When the Long Museum, the private institution founded by Chinese mega-collectors Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei, began selling work last year, it felt like a sign of the times. It meant that Asian collectors were not only being less active in terms of buying. They were actively selling, too.

Previously, the paintings being sold by collectors like Liu and Wang—a $34.9 million Modigliani that appeared at Sotheby’s last year, for example—came from the West and made their way to China via flashy purchases. Today, it is the opposite: these very same paintings are being sent back to the West, where they will likely find new buyers.

Now, there is news of at least two major paintings on the market that appear to come from China: a Warhol that, according to a source close to the gallery, is priced in excess of $100 million and a Basquiat that sold in 2013 for $29 million.

In mid-May—not coincidentally, during the major auctions in New York—Gagosian opened “Icons From a Half Century of Art,” an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Basquiat, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Cy Twombly, and Warhol. It is open only to collectors, and can only be seen by appointment at Gagosian’s 24th Street gallery in New York. The image the gallery used to promote the exhibition on its website is of a Warhol “Mao.” Warhol famously created no fewer than 199 images of “Mao,” but this isn’t just any “Mao.” It is the only one of the four so-called “giant Maos”—they stand a full 15 feet high—that is not in a museum.

The last time the Gagosian “Mao” was publicly on the market was in 2008, when Christie’s, in collaboration with London dealer James Mayor, sent the painting to Hong Kong with a price tag of $120 million. As described in write-up at the time in the Wall Street Journal, that price would have set a record for the artist: the auction record for a Warhol then was the $71.7 million Christie’s got in May 2007 for the 1963 silkscreen Green Car Crash. (The record today is the $195 million that Larry Gagosian paid for a painting of Marilyn Monroe at Christie’s in 2022.) But the “Mao” didn’t sell in 2008 in Hong Kong, and then came the recession. According to a source with close knowledge of the painting, it did, however, sell around 2013 for a price within the range of $120 million.

The person involved in that transaction, dealers say, was Rosaline Wong, who has in the past reportedly worked on behalf of Henry Cheng, chairman of Hong Kong–based New World Development. According to Forbes, Cheng, who succeeded his own father at New World, is China’s third-richest person. New World’s shares dropped 60 percent between January 2023 and January 2024, and the Cheng family’s net worth dropped by nearly a fourth, to $22.1 billion.

Wong is a former Hong Kong barrister that Artnet News and the South China Morning Post previously linked to the purchase of a $150 million Gustav Klimt painting. The painting was previously owned by Oprah Winfrey, and the transaction was brokered by Gagosian, according to Bloomberg. More recently, Artnet News linked Wong with a Klimt that sold at Sotheby’s last year for $108.4 million. Dealers who worked with Wong between 2013 and 2015 say she appeared to be buying on behalf of a foundation that was in formation.

According to South China Morning Post, around 2015, Wong founded an investment advisory company, HomeArt, which matches individuals and companies with art for sale. The SCMP reported in 2022 that at that time Wong was “in the middle of setting up a US$1 billion ‘museum-grade’ art investment fund with Hong Kong- and Singapore-based asset management firm Zheng He Capital, which counts among its heavyweight advisers Gagosian and Wong’s close friend, the Hong Kong billionaire Henry Cheng Kar-shun,” head of New World Development and father of collector Adrian Cheng, executive vice chairman and CEO of New World Development and founder of the K11 , a venture that blends art, commerce, and development, and that has an associated foundation, the K11 Art Foundation. Artnet News reported last year that Wong was “launching a fractional ownership fund specializing in museum-quality works for a broader pool of investors.”

Wong has also been linked to Joseph Lau, whose purchase of a smaller Warhol “Mao” painting in 2006 for $17 million set the stage for Christie’s bringing the “giant Mao” to Hong Kong.

Since 2021, Homeart has since done several exhibitions in collaboration with Christie’s, among them an 11-work Basquiat show in Hong Kong. That exhibition, held in May 2021, included an untitled 1982 painting that was purchased at Christie’s London in 2013 for $29 million. (It’s worth noting that Christie’s made a point of telling the New York Times just after that sale that there was a large amount of bidding from Asia.) That Basquiat painting is also in the current Gagosian “Icons” exhibition, according to several sources who have seen the show.

A representative for Gagosian declined to comment on the identity of the consignor of the Warhol and Basquiat paintings. Wong did not return a request for comment submitted to Homeart.

The four “giant Mao” paintings are so big that Warhol had to make them in the Factory’s screening room rather than the painting studio. They were so expensive to produce that he needed backing from two galleries (Knoedler & Co. and Castelli) and an avid collector of his (Peter Brant). In return, each of those parties got a “giant Mao” painting. The one Christie’s sent to Hong Kong in 2008 went through Castelli to James Mayor, who placed it in a private collection in Europe. Another was sold by Knoedler in 1974 to the Art Institute of Chicago. The third, Brant gifted in 1977 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The fourth “Mao” Warhol kept, and eventually sold it to Charles Saatchi , who eventually sold the piece to the late German collector Erich Marx, who, in 2007, put it on long-term loan to the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin.

Coincidentally, the Hamburger Bahnhof “Mao” was in the news this week. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ran an op-ed by art historian Von Hubertus Butin, who speculated that the painting might soon hit the market. Marx died in 2020; three paintings from the Marx collection—two Warhols and a Twombly —that previously appeared at the Hamburger Bahnhof have been removed from the museum by his heirs. Butin writes that those paintings, which he claims are collectively worth some $170 million, have been consigned to Gagosian and that some may have sold. (Gagosian declined to comment on this; the museum said only that the paintings have been removed.) The Marx collection’s “Mao” could be next to go, Butin claimed, writing that there had at one point been a $155 million offer made for that “Mao.” The museum said it had no knowledge of this, and dealers told ARTnews that the figure seemed unrealistic. One dealer even called the sum “aspirational,” particularly in the current art market conditions.

