How should credit be given when an art practice elevates an ordinary object into a globally understood symbol? Mexican artist Elina Chauvet, best known for her public stagings of “Zapatos Rojos (Red Shoes)” (2009–) addressing femicide and gender-based violence in Mexico, says that the project was reproduced in Bucharest last month without her knowledge or name.

“Zapatos Rojos” takes the form of dozens or hundreds of pairs of red shoes publicly displayed in site-specific formations. Each pair of shoes connotes the absence of a femicide victim, or a disappeared woman or girl. Chauvet began this collaborative installation in Ciudad Juárez, an industrial Mexican border town with a documented reputation for femicide since the early 1990s, and has since restaged the work across Central and North America, as well as multiple European countries, in the last 16 years.

On March 31, Romanian news anchor Alessandra Stoicescu hosted a public intervention called “Dragostea poartă pantofii roșii” (Romanian for “Love wears Red Shoes”) outside the Romanian Athenaeum concert hall. In observation of the parliament passing legislation officially defining femicide the week prior, Stoicescu organized the installation, which anchored a panel about domestic violence, intimate violence, and femicide, through her feminist campaign platform, called Shero. The event was done in collaboration with Mereu Aproape Foundation, which is devoted to survivors of domestic violence.

Despite the similarities with Chauvet's installation, Stoicescu's project did not credit the artist in marketing materials or social media posts. On Stoicescu's Shero website, an entry about “Dragostea poartă pantofii roșii” notes that she and the Mereu Aproape Foundation had originally staged the same red shoes intervention on February 14, 2018, on the steps of the National Museum of Romanian History, but does not mention Chauvet.

The artist said that she had been in touch with Stoicescu in 2018 to voice her concerns over the erasure of her authorship at the time, telling Hyperallergic that the news presenter ended up mentioning Chauvet's name during the program after their conversation.

Now, eight years later, Chauvet alleges that Stoicescu again co-opted the red shoe motif without contacting her or citing her beforehand.

After learning about Stoicescu's March 31 event, the artist left multiple comments on various Instagram posts requesting acknowledgment for the concept of the installation. Chauvet shared her own statement on Instagram on April 6, stating that “Zapatos Rojos” is copyrighted and to be recreated only under her authorization and guidelines.

“I am not an inspiration to you; if I were, you would not have erased my name from my work,” Chauvet's statement read, also referencing her 2018 conversation with Stoicescu.

Neither Stoicescu nor the Mereu Aproape Foundation responded to Hyperallergic's inquiries in time for publication.

Chauvet works with the hosting communities to stage each reproduction of “Zapatos Rojos.” Local residents donate dozens of pairs of shoes to the artist, participate in group sessions to paint them all red, and help assemble the public installation. In its development and interactivity, the project both unearths and represents the collective pain felt by those who have lost a loved one to femicide worldwide.

The project was born from Chauvet's own loss attributed to gender-based violence. In 1993, the artist's 32-year-old sister was killed by her husband in Ciudad Juárez.

In an email to Hyperallergic, Chauvet mentioned that it takes two to three months to stage “Zapatos Rojos” in every host location. “I have an agreement in which people commit to carrying out the project within its guidelines, and cannot do more than one installation to avoid monopolizing it,” she said.

“I know my work very well and I know that wherever it is presented it is a success, it generates a lot of interest and gives media visibility because of the theme and its aesthetics,” Chauvet continued.

Since Chauvet publicly addressed the matter on April 1, Stoicescu has edited two post captions on Instagram and one entry on the Shero website to cite the artist as her inspiration for this event. The news anchor has also disabled the comments section on her Instagram page since April 3, and has not addressed Chauvet's public concerns. The artist says Stoicescu still has not directly communicated with her about this.

“‘Zapatos Rojos’ is not a movement, it's an artwork. Movements end, but art continues,” Chauvet said to Hyperallergic.

“It's more than an installation, it's also my life story,” she continued. “In many ways I'm part of the work, and the work is part of me.”

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced 223 recipients of its annual fellowship, including 76 artists, fine arts researchers, architects, designers, and photographers.

Among this year's fellows are Iranian-American artist and fine arts professor Sheida Soleimani; Leeza Meksin, co-founder of the Brooklyn artist-run gallery Ortega y Gasset Projects; New York-based sculptor American Artist; video artist Kenneth Tram; Ukrainian-born sculptor Alina Tenser; and Sonya Clark, known for her use of human hair as a medium in works exploring the Black American experience. A full list of visual arts recipients is included at the end of this article.

The 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship cohort spans 55 artistic and scientific disciplines selected from a competitive 5,000-person applicant pool. This year's total applicants increased by nearly 2,000 from 2024 and by 1,500 from last year, when President Trump took office. Since the beginning of Trump's second term, federal arts agencies have axed grants to both cultural organizations and individual artists.

The foundation does not specify the award amount and notes that grants vary depending on each year's budget.

In 1925, Republican Senator Simon Guggenheim established the foundation and award in memory of his late 17-year-old son, with the stated aim of supporting scholars and artists “by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.”

The grant has supported the creation of iconic works, including Robert Frank's 1958 photography book The Americans and Zora Neal Hurston's famed 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Applicants to the foundation's 2026 awards in the Creative Arts and Humanities category sharply increased by 50% this year, the foundation said in a press release.

This year's class hails from 10 countries and 33 US states. Most recipients are affiliated with a college or university, and the youngest member is 28 years old. The oldest recipient of the award is 76 years old.

The 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship visual arts recipients are listed below.

Fine Arts

• John Ahearn
• American Artist
• Fia Backström
• Elena Bajo
• Amy Bessone
• Raymond Boisjoly
• Sonya Clark
• Kota Ezawa
• Jude Griebel
• Iva Gueorguieva
• Karl Haendel
• Fariba Hajamadi
• Allison Janae Hamilton
• LaMont Hamilton
• James Hoff
• Julia M. Kunin
• Monica Majoli
• Aspen Mays
• Leeza Meksin
• John Miller
• Marina Rosenfeld
• Michael Ross
• Francis Ruyter
• Kate Shepherd
• Claire Sherman
• Kenneth Tam
• Alina Tenser
• Juana Valdes
• Jennifer West
• Anne Wilson

Fine Arts Research

• Nathan Arrington
• Claudia Brittenham
• Elizabeth Mansfield

Photography

• Samantha Appleton
• Jeremiah Ariaz
• Chris Aluka Berry
• Harlan Bozeman
• Jonathan Michael Castillo
• Stephen Ferry
• Allison Grant
• Kapulani Landgraf
• Matthew Leifheit
• Pixy Liao
• Chris McCaw
• Fred Ritchin
• Collier Schorr
• Lara Shipley
• Sheida Soleimani
• riel Sturchio
• Sadie Wechsler
• Guanyu Xu
• Samira Yamin

