Creuzet’s exhibitions typically carry paragraph-length titles that point to the show’s underlying themes, as did this one that recently traveled from LUMA Arles in France to LUMA Westbau in Zurich: “Orpheus was musing upon braised words, under the light rain of a blazing fog, snakes are deaf and dumb anyway, oblivion buried in the depths of insomnia.”

Not unlike the mythical Orpheus, who descended into Hades to retrieve his love Eurydice only to lose her at the last moment, we too travel into Creuzet’s world, set somewhere below the surface of wakeful consciousness. There, in his reimagined version of an immersive opera, we’re invited to experience forgotten memories told in song accompanied by hanging skeletal sculptures of landscapes, spirit creatures, panel paintings, and holograms of artifacts come to new life from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. If we peer and listen closely, pieced together narratives surface, overlapping before they too fade away, transformed into something else with every new turn.

Creuzet’s work is a hard-to-pin sensory exploration that sparks the imagination. It’s this friction between the strange and unknown that makes us question the familiar, an exercise at the heart of Creuzet’s practice. He wants us to question everything.

That is increasingly possible through Creuzet’s work, as it becomes more visible internationally, with the latest feather in his cap being the French Pavilion; he will be the first Black man to take it over. Other major exhibitions include solos at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2019) and Camden Arts Center in London (2022), as well as appearances in Manifesta 13 in 2020, the 2018 Gwangju Biennale, and the 2017 Lyon Biennale. In 2021, he was nominated for the esteemed Prix Marcel Duchamp, administered by the Centre Pompidou.

Yet, the prestigious platform of Venice seems to have no bearing on Creuzet. “For me, it’s just a title. One step. One exhibition,” he told ARTnews in a video interview earlier this year from his Paris studio. “It’s about continuing with my work, which is to share various imaginations with others. And in a sense, to question the world, our context, our history, our present. … Nothing has changed.”

In essence, he’s interested in reaching the widest audience possible—“art only exists when we give it to others to see”—because that is the way to “generate areas of space for movements of emancipation and movements of the imagination,” he added.

Within those spaces, Creuzet challenges preconceived categorizations, particularly ones that relate to his own lived experience, such as the African and Caribbean diasporas, the significance of artistic and literary voices from those diasporas, the legacy of colonialism, and the struggle to share our planet’s resources. For Creuzet, these subjects are personal and inescapable.

Born 1986 in a working-class Paris suburb, Creuzet was raised in Martinique, where he was introduced early on to artists from the Caribbean, thanks to his family’s love for culture. “Being surrounded by that [artistic] nourishment fascinated me—it made me dream,” he said. He still remembers the blue enamel ceramics by local artist Victor Anicet that are evocative of local pre-Columbian ceramics and the music of Eugene Mona. The “enigma” of his childhood is the source of Creuzet’s “imaginary reservoir,” with Martinique its “emotional heart,” said Creuzet who returned to France in 2006 when he was 20 years-old to pursue a standard educational track at French art schools; he is now a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

“I’m always left trapped, because the Other … endlessly boxes me into this one identity,” Creuzet said. “I try to be what I have to be. But in one way or another, I’m constantly reminded of my condition as a Black man. … It makes me realize there is still a lot to do in terms movements to emancipate and decolonize the body, knowledge, culture, and arts.”

Throughout our hour-long conversation, Creuzet often responded in open-to-interpretation metaphoric French prose (certain nuances, of course, have been lost to translation), which should come as no surprise given that he is also a prolific poet. “I answer this way, because I don’t want to reduce everything to one thing,” he said, pointing his finger into the air in front of him.

“Julien’s vision is needed right now,” said Sibylle Friche, a partner at Chicago’s Document Gallery, one of three that represents him. “The decolonial turn in recent art is not just a trend. It is part and parcel of former imperial nations like France coming to terms with the less savory aspects of their history—work that has only begun. Julien addresses colonialism poetically, which draws attention to its affective consequences as much as its material traces.”

