How an ancient symbol continues to stand for simplicity and national identity

The Independent art fair’s “no booth” layout, where there are few walls and visitors can mingle freely, has itself garnered a reputation among dealers. It’s not hard to see why. At the opening of the fair, which runs through May 14 at Tribeca’s Spring Studios, emerging and mid-size galleries showed off their wares as healthy crowds of people moved about, creating a more intimate vibe than is typical at most art fairs.

In the early hours of the opening on Thursday, disgraced art dealer Mary Boone and journalist Anderson Cooper were among the attendees. Cooper stopped by London-based dealer Niru Ratnam’s booth to view works by painter Kimathi Donkor. Meanwhile, New York dealer Nicola Vassell told ARTnews that there had already been several museums vying to buy works by Elizabeth Schwaiger on view in her booth.

As with previous editions, Elizabeth Dee, the fair’s founder and director, said, “Every year we kind of grow this audience exponentially.” According to Dee, the fair expected around 2,000 VIP attendees to attend Thursday morning. “We really choreograph that first three hours carefully,” she said, explaining that giving collectors and dealers the time to have discussions in those opening hours is key.

Twenty-three of the 70-plus participating galleries were staging debut presentations for their artists. Dee told ARTnews that introducing new talent was a focus: “This should be a place that almost mimics a whole day in New York going to galleries.”

Below, a look at the standout showcases.

The New York edition of the European Fine Art Fair, or TEFAF, has returned to the Park Avenue Armory with its grab-bag of antiquities, historic and cutting-edge design, jewels, and modern and contemporary art. The flagship edition in Maastricht is a fusty affair known for its offerings of Old Masters, while the New York version is a feast of exciting juxtapositions—or a long-simmering identity crisis, depending on your perspective. 

Some 91 galleries are participating in the fair’s 2023 edition, which fills the Park Avenue Armory through May 16. The blue-chip presenters include David Zwirner, Pace, Gladstone Gallery, Gallery Hyundai, Mnuchin Gallery, and Thaddaeus Ropac. Jump scare warning: Gagosian, located immediately inside the Armory’s great hall, brought a blown-up image from Jeff Koons’ smug “Made in Heaven” series, in which the nude artist is entwined with his former wife, the porn star La Cicciolina.

TEFAF New York lacks the dedicated irreverence of Spring/Break or the focus of Independent, which has curated an admirably inclusive show downtown. Accordingly, the fair is best approached piece by piece. Thankfully, many pieces for sale are exquisite.

Keep an eye out for David Zwirner’s solo presentation of Joseph Albers, which spotlights his seminal series “Variant/Adobe,” started in 1947. A standout is the painting Browns, Ochre, Yellow (1948). Mayor Gallery is reintroducing the singular geometric compositions of Verena Loewensberg (1912–1986), a dancer, weaver, designer, and impressive color theorist based for most of her life in Zurich. Meanwhile, Demisch Danant has brought elegant wall textiles by Sheila Hicks and an eye-catching crimson lacquer console by Maria Pergay.

Below are our picks of the best booths TEFAF New York 2023 has to offer.

Columbus, Georgia, a small college town south of Atlanta, is an unlikely place to meet the glamorous actress and painter Kate Capshaw, considered cinema royalty for her marriage to director-extraordinaire Steven Spielberg. But Capshaw is not in Georgia to talk about Hollywood. She’s there to discuss Unaccompanied, her new exhibition at Columbus State University’s Bo Bartlett Center. 

The exhibition is comprised of portraits and life-sized busts of homeless children and adolescents that live on the margins in Los Angeles, Chicago, Fargo, Minneapolis, San Francisco, St. Louis, and New York.

Approximately 4.2 million children experience homelessness in the US each year, around 700,000 of which are unaccompanied minors, according to the bipartisan policy research center National Conference of State Legislatures. The exhibition’s title comes from the official government name for those minors and young adults: unaccompanied youth.

Capshaw met her subjects primarily throuh youth development organizations like The Door in New York and The Night Ministry in Chicago. Many bounce around foster homes and avoid being out in daylight. Those that do venture out during the day often pass unnoticed or, more likely, ignored.

Capshaw’s works then are an act of noticing, of registering these forgotten children as worthy of depiction. In each of the paintings, typically, a young boy or girl gazes directly at the viewer or slightly to the size. Behind them is a great mass of dark, near-black negative space, as if they are  stepping out of a shadowy place, but haven’t decided if they are able to move all the way forward, to be completely seen. Towards the bottom of the frame, their clothes slowly fade away. Not into the void behind them but into runny drips of fading color. T-shirts disintegrate and melt into their logos. Patterns dissolve into clothes and hair. 