Film, Video, and New Media Studies

• Noah Isenberg
• Julie Turnock
• Margaret Brown
• Brian M. Cassidy
• Reid Davenport
• Cate Giordano
• Jacqueline Goss
• Christopher Harris
• Brian Christopher Hawkins
• Madeleine Hunt - Ehrlich
• Zhu Jia
• Sarah Lasley
• Steve Maing
• Mitch McCabe
• Tenzin Phuntsog
• Steve Reinke
• Anna Samo
• Beatriz Santiago Muñoz
• Melanie Shatzky
• Fern Silva
• Adam James Smith

Architecture, Planning, and Design

• Neil Brenner
• Scott Redford

Do I need to go to art fairs? I don’t have gallery representation and galleries don’t seem very interested in new artists at those events. Should I just stay home? —home alone in Chicago 

Nobody needs to go to an art fair. It’s optional. Art fairs are places to look at art, buy art, and meet professionals. If you’re not interested in those things, don’t go. Nobody will miss you if you decide it’s not worth it. They won’t even know you’re missing.

But that’s the problem, isn’t it? People only remark on the absence of galleries, not the absence of artists. You won’t be missed. You won’t be talked about either. 

What you get out of any art fair experience depends on your ability to assess what you should get out of it. You have to know what you want. Networking? Looking at art? Both? Then you can figure out a plan. Usually, this means setting up coffee dates with pre-existing connections and reviewing fair events and programming. 

This is the foundation of career strategy, even if nobody calls it that. Calendar management sounds too simple, and “strategy” is such a dirty word in the art world that nobody wants to use it. But every successful artist does, whether they name it or not. Art Professionals don’t find your work because your art is so great. They find it because you’ve gone out of your way to find them.  

A relevant example: An artist I worked with was debating participating in Upstate Open Studios, which will run on May 16-17, the same weekend as Frieze New York and the Wassaic Project’s summer exhibition opening. He decided against it because he thought curators’ attention would be elsewhere. 

Strategic thinking involves choosing the right fairs. Not all fairs are created equal. Tickets for Frieze’s opening day sell for $200, making it prohibitively expensive and probably not worth attending if you don’t have blue-chip representation. On the other end, artist-first fairs like Clio cater more to amateurs. Choose the fair and programming that suits you. 

Even when you know which fairs to attend, showing up can still feel uncomfortable. If you want to sell your work and no gallery has offered, attending the fairs can feel like crashing a party you weren’t invited to. It hurts.  

If that's the case, get over it. You're treating the main stage like it's the only stage.

The real value of art fairs isn’t networking — it’s information. Knowledge of the scene helps you make better decisions and expands your social currency. 

Most artists believe that no dealer wants to talk to them while trying to sell another artist’s work. That’s true. I don’t normally see many studio visits set up at the fairs, but the point here is that you shouldn’t write off the possibility of these opportunities. Midway through Expo Chicago, which closed this weekend, I witnessed a gallerist set up a studio visit with an artist they’d met, simply because she enjoyed the conversation. She hadn’t even seen the work. 

Meanwhile, the fair, flush with curators who came for the panel programming, buzzed with excitement. Granted, they probably didn’t come specifically for you, but new connections are always a win-win, and this kind of event makes access easy. 

You never know what information you’ll need or use. At Expo Chicago, I learned that many blue-chip galleries were attending the fair with the hopes of placing art at the Obama Presidential Center; the Renaissance Society held a silent benefit where people could only speak to each other via notepads that went over like gangbusters; and Video Data Bank had two remaining staff due to cutbacks. 

None of that impacts what I do (although it did help me write this paragraph). But I treat it like insurance — knowledge I can draw on if needed. You can do this, too. 

I also got a few conversation starters: Everyone talked about Josh Kline's 19-page essay on how real estate costs and financialization have made New York unlivable for artists. No one had anything bad to say about the reduced scale of the Expo Art Fair, but it came up in virtually every conversation. Barely Fair, an auxiliary show of miniaturized versions of artworks, and Neighbors, an art fair inside a lavish Gold Coast apartment, got the lion’s share of attention.  

There’s more, of course, but you get the idea. The more you know about what’s happening, the better. You don’t need to go to a fair to learn about the industry, but I can think of worse ways to spend a day. 

Nikyle Begay (Diné, Todích’ííníí - Bitter Water, Totsohní - Big Water, Deeshchiinii - Red Streak People, bįįh bitoodni - Deer Springs People) is a shepherd, weaver, and teacher based in Naabeehó Bináhásdzo (the Navajo Nation) in Sunrise Springs, Arizona. 

Begay was destined to work with sheep from the very beginning. Following their birth, their grandmother buried their umbilical cord in the family’s sheep corral, a tradition that is said to shape a child’s future path. She prayed that Begay would be the descendant who maintained the family’s sheep flocks and carry her knowledge forward for generations.

Her prayers were answered. Begay took to weaving early on, and throughout their career, they have advocated for the value of ancestral Navajo Churro flocks, modeled high-quality breeding practices, and contributed to the ongoing revitalization of historic twill patterns.

In their own weaving practice, Begay has long been drawn to heritage weaving conventions, particularly the twill technique used to make saddle blankets. They possess an uncanny ability to reconstruct highly complex woven patterns, which they have used to reawaken techniques that were pushed to the margins of the trading-post economy that promoted regional styles to tourists and non-Native buyers over historic and functional styles. Because the trading post system historically promoted narrowly defined “regional styles” of Diné weaving to satisfy the aesthetic tastes of settler audiences, the characteristic durability of twill was less commercially viable. Begay is part of a growing movement of contemporary weavers rekindling Diné techniques and aesthetics after years of suppression by colonial market preferences.

Begay’s practice is also deeply nonhierarchical: Their weavings can be found on the walls of museums in exhibitions, including Smoke in Our Hair at the Hudson River Museum, and on the backs of horses. This dual presence reflects their role as a culture bearer, an artist who sustains and transmits cultural knowledge through equal parts practice, education, and daily use.

Moonoka Begay (no direct relation to the artist) and Zach Feuer spoke with Nikyle Begay over Zoom about their upbringing among sheep, disentangling weaving from colonial influences, and reclaiming queer Diné identity. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

Moonoka Begay & Zach Feuer: How did you start weaving and shepherding? 

NB: I was raised primarily with my grandmothers. I was always fascinated with sheep as a kid. I was just always so drawn to them. Anytime that I visited my grandmothers or my great-grandmothers, rather than going inside to say hello to everybody, I went straight for the sheep corral and I would just watch them. As I got older, I would stay out with the sheep from sunup to sundown on horseback or on foot. I just followed a daily path, going out at least two to three miles to the watering hole, and then slowly bringing them back.

