with: it is Man Ray’s conception impressed upon her.

During this session, Man Ray took multiple photographs of Oppenheim in various poses. In another photograph from this series, titled Meret Oppenheim at the Printing Wheel (1933), her ink-slicked hand and forearm lies on a blank piece of white paper at the printing press. Her nude body appears at the top left corner of the frame, establishing a contrast with her inked appendage. The printing wheel itself bisects her arm at the wrist, displacing her hand from her body in visual space. The near obliteration of her hand, paired with the way the printing wheel frames its imagined demise, suggests castration. Unlike the image of Oppenheim and her false phallus, here her nether regions are completely out of frame. The position of her body suggests that Man Ray castrated her. While viewing the hand as a fetish object in this context, Christiane Meyer-Thoss notes that, “Her body is, in fact, clothed in shadow-like fabric that is the ink on her skin. One of her glove designs seems to be prefigured in the portrait: gloves that, when worn, turn hands into their own skeletons.”

In “The ‘Uncanny,’” Freud references a belief by Ernst Jentsch that a “particularly favorable condition for awakening uncanny sensations is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one.” During childhood, the distinction between an animate and an inanimate object is blurred as objects resembling humans, like dolls, are nurtured as if they were alive. Although fear may not be aroused initially in items such as these, the softened distinction between the animate and inanimate creates confusion about how to perceive similar objects in reality. If an item has human features, there is a possibility that it is alive. Another concept that forms the sensation of the uncanny is the “double.” This is defined as a multiplication of what is known, particularly relating to the body, in order to preserve the object in question from obsolescence. The “double” also mirrors the repressed fear of death. Freud specifies that the manifestation of death is often figured by: “Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, feet which dance by themselves - all these have something particularly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove able to move of themselves in addition. As we know, this kind of uncanniness springs from its association with the castration–complex.” Oppenheim and Schiaparelli materialized this concept in their fashions that doubled the body parts their fashions were designed to adorn. The mirrored appendages create a sense of uncertainty regarding the life and death of both the animate body and the inanimate object. The fear of death as an uncanny sensation is fully actualized as human body parts appear lifeless while simultaneously activating the inanimate objects they wear.

Oppenheim’s manifestation of the uncanny in her fashion designs causes anxiety insofar as her investigation of the unconscious renders visible the body’s interior structures. In the illustration Sketch for Gloves with Veins (1942-5), the top of the glove is marked with veins, as if the skin protecting these vital branches has melted away. The veins branch out among the phalanges like trees, struggling to deliver blood to the comatose hands. The majority of Oppenheim’s fashion designs were never produced; however, this illustration came to fruition in the fourth volume of the German art magazine Parkett. For this collaboration, a numbered edition of 150 gloves was included in the deluxe issue of the publication. The gloves were crafted by hand out of goat suede with silk-screened details to trace out the veins. They were placed within the magazine framed by cut-outs in the shape of hands, accompanied by a few short lines of text in both German and English that read: “The red of the evening dissipates in the lead-grey mist of the nomad-camp” and “Honey from the hollows only that it is almost black.” Colored light-blue, the gloves/hands appear as if drained of life as the red veins strain to pump blood through the deadened hand. Oppenheim’s sinister accessories evoke the sky-blue gloves feared by Breton in Nadja. A hand that would appear full of life activates the lifelessness that perpetually waits.

The motifs of both death and the surfacing of the body’s interior also appear in Template for Gloves (1936), in which Oppenheim illustrated an X-rayed hand as a kind of glove. A white outline traces the shapes of the bones that reach inside the glove. Her fascination with the amalgam of the masculine and the feminine is not directly present in these objects, as they represent the human body in a genderless state. As she expressed in her interview with Robert J.Belton, “There is no difference between man and woman; there is only artist or poet.”68 Template for Gloves coincides with the imagery of Oppenheim’s own skeletal hand in Rötengenaufnahme des Schädels M.O. (X-Ray of M.O.’s Skull), her self-portrait from 1964. Beyond the creation of accessories, Oppenheim used jewelry to illustrate the significant imprint fashion transfers onto the body. As all humans have the same foundation, gender performance contributes to the spectrum of self-expression that is enhanced through clothing and accessories. Oppenheim’s x-ray strips away her external shell to reveal her bones and the jewelry that has fused with her inner foundation. The ossified outlines of her facial features, neck, and right hand decorated in baubles, reveal the importance of these objects to her structural core. Two round hoops hover in space so as to mark the location of her ear, while a delicate silhouette of a beaded necklace circles around her neck. Oppenheim’s faint hand is observable by the thick rectangular rings on her ring and pinky fingers. The contrast between the visceral tactility of her bones and joints and the faint shadow of her nose and lips that fades into the background accentuates the liminal space between existence and disappearance.

Jacqueline Burckhard and Bice Curiger state that this image “may be read as an ironic conversion of fashionable glitz into that which endures and survives,” moving fashion as a token of frivolous adornment to personal attachment. This photograph represents the many different versions of herself that she molded over the years, largely due to the power of accessories. It is unclear if the figure is male or female despite the presence of jewelry. Oppenheim applies her belief that both the male and female components exist within the self and are vital throughout life. Her self-exploration through the camera’s lens is intrinsic to understanding her oeuvre, but the affirmation of her philosophies is emphasized through her fashion choices. Oppenheim devises a balance between the masculine genius who created the image and the muse by obscuring the appearance of her gender through the x-ray, yet she suggests her femininity with the incorporation of jewelry. Without the title identifying this as Oppenheim, it would be impossible to recognize her. The jewelry shown in the x-ray illustrates a prominent feminized performance, indicated by the jewelry with which she enhanced herself. However, her physical features are rendered ambiguous. Oppenheim illustrated how accessories reveal markers of gender identity from the beginning of life until death.

Schiaparelli’s exploration of the uncanny fear of death in her creations goes beyond the hand. The Skeleton Dress, presented in her 1938 Haute Couture Summer collection titled Le Cirque (The Circus), was born out of a collaboration with Salvador Dalí. The inspiration was a near direct translation of a sketch of a woman with her arms outstretched sideways and her skeletal infrastructure exposed under a sheer veil of fabric. In addition to the drawing, Dalí included a note that read: “Dear Elsa, I like this idea of ‘bones on the outside’ enormously…” encouraging her to bring this notion to life. The morbid essence of this dress stood out amongst the rest of the pieces in the otherwise lighthearted collection filled with candy-hued garments fastened with whimsical buttons shaped like circus performers. The inclusion of this piece within this theme may have been influenced by a specific circus performance titled “The Skeleton Man.” Constructed out of silk crêpe, trapunto quilting, and cotton wadding, Schiaparelli sculpted her interpretation of a rib cage into the gown and stitched around the protrusions to highlight them. “An offense against good taste” and the sleek lines of popular evening wear of this era, The Skeleton Dress would fit the body like “a second skin” as her imagined corpse rose to the surface of the body. Sweeney-Risko notes that this dress is a pivotal object that illustrates Schiaparelli’s desire to use the female body as a blank slate with which to construct a version of a mask to strengthen and externalize the nuanced gender disparities faced by the New Woman.

Although the bracelet that Oppenheim created for Schiaparelli was the first piece they collaborated on, their aesthetics overlapped in other accessories they produced in the late 1930s. After their initial partnership, Oppenheim and Schiaparelli continued to work together on undisclosed projects. There are astonishing resemblances between the illustrations Oppenheim produced and the objects Schiaparelli fabricated. One of the most striking similarities appears in the belt designs by each artist. They both designed belts that depicted a pair of hands encircling the wearer’s waist. Oppenheim’s version never materialized, but the surviving sketch depicts a white band with two flesh colored hands with red fingernails overlapping one another to form the clasp. To bind the hands together and to ensure the belt’s closure, Oppenheim used either a small piece of rope or a bracelet appearing as a thick chain around the wrists. Schiaparelli’s version has an arrestingly similar composition, which raises the question of whether Oppenheim was aware of Schiaparelli’s designs prior to working with her. “Evening Belt” comprises a black silk band and two clasped white plastic hands functioning as the buckle. It was common in many of Schiaparelli’s designs to include whimsical decorations made from plaster or plastic. In her fall 1934 collection, Schiaparelli incorporated the hand motif in a handbag with closures echoing the shape of the bag, as well as in garments, including a jacket and cape.80 Like the red veins coursing through the gloves in Pair of Gloves, the red nail polish decorating the fingertips of both sets of hands emphasizes their uncanny resemblance to the human appendage they mirror.

These depictions of hands evoke a semblance of human-like features. The flesh tones and the red nail polish enliven these inanimate objects before they reach the body they would encircle. The history of the belt is permeated with connotations dependent on gender identity. For men, the belt is imbued with “strength, military prowess, and authority” since they have decorated the waists of heroic leaders in literature. Women’s relationship with belts largely centers on sexuality. According to Hannah Korn, “they can be deceitful instruments of seduction or signifiers of purity, modesty, and submissiveness.” The imagery of the belts designed by Oppenheim and Schiaparelli alters these correlations. As opposed to the emphasis on gender, they take on the fears of castration developed in the unconscious mind of men and cast upon women. The hands appear delicate, yet grasp the waist of the individual they encompass. The belts recall the hands of a lover enveloping the waist of their beloved in a protective and affectionate embrace, while the proximity to the groin implies a far less romantic fantasy. The hands take on a sinister presence as they call to mind the looming fear of castration. The hands are positioned downward, ready to make their way to geld the female phallus. As opposed to the dichotomy of the masculine and the feminine characteristics associated with the individual wearing the belt, the conflict represented in both belts oscillates between affection and horror.

The fixation on the hand through the production of gloves by both Oppenheim and Schiaparelli evolved as they elevated its form with materials that exude eroticism. Schiaparelli’s winter collection of 1936 – 1937 was one of the many she and Salvador Dalí coproduced, incorporating his imagination into her visualization of the body. Schiaparelli designed a pair of black suede gloves that include small, red snakeskin ovals placed in the position of nails. Another pair of Evening Gloves designed in 1936 is bedecked with gilded metal nails resembling claws against sumptuous calf velvet. The eye-catching “nails” contrast with the shadow-like hands that appear to have crept out of a nightmare and into reality. Oppenheim also used decorative nails in her version of an eroticized glove. Mammalian by design and in line with her fascination with fur, Fur Gloves with Wooden Fingers imagines hands covered in light-brown fur with wooden extensions placed at the tip of each finger. She painted the elongating appendages to resemble skin with red fingernails. If worn, these gloves would be unnaturally long, veering toward the grotesque rather than the sensual.

Oppenheim felt reassured by her capability as a designer of “high fantasy” objects with these accessories. She found the contrast between the support material and the animal skin. The layers of tactile surfaces decorating a ridged base is much like the body’s strata of muscles, veins, and skin encasing bones. As noted by Ghislaine Wood, the dichotomy between these materials surfaced in the creation of Object, which was later renamed Le déjeuner en fourrure by Breton as an amalgam of the fetishism described in Sacher Masoch’s play Venus in Furs and the depiction of overt sexuality in Edouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. The sense of corporality she sought with Object inspired Oppenheim to decorate the teacup in fur as a second skin. She recognized her notoriety as “the artist who lines things” and began to revamp the mass-produced fashion objects through her perpetual desire to revise the standard of taste.”

Freud’s discussion of the boy’s anticipation while searching for the female phallus is exemplified by a shoe designed by Oppenheim. The materials with which she crafted her extraordinary shoe, which evokes pubic hair, entertain the fetishist’s fascination with the possibility of a female phallus. As Freud articulates in his essay, the foot lures the eyes to travel up the inner thighs to discover the absence of the appendage. The pubic hair that cloaks the genital region provides the last hope in the young boy’s quest for genital assurance. Oppenheim applied this motif to the feet in an illustration of shoes that could accompany her Fur Gloves with Wooden Fingers and Fur Bracelet in an ensemble. In her illustration for Project for sandals (1936), she envisioned a black pump with a thin ankle strap and a tuft of fur covering the top of the foot. The unnatural fur growing from the smooth surface of the porcelain pieces of the tea set and on the body the possibility that this fantasy of fur, could become a reality at any given moment. The combination of the fur glove and bracelet for Schiaparelli, if worn together, would cover the body in fur in a manner similar to Object. The spoon, saucer, and teacup are replaced with the wrist, hand, and foot, breaking their conventional functions are they become active representations of repulsion and arousal. Once bedecked in fur accessories, the human body takes on the characteristics of the mass-produced object that embodies projected fetishistic desires that are both real and imagined.

Meret Oppenheim and Elsa Schiaparelli were forerunners in creating avant-garde designs that showcase the body as a Surrealist vision. They reclaimed the body as a base for their analysis of the ideas and imagery that circulated throughout the Surrealist movement. The malleable nature of clothing allowed them to mask the body with the imaginings of the unconscious, surfacing the fears that lie deep within the unconscious. Oppenheim and Schiaparelli unveiled their perception of convulsive beauty by embracing the imagery provided by Freud’s explanations of both the fetish and the uncanny. They successfully meld the masculine vision with their feminine aesthetics in their revolutionary fashion designs.

Putting the whole bibliography here lengthens this too much, reach out if you’re interested in my sources.

Then, one Friday afternoon, Gray Area told us that Google had decided that there could not be the number of tests required to solve the blending problem. Then everyone disappeared for the weekend, leaving me and Donald to figure out the implications of this pronouncement. Google didn’t even bother to call us, present the problem that caused their decision, and ask if there was a possible solution. Instead, they simply made an arbitrary determination that would have required a complete rethinking of the design. This could have taken weeks, if not longer, and involve the cumbersome communication process that Google had established.

Holy Cowtown: On Nadia Lee Cohen’s “Holy Ohio”
Cleveland Review of Books
Reading ’s flawless review of Nadia Lee Cohen’s recently published photobook was a highlight of my week. When I first read about Cohen’s project, I held my breath, wondering about the intentions of an outsider “documenting” a life they have loose ties to. Ella’s review is particularly illuminating because she has an intrinsic understanding of the locations featured in the book:

My issue with Holy Ohio is not that Cohen took great pains to paint the region as any more remote or dated than is honest. It is genuinely very depressing here. There is deep poverty and industrial pollution everywhere. My issue with Cohen’s selective framing is that, for an artist so supposedly enamored by the kitsch and camp, she sands down the weirdness of this place in favor of tired shorthand. The EDM mural at Legend Valley was aesthetically interesting where the dinosaur statue is a cliche. The log cabin and lighthouse-shaped vacation rentals on Buckeye Lake were fun where the RV was trite. Was it too complex a task for her to wrestle with the headshops and elevated burgers and craft breweries and Apple Pay card readers and how those elements layer onto this chewed up and spit out corner of the Rust Belt?

A Y2K Bedroom in 2026? The “Nestalgic” Trend Taking Over GenZennial Decor
Architectural Digest
Do we think returning to pre-internet influenced design choices is a rejection of “algorithmic modernism”? Trends are trends, and many of the items being collected and glued to bedroom walls also recall a time when there was a semblance of monoculture; nevertheless, individual taste shines through. See also Adrienne Salinger: Teenagers in Their Bedrooms.

Why are Artists So Interested in Making Playgrounds?
Cultured
The world would be a better place if funding could support more imaginative spaces for play. This article also reminded me to read The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids by Alexandra Lange. This article from The Guardian highlights additional artistic playgrounds across the globe.

Artist of the Week: Victoria Dugger

If I were to take advantage of a balmy ~46 degree Saturday afternoon in New York, I would spend the afternoon gallery hopping in Tribeca ( as I’m wont to do when in the Big Apple). Sargent’s Daughters programming has always been a favorite of mine, and I would not miss this last weekend to catch Victoria Dugger’s Freak Flags. Duggar was initially inspired by Jasper Johns’ Flag (1954-55) on view at the Museum of Modern Art, and wanted to interpret this symbolic object in glitter, gingham, and vibrant accoutrements to: “explore the politics of embodiment, sharply speaking to experiences of Blackness, femininity, disability, and desire through maximalist compositions. In this body of work, Dugger turns away from figurative imagery, instead focusing on an iconic symbol. Each work is the exact scale of a standard American flag made to be displayed on a home flagpole. Each contains some version of stars and stripes, but their palettes range from hot pinks to lime green to black sparkles. The geometric fields are further patterned with gingham, and the sections are divided by miniature white picket fences and barbed wire. Spangled nipple tassels and pasties stand in for stars. Glimpsed between the stripes are abstracted landscapes – rolling green fields and sunset skies that the viewer is barred from accessing fully.”

Victoria Dugger (b. 1991, Columbus, Georgia). Lives and works in Athens, Georgia.

