Leonora Carrington’s work unfurls like a dream, both familiar and not. As in her sui generis short stories, mysterious human-animal hybrids populate the fantastical landscapes of her paintings, speaking in riddles, partaking in oblique ceremonies, eating sumptuous feasts. Blending iconography from mystical and religious traditions the world over, Carrington’s work hints at a hidden all-encompassing language of symbols, one that represents the inseparability of the universe and fertility (eggs crop up repeatedly in her work, as do horses—talking and otherwise). After spending years in the shadows of her fellow surrealists, Carrington has finally received her due as one of the twentieth century’s most singular artists: a museum in Mexico devoted to her life and work, reissues of her deliciously odd books, and now “Leonora Carrington: The Story of the Last Egg,” the first solo exhibition of her work to appear in New York in twenty-two years. The show, an off-site presentation by Gallery Wendi Norris, is on view through June 29 at 926 Madison Avenue, New York, NY, where the gallery will also host a symposium on her work and a reading of Carrington’s unpublished play Opus Siniestrus: The Story of the Last Egg. A selection of paintings from the exhibition—as well as two masks that Carrington designed for the play—appears below. 

Leonora Carrington, Green Tea, 1942, oil on canvas, 24″ x 30″. © 2019 Estate of Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris.

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TIM ROLLINS and K.O.S., On the Origin of Species – Instinct (after Darwin), 2015 (Courtesy Studio K.O.S., Lehmann Maupin. Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein)

“Today we make history.” This was the constant refrain from Tim Rollins, as a group of teenagers filed into the South Bronx studio every afternoon after school. The group had named itself Kids of Survival and the lofty idea of making history became ingrained in the fabric of our collective consciousness. Our aim was to change our lives and become immortal through the creation of art. Today, Tim Rollins and Kids of Survival, the longest running art collective in history, is included in over 120 museum and public collections. Since its inception in a junior high school classroom in the Bronx, it has exhibited hundreds of times at major galleries and institutions worldwide

I was fortunate to have grown up in the South Bronx in eighties. Yes, there was violence. No, it wasn’t necessarily the safest neighborhood. Drug dealing and prostitution were rampant at the time, and the AIDS epidemic hit our neighborhood especially hard, but there was an energy ignited by music, fashion, and the visual arts. The South Bronx was the epicenter of hip-hop and its effect on the community was palpable. Despite the abject appearance of the abandoned buildings and vacant lots, there was a certain defiance born from genuine pride in the community. If you had some sort of special talent, like drawing for instance, you garnered respect, including respect from drug dealers and other rough entities. They left this nerdy kid alone. In ways both physical and metaphorical, the making of art provided me safety.

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“Everyone is a collector in one way or another,” the English-teacher-turned-art-dealer David Schulson would tell his children. “Everyone has the impulse to collect.” What Schulson didn’t say is that the impulse to collect often contains within it another: the drive to keep, to hoard, to hold on. Schulson spent his weekends trolling New York’s flea markets for oddities, searching for the stories behind strange objects, and though he often sold what he found, he couldn’t bring himself to part with some of his most treasured discoveries. Over the course of his career, he amassed arguably the most impressive private collection of drawings, scribbles, and autographs in the world. The book Scrawl: An A to Z of Famous Doodles showcases this trove of miscellany for the first time. A selection from Schulson’s collection—including Queen Victoria’s donkey doodles, Stephen King’s spookily jubilant stick figure, and an erotic painting by Tennessee Williams—appears below.

Tennessee Williams

Courtesy of Schulson Autographs.

Tennessee Williams, one of the twentieth century’s most important American playwrights, also painted with oils and pastels. On the back of an eight-by-ten-inch black-and-white photograph, he painted two male figures with thick brushstrokes. Near his initials, he writes, “Frankenste[in] Monster,” and between the two figures, framed in orange, he titles the drawing World of Morrissey. This is likely a reference to the director Paul Morrissey’s 1973 horror film Flesh for Frankenstein, also known as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein. The figure labeled “Joe D.” must therefore be Joe Dallesandro, who played a starring role in the film. Williams’s paintings tended to express his homosexuality, which was largely absent from his plays. Read More

Some people collect rocks. Others collect stamps. Peter Merlin, a former NASA archivist who’s become a leading expert on military aircraft and Area 51, collects the physical remnants of government secrets. As he explains in the artist Trevor Paglen’s new book, From the Archives of Peter Merlin, Aviation Archaeologist, Merlin’s chief animating impulse is fairly simple: “Something always remains,” meaning that every project, no matter how clandestine, leaves a trace—a scrap of metal, a security badge, a commemorative mug. Merlin has amassed a trove of such traces, which are often the only public evidence of highly classified operations. These crumbs offer rare insight into the shadowy machinations of the state, the violence and surveillance committed in our name. A selection of artifacts from Merlin’s collection, along with explanatory text from Paglen, appears below.

Courtesy of Primary Information.

Civil Defense pamphlets from the fifties and sixties offered helpful tips for surviving nuclear bombardment. Such gems included “Take a shower … to remove any radioactive contamination” and “Don’t spread rumors.” Government authors attempted to assure citizens that nuclear war was easily survivable, yet the cover of one booklet features the phrase “Avoid panic” beneath a terrifying image of a city engulfed in flames beneath an atomic mushroom cloud. Read More

Advances in technology, despite their benefits, often coincide with spikes in fear, paranoia, and doubt. Just as the internet has fertilized the rich soil of conspiracy theory, the advent of photography and the birth of modern spiritualism in the nineteenth century are inextricable. Purported paranormal encounters, previously the subject of rumors and candlelit retellings, could now be reproduced and circulated in so-called spirit photographs. Emboldened by new forms of communication, such as the electric telegraph, more and more people sought to commune with the beyond; séances experienced a boom in popularity. In the midst of all this excitement about lost souls, scientists stayed committed to their constant mission: pinning down how the world works. The magician and psychologist Matthew L. Tompkins’s new book, The Spectacle of Illusion, chronicles the struggles of the scientific community to understand—and sometimes debunk—the illusions and mysteries that have so captivated the general public since the eighteenth century. A selection of archival photographs and illustrations from the book appears below.

William S. Marriott seems lost in deep thought as a trio of mysterious spirit forms approach him. The magician worked tirelessly to expose the tricks that mediums used to exploit credulous individuals, who may well have been seeking contact from recently deceased loved ones. Marriott and Three Ominous Materializations, 1910. Image from The Spectacle of Illusion, published by D.A.P. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

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