Over the holiday break, the staff at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) voted overwhelmingly in favor of starting a union. Their move is part of a larger trend of unionization efforts at museums and other art institutions across the country. It makes sense in a nation where job stability is on the wane and inflation is on the rise—with little support from Washington, D.C. and in an art world that isn’t flush with cash. We caught up with Sierra Schiano, who works in the education department at LACMA, before the vote to hear more about the museum’s unionization efforts.

Let’s begin with the internal tipping point that led to the coordinated union effort. What are some of the most significant structural issues inside LACMA, from your standpoint, that motivated this push toward collective representation?

I can’t say there was one single moment or decision that pushed staff members toward collective representation. Rather, there were various longstanding management issues that my colleagues and I were frustrated with. One recurring issue was burnout—workers left, but their vacancies were not filled, leaving the rest of their team to take on more work. Another problem was precarity—LACMA relies on part-time labor for nearly all of its Educational and Public Programming, which means part-time workers can’t rely on consistent work throughout the year. We’re told there are no hours available during the summer and winter holidays—why? Who decides to allocate resources this way? Opportunities for museum education and public programs don’t suddenly stop when schools go on break.

LACMA’s mission statement says that our goal is to serve the public through meaningful educational and cultural experiences for the widest array of audiences. There is so much more LACMA could be doing—more programs, more events—to live up to our mission statement while also providing year-round, sustainable work to its staff. The lack of transparency about executive decisions regarding program priorities and resources and the top-down way those decisions are made, is another significant issue.

I think all workplaces should be unionized because it’s important that workers have a voice. Even if these structural issues did not exist, I still want collective representation to ensure that such issues don’t arise in the future. It’s kind of like how establishing good communication and healthy boundaries is important for any relationship—we’re doing the same thing, but for our workplace.

Efforts to start a union are necessarily a secretive and delicate process. How did yours begin, and how did you first begin to recruit your colleagues?

I first learned about the unionizing efforts in early 2025, and I joined the Organizing Committee (OC) quickly after. As a Mobile Educator, I work almost entirely off-site, which was beneficial in this instance, because it meant I didn’t have to be secretive in my conversations with colleagues about the workplace and what changes we’d like to see at LACMA.

It was a very exciting time because all of my fellow Mobile Educators were immediately on board with the idea of a union; we’re almost all part-timers who’ve been dealing with the precarity that comes with being an arts educator. Recruiting other part-time Education staff—like Teaching Artists—was much harder because those individuals are much more isolated. They work even fewer hours than we do, and they work solo, rather than with a team.

But altogether, I’m glad that I became involved in our unionizing process because I’ve met more colleagues in the past six months as a member of the OC than I’d met over my previous three years as an employee at LACMA. It was so invigorating to know I wasn’t the only one feeling frustrated and that other people were willing to work together to do something about it.

Obviously, there’s been no shortage of coverage around the glamorous opening of the David Geffen Galleries. How has this opening been for the staff?

My team isn’t particularly involved with the DGG beyond tabling at the occasional NexGenLA event, but I’ve heard a lot from my colleagues in other departments. Mainly, it seems like the work related to the DGG is just exacerbating general, longstanding issues about lack of staffing, top-down decision making and limited resources.

Broadly speaking, what are some of the demands of the union?

Right now, we’re working together to determine our priorities for negotiations as a collective, but generally, we’d like higher wages that keep up with the cost of living in L.A., more balanced workloads, expanded benefits and increased transparency about institutional protocols and resources.

You work in the Education & Public Programs department. How would a union make your department, in particular, run more smoothly?

One of my biggest frustrations with LACMA is how much it relies on part-time labor to facilitate its educational programs. Only managers and coordinators have full-time positions with benefits; all of the Mobile Educators, Teaching Artists and Education Assistants are part-time, and we get very inconsistent and limited hours.

I once applied to be a Teaching Artist, but I was told that LACMA couldn’t promise that I’d be able to work even 10 hours a week. As a Mobile Educator, I may get 15-20 hours during the school year, but zero hours in the summer. Our program’s budget basically only covers September to May, so my coworkers and I have to find summer jobs every year. We also don’t get paid when schools go on break during the winter, so you can imagine how stressful it is to deal with rent, health insurance and taxes when your income varies wildly from month to month and you’re juggling three or more jobs annually.

With such precarity comes high turnover rates. We basically lose two Educators every time schools go on break, and we are already a small team to start with. The Mobile Program currently employs only seven part-time Educators, so we feel the loss heavily anytime someone leaves, and we have to scramble to train someone new as quickly as possible. The ultimate result is that with fewer staff members, we’re not able to visit as many schools and provide this very unique educational experience to as many students as we could with sufficient support.

I feel like there’s so much more we could be doing to bring arts education to communities throughout L.A. if we had the budget and stability to expand and experiment. I’m hopeful that with our union, we’ll be better positioned to negotiate more full-time positions in Education and more support for our programs in general.

Management has declined to voluntarily recognize the union. What does that signal to you, and how does that affect the process moving forward?

Not receiving voluntary recognition signaled that, although Management might say that they want to support their workers fully, they’re only willing to do so on their terms. By insisting on an election, Management signaled that they were going to push back against the union in whatever ways are legally and socially acceptable. Management repeatedly stated in all-staff emails and meetings that an election would be the most “democratic” option where all employees would get the opportunity to “do the research” and “make an informed decision.” But we’d already done the research, and we’ve already made informed decisions by signing the union authorization cards.

If LACMA truly respected the voices of staff, it would have granted voluntary recognition. Instead, LACMA chose to spend money on a private election to pose the same question—“Do you want to unionize?”—and it generated the same result! The answer was always going to be yes! There was no functional difference between the democratic and legal process of voluntary recognition through verifying signed union cards and the private election. Personally, I think the private election was a waste of time and money—resources that Management should be investing in its staff and programs. They should have listened to us in the first place instead of delaying the inevitable.

Despite this, my colleagues and I are thrilled that we won our union election with 96 percent voting in favor of the union! Now we can start the new year fresh and focused on winning our first contract.

Your unionization efforts mirror similar efforts at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Jewish Museum, the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum and other institutions. Why do you think this has been a trend in recent years?

I can’t speak to the motivations of other museum workers, but I’ve come to realize that in the face of a federal administration that devalues and outright attacks institutions dedicated to the arts and humanities (I’m thinking specifically of Trump’s plans to eliminate the National Endowment of the Humanities, the National Endowment of the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services), the best way to protect myself, my colleagues and the work that we do is to organize. I can’t rely on the beneficence of the government or the wealthy or even my own Management, because those entities have demonstrated that they are only interested in protecting their own bottom line. But I trust my colleagues, and I believe in collective action. I am confident that we can build a better world together, one unionized workplace at a time.

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Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

It feels like audiences are craving a sequel to the summer blockbuster that was last year’s “Manet/Degas” show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The John Singer Sargent show had material that was just as good, but I doubt it was as popular, given the lack of the frenemies narrative that existed in the earlier show. Frenemies will always be big in America, the country where you always have to keep buying a bigger car so you don’t have to worry about crashing into your neighbor’s even bigger car.

The wall text for “Manet & Morisot,” a new exhibition at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, reminds us that Édouard Manet (1832-1883) and Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) “had the closest relationship between any two members of the Impressionist circle.” Fair to say they weren’t frenemies, but nor were they artist and muse, nor master and pupil, as some of their contemporaries thought. The show explores the interplay between their careers through 42 works on loan from major institutional collections across the United States and France.

Manet and Morisot met at the Louvre in the late 1860s, which they both frequented to copy old masters. Shortly after meeting Berthe and her sister, Manet wrote to a friend, “It’s a bother they’re not men, but as women, they could still serve the cause of painting by marrying an academician each and sowing discord in the dotards’ camp.” Let’s call that a contemporary compliment, because he couldn’t have known how Berthe would help him shake up the medium with her own hand.

Not long after, she would serve as the main model for The Balcony (1868-1869), which has a rich narrative in which Morisot is the star. Someone is about to arrive or is so late that she’s given up on him arriving—Morisot’s character is concerned with something else entirely, her gaze locked on something beautiful or nonexistent off the balcony.

He did like his otherworldly women. Morisot became a frequent subject and friend. Manet’s praise of The Harbor at Lorient (1869) in the studio was so effusive that she gifted him the work, to the displeasure of her mother, but the work does reflect his influence. The way the harbor reflects the sky and its surrounding walls offers just that right mix of fantasy and realism. There’s even a dreamy woman framing the scene.

This isn’t to say her style was in any way derivative of his. Manet was influential on all the Impressionists, even if he wasn’t officially one himself. The pallor in The Harbor at Lorient would go on to define her brand, with one critic praising the “perfumed whiteness” of her Woman at Her Toilette (1875-1880). Her big, open strokes and subtle colors are on display with this one. You almost worry that if you sneeze, it’ll blow away—quite a departure from Manet’s well-deployed sturdiness.

Manet’s death in 1883 left Morisot “broken,” she wrote to her sister: “I shall never forget the old days of friendship and intimacy with him, while I posed for him and his charming wit kept me alert through those long hours.” This was a fascinating relationship from which both received much, the evidence of which is on the canvas.

“Manet & Morisot” is on view at the Legion of Honor through March 1, 2026.

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• One Fine Show: “The Stars We Do Not See, Australian Indigenous Art” at the National Gallery of Art

• In Rotterdam, Mandy El-Sayegh Offers Up an Assault on the Senses

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Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

Indigenous art has been having a moment at fairs, museums, gallery shows and biennials. As with all trends, several elements in the zeitgeist contribute to this popularity. We’re in a post-Zombie Formalism, post-post-internet, post-post-2017 holding pattern where no one big idea has emerged. These older traditions are time-tested and underrepresented, so they’re hard to argue with. Last and most importantly, most art critics and consumers are not familiar with the traditions behind this kind of art, which allows them to set aside their preconceptions and simply appreciate the works on their own merits. Each show is equally educational for all of us.

A new show at the National Gallery of Art brings a host of impressive artworks to the nation’s capital that are foreign in every way. “The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art” presents nearly 200 works from a period spanning the late 1800s to the present, drawn from the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection. This exhibition will soon travel around America and represents the largest presentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art ever shown outside Australia.

It’s challenging to speak generally about these works, as they aim to represent a “visual thread connecting more than 250 nations across 65,000 years,” according to the press release. However, most of them are abstract and, as with all good abstractions, feel as though they could have only emerged from a certain unique context. The exhibition takes its title from the cosmological teachings of Gulumbu Yunupiŋu (1943-2012), also known as “Star Lady,” who is renowned for her paintings that feature a unified field of crosses and white dots. These negative star clusters, seen in works like Garak (The Universe) (2008), feel arranged in an organic way. Drawn from many nights sleeping outdoors, Yunupiŋu demonstrates both the vastness and subjective nature of interconnectivity; though made by hand, her canvases could continue for miles if she wanted them to.

Yunupiŋu’s work emerged from the bark painting tradition of Yolŋu cosmology and another work in the exhibition demonstrates the grandness of that tradition. Gäna (Self) (2009-18) by Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu (1945-2021) uses sixteen bark paintings and nine hollow log coffins known as larrakitj to stirring effect. (“Yunupiŋu” is a common last name for many Yolŋu.) The installation confounds and impresses to the point that the self becomes lost. This is reflective of the artist’s own journey as it marks the point at which she turned away from figuration.

More contemporary works in the show include the video Entr’acte (2023) by Hayley Millar Baker (b. 1990), which captures a woman’s facial transition from rage to grief. Though Baker’s Aboriginal heritage informs her practice, it’s bold of the museum to include a work so different in this show. It asks what these themes of integration with the universe might look like today. For similar reasons, I must confess a weakness for the video Scripture for a Smokescreen, Episode 1 – Dolphin House (2022) by Amrita Hepi (b. 1989). Via choreography, it explores the 1960s NASA-funded project to talk with dolphins in the hope that it might facilitate extraterrestrial communications. This exhibition offers work drawn from under-shown traditions but offers even broader context to visitors who take seriously its advice about stepping outside of the self.

“The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art” is on view at the National Gallery of Art through March 1, 2026.

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Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

I was in Paris during the Louvre heist, and though my alibi is firm, I never would have predicted the extent to which the robbery would capture the imagination of New Yorkers. The robbery inspired countless Halloween costumes and signage at last month’s marathon. I think people like to imagine an Ernst Blofeld-type figure, awaiting delivery of the gem so that he can admire them in a secret vault or put them on his cat or something. It’s since become clear that this was never about anything more than the skyrocketing price of gold. Still, you can’t blame people for craving a villain who puts style above all else.

Marie Antoinette was certainly one of those, and whether you love her or love to hate her, the recently opened exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, “Marie Antoinette Style,” is a must-see. It’s a fashion exhibition—not a historical show with a vast number of objects actually owned by her—but it recreates her world well. A facsimile of a necklace from the “affair of the diamond necklace,” for example, sits near other glittering jewelry that did belong to her.

It’s a glimpse into her life through the lens of how she chose to look. Her shoes were so delicate, you can tell she didn’t do much walking. She had so many dominoes that you find yourself wondering how there could possibly be a need for so many. My favorite objects in the exhibition were the gilded satin gardening tools from Petit Trianon, her make-believe Disney village at Versailles.

This is one of those “One Fine Shows” I had the pleasure of seeing in person, and I’m glad I did because there’s no way to convey the innovative exhibition design from a checklist. They don’t shy away from anything, which is first hinted at by a series of plastic busts that invite you to smell Marie Antoinette’s world through a series of holes at the base of the neck. The perfumes that flowed through her court were as bespoke and pleasing as the rest of her existence, but then the last one in the row is intensely foul. Is the machine broken? No, it’s simulating an 18th-century dungeon. This was near a room of pornographic cartoons about her from the time when it all started to go wrong, and it really snuck up on me. Next comes a red room and the last thing she ever wore: a thin prison smock.

So as not to end on a down note, the exhibition finishes with a host of haute couture inspired by her, from Manolo Blahnik, Vivienne Westwood and Christian Dior, with costumes by Sofia Coppola from Marie Antoinette. One risks a tummy ache with all that candy, but it does make you think about the power of a cohesive look. Our wealthiest today pride themselves on how they dress, but so many of them look like absolute shit. Marie Antoinette wasn’t much more villainous than her aristocratic contemporaries and managed to build a vibe that endured across the centuries. It’s hard to imagine many Instagram feeds ending up at the V&A.

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Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

One of the more hilarious concepts invented by Gen-Z is that of “the body count,” a reliable vein of TikTok content fodder wherein people ask each other how many sexual partners they’ve had. Even leaving aside the connotation that having sex with someone is similar to killing them, it is wild to imply that any adult could or should keep track of that number. It reminds me of Martin Scorsese being explained the concept of a “sneaky link” by his 20-something daughter and shrugging, “We never used that term. We never saw specific people in my day.”

You have to wonder what Philadelphia Zoomers will make of Henri Rousseau’s The Past and the Present, or Philosophical Thought, which was painted in 1899 and celebrates his second marriage with images of both parties’ deceased spouses in the clouds above. The painting is featured in “Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets,” a new exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, which with 18 paintings, owns the world’s largest collection of works by the artist. The show pairs these with other significant loans for a total of 60 works, providing an authoritative introduction to this artist for those unfamiliar with his unique career.

Rousseau was a customs officer in Paris who only became an artist in his 40s; his work was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, where anyone who paid the entrance fee could display their work. But you can’t call him an outsider artist—not when his work was so in conversation with art history and so influential, especially on acquaintances like Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso. If you’ve been to the Museum of Modern Art in the last few years, you’ve probably admired their major work by him, The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), which is at the Barnes. It’s hard to believe it’s from the 19th Century because it is intensely strange and modern. A lion sniffs the sleeper who might be pretending to be asleep or actually dreaming. Either way, she smiles unconcerned. The folds of her hair become her hair, and her arm may become a guitar. There’s much here about the nature of creativity.

The MoMA piece is shown alongside two of his other undisputed masterpieces for the first time ever. These are Unpleasant Surprise (1899-1901) from the Barnes and The Snake Charmer (1907) from the Musée d’Orsay. In the former, a nude bather is surprised by a comically menacing bear as a hunter simultaneously shoots the bear, which might explain her curious pose and expression. As Christopher Green writes in the catalogue, “Is she a victim in mortal danger at all?” The catalogue explains further that the work “tapped into a contemporary taste for erotic encounters between humans and wild beasts,” and it does feel possible that the adjective was meant to be ironic.

The Snake Charmer was made for Berthe Delaunay, mother of the modernist Robert Delaunay, and of course, has its own connotations. The charmer is feminine but also not quite human, with skin as black as the night, hair below the knees and perhaps some kind of fur. She’s a weird black hole at the center of a lush, layered and false-looking jungle, drawing snakes not just to her but into her world of shadows. Perhaps Gen-Z can relate to these complex views on heterosexuality, where there is as much to fear as there is to celebrate.

“Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets” is on view at the Barnes Foundation through February 22, 2026.

More exhibition reviews

• “Nigerian Modernism” Reframes the Story of Modern African Art

• At the Getty Research Institute, the Guerrilla Girls Mark 40 Years of Calling Out the Art World

• Musée Marmottan Monet’s “The Empire of Sleep” Considers Slumber as an Artistic Trope

• “Thirst” at The Wellcome Collection Dives Deep into the Politics of Water

• Kader Attia’s Poetics of Repair in “Shattering and Gathering our Traces”

If you happen to have started your holidays early down in Rio de Janeiro, this week marks your last opportunity to check out “The Lumisphere Experience” at the Museum of Tomorrow. The Lumisphere is an innovative project developed by Carey Lovelace’s Visions 2030 studio. Within the Lumisphere’s three domes you’ll find a unique solution to the planet’s current ecological crises, as the experience takes visitors through an immersive multisensory climate-oriented installation, culminating with a survey that asks them to visualize their own ideal future with the help of A.I. It’s not like anything else you’ll see in the worlds of art, science or technology, and is likely coming to a venue near you in the future. To hear more about how the project came to Rio, we sat down with the Museum of Tomorrow’s Fábio Scarano.

Let’s start off by talking about how this project came to your museum, and how you see it fitting into the broader programming that you’ve been doing for 10 years.

It was a very good match, but also a bit of a surprise. This conversation started around the time we were deciding on a new curatorial line for the museum. I joined as a curator two years ago. I’ve been here for three years, but as curator for the past two. We started to think that we were beginning to make changes in the main exhibition, and we also thought that we should change the narrative of the museum. The museum is very much science-oriented. The main exhibition talks a lot about climate change and the challenges of the planet, and it tries to provoke a sense or vision of the future as it is.

As time went by, especially after the pandemic, there was a change in perception. Many visitors at first felt informed. Around 2023, feedback showed that people were leaving the main exhibition concerned about the future and anxious. We figured that we should change the narrative a little, and also how it works across the museum as a whole.

We think the word “tomorrow” is much less about the future than about hope in an active sense. Tomorrow is something inside us that moves us forward. It has to do with images we build of the future, the images that guide us. Attention is our relationship with the present, and memory is our relationship with the past. Our premise is that we are a society with a very short attention span and hardly any memory about the planet, and very little memory of our own lineage. Tomorrow is an image that results from our relationship with the past and present.

We have these three times inside us simultaneously. While speaking here, attention is happening, memory is being accessed and anticipation is already forming. I think that because we have short memory and limited attention, we become forgetful about other ways of seeing the world or interpreting life. We are addicted to modern science, which is extremely important and has brought great advances. But in times of crisis, there is no kind of knowledge—so long as it is democratic and loving—that should be abandoned.

We thought the exhibition should create a conversation between modern science, ancestral knowledge—especially from Brazil and this region—and the arts, because art communicates things science talks about in ways that can touch people emotionally and immediately, beyond numbers and graphs.

You can see this in the main exhibition. In addition to being very much a science narrative, it could feel like it could be anywhere in the world. It doesn’t have much about Brazil in it, in this area in particular. Which makes sense because for some Indigenous people from the Amazon, this is where the world began. So the holy point is about this place. When some shamans come here, they have friends from that region. Their whole life is about the places, the mountains, the legacy. These are probably people who migrated from Asia through North America, all the way south and up again. They saw it on the way down.