As for whether the “Mao” at Gagosian has found a buyer, the gallery isn’t saying. The “Icons” show is up through July 19.

While the VIP preview Thursday of Tokyo Gendai’s second edition brought healthy buzz—along with major collectors like Takeo Obayashi, Shunji and Asako Oketa, Yoshiko Mori, Jenny Wang and Simian Wang—the atmosphere on Friday was more subdued. ARTnews took the opportunity to ask galleries how their sales had been so far.

Two brand-name galleries with Tokyo branches saw robust sales. By the middle of day two, mega-gallery Pace Gallery, a newcomer to the fair that did a soft opening for its new Tokyo space this week, either sold or had on strong reserve all eight works they were showing by Robert Longo, at prices ranging from $90,000 to $750,000. (All the works were going to local collections.) Meanwhile, Los Angeles’s BLUM, which has spaces in New York and Tokyo, sold a Ha Chong-Hyun painting for $250,000, a work on paper by Yoshitomo Nara for $180,000, a Kenjiro Okazaki painting for $160,000, and ceramics by Kazunori Hamana and Yuji Ueda for $20,000 each, among other pieces.

Tokyo’s ShugoArts sold two Lee Kit works, priced in the range of $30,000. Another Tokyo gallery, Anomaly, had sold out almost all of their works by Yusuke Asai, though the gallery declined to give prices.

BLUM founder Tim Blum told ARTNews that the fair seemed more or less the same as last year, but Taku Sato, director of Tokyo gallery Parcel, another returnee to the fair, had a less positive impression. “Compared to last year, as my expectations were not that high, I think so far [the second edition] is good,” Sato said. “However, I do feel there were more people from abroad last year than this year, and more institutional curators last year.” Parcel is showing large works by Tomonari Hashimoto. So far, numerous smaller pieces by Hashimoto have sold, ranging from $3,000 to $5,000, some going into notable private collections in Japan.

There tend not to be million-dollar plus artworks at Tokyo Gendai. The $750,000 Longo at Pace’s booth appeared to represent the upper end of things. Most top works were selling in the up-to-$300,000 range, as is the case for all of Art Assembly’s fairs, co-founder Magnus Renfrew told ARTnews on Friday. (For what it’s worth, he pointed out, although fairs like Art Basel Hong Kong may have works that go higher in price, most works that sell tend to be in a similar same range.)

Renfrew cautioned against taking any sales results thus far as the final word: there is a strong work ethic in Japan, and for that reason many collectors tend to come to the fair, and buy, on the weekend.

“There’s a lot of collectors that won’t come during the week who will come on Saturday and Sunday. And we know someone personally who are doing that,” he said. According to conversations Renfrew said he was having with participating galleries, “most of them have been having good conversations and many have sold artworks,” though results among them were uneven, with some still awaiting sales.

One noted collector missing from the festivities was young mega-collector Yusaku Maezawa, who, according to dealers, usually likes to confirm his purchases in person. The director of his foundation was, however, one of the first to arrive when the fair opened its VIP preview on Thursday.

While some have hoped that a weak yen right now might encourage foreign collectors to travel, as ARTnews Karen K. Ho reported earlier this week, there was not a large contingent of collectors from the United States or Europe. However, that’s not really this fair’s brief. Renfrew is more focused on attracting collectors from the region. He did, however, say, “In an ideal world, we would want to be able to attract a wider audience from around the world, and I think that there could be the potential to do that.”

The July date for the fair, he admitted, when weather in Tokyo is extremely hot and humid, is a hindrance and spring and autumn tend to be more attractive for US and European visitors. (For what it’s worth, the weather right now isn’t the only obstacle. There are events in more attractive climes. Paris’s Almine Rech may be manning a booth in Tokyo, but the gallery opened a branch in Monaco’s Carré d’Or district, and is participating in the sixth edition of Monaco Art Week, which runs July 2 to July 7, precisely the same dates as Tokyo Gendai.)

“The priority for us is to ensure that we’re delivering a really strong Japanese audience of existing collectors in the art community and curators and museum directors, then to be broaden the audience within Japan through this kind of focal point,” Renfrew said. “And then regional attendance, from the core constituencies within the natural catchment area, which is mainland China, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.  Then we build up from there.”

When I brought up the recent changes in the art market in the West, where speculators are fleeing as prices for young hot artists correct, Renfew said, “We’re really keen to try and build the market for the long term. We’re not interested in a flash in the pan.” He then pointed to the wild speculation in Chinese art in 2006-2008.

“There was an absence of a curatorial critical framework to provide validation [for artworks with] high prices and were on the cover of auction catalogues. After the correction in the Chinese contemporary art market, people became much more aware of that [vacuum].”

Then came Art HK, of which Renfrew was the first director, from 2007 to 2012, which then became Art Basel Hong Kong, and with it a growth in serious institutions like Hong Kong’s M+. “The first phase was that the fair in Hong Kong was the focal point, with a wide catchment area that required all of the different constituencies [across Asia] to come in, and to have a market that was big enough to sustain the scale and ambition that we set up there.”

Now, Renfrew said, “we’re in a new phase of the market in Asia, [where] each of those constituencies has grown, and warrants a fair of its own.”