Inspo for Week Ending:

Latex’s Contradictions Are Mirrored in the Art It Creates
Ocula
A contemporary history of the significance latex plays in art. A second skin that is transformed into ephemeral abstractions, both as standalone sculptures and body coverings designed to explore “human intimacy, global politics and power play.”

New York Didn’t Know What to Do With Noguchi
New York Magazine
Oh, to play on a playground designed by Isamu Noguchi. Currently on view at the Noguchi Museum in Astoria, the artist’s former studio complex, is Noguchi’s New York. This exhibition highlights his aspirational projects that were intended to celebrate the city’s social and cultural landscape, spaces designed for the public to engage with art playfully, but were never realized.

Who Killed the Independent Curator?
Frieze

When power goes unchecked, it has the tendency to accumulate. Such is the current panorama of the art world, where important positions are held by an ever-tighter group of individuals. Nowhere is this clearer than in the institutional takeover of the biennial circuit, where curators are increasingly drawn from the same pool of full-time directorship and curatorial roles, from Venice (2024) and São Paulo (2025), to Taipei (2025) and Lyon (2026). This tendency for curators to cling to power creates structural immobility in the sector by erecting an impenetrable barrier to career development for the next generation of curators while cultural despots rule the roost.

What Happened to All the Barbie Cakes?
Taste
The reigning queen of the grocery store pastry case has gone missing, but where did she go? All throughout my childhood, during trips to the grocery store with my mom, I looked forward to seeing the Barbie Cake currently on display. Surprisingly, I never requested one of these for any of my birthdays. I don’t think my child's mind could comprehend the engineering of how it was created, what would happen to her legs when we cut into it? Plus, her outfit would be ruined. Andrea Aliseda covers the cultural significance these well-dressed cakes had for girls celebrating quinceañeras during the 1980s to the aughts, reveals the mystery behind how they are made, and how her relevance has evolved over the years. This bit of history is also fascinating:

The first recorded doll cake draws inspiration from the poem “A Corpse Going to a Ball,” originally published by American author Seba Smith in 1843, about a girl named Charlotte who braves a frigid snowy night in an attempt to travel to a ball by sleigh, only to (spoiler) freeze to death. When mid-19th-century Germany started producing miniature porcelain dolls, they morbidly took to calling them “Frozen Charlotte” in reference to the popular poem. Poor Charlotte was carried around as a good-luck totem, and German bakers angling to profit on the trend began baking them into cakes––similar to the three kings bread, rosca de reyes, and Mardi Gras king cake, which both hide a baby doll figure somewhere within.

Artist of the Week: Maggie Lee

Lee’s art transports me back to childhood. It’s art that I imagined myself owning, even without knowing what art is. Elevated nostalgia in the form of text clipped from magazines fixed to a butter-yellow moiré. Woven tartan reminiscent of the plaid skirts I was required to wear to school, but playfully accessorized with a cluster of beads in coordinating colors. An exposed Polaroid simultaneously frozen and floating in the splochly expanse our memories live in our minds, actualized. In the text “Fragmentary Chain of Thoughts on Maggie Lee’s Art,” written by Yuzo Sakuramoto on the occasion of Lee’s recent solo exhibition, Unique Boutique, , that was presnted by Reena Spaulings and House of Gaga, it’s noted that her work is firmly rooted in the present: “What’s really at play is her feel for the now—her “nowness”—channeled through her sensibility. I mean, all that deep meaning, problematics, critical scaffolding, frankly feel unnecessary. The work doesn’t settle nicely within an art-world context; it extends to fashion or music, staging and amplifying that sense of the present. That’s actually a tough place to stake out, but that’s exactly where she’s put herself, I think.”

Maggie Lee (b.1987, United States). Lives and works in New York.

Inspo for Week Ending:

Personal News:

• A few years ago, I wrote about attending my first ballet class since childhood. While I didn’t keep up this practice at the time, I’ve picked it back up again. This year, I am wholly committed to focusing on my extracurricular endeavors, creative pursuits that enrich my life. I am finding new ways to substitute the rich, nearly cloying, activities that filled my time. Healthy alternatives that are just as satisfying. I have a goal to be able to go en pointe in two years. It may take longer, but I want to see if I can do it.

• Every Sunday morning, I’ve been going to one of my favorite local parks with a trail that snakes through the desert for a jog/walk. Friends of mine are serious runners, and their journeys have inspired me to hit the trail in my own way. I don’t see myself training for any length of marathon; I’m mostly doing this to get outside and clear my mind.

• As a Las Vegas native, I am embarrassed and surprised to learn about the Clark County Museum this month. How this went under my radar for so long baffles me. I made my first visit on Sunday to see their exhibition Play in Motion: Transportation Toys of the Past, which featured “planes, trains, and automobiles” from both the Nevada State Museum and their collection, with histories of how and why they were manufactured. However, I unexpectedly received a history lesson in Las Vegas architecture and retail, as there were period-specific homes owned by notable business owners on the property to view, time capsules of design I’ll write about later. There were also incredible pieces crafted by Southern Paiutes and Mojave Pottery on view. I want to research them a little more for a future post.

• I did not watch a single film this month. I don’t recall the last time this happened. However, I did secure a ticket to see The Moment for this coming Saturday.

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  The Blood-and-Soil Nationalism That Killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good
  Vanity Fair

  For The Homeland is not “The State” or even “The Country.” The Homeland is not defined by simple geography. It exists beyond laws and norms. It is unconcerned with traditional American concepts like “liberty,” “freedom” or “pluralism.” The Homeland is that piece of earth providentially deeded to The Volk. The Homeland’s borders are drawn in untainted blood, its sanctity exemplified in proper gender conduct and the fulfillment of gender roles. It is The Homeland that ICE venerates in its recruitment posts festooned with victorious white settlers and vanquished indigenous Americans.

  
  Grounds for Action: Landscape and Protest
  Artforum

  If landscape historically existed in relation to the pastoral and the picturesque, it is now equally entangled with the territory: a site that is no longer just aesthetic but instrumental, rigorously optimized for resource production or extraction. And as the dual pillars of neoliberalism—privatization and deregulation—transform our relationship to nature by undermining any sense of collective responsibility for environmental resources, the reconsideration of the relations between city, landscape, and territory, prompted by today’s protest landscapes, becomes all the more urgent.

  
  After the Strike, Will Art Galleries Be Allies?
  Hyperallergic

  If a gallery’s solidarity leaves its own openings, payment timelines, commission structures, and fair schedules exactly as before, then the solidarity is only visual. It borrows the language of disruption while protecting the conditions of comfort.

  Designing When Your City Is Under Siege
  Architectural Digest
  A Minneapolis designer on holding two truths at once: the work of creating beauty and the work of resistance.

  Not All Women
  n + 1
  This arrived at my desk earlier in the week, but I saved it for the weekend as it’s a long read and I want to take my time to take it in. Dayna Tortorici reviews Sophie Lewis’s Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation. One of my goals for this year is to get back into my academic bag, specifically by refreshing my knowledge, understanding, and application of feminist theory. Reading this review is warming my mind back into these ideas.
  

  Mold and Melancholia
  The Paris Review
  Madeline Cash’s novel Lost Lambs is in my current reading queue. The autofiction (?) and rhythm of this short story were enjoyable. I never dipped my pen to draft a short story, but this will live in a mental pocket for inspiration. As the world’s slowest reader, I’ve developed a habit of reading two books at the same time, prolonging my anticipated finishing date. I’m currently reading Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights since I haven’t thought about it since high school. Although Emerald Fennell seems to have taken creative liberties from the novel, I need a baseline refresher before watching her adaptation on the big screen this month.

Artist of the Week: Gowoon Lee

Everything is horrible, but at least we have Hello Kitty. Currently on view at Meredith Rosen Gallery in New York is Lee’s solo exhibition titled Here Kitty Kitty. As a lifelong Hello Kitty fan, I wish I was in a financial position to afford one of these paintings. I am manifesting Kitty Comb to hang over a monderist vanity in my future.

I liked this description of the show from the press release: “Without the normative tropes of narrative or relationships, Lee insists on Hello Kitty’s reality as pure surface. The confrontation of the painted and symbolic surface in Lee’s paintings emphasize Hello Kitty as a vessel for normative cultural values. Hello Kitty’s roundness, symmetry, and perpetual cuteness become uncanny through recurrence and fracture. In haunting monochromatic works, Hello Kitty is repeated in ghost-like form, insisting on the surface as a space of transference. Through the works in “Here Kitty Kitty” Lee asks how images shape our sense of value and personal identity in the absence of narrative.” The last bit about “value and personal identity in the absence of narrative” is something I have been thinking about regarding personal identity and commodities on a broader scale, how much of what we consume shapes us instead of the inverse. Until I unpack this, I’ll enjoy looking at these charming paintings as a respite from the unending bad news.

Gowoon Lee (b. Daegu, South Korea, 1991) lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.

What’s the Point of Wearing Beautiful Clothes?
Highsnobiety
“This is often how I make decisions about style. There has to be some sort of romance behind it. There has to be a story. And the story can’t just be about how an actress in a movie wore a specific kind of dress; that’s not good enough. It also has to be about what that item of clothing represents. In Blanche’s case: being really miserable in a really specific way. How she looks exquisite in a moment when she feels really sad. Sad in the summer. Sad in a blue sailor dress with a big collar.”

BIO POP
Spike
This performance by Bianca Censori had my attention the moment I saw images of it posted online. “What would compel her to tackle this subject matter?" I asked myself. This report from the scene of the performance and interview (seemingly an extention of the work) answers this. I need to sit down and think about this in relation to Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen. It immediately came to my mind when I read about the piece in December.

State of Art
Harper’s
“Why have America’s museums kept getting bigger? To fit a few thousand more artworks next to fifty thousand others, certainly. Fundamentally, though, museums expand because expansion does not need a reason. To the people who make the decisions, it justifies itself, like life or happiness or—for a few hopeless fogies—art. For a long time now, the signature style of the contemporary art world has been something like real estate aestheticism: growth for growth’s sake.”

Artist of the Week: Jesse Zuo

Getting ready is a quiet process for me. Not a ritual, but a small window of contemplation. The items I choose to dress myself in on any given day are selected with consideration. Nothing is worn without intention or purpose. The weight of a sweater on top of a cotton long-sleeve shirt. The necklace I latch around my neck. The lip product I dab on my lips. The dress I chose to commit myself to for 8 hours, lacing it to form to my body in a way that is both flattering and comfortable. Jesse Zuo’s painting of daily preparation inspired me all week.

I’ve noticed many painters focusing on visual memoria as their primary subject over the past couple years. Vignettes of otherwise ephemeral moments, blurred and tightly cropped on a specific moment, made permanent. They remind me of the pictures you would take to use up a disposable camera. Stay tuned as I pull my thoughts together for this forthcoming collection of artists.

Jesse Zuo (b. 2000) lives and works in New York.

Inspo for Week Ending:

• Weekly digests of art and culture news I find interesting or relevant to my main research interests, being the intersection of art and fashion, feminist theory, and “the cute.” 2025 was a big year for fashion designers and artists incorporating themes of domestic labor in their work. I’ll be keeping my eye on this to see if this trend continues throughout the year, and I hope to knock out a few essays about the collections and performances that caught my eye. The newsletters I always open and look forward to reading are collections of articles that writers send; it feels like a peek into what greases the gears of their minds. I figured I’d try my hand at this.

• In these end-of-week digests, I’ll spotlight an artist whose work has been on my mind and encompasses the tone of my life at the moment.

• If you follow me on Instagram, nearly every Friday for the past few years I share images I’ve saved throughout the week as my “inspo for week ending.” A quilt of nine images with credits will be featured at the end of my dispatches.

• Essays on the art I see in person or in my mind’s eye will be sent a few times throughout the month.

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  January 1, 2026 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1930 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1925!
  Duke University Center for the Study of Public Domain
  I love Public Domain Day (aka New Year’s Day). This article was published by Duke University’s Center for the Study of Public Domain, provides a non-intimidating explanation of copyright law and a list of works across literature, art, film, and sound that can be adapted into new creative modes. In a few of the jobs I’ve held, I was responsible for obtaining copyright permissions for various projects, which led me to develop a deep fascination with this topic. Gonna need a fashion or homewares brand to do something fun with this Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Wild no one has collaborated with her estate yet, but probably for the best!

  Forget AI. 2026 Is the Year of the Fashion Illustrator

  Highsnobiety

  Nothing will replicate human-generated artistry, not even artificial intelligence coded by human hands. I agree with Viv Chen’s thesis of this article: “By hiring and featuring artists on their social channels, these brands are able to differentiate themselves from the cheap and clumsy connotations of Artificial Intelligence. In the current media landscape — where every brand needs more and more content to farm out to various online channels, and maintaining the “appearance” of luxury can be attained more cheaply than ever — investing in hand-drawn illustration and animation feels like the ultimate flex.”

  Spectrum of Desire

  4Columns

  This exhibition on love, sex, and gender in the Middle Ages looks fascinating. I enjoyed Jo Livingstone’s review.

  Small-town museums are killing it—on the internet

  The Wall Street Journal

  I follow many small museums and cultural institutions on TikTok and Instagram, and seeing how they adapt digital trends to their current exhibitions and collections is fun. It’s a brilliant way to educate those unfamiliar with art in a way that is accessible.

  Lomex Thinks It Can Create a Sexy New Vegas Art Scene, and More Juicy Art World Gossip

  Artnet

  When I first saw this news drop, I was pleasantly surprised. Vegas has always needed gallery spaces for quality art. Although I will say the public libraries have interesting exhibitions sometimes. The UNLV campus is rich with art as well. But to have a New York gallery break ground in the desert, this is big. I saw their inaugural project on New Year’s Eve and was impressed. Take this as a tease for a future post…

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  Artist of the Week: Maya Hewitt
  
  I was introduced to Maya Hewitt’s work as I was scrolling on Instagram, sometime in the past few weeks. Her paintings resonated with me as they capture caution and skepticism with a dose a whimsy, which is how I feel approaching a new year. I’m getting my footing on new ground with grand plans drafted, tucked in my pocket. In the back of my mind, measured apprehension lingers because you can never be too sure of how things will materialize. Stay ready so you never need to get ready.
  
  These works are currently on view in her solo exhibition titled Tending to the Root at Theta in New York.

  “Hewitt brings this layered sensibility to a new suite of paintings that refract everyday life along a spectrum of care. Where motherhood has reawakened the artist to the simple beauty of ephemerality in everyday things, it has also provided its own tinge of unease. Scenes of figures at play, learning about the world or wayfinding through worries, unfold with the irregular rhythms of sampled love songs. In equal measures of realism and cartoonish fantasy, affection cloaked in a bit of darkness is perpetually disrupted by the light of childlike joy. Her work speaks of life and death, nature and chaos, loving relationships and the spiraling out of time.”

  Maya Hewitt (b. 1981, London UK) lives and works in London.

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  Inspo for week ending:

• My review of Madeleine Ray Hines: As Is was published for Exhibits in New York. You can read it here. Alexandra and Sarah were incredible to work with on this. It also inspired me to dig deeper into the way the repetition of images changes the perceived value of items, art and fashion as signifiers of their owners, and the interpretation of a cultural symbol of luxury and its translation into another high-end asset (fashion to art), but I think these would be better tackled in an academic paper.

• I had the pleasure of writing the press release for Fiona Krugolets’s show that opens this weekend:

The ghosts are steaming their delicate, antique garments, the werewolves are at the salon getting blowouts, and the witches are covertly flying across the sky on cinnamon-scented brooms in preparation for their big holiday next week. You can’t convince me that icons of freight do not prepare for Halloween the way the rest of us mortals do for our celebrations. A rare treat that was delivered this spooky season was a handful of shows that enhance the bewitching spirit of All Hallows’ Eve. Below are 7 shows that will transport you into the haunting worlds of these artists’ imaginations.

Brandon Morris: Tissu Expansé at Europa

I first met Brandon Morris’s sculptural enigmas earlier this year in his exhibition titled Actress at Europa. When I entered the gallery, I was greeted by a group of dresses. One of them gently curtsied, another rested their wrists on the edge of their squared-off skirt, and a few more hunched their shoulders in either sadness, displeasure, or a combination of the two emotions—glowing green like radium in the dark. I could not grasp the true emotions that activated the frocks because they were all standing in the space sans body. These tactile apparitions are haunting reminders of the imprint of mortality on our existence.

Who were the people who once inhabited these garments? The ghastly material frozen in time found my mind drifting back to the late 19th and early 20th century during the boom of Spiritualism. The surface of each dress is slick, as if the former body that lived in these outfits secreted a fluid strong enough for the fabric to hold their shape without their presence. During this time period, ectoplasm was a substance believed to have materialized from the body of a spiritual medium, developing into a tangible representation of the spirit they contacted while under a trance-like state during a seance. It has been proven countless times that this matter, made from cheesecloth smoothed out with potato starch and egg whites, was made to enthrall naive audiences into believing their encounters with the paranormal were more legitimate than they were. However, the haunting gowns that were present in the gallery are akin to this phenomenon and arguably more chilling because they are ever-present.

