How 140 blocks of wood summon up a forgotten history

Over the past five decades, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and her husband, Gustavo A. Cisneros, have amassed one of the world’s most significant collections of Latin American art. They are among the very few collectors to have appeared in every edition of the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. A longtime trustee of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Phelps de Cisneros has donated more than 200 works to MoMA, and funded the establishment of a research institute on Latin American art there.

What is your earliest memory?

So many of my earliest memories are of my great-grandfather, the ornithologist William Henry Phelps (1875–1965), and his fascinating collection of tropical bird specimens. I remember spending time with him as a young girl in Venezuela, amazed at his drive to preserve the natural world. It inspired my awareness of the extraordinary level of care and detail needed to preserve a collection and make it available for study.

Where are you most content?

At our home by the sea with my love, my husband of 52 years.

The Judd Foundation, which focuses on preserving the legacy of Donald Judd and manages the late artist’s two former studios in New York and Marfa, Texas, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against two galleries, alleging that they had caused irreparable damage to one of Judd’s works while it was their care.

In its complaint, filed with Manhattan Supreme Court, the foundation claims that New York–based Tina Kim Gallery and Kukje Gallery, which has locations in Seoul and Busan, South Korea, violated a consignment contract by leaving fingerprints on a 1991 untitled work by Judd made in aluminum and Plexiglas.

Judd was pioneering artist known for his writings and for works that he termed “specific objects,” which he had fabricated according to his precise instructions. He has historically been considered a Minimalist, a label he rejected.

The work at the center of the lawsuit, Untitled (1991), derives from the artist’s “Menziken” series, for which he produced a group of wall-mounted aluminum boxes made with translucent Plexiglas panes.

In court documents, the Judd Foundation claims that in 2015, it had consigned the work to Kukje and Tina Kim, which are affiliated with each other and are owned by members of the same family, in order for it to be sold. In March of that year, the dealers showed the work in a joint booth at the Frieze New York art fair.

Archaeologists at Ta’ab Nuk Na, the largest salt works site in Paynes Creek National Park in southern Belize, have uncovered a rare grouping of underwater Mayan structures. Their research, published today in the journal Antiquity, describes large residential buildings along with three salt kitchens submerged in the coastal lagoon.

“[We found] hundreds of wooden posts that define the walls of Classic Maya ‘pole and thatch’ wooden buildings,” E. Cory Sills, a co-author of the study, said in a statement. “Since wood normally decays in the tropical landscape of the Maya area, the wooden buildings provide a rare view of the architecture that once dominated most ancient Maya communities.”

Excavations revealed the remains of several buildings dating to the 6th century C.E. during the Late Classic Maya era, with salt kitchens and a large residence added in 650 C.E. Underwater archaeologists located key finds on the lagoon floor with over 600 flags marking their locations. These flags were then digitally plotted.

“Mapping individual artifacts on the sea floor allowed us to see their distribution in relation to the 10 pole-and-thatch wooden buildings and to reconstruct the activities in the different buildings,” said co-author Heather McKillop in a statement.

Not only did the Maya “work from home” by producing salt in their backyard, they also performed household activities such as fishing, preparing and cooking food, woodworking, and spinning cotton.

More than 2,500 archaeologists have signed a petition calling on the British Museum in London to repatriate the Rosetta Stone to Egypt.

This effort, which was launched last month, urges the Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly to officially request the object’s return, along with 16 other artifacts that were illegally and unethically removed from the country.

Earlier this year, renowned Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass called for the Rosetta Stone’s return and announced his plans to circulate a petition.

“Previously it was the government alone asking for Egyptian artifacts,” Monica Hanna, an archaeologist who cofounded the current restitution campaign, told CBS News. “But today this is the people demanding their own culture back.” 

The Rosetta Stone, a 2,200-year-old granodiorite stele inscribed with hieroglyphs, Ancient Egyptian Demotic script, and Ancient Greek, was discovered in 1799 during a Napoleonic campaign in Egypt, in which Napoleon’s troops apparently stumbled upon the stone while building a fort near the town of Rashid, or Rosetta. The object was then acquired by the British Museum in 1802 from France under a treaty signed during the Napoleonic Wars. The Rosetta Stone, which led to archaeologists deciphering ancient hieroglyphs for the first time, is among the British Museum’s most notable artifacts.

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When Portland painter Srijon Chowdhury was invited to present a solo exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, he asked himself, “what’s the best kind of museum show an artist could have?” His answer: “a retrospective.” Endeavoring to create the effect of a career survey with his first-ever museum exhibition, he produced a series of new mural-size paintings on panel incorporating much of the imagery that has appeared in his work over the last decade.

The Frye show, titled “Same Old Song,” does not include any of his older paintings, but rather glimpses of past works in the form of motifs—things like morning glories, devils, angels, and knives. In creating the exhibition, the Bangladesh-born artist came to see these painted quotations as a kind of self-portraiture, so he literalized the concept: six of the works highlight his own facial features, all at enormous scale and in extreme close-up. “It turns the exhibition space into the inside of my head,” he told me during a studio visit.

