Kill a myth at your peril, ruined miracles don’t come back.
That’s one way of looking at it. Another is this: One type of miraculous can crowd another out, and sometimes the curator’s most important job is debris removal. Not that the old wonder was junk, but it was impeding passage. Few will begrudge the Hamburger Kunsthalle its efforts to wreck the legend of the death of Bas Jan Ader in their retrospective, living as we do under the long, smug shadow of desacralization.
And so, regarding the artist, whose biography reads “1942 in Winschoten, The Netherlands—missing at sea 1975,” the stance of this show is clear: Enough with your poetics of disappearance, your suicide romanticism. Ader’s death during a quixotic attempt to cross the Atlantic alone in a small sailboat—what was to be the middle performance of a triptych that began with a photographed nighttime walk in Los Angeles and was to be completed with an evening wander in Amsterdam—was just a tragic accident. Despite the fact that the work was called In search of the miraculous, notwithstanding the venture’s improbability, despite the trip seeming to metonymize a career spent subjecting himself to natural forces, the Kunsthalle takes pains to insist that Ader’s final work is in no way to be read as his ultimate, that the truest act of conceptual art is not necessarily the obliteration of the self.
These efforts are overt in the catalog, the curator’s introductory video, and especially in the room devoted to the legendary unfinished piece, which emphasizes the meticulous preparations for the trip and Ader’s previous sailing experience, and includes a fully secular archive of pragmatism: provisions, rations, tools, maps.
The exhibition thereby brings Bas Jan Ader back—not from death to life, but out of the sea and back to shore; or, flip your geometry: It pulls the man out of the ether of artistic myth and back down to earth. As earth is where Ader did his most interesting work, if this is a dethroning of an ideal, it is also a fitting fall to the ground.
He was, after all, the great artist of gravity.
Consider his 1972 performance The boy who fell over Niagara Falls, in which Ader reads aloud a story from Reader’s Digest about a boy’s survival of a plunge over the waterfall. Or the photo series On the road to a new Neo Plasticism, Westkapelle, Holland (1971), in which Ader contorts his limbs into the permitted rectilinear and prohibited diagonal forms of Mondrian with the Domburg lighthouse tower in the background—setting his body down on brick, on blue cloth, with a yellow oil canister, and finally with a red box. A companion photograph, Pitfall on the way to a New Neo-Plasticism (1971), throws body, cloth, canister, and box into blurred disarray. Here, ground is both stable canvas for fixed geometric forms and obstacle to their fixity.
Gravity of a different sort insinuates itself into one of Ader’s best-known works, the 1970 I’m too sad to tell you—a 3-and-a-half-minute film of his face in close-up, tear-stained with the choking grimaces of suffering. The throughline is grief and gravity, both deriving from gravis, weighty.
Ader’s death has dominated accounts of his life precisely because it was so short. He made his most important pieces between 1970 and 1973. What do you do with such aesthetic promise demonstrated in so short a time? It’s the Jeff Buckley problem. Juvenilia and outtakes take on outsize importance. For Ader, the Kunsthalle brings together an impressive amount of material: previously unexhibited early drawings, programs from student shows, letters and postcards, handwritten instructions. This assembly, alongside the fine catalog, enables a rich exploration of the corpus and the promise. Interested parties can contemplate Ader’s relation to light, to masculinity, to de Stijl, and to Conceptual art.
But then the question: What does one find in the exhibition that could not be encountered in all this documentation? If there is some trace of a long-gone action, isn’t that part of what we might want to lump under the miraculous, under the desire to experience something not assimilable to the known?
You’ll have to seek it out, but here is a map. Venture to the farthest corner of the mazy rooms, past the reenactment of Light vulnerable objects threatened by eight cement bricks. Keep going, you won’t see a sign, but search on. It’s there, your small, hunted thing.
Four 16mm projectors cross the center of a long, dark rectangular room, their drilling whir filling the air. Each projects a work on a wall: Fall 1, Los Angeles; Fall 2, Amsterdam; Broken Fall (geometric), Westkapelle—Holland; Broken Fall (organic), Amsterdamse Bos—Holland. They were made in 1970 and 1971 and range from 19 to 109 seconds. Description is of limited use. Knowing that they involve Ader’s body tumbling off a roof, spilling into a canal on a bike, tipping over diagonally, and plummeting from a branch to a stream does not do justice to these revelations.