One question on dealers’ minds as Renfew’s new group of fairs—Tokyo Gendai, Art SG in Singapore, and Taipei Dangdai in Taiwan—matures is how he is connecting them, for instance, by encouraging cross-visitorship. He said that while it is crucial that the fairs maintain their own identity, “One of the interesting things for us is how we will be able to cross promote and cross pollinate, particularly within our VIP network, I think that the fact that we’d have three fairs a year where we’re gaining data for each means that we’re rapidly expanding our VIP database throughout Asia.”

“Deep roots [in each individual location] and broad branches [across the region], means that we’re in a unique position,” he added.

Having three fairs each year, Renfrew said, enables him to iterate quickly. “We’re able to experiment a little bit with different initiatives and see what works and what doesn’t work. We can kind of we can fail rapidly on things, so there’s some quite good learnings.”

I told Renfrew that one dealer had quipped to me that, while Renfrew was fond of pointing to the sheer amount of wealth in a place like Singapore—i.e. note the number of family investment offices there—that didn’t mean that that the wealthy there are in the habit of buying art. “That’s a valid point,” Renfrew said. “Just because there’s money that does not necessarily translate into sales.” His riposte, however, is that you nevertheless need to go where the money is. “No money equals no sales.”

Fair enough.

The flight to Japan from art world centers like New York, London, and Paris isn’t exactly short. Those that do make the trip this year, however, won’t be disappointed with the art offerings, which span modern to contemporary. This week, during the Tokyo Gendai fair, the shows to see in the city are dominated by strong sculpture.

First up on the itinerary: the Artizon Museum’s exhibition of Constantin Brancusi, the first proper survey of the Romanian-born sculptor’s work in Japan.

Brancusi’s The Kiss has it all: it’s cute, it’s romantic, it’s profoundly Instagrammable. Made at the turn of the twentieth century, it also happens to mark the starting line of modern sculpture: from The Kiss’s economy of means, the rest was a sprint, from Picasso to Moore to Giacometti all the way up through Eva Hesse and Rachel Whiteread. So it’s no surprise that the Kiss is situated front and center at the Artizon show.

The exhibition neatly charts Brancusi’s wiggling free of Rodin’s influence and taking flight: the show culminates in a section dedicated to the form of the bird, represented by the rightly famous Bird in Space, an elegant skyward swipe of bronze. There are also photographs, and a section dedicated to recreating Brancusi’s Montparnasse studio. Purists will gripe about the large number of posthumous casts but, for a lay audience, the show serves as a decent dose of beauty and a fine introduction to a titan of modern sculpture.

If Brancusi conceived of the bird, Alexander Calder taught it to fly. Over at the Azabudai Hills Gallery is a compact survey of the master of the mobile—done in collaboration with Pace Gallery , whose huge new space is upstairs—assembled by the artist’s tireless grandson Sandy Rower, head of the Calder Foundation. The title? “Calder: A Japanese Effect” Why not. We’ve already had Calder paired with artists from Giacometti to Miro to Fischli and Weiss. As Rower has shown us over the past two decades, Calder is indeed the gift that keeps on giving. 

There are some real gems in this exhibition, including an unexpected series of drawings of animals in motion: there are no other words for these than just perfect, especially the cats, with their movements captured in just a few strokes of ink. A star of this particular show, though, is Japanese architect Stephanie Goto, who did the exhibition design. A black mobile set against a black ceiling? Unexpectedly brilliant. Other works are situated against a wall covered in large black sheets of paper, another effect that shouldn’t work but does. 

You may think of Brancusi again when you visit “MOON,” an exhibition of Los Angeles-based British artist Thomas Houseago at BLUM , the gallery formerly known as Blum & Poe. Best known as a sculptor, Houseago has several pieces in the show that recall the Romanian master, one of them an abstract egg-like shape set on a rough-hewn wooden plinth, and the other an owl in his signature technique of drawing in plaster.

For my money, the owl is the best piece in this show, displayed silhouetted against a large window. Like Ann Craven’s paintings of birds, this piece seems to capture the essence of the animal. Houseago has recently branched out into paintings, and they are dramatic and rich with color, if somewhat less successful than the 3D work. A large painting of an owl, for instance, is accomplished, but seems only to highlight the less-is-more brilliance of the sculpture.

After seeing the work of those three male sculptors, you will have to put on a different hat to experience the work of Rei Naito. Think of Henry James’s famous dictum and “try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.” Because if you are not paying attention in the various displays of Naito’s work throughout the enormous Tokyo National Museum, you are going to lose quite a bit. 

Naito, who was born in Hiroshima in 1961 and represented Japan at the 1997 Venice Biennale, works in a minimalist tradition, but not in the sense of, say, Donald Judd. There is nothing heavy about her work. Instead, objects ranging from small to miniscule—pompoms, balloons, pebble-like blown glass bubbles, animal figurines, bones, little mirrors, a jar of water—are deployed in ways that demand meditation on the part of the viewer. In one long, narrow gallery of the museum, such things are arrayed against slate gray walls and under dimmed lights: the effect is of being inside the artist’s imagination. Along one wall is white fabric inside a glass display case, looking like a snowbank. What amazes about Saito’s work is just how close it gets to twee without ever stepping over that line.

In the 1980s, Naito said of a particular artwork of hers that she was attempting to “create a spiritual place of her own.” The same might be said for another Japanese artist of Naito’s generation who works in a very different mode. Mariko Mori became known in the nineties for photographs of herself posed in urban environments in Japan, dressed up as various stereotypes of a Japanese woman. But over the past two decades she has been working in a spiritual mode, right down to merging her art with her living quarters. 

