In the 1960s, art dealers and publishers Aimé and Marguerite Maeght decided to create a private foundation that would showcase their collection, based on models they had seen in the United States. They were encouraged by Cubist artist Georges Braque who saw in the project a way for them to cope with the loss of their son Bernard, who died of leukemia in 1953. The first of its kind in France, the Fondation Maeght opened in July 1964. At its inauguration, then minister of culture André Malraux said, “This is not a museum, but a place made from love and for the love of art and artists.”

Today, the museum is home to some 13,000 objects, including 2,000 works by Joan Miró (the largest collection in France), as well as site-specific installations by Braque, Pierre Tal-Coat, Marc Chagall, Pol Bury, Germaine Richier, and Alberto Giacometti, whose sculptures fill the courtyard.

Closed on and off for the past seven months, the Fondation Maeght reopened its long-awaited expansion last month. “We had the idea for the expansion in 2004. It was what my grandfather wanted, but we could not find the right person for the job,” said Isabelle Maeght, the Maeghts’ granddaughter, during a press conference.

Designed by Paris-based firm Silvio d’Ascia Architecture, the new section adds 5,005 square feet to the museum’s footprint, without disturbing the original architecture by Josep Lluís Sert, who also built Miró’s studio in Mallorca. Instead, d’Ascia chose to dig four extra galleries under the existing building; the largest of which lies below the Giacometti courtyard. (They are only visible from the Chemin de Rondes, which runs behind the museum.) The largest one lies below the Giacometti courtyard.

“This is an extension project by subtraction,” d’Ascia said during the press preview. “As an architect it is important to know when to set one’s ego aside, especially in the face of an invisible project. I had to adopt a silent approach not to disrupt the foundation’s already perfect balance.”

These new underground galleries overlook a pine forest and the Mediterranean Sea, thus keeping alive the dialogue between art, nature, architecture that served as the foundation to the Maeghts’ vision for their museum.

Adrien Maeght, 94, the Maeghts’ son and current president of the foundation, added, “The basement rooms designed by Silvio d’Ascia have brought the site into the 21st century.”

The expansion will now allow the foundation to display its permanent collection (downstairs in the expansion) alongside temporary exhibitions (upstairs in the original building), like its current one for Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. The new “Galerie de la Bibliophilie” opens the renovated building, showcasing selections from the 45,000 books in the foundation’s collection. Down a dozen steps are paintings by Pierre Soulages, Jean Paul Riopelle, Jean Messager, Fernand Léger, and others. The final room is dedicated to recent acquisitions, including a figurative painting by Hélène Delprat, who will be the subject of a solo show at the foundation by next spring.

The budget for the expansion project amounts to €5 million, including €1 million from Adrien Maeght and €500,000 each from the French state, the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, and the Alpes-Maritimes department. The Dassault family also gave €1 million, through their “History and Heritage” fund, managed by the grandchildren of Marcel and Madeline Dassault who were friends of the Maeghts and attended the foundation’s 1964 opening. The company Triverio, which oversaw the original building’s construction 60 years ago, participated as corporate sponsors. “Without friendship this foundation would not even exist,” Isabelle Maeght said several times throughout the preview.

The theme of friendship also played a role in the Bonnard-Matisse exhibition, as both artists were friends with the Maeghts. “Bonnard and my father first met in Cannes in 1936 through a lithograph to be printed,” Adrien Maeght writes in the exhibition catalog. Bonnard then introduced Aimé Maeght to Matisse in 1943, but they only became close after Matisse and Marguerite randomly met in a doctor’s waiting room; “a man sat down next to her and asked her to pose for him,” and she soon became his “active agent.”

Today, about 40 drawings of Marguerite by Matisse remain; several of them are featured in the new collection hang. “At the age of fourteen,” Adrian continues in the catalog, “I had the privilege of attending one of these posing sessions and of making an eight-minute film—the only document I know of showing Matisse drawing.” Also on view is Matisse’s Le Buisson (The Bush), which hung above Bernard’s bed during his illness.

Featuring both artist’s landscapes and visions of Saint-Tropez’s light, self-portraits and several portraits of their recurring models, the exhibition mostly avoids pairing works by Bonnard and Matisse side by side. That’s intentional, according to the show’s curator, Marie-Thérèse Pulvenis de Sévigny, a former conservator at Nice’s Musée Matisse. The focus here is on the Maeghts and their relationship to the artists: Bonnard encouraged them to open a gallery in Paris, and Matisse was chosen for the inaugural show in 1945. “What matters here is the synergy between the three, which served as a springboard for the foundation,” she said.

Qiao Space was founded in 2015 by Qiao Zhibing, who has appeared on the annual ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list each year since 2013. Qiao is also the founder of Tank Shanghai, a private museum that has welcomed international dignitaries and art world luminaries when they have visited Shanghai and the extended West Bund area.  

For the past decade, the West Bund has been known for its groundbreaking private museums, art galleries, and artists’ studios. ShanghArt, one of China’s earliest galleries for contemporary art, has been closed, as have Don Gallery, Aike Gallery, Part Group, and artist Ding Yi’s studio.

For now, Tank Shanghai is safe, since it is on the other side of the road (near the Huangpu River) and has a relatively long-term agreement with government-managed enterprises. That institution, along with two other private museums, the Long Museum and the Start Museum, as well as the West Bund Museum, form a “cultural corridor at a relatively minimal level,” according to industry insiders.

Qiao Space was known for showcasing works by contemporary artists such as Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Xiaogang, and Zhang Enli. Unlike some of the other resident galleries, it did not hold a closing event. However, artists and arts enthusiasts visited the site during its closure and demolition, documenting its ending with photographs and videos.

Speaking to ARTnews via phone from Shanghai, Qiao said, “This happened rather suddenly. We were just informed in March that the whole area needed to be shut down so we only had three months to process this development.”

Given the suddenness of the decision, the Chinese entrepreneur and night club owner is still considering whether he wants to reopen Qiao Space in a new physical space. Currently, Tank Shanghai has “a lot of space” to hold exhibitions, he said, and Qiao Space’s next exhibition will be held there.

Shanghai- and Beijing-based independent curator Evonne Jiawei Yuan noted, “It’s indeed a pity to see this demolition of at least five art institutions in one block at West Bund, including two collectors’ spaces and three commercial galleries, which were all of the pioneering generation boosting the development of this art zone a decade ago along with some leading architects’ offices and private museums.”

Last year saw the Yuz Museum, previously a key attraction in the West Bund, relocate an hour away from downtown Shanghai, as well as the permanent closure of the Shanghai Center of Photography. The Art Tower was sold to tech titan Alibaba, which is set to use the premises as part of its Shanghai headquarters.

In interviews with ARTnews, industry insiders said that, during the past decade, the West Bund area has faced significant changes, with the government pushing out policies such as rental discounts to attract galleries, museums, and artists. However, in recent years, this policy has shifted, and more efforts have been made to cultivate the area as a zone of technology and finance, with a special focus on AI and big data.

