In 1967, philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault delivered a seminal lecture outlining the concept of heterotopia. In Foucault’s view, a heterotopia is a “place without a place,” a space in which societal norms are both distorted and distilled, both reflected and transgressed. Among these heterotopias, Foucault named prisons, brothels, bars, cinemas, colonies and ships. Nearly half a century later, the artist Yunghun Yoo identified yet another heterotopia: the discursive Southern California transportation system.

Anyone who has ever had the fortune and the fortitude to travel Southern California by way of train will recognize—if only temporally—the heterotopia that Yoo encircles within his recently closed solo exhibition, “Union Station.” With gestural vigor, Yoo renders the slowgoing transfers, the phantom platforms, the eastward abyss, the detours to nowhere towns and the long, circuitous routes that must pass once or twice through Union Station tracks like blood through coronary arteries.

“My paintings (of trains) are more spaces than beings of transportation,” Yoo told Observer. “I was thinking about this idea of juxtaposing one world inside another world.”

The spatial ordinance of 839 gallery—habituated in the Hollywood bungalow of gallery owners Liz Hirsch and Joshua Smith—enhanced the thesis of Yoo’s work. Trains of thought hover over the kitchen sink, railway signals beside an empty telephone niche. Adjacent to the decommissioned fireplace and across from the record console was Exit Wound, a sweep of yellow blotted with smears of color, unmoored by ranging striations. Yoo explained that he was painting his interpretation of a gunshot wound—with patches of bruising, an undulating suture fixed at the canvas’s center, rivulets of technicolored blood spiraling out toward an abundant edge. Exit Wound also bears a striking resemblance to a bleeding landscape or a ruptured infrastructure or even a train that’s gone off the rails.

“I was trying to describe the idea of parting with something,” Yoo explained. “Like something that’s going through you has this pain, and it leaves a mark.”

In the hallway was the unassuming yet mystifying piece 8 (2). It is a small work with two columns of four nebulous spheres bound together by faint ligatures of color. They represent platform assignments, which in Southern California are subject to transpositions or reconfiguration or instantaneous expirations. Yoo experiments with opacity in the exhibition, ensnaring the ephemerality of train rides by blighting out loud swathes and strokes into quiet implications. 8 (2) suggests a connection but does not affirm it; it promises no reassurance that your train will arrive or that it will take you any closer to your destination once it does.

“The idea of connecting the two platforms together feels like a myth,” Yoo elaborated, “because when you’re on a train, you’re constantly going away from one place to a different place, but nevertheless, you’re on this physical track.”

Across the exhibition, some moments were abstract while others were far more tangible. Train II and Train III are among the few figurative works within the exhibition, both featuring cylindrical shapes chugging along train tracks. Yet they are still quite abstract: the points of perspective are askew, the landscapes that the trains traverse are no more than monochromatic hazes. Yoo said that he leaned into the intrinsic tension between the representational and the implied, running a second rail under the tracks of Train II or painting the freight in Train III to resemble a sushi roll. For Yoo, his practice is not a writ of execution but an active appeal, endlessly deferred against the tracks of judgment and interpretation.

“The line between representation and (figuration) gets blurry for me sometimes,” Yoo explained. “I usually start a painting from a mental image, rather than a representation… [Sometimes] the representation isn’t shareable to the viewer, not because I don’t want to share it, but because it starts from my head.”

Beach is another one of Yoo’s translucent and transferred paintings, but in the form of a self-portrait. At the center of the painting, a Vitruvian Man by way of stick figuration stretches out yellow limbs over a salmon square. The figure’s head, according to Yoo, hangs in a delicate balance; it is a marshmallow, halfway between roasted and charred. Courting a sense of distress, he animalistically scratches and scrapes into the canvas, etching out opacity by any means necessary.

Ultimately, Yoo paints from an interstitial place of discomfort and euphoria, where the body becomes another site of passage. The meaning of Yoo’s work, like movement, is never fixed but briefly and serendipitously encountered.

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In late October, a pageant’s worth of costumed devotees gathered at Perrotin in Los Angeles for the grand opening of Mark Ryden’s solo exhibition, “Eye Am,” which showcased 12 new works by the cult artist. Buccaneers, Pierrot clowns and stag-horned fey wandered the exhibition, examining portraits of coronated Bye-Lo babies, taxidermy arrayed in whimsical mise-en-scènes and the pictorial apotheosis of a yam. It was a scene not too dissimilar from one Ryden might paint—a promenade of the curious and the willfully whimsical—and was one of his own making. A few hours before the opening, the artist posted an image of one of the paintings featured in the exhibition, Sweet Laurette #187—a pale, freckled pixie doll with her chubby hands wrapped around a pair of yams—to his Instagram with a caption reading “Wear a costume!”

Through his work, Ryden offers rabbit holes and tightly packed wonderlands and an invitation to be in on the joke. Where some see paraphernalia, Ryden sees psalms. In the recently closed “Eye Am,” he presents his own agreement on spiritual peace, or at the very least, a scripture on how to obtain it. Ryden’s scripture is not one written with words or even with intention, but with feeling.

“My work grows organically rather than from a deliberate plan or hidden system,” Ryden told Observer. “I love how viewers can possibly stumble across details they didn’t notice at first, because that mirrors the way I experience making the work. There are shifts, moments of recognition and surprises, and the painting can become a journey of discovery.”

Kitschmeister, lowbrow luminary and indisputable Pop Surrealism pioneer, Ryden has become something of a cultural touchstone over the course of his decades-long career. His practice spans album covers, Barbie dolls, ballet set and costume design and variety show automatons, all of which generally fall into Ryden’s signature carnivalesque style. His rose-tinted dreamscapes emanate with a morbid, yet utopian symmetry. Debutantes boast ballgowns made of meat cuts, cherubic children fill their teacups with Eucharist wine, cosmopolitan cloud cuckoo lands populated by the wide-eyed and the woebegone.

Creatura is one such dreamscape. A young woman kneels in a glade, surrounded by all manner of flora and fauna—extinct, mythical and spiritual. A large pulmonate, an anthropomorphic cat, a roaming sea urchin, a miniature pink elephant, a pair of bumblebees and numerous ineffable hybrids all gaze reverently at a stellated tetrahedron, or a Merkaba. The Merkaba—an implement of spiritual ascension with ancient and occult lineage—has had previous appearances in Ryden’s work. “Geometry has always carried a spiritual charge for me,” the artist said. “I am drawn to sacred geometry because it is the intersection of science and spirituality, which feels very natural to who I am.” For years, the artist integrated Platonic solids into his work.

In this way, Creatura happily disrupts taxonomy and the boundaries between animal and insect, mammal and reptile, between real and imagined. “I don’t let the literal confines of nature dictate what can exist in my own painting,” Ryden said. “Some of the critters are drawn from the real world, which is always amazing because they already feel almost invented. I just follow my own flow and see what appears.”

In one small but marvelous work, The Sentinel, the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey sits in a verdant, alpine meadow. It stares with a single, wizened eye at a bumblebee—a recurring figure in Ryden’s work—and the two lock gazes, in a moment of cosmic synchronicity. Several of Ryden’s figurative motifs hold a deeper meaning or convey themes and ideas to which he frequently returns. For example, Ryden has previously expressed his love for bees in a 2022 Instagram post announcing the inclusion of a “Barbie Bee” in his limited collection with Mattel. “Without pollinators, the cycle would break and life as we know it would end,” Ryden wrote. “They are reminders of the delicate connections between all life forms on Earth.” Ryden’s work foregrounds this fragile balance, acknowledging that it is this interdependence that sustains us.

Ryden—who has drawn criticism for his use of gore and sacrilege—finds catharsis in exploring the implicit carnage of the Eucharist. In Communion #183, Christ plays sommelier to a gauntlet of young girls in communion dresses, pouring Holy Wine from his stigmata into their glass chalices. This unfolds in what is an otherwise bucolic scene: cherry blossoms bloom, cumulus clouds part, flower buds open unto the sunlight and a lake glistens in the distance.

“I was thinking about the inherently absurd act of communion itself in this painting,” Ryden said. “The idea of literally eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood has always struck me as strange and difficult to understand. The Bible says this should be taken literally rather than symbolically, and that feels even more disturbing and macabre. By contrast, I find spiritual meaning in connection to the natural world around us. It is there in the passing of the seasons and the interconnectedness of all living things. That is where I feel a sense of awe and spiritual inspiration.”

Ryden paints with technical virtuosity and conceptual clarity; in short, he lets intuition guide him. A maneuver of Ryden’s intuition, Eye Am #181 is a paralyzing work, echoing with skillful dexterity and a refusal of direct interpretation. It features what could be a yam or a pineal gland or a higher self lying wide-eyed in a bed, staring at the name of the exhibition, “EYE AM.”

Ryden regards the mystery behind his work as sacred, a vehicle to spiritual enlightenment. He occasionally works off the Jungian hypothesis, incorporating some images from pop culture, those that preceded it and those that exist outside of it entirely. He marries the phenomenal to the subconscious, the absurd to the eerie and through it all creates worlds beyond explanation. When asked about what the yam in Eye Am #181 represented, whether it was a symbol or a character, something ephemeral or omnipresent, Ryden simply said, “Searching for a clear explanation for the yam misses what really matters.”

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When I visited “The Dying World”—Lauren Tsai’s installation along the periphery of Hollywood Forever Cemetery—I was struck by how Victorian it was. The yellow clapboard house appeared as morbid and anachronistic as any other mausoleum, anchored in a front yard brimming with mid-century detritus—rust-eaten bicycles, jettisoned turbines, mottled teddy bears, sun-bleached spring horses. A waifish, Burtonesque character—pale, with black hair, wide eyes and palpable anhedonia—lives in this house. She gazes out the window with a vacant expression, a bottle of ink in her hand. As she presses her palm to the windowpane, condensation fogs the glass. Her name is Astrid, and she has been haunting Tsai for a lifetime, an apparition or an idea lingering just this side of the spectral plane. Taken as such, “The Dying World” is a séance.

At the opening reception in November, a queue of artists, influencers, and celebrities—some of whom dressed in novelty wedding gowns fitted with tulle veils—posed merrily in front of the marquee that read, “THE DYING WORLD.” When I visited two weeks later, the exhibition’s traction had not waned, and indeed had extended into long, winding lines. This was not unexpected, as Tsai, who has more than a million followers on Instagram, has established herself as a figure in the international entertainment world. From being one of the most beloved characters on the Japanese reality show Terrace House: Aloha State to starring in FX’s Legion and Netflix’s Moxie! to making her directorial debut animating the “Cool About It” music video for Grammy Award-winning indie band, boygenius, the artist’s star is blinding, and she has the fanbase to prove it.

Tsai’s appeal comes as much from her beauty as her artistic tenor—her precocious sophistication, her mystic interiority. Over the past few years, she has embarked on a campaign to break into the international art and animation world with a distinct genre of pop Surrealism. Among her inspirations, she named Alice (1988), Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (2005), Henry Selick’s Coraline (2009) and the oeuvre of the Brothers Quay. In her art, this affinity for the fantastical and the macabre shines through, as she spins out whimsical, willowy creatures that both shout and echo life. Trees and animals, humans and mountaintops share the same lifeblood in Tsai’s art, congealed together with serpentine intricacy. Her dreamy wraithwork appeared on limited-edition Nike Air Force 1s and Nike Air Maxes, on Marc Jacobs nylon bags and on the cover of a Marvel Comics West Coast Avengers issue. But “The Dying World” was perhaps Tsai’s most ambitious project, as within it, she communes with the themes, ideas and characters that accompanied her throughout her whirlwind rise to fame.

