Nikita Gale, a Los Angeles–based artist best known for installations that mesh unexpected elements, pairing video and sound equipment with industrial materials like concrete and metal barricades, has been named the winner of the Whitney Museum’s Bucksbaum Award, which goes to a participant in the Whitney Biennial and comes with $100,000.

Gale is among the most closely watched artists today. For the 2018 edition of the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial, the artist presented a sculptural and sound installation titled PROPOSAL: SOFT SURROUND SYSTEM (2018), dissecting the roles music and physical barriers play in galvanizing protest and mass detainments. In 2022, when Gale’s work was shown at 52 Walker Street, the New York Times argued the artist has become part of a distinct group of women artists of color applying new rules to minimalism that were set in place by an older generation of male predecessors.

For the 2024 Biennial, titled “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” Gale presented a player piano for the installation TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME). But instead of playing its set tune, Gale has made it so the piano emits no sound, other than the clanking of the keys as they are activated. Additionally, the installation, presented in a black box, is dramatically lit, with the lights oscillating up and down as if on a dimmer.

“Works like TEMPO RUBATO decline to perform to the viewer’s liking,” ARTnews senior editor Alex Greenberger wrote in his review of the exhibition. “In doing so, they refuse their viewers’ gaze, mirroring an unwillingness by many artists here to participate in structures that seek to oppress them.”

Gale’s work, relating the body to technology, was selected as the winner by a six-person jury, that included the Biennials cocurators, Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, as well as Whitney Museum director Scott Rothkopf, Hammer Museum curator Erin Christovale, University of Virginia art history professor David Getsy, and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art chief curator Stamatina Gregory.

About three hours into prowling the aisles at the VIP preview of The Armory Show earlier this month, I began to feel déjà vu. It’s difficult to say what triggered it. Was it the sounds of The Dare, an indie sleaze pop revivalist whose sound is reminiscent of 2010s LCD Soundsystem, pumping through my earbuds? Or maybe the performance artist clad in thigh-high fishnets whose plastic-wrap dress listed her phone number and a summons to sext her, a stunt that felt very Art Basel Miami Beach 2016. Or could it be that it was only three years ago that I received the first of two Covid vaccine shots right here at the Javits Center? Back then, the vast, fluorescent-lit convention center was largely deserted, a set for a zombie apocalypse were it not for all the front-line workers.

Covid wasn’t the only reason memories of 2021 felt poignant. It was then, during the dark days of lockdown, that collectors, stuck at home, started bidding up the works of young painters in online auctions. Now, we are paying the price, with an overall market slowdown. Wandering the Armory Show, I wondered what art dealers made of it all.

“We also have been very conservative with our pricing from the very beginning,” Mariane Ibrahim, whose eponymous art gallery is based in Chicago, told me. Ibrahim supported artist Lina Iris Viktor in a 2018 lawsuit against Kendrick Lamar after Viktor alleged that Lamar’s “All The Stars” video drew from her work without her permission. “Even when the market was very high, we kept our prices at a level that was not fitting with the demands.” In other words: she didn’t let the secondary (auction) market determine the prices of primary market works. “Our currency is still the relevance of the artist within an institutional background, and that is what justifies the price.

By increasing the price, Ibrahim continued, “you also lose the younger collectors. You also lose the opportunity to engage with certain demographics. … So we keep it really steady.”

Elsewhere at the Armory Show, New York art critic Jerry Saltz held court at a pop-up cafe, graciously taking selfies with fans and trying mightily to pass off my questions to passing friends who, he insisted, would be better equipped to answer my queries.

A collection of artwork allegedly created by the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, is back on the auction block after the initially scheduled sale was postponed.

When the Jackson-Strong Alliance filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy on August 2, the August 3 sale by King Auctions was postponed. Since a federal judge dismissed the bankruptcy filing and ruled that the art collection return to the block, the auction house rescheduled the sale for October 5.

In 1989, Jackson and Australian artist Brett Livingstone Strong founded the Jackson-Strong Alliance. The artworks slated to hit the block are believed to have been made around that time.

The original August 3 auction was ordered by the superior court of California to account for a debt owed between the alliance and Vinson Investments. The artworks were the property of both the alliance and the investment company.

Ahead of the auction, however, the late icon’s estate questioned the authenticity of the works.

Around 4,000 people filled the Los Angeles Coliseum on September 15 to witness the kickoff event for the Getty Museum’s $20 million PST ART: Art & Science Collide, in which over dozens of institutions present exhibitions around a unifying theme.

They didn’t anticipate having to duck for cover.

The museum’s collaboration with Chinese pyrotechnics artist Cai Guo-Qiang saw spent fireworks and their stone-like byproducts rain down on attendees, with many in the crowd requiring first aid after being hit

The 30-minute fireworks display unfolded over five acts that became increasingly explosive. People were also reportedly scared out of their wits around the University of Southern California (USC) campus and surrounding neighborhoods due to the rising smoke and ear-splitting blasts in the night sky.

Many USC students were preparing to evacuate the campus and posted messages on social media asking if their lives were in danger, fearing the commotion was gunfire and exploding bombs.

In a video clip posted to social media Wednesday, former First Lady Melania Trump defended her prior history of nude modeling by comparing it to several classical paintings and sculptures, including Michelangelo’s David.

In the 45-second video, Trump speaks in a voice-over asking, “Are we no longer able to appreciate the beauty of the human body?”

“Throughout history, master artists have revered the human shape, evoking profound emotions and admiration,” she continues. “We should honor our bodies and embrace the timeless tradition of using art as a powerful means of self-expression.”

