Ask any veteran of Aspen ArtWeek what to expect when attending for the first time and, after a few sentences about the community’s philanthropic ideals and the caliber of collectors, you’re sure to be told about the nature. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the nature, the landscape” is a constant refrain, always said without cynicism or irony. It was no surprise then that, less than an hour after an expectedly turbulent flight on a model airplane from Denver, I was invited to a cold plunge early the following morning in the nearby Roaring Fork River with a group of art dealers.

That kind of invitation is characteristic of Aspen, which seems to be a through-the-looking-glass version of Miami’s art week in December. The wealth is the same, but you trade humid beach weather for mountain air and all-nighters, guest-lists, and exclusive clubs for hikes and yoga. Everyone is invited to everything, with the caveat that you have to make it there first. And whereas Miami centers around the spectacle of Art Basel, Aspen ArtWeek’s home base is the Aspen Art Museum, where every couple of hours there’s another event. There are also artist talks and artist walks and tours of collectors’ homes. But the overall atmosphere, even with the busy schedule, is relaxed, in no small part because the entire town of just over 7,000 residents is eminently walkable.

The quick plunge in the gentle river of “snow melt,” as I was told, is a pleasant if prickly jolt to the system (translation: f—king cold). After the short drive back to town, I was treated to a walk-through of Allison Katz’s extraordinary and expansive group show, “In the House of the Trembling Eye,” at the museum. The Aspen Art Museum has a history of artist-curated shows. In December, it staged an exhibition of John Chamberlain’s work, “The Tighter They’re Wound, The Harder They Unravel” curated by Urs Fischer, and in 2022–23, the artist Monica Majoli organized a museum-wide survey exhibition of Andy Warhol called “Lifetimes.” 

The Katz show is special for a number of reasons. First, it marks the museum’s 45th anniversary and a decade in its current location. Second, the exhibition is made up of works from private collections in and around Aspen, as well as Katz’s own work and ancient Pompeian fresco fragments, the first time such relics of antiquity have been juxtaposed with contemporary art in North America, according to the museum.

“It’s been quite an interesting challenge, an enjoyable one,” Stella Bottai, a senior curator at large who helped research and organize the exhibition, told me during the tour. “Allison wanted to take Pompeii and the domus (essentially an ancient Roman townhouse) as an inspiration and organizing principle for the show, the reason being that the moment you engage with domesticity and personal collections—and many of these works are lived with in private homes—something quite interesting happens in terms of how the boundaries between private and public overlap.”

Artists, scholars, and activists are narrating the climate crisis in many different ways, but typically, the emphasis is on urgency—as with the dramatic actions of Just Stop Oil, for example. Against this, Black Gold Tapestry (2008–17), an embroidered artwork nine years in the making by Canadian artist Sandra M. Sawatzky, stands apart. Currently on view at the MassArt Art Museum in Boston, the nearly 220-foot tapestry insists on a much longer timeline—both in its production and in the history it tells. The work focuses on humans’ relationship to oil over the course of millennia, and is part of an exhibition, titled “Displacement,” that addresses the human consequences of environmental change, including the forced migration so many people experience in the wake of either immediate disaster or slowly shifting climates.

While oil culture is generally thought of as a distinctly modern phenomenon, Sawatzky’s research reveals human engagements with the material dating to the Neolithic era. Showing illustrative, colorful scenes of Neanderthals fashioning tools with sticky tar, bitumen mortar in Mesopotamian structures, Chinese naphtha stoves, and eventually the US automotive industry, the work reveals the ways oil has permeated human production across cultures. Dinosaurs dancing along the edge of Sawatzky’s tapestry remind us of the 65-million-year-old source of the fossil fuels we are so rapidly burning.

Sawatzky was inspired by the iconic Bayeux Tapestry, and her work borrows a number of conceits from that 11th-century account of a Norman conquest, including its linear narrative and the playful dialogue between the scrolling, horizontal storyline and the border of the image. In the Bayeux Tapestry, the arrival of Hayley’s Comet causes a break in the frame. But Sawatzky’s story offers no such moment of rupture pinpointing the moment when it all went wrong, marking the dawn of the Anthropocene. Instead, it emphasizes a continually unfolding story in which everyone has a role to play.

The slowness of Sawatzky’s embroidery recalls writer Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, a way of describing the cumulative, incremental effects of climate change. Environmental change is often insidious and unseen. “Displacement” finds ways to help us visualize that violence regardless, focusing on human migration, adaptation, and extinction. In Akea Brionne’s Begin Again: Land of Enchantment (2024), an embellished tapestry based on a photograph, the artist references her own family’s migration from Belize to Honduras to New Orleans, moves often driven by shifting waterways that induced both flooding and drought. Three women wait with stuffed suitcases in a desert landscape. Their sequined garments, incongruous with the outdoor scene, suggest both a resilient dreamscape and an alienation from the landscape that results from constant displacement.

