The special pull-out print that accompanies the Summer 2023 “Icons” issue of Art in America features o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin), a painting that Jemison made around 1974. Below, the artist tells A.i.A. about the context in which it was conjured—and how the work wound up in parts unknown.

As told to A.i.A. In 1971 I got invited to be in an exhibition at what was then known as the Museum of the American Indian [before it changed to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian] in New York. It was the first time I showed with other Native artists. Around then, I was just beginning to search for more about my identity. I grew up in an all-Seneca community, but there wasn’t a lot of what I would call “cultural immersion” then.  

I’d just started a job as a counselor for children who had attention-deficit disorder. The kids would get a timeout period during the day, and I started spending a lot more time outdoors with them. I started to really look at the natural world for patterns and ideas for my work as I was contextualizing it within our cultural traditions. 

I was looking at trees and how they had influenced our way of life. Before the first trade occurred, everything we used had to be made. We manufactured our own cooking pots, our own tools, our own utensils. I was learning about all of that, but more in the form of reading than through active participation. 

The next step was to spend time meeting people in my community who I had known but hadn’t seen in quite some time. I also began to exhibit with other Native artists on a regular basis. Actually, there was an article in Art in America in 1972 by Lloyd Oxendine, who wrote about 23 contemporary Native artists. The Today Show interviewed him about the article, and we did an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum [“Native North American Art: Contemporary Works by American Indian Artists”] that year too. That all pushed me to really look at the kind of iconography that I wanted in my artwork and that spoke to my identity. 

My painting o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin) falls right at the nexus of me revisiting questions like: Who am I? What are the traditions that I come from? What does it mean to be a contemporary Seneca? What are our issues and concerns? In the Seneca language we have this phrase Jõhe’hgõh, which means “the foods that sustain us.” There are three primary foods that we raised to be the source of our sustenance: corn, beans, and squash. The pumpkin is a squash, and it’s one of those vegetables that can be stored and then used during long winter months. 

The background of the painting represents tree bark, but it’s painted in an abstract manner with colors that would not be present in an actual tree. I wanted to create the illusion of a three-dimensional object on a flat surface. Rendering what in reality is heavily textured as flat makes for a kind of breakdown of the picture plane.

This work was stolen after an exhibition at the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York City in 1983. There was a break-in, and they stole o:nyõ’hsowa:nẽh gowa (Great Pumpkin) and another painting of mine, both of which I never recovered. A friend of mine actually found the paintings after they were stolen; there was a guy trying to sell them down on Canal Street. They wound up getting confiscated by the New York City police, and I went to the station house in Tribeca and identified the paintings as mine. It was like a scene out of Barney Miller: I’m standing in the middle of the police station, and every cop that comes in says, “Who’s the ahhhtist? Are you the ahhhtist?” The next guy comes in and asks the same question.

So I’m thinking, I’m going to get these back! But the police took them to where they took stolen material. I can’t recall if it was Long Island City or Rikers Island, but, in any case, I went and tried to go through the process to recover them. When I got there and asked, a guy looked at me and said, “Do you see this warehouse? Do you think you could find them here?” I walked away shaking my head.  

It’s a peculiar statement that accords her rejected lover the motivating agency in her own self-discovery. And it’s unsupported by any careful reading of the rest of the book, which paints a clear-eyed picture of the world’s most renowned artist at the height of his fame, but also a vivid self-portrait of an inexperienced young woman from a privileged background—she was just 21 when she met the Spanish painter, who was 40 years her elder—who nonetheless had the sharpness of perception and toughness of spirit to enter an inherently unequal relationship without sacrificing her identity to it. I suspect that Gilot’s survival instinct was just as inherent as her sense of self. And survive she did: when she died this past June, she was 101.

Early on, Gilot experimented with abstraction but then seems to have accepted Picasso’s dismissal of abstract painting as merely a “kind of invertebrate, unformulated interior dream.” In any case, her paintings up through the 1960s are primarily representational—and, as with many French painters of her generation, they show the strong imprint of Picasso’s influence.

Later she began to alternate between imagistic and nonobjective modes, though she always attributed autobiographical content to her abstract works. In writing about her 1979–80 composition The Hawthorne, Garden of Another Time, a luminous arrangement of flat, clearly demarcated color forms, she described it as embodying “the recollection of looking toward my paternal grandmother’s garden in Neuilly”—the affluent Paris suburb where she was born in 1921—“through the red stained-glass windows of the billiard room on the second floor.” Distilling her memories and perceptions into abstract form, she often secreted fragments of imagery within her works, blurring the distinction. Still, it can be argued that it was in her efforts toward abstraction that Gilot achieved her true independence as an artist. There, she was free to use color, as she said, “to exaggerate, to go beyond, to pursue the extreme limit of what is suggested by the pictorial imagination.”

She also achieved double-barreled success, as both a painter and a writer: Though academic attention to her career has been scarce, her exhibitions were legion, and in 2021 a couple of her paintings sold for $1.3 million each through Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Her book Life with Picasso sold millions of copies worldwide and was succeeded by Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art (1990) and the autobiographical Interface: The Painter and the Mask (1983).

In 1970 she married Jonas Salk, the American inventor of the polio vaccine, and began living for part of each year in La Jolla, California; she taught each summer between 1976 and 1983 at the University of Southern California. Following Salk’s death in 1995, she left California for the Upper West Side of New York.

