In the corner of the gallery stands an unassuming white cube. A panel on the front of the cube periodically yawns open, revealing an endless, wondrous, lamp-lit nighttime. And then the door closes, extinguishing the dream. Even in the dreary November cold, people wait hours to enter the cube and experience what’s inside; nearly every color of puffer coat is represented in the line huddled outside the building. This is Yayoi Kusama’s INFINITY MIRRORED ROOM—DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE, the centerpiece of the ninety-year-old artist’s “EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE” (on view at David Zwirner’s West Twentieth Street gallery through December 14), which features all-new paintings, sculptures, and installations that build on her legacy as one of the world’s most daring and openhearted artists. Faces are everywhere in this show—peeking out from stalks of succulent-like sculptures, squiggling along the walls like schools of fish, hiding in the vivid biology of her paintings. And then, of course, there’s your own face, repeated over and over on the reflective walls of the infinity room, staring in awe, reeling from the bliss. A selection of images from the show appears below.

View of “Yayoi Kusama: EVERY DAY I PRAY FOR LOVE,” David Zwirner, New York, 2019. Courtesy David Zwirner.

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The town of Lily Dale, situated near the western tip of New York State, is home to one of the most active Spiritualist communities in the world. The website for the Lily Dale Assembly, the official headquarters of the local Spiritualist scene, lists forty-nine registered mediums—roughly one per every four permanent residents. What better place to embark on a quest to glimpse the unknown? Shannon Taggart, a photographer whose passion for documenting Spiritualist rituals began in Lily Dale, has spent nearly two decades capturing the practices by which mediums (and their curious customers) attempt to reach those beyond the veil. Her new book, Séance, published by Fulgur Press, collects a hundred fifty of her photographs, a selection of which appears below.

Table-tipping workshop with the mediums Reverend Jane and Chris Howarth, Erie, Pennsylvania, 2014.

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The multidisciplinary artist Betye Saar is best known for her assemblages: meticulous arrangements of found objects, religious iconography, and cultural ephemera that, together, interrogate the ritual of American racism. “Betye Saar: Call and Response,” the first of two major solo exhibitions this fall devoted to Saar’s legendary career, displays the artist’s work alongside her sketchbooks, which are filled with notes and detailed diagrams that look surprisingly similar to her finished pieces. It’s a rare and satisfying peek inside the mind of one of our greatest living artists. A selection of images from the exhibition’s catalogue appears below.

Betye Saar, The Edge of Ethics, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles. © Betye Saar. Photo © Museum Associates / LACMA.

Betye Saar, Sketchbook, 2009–10. Collection of Betye Saar. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles. © Betye Saar. Photo © Museum Associates / LACMA.

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Nothing looks quite like an Amy Sherald painting. In each of her portraits, the form for which she is best known, an impeccably painted figure stands smack in the middle of a slab of color. But rather than plucking the subject out of reality and placing them in a vacuum, this effect elevates the portrayed to the level of a timeless symbol, a physically manifested corrective to art’s long tradition of erasure. “I paint because I am looking for versions of myself in art history and in the world,” Sherald has said. Her work is a radical act of representation, one that, with grace and breathtaking beauty, foregrounds the interiority and experiences of black people. Sherald’s first show at Hauser & Wirth, “the heart of the matter … ,”  is on view through October 26. A selection of images from the exhibition appears below. 

Amy Sherald, When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be (Self-imagined atlas), 2018, oil on canvas, 54″ x 43″ x 2″. © Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Joseph Hyde.

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Andrew Moore, Yolanda Walker at The Purple Bowl, Pink Bottom, 2018.

There are others who are not remembered,
as if they had never lived,
who died and were forgotten,
they, and their children after them.

—Sirach 44:9

Alabama, the place in Andrew Moore’s photos, my home, is not exotic. But it is the subject of endless fascination. Sometimes Alabama is a punchline, or a word used to provoke horror. I have seen pages of words and pictures filled with my birth state, an abundant canvas for the American imagination, many times—the work of artists and poets, writers and intellectuals. This prolificity is at least in part because Alabama is the imagined grounds for our national shame, a heady mix of poverty and violence: guns, lynching, beatings, and, most of all, racism. Slavery! Alabama might be the true heartland of America after all.

Despite so many treatments, precious and rare are the images and essays about Alabama that I recognize as belonging to my home; rare are the depictions that avoid falling into a funhouse mirror or a voyeur’s imagination of the “dirty South.” There is a lot of looking without seeing.

Blue Alabama is different. This book is true to my home. Read More

Martin Puryear’s “Liberty/Libertà,” an exhibition featuring significant new sculptures in the artist’s oeuvre, is the United States’ official contribution to the ongoing 2019 Venice Biennale. The following essay appears in the catalogue accompanying Puryear’s presentation.

Installation view, “Martin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà,” La Biennale di Venezia, U.S. Pavilion, Venice, Italy, 2019. Photo: Joshua White—JWPictures.com.

“I like a little rebellion now and then,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. minister to France, to Abigail Adams. She’d sent him a letter denouncing Shays’s Rebellion, a movement of Massachusetts insurgents, many of whom had served in the Revolutionary War but were now militating openly against the state they’d fought to form. Farmers, unable to pay their debts, had been imprisoned and dispossessed; four thousand rebels blocked the courts and sprang their comrades out of jail.

Jefferson’s words seem to smile at the events, expressing a kind of princely titillation at the sound and the fury, the thrill of the clash. But the Jefferson of 1787 believed that a regular challenge to government was vital to the exercise of public freedom: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” This was republicanism, this was popular will, this was liberty—the abstraction that fluttered prettily over all his writing and thought. Jefferson was a white, debt-free slave owner who, as he composed his letter to Adams, felt sure of Daniel Shays’s demise. So he wrote from the luxurious position of a philosopher and former revolutionary, flushed with a sense of fabulous drama. He, unlike Adams, was sitting safely in France.

Two years passed before the events of 1789: the Tennis Court Oath, the formation of the Assemblée nationale, the storming of the Bastille, and the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen by the abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès and the Marquis de Lafayette, with help from Jefferson himself. So he stands at the origin of two declarations, two revolutions, two republics. He is a fantastically inflated icon, a gleaming national fetish. We live with his myth, his legacy, his image, and his contradictions. The contradictions are violent. He was a thinker of revolt and constitution, movement and stasis—and a humanist who owned humans he refused to see as such. Read More