“The local government enterprises changed their strategy and withdraw the preferential policy of letting out spaces on the art industry at low rates due to the downcycle of the real estate market,” Yuan said. “Actually, all the spaces got notices a few years ago that they would have been removed one day and it finally happened this year.”

Mathieu Borysevicz, founder of BANK Gallery, said, “Artists and art spaces have been the catalyst for gentrification worldwide and Shanghai has been no exception. In fact, the history of contemporary arts in Shanghai has been plagued with nomadism from the outset. Gallery centers and studio enclaves seem to relocate every five years or so. China’s maxim of certain uncertainty rules supreme.”

Nonetheless, Qiao remains optimistic, currently considering how to embrace the changes of the local and global art scene while creating and supporting relevant and timely contemporary art.

“This indicates the general environment is changing—we just need to get used to it,” he said. “You cannot change the environment, you need to adjust yourself to the environment. I believe in the creation and energy of art.”

In New York, three of the city’s cultural institutions have been tapped to combat how residents deal with the heat, serving as cooling centers, public and private spaces that have been made available to help people deal with these extreme conditions at no cost to them. This year, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of the City of New York will take part in a new city-wide program that went into effect on June 18.

All three are part of the Cultural Institutions Group, consisting of 34 organizations who are housed in city-owned property; other CIGs include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, MoMA PS1, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Queens Museum.

Last month, Mayor Eric Adams and the New York City Emergency Management (NYCEM) announced the Beat the Heat initiative, which offers tips for staying cool. Among them is visiting one of the more than 500 cooling centers across the five boroughs. These air-conditioned centers are activated during heat waves, defined by the city as two or more days over 95º F or one day over 100º F. Cooling centers are free and open to the public however their hours of operation depend on the location. This year’s roll out of the Beat the Heat program features the Cooling Options Map, which allows New Yorkers to find the closest cooling center to them by searching by location or keyword.

Offering temporary relief from the heat, these cooling centers can also be a huge help to low-income individuals who might not have access to air conditioning or be concerned about running up their electric bill over the summer, as well as unhoused people whose access to these venues can be lifesaving. Additionally, cooling centers can reduce the strain on the city’s power grid.

Last year, the Brooklyn Museum was the only cultural institution to be a designated cooling center, alongside senior centers, community centers, and NYCHA facilities, among others. The city has also partnered with Petco to make pet-friendly cooling centers available as well.

“We are proud to serve as a cooling center for our local communities this summer,” said Kimberly Panicek (KP) Trueblood, president and chief operating officer of the Brooklyn Museum. “Our doors are open to provide a comfortable and safe environment where residents can escape the heat, enjoy our exhibits, and experience the arts in a cool and welcoming space. We are committed to supporting our community in every season and look forward to offering a respite from the summer sun.”

The branches of the city’s three public library systems have long served as cooling centers. Since 2023, they have reduced their hours, including being closed on Sundays. After public outcry over their operating hours, the Adams administration announced on Thursday that it would restore $58.3 million to the libraries for the 2025 fiscal year budget, which would allow them to reopen. During last week’s heat wave, there were multiple reports of broken air conditioners in several libraries across the city; two locations in Staten Island closed, and two locations in Manhattan went without air conditioning but stayed open with the use of large industrial fans.

The Beat the Heat initiative comes on the heels of last year’s severe temperatures, offering people more options to our new reality of new extreme weather events brought about by climate change. Last June saw some of the worst air quality in New York in over 60 years due to Canadian wildfires, which made it hard to breathe outside, tinted the sky orange, and produced a series of eerie photos that circulated widely on social media.

Jerry Gallagher, the Museum of the City of New York’s COO, told ARTnews the institution was happy to participate in the campaign. “For us, it was an easy decision. We always aim to help and support our local community and offer assistance whenever possible, whether that’s via our exhibitions, our programs, or partnering with the city for offerings such as this,” he said.

Last year, 350 people died in the city due to heat related causes, according to the mayor’s office, and by expanding the range of cooling centers, with museums being some of the largest spaces in the program, the aim is to help to save lives in the process. A spokesperson for the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs said that more cultural institutions will likely be added as cooling centers in the coming weeks, with partner sites chosen to target “areas of the city with high levels of anticipated summer traffic.”

Over the past several weeks, NYCEM has worked with these institutions to help prepare them to become a cooling center. In order to be one, they must be air conditioned, staffed, have drinking water, give a point of contact, operate between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., and be able to accommodate at least 10 visitors.

Kate D. Levin, who oversees Bloomberg Philanthropies Arts Program and was the commissioner of cultural affairs from 2002 to 2013 said that adding museums as cooling centers will help these institutions better serve their communities by acting as new kinds of spaces for social gatherings.

“Cultural institutions are a key part of the public realm in New York City,” she said. “In many cases, these buildings are especially well-designed for programs like ‘Beat the Heat,’ with lobbies and other spaces designed to accommodate large numbers of people, providing seating, bathrooms, and other amenities for congregating.”

When Xippas gallery showed this work at the 2022 edition of Paris+, Art Basel’s fair in the French capital, there was only one bench and a handful of headphones available. Interest quickly outpaced resources at the fair’s opening, where attendees competed to get a spot before this work. All editions of Mineur Mineur ended up selling to institutions.

This work captured the attention of Jeu de Paume head of public programs Marta Ponsa. “The aesthetic of the images took us to a universe of games and fables,” she said. “The mise en scène had humor and lightness.” She later realized she’d seen Bak’s works already, back in 2012 at Paris’s Museum of Modern Art, but, by then, Bak’s practice had matured: Bak’s 2012 show focused on Romani people that she’d encountered in the Paris Métro, but the artist has since turned her thematic concerns global with works like Mineur Mineur.

Seeking to capture Bak’s evolution, the Jeu de Paume showed eight of Bak’s video works, along with some sculptural accompaniment works, in a solo show this summer. These works ranged in subject, from Bolivian shoeshiners to Moroccan shrimp peelers, to cruise ship workers and their families living in Saint-Nazaire. All these works are bound by one subject: a focus on marginalized communities, especially their labor and the way this restricts their lives.

These works have gained the attention of many across Europe. Last year, Bak was nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp, France’s most prestigious art prize. By that point, she’d already appeared in one edition of Documenta, the famed art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. Signs that her art is on the rise are set to be further evident this June, when Athens’s National Museum of Contemporary Art opens a solo show of her work as part of a series of feminist art exhibitions.

Ever since Bak started making video art in her early 20s, she has always been centered around labor. Her first works in that medium were shot in her family’s hometown, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, a French village whose life revolved around the charcoal mines—her grandparents were among the immigrants who were called to work in them. She shot her family and her family’s friends, looking at how the residents were being left behind. Her videos showed how renovations made everyone leave without the possibility of rehousing and shined a light on the lung sicknesses contracted by the miners.

