Just a few years ago, maternal mortality was the rare reproductive justice issue that seemed to transcend partisan politics. In late 2018, Republicans and Democrats in Congress even came together to approve $60 million for state maternal mortality review committees (MMRCs) to study why so many American women die from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Donald Trump—not exactly famous for his respect toward pregnant women and new mothers in his personal life—signed the bill.

But some Republicans’ enthusiasm for these committees began to wane at around the same time abortion rights advocates began warning that draconian restrictions on reproductive care would only push the shamefully high US maternal mortality rate—the worst among affluent countries—even higher. Nor did conservatives, like Idaho lawmakers, appreciate the policy recommendations that came out of many MMRCs.

Texas, whose record on maternal mortality (and maternal health more broadly) has been an embarrassment since long before Dobbs, has a history of controversial attempts to play down potentially unwelcome findings from its MMRC. After the Dobbs decision, when the state committee was working on its report examining maternal deaths in 2019, Texas officials decided to slow-roll its release until mid-2023—too late for lawmakers to act on its recommendations. “When we bury data, we are dishonorably burying each and every woman that we lost,” one furious committee member told the Texas Tribune. Ultimately, officials released the report three months late, in December 2022. Soon afterward, the Legislature reconfigured the MMRC, increasing its size—but also ejected one of its most outspoken members. 

Now Texas officials have stirred up the biggest furor yet, appointing a leading anti-abortion activist to the panel. Dr. Ingrid Skop, an OB-GYN who practiced in San Antonio for 25 years, will join the MMRC as a community member representing rural areas (even though she is from the seventh-largest city in the US). But she also represents a largely overlooked segment of the anti-abortion movement: researchers who seek to discredit the idea that abortion restrictions are putting women’s lives in danger. To the contrary, Skop and her allies argue that abortions are the real, hidden cause of many maternal deaths—and that abortion restrictions actually save mothers’ lives.

After 11 years, David Lewis Gallery will cease operations, joining the slew of galleries across Manhattan to shutter its doors this year.

“I entered the gallery world as a wide-eyed academic, and, after over a decade of professional growth, it feels right to come full circle (Francis Picabia loved composing with circles!),” founder David Lewis wrote in an email blast, referencing the gallery’s current group exhibition “Everyone Loves Picabia” (on view through July 19).

He continued, “I’m bringing to a close this iteration of my gallery with a celebration of artists, creative communities, and innovative, even transgressive ideas. It has been the honor of a lifetime to work with such brilliant artists. It’s time now for a new chapter, which will further develop these collaborations and commitments.”

Lewis, an art historian and critic, opened his eponymous gallery in 2013 at 88 Eldridge Street, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Early programming centered around emerging talent, such as well-reviewed presentations of painter Lucy Dodd and performance artist Dawn Kasper. The gallery eventually expanded its roster with historical and under-studied artists, including Barbara Bloom, a photo-conceptualist from the Pictures Generation, and Mary Beth Edelson, an influential feminist activist and artist whose renown had waned.

In 2018, the gallery began working with the estate of Thornton Dial (1928–2016), a self-taught artist from rural Alabama whose intimate works on the legacy of slavery and sharecropping in America had begun to find success in mainstream art institutions. Speaking to Cultured in 2021, Lewis called Dial “a giant art-historical challenge.” 

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here.

Sometimes I’d rather not be right. In January, reacting to Donald Trump affectionately referring to the trio of tyrants Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un as “very fine people,” I wrote that two constants in the Trump Era are his affection for murderous authoritarians and Russian efforts to screw with American politics. The former is well-known, the latter, less recognized. Moscow mounted information warfare operations to boost Trump during both the 2016 election—most notably, the hack-and-leak attack in which Russian cyber-operatives swiped Democratic emails and documents and WikiLeaks released them—and the 2020 election, when Russian intelligence operatives spread disinformation about Joe and Hunter Biden and Ukraine. The first op helped the Putin-friendly Trump reach the White House; the second failed to keep him in office, but it had the side-benefit of fueling the House Republicans’ baseless (and now fizzling) impeachment crusade against President Biden. Putin went one for two.