“I’ve always been very interested in the way that certain characters and certain things I’ve either encountered or created myself have shaped my own personality over time, and changed the way I view the world,” Tsai told Observer. “’The Dying World’ is themed around ideas existing as these sentient beings and having this place in which they live after we’ve forgotten them.”

In the Hollywood Forever Cemetery parking lot, just past the peninsular Sylvan Lake and the tombstone of Johnny Ramone, “The Dying World” rose amidst oblique silhouettes of palm trees and power lines. The exhibition had a strategic stage presence. It was humble, New England-style home sat on a square tract of AstroTurf, which terminated abruptly a yard or two out from either side because Tsai wanted “The Dying World” to feel like an ephemeral stage set between this world and the next. Tsai explained that she was intentional with every aspect of “The Dying World,” right down to its location, of which she stressed the “liminality.” 

But as for Astrid, she is not Tsai’s to dictate, but rather to register, to mythologize. To Tsai, the character has a degree of agency—and by some measures, authority—within “The Dying World.” She is an almost chimeric figure of memory and mortality, entitled to her own methodology and course of evolution separate from Tsai’s.

Upon entering the house, visitors were welcomed into Astrid’s world by way of her childhood bedroom. It was pristine, prim and pale yellow, with everything seeming both undisturbed and dissonant. Astrid’s body sat upright on the edge of her bed, holding a lily of the valley sprig in her hand, with her disembodied head resting on her pillow. The window above her bed—presumably the one she’s seen pining out of—a charcoal illustration of diminishing phases of Astrid’s spindly figure bounding onto a pasture toward a distant house. Her desk was tidy, occupied by a bottle of ink, a pencil, a pocket-sized dollhouse and a small stuffed crow. There was a television set stacked with VHS tapes and a nightstand topped with a shaded lamp. On the fourth wall, a projection of the 4-minute The Dying World Part One: Forgetting stop-motion short film played on a loop.

In the film, Astrid wrestles with the inevitability of forgetting. She sits behind a computer at an office desk. Facing a vast, unforgiving white screen, she types, “There is an idea that no one wants.” She pauses, hesitates and adds, “it waits …” to the ledger. The narrative is mercurial, flitting between visions of past, present and a murky phantasmagoria. Astrid is first transported to her childhood bedroom, and from there, into the Dying World, a landscape littered with a variety of forgotten ephemera. Astrid finds herself on an island in this sea of refuse, accompanied by her abandoned idea and personal psychopomp, Crow, a ghastly beast with oil-slick feathers and spidery appendages. She feeds Crow a bottle of ink, and they wait together while sitting on a dilapidated swing set. Astrid returns to her computer screen, and she finishes the sentence: “It waits to be remembered.” At this stage, Astrid has an idea, but she’s running out of time.

“The relationship between Astrid and Crow is a transactional one,” Tsai explained. “The relationship a person has to an idea is transactional. I was very interested in exploring the consequences we have from committing to an idea, yet at the same time, the transcendence we can find when we actually realize one to its fullest, share that idea with others and give it a life beyond ourselves.” She deemed the process behind “The Dying World” as “anti-efficient,” describing the beauty in sculpting every minuscule facial expression, in sourcing doll-sized Dying World props one by one, in making Crow’s feathers and Astrid’s hair lift with the breeze. She found camaraderie with her team, as they created six seconds of animation ten days at a time.

To produce The Dying World Part One: Forgetting, Tsai tapped Nick Cinelli of Studio Linguini, a stop-motion and hybrid animation film studio based out of Los Angeles and London. The Astrid puppet was designed in collaboration with ARCH Model Studios, the studio responsible for the puppets used in classic stop-motion films such as Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. Jim Williams scored the project, and Ines Adriana developed the sound design. In every sequence, every frame, every flicker of movement, the film honored the Dying World and the sentient ideas it represents, as if each detail were an altar.

The rooms in the exhibition—arrayed in vitrines of concept art, sketchbooks, oil paintings, sets, puppets and prototypes—served less as a preservation of the production technique and more as the artifacts of an idea, a memory, a fantastic belief. Each was imbued with a special soundscape designed by Adriana—shifting papers, footsteps on carpeted floors, disparate noises of nature. “I had to add more layers to the story,” Tsai explained, “to make it feel just as much a presentation as a process.”

As guests funneled out of the vestibule of the exhibition, a projection of Astrid on a glass panel appeared to cordon off the opposite ends of the house. She emerged pensive and pacing, her hand resting on her chin, as though deliberating on whether to remember or forget. “I’m more interested in the integration of fantasy into reality and into memory,” Tsai mused, “and creating something that includes this [fantasy world] as well as a foundation and a grounding point for it.”

In “The Dying World,” everything has a particular provenance and a special consequence, the didactics of which come directly from Tsai. She maintains a protective and clandestine relationship with her ideas and their interpretations, parceling out details in a steady, deliberate manner. When asked about the symbolism of Astrid’s accoutrements, such as the lily of the valley or the bottle of ink, revealing primarily that while they are significant, they—and the exhibition as a whole—only skim the surface of what “The Dying World” will eventually be.

“There is a magic to keeping things secret,” Tsai concluded, “For me, everything has to have a romance to it. And being able to romanticize the death of an idea or the death of the self is definitely always in the back of my mind as I’m creating things. I think it’s quite inextricable from my work at this point.”

Performance art is always a negotiation between procedure and provocation. It is an art aimed at infiltrating a neural pathway, at constricting the muscles behind one’s neck, at confiscating the right to familiarity and narrative. It emerges, by these very virtues and not in spite of them, as an art of entertainment. Whether empowered by traditional intentions or iconoclastic ones, performance art functions by implicating the audience rather than just addressing it. If the audience measures the value of entertainment, performance art is entertainment that appraises the audience’s values. In other words, to be entertained by performance art is to be at the mercy of it. Performance art, therefore, has a distinct urgency within Los Angeles, a city that is in a perpetual state of rehearsal. By way of Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT), Los Angeles performance art has become all the more experiential, edifying and electrifying.

Cornered in a part of Downtown Los Angeles swamped in contemporary art museums and performance centers, REDCAT has become a nucleus for a range of experimental work in the city. REDCAT draws a much more eclectic crowd than its neighbors—an assortment of artistic vanguardists and wayfarers, MFA candidates, hangers-on and prospective or participating performers. Every Thursday in November (except Thanksgiving), REDCAT presented a program consisting of three stage works for the 22nd annual New Original Works Festival. The NOW Festival is composed of performers and collectives based in the greater Los Angeles area, with nearly all the pieces being interdisciplinary in one way or another, blending shades of dance, theater, opera, poetry, film and satire.

The most compelling entry of the first weekend was BEG, a cacophonous cabaret loosely consisting of rodeo clowns, techno raving, bluegrass ditties played on a tinny banjo, shaving cream sommeliers, and an overwhelming quality of sadomasochistic Americana, all topped off by Elvis the King. Long Beach-based artist Jacob Wolff directed the experimental opera as both a limerick and a lament to the rodeo clown, exploiting the fine tension between embarrassment and entertainment. On stage, Wolff’s performers gyrate and convulse, singing and shouting, doing everything within their power to distract and disorient. It’s a slippery work, one of those that both defies and defiles expectations of Western art and culture. In one instance, an automated voice reads out a definition of “good” art as defined by classical standards: balance, symmetry, certainty, centrality and beauty. As the definition intones, it is juxtaposed by the incongruous bedlam crescendoing on the stage: a rodeo clown fondles an inflatable air dancer, men in bubble wrap masks sprint across the stage, majorettes flock themselves in the fabric of their flags and a guitar player descends from the aisle, strumming off-tune and singing with a grotesque, guttural viscosity.

When performer Jessica Hemingway is asked what “bad” art is by the disembodied voice that seems to oversee its proper designation, she answers, “dancing, singing, Christian vegetables.” The piece is capricious, absurd and deliciously uncool, soaked in the charming, cultish idiosyncrasies of the Western rodeo circuit without wading too far into currents of discord or dogma.

Where BEG lunges through gestures of bellicose dissonance and athleticism, Thresholds comes to a separate peace. The opening act of the festival’s second weekend, Thresholds married readings from Divya Victor’s KITH and CURB with a composition by Carolyn Chen, the melodic accompaniment of the American Modern Opera Company and the lyrical dancework of Visalini (Vini) Sundaram. Victor’s verse poetry bears the weight of South Asian experience across themes of arrival, assimilation, marginality, mythology and liminality. Victor opens “J is for Jarasandha” with the tale of the mythical birth and undoing of warrior king Jarasandha, who was born in two halves, juxtaposing it to an anecdote about an old Punjabi woman’s inexplicable separation from her son at the Toronto airport. Vocalist Mayuri Vasan backs Victor’s words with strains of Carnatic music, braided into Chen’s piano and Xenia Deviatkina-Loh’s violin section. Sundaram’s movement fuses contemporary dance with classical Indian dances, such as Bharatanatyam, in the same vein as Victor, who maps out the Mahabharata epic onto the lives of contemporary South Asians through “J is for Jarasandha.”

There are moments of clever and copacetic symphony within Thresholds, where each element of the performance orbits one another in ranging succession, but there is no single moment of consonance among the performers, no netted convergence, no singular rhythm that converts them all. Mid-performance, a quarter change occurs, and Victor reads poems from CURB, which plainly and unceremoniously narrate accounts of contemporary hate crimes against South Asians. The titles are simple: “Gas Station 2” or “Curb 4,” referring to the locations where the violence occurred.

Tying these themes up was the performance’s coda, “Paper Boats,” a poem outlining instructions for folding the human body into a paper boat. The performers drop their instruments, slot themselves against the stage and attempt to turn themselves into paper boats, to “Fold the arms towards the chest along the axis of your spine” as Victor instructs, to “hold your / breath as your thumb presses down on any skin / bubbling at the corners” as she recommends. The act of folding oneself into a paper boat makes a perfect metaphor for the impossible demands of assimilation, demands Victor makes explicit in the poem’s opening injunctions: “Go to a place with no water and drink. / Go to a place with no trees and find shade / Go to a place with no bodies and find yours buried there.”

Another second weekend gem was Mommy, a high-octane, psychosexual farce that meditates on motherhood, heteronormativity, mental health and the prison of domesticity with a cartoonish effervescence. Written by Orin Calcagne and directed by Jensun Titus, Mommy is a slapstick comedy horror that thrives on its own supply of physicality, absurdity and versatile anti-sentimentality. That the play opens on the excruciating klaxon call of a bibbed and bonneted Baby, played by Reshma Meister, is a testament to this. There is no romance in having a family as far as Mommy is concerned. Daddy and the eponymous Mommy, played to perfection by the dazzling Jake Delaney and Ren Ye, are the paragons of heteronormative bliss, as constantly reassured to Baby by Mommy herself. Yet when Daddy announces that he will be moving his homosexual lover and 22-year-old intern Lucien, played by Meadow Holczer, fault lines in Mommy’s marriage and her psyche begin to show. Antics ensue.

All of the performers in the play possess a certain thrill and verve that courses through their dialogue and their physical expressions. From Baby, who spends most of his time in the play delivering philosophical soliloquies from the birdcage his mother locked him in, to his older brothers played by Santi MacLean and Calcagne—the latter of whom beetles across the stage on his arms alone because he broke his legs throwing himself from a window. Yet it is Ye’s performance as Mommy that truly stands out in this work. She flaps her mouth in aimless ventriloquism as Tessa Calire Hersch reads most of her lines from a corner upstage, pitches her body to and fro—assisted by black-clad stagehands—with the agency of a marionette.