Using video as an artistic medium interested Bak from the beginning—she shot home movies when she was young. But there was no video-specific instruction when she attended the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris’s top art school, and the medium’s not all that sellable in the art market. “But that isn’t my priority,” Bak told me, sitting on a folding chair near the Jeu de Paume’s café. “For me, it’s most simple to tell stories through videos with groups I meet, nothing more.”

This is the challenge Bak’s gallery, Xippas, has faced since it signed her a couple of years out of art school. Part of it is, of course, the relative newness of video as a medium, and collectors’ reticence about it—Bak said she sells more drawings than her videos, and that allows her to “live simply” in a suburb south of Paris. Still, major private collectors, like the Arnault and Pinault families, have bought her work, as well as major European institutions, among them the Centre Pompidou and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. “She has an approach that interests institutions who have a mission to discover new forms of contemporary art expression,” said Xippas director Tristan van der Stegen, who added that Bak also wants to “help people have another look at society—there’s something about it that raises the education and culture in a public institution.”

“I always return to my origins,” Bak said about how her grandparents’ friends’ plights speak to society’s inequalities. Of her subjects, she added, “They are often people who are in weak situations, facing gross inequalities we don’t necessarily know about. The idea is to show them in their own way.”

Bak is not the most gregarious person—van der Stegen called her “shy” in his interview—so it seems ironic that her work requires her to speak extensively with communities that have never before been contacted by her. (Sometimes, she and her subjects do not even speak the same language, so she involves an interpreter to help her.) “Throughout the course of my life,” Bak said, “encounters occur, without my going out to search specifically to meet a group of people.”

Residencies are the reason these encounters occur. She met the cruise ship workers during a residency in Tétouan, Morocco, for instance. “When I’m exhibiting somewhere,” she said, “I like to be interested in the immediate environment—and why not create something in situ when it’s possible?” Before even writing a script, she spends months getting to know people, listening to stories about their lives, “so I don’t screw up their social and cultural context,” she explained.

Unlike some video art made today, Bak’s works do not have a large budget—she edits her videos herself, so the final products’ animated components do not gel like a Hollywood blockbuster. Bak hopes “there’s a feeling of reality, despite the storytelling I deployed, that we can believe absolutely in it, even though it’s just a game of cutting scenes together.”

She uses special effects inspired by arcade games—Mineur Mineur’s child miners wander up and down paths that zigzag across the screen—and adds her own DIYed sets, such as a cardboard diorama of cruise workers’ living quarters. Bak said she uses “cheap” special effects because she isn’t aiming to make her videos appear cinematic. “Everything that is a special effect can be tinkered with, like everything else: How can we tinker with people’s lives, augmenting or pulling them from the original reality?”

Yet the reality of her film’s participants, who are paid, remains. “I don’t come with the promise of social change,” she said. “It changes nothing in the situations of people involved in these new tactics of representation, so it’s an implicit activism.”

In 2015, Babirye fled Uganda after she was outed by a local publication as an activist and a member of the queer community. In her home country, being queer is considered a crime and can even be punished with a life sentence in prison. (Since Babirye left, the consequences have only gotten worse. Last year, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni signed the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023, which includes punishment of death sentence for those convicted of “aggravated homosexuality.”)

Babirye ended up in New York, and has been based there for the nine years since, working as an artist as well as an activist. During a recent interview with ARTnews, it was clear that she had no regrets about her identity—and that she wanted her artworks to similarly exhibit a sense of pride.

“I want my sculptures to command attention,” she said. “I give them hairstyles and adornments, inspired by the queer community, so yes, it gives the feeling of: We’re here, and we’re not going anywhere.”

In the Luganda language, one of the most widely spoken tongues of Babirye’s homeland, the Ugandan queer community is referred to as “abasiyazi,” which translates to “sugarcane husk,” a reference to the fact that the community’s members are thought of as discarded parts or rubbish. In Babirye’s hands, however, trash from the streets, junkyards, bike shops and other places takes on a new meaning, becoming material used in artworks that explore sexuality, identity and human rights. The negative connotations that follow the word “rubbish” are turned positive.

“Once I realized that you can use found objects and trash as art materials, I realized that I could let go of the negative meaning of the word. No one is rubbish,” she stated. “The process was very positive for me. I used to make work from pain, but now, I make it from joy.”

These artworks—acrylic paint on paper drawings that represent queer people, ceramics made of clay and sculptures made from wood she carves, welds, burns, burnishes, and adorns with found items—have caught on with the art world. Babirye’s artworks can now be seen at the Venice Biennale, where they line one part of a garden that acts as a venue in Adriano Pedrosa’s main show, and at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield, England, where she is having a solo exhibition. On Saturday, she will open her first-ever US solo show at the de Young Museum in San Francisco where she is showing a dozen sculptures, some of which are new.

For some, Babirye’s art is so effective because it bridges so many timelines and formal techniques. “I think Leilah’s work resonates with many people because it taps into historical and contemporary art as well as social issues across cultures and geographic boundaries,” said Sam Gordon, cofounder of Gordon Robichaux, her New York gallery. “Her work is deeply personal, confident, commanding and political, and this is bound up with the material and form.”

The Yorkshire Sculpture Park show, the result of a 2023 residency there, situates a series of larger-than-life works within an 18th-century chapel. Titled “Obumu (Unity),” it features seven wooden sculptures that were carved out of a 200-year-old fallen beech tree from the park and five large ceramic portrait sculptures made of clay all adorned with found objects, building on her practice of giving life to discarded materials, which tell “a story of joy, transformation, and, of course, unity,” she said. The latter, which she calls “an important theme” in her work, is about bringing together queer communities and showing the power of collaboration, not just when it comes to making her art but within life more broadly.

The artist said she was fascinated by the experience of working in the environment at the sculpture park because of its history. The park hosts works by British modernists Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, whose sculptures are sleek and sinuous. By contrast, Babirye’s are rough-hewn, a quality the artist embraces. But even so, Babirye said she’d looked to Hepworth and Moore for inspiration since college, and it becomes clear that her works does share a connection to theirs.

“It’s as though Leilah has absorbed centuries of global sculpture-making, and she has made an innate ability to transform trees and clay into entities that have never existed, that have individual personalities yet speak of a universal earth,” Clare Lilley, director of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, told ARTnews.

Contemporary artists, from Yinka Shonibare to Ai Weiwei, have regularly shown their art here, but Lilley praised Babirye’s show as being unique among because of its “abundant personalities who so loudly sing together in the space. Leilah is at the heart of what is important and worthwhile in art.”

Lilley first became aware of Babirye’s practice when she saw her “raw and uncompromising” sculptural double portrait, Tuli Mukwano (2018), which was shown at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York. The two figures in that work—pressed cheek to cheek, with crown-like attachments made of used cans—were carved from a pine log using a chainsaw. The sculpture’s title translates from Swahili to “We are in love.”

