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On this delightful occasion, I say this to editors of short fiction:

Gift of the Brabblefly was the first short story I ever got published. It’s the namesake of this newsletter. It benefited from the insight of two visionary editors, 15 years and a world apart.

The first was an editor at Space Squid, a sci-fi and humor magazine out of Austin, Texas. She accepted Gift of the Brabblefly for publication, pending my acceptance of a single revision — a six-word sentence she wanted to cut. It was a surgical edit that profoundly improved the flow and mood of the piece. It enlightened me to editorial potential.

The second was the publisher of Antipodean SF, a speculative sci-fi magazine based in Nambucca Heads, Australia. (Antipodean means diametrically opposed places. The North Pole is the antipode of the South Pole.) This editor, while preparing Gift of the Brabblefly for an Australian audience, requested another tiny edit, that again improved the story. I was re-enlightened to the power of editorial insight.

I had read this story hundreds of times over the years, torturing over every word, cutting everything that wasn’t the story. Yet, these editors quickly and easily found stuff I missed.

Capable editors don’t just find typos. They rip open the fabric of perception and hoist struggling writers through the gleaming hole...or something like that…I’ll have my editor take a look.

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James Little has been an influential painter and teacher in New York for decades. He is what some people call an artist’s artist — a high compliment that essentially means “the real deal”. Though he has received steady attention from museums and private collectors throughout his career, recently at age 70, Little found himself in the international spotlight as the breakout star of the 2022 Whitney Biennial. A major profile in the New York Times followed and the world finally learned what so many of Little’s colleagues and students have known all along: that he is a contemporary master. His work has been called minimal, painterly, even formalist. But as Little says in the following interview, his paintings are far more humanistic than those simple labels suggest.

“I am interested in feelings and emotive content, Little says. I am not interested in stripping the thing down to some sort of whimsical idea that I may have entertained about some experience I had that does not mean anything to anybody but me. I am not trying to share my misery with people. What I am trying to do is touch on emotions, and feelings, and perceptions, in real time. And I am trying to do it with generosity. I am trying to share it.”

Little’s latest pre-occupation is a major monograph his representatives at Petzel Gallery are putting together, two years in the making. It tracks his career from the early 1970s to the present. Readers of the book will realise that although his visual style has evolved over the years, Little’s intense work ethic has been staunch and steady from the start. He hand-makes his own paints, often working in encaustic, considered by many painters to be the most challenging medium. He is also known to invest sometimes six months or more on a single painting. The three monumental works he exhibited in the Whitney Biennial were composed of only two hues of black. His current body of work, he explains, makes a similarly intense study of white.

How would you describe the white paintings you are working on?

Well, they are done in oil and wax, or encaustic. Large scale. I think the last one I finished was eight panels, 12 feet across, about six feet high. I am going back and forth with these tints and shades. For instance, the black paintings were a shade apart. Two shades of black and the white paintings are two tints that are one shade apart. So I am playing around with that kind of stuff. I pretty much allow my paintings to dictate where I go. I do not have, I guess, a strata, or anything that I just abide by with a lot of regularity, or any sort of restrictions. I do not set it up that way. I let the work dictate where I go. Or the idea. It is not like a situation where I am particularly working on any specific one thing. So right now, I am engaged with these white paintings. But at the same time, I may break off into another idea while I am working on those, so I always keep the door open.

Are these white paintings shaping up to be geometric compositions?

Yes. They are simple, geometric compositions. But they are also very complex. And sophisticated on a particular level. They are very analytical and I guess you could say, to some extent, reductivist. But they are not minimal paintings. They are very animated paintings, but I only use a few things to get the pictorial punch that I want.

You say they are not “minimal”. What does that word mean to you?

It just means the minimum. They may be misinterpreted as minimal, because I only use a few things, but what I get out of it is quite a bit. I just develop a working design, or a particular kind of organised space, and I go from there. From that point a lot of the paintings require more technique and medium and that kind of thing. So everything plays an equal part. I do not call them minimal, because I use what I need. And if I need more, I use more. The thing that I am more interested in is trying to make something that works, by whatever means. I do not like overloading a painting; I like clarity. It seems to me, the more you put in, the less clarity a thing has.

Have you always had that approach?

No. I had to work my way through it. I went through processes and experimentations; I experimented a lot. I was younger and I had not firmly found my way. I was good at that stage, but I never stopped experimenting. Like I said, I allow the paintings to dictate where I go, and it just came to a point where the paintings began to edit out. Certain things became less meaningful to me. I started paying more attention to other things that interested me in regard to painting, surface and design. I had this phase where I was using a lot of colour but nowadays, I do not use a lot of colour. I am using, some people would say non-colour, but I do not say that. I mean, the last group of paintings I have been doing have been black and white and some of them have these colour shapes, stencil-like images. Geometric. But the emphasis is not directly on colour. The colour is there. Shape is there. Surface is there. Geometry is there. Everything has equal parts. As opposed to saying “James is this geometric painter who is very good with colour”, I want the painting to do a little more than that. So I work my way through the colour thing. I know what I can do with it and I want to see what is beyond that, so I allow the paintings to do that. I know when there is closure. And when there is closure, you just try to take the next step. The next risk or the next challenge. That is the way I have always done it. But nothing ever came out right out of the gate. Never.

What is it like to make your own paints?

Well. A lot of it is in my head. You do have to go in and practice it and do the dirty work, the mixing and all that, but a lot of it is in my head first. And when you say mixing paints, I work with several different media. For instance, I am doing the oil and wax painting, but I also did paintings with dry pigment, paintings with oil on linen, and I have done some things where I worked with acrylic. That is four different mediums right there. Each one has a particular kind of personality, a resonance. I try to engage with that. It is not like there is some sort of formula that I have set. You know, every time I go at it, there is a certain kind of experiment going on. And you just never really know what is going to happen. I am closer to it because I make the materials.

Are materials connected with something psychological within you?

Well, there may be some sort of innate need. It depends on what I intend to do and which medium is going to best help in expressing a particular kind of idea. I will go back and forth. It is a good tool to have, virtuosity. And I think just working a long time, you develop a certain kind of virtuosity and dexterity. I mean, if I have an idea for a new painting, I will figure out what is the best medium to use to go for this particular construct. Sometimes it may be the best thing to do is just use pencil on paper. But I just know a lot about the materials. That has come from me exploring and coming up with tools and formulas that I can use. I try to find the right fit so to speak. So your personality is sort of intertwined with that, or woven into that same thing.

Why did you move to New York?

Because that is where the art world is. You know that guy, Willie Sutton? He was a bank robber back in the 1940s or 1950s. They asked him why he robbed banks. He answered, “That is where the money is.” There are other places like Chicago, California, Europe… But New York is just the epicentre.

What does abstract or geometric painting mean to our culture right now?

You have to look at my work in the context of art history. I am not interested in trying to make paintings that reflect this chaos that we are in right now. The thing that I am interested in is order. I have focused on that kind of thing throughout my career and I have taken a lot of criticism for the way I work. I have been called a formalist and “this and that”, and some of that is true. But, to be a formalist, and couple that with painting, you really do have to know what you are doing. And it is not a word that you just toss around lightly. I see it as a badge of honour. I am trying to make paintings that somehow reflect the extension of modernist concepts, or abstract painting, or even modern painting. That is where I am at. So if you are interested in painting, or abstraction, then you have to give my work a hard look. It is not something that is glossed over. Basically, my paintings are based on ideas and concepts and questions. That is what I try to do — solve problems, reach solutions… and provide answers to some extent, based on that pursuit.

I am not that interested in what is outside of painting. I am not going to be the person that sits here and responds in real time to what is going on in Washington or in the Middle East. It is not going to come into my painting as it is happening. I will reflect on that one way or another, but that is not what is going to get me to where I want to go. I have to get to another thing before I can speak and be heard when it comes to politics, and that is, make some significant paintings. Make some work that holds up. Make some paintings that raise questions. Make paintings that provide some answers to those questions and some solutions. But also make works that arouse the curiosity of the average person, whether they like them or not. Trust me, I am not trying to make paintings for people to like. I am trying to make paintings that people can respect, paintings that evoke feelings and question our existence in this moment in time. It is not about narrating anything. You are alone there with the paintings. It is not a spelling bee. So if you come with some preconceived idea about what painting is, and what I should be doing, then you are going to be disappointed in what I do. But if you come with an open mind and try to meet the thing halfway, you will probably have some sort of success with the kind of paintings I do.

What have you learned about the art market?

The art market is unpredictable. But I think if you are consistent in what you do and the kind of work that you do, you might be able to do pretty well in the market. If it is turbulent, if it is something that confuses collectors, or people that are participating in the market, I do not know if that works in your favour. I believe the market likes clarity.

What does it mean to you to live and work as an artist?

Well, I have not had much of a choice; at least it was not a rational choice. There was nothing else in front of me that I felt like I could embark upon and make any sort of significant contribution to it. And there was nothing out there that I felt complete freedom with, or complete control, that I had complete authority over what I was doing. So that is how it has turned out, but it was never something that was preconceived or something, that was some sort of collaboration with myself and my alter ego. My whole life around art was something organic. There was this appetite, this hunger. It was a love affair. And I had to figure out how I was going to get through it and get to where I want to be. You know, it takes a long time. It is a long haul, very difficult, especially if you are interested in making anything of any sort of real quality. And if you are interested in making works that are going to hold up and making any sort of contribution to the history of art within the canon, it is a tall order. But I arrived at it just out of an innate, or a God-given desire to pursue art.

One thing about painting is physicality. It is a physical activity and a mental activity. And when you couple the two, it is a very taxing and challenging activity. It takes a particular animal to be able to embark on something like this and come out on the other side. The odds of making it as a painter are slim. And there is only a sliver of space within the canon for any artist. A sliver. So if you can get there, you really accomplished something. And nobody can give you a roadmap of how to get there. You have to be really attuned to your psyche, your feelings and your instincts. And you have to be super smart and stand for something. When it comes to art, it stands on its own. The only thing I can promise when it comes to painting is that my work is going to meet you halfway. No more. So I will get back to saying that I use what I need. I am interested in making unadorned works. I am interested in flat space. I am interested in what you do with flat spaces and how you organise flat spaces. That is pretty much my a priori when it comes to abstract painting, in terms of what I am interested in. I think at this particular time, that is the most progressive path.

You know, life is fragile. Everything is fragile. In this particular day and time, the way the world is going and the way politicians are behaving — destroying institutions and trashing culture — if we do not have art, we are done. The last defence is the arts. But in a way, it is not tangible. A lot of it is perceptive and conceptual. But we have to have it. And so that is why I remain calm. I can see the idiocy. I can see the ignorance. I can see the lack of sophistication, and the lack of will. So you have artists to be a bulwark against this kind of destructive atmosphere that we live in. And they have always done that. Throughout history, in all times of war, in religious crusades, all the way through, the arts really have preserved and saved culture. Without that, you do not have anything, so it is best to be cool. What are you going to do? You cannot go out there and challenge these people with these automatic weapons. You have to challenge these people with beautiful art. It is a long game. That is why you are going to see dozens and dozens of people fall off by the wayside. They might be big stars or whatever, with rising careers, that may have made a lot of money, that may have all kinds of things in fashion, in television, in creative arts and performing arts. You will see a lot of them fall off, but then you will see the core, the ones that really have lasting power, the ones that have made a real commitment to art. That will be the front line of this whole thing when it is all over. And so that is what we have to do.

I think artists are privileged and lucky to be able to have a space they can go occupy and get away from some of this madness. Matter of fact, when I did my last show, a lot of people came to it and said they were just so happy to see something that could relieve them from all of the chaos that was going on. Everybody kind of settled down and looked at my, what did they call them, “meditative black paintings” in this big, beautiful space that Friedrich Petzel built on 25^th Street. Anyway, you have to turn the page and do what you know how to do. Do not waste your talent. And that is pretty much it. I am just working hard, trying to contribute what I contribute.

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Blue Chip art is easy to spot in Las Vegas — a massive Shepard Fairey mural on the outside of The Plaza; a site-specific Ivan Navarro infinity mirror in the Cosmopolitan’s high roller poker room; a giant Frank Stella painting behind the registration desk of the Vdara Hotel and Spa. Yet, the city lacks the type of contemporary art ecosystem one would find in New York, LA, Paris, Hong Kong or hundreds of other modern cities. There is no “gallery sector”. The city’s few white-walled commercial galleries are more like art stores for tourists, centred around Pop Art, street art or prints by masters. The city has one institutional, collecting art museum, The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) — at least until the new Las Vegas Art Museum opens in 2028. And museum quality exhibitions are sometimes hosted in The Sahara West Library gallery, operated by the Clark County Library District.

But if you are a serious collector or art tourist visiting Vegas and you feel like you just need more of the good stuff — exciting, meaningful, experimental contemporary art that will expand your mind — you might have to go rogue and find one of the half dozen or so alternative art spaces around the city. Just finding these spaces can turn into its own adventure. Some are nomadic; some are in semi-apocalyptic strip malls; some are inside artist’s homes or studios; many are open by appointment only; all are tucked away in the real Las Vegas, the parts of town most tourists never think about, where actual human beings live, away from the glitz of the strip.

Couper Russ gallery

Matt Couper and J. K. Russ moved to Las Vegas from Aotearoa in 2010. Russ is represented by PAULNACHE Gallery in New Zealand. Couper shows with the always buzzy La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles. Both are accomplished, established artists who have exhibited extensively in galleries and institutions. They consider Vegas an ideal place to live and work, but they also consistently notice how few exhibition opportunities there are for local artists. In 2022, they opened Couper Russ Gallery inside their home, transforming the family room of a nondescript, two-level ranch with a pool into a pristine-looking white cube.

The curatorial focus of Couper Russ Gallery is strictly on Las Vegas based artists. Says Russ, “There are a lot of artists working away in their studios here. They are here and they are doing it, but they are not that visible, you know?” Couper agrees. “We started making a list of artists practicing in Vegas, and we knocked out like 150 really quickly.” Couper and Russ also routinely drop in on the MFA studios at UNLV. The fully-funded, three-year programme, which boasts several influential artists on its faculty, has turned out numerous successful studio artists in recent decades. When Couper and Russ work with an artist, they not only present the work professionally in their perfectly lit space. They also document the exhibition with high resolution images and create extensive writing about the works.

Most generously, Couper and Russ often hang the work in conversation with pieces by historically significant artists from their personal collection. “We can get a young artist from Las Vegas who is obsessed with drawing and put them next to a Philip Guston drawing, says Couper. That is a really big buzz for them and it also allows you to physically look at something that is from a very well known American artist alongside an artist just starting out that we think has potential.”

Couper Russ Gallery has no “openings” per se. The driveway is only big enough for maybe two cars, so visits are strictly by appointment. That limitation has done nothing to soften the gallery’s impact on the community. Artists and collectors who have visited the shows say they are particularly grateful for the “grey space” the gallery occupies. “If you go to a gallery on the strip, the impetus is on buying and selling the work. And if you go to a museum or institution, their impetus is on communicating something about society,” says Russ. Couper agrees: “Here, it is a little more informal and relaxed. People might be connected to the art world already, but we also aim to be a welcoming space for people who perhaps have not spent a lot of time in art galleries. They can bring their own experience to the work.”

Scrambled eggs

Like Couper Russ Gallery, Scrambles eggs prioritises the work of Las Vegas artists. Unlike Couper Russ, the space in which they show that work is always changing. Manny Muñoz founded Scrambled eggs in 2022. He had been looking at a lot of Vegas art on social media during COVID lockdown. Then, he says, “When things opened back up, I had this desire to go out and see all that art in person.” Muñoz realised that most of these Vegas artists had few places to show their work in public. An architecture student at the time, he had a little office space near downtown he had been renting as a studio. He decided to pivot and turn that space into a gallery.

“I was like, I think I can do this, says Muñoz. It is small enough to where if it fails, no one is going to know. I called up Brian Martinez, an artist I had been getting to know. He was a BFA student at UNLV. I felt like he has some of that academic education, so he might know what he is doing, so he can kind of help me figure it out. At the same time, he was super well connected outside the art scene. He grew up on the East Side of Vegas, which is primarily Hispanic. So that was something that was interesting to me, because it was also tackling the idea of black and brown artists, or underrepresented artists. It was kind of a big conversation at the time and I think it still is. But we do not really focus as much on that any more, because we are trying to look at artists more as a holistic part of the art scene and the community.”

That first show was well attended, so Muñoz and Martinez invited another artist to do a show a few weeks later. That went well, so they invited another. Over the summer they put on six shows in about four months. Then Muñoz had to let go of the lease on the space because it was too expensive. After nearly a year of no shows, Muñoz reached out to the director of the Donna Beam student gallery at UNLV and asked if he was interested in collaborating on something. The director liked the idea of an outside curator coming in to do a show. “This was like almost a year since we had done our summer shows, so I hosted what we called Scrambled again, explains Muñoz. It was all the artists who had shown in our first six shows.” Muñoz raised a little bit of money for the show, which he spent on catering and a Mariachi band that performed outside the gallery under a tree. The show drew a huge crowd, which told Muñoz that he could have shows anywhere and the community he was building would show up.

Around this time, a little art book store called Hasta Siempre Books opened up downtown. Muñoz connected with Pedro Duran, the owner of the shop and found out there was a little back room included in the lease. He invited Pedro to curate an art exhibition in the space under the Scrambled eggs name. Pedro’s show was another success, which showed Muñoz that he could trust the curatorial part to others and just work behind the scenes. After a couple more Scrambled eggs exhibitions in the bookstore’s back room, Pedro moved to New York. Since then, Muñoz has been partnering with other spaces and curators, expanding his nomadic, community-centric model.

Meanwhile, he has been receiving mentorship from a Reno non-profit called The Holland Project and he started an interview series with his artists, which is hosted on Wendy Kveck’s popular contemporary art blog Couch in the Desert. He is also preparing for what will be the collective’s biggest exhibition, at the Sahara West Library, a sprawling, institutional gallery run by the Clark County Library District. As for the future, Muñoz says he eventually wants to transform Scrambled eggs into a real “third space”. Ideally that would mean having a permanent space that hosts experimental art exhibitions, maybe has a printing press, a music venue and spaces for local vendors and workshops. “I am always looking at it from the point of view of how we can use this for something beneficial to the community,” Muñoz says.

Available Space Art Projects

Available Space Art Projects (ASAP) opened in 2020, during the height of COVID. It was founded as a project space dedicated to artistic freedom and experimentation, by Homero Hidalgo, an artist who moved to Vegas to earn his MFA. Hidalgo was born in Ecuador and previously lived in Miami and San Francisco. One of the first things he noticed about Vegas was that it was missing the type of art spaces he had seen in other cities, where artists could cut loose and challenge themselves. According to Hidalgo, “you go to San Francisco or Miami and there are pop-up project spaces everywhere. So I figured why not get that started here in Vegas? The mission was to encourage artists to do their B-Side projects. I wanted to shake the leaves of the town so people could see more unconventional art.”

Hidalgo partnered with artist Holly Lay and secured a lease on a commercial space in a rundown strip mall called Commercial Centre, off Sahara Boulevard. ASAP started getting proposals from artists right away. At first, they said yes to everyone and gave the artists full reign to do whatever they wanted. Hidalgo was amazed at the quality of the work. He was also impressed at how the Vegas community turned out big for the shows and for the artist lectures. Soon, the number of proposals they were receiving grew to where they far outnumbered available exhibition slots. Hidalgo also started receiving a lot of interest from artists outside of Vegas.