“I do not make body sculptures, body art or body works,” Ader insisted. “When I fell off the roof of my house, or into a canal, it was because gravity has made itself master of me.”
But like Beckett’s advice that death does not require us to keep a day free, gravity does not require our consent to be subject to its force. In his falls, Ader lets himself be vulnerable to that to which he was already prey. One sees isolated, slowed down, the changing variables of tension, control, restraint, in the service of suspending, for as long as possible, the beautiful precarity of an absurd project. But strain always breaks, flesh gives way. Futile, this resistance: all falling a kind of failing.
Ader’s was a corpus of verbs: not tears, the weeping; not the ledge, the falling. Dwelling in the noisy darkness with these looping films, one sees the ordinary miracle of living effort. Not as wondrous, perhaps, as the old myths, but wonderful all the same.
Last week, crypto billionaire Justin Sun announced on X that he was purchasing $100 million worth of President Donald Trump’s memecoin, $TRUMP, which will soon be tradeable on TRON, the blockchain Sun founded in 2017.
“This move highlights our belief in collaborating across ecosystems to grow the crypto landscape with communities such as @GetTrumpMemes,” Sun wrote, before adding, “$TRUMP on #TRON is the currency of #MAGA!”
It’s just the latest headline-grabbing purchase for Sun, who made waves in the art world for purchasing Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian—the famed duct-taped banana—at Sotheby’s in December for $6.2 million. (He later ate the banana.) Then, in April, a New York Times investigation into World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency firm majority-owned by a Trump family corporate entity, revealed that Sun had spent $75 million on $WLFI coins.
Sun has also been embroiled in legal turmoil over an entirely different purchase. In February, Sun sued billionaire art collector and music mogul David Geffen over the Alberto Giacometti sculpture Le Nez (1949–65), which Sun has said he bought in a private deal. Geffen countersued, claiming that the work was stolen from his collection by an employee and fraudulently sold. Sun has called for Geffen to hand over the sculpture.
Trump and company launched $TRUMP just days before his second inauguration in January, with the coin’s value skyrocketing over 300 percent in days. By March, the value of the coin had plummeted, with investors losing approximately $12 million. As ARTnews wrote upon the $TRUMP launch, meme coins, which are often labeled as “artworks” to skirt securities regulations, often collapse as quickly as they rise in value.
Still $TRUMP seemed to stablize with a market cap of $1.85 billion as of press time—a far cry from its inauguration peak of over $9 billion, and later peaks of $4.29 billion in February and $3.1 billion in late April.
However, ethics watchdogs have repeatedly argued that Trump’s ownership of $TRUMP has given the president an unprecedented method of facilitating graft and corruption. Most critcized was a May 22 dinner and White House tour that Trump gave to leading buyers of $TRUMP—Sun was an attendee—which spurred $148 million in purchases of the coin, according to the Guardian.
“Self-enrichment is exactly what the founders feared most in a leader—that’s why they put two separate prohibitions on self-benefit into the constitution,” former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig told the Guardian last month. “Trump’s profiting from his presidential memecoin is a textbook example of what the framers wanted to avoid.”
“I have never seen such open corruption in any modern government anywhere,” Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University, also told the Guardian.
As for what Sun might actually be trying to buy with his $TRUMP investments, CNBC has a rundown of the billionaire’s crypto-entanglements with the current president.
The cloud-based file transfer company WeTransfer has removed terms in its updated terms of service in regard to intellectual property rights and machine learning models after criticism online.
On July 14, users expressed concern and alarm about changes to Section 6.3 of WeTransfer’s Terms of Service, which specifically referred to granting the company “a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licenseable license” and allowing it to use uploaded content “for the purposes of operating, developing, commercializing, and improving the Service or new technologies or services, including to improve performance of machine learning models that enhance our content moderation policies,” as well as “the right to reproduce, distribute, modify, prepare derivative works based upon, broadcast, communicate to the public, publicly display, and perform Content.”