The works on view in Tissu Expansé were completed during Morris’s residency in Paris, where he continued his exploration of the unsettling and elegant relationship between fashion and sculpture. This is also on view in the City of Lights.

About the artist: Brandon Morris (b. 2000, San Diego, CA), lives and works in New York, NY. He received his BFA from Parsons School of Design in 2023. His influences include the works of Takashi Miike, Bruce Bickford, Hans Bellmer, Sci-Fi, and Victorian design to create grotesque and elegant structures.

Cindy Ji Hye Kim: Saboteur: A Prehistoric Wish at Casey Kaplan

Do you ever wonder what goes on under the harvest moon? The activated skeletal figures in Kim’s paintings come to life as they prepare for both the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice.

The press release for this show is wonderfully written:

“In traditional medieval calendars, the pages illustrating the six months from August to January are adorned with scenes of harvesting and threshing wheat, sowing seeds, fattening livestock, slaughtering animals, and resting. Kim reinterprets these labors of the latter half of the year as allegories for a period of closure, when the fruits of the land must be extracted, livestock sacrificed, and the laboring body comes to an idle pause. Against this melancholic backdrop of nature’s transitional phase, Kim’s silhouetted, skeletal forms teeter on the edge of decomposition.”

About the artist: Cindy Ji Hye Kim (b. 1990, Incheon, Korea), lives and works in New York, NY. She received her B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013 and her M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art in 2016. Synthesizing influences as disparate as early animation, construction scaffolding, pests and flora, medieval torture devices, and Korean folk arts, Kim’s depictions of the contorted human form speak to the limits of both body and language.

Zach McCormick Collins: I Want To Believe at Locker Room Gallery

No episode of television frightened me more than catching the scene of the baby with a tail on The X-Files. My memory cannot recall how fast I ran to my room after seeing that, but the show’s theme song manages to give me goose bumps whenever I hear it to this day. In Collins’s show I Want to Believe, he depicts imagery associated with the convergence of both UFO conspiracies and UK rave culture of the 1990s, “the self-obliterating euphoria of club culture and the ego-dissolving encounter with the alien other both promise escape from ordinary bodily consciousness into something more fluid.” His panels glow, as if the beam from the mothership spotlit his subjects as he translates digital ephemera from this moment in time into artistic truth.

About the artist: Zach McCormick Collins (b. 1992), lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His research-driven practice transforms hyper-specific moments from the internet and media culture into luminous airbrush paintings that reveal unexpected historical and psychological connections.

Elizabeth Glaessner: Running Water at PPOW

One of the greatest fears I’ve had since childhood is being pulled out into the middle of the ocean by rip currents. Every year, when my family would make our summer pilgrimage to Santa Barbara, my mom would tell me about fond memories she had at the beach when she was young (she was a California girl growing up in Simi Valley, then Oxnard), and warn me about the possible dangers of the invisible forces pulsing in the water. For a period of time, I had vivid nightmares of being in the car with family members, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway, and seeing a giant tidal wave gain momentum before descending onto land. I would wake up before it made contact because I did not want to witness the outcome of the disaster.

The images frozen in Glaessner’s paintings capture the mystery, fear, and reverence that I have for water. To capture the “incessant flood” her figures are submerged in, she used layers of enriched pigments and lush oil paint to simulate “the fluidity of water, to create permeable narratives in which figures continuously ebb between formal articulation and non-representational gesture.” This body of work was drawn from her childhood memories, growing up in East Texas, navigating the swamplands rich with biological benefits and hazards. The precarious waterways would be sites for play before turning treacherous, wreaking havoc on neighborhoods in the span of a downpour. The figures in her paintings are paralyzed in a semi-dreamlike state as their faces register the frightening reality that envelops them. However, another reading of these startled expressions could be the initial shock that occurs before navigating rough waters, leading to prolific clarity.

About the artist: Elizabeth Glaessner (b. 1984, Palo Alto, TX), lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Drawing from art history, mythology, memory, and pop culture, her dream-like paintings conjure a surreal universe uninhibited by conventional boundaries. In this imagined realm, fluid figures populate amorphous landscapes where both person and surroundings are in a seemingly constant state of metamorphosis.

Ambera Wellman: Darkling at Hauser & Wirth and One Thousand Emotions at Company Gallery

Ambera Wellmann currently has two exhibitions on view in New York that are delightfully frightening. Darkling at Hauser & Wirth features works that capture the dark, hellish aftermath of apocalyptic destruction as “death appears to be thrashing towards us, as opposed to us moving calmly and expectedly towards her, following in the footsteps of everything that’s ever been alive.” The topic of imminent extinction is also carried through in One Thousand Emotions at Company Gallery. Viewing Wellmann’s paintings make me feel as if I accidentally fell into someone’s unconscious, not necessarily hers, but someone who regularly ruminates on their actions in the corporeal world and how they will determine their existence in the afterlife.

About the artist: Ambera Wellmann (b. 1982, Lunenberg, Nova Scotia), lives and works in New York, NY. Many of the themes and methods she pursues in her paintings are constructed from numerous layers of intricately worked wet oils, often depicting nebulous human and animal forms, sometimes in extremis or entwined in states of ecstasy, figurative in only a tenuous sense. Her work captures the frontier where the known meets the uncanny.

Sarah Theresa Lee: What Big Eyes You Have at Ricco/Maresca

A formative moment in growing up was learning the gruesome origins of fairy tales. Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off pieces of their feet in an attempt to fit into her bespoke glass slipper, Little Red Riding Hood was not liberated from the Big Bad Wolf’s belly, and The Little Mermaid is in a perpetual state of suffering when she walks with her new legs all in exchange for love that never finds her, returning to the sea as foam. In What Big Eyes You Have, Sarah Theresa Lee depicts domestic spaces of comfort and intimacy, yet pulls the curtain back to reveal the horrors kept hidden from public view. Her paintings continue the lineage of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault; the whimsical tales illustrated on panels are more menacing than what we would like to believe.

I’m drawn to the unsettling images she captures because they grapple with the horrors commonly faced by women, yet there is a slight tinge of humor among the exaggerated, grotesque imagery. One figure is sitting at her vanity, popping an eyeball back in its socket in preparation for witnessing new terror for the day, another kneels on a dining room chair as she feeds her proverbial beast, and many others don masks to conceal themselves for self-preservation (are they keeping their percived goodness to themselves and repelling evil with a fear-inducing visage or hiding their sinister ways).

The topic of masks and voyeurism is covered very well in the press release for the show:

“Nowhere is this more apparent than in her treatment of heads and faces as masks: removed, swapped, assumed—they become sites of transformation. Shapeshifting, unstable selves; femininity as both performance and possession; the doubling, troubling gaze of the mirror…[What Big Eyes You Have] points to the act of looking and being looked at: seeing too much or being unable to look away. In Lee’s world, that gaze is never neutral; it becomes voyeurism, accusation, revelation. Power dynamics flicker: someone is watching, someone is pretending, someone is poised to strike. It is this meeting of surface charm and underlying mystery that gives Lee’s paintings their uncanny magnetism. Their lush color, formal rigor, and seductive strangeness invite repeated viewing—and promise new revelations with every return.”

About the artist: Sarah Theresa Lee (b. 1980, Ireland), lives and works in London. She works as a psychiatric nurse and devotes the rest of her time to painting. Her subjects appear as if conjured from the layered sediment of memory, ritual, and dream.

Cultural Digest:

• Films: I haven’t watched as many spooky movies as I intended to this month. Life has been scary enough. However, I did end up watching Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), which didn’t do anything for me. I felt exhausted after watching the nuns exert themselves emotionally and physically under demonic duress. I felt this way after I saw Possession (1981) for the first time. I enjoyed Ms .45 (1981) greatly, so much that I want to write about it. Rohmer’s A Tale of Autumn (1998) also ignited a desire to craft an essay concerning the foibles of modern love.

• Articles and Essays:
  What I Wish I Had Known About Germany Earlier. A timely piece by Ai Weiwei. This passage was one of my favorites: “In the surrounding atmosphere, one sees not culture, but self-congratulation; not art, but insularity and collective reverence for power. What is missing is sincerity — honesty of emotion and of intention. In such an environment, art that grapples with true human feeling or moral reckoning is nearly impossible to produce.”

  The Avant-Garde Is Over. Should Artists Embrace Being Fashionably Late? “The story that culture workers tell about visual art’s prescience contributes to the field’s romance in order to justify our purpose beyond superficial pleasures. Today, when it’s harder than ever for art to function as a leading indicator, it’s worth examining how some art functions as a lagging indicator—showing audiences not where culture is headed but where it’s been.”

  On Jia’s Need. Incredible essay on the complications of writing in a competitive landscape.

• Events:
  If you are in New York this weekend, go see And I A Smiling Woman, curated by my friend Cath, featuring work by Sylvie Harris. Before you go, revisit my interview with Sylvie here.
  This is my dream panel. I wish I could teleport to be here:

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There isn’t a day that goes by that dreams of revisiting the United Kingdom drift through my mind. In 2019, I visited London for the first time to see a few Elsa Schiaparelli works on view at the V&A, as my master’s thesis focused on the accessories she designed in relation to works by Meret Oppenheim that shared similar motifs. It was a childhood fulfillment that I hope to recreate in the future (I need to go to the Fashion Museum in Bath). I was a young anglophile; the music and fashion that found their way into my ears and onto the pages of the magazines I spent hours studying shaped my tastes from childhood to today. I was extremely fortunate to have seen this Mary Quant exhibition while I was there. As a mod enthusiast, I couldn’t have been happier reading every single sentence written on the exhibition labels that described her revolutionary and accessible designs. The Tate Modern holds my personal record for the longest amount of time I’ve spent at a museum: 6 hours.

All of this is apropos of nothing, but to say that Frieze London is currently going on, and I combed through their viewing rooms to see if anything caught my eye. Reader, I am delighted to report that the booths were strong, cohesive, and most importantly, I learned about a handful of new-to-me artists that will stay on my radar. Below are 8 presentations that include artists I would like to collect one day.

Union Pacific, London, presenting Aya Higuchi

About the artist: Aya Higuchi lives and works in Tokyo. Her small-scale subjects are often vignettes of everyday life.
Why I’d buy: I love paintings that are quiet, soft, a balm to my tired eyes. Paintings that hold a moment of delicate pleasure in perpetuity. These are perfect paintings, to me.

blank, Cape Town, presenting Annabelle Agbo Godeau and Kresiah Mukwazhi

About the artists: Agbo Godeau lives and works in Düsseldorf, whose work in both painting and installation “constructs fragmented narratives that resist resolution, employing visual metaphors such as concealment, revelation, and transformation.” Kresiah Mukwazhi is an arist from Harare. In her practice, she explores the power dynamics of the female body while “addressing latent forms of patriarchy and systemic violence.”
Why I’d buy: Along with paintings that capture calm moments of everyday life, I love those that resemble film stills, as Godeau’s do. There is a bit of suspension of disbelief if these are taken from life or the constructive narrative of cinema. As they say, real life can be stranger than fiction. Mukwazhi’s abstractions with bra straps as the medium is one of the most exciting reuse garments in art I’ve seen in a long time. Straps expand and contract, not dissimilar to paint being poured in stages on a canvas. Most importantly, these works make me consider, in a new way, how the female body is constantly being pulled apart today.

Cecilia Brunson Projects, London presenting Claudia Alarcón & Silät

About the artist: Claudia Alarcón is an Indigenous artist from the La Puntana community of Wichí people of the Gran Chaco region of northern Argentina. She leads the collective named Silät, a community of more than one hundred women weavers from the Alto la Sierra and La Puntana Wichí communities. The bio in their Frieze presentation explains, “Their fluid and rhythmic abstractions echo ancestral geometries and stories, and tie the weavers into a collective imagination, connecting them to past generations. The textiles, formed of geometric motifs drawn from the surrounding environment, are a method of communicating unspoken thoughts within a culture that values highly forms of non-verbal expression, and the messages found within dreams and subconscious intuition. Silät, the name adopted by the artist collective, means ‘information’ or ‘alert,’ and reflects the role of their textiles to convey messages and a shared cultural sentiment.”
Why I’d buy: Textile works never fail to introduce me to color combinations I would never consider otherwise. The patterns and colors in each of these simply make me happy, and I love learning about them! I also love seeing the way an artist's signature is woven into the design. :)

ChertLüdde, Berlin presenting Sandra Poulson

About the artist: Sandra Poulson is an interdisciplinary artist from Lunanda-Angola whose work focuses on the cultural and political landscape of Angola, investigating the historical and current “networks of existence” through “oral tradition and global political structure.” Garments are prominent art forms in her work, as she studied fashion design at Faculdade de Arquitectura, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, and completed her BA at Central Saint Martins.
Why I’d buy: I've been interested in the idea of displaying clothes in the home as works of art. I would like to see this happen more, perhaps even rotate with the season. Collectors of designer pieces should do this if they’re not going to wear archival runway pieces and would rather let them languish in their closets, but I understand the elements (sun exposure, dust, unforeseen home disasters, etc.) would deter some from doing this. An artwork that can scratch this itch? Show me the payment plan to make this happen.

Gypsum, Cairo presenting Yasmine El Meleegy and Marianne Fahmy

About the artists: Yasmine El Meleegy is based in Cairo and holds many titles, including archaeologist, designer, museologist, sculptor, and restorer. She excavates personal and collective memory to retell and examine cultural legacies. Marianne Fahmy lives and works in Alexandria and considers herself “a new historicist, using parafiction to deconstruct the social and political issues of the present.”
Why I’d buy: The color in each of these works allows me to see Alexandria through the artists’ eyes; there is always a specific palette for a place. Juxtaposed, the roughness of labor concludes with soft leisure. A reminder that work is rewarded.

The Pit, Los Angeles, presenting Viola Frey and Jennifer King

About the artists: Viola Frey (1933-2004) produced thousands of works of art throughout her 40-year career, including sculptures, paintings and drawings. The topics she investigated in her work include gender dynamics and social constructs. Simialrly, Jennifer King explores the roles women hold and identity, often drawing on moments in her own life to provide sources of reflection on “the personal and the collective, the tender and the absurd, and the ongoing search for equilibrium in an ever-shifting world.”
Why I’d buy: I believe ceramics are often overlooked in art collecting. Is the fear of the object breaking keeping people from buying them? I like how the colors in each of these works correspond to one another and how their narratives differ: blue hands reach toward a fan amid chaos, and once found, cooling peace is possible. Peachy pink, grassy green, and cobalt blue pair well. The intentionally haphazard black squiggles express the artist’s hand.

Rose Easton, London, presenting Jan Gatewoood

About the artist: Jan Gatewood is a Los Angeles-based artist who takes a “sugar in the medicine” approach to depicting topics including personal identity, race, and social history with multilayered organic and inorganic materials.
Why I’d buy: Recently, I’ve had a renewed interest in Rita Ackermann’s work and have been following Oliva van Kuiken’s art star rise. There is a stylistic similarity found in Gatewood’s work with these artists: the fusion of an abstracted base with graphic brushstrokes that make the canvas-bound narrative pop for the eye and imprint on the mind. I love the bratty facial expression of this figure, along with the rabbit that doesn’t know what it got itself into.

Franz Kaka, Toronto, presenting Anne Low

About the artist: Anne Low is a Canadian artist who explores the historical contexts of objects and how they express value, especially those related to domestic interiors and decorative arts, through sculpture, installations, textiles, and printmaking.
Why I’d buy: One of the most striking forms of art in my eyes is seeing massive textiles fitted against a blank wall. They are confrontational, demanding your attention to look closely at the warp and wefts built up for their creation. Textiles are relegated to the mind as being strictly utilitarian, non-art objects. I appreciate it when an artist dares us to rethink our relationship to objects we may be familiar with, but should spend more time with to consider their nuances.