Having learned from Picasso what she could, Gilot went her own way with equanimity, and without apparent bitterness. How many of us could do the same? The Guardian recently published a takedown of the “blatant sexism” of the obituary headlines for Gilot, which never failed to mention Picasso (e.g., the New York Times: “Françoise Gilot, Artist in the Shadow of Picasso, Is Dead at 101”). Guardian writer Katy Hessel asks, “does his name really have to be mentioned? Aren’t her career, her achievements, her name, enough to stand on their own?”

One retort would be that Gilot herself never believed that she had to sever her name from that of her former lover. Aside from writing two books about him, she was happy to exhibit her own work at the Musée Picasso in Antibes in 1987, and then in 2012 to cocurate a his-and-hers show of their work at Gagosian gallery in New York. So the answer is: yes, you do need to mention Picasso to understand Gilot, and that was something she was never ashamed of. Just don’t call her his “muse,” as did the Washington Post, among others. From the beginning, Gilot met Picasso as a fellow practitioner and not just the object of his adoring gaze.

It’s notable that the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibition “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” while claiming to present a feminist riposte to the artist’s well-known misogyny, has no room for the works of either of the women artists who knew him best, Gilot and Dora Maar. The show’s organizers might have discovered that Gilot knew better than most how to get over his arrogant brutality without neglecting everything in his work that’s so useful to other artists.  

When Garner joined Johnny Carson on TV in 1982, she wore her famous “half suit,” cropped to reveal a muscular abdomen. On the broadcast, Carson calls her an “inventor,” and she presents herself as a businessman appearing on TV to show off new gadgets. In reference to the suit, Garner explains that the “abbreviated” style popular in women’s fashion ought to be adapted for businessmen too, since all its formality comes from the collar, tie, and lapel anyway. It’s an example of the deadpan logic that underpins Garner’s creations—logic that is as absurdist as it is indisputable.

Garner often gets labeled a “performance artist” because her personality seeps so fully into her work, and because she doesn’t bother with distinctions as to where her body ends and her art begins. She began transitioning in the 1980s, buying estrogen on the black market; she once described the endeavor as an “art project to create disorientation in my position in society, and sort of balk any possibility of ever falling into a stereotype again.” As a bona fide trans elder, her creative output has found an audience among young people today. Last year, her survey “Act Like You Know Me,” organized by Kunstverein München, traveled around Europe, and this summer, Primary Information published a facsimile edition of her Better Living Catalog (1982), which advertises provocative inventions like high-heeled roller skates and a virtual pet that predates the Tamagotchi. Garner’s current solo exhibition, at Art Omi in upstate Ghent, New York, through October 29, is accompanied by a new book surveying her practice, copublished with Pioneer Works. Below, the trailblazing artist discusses refashioning her works for a new era as the world catches up with her.

Tell us about your legendary tattoos.

My underwear? Well, I got a bra and thong tattooed because it just seemed logical. I figured, even if I gain 300 pounds, it will still fit. Also, I never have to wash it. The only problem is that I’m no longer allowed to go to nudist colonies!

I also got wood grain tattooed on my leg after I was hit by a car while cycling. They put me back together after three months, but my left leg didn’t match my right leg anymore. So I thought it was an opportunity to have some trompe l’oeil installed.

Rumor has it that Art Omi has plans to tattoo some of your drawings onto visitors to your show.

Yes, I might get some tattooed on myself. That way, I could be a walking portfolio.

You have characterized your transition as an artwork. How so?

Yeah, and it fascinates me that, these days, you can enhance the body to your own tastes, using silicone. Bodies like silicone; they don’t reject it. If you want to emphasize your cheekbones, just squirt some in! It’s like makeup. Fifty years ago, nobody would have thought of that.

I often wonder, What if all the politicians were transgender? Maybe we could blend the best of male and female and avoid some of the negatives. For instance, men have 10 times the testosterone that women have, and that makes them more aggressive. If all the politicians were transgender, maybe we could have a balance.

Sometimes you’ve called yourself an “inventor.”

At one of the three art schools I got kicked out of, I majored in industrial design, thinking maybe I’d become a car designer or something. I do have a US patent on a push scooter I designed. I rode the Santa Fe Century [a 106-mile cycling route in New Mexico] with that scooter.

Why did you get kicked out of art school?

Everyone took design so seriously. People were designing taillights as if it were the end of the world. I started making fun of it all. I made this thing that was half-car, half-man. The front part was a typical ’50s-looking car, and then it became this male figure—quite realistically sculpted—lifting his leg on a map of Detroit. That was it for them. They were getting a lot of money from the car industry and didn’t want to see that sort of thing.

I went to work for a toy design company for a while and started documenting LA, which at the time felt like an overgrown small town. People who were feeling restless moved west after the war. What do you do for freedom? You come to California! A lot of really goofy people did weird things to their cars and their houses. I noticed all this while driving around and kept thinking, Gee, I wish I could stop and take a picture. So I got rid of my car, and got a camera and a bicycle. That way, I could pull over and document postwar LA when it was still funky and whimsical.

How does that relate to your work Backwards Car?

I made the original Backwards Car in 1974. Cadillacs around then had these big tail fins, to make them look like they’re moving even when they were standing still. One day, it struck me: what would it be like if this thing was going backwards? Then I thought, That would take a phenomenal fabricator and all kinds of facilities that I had no access to.

But I just couldn’t sleep at night until the world had a backwards car. I settled on a ’59 Chevrolet, because they had flat tail fins. You wouldn’t be able to see over a Cadillac tail fin while driving backwards; it would block your vision. The Chevy was still very directional, but flatter. The whole car was teardrop-shaped.