The live foley of Caro Shannah Levy, Ian Bratschie and Nathan Wolfe, with music composition by Rubin Hohlbein, brackets the narrative. Their work imposes sonic consequences on the family in the form of theremin tones and kazoo noises. The moral of Mommy—if it can be called that—is ultimately delivered at the end of the play by the least neurotic member of the family, Baby. We were all once a part of our mothers. It is not a novel conclusion, though certainly an empathetic one; however, it is also undercut by the play’s outlandish and comical nature. Nevertheless, Mommy shines with a true acuity for comedic timing and a piercing interpretation of the Middle American fever dream.

In the third and final weekend of NOW, jeremy de’jon guyton tested the endurance and plasticity of memory with notes on building a foundation, 1963. It’s a marvelous and meticulous work, uniting video, audio, sound, set design and a physically fluid guyton into a robust, mixed-media autofiction. None of these elements feels put upon or meretricious, but instead functions as part of an organic form.

Excerpts of guyton’s family history in Los Angeles emerge amidst a backdrop of radio fuzz, broadcast announcers, R&B songs and recorded interviews with his family members. The set is simple, partitioned off at the corner of the stage by billowing white sheets. Several CRT television units and radios were scattered across the set, and a projection screen descended from the flies, flicking home video that illuminated scenes of muted dining room conversations and backyard parties. His dance, which oscillates between contemporary, lyrical, and self-effacing styles, was effective in balancing the tension between confession and legacy. The artist moves as though he were possessed by memory and inhibition. With tensed limbs and strained motions, he works around the set with a sinuous gait. At one interval, guyton pushes a wheeled television unit ahead of him as he skates and slips behind it. The artist is someone deeply immersed in his own ancestry, evidenced by his founding and stewardship of a.l.t. ^home, a creative residency and cultural archive established within his South Los Angeles home. In notes on building a foundation, 1963, he channels this legacy through his movement. At the work’s climax, guyton reads a monologue that is a mélange of anecdotes, family records and musings, with no single narrative taking priority over another. Altogether, the piece renders memory itself—fragmentary, recursive and resistant to order.

Lu Coy closed the festival with the ethereal Becoming the Moon, an opera based on the transfeminine rebirth of Tecciztecatl, the Mexica moon god. Coy adapts The Florentine Codex’s account of Tecciztecatl, who, hesitating to be reborn as the sun, allowed the humble Nanahuatzin to leap into the fire ahead of him and be reborn instead. Ashamed by his inaction, Tecciztecatl resolved to follow Nanahuatzin into the flames, and thus two suns were born. Yet the gods, deciding to punish Tecciztecatl for his cowardice, dimmed his light, transforming him into a feminine moon.

Coy regales the myth through dance and song, dominating the stage with sculptural formations and luminescent design elements that are simple yet impactful. In one instance, Coy pours water atop a circular mirror that, once illuminated with light, sends ripples across their face and white costume. Coy, an adroit vocalist and flutist, uses both skills to their advantage in a musical number that encapsulates Tecciztecatl’s ache and acceptance. In the finale, an incandescent organza cloth descends from the flies. As Coy hoists the circular mirror over their head, reflections of light and darkness speckle the audience, and Coy is swathed in the cloth. They conclude the performance transformed into a lunar effigy, cosmic and permanent.

There were some pieces in this year’s NOW Festival that underwhelmed. There was I Am an American (via Los Angeles) from Diana Wyenn and Ammunition Theatre Company, a Schoolhouse Rock-style production that attempts to dissect the American political apparatus without delivering a conclusion of consequence. Then there was Maylee Todd’s MOUTH, which pairs scatological stand-up comedy with a medley of fairly inoffensive and earnest pop music. Though both struck me as particularly aimless, most of the works in the festival were anything but. The offerings of NOW were rigorous, marked by expeditions into risk and vulnerability, a willingness to shatter narrative expectations and a fecundity of original thought.

For nearly 40 years, Elia Arce has practiced and performed from the borderline. Arce’s work toes the line between theatre and dance, prose and poetry, ritual and circumstance, nature and consequence. In dissolving these boundaries, Arce courts liminality, sometimes in pursuit of enlightenment, but oftentimes in direct opposition to a singular narrative. Her practice, at its core, is one of emotional atomization; a foray into the sort of radical empathy that transcends the mind and is thus transferred to the body. Arce has been the “crying Buddha” in A Dust of Gold, inviting the audience to whisper their sorrows to her, one by one, and in exchange, she “released” them, sobbing profusely into a wicker basket. She has been papered to the wall of DiverseWorks gallery for The Long Count II, emerging slowly from her canvassed chrysalis over the course of four hours. She has been First Woman on the Moon, exhibiting the broad and varied experience of being “othered.” In one act, she played with a babydoll before dressing it in red and locking it in a cage; in another, she carefully molded a baby out of clay before dropping it unceremoniously. Arce is keen on creating “living monuments,” works that are sculptural in their presence, yet ephemeral in their lifespan. In No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt), the same principles apply, but extend beyond Arce’s vision of the “living monument” and culminate instead in a lifelong effigy.

The first flicker of No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt) arrived in Houston—a scene of which Arce has been a fixture for the past thirty years—as an altar dedicated to the Palestinians killed in Israel’s war on Hamas in the wake of the October 7 attacks. Arce invited Palestinian families living in the city to read the names and ages of loved ones lost to the sanguinary conflict and to lay flowers in their memory. Drawing from funerary traditions in Costa Rica, where an altar made for one individual often evolves into a site of remembrance for the entire community, Arce sought to foster a space of collective grieving.

“In Houston, the artistic community came to support these families, and we were all there to support them,” Arce told Observer when asked about the initial framework of the piece. “We created a safe space … where we could mourn together. Instead of an individual grief, it became a community healing.”

When No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt) arrived as a performance at Los Angeles’ REDCAT contemporary arts center on October 30, 2025; it had already been staged in Houston and New York City. In each city, the performance was slightly different—tailored to suit a particular venue, audience, mood—but the core elements were unaltered. A figure shrouded in blue sits still and statuesque at the utmost corner of the stage. A train from their shroud runs the length of the stage, and a woman toils at its end, turning it over, folding it this way and that, creating a bundle of cloth. She repeats the process so many times that the bundle, once the size of a watermelon, swells to the size of a body. As the woman on stage completes her solemn task and presents the bundle to the figure, arms emerge from the shroud to cradle it. In No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt), Arce is not the protagonist but a narrator, a functional Greek chorus, winnowing across the performance with laments and lullabies.

Before the woman rolls up the shroud, Arce delivers the first stanzas of her Spanish poem “grietas y fisuras,” (“cracks and fissures”) in a sonorous voice. The first couplet reads, “The child finally wakes up / in his father’s arms.” In tandem with the folding ritual, the haunting preface reveals that the boy, who spends the duration of his life as a funeral shroud, is “finally” with his father. Once the bundle has been made and the living Pietà has been realized and carnations have been placed, Arce returns to the stage to offer the final refrain: “Cracks make way for cracks / Cracks fade with the light that makes them obsolete / This is how cracks ensure that in the end, only light remains.”

In the conversation organized by the Getty Research Institute’s Latin American and Latinx Art Initiative and curated by researcher Jasmine Magaña, Arce described the imagery out of Gaza she drew from: mass graves of bodies wrapped in blue tarps outside Al-Shifa hospital and mourning mothers holding their children’s limp bodies. Seeing such images, Arce felt frustrated and helpless. No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt) was created as a negotiation, to massage helplessness into catharsis. To make a monument out of bereavement.

Monuments ostensibly evoke a collective memory, an identity that is both collaborative and inheritable. Every New Yorker who sees the Statue of Liberty and thinks, “I am a New Yorker.” Every Roman who sees the Colosseum and thinks, “I am a Roman.” Arce’s living monuments reject such logic. They correspond to their own culture, they reaffirm their own narrative, they adhere to their own constitution of humanity, incapable of being altered or othered. The enculturation of No Time to Mourn (An Excerpt) rests on a certainty in its own semiotics, a stalwart belief that no matter the audience, grief should be collective, not singular.

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In the years since his passing, Persian-American painter Manoucher Yektai has begun to shift from the periphery of art history toward its center in a long-overdue reassessment. His work has been showcased in exhibitions around the world, with the latest taking place at Karma in L.A., curated by Negar Azimi. “Beginnings,” which closed last month, surveyed the early experiments of Yektai, from his surrealist-informed abstract inflections of the 1940s to his wondrously nebulous still lifes of the 1960s. On Yektai’s canvases, delicate hues permeate stretches of light and shadow; dense pigments emerge in sharp juxtaposition, cutting into and overlapping one another in brilliant syncopation; contrasting forms wax on impastoed dreamscapes and wane into feathery margins. His paintings offer more than texture; they possess a presence, an ineffable vitality that has accumulated interest over the years.

Nobody painted quite like Manoucher Yektai. Nobody ensnared the flesh of any given object or vista quite as incisively as he could. Nobody rendered the veins of a tomato plant or the countenance of a sitter with such intense bravura. Perhaps as a result of the artist’s withdrawal from the art world, in conjunction with the general reticence of many Western art critics, Yektai’s contributions to Abstract Expressionism have been overwritten in favor of the neat, simplistic narrative that often hangs the mantle of “innovation” on the same familiar names. The work of the viewer or the critic, then, is to go beyond excavating Yektai’s absence from this cast of canonical figureheads to rebuild the narrative from the foundation up—to start uncompromisingly at the beginning.

Born in Tehran in 1921, Yektai’s first dream was to become a poet. He didn’t even consider pursuing fine art until he was 18 years old, according to an interview playing on a loop in the gallery. Yektai’s words don’t paginate as much as they punctuate, as a caesura or a comma—a measured conjunction that marries the artist’s early practice to an ambulant and oblique life. In the interview, he recounts a fateful encounter with Mehdi Vishkai. After sitting for the painter, the two talked about art long into the night.

“We talked together about paintings,” Yektai says. “Stayed up until 3, 3:30 in the morning.” The next day, he announced to his father that he wanted to be a painter—one who “sees any object like a poet.” The sudden, singular, almost mythical arrival at his calling makes Yektai seem, if anything, like a man driven by chance or a twist of fate. This confluence of memory, predestination, and more than a little mythmaking courses through Yektai’s confident brushstrokes; it manifests in the lyrical manner through which he reckons with life and essence.

He received his early arts education at the Fine Arts program of Tehran University and later at École des Beaux-Arts in the atelier of Cubist painter André Lhote. While studying in Paris, Yektai would marble his canvases with surrealist-inflected patterns and rich strokes of color. One piece painted in 1949 especially stands out, both for its peculiar diamond shape and for the delicate trails of pigment that twine and spiral across the plane, wandering into slender arabesques and whirligigs. Yektai’s education was primarily within the framework of the 19th-century Beaux-Arts tradition. In Tehran, Yektai was engrossed by the works of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Magritte. Some critics attempted to prescribe a sort of cultural estrangement to Yektai’s paintings, evaluating them on the apparent absence of Iran’s rich visual legacy.