At around age seven, I noticed my paternal grandmother weaving. She was a proficient twill weaver, which was quite rare back then. After watching her, I thought, “Wow, this is amazing.” So I took to it, and by about nine years old, I would sneak little pieces of yarn that she had and set up a loom on my own. 

Back then, everything was very binary in terms of gender roles. The boys had to be outside doing work, and the women and the girls had to be inside, cooking and cleaning. My cousins and my uncles told me, “You can't weave. You're not a girl.” But with my grandma, she said, “If you wanna weave and if you're going to take to the sheep, you’ve got to take to these other areas like shearing and processing the wool along with weaving.”

So I did. When she found that I was stashing little pieces of yarn and warp and trying to figure it out on my own, she told me to watch her from start to finish a few times. That's how I learned to weave.

MB & ZF: From 2021 to 2024, you ran the Rainbow Fiber Co-Op and distributed wool internationally, with an emphasis on natural, undyed colors. How and why did you start this project?

NB: The thought of bringing value to Navajo Churro wool has always been in the back of my mind, but it was during COVID-19 that it came into fruition. I started hearing stories of friends who are fellow shepherds and weavers getting sick, dying. One woman succumbed to complications when she had COVID, and I wondered what was going to happen to her sheep. I got so emotional thinking about all the knowledge that was lost and the sheep and sheep dogs who would be missing her. That was when the question came to me: How can I help these shepherds?

I called up my friend Kelli Dunaj, who also raises Navajo Churro sheep in Marshall, California, and asked her what we could do. We discussed how the wool economy was struggling, not only for the Navajo, but for other producers around the globe. With help from 4KINSHIP, One Earth, Fibershed, Vivo Barefoot, and First Nations Development Institute, we spread the word. Within our first week, we raised about $70,000. The next step was gathering the shepherds. We wanted to support the largest flocks of Navajo Churro sheep on the reservation. Knowing which shepherds raise which colors, we decided to offer a boutique yarn selection with dyed yarns along with an array of natural colors.

We used every part of the fleece from the sheep and had our first run done in Mora Valley Spinning Mill in New Mexico. We launched, and immediately we sold out. All the members continued investing earnings back into the Co-Op. That way, we became self-sustaining.

MB & ZF: What breeding and husbandry practices specifically pertain to the production of weaving? Do you make decisions early on with sheep that affect the palette, texture, or overall aesthetic qualities of an artwork?

NB: I learned early on that I was not a dyer. The story goes that I was in my kitchen, and you're supposed to be dying outside where the air is just fresh. But had my pots going and was just breathing in all of that noxious air. I was getting lightheaded and dizzy. The process started breaking my hair and I felt like I had a sunburn. It was awful. I was just a total beginner. Mind you, I was dying black and gray. So I thought, “Why not just breed my sheep for black and gray?” That would be a lot easier. I started making connections through platforms like Yahoo Groups. They had a sheep color genetics group that put me in contact with many more people who were breeding for natural, colored wool and fine-tuning their breeding practices to extract some of the more recessive color patterns. 

I noticed other breeders and I were making mistakes in shearing our own sheep. The wool was beginning to become too coarse, starting to have more of a fiber that we call kemp, which is a short, opaque fiber that is way thicker than the actual wool fibers. Because I grew up adventuring to the Hubbell Trading Post and observing textiles woven before The Long Walk, I noticed that the rams’ wool that I was shearing was not the same wool that was used on blankets. That's when my journey of visiting different collections truly began. 

There's one weaving that I do that has a natural color, with tufts at the bottom that are dark gray and almost black at the base. Then they fade in like an ombre into gray. That's a natural color occurrence within that color pattern. I have bred to get those and incorporate them into my own weaving designs. So my breeding practices are fine-tuned.

MB & ZF: Can you share more about the symbolism of those tufts?

NB: Before the introduction of the dazzling Germantown colors, moms would weave their sons’ saddle blankets in very fancy styles to communicate that they were ready to be married off. One of the methods to do this was to create thick tufts at the bottom, which would stick out from behind the saddle while the rider was sitting on top of their horse. The second reason for the tufts was for comfort because you can't always butcher a sheep to make a pelt. Weavers began to weave the tufted rugs, not only for saddle covers but for bedding too.

MB & ZF: Your recent work is characterized by a singular, dominant dye color and natural Churro with some extremely complex and unusual twills. Can you tell us about this series?

NB: I love twill weaving. For many years, it has been undervalued, specifically by traders. When styles shifted from weaving blankets to rugs, traders would create their own regional styles by appropriating designs from Oriental rugs because this was what would sell in society. Many of these rugs went to New York City or Chicago, and then traders like J.B. Moore capitalized on the demand, even creating catalogs to trade rugs. Traders discouraged weavers from weaving twills, saddle blankets, and saddle seat covers because they weren't saleable.

Growing up going to the Hubbell Trading Post, I noticed that in the rug room, there were Ganado Red, Crystal, and Klagetoh from floor to ceiling. The little pile of saddle blankets was tiny compared to the rest. I wondered why, because I grew up seeing my grandmother weave a lot of saddle blankets, which were used around the community. 

It was sad to see that other weavers stopped weaving the twill because traders didn’t value the technique. I made it my life's goal, my mission in life, I should say, to bring the twill into its rightful place. It's an integral part of Navajo weaving. If you look at a blanket pre-1860s, you'll see that it's actually woven in twill as a big blanket. And it's not as thick as a saddle blanket. It's both drapey and very utilitarian.

MB & ZF: Once you identified your mission to revitalize the twill technique, how did you begin the process? Did you call on the community for support?

NB: I told my grandmother that twill was my interest. I love using the warps to create the pattern rather than using the yarns to create the pattern. She would explain twill patterns to me and I would also turn to books. Although there are a lot of books written about Navajo weaving, there is usually only one paragraph, at most, dedicated to “subtle blanket weaving” or “double face weaving,” as they call it. There really aren’t many resources. 

After learning the simplest diamond pattern, I was able to see and understand how the twill had worked. I figured out a lot of these patterns that hadn’t been woven in almost a hundred years. At a Sheep Is Life event, I met a woman who gifted me a loom. She explained, “My grandmother used to do this diamond pattern where it looked like this.” She drew a little sketch and I looked at it. I started picking warps and was able to recreate something she had only seen her grandmother do.

For some background, after the release from Fort Sumner, government agents forced patriarchy onto our people. Before that, it was all matriarchy. In the 1930s, when the grazing permits were issued to families, they were given to the head of household, who was then a man. Those papers were then passed down to certain children and oftentimes the favorite. That had happened in this woman's family, so she didn't have access to learning weaving because now it was closely guarded by one person who had held that grazing permit.

When I figured out that twill pattern, the internet was also getting bigger and people were posting more archival photos. I began to see earlier forms of twills, mostly samplers that were unfinished. I continued to learn by studying and recreating them on my loom. I always had an eye for it. I don't know how else to explain it. I think it's from watching my grandmother do it as a child so many times that my brain now works that way. 