In simpler language, the new terms would grant WeTransfer permission to train artificial intelligence systems on any content transferred by users and produce derivative works based on the transferred content that the file-sharing company would be allowed to monetize and not have to pay users for.
The company’s new terms of service were set to go into effect on August 8. Many art galleries, museums, and other art institutions use WeTransfer to send digital images of artworks, exhibitions, and art fair presentations.
Post-production professional Ashley Lynch also pointed out how the new terms would conflict with non-disclosure agreements with clients in a post on the social media platform Bluesky:
WeTransfer was founded in 2009 and was acquired by Italian technology company Bending Spoons last year.
“We don’t use machine learning or any form of AI to process content shared via WeTransfer,” a spokesperson for the company said in a statement to ARTnews. “The passage under discussion was initially updated to include the possibility of using AI to improve content moderation and further enhance our measures to prevent the distribution of illegal or harmful content on the WeTransfer platform.”
“With that said, members of the art community using WeTransfer can rest assured that we do not use their content to train machine learning models and other AI tools.”
The spokesperson also said “this passage has caused confusion for our customers” and the company had changed the license section of the terms of service.
“In order to allow us to operate, provide you with, and improve the Service and our technologies, we must obtain from you certain rights related to Content that is covered by intellectual property rights. You hereby grant us a royalty-free license to use your Content for the purposes of operating, developing, and improving the Service, all in accordance with our Privacy & Cookie Policy.”
French art galleries are reportedly financially struggling and skeptical amid a wavering art market.
A survey by market researcher Iddem, conducted among the Professional Committee of Art Galleries (CPGA), found that 85 percent of the French gallery association’s 324 members were pessimistic about the economic well-being of the art sector this year. This follows a six percent drop in turnover among French galleries in 2024, with the global art market falling by a total of 12 percent per the UBS Art Basel 2025 report.
“The market is back to the level of 2010, with a decade of growth lost,” Philippe Charpentier, a gallery owner and the new president of the CPGA, told Le Monde, with one fifth of French dealers also reporting a more than 20 percent drop in sales.
France also lacks the young returning collector base of other countries like those in the Asian markets.
“We’re having trouble attracting young people, whereas in other countries, like China, buyers are on average in their thirties,” Magda Danysz, vice president of the CPGA, told Le Monde. “Priorities have changed in France too; it’s the experience more than the object.”
(The Asian art market, for its part, has been steady, if unspectacular, based on activity at Art Basel Hong Kong and at the auction houses this year.)
The relentless pace of the art fair calendar, combined with the overall sluggish art market, has taken its toll on galleries across the globe, with a number of midsize galleries like Blum and Venus Over Manhattan closing up shop. Both noted the strain of following more traditional models, with Tim Blum of the eponymous gallery saying of his departure, “This is about the system.”
Citing an endless cycle of fairs, openings, obligations, and expectations that have reportedly grown more demanding year over year, Blum added, “It’s not working. And it hasn’t been working,” seeking instead “a more flexible model”.
For his part, Adam Lindemann of Venus Over Manhattan previously said to ARTnews in an interview, “Do you want to know the truth about fair committees? They gleefully ask you to get down on your hands and knees, wag your tail, and beg for forgiveness.”
While Art Basel’s expansion to Paris three years ago has brought attention to the French city, local galleries reported that they’ve seen a boost. Approximately 12 percent of French galleries reported major difficulties over the last 18 months, according to the survey, with several outstanding bankruptcy filings and expected closures.
“No new player, opened after 2015, has been able to change scale, internationalize, or enter the fair system ,” Charpentier of CPGA said. “This risks, in the long term, atrophying the market, drying up diversity, and compromising our ability to propel our artists onto the international scene.”
An artist from Cleveland, Ohio is transforming a classic 1947 Greyhound bus, which he saved from a Pennsylvania junkyard, into a traveling museum.
Robert Louis Brandon Edwards, who is also a historian and preservationist, is tearing out the bus’s interior (in a previous life in the 1970s it was a motorhome equipped with a kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom) so he can turn it into the Museum of the Great Migration.