In the essay “Yektai: A Search for Modernism” in the 2022 book Manoucher Yektai, Fereshteh Daftari raises the argument that Yektai’s work exists in a liminal state between cultural inheritance and Modernist ambition. “Is transcending the local a betrayal of one’s heritage, a repudiation of one’s ethnicity, a transgression into a territory reserved for those who are, in Barack Obama’s terms, ‘born into imperial cultures’?” he writes. “Yektai’s choice of themes (still life, landscape, portrait) may reflect his hybrid cultural origin; it may also be a manifestation of what came to be termed in Iran as ‘Westoxication,’ or the unhealthy lure of things Western—in other words, an alienation from one’s own culture.”

Did Yektai feel alienated from his Persian roots? Perhaps, but the artist’s biography provides no direct hermeneutical clarity, no fixed measure on whether such feelings, if they existed at all, were momentary or indefinite. Regardless, it is through this state of flux, this rupture and refashioning of identity, that Yektai’s trajectory subtly converges with the New York School of Abstract Expressionists, who were themselves famously pensive and restless. After reading a TIME magazine piece on Jackson Pollock in 1949, seduced by Pollock’s frenetic fugue of paint and unconventional methods of echoing movement across a canvas, Yektai found himself newly compelled.

This early exposure to Pollock led to Yektai’s early experiments with action painting. He began to paint standing up with canvas on the floor, lumbering over his paintings like Prometheus over humanity. Straddling the corners of his canvas, Yektai slashed and sliced color upon the surface with spatulas, scalpels, whips and trowels. He worked the plane with roars of color and impasto, tapering out figuration in whispers of light and shadow.

Some of these pieces were included in “Beginnings,” reflecting thickly painted organic and industrial forms, each of which suggested, though never fully codified. In one untitled piece from 1950, consonant registers of yellow, green and lavender undulate on the canvas like chlorophyll cells or the hazy lights of a city grid. In Still Life with Flowers (1952), paint rises in corollary crests off the canvas in a sort of mosaic of color. By then, Yektai was running with Leo Castelli, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and other luminaries of the New York Abstract Expressionist movement. They inspired each other, pushing the frontier of modernism further along through mutual osmosis. Yet, unlike many of his peers, Yektai never fully embraced abstraction, and as time passed, he gravitated increasingly toward figuration. In his portraits of this period, Yektai produced enchanting crescents of faces; the dappling of a brow, flashes of a cheek, a tuft of hair, the soft falling shadow of a nose.

Having shifted from gallery to gallery over the course of several years, Yektai rarely showed after 1959. “Beginnings” wound through this quieter period in his work, where his tomato plant and his own solitude were among his most steadfast muses. In Tomato Plant (1964), a red orb tangled in dirt and vines marks the center. In one untitled 1969 piece, two lonely bowls of fruit rise slightly off the canvas. The pigments form a visual feast, plated and pressed together in dissonant striations, applied with a vigorous, unyielding cadence.

Throughout the 1960s, Yektai’s affair with figuration continued, often culminating in portraiture, which he continued to explore and wrestle with. In one untitled work, dating between 1964 and 1968, a face comes into clearer focus, but only marginally so. In the painting, Yektai flirts with the light, lancing the sitter, toys with the thought of a red lip or the bridge of a nose, but never anchors any of these elements into a fully embodied form. It is this deliberate withholding, this resistance to resolution, that makes Yektai’s work such a marvel today.

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On December 2, Christie’s set a new world auction record for Fabergé—the third in its history—after hammering the Winter Egg, designed by Alma Theresia Pihl, for a whopping $30.2 million in The Winter Egg and Important Works by Fabergé from a Princely Collection sale in London. That evening also saw works like The Martyrdom of Saint Paul, a monumental altarpiece of Peter Paul Rubens, and The Flute Player, the handiwork of Rembrandt pupil Gerrit Dou, sell in the Old Masters Evening Sale, which combined with the Fabergé sale brought in more than $53.5 million.

In both its majesty and its provenance, the Winter Egg—one of fifty surviving Imperial Easter eggs commissioned by members of the Romanov dynasty—was pristine. The commissioning of Fabergé eggs became an Easter tradition among Russian emperors beginning in 1885, when Czar Alexander III gifted the very first Hen Egg—a marvelous white ovoid that opened to reveal a golden yolk in which there nestled a golden hen—to his wife. Czar Nicholas II carried on the tradition his father started, giving Fabergé eggs to his mother and his wife every year. The Winter Egg was a 1913 gift from Nicholas II to his mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna. It’s one of just two surviving Fabergé eggs designed by Alma Pihl—who was widely considered one of the greatest talents to emerge out of the luxury atelier. Pihl was inspired by a winter’s day, when she gazed upon her frosted windowpane and marveled at the fractaled snowflakes frosting the surface “like a garden of exquisite frozen flowers.”

The Winter Egg rests on a pearlescent rock crystal formation that imitates a glacier, melting into diamond-studded rivulets. Delicately rendered in rock crystal, the egg is latticed in a gossamer snowflake motif, with each flurry traced in inlaid platinum, and studded with approximately 4,508 diamonds. While robust in its materiality, it evokes the ephemerality of ice and winter—a theme that extends to the egg’s concealed “surprise.” The frigidity of winter literally, and metaphorically, gives way to the glory of spring when the Winter Egg opens to reveal a bejeweled platinum basket cradling a bouquet of white quartz anemones blossoming through a spray of gold moss.  

The egg was purchased in the 1920s by a London dealer for a relatively small sum when the Soviet government sold off treasures following the Russian Revolution, and it has since been sold at auction several times, with each sale breaking records. Yesterday’s sale set a new world auction record for any work by the legendary atelier. According to Margo Oganesian, Fabergé and Russian Works of Art department head, the sale reaffirms “the enduring significance of this masterpiece” and celebrates “the rarity and brilliance of what is widely regarded as one of Fabergé’s finest creations, both technically and artistically.” The Fabergé sale as a whole, she added, attracted fierce competition from bidders around the world.

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The woman reclines on the operating table as though it were a chaise lounge. Her baby boy wrenches his umbilical cord from her womb, trailing bloody footprints across the stage as an audience watches. What makes Danielle Orchard’s Presentation so marvelously unnerving is that the painting contorts the weight of transformation around the diffuse and dreamy voyeurism of the audience, both within the painting and beyond it. The piece was born from Orchard’s own experience of childbirth; she delivered her firstborn son by way of cesarean surgery under the bright lights and piercing observation of the operating theater. In her now-closed Perrotin exhibition, “Firstborn,” Danielle Orchard rendered variously melancholic female forms in the throes of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. Engaging the female form through modern, classical and contemporary contexts, Orchard hones in on the somatic and psychological metamorphosis brought on by maternity with lyrical tenderness and exacting vigor.

Orchard’s women are parsed through benevolent abstraction, illuminated in rich swaths of color and diaphanous daylight, lounging contemplatively or gazing directly toward the viewer with a faraway, saturnine expression. They are classically informed, exhibiting the allegorical depth and configuration we have come to expect from the female figure in art. Yet Orchard’s women court transgression; suspended in very singular, vulnerable moments, they appear resigned to their fate under observation. In Orchard’s Ophelia (2025), a woman stands nude in the flat plane of her home, kitchen chairs and flower vases shift around her, a baby and a dog tread the ground beneath her. Her pose is classical—bordering on contrapposto—yet her stoicism does not necessarily evoke strength, but rather exposure and expectation.

“The female body is often used allegorically,” Orchard tells Observer. “That flexibility is something I think is very interesting about both being a woman and depicting women…. The female body in particular is used so freely to denote really complex ideas about human experience.”

The artist has always worked within the webbings of womanhood; her previous paintings arranged clusters of women in bathhouses, on midsummer picnics, on tennis greens, holding books and cigarettes and gem-colored liquor bottles. Orchard’s paintings are in dialogue with the artists and histories that came before them. At once, Orchard’s coteries speak to Manet’s absinthe-minded muses, Rousseau’s pacific jungle girls and Picasso’s amorphously lithe demoiselles. They stretch to corners of classical and prehistoric female allegory as well, encompassing the female figures of Titian, Botticelli and Artemisia, even swallowing up Neolithic Venus figurines.

“Firstborn” marks a significant alteration in the artist’s experience and subject matter, as she encloses upon the topic of maternity with the same delicate precision and encyclopedic empathy she applied to other phases of womanhood. After the birth of her son, a chasm emerged between Orchard and the typified ingenues of her past work; she found herself resonating with another signature female allegory, concurrent with her present stage of womanhood: the Madonna.

“Having my own body change during pregnancy and feeling the metaphorical but also the physical weight of those changes enhanced my understanding of what the character of Mary may have been experiencing,” Orchard explains. “There are so many different emotions and moral expectations—all of these things that are placed on this one figure as placeholder for an incredibly rich and dynamic experience. And I think that that’s true for every phase of a woman’s life, but the childbearing years in particular. Whether or not one chooses to have children, the anticipation and the expectation still weigh on you.“

Hatching (2025) exemplifies this tension. In the painting, three women sit on a beach, absorbed by a nest of hatching turtle eggs. Waves lap at their legs and a fishfly bobs along the current; the women appear less in community with one another than in internal consonance. One woman lies in repose, her pregnancy represented as a bubble of dripping water, another woman braces herself, her arms wrapped pensively around her shoulders as she stares at the nest, and the last woman rises on her forearms with anticipation. In their solitude and solemnity, they appear as stages of sainthood, interacting not with each other but with the mercurial auspice of motherhood.

“I’m interested in the potential that painting has to show this metaphysical distance between figures,” Orchard says of the work. “The viewer is meant to understand that this is like a passage of time, even though it’s like a still image, you can suggest, you know, like an entire lifetime, essentially. … [The experience of pregnancy is] such a singular experience that it actually is kind of isolating—no one experience, despite sharing particular narrative details, is exactly the same as another person’s.”

With “Firstborn,” Orchard creates a postpartum narrative that is malleable and yet reactive to those that preceded it, especially as it pertains to the archetypal mothers and women depicted throughout art history. In A First Cut, a mother cuts her son’s hair on the banks of a lake. The horizon cuts through a surreal twilight; the moon and sun hang congruously in the sky. The scene has a mythical quality to it, and a sense of foreboding settles over the quotidian act as the mother wields the shears mid-cut. Orchard once regarded cutting her son’s flaxen curls as though she were committing a sin. “Samson and Delilah…” she says, referencing the biblical betrayal. “Female wiles have undone this man whose strength is in his curls.” A First Cut carries a weight and synchronicity that rhymes with the Bible story, yet it renders not the hero of Nazarite and his traitorous lover but a loving mother and her small son.

“That relay between images that you know from art history and then the life that you’re living,” Orchard concludes. “And that kind of constant conversation is ultimately what I’m interested in about painting and that it’s inexhaustible. You can always find these echoes of art history in life.”

Danielle Orchard’s upcoming solo shows at Perrotin will open in Paris in March 2026 and in New York in September 2027. 

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Wilshire Boulevard—one of Los Angeles’ most storied and congested streets—yields glimpses of landmarks, billboards and an assortment of Angeleno ephemera, yet none are as faithful to the experience of L.A. driving as the 25-foot-high anthropomorphic bear that has been marooned at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Glendon Avenue since October. Suspended in motion, the bubble-eyed bear hurtles forward in a dilapidated car, the tearful faces of daisies lining his path. The whimsically sardonic inflatable sculpture quartered just outside Westwood’s Hammer Museum, Buggy Bear Crashes Made in L.A. is the creation of Los Angeles-based artist Alake Shilling, who—despite her fascination with L.A.’s car culture—does not drive.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Shilling became attuned to the dissonant rhythms and modalities of her hometown—the abject anachronisms, the standardized vanity, the blurry distinction between imagined realities and lived ones. Baptized in the visual legacy of Hollywood, Shilling’s animistic characters—rendered through vivid paints and ceramic sculpture—teem with the wayward sentiment that slips through the cracks of pop culture. In this way, these mawkish woodland creatures are mascots of a new pop culture, conceived by Shilling’s own design. Cuddly, uncanny and wryly melancholic, Shilling’s world of sunshine and rainbows is not always one of smiles and sweet endings.