I noted in that Our Land issue: “[I]t’s a good bet that Putin this year will try once again to mess in an American election…[As Putin] continues to commit horrendous war crimes in Ukraine, he has even more reason to clandestinely boost Trump and win the rubber match.” At long last, official warnings have arrived.

Two weeks ago, Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia remains “the most active foreign threat to our elections.” She noted that the Kremlin’s “goals in such influence operations tend to include eroding trust in US democratic institutions, exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the United States, and degrading Western support to Ukraine.” All of this, obviously, would be to Trump’s benefit. She pointed out that artificial intelligence and deepfakes will presumably be deployed in this effort, and she cited China and Iran as other threats.

There are no shortage of exhibitions dealing with KAWS and Andy Warhol individually, but there haven’t been many that contend with the two artists together. This unusual focus forms the subject of a new exhibition that recently opened at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where 47 works by both artists are now on view.

Loosely, the pair has been brought together the shed light on the darkness of their oeuvres. But KAWS and Warhol share commonalities beyond that: works by both have infiltrated the public consciousness, and collaboration with big brands is also responsible for some of their art.

ARTnews recently spoke with KAWS about the exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum, his thoughts on selling out, and his favorite pieces by Warhol. This interview has been edited and condensed.

ARTnews: The new show at the Warhol Museum features works from his “Death and Disaster” series, silkscreened paintings from the 1960s that feature appropriated pictures of car crashes and other violent imagery that Warhol repeated many times over. What relation does your work have to those paintings?

KAWS: The “darker themes” angle was something that [outgoing Warhol Museum director] Patrick Moore really wanted to explore. It’s funny how putting pieces in proximity to each other can really kind of shift the context. Companion (2020) was a sculpture I created thinking that it was just really representative of that year and exhaustion. But when placed under the Warhol’s Ambulance Disaster (1963–64), it suddenly feels much more tragic.

Aboriginal readers are warned that this article includes the name of a dead person.

Destiny Deacon, an Aboriginal artist who drew out forms of racism that are endemic to Australian society, often with a heavy dose of humor, has died at 67. Her death was announced on Friday by her gallery, the Paddington-based Roslyn Oxley9, which did not state a cause.

A descendant of the KuKu and Erub/Mer people, Deacon used her art to parody stereotypes used to subjugate Indigenous people like herself. Although her photographs and installations showed up frequently in international biennials, she was not fond of using art jargon to discuss them.

Among those biennials is the current Biennale of Sydney, where she is showing Blak Bay (2023–24), photographs of Black and Brown dolls that she posed for her camera. The dolls belong to her collection of paraphernalia that she called “Koori kitsch”: objects depicting Aboriginal people meant for mass consumption.

“They sort of represent us as people, because white Australia didn’t come to terms with us as people,” she told the Guardian in 2020, adding that the dolls are “objects, and that’s the way that white Australia saw us: the flora, the fauna, and the objects. And I just thought, well, they’ve just as much to say.”

A painting by Francis Bacon that was stolen in 2015 has been covered in Madrid by Spanish police. 

The recovered painting is one of five portraits of the Spanish banker José Capelo that are collectively worth €25 million ($27.1 million). The paintings were stolen nine years ago, in what is believed to be the biggest heist in Spanish history.

Three of the five stolen paintings were recovered in 2017. Since the theft, 16 people, including the person thought to have orchestrated the crime, have been arrested. Authorities are still looking for the remaining missing work.

“Investigations are continuing to locate the remaining work and arrest those in possession of it, with the focus on Spanish nationals with links to organized groups from Eastern Europe,” a statement released by the Spanish police said.