After more than 30 exhibitions, Hidalgo started looking for a permanent space where ASAP could grow. He was also looking at the idea of buying a place that had some acreage so artists could branch out into land art projects. Then in December 2024, ASAP faced the most familiar of challenges that so many alternative art spaces encounter: gentrification. The wonderfully run-down strip mall the gallery occupied changed hands in a development deal, and they lost their lease. Since then, ASAP has been hosting exhibitions in the front space of artist Wendy Kveck’s studio — the same Wendy Kveck who runs Couch in the Desert, which publishes the Scrambled eggs artist interviews. (Kveck is a professor at UNLV and one of the most prominent artists working in Vegas right now. She is one of a handful of people, like Matt Couper and J. K. Russ, whose name comes up repeatedly when interviewing people in the Vegas art scene.)

Hidalgo says he is still contemplating what a permanent space for ASAP looks like. He wonders what it looks like to continue supporting Vegas artists and encouraging them to level up, while also expanding his programme to include more artists beyond Vegas, including Blue Chip artists. The ultimate goal might be to evolve the project into something evermore rare in the contemporary art ecosystem: a white wall commercial gallery that participates in the market while still prioritising experimentation and artistic freedom. Regardless, he says the most important thing is to keep encouraging the artists who live and work in Vegas to think big. He says, “People here are supportive of the arts. When we sell work, it is to Vegas locals. They are genuinely moved by the pieces they are buying. The reason why is because what we do always has the artist in mind. That is why we focus on the art and the artist first.”

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It used to be common for this or that artist to be declared part of the avant-garde. For various reasons, such declarations fell out of fashion and would be absurd to make today. What does it mean, anyway — the avant-garde? It was originally a military term for frontline forces in a war, those taking and dishing out the most vicious attacks. According to the National Galleries of Scotland, the term was first used to describe artists in 1825, “by French social reformer Henri de Saint-Simon” who “called upon artists to ‘serve as [the people’s] avant-garde’, insisting that ‘the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way to social, political, and economic reform.’”

De Saint-Simon evidently considered human civilisation a battlefield. His society was also unapologetically patriarchal, so the first artists to receive his avant-garde label, Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet, were men, of course. They were both virtuoso realist painters, but it was not their medium nor the quality of their work that made them avant-garde — it was their subject matter. Instead of the popular themes of religion, wealth, power and romance, they centred peasants, farmers and the working class. That was controversial. It bucked convention. Avant-garde henceforth became synonymous with defying tradition. Impressionists were called avant-garde, as were Cubists, Futurists, Expressionists, Surrealists, Dadaists, Abstract Expressionists, Minimalists, Postmodernists — all the “ists”.

Meanwhile, the term’s inherent patriarchal militarism continued to determine who was allowed to be part of the avant-garde, namely straight (or at least closeted) caucasian men.

In 1978, that perspective was brilliantly challenged by artists Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff, in their essay Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture. They wrote: “Manifestoes of modern art often exhort artists to make violent, brutal work, and it is no accident that men such as (Joseph) Hirsh, (Diego) Rivera and (Pablo) Picasso like to think of their art as a metaphorical weapon.”

They quoted Kirsh, who said, “The great artist wielded his art as a magnificent weapon truly mightier than a sword;” Rivera, who said, “I want to use my art as a weapon;” and Picasso, who said, “No, painting is not done to decorate apartments; it is an instrument of war for attack and defence against the enemy.”

The three quotes were made between 1932 and 1949, during the height of Modernism. Supposedly, Modernism embraced newness, summed up by the title of Ezra Pound’s 1934 collection of essays, Make it New. But beneath the surface, Modernism continued the old belief in patriarchy, militarism and Western cultural supremacy. At the Bauhaus, the most famous and progressive Modernist art institution, female students were not allowed to study painting or sculpture. They worked with textiles, a medium associated with so-called “women’s work.”

Another point Jaudon and Kozloff made in Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture is how the official canon of art history systematically discounted the work of artists who did not fit in with the majority. Female artists were discounted, as were gay artists, disabled artists and artists from non-Western cultures. Among other falsehoods, this allowed Modernists to claim they invented geometric abstraction, when Islamic artists had mastered it centuries before, and monochrome painting, which Hindu artists had been making for millennia.

Modernists saw themselves as representatives of “the culture”, which was, in their minds, Western, straight, male and attached to its own siloed history and sense of importance. Jaudon and Kozloff showed how language was used to shape that perception and manipulate outcomes. They hoped their essay would inspire readers to challenge the assumptions of their education.

Jaudon and Kozloff were hardly the only artists of their generation to challenge the limited version of art history being taught in schools. In his 1969 essay Art After Philosophy, artist Joseph Kosuth wrote: “Being an artist today means to question the very nature of art.”

Kosuth explained that if you say you are questioning the nature of painting, you are actually not questioning the nature of art, because to even accept painting as a form of art means you are also implicitly accepting the tradition to which painting belongs, aka Western canonical art history. The essay made him a leading protagonist of what became known as Conceptual Art. And his critique of traditional forms was so effective that for decades, every art student was saddled by the cliché that “painting is dead”.

Then in the 1990s, something happened that suggested that maybe painting has not lived — the Internet became widely available.

Global digital interconnectivity profoundly weakened belief in the inherent dominance, superiority or even existence of a monolithic Western culture. It made clear to everyone that there are (and always have been) innumerable cultures co-existing alongside whatever culture or cultures are momentarily dominant; not sub-cultures, but co-cultures.

There are eight billion people today, each belonging to numerous cultures. There could be 50 billion, 100 billion or a trillion co-cultures co-existing at any moment. Co-cultural respect demands we no longer pretend to believe in universal values. This is why there is no longer “an avant-garde”. Every contemporary artist is an avant-garde of one.

The Avant-Gardes

Many consider the end of a singular avant-garde a welcome development. Artists no longer need to feel pressured to contextualise their work in terms of bigger cultural constructs or a single narrative of progress. They can choose which art historical story they belong to. It can be the traditional Western canon if that is what they want; it can be Modernism. Or it can be something global, or hyper-local, specific to a particular culture to which they belong. Having agency over their artistic position means they can ignore the manifestoes and movements of the past if they want… or they can build from them. And they can decide for themselves if their mediums are dead or alive.

Chinese artist Shao Fan describes his personal journey as an artist as a negotiation between competing influences from Western art history and Chinese tradition. “For nearly a century, traditional culture had been continuously suppressed or devalued, Shao says, from the May Fourth Movement through the Cultural Revolution, and even after reform. Western art arrived with such force that it became another form of forgetting. We began to look at ourselves through Western eyes. Only in recent years have we started to return to our roots. Chinese art today still learns from the West, but the need to reconnect with our own traditions has become stronger. For me, that balance — between outward curiosity and inward return — has defined my entire path.”

James Little enthusiastically embraces Western Modernist values, not because that is the only history he values, but because it relates to his personal pursuit of virtuosity and creative freedom. He also embraces the title of painter. “I have taken a lot of criticism for the way I work, Little says. I have been called a formalist and “this and that”, and some of that is true. But, I think to be a formalist, and couple that with painting, you really do have to know what you are doing. And it is not a word that you just toss around lightly. I see it as a badge of honour. I am trying to make paintings that somehow reflect the extension of modernist concepts. Or abstract painting. Or even modern painting. That is where I am at. So if you are interested in painting, or abstraction, then you have to give my work a hard look.”

Bernar Venet, who most people would describe as an abstract sculptor, has never described himself according to a single medium or intellectual approach. He joins Kosuth in a belief that the medium is irrelevant, and that ideas are all that matters. “To me, it is obvious, Venet says. I do not understand how one can speak of painting, sculpture, literature, music as if they were separate worlds. To me, it is the same thing: imagination, invention, the question posed. I always return to the same principle of equivalence: that the argument can be expressed in any discipline, any medium. What matters is the proposition, the thought, not the support.”

Jessica Stockholder, meanwhile, describes being an artist as her way of knowing herself and others. “I have not always found it easy to be with myself, she says. Being in the studio is a way of being with myself while also talking to the world.”

Richard Tuttle echoes that sentiment, noting that for him being an artist is about creating unity from disparity. “You would never be an artist unless you were born to be this way, Tuttle says. Being born this way has a characteristic that you are absolutely ambiguous about everything. Nothing you experience, or can say, does not have an equal and opposite place or validity in your mind. Because of this, you are always trying to make a unity. One characteristic of art, whether it is Western, or recent or old, is that there is a unity that happens in a made thing.”

Critical Revival

If artists are frontline culture warriors, art critics have typically been seen as the rear guard — a grimy cohort following distantly behind the battle, noting what could have been done differently and to better effect. Happily, the rise of the “avant-garde of one” also has the potential to set art critics free. Critics no longer have to base their criticism solely on the linear canon of Western art history. They can judge each artist on the terms the artist sets forth for themself. If an artist claims they are doing something with their art, the critic can simply judge how well they are doing it, or if they are doing it at all. If an artist says they are working within a particular tradition, the critic only has to judge them according to that tradition’s rules.

This shift has been embraced by some contemporary critics. In a recent article in Hyperallergic about the work of artist Rashid Johnson, art journalist Seph Rodney mounted a substantial and well-supported critique of Johnson’s latest exhibition based solely on the fact that Johnson is not living up to his own declarations about his work. This critique respects Johnson as a solo culture, holding him accountable only for whether or not he is advancing his own guard.

Other critics, however, abhor this change, and even call it the death of art criticism. Maybe they are uncomfortable losing their critical entitlement. For so long, reading the right art history books and taking the right classes has made them the experts in the room. Now they must put in the time to learn specifics about particular artists, including perhaps studying different cultural histories, different concepts of beauty or different philosophical traditions before either trashing or lionising a particular artist’s work.

It is a heavy lift for a critic, just as it is a heavy lift for an artist to have to individuate rather than follow a trend. But in a world where there is no dominant culture, no universally agreed upon cultural values and no singular artistic avant-garde, it is also a more honest approach to art. It argues that the most important thing an artist can do is discover what they were, as Tuttle says, “born to be.” And maybe the most important thing art journalism can do is provide opportunities for artists to converse honestly about that process. This could mean the death of art criticism is the re-birth of the artist interview. Instead of offering answers, critics can, as Kosuth recommends, focus on asking “the right questions.”

Michelle Grabner is an esteemed artist, curator, gallerist, critic and professor. A Guggenheim Fellow, she curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial and soon after was named by Artnet as one of the 100 most powerful women in art. Her work blends formal abstract visual strategies with hints of everyday life — jam lids, brooms, bleacher seats or gingham table cloth patterns — an approach that invites viewers into what Grabner calls an “intellectual engagement” with the familiar.

Beverly Fishman is also a Guggenheim Fellow, Anonymous was a woman awardee and former Head of Painting at Cranbrook Academy of Art. She makes abstract art rooted in the visual language of Big Pharma. She is best known for her wooden relief paintings, which are abstracted from pill forms and sometimes combined into multi-forms — a visual chemical cocktail. The high-gloss auto paint Fishman uses emits a glow, creating nuanced colourfields around the work and in the carved out spaces, which Fishman calls missing doses.

Both Grabner and Fishman are considered abstract artists, though they both also intentionally reference the objective world of recognisable imagery. Asked if she is thinking about specific messages or contemporary political concerns when she is working, Grabner says, “Absolutely. My work is highly critically thought through. I am hoping that that which becomes familiar, nameable, let us say a gingham pattern based on a grid, can be translated into a different kind of formal interpretation. The grid allows for a kind of sameness that can in some contexts be profoundly boring and redundant. But in another kind of social situation, where we are living in too much information, that predictability may be a handhold and may be really important. And with the gingham pattern, I am talking about … the idea of a grid carrying an anecdote to the chaos of too much information, too much political slant, the constant teasing out of truth and fiction in that daily information. That grid structure gives you a predictable, dependable framework.”

Grabner hopes that the grid will offer enough comfort to viewers that they will stick around to enter into a more complex relationship with the work, which allows for deeper personal interpretations. “There are many modes, hopefully, ideally, of intellectual engagement in the work, Grabner says, but there are a lot of viewers that I leave behind. It is not a good time. We are very literal. So if it looks like gingham, it is gingham. It is hard to get some sorts of viewers to actually think about the grid or think about the other vocabularies that are in it, and think about them abstractly as opposed to just thinking, you know, tablecloth. It is about trying to put a lens of abstraction over the thing we think we know, and then in that abstraction, doing a different kind of value assessment. Instead of taking it for granted, let it command our attention in a different way.”

Fishman similarly hopes viewers will linger with her work long enough to see beyond their initial interpretations. She is an adept art historian, and brings a multitude of Modernist abstract references into her work, including the Light and Space movement, Finish fetish and Hard edge geometric abstraction. But she is not referencing those movements or their concerns in a direct way. Nor is she trying to do it as an empty academic gesture. There is always what she calls a “confrontation” happening in her work, between aesthetic concerns and directed political content referencing society’s relationship with the pharmaceutical industry.

“I wrestle with abstraction, Fishman says, and I have done this for decades. But my work has always been connected to the contemporary cultural moment as well. It has never been pure abstraction. It has always had its source in real life issues circulating in contemporary culture and society. And I think as much about these social and political issues as I do about abstraction, to be honest. So there are two sources of inspiration for my work. I have a deep knowledge of the history of abstraction and my work comes from an engagement with this history: I want my viewers to recognise that my art emerges from this history and that it is deeply thought out and felt on an aesthetic level. But, for me, my work has also always been about confronting something in society that, in my mind, is really important: the role that Big Pharma plays in our lives, how medical imaging breaks down and transforms the human body, how color helps to construct both gender and identity. But I have never wanted to be didactic about my thinking. I have never wanted to be obvious or literal. I hope one could have an aesthetic, transformative experience through abstraction… and then realise through the mind that there is a lot more going on in the work than that.”

Cultural currency

Abstract art has always been an easy target for criticism from those who feel art should be a political tool, because it seems to lack obvious narrative content. However, the lack of obviousness is, in fact, the most political part of abstraction — it allows people to think for themselves. Freedom of thought is in short supply today, as are other qualities often inherent in abstract art, such as experimentation and beauty. These things are reserved more and more for the powerful and the elite, who increasingly want to commodify and control them.

“We are at a point where experimentation is hard to transact, says Grabner. I have sat in front of funding boards who want to give money to an exhibition that I am curating, but they need to know exactly what an artist is going to do three years from now at that space. I tell them that no, you are supporting the experimentation of that artist. That is what you are funding. And increasingly, it just does not happen because it is hard for experimentation to be transactional, especially in that context. That is even becoming problematic in art school where federal funding is withheld if we cannot show an artefact of learning. That is a huge problem. How do you show the artefacts of experimentation? Decades ago, critique was considered a form of assessment and accepted by the governing bodies who give accreditation in higher learning. Now critique is not, by our accrediting bodies, considered a form of assessment. So the best I can do is just keep insisting that experimentation is necessary for an artist. No one will ever understand what success is if one does not fail in those forms of ignorance or experimentation. You cannot have success without — I do not want to say failure, because that seems a little cliché and easy — but without the freedom to fail.”

The cultural currency Fishman most often uses in her work is beauty. She knows that a shiny, colourful, beautiful object has the power to attract a viewer from across the room. “I use beauty, and beauty is dangerous, Fishman says, because we stop thinking. We are just drawn to it. We are just taken by it. We are just in awe of it. We lose our rational side for a bit. I hope it is something I have utilised that keeps the viewer looking longer. To stay with something longer. Then, when the beauty starts to calm down a bit, thinking might take over. Then the thought process might change. That is very important to me.”

Fishman’s titles have long been an ironic foil to the beauty of her wall reliefs. A glowing, cotton candy-coloured multi-form that might look perfectly at home in a child’s bedroom might also have a title like, “Bipolar, Opioid addiction, Anxiety,” having been named after the diseases that are treated by the pill forms she is abstracting. Recently, however, Fishman has shifted her thinking about her titles in a way that offers viewers a different kind of entry point to the work. “They no longer deal with the disease, Fishman says, they deal with the cures. So, instead of it saying ‘depression, osteoporosis, anxiety’ it says something like ‘calm, stability, happiness, liberation’. That is because what was going on was, I was coming into my studio being elevated by my own work, having an experience of my own work that was different from the titles. I wanted to have an experience that did not bring me down, where I felt some joy. So the titles now are about the potential outcomes, not the disease itself. I think I am doing my job. But again, I do not want to be literal.”

Space for interpretation

Grabner has similar concerns about balancing enough stability in the work that viewers can be drawn to it, and leaving enough space for interpretation and subjective meaning. Over-storytelling, she says, is too prevalent in the art field today. “AI will tell you how to think about something, Grabner says. We are also at a time where artists and the cultural system at large are telling the artist’s story and the artwork ends up often being a prompt to that story. We are not meeting at the artwork anymore. We are meeting at the story of the artist. And sure enough artists are exceptional and have really interesting stories. But I say very carefully when I am lecturing, mostly to students, that to honour you, I will talk to you about yourself. But if I am honouring you primarily through your work, we are going to assess the work that you make. You are an artist and I owe you that.”

In addition to trying to talk more about themselves than the art, Grabner says artists are afraid that if they do not explain the work enough nobody will “get it”. Viewers are similarly terrified that they will say something wrong about a work and then be embarrassed. “This is something I deal with, particularly with young students who feel that if they get an interpretation beyond what they were conceptualising in the work, that either I am absolutely wrong or they have failed in communicating the ideas that they wanted to bring forth, Grabner says. I have to really underscore that critique is not judgment and that interpretation expands the work. You do not have to agree with it, but if there is something that you put forward that somebody else can see and assess very differently, that is a miraculous thing. That is a thing that we should encourage and not a thing that we should see as an assessment of the work failing.”

Grabner says this phenomenon comes from “over professionalisation of artists who spend a lot of time writing artist statements and articulating exactly what they are getting after. That really closes down radical or rigorous kinds of assessment and interpretation. I am really pushing back against the professional, institutionalised practice of accompanying an artwork with such highly specific language that there is no room for reassessing it, reinterpreting it.”

It is a problem, Grabner says, because it means no one but the artist can participate in the art. “As a viewer, that is how I participate: if I am just looking at something and reading 500 words that accompany the piece of how I am supposed to interpret it, then I am just consuming the work. I do not want to do that. I want to be active as a viewer and start to disentangle it — reshape it, recontextualise it, and then revisit it and see where my assessment was. And I do not have to be right. That is the fine line between consuming an idea and an object or actually participating in its meaning making. In the art marketplace, it is just easier for an audience who feels uncomfortable about art making to transact the story of the artist, as opposed to telling somebody you should feel comfortable interpreting this red square.”

Fishman adds that, for her, the most crucial element in the interpretation of abstract art is to revisit the work over a long period of time, in different circumstances, to allow interpretation to evolve. “I keep looking at it and surprising myself or something shifts, Fishman says. Or I will look at the piece in the morning light, I will turn the lights on, I will go back in the late afternoon for a different quality of light and see if something else happens. I am interested in being involved with the work over a long span of time. I think that is what makes it different from anything else in life that is immediate.”

