This 'magical' ode to nocturnal Mumbai will 'win hearts everywhere'

A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

Who is Jay Lynn Gomez? That question animates the artist’s current exhibition at P.P.O.W in New York, and the answer is a bit complicated, ever evolving. Titled “Under Construction” and on view through June 15, the show poignantly and earnestly depicts Gomez’s gender transition—a process encumbered by the fact that Gomez had already achieved some art-world acclaim using her former name, having exhibited in major group shows like “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and “Day Jobs” at the Blanton Museum of Art.

In 30 some paintings and mixed-media works, many of them self-portraits, we see Gomez contending with her new life. We see her newly subject to the leering gaze of construction workers, and getting accosted by a white woman for using the women’s bathroom at Fenway Park. Elsewhere, in one of the show’s best works, a 2024 canvas titled I am a work in progress, we see Gomez as her former male self, painting a vision of a woman of her own making, as she now wants to be seen. Next to her palette and brushes, we see her gender-affirming medications. Behind him a woman, the artist’s mother, dusts off one of Gomez’s earlier works.

Earlier this year, the artist began painting scenes from her transition directly onto her hormone packaging. The earliest work from this series is titled shot day (all works 2024); it is a tender self-portrait showing the artist injecting her abdomen with hormones. The piece, measuring just over 3 by 6 inches, is painted directly onto the flattened box of Gomez’s Estradiol valerate, her legal name partially visible. This work joins about a dozen other small drawings of Gomez at various stages in her life, all painted on her hormone packaging. This use of found cardboard recalls an earlier series, begun in 2013, in which Gomez painted Latinx domestic workers—gardeners tending to manicured lawns, pool cleaners fishing for leaves—onto magazine pages displaying beautiful mansions that they keep pristine; Gomez later scaled these drawings up to David Hockney-esque paintings. Her objective then as now is to show those who have been marginalized or rendered invisible.

In “Under Construction,” she gives her own process of transitioning a rare kind of visibility, carving an ideal image of herself while also grappling with how the world sees her. But she doesn’t stop there: she also honors the enormous contributions that trans women of color have made toward civil rights for queer people. These women have often been, until recently, intentionally erased from history; Gomez pays homage to some in a monumental work titled Trans women of color that includes Sylvia Rivera, Cecilia Gentili, and Erotica Divine.

Artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen specializes in the kinds of lengthy shots that brand themselves upon your brain: a house that nearly falls onto a person, the Statue of Liberty filmed from a whirring helicopter, the attempted lynching of a Black man shot via long take. But no longer does McQueen seem so interested in creating images like those.

Occupied City (2023), his four-and-a-half-hour documentary about Amsterdam during the Holocaust, seems most telling about his priorities right now. In this film, a narrator outlines the disenfranchisement of Jews across the city, but McQueen’s footage of the present-day Dutch capital never testifies to what is described. His camera drifts through apartments, down museum corridors, and across canals. More often than not, he doesn’t show us anything of much interest. At a time when images of police brutality and suffering have become pervasive, McQueen has moved away from representing violence altogether.

With his latest work, he shows us nothing at all. McQueen has parted ways with moving images entirely for Bass (2024), a new installation that fills the 30,000-square-foot basement of Dia:Beacon in the Hudson Valley with sound and light. The only objects on view are 60 boxes hung on the ceiling that slowly change their hue, turning the space a succession of vibrant colors, from the retina-burning red of a horror movie to the orange glow of a sunset.

The title of Bass is the giveaway: the focus is sound, not sight. The sounds were produced by five musicians, all belonging to the African diaspora, who performed together in Dia’s columned basement this past January. McQueen was there to act as conductor, not that these musicians really needed it—mainly, they just improvised. He has presented all 189 minutes of their music largely unedited.

This quintet—Marcus Miller, Aston Barrett Jr., Mamadou Kouyaté, Laura-Simone Martin, and Meshell Ndegeocello—appears to have played as a unified whole, not as five soloists. It is difficult, for example, to discern which sounds were produced by Kouyaté, playing a West African instrument called a ngoni, and which were produced by Miller, a bassist who’s worked with many jazz greats. Together, the musicians have created a symphony of rumbles, bowed strings, and plaintive hums, some of which McQueen has arrayed across space so that they appear to echo across this vast gallery.

What will it take for Man United to beat Man City in this weekend’s FA Cup final? Computer hacking? Marcus, Vish, Jim and Pete genuinely have no answers on today's Ramble. Poor Vish.

Elsewhere, the lads hail future pub quiz answer Ademola Lookman and Jim makes the case for Steve Bruce taking the Man United job while Pete backs him to go on I’m a Celebrity instead. Vish also argues that pub Sunday roasts are overrated... outrageous! 

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!

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump was continuing to ask fossil-fuel executives to fund his presidential campaign on Wednesday, despite scrutiny of his relationship with the industry.