“I think my art is a reflection of everything I experience in the real world,” Shilling told Observer. “It’s like I’m making my own alphabet and… the whole art piece is the sentence.” Through her art, Shilling conjugates caricatures of kitsch—moon-eyed ladybugs, purple-furred panda bears, baby-blue bunnies—into totems of human emotion and conflict. Her characters evince depths of emotion and vulnerability that very few people are able to express in their everyday lives. Shilling’s candy-colored garden snakes and speckled-shelled turtles do not conform to any degree of respectability or regulation; they exist in a wonderland of relentless sentiment. Shilling, who confessed that at one point her biggest dream was to become a hermit, said she often struggles to find clarity in a city so caulked with rituals of attention. As such, her artistic practice is a coping mechanism.

“I feel like when I speak, people don’t listen, but in my art, I have a voice,” Shilling said. “It’s my world. My characters trust me. They believe in me. They have a conversation with who they are.”

Shilling’s artistry is, to some degree, a practice in magical thinking. Working from the floor of her cozy living-room studio, Shilling mixes unconventional materials—Styrofoam beads, glitter, cotton balls—into her paintings; she leaves her ceramic sculptures pitted with uneven ridges and scored by carving instruments, evidence of her creative provenance. Shilling’s preference for texture and tactility gives her work a certain vitality. Her ceramic sculptures are particularly spirited, appearing as though they have lived—many of them perch talismanically on sculpted landscapes. A pale ladybug and a purple panda sit on a grassy knoll; a blue bunny and a brown bear rest on a mountainous ridge. They present as contemporary parables, slightly discolored by wear and age, bearing titles such as I had a long day please bring me a snack (2025) and Fashion Is a Lifestyle Said the Purple Panda in Pucci (2025). Shilling explained that her characters are portals of empathy, simple and unmuddled by sociopolitical structures or interpretative metaphors; they are affable and candid.

Shilling’s work—visually informed by pop culture, cartoons and middle-American kitsch—is in dialogue with the act of interpretation as it exists in the contemporary art world. Like kitsch, the artist relies on audience familiarity and immediate emotional comprehension. Yet Shilling’s work goes beyond the cheap thrills of kitsch by facilitating a sort of psychological transference between the audience and her morose, cartoonish ceramic sculptures.

“I’m still trying to understand why I’m so drawn to animated characters,” Shilling admitted. “I can sympathize and empathize with what they’re going through. It becomes less about me and more about what the actual overarching piece is like. I can separate myself from the issue and see all the moving parts, but I can only do that if it’s cute. The cuteness is what gives me the empathy I need.”

The artist’s practice purposely defies clarity, oscillating seamlessly through the spheres of high and low art. This quality, like much of Shilling’s work, is typified by equal parts reverence toward and friction with pop culture. Shilling playfully referred to Buggy Bear—a recurring character throughout her work and her artistic avatar—as her Mickey Mouse. “He’s my trinket!” Shilling proclaimed.

To a certain degree, Shilling renders all of her characters with episodic intimacy. They embark on new adventures and experience new emotions in each appearance as though they are protagonists in a Saturday morning cartoon. When admitted to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the artist had ambitions of going into children’s animation, yet became quickly disenchanted upon learning of the strict rules and restrictions on character design and the intense competition within the industry. Taking inspiration from the grotesque and irreverent artwork of the Chicago Imagists as well as the various quaint, winsome forms of Afrodiasporic folk art, Shilling made the transition into fine art. She had the freedom to not only design as she pleased but to execute emotions and expressions that could have been diluted by animation censors.

Central to Shilling’s practice is the tender yet indelible belief that complexity can be etched into nostalgic analogs. “It’s like I am writing a really serious, emotional diary entry in Comic Sans,” Shilling joked. “The font is silly, but what I’m saying is real and genuine. And it comes from my heart.”

Any gala hosted by American Ballet Theatre is bound to be wonderful, but the company’s 85th anniversary fete dedicated to the iconic principal dancer Misty Copeland was an especially splendid—and meaningful—affair. Fresh off a five-year hiatus, Copeland took the stage of David H. Koch Theater for one final performance, a capstone to her revolutionary career. That said—balletomanes rejoice!—because her retirement from the stage will not end her involvement in ballet. Copeland intends to join the ABT board of trustees to continue championing change from behind the curtain.

On the evening of the gala, celebrities, philanthropists, dance enthusiasts and sundry socialites gathered to celebrate Copeland’s legacy as the first Black woman promoted to principal dancer in ABT’s history and her transformative global impact on dance. The evening’s chairs included philanthropist Elizabeth Segerstrom, Darren Walker (10th president of the Ford Foundation), Sarah Arison (president of MoMA’s board of trustees), Jacqueline Badger Mars (heiress to Mars Inc.) and Amy Griffin (venture capitalist and founder of G9 Ventures). Oprah Winfrey attended as honorary grand chair alongside Caroline Kennedy. Spotted among the crowd were Darren Walker, Iman, Gayle King, Amy Sherald, Jordan Roth, Marisa Tomei, Star Jones, Zac Posen and Rebecca Minkoff. 

Winfrey and American dance icon Debbie Allen offered tributes to Copeland from the dais as overflow guests watched a live simulcast in nearby Alice Tully Hall. Sotheby’s auctioneer Kimberly Pirtle, glam as ever, was also on hand and raised more than $1.5 million for a new Copeland-named program. But of course, the highlight of every ABT gala is the dancing.

Copeland and Calvin Royal III (the company’s first Black male principal dancer) opened the program with a pas de deux from Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet, honoring not only Copeland’s talent but also the diversity she helped pioneer. The two were slated to perform in ABT’s full production of Romeo and Juliet in summer 2020 before COVID hit, and they would have been the first Black dancers to perform in the roles in ABT’s history. At the gala, they brought that vision to life.

The full program, partially curated by Copeland, also featured excerpts from U Don’t Know Me, choreographed by Houston Thomas and performed by ABT Studio Company; Swan Lake, choreographed after Lev Ivanov and Marius Petipa and performed by Hee Seo and Cory Stearns; and Sinatra Suite, choreographed by Twyla Tharp and performed by Copeland and Herman Cornejo. 

Interwoven with the dancers were videos and tributes that traced Copeland’s ballet journey from her acceptance into ABT Studio Company at age 17 to her breakout role as Odette/Odile in ABT’s 2015 production of Swan Lake and the countless standing ovations she earned along the way. “I think it’s the exact right time for me to be stepping off the stage,” Copeland told CBS Mornings after the gala. “Because I think that the impact that I can have off the stage is going to be greater than what I’ve done.”

Valentino Carlotti and Misty Copeland

Debbie Allen and Oprah Winfrey

Kylie Vonnahme

Iman Abdulmajid and Nardos Imam

Star Jones

Amy Sherald, Darren Walker, Amy Griffin and Jordan Roth

Isabella Boylston

Simon Huck and Sarah Jane Nader

Connie Spenuzza

Kimberly Pirtle

Tina Raja and Beejan Land

Cristine Arroyo and Andrew Barth Jr

Darren Walker and Amy Griffin

Nia Faith Betty, Caryn Campbell and Justice Faith Betty

Stacey Bendet

Zac Posen

Roman Chiporukha and Erica Jackowitz

Alex DiMattia and Christine Shevchenko

Peter Spenuzza and Connie Spenuzza

Jordan Roth and Calvin Royal III

Hannah Bronfman, Rebecca Minkoff, Zara Tish and Isaac Boots

Gary Rein and Colleen Rein

Joe Hanson, Sabine Getty, Isiah Magsino and Alessia Fendi

Rowan Henchy, Mary Holland Nader, Rebecca Minkoff, Erica Jackowitz and Sarah Jane Nader

Ut supra, sic infra. As above, so below. This is the ethos of Zheng Chongbin’s design philosophy. Based in San Francisco’s Bay Area, Chongbin creates paintings by layering swaths of ink and paint upon one another, transforming canvases into topographic elements. He lets his canvases breathe; he lets them react naturally to the paint—his work is peeling, pitting, cracking, seeping into the canvas. His paintings bear likeness to natural formations from mountain peaks, riverbeds and fault lines to blood capillaries, skin matrices and synapses. They bear witness to the viewer as much as the viewer does to them. Chongbin furthermore embraces the entropic movements of the paint upon the canvas and, in doing so, instills his work with an interiority that, although invisible to the viewer, is instinctually felt by them.

Through his holistic practice spanning painting, light-and-space installation and digital media, Chongbin has graphed ecologies and vitality across his work, muddling our perception of sentience and life. In “Zheng Chongbin: Golden State,” his solo exhibition at LACMA, he casts his eye upon California’s expansive geography. Comprising the artist’s earlier works alongside newer offerings, the exhibition is a systematic symphony of image and composition that privileges experience and temporality over didactic interpretation.

“It’s an environment I’m dealing with. It’s a living thing,” Chongbin told Observer, explaining how his practice revolves around the unique, organic quality behind each subject. “My sensibility—in extension to [art]—is it feels like a part of your body… not in the traditional way, but the habitual way, in a way that you interact with your body extensions. And so you feel like dealing with and collaborating with living things… You’re not the protagonist. You are actually facilitating what happens.”

Born in Shanghai in 1961, Chongbin was brought up during China’s Cultural Revolution and thus trained in classical Chinese art forms, particularly within the ink tradition. In 1978, China’s Open Door Policy allowed an influx of Western ideas, materials and art forms that had previously been forbidden. Among these Western art traditions, Chongbin was most influenced by Abstract Expressionism, German Expressionism and the Light and Space movements, along with specific artists such as the visceral figuration of Francis Bacon, the conceptual installations of Robert Irwin and the sculptural forms of Larry Bell. 

These inspirations are easily perceptible in Chongbin’s work, which shares a visual kinship with modern Western art movements while maintaining dialogue with the ink traditions in which he was classically trained. In this vein, Chongbin intentionally grants his work its own psychology, allowing art to have its own internal world that extends beyond himself, the peripheries of art movements and the borders of countries, and instead arrives directly in front of the audience, whomever and wherever they are. His physical practice, of course, reflects this dynamic—his final pieces, regardless of medium, are often beset with texture and kineticism. They share a palpable lifeblood.

One of Chongbin’s few paintings to utilize color, Golden State (2024), with its bright yellow swaths of color, by strokes of black, gray and white, represents the intense sunlight of California, banded with belts of trees, rain fog, fire scars and earthquake fault lines. For this painting, Chongbin chose to paint on shrimp paper, a light material made from the bark of sandalwood, and in doing so gave Golden State a unique, breathable quality. Chongbin gives his materials agency, allowing the paint to crack and fissure as new layers are applied while still maintaining its bold presence and—in the case of Golden State—its brilliant color.

“It feels like ecologies,” Chongbin said, recalling the effect of the paint penetrating microfibers, coursing color through the paper’s delicate veins. “Everything [that goes] through is my skin… things not only happen on the top, but also happen in the middle of space [and] into the other side. It’s very much a living organism. The space changes and the surface becomes a space… You have this kind of indexical trace of the classic methodology of the work.”