At its annual gala on Thursday evening, the Queens Museum honored two of its board members, artist Sable Elyse Smith and designer Angelo Baque.

The evening’s festivities opened with a cocktail hour that was organized by digital producer Jaeki Cho of Righteous Eats that brought together tastings from five different Queens-based restaurants, all set against the iconic Unisphere in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, just outside the Queens Museum, in addition to the institution’s two current solo shows for Aliza Nisenbaum and Tracey Rose.

During dinner, the evening’s program began with remarks from Lauri Cumbo, the current commissioner of cultural affairs for New York City, and the museum’s director Sally Tallant, followed by a performance by Nick Hakim. That led into the honoree presentation.

“It’s beautiful and poetic to receive this honor from the Queens Museum,” Smith said during her remarks. “I just want to sincerely thank the Queens Museum for this honor, which is a way of the recognize and to recognize they must see. And what a surprise it’s been that the Queens Museum has seen me in many ways, over and over again.”

Smith added that being honored meant a lot to her, “especially as someone who grew up being told that they would never amount to anything by teachers and educators. … Because personally, I was never shaken by others’ sheer and utter racism. I’ve always known the expanse of the world was greater than anyone’s words.”

The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in Sydney announced Friday that it would return an intricately carved temple strut, or tunala, depicting a Hindu goddess to Nepal.

The strut, looted from the 13th-century Ratneshwar temple in Lalitpur, a city southeast of Kathmandu, will be returned in a ceremony attended by Australia’s assistant foreign minister, Tim Watts, at the Patan Museum in Kathmandu on Tuesday, the Sydney Morning Herald reported Friday.

“This is a significant gesture in line with Australia’s commitment to the highest standards of ethical practice and international obligations,” Watts told ABC News Australia. “The return of this tunala to Nepal will further strengthen our bilateral relationship.”

The strut is carved in the form of a tree god known as a shalabhanjika or yakshi and was one of six such struts stolen in 1975 from the shrine. It is thought to have been stolen after Mary Shepherd Slusser, a scholar of architectural studies and Nepalese cultural-history, identified the woodwork at the temple in Lalitpur, during which she photographed the pieces. Shortly after her visit, the ornate woodwork pieces went missing.

Thousands of important artifacts were stolen and illegally smuggled out of Nepal during the 1980s, and, in recent years, there have been extensive grassroots campaigns to see those artifacts, many of which now reside in major museums, returned to the country. The Ratneshwar temple strut became a target for those campaigns in 2021, when Nepali scholars identified it on social media.

A man with a metal detector uncovered a trove of 2,000 year old artifacts while explore a pasture in Llantrisant Fawr, Wales, in March 2019. The National Museum Wales announced the news in a release with McClatchy News late last month.

When metal detectorist Jon Matthews realized he had accidentally found a collection of buried treasure, he contacted local archaeological authorities who further excavated the site. Adelle Bricking, an archaeologist who worked on the excavation, explained the process on Twitter.

The team determined the eight finds, including two that were completely intact, dated back to the Iron Age and were likely buried around the time of Roman conquest during the second half of the first century CE.

One such object includes a metal bowl handle in the shape of an ox head with bowed horns and a jaw that extends into a handle loop.

Along with an ancient Roman saucepan and a broken handle, the team also found two wooden barrel fragments, an Iron Age bucket with copper alloy fittings, and an Iron Age copper alloy cauldron and strainer. A pair of metal bucket mounts also uncovered at the site have an abstract black and orange design.

Artists, we are so often told, help us see the world differently. In the case of Claude Monet (1840–1926), this is literally true. Famously, 100 years ago, the French painter underwent surgery to “correct” the cataracts that had been increasingly blurring his vision for a decade or two. After the surgery, though his vision sharpened, colors continued to appear dull and cool.

You can see this in the canvases he made as he neared that surgery and post-op. Viewing a painting like The Japanese Bridge (Pont japonais), ca. 1918–24,one assumes that the vibrant chartreuse and heavy dabs of crimson must have looked slightly more naturalistic to the artist—they are so unusual, so different from his earlier, iridescent pastel palettes. In Weeping Willow (Saule pleureur), ca. 1921–22, gestural lines blur the image until it veers into abstraction. Without the title as a guide, the arboreal referents of his arching brushstrokes would hardly be recognizable.