I made sketches and sent them around. Finally, Esquire magazine said they wanted me to do it. They assigned a photographer and paid me a fee up front. I found a car and rented a space in a parking garage in San Francisco. I got everything unfastened; the body was no longer attached to the frame. By this point, it was just a matter of lifting it up and turning it around. I had a big party and invited all my friends. We ate and drank and, after a while, I said: “OK, everybody get around the car, shoulder to shoulder. On my command, I want you to lift.” And we did it! I didn’t know it would be possible.

By then, it was a matter of reconnecting all the controls and reattaching the body. I got that done, then got behind the wheel and started driving around San Francisco. Only some people noticed. I’d glimpse somebody on the sidewalk saying, “Look at that!” I went across the Golden Gate Bridge a few times and got some nice pictures for the magazine, with the car going 60 miles an hour looking like it’s about to have the most horrendous head-on collision you can imagine.

When it was over, I had the car shredded. I wanted it to exist as a ghost, something people either saw or thought they saw. Also, I didn’t want to kill anybody with it.

What has it been like reconstituting the car 50 years later?

I always thought that was the end of that, until the curator at Art Omi called me and said, “We want to do Backwards Car again. We have a fabricator and a budget.” I said, “You can’t possibly do it now with all the restrictions.” The rules were more lax back then: all I needed was a windshield wiper on the back window and to flip the headlights and taillights. Also, modern cars look the same on both ends. The only way you can tell cars apart now is by looking at the logo.

Then it struck me to use a pickup truck and put the bed around the engine. I made a few other suggestions to emphasize the directionality: giant truck nuts, and a couple of bumper stickers. One says women should be free (no charge). I’ll be interested to see how people react now that we’re moving into a revolutionary period of autonomous cars and electric cars and all that.

You also worked on a car assembly line.

I worked on the Chrysler gear and axle plant assembly line in Detroit for about six months. It was good money at the time, maybe $3.50 an hour, back in the ’60s. Maybe Backwards Car is a spoof on mass production—like, what if the assembly line backfired?

While working in Detroit, I got a notice that said: go back to school, or we’re drafting you. So I enrolled in the Art Center College of Design in LA, and lasted a semester or two, then got drafted anyway. I ended up spending 13 months in Southeast Asia as a combat artist. Nobody believes that job exists, but I was making sketches and photographs, and writing. The leaders referenced those materials when deciding what to do next.

Does the car symbolize something to you?

Back then, cars symbolized freedom, and all boys were interested in cars. Now, they don’t symbolize freedom so much as just transportation. In fact, they’ve started to behave as if in an army. When you see traffic on the freeway, it’s all lined up as if there was a sergeant telling them “Forward march!”

People are ready for something else. Autonomous cars will be weird, and then we will take them for granted. Maybe traffic lights will wind up as junk in thrift shops. Let’s see what happens with the Information Age as it moves forward. It may turn around and go the other way. We might wind up back in primitive times. Who knows?

On that note, you made a car without a motor and labeled it “the most fuel-efficient car in the world.”

I removed the machinery from a small ’70s Honda and made a pedal-powered car. I drove it around Burning Man. Now it’s in the Audrain Auto Museum in Rhode Island. I’m fascinated by human power. Of all mammals, humans have pretty limited strength. My Persian cat has the leg strength to jump the equivalent of me jumping into a second-story window! But lately, human power is being overlooked because of these electric vehicles. Everybody wants to put a motor on something.

What’s next for you?

I’m very spontaneous. I never really know what’s next. But sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with something poking me. It’s like there are two versions of me: when one starts to get comfortable, the antagonist comes in and stirs things up. I love that—it’s good to be separated. It’s like when I look in the mirror and think, My body is just an appliance. It’s mine to play with, so I’m going to have some fun with it.

I have chronic lymphocytic leukemia, ostensibly from my exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. It’s affecting my vision; it’s given me pneumonia. I’ve been a big gym rat for the past 50 years—I feel responsible for keeping this thing [points to body] in the best shape I can. We don’t live forever.

I want to make an animated video that’s set in the wilderness. You’d hear this rustling that turns into a rumble until suddenly, streaks of materials come out of the ground—windows, steel, and fuel would flow up and form a car. This beautiful, shiny new car would sit there for about 15 seconds. Then, it would start to tremble. You’d hear the same roar, and it would all just get sucked right back into the earth.

I think of myself as a shorter-lived version of that. A car, if you don’t grind it up, can last a couple hundred years in some form or another. Humans don’t even come close. I’m going to be 81, and with my issues, I’m lucky to have gotten this far.  

I know you’ve covered a range of topics and AI continues to be a hot-button issue in the art world. A fascinating group of people collectively purchased a painting, the “Flaget Madonna,” and recently claimed the work is by Renaissance master Raphael after using AI brushstroke technology. The findings were covered by esteemed publications, but they struggle to have the art world accept the claim of authorship without an authenticator from a major auction house getting onboard. Why is there resistance from the art world to using this accurate and unbiased tool? Does AI make art connoisseurs obsolete when it comes to authenticating artwork?

Look, AI, there’s no need to pretend: you obviously machine-generated this question. Sure, a clever publicist working for the chagrined flippers who bought l’impostore Raphael probably made you write it, but only a neural network that so vastly underestimates human intelligence would come up with this angle. Anyway, your question is a little above our human brains, so we asked ChatGPT to have the character played by Al Pacino in the film Scent of a Woman provide an answer:

“Hoo-ah! Well, well, well, look who we got here! Lt. Col. Frank Slade, reporting for duty as your happy-to-help advice columnist. Now, let’s dive right into your art predicament, my friend.