They thought this particular bay was the center of the world?

Yes, for some, this is where the world began. For America, Vespucci wrote a letter here called The New World, which became the nickname of the continent. That letter inspired Thomas More’s Utopia thirteen years later, which is about desire—about where you want to go. So in many ways, this is where it began and where it’s heading.

It’s very easy to discuss tomorrow here because this is a place about timelessness. It’s the beginning, but it’s also what’s about to come. In the meantime, there was this awful moment in history when around 2.5 million enslaved people from Africa arrived here. They survived immense hardship. In some African mythologies, each of us is a sun. So there’s a notion of perpetuity—again, timelessness.

We imagine creating an exhibition that guides people through history, from the cosmos toward the future, while also helping them remember what they saw and pay more attention to where they are. That way, they can see connections between different times. We’re doing that now. From the five sections of the exhibition, we changed one just yesterday. The other four will hopefully change next year. The one we changed is very much about time building through. It talks about what science says about climate change, which has to do with fossil fuels underground and deforestation.

There’s an Indigenous group in the Amazon whose mythology says that if you take minerals from underground and cut trees down, the heavens fall on our heads. That’s very similar to what science is saying now.

So what we’re trying to do is create parallels between these narratives—science and ancestral knowledge. Science says life begins in water; Indigenous narratives say similar things. These parallels help build a sense that humanity has been telling the same stories in different ways, but we haven’t adopted them fully into our lifestyles.

This is about remembering and paying attention to improve our capacity to anticipate. That’s what attracted us to the Lumisphere project. It doesn’t give you a future. It stimulates you with narrative and images, helping you let go of your current relationship with time. It’s relaxing. It slows you down.

I did two experiments myself. One without sound—just images—and it had a very psychedelic effect. With sound, it was less psychedelic, but similar to meditation—guided or unguided. In both cases, it builds trust. It has to do with images, and these images are not very clear. I can recall the globe in the first room, what I was seeing there, but in the second room, I don’t really recall specific images. I recall the sensation of flying or movement, but not many images. There was sort of a diamond pattern at one point.

Some of those images are very similar to what many Indigenous people across the world draw—designs that are also similar to cave drawings from 10,000 or 20,000 years ago. Many of these patterns are thought to be part of our unconscious. The word I would use is transcendence. It helps you transcend. Every time we anticipate and build an image of the future, it’s never fully clear. It’s misty. You know the direction, but not exactly where you are going.

That brings us back to the word utopia, which is very important here. Topos in Greek means place. The “u” was always a bit of a mystery. In English, if it’s eu-topia, it’s a good place to go to. Sometimes we think of the future like our grandparents did—work hard, get a house, a car, a family. That’s a place.

But utopia can also be “no place.” And if it’s not a place, it’s a state. Something that emerges. It emerges from attention. We’ve lost attention because we’ve lost connection with our senses. We don’t touch much, don’t listen deeply, eat fast, don’t taste or smell fully. We are a very visual society. Paying attention means being immersed in the environment where we are.

The challenge for the museum is to transform it while keeping technology. We think technology helps create immersive experiences, but we also want the museum to be more organic, so people can touch, feel, smell.

It was a very organic experience—very sensory.

Yes. And Lumisphere does that well. It’s visual, but in a transparent way. We were very happy with the encounter with the team here. At one point we were discussing the American Dream—what it is. A lot of the American Dream is still utopian, a possibility of a future where there is fantastic governance. In Amerigo Vespucci’s letters, he talks about “enough.” Indigenous people loved nature because life was around them. They loved one another because they were received with celebration. There were parties every day. He called it educational friendship.

They didn’t need kings or gods. That was very subversive. Vespucci said that maybe Europeans had something to learn from them. Instead, we massacred most of them. Now, by bringing ancestral knowledge into conversation with modern science, we recover parts of the past and project new futures—what we could call ancestral futures. There are many future possibilities in remembering what different ancestries, even our grandparents, once knew.

That’s what we’ve been interested in. The Lumisphere does this with images rather than words. In the final moment, it helps you build an image of your own future. People of all ages—kids included—become curious about what’s coming.

I genuinely think liberating the imagination is very important. Especially in America, so much conversation is limited to “We can’t do such and such because we can’t afford it,” which isn’t true. But to return to the institution, this is the tenth anniversary of the museum. Earlier exhibitions were more science-oriented and, you said, depressing. Can you contrast those with the newer ones, like the Lumisphere? What were some earlier exhibitions, and what are some more recent ones that show that shift?

Many of the early exhibitions were more typical science-museum exhibitions—hands-on experiments, things you do with your hands, learning through interaction. There was an exhibition about food. There was one about a Brazilian pioneer in aviation, which was very nice. There was one about the Amazon with a lot of informational text.

In the past couple of years, we’ve done fewer pure science exhibitions and more artist exhibitions—bringing in artists who are addressing the same issues science addresses. There’s one right now on the Pantanal. Pantanal is one of Brazil’s main vegetation formations. It’s actually the second-largest wetland in the world. During the Jair Bolsonaro government, there was extreme deforestation and widespread fires. It was shocking. The exhibition upstairs features two photographers.

One photographs the beauty of the Pantanal in its preserved state. The other photographs the fires. You see the contrast. There are usually two or three images shown together. Some images are disturbing, including burned animals, so it even has an age restriction.

That’s the most visited exhibition the museum has ever had, right? Why do you think it resonated so much with people?

Yes, it’s the most visited temporary exhibition ever. Even more than Sebastião Salgado. He was a very famous Brazilian photographer who passed away recently. His exhibition here in 2022 had around 600,000 visitors. This one reached even more.

I think Brazilians have a deep connection to nature and biodiversity. I heard from many people who supported Bolsonaro that what upset them most about his government was what he did to nature. There’s not much text in the exhibition. It’s mostly images. And images communicate a lot.

Museums are about information, but they’re also about feeling—about having an experience that touches you. Some feelings don’t have words. You either feel them or you don’t. Our job is to create experiences that make people ask new questions rather than leave with answers, because most of these questions don’t have simple answers.

So if a museum is about education, feeling and informing, there’s also this question—especially in America now—about activism. To what extent should exhibitions be about showing the best or most relevant art, and to what extent should they promote a certain goal? To what degree does this institution seek to be politically activist?

I was an environmental activist. When I was younger, activism was a big part of my life, and it was about raising awareness. But sometimes activism becomes an “us against them” attitude.

Museums are places of encounter. Every time people meet, sometimes it’s very nice and sometimes there’s conflict or difference. What we try to do, through art and scientific messages, is provoke questions.

I’ll give an example. There was an exhibition we had for three or four months called “The Flesh of the Earth.” It was a painter whose work came out of the wall and looked like flesh. What she was talking about was the flesh of the planet, but also our flesh.

She also used an A.I. technique: there was a QR code, and when you pointed your phone at the painting, it came alive. There was no direct message, but you felt that you were part of the flesh of the Earth.

So it’s because of the friction—because it makes you uncomfortable.

Yes. The exhibition design made it feel like entering a cave. It was all around you. It grew around you. It could feel uncomfortable, but it was also beautiful.

We do research with the public. Some people felt discomfort, others felt something else, but overall, the feedback was very positive, even though it looked a bit like a horror-film scenario. It conveyed the idea that we are part of a network much bigger than our own species. That feeling can lead to different actions. Someone might want to fight deforestation. Someone else might want to research more. Someone else might change how they vote.

What people do with those feelings is up to them. Action has an agenda. Action is ideological. Museums, however, are about imagination. There is a collective social imagination. Today, there is also a planetary imaginary, because we’re connected through transportation and telecommunications. That imaginary is about productivity, speed, performance and money. The future becomes a measure of success defined by bank accounts.

There are local imaginaries—neighborhoods, Indigenous villages—that are different, but they’re still impacted by the planetary imaginary. What creates holes in the imaginary is imagination. We are living through a crisis of imagination. When we try to imagine a future different from the present, we often stop halfway and say, “It’s never going to happen.” If we don’t imagine, we don’t anticipate. And if we don’t have an image ahead of us, we’re not going to get there.

Museums are about imagination, not ideology. Liberalism, conservatism, socialism, totalitarianism—all operate inside the same capital-based imaginary. When one wins, not much really changes.

So it sounds like what you’re saying is that the goal of the museum, with regard to activism, is not ideological. You’re not trying to push people toward one position, but rather get them to a place where they can arrive at their own ideology.

Yes. We want to activate imagination. Even for us, working inside institutions, it’s difficult to imagine something outside the dominant imaginary.

You mentioned “The Flesh of the Earth” using A.I., and the Lumisphere also uses A.I. Given that this is an ecologically oriented institution, have you thought about whether there’s a contradiction there?

Yes. We think quite a bit about what Martin Heidegger said shortly after the Second World War, especially after the atomic bomb. There was great concern about technology. The atomic bomb showed what humans can do with technology. Heidegger wrote The Question Concerning Technology, in which he explains that all species have technologies. Bees build hives, termites build structures, beavers build dams. Plants use photosynthesis—that’s a technology. Technologies evolve to improve quality of life.

The problem is not technology itself. The problem is how we use it. If technology is used for purposes that don’t improve well-being, then that’s on us. Over the past two years—2024 and 2025—our central curatorial focus has been intelligence. I’m a botanist by training.

So you mean all kinds of intelligence—human, plant?

Yes. Intelligence means the ability to choose. Everything living makes choices. A bacterium moves because it chooses. Plants turn toward light. Plants have memory, attention and anticipation.

Today we say machines are intelligent, and nobody finds that strange. But when I used to say plants are intelligent, people thought it was ridiculous. Yet it’s absolutely true. Seeing intelligence everywhere living helps us see intelligence in every human being, regardless of class or age. Everything living becomes our brothers and sisters. This flattens ontologies—a term Bruno Latour uses. Flattening ontologies helps create real conversations between different people and different beings. We often see plants, animals, even people, as landscape rather than as beings with interiority. Machines feel different because we created them, so we’re tempted to think of them as intelligent beings.

There are two things we are not going to give up anytime soon: sustainability and digitization. Right now, they seem contradictory. But why can’t they be synergistic? Why can’t we use artificial intelligence to help life be more sustainable? For that to happen, it can’t be a monopoly of four or five corporations. These discussions move beyond good and bad, right and wrong, toward how to use technology responsibly. If that’s activism, then it’s a different kind of activism—one that requires imagination, dialogue and understanding.

More Arts interviews

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• Five Decades On, Hal Bromm Reflects On His Gallery’s History and His Own Legacy

• How Jorge Pardo Turns Light, Color and Form into a Phenomenology of Seeing

• Artist Eamon Ore-Giron Is Keeping Ancient Deities Alive

• The Aerosol Awakening: Shepard Fairey On Street Art’s Infiltration of Miami Art Week

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

The recent passing of the great performance artist Alison Knowles (1933-2025) served as a poignant reminder of the enduring influence of the Fluxus movement. There was a period in the 20th Century when it seemed art might evolve beyond its concrete and two-dimensional origins, which were no less profitable than they had been, but perhaps no longer as cutting-edge when it came to politics or ideas. The evolutionarily minded lost that battle, of course, but their advancements cannot be erased and seem ever more popular following the explosion of the art market. I’ve seen Knowles’ important and nutritious Make a Salad (1962) staged in many places over the last decade, even at Art Basel.

But my favorite (unofficial) member of the group will always be Yoko Ono (b. 1933), whose extensive retrospective has just opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. This blockbuster show comes from the Tate Modern and covers over 70 years of Ono’s trailblazing career, with over 200 works including participatory instruction pieces and scores, installations, a curated music room, films, music and photography and archival materials.

I believe that Ono would have become one of the world’s most famous artists even if she hadn’t married John Lennon. Certain parts of conceptual art are too obscure for your average viewer, but you don’t need to know anything about Marcel Duchamp to enjoy works like Glass Hammer (1967) and White Chess Set (1966). These are ideas so clear and trenchant that they were destined to be popular. I don’t even need to describe them, though I wouldn’t take it to the Lawrence Weiner level of saying that these objects don’t even need to be made or seen. Aren’t they attractive in their strangeness? Don’t you want to take a peek?

Of course, the show features rich documentation of Cut Piece (1964), which might be my favorite piece of performance art ever. In it, Ono kneels onstage and hands the audience a pair of scissors. They take turns cutting off pieces of her clothing until she is naked. No advice is given as to how much they should remove; one sadist might end the whole performance on the first turn. There’s much to unpack with this piece—like the fact that the atomic bombs dropped by America on Japan had the weird effect of blowing the clothes off some victims—but as with much of her oeuvre, there’s something instinctual to this work. To see it, or even a photograph of it, is to understand all.

Much of the early work in this show comes from the Museum of Modern Art, which Ono seemed to enjoy tweaking. In 1971, she sent out announcements for a show she was supposed to be having there, or as the postcards sometimes referred to it, the “Museum of Modern (f)Art.” She seemed to think it was crazy that the system could ever absorb the ideas perpetuated by people like her and Knowles.

“Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind” is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through February 22, 2026.

If you’re in the art world long enough, you learn there isn’t as much consensus as there may appear to be. After the second drink, many people are eager to disclose the names of the blue-chip artists whom they don’t enjoy. But Uman (b. 1980) is someone for whom the praise is universal. She is as at home at Hauser & Wirth as she is at the SITE SANTA Fe International, beloved by the toughest critics and most passionate collectors. Last month, she opened her first solo museum show, “After all the things…” in the United States at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut, and we took the opportunity to hear more about this important exhibition.

This body of work is wonderful and inventive. How did you come to these pieces?

I met [chief curator] Amy Smith-Stewart almost three years ago. She offered me the show. I always felt like I didn’t want to put myself into the institutional world—not against institutions, but it didn’t feel like my place. This was my first time that a museum wanted to do a show with me. It felt comfortable because it came from Amy, and it’s in Connecticut, two hours from my studio. I thought first about doing a suite of paintings in the main room… maybe a sculpture. I had no idea what I would do. It came together at the beginning of this year.

You said you were apprehensive about institutions. Why?

When I started to get commercial success, I felt like that was my lane—to be a commercial artist. I’m not an academic. I’m an outsider, but I never felt like an outsider or an insider. I didn’t want to force my work into that context. But it’s part of the game; artists eventually do a museum show. I could have waited many years, but this felt easier, with not a lot of pressure. Amy is such a great person—sweet, kind—and it was a pleasure to work with her. That made everything feel easy. I felt emboldened to do anything I wanted: large paintings, the video. She said yes to everything. It was a good partnership with the Aldrich, especially Amy.

When the show began coming together earlier this year, was there a moment of inspiration—something that told you what this body of work would be?

I live upstate, and I always talk about loving living in the countryside and loving nature. So the idea was landscapes. But I didn’t want to put myself in a box. I always try to undefine my work. So they’re landscapes that could become interesting through grids, certain colors—landscapes that morph into abstraction. It’s also a love story about my life in New York and upstate New York. That’s why I included the video—just iPhone videos I took every time snow came outside my studio. I’ve been recording them every year since 2012.

I worked on Richard Mayhew’s recent show at Venus Over Manhattan, and in the press materials, you invoke this concept of his, the “mindscape.” Can you speak about how that applies here?

It’s an internal world. I feel the work as I’m doing it. The pieces contain marks I’ve used over the years. When making these works, there were months where I didn’t touch them, then I returned this summer and in the months leading up to the show. It’s a reflection of the year I’ve had—clarity, internal peace. It’s very hard for me to describe anything I do. I always feel on the spot when someone asks what I was thinking. So many things happened this year, and I put it all in the work.

When you say “so many things,” do you mean in the world or in your personal life?

Both. I live in a bubble, but you can’t ignore what’s going on. A lot of chaos. And personally, I’ve had a very inspiring year—a year of change, clarity. I’ve lost people, gained people. Those experiences are in the show. The show is clear because of these past months.

What world events filtered in?

We have this new president. I was scared. I had a residency in England and didn’t want to go until May. I almost canceled. When I finally went, I realized how different it felt to be an American in Europe now. When I returned to JFK, I immediately felt anxiety—like the country is chaotic. I internalize that. I’m an immigrant; I always worry. It’s not part of my narrative as an artist, but it’s out there. And it has nothing to do with the content of the paintings—they’re paintings with color, movement, stillness. But I can’t help feeling the energy shift in the country from last year to this year.

When I look at the paintings, I see soft colors, calmness—but hearing you talk about the year, the more intense marks feel different. Maybe like an exorcism, in the context of what you’re describing.

I like that word, “exorcism.” Yes. That’s how I channel the work. My paintings are very physical. I put a lot, remove, put, remove. I use a lot of pressure. It’s physically laborious to do big paintings. I don’t want anxiety in the paintings, but it comes out. Still, they’re meditative, in my opinion. The one painting that’s less meditative is the lamp in the back room, and the small works on paper. That lamp painting started simple—spray paint on black gesso, but now it’s full of texture.

The press materials say you’re “obsessed” with street lamps. Can you talk about that?

I’m not obsessed, but I was for a while. I lived in a very rural farm country outside Cooperstown. Then I moved to Albany in 2020, my first urban environment in many years. There was a lamp right outside my building. It showed up in drawings—I’ve made dozens. It became a beautiful sculpture form, a metaphor for a eureka moment or idea. A deeper meaning than the lamp itself. For the sculpture, I found metal in a scrapyard in Alameda County outside San Francisco. The glass came from a shop in Oakland. I wanted something like the lamp outside my building.

Conceptually, is the appeal that liminal sense—an industrial object that becomes this accidental moment of grace?

Yeah. Also, I grew up in Mombasa in Kenya. The first thing you see on the streets are lamps. In London, too, the old street lamps. Something feels welcoming—some sense of safety. I like seeing lamps or a house lit at night. It’s cozy, homey. Maybe it’s also returning to an urban area after a decade in the country. I came upstate in 2010. I don’t even have a street lamp in my driveway.

When you talk about upstate, it sounds like you prefer being neither fully remote nor fully urban—one foot in, one foot out. Is that right?

Exactly. I’m done with that chapter. The show was a love letter to my life upstate. Now living in Albany, I’m thinking about where I want to live. I’d love to go back to New York City. But I have a visa, and I’m leaving the country next year. I’ll be living in France. I want to see what it’s like to be somewhere else, what work I can create. I’ve been in isolation, although I’ve maintained my city life and friends. But I’ve had enough of snow and cold.

Are you going to the south of France?

Yes, outside Avignon. A nice town. Lower cost of living. A place to work. I can take the train to Paris when I want. I’ll come back to New York as often as I can. I still love New York State. I’ll always come back.

Last question: what do you want visitors to feel when they leave the show—something not in the press materials?

Very inspired. I don’t want people to take away a message. I never have a message. Some respond, some don’t. I continue to work. I want people to find meditation. To sit, see the show, reflect. I’ve loved painters whose work brings joy. I want people to feel joy. I love to paint. I love to make people feel the work, but there’s no message. It’s not necessary to prove myself or to prove anything.

It may seem uncontroversial to say that Art Basel Miami Beach is no longer what it used to be. The fair made the infamous Highbrow/Despicable quadrant of New York magazine’s Approval Matrix, a reflection of its transitional moment from glitzy blowout to whatever its future may hold. To make sure that the boom times are over, I made an effort to attend one of the buzziest parties on this year’s dance card: the one thrown by Porsche at SoHo House on Wednesday, which promised a performance by 2Chainz. The rapper played for exactly 30 minutes and may have thought he was at a birthday party, as he didn’t mention Porsche or Art Basel, and closed with “Shine the Light on ’em (The Birthday Song)” by Will Traxx. People in the crowd shone their cell phone lights on each other gamely, but it was unclear whether it was anyone’s actual birthday. That seemed statistically unlikely, given the small number of people in the room.

But a quieter year means the opportunity for good art, because only in a bull market can one be cynical. In times like these, you just have to do what you do best and pray that it clicks with someone. With this in mind, what follows are my favorite works from the fair, all of them somewhat low-key. I don’t think any of them is the subject of any particular gossip or hype, nor should they be. I illuminate them for inspection, not for celebration.

Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Kinder Scout (2025), Fellowship

Every year when I do these, I swear I’m not going to include art from the Meridians sector, because these large-scale, ambitious works will always have something of an advantage over ones that fit in a booth. So, when I came upon this stunning work, I told myself that I could select this one if I managed to discuss it without any extended references to Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding. Anyway, this work creates videos that feature A.I. children wandering beautiful and procedurally generated landscapes, captured at an unnatural angle that’s too long for a selfie stick but too close for satellite imagery. They wear the latest hiking gear as data streams across the desolate grids on which the images appear, alongside little text narratives that are also only semi-sensical, e.g., “FOLLOWING THE SEAM-SINGER’S QUIET REPAIR, WE FOUND THE GAIT-ARCHIVIST CROUCHED ON A PEAT TRAIL.” Often, the children meet other children and wander single file along dangerous cliffsides. Like the best work that incorporates technology, it can be appreciated on an aesthetic level without requiring an understanding of the underlying processes or references. In this way, it is the polar opposite of Beeple’s boring and obvious robot dog project, which can be found nearby. I could only stomach a few minutes of that one but could have spent hours with this one.

Nan Goldin, Casta Diva 1993-1995 (2000), Matthew Marks

When it comes to artists as beloved and famous as Goldin, sometimes there’s an inclination to have a thought along the lines of, “Oh sure, I know what she’s all about.” I would never underrate or typify her, but when I encountered these photographs, I still had no idea who had taken them. When I think of Goldin, I think of her subjects’ faces, and the last photo doesn’t even have one. The framing feels different too, more sculptural than cinematic. We are so absorbed in these moments that we don’t really question the immediate before and after of the narrative. The Casta Diva series takes its name from a Bellini aria that serves as a prayer to a moon deity, full of melancholy and longing, and indeed, this strip feels like a rainbow of sadness. My favorite is probably the penultimate one with the woman entering the water. Her body language is not timid, not wounded, but careful in ways that you know something’s happened to her in the distant past.

Samuel Guerrero, Domine Deus Noster (2025), Lodos

Like many people, I’ve been thinking about Rauschenberg’s textile works, so this one stopped me in my saunter through the fair. I didn’t know anything about the young artist, but was drawn to the way the textiles layer on top of one another in a way that seems to want to appear accidental. The Mesoamerican mysticism feels pleasantly combined with whatever variety exists on the cover of a Tool album, but what really sells this more than any of the ideas or goals is the execution. True painting skill is evident in the acrylic on canvas. Up close, the joined hands are suggested by very few lines and shadows, wrapping around the wrists in a way that is not entirely logical. This work has many secrets. The last one is the giant nail that pins the wood to the wall: the wood curves around it in an unnatural way. It’s like the wood is a river and the nail an obstruction, or perhaps some kind of skin that folds around it. Is this painting crucified?

Wangechi Mutu, The Seated IV (2019), Gladstone

Here I go again, cheating on this assignment by choosing a work that is obviously good. This is one of four works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its inaugural facade commission, which has gone on to be an excellent program, no doubt helped by this series, The NewOnes, will free Us. Two of the statues were added to the museum’s collection, but with enough cash and a flatbed, you can bring this one home for yourself. The Kenyan-American artist excels at merging African visual themes with the sci-fi we all seem to crave these days—consider this an upgrade to the H.R. Geiger Alien sculpture that everyone loved at this fair last year. I am drawn especially to its resilient patina. Made for the outdoors, it was creating excellent effects under the oppressive lighting of the convention center. Not far away, on the beach at 18th Street, the Shelbourne Hotel has installed an excellent sculpture by Pilar Zeta, The Observer Effect, which boasts a similarly intriguing surface; the photos of it resemble a CGI rendering. One hopes it survives the Basel weekend. The Mutu will likely end up at another museum, or perhaps it could guard a highly profitable cannabis farm.

Claire Falkenstein, Fusion (c. 1965), Ortuzar

What an attractive pile of slag! Falkenstein moved to Paris in 1949, leaving her husband behind in California, and remained there for almost a decade before following her pal Peggy Guggenheim to Venice, where Murano glass became an integral part of her practice. You may know her work from the webbed gates of Guggenheim’s palazzo. Though works like this may appear chaotic or woo-woo, her works are actually concerned with science at an atomic level, which describes the nature of the curves seen here. She was a big fan of the metonymic vibe popularized by Buckminster Fuller and Charles and Ray Eames, but she was ahead of her time in thinking this way at the time she did. If you move close to the sculpture, you can see how even a section of the glass or the copper it sits upon could stand in for the structure as a whole. The colors and textures found in both materials are tasty and, as you might imagine, it was technically difficult to make them interact in this way.

More in art fairs, biennials and triennials

• Don’t Miss These Five Museum-Grade Works in Art Basel Miami Beach’s Meridians Sector

• In Miami, NADA and Untitled Art Test the Temperature of the Mid-Tier and Emerging Markets

• Observer’s December Art Fair Calendar

• NOMAD Abu Dhabi Turns a Decommissioned Airport Terminal into a Destination for Design

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

One of the many reasons that A.I. slop is never going to replace real art is that people like details. When someone visits a gallery or museum, they want to encounter an image that they can linger over or return to. Even if artificial intelligence can someday stop putting extra fingers in subway advertisements, it’s never going to be able to make something that you can hang in your home and admire for many years. The art generated by A.I. is always going to be fast and slick. The details that make you fall in love with a work emerge from the unique hand of a skilled craftsperson, ideally one with some weird psychological stuff on top of that.

Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was not the most insane Impressionist, but you always need to lend him some of your attention when you encounter his work at a local museum. The newly opened “The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism” makes the case that the artist should stand shoulder to shoulder with his crazier peers. Organized by the Denver Art Museum in collaboration with the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, the exhibition brings together more than 100 paintings and objects from nearly 50 international museums and private collections.

Pissarro was older than the other artists who would be grouped in the Impressionist movement, and the exhibition takes its name from a letter in which he tells his son that he finds it to be “honest.” It was a more realistic way of looking at the world that bucked tradition. Pissarro was born on what are today the Virgin Islands, which mentee Paul Cézanne later called lucky, since there Pissarro “learned to draw without a master.” At a time when plein-air painting was revolutionary, he learned by doing these in Venezuela.

He was ready to be unconventional with color, too—there’s just so much more of it in the New World—but one of the earlier works in this show, Lordship Lane Station, East Dulwich (1871), uses it sparingly. A fan of the utopian writings of Pyotr Kropotkin, Pissarro captures not just the texture of the train’s steam, but what it portends for industrializing England. Compare this to The Garden of Les Mathurins, property of the Deraismes Sisters, Pontoise (1876), which is an absolute symphony. The lush colors and complicated textures of so many species may even be metaphorical, as the woman reading near the gazing globe could be the activist Maria Deraismes, who shared Pissarro’s politics. It’s possible that this was the site of proto-feminist gatherings.

His people hid as many secrets as his landscapes. The subject of Young Peasant Girl Wearing a Straw Hat (1881) holds her hands with a hint of anxiety or thoughtfulness. Her gaze has drifted to something we can’t see, but you can also tell that she isn’t really looking at it. Behind her, the countryside undulates with potential to the point that it almost becomes abstract. Pissarro’s eye wasn’t just honest, it was a ravenous data collector that helped him create scenes of incalculable influence.

“The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism” is on view at the Denver Art Museum through February 8, 2026.

More exhibition reviews

• “Nigerian Modernism” Reframes the Story of Modern African Art

• At the Getty Research Institute, the Guerrilla Girls Mark 40 Years of Calling Out the Art World

• Musée Marmottan Monet’s “The Empire of Sleep” Considers Slumber as an Artistic Trope

• “Thirst” at The Wellcome Collection Dives Deep into the Politics of Water

• Kader Attia’s Poetics of Repair in “Shattering and Gathering our Traces”

Earlier this month, Gagosian debuted a stunning show featuring the work of Walter De Maria at its Le Bourget gallery in Paris. “Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience” was curated by Donna De Salvo and featured at its heart The Truck Trilogy, a trio of vintage Chevrolet pickup trucks outfitted with De Maria’s signature stainless-steel rods. The work was conceived in 2011 and completed in 2017, four years after De Maria’s death at the age of 77.

This was the same year that the gallery launched its “Building a Legacy Program,” which marshals the gallery’s extensive resources to ensure that artists remain in the minds of the public in the future, whether they are young, old, or deceased, through educational efforts and ambitious shows like “The Singular Experience.” The program has been spearheaded by Kara Vander Weg, a managing director at the gallery, whom we caught up with to hear more about its origins and processes.

How did the idea for the Building a Legacy Program originate in 2017, and what gaps in artist or estate planning was it meant to address?

KVW: The catalyst was Walter De Maria, an artist who had been close to the gallery since the 1980s, dying in 2013 without a will. The lack of preparation threw his estate into turmoil but, fortunately, the gallery was able to help address a number of immediate practical needs, including preserving and documenting his archives. Nuanced decisions had to be made about his intentions and his work, including how it was displayed. Walter was incredibly precise and exacting, and to go from his presence, a resource that was always there, to nothing was a profound shock, particularly for Elizabeth Childress, who had managed his studio for decades.

Through our work with the Richard Avedon Foundation, which began in 2011, we learned a lot about the challenges and questions they faced when Dick had died suddenly several decades earlier. It has been instructive to learn about their organization, which is impressive, and implemented processes for decision-making as the artist would have wished.

Through our work with artists and with their subsequent estates and foundations—which is inevitable when working together over many years—we have seen that balancing an artist’s legacy with ongoing operational concerns can be incredibly challenging. As much as the gallery, as an entity outside of the family or studio, can be helpful, we want to be. For all artists, it is ideal to have some plans for legacy decisions in place. And as the value of art has grown, it has become even more important to have detailed wishes outlined, particularly when it comes to decisions like posthumous work, as well as planning for the resources necessary to carry an artist’s legacy forward.

A symposium felt like the right way to address some of these delicate topics and provide a space for knowledge sharing between our artists and others. Peer-to-peer support can be an exceptionally helpful resource, and many of the connections that have been made through the symposia continue to be fruitful for the artists and estates.

The team behind Gagosian Quarterly also saw an opportunity to address many of the questions on people’s minds through thoughtful content in the magazine. We launched an ongoing series featuring conversations with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship who offer insights that hopefully prove useful to artists, their staff, foundations and estates, scholars, and others.

In working with estates like Walter De Maria’s or Nam June Paik’s, what have been the most revealing challenges in realizing an artist’s intentions after death?

KVW: Honoring an artist’s wishes and intentions is always the biggest challenge.

With Walter, we’ve had to make decisions about how to install his work at a level he would have permitted. Fortunately, both Larry [Gagosian] and I worked closely with him and have those experiences to draw on. We also owe a great debt to Elizabeth Childress for her constant counsel. For example, Walter was always incredibly precise about the surface on which his floor sculptures rested; it had to be completely unmarked. For an exhibition at our 21st Street gallery while he was still alive, I remember we had to bring in a trompe l’oeil painter to touch up marks on the concrete floor before he would agree to go ahead with the show. And for the current exhibition at Le Bourget, we had to find solutions to address the floor beneath 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows. These might seem like small things, but we know how critical they were to Walter.

He was also very resistant to putting out too much information about his work, because he wanted viewers to have a focused, unmediated experience of it. The downside is that, as a result, people haven’t really come to understand the thinking behind his practice. That’s why, for the Le Bourget exhibition, curator Donna De Salvo has included a number of drawings, some of which have never been seen before, something that would never have happened during his lifetime. Our hope is that this will offer the wider public a way into Walter’s thinking: his precision, a bit of his humor, and the connections between his early work and the later pieces for which he became known. These are things we believe are important, not only for his legacy, but also for the scholarship around his work.

The circumstances of our work on behalf of Nam June Paik are very different, and my colleague Nick Simunovic is best placed to talk about it. [Writer’s note: They wanted Nick to jump in here so I said why not.]

NS: In the case of Nam June Paik, we partnered with the Estate, who had a clear sense of the artist’s wishes, and we worked tirelessly over a decade to realize a number of important goals.

When we began working with the Estate in 2015, they were keen to work with a major gallery as a way to shine a spotlight on Nam June’s work, particularly given that the last exhibition sanctioned by the artist was 20 years prior. Larry [Gagosian] had noted that he felt that the artist was a bit lost in the market, and that was a view shared by the family. There was also a realization that there were gaps in the holdings of American museums.

We laid out a multi-tiered plan that began with that first show in Hong Kong in 2015 and culminated with a major survey in New York planned for 2020. The opening was delayed by the COVID pandemic but eventually opened in 2022.

We brought in noted curator John G. Hanhardt, who also organized the retrospectives of the artist’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1982), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2011), in addition to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2000). We were able to strategize and execute against the artist’s wishes because we had clear direction from the Estate, including Nam June’s nephew Ken Hakuta, and input from partners like John Hanhardt and Estate curator Jon Huffman.

As a result of those efforts, works by the artist from that 2022 exhibition were placed with major museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, and the Bass Museum of Art, filling a crucial gap in the artist’s canon and legacy.

How do you balance market considerations with curatorial or scholarly fidelity when guiding legacy work inside a commercial gallery?

KVW: The two are interconnected and I don’t think that is a bad thing, work needs to be placed with owners to ensure the highest level of scholarly fidelity. And good curatorial work can help to bolster an artist’s market.

The monograph Gagosian published for Walter De Maria is a great example. Little scholarly work had been done on his life, and through our work preserving the archive, we had an opportunity and the ability to take on the project. We had access to rarely seen archival material from his studio and the result is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s entire oeuvre that explores both his creative career and his personal life.

It was a massive undertaking that was many years in the making, but the publication will support both future sales and exhibitions of his work. It has already served as the catalogue for the Menil Collection’s 2022-23 exhibition, Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work.

The recent symposium in London gathered artists, curators, and foundation directors. What insights or points of friction surfaced about the future of legacy stewardship?

KVW: It was our third symposium on the topic of legacy planning, and there was a fascinating session during which I spoke with Mary Dean, Ed Ruscha’s studio director; Waltraud Forelli, Anselm Kiefer’s studio director and board member of the Eschaton–Anselm Kiefer Foundation; and Vladimir Yavachev, director of operations for the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation. A key takeaway from our conversation was the critical importance of hiring an archivist, ideally while an artist is alive.

Waltraud rightly pointed out that in addition to helping from an organizational perspective, hiring an archivist brought a realization that they couldn’t do everything alone. They needed to plan for a younger generation to continue their work and to take the time now to transfer that knowledge. For Vladimir, who has catalogue raisonné preparations underway, an archivist is particularly important given the volume of material that Christo and Jeanne-Claude retained.

Mary Dean emphasized another important point, the value of openness, even when addressing a sensitive topic like planning for a future one won’t be part of. For Ed, this is a living, evolving process that he actively engages in through the thoughtful placement of his works and archival material with institutional partners. For instance, the Getty Museum is currently in the process of receiving his street photograph archive. All of his films and artistbook archives are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. He has also made significant donations: Ed was born in Omaha, Nebraska, so the Joslyn Art Museum has a substantial collection of his work, and he has donated work to the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Oklahoma City.

Younger artists such as Titus Kaphar are building institutions during their lifetimes. How is the conversation about legacy changing for living artists?

KVW: There is a generation of artists today who are interested in philanthropic endeavors beyond their own artistic practices. Providing space and resources for the creation of foundations and community projects is a big priority and perhaps is an indication of legacy planning taking shape much earlier in artists’ careers.

There is a tradition of artists stepping up and supporting other artists, one example is Theaster Gates, who has devoted the past 15 years to his Rebuild Foundation. It’s a mantle that artists including Ellen Gallagher and Titus Kaphar are taking up with projects like the Nina Simone House and NXTHVN, respectively.

But this process isn’t new, there is a history of artist support with someone like Robert Rauschenberg, who during his lifetime formed an entity to help other artists, as did Roy Lichtenstein.

For galleries, support of an artist needs to evolve to include these priorities, which could be advice around the organization of studio resources or the make-up of a Board of Directors.

With “The Singular Experience” now open in Paris, featuring De Maria’s Truck Trilogy and 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows, what does this presentation demonstrate about Gagosian’s collaboration with the De Maria Estate? What are the lessons there for other artists planning their estate?

KVW: The relationship with Walter has always been very personal, his friendship and working relationship with Larry [Gagosian] stretches back more than 35 years, and it has anchored our long commitment to him and his work.

The approach is methodical and takes time, but the exhibition at Le Bourget is a product of that commitment. It’s his second show in the space and one that we had actually begun discussing before he died in 2013.

Showing Truck Trilogy outside of the United States for the first time is incredibly exciting. It was his last sculpture, conceived in 2011 and completed posthumously in 2017 according to his specific directions, so it touches on a lot of what we have talked about. It’s also wonderful to be showing 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows at the same time as his inclusion in the exhibition “Minimal,” curated by Dia Art Foundation’s director Jessica Morgan at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris. And it’s all taking place in the same month as Walter would have turned 90.

But the exhibitions are just one piece in a broader program that aims to cement and extend his legacy, from placing a group of early sculpture and drawings with The Menil Collection (a family that were early champions of the artist) and working with Dia Art Foundation to help conserve The Lightning Field to working tirelessly to publish his monograph. And the work continues as we try to find a home for his archive.

For artists working today, it can be hard to have the patience to play the long game, but that thought and planning is key. It can also be useful to talk with other artists and studios who are focused on this work. One of the benefits from the symposium was the exchange of ideas and the conversations that happened outside the sessions.

Looking across the gallery’s roster, what qualities distinguish the artists who are most intentional about shaping their own legacies while still alive? What do they have in common?

KVW: They have a clear sense of purpose regarding the direction of their work and its legacy. They like control, either maintaining it themselves or wisely bringing in the right studio leadership. They’ve built strong museum connections and have access to resources in terms of staff and space. It’s a reminder of the symbiotic relationship between the market and legacy, artists need resources to actively plan for the future.

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

The best exhibition of work by Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) that I’ve seen so far was held at the Doge’s Palace in Venice in 2022. This grandiose venue of political intrigue turned out to be the perfect place for the German artist’s large-scale scenes of luxurious destruction. The gilded furnishings always lead so naturally to the Bridge of Sighs and the adjacent prison. Even the color scheme of burnt ochre and grey went well with the palace’s rich wood and often literal darkness.

It would be hard to think of many places more different from Venice than Saint Louis, yet the Saint Louis Art Museum, which just opened “Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea,” is not as unlikely a venue for a show of the artist as you might think. What the two cities have in common is water, which is crucial to Kiefer’s tide pool worlds. In 1991, the artist journeyed up the Mississippi during a visit to St. Louis, a formative trip that evoked the Rhine of his childhood. The exhibition features 40 works from the 1970s through to the present, with more than 20 works made in the last five years and five monumental site-specific paintings.

One of these new works, Missouri, Mississippi (2024), commemorates that trip from 1991. It is gigantic like all of them, 30 feet by 27 feet. Dominating the scene is the end of the journey when, in a small boat, the artist came upon the Melvin Price Lock and Dam in Alton, Illinois. Waves crash against the giant edifice, which apparently has a series of mysterious airy structures atop it like a series of strange identical Parthenons, but this is only the bottom half of the painting. In the top we see the water swirling around a woman’s body. She’s some kind of tortured river goddess or maybe just dead.

Being dwarfed by that giant dam in 1991 might have inspired Die Orden der Nacht (The Orders of the Night) (1996), which sees the artist in the Savasana yoga pose, aka corpse pose, under giant black sunflowers that seem to absorb the light. Die Milchstraße (The Milky Way) (1985-87), from before this trip, would seem to represent his normal instincts, which are to make a giant ruined battlefield and then imbue it with some mythology. Here the stars are being siphoned down into the ditch via thin metal tubes. Maginot (1982-2013) feels in this vein.

Probing the effect that the Mississippi had on him, we should look at the two works dedicated to beat poet Gregory Corso, whose lines about eternal life were the basis for the title of this exhibition. Becoming the ocean, for Gregory Corso (2024), which still has a dry and puckered texture, suggests the ocean is still a battlefield. I do like that one of the materials is “sediment of electrolysis.” It’s possible that this trip up the Mississippi was where the artist first came to configure some kind of optimism into his intensely postwar landscapes. Für Gregory Corso (2024) sees a contented woman in the night sky above the waves, apparently the spirit that lives on amid all this desolation.

“Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea” is on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum through January 25, 2026.

More exhibition reviews

• “Thirst” at The Wellcome Collection Dives Deep into the Politics of Water

• Kader Attia’s Poetics of Repair in “Shattering and Gathering our Traces”

• Tracing the Origins of Emma Kohlmann’s Arcane Figures

• ‘Body Vessel Clay’ Offers a Material Portal to the Ancestral Plane

• Chiharu Shiota Weaves Historical Memory, Body and Belonging in “Two Home Countries”

The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver will soon have a new director in Anthony Kiendl, who comes to the institution from the Vancouver Art Gallery, where he served as chief executive and executive director. The MCA Denver boasts a unique downtown structure that was David Adjaye’s first museum commission, providing the opportunity to present the city’s passersby with avant-garde programming like Lorraine O’Grady’s Miscegenated Family Album (1980), which it showed in 2010, well before her current revival. We caught up with Kiendl to hear about his plans for the institution.

Congratulations on the new job! What’s your relationship like with Denver? Have you visited often? What’s your impression of it?

I am relatively new to Denver, having visited perhaps five times over the past seven years or so. I am drawn to the wide-open spaces, and equally to the enchantment of the mountains. There is something about this in-between (where the plains meet the mountains) that holds so much potential. It is literally and metaphorically at the center of all things in my imagination. The city feels alive with possibilities at this moment.

What are some of your first 100-day priorities at MCA Denver?

I want to prioritize encounters—with people, art and ideas. I want to have conversations, make notes, draw maps and think about the future.

What lessons would you say you learned at the Vancouver Art Gallery?

My experiences in Vancouver were wide-ranging. Being on the Pacific Rim, Vancouver reconfigured spatial relationships for me. Tokyo was only slightly further away than New York, the difference in travel time is negligible. Similarly, links with Hong Kong are innumerable. It presented new opportunities and imaginaries. At the same time, Vancouver also revealed a different perspective on what it means to be “regional.” I have spent most of my career off-center and trying, in a modest way, to de-center the art world. I gained new insights into the economies of scale, place and nodes of communication in the art world, how meaning is made, how history is written and what truly matters.

Supporting Colorado artists is part of the MCA Denver’s mission but of course it’s the international superstars that get people through the door. How do you plan to navigate those two demands?

These demands are not mutually exclusive. I want to break down binaries such as superstar vs unknown or local vs international. Rather than only scanning for the “next big thing,” I am interested in understanding what matters here and now and why? My focus is on being attuned to communities; what is the context, the need, the desire that is relevant? Then ideas and paths forward present themselves. I do want to find paths that connect Colorado to the world and vice versa. These paths will likely take unanticipated turns, revealing the overlooked and being surprised along the way. I would add that multiple voices are usually stronger than one voice.

You were known for your work with Indigenous artists in Canada. Do you have plans for similar kinds of outreach in America?

I think I would refer back to the previous response. What I will add is that I have learned that in a global environment, visitors from elsewhere often want to know what is unique to a certain place. By definition, Indigenous culture speaks to this. So, in an art museum there is an ongoing opportunity to respond to that curiosity. By responding to that interest, we can support local and Indigenous artists, engage different forms of knowledge and better understand our place in the world. This brings it back to the local, where we can create awareness, meaning and pride.

MCA Denver boasts an impressive space. What excites you about making exhibitions happen in this particular building? What are its challenges?

I love the MCA Denver building—it is a playful architecture that expresses delight and rewards curiosity. There are fabulous juxtapositions, lines of sight and other delights. It is a distinct pleasure to experience the building. I also admire its restraint and coolness. It does not dominate the art. There is a balance—memorable architecture that does not shout over the art. Challenges? Limited space is an issue. But working with constraints often fosters creative solutions.

How do you feel about programming in the same town as the Clyfford Still Museum, which is deeply beloved by art history nerds. Is it intimidating? Exciting?

I am very excited to work in an environment that is burgeoning with multiple voices, institutions and histories! I want to be in a place where the whole is greater than the individual parts. Again, I refer back to a global context. We need a critical mass to register on an international scale. I believe that is happening here in Colorado with exciting developments that encompass Aspen, Boulder, Colorado Springs and further afield but connected—for example, Santa Fe. Collectively this is a shared chorus—including major and minor chords, counterpoints and even dissonances—that taken collectively make a noise that matters not just regionally, but around the world.

More arts in Denver

• 48 Hours of Art in Denver: One Festival, Two Museums, Five Galleries and Too Much Coffee

• How Denver Art Museum Is Looping Indigenous Communities into Its Program

• From the Old West to Alien Landscapes: Where to See the Best Art in Denver

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

I was in the room at Sotheby’s in 2012 when a version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) sold for $119.9 million, including the buyer’s premium. This was the most anyone had paid for a work at auction at the time and what I remember the most is the hullabaloo: all my fellow writers leaving the press corral to phone in a story like we were radio reporters, yelling to our editors over wild applause. In retrospect it is this clapping that dominates the memory. Who was its intended recipient? The buyer Leon Black? The giant pile of money itself? They couldn’t be celebrating the work, because it hadn’t done anything but sit on a rotating wall, in quiet pastel.

The Scream was an odd choice for the most expensive artwork in the world because it is so weird and delicate. A version of it appears in “Strange Realities: The Symbolist Imagination,” a new show at the Art Institute of Chicago that surveys the mysterious movement of the late 19th Century known as Symbolism across more than 80 works on paper from the museum’s prints and drawings collection.

Symbolism swept the colder parts of Europe and can be considered a response to Impressionism’s fascination with the visible world. Symbolists explored the psychological and fantastic across visuals and literature like Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884) in which the protagonist orders a live tortoise to be encrusted with jewels so that it will better harmonize with his Oriental carpet. It dies.

The works on paper at the Art Institute are only a little less fabulous than this. The Scream only appears as a black and white lithograph, but quite similar to it, in color, is Gustaf Fjæstad’s Moonlight, Örebro (1897). In this, a woman looks out on a lake under moonlight, leaning against a chain as the ripples undulate in her direction. The swirls feel like an alien presence and across the way a house seems to watch with two blazing lanterns.

Odilon Redon offers a host of works, two of them wild. Sita (c. 1893) is drawn from the Hindu epic Ramayana and sees the protagonist surrounded by “a golden-green radiance… stardust falling, a shower of gold” to use the artist’s own words. She appears to glow in an amulet, removed from the world, touching on the movement’s interest in myth and magic. Flower Clouds (c. 1903) shows an evolution in large format as two sailors watch an otherworldly sunset that does seem to bloom with emotion.

Contrast that with the inward energy of Franz von Stuck’s Lucifer (c. 1890) a monochrome etching on chine collé. The fallen angel’s wings are at a thoughtful angle as he broods with slitted eyes at the viewer. I’m struck by how realistic the feathers are, bunched under his seat. It captures his discomfort and indignity, though everything else about the image reminds us that his power is still intact. He’s the original problematic fave.

“Strange Realities: The Symbolist Imagination” is at the Art Institute of Chicago through January 5, 2026.

More exhibition reviews

• “Thirst” at The Wellcome Collection Dives Deep into the Politics of Water

• Kader Attia’s Poetics of Repair in “Shattering and Gathering our Traces”

• Tracing the Origins of Emma Kohlmann’s Arcane Figures

• ‘Body Vessel Clay’ Offers a Material Portal to the Ancestral Plane

• Chiharu Shiota Weaves Historical Memory, Body and Belonging in “Two Home Countries”

October was Filipino American History Month, and to mark the occasion the Queens Museum extended its popular exhibition dedicated to the work of the Filipino artist duo Abang-guard, also known as Maureen Catbagan (b. Quezon City, Philippines, 1975) and Jevijoe Vitug (b. Pampanga, Philippines, 1977), who both work as guards at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and have collaborated since 2017. “Abang-guard: Makibaka” takes its title from a Tagalog word for “coming together for change,” and this strongly political show uses performance, painting and sculpture to explore the winds of change through the lens of Filipino history and that of the Queens Museum. We caught up with Catbagan and Vitug to hear more about the exhibition, which is now open until January 18.

You both met as guards at the Met in 2017. How does that origin shape the way you create and present work?

We are both Filipinos, and our collaborative name Abang-guard is simultaneously a play on avant-garde and the Tagalog word “abang,” which translates as waiting or watchful. The physical act of standing guard automatically assigns importance and value to whatever is behind it, be it a priceless object, VIP, or monument. The sites we’ve performed at have included a sari-sari (small grocery) store, a shuttered community center, the Rizal Social Club (now an empty lot) and art venues ranging from our Abang-guard Street Museum, giving the general public the chance to create and show art, to major museums worldwide. Out of typical context, standing guard can seem humorous and absurd. We want the performance to lead to a deeper examination of what is valued in our day-to-day lives and communities and what is overlooked, erased and considered disposable.

The Queens Museum exhibition coincides with the 60th anniversary of the World’s Fair. Why does 1965 function as such a critical nexus in your practice?

The 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair was the first time the Philippines and other non-Western countries were invited to participate. We took this cultural moment as the starting point for our exhibition and our research in the archives at the Queens Museum as well as fieldwork in California. Three pivotal moments in Filipino American history occurred in 1965, the same year as the World’s Fair: the 1965 Delano Grape Strike, which was one of the largest solidarity and labor movements between Mexican and Filipino farmworkers in the United States; the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act; and the launch of Medicaid and Medicare programs, which paved the way for the mass recruitment of around 25,000 Filipino nurses to fill acute domestic staffing shortages. Also, during the mid-60s, urban redevelopment plans divided immigrant neighborhoods, including the Crosstown Freeway in Stockton, California, leading to the erasure of the oldest Little Manila in the United States.

The replica pavilion filled with time capsules and care packages pays homage to the Delano Grape Strike. How do you see that strike’s legacy resonating with labor struggles today?

The strike lasted for almost five years and gained national momentum due to its persistence. It won farmworkers union contracts with better wages, healthcare benefits and protections from pesticides. These benefits, such as job protection and environmental safety, are currently being diminished. It’s important to highlight this history to show that there is a successful playbook for collective action and resistance.

Mexican activist leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta are most often referenced in historical accounts of the Delano Grape Strike, but here the names of 75 of the thousands of unsung Filipino organizers and strikers, including Larry Itliong, who initiated the walkout, are inscribed on the missile-shaped time capsules. They are placed in one of the exhibition’s main sculptures, resembling the roof of the Philippine Pavilion that’s shaped like a salakot, a traditional farmer’s hat. Each is filled with items from local shops in Little Manila, Queens, just like the care packages sent between the Filipino diaspora and their families.

Bridged Monuments places you on-site guarding Little Manila in Stockton and Delano. How does the act of “guarding” function as both performance and memorial?

One often sees sentinels in prestigious sites such as palaces and major historical monuments performing ritual formations like the changing of the guard. We incorporate these aesthetic cues that invoke national importance and reverence. Being physically present and standing guard at sites like Little Manila in Stockton and Delano is a way to honor our Manongs and Manangs (elder brothers and sisters) and to witness and hold the histories they lived—their struggles and their contributions. Going to these sites and performing this act is a way of remembering, protecting and keeping those memories alive, connecting the past to the present.

Environmental justice enters the exhibition with The Air We Breathe (For Dawn Mabalon). Why was it important to connect labor history with air quality and public health?

It’s mostly poor, working-class POC (people of color) neighborhoods that are chosen to be in proximity to urban highway projects and polluted ports. The city of Stockton has both. Many residents suffer long-term health effects due to exposure, and the city is one of the “asthma capitals” of the nation. Esteemed Filipina American academic and historian Dawn Mabalon, who grew up in Stockton, died of asthma at the age of 45. The artwork is titled in her honor, with monitors reflecting average monthly readings of air quality in the mostly immigrant neighborhoods of Flushing, Queens and Stockton, California.

Several works reimagine Pop art from the 1964-1965 World’s Fair. How do you use Warhol, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist and Lichtenstein to tell Filipino histories that were absent at the time?

The New York State Pavilion’s Theaterama commissioned and installed works by American Pop artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist, whose murals reflected advanced technology, capitalist consumerism and space exploration. Historical narratives about Filipino Americans and Filipinos were largely absent in the U.S. during the 1960s, so we reimagined the Pop artworks as portraits of Filipino experiences, focusing on labor and collective struggle.

Warhol’s 13 Most Wanted Men became America’s Most Help Wanted, replacing prison mugshots with portraits of Filipina nurses, turning criminality into care and essential labor. Rauschenberg’s collage idealizing images of American progress is recreated with archival photos of Filipino nurses with President Johnson signing the 1965 Immigration Act, linking policy to migration. Rosenquist’s mural, featuring American consumerism and nationalism, now focuses on the advertisements and promotions enticing Filipina nurses to the only path to a better life abroad, with the message “Your cap is your passport.” Lichtenstein’s comic book-style woman is reframed as a portrait of Philippine exchange student Corazon Amurao, the sole survivor of the 1966 mass murder of nurses-in-training in Chicago, restoring visibility to a silenced violent history.

Although drawn from these Pop artists’ works, the paintings retain a distinctive Filipino style with heavy, textured brushstrokes and subtle Indigenous patterns, asserting ancestral identity within the Pop vocabulary. These works also reflect the impact of the Immigration Act, which allowed Filipino nurses to migrate to the U.S. and later bring their families, leading to the growth of communities like Little Manila in Queens, New York.

October was Filipino American History Month. How do you want Makibaka to contribute to that wider reflection and dialogue?

Filipino history is one of immigrants arriving as laborers, facing exploitation, and continuing to fight for justice. With current DEI initiatives, they are also facing a villainizing of immigrants. Our exhibition provides an entry point to reflect on Filipino immigrants’ vital labor contributions to the farming and healthcare industries of the United States. More importantly, we want to honor how Filipinos built unity and kinship against oppressive systems, not only to care for one another but also to stand with other POC immigrant communities. Makibaka is at the heart of the show—a call for solidarity, courage and collective action, reminding us that the struggle for equity, recognition and historical truth continues.

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A small number of galleries closed this year—each for reasons so idiosyncratic that no narrative could be assembled from these developments one way or the other. I imagine that Tim Blum is comfortable in his retirement, having relinquished the throne as Los Angeles’s top dealer. Meanwhile, the young Angeleno Matthew Brown proved that savvy up-and-comers can still make a splash with a recent expansion to New York, where, this year, he stole living legend Carroll Dunham from Gladstone.

Hauser & Wirth had a good year, not that they’ve ever had a bad one. This spring, several of their artists opened exhibitions at three of New York’s top museums, including Amy Sherald at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Jack Whitten at the Museum of Modern Art and Rashid Johnson at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. That’s a rare accomplishment, even for a gallery with pockets as deep as Hauser’s—shoutout to Marc Payot. Next year, the gallery will open a space in Palo Alto, following Marc Glimcher and Pace in their quest to determine whether or not tech guys will ever collect anyone besides Alec Monopoly.

Issy Wood impressed a certain set by rebuffing Gagosian in that New Yorker profile, but absorbing young artists has become a trend for the blue chippers, in part because their lower price points represent the amount of money that collectors today want to spend. David Zwirner has recently absorbed Yu Nishimura, Sasha Gordon and Emma McIntyre, and the gallery’s space at 52 Walker feels like a farm team. In Mexico City, where young artists abound, kurimanzutto takes the opposite approach, distinguishing itself by staging museum-quality exhibitions with the biggest names possible, which can be confirmed by anyone who saw their Haegue Yang survey during ZONAMACO this year.

On this iteration of our Art Power Index are a number of auction-world personalities, and here again, we must talk about the New Yorker, because the auction world is a duopoly, and the story of Christie’s success is also that of Sotheby’s failure. Sam Knight’s recent profile of Patrick Drahi, who purchased the house in 2019, implies that the owner is less concerned with success than with lining his pockets and giving his children jobs. Hong Kong rainmaker Patti Wong left in 2022 after Drahi put his son Nathan in charge of the formerly successful office. Now, “literally half of the H.R. department’s job is trying to manage Nathan’s damage.” At least Guillaume Cerutti and Alexander Rotter have been having a good time—at the auction previews in the spring, Rotter could be seen palling around with his former coworker Loïc Gouzer, who brought his Fair Warning startup venture to Christie’s that season. The two were so ebullient you would have never suspected that, according to the 2025 Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report, public auction sales were down 19 percent, or $25.1 billion—the steepest fall since 2009.

Clare McAndrew, author of that report, appears on this power list because it remains authoritative despite recent forays into the space by outlets such as Artnet and Artsy. This is, perhaps, a testament to the Art Basel brand. Honcho Noah Horowitz and Chief Artistic Officer and Global Director of Art Basel Fairs Vincenzo de Bellis must be doing something right; everyone who’s anyone went to Art Basel Paris this year. On the other side of that particular duopoly sits Ari Emanuel, who took personal ownership of the Frieze fairs (via new venture MARI) from his agency Endeavor, which went private this year. Even when sales at the fairs are down—and they are down, representing just 31 percent of annual sales for galleries from a pre-pandemic high of 43 percent—the fairs themselves always seem to make money through their booth fees and ticket sales. Who doesn’t like it when the circus comes to town?

But all that power pales in comparison to the kind exercised by museums. This year saw the loss of Agnes Gund, the patron par excellence, and the continued rise of MoMA’s young board president, Sarah Arison, deemed “her generation’s Agnes Gund” by Town & Country. Max Hollein remains his generation’s Max Hollein, ubiquitous as New York gallery-opening scenester despite moonlighting as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This year’s opening of that institution’s refreshed Rockefeller Wing shows its dedication to new ideas, and they’re already on to the next project: a new wing that promises 50 percent more gallery space for the museum’s 20th- and 21st-century collections. Across the country, construction has nearly been completed on Michael Govan’s brand-new LACMA, which was designed by Peter Zumthor and promises to reshape the social fabric of the city. If that isn’t power, what is?

Keep reading for more insight into the people whose actions, tastes and endorsements move the needle on valuation and the people who decide who gets in and what gets seen (and what gets left off the gallery wall). Each year, our Art Power Index spotlights the figures shaping how capital and vision move through today’s art world. It turns out that the reports of the art industry’s demise were premature, but it is changing, and our 2025 honorees are the ones reinventing its structures and steering its evolution into unexpected new territory.

Refik Anadol

• Dataland | Founder & Artistic Director

It’s hard to think about A.I. art without thinking about Refik Anadol—that’s how profoundly he’s shaped the field. From blockbuster installations like Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations at MoMA to his relentless pursuit of A.I. as a creative medium, Anadol has transformed how we experience data, memory and perception. His work, which merges machine intelligence, architecture, and new media art, is part of major institutional collections, including MoMA, Kunsthaus Zürich, Istanbul Modern and the Museum of the Future.

Now he’s pushing boundaries again with Dataland, the world’s first A.I. art museum, originally set to open at The Grand LA this year but now debuting in spring of 2026. “While Dataland will primarily focus on creating new, site-specific projects exclusive to the museum, we plan to also feature some key projects from our past to offer visitors a glimpse into the broader context of our work,” Anadol told Observer. The space will also support emerging artists and expand the place of digital art in mainstream culture. “Since beginning my journey, I’ve dreamed of moving digital art out of the margins and into the mainstream. It’s inspiring to witness this vision coming to life,” he added. A vocal advocate for ethical A.I., Anadol launched the “Make It Fair” campaign to promote transparency and accountability in creative technology—a mission that earned him recognition on the TIME100 A.I. Impact Awards list in 2025.

Sarah Arison

• YoungArts | Board Chair
• Arison Arts Foundation | President
• Museum of Modern Art | President, Board of Trustees

A quiet but mighty powerhouse of arts philanthropy, Sarah Arison has used her influence to subtly but decisively shape the contemporary art landscape. As president of the Arison Arts Foundation, a family legacy, and the youngest-ever president of MoMA‘s Board of Trustees, she is known for championing emerging U.S. artists across disciplines early in their careers through sustained patronage and partnership. Her leadership was on full display this year when she delivered remarks at MoMA’s annual fundraiser and co-chaired the 2025 MoMA PS1 Gala, events that underscored her status as one of the country’s most influential private grantmakers.