MB & ZF: Some of your work goes onto a horse, some of it goes onto a wall, and some of it goes into a museum. Does this affect how you're making a piece?

NB: At the beginning of my process, I'm inspired by the sheep and by nature, and my work has always naturally gravitated toward the horse rider. However, whether my work ends up on a horse or it ends up on a wall, I'm content. 

MB & ZF: There is a dominant idea in popular culture that Diné weaving is traditionally a women’s art form. As we know, tradition is a fluid and ever-evolving topic for Native people. Can you speak to your understanding of this history and how it affects your experience carrying on the legacy of weaving today? 

NB: My grandmother held the view that work still belongs to everybody. If you're alive and you need to cook for yourself, and if that entails chopping wood, building a fire, something that's seen as masculine and you're female, it just needs to be done. They raised me with that understanding. For example, if you are cold, are you just going to sit there and be cold, or are you going to figure out how to weave yourself a blanket to keep warm? For outsiders, it was an anomaly to see a Navajo boy weaving or processing wool. They'd create elaborate tales and attribute the behavior to being intersex just to make it make sense to their brain. Our way of life has been co-opted and corrupted by the outside views coming into our culture.  

MB & ZF: Do you think the intersex assumption that you described was developed through a strictly Christian lens? Or was it partly an attempt at understanding older Diné understandings of gender, such as Nádleehi, and the long history of gender fluidity in Diné communities?

NB: A little of both. I read the intersex story in a book. In my sense, being fortunate enough to grow up with traditional grandparents, they told me stories affirming that everybody has their place in society. In our traditional stories, they say that the first men and the first women had so many sets of twins to explain all the types of people. The first set of twins were intersex and they gave ceremonies to the Navajo people. The second pair were trans women and they gave tools and the knowledge of farming to the people.

These traditional stories give something to the people to survive. Growing up, I was always told that if that's who you are, be who you are and don't let anybody tell you otherwise.  Coming from other family members who didn't understand that, who were taken away and exposed to other ways of growing up, they said the opposite: They were against it. I have gone back and forth between feeling proud of who I am and then feeling very small and like I should hide.

MB & ZF: You have spoken about how Diné teachings and creation stories impact and influence your weaving process. Were the teachings of Spider Woman and Spider Man ever part of your weaving training passed down by your grandmother?

NB: The story of Spider Woman was passed down to me from my grandmother, but the teachings I learned about sheep are what truly impact my weaving. I pay homage to Spider Woman, of course, but in all honesty, it's the sheep. We call ourselves the Diné, and we call our sheep dibé. Apparently, as a baby, when my umbilical cord dried and fell off, she was the one who had the honor of taking it and placing it in a sacred place, which in our culture will shape who you are in the future. In Navajo culture, this is done by the grandmother or the mother. They'll place it, for example, at the doorway of their house so the child will always have their mind at home. Or they'll put it in the horse corral because they want the child to become an experienced horseman. 

She told me that when my umbilical cord was ready, she took it to the heart of the sheep corral. She dug far down until she hit dirt and placed my umbilical cord there. She covered it back up and left a prayer that this would be the grandchild to take over her weaving legacy. We were shearing sheep together when she told me this. I said, “Thank you, Grandma. Thank you so much.”

Social Practice City University of New York (SPCUNY), a five-year-old project that provides fellowships and support to social justice-minded artists across the public university system, will shutter next February. 

Artists and educators Chloë Bass and Gregory Sholette founded the program in 2021, in part as a reimagining of higher education following months of virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic and the perceived corporatization of the university at large. The independent project announced its February 2027 closure today, Tuesday, April 14. 

The artist-led network, celebrated for facilitating faculty and student projects that apply the arts to social issues, granted unrestricted fellowships to artists across CUNY’s 25 campuses with support from the Mellon Foundation. Following the matriculation of 129 fellows and the distribution of $535,000 in project awards, SPCUNY Co-Directors Bass and Sholette — who are both transitioning out of their academic titles — will end their pedagogical project. Bass left her position as associate professor in Studio Art at Queens College last year, and Sholette is retiring from his professorship in the Department of Art at Queens College.

SPCUNY was never formally absorbed by the university as a department or academic program. Bass told Hyperallergic that with both directors leaving the university system, there was no clear pathway to transfer leadership and continue the program, despite the Mellon Foundation's funding.

“There's no real institution,” Bass explained to Hyperallergic. “It's an artist-run project that looked like an institution.”

Over the program's five years of operation, SPCUNY has funded projects that confront climate change, racial inequality, and immigration crackdowns, imagining futures beyond social injustice. The project also linked otherwise detached academic departments, Bass said.

SPCUNY student and faculty fellows have documented the disparate health tolls of the city’s polluting peaker plants through photography, magnified the plight of deported United States military veterans through public art, and proctored a mock standardized test interrogating ritual and relationship.  

Sholette told Hyperallergic that the organization paid homage to the history of the city's public university system, which for nearly 130 years had been tuition-free and an emblem of accessible critical education.

“ We were in a way going back to the roots of the city university itself, especially the phase it went through in the 1970s when the idea was to really make it free,” Sholette recalled. “To make it a place where you would not just step up into the middle class, but would allow working-class people to come and have a critical education.”

Sholette said that while SPCUNY could not waive tuition for all the students, the program embodied the spirit of the university's founding.

“We couldn't make their education completely free in SPCUNY, but we could give them money that we got from our foundation supporter, the Mellon Foundation in particular,” Sholette explained. “We kind of created a mini wayback machine, if you will, to that period of time.”

Though Bass and Sholette have made the decision not to continue the program, they said they believe in its enduring impact, as well as its potential for a future comeback. 

Recognizing an era of university capitulation to the Trump administration’s demands, Bass and Sholette underscored the importance of investment in justice-driven projects by higher education institutions. 

 ”Even though these projects might be small, they're one way of modeling a world that we want,” Bass said. “And in the absence of having support to make those models, it's hard for people in the future to understand.”  

Bass and Sholette hope that in the future, aspects of the program might find new life. Coinciding with its February end, SPCUNY will publish Practicing in Public, a book on socially engaged art. It will also hold events as part of its event series How Do We ______ in Public? through its closure. 

“ Part of what we hope is that we're leaving behind a really robust legacy of materials and a living archive that just needs some drops of water to get it to spring back to life,” Sholette said.

HOUSTON — “If you think there are too many pictures here, you’re right,” joked Wendy Watriss, photographer and FotoFest co-founder, at the biennial’s opening reception on March 7. For the show’s 40th anniversary, organizers mounted a massive retrospective featuring over 450 artists from 58 countries. “We wanted people to see the breadth and the scope of FotoFest, from China to Argentina, from Russia to England, from Canada to Africa, and on and on,” said Watriss. 