Exhibitions on View in London

Museums

Marie Antoinette Style
What: “A complex fashion icon, Marie Antoinette’s timeless appeal is defined by her style, youth and notoriety. Explore the lasting influence of the most fashionable (and ill-fated) queen in history – with over 250 years of design, fashion, film and art.”
Where: V&A
When: Now - March 22, 2026

Design and Disability
What: “Both a celebration and a call to action, Design and Disability showcases the radical contributions of Disabled, Deaf, and neurodivergent people and communities to design history and contemporary culture, from the 1940s to now.”
Where: V&A
When: Now - February 15, 2026

Nigerian Modernism
What: “Nigerian Modernism tells the story of artistic networks which spanned Zaria, Ibadan, Lagos and Enugu, as well as London, Munich and Paris. Through groups like the Zaria Art Society and Mbari Artists’ and Writers’ Club, they fused Nigerian, African and European techniques and traditions to create vibrant, multidimensional works.”
Where: Tate Modern
When: October 8, 2025 - May 10, 2026

Lee Miller
What: “The exhibition will showcase Miller’s extraordinary career, from her participation in French surrealism to her fashion and war photography. Exploring her artistic collaborations, the exhibition will also shed light on lesser-known sides of her practice, such as her remarkable images of the Egyptian landscape in the 1930s.”
Where: Tate Modern
When: October 2, 2025 - February 15, 2026

Wayne Thiebaud. American Still Life
What: “This exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery is the first ever museum show of his work in the UK. It presents Thiebaud’s remarkable, vibrant and lushly painted still-lifes of quintessentially post-war American subjects, from diner food and deli counters to gumball dispensers and pinball machines. These are the paintings with which Thiebaud made his name in the USA in the early 1960s.”
Where: The Courtauld
When: October 10, 2025 - January 18, 2026

Galleries

Bex Massey: The Ágalma
What: “Bex Massey’s paintings carry a soft realism; images rendered in oil paint are displayed in relational pairs, usually two per canvas. A selected image appears beside its counterpart; the combination forms the start of a visual equation waiting to be balanced by you, the viewer.”
Where: Seventeen
When: September 12 - October 25, 2025

Zemba Luzamba
What: “Sharp suits, polished shoes, tightly knotted ties: in Zemba Luzamba’s paintings, clothing is more than style - it is a language of freedom and resistance. The figures that Luzamba paints are sapeurs, members of the Congolese sub-culture known as SAPE (the Société des Ambianceurs et des Persons Élégantes) that emerged in the 1960s and 70s when President Mobutu banned the wearing of Western-style suits in favour of the abacost, a lightweight suit which was traditionally worn without a tie. To Luzamba and many Congolese today, the tailored suit continues to signal defiance and individuality.”
Where: Kristin Hjellegjerde
When: September 6 - October 25, 2025

Danielle Mckinney
What: “In Mckinney’s paintings, her protagonists are caught in a balance of tension and relaxation. Depicted on the brink of transition, they exist in states of perpetual liminality. Often nude, robed in a dressing gown, or draped in crinkled bed sheets, the figures are at once sensual, emotive and softly formidable. Lost in thought, daydreaming or asleep, each woman is absorbed in her own private world – far removed from the humdrum of external life.”
Where: Galerie Max Hetzler
When: September 18 - November 1, 2025

Unveiled Desires: Fetish & The Erotic in Surrealism, 1880 - Today
What: “The exhibition forms part of the gallery’s six-month program dedicated to women artists in Surrealism and traces more than a century of artistic engagements with eroticism by female and queer artists across painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture.”
Where: Richard Saltoun
When: Part 1: October 13 - December 20, 2025; Part 2: January 13 - February 28, 2026

Lisa Brice: Keep Your Powder Dry
What: “Known for her depictions of feminine actors in interior spaces and working environments, Brice reflects on the erosion of safety in the current socio-political climate. She gives her protagonists codes of collective assertiveness, an emboldened and defensive response, willing the triumph of the underdog.”
Where: Sadie Coles HQ
When: October 15 - December 20, 2025

Rachel Lancaster: Notes Lie Long
What: “In this new body of work, Lancaster continues her idiosyncratic investigation into the emotive and conceptual potential of painting. Her subjects, cropped, close, and seemingly familiar, hover on the edge of recognition. A glimpse of blonde hair casually tied with a green band; the tangible soft texture of a mohair jumper; the potential touch of two hands meeting.”
Where: Workplace
When: October 9 - November 21, 2025

Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey
What: “Conceptually rigorous and visually seductive, Gregory’s work invites important reflection on power structures, representation and cultural memory. The exhibition’s title comes from the proverb, ‘you catch more flies with honey than vinegar’, a phrase that Gregory’s mother used to say to her. It encapsulates her approach to art as political ‘with a small p’; her intimate, visually pleasurable and poetic works encouraging nuanced rather than polemical discussion.”
Where: Whitechapel Gallery
When: October 8, 2025 - March 1, 2026

Madeleine Moments
What: “Retracing one’s steps through the corridors of memory, searching for particular moments or times, is rarely a simple task. More often, it proves impossible to do so by will alone; instead, we must wait for ‘madeleine moments,’ when the sensorial textures of daily life unearth what has long been concealed. It is within forgotten yet familiar scents, tastes, sounds, and places that such moments rise again.”
Where: Union Pacific
When: October 3 - November 8, 2025

Cultural Digest:

• This post was soundtracked by PinkPantheress’s remix tape Fancy Some More? My favorite tracks: Stateside + Bladee, Illegal + Nia Archives, Noises + JT, Nice to Know You + Sugababes, Girl Like Me + Kaytranada, and Tonight + Basement Jaxx (!!!).
  

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Samantha Pleet x Francesca DiMattio

Last fall, I wrote this piece for Architectural Digest, analyzing the relationship fashion designers have with interior design and how references to home decor infuse their collections. I had an enthralling conversation with Samantha Pleet and her husband, Patrick, about art, design, and architecture that could've gone on for hours. In this piece, Samatha told me about her grandmother’s Tudor-style home covered in floral-pattered wallpaper that serves as endless inspiration when she is developing patterns, “There’s a lot of personal storytelling in my clothes, which I feel is the most important element. There is a human touch and a history behind my patterns [beyond] their aesthetics that connect our lives to what we create.” This past week, she released a new collection in collaboration with the artist Francesca DiMattio, who blends architecture, art history, and design references into her paintings and scupltures. Garments fit for the most imaginative design lovers ( i.e., me, I am an imaginative design lover)! This collection was welcomed into the world with a celebration held at DiMattio’s porcelain-adorned Manhattan townhouse, which has been featured in The World of Interiors. As you can see, motifs found throughout her art and home make for equally eye-catching textile patterns: delicate cobalt blue flowers signature in porcelain art and joyful expressions of rosebuds enliven wardrobes and walls.

Tanner Fletcher SS26, “Re-Decorating”

Most runway spectacles performed at fashion weeks in the recent past have come across as flash-in-the-pan moments for virality. Thankfully, Tanner Flecther literally delivered a substantial presentation for their latest Spring Summer 2026 collection titled “Re-Decorating.” As soon as the moving truck doors swung open, it was time to get a peek into dressing and decorating when the weather begins to warm and the flowers start to bloom. And when the flowers bloom, you will certainly have a baby blue ceramic vase to display the spoils of May showers.

Each of the models was accessorized with objects that were co-designed by Tanner Flecther for Etsy or hand-picked selections from sellers on the ultimate website for treasure hunters. As models entered the living and dining room, they gingerly placed their wares in the room they were destined for, all dressed up to dress the home. The pairings of the home goods and looks are impeccable. So much so that I will consider wearing headkerchifs to coordinate with a polished napkin and ring (imagine this as a bangle concept, a substantial silver bracelet with a cotton napkin to dab off sweat), carrying a ruffled pillow in case of an emergy nap in a fabric that matches my dress, hell, why not walk around with an artwork, I don’t mind being a walking billboard for artists I love! What I love most about this collection is the enhanced attention to the way the shape of home goods resemble clothing structure, particularly with the exaggerated bow loops and ends, and the accompanying candelabra and the column dress with an extra flair, and the lampshade. Least we not mention the function of draping when Romilly Newman, Gen-Z’s Martha Stewart , according to Town & Country, closing the show, emerges from the truck effortlessly carrying a set of 1700’s reproduction curtains matching her gown.

The Semiotics of Dressing

Earlier this year, I visited the exhibition The Semiotics of Dressing at the Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery, a gallery specializing in decorative arts and design. My interest was immediately piqued because I studied semiotics throughout my undergrad; it is a valuable theoretical framework for my interdisciplinary studies in art history and communications. For those unfamiliar, semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and how they create meaning. The two principal founders are the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, each defining systems for analysing language through words, images, or more generally “signs.” Saussure is famously known for ascribing sign systems to language and defining the components of signs, which are the signifier (word, sound, image, visual component), signified (concept behind the visual/sonic component), and the sign (the combination of the signifier and signified, the whole meaning of the visual/sonic component). Pierced favored pragmatism in his work and defined signs into three main categories: “an icon, which resembles its referent (such as a road sign for falling rocks), an index, which is associated with its referent (as smoke is a sign of fire), and a symbol, which is related to its referent only by convention (as with words or traffic signal).”1

However, upon rereading the exhibition’s text, I was extremely disappointed in the lack of how this framework relates to the objects on view. Instead, it rambles on about “the concept of the dressing room as a private place of metamorphosis; it is a jewel box where delicate adornments become instruments in service of beauty. Furniture, lighting, art and decorative objects comprise the dressing room’s scenography, a deliberate and thoughtful – even possibly peculiar – arrangement.” Okay…Nothing irritates me more than when a body of text repeats itself with different words, as this one does. It points out that the title derives from Martha Rosler’s The Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), in which the artist parodies Julia Child by way of standing in a kitchen and assigning letters from the alphabet to the tools found in the domestic space, adding frustration to her voice as this video work goes on. For additional context, Rosler explains this work, “I was concerned with something like the notion of ‘language speaking the subject,’ and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.”2 But how does this specifically relate to the objects in this exhibition? The text would’ve been stronger if they could connect this with anything in the gallery, especially since this work is a critique of domestic labor and not dress.

Sure, the meaning between an object and an individual is subjective. Still, there is no inciting idea for visitors to consider, especially if they are unfamiliar with semiotics. Why were these objects chosen in relation to the signifier and signified between the individual and their dressing room? What do the materials tell us about the act of dressing and its performance? Respectfully, if you want your audience to gain an understanding of your exhibition’s thesis, you’re gonna need to be more explicit about the purpose of the works in the show. But, if the goal was to draw people in because any mention of dressing is a light to the eclipse of moths that only want to look at beautiful objects, then this is a success.

Anyway, the pieces below sent me into an analytical spiral.

What did I think about when I first saw this piece? Well, I considered the reflective material and how it causes us to look at ourselves, how window blinds create a barrier between a private interior and the exterior world, and the consideration of self-presentation in both spaces. Does self-perception in either of these areas, physically or emotionally, correspond? Do they diverge, as extravagant clothes detract from an introverted disposition? Alignment between the public and private self is a rich topic for contempation with this piece.

My mind flipped through the images in my mental archive and landed on Louise Bourgeois’s Blue Days as soon as I saw Hermann Becker’s Gessler Clothing Rack. Initially, it resembled any modern sculpture, but the felt-covered curves are aching for clothing to cover them. That is the beauty of this work: it can function as both an objet d’art and a utilitarian clothing support. The conversation between these two works began to take shape in my mental gallery as Bourgeois fills the void present in Becker’s, 3-dimensional mannequin forms are extended into space to display an intensified version of “the human body and of life’s episodes (those as daughter, wife, mother, woman, artist).” When Bourgeois was 85, she began to explore her wardrobe for inspiration, using her collection of garments and textiles to fashion “fabric drawing” that expanded upon themes like family, memory, and desire that are present throughout her oeuvre. Bourgeois noted, “You can retell your life … by the shape, weight, colour and smell of those clothes in your closet. They are like the weather, the ocean, changing all the time.”3


Honorable Mentions:

London Fashion Week is currently underway, and I would be remiss not to mention these standout looks from Simone Rocha's Spring/Summer 2026 collection. The draping across select outerwear pieces and bottoms evoke unruly curtains swooping into a floral display on a nearby side table, making for well-scented tiebacks. Plastic coverings shield “dry clean only” finery that is reminiscent of the bespoke sheaths reserved for furniture covered in precious textiles. This is a collection so dreamy she included pillows as accessories:

The World of Interiors recently published the perfect editorial on the culmination of interior design and fashion. Taking inspiration from the book Jane Asher’s Fancy Dress, a gaggle of luminaries, including Zandra Rhodes and Jane Asher herself, are styled in over-the-top costumes resembling home goods to flaunt the latest and greatest fabrics this season.

Cultural Digest:

• Literature: I’m starting Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic. I’ve been noting in each of my books when I start and finish them, averaging about a month for each. I like to absorb each sentence on every page, slow and steady, to remember better.

• Articles: Everyone’s favorite fashion critic Rachel Tashjian on the banality of New York Fashion Week. I agree that Anna Sui (the nod to Southwest aesthetics caught my eye, as this style has been a topic on my mind to research, being back in the desert) and Eckhaus Latta were standouts, as was the fantastically tacky AREA. I loved this brilliant piece on yearning and style by Rachel Kushner in the New Yorker. Need to reread The Flamethrowers.

• TV: Last fall, I tried to watch Gilmore Girls for the first time while teaching myself how to crochet. I’m doing this earnestly this season.

• Film: In honor of both the Robert Altman collection on Criterion and fashion month, I pressed play on Prêt-à-Porter (1994). I enjoyed the tapestry of drama and collection presentations. Recent watches include: a double feature with the theme of “male internal conflict that ends with a club banger” that consisted of Trainspotting (1996) and Beau Travail (1999). A Trainspotting rewatch was inevitable after seeing it listed in the ‘90s Soundtrack Movies collection on Criterion and getting served Underworld’s Boiler Room set on TikTok repeatedly. If I had three words to describe Beau Travail they would be: militaristic Merce Cunningham. I also did a double feature with the theme “Girl, so confusing in the high desert,” which was comprised of 3 Women (1977) and Female Perversions (1996). Female Perversions is one of the few films I watched for the first time this year that I keep thinking about. I hope to turn this pairing into a newsletter post one of these days. Stay tuned.
  

1

This was pulled from Britannica’s quick primer on semiotics. It also notes the famous Film Forum banana bread lover and French philosopher Jacques Derrida as a semiotics user. Other men who have impacted my academic life are also included: Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jacques Lacan. If these names don’t ring bells, then I’m sad the academic system failed you, but please educate yourself offline. Print their work out / buy their books, and get to note-taking.

I have a question for the organizers of The Armory Show: Why do you not have online viewing rooms? I have consistently checked their website over the past few days and was met with a dizzying list of exhibitors that rerouted me to their websites, which had half-baked pages for their fair offerings. I am incredibly disappointed. OVRs provide accessibility to everyone. Don’t you want to reach more clients or possible future clients in an ever-precarious market? Not only that, I think they are helpful press tools for the fair, galleries, and artists. During such a busy art weekend, it would be reassuring to know that one can refer back to the fair’s website to refresh one’s memory of impressive booths to either write about or send to clients…If this finds anyone from The Armory, I am more than happy to assist and build out these viewing rooms. Galleries too. If you need assistance with building online platforms to showcase your fair offerings (and it seems many do), I am an email away.

Not much was impressive overall; fairs are often used as curated stock cleanouts. Anyways, after clicking through pages and looking into my Instagram “Saved” folder, where I keep my inspiration images, below are the presentations that left an impression on me:

Mrs., New York, presenting Molly Bounds

The light Bounds captures feels crisp, perfect for the current shoulder season we are in. As a voyer looking onto her subjects, the moods abstracted and present on the figures’ faces radiate from the canvas. I sense the stoic contempation, quiet concentration, and glowy elation from my computer screen. Bounds works from both life and memory, depicting friends and loved ones in liminal spaces that are personal, with a hint of her own projection that imbues familiarity with a touch of the uncanny.

Keijsers Koning, Dallas, presenting Tamara Johnson and Michelle Cortez Gonzales

I appreciate the fullness of a domestic setting portrayed in this booth, situated between Johnson’s sculptures and Cortez Gonzales’ paintings.

Europa, New York, presenting Nick Farhi

Farhi translates his collection of 1970s film stills into paintings, translating the desire of filmmakers of that period into a reality. Dappled, grainy imagery with a potent narrative where frames can stand alone outside of the cinema. In the preview text, it notes “Farhi’s glowing edges make the paintings feel alive and unstable, caught between reality and dreams, all the while insisting on the vitality of vision, and the power of images to outlive their moment.”

Pangée, Montreal, presenting Élise Lafontaine

These paintings pull me in like a moth to a flame, magical worlds I want to escape reality and float among the abstract organic forms. This body of work “echoes Carl Gustav Jung’s concept of synchronicity, those coincidences in which an outer event mysteriously mirrors an inner state, with no rational explanation, and is yet charged with powerful symbolic meaning.”

HESSE FLATOW, New York, presenting Emma Safir

HESSE FLATOW also has a solo show of Emma’s work on view that looks great! When I said this would be the year of the shell, I am proven right more each day.

