Rita Asfour was not like most artists. How many painters would leave Southern California’s artistic community for Las Vegas—then come out of retirement to paint showgirls, no less?

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Then again, most artists were not Rita Asfour. The late painter, sculptor, and gallerist blew up the walls separating highbrow and lowbrow, then danced on the rubble.

Left, Puppet, mixed mediums on masonite, 48 by 32 inches, and right, Ruby, mixed mediums on masonite, 48 by 32 inches.

Born Markrit Thomassian in 1933, Asfour was the child of refugees who had settled in Egypt after the Armenian Genocide. When she was only eight years, Hitler bombed Egypt; to negate the unpleasant images in her mind, Asfour used crayons to paint flowers. This formative traumatic experience inspired her to spend her life creating beautiful art. Asfour received her early art education at the Leonardo da Vinci Italian International School in Cairo, then worked as a commercial illustrator in Beirut for five years. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1965, she found work as a sketch artist for tourists at Universal Studios in Hollywood. Those inverted professional experiences—rendering photorealistic portrayals of glamorous women in everyday settings, then capturing everyday people in a glamorous setting—informed the keen observational eye Asfour would bring to her later impressionist-style work.

Left, Helping Hands, pastel on board, 40 by 32 inches, and right, First Worries, pastel on board, 29 by 20 inches.

Asfour settled in Malibu, where she lived for 30 years. That period was her most prolific, painting seascapes and experimenting with various artistic mediums. Here, she developed her style and became embedded in the Los Angeles art community, opening her own gallery, Galerie Camille, in Beverly Hills in 1970. She attracted a number of celebrity clients who commissioned her to paint portraits of then-President Richard Nixon’s daughter Tricia, singer Ella Fitzgerald, and Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler.

It was in Malibu, too, that Asfour pursued one of the major throughlines of her career: painting ballet students in motion. She was inspired to focus on dancers after seeing Pepperdine University students perform, observing the corps backstage on multiple occasions. Asfour also shadowed toddler-age dancers at Ballet Studio By The Sea, a private dance studio. She was intrigued by the age groups’ divergent approaches to dance: The Pepperdine dancers approached their craft with rigor and acute self-imposed expectations, while the toddlers were genial and unself-conscious. “It was a joy to watch the little marvels give it all they had in a show that sometimes lasted only a few minutes,” Asfour recalled in the exhibition brochure of a 2016 retrospective at the University of Nevada Las Vegas’s College of Fine Arts.

For Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects, released earlier this year, writer and museum consultant András Szántó conducted interviews with established and rising stars in the field of museum design.

The cast of subjects is widely international, and the roster includes architects at different stages in their careers, including David Adjaye, David Chipperfield, Elizabeth Diller (of Diller Scofidio + Renfro), Bjarke Ingels, and Jing Liu & Florian Idenburg (of SO – IL), among others.

The new volume follows the 2020 book The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues, for which Szántó interviewed museum directors in the midst of the pandemic about the state of art institutions going forward.

Below, Szántó spoke with ARTnews about aspirational architecture, museums’ new trend toward humility, and how the art world can help guide society at large.

ARTnews: Before getting to the new book, what was the response like around The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues? Was there anything that surprised you or stood out?

Artist, scholar, and activist Amalia Mesa-Bains is a magnetic storyteller in many senses of the word. For six decades, she has advocated—or agitated, as she has often put it—for real change in the art world, with the aim of upending systems that have long marginalized artists of color, women artists, and queer artists. Just as she passes along tales of her own efforts to do this to younger generations, her art also conveys the narratives of those who refuse to be forgotten, erased, dispelled, or silenced.

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Generations of artists, scholars, curators, and writers that have followed are forever indebted to women of color like Mesa-Bains, whose outstanding retrospective, “Archaeology of Memory,” on view until August 13 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), is the fruit of all her labors, no matter how delayed. It is not to be missed.