At his LUMA exhibitions, Creuzet’s human-scale, drawing-sculptures, made of bent poles smothered in a colorful, gummy paste, at first appear abstract, but slowly reveal themselves to be spirit-like beings. In one, a fairy emerges from a dark blue ooze, as painted-over, pre-Columbian demons mock us. Elsewhere are mesmerizing holograms of African artifacts dancing bélé, a genre associated with slavery’s abolition in Martinique.

In his practice, Creuzet orchestrates self-described operatic installations using a range of mediums and collaborations with other artists, including musicians and dancers. Through those collaborations, as well as drawing from the writings of Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, and André Breton, among others, Creuzet wants to “complexify … the way different African and Creole cultures have actually played an important role in the current manifestations of contemporary France, and by extension, the contemporary world,” said Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, director of exhibitions and programs at LUMA.

There’s also a sense of hope, even joy, imbued in these works, a nod to Creuzet’s own feelings about this “moment of crystallization” and “emancipation” that we are witnessing.

“We are living through a changing context,” Creuzet said, pointing to issues as wide ranging as Covid, the energy crises, and efforts in France and elsewhere to restitute looted artworks from Africa. Society is “asking individuals to try to situate themselves in terms of who they are, where they come from, how they feel in their skin and in their bodies, and heads,” he said.

In his art, Creuzet aims to discuss socio-political issues like these in a language he hopes can reach beyond the art world’s institutional boundaries. “Julien’s work feels so urgent because of the many references and transnational connections he makes, that go beyond the bubble of contemporary art discourses,” said independent curator Cindy Sissokho, who with Céline Kopp will curate the French Pavilion. “It’s a practice that is liberating, opening up imaginaries and therefore possibilities that expand discourses about the African diaspora.”

And Creuzet’s international acclaim will likely only continue to increase in the near future. In addition to the Venice exhibition, Sissokho and Kopp will also organize a solo exhibition of Creuzet’s work later this year at the Magasin in Grenoble, where Kopp is director. Co-produced with Brown Arts Institute and David Winton Bell Gallery, the show will travel to the US starting in 2024, marking Creuzet’s first major solo institutional exhibition there. Beginning this month, he will participate in the 2023 Liverpool Biennial, and in November, he will present a new commission as part of the Performa biennial in New York. His work is also featured in the traveling exhibition, “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today,” which debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and will open at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in October.

With a method reliant on archival and on-the-ground research, Creuzet sticks to a constant, daily work ethic. “Art is deeply about daily research. I never stop nourishing and cultivating myself. I never stop learning,” he said.

His art-making is one that forces him to “se debrouiller,” or manage with what he’s got. “I always thought of art as a door to survival or fresh air, an absolute, visceral necessity,” he said. For years, and because of financial and material constraints, Creuzet’s pieces were largely composed of found objects. They still maintain that aspect, though his production means have recently expanded, and he’s incorporated new, technically advanced elements, including virtual reality.

Today, Creuzet says he “gets the most pleasure from sharing” with others. “Generosity is the most beautiful thing,” even when much of the world is currently set up to make it “difficult to share essentials, like water and food. It’s hard to share the same planet. It’s hard to simply be.”

He continued, “I’m learning not to point fingers in an inquisitive way anymore, because I don’t think it helps improve the situation. I think everyone has to do the work of emancipation and decolonization, and we still have far to go. … I’m now trying to figure out how to engage in a form of activism and denunciation, but with less pain.”

It’s anything but basic, and its necessity is currently the subject of a new exhibition, simply titled “Milk,” at the Wellcome Collection in London, through September 10, that takes on the subject with close attention to milk’s societal impact on global politics, economics, and culture. The show looks at milk’s deep-rooted past to humanity, our present relationship with the superfood, and our changing perceptions of it and how that might impact milk’s future.

Curated by Marianne Templeton and Honor Beddard, “Milk” features over 100 works ranging from objects used in infant feeding and farming to advertisements and public health posters, as well as works of contemporary art and new artist commissions.