Fall Exhibitions in New York


Museums

Man Ray: When Objects Dream
What: The exhibition will feature approximately 60 rayographs and 100 paintings, objects, prints, drawings, films, and photographs to highlight the central role of the rayograph in Man Ray’s boundary-breaking practice.
Where: The Metropolitan Museum
When: September 14, 2025 - February 1, 2026

Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages
What: This exhibition showcases the richness of visual expression in Western Europe from the 13th to the 15th century, drawing primarily from The Met collection. This exploration of the visual language of desire in its many forms invites visitors to reflect on ideas of love, identity, and kinship today.
Where: The Met Cloisters
When: October 17, 2025 - March 29, 2026

Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective
What: This first posthumous survey celebrates the ways Asawa continuously transformed materials and objects into subjects of contemplation, unsettling distinctions between abstraction and figuration, figure and ground, and negative and positive space.
Where: Museum of Modern Art
When: October 19, 2025 - February 7, 2026

Sixties Surreal
What: This revisionist survey looks beyond now canonical movements to focus instead on the era’s most fundamental, if underrecognized, aesthetic current—an efflorescence of psychosexual, fantastical, and revolutionary tendencies, undergirded by the imprint of historical Surrealism and its broad dissemination. [Editor’s Note: I am curious to see the works selected for this show. Many artists in the 1960s did not refer to Surrealism in their work, and I’m afraid this connection might be a reach.]
Where: The Whitney Museum of American Art
When: September 24, 2025 - January 19, 2026

Dress, Dreams & Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis
What: The first exhibition to explore the cultural history of fashion and psychoanalysis that draws on key psychoanalytic concepts about the body, sexuality, and the unconscious to interpret almost 100 items of dress. Editor’s Note: These are themes I focused on in my MA thesis, and I already need the catalogue that will be released in November!]
Where: The FIT Museum
When: September 10, 2025 - January 4, 2026

Sèvres Extraordinaire! Sculpture from 1740 until Today
What: This exhibition presents the history of the Sèvres Manufactory and its production of extraordinary sculptural objects in various ceramic pastes. Organized by Sèvres, Manufacture et Musée nationaux, and Bard Graduate Center, the exhibition is the first outside of France to highlight the production of sculpture made at the famed porcelain manufactory.
Where: Bard Graduate Center
When: September 10 - November 16, 2025

Galleries

*I will more than likely write about some of these in future posts because they are inspiring.*

What: Sasha Gordon: Haze
Where: David Zwirner, 533 West 19th Street, New York, New York 10011
When: September 10 - October 18, 2025

What: Angela Burson: Analog Conditions
Where: Hashimoto Contemporary, 54 Ludlow Street, New York, NY 10002
When: September 6-27, 2025

What: Claudia Keep: New York
Where: March, 62-64 Avenue A, New York, NY 10009
When: September 4 - October 18, 2025

What: Anne Buckwalter: Lover’s Knot
Where: Uffner & Liu, 170 Suffolk Street, New York, NY 10002
When: September 5- November 1, 2025

What: Nianxin Li: Neon Haze
Where: Uffner & Liu, 170 Suffolk Street, New York, NY 10002
When: September 5- November 1, 2025

What: Madeleine Ray Hines: As Is
Where: Tara Downs, 424 Broadway, Floor 3, New York, NY 10013
When: September 5 - October 25, 2025

What: Erin M. Riley: Life Looks Like a House For a Few Hours
Where: P.P.O.W., 392 Broadway, New York, NY 10013
When: September 5 - October 18, 2025

What: Olivia van Kulken: Bastard Rhyme
Where: Matthew Brown, 390 Broadway, New York, NY 10013
When: September 5 - October 18, 2025

What: Emma Kohlmann: Moon Minds
Where: Silke Lindner, 350 Broadway, New York, NY 10013
When: September 5 - October 4, 2025

What: Brandi Twilley: Recent Flowers
Where: Sargent’s Daughters, 370 Broadway, New York, NY 10013
When: September 5 - October 18, 2025

What: Nihura Montiel: Corporate Goddness
Where: Sebastian Gladstone, 36 White Street, New York, NY 10013
When: September 5 - October 25, 2025

What: Rosie Harbottle: The Tomatoes Are Ripe!
Where: Scroll, 86 Walker St, New York, NY 10013
When: September 5 - October 18, 2025

What: Emma Safir: Uyt Den Gheest
Where: HESSE FLATOW, 77 Franklin Street, New York, NY 10013
When: September 5 - October 4, 2025

The last dregs of summer are lingering, but they won’t be here for long. The art world has returned from holiday and is ready for a fresh season of fairs, exhibitions, and happenings. Back-to-school season never ends; the way that it presents itself evolves. Early September marks a fresh slate of learning and discovery, especially in the arts. Nearly every gallery will have an opening this weekend to coincide with the multiple art fairs this weekend.

Although I may not physically be in New York, that will not stop me from writing about what is on display. 😈 I’ve done it for years and will keep doing it! Art doesn’t hit the same when looking at images of it, but what have I always returned to when I need a mental refresh? Images. They have been my #1 research resource for decades and opened my eyes to work I would never have access to, from the past to the present. Shout out to all the photographers working overtime this week, covering the cornucopia of installations. Your work is keeping me informed and inspired.

Without further ado, below are the booths that I would send an inquiry email to at Independent Art Fair’s fall edition, which highlights underrecognized artists and movements of the 20th century. As soon as The Armoy Show’s online viewing rooms go live, I’ll comb through them and share my selections in addition to the exhibitions that I would like to see in the city.

Independent 20th Century

What: The 4th edition of Independent Art Fair’s fall edition, focusing on underrecognized artists and movements of the 20th century
When: September 4-7, 2025
Where: Casa Cipriani at the Battery Maritime Building, 10 South Street, New York
Tickets: Single-day tickets: $45, Run-of-show: $75, Vernissage: $120

Sea View, Los Angeles, presenting Bruce Richards

Upon first glance, you may confuse Richard’s work with another one of my favorite West Coast artists: Ed Rucha. Inanimate objects floating in space, yet hold an “ambiguous dualism and talismanic potency.” Paul Maziar explains these seemingly innocuous objects that occur in Richard’s work: “Often rendered in trompe-l’œil at 1:1 scale, the compositions flirt at the boundary of a particular place. No mere blandishments, they envelop the psyche. A letter and a rock (or cudgel, as haunting and heavy an image as any of them), a t-bone steak, an antique scissor—float suspended in a void, beset by the faint luminescence of some occult force. They’re not symbols to be decoded but presences to be reckoned with.” As someone who enjoys examining the relationship between people and objects, I doubly relish artists who center their work on this topic.

Tony Shafrazi, New York, presenting Brandon Deener

Jiffy Corn Muffin mix was a staple in my house growing up. As a special weekend treat, sometimes my dad would transform the batter into cornbread pancakes. Of all the classic American brands, Jiffy never gets the recognition it deserves. For his Jiffy Box Series, Deener plays upon Andy Warhol’s signature Campbell’s Soup Cans in his depiction of a product that his own mother used and adapted in her recipes. He continues the legacy of Pop Art by imbuing it with his own personal history while evoking a “visual poem to seriality, mass production, and consumerism.”

Lovay Fine Arts, Geneva, presenting Lucia di Luciano

I’ve found myself attracted to abstract paintings that resemble textiles placed under a macro zoom lens. This presentation is the 93-year-old Luciano’s first feature in the U.S. Although this is the first time her work is being shown in the States, she was a pivotal figure in the Italian art movement Arte Programmata in the early 1960s. These artists composed works defined by a series of systems and sequences to explore the concept of authorship in creation.

Addison Rowe, Santa Fe, presenting Raymond Jonson

Of the presentations focused on enhancing a historical lineage, this is the best one. Raymond Jonson was a founding member of the Transcendental Painting Group, an American modern artist, and a central figure in New Mexico’s art scene. According to the text in the online viewing room, “ his work helped usher in a new form of expression combining spirituality and dynamic colorations in abstract compositions, a radical shift in the art movement of the period.” In addition to Johnson’s work, a selection of paintings by fellow members of the Transcendental Painting Group are also on view, including works by Georgia O’Keeffe and Ida O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Emil Bisttram, and Dane Rudhyar.

Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York, presenting Judy Pfaff

Judy Pfaff does not simply press a brush to a canvas, but “paints in space.” The layered techniques that form her lively works include collage, printmaking, and of course, the classic paint and brush method to activate the eye. There is no shortage of dynamism in the collaged shapes, colors, and materials in her work. Cristin Tierney Gallery will also open Pfaff’s first solo show with the gallery on Friday, October 17th, to inaugurate their new location in Tribeca.

Richard Saltoun Gallery, London and New York, presenting Baya

I believe this presentation of Baya’s work fulfills the thesis of this fair. In all the historical research I have done in the realm of modern art, her name never appears, though it should. Born Fatima Haddad (also known as Baya Mahieddine) in Bordj El Kiffan, Algeria, she was a self-taught artist who depicted jubilant women among vibrant natural motifs in a folkloric style that was antithetical to the exoticised renderings of women made by European artists during this period. After her breakthrough exhibition at Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1947, her work caught the attention of André Breton, who had nothing but praise for her work:

“I speak not, as so many others do, to lament an ending, but to promote a beginning, and in this beginning, Baya is queen. The beginning of an age of emancipation and harmony, a radical break from what came before, driven in part by man’s growing, systematic attunement to nature… Baya, whose mission is to restore meaning to those beautiful, nostalgic words: ‘Arabia Felix’ [‘Happy Arabia’]. Baya, who holds and rekindles the golden bough.”

Art Events in New York in September

Salon Zürcher: 100 Women of Spirit +, Part 3
What: The title is derived from the French phrase femmes d’esprit, which was bestowed upon women artists and intellectuals in 18th-century France. 11 women artists are featured in this year’s 33rd edition of the fair.
When: September 2-7, 2025
Where: Zürcher Gallery, 33 Bleecker Street, Soho, Manhattan
Tickets: Free

Art on Paper
What: 11th edition of the celebrated fair with 100 galleries showcasing modern and contemporary paper-based art.
When: September 4-7, 2025
Where: Pier 36, 299 South St, New York, New York
Tickets: Single Day Tickets: $35 plus fees, Fair Weekend Pass: $65 plus fees

Clio Art Fair
What: A two-weekend event highlighting independent artists without gallery representation.
When: September 4-7 & 18-21 2025
Where: 511 West 25th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Tickets: VIP Opening Reception Tickets on Sept 4th & 18: $35.00, Free from Friday-Sunday each weekend

Open Inviational New York: An Art Fair for Artists With Disabilities
What: This fair was recently inaugurated in Miami last December. They are dedicated to celebrating the work of artists with disabilities and broadening the awareness of progressive art studios.
When: September 4-7, 2025
Where: 356 Broadway, Ground Floor, Tribeca, Manhattan
Tickets: Free

Collectible Art Fair
What: The 2nd edition of the fair showcasing contemporary design
When: September 4-7, 2025
Where: 161 Water Street, Financial District, Manhattan, WSA Building
Tickets: Day Tickets: $28, Multi-Day Pass: $60

Duet at WSA
What: This exhibition, curated by Kyle DeWoody and Zoe Lukov, features work that explores various iterations of duality that appear as “partnerships, twins and two spirits, mirrors and reflections, and the magnetic tension between two forces.”
When: September 4-8, 2025
Where: 161 Water Street, Financial District, Manhattan
Tickets: Free

U-Haul Art Fair
What: Curated container trucks showing off their wares in Chelsea, this looks like the most fun event out of all of these.
When: September 5-8, 2025
Where: Somewhere outside the Javits Center, check their Instagram
Tickets: Free

Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair
What: My personal favorite event of the year! Blessedly back at MoMA PS1, there will be a seemingly endless number of exhibitors from around the world selling all kinds of printed materials and ephemera.
When: September 11-14, 2025
Where: MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens
Tickets: Free, until you start loading your arms up with goods.

Affordable Art Fair
What: A contemporary art fair featuring over 400 established and up-and-coming artists working across painting, prints, photography, and sculpture, with works priced anywhere between $100 to $12,000.
When: September 17-21, 2025
Where: Starrett-Lehigh Building, 601 West 26th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan
Tickets: $30 plus fees for a one-day pass, $85 plus fees for 2 people to attend the fair all weekend.

La Feria: Print Media Fair
What: Presented by NYU’s The Latinx Project, this fair will include a variety of print media by 45 artists and small publishers.
When: September 27, 2025
Where: 20 Cooper Square, 1st Floor & 3rd Floor, Noho, Manhattan
Tickets: Free

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During my last visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, school was on my mind. I was not thinking about my hands-on research in the Japanese art department for a class focused on Japanese Decorative Arts in grad school, where I learned about the significance of the flora painted and resist-dyed onto the kimonos and uchikake housed in their collection. Nor did I reflect on my time as an intern in the Costume Institute, preparing for the exhibition Women Dressing Women. As I wandered around the American Wing, I stumbled into a pocket-sized exhibition titled A Century of Massachusetts Samplers, 1739-1838, that displayed elaborate embroideries made by young girls as part of their school curriculum. I was transported back to 2007.

In my freshman year of high school, I enrolled in a fashion design course that was intended to teach students interested in garment making how to cut and sew patterns at the beginner level. It almost feels like a fever dream that this was even offered, as Las Vegas is not known for its sartorial offerings outside of retail. However, our showgirls have been influencing pop stars for years (a Taylor Swift residency would do wonders for our economy). In reality, this class was Project Runway meets Lord of the Flies; you had to fight your way to touch a sewing machine since the class and entire school were overcrowded. It wasn’t until the next year that the population would be reduced to a normal capacity, but by then, the fashion class was cut from the curriculum. I did not learn to sew. I did not cut a pattern. I don’t know how I even passed that class, but I wish I had learned how to create with needles, thread, and fabric at 15. I was utterly fascinated by examining the samplers and wish this style of craft was available to me. They are artful, comprising a range of techniques, which also strengthens this skill for practical applications.

A historical thread

The primary function of a sampler was to display an assortment of stitches that range from basic to elaborate. The earliest known embroidery samplers originated in 16th-century Europe from both professional and amateur needleworkers, serving as records for stitch patterns they favored. The majority of the surviving samplers in museums today were created by young women as part of their school curriculum. Sewing was seen as a vital skill for women to have, as they were responsible for taking care of linens and making clothes for their future families.

Noted by Amelia Peck in an article for the Met’s Timeline of Art History

…before the advent of public education in the mid-nineteenth century, in order to receive any education at all a boy or a girl had to be born into the middle or upper classes and have parents who valued education enough to pay for it. Usually, a boy would be taught traditional academic subjects, while a girl might be tutored in the barest rudiments of reading and arithmetic. Instead of academic studies, girls were usually sent to schools that taught an assortment of skills considered “female accomplishments”—music, watercolor painting, comportment, manners, and sewing.

Many young girls first learned how to mark samplers from their mothers, grandmothers, or in “dame schools,” community schools for women. Peck goes on to explain that both boys and girls were taught reading and arithmetic in addition to “knitting, sewing, and sampler-making instruction” at the equivalent of today’s elementary schools. However, most boys were able to advance their academic pursuits; formal training for girls generally ended here unless they were able to attend a ladies’ boarding school.

Teachers were integral in instructing their students on the various methods and styles of expression through needlework. Although there wasn’t a standard curriculum of what girls were taught, the majority of beginner-level stitches included geometric shapes, the alphabet, and numbers. Once they got a handle on the basics, girls were able to craft personal pieces by threading together motifs with religious verses and poems. These later served as documents of their educational training and the value they placed on mastering their stitching skills. Girls would often mark their initials, names, age, and date of completion on their finished samplers. These marks would also come in handy to keep track of prized home goods.

By the late 19th century, needlework in the classroom was unspooled from the curriculum. Markmarking was executed with materials found in schools today: paper, pencils, and blackboards (maybe not these, but they were present in my classrooms).

According to the Smithsonian American History Museum, samplers have become important objects for museums to acquire, as they reveal vital information — like the names of students, teachers, and schools — about the early lives and education of young women in America.

A Century of Massachusetts Samplers, 1739-1838

The wall text in the gallery notes that some states along the East Coast achieved financial stability after the American Revolution by participating in transatlantic trade. With this new influx of funds, more schools for girls opened with academically rigorous curricula. More than one hundred schools throughout Massachusetts offered needlework classes in their institutions.

The samplers on view were crafted by young women, primarily between the ages of eight and thirteen, displaying their artful sewing skills with imagery that reflected the pictorial and technical trends of the 18th and 19th centuries. The earlier samples depict bucolic scenes of leisure, animals, and flowers blossoming among the warp and wefts of linens. The markers of time and societal values slowly reveal themselves in the stitches with the movement into the 19th century. The themes of the samplers are focused on depicting familial and spiritual reverence and the value of female education.