She founded FotoFest with her husband, photographer Frederick Baldwin, after the two visited the Rencontres d'Arles in southern France in 1983. During their travels, the pair encountered groundbreaking photography that had never been shown in the United States. As a result, they sought to create their own festival in Houston with the founding values of “internationalism, opening the door to new opportunities around the world, and making sure that the United States doesn’t remain as parochial as it often is,” Watriss said at the opening event. That was a radical message when the festival began in 1986, and it remains so today.

For all the right-wing attempts to resurrect American McCarthyism, the mood among FotoFest attendees was relaxed and upbeat. Despite a heavy downpour outside, turnout was strong. A live band played. Guests mingled and posed for photographs. The festival’s organizers and attendees from local arts organizations projected a joyful self-assuredness so far from the “culture under siege” narrative that it seemed almost foolish to bring it up. When asked by Hyperallergic how he felt about the current atmosphere of censorship and whether the arts would bow to governmental demands, FotoFest Executive Director Steven Evans smiled and replied, “I’m against it.” Though Evans vaguely alluded to pushback the biennial received for its political ethos, when asked to comment further, he steered the conversation back toward the artwork it championed.

Indeed, there was much to celebrate. The biennial is spread across three buildings, a series of commissions at Project Row Houses, and a slate of public programs and partnerships across the city large enough that the FotoFest guide is a 192-page paperback. (The retrospective is also accompanied by a hefty hardcover catalog by Schilt Publishing.) Its main exhibition, Global Visions: FotoFest at 40, spans two buildings at the Sawyer Yards Galleries and provides a taste of each of the 20 biennials FotoFest has held since 1986. Unlike Arles and other similar festivals, FotoFest — as the retrospective demonstrates — has always been more tightly curated, focusing on a deeply researched theme for each iteration. Past biennials have focused on topics as diverse as contemporary photography and new media in India (2018); 20th-century Russian Pictorialism (2002); Latino photography in the US (1994); and early modernist Japanese photography (1988). No overarching FotoFest “style” emerges from the retrospective, as it spans every conceivable mode, from the formal abstraction of Theodore Schwenk’s scientific liquid motion studies to Susan Meiselas’s documentary photojournalism capturing the Kurdish struggle for independence.

FotoFest is the oldest photography festival in the nation, and its age is reflected in the long-term ties with the artists on view, all of whom the biennial re-engaged for the retrospective. Photographer Lola Flash first attended FotoFest 15 years ago on a scholarship from the New York nonprofit En Foco, and today they are one of the commissioned artists at Project Row Houses, where they present Afrofuturist self-portraits from the series syzygy, the vision (2019–present). “As a Black, queer, female photographer, I think that when you look around, you can see the inclusiveness that [FotoFest] really pushed for,” Flash said in their remarks at the opening. “So for me, to feel like a part of this organization and a part of the world of photography, it’s very important.” 

Likewise, Delilah Montoya — now an established photographer and educator — had barely been exhibited before her work was included in the biennial’s 1994 edition, American Voices. “There were a lot of really important Latinos and Latinas who were invited into FotoFest, and it was really the first time that all that work was shown together,” Delilah said, addressing the crowd. “This was the first time Latino Americans, though we’ve been here for four or five hundred years, were being shown.”

Despite sitting squarely in a red state, Houston’s thriving art scene remains largely independent. Although the Trump administration has attempted to exert unprecedented levels of control over the arts — including taking over the Kennedy Center, erasing Black history from public monuments, and censoring the Smithsonian — its impact has been mostly confined to government-funded cultural institutions. The US has never funded the arts in the ways that other countries do. Although this has made it harder to be an artist or nonprofit here, it also means that such organizations are already largely independent and resourceful; no money means no strings attached, and therefore no strings to pull. There is little incentive to comply, and so far, at least in Houston, few signs of compliance in advance.

FotoFest embodies this spirit of freedom, as the retrospective demonstrates the biennial’s tireless commitment to never looking away from hard truths and to building a community that is both local and international. Doing all that for 40 years — that’s no small feat.

LONDON — The most remarkable aspect of the Royal Academy’s newly opened monographic exhibition on Michaelina Wautier (1604–1689) is its rediscovery of a talent on a par with the likes of Van Dyck and Rubens. Despite apparent success and recognition during her lifetime, the artist seemingly flew undetected — or, more accurately, misattributed — beneath our noses for centuries. 

Wautier is an art-historical anomaly; working in mid-17th-century Brussels, she spans wide genres from flower pieces to portraiture all the way up to grand, male-dominated history painting, excelling throughout. 

Her versatility defied the contemporary confinement of women to decorative or floral work — then seen as “lower” genres in the hierarchy of painting — preventing easy categorization or attribution. More significantly, however, it is her sex, and ingrained societal norms, that have obfuscated her position in the art historical canon. The situation echoes that of Artemisia Gentileschi in similarly patriarchal Italy, who trained under her father, Orazio Gentileschi, and had many of her paintings subsequently misattributed to him. (Wautier likely shared a studio with her brother Charles, to whom her work was often falsely credited.)

Women were excluded from studio art classes, and therefore access to live nude models; despite Wautier signing two of her pieces “invenit et fecit” (“invented and made”), historical appraisals denied her authorship based on the improbability of a woman so accurately rendering the twisting nude flesh of a work like “The Triumph of Bacchus” (1650–56) having been denied the means to study it. Indeed, “The Triumph of Bacchus”, listed in the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, was for centuries assumed to be the work of a male painter. The situation is compounded by scant biographical documentary evidence, meaning that Wautier’s paintings are generally all we have had to go on. 

It was the reattribution of the “Triumph of Bacchus,” presented by curator Gerlinde Gruber at Vienna’s  Kunsthistorisches Museum in 2009, alongside investigative research of art historian Katlijne Van der Stighelen of KU Leuven, that turned the tide in recent years. This culminated in Wautier’s first monographic presentation in Antwerp in 2018, a joint enterprise between the Museum aan de Stroom (MAS) and the Rubenshuis. Such consistently high quality across genres in work made by one hand — not to mention a previously unrecognised one — was nothing short of astounding. The exhibition included the freshly reattributed “Everyone His Fancy” (c. 1655) and presented the case for Wautier’s authorship of a series known as “The Five Senses” (1650), now considered to be one of her most important works; in it, the senses are allegorised as different boys engaging in everyday activities, flipping a gendered thematic tradition on its head. 

Most exciting about such monographic shows is their place in ongoing historiography. Since the Antwerp exhibition in 2018, art historians including Van der Stighelen, Jahel Sanzsalazar, Jeffrey Muller and their teams have expanded on and driven research into Wautier’s changing oeuvre. A key difficulty researchers face in piecing together her presence in history is the inconsistency with which Wautier was referred to in name: for example, she’s often listed as “M Wouters” in historic auction catalogues. In this respect, ongoing work into the digitization of documentary sources, such as auction catalogues and collection inventories, has facilitated better mapping of potential clues and leads. Building the picture of Wautier, or rather the evidence supporting her existence, movement and activities, is to better understand her social and intellectual milieu, and therefore the context in which the paintings were created. 