This is the 79-year-old artist’s first museum retrospective, and one of only a dozen or so solo exhibitions she’s ever had. It is the rare opportunity to see well-known works together, like the stunning Transparent Migrations (2001), which reflects on the perilous journeys of migrations that many in the Latinx community know all too well. An armoire made of mirrors sits in a field of shattered glass straddled by two sculptures of agave plants. Inside the artist’s wedding mantilla hangs above an array of carefully placed objects.

That work finds its analog in a lesser-known piece by Mesa-Bains, Queen of the Waters, Mother of the Land of the Dead: Homenaje a Tonantzin/Guadalupe (1992), made of a three-tiered mirrored altar to the Virgen de Guadalupe that is flanked by six bejeweled clocks with an image of the Virgen on their faces. Above hangs a sky-blue cascade of fabric; affixed to the wall are dozens of crystal jewels; and on the floor is a pool of potpourri.  

Amalia Mesa-Bains, Transparent Migrations, 2001.

Mesa-Bains’s artistic and scholarly practices are centered around holding space for those whom the mainstream would prefer to ignore. This dates all the way back to the late ’70s, when, as a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology, she interviewed ten Chicana artists of her generation about their lived experiences, what led them to art-making, and how their culture influenced the formation of their identities. In the ensuing decades, Mesa-Bains would continue this work, curating exhibitions of and penning essays on Chicanx and Latinx artists—often writing some of the earliest scholarship on these artists.

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The Headlines

THE POLITICAL SCENE. Thursday was quite a news day in Washington, D.C., as politicians reacted to the bombshell that President Trump was being indicted in a case concerning his handling of classified documents. Before that, though, on Wednesday, a bronze statue was unveiled in National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol that depicts the acclaimed writer Willa Cather, who died in 1947. It was created by Littleton Alston, who became the first Black artist to have work included in that collection. (Each state selects two statues to be displayed there; the Cather piece came from Nebraska.) In other news from the Hill, Congress is looking to hire a new Architect of the Capitol, who oversees its home and various collections. (The last one was ousted amid scandal. He has denied wrongdoing.) A member of the team seeking to fill the job told the New York Times, “This is a uniquely complex role. A term we often use is a ‘unicorn.’ ”

ARTISTS SPACE. It is one of those special days when editorial calendars align, and a bunch of great interviews are all published at once. Grab a cup of coffee! Grab a cocktail! There’s a lot to read. Apollo romped around Reykjavik with hometown hero and performance legend Ragnar Kjartansson. “What I love about being from Iceland,” he said, “is that I really did not understand the idea of the art object until I was 35 or something. Like, you go to the museum here and you just see some Icelandic shit… there is no art history, and there are no objects of mega-value.” Sculptor Anselm Kiefer, an expert in mega-value, has a new show at White Cube in London and spoke to the Guardian. Two more stories from England: Painter Hurvin Anderson, who has a show up at the Hepworth Wakefield, is in the New York Times, and Lubaina Himid, who’s presenting work at the Glyndebourne opera house, is also in the Guardian.

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From the Royal Family to Glastonbury, how the Barbour jacket became iconic

This article originally appeared in The Globe and Mail. John Vaillant’s latest book is Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast.

We weren’t a week into May before 30,000 people had been evacuated because of dozens of fast-moving wildfires in Alberta. Structure losses were mounting, and politicians were trotting out words like “unprecedented.”

Unprecedented? Where were they in 2017, when British Columbia had its worst fire season on record and generated four simultaneous pyrocumulonimbus thunderstorms? Where were they in 2016, when Fort McMurray burned—for days—along with 6,000 square kilometers of forest? What about 2011, when Slave Lake lost its town hall, library, radio station, and 500 houses in a few hours?

No, the current fire situation is not unprecedented, and calling it the “new normal” is offensive. There’s nothing “normal” about it. Do I sound angry? I have a right to be, and so do you. In the late 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists predicted that the effects of increased industrial CO2 would penetrate the “noise” of random climate fluctuations and become measurable in the form of rising global temperatures, especially at higher latitudes like ours.