These were a few of the works that caught my eye with corresponding information from their wall labels:

Salem needlework can often be identified by long stitches made of untwisted silk. This imported thread adds a lustrous sheen to the pastoral scene in Rebekah White's sampler. The elegant woman holding an open umbrella in the lower left is one of the earliest known American images of the ingenious Chinese invention, used for protection from both the sun and the rain.

In the 178os, Salem was a leading maritime trading center and supported many schools for educating young women. A hunting scene like this one, featuring a male figure watching his black-and-white dog chase a leaping stag, was a classic needlework subject of the eighteenth century. Mary proudly stitched "Salem" on to her sampler.

Millsent Connor's decorative sampler is laid out in two tiers of animated scenes, likely designed by Millsent herself. The upper scene features a cottage on a country lane, while the lower portion shows a grand brick house, its hostess at the door waiting to greet her visitor, who approaches on horseback. The two houses are connected by a vertical green road that defies conventional perspective.

This work is one of only fifty identified samplers made by Black American women. Angenett Jackson grew up in Boston, where Black children were able to attend the predominantly White schools, yet at the time she made this sampler, schools remained mostly segregated. She is known to have attended the Garrison Juvenile Society, a school established by local community members that met in a classroom in the African Meeting House.

This is one of three known samplers of similar design made by Parker family girls. Mary's sister, Sally, made one in 1799, and their cousin Harriot Parker stitched another dated 1808. While the school where they were made has yet to identified, these large samplers, with their impressive Federal houses at center, attest to the Parker family's pride in educating their daughters.

The Federal-era girls' schools and academies in Newburyport produced a group of samplers characterized by a two-handled vase with overflowing flowers, a strawberry-strewn dark green lawn, and a meandering floral vine border tied at the top with a bowknot. Lydia Pearson's sampler is amongst the finest of this group and features an inscription extolling the importance of women's education.

Clues to a unique immigration story are embedded in this family record sampler. The maker's father, Joseph Rochemont de Poyen, a French aristocrat, fled from his family's sugarcane plantation in Guadeloupe during the French Revolution, arriving in Newburyport in 1792. There he married Sally Elliot, a local girl. The distinctive names given to the children listed on the sampler refer to their parents' differing heritage.

Cultural Digest:

• Literature: I started reading Marlowe Granados’ Happy Hour. It has been on my ‘to-read list’ for years, and I’m aiming to finish it before the season ends.

• Article: Lauren Collins’ “The Case for Lunch” in The New Yorker. Lunch is the most important meal of the day. I love a big lunch and a small bite later on.

• TV: I haven’t pressed play on Project Runway in years, but I decided to return this season since Law Roach is a judge. I’m enjoying his criticisms from a styling perspective. The creative ingenuity of the designers is endlessly inspiring, even when the garments are ugly.

• Film: I’ve been on a music-centric film spree. Recent watches include: Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991), 24 Hour Party People (2002), and The Decline of Western Civilization (1981). I also watched The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Dells (2024).\

Sources:

• The researchers and curators in the American art department at the Met.

• Amelia Peck, “American Needlework in the Eighteenth Century.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 1, 2003.

• Valerie J. Davis, “The ABCs of Schoolgirl Samplers: Girls’ Education and Needlework From a Bygone Era.” Milwaukee Public Museum.

• “American Samplers.” Smithsonian American History Museum.

Lauren Vaccaro: Out of all the artistic mediums, what drew you to photography?

Sylvie Harris: I didn't immediately gravitate towards photography. When I was taking my first photo class as a freshman in college, it didn’t resonate with me until I saw the images I was capturing as translations of mental sketches. I never carried a sketchbook or regularly drew, but I like to keep notes of things. However, I always had a strong inclination towards art and knew that it was a path I would pursue.

I started loving photography while I was working in the darkroom because it was tactile. I like the concept of taking pictures as sketches for myself and making images with intention because you only have so many exposures on a roll of film. It’s a precious and physical process. When I began printing on textiles, that's when everything started to gel.

LV: When I dabbled in photography myself, it took time to adapt to the physical mechanics inherent in the process. It's a joy to get to the point when something clicks and you can translate what you have in your head into something physical. And if it works, why not stick with this to see how it develops, so to speak.

SH: That is the whole challenge of photography. You see something you want to capture, but then you have to use this machine to make it happen. I have a good understanding of the mechanics for taking pictures, but it can be a hurdle to jump over. Once I made the leap and I found confidence in working with this process, things took off from there.

I think that there's something visceral about processing images in the darkroom and printing on textiles. The procedure of making the image, developing the film, and printing it on the paper. All the mixing, all the chemicals, moving things from the trays. When I learned how to print on textiles, although it's different, it had a similar tactile nature to it. Whereas taking a picture, working on it digitally, and then printing it digitally, that's great and a huge skill. But something was missing in terms of me feeling like that was the final product.

LV: I know you work with both archival and your images on textiles, but how do you reframe these images on materials beyond paper? Do you have an idea of how your work will take shape as a garment to be worn or as a free-form, sculptural piece?

SH: I go through different phases of that. Right now, I have archival images and one that I've taken, but it's also about coordinating how I want certain projects to tell stories, which right now is the maternal lineage of garment making. Recently, I've been going through images that my mom took or exist in our family archive. I usually print them out on a small scale and place them on the wall to look at for a while. Once I commit to printing it on silk, I am committed to making the work. I spend a lot of time thinking, “How does this work with this concept?” Then I consider how they take shape in the form of a pattern.

LV: I love how the works took shape in your “Lineage of Labor” show. What was the spark for you to explore domesticity, especially in a medium historically connected to women's work across generations?

SH: I've been thinking about this for a long time because I was pretty close with my grandmother, who passed away when I was a teenager. She was a talented seamstress and made clothes for many people in my family. She stopped doing it so much for her younger kids because she had nine children, and she kind of stopped halfway through. She also cooked three meals a day for 11 people who lived in her house. She worked herself to the bone, but I had such a reverence and appreciation for her. I loved her. She was also incredibly artistic. And I think she understood me as an artist. She would like to send me drawings or sketchbooks with drawings of hers on the first few pages. But she also spent so much time sewing and had a special corner in the basement where she worked. My great-grandmother did the same thing. I've always been interested in this idea, of these beautiful projects that my grandmother made, but they never made their way outside the home. And that wasn't necessarily her goal.

I've thought about what my grandmother would have wanted, and I can't make assumptions that she wanted to do anything aside from making clothes or decorative things for the house. However, I do think there is an underappreciation of objects made for the home. They are usually relegated to this other world of craft, but there's a whole history in art of women making these beautiful items for the home that are considered just crafts. I think looking at what she created and appreciating the things that she did, these beautiful objects that were beautiful and made for daily use, and then also knowing that they just don't get seen in the same way as other art forms like paintings. I am always thinking about how these domestic objects operate and how domestic work is framed differently.

LV: This is also something I am so fascinated by and want to sink my teeth into more from the notions you brought of how certain objects are classified in art. I am always questioning why decorative objects designed for the home aren't as appreciated as a painting. Why can't an everyday item hold the same weight in value as an “art object,” when these handmade items are carefully created for a specific purpose? It's interesting how people perceive what is valuable and what isn't, when I'm always of the mind of thinking it's all valuable. It's all for a reason, especially when it's the desire to create something for themselves as a creative outlet or something for a family to enjoy and hopefully be passed down through generations to be appreciated throughout the familial lineage.

SH: I agree, it seems so blatantly obvious. Throughout history, those things have not been valued in the same way; however, the creation of domestic items was a way for people to express their creativity. If someone has a creative inclination, they're going to find a way to use it. There's no less artistic intention in these objects than there is in paintings hanging in museums. I wonder if this is shifting a little. I think there is a lot of textile art being made now. I think that there's maybe a reframing, but the way that the art world can be and is just inherently misogynistic, it will take a long time to change that.

LV: I do see hope with it, as there is a shift of people being so focused on interiors as well. From what I've seen, like within like the past year or so, even in fashion, newsletters are covering home objects. I'm endlessly interested in the way people present themselves and how they decorate their home, creating a world of their own in clothes and decor. Even in these discussions, female designers don't get the same coverage as men do. If anything, I'm glad that this discourse is going on regarding connecting that value and appreciation of what we bring into our home and how it relates to our lives, from a piece of clothing that we cherish or a piece of furniture that we hope to keep for a long time. Going back to textile works, which have historically been regarded as craft or outsider art, if it's a work made by a self-taught artist, who is to say what is and isn’t art? There are always these ridiculous stipulations that attempt to determine value based on how something was created, what it’s made from, and the skill level of the artist.

SH: Totally. I'm interested in that division. I was saying, as we're both talking about, like that division between the art object and the non-art object. But I think that this medium that I figured out is operating on this border that I really like because it's a printed photograph. Art is always going to keep evolving. Photography is a two-dimensional, precious medium. People create these beautiful prints that get framed and hung up on the wall. And to print them on textiles and kind of make them into this very fluid object and an object that references an apron, something that gets dirty, gets worn. It’s not a garment that you'd wear outside the house. It's not even a garment that you would treasure. So to operate in this gray area between all of those things, I think, is interesting. And I want to see how I can move to the point of somebody buying this work to wear. I think it would be interesting to experiment with why, when somebody's buying art, they can wear it and show it in their home. I'm not a trained seamstress, but improvement in this area is in the future. I think what I have created now is a great way to even track progress as an artist, to see how these objects evolve.

LV: Even if slight imperfections may appear, it’s important to cherish them. If we're looking at it as an art object or thinking about things made by hand or, you know, adding flourish to something, I still think there's such an important value in unexpected details.

SH: Yeah, that's a good point. And that's also what makes something made by hand special. The evidence of mark-making by the artist, which is something that we value a lot in other media. It would be interesting to include in textile work that has the potential to be born. I think it's better to reframe it than to just expect perfection.

LV: There's an expectation of perfectionism in nearly anything women do, including the various tasks we take on. I struggle with self-imposed perfectionism too. Something I cherish while looking at art, painting, for example, is when I get close to a canvas and the brush strokes are undetectable, but what I geek out on is looking at the sides and seeing the artist’s fingerprints that break the veneer of perfection. It’s refreshing to see an artist's hand. In an age where clothing or images are mediated by mechanical objects or systems, it's refreshing to see human touch.

SH: That's so true, especially digital photography. Perfection is kind of the goal. To see the imperfections, not to say there aren't imperfections in that process, but I'm much more of a perfectionist with photography because I'm trained as a photographer. It’s part of my job for images to be perfect for clients. Maybe I should embrace the slight glitches with textiles instead of thinking “I need to work on this.”

LV: When I went to your studio, I remember seeing the beautiful ball of collaged fabrics collected by your grandmother, and how she fused strips of mechanically made textiles into a sculptural collection.

SH: I love those balls of fabric. I use so much of her stuff. I inherited a lot of her sewing materials. All of the thread I have is from her. Obviously, she and I lived different lives. But in some ways, I'd like to think of it as kind of picking up where she left off artistically. She was able to sew, and she kind of passed that down in a way through her materials, which also makes me feel more connected to the work I’m making.

LV: Absolutely! The pieces that feature women working in textile factories is that a subject you plan on expanding upon in other ways in your work?

SH: I did a whole project with pieces of archival images and made this quilt from scraps of images of women working, and I think about this imagery a lot. However, I want to insert myself in the story and expand the imagery beyond my family's story. I'm wondering where I want to go and where I want to photograph. I love using archival images, but I don't think only archival images work for this. A contemporary experience, like mine, should be in the work too as well as the stories of other seamstresses. I think I need to just find more stories. Because I know my story, know my family story, but there's more. There's more out there.

LV: I think it'd be interesting to build an archive or create a visual tapestry of all the stories you come across from talking to people. The East Coast is rich with textile history.

SH: Oh, definitely. I feel that there's something in my neighborhood, too. I live in Greenpoint, which has a deep industrial history I want to learn more about. In some of my pieces, I used images from the photographer Lewis Heine. These specifically feature textile mills located in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts, where my great-grandmother worked. He traveled throughout the East Coast to these textile mills, many of which don’t exist today. But I know there are stories to uncover, especially in this part of Brooklyn.

I like the progression that my work has taken because I've experimented with many different things within both photo and textile. I still love working with both those mediums, and I feel grateful that I found a way to work with them together while I was in grad school. I initially started with quilting, and I liked that, but there wasn’t a connection to the quilting process in my family. I didn’t feel like I was expressing my story in this way with textiles. But then, when it came to garment-making, it felt more natural because I am fascinated by the construction of clothing and have been admiring clothes for as long as I can remember. I am not part of that world, but I just watch from the sidelines appreciating it. I've landed in this place now where I feel like I'm working in the way that's the most authentic to me.

I’ve noticed that there is a lot of experimentation in the art world today. I think the larger system of it is not working for a lot of people, but I think artists are making great work right now. I think artists are tired of the old structures and are trying new things. That's one of the benefits of things kind of falling apart.

LV: This is the reason why I advocate for keeping art programs, holding on to them for dear life in schools, because nothing will teach you problem-solving skills like being an artist or working on an art project. That is where practical problem-solving skills are developed.

SH: Absolutely. When I'm making a piece and I think it's going to turn out a certain way and it doesn't, then I have to figure out how to correct it. But there's also learning how to emotionally let go and not letting something get to your head. I've learned from every phase of my work, and I'm wondering what will come next. My main goal is to take more photos and try to get better at sewing.

Sylvie Harris’s work combines photographs and textiles into domestic garments that address the burden of the unachievable feminine ideal. Harris graduated in 2022 with an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago where she was also a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the recipient of the 2021 Stuart Abelson Graduate Research Fellowship in Krakow, Poland. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas, Foreman Gallery at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York and All Street Gallery in New York, New York, among others. Harris’s recent solo exhibitions include "The Ancestry of Home" at Arcade Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, “Lineage of Labor” at Swartley Gallery at Dwight Englewood School in Englewood, New Jersey and “Labor” at Korn Gallery at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Harris was born in 1993 in Chicago, Illinois, raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Follow Sylvie on Instagram:

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• wrote an incredible piece for her newsletter, Nobody’s Home, about the exhibition WORK/LIFE IMBALANCE on view at Kalei that celebrates the brilliant designer Gaetano Pesce’s colorful and expressive office interior, which he designed for TBWA Chait/Day. This is an office I would happily commute 40 minutes to in a heatwave and/or torrential downpour. I also can’t get it out of my mind how much the below mail chest reminds me of Jasper Johns’ work.
  

• The Venn Diagram of the girls who are excited about the Sofia Coppola-directed Marc Jacobs documentary and those upset at Kylie Jenner’s inclusion in Miu Miu’s Fall/Winter 2025 campaign is a circle. The worlds crafted by Marc Jacobs and Miuccia Prada are done so with precise intention, where the it girls of the moment inhabit. Those who have watched their brands develop over the years via fashion magazines and online runway images have the sharpest eye to spot when a shift happens for better or worse. ’s thoughts on the campaign casting hit my inbox at the perfect moment as I was wondering what Miuccia was thinking, and her piece mirrors many of the thoughts I had. After sitting with this throughout the week, I wondered if her inclusion reflected the symbolic little sister brand (Kylie/Miu Miu ) outshining in “coolness” to younger generations compared to her older siblings (the rest of the Kardashians/Prada). This is probably a stretch, and I don’t like to pair that family with these brands, but I also have two eyes and am online enough to see this unfolding. Their exact style may not be as prominent in the zeitgeist anymore, but the desire to make a living from “influencing” is Gen Z’s dream job. Depop and Poshmark are the proletariat’s Kardashian Kloset.

• Every summer is an Éric Rohmer summer, to me. I watched both The Green Ray and A Tale of Summer for the first time this week. The sequence of both films cover nearly the entire month of July, according to the cards that indicate the change of day and scene.

  

In my last post, I mentioned the exhibition Phantom Attractions at Astor Weeks and highlighted a few artists whose work resonated with me. There was one artist whom I wanted to research a little more, someone with a mysterious history, as there is very little information available about her life. Today, I would like to introduce you to Dorothy F. Foster.

Foster was born in Jersey City in 1903. Her mother, working as a dressmaker, eventually relocated the family to Manhattan for better career prospects. Following in her mother’s footsteps, she also chose a creative career path and went on to study art and interior design at the Cooper Union. After graduation, Foster began designing textiles and worked for A. Sulka & Company, a label recognized for their lush silk robes and custom shirts favored by royalty and film stars. Unfortunately, there is no record of what Foster worked on. We can only surmise how she laid out the patterns and paired colors together by viewing the archived advertisements and garments online and in museums.