This year’s solo exhibition at the Royal Academy and Kunsthistorisches Museum represents the next stage in the process, where visitors may participate in the rediscovery of Wautier in real time. It is hard to overstate the rarity of uncovering such undisputed talent in an artist simply “disappeared” from art history. “It’s a genuine story of rediscovery — it’s become a bit of a cliché to say a woman artist is being “rediscovered,” while most of the time they’ve simply been ignored,” Julien Domercq, who co-curated the show with Rina Sagoo, told me. “But in Wautier’s case it’s true: She was completely forgotten and only rediscovered in the last 30 years.”

Domercq also noted that the list of Wautier’s autograph works has changed since her first monographic exhibition; the Royal Academy presents the updated oeuvre of recognised paintings, alongside pieces by her brother Charles and contemporaries Rubens and David Teniers the Younger. 

I asked Domercq why Wautier is so unknown in the public imagination; her name isn’t even included in most popular surveys of women artists. This is a striking contrast to the extraordinary attention and recognition afforded to Gentileschi, her direct contemporary, not least in the National Gallery’s recent monograph and acquisition of Gentileschi’s Self Portrait as Catherine of Alexandria. For the two are both titans of technical ability; it is not so trite a matter as one being “better” than the other. Domercq rightly pointed out that Gentileschi was never “forgotten” in the way Wautier was, citing extensive surviving documentary evidence on the former (not least the brutal trial lending a “drama that fascinates many”). 

“We hope the show here will change that,” Domercq said, though given the scant information available on Wautier, “it is her works that need to do all the talking. All that we can really tell is that she must have been an extraordinary human being to paint such great, varied pictures, transcending all these limitations usually imposed on women.”

Having covered the developments on Wautier since 2018, I can liken the effect of first encountering so many accomplished and vivacious paintings in one presentation, combined with the realization they are all by one hitherto unknown person, to the peculiar and powerful sensation of that silent person reappearing again — even if, as Domercq notes, “we do not really have ‘her voice.’”

Michaelina Wautier continues at the Royal Academy of Arts (Burlington House, Piccadilly, London) through June 21. The exhibition was curated by Julien Domercq and Rina Sagoo and organized in collaboration with the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, a painter who confronted injustice at home and abroad with striking scenes of resistance, died on Friday, April 10, at the age of 46 at her home in Los Angeles, days before the opening of a new solo exhibition of her work at Jeffrey Deitch’s West Hollywood gallery. The cause of her death was not publicly reported, and the gallery is expected to make an announcement about her show and a memorial in the coming days.

Deitch, whose gallery announced the news of her death on Saturday, said Dupuy-Spencer was “beloved by people in her creative community.” 

“Celeste was an extraordinary artist and a wonderful person, deeply dedicated to her painting, often working round the clock in her studio,” Deitch wrote in an email to Hyperallergic. “We spent many hours in her studio talking about the history of art and how it intersects with world events.”

The California-based artist deconstructed violent moments of contemporary American politics in her work. Her vivid depiction of the January 6 insurrection, “Father, Don’t You See That I Am Burning” (2021), was acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, in 2022.

Dupuy-Spencer also spoke in opposition to the atrocities Israel committed against Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank. She was the target of relentless pro-Israel online harassment from the art world and beyond, but she continued to defend her stance in solidarity with the human rights of Palestinians.

“I’m proud to be included on the list of people who stopped everything to cry out for an end to the genocide and a free Palestine,” she posted on her Instagram page in September. “I don’t care what they do to me. Why would I duck and hide from fascists?” 

"To call a Jewish person a token for speaking against the state — that is anti-Semitism," she wrote.

Born in 1979, Dupuy-Spencer grew up in Rheinbeck, New York, and traveled frequently to Louisiana before pursuing a Bachelor's of Fine Arts at Bard College in 2007 without graduating. She moved from New York to New Orleans in 2012 but eventually settled in Los Angeles, showing at Nino Mier Gallery and Eve Fowler’s Artist Curated Projects.

A decade after college, Dupuy-Spencer found acclaim when her paintings were featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the Hammer Museum’s 2018 Made in LA biennial. She reportedly contemplated shelving her art career while in New Orleans, but the experience of living in the Deep South inspired her to explore the origins of American mythologies and their reach into the present.

“Our relationship to that stuff is so twisted…It’s...desperately trying to be like, ‘that has nothing to do with me’ — when in fact it has everything to do with you,” she told Pelican Bomb’s Hyunjee Nicole Kim after refusing to attend a family’s wedding at a historic plantation.

In 2021, Dupuy-Spencer became transfixed following Democracy Now! and CNN reports of MAGA activists ransacking the US Capitol as Congress certified the 2020 election. She first resisted painting the scene, but chose to depict the chaotic images of QAnoners, Proud Boys, and other camo-clad rioters with references to Caravaggio, Thomas Cole, and James Ensor’s “Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889” (1888) and Tintoretto’s “Moses Drawing Water from the Rock” (1577). 

As she became more well-known, Dupuy-Spencer began speaking about her identity as a trans, masculine-presenting person while never seeing herself as fully male or female. (Dupuy-Spencer did not like using specific pronouns, but went by she/her in interviews.)

“I don’t consider myself transitioning to male, but I was starting to do that and found myself reacquainted with something that I really love in myself — the feminine side that was in a constant state of suppression,” she told Los Angeles Magazine in a 2021 profile. “Being trans allowed me to understand what femininity really was.”

Her upcoming solo show at Deitch, Burning in the Eyes of the Maker, grappled with the tension between the transactional nature of the art world and the political meanings she imbued in her works. In an artist statement for the exhibition, Dupuy-Spencer wrote that she approached her new paintings as a “conversation rather than a construction” and that the process of making work helped her reach inaccessible emotions and ideas.

“Painting, for me, is participation in the aliveness of life,” she wrote. “It is communication as recognition, not explanation. Meaning emerges only through encounter — when a viewer and a painting agree to stand in the same place and face the same uncertainty. The task is contact.”

Nina MacLaughlin, who co-authored a book with Dupuy-Spencer about her paintings that will be out with Phaidon’s Monacelli Press this summer, called her loss “a massive sadness” and said working with her was “one of the great honors of my life.”

“Celeste saw beyond. She saw through and she saw beyond and she saw what was right here and she showed us. She showed what most of us try to ignore, deny, scroll past. She looked for us. There was deep tenderness in her rage,” MacLaughlin told Hyperallergic. “No one had a mind like hers. No one. No one. She burned at a different temperature.”