This is one of the biggest ways abstract art intersects with politics today, Fishman says: it exposes humanity’s chronically short attention span and unwillingness to quiet their minds. “Our culture does not want to spend that much time even with themselves, Fishman says. People cannot sit in silence. They are afraid of silence and have to make noise for themselves. I sit very quietly with nothing going on, except whatever my brain wants to think about. That is scary for a lot of people, especially a lot of younger people. And I do not mean going out in nature. I mean just sitting with yourself. They are talking about AI reducing our intelligence, because our brain does not have to work so hard to create a full sentence, or redo something. If a machine can take my first impressions, my inchoate ideas, and turn them into polished prose, then I do not have to develop my thinking. I do not have to rework my thoughts, you know? It is the same way with Instagram and everything else. People will say, I saw your work. No, you did not see my work. You saw a tiny image taken from a single perspective on your phone. I had a group of students come to a show and some of them said, I never saw your work in person before. It is so different from what I thought it was. And I said, yes, it should be different. It should have something — and not a cheap trick, not something fast. Not something that is obvious.”

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SPARTA, Wisconsin — Walking through the boneyard I see an amputated foot. Beside it, a severed arm. Next to the arm is an axe.

“Is that Paul?” I ask my guide, Darren Schauf.

“Yes, that’s Mr. Bunyan himself,” Darren says. “One of my favorite things we’ve made here.”

Welcome to FAST Corp. FAST stands for Fiberglass Animals, Shapes & Trademarks. I have come to their headquarters amid the placid farmlands of Sparta, Wisconsin, a one-stoplight town with a population just under 10,000, to learn how fiberglass public sculptures get made. Darren is showing me the company’s back acreage, where the molds of about a thousand fiberglass sculptures have been retired.

Dismembered Paul Bunyan was tossed asunder in this field more than a decade ago. It is the mold for “Paul” (2006), a public sculpture FAST fabricated for the artist Tony Tasset. Installed in the Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park south of Chicago, “Paul” slouches forlornly, dragging his axe in the dirt, his wrinkled face worn from the burden of manifest destiny.

It is one of several pieces FAST has made for Tasset. They fabricated his 20-foot-tall “Mood Sculpture” (2017) for last year’s inaugural edition of Sculpture Milwaukee. They also fabricated “Eye” (2010), Tasset’s three-story tall eyeball that now resides in downtown Dallas.

I pounce atop a massive, curved, fiberglass slab seeking a better angle for a photograph of Mr. Bunyan’s boot. Darren tells me I am actually standing on part of Tasset’s “Eye.”

“We had to cut that eyeball into 17 pieces,” he says. “The iris was all one piece. When we drove it down, it was on the back of a flatbed semi. The wind caught it and almost flipped the truck.”

I chuckle, visualizing this surreal near-catastrophe — a massive, blue iris strapped to a semi-trailer flipping down the interstate. But my imagination cannot compete with the dreamland in which I actually stand. FAST makes many things besides public art. Strewn along a tree-line where the boneyard connects to neighboring farmland are about a dozen massive ice cream cones, as if a gargantuan toddler had thrown a tantrum at the giant’s picnic. Next to the cones I see a sight familiar from the road trips of my youth.

“Big Boy!” I exclaim.

“Two Big Boys, actually,” says Darren. “There’s a smaller one behind the big one.”

“A big Big Boy and a little Big Boy!” I cannot contain my excitement.

Continuing along, Darren shows me life-size dinosaurs and all manner of jungle beasts. Vikings are scattered about, along with the shoe in which the Little Old Lady lived, and a shocking number of cows.

“Since you already have the molds,” I inquire, “how much would a fiberglass cow set me back?”

“Depends on the size,” Darren says.

“The big one,” I say.

“About $13,000.”

This seems like a bargain to me. Yet Darren offers an even better deal. Amongst these molds hide a few finished fiberglass statues — either leftovers from large production runs or items that were paid for but never picked up. For a cool $300, I could have a fiberglass dolphin, or a Mufasa made for a production of the Lion King in nearby Appleton, Wisconsin.

Frankly, my eye is on one of the giant, white, fiberglass guitars I see lined up in front of an outcrop of pine trees.

Darren explains they were fabricated for Gibson to be used for publicity — bought and paid for, but never picked up. Admiring their strange beauty, I find myself wondering how this story relates to the recent news of Gibson’s bankruptcy.

Passing by two humungous traffic cones laying on their side, Darren explains that they, too, were made for Sculpture Milwaukee. They are replications of works by Dennis Oppenheim, who passed away in 2011. FAST has a long history with the artist. The mold for his sculpture “Performance Piece” (2000), which resembles a brick fireplace with its chimney tied in a bow, is also in this boneyard. Darren then tells me how a few years back FAST was hired to replicate an Oppenheim series called “Black,” which consisted of large-scale fiberglass pots and tea kettles. Oppenheim fabricated the early versions himself, but they did not weather well. Darren’s team used the original sculptures as forms from which to make new molds. He escorts me to a forgotten corner of the boneyard, where those original Oppenheim sculptures, handmade by the artist, still sit exposed at the edge of a cornfield, slowly crackling in the elements.

“Are you not afraid someone will come through with a truck some day and steal these?” I ask. “Or for that matter a Big Boy, or a cow, or a giant fish?”

Shrugging, Darren asks, “What would they want them for?”

“Kitsch value,” I suggest.

He grins. “I don’t worry about it much.”

Nobody is harmless, and nowhere is safe, but I have to admit if there was one place you could leave original Dennis Oppenheim sculptures outside unattended for the better part of a decade, steps away from giant fiberglass Gibson guitars, Mufasa sculptures, and lots and lots of giant cows, Sparta, Wisconsin would be it.

The main activity Spartans evidently enjoy is bicycling. The city earned the moniker Bicycling Capital of America when it became the first in the country to institute a “rails to trails” program, converting old railroad tracks into bike paths. At the entrance of town is a massive fiberglass sculpture of an old-timey gentleman riding a penny-farthing, or “high-wheeler” bicycle.

I ask Darren if FAST fabricated the guy on the penny-farthing. He proudly confirms they did.

As for how FAST got into fabricating public art, Jill Schroeder, who has been with the company from the beginning, explains, “Nails’ Tales was the first.”

Jill hands me a framed photograph of a three-story high fiberglass obelisk that looks to be made out of footballs. The sculpture is installed outside of Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, where the University of Wisconsin Badgers play. The photograph is signed by the artist — Donald Lipski. Lipski attended UW and named the sculpture in honor of the Badgers football updates he still receives from his former roommate, Eric “Nails” Nathan.

That commission started two new relationships for FAST: one with UW — for whom they recently fabricated 85 fiberglass Bucky the Badger statues for Bucky on Parade, a festival in the tradition of Art Cow Parades — and one with the world of fine art.

Lipski collaborates often with FAST. They fabricated his 60-foot-tall, elongated baseball statue “The Ziz” (2009), which stands outside of Goodyear Ball Park in Goodyear, Arizona, where the Cleveland Indians have spring training. And as luck would have it, on this day the finishing touches are being put on the most ambitious sculpture FAST has ever fabricated for Lipski: a two-and-a-half-story-tall Dalmatian puppy titled “Spot” (2018). Destined for New York City, “Spot” will live outside of the Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone, and will balance an actual Prius New York Taxi Cab on its nose.

Using “Spot” as an example, Darren walks me through the entire process by which a fiberglass sculpture manifests. “Spot” started with a 3-D computer drawing. From that drawing, a scale model was mill-cut. As he shows me the model, I ask Darren about the hand-painted board decorated with whimsical Dalmatian spots leaning behind it.

“Donald painted that,” Darren says, “to show us how the spots should be painted on.”

“So that’s an original Lipski painting,” I say.

Darren smiles. “I guess it is.”

From that small-scale model, FAST Corp’s lead artist Rob Kneifl replicated a precise, full-sized, version of “Spot” out of styrofoam. That massive styrofoam puppy was then sprayed with a mix of resin and shredded fiberglass. The resulting fiberglass shell was then sliced away in parts from the styrofoam, creating a mold that could later be reassembled. That mold was then sprayed on the inside with more fiberglass, creating a product suitable for finishing.

Dean Weber, one of FAST’s directors, brings me a face mask, and we head out to the sanding bay, where the two-and-a-half-story-tall Dalmatian puppy now sits cut in half. Team members are busy sanding it down smooth. “Once the surface is perfect,” Dean explains, “it’ll go to the painting bay.”

“Is anything being painted today?” I ask.

“Let’s see.” We walk towards the painting bay, across a lawn strewn with Santa Claus, one stray Bucky, a giant frog, and a smiling bear sitting on a bench. I pause in front of two odd-looking safari animals — a rhino and an elephant, with holes where their tails, ears, and the elephant’s trunk should be. Evidently, this is an emerging niche of the fiberglass sculpture business. On rare occasions it becomes necessary to conduct an ethical hunt on African elephants or rhinos. The animals are completely consumed or otherwise put to use by the local population, except for the tails, ears, and trunk. Those parts are sent to a taxidermist, who combines them with fiberglass replica animals, suitable for display.

When we arrive at the painting bay, the garage door to the first bay is open. Inside is an enormous tropical fish slide. Its bright, flamboyant colors are a feast for my eyes. Busy painting the fish is Eugene Ortize. I watch as he adds nuanced details to its surface, employing a blend of methods, from careful brushwork to the expert handling of a variety of airbrush tools. His technique is at the highest level. I ask Ortize where he attended art school. He tells me he is self-taught.

From the bay next door I hear metal music blaring. Inside, I meet Max Muraski. He is painting another of Tony Tasset’s “Mood Sculptures.” Instead of five, this one has seven heads. The sculpture is destined for Randall’s Island, for installation outside the entrance of Frieze New York 2018.

From behind his double barrel ventilation mask, Muraski says he is almost finished — just a few heads to go. As I watch him work, I am entranced by the purity of color Muraski has coaxed from his paints, and the intensely high gloss sheen he has imparted onto the sculpture’s surface.

I came here to learn how public sculptures get made. What I found was so much more. The grace of these painters’ gestures; the confidence of these artisans’ techniques; the absolute authority which these object makers conduct their craft: this is why artists like Tasset, Lipski, and Oppenheim trust Kneifl, Ortize, Muraski, and everyone else here at FAST. They are the perfect collaborators — true artists, even if they don’t presume to use that word themselves.

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In 2024, Jessica Stockholder and her husband, artist Patrick Chamberlain, left their long-time home in the United States for their native Canada. About their new home, which overlooks Departure Bay on Vancouver Island, Stockholder jokes: “We bought a three-car garage that came with this odd house. The garage is a good studio.” A quintessential multi-hyphenate (painter-sculptor-installation artist-public artist-writer-teacher), Stockholder recently retired from a long and legendary career as an art professor, first at Yale, then at University of Chicago. This is the first time in years she has had the luxury of making objects in a studio full-time.

Yet, Stockholder’s exhibitions are never just collections of objects on display. They are better described as multitudinously layered aesthetic phenomena. The gallery space, with all of its pre-existing components, as well as any and every material substance within her grasp is potential material for Stockholder’s visual compositions. The first question she answered for this interview was about the meaning lurking within those layers.

“It is an accumulation of things, Stockholder says. The art that I value, that I think is strongest, is not linear. It makes room for emotional life of all kinds — beauty, stress and discord. It makes all things tolerable in some ways, like a way of managing trouble in life. Life is never easy. Painful stuff happens — people get sick, live with horrible things. You have to accommodate unhappiness. You cannot be alive otherwise. That is part of what art is useful for.”

What you are working on right now in your new studio?

I moved here just over a year ago, and it took me probably about six months to settle enough to get my studio going and get myself going inside the studio. Now, I am working on some smaller works. They are for a two person show that I will have at Catriona Jeffries Gallery in Vancouver, with the painter Eli Bornowsky. I am sort of hesitant to talk about what they are and how they will come together, because they are so in process. But in general, I am trying to work out how to make things that are smaller and have presence and perhaps address space even though they are small materially. And I am thinking about lines. Metaphorically, you can talk about lines and how fat it has to be before it is not a line anymore, etc. I also keep thinking about writing poems. I have been wanting to do something that is between language and image somehow. I am reading a book, The Master and his emissary, by Iain McGilchrist, that a friend here recommended. His description of the mind and how it works, and the kinds of questions he is asking, puts words to things I have been thinking about for a long time, in terms of what it is like to be in the studio and the relationship between language and apprehending the process of thinking in the studio, which is not, for me, a very verbal process. I am enjoying that not teaching is letting me be involved in the work really differently. I also had a show that just came down at MOCA Toronto and I did a big show in Spain, in Palma, at the Es Baluard Museum.

What was the show in Toronto like?

It was called “The squared circle: Ringing”. MOCA has four floors and most often there is an artist on each floor. They do not always show site-related work but they enjoy and tend to support that kind of practice. I was on the ground floor, which is a really awkward space for many to deal with. There is an entryway on two sides, a desk that greets people and a cafe with a glass window open to the exhibition space. It is not a clean, white-cubish kind of exhibition space. It is a little complicated in terms of traffic flow and what people expect coming in. But I really enjoyed it. “The squared circle: Ringing” followed a show that I had made in Torino during the pandemic titled “Cut a rug a round square”. In that show, I was curating work from a couple of other collections and it was supposed to be a painting show. It was not just a painting show but was tethered there. There was a wrestling ring stage thing that you could stand on and view the rest of the show. There was a dashed line in the middle of the floor, organising passage through. All of the works in that show focused in different ways on the circle and the square. This show in Toronto following on that show was not a curated show, it too has a kind of wrestling ring structure, and it had triangular wall structures related to the show in Italy. In addition I placed a bunch of poem “things” on the walls. The poems kind of rattled together with all the mess on the walls that everyone likes to ignore, like fire notices and exit signs. There were also a couple of videos, one which I had taken in Chicago of some hydrangea blooms in the wind, looking really anthropomorphic, moving around and kind of fighting. The other was of a hedge here in Nanaimo also being blown about by the wind.

One of the video screens was hung next to an air vent that was the same size as the TV…

Yes, and the vent, in addition to blowing air, has a sound coming out of it matching the sound of the wind of the blowing hydrangeas. The two sounds were beautiful together. I came prepared with that video knowing that I wanted it to be part of the show, but I did not know just where it would be exactly. And of course, I had not taken account of that vent. Things like that happen. Being there, you see things, feel them and can respond to them. That is part of a thinking process, of making something; and yeah, I really love that moment in the show.

How have your ideas always been so layered and complex?

I started as a painter. I was wanting to learn how to draw and my dad arranged drawing lessons from Mowry Baden, who is quite well known out here as well as a great teacher. I went to UVic to study with him for my second two years of college. I also studied with another painter in Vancouver, Nora Blank, who was also influential and helpful. Baden is a sculptor very interested in the body’s relation to experience. Working on a piece of paper or on a canvas, illusionistic space emerges immediately. Put one mark on the thing and it becomes an illusionistic space unless you resist it mightily. I love that but I also felt too powerful inside of that space. I wanted to encounter more resistance from the world. So I became interested in the materiality of the canvas and I started to be interested in the space between things and the wall. Then I put lots of stuff in the paint, you know — toilet paper and marble dust and stuff mixed up in the paint to give it physicality. And then minimalism — which I really love, though my work does not tend to appear too minimal — really called attention to the question of the pedestal, and the space of the body in the room with art. I went down that road and was compelled by how context figured into everything. My parents were both English professors very involved with the life of the mind. That was a kind of gift. Though I also found a discord between the abstraction of intellectual life and a relationship to the immediacy of experience that is a huge part of being alive. I am compelled by the relationship between abstraction and the sensuality of immediate experience. My work is at once very concrete and immediate, and also abstract. It calls attention to how those things bump into each other.

Was that something you understood at the start of your career?

I certainly would not have been able to say any of that. I am able to speak to these things looking backwards, putting words to what was motivating me, how I was feeling, why my interests went the way they did and why I cared to do the things I did. And still today I am not able to put words to what I do in advance of making. It is a process of thinking, being in the studio.

What meaning do materials have in that process?

I do not have a single answer to that question. Many answers kind of all at once. I think about the sensual part of art, which maybe is what we mean by aesthetics being attracted to something, viscerally, without concern for what it means, like a crow likes shiny things. Something about colour is sensually engaging and then becomes meaningful. So at some level, a more backed-off level, I could make art out of anything. Give me anything and I can find a way to do something with it that intersects the things I care about, which have to do with an intersection of my engagement and making with something that I did not invent, that was there before me. So everything in the world, outside of myself, qualifies on that level. But then, through the process of making things over my lifetime, that process of making and engaging the material world made me much more curious about how things, or stuff, is meaningful. It is not like I thought: “Oh! I have to tell a story A, B, C and D.” That is not how I came to the work. Rather, engaging the work and the world through my work, awoke curiosity about how these things are meaningful. Things can be meaningful in so many ways. A material can be just the right material because it has the exact right colour. And at the same time, who made it, how it was made, what it is made out of, the history of that object is there in the work, kind of hanging out sideways attached to the colour, which is its primary reason for being there. In other ways, there are times where all those meanings that are attached to the object become players in the structure and organisation of the work. I have noticed over the years I have used a lot of refrigerators and refrigerator doors; there is something really lovely about the intersection between the white cube gallery space and the white cubic refrigerator, that both of them hold food of different kinds, full of care and love. So things become meaningful in many ways. Then in a more general way, I am invested in the personal piece of art making. I make the thing. It has something to do with me, the gesture of an individual human in contrast to many of the factory made things I use. Sometimes stuff is machine-made, extruded by machines, sometimes it is actually people’s hands making stuff in a factory, but we do not know whose hands and their name is not attached to it. All of these things were designed by someone, but again, most often their name is not attached to it. So I am in dialogue with lots of other people in an entirely different framework from the one that the art world has put me into. Then the replicability of all those materials is relatively new, that we have thousands of objects that are all the same. That replicability is kind of analogous to abstract thought that can be passed around in a video, text, or in language. Abstract thinking is replicable in the same way as the goods produced by our economic systems. But the work that I make tends not to be reproduced; it tends to be proposed as a one-of-a-kind. It could be reproduced. It would be a lot of work for somebody to reproduce it and make it look just like I made it look, but it could happen; it has not happened. All of these systems of making inflect the meaning of materials. And then there is time: how time inflects the meaning of things. Objects have history. Sometimes they accumulate evidence of use and sometimes they were made in the 1950s, not today, or whatever, so time gets pulled along with them. But I am rarely engaged in the kind of storytelling like with the refrigerator and the white cube. I came to that story looking backwards and noticing how often I have used those things.

What does it mean to you personally to be a professional artist?