In his book Slow Violence and The Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Nixon emphasizes the particular injustice of environmental crises precipitated by the actions of the wealthy but felt most acutely by the poor for whom migration is a means of survival. At MAAM, the universal history proposed by Sawatzky’s tapestry is counterbalanced by artists who tell specific stories about the uneven realities of climate change. Nguyen Smith’s Bundle House Borderlines No. 3 (Isle de Tribamartica), from 2017, disaggregates the idea of a singular Caribbean by way of a fantastical hand drawn and collaged map that combines the shorelines of Trinidad, Cuba, Martinique, Haiti, and Jamaica. Referencing the antiquated style of colonial cartography and the attendant misunderstandings of local geographies, Smith asks viewers to think about what they really know about the Caribbean—a region he terms “ground zero” of climate disaster—in a work laced with Trinidadian and Zambian soil. Sculptures on view nearby model “bundle houses” made of found objects, small evocations of the scavenger existence required in the wake of disaster.

Season three of Industry is more ruthless and fascinating than ever

The Premier League season is fast approaching and Luke, Jim, Vish and Andy have worked out how Arsenal can finally get to Man City and win the league… Hire Zlatan Ibrahimović in the Jason Tindall role.

Today, we hear how Zlatan’s beef with Pep Guardiola is still raging on in 2024. Elsewhere, news has broken that West Ham might be signing a new forward for the 56th time under their current ownership. Plus, Vish auditions to be Gennaro Gattuso’s interpreter.

Sometimes may be bat, sometimes may be foot…

We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Fred Trump III, Donald Trump’s nephew, very much hopes for a bipartisan national effort to better support the needs of disabled people, a passion driven by being the father of a disabled son. That’s why he tried—when his uncle was president of the United States—to use his family ties to push for disability rights.

Fred did manage to have a White House meeting with disability advocates that his uncle Donald attended. Later on, he was met with comments by Donald that Fred “should just let” his son, Donald Trump’s grandnephew, “die”—an anecdote he recounts in a new book, All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way.

The former president, Fred Trump says, has never met his grandnephew William. In fact, he’s never even tried to. Donald isn’t the only Trump family member to share that attitude, according to Fred—who, perhaps unsurprisingly, doesn’t think “anything positive happened” for disability rights under Trump’s administration.

When JD Vance appeared as a special guest at the 2021 summer conference of the Napa Institute, a Catholic organization that seeks to “advance the re-evangelization of the United States,” he was weathering a storm for a talk he had given that week to a conservative group in which he assailed the Democratic Party for being led by childless people. He had also proposed that parents be granted more of a say at the ballot box than people without kids. During that speech, he had called out Vice President Kamala Harris, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for being non-parents. (Harris was a parent to two stepchildren, and Buttigieg adopted twins the following month.) Asked at the Napa Institute event about these remarks, Vance did not blanche. He doubled down and even singled out AOC for promoting what he called a “sociopathic” view of the family.

Vance, then a Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio, told the crowd of Catholic activists that he had gotten into “trouble” for his earlier comments. But he stood by his remarks, saying “My basic view is that if the Republican Party, the conservative movement stands for anything… the number one thing we should be is pro-babies and pro-families.”

He emphasized that not enough Americans were procreating: “We have, I believe, a civilizational crisis in this country, where we have unhealthy families, we have families falling apart. We have the rise of childhood trauma. And even among healthy intact families, they’re not having enough kids, such that we’re going to have a longterm future in this country.”

David Zwirner has eliminated around ten staffers from a team of engineers and web developers hired in March last year to revamp the gallery’s online presence.

“We have significantly reorganized our digital team,” a gallery spokesperson told ARTnews in a statement. The change to its workforce comes more than four years after the gallery made expanding online a primary goal during the pandemic in 2020. In July of that year, the mega-dealer laid off 20 percent of its staff to make up for a shortfall in sales.

A gallery spokesperson said the team was reorganized after its staffers finished building a custom database and migrated its website to a new platform, a process that took around a year to finalize.

The most recent layoffs, which amount to three percent of the gallery’s workforce, come several months after Zwirner shuffled staff at Platform, a separate Zwirner-financed digital marketplace that partners with smaller galleries. Launched in 2021, Platform laid off two heads of content, and another full-time staffer from its ten-person team last fall, according to two former employees who spoke to ARTnews on the condition of anonymity.