The project currently on view at SCAI The Bathhouse is complex, involving crystals and a spiritualistic painting, and is connected to Mori’s artwork Peace Crystal (2016-2024), which is currently on view outside a palazzo in Venice during this year’s Biennale. At SCAI, Mori appears in augmented reality (you need to make an appointment) as a priestess whose attire draws on both Japan’s history and on the kind of futuristic effects found in video games. Like Saito, Mori has crafted an entire immersive world, one you can only enter in person.

For Theaster Gates, too, as a wall text explains in the Chicago artist’s first solo exhibition in Japan, at the Mori Art Museum , making art is a spiritual enterprise. Gates prepared for the Mori show by working with potters in Tokoname, which he had first visited in 2004, and came up with the concept of “Afro-Mingei,” a reference to the word for Japanese folk art, a movement that was overshadowed by the introduction of Western art to Japan in the 19th century. (“[W]hat is key for me is the way in which Mingei honors makers native to a place and resists external impositions of cultural identity,” Gates explains in wall text in the show.) 

The results are displayed in the final section of this survey of Gates’ work and they are by far the highlight. After an elaborate timeline that traces Gates’ links with Japan comes an enormous display case holding ceramics by Tokoname potter Koide Yoshihiro, who died in 2022, and an enormous wooden bar—stools and all—that fronts a set of shelves holding binbo tokkuri bottles (sake bottles) made in collaboration with Japanese potter Tani Q. There’s also a terrific soundtrack (Busta Rhymes was on when I visited) and a spinning disco ball in the shape of an iceberg.

On Tuesday evening in Tokyo’s Roppongi district, under a sky that threatened downpour, artists, collectors, dealers, and others gathered for openings at the numerous galleries that are clustered in this bustling gallery neighborhood, including the homegrown ShugoArts and Taka Ishii, as well as outposts for foreign blue-chip enterprises like Perrotin. There was champagne and canapes, and, at the Perrotin store, next to his main first floor gallery, frozen ice desserts. Upstairs, Perrotin was inaugurating a third, intimate salon-style space.

It was the first night of what might be called Tokyo Gendai week after the art fair that opens its second edition on Thursday in the Pacifico Yokohama, a convention center about an hour south of central Tokyo. On hand for the openings among locals was Magnus Renfrew, the founder of the fair, as well as London gallerist, Sadie Coles, a participating dealer.

Reports from the first edition last year were generally upbeat, but as anyone in the art fair business knows, it’s the sophomore year that’s the real test. There are some complicating factors this time around: the global art market is in a different place than it was in 2023, with the work of many hot young (flippable) artists having cooled considerably, and the dollar’s strength against the yen, while a boon for those Americans coming to Japan to shop, could be glitchy for dealers selling work in dollars to locals. 

Still, art fairs are a long game, and the fact that Perrotin is expanding and, more significantly, that Pace Gallery is previewing its forthcoming Tokyo branch this week ahead of its September opening, signals that the Japanese capital is heating up. Renfrew likely knows this better than most art fair owners: it was he who, starting in 2007, was the founding director of Art HK which eventually became Art Basel Hong Kong. 

Back in 2007 no mega-galleries had a presence in Hong Kong, though Gagosian was sniffing around and opened in 2011; now, all the megas have spaces there. The shift being observed now is away from a centralization of Asia’s market in Hong Kong and toward regional markets: note, for instance, that Gagosian will for the first time have a presence in Seoul coinciding with the third edition of the Frieze Art Fair there, hosting an exhibition of new paintings by Derrick Adams in an adjunct space (APMA Cabinet) at the Amorepacific Museum of Art, in the headquarters of Amorepacific, the cosmetics brand led by ARTnews Top 200 collector Suh Kyung-bae. Pace opened a permanent Seoul branch in 2017.

What can assuredly be said about Japan is that there is a new generation of art collectors here that, as one dealer told me, have been spurred to acquire art in part through the example of entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa , who famously bought the record-setting $110.5 million Jean-Michel Basquiat painting at auction in 2017, when he was just 41. Maezawa’s influence is mixed, the dealer told me. “He had a big impact, and in some negative ways because he has been a speculator, but there are legitimate people in Japan who are thoughtfully collecting.” 

And then there is the old guard, like the powerful Mori family, now largely represented by Yoshiko Mori. Pace’s 5,500 square foot, Thomas Heatherwick–designed Tokyo gallery is in the new Azabudai Hills development, a project of the Mori Building company. It was Minoru Mori (Yoshiko’s father, who died in 2012) who established the Mori Art Museum in 2003, which catalyzed Mori’s Roppongi Hills development. The Mori Art Museum opened an Azabudai branch in November, with an exhibition of Olafur Eliasson. In Tokyo, as elsewhere (like, for instance, New York’s Chelsea art district), the art market and real estate development are closely linked.

When the first edition of Tokyo Gendai opened last July, the big news was that the government was revising tax laws to make it easier for galleries, and the fair, to operate. This year will be a measure of how that is playing out. “Japan’s art market is behind where logic dictates it should be,” Renfrew told the Art Newspaper last year. Just how far behind will be determined this year, and in the years to come.

In late July, the Aspen Art Fair will open its inaugural edition at the Hotel Jerome, a historic red brick Victorian building opened in the 1880s. Some exhibitors will take over hotel rooms; others will show in public spaces in the building.

The fair, which will include around 30 exhibitors, comes with a program of talks, performances, screenings, and dinners. It also will coincide with Aspen Art Week (July 29 to August 2) and with Aspen’s existing art fair, the Intersect Aspen Art and Design Fair.