Remember brat summer? Well, apparently New York City is determined to have a Duchamp spring as Gagosian gallery announced that the inaugural exhibition at its new Uptown location will center the conceptual artist's famous “readymades” — including a replica series first exhibited at the same location over six decades ago.  

Opening April 25 and running concurrently with the artist's first United States retrospective in over 50 years at the Museum of Modern Art, Gagosian's forthcoming exhibition will present several of Duchamp's most recognized readymades — pre-existing, mass-produced objects that the artist designated as artworks.

The show is a tale of new beginnings at the same place for both the mega-gallery and the artist. Having opened its first NYC location at 980 Madison Avenue in 1989, Gagosian was recently forced to vacate its multi-level headquarters after Bloomberg Philanthropies bought out the building in 2024. Nevertheless, art dealer Larry Gagosian was determined to stay in the NYC flagship location of 35 years, and managed to secure a ground-level space at 980 Madison Avenue for the gallery.

In 1964, Duchamp and his dealer, Arturo Schwarz, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the artist's first readymade — “Bicycle Wheel” (1913) — by creating a limited edition set of 14 authorized replicas of original works that had been lost over time. The replica set made its American debut in a 1965 exhibition at Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, then housed in the same Upper East Side building.

(As it turns out, Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery also lost its lease at 980 Madison Avenue after 20 years in 1979 ... Time is a flat circle — nay, a spinning bike wheel.)

Since their inception, Duchamp's readymades have maintained a polarizing influence on modern and contemporary art, provoking conversations about what the term “art” encompasses, and who gets to determine that, for over a century. It was “Fountain” (1917), an overturned porcelain urinal that the artist signed off with the pseudonym R. Mutt, that catapulted the body of work into fiery debate after Duchamp submitted it for display in an inaugural un-juried exhibition hosted by the Society of Independent Artists in NYC.

The work's ultimate exclusion from the main show, which aimed to display all artists' submissions so long as they paid the required fee, led to Duchamp's resignation from the Society. The dialogue about the work's value and artistic designation continued in the following issue of the Blind Man, a short-lived Dadaist journal, which included a segment in defense of “Fountain.”

Alongside replicas of “Fountain” and ”Bicycle Wheel,” Gagosian’s forthcoming exhibition will also include Duchamp's “L.H.O.O.Q.” (1964, after 1919 original); “Porte-bouteilles (Bottle Dryer)” (1964, after 1914 lost original); and “Boîte-en-valise” (1935–49; contents 1935–41). 

A spokesperson for the gallery told Hyperallergic that additional details regarding the included artworks and the format of the new gallery space would become available closer to the exhibition’s opening date.

Yesterday, on Orthodox Easter, Donald Trump faced an eruption of backlash for posting an AI-generated photo of himself as Jesus Christ, just a couple of minutes after he criticized Pope Leo XIV on Truth Social. The image parodies the centuries-old Catholic image of the Divine Physician, with Trump wearing a flowing white mantle with a red robe, a beam of light emanating from his left hand as he rests his right on the forehead of a man in a hospital bed. Surrounding him are an older man in a dark navy cap (presumably a veteran), a man in military camouflage, a woman in a blue surgeon cap with a stethoscope, and a woman with hands folded in prayer — all of whom are White. Behind him waves a rippling American flag, while eagles and fighter jets soar through the sky above the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial.

Trump posted the image right after going on a political tirade against Pope Leo about an hour after 60 Minutes aired a segment about the pope and American Catholic leaders’ ongoing opposition against the president’s war in Iran and immigration policies. In his post, Trump claims, “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”

The post was deleted after outcry from his loyalist supporters, including Bishop Robert Barron, who serves on the presidential administration’s Religious Liberty Commission, formed last May. Conservative pundit Michael Knowles — himself a practicing Catholic — posted that “it behooves the President both spiritually and politically to delete the picture, no matter the intent.” Even the Knights Templar International, a far-right Catholic group that has long supported Trump, said they “demand that this offensive and blasphemous image be removed forthwith.” Today, Trump denied that the AI image depicted him as Jesus, claiming that it rendered him instead as a doctor.

Last May, I wrote about how Trump posted an AI-generated meme of himself as the pope as a way of virtue signaling to MAGA Catholics. However, his latest attempt to fashion himself as an American messiah is costing him some of his most loyal Catholic supporters, who are now faced with the choice of publicly supporting the pope or the president. It’s not the first time that Catholics have had to choose.

Despite the recent ascendency of wealthy White Catholics into positions of power, anti-Catholic sentiment is deeply rooted in American history. For much of the nation’s lifespan, Catholics were targeted and discriminated against due to anti-Catholic, xenophobic bigotry. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as Catholic immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe arrived in the United States, they faced intense nativist violence, including from the Ku Klux Klan. Now, the Trump administration is wielding nativist violence against immigrants and communities of color — including Catholic Latinos — whom he accuses of taking resources away from “true” Americans: White Protestants.

Trump’s absurdist image of himself as Jesus with a fake tan makes clear who he has come to “save.” Just like 19th- and 20th-century anti-Catholic campaigns, Trump fashions himself a Messiah for American Protestant Christian nationalists, whom he blesses with a blazing, white light emanating from his left hand.

But art historians and cradle Catholics alike will recognize that light is emanating out of the wrong body part — light poured out of Jesus’s side wound, not his hand. It’s a perfect illustration of just how little Trump knows about the art and religion he is weaponizing, all in the name of his false White Christian Jesus.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has detained the father and portrait muse of California-based Chicana painter Criselda Vasquez, the artist said in an Instagram post.

“My father and one of his workers were detained by ICE while simply on their way to work,” Vasquez wrote on April 3. “Our entire family is heartbroken, and my mother is completely devastated.”

The family has not publicly named Vasquez's father. Vasquez noted in her post that he had been in the United States for over 40 years now.

In an April 13 email to Hyperallergic, Vasquez said that her father had been “racially profiled on his way home from work, and taken by Immigration authorities,” on Tuesday, March 31, adding that he had been pulled over and arrested right outside of a neighbor's home.

“My family and I have since made contact with him and know which detention facility he is being held in,” Vasquez said.

Through a GoFundMe linked on the artist's social media, the family raised nearly $68,000 of a $80,000 goal within 10 days of its launch. In a statement attached to the fundraiser, the family said the money would go toward his lost wages and legal fees associated with his detention.

“What I want the public to know about my father is that he is a devoted husband, parent, and grandfather, and the hardest-working, most selfless person I know,” Vasquez continued in her email to Hyperallergic. “He has become a role model not only to his four children, all of whom are United States citizens, but also to many people he has come across.”

“My father's hard work, dedication, and sacrifices will never be forgotten and will continue to be a long lifetime inspiration to me and my family,” Vasquez said.