The Great Migration was a period between around 1910 and 1970, when millions of African Americans uprooted from the rural South to the North America’s Midwest, West, and Northeast. The museum will highlight the experiences and hardships they endured as they migrated north, including racism, Jim Crow segregation laws, and violence. Its program will include virtual reality exhibitions.
“Depending on how quickly I can raise the funds to get the bus operational again, I hope to have it on the road by this time next year, and plan to hit all of the major Great Migration destination cities,” Edwards told ARTnews.
The bus was designed by Raymond Loewy, who also designed a number of the cars featured in The Negro Motorist Green Book, a 1930s-era guidebook for African American road trippers which detailed safe stops. It originally operated out of the Great Lakes region of America, making stops in cities including Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia, “all major destinations for Black southerners during the Great Migration,” Edwards said.
The bus is currently parked outside a Greyhound terminal in Cleveland on Chester Avenue. The building was designed in 1948 by architect William Strudwick Arrasmith in the Streamline Moderne, post-Deco style. Later this year, the terminal is permanently closing its doors, as Greyhound services struggle against factors like increased competition from airlines and ride-sharing services. It is slated to be turned into a performance venue by Cleveland-based arts education nonprofit Playhouse Square.
Edwards’ museum project, part of his Columbia University doctoral studies in historic preservation, is in partnership with Playhouse Square. He was inspired to launch it by his grandmother, Ruby Mae Rollins, who travelled on Greyhound buses from Fredericksburg, Virginia to New York with her two daughters, Cindy, and Linda (Edwards’ mother).
“I thought of the stories that my grandmother shared with me and how traveling while Black during the era of Jim Crow was both liberating and challenging,” Edwards told ARTnews. “It made me realize that the car, train, and bus are spaces that need to preserved to expand the field of preservation and expand the archive of spaces that represent the Black experience.”
He continued: “I realized that while some museums interpret the Great Migration, there was no museum entirely dedicated to the Great Migration. The Great Migration brought Southern African Americans to the North, West and Midwest which not only affected industrialism and urbanism, but art, food, music, culture, literature, and television. We’re all products of migration and this bus museum will hopefully bring us together over this commonality.”
Edwards told The Art Newspaper that during the mid-20th century, Black Greyhound passengers were often subjected to harassment and assault. He said they tended to bring their own food for the journeys because there was no guarantee roadside restaurants would let them enter. “They didn’t know which places were safe for them to use,” he said. “Greyhound bus stations, to me, are like Ellis Island.”
In 2022, Edwards said he was compelled by a “crazy idea”: Did any buses used during the Great Migration survive? After some searching, he found one in Pennsylvania listed for $12,000 but managed to haggle the price down to $5,500 in cash. However, shipping the bus to Cleveland on a flatbed truck cost him $7,000. Several components had survived one of the previous owners turning it into a motorhome, including the back bench that Jim Crow laws forced Black passengers to use.
Playhouse Square purchased the Greyhound terminal for $3 million before Edwards asked the nonprofit if he could park the bus outside. Craig Hassall, Playhouse Square’s president and chief executive, told TAN that “the synchronicity is palpable.”
He added that exhibitions at converted terminal could also explore Ohio’s Black history as a result.
“The bus serves as an alternative ‘vehicle’ of inquiry into how regular Black people navigated cultural, social, and physical landscapes,” Edwards told the Cultural Landscape Foundation. “I wanted to understand what my grandmother’s experience may have been like riding on a segregated bus to an unfamiliar city in the North. Was it loud? Was it warm? Was it comfortable? Was it scary? Figuring out what that ‘in-between’ moment traversing the American landscape was like is important to me. I also wanted to challenge and change how we practice and implement research and pedagogical methods in preservation.”
On July 14, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced the relaunch of his New York mayoral campaign, this time as a third-party candidate, following his defeat in the Democratic primary to Zohran Mamdani.
Cuomo lost to Mamdani by 12 percentage points on June 24 despite a super political action committee (PAC) spending more than $22 million, the largest amount in the city’s history. Spending is sure to spike as the candidate’s respective campaigns advance towards November 4, and per a recent ARTnews data analysis, prominent art world figures have already gotten involved in the race. Those who made donations to Cuomo’s campaign include:
Loeb also made an individual campaign contribution of $2100.