Though, as noted, Chongbin rarely paints with color, his paintings are often in dialogue with one another, not only in form and context but in composition as well. Turbulence (2013) and Golden State are operational foils of one another. While Golden State primarily looks to the skies of California, reproducing its dappled sunlight through elements of nature, Turbulence looks to the earth; its bands of black paint, puddled by various ink blots, resemble mountain basins, rocky ridges, igneous extrusions and cooling magma. Both paintings, as well as most of Chongbin’s work, consider the spatial experience of the environment. Both are monumental pieces, climbing eight, nine or ten feet high, enveloping the viewer in the sublimity of their ecologies.

“I always explore… what’s happened on the surface [and] what’s happened underneath,” Chongbin said. “All of those bold lines are a cast of what’s happening underneath. The water is actually like rushing down through the themes, through the slope and goes underneath and pushes out. I want to instantiate nature rather than depicting it.”

Chongbin regaled us with stories of his adventures on hiking trails in the foothills of Marin County and wandering the steely beaches of Northern California. He saw “the dead things come alive.” His installation, Chimeric Landscape (2015), was inspired by one such encounter. Chongbin described looking at a sand dollar awash on the shore and seeing a multitude of lifeways. He remarked with wonder at the creature’s iridescence as it shimmered in the sunlight. He marveled at its respiration—its “millions of little lights flickering” as the sand dollar’s velvety matrix of pores undulated gently.

With Chimeric Landscape, he weaves short clips of water, ink, cell functions and other ephemera into Euclidean geometries that twine and break only to reform again. The installation celebrates the little breaths of life that these inanimate objects take while deconstructing their spatial differentiation. “The structure of Chimeric Landscape is obviously a non-linear narrative,” he explained. “The one visual dominance that we encounter is the ink flow, it’s used as the symbol of the water, but water is reflected in a lot of the formations and the emerging qualities that I think are essential elements for everything—our bodies and the earth.”

This natural essence echoes throughout the work in the LACMA show, invoking atmospheres that range from the monumental to the microscopic. Whether constructing a cosmos out of ephemera or a simulacrum out of geographies, Chongbin places equal emphasis—equal importance—on his art and his viewer. He collaborates with both material and mind, allowing one to inform the other, ensuring that what lies above reflects below.

“Zheng Chongbin: Golden State” is on view in LACMA through January 4, 2026.

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Summarizing Tavares Strachan’s art is difficult because the very thrust of his practice defies categorization. That complexity is, of course, by the artist’s design. In 2006, he embarked on an expedition to the Alaskan Arctic to excavate a 2.5-ton ice block and deliver it to his hometown elementary school for The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want. In 2018, Strachan collaborated with SpaceX to send ENOCH, a small gold urn—filled with sacred air blessed by a Shinto priest and engraved with the likeness of the first Black astronaut, Robert Henry Lawrence Jr.—into orbit. And in October 2025, under the stewardship of LACMA’s curator of special projects, Diana Nawi, and with support from the Hyundai Project, Strachan debuted his latest exhibition at the museum: “The Day Tomorrow Began,” which codifies the scientific, artistic, intellectual and civic achievements of the African diaspora into a wonderland of both practical and imagined realities. 

In a world governed by neat narratives, Strachan seeks to unravel and transgress every one. Born in Nassau in the Bahamas in 1979, Strachan has fostered a unique and dynamic practice that comprises a confluence of inspiration. Notwithstanding his projects’ marked ambition and theatricality, they tend to center on highlighting the magnitude of Black contributions. The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want brought attention to the little-known contributions of Matthew Henson, an African American explorer credited as the co-discoverer of the North Pole. Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. died in a plane crash before he was able to experience spaceflight. With ENOCH, Strachan not only honored Lawrence’s memory but expanded upon his legacy by symbolically launching him into space. 

“The Day Tomorrow Began,” which unfolds across seven galleries, follows a similar thread by uniting imagined histories, invisible realities and unwritten truths across a spectrum of craft and concept. “This exhibition is an opportunity for viewers to not only engage with the diversity of concepts and hybrid approaches that animate Tavares’s practice, but also to experience his attention to the craft of object-making and the importance of worldbuilding,” Nawi told Observer.

The first room of the show—the Encyclopedia Room—is a sprawling collage of print and pigment so vast that it becomes overwhelming at times. Occupying all four walls of the space is Strachan’s Six Thousand Years (2018), the unspooled knowledge of Strachan’s 2,000-page The Encyclopedia of Invisibility (walnut #3) (2018). A wink to the Encyclopedia Britannica, each panel is a single entry on a figure, place, event or narrative that Strachan considers obscured. Webbed over the panel are images illustrating the various entries—James Baldwin, Billie Holiday, the fiction of H.G. Wells, blueprints depicting everything from 747s to Ferris wheels, and much more. Profuse and unrelenting, the room serves as a lexicon on the content of Strachan’s work, a primer to his practice and an introduction to his art that is, by every measure, a multisensorial, multimedia and multidimensional experience.

In The Barbershop installation, focusing on the few pops of color in the space—presented in the form of ceramic jars and digital silkscreen posters advertising mid-century Black hair care products—is much simpler. Yet it is the Black elements, functionally melting into the all-black room, that truly frame the exhibit. Poised beside the mirror at each barbering station are bronze busts—two of which are flocked with hair—showcasing region-specific hair practices across the African continent. Correspondingly, large-scale paintings of flocked hair (Mind Field No. 5, Mind Field No. 3 and Mind Field No. 6) tabulate into concentric circles, invoking a celestial map. Adornment, especially of one’s hair, is a pillar of Black culture across the African diaspora and constitutes more than just identity but civics and politics. The barbershop is—especially in Strachan’s carefully crafted world—a brick-and-mortar manifestation of hair’s importance within the Black community. An open copy of the Los Angeles Times, draped casually on the chair of station no. 1, reinforces the space as one of symposium as well as fraternity.

The Monument Hall, visible through a niche in The Barbershop, houses Strachan’s latest sculpture series. In Praise of Midnight emphasizes the exhibition’s driving argument by literally flipping dominant history on its head. The central sculpture depicts the triumphant Henri Christophe, figurehead of the Haitian Revolution, atop an inverted Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1804, the very same year that Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of France, Christophe and the Haitian Revolution were successful in obtaining Haiti’s independence. The sculpture series satirizes the Western neoclassical monuments and statues that tend to fabricate ideal legends out of bloody shreds of history. Through In Praise of Midnight, Strachan venerates Black figures who have been overshadowed, working their relevance into a regal, practically divine depiction. One sculpture of Nina Simone atop Queen Victoria renders the High Priestess of Soul in British regalia, holding the Sovereign’s Scepter and Orb, while Queen Victoria holds a dragon fruit and a palm stalk. Notably, the fallen fruit at Queen Victoria’s feet—coconuts, bananas, pineapple, dragon fruit, papaya and mango—are native to the American tropics and Southeast Asia. They signify the artist’s acknowledgment that the wealth British colonialism extracted from these countries spanned far more than jewels, land and labor.

In the site-specific Rice Grass Meadow, where pads of rice grass curl into Ghanaian Adinkra symbols and the air is pleasantly fragrant, ceramic depictions of historically and culturally significant Black women open to the viewer. In one rice paddy, Rita Marley’s head blossoms from the bud of a dragon fruit; in another, we see Andrea Crabtree, the United States’ first Black female deep-sea diver. In Strachan’s majestic depiction of the aquanaut, she wears a Nefertiti-esque cap crown, with her gilded diving helmet balanced gracefully atop it.

Like The Barbershop, The Wash House, an all-gray room modeled after a laundromat outfitted with whirling washers and dryers, bleach and detergent bottles and a neon sign reading Some Loads Are Too Heavy to Carry Alone, represents a space Strachan visited often in his youth. The two monochrome rooms in “The Day Tomorrow Began” reflect one another in ritual and camaraderie, notwithstanding the overarching theme of historical whitewashing that appears most saliently in The Wash House. The labels on the disinfecting bleach bottles advertise that it “Kills 99.9% of truths, archives, and inconvenient voices.”

On occasion, costumed performers roam the exhibition: a Greek chorus to both silenced and imagined histories, animating each display through song and soliloquy. “Even monuments need laundering,” one performer proclaimed in The Wash House; “Washing is testimony, laundry is legacy,” declared another.

“The Day Tomorrow Began” is not only a testament to the lost, forgotten and outright effaced achievements of Black figures but a measure of one artist’s ability to retain and acknowledge these achievements, to construct an entire world in which they are the pinnacle and all else falls away. As is to be expected from a brief exhibition review, there are details we will leave out in hopes that the reader might one day wander the exhibition and appreciate these small marvels for themselves. Yet with “The Day Tomorrow Began,” there seems to be a surplus of spectacular details that should not go without recognition—like the Wall of Gemini, the wallpaper at the back of The Monument Hall, a cipher sprinkled with words such as “conductors,” “Black” and “history”; the negligible television monitors posted in the corners of every room displaying a single chess move; and the distinct Pine-Sol redolence of The Wash House. Even in a world Strachan rendered with such careful continuity and construction, it is those little finishing touches that some might consider invisible that are the most triumphant.

“The Day Tomorrow Began” is on view at LACMA through March 29, 2025. 

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When I visited Eamon Ore-Giron’s Talking Shit with Amaru, currently on display in “Grounded” at LACMA, I was struck by the painting’s congenial quality—the vibrant color palette, the bold shapes summoning the eye from one edge to the next. The composition borders on symmetry, though never fully embraces it, and the painting as a whole is animated by a certain verve and versatility. The negative space serves as a visual digestif, arranging itself around the striking motifs and the vivid colors, which open themselves to the viewer’s interpretation. As the title implies, Talking Shit with Amaru is a conversation, albeit a visual one.

The painting, which depicts the transdimensional hybrid creature of Andean mythology, is idiomatic of the Los Angeles-based artist’s half-abstract, half-representational style. In his Talking Shit series, Ore-Giron has conducted an ongoing conversation with the artistic legacy of the ancient Americas, embracing symbols and forms from ancient Andean and Incan textile, architecture, mosaic and ceramic practice. He especially favors the artistic technique of contour rivalry—a visual style rooted in the Chavín culture of the central Andes. Ore-Giron’s own style has cycled through various stages of figuration and abstraction, a process by which he has developed his visual language—one that engages the expectations of contemporary Western abstraction, while communing with the arcana of ancient American artistry.

“Depending on the heritage, a lot of abstraction lives side by side with the figure in the form,” Ore-Giron tells Observer. “Nature can provide some of the original forms in abstraction, like the pattern on a snake’s skin or the pattern on an insect.”

Disparate ecologies: Amaru at LACMA

Nature—and its impact—was a core theme of “Grounded,” which mapped perfectly onto Ore-Giron’s 2021 painting. “This idea of nature is not something external. It’s something internal,” he says when asked what excited him about the premise of the exhibition. “This piece, in particular, is internal in the sense that it’s a story that I carry with me—the gods that live here and still live here. Being ‘grounded,’ essentially, can actually be manifested in stories and in imagery and in a rekindling of a personal relationship to these deities.”