I have been extremely fortunate to be able to be an artist and have it be my profession. It is not like deciding to be a lawyer or a dentist or something, where there are jobs out there for you. My mother said to me in high school: “Jesse, do you think maybe you should also study something that, you know, you could make some money at?” And I said: “oh, Mom, do not be ridiculous.” I think it was a way of being with myself. I do not know if everybody has trouble being with themselves. We are social people, animals, and very few of us are hermits. Most people need these social networks and interconnections in the world. I imagine that being a theatre person is a very different way of being than a writer or a visual artist, where you put yourself alone a lot. I have not always found it easy to be with myself, but I really wanted to be with myself anyway. Being in the studio is a way of being with myself while also talking to the world. So yeah, it serves me in that way. It has given me a particular kind of community. I mean, identity politics is such a big deal these days. We all have the colour of our skin, the social group we are born into, the history of our peoples; and art, in the Western world, has enabled another form of connection to identity. Being an artist has brought me into contact with many different kinds of people; and the work speaks to a world past the immediacy of oneself. I have found that valuable. It seems that a lot of interesting art has emerged from times where people are stressed in relation to their identities, their social groups and politics. A lot of great work came out of East Germany, before the wall came down and as that struggle happened. My parents were New York secular Jews who found jobs in Vancouver, so we did not have deep roots there. Making art was, for me, a way of finding a place in the world, a way of growing some roots. So I was just really fortunate. If I had not been an artist, if I had been better at math and stuff like that, I might have liked to be a biologist. There is something about the workings of organisms and their structures and systems that I have always found incredibly engaging.

Is your work partly about the notion of finding value everywhere?

And to notice what is there, because we are asked not to notice a lot of things. And in fact, all those things we do not notice are the world we are living in. Like, when you go to a shopping mall, there is a kind of plastic surface to the world. All this stuff is not made to last forever. It is, in fact, planned not to. So we are in this world of our making, that we have to participate in, and the nature of the world is kind of like a false front. All these surfaces will not be there in 50 years. It is all very provisional, temporary, but we are not supposed to look past the surface of it. It is kind of like watching TV. I find there is something kind of sad and painful in that. My work is also presenting a surface in relationship to all the materials I work with. I use the surface of the materials, and I use their structure, and they all add up to something that is not them. I have access to all that Stuff at the shopping mall. It is all on its way to the dump — the clothes, the furniture. You have to be really wealthy to buy stuff that is not on its way to the dump. And even then, some huge percentage of it is. So I think my work exists in that world and I make an experience that is sometimes fleeting. Nothing we make lasts forever. So the relationship between immediacy and ongoingness, I just have a lot of thoughts, feelings and questions that float in there.

What is your relationship to the art market?

Well, over the years I have been fortunate to sell some work to private collectors and to museums. I also ask for an honorarium in relation to making ephemeral installations; sometimes more, sometimes less, depending. I have been fortunate to work with gallerists who have been committed to my work over the years. There are many different streams of valuing in the art world; buying and selling is just one of many kinds of exchange. There are different markets in different places. It is kind of a mystery how prices are arrived at; and people buy art for many different reasons. Some people just love art! Some people find themselves with extra money and enjoy being involved in the complexity of the art world. It is a place that brings many kinds of people together; it is a lot of things, not always pretty, but it is cosmopolitan… and the art marketplace provides a unique community.

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“Tell Clyfford I said ‘Hi’”, on view at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado, includes examples from a body of Still’s work most people have never heard about — representational images Still created in the mid-1930s during visits to the Colville Reservation, an Indigenous community consisting of twelve Confederated Tribes in the American state of Washington. These works document the people Still met on the reservation, as well as the landscapes he saw and the work that was then happening on the Coulee Dam, a massive infrastructure project that flooded the Columbia River and destroyed many Indigenous sacred sites.

It may surprise people to learn that Still was an accomplished representational painter before transitioning into abstraction. But there is an even better surprise lurking in this exhibition — a surprise of didactic proportions. Along with the usual museum labels, the ones that add advanced context to an artwork, are labels sharing impressions of the works offered by children. A label for PH-762, a massive, 238.8 × 393.7 cm abstract canvas Still painted in 1970, reads, “I like the colours… white, yellow, red, black and… GREEN! A green frog! — Charlotte, preschool, Nespelem Head Start”. A label, for PH-194, a smaller abstract painting from 1947, simply reads, “I love this picture soooo much. — Jules, preschool, Nespelem Head Start”.

Nespelem Head Start is one of several schools currently operating on the Colville Reservation. Children from those schools co-curated “Tell Clyfford I said ‘Hi’”. Some of the kids are descended from people whose portraits are in the show. “The kids were able for the first time to see images of their relatives from that time,” says Michael Holloman, an enrolled member of the Colville Tribes who teaches courses in Native American art history and studio arts at Washington State University, and helped organise the exhibition. “It was remarkable for the children to recognise their homelands and their great grandparents or great-great grandparents.”

But Holloman was particularly excited that the children’s curatorial choices did not stop with the representational images they recognised. “They included work Clyfford did later, his more noted abstract work, Holloman says. The children absolutely embraced that work and brought their interpretations to it in a way that I think would have made Clyfford proud. Because he really did not want to provide descriptions and interpretations directly about his work. He wanted people to have their own kind of take. And the children, of course, were more than willing.”

“Kids are just so fearless when it comes to approaching Still’s work,” says Bailey Placzek, curator of collections at the Clyfford Still Museum. Placzek leads the project alongside Nicole Cromartie, director of learning and engagement, to include kids’ perspectives on wall labels. The idea first emerged during preparations for an earlier exhibition in 2022, called “Clyfford Still: Art, and the Young mind”, which Placzek and Cromartie also co-curated with children. “That project was life-changing for me, Placzek says. Since we opened in 2011, it was always such a conundrum for us — how do we make people not feel like they need an advanced degree to understand these works? Multiple people came forward and said, I love these early galleries showing his representational works, but as soon as I hit the first abstract gallery, you lose me, I feel uncomfortable.”

Placzek realised kids did not have those hangups. “The ‘Young mind’ show taught us that kids just dive right in and engage with the works with no preconceptions about what they think they should know, or how they should talk about it,” she says. So she and Cromartie started documenting what children said and did around the paintings, and adding those impressions to wall labels and to the descriptions on the website. “Children are so confident, they are so playful, says Cromarite. They just walk right in and are like, this is a nacho or whatever. There are barriers that adults put between ourselves and abstract work because we think we need an art history background. Children just do not have those kinds of hangups.”

“The vast majority of adult visitors reported that reading the children’s perspectives on the wall made them feel more confident in their own interpretations of the abstract works, Placzek says. That was just a light bulb moment for me, as a curator for this collection. So, from that moment on, we decided every exhibition, no matter what it is, we are going to have children’s perspectives in the galleries. Then to have this opportunity with the Colville school children, to have their perspectives on works that they have this tie to, is really exciting.”

Elder building

Visitors to “Tell Clyfford I said ‘Hi’” may be curious how an artist associated with New York came to have such a deep connection with an Indigenous community in Washington. It is true that Still is associated with Abstract expressionists, a group of artists sometimes referred to as the New York School. He was, in fact, the first of that group to free his work from representational imagery. His earliest New York shows, in the galleries of Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons, were cited by his contemporaries as crucial influences on their own paths to abstraction. But Still’s relationship with those other artists was tenuous, and he was exhausted by New York. He had a Western state of mind: born in North Dakota, raised in Washington State and moved with his family to rural Alberta in his 20s, where he worked on his father’s farm. When he started painting at age 15, most of his works were Western landscapes and depictions of farmers.

After earning his undergraduate degree in Spokane, Washington, he enrolled in graduate fine art courses at Washington State College (WSC). That is when he began visiting the Colville Reservation. He was so impacted by those visits that he convinced WSC to invest in a summer art programme there, for which he became one of the first teachers. Still continuously made artworks during this time, but barely showed them. When he died in 1980, his last will and testament stated, “I give and bequeath all the remaining works of art executed by me in my collection to an American city that will agree to build or assign and maintain permanent quarters exclusively for these works of art and assure their physical survival.” More than two decades later, Denver won the bid to become that city. The collection they received from Still’s estate consisted of 93 percent of Still’s total lifetime output — 750 oil paintings on canvas and 1,300 works on paper, including the works he made on the Colville Reservation.

Nicole Cromartie, director of learning and engagement at the Clyfford Still Museum, says outreach to the Colville tribal community has been paramount to the museum’s mission from the beginning. “They have been incredible thought partners for the museum team, she says. They have been instrumental in identifying some of the portrait sitters, and building on the notes that Still had in his diary about the community and cultural traditions.” “Tell Clyfford I said ‘Hi’” was born from a discussion between Cromartie, Placzek, Holloman and John Sirois, the traditional territories advisor for the Confederated tribes, about how they wanted their partnership to continue in a way that felt reciprocal and equitable.

“John Sirois said, we want you to involve our children, Cromartie recalls. He said all of this knowledge that is being held at the museum, it does not matter if we are not passing it along to the children. He said, it is important for us to build our elders. That really shows their respect for children, which is very value aligned for me. I am very much led by children. In my own practice, children have been some of my greatest teachers.”

Holloman echoes that sentiment. “Intergenerational memory and importance is so much a part of Native American culture within the region of the Columbia River Plateau. It is so much a part of who we are as a people. And with that comes protocols, activities, your relationship to a community. All these things are helping instil and strengthen an understanding of oneself within that relationship.”

Working from what Sirois said, the museum team made reproductions of Still’s Colville Reservation works as well as all other works from the collection that could conceivably be available for an exhibition, then distributed the reproductions to three tribal schools, and invited the kids to select the works that were most meaningful to them. It was exciting for everyone involved to see how many of Still’s abstract works the kids were choosing. When the kids were brought into the museum to spend time in front of the actual works, they were amazed by the scale of the paintings and had no trouble sharing their thoughts and feelings. There was an atmosphere that said every opinion was valid and everyone’s thoughts and feelings were of value. Holloman remembers how at the opening the children were still exuberant, talking about the things that they were seeing in the paintings. With a smile, he says: “They were talking about Clyfford’s work before we could tell them that the things that they see are not what they are seeing. That was spiritual. That freedom of expression and emotion is something that we celebrate our children to have.”

Forever young

Cromartie studies the aesthetic preferences of young children, and although there have not been extensive studies on it, she says the research that exists is fascinating. “Young children are really drawn to work that they themselves could create — explorations in colour, texture, composition. For a lot of adults there is this idea of, “oh, my kid could do that, so it is not important.” It is not valued. But for children it is this really empowering thing. They see a Clyfford Still on the wall and they are like, I could do that. He is an artist, I must be an artist. They flip this idea on its head. They realise art does not have to be a depiction of your parents or a rainbow or a house. It could be about how you feel about those things.”

As children get older, around age eight or nine, Cromartie says they become more interested in reproducing the world precisely. That is when they start to determine whether or not they are a good artist based on how much their drawing looks like the thing that they are drawing. “That is an opportunity for them to say, I am actually not an artist — this is not for me, because the person sitting next to me has drawn that much better than I have, Cromartie says. But abstract art is this incredibly accessible form of making art, because there is no right or wrong. And we think that is really important. We want children to feel like they have a visual outlet to express themselves.”

Cromartie adds that there is an interesting parallel between the way children approach making art, and the way that they approach looking at art. It is this freedom and openness that we tend to lose as we get older, unfortunately. But adulthood does not always have to diminish our sense of intellectual freedom. In 1955, when he was 51 years old, Clyfford Still wrote in a letter to art historian Betty Freeman that it was his “purpose in life to reveal to my time what painting can be, and how it can be made to live as the highest instrument of a man’s revelation and freedom.” Revelation — becoming aware of something previously unknown; freedom — the ability to think and act without limits. Artists like Still are, in some ways, just grown children who somehow stayed in touch with their childlike sense of wonder, a state of mind that rewards free experimentation and brings endless revelations.

This is not just an academic topic. An adult’s ability to entertain abstract ideas and value the perceptions of others has an inverse correlation with their level of egocentric thinking, which can be a predictor for a host of toxic outlooks and behaviours. Globally, close to twenty percent of adults are diagnosed with depression, anxiety or addiction, and it is estimated that hundreds of millions more suffer from these afflictions without a diagnosis. Studies repeatedly show that meditative activities, combined with a shift towards seeking out and valuing other perspectives, can significantly increase levels of joy and feelings of belonging.

Holloman says that is one of the key reasons “Tell Clyfford I said ‘Hi’” represents such a remarkable opportunity for the museum, the tribe and for all the people in between. “It is not too hard to do a little bit of research and find out the realities of the world that we exist in, Holloman says. The highest rates of poverty, alcoholism and domestic abuse, dropout rates, suicide — these are realities on the reservation. So any opportunity we have to allow the youth to keep dreaming is so important to the people. We are trying to do what we can to get these young students to keep believing, not just that you can finish school, but maybe you love the arts, you want to do something in the arts. The tribe is very committed to wanting their children to have those experiences.”

The point of this exhibition may originally have been just to reconnect part of Still’s artistic output with the people of the Colville Reservation, and to find the right way to move forward with that part of the collection. The outcome goes far beyond that. The Colville children have been transformed, and they have then given something transformational back, creating new connections for adults, including the curators who research Still’s art every day. Placzek says the process of collecting the impressions of children has become one of the most rewarding parts of her work. Sharing those reactions not only encourages free self-expression in children, and shows them their opinions are valid — it liberates adults from the cynicism or self-censorship that too often causes them to reject abstract art. The exhibition is not only about building future elders, it is also about liberating the elders we already have.

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Julia Bland’s weavings are visual marvels — cords and yarn, plaits and twists, woven, sewn, painted, tied and dyed by Bland in her New York studio. They are fragmented mental mirrors for us to reflect upon. They have multiple centres, and no centre, exemplifying Bland’s interest in the Gestalt shift, a phenomenon when one’s understanding of something suddenly changes because of a shift in perspective.

A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and Yale, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant recipient and a former artist in residence at Yaddo, Bland’s first solo museum exhibition opened at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut in 2024. Called “Woven in the reeds”, the show featured a single, large-scale abstract weaving; both image and object; a magnification of weft and warp, the defining elements of a woven textile and a statement of Bland’s revelation that weaving is not so much based on a flat grid, as is often misunderstood; it is a more complex structure that employs diagonals and extends into dimensional space.

Bland’s next solo show will be with Derek Eller, her New York gallery, in September 2026 — it can take a year or more to complete some of her works. Meanwhile, she took some time out to answer questions about her history with weaving, the sources of her inspiration and the meaning of her work.

Abstract art is sometimes derided or diminished as meaning nothing, except that someone had the money to buy it. Can you express the deeper meaning of abstract art?

Wow. You know how to start an interview! I think certainly there are some people, some collectors, who would like to have art that is pleasing, that somebody else bought for them maybe, and that they maybe do not even look at. That is true. I do not think that is only true for abstraction. And I definitely do not think it describes all collectors who buy abstract paintings. I think that abstraction is a very deep part of culture. It sounds like that point of view is saying that abstraction is separate from culture. But it is not. Abstraction is in every culture and it is everywhere. Maybe in its ubiquity, it can become invisible, but it is a huge part of the way people think. We make a lot of assumptions about things that we are used to seeing all the time. So one of the things that abstraction can do is make you look at something closer and think twice about something that you think you understand. But that is in the hands of the viewer, if they are going to take this step to think about something twice or rethink something that they already thought they knew.

How did you arrive at abstraction as the field that you would focus on?

There were some different points in my life where I had a big shift. Ever since I was very little, I was thinking about the surface of the image. I grew up sewing and doing craft projects with my neighbour, who was a craftsperson. Even when I was painting, I was always doing these other projects that had other materials. When I went to art school, after the foundation year I entered the painting department and then, within a couple weeks, I was working with fabric and had decided I was an abstract artist. That was a big shift. It did not mean that everything I did from that point on was totally abstract. But I knew that I was not interested in describing the world representationally. The question was, well: “what is the image then?” If it is not an image of what things look like, “where does the image come from?” I spent many years thinking about that. I still think about it. It is a never ending question, really. That was a big revelation for me. That was an epiphany. It led to seven or eight years of experimentation.

Did those years include the time you were living in Morocco?

Yes. In the years when I was experimenting, three of them were in Morocco. When I first got there, I was pretty overwhelmed because it was so different from where I was from, Palo Alto and New York. So as I was getting used to how different it was, I was not making any art. I made clothes — I made clothes to wear, because I did not even know what clothes to wear there. That was hard to figure out because it was a very traditional city that I was living in, that was very old, and I did not want to walk around like an American student, and I was not a Muslim woman either.

How did the visual environment of Morocco affect you?

I was interested in the patterns. Like abstraction, pattern is everywhere and it takes on different meanings in different places. This is something I started to think about there. There were patterns that felt really different to me, and patterns that felt similar to things that I was used to — some that were very Moroccan and yet felt totally familiar. So I was sort of thinking about aesthetics. Then I also worked for a person who carved wooden doors. We would transfer patterns onto the doors and then I learned how to carve the wood to make these relief patterns on the surface. He had a really quiet workshop and I would just sit there for hours in silence. Sometime after that I started making paintings. They were on paper with really crappy paints. They were abstract, but they were not much to speak of. I was just starting to make something again. It was just about making — making anything, you know? The people there were making tons of stuff. That is the thing. They were making their own couches, their own clothes. There were tile craftsmen, leather workshops, pottery, just tons of stuff being made. So there were all these materials. I would go buy fabric and I would buy things like sponges and beads and try to just make stuff.

Was weaving something you practised there?

Actually, when I came back home to New York somebody gave me a loom. It was random. My dad’s friend was like: “I have a loom in my attic; do you want it?” And she shipped it to me across the country. So that is when I really started learning to weave. And that really changed things. It was a huge deal because I had been looking at patterns in Morocco for years and thinking about what is the meaning of these patterns and where do they come from? Then suddenly I had this machine that made patterns, automatically. It was like: “Oh, my God, this is it! This is a machine that makes a surface and it makes an image at the same time.” It was mind blowing. That was also my step out of minimalism, where I could embrace a more rich visual language… or I was forced to.

Geometric abstraction is important in Morocco and prevalent in your compositions. Do you feel there is a spiritual aspect to the geometries you use?

I feel like there are different kinds of abstract patterns in Morocco. There are the mosaic patterns, there is calligraphy and textile. There are all these different forms that abstraction takes. The one that I was really interested in was in the mosaics. I do feel like there is something spiritual about them. One thing I talked about recently in my show at the Aldrich Museum was this thing called the shifting Gestalt effect, which is what I encountered there. The way patterns are intertwined, there are all these different centres. You look at the pattern in one way, and you think this is the middle of the pattern and everything is radiating out from there. But then you look over just a little bit and… “no, that is the middle of the pattern now.” And it keeps shifting so that there is no centre but everywhere feels like its own centre. That was really impactful for me. It is not like there is a wall and then the art is on the wall. The walls in the rooms are all covered in that pattern. The art is embedded in the architecture. So you are moving through this dizzying array of patterns. And yeah, it feels like a mystical experience. Coming from a Western perspective, the history of Western art is the history of one person’s perspective. I am standing here, painting what I see, and the painting is of the view that I have, versus walking in a room where there is no centre. The loss of that sense of individualism, there is something spiritual to it.

In your studio, you are still one person working from a singular perspective. How have you brought that broader perspective into your art?

