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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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