Aspen Art Fair was cofounded by Becca Hoffman, founder of 74tharts and former director of Outsider Art Fair, and Bob Chase, owner of Aspen’s Hexton Gallery. Hoffman was the director of the Intersect fair from 2020 until this past fall, when she left to start 74tharts, which has produced an event in Vienna and has ones planned for later this year and 2025 in Milan, Singapore and Marseille. A full half of the 20 galleries that have committed to the Aspen Art Fair so far are following Hoffman over from Intersect, including blue-chip heavy hitters like Perrotin and Gmurzynska. (The full list is still in formation.)

The new venue was part of the draw. While Intersect is held at the Aspen Ice Garden, a recreation center a few blocks off Main Street, Hotel Jerome is on Main.

“I love Intersect, but it’s just too far out of the town,” Robert Casterline of Casterline/Goodman Gallery, which has locations in Aspen and Santa Fe, told ARTnews. “There’s a lot of events going on [that week] and a lot of people are like, ‘If it’s not easy, I’m not going to do it.'”

Casterline/Goodman is moving over to the new fair, where it will show work by Stanley Mouse, who did original posters for the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and other musical acts beginning in the 1960s.

Other exhibitors making the jump include locals like Chase’s Hexton Gallery and Galerie Maximilian; as well as New York galleries Miles McEnery and Nancy Hoffman. Newcomers exhibiting in Aspen for the first time include Chicago’s PATRON gallery.

For its fourth edition, Intersect has retained galleries like Hilton and Todd Merrill, and has maintained its number of 27 international exhibitors—adding 12 new exhibitors of its own, including Tel Aviv’s Corridor Contemporary. Intersect will have a space curated by local curator and artist D.J. Watkins highlighting local artists who are represented at Watkins’ new downtown Aspen gallery, Aspen Collective. Intersect evolved out of Art Aspen, which ran from 2010 to 2019.

74tharts is trying out a new concept with the Aspen Art Fair, according to Hoffman. “We have conceived a new type of cross-disciplinary art fair that aims to re-think, re-examine, re-engage, and re-invigorate, connecting and convening a dynamic set of international and creative communities in Aspen in a luxurious social setting,” she said in a statement.

In an interview, Hoffman told ARTnews, “What I’m interested in doing is bringing as many people who support the arts to the town of Aspen as possible. So I think it’s great that we have multiple art fairs. It’s all about a rising tide floating all boats.”

The Aspen Art Fair is partnering with Anderson Ranch Arts Center to award a Guest Artist Prize to an artist showcased at the fair, which will include a one-week visit to the ranch to work in its studios.

Tickets for the fair run $30 per day, or $90 for a 4-day pass, and $100 for VIP.

Exhibitors announced so far are:

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Pierre Huyghe Takes on AI and Nonhuman Evolution in Venice

All the Icon artists in this issue, to a greater or lesser degree, have had to wait for the world to be truly ready for their work—in essence, to catch up with them. For Fred Eversley, it took half a century for discrimination against Black artists to fade, to enable him to produce his parabolic sculptures on a large scale. The art world had to evolve to acclaim ceramics, a medium that was often associated more with craft, before Arlene Shechet saw her artworks positioned on a global stage. Joan Snyder practiced patience until ambitious painting by women began to earn appreciation the same way that men’s did before she started to draw the attention she deserves. And Shahzia Sikander’s miniature painting awaited recognition as an avant-garde approach before she could begin to expand her practice.

In the meantime, these artists didn’t wait at all, of course: they made work, got it shown, and, slowly but surely, produced the change they hoped to see. The profiles of these artists all showcase one essential trait for iconic artists: a profound perseverance.

As we celebrate these towering figures, we mourn another: the sculptor Richard Serra, who died in March. Serra’s works were the most aggressive, imposing, and deeply memorable of the Post-Minimalists. In an Appreciation of the artist, Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, a curator at Dia Art Foundation, writes that the scale of Serra’s famous Torqued Ellipses “is more than can be fully comprehended, and their materiality attracts a kind of bodily engagement that is entirely their own.”

Finally, to mark the 150th anniversary of Impressionism, art historian Kelly Presutti offers readers a Syllabus of lively and informative books—including recent volumes that expand the scope of the movement that changed painting forever and launched a thousand blockbusters. Study up, and you might just be ready for the latest one: “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism,” which runs through July 14 at the Musée d’Orsay.

FEATURES

Hide and Seek
Jeffrey Gibson puts Native American culture on poignant display in the Venice Biennale’s US Pavilion.
by Andy Battaglia

Don’t Box Her In
On the eve of a career retrospective, Shahzia Sikander continues to elude categorization.
by Eleanor Heartney

Full Circle
In 1967, Fred Eversley left a job with NASA to become an artist. Now, he’s finally realizing ideas 50 years in the making.
by Emily Watlington

Work Hard Play Hard
Eccentric sculptor Arlene Shechet makes her recalcitrant materials feel fresh and alive.
by Glenn Adamson

Painting the Roses Red
Joan Snyder’s searching canvases cast her as an uncompromising creator both in and out of control.
by Barry Schwabsky

DEPARTMENTS

Datebook
A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Hard Truths
An artist rues downsizing his studio, and another wanders into unwanted political territory. Plus, an interactive quiz.
by Chen & Lampert

Sightlines
Multidisciplinary creator Miranda July tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton

Inquiry
A Q&A with Joyce J. Scott about her pointed and playful provocations.
by Andy Battaglia

Object Lesson
An annotation of Tomashi Jackson’s Here at the Western World (Professor Windham’s Early 1970’s Classroom & the 1972 Second Baptist Church Choir).
by Francesca Aton

Battle Royale
Italy vs. Greece—two summer vacation art destinations face off.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on Impressionism.
by Kelly Presutti

Appreciation
A tribute to Richard Serra, a sculptor without peer.
by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi

New Talent
Singaporean photographer and filmmaker Charmaine Poh confronts trade-offs between visibility and protection.
by Clara Che Wei Peh

Issues & Commentary
AI imagery is inciting widespread paranoia. Can art historians help?
by Sonja Drimmer

Spotlight
Mexican painter María Izquierdo is finally getting the attention she deserves.
by Edward J. Sullivan

Book Review
A reading of Claire Bishop’s Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today.
by Emily Watlington

Cover Artist
Jeffrey Gibson talks about her artwork featured on the front of A.i.A.