Three years later, Lilley was awed by a show at London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery, which represents Babirye alongside New York’s Gordon Robichaux. “ It was strong and visceral and also loving and celebratory, most especially of women and Uganda’s LGBTQ+ community,” she said. “Her work caused me to cry.”

Babirye was born in 1985 in Kampala, Uganda. In high school, she and her mates took art course because they thought it’d be “an easy class.” There, she studied basics like still life drawing, which didn’t exactly have strict guidelines.

She didn’t become serious about art until 2007, when she was a student at Makerere University, where her professors taught wood carving and ceramics. “The ceramics program was focused on wheel throwing, but I was more excited about hand building because of the endless possibilities in what I could create,” she said.

In 2011, David Kato, a Ugandan LGBT rights activist, was murdered. Babirye said that was “an important event that sparked my activism.” She noticed that during the ensuing protests and Kato’s funeral, some demonstrators decided to cover their faces with masks to protect their identities. “This inspired me to create masks during my senior dissertation,” she said.

Since the early 2010s, Babirye has been including found objects including newspapers, aluminum cans, trash, and items she found on the streets in her work. The intention, she said was to “give honor to discarded materials and show that there is beauty in everything.” She went on, “I still get materials from the street, junkyards, bike shops, and more. I make them into something beautiful and important.”

Within the US, her work was almost immediately recognized as such. In 2015, the year she was forced to leave her home country, she participated in the Fire Island Artist Residency in New York, billed as the first LGBTQ artist residency in the world. Three years later, she was granted asylum in the United States and had her first solo show at Gordon Robichaux.

Even while working in New York, she continues to ensure that her work retains an African context. She has drawn influence from West African masks, which she finds “interesting because of the facial expressions and emotions that they communicate. For the Yorkshire Sculpture Park show, she created a mask titled Nakakumba, based on similar ones from the Kuchu Ngo (Leopard) clan. Babirye’s rendition is adorned with hammered metal, nails, bicycle parts and braided tires. “I draw inspiration from drag queens and fashion in the LGBTQ+ community when I add these adornments, which I think of as jewelery, accessories and hair,” she shared.

Babirye has also continued to create painted works on paper that she’s called “Identity Cards,” a reference to Ugandan ID cards. They’re inspired by people she knows, and also feature imagined characters that represent queer Ugandans.

“I like there to be some ambiguity when it comes to their gender. I draw fun hairstyles, jewelery and clothes similar to how I adorn my sculptures,” she said, adding, “I want people to feel empowered to embrace themselves when they see my work.”

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From the Archives: Read What ARTnews Critics Said About Robert Mapplethorpe

LGBTQ+ Artists Having Institutional Shows This Pride Month

“Robert was smart with his board because he knew that appointing family members or life partners who can make emotional decisions is not always great to manage an artist’s legacy,” lawyer and Mapplethorpe Foundation president Michael Stout told ARTnews. Mapplethorpe instead assembled a board with professional specialties in both law (Stout is a copyright expert) and photography to shape the future and legacy of his impressive oeuvre.

Stout estimates that Mapplethorpe left behind approximately 14,000 prints, made from around 2,000 negatives, as well as a smaller number of sculptural objects and Polaroids. And in recent years, the management of the artist’s legacy has become an intricate feat: 15 galleries around the world manage the sales from the estate based on their respective geography. Gladstone Gallery, Morán Morán and Olga Korper Gallery are among the five in charge in North America; in Europe, Xavier Hufkins Gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, Alison Jacques Gallery, and Galerie Thomas Schulte are half of the eight galleries holding representation deals; Brazil’s Galeria Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel manages the South American demand; and the Asian market is handled by Seoul’s Kukje Gallery.

At Art Basel next week, Gladstone Gallery, Ropac, and Alison Jacques will each have a Mapplethorpe work on offer. There’s also various institutional shows each year and brand partnerships, like those with Uniqlo, Chrome Hearts, and Honey Fucking Dijon, who license Mapplethorpe’s images. In its earliest days, the foundation only licensed paper-based products, such as postcards, calendars, and posters. “There was no way we could know if Robert would like a Chrome Hearts leather jacket, but we did it, as many artists started making licensing deals,” Stout added.

“We have to make careful decisions about licensing and act meticulously about publishing because books do survive,” Stout said. “They are not as popular in terms of sales anymore with everything being online, but Robert knew it was important to have them and he did an awful lot of books with different publishers.” He also added that the foundation’s trustees have reached a consensus of being “conservative about licensing” and that they aim “to make decisions that we thought he would have made.”

In addition to its management of Mapplethorpe’s art, the foundation has a lesser-known remit, acting as a grant-giving entity invested in supporting HIV research. “We largely depend on gallery sales, and running a photographer’s estate is more challenging than a painter’s,” he said about the given vast difference in pricing for the two mediums.

Mapplethorpe’s intriguingly enigmatic visual lexicon however has perhaps been more popular than ever in recent years. The first quarter of 2024 has so far seen four solo gallery exhibitions for the photographer: at London’s Alison Jacques, Gladstone in New York, Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, and Morán Morán in Los Angeles, as well as a three-artist show, with Ann Craven and Mohammed Z. Rahman, at Phillida Reid in London. The Paris and LA shows both had high-profile curators: fashion editor Edward Enninful and artist Jacolby Satterwhite, respectively. Last month, the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire opened the exhibition Filippo de Pisis and Robert Mapplethorpe which places the photographer’s work in conversation with that of the 20th-century Italian painter. Their mutual fascination with flowers anchors the show, which features 38 photographs, all on loan from the foundation. 

The Gladstone show, which closed in April at the gallery’s Upper East Side outpost, sought to shine a light on a lesser-known part of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre, his three-dimensional assemblages and photographs in sculptural frames. The exhibition benefitted from the gallery space’s former life as a townhouse, as the installation conveyed a demure blend of theatricality and domesticity. His ca. 1972 Untitled (Coat Rack Sculpture), for example, occupied a corner with a lit lightbulb (in lieu of a coat) adjacent to a black-and-white photograph of artist Jay Johnson in which the same sculpture appears next to Johnson’s nude body. In front of a backyard-facing window was Open Book (1974), a large aluminum floor structure in which a quartet of photographs of penises sit above a sleek triangular base.

The recent Gladstone show followed the Guggenheim Museum’s year-long exhibition “Implicit Tensions” (2019), which presented a considerable group of Mapplethorpe’s mixed-media constructions for the first time. The ambitious undertaking was an extension of the foundation’s gift of 194 artworks to the Guggenheim in 1993, which also established a photography department at the museum and a gallery named in the late photographer’s honor.

“Before Mapplethorpe, photography frames were more incidental, reflecting the uneasy transition of the medium from page to wall,” Guggenheim associate curator Lauren Hinkson recently told ARTnews of the two-part show.The second part of her project invited living artists like Lyle Ashton Harris, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, and Catherine Opie to exhibit their own images about queer resilience as a response to the first part of the exhibition. “Like the work of any canonical figure, Mapplethorpe’s work and its meanings are neither stable nor static, but are continually open to reinterpretation as other artists offer alternate approaches to image-making,” Hinkson said.