We always are one person making something. And I am not a craftsperson. I feel like there is some of my work where I am like an animal, making a nest or something. I am not even thinking about it. I am just interacting with stuff. But I am also the architect of all of this, in a big way. In terms of the geometry, I do try to evoke some of that broader perspective. It is not the same, but I do think about how the pattern can shift. I am working on this piece right now where I want to have these patterns that set up a certain expectation… and then move against it. But then the geometry also comes from this totally separate thing that happened for me when I was learning to weave, where I had been thinking about the grid. For a while, all the works were based off of the grid as the structure. Then it occurred to me that weaving is not really a grid. It is a zigzag. The threads are always going back and forth this way and that way, one thread in each direction. So this obsession with the grid is not real. It is just an assumption. So I started using that idea to structure some of the imagery. I did not start making a giant weaving of zigzags intersecting, but I started thinking about compositions that were based off of a continuous zigzag. Once that entered into things, it evoked all this different stuff for me and it took off in an unpredictable way. The triangle shape and the zigzag look like writing… or look like a landscape… or look like a person. It suddenly just looks like everything.

Is it important in a political sense that you are making work that is not prescriptive — that people have agency to experience it however they want?

I try not to predict or anticipate people’s experience of my work. But, yes, that is how I experience making my work and speaking with people about it. My intentions and understanding of my work can be conflicted in ways that are sometimes maddening. And I have learned a lot by listening to people responding in ways they feel are totally self evident and obvious that never would have occurred to me or to other viewers. This is fascinating to me on a human level, but I suppose it also extends to the political realm where I feel humanity is sometimes sacrificed by “us vs. them” narratives. What is most interesting to me is how vast and diverse human experience can be. Two people can be given the same information or see the same thing unfold and come to wildly different conclusions… and that both hold some kind of truth. I am looking for evidence of this as I work and I hope that others will find evidence of this in my work as well.

Richard Tuttle is a living legend in the contemporary art field. He has his detractors, like anyone else, but most antagonism Tuttle endures is not personal — it is just the usual derision hurled at any artist who, after coming of age during the post-minimalist, post-conceptual period of art history, when academics declared art objects irrelevant, audaciously dared to keep making art objects anyway.

Tuttle’s 10-year survey show at the Whitney Museum in 1975 gave critics fits. The most divisive works in the show, Tuttle’s Wire pieces, were also the most subtle. To make them, he hand-drew simple graphite lines on a pre-lit wall, traced the lines with a thin piece of wire, then the wire sprung free, creating a third element — a shadow. Reviewers trashed them as sparse and minuscule, unaware that that only demonstrated their understanding. As Marcia Tucker, curator of that exhibition, recalls, “what people criticised about the work was very often the thing the work was about.”

Tuttle continued following his ideas wherever they led, and 50 years on his exhibitions still feel nuanced and challenging. His commitment to creative independence has made him an enduring influence on successive generations of younger artists. Meanwhile, the aging process has him feeling freer, and he says “purer” than ever. As he explains during the following interview, “There is a whole registry of old art from older people that can be the best art there is. I think what makes this happen is that things are peeled away.”

What are you working on right now?

Art is curious. I think it is the first invention of humans, homo sapiens. It precedes the immune system for example, which a lot of people think was the first thing necessary to make us viable. An ingredient in artwork should be a remembrance, or acknowledgement of, or connection to, the origin of art, for us. That cannot help but be beneficial, especially when we are challenged by environmental and health issues and changes of mores and values and so on. If your values come from art, you cannot be far off the track. Although we know art’s values can be polluted as well. It is a game, so full of contradictions. Getting old, I think, can be a good thing in terms of art, because you have to peel away a lot of impediments and, in a way, you get “purer”. I feel full of contradictions, but as I develop as an artist, I want to become more and more what I was born to be.

How can you talk about “development” if you are trying so hard to go back to such a beginning? I think it is fully understandable. I find it very useful to think that artists are born. It is not a question of nurture at all. Nobody would ask to be an artist if they knew what it was. You would never be an artist unless you were born to be this way. Being born this way, has a characteristic that you are absolutely ambiguous about everything. Nothing you experience, or can say, does not have an equal and opposite place or validity in your mind. Because of this, you are always trying to make a unity. One characteristic of art, whether it is Western, or recent or old, is that there is a unity that happens in a made thing.

When I think of this notion and the current work, what I am trying to do is extremely experimental. I find, as an artist, I have been given two kinds of time: linear and circular. One, the linear, does not have an end or beginning; and one, the circular, does, where the beginning and the end are the same. As a four-year-old, I understood my linear time. Just recently I have understood my circular time. They of course are quite opposite. In terms of making a picture — which is a unity — can one, or is one called upon, to attempt to make a picture that unifies these two kinds of time?

What do you mean by “picture”?

“Picture” is a word that was disparaged in my youth. My first dealer, the great Betty Parsons, used the word in a particular way. In those days art was a religion where you had to learn a catechism in order to practice. Recently, I find I use the word if I make a statement, like, I am somebody who needs a picture to live my life. The better the picture, the better I can live my life. Whoever gives me a better picture, I am enormously grateful to. I find, to know what we think, to know the self, is a very difficult thing. We will hide things from ourselves, maybe even for very good reasons. That does not help the artist when they are trying to make their picture. It may for a certain period, but in the long run — when you are a “senior” artist — your work becomes a lot about creating tricks to flesh things out what might be deeply hidden, or obscured, that get in the way.

In preparing for our talk, I sketched out some notes. One of the things I wrote down was from Aristotle. His two “go-to” points were: necessity and better. He said, if you want to understand nature, you have to understand how nature operates. It is, he says, either because it is going towards something better, or because it finds something a necessity. What jumped into my head is: this is analogous, i.e., that in your senior period nothing can be hidden. That what we have is a pure issue of necessity. I find it amusing, younger artists can work toward better: I want to make a better picture, a better cover, a better presentation. Then, there is a shift somewhere, where “better” turns into “necessity”.

What materials are you working with at the moment?

I am back into the notion of canvas. The colour of canvas. That fits, because I am showing, right now, a group of works at The Campus upstate in Hudson, New York. Long story short, I did a room there. The pieces, 58 of them I think, are all made of 2 × 4s. I made them in New Mexico. They are extremely simple, embarrassingly simple. I wondered whether they could be anything worth looking at. In the end, it could be, all those pieces are a single work. I like that. There is an aspect of an alphabet, or letters. For example, take the letter “F”: how interesting is that to look at? Maybe, its interest lies in the fact of reading it and the simultaneity of reading it and looking at it, which is, oddly, a concept close to the Mayan alphabet, where the writing system allows three different experiences simultaneously to its reader? Whereas ours strives for one “correct” experience — which I think is unfortunate. A lot of my work has an aspect of writing, or the verbal world, attached to it. Not in a Greek kind of way, or a Magritte kind of way, or an Abstract expressionist kind of way, but as a signal of new pursuit.

The Campus exhibition happened after making these 58 pieces. As I came to understand, they must be on a grey wall. When I saw them there like that, I saw two wonderful things had happened. The grain of the wood resembles and even is you could say, the same as my natural, drawn line. One of my battles, and my generation’s battles, is to free the relationship between identity and image, of which there is nothing wrong, except that it has been used and abused in the world to the detriment of what we might consider “good” art. Not being judgmental: anything is good. A tree is good. Ground is good… and so is art! It should be good, like a tree should be good. I enjoy doing what I can to feed and nurture a tree, so the same with art. The second important thing that happened in The Campus show is that the colour of the wood took over the job of colour. That is very thrilling to me, because in sculpture — and it does not matter whose cultural lineage it is in, or comes out of — sculpture can be divided between polychrome and not polychrome. You can have sculpture that is part and parcel with the actual world of colour and you can have sculpture that is not. That is an extremely interesting phenomenon we have in front of us as sentient beings. It is also a division. When you put that division in front of an artist, whose job is to unify, they are going to, from the bottom of their souls, do what they can to unify it.

In the case of this exhibition, the decision to put them on a grey wall, brought out the division between polychrome and not polychrome. Polychrome does not mean paint, it means colour. In this case, the colour comes from the wood itself. This is coming from a kind of energy that is free. When the people look at this, consciously or not, they partake of this freedom. It can be added to the social toolbox of good things. Principally, it shows that art is good. Now, I am being very theoretical, i.e., because it is the first thing that was invented by homo sapiens, how could it not be good? Here is another paradox the artist has to wrestle with — the good in themselves and in art, cannot be known or investigated. You cannot know more about them than you already know.

What role do opposites have in your work?

I am open to contradictions, yet I am a nut for the truth. I mean the truth of art. The world is always looking for some kind of scientific truth. Art can never supply a scientific truth. Philosophy looks for something that cannot be contradicted in any way. Art looks for something that cannot not be contradicted. In a book I am reading, the author quotes a poet who said that a poet has to offend their fans, has to figure out who their fans are, and then must offend them in order to keep on writing. Is that not interesting? You say you are happiest when your editor approves of your writing. What about the opposite? When you offend your editor, then you are free and you can write the way you want to write. One of the starting points of my work looked like islands. I would take a pencil in my mouth and bring my thumb and forefinger together and trace that shape on paper and then put out linings of watercolour around the shape. It looked to me like an island. John Donne said: “no man is an island”. Others say, you are not happy unless you become an island. I think I do not believe in the opposition. For example, you can be shaped by early experiences in life, shaped by certain darknesses that will become what you think life is, that the pain that you experience: that is life, even to the point where you will look to painful situations when looking for life. This is a darkness. Or, like even where I am in Maine right now, and we have the spectacularly beautiful light in August and early September. It is so clean and so pure. I know as an artist that there is a dark, a pit that is part of what light is.

Another book I am reading this summer is called Wild thing. It is a recent biography of Gauguin. This period of Post-impressionism, which was not that long ago — Gauguin was a contemporary of James Joyce, for example, and of relativity theory — all this stuff was happening at the same time, Schoenberg was writing music. Anyway, what happened with Gauguin and Van Gogh was a kind of mannerism, where, like Pop art, the image comes from back to front and the viewer experiences it in a sort of smash — it smashes into us. Van Gogh understood deeply Cezanne’s art, and employed the gist of his art making. Gauguin only half understood it, so was less successful. I love Gauguin’s work, but it is flawed, because his understanding was flawed. This is always beautiful, because he achieved what needed to be achieved, but shows us he did it despite his flaws. As an artist I think this is very important, because this is the other thing about painting — that it is a unity and it has to be a unity, but there is no such thing as a perfect painting. There is something wrong with every painting. For people to have art in their lives, they have to accept, something can be a perfect unity and still have something wrong with it.

Does art in your life help?

Art helps your life if you are the kind of person who can walk down the street and feel good, knowing that you have experienced an extraordinary unity. In art, the artistic is challenged more and more by making unities out of the greatest disparities. This is why I am working with two kinds of time which absolutely will not coexist in the world. Yet this is a perfect field for art to become involved with and attempt a unity. The wonderful thing about art is, success and failure does not matter. Even if you succeed commercially, it is not success, in that way. It is only another artist, who knows if you succeeded as an artist. This is something certain artists know and they really work toward the recognition of other artists as their shield, the shield of success of art, to earn the shield of success in art, rather than in other devices. The depth of the materiality of art culture is so enormous, there must be something else than just material things.

On that topic, what are your thoughts about artificial intelligence and art?

I think we are sort of winding things up. I was invited to Notre Dame. They have an advanced studies program at the university, and there was a panel about creativity. A respected and famous psychologist from Denmark had a residency there to write a book about creativity. He chose three or four creative people to explore and investigate in order to produce a general theory. One of them was Agnes Martin, who was an important person — is an important person — in my life. She has passed on, so I was invited to come and speak about her. Long story short, the psychologist and I fought a fierce, enormous and basic fight. I said, he should throw away his book, and when he understands something about art, he should try again. The moderator of the panel was a remarkable man, who was a lay, Dominican priest. He did not say a word during this panel. Afterwards, I thought to write to him. My question was: “You experienced all of this, you did not say a word, I gave everything I could to you. Now, I want to know what you saw going on?” His answer was, “I saw a classic battle between the scientific and the humane, where the scientific believes in repetition and the humane does not.”

This, for me, signals some part of the thing we are addressing. When you are living in this frenetic, everyday world, as you are, you do not have the perspective from which you can see life. One of my jobs as an artist is to make something, so some can actually see what life is between their birth and death. I was a resident at the Getty during a year that was supposed to be focused on colour. Dredging the bottom, coming up for air, I made a book for them titled, You never see the same colour twice. You know, our scientific-based civilisation operates on the idea that you can see the same colour twice — all these paint chips. I can go on. Western philosophy is hobbled and has nothing to say when colour is brought into the discussion. This same civilisation claims that we can see the same colour twice. Ok, so as far as AI is concerned — and a lot of other technologies — it is based on “you can see the same colour twice,” i.e., this “scientific” position, which is based on repetition, that cannot be proved and diminishes life. At the very least, there should be an alternative in our lives — a possibility where the reward is life.

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It was late May 2025. Art and culture power brokers from around the world were gathered in San Francisco for the first Creative Land Trust Summit. The event was based on the idea that there is a relationship between a city’s art scene and its reputation as a global capital. In other words, great cities are great in part because their arts and culture scene is robust. Of course, the greater a city becomes, the more expensive real estate becomes, and since most working artists are not paid well, fewer artists can afford to live and work there over time. As the city then loses its artists, its arts and culture scene declines, making the city less great.

Among those speaking at the summit were representatives from London. They talked of how their city at one time had a reputation as a vibrant hub for up-and-coming music acts. But in recent decades, a number of live music clubs, recording spaces and practice studios had closed and local musicians were having to move out of town in order to afford to pursue their careers. The city still had plenty of massive performance venues that could attract superstar talent, but the music scene below that tier was becoming a shadow of its former self. Consequently, London is in danger of no longer being seen as a place where musicians have a good chance to scale up. The same phenomena, they said, is happening in theatre, film and visual arts.

In the audience listening to London’s story was Gülgün Kayim, Director of Arts and Culture for the City of Seattle — a position Kayim had been in for less than a year, having previously served as the Director of the Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy for the City of Minneapolis. Kayim also happened to be a native Londoner, earning her BA in Theater and Film from University of Middlesex. Before becoming involved in cultural governance, she was an accomplished artist in the theatre. Her life experiences had already taught her that London’s challenges are real. She was there to hear about solutions.

The primary fix offered at the summit was something called a Creative Land Trust. Basically, a non-profit entity takes control of real estate assets in a city, then manages them in such a way that artists can afford to live and work in them for a long period of time, regardless of how expensive the surrounding real estate becomes or how much the area gentrifies. The Kenneth Rainin Foundation, one of the key sponsors of the summit, pioneered this idea in 2013 in San Francisco. They have data showing that it has had a transformational effect on that city. Recently London has been trying it out. It is also being tested in Sydney.

Kayim already knew that real estate prices can affect a city’s art scene. But she has also learned that affordable live and work spaces for artists is only one piece in a larger and more complex cultural puzzle. That puzzle involves every other professional field within a community, including the non profit sector, food, beverage and hospitality sectors, transportation, parks and recreation, policing, insurance, commercial development and every level of government. What a city needs if it wants to become or remain great, Kayim believes, is a comprehensive plan for integrating art into the full fabric of the community. “I call it art based community development,” she says.

Here is an example of how it works. Kayim and her team recently initiated a project involving Seattle’s jazz community. For background, back in 2021, in response to COVID-19, Seattle launched something called Hope corps, which pays local artists to do creative work that contributes “to the well-being” of the city. The programme funds all kinds of things, from performances to education to public art. One Seattle neighbourhood that was hard hit by the pandemic was Pioneer Square. It has cobblestone streets, and is where most of the art galleries are, as well as a lot of bookstores, cafes and restaurants. It is also the historical centre of Seattle’s famous jazz scene. COVID annihilated that scene. Most of the musicians and live music clubs that had made the neighbourhood what it was were barely hanging on. Using Hope corps money, Kayim and her team funded an idea a jazz musician came up with to put on a night of live jazz in clubs all over Pioneer Square. The funds paid all of the musicians, so the clubs had no expenses and the public could attend for free. Massive crowds showed up. The streets were packed. Food trucks came out. All the bars were full. That was a Tuesday in the middle of winter, and it was the best night the neighbourhood businesses had seen in years.

“That is what art based community development looks like, says Kayim. Ask yourself, when you go to big cities, what is it about that place that is attractive? It is hard to put your finger on, but I think it is that burst of energy. My role is to mobilise art to make the city vibrant; to leverage art and culture as an asset for telling the story of place; and to make sure artists get paid for their time.” Kayim acknowledges that a lot of this is what she calls “internal ball playing”, meaning it is not exciting. There are issues that have to be dealt with around land, zoning and development. She says: “It is the invisible hand of government. The purpose is to create the conditions to have an environment where things will happen. For example, it is the permitting environment that allows street musicians to exist. Whether a glass blowing studio can exist in one part of town is all about zoning. It is the affordability of space that allows artists to live and work in town — then you can have open studios. It is all the mechanisms of government that make it so this can happen.”

One of the most visible ways any city engages with the visual arts community is through public art. Seattle was one of the first cities in the United States to embark on a large-scale, official public art programme. Funds to manage the collection come from a percentage of capital budgets, including from utilities, the department of transportation and the construction of new roads and buildings. The city’s collection currently stands at around 4,000 pieces. Kayim’s office is responsible for managing it. She says: “The Jonathan Borofsky statue in front of the Seattle Art Museum, the giant hammering man, that is ours. We also have a portable collection. For that, our curators buy artwork from local artists that we hang in city offices everywhere. That collection is around 3,000 objects. Walking into city hall you will see the artwork. That is another way we focus locally.”

Kayim’s office is currently managing the public art element of one of the biggest public works projects in the United States, Seattle’s new Waterfront Park. Designed by the same company that designed The High Line in New York, this massive project involved the deconstruction of part of a highway and the construction of a new walkway connecting the waterfront with Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market. The public artwork component is significant. Of course, public art investments are tricky, in part because art is subjective. That issue aside, Kayim says the most complex part of her office’s work is communicating to everyone involved how layered and nuanced the whole process is. It is not just a question of commissioning an artist to make something cool looking that can be installed along a walkway. Most of what Kayim’s team deals with has nothing at all to do with the aesthetic value or meaning of the art.

She explains: “Public art has become very institutionalised. The money is flowing through specific channels. We have to consider legal issues and liabilities. Also, our collection is aging. We are thinking about legacy, as in how we are going to deal with this collection in the future. Our maintenance budget has not grown along with our collection, which means our restricted dollars do not allow us to keep feeding money into maintenance. That is an issue for the entire field of public art to consider. Some people are thinking the concept of temporary public art is something to take on. Temporary meaning 20 or 30 years. Permanence is lifetime, generational. Where are the resources going to come from to make that so?”

That issue of permanence has been front and centre in Seattle recently. As soon as Kayim arrived in her new position a year ago, she was pulled into an ongoing negotiation between the city and Seattle-based artist Don Fels about a public sculpture he had created decades before, called Paragon. The negotiation had become bitter and Fels had made multiple pronouncements in the press decrying the city. His conclusion: “I think public art has made a wrong turn, leaving behind the community-based impetus of public art that those of us who got it started in Seattle decades ago so believed in.”