Images of David, John Collier’s Lady Godiva (1897), a painting from Paul Cézanne’s “Bathers” series, and other works appear in the background as Trump talks.

While, in the video, Trump references media scrutiny over her nude modeling, it’s not clear what exactly prompted the video.

The US Department of Justice has charged political advisor and Russian television contributor Dimitri Simes and his wife, Anastasia Simes, with violating US sanctions through schemes involving art and antiques.

The two indictments against the couple were unsealed on September 5, according to a DOJ press release.

The first indictment accused the Simeses of laundering funds for the Russian state-funded network Channel One Russia, where Dimitri Simes hosts a popular news commentary show, for which they allegedly received over $1 million and various personal benefits including a personal car and driver, a stipend for an apartment in Moscow, and a personal team of ten employees from the station. Channel One Russia was sanctioned in May 2022.

The second indictment focuses on Anastasia’s role in purchasing and storing art and antiques, including a 19th-century painting by F.C. Welsch and a statue of the Greek goddess Minerva by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, for Russian oligarch and close friend of the newly appointed Prime Minister, Aleksandr Y. Udodov, who was sanctioned by the US government in February 2023. 

According to that indictment, the artworks and other antiques were acquired from American and European galleries and auction houses, then stored at the couple’s home in Virginia before finally being sent to Russia. However the FBI seized the couple’s collection during a four-day raid in August. Some of the items were family heirlooms, Dimitri said in an interview with the New York Times, which he said were irrelevant to the government concerns. 

I first tried AI the way many people did: I fell prey to a viral marketing trend. In late 2022, photo-editing app Lensa briefly broke the internet when users flooded social media with its uncanny AI-generated avatars. As my feeds overflowed with yassified portraits of friends in bootleg Marvel gear, I couldn’t help but think about my mother. What would Mom look like as an Avenger? I’d been making images of her in my art practice for more than 15 years, using every modality I could manage. AI seemed like a funny, if unexpected, next step.

My first reaction was simple amazement. The representational prowess of AI was shocking. But while the avatars in my feed were all GigaChads and Stacies in space, the renderings of my mom were remarkably more morose. The algorithm didn’t seem to know what to do with an androgynous barefaced older woman. The best it could manage were clichés of a cougar or a crone. I looked at my fierce friends and I looked at my mutated mom—all the normative visual tropes were there, but they were twisted, roughly hewn. Everything was so eerily familiar and yet so indescribably weird.

I suddenly thought, I’ve finally found the perfect tool.

Up until then, photography had been my primary medium, in large part for its dual ability to alienate a subject while also drawing it more into view. I had a little catchphrase: Taking a picture of trash is like crowning a prince. Conversely, making a postcard of a landscape can be a kind of dethroning, an unceremonious flattening. The mechanisms of this transformation have slowly revealed themselves to be one of my most important and bedeviling subjects (something I explore at length in my book Hello Chaos: a Love Story).

In photographing my mother, I had to confront the social conventions that underlie every aestheticized gesture. I crammed her into pitiless high heels and bound her breasts in forced masculinity. What voice did these visual conventions have, and how did they speak through the singular subject of my mother? How did my mom and my representations of her make these social and aesthetic expectations sing—or scream, or laugh, or cry? What assumptions do we draw upon to categorize what we see, and what are their political implications?

Artists’ grant applications tend to be anodyne things because the point of them is often to appeal to an organization’s sensibilities, not to take a stand. But take a stand is what Elizabeth Catlett did in 1945 when she wrote of the “double handicap of race and sex” that Black women like herself faced. “Because of subtle American propaganda in the movies, radio and stage they have come to be generally regarded as good cooks, housemaids and nurses and little else,” Catlett wrote in her Rosenwald Fellowship plan in 1945.

“At this time when we are fighting an all out war against tyranny and oppression,” she continued, “it is extremely important that the picture of Negro women as participants in this fight, throughout the history of America, be sharply drawn.” She referred to the rape of Recy Taylor by six white men the year before; Taylor’s assailants were never indicted.

Catlett’s art rebuts an avalanche of racist, misogynistic images that she frequently encountered, offering pictures of strength, endurance, and proud femininity. Working in sculpture, painting, and printmaking, Catlett took styles associated with European modernism, then applied them to Black women, who were often demeaned or altogether ignored by white male artists abroad. The artist, who started out in the US before achieving fame in Mexico, would go on to produce works referring explicitly to a range of political subjects, from the imprisonment of Angela Davis to the stripping of rights from Indigenous Mexicans.

In doing so, she asked prescient questions, ones that have recently been taken up anew by generations of artists after her: What makes a good form of representation? And can images move people to action, raising political consciousness among the masses?

Now, for the first time in nearly 25 years, Catlett is the subject of a proper US retrospective, with some 150 of her works in multiple mediums brought together at the Brooklyn Museum. (After it closes in New York, the exhibition heads next to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which co-organized it, and then to the Art Institute of Chicago.) The exhibition makes a compelling case that Catlett, though hardly overlooked in the history of American modernism, deserves to be viewed as a transnational pioneer and one of the finest 20th-century artists. Below, a look at five essential works by Catlett, each of which appears in the Brooklyn show.

August 3 – September 14, 2024

August 18 – September 15, 2024

July 30 – September 8, 2024

July 27 – September 8, 2024

June 21 – September 29, 2024

August 3 – September 16, 2024

August 27 – September 15, 2024

April 12 – September 29, 2024

April 6 – December 22, 2024

June 7 – September 8, 2024

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