New-generation queer creatives, on the other hand, still find inspiration in Mapplethorpe’s unabashed handling of carnality, whether in his allusive flowers or dramatically lit double fisted rears. Ludovic de Saint Sernin, a fast-rising French designer with cult following, unveiled his Mapplethorpe-inspired men’s collection, in collaboration with the foundation, during New York Fashion Week in February. Pop star Troye Sivan currently wears some of the pieces from the bondage-inspired collection in his ongoing word tour, Sweat. The leather-heavy garments veer away from Uniqlo’s 2015 T-shirt line which were printed with the artist’s more approachable photographs.

Inviting new perspectives has been one lucrative way for the Mapplethorpe Foundation to keep his legacy alive. A suite of gallery exhibitions curated by cultural luminaries, from Isabelle Huppert to Elton John or the recent Enninful and Satterwhite ones, activate his large oeuvre through different personal lenses. (Ropac’s Enninful-organized exhibition drew around 2,000 visitors on its opening day in March.)

For Satterwhite, the opportunity to curate a Mapplethorpe show finds resonance in his own practice, which also traverses themes of power, autonomy, and euphoria. The foundation gave the Brooklyn-based artist access to the photographer’s entire oeuvre, and the resulting show, titled “Animism, Faith, Violence, and Conquest,” included a medley of Mapplethorpe’s less-charted images about utopia, resistance, and devotion. The show’s titular themes are subjects Satterwhite explored about belief systems and survival while working towards his recent Metropolitan Museum of Art commission, A Metta Prayer (2023).

A 1982-dated photograph, for example, shows a television with a chain hanging from its bottom; an image from 1985 includes a young boy in pirate costume looking through a spyglass. “I was thinking about how to subvert video games and ideas of violence, surveillance, and conquest in my project,” Satterwhite told ARTnews. He noted that he has long dreamed of doing a project around Mapplethorpe, “but if I had the chance 10 years ago, the result would have totally been different,” he said. Organizing the show fresh off his Met commission, in which he marinated similar ideas of devotion, power, and toxicity in beauty, the artist said he felt closer to Mapplethorpe’s similar concerns at this point in his practice.  

Mapplethorpe’s gallery representation itself has been important in the shifting perspectives of the artist’s work. “The dominant aesthetic of Robert’s estate, with calla lilies and nudes, was established by the foundation and Robert Miller Gallery, which initially had an exclusive representation,” Stout, the foundation president, said. The foundation changing its representation to New York’s Sean Kelly gallery in the early 2000s, helped bring forth a more multivalent approach to Mapplethorpe. In 2003, with the help of Sean Kelly, Cindy Sherman organized the first of these artist-driven curatorial projects that are now done multiple times a year.

“The public reaction and a Roberta Smith review in the New York Times convinced us that we should let other people make decisions for exhibitions,” Stout said. “Even we still see works this way that we never saw or forgot about.”

The challenge for the Mapplethorpe Foundation these days is to run an endeavor with funding from a finite repertoire. In an effort to monitor sales in various price points and avoid exhibiting the same work concurrently in separate shows, the foundation has established what they internally call “a core system.” The layout helps the board and staff break down and control the types of images sold across the globe and maintain a balanced inventory in terms of value and future demand. The works with exceptionally iconic subjects such as Patti Smith, Mapplethorpe himself, or Andy Warhol, as well as calla lilies are “for more special moments,” Stout said. This system also helps the foundation shuffle works between different gallery inventories for an even distribution.

“When we started the foundation with Robert, we weren’t sure if we would go on for over 20 years,” Stout recalled. “We don’t have trustees making emotional decisions and holding onto sentimental pieces on our board—we just want to place everything well.”

But back in the country’s capital city, at the historic 798 Art District, it was business as usual with the launch of the eighth edition of Gallery Weekend Beijing. Running from May 28 to June 2, 2024, with a VIP preview in the days before the event’s opening, Gallery Weekend Beijing this year included 27 participating galleries and nonprofit institutions in the main sector, and 8 galleries from locales beyond the city in the visiting sector, plus “The inner side of the wind,” a show curated by Yuan Jiawei.

This year, Gallery Weekend Beijing, as well as the city’s two major art fairs, Beijing Dangdai and Jingart, all held their openings at the same time, drawing a larger crowd to the city in the hopes of reigniting flagging excitement surrounding Beijing’s art scene, according to industry insiders.

The main theme for this year’s Gallery Weekend Beijing, or GWBJ as it’s known for short, was “Drift to Re-Turn.” It encapsulated the international artistic connections that participating galleries, institutions, and curated projects aimed to create through the annual showcase.  

Speaking to ARTnews, GWBJ program director Yang Jialin said, “On a deeper level, GWBJ, as a platform for contemporary art exchange, hopes to help the outstanding artists and their work ‘drift’ out to the world, allowing the voices from Beijing to reach the international stage; and to let excellent international art content ‘return’ to the local art scene, presenting it to the Chinese audience.”

Victor Wang, chief curator and artistic director of M Woods, a private museum at 798 Art District, said, “Unlike Hong Kong and Shanghai, Beijing’s art ecology operates uniquely through a mix of connections and disconnections with the outside world.”

The city’s scale, legacy, and structure provide the opportunity for some galleries and institutions to thrive in isolation, building frameworks that benefit from this separateness. Meanwhile, others continue to actively seek connections with the global art scene, striving to create bridges and establish networks beyond Beijing.

“I’m personally uplifted whenever I see marginalized voices and radical thinkers presented in Beijing, in dialogue with this local cultural context, especially those perspectives we might not be able to showcase or engage with often locally,” Wang added.

One such exhibition was tucked away in a small private room at Magician Space. The quietly provocative show is paradoxically titled “Room of Boundlessness” and is curated by Liu Ding, one of the artistic directors of Yokohama Triennale 2023. Upon first look, there seemed to be nothing contentious: viewers were greeted by nothing much at all, with the artworks left facedown on the floor or propped against the wall. That, it turned out, was just the beginning of the show. Visitors were invited to pick up the works, by the likes of Hu Shangzong and Feng Guodong, and hang the pieces themselves.

“Our objective is to offer both local and international audiences the opportunity to engage with diverse forms of art and contribute to the overall artistic ecosystem,” said Pojan Huang, researcher at Magician Space. By way of example, Huang cited the dedicated project called the Antechamber, which was designed specifically for experimental art.

Magician Space also presented a solo exhibition running till July by New York–based artist Timur Si-Qin. The show, which explores the relationship between humans and nature from different perspectives, including a spiritual one, proved particularly popular.

Some quality exhibitions, stunning artist studios, and frenetic programming aside, there were still concerns regarding the volatile climate of geopolitics and fiscal uncertainties in China and beyond.