Ore-Giron’s work favors the viewer’s personal connection with its subject over impressing a precise intention on its form or meaning. As such, in Talking Shit with Amaru—which appears, at first, as a vivid constellation of shapes, colors and varied opacities—takes on different dimensions the longer the viewer regards it. A body forms out of the multicolored coordinate circles, talons bookend fluid lines, a tongue bolts down the width of the linen canvas. Fittingly, Amaru is a deity with the ability to transcend the boundaries of the aerial and terrestrial worlds, a celestial interloper. He explains that, having very few depictions of this particular creature, he mostly drew from Amaru’s mythographic descriptions. In his depiction of the god, Amaru is not an ancient deity but  one that rhymes with the conventions and culture of modern-day Latin America.

“There are so many different ways in which ancient history interfaces with modernity,” Ore-Giron explains, expressing his fascination with the ways in which ancient aesthetics and stories have survived into the modern day, and how our concept of modernity often informs our interpretation of the past. For example, the name “Amaru” carries vastly different implications in today’s Andean culture than it once did, eliciting notions of both divine power and individual identity. Among the Peruvian resistance fighters, “Túpac Amaru” was a name given to someone who fought against colonial powers. In Talking Shit with Amaru, Ore-Giron effects a portrayal that incorporates not only figure, but legacy.

“It’s interesting that these deities then can take on these names in a culture,” Ore-Giron continues. “Even as the culture model changes so much. It goes through so many different changes, [but] doesn’t stay fixed. It’s not static. The most fascinating thing is the ways in which these deities and these ideas and the visual language all around it are constantly being reinvented.”

Resistance, reinvention, repetition

This theme of reinvention and resistance is present in every fiber of Ore-Giron’s work, from the subject matter to his preference for painting on raw linen as opposed to pristine, gessoed canvas. (“There’s sometimes little blades of grass that are accidentally woven in the factory,” he says of the linen. “It’s very physical.”) A musician as well as a visual artist, his creative identities often intersect at the very same juncture of reinterpretation and cross-cultural exchange. He lived in Mexico City in the 1990s and found a wealth of inspiration from the city’s DJ culture, which often sampled and mixed Peruvian music. He was fascinated by the subculture’s decision to find its primary inspiration in another Latin American culture as opposed to a Western one. “Instead of being oriented towards the north, toward the United States or toward Europe,” he elaborates. “Their primary focus was the south and to look to the south for inspiration.”

Similarly, Ore-Giron synthesizes Latin American folk music such as Cumbia with the esoteric production techniques of artists such as MF DOOM. “I think it had a profound impact on the way that I approach visual language as well,” he says, “because it made me want to look deeper into the histories of visual language in Latin America. On a conceptual level, that’s where the music and the art really are working together.” As such, on Ore-Giron’s grounded linen canvases, where abstraction meets figuration, antiquity meets modernity and a visual rhythm that rings above all, strong and resonant.

Talking Shit with Amaru is on view in LACMA’s “Grounded” through June 21, 2026. James Cohan Gallery in Tribeca will show “Eamon Ore-Giron” from November 7 through December 20, 2025.

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On a recent balmy night, Dallas’s see-and-be-seen set gathered in the industrial-style kunsthalle that is Dallas Contemporary for the institution’s annual gala and benefit auction. Presented by Headington Companies and museum board president Ann McReynolds with John McReynolds, and organized by co-chairs Shayna Fontana Horowitz, Peter Augustus Owens and Robyn Siegel, the glamorous, art-fueled event raised over $1 million—a testament to the important place the DC holds in Dallas’ scene.

A series of Fontana Horowitz’s atmospheric still lifes projected on the walls greeted gala-goers, who fueled up on hors d’oeuvres and specialty cocktails before moving into the auction gallery to preview work by the evening’s auction artists: Chris Wolston, Ali Dipp, Katherine Bradford, Maria Haag, Willie Binnie and Xxavier Edward Carter. Spotted in the crowd were philanthropist and collector Grace Cook, artisan and entrepreneur Rachel Bently, luxury retail merchant Brian Bolke, collector and patron Marguerite Hoffman, artist Vicki Meek (former executive director of the Dallas Contemporary), The Power Station founders Alden and Janelle Pinnell, museum director Jeremy Strick and sundry gallerists and art lovers.

Fontana Horowitz’s final projection—a crystal bell—pulsed as chimes rang throughout the museum, signaling the start of dinner. Tables were set in “You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry,” DC’s spring 2025 exhibition guest curated by Su Wu, with centerpieces part-victual, part-bouquet: an artful collision of moss, sweetgrass, pomegranates and cherry tomatoes. Christina Forrer’s Untitled (on brown background), on loan from Hoffman’s collection, wafted above the crowd, complementing works by Mika Tajima, Marie Hazard and others on the walls.

Between bites of Sassetta’s black pepper Parmesan panna cotta and Joule’s Texas wagyu short rib, benefactors enjoyed a runway of students from Booker T. Washington School for the Performing Arts modeling original designs by Caroline Correa, Kathleen Cusick, Skylar O’Hara, Lily Wilkinson, Maude Williams, Emmanuel Gillespie and artist Sai Sankoh. At the dais, Dallas Contemporary executive director Lucia Simek thanked supporters, declaring that, “it’s the necessary collaboration” that makes each year’s gala “so meaningful.” Christian Vasquez screened a short film featuring Meek, Wu, Simek and publisher Deep Vellum’s Will Evans, among others. Capping off the evening was the live auction, led by Christie’s Brett Sherlock, who had the honor of announcing the Eugene McDermott Foundation’s gift of $100,000 to fund free museum admission through 2026. A surprise donation from painter Francisco Moreno (who will mount a solo exhibition at Dallas Contemporary in spring 2026) kept bidders on their toes.

As always, the gala spilled into the night with an afterparty hosted by soon-to-open hi-fi bar Shyboy. Friends of the museum danced to sets spun by New York DJ GE-OLOGY, alternating between sipping signature highballs and cooling off with soft serve ice cream on what was a near-perfect night.

Rod Sager, Ann McReynolds, Lucia Simek, Robyn Siegel and Shayna Fontana Horowitz

Mark Agnew and Emily Clarke

Michael Phelps and Ra Kazadi

Ann McReynolds

Jill Parker and Rod Sager

Rand Horowitz and Shayna Fontana Horowitz

Bryn Stringer

Rod Sager

Kelly Mason

Faisal Hallum, Ceron and Brian Bolke

Elizabeth Hooper O’Mahoney, Ashley Varel, Shayna Fontana Horowitz and Nadia Dabbakeh

Brad Owen, Peter Augustus Owen and Thomas Fuelmer

Alden Pinnell and Ben Slater

Sal Jafar and Christina Jafar

October is National Arts & Humanities Month, which launched thirty-plus years ago as National Arts Week to honor the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for the Arts. Yet perhaps not so ironically, given the state of the arts in the U.S.’s current political climate, this year’s October art fair calendar is heavy on the international fairs, with London hosting Frieze, Frieze Masters and 1-54, along with several others, and the much-anticipated return of Art Basel Paris. The handful of domestic fairs on the list includes the inaugural edition of Affordable Art Fair Boston, while in New York, the cancellation of the 2025 edition of ADAA The Art Show has left a void. Scene newcomer Echo Soho (founded by and for female-led galleries) is stepping up.

According to our reports from on the ground, American collectors were feeling optimistic at the September art fairs (particularly this year’s Armory Show, which had healthy early sales), and it will be interesting to see whether those same collectors make their way across the pond or take a breather before the upcoming edition of Art Basel Miami Beach and all its associated satellite fairs and shows. If your plans involve doing the former, Observer’s guide to this year’s October art fairs can help you put together the perfect itinerary.

Art Now Fine Art Fair 2025

October 2-5

The tenth edition of the Art Now Fine Art Fair is a one-of-a-kind event, hosted by SaskGalleries in the Canadian prairies of Regina, Saskatchewan. Highly local, it promises an accessible and enjoyable pageant of the nation’s emerging artists; the fair’s programming includes daily conversation with presenting artists, musical performances, live artist demonstrations, guided tours of the Dimensions 2025 craftwork exhibition and the Craft Is… Fine Craft Market, organized by event partner Saskatchewan Craft Council.

Art Jakarta 2025

October 3-5

Art Jakarta is a vibrant art fair with a priority on platforming work from Southeast Asian exhibitors. Under the leadership of fair director Tom Tandio, Art Jakarta has blossomed into an internationally-acclaimed forum for artistic exchange and cultural dialogue. The fair presents a diverse catalogue of 75 exhibitors, with a dedicated section called the “Scene” for the 33 participating artist collectives, studios and projects. Other exciting features include the Portrait of Possibilities, a new entry into the monumental self-portrait series of artist Agus Suwage, comprised of 60 painted zinc panel portraits, and Reserve for Care, an interactive installation by Azizi al Majid and Nuri Fatimah framed around the multisensory experience of sitting around a table.

art3f Luxembourg 2025

October 3-5

With a whopping twenty-one fairs in eighteen cities, the international contemporary art fair art3f comes to Luxembourg twice yearly, once in spring and once in October. The focus of the latter Luxembourg edition, this year at Luxexpo – THE BOX, is squarely on friendliness and accessibility (there’s even a special kids’ section). Tickets are just ten euros, the opening night preview is open to all, and there’s an emphasis on affordability that you don’t see at many other art fairs. It’s a great place for collectors to discover artists on the rise and to relax in the presence of beautiful things—live music and a fully stocked café round out the experience. As art3f puts it, “Because life goes on and optimism takes back its rights, because you have to be positive, drink, eat, have fun, marvel, art is an excellent remedy!”

ArtVilnius 2025

October 3-5

Hosted by the Lithuanian Art Gallerists’ Association at LITEXPO center in Vilnius, the sixteenth edition of ArtVilnius has eighty galleries and institutions participating, with over 320 artists from sixteen countries. The art fair focuses on Baltic creativity, with an emphasis on artistic practices, traditions and narratives from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Along with installation, sculpture and performance exhibitions, the event will host conversations featuring various perspectives on the implications of art collection locally, internationally and historically. ArtVilnius is also family-friendly and hosts several creative workshops ranging from tutorials on postage stamp creation to lessons in trinket collection and cataloging.

Affordable Art Fair Amsterdam 2025

October 8-12

The Affordable Art Fair Amsterdam will return to De Kromhouthal for its 19th edition with the provocative theme Nature and Connection. The fair will showcase over 1,000 works from 68 galleries exploring humanity’s relationship with the natural world, exploring nature as inspiration, subject, and occasionally, medium. The fair’s campaign artist, Koz Dos, will present his interpretation of the theme with both his featured Led Zeppelin-inspired painting, When the levee breaks, and a live painting demonstration. The Discover Programme spotlights Netherlands-based artists, Anne ten Donkelaar, Ben Rikken and Tarja Laine, while the Interactive Studio invites guests of all ages to contribute their plant to the collaborative mural. And as always, the pricing of artwork is accessible, with a new feature of eight galleries dedicated entirely to work under 750 euros.

The Other Art Fair London 2025

October 9-12

The Other Art Fair empowers both emerging artists and new collectors by lowering the barriers to entry into the contemporary art world for both. Presented by Saatchi Art, the Other Art Fair will return in East London’s The Truman Brewery with its largest edition to date, showcasing works brought by 175 artists alongside interactive installations, workshops, and a fully outfitted tasting room. Returning to the event is the Price Point Curated Hang where all works displayed are available for 300 euros and under. The fair is curious, yet charming—with a mini print vending machine stocked with the blithe illustrations of Hollie Fuller, an on-site S l o w l y tattoo studio pop-up booth, staffed by tattoo artists, Suki and Molly G and opening night life drawing workshops of the East London Strippers Collective—the event promises to be a fun, high-octane and, above all, an affordable experience.

