Why the hands in Berthe Morisot's The Cradle are groundbreaking

'As an artist, I want to tell my story of the times – what I've lived through'

Frank Prentice on the night he never forgot

Artist Faith Ringgold, whose seven-decade career encompassed bestselling children’s books, incisive activism, and work in an astonishing array of mediums, and culminated with the kind of mass international acclaim that was long denied to Black visual artists and women artists like her, died on Saturday at her home in Englewood, New Jersey. She was 93.

Her death was announced by her longtime New York representative, ACA Galleries, which did not specify a cause.

Just one aspect of Ringgold’s remarkable life would have been enough to secure her place in history, but it was her action-packed, richly detailed painted quilts for which she was best known. Her most famous was Tar Beach (1988), which tells the story of an 8-year-old girl, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, who flies from the roof of her Manhattan apartment building into the night sky. In 1991, it was adapted into a children’s book that has become a staple of elementary school classrooms in the United States.

Ringgold made fabric part of her practice after seeing Tibetan thangkas at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, but quilting had deep roots in her family. Her great-great-great-grandmother, who was enslaved in the South, quilted, she said. Her mother, Willie Posey Jones, a fashion designer, helped her sew early on, and Ringgold would go on to use the process to chart her travels, her love of art history, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and a great deal more.

With mordant humor and a joyful flare for invention, Ringgold also made vivid dolls and unforgettable political posters, staged performances, and wrote. We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold was published in 1995.

Every other year, the art world flocks to Italy for the Venice Biennale, the world’s grandest and most esteemed recurring art exhibition.

Many are coming with the top priority of seeing the main exhibition, which, in 2024, will be curated by Adriano Pedrosa, the first Latin American to have received the honor. But just as many are there for the national pavilions, which are not officially related to the main show but coincide with it.

As usual, there will be firsts, with Benin among those making its Venice Biennale debut this year. Yet other countries who typically participate won’t be there this time for a variety of reasons.

Russia, which is still embroiled in its war with Ukraine, won’t show at the Biennale for the second edition in a row. New Zealand and Scotland scuttled their plans to mount pavilions, citing problems associated with financing their exhibitions. Morocco, which was set to exhibit at the Venice Biennale for the first time ever, bowed out at the last minute; the reasons for the decision remain opaque.

Meanwhile, a storm of controversy has centered around the pavilion for Israel, which will go forward with its show. Amid military action in Gaza that has killed more than 30,000 people sparked by the October 7 Hamas attack, thousands of artists, including some showing in the main exhibition, called on the Biennale to ban Israel from participating. The Biennale declined to do so.

Ignacy Czwartos, the artist originally selected to represent Poland at the 2024 edition of the Venice Biennale, later dropped from the plan after the new government dissented from the show, will now mount an independent exhibition titled “Polonia Uncensored” in Venice this month.

The show will open on April 20 at a private space in the Viale IV Novembre, located close by to the Giardini site where Poland’s national pavilion is being held.

The move comes after his initial presentation, which was to encompass 35 paintings, was rejected after an election in October removed officials from Poland’s far-right Law and Justice party (PiS), who approved the original pavilion. The conservative party, whose members align themselves with nationalist politics, reigned in the country since 2015 until the fall of last year.

The pavilion’s initial plan drew widespread criticism for featuring imagery that imagined Poland as having been historically oppressed by Germany and Russia during the 20th century. Poland’s newly-instated culture minister, Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz, halted the project at the end of December.

Replacing Czwartos to represent the national pavilion is Open Group, a Ukrainian artist collective founded in 2012 that includes Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga.

Expo Chicago has returned to Navy Pier, offering its fairgoers more of what it’s known for: a decidedly relaxed vibe (at least compared to its coastal counterparts), an unparalleled focus on regional operations, and wide-ranging art willing to take on American politics.

This is the first edition of Expo under the leadership of Frieze, which acquired the event alongside the Armory Show in 2023. Tony Karman, EXPO director, told ARTnews that new management has only led to further improvements. The fair has a fresh layout and its special sections—Exposure, In/Situ, and Profile—have been better integrated into the main exhibition. 