“In the current global landscape, the first layer of meaning of the theme of GWBJ is its literal sense: we are always in an unstable state, with an uncertain future,” said Jialin.

Just a few months ago, Bloomberg reported that China faced a series of challenges from shrinking population to record property downturn to rising trade tensions. Amid conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, and with trade wars ongoing, the global economy looks precarious, and China is not an exception. In fact, as tensions with the US ratchet up, Chinese businesses are reportedly looking toward countries such as Mexico and Vietnam.

“The art market is not optimistic in light of the ongoing deterioration of geopolitics and the decline of the global economic situation,” Huang said. “A cold wave is approaching not only China, but also the global gallery industry, making future prospects for the art business increasingly challenging.”

“Certainly, the days of quick sales and waiting lists are waning,” said Mathieu Borysevicz, founder and director of BANK, a Shanghai gallery that participated in GWBJ. “Right now, everybody has sobered up and is working a lot harder to make each sale. China is still the second-largest art market in the world, and the economy is resilient, but it has created a widespread sense of precarity. In fact, I must say that in my 20-plus years of coming to China, this is the first time I have witnessed widespread pessimism.”

Yet there remains cause for some optimism—or at least artistic resilience.

“Usually, when the economy isn’t so great, art tends to get more interesting,” Borysevicz added. “For too long, the emphasis was disproportionately on the market at the expense of criticality. I hope the shift away from the market will help vitalize the work.”

Huang agreed, saying, “When Magician Space was established in 2008, it coincided with the economic crisis, and the exhibition was not conceived for commercial purposes, thus our objectives extend beyond business. It has been a source of great satisfaction to continue delving deeply into the work of our favourite artists and to persevere.”

Meanwhile, other industry leaders are paying more attention to their regional counterparts.

“Connecting local artists and the Beijing art scene with international communities is crucial—especially now, given the growing skepticism toward globalization and the current economic and geopolitical climate,” Wang said. “It’s awesome to see our colleagues and communities from South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and other countries perambulating 798, experiencing firsthand our institutions and galleries, and seeing what Beijing has to offer.”

It is this ethos that the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston carries in its veins. Established in 1948, the CAMH recently celebrated its 75th anniversary with the exhibition “Six Scenes From Our Future” (October 2023–March 2024). Senior curator Rebecca Matalon and curator Patricia Restrepo invited six artists to respond to CAMH’s first-ever exhibition “This is Contemporary Art,” which aimed how people could live with contemporary, boldly placing artworks alongside furniture, design, and architectural elements. Those artists—Jill Magid, Leslie Martinez, Mel Chin, Leslie Hewitt, Lisa Lapinski, and JooYoung Choi—all have a relationship to Houston or CAM Houston, and the work on view continued the inaugural presentation’s legacy of dissolving artistic categories. 

Founded as the Contemporary Arts Association by six local artists and architects as a sort of artist cooperative, the organization aimed to bring the contemporary arts to Houston and imbricate the city with a richer, more sophisticated art community. Because CAA didn’t have a space back then, “This is Contemporary Art”was actually staged at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

“Shortly after it was founded there were 200 plus members,” Matalon said of CAMH’s early days. “You paid [dues] and you exhibited your work through your membership and, of course, as the institution evolved, and the understanding that Houston really needed a space for contemporary art, its mission also shifted.”

The museum soon moved a semi-permanent location near downtown Houston and later to its current home, the iconic, stainless-steel parallelogram designed by Latvian architect Gunnar Birkerts, in the Museum District. And soon, it will likely grow once more as the museum eyes a potential expansion. Through it all, CAMH has long been served as a visionary agent in defining Houston’s cultural landscape.

“It’s always been a kind of really radical and experimental institution in its support for women artists and artists of color early on, its support of artists working across disciplines and media,” Matalon said. “CAMH has really been a site of radical experimentation and play.”

Indeed, the CAMH’s inauguration situated itself on the precipice of an art historical tectonic shift: post–World War II America. While situated firmly during the height of Abstract Expressionism, both the curation of “This is Contemporary Art” and the tenor of its exhibition catalogue felt very proto-Pop in how the exhibition could show Houstonians how the art on view might also fit within their daily lives.

To accomplish this, the exhibition exhibited modern art alongside other genres, such as graphic design, interior design, craft, and even household objects in a way that, for its time, was innovative. Among the artists and designers included were Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Mary Callery, Stuart Davis, Charles Eames, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Knoll, Jacob Lawrence, Fernand Léger, John Marin, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Edward Weston, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

“The strategies used in the inaugural exhibition were happening elsewhere,” Matalon said. “The ways that there was this kind of synergy between commercial and museological design in terms of how objects were being shown. There wasn’t anything like that happening here [in Houston].”

As the decades passed and CAMH grew in scope, ideas around what constituted the notion of “contemporary art” evolved as well, changing its policy in the 1990s to exhibit work made within the last 40 years. In recent years, the museum has also mounted a number of landmark exhibitions, including “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art,” which opened in 2012 and then traveled the country, and “Stonewall 50.”

January 2020 brought a new executive director, Hesse McGraw, who understood “the way that CAMH needed to shift in relationship to our current moment in relationship to [the] manifold crises of the pandemic including the death of George Floyd and the urgency with which we needed to respond to different kinds of social, political crises,” Matalon said.

In “Six Scenes,” two artists, JooYoung Choi and Leslie Hewitt, look back at the history of the CAMH within the larger sociological climate of the late ’40s. In Choi’s research for the show, she discovered troubling revelations about the inaugural exhibition’s racist past: “I wanted to know about that first show and who was allowed to be at that first show, she said. “And so, that’s where my research came in about the fact that the first show for the CAMH was segregated, and Jacob Lawrence, who’s one of my favorite artists, had work in that show, and would have not been able to go to the opening.” 

In a puppetry installation and video work, Choi thinks through these painful aspects of CAMH’s racial history. Her 2023 video, Pleasure Vision and VFC Intergalactic Presents—Great Moments in Cosmic Womb, re-creates “the eight-year-old version of me,” she said. “That’s the ‘pure being’ version of me…completely in flow and just loves what she’s doing—the little girl who’s sitting and doing watercolors ’til the sun goes down, and they have to tell her to come inside.” The childlike wonder in the work acts as a way to disarm the viewer and enable them to confront the more difficult realities of racism and other forms of bigotry she discusses in the work, as radically diverse characters coexist, thrive, and fight for freedom in Choi’s paracosmic world.

Hewitt’s research led her to John S. Chase, the first African American licensed architect in Texas. “Thinking of this collapse in design and architecture and ‘fine art,’ there was already a vested interest in that art can promise something that wasn’t already being delivered to society,” she said. That led her to a series of questions: “How can I connect the dots? What other view can I bring? What does it mean for this institution to look back at its past?”