Mamdani also received campaign donations from notable names in the art industry, including:
The following names respectively made donations of less than $100 to Mamdani’s campaign:
Mamdani also received donations from actors Hannah Einbinder (Hacks), Bowen Yang (Saturday Night Live), and Cynthia Nixon; as well as Tony-winning playwright Tony Kushner.
In a more general look at major donor involvement, the pro-Cuomo Fix the City superPAC included $5 million from billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as $250,000 from Top 200 collector and hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, reported the New York Times. By comparison, the pro-Mamdani super PAC New Yorkers for Lower Costs raised about $1.4 million.
On March 24, Gothamist reported that Cuomo raised $1.5 million compared to Mamdani’s $1.4 million.
While a large portion of the individual donations to Mamdani’s mayoral campaign were under $100, he also had significantly higher number of donations, with more than 27,600, compared to Cuomo’s 6,500, according to publicly available data from the New York City Campaign Finance Board.
Mamdani’s campaign also raised more than $900,000 from city residents eligible for a $8-to-$1 match program; far more than the just over $330,000 that Cuomo raised that was eligible for the same program from city residents.
In a lawsuit filed earlier this month, Phillips, one of the world’s top auction houses, claimed that a billionaire’s son failed to pay $14.5 million for a Jackson Pollock painting that sold in New York this past November.
The lawsuit, filed in the Supreme Court of New York, alleges that David Mimran, a film producer and the son of French businessman Jean Claude Mimran, had agreed to pay that sum as a third-party guarantee. Third-party guarantees, which have become common in major sales, especially since the onset of the pandemic, help auction houses defray the risk of offering art by bringing in an outside backer who agrees to buy a work, even if bidding does not break a certain barrier.
Documents submitted alongside the lawsuit, which was first reported by the New York Post over the weekend, suggest that the Pollock painting did not reach that amount when it came to sale. Per a third-party guarantee agreement submitted by Phillips, Mimran would have to pay just half of the $14.5 million if the work’s hammer price—an amount that does not account for additional fees—exceeded $14.2 million.
The Pollock piece, an early drip painting, was the Phillips sale’s top lot. Painted ca. 1948, it sold for $15.3 million with fees.
According to Phillips, Mimran sought an extension on his payment. “Mimran admitted that he owed the money, but he cried poverty and asked for more time,” the lawsuit reads. Then, he allegedly claimed he could not pay under that new deadline. The auction house is now seeking just under $15 million from Mimran—a figure that accounts for a 10 percent interest.
Mimran told Artnet News, “I love the painting and will buy it just a little late which happens often in this market and most auction houses had to deal with this.”
Mimran’s lawyer declined to comment to ARTnews and referred ARTnews to Mimran’s comments to Artnet.
He is the producer of films such as Warrior (2011), an acclaimed drama starring Tom Hardy as a boxer. He also formerly held a high-ranking position in Endeavor Mining, which has mines in Senegal.
“It’s astonishing that Mimran believes he can bid like a billionaire and then hide behind the claim that he’s broke,” Luke Nikas, a lawyer representing Phillips, said in an email to ARTnews. “If Mimran didn’t have a dollar to his name to pay for the artwork, as he claims, then he shouldn’t have raised a paddle.”
UNESCO has granted World Heritage status to Murujuga rock art in Western Australia that many have said is vulnerable as a result of a nearby gas project.
“This is a momentous day for our old people and our future generations to have Murujuga’s outstanding universal heritage values recognized by the world,” Raelene Cooper, a Pilbara traditional owner and Mardudhunera woman who is a former chair of MAC and founder of the Save Our Songlines group, told ABC News. “Our rock art tells the stories of our people, and maintains our songlines and bloodline connection to our ngurra.”
The Murujuga site, located in the Pilbara region in Western Australia, is comprised of ancient Aboriginal rock art that predates such notable monuments as Stonehenge and the Pyramids of Giza. It contains more than 1 million known petroglyphs, including the oldest depiction of a human face, dating as far back as 50,000 years.
