From John Wick: Chapter 4 and Close to EO and Infinity Pool

Edra Soto’s work likely appears familiar to you. Though the Chicago-based artist has been commissioned for numerous public artworks in recent years, that is probably not the reason why. Instead, it is simply because her decade-long project, “GRAFT,” draws on architectural motifs—repeating stars, circles, and other shapes— ubiquitous in Puerto Rico that have since been exported all over the world.

In her work, Soto, who was born in Puerto Rico, highlights the cultural appropriation of these patterns, which were originally found on cast-iron fences outside homes in Puerto Rico.

“You can find them everywhere,” Soto told ARTnews recently, ahead of two solo exhibitions opening this month. “You can find them at Starbucks, at a department store. I realized they exist all over the world. They’re not only exclusive to Puerto Rico. But the story that I’m telling is the story of Puerto Rico.”

When visitors arrive at Puerto Rico’s San Juan Airport, among the first things they encounter is Spanish colonial era architecture. One element, the garita (an overhanging turret or sentry box), has even been incorporated into the logo of the Puerto Rico Tourism Company, in essence becoming a symbol synonymous with the island, according to Soto. But, for her, that symbolism is inextricably connected to Puerto Rico’s status as an unincorporated territory of the United States and as the world’s oldest colony.

“This is a colonial and military architectural element that lives in Puerto Rico,” she said of the motifs.

The Expo Chicago art fair has revealed the four institutions set to acquire works being sold there via prizes, as well as the curators set to receive a fellowship through another, separate award.

Through the Northern Trust Purchase Prize, the Seattle Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg in Florida, and the Saint Louis Art Museum were able to purchase work out of the fair’s “Exposure” section, which is devoted to galleries that have been in business for 10 years or less.

The Seattle Art Museum acquired Mohau Modisakeng’s Phahamong III, which had been brought to the fair by Martin Art Projects. The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg is set to accession Claudia Peña Salinas’s Ahua Can; similar works by her at Embajada’s booth qualified the showcase as one of the best at Expo Chicago, according to an ARTnews roundup. The Saint Louis Art Museum will get to add Wole Lagunju’s Irawo II, which is on view at Montague Contemporary’s booth.

Aimé Iglesias Lukin, director and chief curator of New York’s Americas Society and curator of the “Exposure” section, said in a statement that the Northern Trust Purchase Prize supports “a spirit of inclusion and mission to enhance visibility of underrecognized artists and arts regions.”

Additionally, the inaugural Barbara Nessim Acquisition Prize, which funds the acquisition of an artwork valued at up to $10,000, went to Chicago’s DePaul Art Museum. That institution Auto-da-Fé (Act of Faith) by Selva Aparicio.

A grand golden lady guards the entrance to Simone Leigh’s widely anticipated first museum survey, now on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. The sculpture looks similar to many of her best-known creations. In it, a woman’s torso emerges from a bell-shaped raffia skirt. Her face is clean of emotion, and her eyes are missing, a statement that the following works are unbothered by scrutiny.

In choices of material, mass, and form, Leigh gestures to a wealth of historical periods, locations, and artistic traditions that center Black female experiences. Some of her references are implicit; most are layered and oblique. Leigh liberated herself long ago from having to educate the ignorant—an obligation surely familiar to most people of color. The sculptures here nod to the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, the nimba headdresses made by women of the Guinea coast, and South Carolina pottery, among much more.

The poise and power of these works is immediate, but it takes time to decode Leigh’s art. That’s the point, though: she is thinking through lineages that span centuries but have been largely denied a proper place in the historical record.

Leigh, 56, is among the most famous contemporary sculptors working today—she was given the Hugo Boss Prize in 2018, participated in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and did the United States Pavilion for the 2022 Venice Biennale, which won her the Golden Lion. Those are tough acts to follow up, but her ICA show lives up to the hype.

Many of the bronzes and ceramics on display will be familiar to anyone who visited her Venice Biennale pavilion, which made her the first Black woman to represent the US. The curator of the ICA Boston show—Eva Respini, with assistance from Anni Pullagura—has paired these works with older sculptures and installations to demonstrate how experience refined Leigh’s argument and technique.

Josh Harris has reached an agreement in principle to acquire the Washington Commanders for $6 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

Harris and Commanders owner Dan Snyder are hoping to execute a contract in the coming days, said the people, who were granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the transaction publicly.

Harris declined to comment. A representative for the Commanders declined to comment.

The deal between Snyder and the group led by Harris, the Philadelphia 76ers co-owner, would end one of the more tumultuous and controversial ownership tenures in modern U.S. sports.

Harris’ group includes billionaire Mitchell Rales, an ARTnews Top 200 collector, and former NBA star Magic Johnson.

Looking at Esmaa Mohamoud’s sculptures at Chicago’s Kavi Gupta gallery, you might not immediately know that they are directly dealing with killings of Black Americans by the police.

Darkness Doesn’t Rise To The Sun But We Do (2020), one of the works in the show, is comprised of a mass of dandelions made of steel that has been painted black. Part of a larger installation called Faith in the Seeds, the blossoms are bathed in a dim orange-colored light meant to evoke a sunset.

The sculptures may have a peaceful, contemplative air, but they’re also a stark reminder of the racial injustices that have become so common that no one has to be reminded of them.

“A lot of what I’m working on right now deals with re-approaching understandings of Blackness that I have had as a child from the perspective of a 30-year-old Black woman and debunking a lot of that,” Mohamoud told ARTnews. “The dandelions were a large part of that. They’re a plant that seems so innocent when you’re a child.”