Vasquez depicted her father in her celebrated 2017 painting “The New American Gothic” (2017), a reimagining of Grant Wood's “American Gothic” (1930) featuring both of her parents, originally from Mexico, holding cleaning products and a hoe. The Lucas Museum for Narrative Art in Los Angeles acquired the painting in 2021. In an earlier statement about the work, the artist had said that she sought to depict the “plight and the plight of many in my community.”

In a previous social media post, Vasquez described her parents' influence on her figurative painting practice, which seeks to unveil hidden aspects of the Mexican-American life.

“When my parents pose for these paintings, their faces are reduced to extremely raw and somehow vulnerable expressions,” Vasquez said. “Sadly, they strive to be invisible every day. They have dealt with constant rejection, suspicion, and fear so long, that it seems now that it comes naturally to them.”

“In the long tradition of immigrants that come to the United States, they have made homes here, and they are just trying to live a simple life with a bit of security and hopefulness for their children,” Vasquez continued.

The news of Vasquez's father's arrest comes amid President Trump's ongoing crackdown on immigrants in the United States. A recent report from the Deportation Data Project, which analyzes immigration enforcement data, outlined that ICE street arrests — as in those occurring in neighborhoods, immigration courts, and check-in appointments at ICE offices — had increased more than elevenfold during the first year of Trump's second presidency. It's also significantly harder to get released from immigration detention amid deportation proceedings, the report notes.

Steve DiBenedetto, who began exhibiting in the 1980s, has become one of the best painters of his generation. A bundle of contradictions, restlessly moving between figuration and abstraction, he loves to push the paint around in his work — adding, scraping, changing — as he seeks links between the body and visionary states. The otherworldliness we encounter in his work is comic and unnerving, the perfect combination for these upside-down times.

The title of his current exhibition at Derek Eller, Spiral Architect, brings together two of his ongoing preoccupations — a line that winds around a center and the designer of a functional environment. Together, they underscore DiBenedetto’s conception of a painting as a search for a functional structure, a talisman that can aid viewers amid our collective sense of traumatic crisis. In contrast to artists such as Hilma af Klint and Forrest Bess, who believed they were conduits transmitting messages from a higher power, DiBenedetto wants to unlock the viewer’s own psychic unconsciousness and tap into the mind’s capacity for attaining visionary states. In this way, he is constantly reaching toward a cosmic sense of the absurd.

There are 17 paintings in the exhibition; four of which are 7.3 by 6.2 feet (~2.2 by 1.9 meters) or larger, while the rest are 24 by 20 inches (~60.1 by 50.8 centimeters) or smaller. In the large ones — all replete with disembodied body parts that recall humans, octopi, cellular forms, and machines — we sense a brain-body relationship in a state of turbulent reformation.

In “The Octopus Paradox” (2025–26), isolated rectangles around the work’s edges contain non-human forms of life. They are connected by tubular forms to a strange Rube Goldberg-esque concoction rising from the painting’s bottom edge. Between the rectangles and forms, we see other tubes connecting the figural form to vacuoles and sacs filled with disembodied parts, including a large eye and cellular forms. We have entered a world of science fiction, laboratory experiments, and computer wizardry run amok. By reworking the surface, DiBenedetto gets encrusted areas, smeared passages, drips, and crisply defined forms to work in tandem with tonal relationships and jewel-like color. Visually mesmerizing, the effect is both absurdly funny and deeply disturbing.

This technique has carried DiBenedetto into a speculative territory that is all his own. Each area of his large paintings requires a different treatment to keep the entire work from devolving into chaos. His visionary impulse propels him toward an inchoate state without crossing over. By reaching the porous border separating order from chaos, he conveys the state of anxiety many of us currently inhabit, unsure of how to proceed in this threatened world.

The 13 intimately scaled paintings reveal DiBenedetto pushing his process-based method in other directions. Dated 2022 to 2026, “Interstellar Antifreeze” depicts a tarry black and pink head seen in profile, covered with white dots of paint. “Ok, I lied” (2023) is a thinly painted ground of pale blue with small areas of pink and dark blue covered with different-sized dots of red, green, and yellow that DiBenedetto applied by brush, so that they culminate in a peak. In the other paintings, many of which are made of bands and lines connecting outlined nodes that resemble distortions of the Kabbalah Tree of Life (Etz Chaim), DiBenedetto arrives at different surfaces, from those that appear worn by time to ones that are firm and clear. Others resemble topographic views of ancient cities whose names and histories are lost to us.

DiBenedetto touches on the gamut of anxieties and hopes we face in a rapidly accelerating world that seems to have lost its moral compass by evoking indecipherable, mystical diagrams, maps of forgotten kingdoms, and life-forms comprised of different unnamable identities. Filtering a mixture of humor, mystery, belief, doubt, religion, and science through a skeptical viewpoint, he takes measure of our befuddled grasping for certainty. 

Spiral Architect continues at Derek Eller Gallery (38 Walker Street, Tribeca, Manhattan) through April 25. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.

Jeremy Frey is one of the most celebrated Indigenous weavers in the country. Hailing from Maine, he learned traditional Wabanaki weaving techniques from his mother and through apprenticeships with the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. His art balances tradition with innovation, while imbuing each object with new ideas and creating a market for objects that haven’t traditionally been part of the contemporary art gallery ecosystem. Through experimentation, he has forged a singular aesthetic that embraces the fusion of craft, design, and contemporary art, while being influenced by forms of every kind and developing his own techniques that push the artform to new levels.

Frey was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2025, and he will join Hyperallergic co-founder and editor-at-large Hrag Vartanian to talk about how he shepherds each artwork that begins with harvesting his own materials and ending with works that have challenged traditional categorization and been exhibited in the world's most renowned art museums.

This event is free for Hyperallergic paid members.

Jeremy Frey (b. 1978, Passamaquoddy Indian Township Reservation, Maine) is one of the foremost Passamaquoddy craftspeople of his generation. A descendant of a long line of Indigenous weavers, Frey learned traditional Wabanaki methods from his mother and by apprenticing at the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. Woven from natural materials that the artist himself forages, such as sweetgrass and wood from black ash trees, Frey’s vessels are characterized by subtle forms, delicately layered colors, and elaborate weaves. Building on and experimenting with the material histories of Wabanaki basketry, his work is also in dialogue with contemporary sculpture’s emphasis on materiality, form, and variation within repetition. To create his basket relief prints, Frey has developed a novel form of flat weaving that can be run repeatedly through a printing press, preserving and sharing his techniques without impacting the stock of his rare materials. Frey lives in Maine.

Hrag Vartanian is editor-at-large, founding editor, and co-founder of Hyperallergic.

Previously on Hyperallergic

The Mesmerizing Wonder of Wabanaki Weaving

Jeremy Frey’s first museum show presents the artist’s virtuosic craft as must-see contemporary work.

HyperallergicJulie Schneider