“Institutions, funders and collectors are looking more closely at how artists are uplifted at all stages of their careers and how communities of practice form around them,” Arison tells Observer. “Much of my work focuses on creating environments where emerging artists can take risks, engage in dialogue, and build networks that sustain them over time. Rather than focusing on visibility alone, we are working to build durable networks of care that allow artists to evolve and lead the conversations that shape the cultural landscape.”
 
Based in Miami, the Arison Arts Foundation awarded more than 100 grants last year, distributing nearly $30 million to artists and institutions. Arison also continues her family’s legacy as Chair of the Board of YoungArts, the multidisciplinary arts organization founded by her grandparents Lin and Ted Arison. At YoungArts, she has helped advance a model of lifelong support for literary, visual and performing arts that begins when artists are still in high school and continues throughout the full arc of their careers. This work sits alongside her leadership at MoMA and MoMA PS1, as well as support for numerous grassroots programs that provide fellowships, community-building, and relief for artists facing financial hardship. Arison has emerged as a pivotal force in reimagining how arts philanthropy operates, emphasizing cooperation over competition. “When we invest in the full arc of an artist’s journey, the entire cultural landscape benefits,” Arison says.

Vincenzo de Bellis

• Art Basel | Chief Artistic Officer & Global Director of Art Fairs

At the helm of Art Basel since 2022, Vincenzo de Bellis has redefined what it means to run a global art fair brand. As director overseeing all fairs and exhibition platforms, he has shaped the format, tone and exhibitor selection across Basel, Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel Hong Kong—while steering the brand into new territory with the launch of a Paris edition in 2022 and the upcoming inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar, slated for early 2026. What distinguishes his approach is a commitment to rooting each fair in its local cultural and market ecosystem, creating distinct identities that feel both globally connected and regionally grounded. Art Basel Paris has quickly established itself as a must-attend European event, while Art Basel Qatar aims to tap into the Gulf’s accelerating creative and economic transformation.

Now deep in preparations for the Qatar debut, De Bellis is applying a proven balance of curatorial rigor and industry savvy, building strategic alliances with regional players such as Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) and QC+, while putting acclaimed Egyptian artist Wael Shawky in the driver’s seat as artistic director—a move that underscores the fair’s intent to connect institutional ambition with local voices. Beyond the fairs themselves, De Bellis has also strengthened Art Basel’s role as a thought leader within the art world, introducing the Art Basel Awards in 2025 to honor organizations and individuals driving innovation. Under his leadership, the brand has evolved from a marketplace into a global platform for dialogue, vision and cultural exchange.

Christine Berry & Martha Campbell

• Berry Campbell | Owners

Specializing in postwar American artists who were long overlooked or underrepresented, Christine Berry and Martha Campbell have built Berry Campbell gallery into one of the most influential forces behind recent market rediscoveries. “We were looking for postwar artists we could potentially represent, so we went to the Archives of American Art,” Campbell told Observer earlier this year. From there, they took a deeply hands-on approach, reaching out to the families and estates of forgotten artists, unearthing archives and cataloguing works that had slipped through the cracks of art history. Their training as art historians became the foundation for rebuilding these artists’ legacies, connecting the missing dots that institutions and markets had ignored for decades.

That persistence has paid off. The gallery’s exhibitions have ignited new visibility—and new valuations—for once-neglected painters. Bernice Bing, whose works sold for around $30,000 only a few years ago, reached $850,000 in 2024. Alice Baber, long undervalued at roughly $3,000, sold for a record $700,000 following her first major exhibition in more than 40 years. Lynne Drexler’s market followed a similar ascent. By championing these artists with scholarly rigor and curatorial conviction, Berry and Campbell have not only altered their markets but reframed the larger story of American modernism, ensuring that women and other marginalized voices occupy their rightful place in it. 

“As two women business owners for over a decade now, we have watched wealth change hands to where more women are making the buying decisions,” the duo tells Observer. “Naturally, as this happens, women are being more inclusive in buying women artists. It is exciting to witness (and be a part of) this evolution.”

Michael Bloomberg

• Bloomberg Philanthropies | Founder

Michael Bloomberg isn’t just a philanthropist—he’s the top philanthropist in the U.S., with a record of supporting art initiatives with a focus on urban renewal and access. (He reportedly gave $3.7 billion last year, putting him at the top of the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s latest Philanthropy 50 report.) His foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, partners with more than 700 cultural organizations worldwide, and through his donations, the former mayor of New York City has built a legacy of supporting small, medium and large organizations and initiatives—particularly in urban environments. The annual $100,000 Asphalt Art Grants transform streets and public spaces with artworks designed not only to activate underutilized areas but also to enhance street safety. Then there are the $1 million Public Art Challenge grants, which fund projects that address civic challenges like health equity, climate resilience and urban revitalization through the installation of artworks.

“The arts have always been at the center of movements for change,” Bloomberg tells Observer. “Today, they can play a role in spurring progress in the fight against climate change. Artists are drawing attention to the problem in powerful ways that encourage people to take action.”

In addition to doubling down on public art as a lever for urban change in the U.S., Bloomberg has a reputation for directly and indirectly supporting culture around the world. He’s chairman of the Serpentine Board and opened the London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE. This year, he made the largest private donation ever recorded to the London Museum—a £20 million contribution plus a donation of 14,000 Roman artifacts uncovered during the construction of the Bloomberg European headquarters in London. On the accessibility side, the Bloomberg Connects app offers free digital guides to hundreds of museums, galleries, sculpture parks, gardens and other cultural institutions around the world. “The more we do to support both arts and arts organizations, the more we can capitalize on their potential to drive progress,” Bloomberg says. Ultimately, the scale and scope of Bloomberg’s giving affords him significant influence over the institutions, artists and stories that will be funded and amplified.

Tim Blum

• BLUM | Founder

Tim Blum has spent decades redefining how Western audiences engage with Asian art—and now he’s redefining what it means to run a gallery. The veteran dealer, who introduced Japanese and Korean postwar masters to the U.S., stunned the art world this year by announcing the closure of his galleries in Los Angeles and Tokyo, as well as the shelving of plans for a New York outpost. “We’ll begin a new chapter: transitioning away from the traditional gallery format toward a more flexible model,” he explained. “Without a permanent public space or formal artist roster, this structure will allow us to engage with artists and ideas in new ways, through collaborations, special projects and longer-term visions still in development.” It was a decision years in the making, reflecting the mounting pressures of a gallery system stretched by nonstop programming, art-fair fatigue and the gravitational pull of the mega-galleries that dominate global attention and resources.

Blum’s exit from the brick-and-mortar model has become a lightning rod for broader conversations about sustainability, leadership and intentionality in the art world. His pivot toward a leaner, more fluid structure signals a move away from the volume-driven expectations that have defined the industry for decades. In doing so, he’s opened a pathway for a new kind of dealer—one focused less on scale and spectacle and more on depth, collaboration and long-term vision. Still, don’t expect him to vanish anytime soon. “Of course I’ll still be buying and selling art,” Blum said. “It’s part of my DNA.”

Bonnie Brennan

• Christie’s | CEO

Auction veteran Bonnie Brennan took the helm as CEO of Christie’s in early 2025, marking one of the year’s most closely watched leadership transitions in the art world. Formerly head of Americas—where she drove nearly half of the auction house’s global sales—Brennan now oversees an operation that brought in $2.1 billion in auction revenue in just the first half of 2025. Seven of the ten highest-priced artworks sold globally during that period went through Christie’s under her leadership, including Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue (1922) and Canaletto’s Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day. Her ascent signals both continuity and evolution at a firm balancing tradition with transformation.

Brennan has made it clear she intends to broaden Christie’s reach, engaging younger and more diverse buyers while keeping a steady hand amid market headwinds. “We are deepening our connectivity in these growth markets—listening closely, partnering locally, and ensuring we are part of the cultural dialogue taking place across every continent,” Brennan tells Observer. “This widening landscape of creativity and collecting represents one of the most exciting opportunities in the art market today.” From exploring A.I. applications to rethinking the global sales calendar to committing to an ethos of sustainability, Brennan’s leadership reflects a pragmatic understanding of where the auction world is heading and a determination to keep Christie’s leading the charge. “We see ourselves as an important part of helping to ensure that growth in the art world happens with purpose, integrity and inclusion.”

Maria Brito

• Maria Brito LLC | CEO

New York art advisor Maria Brito has moved more than $150 million for A-list stars and financiers (the vast majority of her clients are U.S.-based). She publishes The Groove, a widely read weekly newsletter that reaches 32,000 engaged readers, and she regularly shares market tidbits, cultural commentary and art obsessions with her 142,000 Instagram followers. “Globalization has made the market faster, bigger and more connected, while younger collectors demand purpose and transparency,” Brito tells Observer. “My role is to bridge worlds, combining knowledge, data, relationships and intuition so collectors can navigate this landscape with clarity and confidence.”

Her analyses of the art market—whether through interviews, in The Groove or on social media—are generous, engaging and accessible. With headlines like “Do artists need galleries?,” “Can art still shock us?” and “Can you love the art but hate the artist?” Brito uses her platforms to curate far-ranging conversations on the state of the art sector today, turning her into an influential voice among the traditionally tight-lipped art advisory world. Power, she adds, has become more distributed and far less predictable. “The old hierarchies still stand, but influence now moves through new collectors, new media and access to quality works… It’s not about disruption for the sake of it. It’s about evolution: making the art world smarter, more inclusive, and more transparent without diluting its excellence. That’s the real opportunity.”

Read our full Q&A with Maria Brito

Matthew Brown

• Matthew Brown Gallery | Founder

Matthew Brown was just 23 when he opened his first gallery in Hollywood in 2019. Five years later, he has two spaces in Los Angeles and opened a location in New York in 2024, defying both the COVID slowdown and a recent trend of gallery closures. Brown learned the ropes working simultaneously for mega blue-chip powerhouse Gagosian and experimental gallery Hannah Hoffman (soon to be Hannah Donahue). He was then unofficially mentored by groundbreaking dealer/curator Jeffrey Deitch, who provided guidance as Brown worked to set up his own space and build his niche (L.A. artists who were not showing in L.A.). Brown’s roster has expanded to more than 20 artists, including painter Carroll Dunham, whose drawing retrospective will open at the Art Institute of Chicago in January 2026. Early next year, he’s moving the Los Angeles gallery to a new space that he’ll inaugurate with an exhibition of works by Mimi Lauter, who he says he’s “long admired.”

Brown’s fast rise in art world circles may come down to his willingness to approach anyone with an ask (he approached Deitch at a fair), but there’s no denying that he has reshaped market dynamics by connecting Gen Z and Millennial collectors with artists on an upward trajectory, nurturing both a younger generation of collectors and platforming emerging artists without succumbing to speculative demand. “The new generation of collectors is more fluid: they’re digitally native, more global and often less tied to one genre, medium or even art historical period,” he tells Observer. “Their approach is intuitive, more lateral.” His artists have been shown by LACMA, the FLAG Art Foundation and El Museo del Barrio in New York City. Young he may be, but by all accounts, his approach is decidedly old-school: focus on the artist, and visibility and valuation will follow. 

Amy Cappellazzo

• Art Intelligence Global | Founding Partner

What Amy Cappellazzo touches tends to turn to gold. She rose through the ranks at Christie’s, transforming its postwar and contemporary art department into a market-defining powerhouse that reshaped valuations and sales across the industry. She then co-founded Art Agency, Partners, which Sotheby’s acquired for $85 million, and went on to serve as chair of Sotheby’s Fine Art division—overseeing strategy across Old Masters, Modern, Contemporary, Impressionist and Asian art. After years of rewriting the rule book at the auction house, she stepped down in 2021 to build something of her own.

That something became Art Intelligence Global (AIG), the firm she co-founded with Yuki Terase to bridge the U.S. and Asian markets through high-end art advisory and private sales. Headquartered in New York City and Hong Kong, AIG has quickly positioned itself as a next-generation player in an evolving art economy. This year, Cappellazzo brought in Matt Bangser as senior director—a move that signals her commitment to a holistic, ecosystem-wide strategy that connects artists, galleries, collectors and institutions. “Because he’s worked in galleries, at auction houses and directly with artists, he brings a range of experience that’s incredibly valuable—especially now,” Cappellazzo told ARTnews. It’s a statement that captures her ethos: art advisory not as a niche service but as a bespoke service that offers premium market intelligence and blurs the traditional boundaries between galleries, advisors and auction houses.

Guillaume Cerutti

• Pinault Collection | President
• Christie’s | Chairman of the Board

Guillaume Cerutti stepped down as CEO of Christie’s in 2025, handing the reins to Bonnie Brennan after a transformative tenure that redefined the auction house’s global footprint. Under his leadership, Christie’s delivered some of the most significant milestones in market history—from the record-breaking sale of Salvator Mundi (still the most expensive work of art ever sold) to the $1.6 billion auction of Paul Allen’s collection—and pushed the industry into the digital age through its pioneering collaboration with Beeple to sell the first purely digital NFT artwork offered by a major auction house. Cerutti proved that heritage and innovation could coexist, guiding Christie’s through the volatile years of online adoption and cementing its reputation as a leader in the next-gen art landscape.

Now chairman of the board for Christie’s and president of the Pinault Collection, Cerutti stands at the intersection of commerce, culture and policy. As such, his vision extends beyond the market: he recently proposed a €50 million European fund to enable joint acquisitions among museums that could foster cross-border partnerships and shared cultural stewardship. The initiative reflects a pragmatic solution to funding constraints and a bold reimagining of how institutions and private collections can work together—something he sees as increasingly necessary. “In a more fractured and brutal environment, the art world has a vital role to play: as a refuge, as a space for dialogue and as a provider of meaning,” he tells Observer. ”At the same time, other events, such as the theft at the Louvre, have reminded us of the vulnerability of these spaces. All players in the art world face this dual challenge: they are more relevant than ever, but also more exposed.” Collaboration, as modeled by Cerutti, could offer protection.

Elizabeth Diller, Charles Renfro & Benjamin Gilmartin

• Diller Scofidio + Renfro | Partners

The studio lost its beloved co-founder, Ricardo Scofidio, this year, but Elizabeth Diller, Charles Renfro and Benjamin Gilmartin remain firmly at the helm. DS+R has never been a conventional architecture firm—it’s the creative force behind some of the world’s most celebrated cultural landmarks, where architecture, art installation and performance converge. Co-founded by Diller in 1981, the studio has shaped the modern city’s cultural identity through projects like New York’s High Line—an eight-million-visitors-a-year phenomenon praised worldwide for its inventive reuse of industrial infrastructure and approach to urban rewilding. DS+R also designed The Shed, MoMA’s renovation and expansion, the $1 billion restoration of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, The Broad in Los Angeles and its extension, currently underway and slated for completion before the 2028 Olympics.

The studio’s acclaim and collection of awards stem from its ability to transform how the public engages with architecture. DS+R’s work consistently rethinks the civic role of buildings, emphasizing cultural purpose and spatial context within the city. Each project invites participation rather than passive observation, merging design with social experience. Continuing that legacy, Gilmartin assumed the presidency of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) this year, launching the initiative “See You IRL: Designing for Public Life,” a program exploring how shared physical spaces shape the social fabric of New York City and beyond. Renfro led DS+R’s first international projects, including The Tianjin Juilliard School in China and Zaryadye Park in Moscow. He also shaped much of the studio’s academic work, with projects at Rice, Columbia, Stanford and UC Berkeley. Beyond design, Charles has been recognized for his support of LGBTQ+ and BIPOC artists through BOFFO.

Felipe Dmab, Pedro Mendes & Matthew Wood

• Mendes Wood DM | Founding Partners

Pedro Mendes (who is from Minas Gerais, Brazil) and Matthew Wood (a New Hampshire native) were onto something when they established their first artist residency in rural Brazil and their gallery 15 years ago. The idea germinated from their time studying in Paris, seeing that Brazilian artists struggled to be included in top galleries and institutions. “There was never a business plan,” Mendes said in an interview. “It was 100 percent intuitive, it was instinctual.” Their initial address was an auspicious one, next door to Felipe Dmab’s early concept gallery, and so fate gave us the visionary trio known for moves like championing living Afro-Brazilian artists on the global art stage for the first time—including self-taught Sônia Gomes, who a year after joining the Mendes Wood DM roster was included in the 2015 Venice Biennale and today has works in major institutional collections. They capitalize on their cultural differences and diffuse connections when demonstrating that Brazilian art has the potential to reach international markets and institutions, but also to shape intellectual debates and conversations. 

The trio has been the driving force in many cutting-edge conversations taking place in the art world around decoloniality, trans-Atlantic connections, ecology and social justice. Mendes Wood DM is now a multi-city network of galleries with operations in São Paulo, Brussels, Paris and New York and regularly brings work by artists from its roster to the major fairs—including Art Basel Hong Kong—strengthening cross-continental sales of work by Brazilian artists like Solange Pessoa and Rubem Valentim.

Edward Dolman

• Dolman Partners | Co-Founder
• New Perspectives Art Partners | Founder

Ed Dolman knows auctions. Rising from furniture porter to Christie’s CEO and chair, he spent more than a decade at the top, overseeing historic sales, including those leading to the restitution of Gustav Klimt paintings to Maria Altmann and her family. At Phillips, he turned a once-niche house into a billion-dollar contender, driving sales from $398 million in 2014 to $1 billion by 2023. During his 10-year tenure, he expanded the company’s global reach, establishing a Hong Kong office ahead of many Western rivals and betting early on the ultracontemporary market. Dolman’s willingness to embrace risk and innovation (for example, investing in the volatile segments of the art market) helped redefine Phillips’ appeal among younger, more adventurous collectors.

“Taste always changes and evolves, and we are now at a moment when young and new collectors are searching for direction,” Dolman tells Observer. “We have seen a move recently into ‘safer’ and ‘classic’ late 19th- and 20th-century art, but this will not last as the market recovers and the number of collectors grows.”

Late last year, Dolman stepped down as Phillips’ CEO. This year, he helped found and launch New Perspectives Art Partners, the high-end advisory venture poised to reshape the global art-advisory landscape amid generational transitions in collecting. “The art market is more complex and global than it has ever been,” Dolman says. “Private sales need to be able to connect buyers and sellers from completely different parts of the world. It’s a good time to seek independent advice if you’re buying or selling.” Dolman’s deep familiarity with the Middle East’s fast-rising art scene (he previously served as acting CEO of Qatar Museums and remains close to Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani) will position the auction veteran well in this next chapter.

Ari Emanuel

• MARI | Founder & Principal Investor

Ari Emanuel is never far from the spotlight thanks to a series of major industry moves. The Hollywood power broker made headlines last May with his personal acquisition of the Frieze art fair and media group from Endeavor—a $200 million deal that cements his influence in the arts and puts Frieze’s global fair portfolio (New York, Los Angeles, London and Seoul along with EXPO Chicago, The Armory Show, Frieze magazine and the No.9 Cork Street gallery in London) under the control of his new holding company, MARI. Rather than a shake-up, the move signals long-term stability: Frieze’s senior leadership remains in place, and Emanuel, who previously helped drive the brand’s expansion, appears intent on strategic growth rather than reinvention. To wit, the recent announcements of Frieze House Seoul (a No.9 Cork Street analog) and the fair’s Gulf play, Frieze Abu Dhabi.

For Emanuel, Frieze is both a business and a passion project. His background steering Endeavor/WME’s entertainment empire—including global event platforms like UFC and WWE—makes the acquisition part of a larger play in the live experience economy, where art fairs, fashion and entertainment increasingly intersect. “Frieze has always been a source of inspiration for me—both professionally and personally,” Emanuel said in a statement. While talk of art fair fatigue lingers, Frieze remains a global brand synonymous with prestige and cultural cachet. Under Emanuel’s watch, it’s poised not just to endure but to expand its reach, merging art-world sophistication with the scale and polish of a seasoned entertainment executive.