Some 170 galleries have gathered for this year, including first-time participants Labor (Mexico) and Hannah Traore Gallery (New York), along with blue chip enterprises from beyond the Windy City, like Galeria Nara Roesler and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Chicago, of course, is well represented by homegrown operations such as Document, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, and Corbett vs. Dempsey. Among the notable returning enterprises are Perrotin, Mariane Ibrahim, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, and Harper’s.

Below, a look at the best on offer during the 2024 edition of Expo Chicago, which runs through Sunday.

The Australian fintech start-up Art Money has announced a new partnership that will extend its interest-free loans that can be repaid in up to ten installments, to auctions at Christie’s.

The partnership will officially launch with the Christie’s Prints and Multiples auction in New York on April 16. According to a spokesperson, Art Money can be used for works up to $1 million. 

In order to take advantage of the initiative, collectors must first be approved by Art Money, which involves choosing an amount of credit followed by a soft credit check. Once approved, a winning bidder uploads their invoice from Christie’s to Art Money and accepts the purchase offer. Then the auction house and consigner get paid, the work gets delivered, and the installment payments begin. 

Art Money makes money by charging a flat monthly fee of up to 10% of the final cost of the work for its services, which is spread over the monthly payments. That means a collector who’s successfully bid on a $10,000 work would pay $11,000 for total, $1,100 over ten months. (That final price would include all auction house fees and buyer’s premium.)

Art Money was founded in 2014 and then launched in the US in 2016 during Expo Chicago. By the end of that year it had partnered with the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair in Miami. According to Art Money’s website they currently have more than 2,000 partners, include boutique and mainstream galleries including Anat Ebgi, Various Small Fires, The Hole, and Galerie Lelong. 

More artists should keep diaries. While they can be deliciously revelatory, their pleasure mostly lies in the liberated quality of the writing. When writers keep diaries, the activity is freighted: this, after all, is their art form. Artists have a tendency to be less inhibited. Andy Warhol, for example, famously wrote down everything that happened to him; his diaries sometimes read like the society pages. Other artists record in painstaking detail the challenges—mental, emotional, physical—involved in the creative act. The diaries of sculptor Donna Dennis, set to be published later this month by Bamberger Books, fit this last category.

The diaries, Writing Toward Dawn: Selected Journals 1969-1982, come just as Dennis’s work is getting long overdue recognition. “Houses and Hotels,” a show of five major works, dating from 1967 to 1994, is currently on view at downtown New York’s O’Flahertys gallery; there are other presentations of Dennis’s work to follow elsewhere this year.

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

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

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

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

With the May evening sales in New York fast approaching, Christie’s has announced that Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 work The Italian Version of Popeye Has no Pork in His Diet will be among the highlights of its 21st century evening sale.

The work, which is estimated to achieve around $30 million, is part of a series of works featuring tied-together wooden supports, onto which a canvas has been mounted. Nearly every inch of the 60-inch square canvas is peppered with figures, numbers, shapes, and crossed-out words. There are three of Basquiat’s distinctive crowns, as well as references to sports, comic books, and, in the form of a skullcap-less head and a severed foot, the human anatomy.

“This 1982 painting shows Basquiat at his absolute best—deftly mixing symbols, text and portraiture,” said Alex Rotter, Christie’s chairman of 20th and 21st century art. “The composition is frenzied and plentiful, drawing inspiration from so many of his iconic influences through history, sports and contemporary media. You could enjoy a lifetime untangling everything here.”

Both Sotheby’s and Phillips also have expensive Basquiats in their May sales, a testament to how strong the artist’s brand remains even in a market that is considerably weaker than in recent years.

At Sotheby’s, an untitled Basquiat-Warhol collaboration from 1984 that starred in the Fondation Louis Vuitton show last year is expected to sell for around $18 million.

If you recognize every image that Arthur Jafa has appropriated for his art in the past, you are in need of a digital detox.

Some of Jafa’s pictures are famous: readily available stills from notable films, glamour shots of pop stars, photographs of ugly moments from American history that have appeared in textbooks. But many more of his images are considerably less well-known: the various Instagram Reels and YouTube clips, for example, that Jafa has pilfered from the internet and re-presented for gallery viewers in a string of acclaimed videos, most notably 2016’s Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, his famed elegy for the tenuousness of Black life that crams more than 100 pieces of footage into less than 8 minutes.