By December, the small startup had trimmed its staff further to a mere five and pivoted its model, launching collectible products like jewelry, tote bags, and sculptural editions by Josh Smith, Raymond Pettibon, and Katherine Bernhardt, some of the biggest artists in Zwirner’s stable, occasioned by a glowing feature in the New York Times Style section.

After being wrongfully detained by Russian security forces for more than a year on bogus espionage charges, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been released following a massive prisoner swap, the Journal confirmed on Thursday.

The swap—which also reportedly includes two dozen prisoners total from six countries, including former US Marine Paul Whelan and Russian-American Radio Free Europe editor Alsu Kurmasheva—comes as a major win for the Biden administration and advocates of press freedoms. The WSJ in particular kept Gershkovich’s wrongful detention front and center in the media throughout his detention, reminding the world that journalism is not a crime. Among those efforts were the hashtag #IStandWithEvan and a front page dedicated to Gershkovich on the first anniversary of his detention. The page was largely blank with the headline, “His story should be here.”

In a statement, President Biden called the exchange “a feat of diplomacy,” adding, “Some of these women and men have been unjustly held for years. All have endured unimaginable suffering and uncertainty. Today, their agony is over.”

Gershkovich’s family, and the families of some the other American hostages, joined Biden at the White House on Thursday afternoon to celebrate the news. “This is a very good afternoon,” Biden told reporters. He added that he and the families who joined him in person had just spoken to the newly-released Americans by phone from the Oval Office. “I told them, ‘welcome almost home,'” Biden said.

As the Democratic National Convention kicked off its virtual roll-call vote this morning, the Uncommitted movement—an organization that successfully pushed thousands of primary voters to choose no one instead of casting a ballot for President Joe Biden because of US backing of Israel during its war on Gaza—called on the party to let a member of their delegation speak. 

The movement would like a five-minute speaking slot for a humanitarian aid worker who has recently returned from Gaza. Abbas Alawieh, an Uncommitted organizer, said at this morning’s press conference that the delegates from his group communicated this request to the DNC via email “maybe a month ago.” They have not yet received a response. 

Nationwide, as previously reported in Mother Jones, the Uncommitted movement earned over 700,000 votes—and 30 delegates to the convention. As we wrote:

The movement’s impact was notable, especially in swing states: 13 percent of voters in Michigan, just under 19 percent in Minnesota, and just below 15 percent in North Carolina voted “uncommitted.” In Illinois, a state without an “uncommitted” option on the ballot, voters wrote in “Gaza.”

Popop, who came home to raise me after his release from Holmesburg Prison in ’88, would have never let a white man in a white coat lay a hand on the D, let alone the vas deferens, had he the context to differentiate between the two. He never mentioned any experiments either. If he had, he wouldn’t have seen the wanton use of his body as some epic reveal of treachery but another quotidian instance he might describe by way of an exasperated sigh, shrug, or “Duh, dickhead” hurled at some scholar with the “real” details, or social reformer come to reimagine us in their image, to correct our supposedly devious sexual habits before it was too late, which often meant well before our twelfth birthdays. Given the early onset encroachments of power, that old black adage on suspicion and physicians was never an abstraction at home.

I got snipped anyway.

And I was late, by any reasonable measure, thirty-two with too many kids climbing up my leg, three boys and one girl whose temperaments have long since broken and rebuilt me in their images, the first of whom arrived too soon after his mother stopped taking birth control and forgot to tell me. And I’ve never met people more averse to independent play. Shouts of “Daddy!” and “Dada!” puncture my every attempt to think, coming on as tickles or itty-bitty terrors between each typed word, and so I write this from two worlds at once, where promises of the near future—the local pool or doggie park, Rita’s Water Ice, the school track, the bike trail, or playing Diablo and Super Smash Bros.—defang the demands on my attention for ten or so minutes at a time. The interstices allow collective laughter over new word enunciations—a six-year-old’s “feastidious,” or a question of the utmost importance: Who taught the twins to say “Fresh to def?” My daughter, twelve, takes credit, and my oldest son, two years her senior, is above it all until we remind him how the ticklish remain so, even chin hair deep into puberty. It’s there, between the laughter and all my pleading—“Stop, no, don’t” and “Put that dog down!” and “Stop chokin each other!”—that I give myself over to thought, which is writing, and in this case or every case, correlated with what the children mean to me, and what I might mean to them, and what it meant to ensure that I might conceive children nevermore.

The doctor was quite brown, if that counts for anything in this context, and not one of those people whose entire personality is dedicated to the hatred of children, who seem to be multiplying on every blunt “side” of the political spectrum. Gentler than most lovers, he cupped my testicles and said that everything would be all right. And in this man’s supple embrace I drifted off into a blissful nondream of future agency.