Bacon is one of the most influential painters of the 20th century. His work has achieved incredible sums at auction, with his tryptic Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) selling for more than $142 million at Christie’s New York in 2013. At the time, it was the most expensive painting ever sold. More recently, at Sotheby’s New York in May of last year, Bacon’s 1966 painting Portrait of George Dyer Crouching sold for $27.7 million.

I reread “Family Furnishings” this morning because it is one of my favorite stories and because I will be discussing it soon with my students and because Alice Munro, possibly the greatest short-story writer there ever was and certainly the greatest in the English language, is dead. One of my teachers at the University of Montana introduced me to the story when I was an undergrad who had just begun to write and was utterly lost and did not know yet that these two things were one and the same. The story was so far beyond me I had almost no sense of what was going on except that by the end the narrator had been exposed to her own ignorance and arrogance and emotional irresponsibility in a way that was permanently imprinted on me, most likely because I understood it as a premonition of what was to come in my own life. But it is also a story about how the narrator becomes a fiction writer, about the ways a person from a small town might become such a thing, the ways high art will come into your life and separate you from the people who don’t live for art—this is most of them—and the things you must give up in order to commit yourself to the discipline of writing, the ways you will almost certainly piss people off back home when you finally find a way to fork the lightning of the sentence. Munro is one of the only writers whose work has haunted me not just on the first read but more and more as I’ve gotten older. A good story will hold your attention for a while, but a great story will open a new door in your head and then will change with you as you go and “Furnishings” is that kind of story. Each time I read it I see a thing I somehow did not before and understand something about life I did not before or had purposely forgotten; Munro’s best work is always a step past me and no matter what I do or how much older I get it remains that way and I hope it stays that way. What has not changed is my sense that the writer driving this story is clear-eyed to the point of cruelty but not unnecessarily so and that this way of seeing is extended to everyone in the story including the narrator herself and now that I have been reading and writing for some time I know this to be the mark of legitimate fiction. Otherwise the work is ersatz. When I was younger I tried to diagram the architecture of Munro’s stories because I believed this would help me get better as a writer; I gave up because I realized it was the architecture of her mind I was diagramming and that no one would ever do it like her again. It is revealing that when I think about how good she is, I have to go to the peak of literary Olympus to find her equals. I must go to Proust to find someone with her emotional and relational intelligence; I must go to Flannery O’Connor to find someone who so understands the shame and wry humor and darkness and strangeness of rural life; and I must go to Chekhov to find someone whose stories turn as strangely and by their close leave me as stripped and ragged and human. What a goddamn writer she was. Goodbye, Miss Munro. I am grateful to you forever.

—Sterling HolyWhiteMountain

I was a first-term M.F.A. student when I read “Differently,” the penultimate story in Munro’s Friend of My Youth. The story begins with the narrator, Georgia, giving us her writing instructor’s feedback on her stories: “Too many things,” the instructor had said. “Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to?”

For her twenty-first birthday, in July 1952, Alice Munro’s husband gave her a typewriter. The present was as much a symbolic offering as a practical one. As Robert Thacker records in his biography, Jim Munro, a manager at Eaton’s, the Canadian department store, wanted to assure his young wife, who at the time had just a single publication to her name—a story read on one of the CBC’s radio programs—that she was the real thing and could act like it.

Yet Munro, the Nobel laureate who passed away last week at the age of ninety-two, never entirely quit the habit of longhand. On deposit with her manuscripts, correspondence, and other papers at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, are several folders of notebooks. In them one finds a little bit of everything: fragments and false starts, alternate endings, even drawings. The notebooks were where Munro tinkered and experimented, made detours and sudden revisions—where she surveyed the whole field of possibility before committing herself to a full, typed version of a story.

As a result, she leaves behind an especially revealing record of her process. Earlier this year, when I visited the archive, I stumbled across a notebook in which Munro drafted two of her finest short stories, “The Progress of Love” and “Miles City, Montana.” The notebook, medium-size, is filled with blue and black ink, its lined pages crammed with Munro’s plain and legible cursive. A thrilling find, it captures not only her creative method but a crucial point in her development as a writer.