In “Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape,” on view at the St. Louis Art Museum through June 25, the enduring impact of Monet’s vision hits hard. I mean both his literal and artistic vision—these were inextricable for the plein air painter. The show highlights the rhymes between his work and that of the American Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell (1925–1992), focusing specifically on works both artists made in the gardens of Vétheuil, in northern France.

In the catalogue, curator Simon Kelly notes that Monet’s late work had a profound impact on Abstract Expressionism more broadly, prompting painter and critic Elaine de Kooning to coin the term “Abstract Impressionism.” The AbEx movement took off across the pond a couple decades after Monet’s death, and it’s clear that Monet charted some kind of path for the movement.

The connection is so strong, in fact, that in this show, guessing which paintings were made by whom is not as easy as you’d think. “Monet/Mitchell” ought to be in the curatorial handbook of how to make an argument with objects: their shared sensibility is wholly irrefutable the minute you enter the galleries, and its significance deepens the closer you look, the more you read. This is an elegantly pared-down version of an exhibition that premiered at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris last fall, where some 60 canvases portrayed their shared immersive and intuitive approaches to landscape.

Nearly seven years ago, Mohammed bin Salman al Saud, the newly ascended crown prince of Saudi Arabia, then 31, sat relaxed in his palace as he explained on international television his ambitious plan to diversify the Arab economy away from oil. At the center of Saudi Vision 2030, as the plan was dubbed, was a mandate to develop—like its Gulf neighbors the United Arab Emirates—a formidable tourism sector.

“There are very large assets … areas that have not been developed yet, especially in the tourism field, or others,” bin Salman said. “I believe that the size of these assets will be one trillion riyals.”

Bin Salman’s tourism plan centered around AlUla, a desert region that has been described as an open-air museum for the 30,000 historical sites that dot the landscape, some dating back as far as 7,000 years. The most important is Hegra, the country’s only UNESCO World Heritage site and a Nabataean wonder of more than 100 tombs carved out of sandstone cliffs. Saudi Arabia is spending more than $35 billion over the next seven years, to turn the region, and Hegra, once a crucial trading post along the Silk Road, into a new kind of international crossroad, an official told Art in America.

The Kingdom hopes to draw over 2 million visitors to the region per year, a tall order for a country that up until a couple years ago allowed visitors only for religious pilgrimages.

France has been at the center of the project almost since the beginning, signing a 10-year, €30 million ($32.4 million) per year deal in 2018 to provide “expertise” in the development of luxury lodging, fine dining, horse-related sporting activities, artistic and cultural exhibitions, and artist residencies. Already, an international airport, a 12-mile greenway and tramline, numerous hotels, and an Arab history museum have opened or are in development.

Earlier this spring, the London nonprofit a/political and the Hamburg-based Wau Holland Foundation held the exhibition “States of Violence” in partnership with the whistleblowing NGO Wikileaks. The show, housed at a former meat processing factory in South London and displaying the work of 16 politically active artists and collectives, had an admirable aim: to defend free speech and condemn state-sanctioned brutality.

But the selection of artworks—which included pieces by figures known well beyond the art world like Ai Weiwei and Forensic Architecture—risked undermining the show’s democratic ambitions by indulging in ghoulish, conspiracy-adjacent suggestions about who holds power and why. “States of Violence” is then a product and embodiment of the complexities of political art today.

It’s only possible to make and display works that condemn the inner corruption of liberal democracies by using the very freedoms codified in those same liberal democracies, even if they fail to live up to their own standards in so many other ways.

There’s a strange, backhanded generosity at work here: unless self-espoused radicals openly seek to commit acts of terrorism or violence, the liberal state doesn’t crush people motivated by insurrectionary energies that might want to get rid of the state; rather, it disempowers them, allowing them to exist in and only in art, a space of social and political detachment that can’t really do much.

The life-size marble statue of Silencio (Royal Courts of Justice) (2023) by Spanish collective Democracia, for example, is a very literal take on the idea that conformity is ensured by ferocious threats from law enforcement officers. This statue presents a steely-gazed police officer in riot gear bearing guns, with ammunition belts tied to his waist, pressing his finger to his lips.

March 31 – May 6, 2023

October 26, 2022 – May 7, 2023

March 29 – May 6, 2023

March 3 – May 6, 2023

March 10 – May 4, 2023

March 31 – May 7, 2023

March 28 – April 22, 2023

March 25 – May 6, 2023

April 1 – May 5, 2023