Hewitt, who collaborated with artist Iman Raad in the graphic design piece Forty Four Fifty Fifty Four Sixty Eight (2023), conjoined the text of seminal civil rights court cases of the time—particularly Sweatt vs. Painter, which granted Chase admittance to the University of Texas School of Architecture—with the residential floor plan Chase used to design his own home to create an abstracted architectural layout. The work culminated as a stack of posters on the floor that visitors could take home, à la Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Architecture also features in another of Hewitt’s contributions to the exhibition, two untitled works that re-create the original measurements of the walls at the MFA Houston that hosted “This is Contemporary Art.” Hewitt sees this architecture as part of the institution’s metadata. “It’s a haunting—the past has a resonance,” she said.

So, what comes next for the CAMH? “We’re at the beginning stages of a potential future expansion that will position the museum to have a greater impact in our city and within our community,” McGraw, CAMH’s director, said in a recent phone interview. “We’re at the beginning of planning for what the most impactful design of our campus would be in the future.”

As part of this expansion, the museum has acquired several adjacent properties along Bayard Street, which, McGraw said, “was an effort that really was 40 years in the making—it happened very quickly, within the last nine months.”

As of now, how this expansion will manifest remains unclear, although CAMH “will engage a Community Advisory Committee to ensure the project’s vision and goals are informed by the representatives’ expertise and values—and aligned with the shared aspirations of the community,” according to a press release.

Will the CAMH’s ideas around contemporary art—especially with its imminent expansion—shift within the next 25 or 50 years? Matalon postulated: “The contemporary is contextual.”

And at the center of the BKC is the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), opened last year by art patron Nita Mukesh Ambani, whose husband, Mukesh, sits at number 9 on the Forbes “World Billionaires List.” After a show dedicated to TOILETPAPER, the magazine and creative studio founded by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, and one on American Pop art, the NMACC has shifted its focus closer to home, with its third exhibition “Liminal Gaps” (through June 9), focusing on four contemporary Indian artists and collectives as a way to reshape “perspectives on India’s evolving cultural identity,” according to the catalog.

In explaining the exhibition’s approach to liminality, Mafalda Millies, one of the show’s curators and a cofounder of TRIADIC, a self-described “creative house and cultural engine,” said, “we aren’t from here and wanted to understand India in today’s time and space. We noticed that art in India has always had a historical element while shedding light on the present. India seems to thrive in this liminality between the past and the future and that is how the theme came to us.”

The exhibition takes over the four floors of NMACC’s Art House venue, with each artist getting their own floor: Ayesha Singh, Raqs Media Collective, Asim Waqif, and Afrah Shafiq (from the ground floor up). With the works on view, the show insists on sensorial and cognitive participation from its audience, asking them to occupy the museum’s many lines and nooks—to touch, click, scroll, play, listen, read, think, scribble, walk, stop, chuckle, rest, and most important, take pictures.

Roya Sachs, a cofounder of TRIADIC and its artistic director, said the group wanted to approach this exhibition in an untraditional format, as it had with the TOILETPAPER show and with its editions of the Format Festival in Bentonville, Arkansas. “We come from different worlds—art, performance, production—and our ethos has been to mix mediums and people,” she told ARTnews. “The contemporary art world is a disruptive space where we increasingly witness interdisciplinarity: choreographers working with visual artists, fashion designers creating sculptures, or sound engineers collaborating with painters. We are always trying to make bridges, take risks, and find magic in the unexpected.”

“Liminal Gaps” begins with visitors physically entering Delhi-based Ayesha Singh’s Hybrid Drawings (2024), a white-box room housing a wireframe installation of a two-point perspective. As you move around the space, architectural elements from different cultures and eras—Mughal, Indo-Saracenic, Sikh, Hindu, and modern—come into view. While the lines are a technical abstraction of Delhi’s architecture, they could be representative of any ancient city in the Indian subcontinent where imprints of past civilizations continue to transcend time and space. Even so, there is a clear erasure of the complexity, chaos, disarray, and entropy that resides in Delhi, or any Indian city for that matter. Singh’s work purges and reduces the city into sanitized lines of black against the spotless white of the walls, ceiling, and floor.

Established in 1992 by three artists (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), Raqs Media Collective presents several works that are meditations on time. The first, titled Nerves (2018), starts in a stairwell that leads from the floor where Singh’s work is installed to the other Raqs pieces. Set against a deep cobalt blue background are line drawings of neurons as they were represented in the early 20th century; running alongside them are expressions like “hit a raw nerve,” “nerves of steel,” or “you have some nerve.”

This passageway leads to Chromacron (2023), where stripes of Pantone’s Color of the Year from 2000 to 2024 line up in chronological order, leading to the installation called Escapement (2018). As the name suggests, its liminality derives from the mechanism in clocks (escapement) that governs consistent and uninterrupted motion of its arms. The work’s 27 seemingly identical clocks are set to different time zones. However, there are two aberrations: the hours are denoted by moods and emotions—remorse, awe, fear, epiphany—instead of numbers, and three clocks, running counterclockwise, are tagged to fictional cities (Babel, Shangri La, and Macondo). Nearby, a giant 24-hour clock sits by itself toward the end of this space; its digits are replaced by words in the Devanagari script that take on literal and symbolic meanings associated with time, such as shran (second), pran (life), atithi (guest), ritu (season), and kaal (era).

The center of the room looks deceptively empty wherein sits Betaal, an augmented reality work of abstract geometric figures that can be seen using iPads. Raqs has said they see this work as an entity that moves in the liminal gap between time and consciousness. There is a comfortable rhythm to Raqs’ work, the repetition and symmetry of clocks for instance lull you into reading it as an obvious rendition of time, until you are faced with the giant clock that compels you to dwell on the immense volatility of time and how it shapes our lives, language, and consciousness.

On the third floor is Asim Waqif’s Chaal (2024), an elaborate bamboo structure that is brought to life as you walk around or into it. While the work, and the exhibition as a whole, could perhaps be interpreted as an escape from the world, Waqif sees it differently. “I am nauseated by celebration right now, especially in the arts which has become a medium of celebrating redevelopment projects, real estate, new infrastructure, or just about anything. So Chaal while being playful is intended to have a dark mood, an element of unsettlement owing to its unpredictability.”

That unsettling feeling can come in the form of sudden sounds and lights activated by stepping on the bending bamboo structure or getting lost in its crevices—like entering a maze that has no exit. The experience can often vacillate between a childlike curiosity or a melancholic sense of doom.

In thinking about Waqif’s work within this context, BKC, the real estate development where this work is now sited, itself become a negation and denial of the realities of Mumbai, especially its poor. BKC and the NMACC within it are technically open to everyone are traversed by few, and comfortably so by even fewer. The looming glass facades, luxury brands, and absence of public transport or affordably priced food all ensure that the barrier of class and caste stands inviolable. The show itself is priced at INR 299 ($3.60 USD), an amount that could buy three dinners in Mumbai; it is, however, free for art students, if previously booked online.