Each of these six studies has one gigantic feature that, on closer inspection, abounds with allusions to Chowdhury’s symbolic vocabulary. Measuring a towering 10-and-a-half by 6 feet each, the five adjoined oil-on-linen panels that comprise Mouth (Divine Dance), 2022, induce a sense of envelopment. The interior of the mouth is a hellscape, with flayed and skeletal figures dancing around a fire, imagery reprised from a work Chowdhury painted as a hex against Donald Trump during the 2020 election. Surrounding the mouth, in the creases of the lips, about 150 figures from Chowdhury’s prior works are faintly rendered, like petroglyphs marking earlier civilizations.

The tension between epiphany and mystery remain an inspiration to Chowdhury. His 2017 exhibition “Revelation Theater” at the Art Gym at Marylhurst University in Oregon evoked the Book of Revelations, a Biblical series of visions representing the tribulations and final judgments that await saint and sinner alike. For “Memory Theater” in 2016, a show at Upfor Gallery in Portland, Chowdhury reimagined 16th-century philosopher Giulio Camillo’s proposed architectural structure, whose physical reminders of all the world’s important concepts promised the viewer omniscience. These ideas of sacred vision and prognostication appear again in the 2022 works in the form of divine messengers delivering succor and retribution. “I’m always going back to something,” he said. “I wanted to have ‘Revelation Theater’ and ‘Memory Theater’ in this show.”

Other panels depict some of the recurring motifs in Chowdhury’s illustrative oeuvre, including the morning glory and knife that replace the pupil and iris of Eye (Morning Glory), 2022. Both objects appear in multiple paintings made between 2018 and 2021—works that, for Chowdhury, allude to the thin veil that divides the everyday from the unknown.

Paris, the City of Light. Millions of travelers perceive it as an ideal destination.

With architectures spanning the Middle Ages (Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés) to the 21st century (Frank Gehry’s Louis Vuitton Foundation), Paris offers a way to time travel through beauty. It is the birthplace of Gothic and Art Deco styles, of postmodern aesthetics even. The Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris (1163–1345), the Dôme des Invalides (1677–1707), the École Militaire (1751–1780), the Palais Garnier (1861–1875), the Eiffel Tower and the Grand Palais—all can be considered masterpieces in an open-air museum as large as the city itself. Within this vast museum thrive about 200 institutions with collections of their own.

“One of my favorite things about Paris is the concentration of cultural hot spots,” says French artist and academician Jean-Michel Othoniel.

Opposite the Musée du Louvre and its 38,000 works of art stands the Musée d’Orsay, known for its Impressionist treasures. Further along the Seine is the Petit Palais, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Palais de Tokyo . . . However difficult it may be to choose among them, here is our pick of the 12 best museums in the Ville Lumière.

Designer Lisa Perry’s love affair with art began with fashion, when she began collecting vintage clothing from the 1960s, designers like Pucci and Pierre Cardin. It ultimately led her and her husband, Richard, to amass a collection of Pop and Minimalist art that includes the work of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Martial Raysse, Niki de Saint Phalle, Ellsworth Kelly, Larry Bell, and Donald Judd.

After learning that a ’60s modernist home in East Hampton, New York, that once belonged to Richard Scull—the collector behind the infamous art-market-changing Sotheby’s sale of contemporary art in 1973—was on the market, a new passion emerged in Perry, under the banner of Onna House. “I decided that Onna House would be a project that could bring together everything I love: architecture, design, art, and helping women,” Perry told ARTnews one summer afternoon out East.

Located in a private residence and showing a collection distinct from Perry’s more well-known one, Onna House (the name coming from the Japanese word for woman), highlights art by women, placing painting and sculpture alongside weaving and pottery. With “a complete focus on women,” Perry has been actively seeking new artists to acquire for Onna House. Currently, it holds the work of Mitsuko Asakura, Julie Wolfe, Leah Kaplan, Kelly Behun, and Candace Hill-Montgomery.

Earlier this year, the venue, which is open by appointment, mounted its first exhibition, “The Lightness of Being,” with work by five ceramic artists: Kaplan, Sabra Moon Elliot, Yoona Hur, Katherine Glenday, and Yuko Nishikawa, whose hanging works made from recycled and pulped photograph paper in pink and orange were a standout. For Perry, the opening salvo was a dedication to her mother, who in the 1970s ran a ceramics-focused gallery outside Chicago.

Perry is still thinking through what she’ll present at Onna House next summer, but so far “it’s been a complete gift.”

The Morgan Library & Museum in New York will open its much anticipated exhibition “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia” on October 14. In a series of sculptures, cylinder seals, and translated clay tablets, “She Who Wrote” will celebrate the Mesopotamian High Priestess Enheduanna, the first-ever named author in all of humanity’s history.

“The Morgan has done exhibitions on Emily Dickinson, Mary Shelley, the Brontés, so I thought we should do an exhibition on the first-known author ever, who happens to be a woman,” Sidney Babcock, the Jeannette and Jonathan Rosen curator and department head of Ancient Western Asian Seals and Tablets at the Morgan, told ARTnews. “Most people don’t know that. It’s not celebrated. Why? School children know about Sappho, and she’s 1,000 years later for Pete’s sake!”