One of the first works you see is a giant, black cow udder, stretched and sagging from carrying milk. Made of metal, coal dust, textile, and paint, Julia Bornefeld’s 1995 untitled hanging sculpture draws out how a maternal body, both human and animal, as both a site of extraction and care, a recurring theme across the exhibition.

But first some history. Dairy products, and methods of their preservation, date back centuries, with that ancient history represented here by a Roman terracotta model of a mule carrying two trays loaded with cheeses, dating to the 3rd or 2nd century BCE. Milk consumption largely spread because of European colonialization, which imposed the drink as a cultural standard; European dairy cattle breeds, like the Holstein-Friesian, are still the most common globally. Though, according to wall text explaining the “Story of Milk,” around two-thirds of the world’s population has difficulty digesting milk, especially into adulthood.

In an eight-minute animated video titled White (2022), Danielle Dean highlights the role of milk as a tool for colonial narratives. She explores the impact of dairy cattle in the area around Mount Taranaki in New Zealand, a place deforested by British colonial settlers in the 19th century to create grazing pastures. The video shows the forest covered in white matter contaminating it. Nature’s destruction gives way to green fields dotted with cows. The animation runs on a loop, going back to the forest showing an imagining of what it could look like if it were rewilded.

“The animation imagines what the forest would have been like before it was cleared,” Templeton said in an interview. “The artist worked with the Ngāruahine Iwi, who are one of eight Iwi (Māori tribes) in the Taranaki region, to research the plants and animals, and has reconstructed an imagined version of the landscape through a layering of intricately detailed watercolor drawings.”

The show’s primary focus, however, is on the modern milk system, looking at how it became a central part of people’s diets. Milk consumption became popularized in Britain with the rise of coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries, which expanded during the Industrial Revolution. As the urban population grew, so did the demand for milk. A two-minute video titled “The Daily Round: The Story of Milk Production and Distribution” shows the Express Dairy company pasteurizing milk with advanced equipment in their factory before being transported on milk trains. Large dairy corporations took control of production as dairy products became centralized. (Today, dairy farms rely on labor from migrant workers, which has decreased since Brexit and has been further exacerbated by Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine.)

In the US, beginning in the early 20th century, milk’s popularity was aided by powerful marketing campaigns that at times weren’t what they seemed. Advertisers created campaigns promoting the white nuclear family as the face of milk; the underlying emphasis on “purity” was not subtle. It also gave eugenicists like Herbert Hoover (later the 31st US President) the tool to argue his racist pseudo-theory of associating the purity of “natural” milk with ideologies of whiteness and racial hierarchy. A 1920s advertisement included in the show quotes Hoover saying, “The white race cannot survive without dairy products.”

Nearby, Luke Turner’s 2017 three-minute video parallels Hoover’s racist ideals. Turner invited the public to respond to the words “He Will Not Divide Us” in a live stream beginning on January 20, 2017, the day Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States. The footage shows American Neo-Nazis drinking milk as they chant racist and antisemitic slogans.

Milk being used for political agendas is not a thing of the past, as seen in a limited-edition hat advertising “Government Cheese,” a processed cheese given to American welfare recipients, a disproportionate number of which are Black and Latinx households who have a higher risk of health conditions linked to the consumption of saturated fats, found in Government Cheese. The cheese became a symbol in pop culture with musicians like Kendrick Lamar and Jay-Z mentioning it in their music as a reference to the poverty they had experienced.

Similarly, advertising campaigns, like the “Got Milk?” campaign in the US and the British version “Make Mine Milk” likewise entered the cultural milieu with a host of celebrities promoting the health benefits of including milk in one’s diet.

A section titled “Scientific Motherhood” highlights how, for example, a crocheted portable weighing scale used by a Health Visitor in the 1930s to weigh babies during home visits became an anxiety-inducing object for many mothers, especially if the baby was underweight. Poor women often lacked the right nutrition and unable to provide enough breastmilk needed for the baby’s growth. (Baby formula milk, first introduced in the 1860s, is a powdered substance consisting of cow milk that was advertised as a “perfect substitute” for breast milk by companies like Glaxo.) These standards in weight and nutrition, developed around white women’s bodies, still persist today and continue to overlook how class, race, and social mobility impact a child’s development.