The former president attended a fundraising luncheon at Houston’s Post Oak hotel hosted by three Big Oil executives.

The invitation-only meeting comes a day after the defense rested its case in Trump’s criminal hush-money trial, and a week after Houston was battered by deadly storms. The climate crisis, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, has created the conditions for more frequent and severe rainfall and flooding, including in Texas.

The Spiderman star's stage turn is a global event – shame about the production

Opening statements in the trial of exiled Chinese mogul Guo Wengui are expected Friday with the selection of an anonymous jury consuming the first few days of the proceeding.

US District Court Judge Analisa Torres on Thursday told potential jurors their names would be kept private “to protect all of you from any unwanted attention.” She did not mention that she decided last month to anonymize them due to Guo’s past efforts to disrupt legal proceedings by dispatching his followers to protest outside the homes of legal adversaries and members of their families.

Guo, a former real estate developer once reportedly among China’s richest people, fled to the US in 2015. From a Manhattan penthouse that he bought for more than $67 million, with a reference letter from Tony Blair, he built a sprawling group of organizations he said aimed at deposing China’s Communist Party rulers, and gained a devoted following of tens of thousands of Chinese émigrés. With Steve Bannon, he founded the “New Federal State of China” which claims to be government-in-waiting set to take over governance in Beijing.

Guo has pleaded not guilty to 12 charges, including securities fraud, wire fraud, unlawful monetary transactions and conspiracy, including conspiracy to launder money. Though it is not among the charges against him, prosecutors argued last month that Guo also has used supporters to harass and threaten critics.

Moms for Liberty is on a mission.

The conservative “parents’ rights” group will spend more than $3 million on ads in swing states ahead of the election, according to a Wednesday report in the Associated Press.

Known for stirring the panic about pronoun usage in schools and pioneering book bans across the country, Moms for Liberty plans to target voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. They hope to expand to Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania later this year, according to the AP.

Tina Descovich, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty, said that their goal is to “activate” their members who do not vote. The group doesn’t endorse specific presidential candidates, but their preferences—for electing right-wing representatives—are clear: The latest ad campaign, the AP reports, will attack President Biden for his recently-enacted Title IX rules that extend safeguards to LGBTQ students.

This June, Germany’s Ketterer Kunst auction house will mark 70 years in the auction business. To celebrate, the house has announced an evening sale of German Expressionist work, one of its specialties, along with a collection of American Pop art works on June 7.

Leading the sale will be Alexej Jawlensky’s Spanische Tänzerin (1909) with an estimate of €7 million – €10 million ($7.57 million – $10.81 million). The picture has been out of the public eye for more than 90 years and has only ever been photographed in black and white, robbing afficionados of German Expressionism that opportunity to admire its rich blue and vibrant red hues.

The sale with also feature Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s 1911 work Tanz im Varieté, which has been held by the same family for 80 years and carries an estimate of €2 million – €3 million ($2.16 million – $3.24 million).

The German artists in the sale will also include Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Konrad Klapheck, Georg Baselitz, and Gerhard Richter.

The sale will also highlight works by American Pop Art masters James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg. A rare full set of 10 brightly colored screenprints from Andy Warhol’s Flowers series from 1970 will be included in the sale with an estimate of €800,000 – €1.2 million ($865,000 – $1.3 million), as will Rosenquist’s risqué large-format picture Playmate (1966), which carries an estimate of € 1,000,000 – €1.5 million ($1.08 million – $1.62 million).

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office recently announced the return of 133 antiquities “collectively valued at $14 million” to Pakistan after being seized as part of multiple investigations of trafficking networks.

The press release specifically mentioned Subhash Kapoor and Richard Beale, both of whom have been previously charged with trafficking artifacts. The items were returned during a ceremony with Consul General Aamer Ahmed Atozai and a special agent from the New York office of Homeland Security Investigations.

“These artifacts are now being returned to where they belong. This repatriation is more than the return of physical objects; it is the restoration of a part of Pakistan’s soul and identity,” Atozai said in a press statement.

Among the items being returned is a Gold Strato I Coin from circa 105-85 B.C.E. According to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, Beale tried to smuggle the coin into the US through John F. Kennedy airport, resulting in its seizure in 2023. Beale was arrested in New York last January on multiple charges relating to the sale of a multimillion-dollar ancient coin. Prior to his arrest for the “Eid Mar” (Ides of March) coin, Beale was the owner and managing director of Roma Numismatics, a London-based auction house that dealt in ancient coins. Beale and Italo Vecchi were convicted of crimes related to antiquities trafficking in August last year.

The other highlighted item being returned to Pakistan is an elaborately carved stone head of a Bodhisattva wearing a headdress featuring a lotus flower from the 2nd or 3rd century. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office said the stone head was recovered from a storage facility “allegedly hidden by Kapoor.”