Daughter of Sargon of Akkad, the first ruler of the Akkadian empire of Northern Mesopotamia, Enheduanna was born more than 4,000 years ago. She was appointed to lead the cult of Nanna, a moon goddess worshipped in Sumer, a territory in the South of Mesopotamia that Sargon had conquered, and in her position as priestess wrote many hymns dedicated to goddesses.

“Her writings were copied for hundreds of years in the scribal schools,” said Babcock. In Mesopotamia, scribes were taught to write by copying hymns and myths that previous generations had written onto clay tablets.

The hymns of Enheduanna not only represent the first authored writing but the first example of the first person singular. In a hymn, Enheduanna describes a trial in which a usurper comes, throws her out of her complex, abuses her, and offers a dagger with which to kill herself. Thankfully, the goddess Inanna saves her, and she dedicates the song to her. Another hymn is the first-known example of the creative process being likened to birth. In the hymn, Enheduanna describes the birthing process, which starts with a lit fire in the nuptial chamber. She goes on to write:

“It’s not like any other city,” Mera Rubell told ARTnews, referring to Washington, DC. “To be bringing a collection that [my husband] Don and I built over the last 58 years to our nation’s capital is emotional. I have a lot of history with Washington. I was there for Martin Luther King Jr.’s march in 1963.”

Over a decade in the works, the Rubell Museum DC, which opens to the public October 29, is Mera and Don Rubell’s second private museum, after one in Miami. Housed in a building more than 115 years old, it will span 32,000 square feet. The architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle is renovating the building, which was the home, until 1978, of the Randall School, a segregated junior high school for African American children in DC’s Southwest neighborhood. (Alumni include singer-songwriter Marvin Gaye.) The building joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.

“We tried to preserve as much of the character and spirit of the school as we possibly could, because there’s something very special about saving a building of that age and in that neighborhood and [with] that history,” Mera said.

Unlike the Miami museum, which has 20-foot-tall ceilings and loading bays, physical limitations may affect what kind of art DC can showcase. Mera sees it as an opportunity to highlight works in the collection that may not shine as brightly in the Miami branch’s more expansive environs. “Many of the spaces—classrooms, teachers’ offices—lend themselves to very intimate work. You can feel that history,” she said.

The building was at one point considered as a new home for the now defunct Corcoran Gallery of Art, which had purchased it from the District in 2006 for $6.2 million, and then sold it to the Rubells in 2010 for $6.5 million. The Rubells also own the Capitol Skyline Hotel, down the street, which provided shelter for unhoused people amid the pandemic. (As part of the acquisition, the Rubells are also developing a residential building with close to 500 units that will share a courtyard with the museum; one-fifth of those apartments have been set aside for affordable housing.)

Beyond buying pieces by Rashid Johnson, McArthur Binion, Deborah Roberts, Carmen Herrera, and Barbara Kruger, Philadelphia-based collectors Michael C. Forman and Jennifer Rice have spent much of the past year seeking to help the local arts scene, still ailing from the pandemic. In 2021, knowing that the city’s larger organizations would likely find a way out of economic distress, Forman and Rice focused their attention more directly on artists and on small and midsize arts institutions. They launched the Forman Arts Initiative, an organization that will oversee a grant program called Art Works, and another project to bring Theaster Gates’s Monument in Waiting (2020) to the Drexel University campus; the sculpture, a response to the removal of Confederate and colonial monuments, will remain there through July 2023. Other initiatives currently in the works include an artist residency program and public art commissions.

“We’re committed Philadelphians,” Forman told ARTnews. “This is not just an opportunity; we feel it is an obligation to give back. If Philadelphia is to recover post-pandemic, one of the real value propositions is arts and culture, and small and midsize institutions are so important to the fabric of the city and their neighborhoods.”

Administered in partnership with the Philadelphia Foundation, Art Works is a five-year, $3 million grant program that will give two-year grants to four local artists and four nonprofits, with a focus on BIPOC and other underserved communities. Organization grants (for those with budgets between $250,000 and $5 million) will range from $50,000 to $150,000, while artists will receive unrestricted grants of $50,000 over two years.

“We felt that the best way to support the community in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods would be to support BIPOC cultural organizations and artists,” Forman said. “We focused on what we saw as shortcomings in the city’s funding for arts and culture, and how we could best leverage our resources.”

Even before the onset of the pandemic, the Forman Arts Initiative brought together various stakeholders in Philadelphia’s arts community to “listen and learn about the challenges they face and the opportunities they saw for how our organization could be most impactful with our support,” he said. “We’ve always been of the view that the art is a shared resource.”

September 17 – October 15, 2022

September 3 – October 8, 2022

September 14 – November 5, 2022

September 14 – November 5, 2022

August 27 – October 22, 2022

September 10 – October 15, 2022

September 20 – October 14, 2022

September 10 – October 12, 2022

March 26 – October 9, 2022