Tracking down the source for all this imagery is a pointless exercise—Jafa’s intent, it often seems, is to let all his pictures run free, reveling in the friction that results from when they rub up against one another, shorn of their initial context, as they might be on social media feeds. Which makes it a surprise that, for his latest video, he has lifted a very recognizable sequence from a very famous movie: the brothel massacre that concludes Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, a character study about Travis Bickle, a lonely cabbie who tries to find his place in New York City through vigilantism. (While the film hasn’t been a core reference to Jafa previously, two years ago, he spoke approvingly of a 1999 Douglas Gordon video that appropriates and modulates a different Taxi Driver scene.)

Travis’s bloody bid for attention is seen, over and over, in Jafa’s 73-minute ***** (2024), which presents the sequence half a dozen or so times. But the video, which recently debuted at Gladstone Gallery in New York, contains a twist: everyone Travis murders is now Black, not white. In a particularly strange gesture, the cops who arrive too late are also now Black.

The fascinating concept is rooted in the film’s mythology. Screenwriter Paul Schrader had initially written Sport, the pimp in control of the film’s bordello, as a Black man. But, according to critic Amy Taubin, Schrader and Scorsese ended up whitening Sport, fearing protests during screenings of Taxi Driver. Now, Jafa has undone that editorial decision, subbing out Harvey Keitel’s Sport for one energetically played by actor Jerrel O’Neal, who has been seamlessly integrated into Scorsese’s original footage by Jafa, a cinematographer by training.

Several museums in the UK have admitted that hundreds of items from their collections have been lost, stolen, or destroyed over the past five years, highlighting a sector-wide issue after the British Museum thefts scandal last year.

Institutions including the Imperial War Museum, the National Museum of Scotland, and the Natural History Museum reported a variety of missing historic items. The information was released in response to Freedom of Information requests filed by The Independent, which first reported the news earlier this week.

Between 2018 and 2023, the Imperial War museum recorded 539 items as lost and one item as stolen. For the same period, the Natural History Museum reported 12 items from its collection had gone missing, while the National Museum of Scotland reported six items lost, one item stolen, and another destroyed in a fire.

The Independent reported that among the missing items from the Natural History Museum are mammal teeth over 65 million years old from the Mesozoic Era, as well as a stomach stone known as a gastrolith from its Dinosaur Gallery assumed to have been stolen. A spokesperson for the Natural History Museum told the Independent that security of its collection was a serious issue, which totaled more than 80 million items, many of them small ecological specimens such as teeth, fish, and frozen animal tissue.

Another item likely stolen from public display in 2022 was a telephone handset from the Havilland Comet 4C at the National Museum of Scotland. The plane was the world’s first commercial passenger jet aircraft, making its first commercial journey in 1952 and officially retired in 1997.

Pace Gallery will globally represent the Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, a company dedicated to managing the Pop artist’s art and legacy. Pace announced the news on Friday, just days before an Indiana show is set to open in Venice around the same time as the Biennale.

The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative bills itself as the primary organization responsible for maintaining Indiana’s art and archives. It was formed by dealer Simon Salama-Caro in 2022, not long after the estate settled a complex and long-running legal conflict over Indiana’s legacy.

“This is the start of an exciting next phase of Robert Indiana’s illustrious legacy,” Salama-Caro said in an email to ARTnews. “For Bob’s work to be globally represented by Pace Gallery provides wondrous opportunities for a distinctly American artist to be further introduced to new audiences around the world, where his art can continue to influence and inspire artists and creatives for years to come.”

Indiana remains famous for his bold use of numbers and letters in sculptures, paintings, and prints. His iconic 1964 LOVE image, for example, has appeared as sculptures, prints, and more, and is widely known.

After hitting it big in New York alongside the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Indiana left for the remote island Vinalhaven, off the coast of Maine, in 1978. Unlike his Pop colleagues, Indiana had a rough time in New York and wasn’t receiving big retrospectives. His luck changed in the 1990s, however, when Salama-Caro began representing him. Indiana sold the rights to LOVE to the Morgan Art Foundation, providing him with a financial lifeline. In the meantime, Salama-Caro helped get Indiana’s work into major museums and galleries.

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