The land is overseen by the five language groups known as the Ngarda-Ngarli and Aboriginal peoples.
After Indigenous groups campaigned for protection for two decades, the landscape was nominated by the Australian government for World Heritage status in 2023.
Major gas and fertilizer plants, which are a major pollution concern, sit on the approximately 247,105 acres of nominated land.
The Karratha Gas Plant, operated by Woodside Energy, is part of the North West Shelf Project, which has been in operation since the 1980s. Woodside is seeking to expand its plant, but the efforts have been scrutinized over the resulting emissions. (Last month, the government conditionally approved a plan to extend the gas plant through 2070.)
While the Australian government has reported that the Murujuga rock art is in overall good condition, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), a body that advises UNESCO, claimed the site was vulnerable to these emissions in May.
In Paris, custodians from the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation (MAC) and the Federal Environment Minister Murray Watt campaigned against the draft decision that recommended the bid for World Heritage status be referred back to Australia.
Though the decision to protect the area as a UNESCO World Heritage site was unanimous among UNESCO member states, it moved an amendment on Friday for the country to continue tracking the impact of local industry on the land. Other traditional owners, however, pushed for more protections at the site, with some arguing for an end to nearby oil and gas expansion.
“Today, Australia rewrote the World Heritage listing in the interests of the gas industry. Even though all the recommended protections were removed after concerted lobbying from the Australian government, we are still overjoyed to see Murujuga finally World Heritage listed by UNESCO,” Cooper continued.
“Meanwhile, fertilizer plants are still being built around our sacred sites and polluting gas plants will emit toxic acid on our rock art for another 50 years. The final decision today falls well short of the protections that expert body ICOMOS has recommended,” she added. “But comments from World Heritage Committee members today send a clear signal to the Australian government and Woodside that things need to change to prevent the ongoing desecration of Murujuga by polluting industry.”
This designation by UNESCO marks the 21st World Heritage site for the country and the second of Aboriginal cultural heritage.
Bill Dilworth, the beloved caretaker of Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room, has died at 70. The New York Times reported on Saturday that he died on December 10, 2024, of a stroke, though his passing was not a matter of public knowledge until the Times obituary was published.
For 35 years, Dilworth tended to the 1977 De Maria piece, an installation composed of 280,000 pounds of dirt piled two feet high. (Visitors stand behind glass and are not allowed to walk on the dirt.) Managed by the Dia Art Foundation, the piece has been open to the general public since 1980 and has since become a point of pilgrimage and a cult favorite. The pop star Lorde even featured an Earth Room lookalike in a recent music video.
The dirt in that room looks natural and stately, in large part thanks to the behind-the-scenes labor of Dilworth, who took the job in 1989 and held it until his retirement in 2024. Prior to taking the role, he had only seen a 1977 picture of the piece—the only approved photograph of it in existence. He came to know the work intimately, spending many hours of his life maintaining it.
In a 2023 New Yorker article, for example, Dilworth described careful thought over how the dirt was moved around. He began with a cultivator, a piece of agricultural equipment with sharp disks, then switched to a rake at the advice of Heiner Friedrich, a Dia founder.
He also paid mind to the moistness of the earth, watering it regularly. “Just to get it back to this moist state is gratifying to me, because this is the state that I relate to, that I maintained for decades,” he told the New Yorker, having spent the prior two days watering the dirt.
Born in 1954 in Detroit, Dilworth attended art school at Wayne State University, where he met his wife Patti, who later became the caretaker of another De Maria work under Dia’s aegis, The Broken Kilometer (1979). Dilworth became an abstract painter and would continue to paint for many years.
But he was known mainly for caring for sites like The New York Earth Room. Before taking that job, he had also maintained the Church of St. Teresa, which dates back to the 19th century and is located on New York’s Lower East Side. His Earth Room job came by happenstance. “I was with my friend who was the building operations guy at Dia and he had to look at these pipes for something,” Dilworth told Artsy. “Over my shoulder, I saw the guy at the desk here and afterwards I asked my friend Jim, ‘Does that job ever open up?’ And he said no. Two months later, it did.”