REVIEWS

Lagos
Lagos Diary
by Emmanuel Iduma

New York
The 2024 Whitney Biennial
by Emily Watlington

“Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning”
by Jenny Wu

Metz
“Lacan, the exhibition. When art meets psychoanalysis”
by Brian Ng

Venice
“Pierre Huyghe: Liminal”
by Eleanor Heartney

Cape Town
“Esther Mahlangu: Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting”
by Nkgopoleng Moloi

To read of the circumstances under which Dennis made the pieces featured in “Houses and Hotels” is gratifying. These large, complex architectural sculptures  were pieced together in the limited space of her New York studio, sometimes lying on the floor under the artworks. But the challenge wasn’t only logistical. The works are also documentation of something far less timebound: the struggle to balance life—relationships, as well as practicalities like housing and money—with creative work. Like anyone fully engaging in creative activity, Dennis had to decide along the way where she would compromise in her life to make her art. As it should go without saying, it was harder during those years for a woman to do such a thing than it was for a man. Ironically, if it weren’t for one man in particular, she might never have kept her diaries in the first place.

Born and raised in the New York City suburb of Westchester, Dennis attended Carleton College in Minnesota in the early 1960s, then moved to Manhattan, amongst a social circle of fellow Carleton graduates like the late critic Peter Schjeldahl and the late painter Martha Diamond. Dennis, who was also a painter at that time, shared with the two of them an ambition that was apparent from the start. Another of their peers, the poet Anne Waldman, recalled in a New York Times obituary of Diamond earlier this year, “When you feel it with people who have this conviction already, it’s very much in them, and I felt that with Peter at an early age, and with Donna and with Martha.” Others in their social circle were poets, like Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan, the latter of whom Dennis fell into a romantic relationship with. It was that relationship that gave birth to her journals. Arguably, the end of that relationship gave birth to her career.

“I was in kind of a major romantic thing with the poet Ted Berrigan, and Ted kept a journal,” Dennis told writer Nicole Miller in 2019. Dennis, too, started keeping a journal in the late ‘60s. Not surprisingly, it opens with a lot of talk of Berrigan: “While Ted is away I am drawing self-portraits”; “I am beginning to feel anxious about missing Ted.”; “I feel that maybe I’ve lost my mystery for Ted”; “I said to Ted, “It’s spring!”; “In the past week I’ve felt I really have come to understand what Ted was trying to tell me last year.”; “Ted says an artist never lets money come between him and his art.” She wonders who she is supposed to be at any given time: “One side of me wants to be so sensible & sane and respected that way—the other side of me wants to be weird and shocking—but not really that—more than that. One side of me wants to be a witch—a mystic, to be burned at the stake, to see the horrors of the universe, the vastness—to be a vehicle for that power—a vessel through which that power flows & makes itself manifest.” But then it’s back to Ted: “I am beginning to feel anxious about missing Ted.”

It’s only after the breakup with Berrigan that Dennis seems to come into herself. She reads The Feminine Mystique (“It’s changing my life at a time when I am open to change in a major way.”) She meets feminist critic Lucy Lippard. She joins a feminist consciousness-raising group, goes to marches. She has an affair with a woman artist (“Bisexuality appeals to me as an idea. Loving a woman seems a way to throw off the hurt and futility and bad habits of loving a man.”) She refreshes her wardrobe (“Bought dungarees today. Change in lifestyle.”) She enters the ‘70s with guns blazing (“finished The First Third by Neal Cassady. Sweet guy like Kerouac. Find myself envying them for their pleasure at their time (the ‘50s). Hope I’m getting as much from my time (the ‘60s) but no, I’m absolutely certain that this whole decade— the ‘70s—is mine—more than the ‘60s ever were.“) She finds her voice, her style: she starts making sculpture inspired by buildings she sees in the city, as well as in photographs by Walker Evans and George Tice, and in paintings by Edward Hopper.

The ‘70s were of course the heyday of second wave feminism in New York and artists were at the vanguard. The decade opened with Linda Nochlin’s famous article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists” in ARTnews; a group of downtown women artists, alongside critic Lucy Lippard, started a consciousness-raising group and the quarterly journal Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. It is all too easy to rely on sweeping accounts of how feminism changed things for women artists; it is much more affecting to read of the particulars. Dennis’s diary captures her real-time revelations both personal (“I like myself more and more because I accept myself as a woman more and more.”) and art-historical, the latter recorded in all-caps: “NOW I REALIZE HOW I’VE FELT CONTEMPT AT BOYS FOR SHUTTING ME OUT. FOR YEARS I’VE BEEN HAMMERING ON THE DOOR TO THE ROOM THE MEN LIVED IN (WITH MATISSE, PICASSO, KANDINSKY, CHOPIN). I’VE BEEN MANEUVERING MIRRORS TO ATTRACT THEIR ATTENTION WITH FLASHES OF THEIR OWN (SUN) LIGHT REFLECTED. “

She also sees the movement’s contradictions in action: “Everyone, it turned out, felt grotesquely fat and had treated their bodies horribly at times. No one is really fat. It seemed quite a devastating revelation that everyone was such a slave to a false conception of themselves, and yet—what ensued? A great ‘girl’ talk session on diets, hairdos, exercise, in fact a further acceptance of the horrors turned up.” And she notes the movement’s limitations. At one point, she faults her feminist consciousness-raising group for not being political enough. It’s “tainted by psychotherapy,” she writes. “I do not want to have to defend myself as a fucked-up person. I want to be able to give my testimony as an exploited female.”