Both “The Progress of Love” and “Miles City, Montana” date to the mid-eighties. Munro by then was in her fifties. She had published four collections of stories and a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. But, as she often said, her career was just beginning. She and Jim had divorced in the early seventies, and after two decades of living in Vancouver, Munro returned to her native southwestern Ontario—Sowesto, as it is sometimes called—a jut of bottomlands and farming country wedged between Lakes Huron and Erie. She married for a second time—to the cartographer Gerald Fremlin—and acquired an agent, who among other things secured Munro a first-look agreement with The New Yorker.

AKNEYE, a visionary in the fusion of traditional art and digital innovation, is pleased to announce its presence in Venice during the highly anticipated 60th Venice Biennale, where it will unveil the AKNEYE Phygital Space by ftNFT. This installation, situated adjacent to the Arsenale venue on Ramo de la Tana, offers a selection of AKNEYE’s ever-growing collection of non-fungible token (NFT) artworks that bridge the gap between physical and digital art.

Related Articles

AKNEYE aims to harmonize the tangible aspects of traditional sculpture with the virtual dimensions of NFTs by creating a novel platform for artistic exploration and collaboration. Artists from Armenia and around the world have crafted original artworks on eye-shaped wood or resin sculptures. These forms serve as the raw canvas upon which the artists, typically employing traditional methods such as paint or mixed media, realize their creations.

These sculptures are then scanned in painstaking detail and rendered digitally, essentially creating a digital twin of the physical version. This virtual proxy is then displayed as an NFT artwork in AKNEYE’s digital gallery hosted on Fastexverse, a navigable, 3D metaverse platform that enables users to participate in events, engage in commerce, and interact with other users in an immersive digital environment.

In Venice, the AKNEYE Phygital Space installation brings the relationship between tangible and digital art full circle by creating a real-life environment for viewers to interact with the art. The Venice site, established in partnership with Fastex’s NFT marketplace ftNFT, joins a growing roster of ftNFT Phygital Spaces in Dubai and Yerevan, Armenia, which also serve as outlets to purchase artworks.

“The Phygital Space is not just any digital space; it is a vision of the future of art, where boundaries are blurred and new connections are formed between the artist, the observer, and the medium,” says Vigen Badalyan, founder of AKNEYE.

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.

THE HEADLINES

LOST, NOW FOUND. Spanish police have recovered a stolen Francis Bacon painting worth an estimated $5.4 million. The 1989 portrait of Bacon’s friend, the banker José Capelo, is one of five works by the Dublin-born artist, robbed from Capelo’s Madrid home in 2015, worth over $27 million all told. Three other paintings from the same loot were recovered in 2017, and two suspects reportedly helped investigators find this most recent, fourth missing painting. They are among a total of 16 other suspects arrested in connection to the major 2015 theft, which also included a snatched safe of jewelry and coins. As for the last missing painting, investigators said they were “continuing to locate the remaining work and arrest those in possession of it, with the focus on Spanish nationals with links to organized groups from Eastern Europe,” reports the BBC.

RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE. French investigators suspect Moscow may have given orders for the recent vandalism of Paris’ Holocaust memorial. Using video surveillance, authorities have identified three suspects who came from Bulgaria and allegedly painted over 30, large, red hands on the Wall of the Righteous, located on the northern side of the museum, in the Marais district.The investigative journal Canard Enchaîné first reported French intelligence services have “privileged the hypothesis” that Russian influence is behind the incident, and other French media have since corroborated the scoop. The memorial wall lists the names of thousands who risked their lives to save Jews from Nazi extermination, and is part of the museum. French foreign minister Stéphane Séjourné linked the incident to multiple Star-of-David tags found on Paris buildings after October 7, which were also reportedly tied to Russian sources. Both are cases of individuals being “paid to destabilize and trigger divisions in French society,” he told BFM TV.

THE DIGEST