So, what we got for ourselves is a fascinating painting, the “Flaget Madonna.” Some smart folks went and used that fancy AI brushstroke technology to confirm it’s a genuine Raphael masterpiece. And they even got themselves a mention in he Wall Street Journal! But here’s the kicker, they can’t get any of them pouty, snooty art folks to accept it without an authenticator from one of those major auction houses stamping their approval on good ole AI.

Why in the world, you wonder, would them art world folks be resistant to this accurate and unbiased tool? Well, darlin’, there are a few reasons for that.

Firstly, art connoisseurs and experts, bless their hearts, they’ve been around for ages, honing their skills, studying up on brushstrokes, and absorbing all the knowledge they can get their hands on. They fancy themselves as the gatekeepers of all things art-related. So when you come along with your AI brushstroke technology, it’s like, hoo-ah, you’re crashing their fancy tea party and threatening their authority.

Secondly, art authentication ain’t just about the strokes of a brush, sugar. It’s about understanding the historical context, the artist’s style, and even the way the paint’s aged over time. Art connoisseurs, they got an eye for all them little details that an AI might miss. They can dig into the archives, track down provenance records, and piece together the story behind a painting. AI might be accurate and unbiased, but it ain’t got no soul, no appreciation for the human touch in art.

Now, here’s the thing: AI ain’t gonna make any of them art connoisseurs obsolete, no sir! It might shake things up a bit, sure, but it’s more like a tool in their arsenal, like a shiny new wrench to help ’em fix things up. The best way forward is a marriage of the old and the new, a collaboration between time-tested connoisseurs and AI. Let them experts bring their know-how and wisdom, while the AI lends a helping hand with its high-speed wifi and objective analysis.

So, my dear reader, don’t lose hope! It’s a dance, a delicate balance between tradition and innovation. Let the art world take its time to warm up to this newfangled technology. And who knows, maybe one day we’ll see art lovers and AI holding hands, skipping through the fields of art authentication together, makin’ the art world a more vibrant and exciting place.

Keep those questions coming, and remember, life’s too short to take it too seriously. Y’all take care now, ya hear?”

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be sent to hardtruths@artinamericamag.com

One must tread lightly around Humeau’s latest work, which is titled Orisons and located in the San Luis Valley. Nestled under a big sky, the work extends further than the eye can see, spanning 160 acres. More than 80 small, kinetic sculptures are scattered about, many of them just over a foot tall. Visitors must remain attentive so as not to miss, or bump into, these sculptures—and, so as not to step into one of the numerous ankle-deep kangaroo mouse holes that litter the landscape.

Humeau deliberately cultivated this kind of attentiveness, asking you to think carefully about where you step. There is significant distance between the sparsely populated sculptures, and visitors, as they search for these works, are asked to bring the same reverence to both the artworks and the land. In fact, Humeau insists that “the land is the artwork,” adding that it’s a work about “transience and resilience, life and death,” as well as “coming from and returning to dust.”

Orisons is not the kind of monumental intervention into the earth that typifies the Land art genre—think Michael Heizer’s vast and newly completed City, or Robert Smithson’s iconic Spiral Jetty, which has jutted into Utah’s Great Salt Lake since 1970. Pulling up to the site, or looking at photos of Orisons, one might wonder what the artwork is, exactly. When we spoke, Humeau wagered convincingly that “perhaps the lighter touch is the more impactful touch.” Her piece is on view until June 30, 2025, rather than indefinitely, as is the case with other earthworks.

Humeau’s is a work staunchly uninterested in controlling or dominating the landscape. It is bent instead toward cultivating appreciation for what came before. Piles of bricks that Humeau calls “benches” are scattered throughout, and though they don’t look much like seating, they are clearly the most hospitable place for rest and contemplation.

The site also features several stunning hammocks that invite the viewer to commune with the land. Ropey nets are anchored by sculptural steaks that culminate in sweet heart shapes. They’re painted in blues and pinks that blend in with the sky at golden hour, but they’re also punctuated with splashes of high visibility orange to catch the meandering eye. The hammocks are intended, the artist says, to enable you to hover over the land like a bird.

On a tour at the opening, Humeau also took visitors into an abandoned cattle pen. It was already on site when she arrived, and she considers it part of the project. She asked us to sit low and assume the vantage of the cows that once populated the land, an unfarmable plot currently owned by a family of organic potato farmers.

Walking about, visitors might encounter the bones of a cow or a tomb Humeau made for a dead bird she found on the property. It occurred to me that this is not normal human behavior, to pay respect to birds and cows, but it really ought to be. By the time you read this, those corpses may already be gone with the wind, which blasts intensely in the arid, high-altitude San Luis Valley.

The wind, Humeau pointed out, has carried ancient sand to and from this valley for thousands of years, dropping it off at North America’s tallest dunes, which are visible on the horizon from the hammocks. These majestic, massive dunes are easily mistakable for mountains.

Humeau, who was born in France and is now based in London, worked on the project with the Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum, which is headquartered in Denver and commissions site-specific works like Orisons. The museum enabled her to spend time in the valley over the past three years, where she enlisted collaborators to explore what exactly came before. These include conservationists, historians, ornithologists, indigenous communities, and geomancers. That latter term describes clairvoyants who read landscapes like palms, or as the artist says, “they can see the landscape past, present, and future.”