Elsewhere in the diaries, however, she grapples with the demands that politics seem to put on her to choose sides: she takes her slides in for consideration for the Whitney Biennial, then learns that a group protesting the lack of women and people of color in the art world planned to pressure artists who participated in it. “Shit! The issue is having women’s work seen,” she writes. “So, what’s the point of intimidating women, anywhere, anytime, anyhow, who get a chance to show. I feel quite disturbed that a group for artists’ rights would take such a stand. Unless they were to organize an alternative show. I feel that this is going to be a year when women show their incredible power as artists. Power of demonstrations paltry compared with the power of the work. Once it is seen no one will ever be able to discuss women artists (or black artists) again in the same way.”

Dennis wasn’t making art whose subject matter was overtly feminist; she was innovating architectural sculpture alongside the likes of Alice Aycock. Nevertheless, the influence of feminism becomes apparent in the way she thinks of her work, leavened by her unique sense of humor: “The door is also a kind of vagina and I’ve always thought of my works as kind of mantraps,” she writes. “So it’s a woman’s joke on men. The works are my size (height). The scale of my works once they started coming into the room (marked by the birth of the box) has always been measured and determined by human scale. The painted world behind the box was 10′ × 7′, designed to engulf the viewer (who I REALIZE I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT OF AS MALE). I wanted to overwhelm him. So I see now I’ve developed a sense of confidence and humor on the subject of male/female relationships.”

If being an artist in downtown New York during those years sounds romantic, the diaries reflect that. In one memorable entry, Dennis finds ways around the police not letting her take photos of a structure at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel that she is using as inspiration for a sculpture. In another, she cries at the sight of Matisse’s sketches for the windows at Venice cathedral.

But the entries are also filled with banalities. Dennis takes care of her cats, cleans and “de-roaches” her apartment; she moves her bed so she can hear the street sounds at night. She wonders how she will pay December’s rent. She takes menial jobs that pay $2.00 an hour. She starts and leaves a department store job, all in one day, in an account that serves as a time capsule of ‘70s Manhattan:

“[H]ad a great night. Did a really good, new drawing. Slept a couple of hours. Got up, went to Bloomingdale’s totally shot. It was horrible. Thirty of us in a tiny claustrophobic classroom that reminded me of the worst first days in high school. The teacher referred to women as “girls.” Then she started asking people to get up in front of everyone and gave them problems to work out on the computer-register. The first person shook so much she could hardly touch the keys. My mind went numb (it already was pretty much so) and I just waited for lunch. By then I was in a daze. Went to Bonwit’s in the rain (my umbrella wouldn’t open right), called my answering service—the two freelance jobs I’d been hoping for hadn’t materialized. Cashed a bad check for $10. I’d spent my last money the day before. Ate lunch at MoMA. (I hardly could.) Walked around trying to figure out what to do.”

Throughout the journals the reader accompanies Dennis on visits—sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend or lover—to the apartment studio of her friend, the Russian-born Social Realist painter Raphael Soyer, who, in his 70s, serves as a kind of mentor figure. Dennis admires his work ethic (“Raphael pointed out that he is in his studio every day by 9:30 and leaves at 5:30. Even New Year’s Day and Jewish holidays, he said! So there’s my inspiration. “) They discuss the status of the artist. “At Raphael’s today we talked about the place of the artist in our society,” she writes, “We agreed that the artist has a very small, inconsequential place in society today. Most people get along without it. I mentioned commercial art, films, TV. Warhol is really the least romantic of us all. The artist today must be a star rather than a workman. Warhol and his ordinary ‘stars.’ Raphael says he can respect his cynicism.”

At the same time, the Soyer sessions prompt revelations about how women’s art might be important to all women: “After some silent musing, I told Raphael that I felt that art could mean a lot to people just beginning to discover themselves. Really, I was thinking of women. Nearly every woman who is becoming aware is watching, waiting, listening to see who we are. What we are like. And so, for a woman, women’s art (unless it tries to be men’s art) is of everyday importance.”

As much as he’s a wise elder and a sounding board, Soyer also provides a kind of mirror for Dennis as she evolves. In 1981, she writes of a visit to him, ““You’re a very strong woman,” he said. He said I seemed “very lost” at one time. Not quite but certainly I was troubled and have come a long way.”

The struggle of the starving artist is present in these diaries; throughout the book, writing bad checks is almost a running gag. But so is impostor syndrome, a condition that came out of a scientific study in 1978 and was first named in an article called “The Impostor Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention.” “Just wrote a bad check and got another pass for MoMA. I showed a Xerox of a review to prove I was an artist. And suddenly I got the tightness in the pit of my stomach and the shaky hands were upon me again. Jesus. I hate it. Must have something to do with my sense of myself. Do I feel like an imposter? That I don’t deserve to be me? That I’ll be found out to be not what I seem. So hard to throw off all the fears and inadequacies.” Like a lot of women in the ‘70s, she goes into therapy. She reads Gail Sheehy’s 1976 bestseller Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life and reassesses her relationship with her parents.