The sculpture in question is an elevated boat made of wood and metal. It was installed in Seattle’s Village Park and Shoreline Habitat in the early 2000s. It was built with reclaimed wood that was not designed to withstand decades of wind, water, sun or pests. Over time, ants and the weather caused the wood to decay to a point where the large, heavy object posed a serious risk to anyone standing beneath it. The initial contract between Fels and the commissioning entity did not include a contractual obligation to maintain the work. Neither did Fels endeavour to maintain it over the years. Once the damage was identified, the city’s public art maintenance budget was not sufficient to repair or rebuild Paragon. The decision was made to deaccession the work from the city’s collection.

Kayim explains, “Paragon was a collaborative effort with the port. They own the land. We did not commission the work. Our program was new at the time, but we were asked to look after the work after it was made. The piece was built with methods that at the time were fine, but now would be problematic. We have a limited budget to do specialised care. We have on staff a specialist who goes piece to piece, but we have 4,000 pieces. So in the scope of what we have, we need to ration our efforts. We did not neglect the work. We dealt with the work in the order we always do. But it had inherent flaws. We do not take it lightly.” Kayim further notes that Fels perhaps misunderstands the intent behind the deaccessioning process. The city is only deaccessioning the work in order to administratively remove it from the books. If Fels rebuilds it, the city intends to reaccession it. There is already a new space reserved for it when and if the new work is complete. Says Kayim, “We have to follow a process where the source of the money dictates where we can put the art. So if there is a big construction on the waterfront, we can put the art on the waterfront. There is no construction where Paragon is, so we cannot put it there.”

The city has already lost two court cases in the past over other artworks that affirm the limitations Kayim is working under. Fels, meanwhile, recently acknowledged, “I like Gülgün and do not envy her position.”

The reality is that public artists do not usually have to deal with the same administrative details as people who work in public art governance. The artists perceive bureaucrats as anti-art, when in many cases they are simply facing limited resources — or, as in the case of Paragon, they are trying their best under difficult conditions to mitigate challenges caused by the poor planning of others.

Such is the humdrum reality, or internal ball playing, that forms the foundation of that buzz Kayim talks about — the buzz that makes a city feel exciting and turns it into a culturally significant place. Cities can buy up spaces and rent them on the cheap to artists; they can fund symphonies and festivals and museums; they can pay publicists to convince tourists to visit. But what ultimately makes a city great is the work people like Kayim and her team do behind the scenes to create the conditions in which artists can do their work. Support has to flow freely between all the stakeholders. That is the definition of creative trust.

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Something becomes iconic when it symbolises something larger. Think of Russian icon paintings, which depict biblical Christian figures with halos. The paintings are not, themselves, divine, but they are symbolic of the power of the Church and thus venerated as objects that transmit divine messages.

The word icon comes from the Greek eikon, meaning an image or likeness. That explains why, historically, it has referred to works of art. But today almost anything beloved is called iconic. Cher is iconic. Gucci is iconic. The baguette is iconic. These are not gods; nor are they images; but they represent values that people cherish on an almost-spiritual level.

Iconoclasm is what happens when someone destroys an icon. Iconoclasts do not hate the icon, per se — they oppose its messages or the values it represents. By annihilating it they think they can annihilate what it stands for. One of the most notorious modern examples of iconoclasm occurred in March 2001, when the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, giant statues carved into the side of a mountain in Afghanistan. The Bamiyan Buddhas were carved around 1500 years ago, presumably to venerate Buddhism, though no one is certain. Insisting they were guided by their interpretation of Islamic law, Talibans ordered the Buddhas’ destruction (along with the destruction of every other statue of a human in Afghanistan) to give “praise to Allah”.

On 11 September of that same year, members of al-Qaeda attacked the United States. They crashed two planes into the World Trade Centre in New York, crashed another into the Pentagon, America’s seat of military power, and hijacked a fourth plane that went down in a field in Pennsylvania — it is unclear what its intended target was. The attackers were known to be associated with an Islamic organisation, but their known targets were not religious symbols; they were economic and military symbols. The attacks are nonetheless considered iconoclastic — an attempt to destroy the icons of secular gods.

Despite the extreme violence of the attacks on the Buddhas of Bamiyan and on the United States, and even despite footage of them being broadcast widely and repeatedly around the world for more than two decades, the messages of Buddhism and of American economic and military influence are still ubiquitous. Is that simply testament to the power of these particular icons? Unlikely, says James Simpson, the Donald and Katherine Loker Research Professor of English at Harvard University, and a leading expert on iconoclasm. It is just the latest evidence that iconoclasm is, and always has been, doomed to fail.

Spectral gaps

When Simpson first started studying the subject around 2000, he thought iconoclasm was something relatively recent. “I thought it was a minor aspect of a much larger early modern phenomenon, namely Reformation, starting in 1517, he says. It turns out, however, to be a major topic with world historical significance. The change from one historical dispensation to another is, for example, almost always accompanied by iconoclasm. Revolutions characteristically turn aggressively on the symbolic edifice of the ancient régime, hammer in hand. Break the images of the old order (e.g. statues of the polytheistic gods, of saints, of kings) and you deliver a visceral blow to the cultural order upheld by those statues.”

Despite its inherent drama, Simpson says iconoclasm is almost always ineffective. “Utter destruction of the image tends not to work. It not only effaces the past so as to produce the tabula rasa of ignorance, but it also leaves a spectral gap, activating the deep desire to replace the image.” The crevices in the mountain cliff that once held the Buddhas of Bamiyan are still there; everyone remembers what was in them. Artists have even projected images of the Buddhas back into these empty spaces. The Buddhas were destroyed, but the idea of them remains. Similarly, in New York, architects Michael Arad and Peter Walker designed a pair of reflecting pools on the footprint of the destroyed Twin Towers. Titled Reflecting absence, that monument is a direct reference to the “spectral gap” Simpson describes. The emptiness only strengthens and spreads the values the iconoclasts were attempting to destroy.

Despite its obvious fruitlessness, iconoclasm has only gotten more prevalent in recent years, especially in the West where the preservation of cultural objects and sites has traditionally been seen as a mark of modern sophistication and respect for the past. “We use the catch-all word “heritage” to designate crafted objects of special historic and cultural status, no matter the tradition from which the object arose, Simpson explains. When we in the West witness destruction of “heritage” artefacts and/or buildings, we tend to react with horror at the barbaric practices of some cultural “Other”, whether that other be Islamic revolutionaries or, not so very long ago, the young cadres of the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976. We care about the past; we do not smash stuff. That complacent projection of barbarism onto some other does not prepare us either for understanding our own long history of revolutionary iconoclasm or for our own, contemporary practice of iconoclasm.”

Simpson points out several recent iconoclasms in the West, including the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in 2015, which demanded removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the façade of Oriel College at Oxford; the toppling of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in 2020, after which the statue was thrown into Bristol Harbor; and the removal of more than 155 statues of Confederate leaders throughout the United States. “We too break things”, Simpson says.

Museum as iconoclast

Simspon divides iconoclasms into six stages. The first is “unlicensed iconoclasm” or the destruction of icons by individuals or loosely organised private groups. Next comes “licensed iconoclasm”, which is backed by the authorities. Next is the “resurgence of images, both material and mental”, which is when the destroyed icons are memorialised or replaced. Then comes stage four, the “resurgence of licensed iconoclasm”, a re-invigorated attempt to destroy all those newly created icons along with whatever pre-existing icons were missed in stages one and two.

The futility of stages one through four throughout humanity’s earlier epochs eventually gave rise to stages five and six, which Simspon calls “museum culture; aesthetics and the cultivation of taste” and “safe ‘iconoclasm’ within the sacred space of the museum.” As Simpson explains it, iconoclasm “triggers a long and largely unstoppable historical process. The image breaking provokes the restoration of images, which provokes more breaking, which provokes the new solution of the museum, where the process begins again.”

Of course public museums are not iconoclastic in the sense that they physically destroy the icons they collect. Rather, they act as agnostic storage houses where icons are transformed through admiration as aesthetic objects. Their new status as art disconnects icons from whatever religious meaning they once had. They have not been smashed, but they have been metaphysically neutered. “Museums are places of asylum for images, says Simpson. The religious image sits safely in the quiet, not to say implicitly sacral atmosphere of the protected museum, set paratactically beside secular images (landscapes, or still life, say), as examples of something we decide to call “art”. That appellation licenses us to look in safety.”

The museum also supports a concept of “official art history” that is separate from religious history or political history. This creates “discourses around ‘heritage’ and ‘aesthetics’ to allow us to look at cultural artefacts over which our ancestors may have violently fought, Simpson says. My Protestant ancestors may have wanted to imitate Moses, who destroyed the cultic image of the Golden Calf. Now instead we make pilgrimages to Rome to see Bernini’s statue of Moses; we consider the statue as somehow ‘good’ for us not because it will save our souls by repudiating idolatry; it is good for us because a great artist sculpted it.”

The non-violent, museum-sponsored form of iconoclasm not only diminishes the influence of icons by changing public perception of them; it also transforms previously sacred images and objects into collectible commodities. The sledgehammer, Simpson jokes, has been replaced by the auction hammer. “Of course the museum is never the end of the story, he says. The cycle repeats itself within the museum: the differently sacred ‘heritage’ artefacts now themselves become targets of iconoclastic paint and hammer: climate activists, for example, have defaced many artefacts in western museums since 2022.”

The veneration of paints

The world’s first known public art museum was The Kunstmuseum Basel. It opened in the mid-17^th century. It was about a century later that Joseph Wright of Derby painted An experiment on a bird in the air pump, a painting that Matt Wilson, art writer for the BBC, contends was the first work of modern art. Its modernity, Wilson says, is defined by its departure from art’s traditional role of transmitting religious or political values. It offers a secular, complicated view of humanity instead.

Ironically, the popularity of secular art since the rise of “modernity” has resulted in art itself becoming an iconographic institution. Each modern artistic innovation or movement has its believers and its saints, some of whom even have chapels in their name (the Rothko Chapel; Louise Nevelson’s Chapel of the Good Shepherd; Tadeo Ando’s Church of the light; the Ellsworth Kelly Chapel). Meanwhile, religious institutions have continued to commission secular artists to create original artworks for their houses of worship. Just a few examples: Picasso and Matisse both made art in service to Christian churches, while contemporary French artist Véronique Joumard recently designed new stained glass windows for Cathedral Notre-Dame in Bayeux.

Thus, museums destroy the religiosity of icons, only to create secular aesthetic saints who receive notoriety by making new icons for the same religious institutions the museums attempted to neuter. Meanwhile, modern art’s progressive march continually generates an expanding pantheon (or canon) of artistic, aesthetic and conceptual icons who now inhabit the secular sacred museum space like ancient gods haunting a stone temple.

In that context, could reactions against art — from critics, art schools or individual artists — be considered a form of soft iconoclasm? “The image in Western culture is always under threat, says Simpson, not least because the image is public and potentially lethal if we treat it as God, which is to say if we practice idolatry. I will only say that the transfer of value from religion to aesthetics saves the image but also potentially kills it. The auctioneer’s hammer is another art killer. I could not help but admire Banksy’s inspired and hugely funny iconoclasm, as he triggered a paper slicing instrument to destroy from within an image that he had just sold at auction seconds ago for a vast price.”

Of course, Banksy’s iconoclasm was itself a failure, since the shredded painting sold again at auction for an even higher price. As Simpson reminds us, that is always how it goes — every icon falls under one type of hammer or another, and every iconoclast eventually realises they cannot erase the icons of their enemies, as they always endure, either in the museum or the spectral gap.

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Turn off your AI for a minute. We need to talk about the invisible elephant in the empty room — abstract art. Do you remember it? That enigmatic stuff on the walls and floors and city streets, waiting patiently for us to spend time with it? We have been ghosting it, preferring spectacle, passive entertainment and outrage theatre to silent contemplation. Maybe we were annoyed. Abstract art left us feeling confused, inadequate, like we needed a PhD to understand it. But it was never here to be understood. It helps us understand ourselves. It does not tell us what to think, it helps us teach ourselves how to learn. It encourages curiosity and imagination. It answers no questions… and usually asks none. We are the question and the answer. It is a doorway to revelation, a stage on which we express our thoughts and emotions.

AI is not that. AI is obvious. It is a shortcut. It gives us the questions and the answers so we do not have to bother thinking for ourselves, talking with experts, searching for information in the real world… or even scrolling two centimetres down a page of Internet search results. It tells us we are inefficient and that efficiency is what matters most, so we should let it do the work, then we can sit around and collect a basic minimum income from our tech overlords, who meanwhile are floating on yachts or hunkered in underground bunkers filled with abstract art, expanding their minds while the monster they built destroys ours.

AI is the perfect tool for the “daddy culture” we now find ourselves in, where we happily give our power away to anyone who can tell us what to think and how to feel. It replaces freedom and imagination — which is scary and asks so much of us — with predictability, which is safe and easy. So what will it be? Will we embrace our human need for effort, creativity and mystery? Or will we surrender our humanity to machines built to subjugate us? Would you rather be efficient, or truly alive? A mindful creator, or a mindless consumer?

Degenerative intelligence

Abstract art predates human civilisation. It is found among the oldest cave paintings. AI just got to the party. Most of us thought AI was science fiction until 2023, when the CEOs of various tech companies began parading their AI clunker-bots to the world. That year, journalist Scott Pelley interviewed the CEO of Google on 60 Minutes about Bard, that company’s AI chat clunker (which was recently rebranded Gemini, a cynical nod towards an astrological sign associated with curiosity, which AI is here to replace). Pelley’s test of the technology was to challenge it to “finish” Ernest Hemingway’s famous micro-story, “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” The story was allegedly the result of Hemingway betting his writer friends he could write a complete story in six words. The AI’s response was to add back all of the extraneous, trivial details Hemingway left out. Hemingway’s achievement was brevity. AI’s was a bloated cliché. Yet, Pelley and the Google chief ooh-ed and ahh-ed as the so-called “super” computer barfed our culture back at us, half digested and foul.

That nauseating moment of televised asininity should have caused Google stock to implode. Instead, it was a sign of things to come. AI has only gotten more popular. It is responsible for the current stock market bubble that could bring the world economy to its knees any day. Meanwhile, hordes of artists in every medium are proudly proclaiming they use it. Imagine — human artists abandoning their freedom to a technology designed to make them irrelevant, producing gee-gaws that museums and collectors are eagerly gobbling up, while ignorant reporters tout this laziness as a breakthrough.

The same year Google’s AI massacred Hemingway’s six-word story, the Museum of Modern Art in New York made history by purchasing what they say was the first AI artwork to enter a major museum collection: a computer programme devised by Turkish American artist Refik Anadol. The word artist is being used loosely here; Anadol is more of a tech executive whose company instigates aesthetic phenomena marketed as “enthralling and immersive media art intended for anyone, any age and any background”. The AI programme he sold MoMA, titled Unsupervised was designed to analyse the existing artworks in MoMA’s collection and then interpret those works into an ever-evolving digital mishmash, which is then broadcast on a wall-sized screen in the museum. It looks like something that should be playing in the background of a check-in desk at a hipster hotel in Miami. There are bigger TV screens at football games. By Anadol’s own admission, the thing is derivative. It devoured thousands of actual artworks and is now endlessly flatulating a digital response.

How silly that the inventors of AI co-opted the term “generative” to describe it. To generate is to cause something new to come into existence. Unsupervised is an example of how AI does not generate — it digests then defecates. We can correctly call it defe-cative. Or at best, re-generative. Unsupervised is the kind of trash that would naturally be expected of something called “artificial intelligence”. The question is, should artists not aspire to authentic intelligence? The presence of Unsupervised in the MoMA collection is an insult to the artists whose works Anadol trained his AI on. It begs the question: how many of those artists gave their consent for their work to be used in the making of this catastrophe?

And how many viewers want to be confronted by a massive, everchanging digital screen while they are in the museum anyway? Eva Reifert, curator of 19^th-century and modern art at Kunstmuseum Basel, is amongst the few in the art field today pushing back against this kind of techno assault on museum visitors. “We should offer spaces that are for digital detox, Reifert says, which is why I am adamant to say we do not need screens everywhere. We do not have to have a digital experience for the collection. You are encountering in a painting — or a sculpture, or something that has been handmade by someone, even if it is minimal art or minimalistic art — the tangibility of the object, and the relationship to the space, and the old thing about aura, authenticity, originality, seeing the brushstroke and getting a feeling for where that person was when they made the work, what was going on in their heads, what they were trying to say. Or do you want the digital experience, that is always a sort of simulacrum?”

Abstract art, the anti-AI

If we are going to salvage humanity from the pit of lameness AI is digging, we need something truly generative; something that is the result of intuition, imagination and experimentation. We need abstract art. Even if they have a plan, abstract artists venture into the unknown every time they start working. They are uncertain exactly what characteristics the thing they are making will end up having; how it will respond to whatever environment it is placed in; and how it will be received by the humans who interact with it. Even if the artist offers to explain the work afterwards, every viewer must ultimately take on the responsibility of finding their own meaning in it. Abstract art asks something from us, but it also respects us as independent, autonomous, sentient beings, and lets us decide for ourselves what we are sensing and what it means to our sense of being. It is the anti-AI.

“It is about trying to put a lens of abstraction over the thing we think we know, and then in that abstraction, doing a different kind of value assessment or formal interpretation,” says Michelle Grabner, artist, curator, gallerist, critic, professor and Guggenheim Fellow. Grabner curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial and was named by Artnet as one of the 100 most powerful women in art. Her work blends abstract visual strategies with hints of everyday life, like jam lids or table cloth patterns, which invites viewers into what she calls an “intellectual engagement” with the familiar. This leaves some viewers behind, she says, because people have become so literal. If they see something that looks like a tablecloth, they end their interpretation there. “Instead of taking it for granted, let it command our attention in a different way, Grabner says. Having somebody tell you what it is — I find that just dreadful. Why would we want to not have to deeply assess, and wildly interpret? And it is not about being right or wrong. It is about the activity of critically thinking.”

Imagine an AI company saying what they do “it is not about being right and wrong, it is about the activity of critically thinking.” That would be crazy. AI is here precisely to tell us what is right, what to do, what to say and what to think. When it is wrong, it is not only useless but dangerous. Abstract art can never be wrong. It is often confusing, odd, silly and sometimes pointless. But that is part of its beauty and value. It is like us — deeper than its superficialities suggest. When we grapple with its existential nature, that process connects us with our own, which makes us more human, and more humane. Now is the moment when our species needs to decide whether that matters.

Gestalt shifts

Mumbai-based abstract artist Manish Nai also uses bits of the everyday world in his artworks. His favourite materials include jute, newspaper, second-hand fabric, found metal and old books, things in great supply in contemporary India. Nai does not begin a new artwork with an idea of how it will turn out. He lets the materials guide the process and, perhaps later, in retrospect, gains understanding from it. “Most materials I use — cloth, newspaper, jute, metal — are already loaded with history, Nai says. I do not add meaning; I try to reveal what is already inside them. I often discover the final form only after the process is complete. That unpredictability keeps me engaged — it is like collaborating with the material rather than shaping it.”

While exhibiting in institutions around the world, Nai has noticed that reactions to his work vary widely depending upon where he is geographically. For example, he says Indian viewers respond more easily to the materials he uses, while Western viewers respond more to the forms. This reveals how cultural predispositions can easily shape how someone reacts to abstract art. What is perhaps more important, however, is not whatever assumptions or preferences a viewer comes with, but what new levels of thinking and feeling emerge as they spend time with the work.