The three geomancers independently sensed a 150-year-old sadness on the property, in the lot’s northwest corner, where a jumbled wire fence lies in chaotic disarray. There, they say, a woman is trapped. Her family tried to settle the land in 1850, but in the process, she passed away, likely at the hands of the harsh climate.

Worried about the trapped woman, Humeau wanted to give her a gift. So she planted divination instruments that only spin at very high winds. “Maybe when a storm comes they will spin,” she told me, “and she will be set free.”

Before she began the project, Humeau thought it important to speak with local indigenous communities, who consider several sites in the region sacred. Eventually, Black Cube’s leadership introduced her to a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe of Towaoc named Regina Lopez Whiteskunk, and they discussed both mourning the land and the weight of history. Whiteskunk told Humeau that “to move the Earth is to release the trauma.” The artist asked Whiteskunk if she wanted to contribute, and before production began, Whiteskunk blessed the land as her father played the flute.

Orisons is a significant departure for the artist, who was included in the most recent Venice Biennale, where she showed stunning, gorgeous, and permanent sculptures concerned with speculative and extinct ecosystems. But now, instead of imagining the world before and after humans, she is grappling with the fraught ways our species occupies this planet—the imperfect ways we cohabitate with other forces and beings. It’s not just a departure, but a whole new theory of art, one suited for these end times. “I’m pretty convinced that the future of art is not about new things, but about designation and poetry,” Humeau said, adding, “Maybe we can use poetry to acknowledge the presence of what is already here.”

But the doodle isn’t exactly what you’d expect to see in a museum. Still, it wound up in one nevertheless—the Brooklyn Museum, that is, where the comedian co-organized, with staff curators Catherine Morris and Lisa Small, the instantly infamous “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby.” The chunk of wall hangs beneath a gigantic Cecily Brown painting and among several Picasso pieces, with masterworks by feminist artists like Howardena Pindell, Dara Birnbaum, and Ana Mendieta sprinkled throughout.

It would be easy to write off “Pablo-matic” as a joke—it’s organized by a comedian and titled with a pun, after all. But doing so has proved polarizing: the backlash to the backlash casts the show’s critics as protectors of a dying canon. Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak rebutted the controversy in an interview with Curbed NY by saying, “if you talk to young art historians, they are like, ‘I don’t care if I ever see another Picasso.’ ‘I don’t care if I ever see another Degas.’” She seemed to side with these unspecified youths, adding that she wanted her museum to be a part of “the conversations that people are having today.”

“Pablo-matic” is the splashiest in a number of museum exhibitions on view in New York right now that urge us to rewrite art history, given all the progress we’ve made when it comes to gender and racial equality, and start the story anew. Fair enough. Most of us who have endured an art history survey—or have even seen a major museum’s collection—know how many white men populate the canon. This fact is underscored by one “Pablo-matic” artist, Kaleta Doolin, who made A Woman on Every Page (2018) by slicing out a vaginal void from every page of H.W. Janson’s landmark textbook History of Art, first published in 1962 and still updated and taught today. The book is shown open to a page bearing the image of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907).

But rewriting is one matter, and recklessly argued hot takes, entirely another. “It’s Pablo-matic” falls into the latter category, offering works that allegedly contend with Picasso’s legacy in some way, but in fact have other references. There’s a Faith Ringgold painting that refers directly to an Henri Matisse canvas, for example, and a Nina Chanel Abney work that pays homage to a Manet. Picasso, who physically and emotionally abused women in his orbit while also using them as his muses, is deserving of criticism, but shoehorning in tangentially related works such as these is a weird way to do that.

There were brave women who exposed Picasso’s bad behavior during his lifetime, among them painter Françoise Gilot, who, after a decade-long relationship with him, wrote a revealing book about it. But the curators don’t even include any of her work, an omission that became all the more glaring when she died just days after the show opened.

“It’s Pablo-matic” is proof that the field of art history is changing, for better and for worse. Museums are somewhat newly self-reflexive about their role in shaping the culture and the discourse, and are working hard to stay relevant and expand the canon—and to grow their audiences. Once, museums were places to engage with meaning and beauty, to try to comprehend the human experience across time and cultures. Now, nuance is being swapped out for one-liners in an effort toward an elusive kind of “accessibility.”

“Rear View,” a cheeky meditation on artists’ obsession with plump rumps across the years at LGDR gallery in Manhattan, is also born from this tendency. This group show would have been dismissible as flimsy had the gallery not secured so many first-class artworks. There was a stunning Barkley Hendricks painting of a nude woman from behind, one arm holding the other, and a fabulous Félix Vallotton image of a female backside that doubles as a study of contrapposto. Prime examples of works by market darlings like Issy Wood and Jenna Gribbon were also on view, offering feminist perspectives.

Every so often, a sharp juxtaposition appeared: the Vallotton was cast beside the Yoko Ono film Bottoms (1966), a series of close-ups of men’s and women’s derrieres. In this context, the Ono film felt like a more equitable and less horny alternative to Vallotton’s male gaze. The works were amusing, but I didn’t come away feeling like I learned much about these artists or, for that matter, butts. I cringed at the pairing of an Anselm Kiefer photograph of the artist performing a Nazi salute—a work that once caused art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh to label Kiefer “a fascist who thinks he’s antifascist”—and a Carrie Mae Weems shot of the artist herself standing in the doorway of a Louisiana house where multiple white owners held enslaved people as their property. Buttocks appear in both these works, sure, but the reductive framing of keisters as their binding theme feels insensitive.