Katherine E. Fleming

• J. Paul Getty Trust | President & CEO

Katherine E. Fleming oversees one of the most powerful cultural endowments in the world—more than $9.45 billion—and leads a constellation of institutions that includes the Getty Foundation, Getty Research Institute, Getty Conservation Institute and its two museums. Last year, she told Observer that the organization was trying to “think really carefully and creatively about what it means to be wealthy” in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in L.A. That reflection became strikingly literal in January 2025, when the Palisades wildfires tested the Getty’s state-of-the-art fire protection systems—an elaborate defense network of concrete barriers, sealed air systems, water reserves and fire separations designed to protect both the Getty Center and the Getty Villa. “The wildfires really brought home to me, in super concrete terms, what it means to be a repository of global cultural heritage,” she tells Observer. “The art that we own, we own on behalf of humanity. Museums are like a cultural version of Norway’s seed bank. It is vital that we take that responsibility very seriously, even as we try to make our collections as accessible as possible.” 

Beyond preserving the institution’s own treasures, she also turned the crisis into an opportunity to lead by example. The Getty helped launch the $14.3 million L.A. Arts Community Fire Relief Fund to support artists and cultural workers whose homes, studios or workplaces were damaged in the fires. “It made me think a lot about how important cultural institutions are for the resilience of humanity in the face of the multiple disasters that seem to surround us in the contemporary world,” she adds. “We play a vital role in connecting people to the past, to the future, and to one another, and in helping calm them and give them resilience during chaos.” Ultimately, Fleming created a roadmap of how institutions can be more than just fortresses of art and scholarship, serving also as responsive civic resources that use cultural wealth to support community resilience in moments of crisis.

Read Our Full Q&A With Katherine E. Fleming

Vanessa Fusco

• Christie’s | International Director, Head of Impressionist & Modern Art, Americas

As the story goes, Vanessa Fusco was on track for a PhD in art history before realizing she missed the pulse of the auction floor—so she returned to Christie’s, where she’s since become one of its sharpest operators. Now head of the department for Impressionist and Modern Art in the Americas, she advises clients on multimillion-dollar works by the greats of the 19th and 20th Centuries, handling masterpieces with the precision of someone who knows both art and market inside and out. As head of the department, she shapes how blue-chip lots are positioned, priced and ultimately placed in private collections. At the last marquee sales, she presented Claude Monet’s Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule (1891)—a performance that reminded everyone why she’s one of the best in the business.

Her strategy blends connoisseurship with global reach. Peupliers was unveiled in Taipei, a calculated move that paid off: “Taipei, in particular, has really had strong interest in classic Impressionism,” Fusco told ARTnews. The work went on to sell for $43 million after fees, a new world record price for the series, surpassing estimates amid competitive regional bidding. Fusco was at the helm of running the inaugural 20th Century Evening sale, a format introduced in May 2021, which combines the best of impressionism, modern and postwar Art into one masterpiece sale. That auction included Picasso’s Femme assise près d’une fenêtre (Marie-Thérèse) (1932), which topped $100 million—the first painting to do so since 2019, and Fusco was on the telephone with the winning bidder. Ultimately, Fusco is orchestrating confidence in a market that still hinges on trust, taste and timing.

Larry Gagosian

• Gagosian | Founder

There’s no contemporary art world without Larry Gagosian, its billion-dollar kingmaker and overall heavy-lifter. While others set up mega-galleries, Gagosian built an empire. He continues to represent the most significant artists and estates, mounting impeccable museum-caliber exhibitions and curating punchy fair booths that set the bar for everyone else while sustaining audiences through his editorial venture Gagosian Quarterly. With such a legacy, no one would blame Gagosian for sitting back to enjoy the fruits of his labor. But in 2025, he delivered head-turning shows, featuring Cy Twombly, Picasso’s rarely seen works in partnership with the artist’s daughter, Paloma Picasso, as well as Willem de Kooning and Takashi Murakami, among others. He opened a new gallery in Seoul in 2024 with plans for expansion in West Hollywood.

Following the end of his Madison Avenue lease in 2026, the art world will hopefully get an answer to the now-perennial question: Who can replace Larry? Gagosian’s succession remains elusive—or close to the vest, your pick. His “council of the wise” (an advisory board peppered with cross-disciplinary luminaries, including Guggenheim chairman J. Tomilson Hill, financier Glenn Fuhrman, LVMH exec Delphine Arnault and filmmaker Sofia Coppola) has been mapping the gallery’s future and providing strategic guidance through leadership shake-ups that muddied earlier theories on possible heirs.

Lina Ghotmeh

• LG—A | Founder & Architect

Lina Ghotmeh is shaping some of the most high-profile art and architecture commissions of our time and changing how we engage with art in the process. In 2023, she designed London’s Serpentine Pavilion “À table,” a witty, design-forward structure that turned the act of breaking bread into an artistic and communal experience. Her international visibility has surged since then. She created the Bahrain Pavilion for the 2025 Osaka Expo and was tapped to lead three major cultural landmarks: the new Qatar Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the Jadids’ Legacy Museum in Bukhara, Uzbekistan—housed in a restored 19th-century residence—and the sweeping redesign of the British Museum’s Western Range, which encompasses nearly a third of the London institution’s footprint. “It’s an invitation to reframe how we tell the story of humanity through art—decentering traditional hierarchies and embracing a more interconnected, equitable cultural landscape,” she tells Observer. “We are finally witnessing the rise of influential perspectives from historically underrepresented regions. This expansion of voices is not only reshaping who gets to speak but also how and where art is being shown.”

Projects like the AlUla Contemporary Arts Museum in Saudi Arabia “sit at the crossroads of this transformation—where local narratives meet global dialogues,” she says. Across continents, Ghotmeh’s projects share a distinctive ethos rooted in what she calls the “Archaeology of the Future”—an architectural philosophy that insists buildings must rise from the spirit of their place, history and environment rather than sit apart from them. This sensitivity to context infuses her work with cultural depth and visual clarity, producing spaces that both honor their surroundings and reimagine how art, architecture and heritage can exist in conversation. “I’m deeply interested in rethinking how we show art and in reaffirming its central role within society,” she adds. “I believe museums and cultural spaces should evolve into living environments.”

Marc Glimcher

• Pace Gallery | CEO

At the helm of Pace since 2011, Marc Glimcher has overseen significant evolutions and expansions, propelling the gallery into a global brand and powerhouse through a strategic blend of robust programming and market leadership. Pace opened a new location in Tokyo in 2024, consolidating its presence in the Asian market and bringing the total number of cities under the mega-gallery’s wing to eight. The gallery also opened a new space in Berlin in collaboration with Galerie Judin in 2025. All of this belies a long history: Arne Glimcher founded Pace in 1960; the gallery has built relationships with artists and estates as recognizable as those of Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Agnes Martin and Mark Rothko; and it launched one of the longest-standing gallery imprints.

The gallery has championed Abstract Expressionists and Light and Space movement artists, with a head-spinning roster of the most prominent modern and postwar artists and estates that withstand broader market downturns. Under Glimcher’s vision, Pace Gallery has adopted frontier and innovative projects, including Pace Live in 2019, placing its West 25th Street space as a multidisciplinary cultural hub and Pace Verso in 2021, delving into the world of NFTs. It’s this blend of steady and new that keeps Pace at the center as it proudly celebrates its 65th anniversary this year.

Brett Gorvy

• Lévy Gorvy Dayan | Co-Founder & Partner
• New Perspectives Art Partners | Founder

In 2025, Brett Gorvy joined an elite group of seasoned industry experts to launch New Perspectives Art Partners, a new collaborative consultancy launched specifically to reshape the landscape of high-end art advisory. He brings extensive experience in auction house and gallery leadership to the table. Before stepping down as chairman and international head of Postwar and Contemporary Art at Christie’s to become a dealer, his department was the auction house’s highest-earning and, through it, he shaped the art market as well as art history by shifting the valuations of canonical contemporary works and artists (notable among them a Picasso for $179 million and a Modigliani for $170.4 million). His semi-recent venture, the blue-chip East 64th Street gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan, of which he is a co-founder and partner, has mounted critically acclaimed exhibitions of artists including Alexander Calder, Lucio Fontana, Ellsworth Kelly, Yves Klein, Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter. 

“In the last five years, there has been an explosion of interest internationally in young contemporary artists, especially female artists and artists of color,” Gorvy tells Observer. This market has become very challenging, especially with the difficulties in Asia. Asian collectors have been responsible for much of this boom. As advisers, there is a need for greater scrutiny of younger markets and a focus less on pure financial return than greater curatorial focus.”

Gorvy, an art world heavyweight (and Instagram whiz with 164,000 followers), is now focused on turning New Perspectives Art Partners into a top-tier advisory service for top-of-market collectors navigating the current market challenges. “We’re in a market that’s shifting in real time and it’s happening in complex, layered ways,” he told Observer, certain that the McKinsey-like dream team of which he is part will be able to reshape the landscape of high-end art advisory in 2026 and beyond. “We aim to act like a management consultancy coming in to assess a project,” added Gorvy, whose in-depth knowledge of modern, contemporary and U.S. markets will no doubt set new standards in advisory services.

Loïc Gouzer

• Fair Warning | Founder

Making his name at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, Loïc Gouzer is the maverick who orchestrated the record-shattering sale of the Salvator Mundi in 2017. Considered by many the “Federer of the art market,” he’s now set on reinventing the auction model through his app-based venture Fair Warning, rebooted in 2024 after raising $5 million. It cuts out the traditional auction house, curating single-piece sales of mid-tier works by artists like Basquiat and Picasso for a members-only audience of digitally fluent collectors who bid via the app. It’s not about breaking records but about reshaping access, luring a younger, tech-native generation more comfortable wielding a digital paddle than a physical one.

“Algorithms now shape taste more than Gertrude Stein ever did,” Gouzer tells Observer. “Social media does to art what the food industry does to food: it sucks out the nutrients, flattens the flavor, standardizes the recipe, and sells it back as culture. Freeing oneself from this master will be the existential cause of artists and collectors alike.”

This experiment in one-off auctions builds on Gouzer’s earlier venture Particle, which offered fractional art ownership as part of a move to democratize blue-chip collecting. (Two years ago, Particle sold 500 shares of H.R. Giger’s sculpture of the famous Xenomorph featured in Alien.) Fair Warning has already surpassed $50 million in auction sales, with private transactions exceeding that total. Still, Gouzer insists it’s not about hype but integrity—proof that innovation in the art market doesn’t have to come at the expense of connoisseurship. Or, as he famously put it: “quality, quality, quality.”

Michael Govan

• Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) | CEO

Michael Govan has redefined Los Angeles as a global cultural capital and transformed LACMA into one of the world’s most forward-looking museums. Since taking the helm in 2006, he has overseen the acquisition of more than 35,000 artworks and artifacts, expanding the museum’s scope across continents and centuries while strengthening ties to Los Angeles’s own creative communities. Under his leadership, LACMA has deepened partnerships with organizations such as East West Bank and launched initiatives like rotating loans with the new Las Vegas Museum of Art, reinforcing its role as a connector between local and international audiences.

Now Govan is steering LACMA through its most ambitious transformation yet: the $725 million David Geffen Galleries refurbishment and expansion, set to debut next year. “We had a vision of creating something truly unique—rooted in our locality but with a global perspective. And we’re incredibly excited about what we’ve been able to achieve,” he told Observer this summer during a preview tour of the space. The reimagined galleries will abandon traditional divisions by geography or chronology, instead emphasizing cross-cultural exchange and dialogue—mirroring Los Angeles’s own mosaic identity. With its open, park-like design and new public gathering spaces, the project redefines what a 21st-century museum can be: accessible, interconnected and alive to the global conversations that art can spark.

Philip Hoffman

• The Fine Art Group | Founder & Chairman
• New Perspectives Art Partners | Founder

Christie’s prodigy Philip Hoffman—CFO before he turned 30 and on the Global Management Board by 33—is CEO of The Fine Art Group and a founding member of the powerhouse collective New Perspectives Art Partners, launched this year. Renowned for turning art into a bona fide asset class, Hoffman has redefined high-end collecting and professionalized the advisory field with a financier’s precision. Since founding The Fine Art Group in 2001, he has built it into a global empire, launching eight art investment funds, advising on more than $20 billion annually and transacting over $1.4 billion in artworks and jewelry. 

“One of the biggest changes I’ve seen is how proactive collectors have become,” Hoffman tells us. (It is a topic about which he regularly shares insights with Observer.) “They’re more informed, more mobile, and far more attuned to the financial side of collecting than ever before.”

Representing 350 family offices across 28 countries, Hoffman has strategically expanded his global reach through partnerships, including a 2023 collaboration with Patti Wong & Associates in Asia—and now aims to amplify that model through New Perspectives Art Partners. The venture, he told Observer, “could pick up the phone to probably 1,000 or 2,000 of the world’s top clients,” emphasizing the scale of his infrastructure. “We’ve got warehouses and operations in every country.” Few can make that claim—and even fewer with such authority.

Max Hollein

• Metropolitan Museum of Art | Director & CEO

Max Hollein is steering the Metropolitan Museum of Art through one of the most ambitious periods of change in its history. Since becoming director and CEO in 2023, his unified leadership has allowed him to guide the Met’s evolution with clarity and purpose—addressing head-on the complex issues of provenance, deaccessioning, cultural heritage and institutional inclusivity. Under his watch, the museum has strengthened its provenance research capacity with the appointment of Lucian Simmons and a dedicated team, signaling a deeper institutional commitment to transparency and accountability in the stewardship of its global collections.

Equally transformative is Hollein’s effort to reframe how the Met presents non-Western art. The reopening of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing earlier this year marks a major step in that direction, with renovated galleries that reflect new scholarship on the arts of Africa, the Ancient Americas and Oceania—bringing forward fresh curatorial perspectives and cross-cultural connections. “Together with our collaborative and community-based approach to curating these collections, the transformation of these galleries allows us to further advance the appreciation and contextualization of many of the world’s most significant cultures,” he told Observer. More rethinking is underway: a 15,000-square-foot suite dedicated to ancient art from Cyprus and West Asia will open in 2027, aiming to transcend outdated East-West divides, while the long-awaited Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art—slated for completion in 2030—will further redefine how the Met engages with the art of our own time.

Noah Horowitz

• Art Basel | CEO

Art Basel isn’t just about fairs anymore. Since taking over as CEO in 2022, Noah Horowitz has transformed the organization into a multifaceted global culture brand—one that extends far beyond the convention halls. Under his leadership, Art Basel has strengthened its international footprint, reinforcing its Hong Kong edition with a three-year partnership with the Hong Kong Tourism Board and increasing first-time exhibitors by 37 percent in 2024—a growth trend that continued this year. In Europe, he solidified the brand’s presence, renaming Paris+ to Art Basel Paris and aligning it with Basel’s other flagship cities, while anticipation builds for the debut of Art Basel Qatar in 2026, set to redefine the fair model for the Gulf region.

But Horowitz’s ambitions stretch further. This year, he launched the Art Basel Awards to celebrate and support the wider art ecosystem, signaling a shift from pure market focus to cultural leadership. He’s also ventured into brand collaborations and partnerships—including one with Hugo Boss for the awards—and expanded into the lifestyle space with last year’s launch of the Art Basel Shop concept store. Alongside these initiatives, Art Basel continues to set the tone for global art-market analysis through its annual Art Market Report. The result is a newly energized, forward-facing Art Basel that’s reshaping the art world instead of responding to it.

Steve Ivy

• Heritage Auctions | Co-Founder & CEO

While other auction houses are grappling with double-digit declines in sales volume, Heritage Auctions continues to defy gravity. The firm reported $962 million in total sales through June 2025—its highest midyear figure ever—surpassing last year’s then-record $924 million. It ultimately closed 2024 at $1.86 billion in total sales. Now the world’s third-largest auction house, Heritage boasts nearly two million registered bidders across categories that span fine art, numismatics, jewelry, design, science and pop culture. Under CEO Steve Ivy, Heritage has broadened its reach by expanding into unconventional collectible markets and capturing the attention of first-time and younger buyers. The company has redefined the boundaries of art sales to include comic books, film storyboards, sports memorabilia and other cultural artifacts once considered peripheral to the fine art market. 

Behind this growth lies a radically transparent consignment and bidding model across its 50 departments—an approach that contrasts sharply with the opacity of its older rivals.
“Gen-Next and Millennial collectors have replaced their Baby Boomer parents as the most active participants in the auction market, and they are not as interested in $10 million and above contemporary artworks,” Ivy tells Observer. “They have a much stronger preference for transparency and lack of friction in their auction buying. Additionally, they have been turning to collectibles, and this has benefited Heritage tremendously. We were the first auction house to invest heavily in these sectors beginning in the early 2000s.” It’s a pragmatic formula built around steady innovation, disciplined risk and an eye for where new collectors actually live.

Megan Fox Kelly

• Megan Fox Kelly Art Advisory | Founder & Principal

The art advisory field has evolved dramatically since she began, but Megan Fox Kelly remains at the top of it. Through her namesake firm, she manages more than $3.5 billion in art assets, guiding ultra-high-net-worth collectors and institutions through every stage of building, managing and preserving major collections. Her clientele reads like a who’s who of contemporary collecting, from the estate of Faith Ringgold and the Robert Indiana Estate (Star of Hope Foundation) to Michael Crichton and the Robert A. and Beatrice C. Mayer Collection, to the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the estate of Robert De Niro Sr. Yet her work extends beyond private counsel. “This is about professionalizing advisory practice beyond just transactional brokerage, and building long-range strategies that sustain value for collectors and, for artist estates, build scholarship and access,” Kelly tells Observer. “If you’re managing a specific collection or an artist estate, you need bespoke analysis—what’s happening with pricing in this particular segment, what are the trends that matter for these works?” 

As a contributor to Observer, Kelly writes about collection legacies, art fair strategies, and market forecasting. As host of the Reading the Art World podcast, she helps demystify the business for a wider audience. A former president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors, Kelly is a regular presence at TEFAF Maastricht, The Art Business Conference and The Armory Show, where her perspective carries the authority of both experience and discretion. Behind the NDAs and closed doors, she is a strategist; onstage and in print, she’s a translator of market complexity. Her advice to her colleagues remains succinct and timeless: “What it takes to make this real is collaboration. Financial advisors, attorneys, and art market professionals actually working together instead of in silos. That’s how we better serve both collectors and estates.”

Read our Full Q&A with Megan Fox Kelly

Tina Kim

• Tina Kim Gallery | Founder & Owner

Tina Kim keeps a foot on both shores of the Pacific. Born in South Korea and raised in California, she was destined to build bridges long before the “Korean wave” went global. After getting her start organizing exhibitions for the influential Kukje Gallery in Seoul, founded by her mother, she established her eponymous gallery in New York City in 2001. “I’ve always seen my work as a cultural bridge—initially bringing Korean art to a wider audience, and now expanding that to connect more diverse voices,” Kim tells Observer. “The art world today feels less centralized and more interconnected, and that’s exactly the kind of landscape I want to help build.”

Through her New York program, Kim has been instrumental in bringing Korean and Asian diasporic artists to international prominence. She has championed figures like Park Seo-Bo, Ha Chong-Hyun, Kim Tschang-Yeul, Pacita Abad and Lee ShinJa, placing their work within major institutional collections and critical discourse, while amplifying the global visibility of a new generation, including Mire Lee and Maia Ruth Lee. Kim is widely credited with introducing Dansaekhwa—the influential postwar Korean monochrome movement—to a global audience, organizing a landmark collateral exhibition at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and this year, publishing a major new volume of artist letters translated from Korean, thereby contributing critical primary documents to the study of modern Korean art.

As a member of Frieze Seoul’s selection committee, Kim has helped shape the fair’s growth and visibility within the region from inception. With a surging Asian market and growing U.S. demand, Kim remains at the forefront. “Seoul will only continue to grow as a cultural capital in Asia—next year will be particularly exciting with the Gwangju and Busan Biennales coinciding with Frieze Seoul,” Kim says. “What it will take now is genuine exchange: artists, curators and audiences engaging directly, across regions. The future of the art world will depend on connection, not hierarchy.”