Julia Bland is a New York based artist who spent several formative years living and working in Morocco, where she often found herself immersed inside of the abstract patterns that are integrated ubiquitously into Moroccan architecture and design. Unlike when she was simply looking at an artwork hanging on the wall, she found it impossible to identify the centre of these all-over visual compositions. Or rather, the centre constantly shifted whenever she moved through the space or changed her point of view. She describes it as a Gestalt shift — when a person’s understanding changes suddenly because of a new perspective.

“Abstraction is in every culture, and it is everywhere, Bland says. Maybe in its ubiquity, it can become invisible, but it is a huge part of the way people think. We make a lot of assumptions about things that we are used to seeing all the time. So one of the things that abstraction can do is make you look at something closer and think twice about something that you think you understand. But that is in the hands of the viewer, if they are going to take this step to think about something twice or rethink something that they already thought they knew.” Bland has introduced a similar visual approach into her abstract weavings. If she can instigate a Gestalt shift for viewers, she hopes she can get them to question the nature of what they are perceiving and become more open to other possible interpretations.

Grabner, Nai and Bland all make different kinds of abstract art, but they are all inviting us to engage in a similar intellectual conundrum. What are we supposed to think about them, or say about them out loud? Is it okay to just feel something? Would it be okay if we just danced or sat on the ground or started laughing or crying when we looked at their work, like children do? At the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado, curators have started adding the reactions of children to the wall didactic. Children do not have the same hangups as adults. They say and do whatever they feel in the presence of an artwork. Can we become more like them? According to the museum, a majority of adult visitors now say that reading the children’s thoughts makes them feel more free to express their own inner feelings. This is important. The agency humans have to think for ourselves is precisely what AI is designed to eradicate.

Abstract artists who struggle every day with abstraction in their studio report a sense of never-ending evolution of their own understanding of what they are doing. They may not be entirely comfortable in that space of unknowing, but they stay there because it brings them into contact with their intuition and intelligence. That is the point. We are in a cultural moment when too many of us are giving into easy answers. The truth is more complicated than AI, algorithms and daddy politicians are making it seem. It is time to get the kids, and ourselves, off social media and go look at abstract art in real life; to stay as long as possible in a space of nuance and questioning; to ask our own questions and find our own answers; to reject the toxic certainty offered by AI and embrace the very human nature of the unknown.

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How many different words can you think of for rain? Artist Miya Ando recently published a dictionary through MIT Press called Water of the sky, that lists 2000 Japanese rain words. Keame means “fine rain that looks like a fiber”. Bunryūu means “rain that splits a dragon’s body in half”. Takuu is a “blessed rain that quenches all things in the universe”. Each of the book’s definitions is illustrated by one of Ando’s indigo paintings, which evoke the feeling of the type of rain being described. The book opens with a quote from Zen Buddhist priest and poet Ikkyu, who wrote that priests “should learn how to read the love letters sent by the wind and rain, the snow and moon”, before studying sutras.

“Ikkyu is saying nature can hold profound Buddhist truths, just as sutras and lectures, Ando explains. In my practice I am dealing with natural phenomena, where there is a vocabulary for philosophical things. When you look at clouds and they change in the sky and turn into different shapes, that is beautiful, but it has also been codified in Buddhism as a metaphor for all things being impermanent and constantly changing. Clouds are no different than you. As humans, our time is temporary on Earth. Clouds express the human condition.”

Ando was raised in a Buddhist temple by a Buddhist priest. However, she says she does not make Buddhist art. “Is there a direct line to my art from my religious upbringing? Maybe. My dad also has a PhD in electrophysics. Is it because I was near a physicist? Perception is not an abstract concept. It is something that can be experienced. Humans have fundamental questions, across art and cultures, about how we understand time and experience nature, and how we perceive these things. There is a material experience of nature evidenced in my work. So, are the works Buddhist? I do not like to say that they are. Maybe I am just a Buddhist proselytising! I hope I am not because Buddhists do not proselytise. I just believe in the equation that has been set up by Buddhism that states everything is ephemeral.”

Lewinale Havette would also not describe her art as religious. Havette was born in Monrovia, Liberia, where her father was a leader in the Methodist church. Her mother, an Indigenous Liberian, was raised with more nature-based religious beliefs. Religious tensions in Liberia, where Christianity has been used to subjugate Indigenous people, caused Havette’s family to emigrate, first to Côte d’Ivoire and eventually to the US, where her father pursued theological studies. As Havette has gotten farther from the experiences of her youth she has begun stripping away and rebuilding her relationship with religion and spirituality.

I” am not religious, Havette says, but I did have a religious upbringing, and spirituality is always at the core of my practice. Spirituality is less about religion and more about ways of being, ways of doing things; understanding and appreciating nature; being able to see and hear things without talking to a quote unquote god; understanding what is on Earth and in the heavens, things unseen. That is more connected to what I am trying to get back in touch with.”

Havette’s latest exhibition, ““Playing with fire” at Von Racknitz + Baer Gallery in Berlin in partnership with Palo Gallery New York, features 16 new paintings that depict female bodies in poses suggesting power, sensuality and suffering. She describes this body of work as the first time she led with intuition and a sense of the spiritual. “It carried a sense that I was a vessel”, she says. The brushstrokes are frenetic and minimal; the colour worlds verge on monochromatic. Several titles reference metaphysical ideas.

The mercy of not pretending, the largest work in the show (274.32 × 132.08 cm), depicts stacked bodies, twisted, maybe in ecstasy, maybe in pain. It is rendered in black paint and ink. “I see in this painting how romantic love ties into an understanding of our higher self, Havette says, especially the good love, the one that challenges you. That love ties into a breaking open of your higher self. In many West African cosmologies, experiences are understood through the energies they carry and how we move with them. Romantic and embodied forms of connection can open us, unsettle us, and bring us into a deeper awareness of the self. These thresholds are not good or bad in essence. The harm begins when we impose a judgmental framework on our inner life, especially the inherited Western religious habit of dividing impulses into permitted and forbidden. I am not suggesting that every desire should be acted upon. I mean that the internal act of labeling our experiences as morally right or morally wrong can distance us from what those energies are trying to reveal.”

Between two worlds

Havette’s painting Seventh son is a yellow monochrome painting that depicts multiple superimposed perspectives of a female head. Its title references a common male figure in West African spirituality and folklore. “The seventh child tends to be this threshold being, Havette says. It sits between worlds and carries insight. The son, the male child, tends to be the celebrated figure. I am flipping that in this painting, because my work focuses on women. This mystic being has insight into more than the physical. She is the ancestral mirror between worlds.”

Ando also walks comfortably between worlds. There is the Buddhist world of ideas that compels her to make art; then the world of the contemporary art market, where she is represented by commercial galleries, accepts public commissions and takes on collaborations with brands. Her most recent brand collab was with the Beverly Hills outpost of luxury fashion house Saint Laurent. It might seem hard to imagine a more opposite representation of Zen Buddhism than a luxury store on Rodeo Drive. But Ando saw it differently.

“Creative director Anthony Vaccarello liked my work and had seen it in a number of places, Ando says. I went to look at their space in LA because I was already going there, and I liked the way they thought about art. I see their thinking about fashion and lifestyle and why there is a connection to my work. The genesis of Saint Laurent’s style, as well as my style, is informed partly by Zen reductivism, in my opinion.”

Ando recreated Ryōan-ji, the most famous Zen garden in Japan, inside the Saint Laurent store. “It is just 15 stones on gravel, Ando explains. It is the embodiment of Zen reductive thought, and by that I mean without anything extra. The 15 stones are of varying sizes and shapes. The viewing place is this long veranda, but from no one place can you see all 15 stones. One is always hidden, regardless where you are. I recreated that on a smaller scale at Saint Laurent with charred cubes of wood. You could see them all at once. That changed the inherent quality of the original. It was a way of shifting the perspective. That is one of the foundational concepts of wabi-sabi, a Japanese concept that arises from Buddhism. Part of what it means is that nothing is perfect and all things are impermanent. So this garden is representative of those ideas.”

On the large wall behind her recreation of Ryōan-ji, Ando placed one of her cloud paintings. For this body of work, Ando photographs clouds, recording the exact date, place and time of the observation, creating a record of a fleeting moment. She later paints amalgams of those clouds in ink on metal. “Clouds are impermanent and the metal suggests permanence, Ando says. That is the language for this inquiry. The work is archival, it is not ephemeral. But the overarching idea is that everything is impermanent.”

Inquiring not prescribing

Religious organisations have a long tradition of commissioning artists to make artworks that prescribe their version of truth. And there are artists making overtly religious artworks on their own that attempt to expand those official religious narratives — as an example, Crowning by Esther Strauss, which shows the Virgin Mary in the act of giving birth to Jesus. Then of course there are artists who make art that mocks religious art — like Andres Serrano’s famous Piss Christ or Maurizio Cattelan’s La nona ora (The ninth hour), which shows the Pope being smashed by a meteorite.

Less attention comes to the artists who are not prescribing spiritual truth with their art, but rather inquiring about it. This type of work has just as much power to affect the minds of the people who encounter it. “I am posing questions to myself, Havette says. It is a personal search. But when you are asking spiritual questions in the works, you have an audience that starts to also ask those questions. It is this net, this bag over all of our heads to various degrees; a blanket of spirituality that covers the work.”

Havette says she has an increasing awareness that the people who collect her work are looking for transcendence. “I am hearing the feedback. Collectors come by and tell me, ‘Every morning I wake up and this is what the work does to me, and this is how it does it.’ And often the things they are seeing are similar to the things I am looking for when I am creating the work.” When this happens, Havette says she laughs to think that in some way she might unintentionally be following in the footsteps of her minister father, just without the weight of organised religion. But that is never her intention. “People make gods of objects, she says. They make icons. They make gods of people, too. It is not the artist. The viewers make it this elevated thing. But it is less about hardcore religion for me. I am trying to understand so much more — romantic relationships, sexuality, power dynamics between men and women. Those things are key to me understanding my higher self and what it means to be in touch with that.”

Ando is also not in the business of making icons or prescribing truth. She makes art in service to something that is ultimately personal — the search for a system of thoughts that makes sense. “I have a belief and a reverence for something beyond myself, Ando says. I grew up with that conditioning. It is like having a veil over your eyes. All that stuff formulates how you are going to perceive the rest of the world for the rest of your life. For me that meant there is a deity in the mountain, in the waterfall. Nature is not just nature. There are 72 seasons. There is a season for when the geese come home. There is a season for when the frogs start crying.”

But Ando also realises there is this idea that specific beliefs matter, and do not matter. “I think what we are trying to do with our belief systems is make things peaceful, she says. Whatever paradigm works. Call it a religion or not. I make art so I can reason and reconcile questions that I have. The title of my exhibition in Beverly Hills was “Mono no aware”. That is a Japanese term that means an appreciation for ephemerality. It is not nihilistic or negative. You are lucky to see that rain. You are lucky to recognise a shooting star or a sunset or snow that fell right in front of you. It was beautiful because it was short-lived. That is something that is informed by Buddhist thought, but then again these are just profound truths. It is secular and non-secular. You can choose.”

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Religions tend to organise around some variation of the question, “What is God, from our perspective?” Their houses of worship are then logically designed to accommodate whatever the believers think their deity needs in a building. Mosques feature minarets so the faithful can be called to prayer; Shinto shrines feature a Chōzuya, or fountain, so pilgrims can cleanse their hands and face before entering; Catholic churches contain consecrated altars containing at least one first-class relic — a body part of a saint — echoing a time when sermons were delivered atop the graves of martyrs.

But what if a religion teaches that all other religions are correct — that God is everything they all say God is, and more? Could any house of worship ever be designed that would accommodate everyone worshiping everything they think God is, all in the same place, all at once?

That is exactly the challenge faced anytime someone designs a Bahá’í house of worship. Bahá’í is a messianic religion that preaches that all other religions are also true. It was founded in Iran in 1844. That was the year its first central figure, Alí-Muḥammad (1819-1850), changed his name to The Báb, an Islamic term for gate, and proclaimed he was a manifestation of God on Earth akin to Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. The Báb’s writings (along with those of his professed messiah Baháʼu’lláh and Baháʼu’lláh’s oldest son Abdu’l-Bahá) form the canonical texts of Bahá’í. In addition to teaching that all religions are born of the same source and all religious people worship the same God, they call for humans to strive for spiritual unification in order to make life materially better for everyone. Houses of worship are a central part of that mission.

The first Bahá’í temple was constructed in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, in 1919. Its design incorporated minarets out of respect for local Islamic architecture. It was damaged in an earthquake in 1948, and was later demolished in an act of iconoclasm. But since then, every new Bahá’í temple has similarly been designed so that it respects preexisting local architecture and fits in with the natural environment. As such, each is unique. Yet, all Baha’i temples do share one design principle in common: they have nine entrances, a nod towards what the Bahá’í consider the nine “major” world religions — Bábism (the original religion that was founded by The Báb), Bahá’í, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, the Sabians and Zoroastrianism.

As of 2025, there are 15 Bahá’í houses of worship around the world. The largest and most famous is The House of Worship in New Delhi, India, also known as The Lotus Temple. 34 metres high and 64 metres in diameter, it can seat 2,500 people — more than twice the capacity of the second largest Bahá’í temple, in Wilmette, Illinois. The Lotus Temple takes its name from its shape, which includes three concentric rings of nine giant petals — 27 petals in all. Each petal was first framed in wood, then formed from poured concrete and finally covered in Italian marble. A ring of nine reflecting pools surrounds the main structure, which is cooled by a system that funnels air over the reflecting pools, through underground chambers and into the temple.

An impossible dream

The Lotus Temple was the dream of Iranian-born architect Fariborz Sahba, who was first approached by Bahá’í church leaders to design a temple for India in 1976. At the time, only four other Bahá’í temples existed around the world. Sahba studied their designs, then traveled to India to get a sense of the character of the location. While searching for inspiration, he met a man who inspired him, “an ordinary Bahá’í, Sabha recalls, who came because he heard that I was going to design a temple. He said he was curious about what I was going to do and then he mentioned to me the lotus. I was impressed by his enthusiasm but the concept itself did not attract me. Yet… everywhere I went I saw the Lotus in front of me. I could not escape from this concept. I was seeing it everywhere.”

The lotus is indeed ubiquitous in Indian architecture and design. It is also appreciated in many other cultures, in part because it grows in muddy water. It is sacred in Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Jainism and Asian Christian sects as a symbol of creation emerging from the primordial ooze. Even the Egyptian deity Nefertem is said to have appeared in a lotus flower during the creation of the universe.

Sahba concluded that the lotus was the perfect form for his temple design to take. But when he revealed his initial drawings to engineers at the British firm Flint and Neill, who were contracted to undertake the structural design, they proclaimed the project dead on arrival. They said there was only a tiny possibility that something so complex could be built in Europe, where the most modern technologies and techniques were available, but there was zero chance it could be built in India, where means were considered more primitive. Their bias was perhaps logical. But Sahba focused on something beyond logic — the human element— because he knew that Indian culture fosters a unique perspective about what is possible when people are motivated to work together for a meaningful goal.

For more than six years, hundreds of workers collaborated on building The Lotus Temple. They faced every imaginable setback, including monsoon rains, extreme heat and import regulations that meant they had to use rudimentary tools rather than the most modern technologies. Meanwhile, they spoke around a dozen different languages and practised several different religions. They still had no trouble working together. The wooden forms they constructed for the building’s giant petals were the same quality as the highest grade of furniture. The concrete pours were done one bucket at a time with artisans working 48 hours straight on every petal, pouring and vibrating the concrete constantly in order to avoid seams that could weaken the structure. Not a single petal cracked, even when covered with thousands of tonnes of hand carved and polished Italian marble.

During this grueling process, many of the workers reported feeling a spiritual reverence for the project, even those who were not followers of Bahá’í. Some even worked for free, saying they were prohibited by their beliefs from accepting pay for helping to build a religious temple, no matter what religion it was for. The result is that not only was The Lotus Temple completed in contradiction to the biases of the British architects, but it has become renowned as one of the most astonishing architectural accomplishments on the planet.

Bahá’í and art

Something visitors do not see when they enter The Lotus Temple, or any other Bahá’í temple or house of worship, is traditional works of art on display. As most other religions have learned the hard way, people are quick to make Gods out of images and objects, then to fight over which images and objects are sacred and which are profane. Bahá’í temples avoid art for exactly that reason — they have a primary purpose of unifying humankind. “Regarding the design of all Bahá’í Houses of Worship, it is important that the space created be welcoming to all, says Ellen Price, Welcome Centre Coordinator at the Bahá’í House of Worship in Wilmette. Inside, there are no pulpits or altars, and no pictures, icons or statues.”

That is not to say the Bahá’í religion rejects artistic expression. Abdu’l-Bahá (1844-1921), the third and final central figure of the religion, wrote, “I rejoice to hear that thou takest pains with thine art, for in this wonderful new age, art is worship. The more thou strivest to perfect it, the closer wilt thou come to God. What bestowal could be greater than this, that one’s art should be even as the act of worshipping the Lord? That is to say, when thy fingers grasp the paintbrush, it is as if thou wert at prayer in the Temple.”

Bahá’í Houses of Worship are, in fact, extraordinary works of art in themselves. As Price says, each temple “should be beautiful and ‘as perfect as is possible in the world of being’, so as to act as a means of ‘nurturing an attraction to the sacred’.” The Lotus Temple epitomises the notion of attraction. It is among the most visited sites in the world, attracting more than 10,000 visitors every day. As for its beauty, It has been called a modern-day Taj Mahal and has won numerous global awards, including being named one of the “100 canonical works of the 20^th century” by the Architectural Society of China, and “one of the finest concrete structures of the world” by the American Concrete Institute. Most importantly to members of the faith, the unlikely story of its making also elucidates the spiritual ideals of Bahá’í — the unity of all faiths and respect for every individual’s ability to contribute to the improvement of “the world of being”.

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When we decided on the name Icelandic Love Corporation, it was in 1997 or even 96. It came naturally to us. We are Icelandic and doing works about love. Corporation was a joke, because we are small, and we are definitely not a corporation. And love is maybe not something that people think about when they think about corporations. It is all very opposite. We were just trying to find a name that would work in English, because our Icelandic name would translate as “the performance club.” It does not have the same power in English as in Icelandic. In Icelandic it has more connection to witchcraft and women coming together, doing something together. And maybe by energetically calling yourself Icelandic, you become somehow more Icelandic, even though you are doing things internationally. But we are just people doing art and living in Iceland.

You recently completed the Vagus Symphony, about the vagus nerve. The Latin translation of vagus is wandering. Was that part of the thinking about that project?

Absolutely. The symphony is Vágušnár in Icelandic. If you would translate it directly, it is like wandering symphony. That meant a lot when we were doing the work, that it had this meaning of being the biggest nerve in the body that wanders from the head to the second brain, and everything that happens in between. We were thinking about the seven continents of the body, like the body as the Earth somehow. And the whole piece is in seven chapters. We wander between the highest part to the lowest part, and things happen on the way. For example, instruments. Sometimes you think an instrument comes from a specific place, but when you look into it, it has traveled from another place to this place. Wherever it comes from, it has a story. So we were also thinking about borders. Music and instruments have no borders, but people always have borders. Why do we have to have borders for people? Why can we not open everything up like music or creativity? Borders are made up. It is man-made. And man can also take it back if they want to. So we think about the Earth as a body, something like that. And we want the Vagus Symphony to travel the world. It is a project for the world. That is the reason there is no spoken language in the video. People can take it in through their ears and through their body. We see it as a healing sound, and visual healing for every human.