One might expect a deeper understanding of The New York Earth Room after years of working inside it. Yet Dilworth said in interviews that he was loath to explain it because De Maria himself declined to do so when he was alive.
“It’s about earth, art, and quiet,” Dilworth told the New Yorker, adding, “People look at it, and they think nothing’s growing, and I say, ‘Look at it again, time is growing out there.’”
Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, an ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world.
While most viewers came to Sex and the City in the early 2000s for its scandalous sex lives and couture looks, the reboot And Just Like That… offers a more nuanced look at middle age. Along with the new perspective is also a new character, Lisa Todd Wexley, portrayed as a caring mother, a loving wife, a cutting-edge documentarian, and a strong Black woman.
To help develop Wexley, the show brought in curator and collector Racquel Chevremont—who was recently on a TV reboot of her own, the Real Housewives of New York—to build the character’s art collection.
Wexley’s home, shared with her husband Herbert, showcases their incredible collection of figurative Black art, including such works as Carrie Mae Weems’ “Kitchen Table Series” (1990), Deborah Roberts’ Political Lamb in a Wolf’s World (2018), Barkley Hendricks’ October’s Gone . . . Goodnight (1973), Gordon Parks’ Department Store, Mobile, Alabama (1956), Mickalene Thomas’ Portrait of Mnonja (2010) and Racquel avec Les Trois Femmes Noires (2011), Derrick Adams’ Family Portrait 9 (2019) and Style Variation 32 (2020), and Alma Thomas’ Snoopy — Early Sun Display on Earth (1970).
Chevremont carefully chose each piece of historic and contemporary art to exemplify excellence in Black art. Together, these pieces highlight moments of reprieve and difficulty alike to demonstrate the larger ethos of Wexley herself. The artworks are not only aspirational for the character, who is an artist on the show in her own right, but also celebrates her very personhood.
ARTnews caught up with Chevremont to talk about the behind the scenes details of curating the Wexley collection and what it means to showcase artwork that exemplifies Black life to millions of viewers worldwide.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.
ARTnews: You’re the brains behind Lisa Todd Wexley’s art collection. Tell me how that started.
Chevremont: People working on the show kept being given my name and reached out to me about doing this. One of the episodes was going to be specific to the Wexleys’s home and to their collection. Then the mother-in-law comes and critiques everything. So, they gave me a little background on the characters—Lisa, her husband, and their children, along with their ages and where they live.
When I work on television shows or films, I want to know who the character is because then I can relate to that as I work with collectors. I can think about, as a collector, this is where I believe they would be or the types of work that they would be interested in. So, I began there.
I was told a little bit about the episode and I started pulling artists that I thought would round out the collection well. I submitted a bunch of different ideas, and they loved it. And then I went from there. I don’t reach out to the artist until after they’re approved [as opposed to curating an exhibition where one needs permission from the artist to participate] because things work a little differently with set design. There are some collectors who buy specifically for certain spots in their homes, but for the most part I work with collectors who buy what they love and then figure out where to place it after the purchase. With television or film, you need to know where the pieces are going to be placed. Once everything is determined, I reach out to the artists to see if they’re interested.
After everything is approved with set design and the artist is notified, what does the process look like on set?
For TV, I don’t borrow work because there is usually not enough insurance, especially for the type of artwork I’m trying to use. More often, I license the image and then have it recreated. So, I have it printed on canvas, or whatever medium it happens to be, and then go from there. The And Just Like That… set design team is amazing because they were way more detailed than a lot of the others I’ve worked with. They wanted to know specific colors so that once they printed it, they could go back in with actual paint to try to make it look as real as possible, especially because there was going to be so much focus on the collection. But that’s not always the case. I did [the 2015 television series] Empire years ago, for example, and they would just print the work on canvas and put it on the wall in this kind of background situation. With And Just Like That…, I thought about family, and I did select mainly figurative work that would tell a story and let viewers know a little bit about the characters.
Were all the works recreations?
There were certain pieces that I got really lucky with, like the Gordon Parks piece. They don’t let you recreate work, so I reached out to his foundation directly, and they were willing to loan me the actual piece. It came with security, and we put it on the wall, shot the scene, and it left immediately. It was there just for that one scene. That Gordon Parks piece was essential because the character is a documentarian. Another original on set was the Carrie Mae Weems work.