Mohamoud’s political message and her personal history collide throughout the show. In Nirvana (Oh, Sweet Elham), a colossal sculpture of a pink Cadillac on rims so massive that visitors can walk underneath the car and gaze into its engineless core. The work was inspired by a Cadillac-shaped VHS cassette rewinder owned by Mohamoud’s grandmother that got constant use—the two often spent time together watching movies when Mohamoud was young.

It is not a total surprise that Gio Swaby would base her practice on textiles. After all, her mother was a seamstress.

However, there is more to the 31-year-old artist’s life-size embroidered portraits, characterized by bold patterns and freehand machine stitching. From a distance, the contours of her work appear seamless, but, as one moves closer, the intricate stitching and thread come into focus. This impression pervades “Fresh Up,” Swaby’s first museum solo show, which opened last May at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, and is now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago until July 3.

Curator Melinda Watt, in a walkthrough before the opening of EXPO Chicago, highlighted the multidisciplinary aspect of Swaby’s work. “We are here in textile but we don’t claim Gio for a particular medium,” Watt said. “For me, it’s important to foreground people who are working in fiber and expanding the definition of what art is.”

The exhibition at the Art Institute features seven selections from seven different series created by Swaby until 2021. Watt intentionally arranged Swaby’s self-portraits in the first room and lowered the hanging height by 5 inches to allow for a closer viewing experience.

“We tried to take advantage of this more intimate space to put together conversations and ideas of community, which are important to Gio’s vision,” said Watt, who added that lowering the hanging height “made all the difference in being able to stand in close proximity with the works.”

In February, after a decade-long legal dispute, a French court ordered the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to return a group of Impressionist paintings that were determined to have been illegally sold in Germany during WWII following the death of their original owner, the French art dealer Ambroise Vollard.

The four works returned to Vollard’s relatives as part of the suit are now slated to be sold at auction in France next month—a common outcome for restitution settlements, where the funds raised from public sales of artworks are split among legal heirs, who share ownership.

Two pieces by Pierre-Auguste Renoir—Marine Guernesey (1883) and Judgement of Paris (1908)—Paul Cézanne’s Undergrowth (1890-1892) and Paul Gauguin’s Still life with mandolin (1885) will be offered during a Sotheby’s sale that will take place in New York on May 16.

The Gaugin, which carries the highest estimate of the grouping, is expected to sell for a price between $10 million and $15 million. The remaining three works are valued are prices between $250,000 and $1.5 million.

After his abrupt death in 1939 at the age of 73, Vollard’s estate became embroiled in controversy after evidence came to light that some works in his 6,000-item collection had been improperly distributed by his relatives. (Exact records for the sale history of the four works is unclear.)

A Miriam Cahn painting at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo that incited outrage in France after many claimed it represented pedophilia can stay on view, France’s Council of State said on Friday.

The council’s ruling affirmed a prior decision that a lower court had made in March. The legal matter continued, however, after several children’s rights groups appealed it, forcing a higher court to look once more at the case.

Cahn’s painting, titled fuck abstraction !, appears in her current survey at the Palais de Tokyo, one of the largest solo presentations of her work to date. Her paintings are widely known in the European art scene, with her work memorably appearing in last year’s Venice Biennale.

In the painting, a small figure whose hands are bound is shown kneeling and fellating a larger, more muscular person. Cahn stated that she painted the work in response to atrocities being committed in Ukraine. Specifically, she was reacting to news reports on mass graves in Bucha, as well as the rapes of women and children by Russian soldiers.

“The repetition of violence during wars is not intended to shock but to denounce,” Cahn said.

Usually, green screens are temporary placeholders. On set, they stand in for backgrounds or elements that will eventually get replaced with CGI or other footage. But in Will Rawls’s latest project, [siccer], 2023, chroma green predominates.

The project has two parts—a video installation, currently on view at both the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Momentary in Arkansas, plus a live performance, premiering at the latter venue on April 21. The green screen’s presence in the performance is especially unusual, as no after-effects can be added live. In the hour-long video, performers move behind green scrims or are cast in green light. It’s easy to imagine them disappearing, but they remain decidedly present.

Below, Rawls talks about the green screen’s meaning. —Emily Watlington

With [siccer], I wanted to make a stop motion film of a dance, which is almost never done! It highlights impossibility of truly capturing a dance. The technique allows you to pause and restart, to tailor what exactly gets captured. It also means the camera operator is kind of dancing with the performer.

Stop motion draws attention to what is missing from an image, and what happens between the frames. The project is very much a product of the pandemic, of continually asking, how do you keep something alive?

Bringing together more than 170 galleries from 36 countries, Expo Chicago hosted its VIP preview on Thursday morning. The fair’s aisles were moderately filled during the first few hours, with a mass of people filling up the Navy Pier during the evening vernissage hours.

Now celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, Expo Chicago made apparent this edition that it is still intent on bringing world-class art and leading curators to the Windy City for a fair experience unlike any other. The fair made good on its promise.

Below, a look at the best on offer during the 2023 edition of Expo Chicago, which runs until Sunday, April 16.

March 9 – April 8, 2023

February 10 – April 8, 2023

January 25 – April 23, 2023

March 12 – April 29, 2023

February 25 – April 16, 2023

February 17 – April 16, 2023

February 4 – April 8, 2023

January 27 – April 9, 2023

March 2 – April 8, 2023