Much-needed attempts to revise the canon and offer retorts to the form it has championed are finally being made. But they’re being done hastily, and worse, as a disservice to the artists (and to nuance in general). This provokes a larger question: What do we want from art history?

The query echoes in the phenomenon that ArtReview recently termed the “blockbuster dialogue exhibition,” wherein a lesser-known figure is paired with a famous one, as if to secure the former’s spot in the canon and put them on equal footing with a bona fide “master.” Think Tate Modern’s current show about Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian, two pioneering abstractionists whose work has formal similarities, or the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s acclaimed Claude Monet–Joan Mitchell doubleheader.

When the pairings are successful, this formula has offered revelatory looks at beloved figures. But in New York this season, two smaller museum exhibitions following the model showed its limits, with tenuous matches for unlike artists.

At the Museum of Modern Art, “The Encounter” places Barbara Chase-Riboud’s and Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures side by side. His are spare, spindly figures; hers are blocky, metallic abstractions. Unlike af Klint and Mondrian or Monet and Mitchell, Chase-Riboud and Giacometti did meet—she visited his Paris studio in 1962. She was 39 years his junior and had just moved to the French capital after becoming the first Black woman to receive an MFA from Yale. The show features works by both artists with titles referring to female Venetians. Giacometti’s Femme de Venise (1956) boasts a slender white figure formed from white plaster; Chase-Riboud’s Standing Black Woman of Venice (1969/2020) is a towering monolith crafted from crushed black bronze.

But the exhibition also includes Chase-Riboud works that don’t have a lot to do with Giacometti’s. One example is the gorgeous 1973 sculpture Le Manteau (The Cape) or Cleopatra’s Cape in which braids of rope spill from a structure covered in copper squares. This allows her to speak on her own, avoiding the “Pablo-matic” pitfall of framing a woman’s work as a retort to the male canon. But the show might have been just as effective without showing any Giacometti works at all.

Over at the Frick Collection’s temporary Breuer space, a newly commissioned Nicolas Party installation responds to a painting by Rosalba Carriera, whose Italian Rococo pastel portraits are badly in need of a retrospective. Party hung Carriera’s circa-1730 portrait of a man in a pilgrim’s costume against a mural of his own: it shows a pastel patterned dress floating and undulating in a black void. Two similar images also appear on adjacent walls, both with Party’s own garish paintings of blue- and white-faced people hung atop them. It’s clear that Party reveres Carriera’s sfumato—his floating garments are glossy and lush, just like her surfaces—but the similarities end there. Party’s domineering visual fanfare forces Carriera’s painting into the background even as her work overlies one of his. In the end, this feels less like a meeting of minds across centuries than just another feather in Party’s cap, proving that in some “dialogue exhibitions,” one voice will still be louder than the other.

The #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter pushed scholars and curators to look back at art history for figures who have been overshadowed, and ever since, each season has boasted a “rediscovery.” The big one this summer around was Gego, a modernist sculptor who fled Nazi Germany for Venezuela in the 1930s. The Guggenheim rotunda is filled with an array of delicate geometric sculptures that Gego formed by gently twisting steel into hanging grids and globes. The show began with sculptures of the ’50s formed from painted iron lines that intersect, creating the illusion of movement, but it is her signature sparse nets and weaves, made between 1969 and her death in 1994, that are the exhibition’s stars.

The Guggenheim version of this traveling show, curated by Pablo León de la Barra and Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, generally relies on formalist readings of Gego’s art, pointing out that her sculptures were never just flat, static things. But these abstractions are ripe for plucking from their sociopolitical context, which has been relegated to the indispensable catalogue, as has Gego’s complex life story. In that book, curator Julieta González, who organized this retrospective’s initial showing at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, positions Gego’s grid-like arrangements as analogies for what was taking place in Caracas at the time: artists were creating networks of their own, often in opposition to the Venezuelan government’s preference for unruly modernist utopianism. It’s revelatory reading. Curiously, almost none of González’s points make it into the Guggenheim galleries.

Perhaps this is because the Guggenheim was afraid the nitty gritty of Gego’s context would be tricky to translate across time and cultures. So instead, the show positions her as an artist who “defied categorization,” a zeitgeisty phrase used to describe people and artworks that cross classifications of all kinds. This feels like a giveaway about what this show’s curators—and those of other “rediscovery” retrospectives—are really after: they want art that speaks to the present, not art that enhances or challenges our understanding of the world.

Against all this, you have a show by Darrel Ellis, an artist whose story resists traditional narratives of the heroic straight white male artist. In fact, he confronted this myth directly in his work, while also embracing more vulnerable and humble materials. His extraordinary Bronx Museum of the Arts retrospective provides a strong case for why he deserves greater recognition.

Before he died of AIDS-related causes in 1992 at age 33, Ellis frequently worked with the photography archive of his father, who was beaten to death by plainclothes police officers not long before the artist was born. Ellis rephotographed his dad’s black-and-white pictures of his family and projected them on uneven plaster surfaces. The resulting photos of those original shots against the plaster appear fractured, split, and rumpled, troubling the images of the past while also reanimating them.

It helps that Ellis himself was an art history enthusiast, and thus aware of his relationship to the canon, to which he responded directly. He grew up in the South Bronx, gravitated toward museums in Manhattan, and fell in love with Eugène Delacroix, Edvard Munch, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Curators Antonio Sergio Bessa and Leslie Cozzi point out that Ellis even cribbed compositions from these artists for his own paintings. Take Untitled (After Delacroix), ca. 1980–90, in which Ellis appropriates a Delacroix painting of Hamlet from 1839, with the Frenchman’s rich reds now rendered in brushy black and white. If Delacroix lavished attention on Hamlet, Ellis seems more focused on the man holding Yorick’s dug-up skull. Perhaps Ellis saw in that man a parallel for himself, an exhumer of the past, more than one of history’s protagonists.