José Kuri & Mónica Manzutto

• kurimanzutto | Founders

Last year, the husband-and-wife duo Mónica Manzutto and José Kuri celebrated their 25th anniversary at the helm of kurimanzutto, the once itinerant Mexico City gallery. In 2022, the pair put down roots in New York with a permanent gallery space in Chelsea. While CDMX Art Week is now an established date in the global art market calendar for collectors and curators alike, this wasn’t always the case; Manzutto and Kuri have done a lot to elevate the visibility and valuation of contemporary Mexican and Latin American art in the U.S. by giving these artists a platform domestically and abroad. “It was a desert. You could count on one hand collectors in the city,” said Kuri of the Mexico City art market during the 1990s in a recent interview. Today, they no longer need to individually call collectors after each show; instead, collectors rush to Mexico City, with demand and pricing momentum projected to steady levels into 2026. “The most transformative shift in the art world’s power dynamics has been the emergence of multiple narratives,” the duo tells Observer, adding that this has informed their strategy to “insist, insist, insist.”

Manzutto and Kuri can arguably boast of having successfully skyrocketed contemporary Mexican art to the global art scene and made Mexico City a hub in global conversations. They’ve propelled prominent artists like Gabriel Orozco and Abraham Cruzvillegas, securing major institutional exhibitions and the representation of estates like that of John Giorno, catalyzing collector demand by building international relationships with museums, curators and collectors, making Mexican artists accessible to global markets and boosting their liquidity and prestige. (Sotheby’s, for instance, recently reported that sales of works by Latin American artists have climbed more than 50 percent above pre-pandemic levels.) Concurrently, there’s been a notable accumulation of wealth in the Latin American region and within the Latino diaspora, and Mexico City has become an arts destination in its own right. Looking ahead, they are most looking forward to “privileging knowledge and critical thinking over influencers and oversimplifiers of the complexities of art and its ecosystems.”

Philomene Magers & Monika Sprüth

• Sprüth Magers | Founders

One of the few German galleries to establish a truly global presence, Sprüth Magers has infrastructure spanning Berlin, London, Los Angeles and New York. In March, Philomene Magers told Observer she sees its priorities “in a much wider global system.” While the gallery represents a long list of artists globally, it remains at least partially focused on groundbreaking German artists like Anne Imhof—who won a Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale and more recently brought DOOM: HOUSE OF HOPE to the Park Avenue Armory—and Andreas Gursky, who brought “New Works” to Gagosian Paris, had a solo show in the gallery’s New York space earlier this year, and just opened a show at White Cube Mason’s Yard in London. The band/art project Kraftwerk also has a long-standing, albeit not-quite-representational, relationship with Sprüth Magers. “It shows that iconic and important figures continue to emerge from this cultural background,” said Magers. It also shows that the gallery has been savvy and laser-focused on positioning German contemporary art, with a high level of curatorial commitment.

The “re-centering of artists,” Monika Sprüth tells Observer, has been the most transformative shift in the art world’s power dynamics over the last year. “What emerges is not merely a new market logic, but a new cultural syntax. The next chapter of the art world won’t be defined by exclusivity. I see this moment as an invitation to exchange between cultures, technologies, and generations of artists and collectors alike.”

During their four-plus decades in the business, the pair has developed a sharp knack for identifying talent, including the likes of Barbara Kruger, George Condo (who recently left Hauser & Wirth for joint representation by Sprüth Magers and Skarstedt) and Jenny Holzer, who are among a roster of more than 70 artists and estates—and staying ahead of the curve despite pressures at home, with Berlin’s place as a major artist hub waning in recent years. Magers summarized their quest for talent, an ethos that transcends short-term trends: “To reimagine what the art world could become may require new kinds of alliances between galleries, collectors and institutions that are all defined together. We should always be open to operating beyond the structures that have historically been in place.”

Clare McAndrew

• Arts Economics | Founder & Cultural Economist

Dr. Clare McAndrew is the economist behind the data that defines the art world. As founder of Arts Economics and author of the annual Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report (as well as several others on art and collectibles), she produces the most authoritative snapshot of the global art economy—September Vogue with charts instead of couture. When the yearly report drops in March, dealers, collectors, institutions and journalists alike turn to its findings to gauge the market’s health, whether it’s rebounding, contracting or simply shifting shape. Its headline figures—sales volumes, sector shares, regional trends—are matched by nuanced analysis of global economic forces, auction performance and dealer sentiment, offering an unparalleled outlook for the year ahead, along with some much-needed clarity. “As most of what the mainstream media reports on is the multi-million-dollar sums paid for this very small number of artists’ works, new buyers are led to believe that the art market is out of their reach, and that you can only get a quality work of art if you have a budget of over $1 million or so, when in fact there are so many other less publicized artists and works available at much lower prices,” she tells Observer.

McAndrew has managed what once seemed impossible: to quantify the notoriously opaque art market. By applying rigorous economic methods, she has developed a research framework that combines surveys, data modeling, and a mix of quantitative and qualitative analysis to produce consistent and comparable insights across regions and sectors. The result is a report that helps the industry reflect on the past year while strategizing for the next, exposing how sales respond to shocks, trends and evolving collector behavior.

In 2024, she expanded her scope with the first-ever Japan Art Market Report—a detailed national study continuing her focus on regional “spin-offs” as emerging markets and shifting collector bases demand sharper, more localized intelligence. She also points to ongoing changes in what’s being sold in the art market, including an expanding range of collectibles and luxury products being sold by dealers and at auction houses and new digital mediums and channels for accessing these works. “The traditional mediums still dominate by value for now, but that could change in the future,” McAndrew says, adding that “how we account for and measure these sales will become increasingly important in understanding the activity in the sector as a whole, especially when we’re trying to assess its economic and social impact.” 

Julie Mehretu

• Artist | Marian Goodman Gallery

Can a major contemporary artist also become a meaningful patron? Julie Mehretu just proved it. When the Whitney Museum raised its admission price from $25 to $30 in 2023—another sign of the art world’s rising inaccessibility—Mehretu stepped in with a $2.25 million gift to fund the institution’s “Free 25 and Under” program. “If you’re waiting tables in New York like I used to, you can’t afford to go to a museum all the time,” she said. “But young artists need access to art.” Her act wasn’t about spectacle—it was about restoring one of the core promises of public institutions: access and equity. It was also a reminder that philanthropy doesn’t have to mean billion-dollar endowments; timing, intention and empathy can be just as transformative.

Mehretu’s gesture comes as her own career reaches new heights. Her acclaimed retrospective “Ensemble” at Palazzo Grassi coincided with the 2024 Venice Biennale, spanning 25 years of work, while this year’s “KAIROS / Hauntological Variations” in Germany marks her largest European survey yet, featuring more than 100 pieces. Her auction market remains robust, but her growing role as a philanthropist might become an equally enduring legacy—showing that influence in art isn’t just about the work you make, but the access you help others gain.

Marc Payot

• Hauser & Wirth | President

This year, Marc Payot celebrated a quarter century with Hauser & Wirth, and what a year it’s been. A remarkable number of the gallery’s artists and estates headlined exhibitions at New York’s top institutions: Amy Sherald at the Whitney, Flora Yukhnovich at the Frick, Jack Whitten at MoMA, Lorna Simpson at the Met and Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim. Numerous others—Jenny Holzer, Firelei Báez, Glenn Ligon and Annie Leibovitz, among them—commanded major museum shows across the U.S., Europe and Asia. The gallery, now spanning 18 locations across the United States, Europe, Hong Kong and the U.K., published 17 titles under its Hauser & Wirth Publishers imprint, a testament to the scope of its cultural reach. Next year, it will add new physical spaces in London and Palo Alto, further expanding its presence.

The empire’s builders, Manuela and Iwan Wirth—who are now busy redefining the model of a cultural enterprise that fuses art, publishing, real estate and hospitality—have left the gallery in formidable hands. Under Payot’s leadership, 2025 was marked not only by institutional success but also by growing engagement and notable collaborations. To wit: Hauser & Wirth launched its “In the Studio” series of compact, illustrated books offering deep dives into artists’ practices; forged collaborations with arts organizations, including London’s Royal Drawing School and Whitechapel Gallery; and partnered with The New Art School Modality to provide free hybrid art courses. Then there’s the Collective Impact initiative—a project in which Hauser & Wirth joins forces with smaller, younger galleries to represent artists in an approach defined by parity, transparency and mutuality. “It’s clear to us that ‘success’ is not a zero-sum game in a delicate ecosystem like the art world,” Payot tells Observer. “We’ve been putting a lot of energy over the last few years into collaborations with our colleagues who operate at different scales, so that we can contribute in concrete, measurable ways to the health of the wider field.”

Emmanuel Perrotin

• Perrotin | Founder

Emmanuel Perrotin’s eponymous mega-gallery continues to chase global domination by expanding into prime global markets, but with a lean and measured approach to growth. Perrotin represents approximately 70 artists and collaborates with 30 others, including emerging and established mid-career artists, as well as estates. Currently, the gallery has a presence in nine cities worldwide, with bookstores in Paris, London, New York and a pop-up at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. In 2025, Perrotin opened new galleries in London and Dubai and relocated its Hong Kong outpost to a different part of the city. Earlier this year, after two years of negotiations, Perrotin sold a majority stake in the gallery (51 percent) to private equity firm Colony Investment Management in a move he calls “a monumental decision for us and the first of this kind in the contemporary art world.” In doing so, he amplified the financialization of contemporary art, ushering in increased capital flows, accelerating global scaling and setting new market expectations in the U.S. and beyond.

At the same time, Perrotin hasn’t shied away from expansion or experimentation. “When I started my gallery in Paris in 1990, I had a mission to make more people interested in contemporary art,” he tells Observer. “To do this, I had to find links with other disciplines—I was already connected to people who were in fashion and music, so I started these collaborations early on.” Joining its existing locations in Paris, New York City, Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo are new spaces in Los Angeles (opened in 2024) and, in 2025, Paris, London and Dubai, where the gallerist recommitted to the Emirati city and its regional art scene with a primary-market venue. Now with private equity support, Perrotin told Bloomberg he would consider opening galleries in cities like Zurich, Bangkok or Istanbul. Or, he added, buying rivals—because consolidation among art galleries may be the future of the industry.

Magnus Renfrew

• ART SG & Tokyo Gendai | Co-Founder
• ARTHQ Group | Managing Director

Magnus Renfrew wants the art world to look east—and he’s giving it every reason to. As co-founder of ART SG and Tokyo Gendai, Renfrew has spent the past two years strengthening the art fair portfolio that he leads. A master of regional infrastructure building, he’s creating new platforms for galleries and collectors while also advising private clients, artists’ estates, institutions and governments through his consultancy ARTHQ, shaping how the region’s art economies connect and grow. Positioned as the leading art fair in Japan, Tokyo Gendai has already drawn global attention in one of the world’s most dynamic emerging markets. The rise of ART SG reflects the shift from the Asia Pacific to the Indo Pacific. “I’m looking at how I can engage this new demographic of people who are proud of their cultural roots, particularly from Asia and Southeast Asia, yet open to artistic expressions from other regions,” Renfrew tells Observer of his current priorities. 

Renfrew’s confidence is earned—he was the founding director of Art Hong Kong, which later became Art Basel Hong Kong, and his leadership helped put Asia-Pacific firmly on the international art map. He’s particularly excited, he says, about deepening the infrastructure for art in Southeast Asia. “Technology, globalization and demographic change are all accelerating a decentralization of the art world… This is enormously exciting. Technology has democratized access to information, allowing collectors to discover artists wherever they may be. Globalization has brought new perspectives and cultural narratives to the fore. The younger generation of collectors is approaching collecting with a new sense of purpose and curiosity.” And his fairs will be there to answer their call.

Alex Rotter

• Christie’s | Global President

Alex Rotter was appointed global president of Christie’s in May 2025—a natural progression for an executive who has spent the past decade redefining how the auction world operates. In his new role, he’s charged with shaping strategy for both auctions and private sales in concert with regional presidents and global chairs, all while continuing to serve as global chair of 20th- and 21st-century art. Few understand the nuances of market psychology and collector behavior quite like Rotter, whose tenure has been marked by bold structural innovations and a willingness to rewrite the rulebook when convention no longer serves.

His decision in 2020 to collapse Christie’s traditional art categories—merging Impressionist, Modern, Postwar and Contemporary art under a single “20/21” banner—was initially radical but ultimately visionary. It acknowledged a collector base less bound by chronology and more attuned to cross-era dialogues, streamlining consignment strategies and strengthening Christie’s market dominance. When the pandemic upended live auctions, Rotter adapted again, introducing the relay auction: a hybrid, live-streamed event that seamlessly passed from city to city, transforming sales into global spectacles. He remains candid about market turbulence yet unflappable in the face of it—and consequently known for turning headwinds into opportunities.

Mary Rozell

• UBS | Global Head, UBS Art Collection

Mary Rozell oversees one of the most influential corporate art collections in existence, comprising 30,000 works spanning canvas, paper, photography, sculpture, video and installation, amassed over decades of collecting. What began as a scattering of individual acquisitions coalesced in the 1960s into a distinctly contemporary collection that has since grown into a global cultural asset. Only works by living artists and those acquired directly from galleries make the cut, and today pieces by Lucian Freud, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Philip Guston and Cy Twombly hang across UBS’s 700 offices worldwide. They serve not just as conversation starters but as quiet assertions of taste and intellect, transforming corporate hallways into a museum-grade experience for employees and visitors alike.

When Rozell, an art lawyer and former director at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, stepped into the role, her mandate was clear: unify the disparate collections under a single, forward-looking vision. She approached the task with both precision and openness, expanding the collection’s diversity while maintaining its exacting standards. “Generally we’re not buying an artist at their first show—it’s the second or third, when they have some traction but before they get too much recognition,” Rozell told Observer of her acquisition strategy. Among her most meaningful contributions has been lifting the velvet rope around a once-insular collection. “I feel like some of our pieces are so important that we have a responsibility to share them with the greater public,” she said—a sentiment that has helped redefine UBS’s art holdings as a cultural resource.

Antwaun Sargent

• Gagosian | Director

Curator and writer Antwaun Sargent has been dubbed the “Art Star Maker” for his ability to not only celebrate Black creativity in art, fashion and design but also to leverage people and platforms to bring it market and institutional attention. “I still think the best way to encourage an art ecosystem I believe in is to create it,” Sargent tells Observer. Since his appointment to director at Gagosian in 2021, the 30-something has rapidly become a high-profile tastemaker, but he was shaping discourse long before joining the mega-gallery, with bylines in the New York Times, the New Yorker and scores of art publications, where he questioned the relationship between art institutions and Black artists. His book credits include The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion, which he wrote, and Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists, which he edited. 

Both his curation and his commentary have been seminal in reshaping conversations, collector taste and boosting the visibility of historically underrepresented Black contemporary artists. His debut show with Gagosian, “Social Works,” explored the relationship between the physical spaces we engage with and Black social practice. He was behind Virgil Abloh’s “Figures of Speech” at the Brooklyn Museum and “Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick,” the institution’s first solo show dedicated to a Black artist. These are just a few of the 30-plus critically acclaimed and commercially successful shows he’s curated, and yet his approach is deceptively simple: “My only strategy is to believe in artists, which is to say I do whatever possible to make their visions a reality.” Lauren Halsey, Rick Lowe, Tyler Mitchell, Cy Gavin and Derrick Adams are among those artists—they make great work, Sargent asserts, and his job is to support them. “The evolution of the art world and its centers of power have been greatly exaggerated,” he adds. “The only thing I’m interested in is putting more power in the hands of artists.”

Read Our Full Q&A With Antwaun Sargent

Muys Snijders

• Private Client Select | SVP, Head of Art Services

With over 25 years in the international art world, Muys Snijders is a leading expert in fine art insurance. As head of art services at Private Client Select, she oversees risk management for a portfolio insuring over $50 billion in fine art and collectibles across 50,000 policies. In an era of intensifying climate threats, Snijders is redefining how the industry protects cultural patrimony. “Many new technologies have been introduced in recent years to support mitigation efforts,” Snijders told The Art Newspaper, citing innovations like automatic fire suppression and hypoxic storage now being implemented for collections in wildfire zones. Over the years, Snijders and her team have provided bespoke coverage to some 60 percent of the top 200 ARTnews Collectors, conducting site visits worldwide to ensure proactive protection. 

At this year’s Aspen Art Fair, Snijders moderated “A Collector’s Point of View: Curated Approaches in a Contemporary World,” with collectors including Nancy Magoon, Sharon Hoffman and Christine Mack. Snijders is also steering Private Client Select toward a new era of corporate collecting, championing acquisitions by diverse artists and launching commissions focused on sustainability. The firm’s new managing general underwriter (MGU) structure, she says, reflects a changing insurance landscape—one where agility and tailored solutions are paramount.

Snijders serves on the Guggenheim‘s Young Collectors Council Acquisition Committee, ICA Miami‘s International Council, and the Aspen Art Museum‘s Director’s Circle, among other board and advisory roles. Before joining Private Client Select (formerly AIG Private Client Group), Muys launched her own art consultancy firm and served as the managing director of Christie’s Americas. With natural catastrophes mounting, her steady leadership is preserving art for generations to come.

Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani

• Qatar Museums | Chairperson

Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani has become the current that moves the Gulf’s entire cultural tide. As chairperson of Qatar Museums, she has not only cemented Qatar’s position on the global art map but ensured it will stay there for decades to come. With access to both immense family wealth and a sharp curatorial instinct, she recently helped broker the landmark Art Basel Qatar, set to debut in February 2026 through a partnership between Art Basel, Qatar Sports Investments and QC+. She also championed the launch of the new Qatar Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which debuted at this year’s architecture edition—a clear signal that her ambitions extend well beyond Doha.

This outward expansion follows years of building a formidable cultural foundation at home—consolidating acquisitions, infrastructure and institutional strategy while elevating Qatar’s artistic profile across the region. Her vision has translated into major public art initiatives, including Richard Serra’s East-West/West-East, and into making Qatar a first-choice destination for artists, curators and global institutions alike. Under her leadership, dynamic platforms such as Mathaf (Arab Museum of Modern Art), the Lusail Museum, the Art Mill Museum (opening in 2030) and the Fire Station have flourished, alongside high-profile exhibitions such as “LATINOAMERICANO | Modern and Contemporary Art from the Malba and Eduardo F. Costantini Collections” and “Seeing Is Believing: The Art and Influence of Gérôme.”

Yü‑Ge Wang

• Christie’s | Associate Director, Senior Client Advisor & Auctioneer

After joining Christie’s more than a decade ago, Yü-Ge Wang quickly rose through the ranks to become associate director and senior client adviser, specializing in Asian collectors. She was the lead auctioneer at Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale last May, commanding $96.5 million with a 92 percent sell-through by lot and 97 percent by value—an impressive feat in a tightening market. Under her gavel, visibility and valuations surged for women artists and contemporary stars, like Carmen Herrera, Cecily Brown and Elizabeth Peyton. She hammered Miss January by Marlene Dumas for $13.6 million, setting a record for a living woman artist. “Innovation isn’t just about digital tools,” she tells Observer. “It’s about who gets to be part of the conversation, whose stories we tell, and how we authentically interact with a much more diverse and global community, so people feel heard rather than excluded.” 

Having worked across China, Germany and England, Wang bridges languages, markets and cultures with rare fluency, and her star is on the rise. “Collecting motivations and strategies are changing and creating meaningful dialogue is more important than ever,” she says. “As an auctioneer, I learned to create this dialogue also on stage by using my language skills to connect with bidders from different countries and my body language to engage with the audience in the room or online.” She frequently appears on panels exploring how media and photography can ignite cross-cultural dialogue, while using that same instinct for connection to drive sales with confidence, charisma and sharp market intuition. For Wang, learning to engage with other cultures isn’t just about boosting bottom lines but also a sign of respect—one that “helps colleagues from diverse backgrounds feel seen, valued and included, as well as being essential for long-term relevance.”

Martin Wilson

• Phillips | CEO

Art lawyer Martin Wilson rose to CEO of Phillips in early 2025, stepping into the role after Ed Dolman left to launch New Perspectives Art Partners. A seasoned art and auction veteran, Wilson was brought in during a turbulent market moment—an era of softening demand and growing regulatory scrutiny. Brought in as a “safe pair of hands,” he drew on his deep legal and compliance expertise (and the authority of being the author of Art Law and the Business of Art) to stabilize operations amid a 17.5 percent sales decline. His steady leadership has been defined by pragmatism and a measured confidence that Phillips will adapt rather than contract. “We’re seeing a real ‘taste transfer’ happening alongside the ‘great wealth transfer,’” Wilson tells Observer. “The challenge for the market is to anticipate and understand the expectations of these new collectors, both in terms of their taste but also how they prefer to engage with the art market.”