Things happen that bolster her confidence: she gets grants, gallery shows, representation with a prestigious dealer (Holly Solomon). Gradually the talk about men is replaced with talk about her own work that is no longer vaguely about inspiration but that is very specific: about scale, logistics, materials, revisions, her struggle to make a two-story structure, (“I should go to Coney Island on the elevated tomorrow and just revel at the second-story views.”) She spends years in courts trying to protect tenants’ rights—including to remain in her own downtown loft. (She finally sold it a couple years ago; she now lives and works near Hudson, New York.)

But some of the most poignant moments in the book are when Dennis attempts to balance romantic relationships with artmaking. After Berrigan, she has a six-year relationship with a male artist that leads to talk of having a baby, but eventually breaks up. Its fault lines track with changes taking place in society at the time. “He said he wanted to marry me,” she writes, “& I, sort of incredulous, laughed, said no, I didn’t believe in it.” Among Dennis’s set in New York, roles are shifting. “Funny, seems that the men … can declare their feelings these days more easily than the strong women who have bought their independence at tremendous personal expense.” She marvels—who hasn’t?—at how similar the state of total absorption in one’s work is to limerence. “[H]ere I am again without a man, getting more involved with my work. Is it because the particular state of mind I put into my work is interchangeable w/ the one I slide into when I think: I love you, I love you, I love you and get all soft and warm inside? Is it really possible that I can’t be happily in love and happily at work at the same time?”

In a happy coincidence, Dennis’s diaries are being published the same week the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale opens. The Biennale is known as the art world’s Olympics—a make or break moment for an artist’s career. The diaries conclude with Dennis’s inclusion in the Biennale of 1982. “VENICE BIENNALE,” she writes in all caps. “Judy Pfaff is going too. Neither of us can quite believe it. Fickleness of the art world and all. Yet I’ve felt ready for this for years.”

At O’Flaherty’s, I asked Dennis what it was like to re-read her diaries in preparation for publishing them. “It’s almost like it’s another person,” she said. “I’m very proud of her though. I was brave and determined. I went through huge financial hardships. The writing helped me figure out what I was doing.”

“Donna Dennis: Houses and Hotels” runs at O’Flahertys until April 28.

The five pieces set to go on view are Repetition Nineteen I (1967), a series of 18 bucket-like forms, on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Area (1968), a group of rubberized forms Hesse made for critic Lucy R. Lippard’s landmark traveling exhibition “Soft and Apparently Soft Sculpture,” that is on loan from the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus; Aught (1968), a four-part piece on loan from from the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives in California; Augment (1968), a related four-part piece on loan from Glenstone Museum in Maryland; and the monumental 13-panel Expanded Expansion (1969), which stands 10 feet tall and 30 feet across, on loan from the Guggenheim Museum in New York. None of the pieces is for sale.

The show, which is organized by Hesse estate adviser Barry Rosen, with art historian Briony Fer, opens May 2 at the gallery’s 22nd Street location in New York, comes complete with a publication (Eva Hesse: Exhibitions, 1972–2022) and a Hesse symposium, and features speakers including art historian Élisabeth Lebovici, and Hesse’s sister Helen Hesse Charash, with whom Hesse fled Nazi Germany when they were children.

The show will stop first at California’s Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in October, then the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, in September 2025. While those venues were originally slated for the exhibition, the American Federation of Arts, which travels exhibitions to institutions throughout the United States, has taken on the show and is now set to put it on an extended tour.

The exhibition was born as a book. Collector Komal Shah, who has been on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list with her husband Gaurav Garg since 2018, had steadily been collecting work by postwar and contemporary women artists like Joan Mitchell, Suzanne Jackson, Joan Semmel, and Kay WalkingStick when she decided to make a book from the collection in order to bring more visibility to the artists.

The book, Making Their Mark: Art by Women in the Shah Garg Collection, was published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. last year, and includes essays by curators like Mark Godfrey and Katy Siegel. Shah then organized an exhibition, curated by High Line Park curator Cecilia Alemani, who was the curator of the 2022 Venice Biennale, an edition notable for its high percentage of artworks by women. The show that resulted from the book runs in New York through March 23.

AFA director Pauline Forlenza met Shah in San Francisco in 2019, when AFA was touring “Black Refractions,” an exhibition of artworks from the Studio Museum in Harlem collection. Shah had just started work on the book. When Shah opening the pop-up exhibition in New York, Forlenza went to see it.

“I was extraordinarily impressed,” Forlenza said in an interview. “Throughout its history AFA has done work in terms of telling artists’ stories, and elevating the work of underrepresented artists. There are so many stories in ‘Making Their Mark.’ We had traveled the exhibition ‘Women Artists in Paris 1850-1900.’ It was difficult at that point to be a woman artist. Fast forward to today, and women are still seeing difficulties.[Komal and I] began talking about the possibility of the exhibition, or a subset of it, going to regional museums across the country.”

Shah was keen to collaborate. AFA’s exhibition committee approved the show, and things moved forward.

The checklist and participating institutions for the traveling version of the exhibition are still being drawn up. Alemani will remain the show’s curator, but will collaborate with curators at the individual institutions, as she is doing with Margot Norton at the Berkeley Art Museum and Sabine Eckmann at the Kemper.

“I am thrilled about our partnership with the American Federation of Arts, as it will  amplify our mission to celebrate excellence by women artists and rechart art history to be inclusive of these singular talents and practices across the nation,” said Shah. Citing the more than 500 K-12 students and 125 teachers who have visited the show in Mew York, she added, “Personally, I also look forward to learning from and working with the museums to inspire students and make a long-lasting impact on local communities.”