I started working on my latest book, Fire Weather, in 2016, just days after Fort McMurray disappeared beneath a fire-borne pyrocumulus cloud 14 kilometers tall. I did so not because this was a once-in-a-lifetime fire (the intervening years have proven otherwise). I did it because I understood, way back in 2016, that if a fire could do that much damage to such a wealthy, well-equipped subarctic city when the lakes were still frozen and car-sized blocks of ice still lined the Athabasca River, imagine what it could do to more southerly towns filled with old, densely packed wooden houses? Places such as Vancouver, Moose Jaw, or St. John’s? Imagine what such a fire could do in cottage country, or in the thousands of rural communities located in the wildland-urban interface, where half of Canadians, and a third of Americans, now live.

From Breakfast at Tiffany's to 25th Hour – the city is defined by its cinema

Former President Donald Trump wrote on his social media site Thursday that he had been indicted for a second time, this time for taking classified documents with him to Florida when he left office in January 2021. The New York Times confirmed the indictment, reporting that he had been “charged with a total of seven counts, including willfully retaining national defense secrets in violation of the Espionage Act, making false statements and an obstruction of justice conspiracy, according to people familiar with the matter.” Trump is the first former president in US history to be charged with federal crimes.

“I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States, who received far more votes than any sitting President in the History of our Country, and is currently leading, by far, all Candidates, both Democrat and Republican, in Polls of the 2024 Presidential Election. I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!”

Trump left the White House in 2021 with hundreds of documents that the National Archives and Records Administration considers federal records that do not belong to the former president. The charges against him, which the DOJ has not yet detailed to the public, would likely have resulted from his efforts to keep much of the material, some of it classified, despite repeated demands that he return it, including a May 2022 Justice Department subpoena. Trump lawyers claimed that he had complied with that subpoena, but a dramatic FBI search last year at Mar-a-Lago showed their claims were false. Trump was ultimately found to have taken to his club more than 300 documents with classified markings.

The charges, apparently related to illegal retention of documents, may strike many people relatively minor compared to some of conduct for which Trump has been investigated. Special counsel Robert Mueller found in 2019 that Trump’s campaign had hoped benefit from Russian hacking efforts designed to damage his opponent, Hillary Clinton. The House impeached Trump in 2020 over his effort to delay US military support from Ukraine in a bid to pressure that country to launch investigations Trump hoped would embarrass Joe Biden. Trump’s efforts to retain power after his 2020 election defeat—including his incitement of the January 6 attack on Congress, which led to his second impeachment—seems like a bigger deal than the documents case.

But lawyers and former prosecutors have argued that regardless of how bad Trump’s conduct in the documents matter may seem, the case is simpler than other matters for which Trump has been investigated. In other words, Trump appears to have clearly broken the law. Served with a federal subpoena after refusing to turn over records that belonged to the US government, he allegedly took steps to hide the material, some of it highly classified, from prosecutors.

In the middle of the night on May 15, a public art project in Richmond, California, disappeared without a trace. The project, titled Fencelines – A Collective Monument to Resilience, was a collection of slats onto which community members wrote their hopes and wishes for the future of the city and its environment. The slats were installed on a fence that cordons off the Chevron refinery, which sits along the waterfront of the San Francisco Bay.

On Wednesday, Chevron admitted that it took down the public art piece in a statement made to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“The installation on company property was removed, in keeping with our security, safety and facilities policies,” a Chevron representative wrote to ARTnews. “Our fences and other company facilities are functional equipment and we cannot allow tampering or unauthorized construction.”

The artists and organizers behind the project, meanwhile, argue that Fencelines was mostly on a city-owned portion of the fence, which runs alongside a running trail and is separated from Chevron property by a six-lane thoroughfare. Fencelines, which was brought to life by community organizer Princess Robinson and artist Graham LP, had been in the making over the past year and a half, during which they and Gita Khandagle, an artist and designer, reached out to Chevron and city officials to ascertain who owned the fence so they could get approval for the project.

According to the organizers, Chevron never responded but the city did, approving the project. Graham LP and other people involved claim that the majority of the project was installed on the city-owned portion of the fence but bled into a part of the fence that Chevron owns.