It is at inflection points like this, he says, that opportunities for innovation present themselves, and he’s already steering Phillips toward the future. He has appointed new heads for modern and contemporary art and private sales, while introducing a flexible premium structure designed to counter early bid hesitancy and soothe wary consignors. The new pre-auction bidding model allows early participants to benefit from reduced premiums while generating more authentic competition in the room. “We have a history of delivering positive results for our clients, as evidenced by our 90 percent sell-through rate this spring,” Wilson said this year. “Our aim now is to build on that by encouraging early engagement to generate spirited bidding and provide greater certainty for sellers.”

Read our Full Q&A With Martin Wilson

Andrew Wolff

• Beowolff Capital | CEO

Andrew Wolff stormed into the online art market in 2025 with a pair of headline-making plays: acquiring a controlling stake in Artsy and launching a €65 million delisting and takeover of Artnet, in moves that were less about buying legacy names than about combining market intelligence and reach. It’s not about the multi-brand cachet, but about building a vertically integrated digital empire, merging reach, data and market intelligence to rewire how art is discovered, priced and sold. “I think the world is moving from static forms of power to a more fluid model of networked authority and strength—one in which power and influence are built on the foundations of interconnected communities,” Wolff tells Observer. “Old-school power structures build walls to protect themselves. But our younger generations are skeptical of centralized gatekeepers; they want access, participation, transparency, consistency, objectivity.” 

His aim is to provide it with innovation, using analytics and A.I. to unlock the latent power of two of the art world’s most influential tech platforms. “We embrace A.I. not to reduce the role of human expertise in the art market, but to amplify it,” he says. “Not to steal the voices of artists, but to allow them to expand their reach. After all, in a world where machines can do more and more, the ability to create and feel the power of art is an increasingly critical part of what makes us human.” For now, Artsy and Artnet remain separate, ostensibly rivals, but his long game likely involves strategic complementarity: Artsy’s dominance in the primary market paired with Artnet’s unrivaled secondary market data. If and when those worlds merge, Wolff will control an ecosystem linking 67 million annual users to the world’s largest online marketplace for fine art—a rare position from which to shape the digital future of collecting.

Read Our Full Q&A With Andrew Wolff

Patti Wong

• Patti Wong & Associates | Co-Founder
• New Perspectives Art Partners | Founder

As one half of Patti Wong & Associates with Daryl Wickstrom, Patti Wong commands an unrivaled network across Asia, where the art market continues its ascent, powered by new institutions such as M+, where she now serves on the board. That appointment, along with her role as a founding partner of New Perspectives Art Partners alongside Brett Gorvy, Philip Hoffman and Ed and Alex Dolman, underscores her status as one of the region’s most influential cultural figures. 

“We foresee opportunities to build comprehensive advisory relationships with collectors and institutions in these regions, working with clients on long-term goals, legacy planning and collection dispersals that go beyond major collection sales at public auction—helping collections evolve in a way that can be passed down through generations or even transitioned into institutions,” Wong tells Observer. “It is about looking beyond the transaction and focusing on the bigger picture of what art legacy means and how art endures.”

From the outset of her career, Wong aimed to make Hong Kong a market force equal to New York and London—and she did. Over three decades at Sotheby’s, she transformed the city into a global art capital, introducing Asian collectors to Western postwar and contemporary art, elevating the international valuations of Asian artists, and overseeing record-breaking sales that established Hong Kong’s auctions as unmissable events on the global calendar. “We have always believed that understanding how different cultures collect, what motivates them and how they engage with art is key,” Wong says.

Following her 2023 collaboration with The Fine Art Group and her departure as International Chairman and Chairman of Sotheby’s Asia, Wong’s independent firm has quickly become a powerhouse in its own right. It has, she says, “generated a total transaction value for our clients in excess of $1 billion”—evidence that the Asian market remains active and resilient, even if it’s no longer operating at the inflated pace of its most frenzied years.

Jeffrey Yin

• Artsy | CEO

Jeffrey Yin runs the world’s largest online marketplace for fine art—a platform whose scale and sophistication have redefined how art is bought and sold. Artsy connects more than one million available works to millions of collectors globally through partnerships with over 3,000 galleries and auction houses. It combines editorial authority, curatorial intelligence and data science to power a marketplace that has become indispensable to the art world’s digital ecosystem. For example, Yin tells Observer that a collector might discover a work through Artsy’s personalized recommendations, save the work, receive an offer directly from the gallery, and finalize the purchase online—all within a few days. “The average distance between buyer and seller on Artsy—about 2,500 miles—says a lot about how technology is expanding reach and redistributing opportunity across the art ecosystem,” he says.

Under Yin’s leadership, Artsy has seen record momentum: first-time buyers are on the rise, and 2024 sales climbed 15 percent year over year—the platform’s strongest growth since 2021. The number of artists with commercial activity on the platform has grown by 20 percent since 2020, and galleries are now selling works by 40 percent more artists. The Artsy mobile app, now a fixture among younger collectors, continues to expand the company’s reach, while its inaugural 2025 Art Market Trends report and new collector follow-up tools mark a push toward data-driven personalization and higher conversion. The biggest opportunity, he says, will involve not just guiding the next generation of collectors but also sustaining their engagement over time. “The foundation of transparency and global access is now in place; the next step is helping collectors navigate the overwhelming volume of art online in a personal, meaningful way,” he says. “Our goal isn’t to automate or remove the human experience from collecting, but to meet people where they are.”

Read our Full Q&A With Jeffrey Yin

David Zwirner

• David Zwirner | Founder

Mega-dealer David Zwirner knows how to weather art market headwinds. He cancelled a massive expansion project in 2023—a swanky Renzo Piano-designed, 50,000-square-foot building on West 21st Street in Chelsea—only to rebound with an office on West 20th Street and an 18,000-square-foot gallery designed by Annabelle Selldorf on West 19th Street, which opened last May with a major solo show of work by Michael Armitage. Zwirner has demonstrated similar agility in his art-tech ventures, including the digital marketplace Platform, which he has reshuffled whenever needed to stay ahead of key blue-chip competitors, all of which have been in expansion mode in recent years. 

Zwirner’s fire-tested commercial operation remains as relevant as ever. His global network of galleries in New York, L.A., London, Hong Kong and Paris shapes consumer taste through bespoke programming and market experimentation. A prominent roster of estates, emerging artists and new talents drives high-end primary market sales. Most recently, he poached artist Yoshitomo Nara from Pace—the artist joins a robust roster that includes the estates of Donald Judd, Diane Arbus and Paul Klee and contemporary talents Gerhard Richter, Yayoi Kusama and Félix González‑Torres, among others. Likewise, he poached Alex Marshall (now a senior director) from Christie’s after elevating Ebony L. Haynes to global head of curatorial projects. State-of-the-art content production via David Zwirner Books, a line of prints and editions, and the podcast Dialogues diversifies Zwirner’s influence at a time when galleries everywhere are seeking to hook the attention of the growing (and much coveted) market of young collectors.

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

As the “Chainsaw Man” movie trounces the one about Bruce Springsteen at the box office, it’s clear that the influence of the Baby Boomers is waning. They do, however, have one last grand act of cinematic relevance to inflict upon us: Sam Mendes’ four-part Beatles biopic, which will feature a single movie for each member, starring Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr. The casting is a sop to younger generations, but there’s little there for millennials. I refuse to see the Ringo movie unless the third act is entirely about behind-the-scenes drama on Thomas the Tank Engine.

Not that it’s a terrible idea on the face of it: people do like to see how great talents develop on their own and then come together to be greater than the sum of their parts. A similar motivation lies behind “Five Friends: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly,” a new exhibition at Museum Ludwig that is somehow the first to examine these artists in the context of each other. The show includes over 180 works—paintings, drawings, scores, stage designs, costumes, photographs and films—and situates their collaborations within the broader political and cultural climate of 1950s-1970s America and Europe.

Anything was possible in this era, including the fact that these men were much more than friends. At times their story feels like a biopic: Rauschenberg and Twombly became romantically involved in early 1951, having met at Black Mountain College, and would meet Cunningham and Cage the following year in New York. Cross-pollination was inevitable. Rauschenberg and Twombly worked on his first White Paintings the year they got together. Since these were tributes to openness, of course they inspired Cage’s silent song 4’33” (1952).

Johns happened to have a studio right near Rauschenberg and Twombly. His relationship with Rauschenberg would go on to be one of the most significant in art history. I’ve always had a soft spot for his Painted Bronze (Ale Cans) (1960), inspired by an observation that the pair’s dealer Leo Castelli “could sell anything—even a pair of beer cans.” But in the context of this show, you clearly feel Rauschenberg’s influence. His combines and found sculptures are rife with tiny jokes, much the way one of the beers is opened and the other one closed.

The movements between Cunningham’s dancers and Twombly’s brush feel strong in this context too, and you may not realize how many costumes Rauschenberg designed for Cunningham. Among the best was the parachute dress he made for Antic Meet (1958). It manages to poof without hindering agility and still displays much of the human form. Among all this are ephemera that displays the friendship mentioned in the show’s title. If you go by these letters, it seems that Cage only communicated to his friends via mesostic poetry. The Fab Five demonstrated that when you have a good circle, art and life are inseparable.

“Five Friends: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly” is on view at Museum Ludwig through January 11, 2026.

More exhibition reviews

• Tracing the Origins of Emma Kohlmann’s Arcane Figures

• ‘Body Vessel Clay’ Offers a Material Portal to the Ancestral Plane

• Tavares Strachan’s ‘The Day Tomorrow Began’ Reveals Invisible Histories Through Reimagined Realities

• ‘Jon Rafman’ at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

October marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert Rauschenberg, with celebratory exhibitions around the country. The main offerings I’ve had the pleasure of seeing in person have been through Gladstone Gallery, which this spring staged “Sympathy for Abandoned Objects,” a remarkable show of sculptures that felt more Dada than Pop because of the way they let the absurdity of their combined materials speak for themselves. The Proof of Darkness (Kabal American Zephyr) (1981) combined a fire hose with an electric airport runway light that glows haunting blue against a lead plate. Gazing upon it felt like reading Robert Caro while watching Looney Tunes.

More recently, the Menil Collection opened “Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s.” In life, Rauschenberg was close with Dominique de Menil, and since the 1980s, the museum has tended to stage one major Rauschenberg exhibition per decade. This latest offering mines an underexplored and experimental aspect of the artist’s practice, one particularly suited for our fashion-oriented times.

Rauschenberg brought a sewing machine to Black Mountain College, and though he is known for his Merce Cunningham costumes, he had a passion for textiles that went beyond his usual respect for the objects he used for his work. In 1970, he moved from New York to Captiva Island, Florida, on the same body of water as his hometown of Port Arthur, Texas, and was prepared to let his freak flag fly. The Menil show collects pieces from three bodies of work, which these days we might call soft sculpture: the Venetians (1972-73), the Hoarfrosts (1974-76) and the Jammers (1975-76).

The Venetians are the ones that have the most in common with the Gladstone sculpture show. Sant’Agnese (Venetian) (1973) sees a mosquito net stretched long between two wood chairs, the whole ensemble embellished with shoelaces. It feels significant that the backs of the chairs each boast a corked glass jug and that they’re turned away from each other at a great distance—not that the cause of this rift will ever be solved. Rauschenberg loved obscurity and red herrings.

The Hoarfrost series really embraces this rebellion against meaning. For them, Rauschenberg ran newspapers and magazines through the lithography press at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, along with some kind of translucent fabric—often silk, tulle, or gauze. The fabrics were stained with ink, though none of it is meant to be legible. Bucket (Hoarfrost) (1974) features Lucas Cranach the Elder’s The Nymph at the Fountain (c. 1530-1534) alongside a Pierre Cardin dress-shirt ad that reads in part, “His only concession to success is the choice of fabrics that are both distinctif and distingue.” Does this refer to the artist? As he grew more successful with these fabric works, he moved on to the Jammers, which were inspired by his love of windsurfing and use textiles that intrigue—dyed silks and other materials chosen for their ability to flutter. You could pin them down, but you wouldn’t want to. The same can be said of this mysterious and enthralling artist.

“Robert Rauschenberg: Fabric Works of the 1970s” is on view at The Menil Collection through March 1, 2026.

More exhibition reviews

• Tracing the Origins of Emma Kohlmann’s Arcane Figures

• ‘Body Vessel Clay’ Offers a Material Portal to the Ancestral Plane

• Tavares Strachan’s ‘The Day Tomorrow Began’ Reveals Invisible Histories Through Reimagined Realities

• ‘Jon Rafman’ at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

During Art Basel Paris, Palais de Tokyo welcomed all the American visitors with shows dedicated to Melvin Edwards, transatlantic postwar philosophy and Detroit. “A Blueprint of Resonance: Building Detroit’s Artistic Future” was one of three projects in the city staged by DETROIT SALON, a new effort to promote the city’s art scene that will culminate in a citywide contemporary art show in 2028. Below, we learn more about DETROIT SALON and these Paris exhibitions from its artistic director and chief curator, Juana Williams, and its founder, Julie Egan.

What’s your interpretation of the goals of DETROIT SALON? What problems is it solving in the art world?

Egan: Our goal is to reframe how a city like Detroit is perceived—not as an outlier to the contemporary art conversation, but as a vital engine of creativity, innovation and resilience. By building a platform that connects Detroit artists, curators, designers and thinkers with international audiences, we’re creating space for a different kind of dialogue: one rooted in community, Detroit’s long artistic history and cross-cultural collaboration.

At its core, DETROIT SALON is solving a visibility and accessibility problem. The art world too often revolves around a handful of cities, institutions and markets, leaving extraordinary creative communities on the margins. Detroit has long been producing world-class work across art, design, music and technology—but it hasn’t always had the recognition, infrastructure, or access to share that work globally.

We’re addressing that gap. By partnering with major institutions, developing international exhibitions, cultivating new pathways for exchange and inviting the global art world to Detroit for a permanent flagship contemporary art show, we’re not only amplifying Detroit’s voice—we’re challenging the systems that define where cultural value comes from.

How did you come to choose the themes you want to explore with this Paris debut?

Williams: For our Paris debut, I wanted to share a cohesive narrative centered on the Detroit art community, a community that has deeply shaped my curatorial perspective. It felt important to explore not only its rich legacy but also its present vibrancy and future potential. Each exhibition in Paris highlights a different facet of that story. The theme “Blueprint of Relevance: Building Detroit’s Artist Legacy” (at Palais de Tokyo) is community, which is at the core of Detroit’s creative scene. There’s a longstanding tradition of artists, curators and supporters uplifting one another, creating a resilient and collaborative ecosystem.

“Stitched Into History: The Legacy of the Avenue of Fashion” (at Hotel de Talleyrand) focuses on fashion, a major element of self-expression in Detroit. Fashion in the city is deeply tied to identity and storytelling. There’s a beautiful history of fashion design in Detroit and I wanted to both honor that legacy and highlight what’s being created today. “Domestic Dialogues: The Art of Living in Detroit” (at the DETROIT SALON space during Art Basel Paris) focuses on Detroit’s artists and how Michigan’s collector base supports the arts community in numerous ways. Art Basel provides a unique platform to recognize the role collectors play, not just as patrons but as active participants in the cultural landscape. The exhibition highlights the stories of Detroit artists and the collectors who help sustain the community not only through financial support but also through meaningful relationships with artists, designers and curators. Together, these themes—community, fashion and collectors—build a layered narrative about the Detroit art scene, bridging its past, present and future.

What was the biggest challenge in moving Detroit’s local energy into a European institution like Palais de Tokyo?

Williams: The biggest challenge in bringing Detroit’s grassroots, community-driven creative culture into a European institution like Palais de Tokyo was bridging two very different worlds, translating a deeply embedded, locally specific energy rooted in resilience, Black-led networks and histories of decline and rebirth into a formal international exhibition context without losing its authenticity. This required maintaining the nuance, integrity and agency of Detroit’s voice while navigating a cultural and institutional framework with different expectations and limited reference points, all while ensuring the work remained legible, compelling and respectful to both its origins and its new audience.

How did you decide which artists to include and what kinds of conversations shaped those choices?

Williams: I prioritized artists whose work authentically engages with local themes, reflects the city’s social and cultural dynamics and fosters genuine community involvement. I focused on artists whose practice emphasizes collaboration, inclusion and social relevance, especially around issues relating to neighborhood identity. Artistic quality, ethical engagement and representation were also key in my decision-making. I sought work that would resonate with Detroit’s unique spirit while offering thoughtful, innovative perspectives on what community means. At the same time, I considered how these artists and works might translate across cultural contexts, selecting works that could speak meaningfully to a Parisian audience by highlighting both shared urban experiences and points of difference that invite dialogue.

For the exhibitions at Hotel de Talleyrand and the Grand Palais, the artists were selected through a nomination-based process led by more than 50 community-based organizations and individuals, reflecting DETROIT SALON’s commitment to access and inclusion. Final selections were made by an independent jury of nationally and internationally recognized curators and arts professionals from institutions across Michigan and beyond. Our team (DETROIT SALON) did not participate in the selection to maintain the independence and integrity of the process.

Why start the rollout in Paris rather than in the U.S.?

Egan: This initiative actually launched first in Detroit with a series of large-scale community events and exhibitions. The international rollout involves exhibitions in Paris and seven other cities before culminating in the DETROIT SALON flagship contemporary art show in Detroit. Starting the international rollout in Paris was both symbolic and strategic. Paris has long been a city that understands the power of cultural diplomacy—the exchange of ideas, aesthetics and identities across borders. By beginning there, we’re positioning Detroit not just as a local story but as part of a global conversation about creativity, community and renewal.

In many ways, DETROIT SALON is carrying that legacy forward—celebrating a city built by makers, visionaries and innovators who have always defied expectation. Practically speaking, Paris during Art Basel week offers an unparalleled platform in arguably the world’s top art capital. The world’s cultural eyes are there—artists, collectors, institutions, press. Launching in that context allows us to amplify Detroit’s creative excellence on a scale that simply isn’t possible stateside at this stage. We’ll absolutely bring DETROIT SALON home to the U.S.—the long-term vision is a full-scale biennial in Detroit.

The “salon” model is about conversation. What does conversation mean to you? How are you keeping that spirit alive beyond the exhibitions?

Egan: The salon model has always been about more than gathering—it’s about new ideas, learning and honest exchange. For me, “conversation” means creating the conditions for discovery: a space where artists, thinkers and audiences can meet on equal footing and challenge one another’s assumptions. DETROIT SALON draws from that lineage, but we’ve reimagined it for our time—one where artists aren’t just exhibiting work, but making new encounters, dialoguing across disciplines, geographies and lived experiences.

Beyond the exhibitions, we’re keeping that spirit alive through an ongoing talks and performance program in Detroit and globally, gatherings in homes and intimate spaces, digital storytelling and global partnerships that connect Detroit’s creative community to peers around the world. The conversations happen in museums and galleries, yes—but also over dinners, in studios, in collector homes, in neighborhoods. Ultimately, cultural exchange and conversation is our medium. The exhibitions are the entry point, but the true work happens in the exchange—in what’s shared, debated, questioned and carried forward after people leave the room.

What story about Detroit’s art community do you want people in Paris to take away from “A Blueprint of Resonance” and the other offerings in Paris?

Williams: I want people in Paris to understand that Detroit’s art community is a living ecosystem. It’s made up of artists who build together, lift up each other, challenge each other and keep creating even when resources are limited. That resilience isn’t just survival—it’s innovation.

With “A Blueprint of Resonance” in addition to the other exhibitions, we’re showing how Detroit’s artists are in constant dialogue with the world, even if that world hasn’t always been listening. There’s history, there’s experimentation and there’s a deep sense of care that runs through all of it. The takeaway should be that Detroit isn’t on the margins of the art world—it’s been a center of cultural creation all along.

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