Wexley is this strong Black female filmmaker in this very opulent and wealthy Manhattan lifestyle. The artwork has to reflect that because it is such a huge part of her personhood. What was your approach to her art collection and the art collection on set?
I wanted her to have some established artists, but also some artists that were maybe not as well known, because I wanted to show that she’s a true collector not just a trophy hunter. And I wanted it to reflect family. There were certain parameters that felt important, for instance, we didn’t feel that there should be nudity because the character has children in the home, and she and her husband are of a particular generation. So, it just felt like the works needed to be figurative. We wanted it to be clear that this is a home that celebrates Blackness.
Were there any artists or works that “got away”?
There were a couple of artists that I would have loved to have had in there that I could not get. I have to say, I wanted an Amy Sherald, but she doesn’t like to have her work on film or on television. I respect that. There were a bunch of others that I considered if we decided to do some abstract work too.
Were there any other works you felt strongly about?
The piece by Barclay Hendricks. I reached out to his wife and his estate. I was so hyped, but that was a tricky one. I attempted to get his work for other things, and it just didn’t work out. But this time it did, and the work is incredible!
I also had Deborah Roberts on there, who’s not as much of a household name, but is someone I personally collect. I’ve worked with her quite a bit and she’s always down to make it happen.
Her work in particular has a playfulness, and I think a huge part of showcasing Black excellence is not just the hard moments, but these opportunities for relaxation and joy.
Exactly. It was also important for us to name the artists in the script and then to discuss it so that people could look these artists up and find out more about their practice. It really became a focal point of Lisa’s character. I think it really resonated.
What does it mean to be able to showcase this art and artists outright on such a big platform?
It’s huge. When I first started working on television, there were a lot of artists who were trepidatious about the process. Art is not accessible to everyone and I always looked at it as an opportunity for millions of people to see this work on the screen who might not get to see it at their local museum or at a gallery, or don’t feel welcome in these kinds spaces. Unless you’re in a big city, you don’t really have access often times to actually see work. This shows how people live with their art, which is important. I feel like you can reach way more people through television and film than you could otherwise. Art changes perspectives. It changes lives. We don’t have enough art. We’re losing art funding everywhere. And I’m going to do whatever I can do to get art out there on a platform to kind of democratize it so that it becomes accessible.
Even if you live in a big city, a lot of museums cost at least $30 for one ticket and that’s not affordable for the average person.
It’s prohibitive, especially for the audience that a lot of these artists want to engage with. This offers a different way of engaging with that audience. Ultimately, it’s reaching more homes than a museum show and changing someone’s life.
Another project I worked on that I felt strongly about was the [2023] movie Leave the World Behind, but that one had a completely different take. It follows this couple, played by Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke, who rent a home on the beach in Long Island, when the world starts to fall apart. The owner of the home, played by Mahershala Ali, shows up in the middle of the night and there’s this tension because they don’t realize the home is owned by an African American man. The artwork in this movie was also all by African Americans, but it was all abstract because I wanted, as you go back, to see signs that this is potentially owned by someone of color, but it’s not as immediate as when you walk into the Wexley’s home in And Just Like That….
This was more of a build up, with a pan on artworks by Adam Pendleton, Gary Simmons, and Julie Mehretu. It also had a Glenn Ligon that changed throughout the film. For the work, he allowed me to take pieces of a painting to create three different images. The painting gets more chaotic as everything in the film gets more chaotic. That was the first time I had the chance to work with art in that way, where you can help a film move along and tell a story. Similar to the Wexleys, I got to tell a story of who they are. There are people who disagree with putting art on television, but I’m all in on it.
What is your approach to your own collection?
I started collecting in 2000, and it took me a while to decide the direction of my collection. Now I’ve changed a bit again. Lately, I’m collecting more Latinx artwork. I’m Puerto Rican, and I feel like that market hasn’t really been supported in the way it should be. I primarily collect work by female, queer, and artists of color. Every now and then I’ll buy something because it struck me and I just had to have it.