She maintained her creative practice in other art forms, including writing poetry and painting throughout her life. In the 1970s, she moved to Port Jervis, New York to retire and spend time with her sister. Although she was away from the city, the creative energy never left her. Her ballpoint pens continually flowed as she produced hundreds of drawings of delicate figures outfitted in witchy, conical hats, facial silhouettes with their gazes into mystical atmospheres, dream worlds recorded with urgency on nearly any surface readily available to absorb her fantastic illustrations of the world that lived in her imagination. Envelopes, magazines, paper plates, and postcards were sufficient canvases, everyday items made otherworldly. For Foster’s presentation at Outsider Art Fair in 2023, writer Hannah Sheridan noted that the ballpoint pen-carved arches framing her work “adds a theatrical quality to each piece, as though the scene takes place on stage...Foster presents found images in a new context or erases the original image completely, leaving only the artist’s balanced compositions and rich color palette in their place.”

The only record that opens the portal into her world, where one may learn more about the cryptic catalog of artworks she created, is her 1973 autobiography titled The Noisesome Day, the Stilly Night. Foster recoded the quitodian goings on of her life, such as scenes of life in New York, birthdays, and personal reflections. In a quote that was pulled to explain her work for Phantom Attractions, she recorded that “daydreams seem to collide with facts…to come up breathless with something bright and lively, patchwork droll, and yet a whole new-patterned, conjured-into-being thing.”

Foster’s work was unearthed fairly recently from an antique shop in Port Jarvis, New York. Claire Iltis, an Associate Director at the Philadelphia-based gallery Fleisher / Ollman, uncovered faded photo albums containing the small, collage-like drawings and asked the shop’s owner, Robert Young, as many questions as she could about the origins of these artworks. Kismet struck twice for her that day, as he happened to be Foster’s grand-newphew. In a quote to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Iltis said, “It’s every dealer’s dream to be the one that finds the work. I can’t imagine how many caches like this have been lost to time.” Since 2022, Fleisher / Ollman has represented Foster and presented her pieces in various art fairs and exhibitions.

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of attending a screening of select films by Hollywood’s enfant terrible Kenneth Anger at Anthology Film Archives. An auteur of avant-garde cinema, Anger produced approximately 40 films throughout his life, from 1937 to 2013, that explored themes of pop culture, mythology, queer culture, and the occult through a unique, kaleidoscopic lens. While parsing through the digital archive of Foster’s works, a Morse code message began pinging in my mind, reminding me of the visuals that graced my eyes in Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon from 1971. Set at twilight in a blue-lit forest, we see Pierrot tiptoeing across a leaf-strewn ground, beckoning for the moon to radiate its affection onto him. As the short film goes on, cards of sunbursts are collaged within the video as fellow clowns, namely Harlequin and Columbine, and a rabbit entertain Pierrot during his quest. The mystical environment inhabited by costumed characters, the whimsical expressions animating their faces, and the soft moonlight drenching the scene could exist in the world of Foster’s illustrations.

Rabbit’s Moon belongs to Anger’s collection of films titled the "Magick Lantern Cycle,” which is comprised of nine of his most influential works, including Scorpio Rising (1963) and Inaguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), where he solidified his mastery in visualizing the uncanny, erotic, and magical scenes that occupied in his mind.

I do think the strongest visual correlations between Foster and Anger are reprsneted in Inaguration of the Pleasure Dome. Collaged faces that fade into one another, the visual energy of carmine red, and pure magic frozen in each still. For Film Quarterly, Carel Rowe wrote, “All of [Anger’s] films have been evocations or invocations, attempting to conjure primal forces which, once visually released, are designed to have the effect of ‘casting a spell’ on the audience. […] Not a surrealist who puts blind faith in his own dream images and trusts his dreams to convey an ‘uncommon unconscious,’ Anger works predominantly in archetypal symbol. As the magus, he is the juggler of these symbols, just as in the Tarot, where the Magician is represented by the Juggler and is given the attribution of Mercury, the messenger.”

The message I received when exploring the oeuvres of both Foster and Anger is that there are no limitations on imagination. Create for the sake of creating, allow your mind to wander into a metaphorical wood growing in your mind, because magic might be in there.

Sources:

• Zoe Greenburg, “An art director stumbled upon a stack of drawings in an antique shop. Could she make them the next big thing?” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 25, 2023.

• Hannah Sheridan, “Dorothy F. Foster,” Outsider Art Fair.

• Press Release for Phantom Attractions at Astor Weeks, New York.

• Press Release for The Stilly Night at March Gallery, New York.

• EC: KENNETH ANGER PROGRAM, Anthology Film Archives

Greetings,

I had the best intentions of writing this newsletter on a regular schedule, but life happened. I moved back to my hometown of Las Vegas a few weeks ago. The logistics of moving, working, making time to see my friends, and stopping at all my favorite haunts before my departure took precedence over writing. Be prepared for lessons, commentary, and the history of this kitschy city soon in forthcoming dispatches. When meeting people for the first time, I always dismissed where I’m from, even as their faces brightened in amazement. I noted my origins with a bit of an acidic tone, mostly due to the dissonance I felt between who I am and what I like and the connotations people have about Vegas. However, as my knowledge of design and architecture continues to grow, my appreciation for the unique buildings that have lined the Strip deepens. I love kitsch! I always have, and I felt a desire to reconnect with “bad taste” heightened after being away from and hopefully change the recipe of interpretation for others to develop an appreciation for odd nuances in tacky flavor. “Good taste” can also leave a sour aftertaste over time. Years ago, for a brief period, I worked at the Neon Museum while I was deep in my grad school application process. One of the projects I worked on was a master list of known motel signs that once decorated the city and documented their metadata. This was one of my favorite projects I have ever worked on. It reminded me of the rich architectural artistry I often overlooked, as I was always focused on leaving. Earlier this year, The New York Times published this story about the fight to save Googie architecture that primarily focused on the futuristic signs that remain in Los Angeles. I read this shortly after my return from the West after a five-year absence, and was emboldened to dive back into my mental reserves of knowledge because Googie was a huge style here. This city has been in constant evolution my entire life, and certainly, before I emerged into the arid landscape. It’s a shame how much history is lost because being out with the old and making way for the new is the norm and perceived mode of keeping the world’s attention to draw people to this oasis of LED screens and monetary chance. As a historian of art and design, the preservation of the past matters to me. And since I’m stationed here, I am excited to explore my hometown with refined eyes and share stories about this city that I’m sure you haven't heard before. 🎰✨

Introducing my Cultural Digest, my brief list of what I watched, read, and consumed each week.

• My dad and I watched the 30 for 30 documentary about Supreme titled “Empire of Skate.” I enjoyed it for the most part, but felt the ending was rushed. I wish there was a bit more elaboration at the end explaining the leap from being an if you know you know brand in New York to being coveted by people who don’t know anything about skateboarding. They briefly touched on the origins of their global resale market and limited product business model, but I would have liked to see the evolution of their marketing and how they reached those outside of the skate world. Maybe that would’ve taken too much time to explain and veered away from the sport element that drives the thesis of this documentary series. Still, the aesthetics of sports constantly influence areas of culture in ways that are sometimes unexpected. Maybe I’m upset because there was no mention of my favorite Supreme products: their accessories. The accessories embody the bratty, devil-may/care essence that one must possess to confidently grind the surfaces of municipal buildings. Having one of these charming and cheeky items digitally slip out of your shopping cart is just as painful as being ghosted by a four-wheeled wielding heart-throb (this never happened to me, I know better than to get involved with a skater). I educated my dad about some of the top-line objects they produced: the brick, Oreos, and of course, the Meissen porcelain sculptures wearing their own box logo t-shirts that I need for my archive. If you happen to see one for a good price, let me know. I would like to bequeath it to the Met one day; they need this in their permanent collection.

  

  
  

• With my move, I felt that my brain had a hard reset. It was a computer with a decibel-breaking fan, relentlessly whirring due to the innumerable tabs I left open of exhibitions to see, projects to research, and books to read. Unfortunately, my mind did not have the capacity for more information via the written word. But because the power cord has been yanked from the NYC power grid, it can get reacquainted with literature offline. I’ve been oscillating between Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection and Eve Babitz’s Black Swans. This is my first Babitz. I’m really leaning into west coast-based art again

• Speaking of which, I rewatched Gregg Arkai’s Totally F***ed Up as it is featured in Metrograph’s curated selections titled “LA Stories.” I want to write an analysis of rooms in his Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy, as the environments featured in The Doom Generation and Nowhere are as striking as the events that occur in each film. I also did my seasonal rewatches of Paris is Burning and Grey Gardens (I watch this every July 4th). Pre-move, I was working through the Criterion Collection’s “In the Deep End: Swimming Pools On-Screen” collection. I watched The Graduate for the first time (I need to be in the right mood to watch a classic), The Swimmer, Water Lilies, and 3 Women (I think this would make for a great double feature with Female Perversions, which was recently added to their channel to screen online).

• I’m rewacthing Girls. It has only gotten better over time.

Name a more perfectly summer pastime than spending a day at an amusement park, I’ll wait. Currently on view in New York are two shows that focus on popcorn-scented, vibrantly built mini worlds of imagination.

Grab some cotton candy and head off to see Jane Dickson: Wonder Wheel at Karma and the group show Phantom Attractions at Astor Weeks.

I first encountered Jane Dickson’s work during her exhibition Promised Land at Karma in the fall of 2023. As I walked through the gallery, her depictions of New York City at night glowed against the white walls. It was as if each work was an aperture, exposing ordinary scenes outside the gallery’s confines, frozen in time. Dickson’s work investigates the psychogeography of American culture. She moved to New York in the late 1970s and began exploring the texture of text by photographing her visually loquacious neighborhood: Times Square. In easily shifting materials like oil paint and sticks, she reilluminates her images against a range of surfaces, such as astroturf, sandpaper, felt, and traditional supports like canvas and linen to examine the American landscape. She has noted that the imagery and language that surrounds us in signage reveal “what Americans are thinking, what we want and why we want it,” which results in works that appear like soft, looming memories. Scenes that diffuse as we pass them day-to-day and in our minds over time.

In Wonder Wheel, the scenes are focused on whimsical, classic carnival scenes and abstracted amusement park rides, primarily Coney Island and the Feast of San Gennaro. The artificial landscapes of imagination are softened, slightly out of focus, like when our eyes grow tired after an afternoon in the sun or are diffused by the steam of food booths hawking sausages and peppers.

Phantom Attractions at Astor Weeks brings together a group of artists who cull the archives of theme parks to create work with the aim to “draw on emotionally-charged cultural artifacts and sites, especially those whose capital is built on economies of hope and desire.”

I am utterly fascinated by Zoe Beloff’s illustrations of a psychoanalytical carnival. On view are pieces that represent her best-known body of work, titled The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society, in which she enviosned a collective of 1930s filmmakers whose desire was to play in the minds of the public to find meaning in their behaviors at play. Her alter ego, Albert Grass, designed a Freudian amusement park complete with a drive-thru for on-the-go psychoanalytical sessions. This Thursday, July 24th, at 7:00pm, she will be at the gallery for a lecture and screening of films by the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society.

Megan Mi-Ai Lee’s sculptures feel as though they are found objects from the entertainment spaces she finds inspiration in. A Los Angeles native now working in Queens, she spent her childhood traveling to Las Vegas, which served as a place for research via souvenirs, signage, and magic tricks that she would find here and during her travels. Her series Zig Zag Girls is inspired by the illusion magicians use to “slice’ their female assistants into pieces while they lay in wait in boxes. Lee transcribes the visual of the confined female body, frozen in a liminal space, with her Blonde in Bathtub works. Both the flat and petite, fuller bodied figures are designed to examine “ the ways in which abbreviations of gender and grandeur become stand-ins for value.”

What is a visit to an amusement park without winning a prize? Hanna Rochereau’s sculptures examine the aesthetically pleasing artificiality of consumerism. As noted in the exhibition’s press release: “If these sites normally rely on the illusory effects of cheap materials to elevate value and pique visual interest, Rochereau’s empty constructions emphasize the material futility of these housings.”

Syllabus:

• If you are in New York this summer and need to dip into the ocean, I am here to tell you that you do not need to waste your time trekking to the Hamptons or the Rockaways; go to Brighton Beach instead. Have lunch at Ocean View Cafe, drink Georgian lemonade, and admire Coney Island while you splash in the surf.

• Watch the 1980 documentary Brighton Beach, it’s streaming on Tubi here.
  

Yesterday, I saw a few posts lamenting about the overwhelming amount of art happenings this week (and if you’re also a design head, gird your loins and get some rest because design extravaganza events are trickling into the city by the second). I always wish I can split myself in two, so I can simultaneously chip away at my to-do list and see things for cultural nourishment at the same time. If only this was possible. Fear not for my fellow busy bees, online viewing rooms are here to save the over-scheduled art lovers. Out of all the fairs on view, Independent’s online viewing rooms are the most robust. Many galleries have included editorial content to enhance their presentations. I encourage you to read the remarks from the artist about their work, essays reflecting on the methodologies on their practice, and videos that enliven the static movement of virtual gallery browsing.

Independent

What: Art fair devoted to showcasing 21st century art from a global array of galleries. Independent also has an excellent track record for presenting emerging artists right before they make a bigger splash in the art world.
When: May 8 - 11, 2025
Where: Spring Studios, 50 Varick Street, New York, NY or online

april april, Pittsburgh presenting Alix Van Der Donckt-Ferrand

Why I’d buy: In all my years of working in the arts, a gallery from Steel City has never signaled on my radar. This is exciting for me to see has my family has roots there. I enjoy the whimical pop style of the artist, but my mind also flickering with stills from Anora when I look at these (complementary).

Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles presenting Adam Higgins

Why I’d buy: The hyperreal abstractions of salad topped images are oddly satisfying. A salad is an excellent metaphor for life

Indigo + Madder, London presenting Sameen Agha

Why I’d buy: The paintings paired with these incredible marble frames (yes, the eyelet frames are also marble). Enough said!

Kerry Schuss Gallery, New York presenting Mary Carlson

Why I’d buy: You don’t see too many artists making wall sculptures. I think these would be fun to play with among an assortment of family photos, Impressionist gardens, and country striped textiles.

Europa, New York presenting Suyi Xu

Why I’d buy: I first encountered Xu’s work at her show at Europa and found these paintings both mesmerizing and tranquil. I need to see them in someones home!

Broadway, New York presenting Andrew Kuo

Why I’d buy: I already have a small watercolor by Kuo from a small sale he was conducting via Instagram Stories that is in this similar composition of washes of paint framed by a letterhead, I love it. These are equally brilliant and even more so because of their larger scale.

South Parade, London, presenting Zoë Carlson

Why I’d buy: I love a dainty interior, plus these works are oil on aluminium so I know they would dazzle in person.

MARCH, New York presenting Claudia Keep

Why I’d buy: I’ve been a fan of Claudia’s work for a few years. Me posting this is my form of eventually manifesting one of her paintings in my collection. This is contemporary Impressionism (thinking of a more precise term for todays world).

Swivel Gallery, New York presenting Lucia Hierro

Why I’d buy: Elevating the mundane = YES!

I’ve been scrolling through the offerings from the other fairs online and either nothing has excited me enough to note or available to view online. The work at Frieze is too sterile and typical for my liking, its all the usual suspects of art stars. Therefore, keep an eye out for my dispatch from Esther!

<3,
Lauren

But that’s not all the art to see in the city right now. It is art fair extravaganza with Frieze, NADA, Independent Art Fair, TEFAF, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, Spring Break Art Show, Future Art Fair, and Clio Art Fair all on view through the weekend. On Saturday, I will only attend one fair in person, one that I fell in love with last year and whose exhibitors have me the most excited: Esther II. I will report back with my highlights from Esther on Sunday, but until then I will send off my picks I would purchase from the fairs both today, tomorrow, and over the weekend.

Welcome to my Interest List. Bless online viewing rooms.

New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA)

What: The 11th Edition of NADA New York showcasing contemporary artwork from 120 galleries cross 19 countries and 50 cities.
When: May 7th - May 11th, 2025
Where: The Starrett Lehigh Building, Chelsea, specifically 26th and 11th

JO-HS, Mexico City & New York presenting Melissa Ríos

Why I’d buy: I loved the abstract interplay between the figure and their environment. I’m also a sucker for seamless paint rendering.

Cob, London presenting YaYa Yajie Liang

Why I’d buy: These are reminiscent of Surrealist watercolors. Instead of tackling dreams, Liang’s works are firmly rooted in the present, asking the viewer “What does it mean to be human in an era of ecological crisis?”

Dohing Art Gallery, Seoul presenting Bárbara Alegre and Minyoung Kim

Why I’d buy: This presentation is one of the reasons why I enjoy art fairs. Each artist is documenting quotidian slices of life, but in ways that only their hands can translate. I love how their is a color-way through line across their works. This is a way, an idea, to keep in mind when building your own collection or thinking about art works with your interiors.