For Sultana’s Reality (2017), Afra Shafiq takes the liminal gaps of the exhibition’s title more literally, presenting a mini library of books written by South Asian women, which visitors can annotate using sticky notes and graphite pencils, and a black box displaying a fantastical interactive experience (it can also be accessed online). This multimedia story, which borrows part of its name from Begum Rokeya’s 1905 feminist utopian story Sultana’s Dream, explores the relationship between women and colonial education movement in India using archival imagery, humor, contemporary culture, and historical nuggets.

“Most conversation around women’s education in India has been in the lines of ‘beti bachao… beti padhao’ (translation: save the daughter by educating the daughter) devoid of women’s autonomy or even voice,” Shafiq said. “Even the early reformers—colonial and Brahmanical alike—never thought of women’s education as a way to make them equal partners, or to imagine a world where they’d be educated and hence emancipated. She sees this reform movement “as a software update” that is “full of bugs.” Indeed, a thinking, liberated woman would be disastrous to their world order, especially when taking into account that Indian women were to be taught “to read but not to write,” according to one primary source in the video, and “only literature on devotion, gardening, child rearing, perhaps poetry” but never mathematics, chemistry, philosophy, or political science.

How this exhibit will “reshape India’s cultural identity” remains an unanswered and forgotten assertion when actually visiting “Liminal Gaps.” The insistence on these artists’ Indian-ness, on the part of the curators and NMACC’s billionaire founders, fails to register.

“I used to work all day and bead all night. Now, I get to bead full-time. And this way is better,” Melancon told ARTnews, with a laugh, during a studio visit last fall. “I can’t live without my beads. I can’t wait to get up in the morning to do this work.”

Big Chief Melancon—as he is known in his community, the Young Seminole Hunters—began making Mardi Gras Indian suits 30 years ago in a laborious process requiring thousands of hours and innumerable beads, glass rhinestones, and feathers. When crafting a suit, Melancon aims to summon ancestral forebearers to realize what he describes as a-koo-chi-mali—Black masking energy embodied when the suit is made, adorned, and activated in performance.

“Making the suits is spiritual practice. There’s an elder presence in this work,” Melancon said.

On Mardi Gras day, dozens of masking Indian tribes meet each other in the streets of the Lower Ninth Ward in competitive battles of performance and percussion, singing to honor the history and culture of Indigenous peoples who welcomed those escaping enslavement into Native communities outside of New Orleans before and after emancipation.

Though now referred to as “Mardi Gras Indians,” Black participants were originally forbidden from participating in Mardi Gras celebrations. In refusal and rebellion of this restriction, Black revelers and the descendants of these hybrid communities came together as Masking Indians to create their own Carnival. On his suits, Melancon features Nyabinghi warriors from Central Africa, Emperor Haile Selassie and Empress Menen of Ethiopia, Shaka Zulu warriors, the Louisiana enslaved dancer Bras-Coupé, and other under-studied figures of African and African diaspora histories. “I’m big on studying—there’s a lot of research before I start to bead,” Melancon said.

For “Ten Thousand Suns,” the 2024 edition of the Biennale of Sydney in Australia, Melancon has on display two beaded aprons deconstructed from Mardi Gras suits he wore in 2011 and 2013. One features large profiles of Lakota leaders Sitting Bull and Red Cloud overlooking layers of the state of Louisiana, the Egyptian Khufu Valley Temple pyramid, and First Nations peoples dancing, drumming, and praying amid land, sky, and water.

“If I break a suit down, the work is transformed into art objects, into contemporary art pieces,” he said. “In the gallery, that work catches the viewer, it gets the viewer, just like if I was wearing the whole suit. The spirit is still in them. The gallery doesn’t transform the suit pieces—the a-koo-chi-mali transforms the space.”

In addition to the patches, aprons, headpieces, fans, and other components that comprise one of these suits, Melancon makes work not ever intended for wearing but exclusively for the wall. In the context of the gallery, Melancon often shows patch-like beaded portraits that feature icons of history, music, and art: Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, Barkley L. Hendricks, Big Freedia, Harriet Tubman, and more. These familiar faces, their adornments, surroundings, and borders, are all composed and textured with impossibly small glass beads.

“I want to wow people with my beads. You gotta show people what you can do,” he said.

To create these designs, like those on his suits, Melancon drafts the outline of the images in pencil on stretched canvas before solidifying the line with pen. He often sketches in collaboration with friends and colleagues and is accompanied in the creative process each day by his wife and collaborator of 19 years, Alicia Melancon, who has a hand in the majority of his work.

Melancon and his wife start every morning with a walk together before turning their hands to beadwork. “She’s my right hand,” he explained. “She’s a maker, a critic, and everything in one. Without my wife, I wouldn’t be making this work. She’s a Big Queen.”

After selecting the most symmetrical beads, Melancon painstakingly affixes every piece of glass individually with a needle and nylon-cotton thread in a tacking lockstitch. Beeswax rubbed into the thread with nimble fingers ensures the strength and flexibility of the chord. In his studio, Melancon has hundreds of pounds of beads—opaque, transparent, matte, and metallic, as small as 2 millimeters, and sourced from around the world. When completed, his suits, too, can weigh upwards of a hundred pounds. When asked about the physical tolls of this work, Melancon simply shrugged, admitting to some pain in his back and wrists. But his fingers, he said, beginning to smile, “are like bricks.”

Melancon sees his work, which at first may seem to have more in common with sculpture, as a kind of painting in the vein of Michelangelo, Caravaggio, or Kerry James Marshall—figurative artists whose paintings Melancon describes as coming off the wall or off the canvas “like magic.” His practice, highly resonant with portraiture and history painting, also shares great affinities with draftsmanship, collage, embroidery, performance, worldbuilding, song, rebellion, community activism, and memory preservation.

Last fall, his studio was packed with various historical and fantastical scenes, in-progress Victorian portraits, and one or two large patches for an upcoming Mardi Gras suit. Those patches were covered by a large cloth for my visit—they are private and secret until Melancon adorns them on his suit for Mardi Gras day. His practice, like the Black Masking tradition itself, holds various levels of representation and opacity, depending on how active the viewer is in these communities. 

Glass beads themselves are, in their most basic material form, grains of sand. As anthropologist Vanessa Agard-Jones explores in the article, “What the Sands Remember,” sand is both a bridge and a boundary territory between water and earth, providing shifting ground and geological legacy in both worlds. That’s especially true in Melancon’s hometown of New Orleans, a place built below sea level that continues to lose land to rising and warming waters. What does it mean to adorn the body, to adorn art spaces, in this glassy substance that is of both land and sea? Melancon’s work dances in the streets on Mardi Gras day and then, in formidable stillness, holds space in galleries and museums. His finished objects, like his materials, move through multiple worlds. 

“Who are the Indians? We walk on water and can’t get wet,” Melancon said. “I love to bead water. I know when I bead, I walk on water. The elders taught me that.”