ARTMUC 2025

October 10-12

Founded on principles of international diversity, artistic freedom, and subjective interpretation, the 2025 autumn edition of ARTMUC is slated to be the most ambitious year of the art fair’s twelve-year standing. With over 180 exhibitors, galleries and international projects from Europe, South America, India, Taiwan and Thailand, ARTMUC has declared this year’s roster the most diverse in its history. Highlighted exhibitions include the soft-sculpture, flying installation, Under Butterfly Wings, by Thai artist Rungploy Lorpaitoon, and the Indian start-up NALOM’s collection of silk scarves celebrating the extinct and endangered folk art forms of India’s remote villages. The event is priced at 17 euros for day tickets, and 18 euros for access to the full duration of the event, with free admission for wheelchair users and children under the age of 16.

Minor Attractions 2025

October 14-18

Boutique art fair Minor Attractions returns to The Mandrake in London mid-month for its third edition. This year’s roster of participants is twice as big as last year’s, with 70 galleries from across Europe, Mexico City, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto and Los Angeles mounting displays in the hotel’s rooms and public spaces. Beyond gallery presentations, the fair has a nightly program featuring music, film, conversation, book launches and performance that serves as a platform for emerging voices.

PAD London 2025

October 14-19

PAD London is slated to return for its seventeenth edition in mid-October with an evolved selection, but familiar intent on 20th-century design, art, photography and jewelry. This year, sixty-seven galleries from approximately twenty countries will be participating, eleven of which will be joining for the first time. Among the exhibitors are Christian and Yasmin Hemmerle, fourth-generation family jewelers renowned for their innovative works, Bryan O’Sullivan, who designs a range of pieces fitting both classical and contemporary proportions and Adrian Sassoon, the U.K.’s leading gallery for international contemporary sculptural art and design. The preamble of the 2025 PAD catalogue asserts that, at the fair, “the eye is constantly alert, the mind on the ball… taste for historical and contemporary Design is not only revealed but constructed.”

Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2025

October 15-19

Frieze and Frieze Masters, the reigning headliners of London’s Frieze Week, will take to London’s iconic Regent’s Park for their 2025 edition, showcasing work from more than 280 galleries from 45 countries. At the foreground are leading local and international galleries that help to mold the dialogue around both contemporary and historical art, including London’s own Modern Art, Seventeen and The Sunday Painter. Returning to the Frieze London is the Artist-to-Artist section, spotlighting six solo presentations nominated by prolific and respected artists such as Camille Henrot, Nicole Eisenman and Abraham Cruzvillegas. Across the row, Frieze Masters will introduce a new and exciting line-up for the third iteration of its Studio section, curated by chair emerita of modern and contemporary art at The Met, Sheena Wagstaff, alongside Margrethe Troensegaard. Exploring the studio as a unique space of both culture and creation, Studio features solo presentations from Dorothy Cross, Anju Dodiya, Samia Halaby, R. H. Quaytman, Anne Rothenstein and Glenn Brown.

1-54 London 2025

October 16-19

1-54 returns this year to London’s Somerset House for its 13th edition. Founded by Touria El Glaoui, it remains the first and only international fair dedicated to African and diasporic contemporary art. Alongside artist talks and panel discussions with both emerging and established voices in the art world, 1-54 will also feature a curated Caribbean Spotlight. Of the over 50 exhibitors from 13 countries, most participants come from Africa or wider diaspora, including 193 Gallery, 50 Golborne x Project Loop and Affinity Gallery. Among various special projects and installations is Mónica de Miranda’s remarkable Earthworks installation, nested in the courtyard of Somerset House—the work utilizes stage-sculptures, vertical gardens and public space to depict an imagined terrestrial community where human and non-human life blends into one.

Echo Soho 2025

October 16-19

Founded by gallerist and art fair veteran India Rose James, the inaugural edition of Echo Soho is set to take place at the Mannette Street Artists’ House of London, offering a platform to underrepresented artists and highlighting female-led galleries. Launched as a satellite art fair of the Soho Revue, Echo Soho presents a bold and accessible alternative to the traditional art fair. Timed to coincide with Frieze Week, the fair’s highlights include performances, workshops, a special preview courtesy of the Contemporary Art Society and an AWITA-curated chapel presentation. This year’s roster of participating galleries includes Alice Black, Alice Amati, AWITA, Berntson Bhattacharjee, Gillian Jason Gallery, House of Bandits, LAMB, Liminal Gallery, Lizzie Glendinning, Pipeline, Wilder and Wondering People. Don’t miss the site-specific chapel installation by Alicja Biala with Berntson Bhattacharjee.

FOCUS Art Fair London 2025

October 16-19

For its landmark fourth edition, FOCUS  art fair will unite 42 exhibitors in London’s SAATCHI GALLERY, honing in on its foundational dedication to Asian contemporary art with a bold, transformative program. Founded in 2017 by Paris art agency HongLee Curator, FOCUS was envisioned as an interface between the physical and digital art worlds, and is one step closer to achieving this vision by availing the advanced display technology of collaborative partner, LG Electronics. In addition to exciting showcases from exhibitors such as Gore Gallery, presenting a solo show of Oliver Mourão, East Atelier Gallery Seoul and Jay Chung Gallery, there will be exhibitions from Michelin-starred Chef Kiran Kim (colloquially known as “Chef KiKi”). Kim will present her “Art on Table” performance, which melds the experience of fine art and fine dining.

Art Market Budapest 2025

October 16-19

Art Market Budapest is Central and Eastern Europe’s leading international art fair. Since its founding in 2011, it has featured exhibitors from over 40 countries with innovative and inspiring exhibitions, performances, discussions and concerts. Art Market Budapest also has a satellite fair, Art Photo Budapest, dedicated entirely to photography—the only fair of its kind in Central and Eastern Europe.

Parallax Art Fair 2025

October 18-19

Born from a provocative 2010 research exhibition in London, Parallax Art Fair has since grown into the largest indie art and design fair in Europe. With the foundational philosophy on the equality of all artists and artworks, Parallax Art Fair primarily exhibits independent artists and designers, rejecting the conventional dealer-artist dynamic that many fairs are predicated on. Instead, Parallax Art Fair keeps exhibitor space prices and break-even points low, and offers free entry to visitors. With over 10,000 works of art and design on display, Parallax Art Fair is both experimental and accessible.

OFFSCREEN 2025

October 21-26

Returning for its fourth edition to the exquisite 17th-century baroque La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, OFFSCREEN offers visitors a refreshingly active art fair experience. It features a selection of avant-garde, historical and contemporary exhibitors, underscoring installations and experimentation with the still or moving image. Programming highlights include an exhibit on the video art and sculpture of Shigeko Kubota, and showcases from 28 participants, including Maria Brunner, Laurent Lafolie and Gisela Capitain.

Affordable Art Fair Boston 2025

October 23-26

After hosting events in cities such as London, Sydney, Stockholm and Amsterdam, Affordable Art Fair is making its Boston debut in the city’s cosmopolitan South End. As this fair’s name implies, Affordable Art Fair prides itself on offering visitors an array of art priced $12,000 and under, with various monthly payment plans available. Showcasing work from both emerging and established exhibitors, workshops, interactive artist performances, kid-friendly activities, food, live music and talks, the Boston edition of Affordable Art Fair will be an eclectic yet intentional “creative smorgasbord.”

Art Toronto 2025

October 23-26

Art Toronto, Canada’s largest international art fair, is returning to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre for its 26th edition with an expansive new program and a diverse roster of exhibitors. With more than 100 galleries participating, there are presenting galleries from nearly every continent, including cities across Canada, the Americas, Europe, Australia, Asia, and elsewhere. This year’s Focus Exhibition, curated by Dr. Zoé Whitley, explores the versatility of Canadian artistic practice and creative thinking, while the Discover section distinguishes a selection of gallery presentations on exceptional solo artists, including Jermay Michael Gabriel (Black Artists’ Networks In Dialogue (BAND) Gallery), Greg A. Hill (Central Art Garage) and Aline Setton (DURAN CONTEMPORAIN). Capping it all off is a new section curated by Karen Huber, Arte Sur, dedicated to the vibrant and vivid artistry of Central and South America.

Art Salon Zurich 2025

October 23-26

The founders of Art Salon Zurich, Fabian J. Walter and Sven Eisenhut, envisioned the galleries, dealers, and artists when designing the city’s newest art fair, and this ethos is clearly communicated through the fair’s fourth edition, with 40 local and international participating galleries present diverse and current works, including those by Swiss artists such as Carlos Leal and Hanna Roeckle. A first for the Art Salon Zurich, the Zilkens Best Booth Award will be presented, recognizing the outstanding curatorial approach and design execution of the winning booth. Two of the anticipated special projects are Galerie Bildhalle’s tribute to the Swiss photography pioneer, René Groebli, and the Jasmin Glaab Gallery’s exhibition, “Female Artists,” on the works of important and underrecognized contemporary artists.

Art Basel Paris 2025

October 24-26

The majestic Grand Palais, nestled on the banks of the Seine overlooking the Champs-Élysées, only further reinforces Art Basel Paris’s critical dialogue with the city’s art history. This year’s program is a celebration of the city’s prolific avant-garde movements, past and present, with 206 leading galleries participating, a variety of panels, performances and a Public Program spanning nine monumental venues across the city. Some highlights of the Public Program include the presentation by Miu Miu at the Palais d’léna, British artist Helen Marten’s 30 Blizzards, a fascinating blend of sculpture, video and libretto performance, and Alex Da Corte’s inflatable sculpture Kermit the Frog, presented by Sadie Coles HQ.

AKAA 2025

October 24-26

The Also Known as Africa art fair, or AKAA, will take place in the Carreau du Temple for its 10th edition. The fair’s mission in highlighting the diverse and thoughtful expression of African and diasporic art is paid forward with 41 participating galleries, spanning countries across Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Caribbean. Headed by new artistic director Sitor Senghor, who has both a personal and familial history in uplifting African art, the fair will feature a monumental installation by Serge Mouangue in the central aisle of the venue. Presented by Tokyo gallery, gallery space Un, Mouangue’s The Third Aesthetic invites audiences to stop and behold its “sculptural staging imbued with collective memory,” thus making the audience collaborate in the piece’s dialogue around materiality, spirituality, and self.

Menart Fair 2025

October 25-27

Now officially part of Paris Art Week, Menart returns this year for its sixth edition with work reflecting this year’s theme, softness, which looks at the balance between vulnerability and power. The only international art fair in Europe dedicated to modern and contemporary art from the MENA region (the Middle East and North Africa), it will bring 30 galleries from a dozen countries to Galerie Joseph for discovery and meaningful exchange between institutions, art lovers, galleries and artists. Work on view will highlight the strength and power that is often present in softness and how it manifests in different contexts.

Even more October art fairs in 2025

As always, what’s above doesn’t represent the totality of the October art fair calendar in 2025—there are always plenty of smaller, lesser-known and niche art fairs happening around the world. Here’s a quick roundup of several more fall art fairs you might want to check out this month.

Affordable Art Fair Stockholm 2025

October 1-5

art3f Haute-Savoie 2025

October 10-12

Upstairs Art Fair 2025 (Paris)

October 22-24

Paris Internationale 2025

October 22-26

FUZE Caribbean Art Fair 2025

October 22-26

art3f Barcelona 2025

October 24-26

Lausanne Art Fair 2025

October 30 – November 2

ARTISSIMA 2025 (Turin)

October 31 – November 2