HESSE FLATOW, New York & Amagansett presenting Aglaé Bassens, Xi Li, and Andina Marie Osorio

Why I’d buy: Speaking of interiors, I would like to line my walls with some I find beautiful.

Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York presenting Carolyn Case and Trish Tillman

Why I’d buy: These pieces are dropping with personality. They greet you with their arm extended for a handshake, hell, they would even bring you into a full on hug because they are bold and expressive. Who doesn’t want a giant piece of sexy candy hanging on their wall? Charming art is my favorite art.

Superposition Gallery, Los Angeles presenting Haleigh Nickerson

Why I’d buy: As the number one proponent of the intersection of art and fashion, seeing these sculptures formed out of hair accessories and earrings is incredible!

Massey Klein, New York presenting Jude Griebel

Why I’d buy: Another artist calling us to consider our surroundings, but with a wink.

Thank you for scrolling. Tune in tomorrow for my selections from Independent!

<3,
Lauren

Vegas is a hotbed for transactions of all kinds. Retail is as important as gambling. I’ve never placed a bet or pulled down the handle of a slot machine, but I certainly have taken a financial risk on buying an article of clothing and seeing if it will make it into my wardrobe rotation. Emerging from the arid soil are shopping centers that keep the spark of a glamorous oasis alive in the imagination of Las Vegas visitors. Nearly every casino has a retail thoroughfare you can wander, losing time and possibly funds even without sitting at one of the card tables. The more I think about this, the more I realize that malls and casinos aren’t as different as they appear. You get lost in the excitement of trying to do something that could change your life or you leave with your head in your hands as the impact of the credit card swipe radiates from your wallet to your consciousness.

Recently, I went to a screening of the documentary Secret Mall Apartment. This film recounts the risk a handful of Rhode Island School of Design students took to create a private space for themselves within the Providence Place Mall, where they “resided” from 2003 to 2007. This was a spectacle conceived in secret for a private audience. A risk was taken to see if they could reclaim a slice of their lives from within the belly of consumerist Goliath.

Never underestimate the levels art students can get scrappy. Prior to the mall’s construction, our main protagonist Michael Townsend, and his collective of friends utilized abandoned mills that were nearby as spaces for living, art studios, and music performances. However, since there was essentially no rent and the location was about to be desirable due to the forthcoming retail behemoth, real estate investors started to sniff around and kicked out the artists. A tale as old as time.

When the mall was built, they began analyzing its grand construction and noticed a pocket of space was hidden away. They finally discovered it after climbing through the nooks and crannies other folks would never think to venture into. Their ingenuity was rewarded with room for them to make whatever they wanted. Throughout the film we see them haul couches, lamps, cabinets, and an array of home goods sourced from antique shops and the mall they resided in, up to their secret apartment, squeezing them in too-small hallways and precariously pulling them up a narrow flight of stairs. Thank god they had the foresight to document their “home” project with a small Pentax camera they conceal in an Altoids tin.

What struck me the most was how their apartment was an active art installation against gentrification and an idea incubator for public projects that did something for others. I say something because I can’t articulate the perceptions others felt when seeing Michael’s ephemeral murals made of tape for the local children’s hospital (and sometimes with the children as a collaborative project) or the silhouettes echoed in tape that dotted lower Manhattan in honor of those that lost their lives during 9/11. Risk is fuel for meaningful creation.

By 2007, the apartment was discovered and the collective was banned from the mall. That is, until the release of this film.

Syllabus:

Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall by Alexandra Lange

I highly recommend this book and I’m due for a reread.

“Few places have been as nostalgized, or as maligned, as malls. Since their birth in the 1950s, they have loomed large as temples of commerce, the agora of the suburbs. In their prime, they proved a powerful draw for creative thinkers such as Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, and George Romero, who understood the mall's appeal as both critics and consumers. Yet today, amid the aftershocks of financial crises and a global pandemic, as well as the rise of online retail, the dystopian husk of an abandoned shopping center has become one of our era's defining images. Conventional wisdom holds that the mall is dead. But what was the mall, really? And have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated?”

Corduroy by Don Freeman

I would be lying if I didn’t mention that this also lit up in my mind while watching this film. My dreams of staying overnight in the mall began after reading this countless times. I always wanted to take him home!

“Corduroy lives in the toy department of a big store. Day after day he waits with all the other animals and dolls for somebody to come along and take him home. Yet as soon as Lisa sees him, she knows that he’s the bear for her. Her mother, though, thinks he’s a little shopworn—he’s even missing a button! Still, Corduroy knows that with a bit of work he can tidy himself up and be just the bear for Lisa.”

Greetings and Buona Pasqua to those who celebrate. Like Christ, I have had my own resurrection in the form of rolling away the giant, metaphorical rock that was blocking me from developing my ideas, cracking open my computer, logging on to Substack, and typing away. Unlike Chirst, it took me about a month or so to do this instead of three days. I’m a mortal woman; life happens.

Things of note:

• I would like to have a more strict schedule of sends and I am *finally* holding myself to a schedule, expect me and my thoughts to grace your inbox on Sundays and Thurdays. Sundays will be short and sweet and Thursday posts will focus on deeper dives into things I’ve observed across the arts.

• Warmer weather is here. My mind has defrosted because of this.

• When in doubt of what to watch, sure enough Criterion will post something seasonally fitting on Instagram. I’m going to press play on this today:

Peep Art & Dioramas

Every major holiday has a devisive signature candy: Halloween and candy corn, Chirstmas and candy canes (who honestly enjoys eating these, they’re better hanging on a tree than chowing down on), and Easter and Peeps. In the history of their existance, Peeps have primarily maintained a signular flavor profile: sweet. Grainy pillows of pure sugar in the shapes of vernal critters like chicks and bunnies. In the past few years, they took a cue out of Oreo’s playbook by experimenting with different variations on sweet flavors that attempt to capture the taste of other saccharine foods in their signature forms. Some of these include Dr. Pepper, Party Cake, Fruit Punch, and S’mores (the only one I considered purchasing last week while running errands).

Peeps are for those who appriciate whimsy and spring apprioprate as their colors often coordinate to seasonal blossoms. Love them or hate them, its hard to frown when looking at these bite sized sweeties.

My personal favorite form of Peep is checking images from the annual Peep diorama competitions from across the country (their offical wesbite has a list of participants that include community centers, libaries, and museums.) In 2004, the St. Paul Pioneer Press started this tradition by asking readers to submit images of vinegttes of their imagined Peep worlds. Other publications began to hold their own contests, such as, the Chicago Tribune, the Seattle Times, and the Washington Post.

The full list of the 2025 Pioneer Press Peeps Dioramas can be found here.

These are a few of my favorites:

For the past 16 years, the Racine Art Museum in Wiscosin has put on Peeps art exhition. This year’s display includes 187 works from across the country. The concept for an exhibition like this fits precisely within RAM’s mission and aligns with their collection. They have the largest contemporary craft collection in North America, which is comprised of over 14,000 objects from national and international artists. On their wesbite, they note how exhibtion like this is far from typical for a traditional museum. However, they undertsand the importance of creative expression through unexpected materials. This is a fun way to enage their community and contextualize craft in a recognizable medium. On their website, they note “the concept of working with unusual materials is supported by RAM’s mission to exhibit, collect, preserve, and educate in the field of contemporary craft—a subset of art that focuses on handmade work created traditionally from ceramic, fiber, glass, metal, polymer, and wood. Artists consistently push material boundaries, so the idea that they sometimes utilize and experiment with materials produced for purposes other than art-making can be seen throughout RAM’s exhibitions and many works in the museum’s permanent collection.”

You can view the exhibition checklist and virual awards presentation here.

My Easter Basket 2025:

My interpretation of Easter treats have grown up with me. I have traded in faux woven buckets filled with sythetic grass and plastic eggs for baked goods inflused with seasonal flavors and films to embrace the holiday spirit.

If you live in New York or plan on visit, you must make Red Gate Bakery a stop on your East Village Bakery Crawl. Also, if you’re going to catch a movie a Film Forum you can find their cookies at the concessions. First of all, they open at 11:00AM so there is no need to queue at the crack of dawn for a chance to aquire one of their unique sweet treats. Second, every weekend they serve up special cake slices and sweet buns. Each week is a new flavor conversation between the two pasteries, for example: Strawberry Matcha Cheesecake Buns and Coconut Caramel Sudachi Sesame Cake, Pavlova Buns and Funky Lemon Cake, and for this weekend the offerings were Cadbury Creme Buns and Rhubarb Macaroon Cake. I picked up a slice of cake and a bun was greatly impressed with the flavor match of the beloved Cadbury creme egg in bun form, a semiotic flavor success. I tucked these away in my adult version of an Easter basket (my seasonless L. L. Bean tote) as I made my way to Gem Home to grab their kale and white bean sandwich for lunch (perfect sandwich, excellent bread) before heading down to Tribeca for gallery visits.

Last night, I watched Éric Rohmer’s A Tale of Springtime. The story was just fine. A philosophy teacher named Jeanne meets a pianist named Natacha at a party and tells her about her poorly thought out sublet situation she has with her cousin. Jeanne has no where to rest her head until her cousin leaves. Natacha offers Jeanne to stay at her family home, as her father, the Minister of Culture, is away on business. We learn that his work has caused a strain on their relationship, along with his younger girlfriend, Ève, who Natacha views as an enemy (understandable). And yet, Natacha attemps to play matchmaker between her father and Jeanne! Temperaments ebb and flow like the weather of the title’s season, constantly alternating between warmth and sudden brisk chills until it eventually stabilizes. The bits of art puntuating the scences were fun Easter eggs to catch.

If I were giving you directions on where to see art in this neighborhood, I would suggest you take a stroll along Walker Street. This is the aortic valve of the neighborhood, the main street pumping life into the downtown gallery scene dense with galleries providing visual enrichment with their artists rosters. Over the past few months 52 Walker has displayed immersive installations from artists I admire like Diamond Stingily and Sara Cwynar, Cheyenne Julien’s excellent exhibition 41 Floors recently closed at Chapter NY ( I wrote about it for 1202), and James Cohan utilizes both of their gallery spaces on this street to their fullest by exhibiting thoughtful group shows and artists whose work is technically mesmerizing. To name a few favorite shows I’ve seen here are Naudline Pierre’s The Mythic Age, The Superfluity of Things, and Jesse Mockrin’s The Venus Effect. I am looking forward to the weekend where I can spend time taking in Kelly Sinnapah Mary’s The Book of Violette , look at that wallpaper!

This past Saturday, I found myself in two different words within a few blocks of each other on Walker. I felt like Alice going down a 1980’s vivid and acid rabbit hole walking through Super House’s exhibition of Dan Friedman’s masterworks titled Why Shouldn’t I Have Fun All Day before finding creative enlightenment in the historic and contemporary objects on view in Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery’s The Loving Cup. My favorite weekends are when I can escape my world for an afternoon and fall into others.

Why Shouldn’t I Have Fun Day is a question I constantly ask myself and Dan Friedman’s work will certainly imbue your life with fun if you are lucky enough to own one of his eye-catch pieces. This exhibition commemorates the 30th anniversary of his passing from complications related to AIDS in 1995 and showcases a wide-ranging selection of objects that belonged to him and his loved ones. Born in 1945 in Cleveland, Ohio, Friedman was an artist, educator, and graphic designer known for his neon assemblages designed to evoke the fun he experienced in his life. He received his BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and went on to teach at Yale’s Graduate School of Art and Architecture, The Cooper Union, and SUNY Purchase. While Friedman was teaching at Yale and worked as a corporate design executive at Pentagram (a major independent design firm) in the 1970’s, he started to redecorate his one-bedroom apartment above Washington Square Park into a Day-Glo wonderland that served has a 3D, tactile “sketchbook.” He lived, worked, and experimented with the definition of “good design” by playing with shapes and colors to challenge the aesthetics of taste in modern American interior design. Friedman eventually left his 9 to 5 to focus on developing his own visual language and design philosophies that allowed him to fold his day and night lives into playful objects that stir up some fun all day long. In his 1994 book titled Radical Modernism he wrote, “I have used my home to push modernist principles of structure and coherency to their wildest extreme. I create elegant mutations, radiating with intense color and complexity, in a world that has deconstructed into a goofy ritualistic playground for daily life."

Friendly faces greeted me as soon as the elevator doors opened to the gallery 6th floor space. Power Screen is not just any room divider, it is a companion. It is sticking out its tongue for service, to hold additional objects on display and be silly at the same time. I would love to see whose collection this belonged to and where it was placed in their home. There was a pair of objects on view that reminded me of an article the designer Sophie Collé wrote for Architectural Digest about all things round and name checks Friendman in the piece. She writes, “Perhaps it’s that as adults, we strive for balance and perfection—both visually and in life. Could our love of the ball be purely for aesthetics? Is it their versatility (cue Dan Friedman’s entire oeuvre) and incredible ability to be both completely functional and functionless? Their ability to both ground and achieve weightlessness depending on scale and materiality? Their inability to be pegged to one specific era? All of the above.” I completely agree. If you’re gonna add a pop of color to your space, what better shape than a ball?!

It’s one thing to see a chair that looks inviting to sit on, but the one on view in this slice of Friednman’s world urges you to see in big bold white letters spelling out PLEASE. A fun fact about this piece, it was originally designed for the fashion designer Willi Smith’s WilliWear offices in New York. Boldly stationed on the wall was Time Piece (Atomic Clock), the shape of an almost state, Friedman’s dream land where imagination runs wild. This made me question of this was designed to function as a wall clock or if it was just art, there are many such cases that wacky objects work with purpose. Regardless, It was a treat to take in the various elements that comprise this: the black painted wood fragments that look like ruptured pieces of willow charcoal, the comic book burst of yellow, and the unlit neon beam that harkened my mind to think about the work of Mary Weatherford, an artist known for affixing stretches of colorful light on top of her vibrant abstract canvases. The most formal piece of art hanging in the gallery is his multidimensional landscape titled A Fallen Sky in a Regal Landscape depicting neon detritus including a film real, an organic mass nearly in the shape of a guitar, and what I image is a destroyed set somewhere in the desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

After my senses were hit with the visual equivalent of a lemon ginger wellness shot, I found myself ascending the mountainous stairs up 52 Walker to see Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery’s latest exhibition titled The Loving Cup. What is a Loving Cup you ask? Worry not, as the gallery defines this for us:

The Loving Cup is a decorative vessel that historically commemorates a marriage union, representing the promise of love, honor and good fortune. Inscribed with the nuptial date and the names of the betrothed, it exists as a sober testament to enduring fondness and fidelity. The Loving Cup bears witness to the fragile complexity (and often, ephemerality) of human connection, and serves as a sacrament to the sincerity of care we feel for others, and the esteem we hold for ourselves.

The Loving Cup exhibition explores how these traditional vessels become a means of archival stewardship, honoring relationships of all kinds. Contemporary artists and designers responded to this historical tradition both in concept and practice, through a diverse range of materials such as ceramic, fiber, metal, and found objects both natural and human-made.

I will always love and appreciate this gallery for juxtaposing historic and contemporary objects in their World of Interiors-esque space. After examining Sophie Stone’s delicately embellished doilies, the equivalent of fascinators for cups, I couldn’t stop thinking about the act of dressing up our small home goods. It is easy to understand why some New Yorkers take self presentation as seriously as they do, everyone’s life is so public, even in the home since our neighbors lives are in constant eyesight due to the close proximity of windows. Our living spaces are small, but our lives are full of places to go, meals to eat, friends to see. In our small spaces, objects that make up our world are also on display, why not dress them up as well? I gather ideas for future creative projects during my visit, Stone’s Tuffet, an antique flower shaped pouf the artist covered with a collection of personal trinkets they collected over the years. A document of personal history as a sculpture. I first thought this was a box when I saw it because the grey and brown seam appears as if that is where the edge of the lid met the body of the box, but it is a pouf. However, I would love to make my own trinket covered trinket box.

A few months ago I wrote about how shells kept washing into the culture I was seeing around me and I’ve seen their motif come in like a tidal wave since then. I am declaring 2025 the Shell Year, I hope to flesh out this pearl of an idea more later. Naturally, I was pulled into the works by Ficus Interfaith, a collaboration between artists Ryan Bush and Raphael Martinez Cohen, who imbue their practice with research concerning historical symbolism that is “ubiquitous to the point of being overlooked or misunderstood” through craft. The terrazzo filled oyster shells that adorn their interpretation of a Loving Cup delighted me.

Below are a few images of what a dream apartment looks like to me:

Thank you for reading,
Lauren <3