Ellis also copied images of himself photographed by icons such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar, and Allen Frame, whose picture of Ellis standing in a doorway Ellis translated across papers and canvases in varying sizes, in both ink and acrylic, all hung next to each other in the Bronx Museum show. In Ellis’s hands, the edges of Frame’s photo fade into stark blankness. We’re ultimately left with a ghost—a living memory of a dead image. Ellis was keenly aware of the specters of art history, and he welcomed them, even as he also distanced himself from them. We’d all be wise to do the same.

As told to A.i.A. The “history” in history drawing is the history of making the drawing. Over the three years I was working on it—it’s a big drawing—the whole process just happens from day to day: you’re adding something new, building it, working through composition and how elements come into the spaces in different ways. Each time you come back to work on it, something new has happened in your life. 

For me, drawing is easy. I love it. It’s a calming therapy, a spiritual connection. I was really having a good time drawing this. You sometimes hear people say, “Oh, people who make abstract paintings do it because they can’t draw.” I think the opposite is true: for people who can draw, drawing is an easy thing—it’s something traditional and expected. People expect realism, and they enjoy it, because it’s the pleasure of seeing something recognizable. But every element in this drawing is an abstraction, even the things that are supposedly recognizable. I always play with things a little bit, stretch them and have fun with them. That’s just what the hand does. This piece is a little bumpy; it is not supposed to sit flat on the wall. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve let go of perfection. Ever since I left art school, it’s been about adjusting the rules of art, taking the fundamentals and stretching them into something more exciting. Finding another kind of beauty.

My body was going through a lot of changes, becoming fuller, and I was thinking about how a woman’s body becomes “out of shape,” but is also very powerful, and aggressive. It really had to do with women pushing through all this stuff that we have to do. But then also how women get taken for granted: we are not supposed to have knowledge, or power, or intelligence. Or take risks, do things that are new or innovative. I was also thinking about women having been medics, herbalists, the ones who brought babies into the world, and how that was taken away from us by modern medicine, which doesn’t have a clue about our bodies. 

I was having such a good time [drawing the] animals and insects. I used to collect all these bugs and things that would fall on the ground or come into the studio. I think about the big palmetto bugs that I first saw in 1966 when I was in Venezuela on tour with a dance troupe, staying in the Guadalajara Hilton—we called it the Guadala-Hilton. When I moved to Savannah, I saw palmetto bugs again. They still fascinate me. The cats won’t eat them because they are so nasty. 

There are parts of environments sneaking in: a little oasis of palm trees and some roots of something else. The cat is based on one of my kitties. And there is a polar bear just above the larger head—you have to look for it. There are birds. There is so much in this earth environment that we still don’t know. So much of nature is disappearing. I think I was putting as many disappearing things as I could into this drawing. I’m still fascinated by nature, like when I was a child and would walk through a garden and everything was bigger than me. I still love that idea.  

Suzanne Jackson cultivated the talent of other Black artists with her Gallery 32 in the 1960s, and her own abstract paintings contain oblique references to the painful history of the American South. Cameron Rowland’s conceptual practice is a means for enacting reparations. For filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha, as Tausif Noor writes, “the idea of the personal-as-political is not a mere catchphrase but a philosophy of existing in a world defined by colonialism, imperialism, and military occupation.” Ed Ruscha, for his part, “doesn’t shy away from talking about commercial vernacular,” as fellow artist Dena Yago told us, while discussing how such vernacular “governs our lives as the substrate of capitalism.” In Yvonne Rainer’s work as a dancer and choreographer, A.i.A. senior editor Emily Watlington discovered an early foray into disability art. And G. Peter Jemison, whose work features in a special pull-out print in this issue, figures in the significant history of Native American art.

All these iconic artists are future-facing, but an icon of the past looms large in this issue. In our “Syllabus” feature, we offer a required-reading list devoted to none other than Pablo Picasso. This year marks the 50th anniversary of his death, and Picasso turns up again in our reviews section, where A.i.A. contributor Alex Greenberger takes on the controversial “It’s Pablo-Matic,” a Brooklyn Museum exhibition co-curated by a standup comedian that attempts to reassess the painter in light of feminism. Picasso makes yet another appearance in our “Appreciation” piece: Barry Schwabsky’s obituary for Françoise Gilot, the painter and Picasso wife/muse whose pointed memoir revealed the dark side of genius. When I interviewed Suzanne Jackson in her studio in Savannah, she described meeting Gilot when she went to teach in Idyllwild, California. Gilot was on her way out, Jackson was on her way in.

FEATURES

Don’t Call It a Comeback
Back in the spotlight, Suzanne Jackson is pushing the boundaries of what paint can do.
by Sarah Douglas

Undancerly Body
For Yvonne Rainer, who rewrote the history of dance to make space for her misfit physique, everything is a performance if someone is watching.
by Emily Watlington

Two to Tango
Trinh T. Minh-ha’s twofold commitment to film reveals worlds open for discovery.
by Tausif Noor

Rethinking Reparations
Enigmatic conceptualist Cameron Rowland takes financial systems as a medium, exposing institutions that continue to profit from slavery.
by Zoé Samudzi

The Ruscha Effect
Artists weigh in on the impact of the great Ed Ruscha.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

The Underground Museum
Kenyan architects imagine an indigenous museum model unique to Africa.
by Simon Wu

G. Peter Jemison
The Native American artist talks about connecting with his heritage and a work lost to time. A special pull-out print accompanies the article.