You have done films and performances. Your recent exhibition Written in Blood included watercolours, wall hangings and diplomas for post-menopausal women. Now that project is on billboards in Copenhagen. Do you call yourselves multi-disciplinary artists?

The watercolours were also collage and crochet. And we used some printmaking materials. And the wall hanging was pantyhose. Yeah, I mean, it is almost 30 years since we started and we as individuals have evolved. We have matured and gone through menopause and all that. We are graduated. We have our diplomas. So there are changes as well in our art. We use every medium possible. It is always the idea that controls what we do. Our pieces come from a lot of conversation about what is going on in our lives and in the world. Like the Vagus symphony is touching base with all the genres: acting, filmmaking, musicians, dancing, all the art forms. And now we are even making a book together with a guy from India. He just contacted us and it was such a nice coincidence. He was in Reykjavík and he found our email and contacted us. We were actually having soup with him just before we spoke to you. So we are making a book together with him, about our works. He is a poet and a writer and is going to be like a curator of the book. But we also want to make an exhibition. He will gather poets from different countries and they will reflect on works by us, and they will send us the poems and we will make new works from the poems. So I think we just try to be true to ourselves. That is the only thing you can do. It has to be very egocentric. By being egocentric you can be giving as well. I know egocentric sounds bad. I mean it comes from a place deep within you. I think people forget that ego is also very healthy. The right amount of ego can be a driving force. But as a label, if somebody asks you what you do, you say I am a visual artist. You do not say I am a performance artist or something. No, just I am an artist, and within that is all the genres. You can do everything.

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Iceland has the lowest per-metre population of any European country, with 389,000 inhabitants occupying 103,000 square kilometres. Two-thirds live in the capital, Reykjavik, the name of which translates loosely as “Smokey bay”. Despite its sparse population — or some say because of it — Iceland has become an unrivalled hub for artistic creativity. More than 90 percent of the population are said to either play in a musical group, make visual art, write or perform on stage. Ten percent have published a book and more than a quarter actually make their living in a creative field.

Since 1970, the fruits of Icelandic creativity have been put on display every other June in the biennial Reykjavik Arts Festival (RAF), which unfolds across scores of venues and includes art exhibitions, operas, symphonies, pop concerts, street performances, readings, talks and basically any type of aesthetic phenomena imaginable. Though primarily a showcase of what Icelandic artists are up to right now, the RAF does also invite a small number of participants from off-island.

“The first festival featured Led Zeppelin with a concert,” says Lára Sóley Jóhannsdóttir, Artistic Director and CEO of the RAF. “[We have] always wanted to support the arts within the country, but also be a window for the people in Iceland to see art from around the world. It is interesting when you go to the theatre to see a play with the actors who work there and are based there, then you see something completely different done within that same hall by people from outside. It is great for your imagination to think about how things can develop further.” Exact attendance numbers are difficult to track, in part because so many RAF events do not charge admission, but Jóhannsdóttir estimates the 2024 edition attracted around 90,000 visitors, mostly Icelanders (nearly a fourth of the population). Aside from attendees, thousands of locals participate in the festival, either as artists or in a supporting capacity. Jóhannsdóttir says every cultural institution also schedules their own programming in an intentional way around the festival. (Institutional highlights during the 2026 festival will include Björk and her mask-making collaborator James Merry taking over the National Gallery of Iceland, and a concert by musician John Grant on closing weekend.) “I was managing director of the national orchestra before joining the festival so I have experienced it from that side as well, Jóhannsdóttir says. You always think about what to program with the festival. The beauty of it is so many people coming together to make something special.” This all sounds extraordinary from an outside perspective. It is rare that any nation hosts a major, recurring festival spotlighting its local talent to the world. For such an event to also welcome some outside performers, just to inspire local artists, is surprising. That a quarter of the population either attends or participates is incredible. That some of the biggest and most renowned creative artists in the world have at one time bee — or currently are — part of it, yet few from outside the country attend or even know about it, is confounding.

Land of many hats

What is it about Iceland that makes it a locus for such intense creativity and such a cheerleader for homegrown arts? Some say it is a side-effect of so few people living in so much space. “It is very normal here to wear many hats,” says Ásdís Þula Þorláksdóttir, owner of Þula gallery, one of Reykjavik’s newest contemporary art venue. “We all tend to do a lot of things that might not be related. Maybe the captain of the national football team is also a dentist.” Jóhannsdóttir agrees. “The population is only 400,000, so everyone has different roles, she says. If you are a musician or an artist you will also be working in a shoppe or teaching. You do different things. All these things can be positive and inspiring to your work.”

That multi-disciplinary ethos has become embedded in all aspects of Icelandic culture, in particular its educational system. “Especially if we talk about the music scene and all the fantastic new music happening in Iceland today, both with classical and pop music, I think the school system plays an important part here, Jóhannsdóttir says. Kids do art, they do music, it is part of the curriculum. They do craft as well. They do cooking. In many other countries that has been cut out. We have to make sure it stays, because all of us need to be prepared to do lots of things ourselves. That feeling of finally becoming independent and being able to do what we want is in our blood.”

Icelandic parents are in agreement with these values according to Þorláksdóttir. “When children decide that they want to go into art, or be a musician or a writer or actor or painter, it is looked at as a career choice and not something outlandish and crazy, she says. We are lucky to have families who encourage their children to take art seriously. The outlook is not like, ‘There goes your life, you are going to be poor forever.’ It is very often met with, ‘Okay, great, are you going to go to the art school?’ People support it 100%. It is something in the culture that is really healthy and beautiful.”

A concrete manifestation of that cultural appreciation is that Iceland University of the Arts is tuition free — students only pay a 75,000 Icelandic Króna processing fee (roughly 400€). The university came together in its contemporary form in 1998 when several smaller Icelandic art schools merged. Icelandic Love Corporation (ILC), one of Iceland’s most experimental and influential contemporary art collectives, met as students at one of those smaller schools, the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts, in the 1990s.

Originally comprised of Jóní Jónsdóttir, Eirún Sigurðardóttir, Sigrún Hrólfsdóttir and Dóra Ísleifsdóttir, today the ILC includes only Jóní and Eirún. Speaking always as a group, not as individuals, they agree there is something unique about how Icelandic supports its artists. “Nobody said ‘no’ to us, or ‘are you sure’, when we were deciding to be an artist. We are both from parents that come from not very high income families, but they were supportive. And the community tries to be supportive — we have artist salaries and grants and things like that.”

The artist salaries the ILC mentions are provided to certain artists by the Icelandic government, and amount to ISK 538,000 (3,635€) per month. “That means that the Icelandic art scene should be made up of people from different directions, different incomes, different cultural capital, says the ILC. But of course, this art business is a strange business. Even with the help and support not everybody can do it. You can be an excellent artist, but there is also this endurance element.”

For many Icelandic artists, the endurance element comes most into play when they take their work international, where commercialism and trends are more important than experimentation and creative freedom. After assisting her father, an Icelandic artist renowned for his experimental approach and his rejection of the traditional art market, Þorláksdóttir was inspired to open Þula gallery to work with more artists. “My father has had his own unique path in his career, Þorláksdóttir says. He has never worked with a gallery. That has allowed him to do whatever the hell he wants. Going from abstract paintings in the 1980s, then working in graphic and abstract, then going into cityscapes then the landscapes that he is now mostly known for — he retains that freedom. He is 70 now. When someone has been working that long you can see their art has developed in the way that, as a person, they have developed. With artist careers, that excites me.”

Þorláksdóttir encourages Icelandic artists she represents to follow the example of her father and retain their freedom as long as possible. “I think this is such a healthy way to develop in your career, she says. It gives an opportunity for world building.” At the same time, if it is what they want, she mentors them how to be successful in the global art market. “As an art dealer I am aware that there need to be some guidelines of how you navigate when you want to succeed internationally. But as a lover of art and a lover of artists, it is exciting to see that artists’ careers can develop in so many different ways.”

“Icelandishness”

Gallery support; government support; educational support; familial support — all of these things contribute to the “Icelandishness” of Iceland’s art scene. And there is one more vital influence — the natural world. “I am sure that plays a role in inspiration, says Jóhannsdóttir. For example in December we get two to three hours of daylight. During the darkness we need to do something. Most people are playing music, going to concerts. We are crazy about Christmas concerts. Everyone needs to see two or three. It can be quite depressing to have it dark all the time, so it is up to us to do creative things until we see the sun again.”

The RAF, meanwhile, is always held in summer, when Iceland has almost 24 hours of daylight. “It is the complete opposite of what we have now, says Jóhannsdóttir. So it is unfortunate, I get presented with all these proposals for beautiful outdoor acts with lots of lighting… and I am like, ‘oh sorry we have no darkness at that time of year’. It leaves out a lot of great things.”

These natural extremes — winter darkness and summer light; constantly changing weather; active volcanoes spewing lava into the sea, making more Iceland — whisper to artists that they should not become too attached to anything, that change is part of life. “A lot of artists have studios with a view over the ocean or the mountains, says Þorláksdóttir. And we all travel the country a lot, so it plays a part in people’s creation in one way or another. People allow themselves to explore without feeling like they are taking a big risk. There is playfulness and freedom in living here and working.”

That sense of playfulness and freedom is also evident in the programming of i8, Reykjavik’s longest running contemporary art gallery. i8 recently celebrated their 30^th anniversary and, with such famous artists as Olafur Eliasson on their programme from the beginning, they are no strangers to international attention and market success. Yet, in 2022, when they had the opportunity to open a second outpost, instead of simply opening another commercial gallery, they created a space where individual artists can conceptualise year-long exhibitions that evolve.

“The art world felt like it was only speeding up and we consciously wanted to slow things down,” says Geneva Viralam, one of the gallery’s Directors. “Time is valuable and everyone always wants more of it in life. By offering our artists the chance to have ownership over a single exhibition from January to December that is encouraged to actively change and evolve, it has allowed for a new kind of experimentation and exhibition evolution that is rarely afforded to artists. This also makes a dynamic experience for our visitors, as they can experience one show many times and in many iterations as the year progresses.”

It is hard to imagine such a venture succeeding in other international capitals, where real estate prices are unapproachably high and gallery walls are seen as precious, primarily economic commodities. But in Reykjavik such an unconventional model feels completely normal; a natural outgrowth of a nation and an art scene always in the process of becoming.

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A landscape painting can also be a time capsule, in more ways than one. It can show what an artist was doing at a particular point in their life, helping to explain their artistic evolution. And, faithfully executed, it can also give a good idea of what nature was up to at that particular time and place. That first part may be of interest to art lovers; the second could be more important to scientists and policy makers.

“Northern lights”, an exhibition originated at Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, that then traveled to Buffalo AKG Art Museum in New York, features more than five dozen landscape paintings depicting boreal ecosystems. They were all created by Scandinavian and Canadian artists between 1880 and 1930. From the current vantage point, a century on, it is indeed fascinating to examine the ways these artists ended up influencing art history. The exhibition also makes disturbingly clear how much the part of the world these artists painted has changed.

“We are looking at paintings that depict the boreal forest, so of course that brings us into the future easily,” says Helga Christoffersen, Curator-at-Large at Buffalo AKG, and co-organiser of “Northern lights”. “What does this mean at this moment, to make a historical exhibition that depicts this forest? Looking back at the context when this work was produced, it depicts this glorious outdoors, but it is also very clear that artists were aware of the forest’s fragility. Some of these painters were actually buying the land they were painting to preserve it, because logging was on the rise at that time on an enormous scale. It was in their face that the forest was getting cut down.”

Future forests

When the “Northern lights” exhibition debuted at Fondation Beyeler, it included a contemporary digital work (absent from the iteration of the show that traveled to Buffalo). Created by Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, this work is titled Boreal dreams (and is available to view online). It basically visualises how the boreal landscape will adapt as the planet warms due to climate change. Steensen created the work in collaboration with sound artist Matt McCorkle and dream scientist and writer Adam Haar, based on research they conducted at the Marcell Experimental Forest in northern Minnesota. That is where scientists created a network of giant outdoor glass chambers that surround sections of forest and simulate rising temperatures.

At + 2.5°C, the permafrost begins to melt and bogs dissipate. Microorganisms are released that change the environment and also change the physical makeup of human beings. At + 4.5°C, a tipping point is reached where the chronobiology, including circadian rhythms that affect sleep of plants and humans is affected. Finally, at + 9°C, the boreal environment is completely altered to the point where the only way we can experience it is either in our dreams, or through artistic or technological recreations such as paintings or digital environments.

“Boreal dreams is a very important component of this project, Christoffersen says. It puts some pieces together for the audience. Minnesota is the southern frontier of the boreal forest. That is where the composition of the ground is changing. We as museums, we show historical material, things created in the past, but then we have to ask ourselves what does it mean in the present. These things are not locked in time. So what are we saying to our audience today? Why does it matter looking at these paintings now? These are the questions we need to reflect upon, not to just say these are beautiful landscapes, and clap clap clap, we should celebrate them.”

However, historical painters featured in “Northern lights” did not, for the most part, focus their work on the environmental destruction they were witnessing — and neither, for the most part, does the exhibition; a notable exception being The yellow log (1912), a painting by Edvard Munch that depicts several sickly looking, felled trees in an otherwise healthy forest. Rather, the painters engaged in something more like a loving celebration of the boreal world. They tapped into what Christoffersen calls “a painterly relationship with nature” — using the subject as a way of exploring their personal artistic innovations. The title of the exhibition might suggest those innovations included painting the actual northern lights, the aurora borealis. But only one painting in the exhibition shows them — an undated study done in northern Norway by Swedish artist Anna Katarina Boberg (1864-1935). “From the outside, people say, ‘oh, they have these dancing lights in the sky, all of the painters must have painted them’, Christoffersen says, smiling. But no. There is only one painter in the show who dedicated her life to painting the northern lights. She did it for 30 years, traveling with her little skin suit — but that was an extreme. Many of these painters were much more occupied traveling across Europe and connecting to avant-garde conversations at the time, in a painterly sense. But if you look at those painters and think about their work, what you can say is that across the board light played an enormously important part in their innovations. Absolutely, what these painters mastered was an ability to paint light. There is such a change of light at this latitude because of the climate, because of the forest and the very outspoken seasons. There is a lot of painterly material, if you will.”

Nordic connections

Another important thread in the “Northern lights” exhibition’s story is the influence the Scandinavian artists in the show had on the evolution of Canadian art history. The show includes a trove of ephemera documenting something called “The exhibition of contemporary Scandinavian art”, which traveled the US starting in 1912, and visited the Albright Art Gallery (now Buffalo AKG) in January 1913.

“A number of artists who were on the forefront of the Canadian avant-garde, John Edward Hervey MacDonald in particular, traveled across the border to see that exhibition in 1913, Christoffersen says. The boreal forest these Scandinavians were painting was the same as the forest in Canada. This was a watershed moment for Canadians. It is more complex but in short you could say the Canadian artists felt that they saw a unique and characteristic path to interpreting a northern landscape. It became this launch of a painterly language, a movement, an avant-garde that set out with a project to specifically give voice to a Canadian identity and to a particular Canadian style of painting. It was very influential for the subsequent formation of the Group of seven [one of Canada’s most influential Modern art collectives, Editor’s note], which came together in 1920. Our exhibition also surveys that link.”

Such a curatorial gesture — bringing fresh attention to a link between northern artists from different regions — is the raison d’être of a larger programme at Buffalo AKG Art Museum called Nordic art and culture initiative. This programme will, over the planned course of 60 years, focus significant resources on organising exhibitions and cultural programming that draws attention to artists from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and the Åland Islands. It will also help Buffalo AKG assemble what organisers promise will be “North America’s leading collection of contemporary art from the Nordic region.”

Christoffersen is the Nordic art and culture initiative’s founding curator. She says the project emerged in part out of a process of reflection that occurred during the museum’s recent multi-year closure for renovation and expansion. “I think the last few years have shaped institutional missions all around, Christoffersen says. The art world has grown so large and so fast, it is hard for a big museum to say they are modern and contemporary and they present all the important modern and contemporary art in the world. That rings very shallow.” Instead, she says curatorial departments are now being organised in specialised ways that are often geographically driven. Rather than trying to pretend they can show everything, they focus on the particular strengths of their collection. “For example, if we focus on Chinese contemporary art, we are already way behind, Christoffersen says. Several other museums have already dedicated decades (or centuries) to that direction. So we ask, is there anything we can add? That is the major factor that focused our attention on the Nordic region, a place in the world that has many solid histories, great museum traditions, great artistic traditions, very active art scenes to date, but is also a part of the world that is under-represented in America.”

There are, in fact, few if any institutions anywhere, even in the Nordic world, that have been organised to specialise in Nordic art. There are some that centre one nation — Swedish art, Danish art, Norwegian art, Icelandic art, etc. But Buffalo AKG is looking at the Nordic region in its entirety. “Given its wingspan of 60 years, we can do something extraordinary, Christoffersen says. We can build the biggest collection of Nordic contemporary art anywhere. The potential is that we can move a very big needle in terms of access and understanding of this part of the world. We can also dig a little deeper, to see just how closely we are all linked. It is a bridge. In our current climate, to say something mild, these cultural bridges are important and they matter. It is good to be reminded of the things that are shared.”

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Mainland Iceland is surrounded by thousands of smaller islands. Most are uninhabited rocky crags that are mainly home to birds, like the Atlantic Puffin. Some, like Flatey, Grímsey, Hrísey and Heimaey, are considered inhabited, meaning someone lives there year long. One, Viðey Island, though not inhabited year round, attracts more visitors than any of the others thanks to two permanent contemporary public artworks installed in recent decades, one by Richard Serra and one by Yoko Ono.

Richard Serra created Áfangar (Milestones) on the occasion of the 1990 Reykjavik Arts Festival. He was at the height of his fame at the time and could command millions of dollars for his public works, but he famously donated Áfangar to the Icelandic people. The work consists of nine pairs of basalt columns located around the island. Each pair consists of a three-metre tall column and a four-meter tall column. The taller column is installed closer to sea level so each pair appears to be level. The spacing of the columns depends on the topography. Each pair frames a notable landmark.

Yoko Ono’s Imagine peace tower was installed in 2007. From the mainland it appears to be a single spotlight shining directly up into the sky. It is actually 15 searchlights contained within a 10-metre wide wishing well. The lights are aimed at mirrors that reflect the beams upwards. The phrase “Imagine peace” is inscribed on the well in 24 different languages. Since 1981, Ono has been collecting wishes from people around the world as part of her Wish tree project. More than half a million of these wishes are buried in capsules surrounding the Imagine peace tower. The spotlights are powered by Iceland’s renewable geothermal power grid.

In addition to these two contemporary works, there are two other artworks on Viðey Island. One is a statue of the Virgin Mary, installed in 2000 to mark 1,000 years since Christianity was brought to Iceland. The other is a series of three centuries-old inscribed stones of undocumented origin.

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