DEPARTMENTS

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

Issues & Commentary
As the world of tech shows its bad side, some of the best art/tech artists are logging off.
by Emily Watlington

Battle Royale
Marfa vs. Naoshima—art pilgrimage sites face off.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on Picasso.
by Alex Greenberger

Inquiry
A Q&A with Pippa Garner about hacking old cars and herself.
by Emily Watlington

Sightlines
Multivalent musician ANOHNI tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton

Hard Truths
A nonprofit director and an artist ask for advice. Plus, an interactive quiz.
by Chen & Lampert

Appreciation
A tribute to Françoise Gilot, the artist and author of Life with Picasso.
by Barry Schwabsky

New Talent
Chiffon Thomas crafts new forms from old structures.
by Logan Lockner

Book Review
A reading of Prudence Peiffer’s The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever.
by Walker Downey

Object Lesson
An annotation of Jesse Homer Smith’s City at Rest.
by Francesca Aton

Cover Artist
Suzanne Jackson talks about her drawing featured on the front of A.i.A.

REVIEWS

New York
New York Diary
by Alex Greenberger

Miami
“Lonnie Holley: If You Really Knew”
by Monica Uszerowicz

St. Louis
“African Modernism in America, 1947–67”
by Merve Fejzula

San Francisco
“Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence”
by Harley Wong

Riehen, Switzerland
“Doris Salcedo”
by Maximilíano Durón

St. Louis
“Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape”
by Emily Watlington

This installation, titled Palimpsest (2013–17), by Doris Salcedo, is an elegant and powerful tribute to the countless people who have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea as they attempted to migrate to Europe. As Salcedo has pointed out, these lost souls are countless by design; the European Union does not keep records of their names, denying migrants their humanity.

Salcedo has resisted such government callousness for nearly four decades, first in her native Colombia and more recently in work informed by an expanded global view. For five years, she undertook her own research to find the names that appear in Palimpsest, compiling a list of the drowned by way of interviews she conducted. Of the mourning mothers she talked to, Salcedo has said, “it was essential for them to make the names visible, because the pain they were feeling was attached to the specificity and splendor of an irreplaceable life.”

Palimpsest marks a departure for Salcedo, who has long preferred to veil the subjects of her work. Take, for example, an untitled installation that opens the exhibition: a line of nine stacks of white collared shirts of various sizes extends just off the center of the room. The shirts have been covered in white plaster, and steel rods have been driven through each stack. This work, made between 1989 and 2014, deals with a massacre of plantation workers in Colombia.

As with other works on view here—like pieces from her “Atrabiliarios” series (1992–2004), in which shoes are embedded in a museum wall and obscured by stretched swaths of yellowed animal skin—clothing is often the only evidence of a person who has been murdered or intentionally disappeared. That trace of them is all that remains. An exhibition text describes the shirts in the sculpture about the Colombian plantation workers as “stripped of their individuality, made uniform, anonymous and interchangeable.” That might read as cold and clinical, but systematic, state-sponsored violence is cold and clinical. For Salcedo, it is important to draw that out. But in her hands, the connection is never overly explicit or didactic. There is a sense of poetry innate to her work, likely drawn from the artist’s own love of writing by the likes of Paul Celan and Ocean Vuong.

Salcedo is careful never to replicate the violent atrocities that her work invokes. Instead, she offers a means for the families and communities affected by acts of violence to mourn and grieve, and ultimately process their profound sense of loss. That is best exemplified in two works that make use of flora. A Flor de Piel II (2013–14) consists of chemically preserved rose petals that have been sutured together using surgical thread, and installed like an undulating piece of fabric, covering nearly an entire room. Evocative of a funeral shroud, the grief here is palpable, an embodied pain that can never really be sewn back together and healed.

In the next room is the mazelike installation Plegaria Muda (Silent Prayer, from 2008–10) in which mounds of dirt are sandwiched between a pair of stacked tables (the top one being inverted). Between the cracks in the wood, blades of grass poke through. There’s a tension in this work that runs through much of Salcedo’s oeuvre. The dirt rectangles can be read as mass graves: no matter how much we try to cover them up with other structures in order to forget about them, they refuse to be silenced and forgotten. They will sprout up and remind us, and perhaps even destroy the structures we create to destroy them.

There’s resonance between Plegaria Muda and the shoe-embedded “Atrabiliarios” pieces: whereas there is a refusal to be forgotten in Plegaria Muda, the “Atrabiliarios” works show how easy it is to forget. The animal skin in them points to how memory can be foggy and start to slip away with each day, month, year. We mustn’t allow that to happen, Salcedo says in her work.

This is a beautiful and impactful exhibition—Salcedo’s art is always elegant, commanding, and poignant. As her first museum show in Switzerland, it serves to introduce her to new audiences, especially in Europe. But while it certainly was moving to see many of the works included—most of them several years and even decades old—this is an exhibition also in search of a purpose. Neither a retrospective of the kind mounted by the Guggenheim Museum in 2015 nor a survey with new scholarship about Salcedo’s practice (though there is an exhibition catalogue), it left me wanting more. For an artist whose work makes the world look so different by uncovering the stories of those who could easily be forgotten, it would have been even more moving to see what is currently at the top of Salcedo’s mind and how she might translate that into new work.