Other artworks in the exhibition include a captivating 14-minute video projection, with bespoke seating and wallpaper, by Ilana Harris-Babou that was commissioned by the Wellcome Collection. Titled Let Down Reflex (2023), the video includes personal testimonies on breastfeeding by the artist’s mother, sister, and niece, reflecting on the wider political context that surrounds infant feeding. The work also references the lullaby “All the pretty horses,” which is said to have been sung by an enslaved African mother who had been separated from her baby to wet nurse and care for her enslaver’s child. Harris-Babou’s work highlights the horrific and traumatic history of the transatlantic slave trade in which enslaved women were robbed of their bodily autonomy, while also linking it to the present-day inequalities in Black maternal healthcare in the US and UK.

The final part of the show, titled “The Cost of Milk,” encourages viewers to consider the values that underpin our food systems and the choices we make as consumers. Works from Eve Bull with her zine DIY Oat Milk, instructing people how to make oat milk at home, looks at the environmental impact of lifestyle choices and the challenges of ethical consumption in a capitalist system. Commercially produced plant-based milk is sold at a higher price compared to cow milk—environmentalism then risks becoming a concern only the wealthy can afford to care about.

The exhibition’s final work, Jess Dobkin’s commissioned installation For What It’s Worth (2023), examines the ethics, regulation, and complex systems in which human milk and those who produce it are both valued and devalued. She also highlights the rise of human breast milk sales online consumed by bodybuilders, fetishists, and alternative health enthusiasts in the 21st century. The soundtrack played in the room includes excerpts from conversations Dobkin had with her research collaborators during the making of the project.

“I keep coming back to a comment made by [collaborator] Charity Mwebaze,” Beddard said, “that throughout history, a woman is either an animal because of the milk that she produces, or she’s divine also because of the milk that she produces.”

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Born Earle Goodenow, Kyohei Inukai (1913–1985) was the third son of established portrait painter Kyohei Inukai the Elder and sculptor Lucene Goodenow. When his father died, Earle Goodenow became Kyohei Inukai as a way to honor him.

Though he remained largely unknown as an artist during his lifetime, Inukai produced more than 2,000 artworks over the course of his five-decade career. Among the few showings of his art he had during his lifetime were two in 1970, at the year’s World Exposition in Osaka and the Brooklyn Museum, both in print exhibitions. To support his family, Inukai worked full-time as an art director at McCann Erickson during the day, producing art at night into the early morning. They ranged from abstract oil paintings and sumi-e (ink) paintings to silkscreens composed of bold colors and geometric shapes to even sculptures and children’s books.

But interest in Inukai’s work is slowly changing, nearly 40 years after his death, with his first institutional solo exhibition currently on view at the Japan Society in New York, through June 25. Curated by Tiffany Lambert, the Japan Society Gallery’s interim director, the show features over 100 works by the artist, dating from the late 1960s through 1985, the year of his death, showing the range of Inukai’s experimentation in style and technique, all the while incorporating and grappling with his Japanese heritage.

“You see American abstraction, Pop art, Op art as influences in his silkscreen prints,” Lambert said in an interview, “and then you also see the washi [handmade paper], the use of sumi-e (ink painting) as a pathway to abstraction in his work. For me, I see that he’s trying to find his own way to visualize some of those artistic and cultural traditions in his life.”

That journey of understanding his cultural identity filtered through various art historical influences is reflected in the show’s exhibition design. “We divided the galleries into two distinct zones: one light, airy, and approachable, the other dark, quiet, and reflective. Each space is intended to emphasize the particular nature of the work,” exhibition designers Masamichi Udagawa and Sigi Moeslinger, of the New York–based firm Antenna Design, told ARTnews.

In the first gallery, Inukai’s playful silkscreen prints are filled with vibrant colors, shapes, and lines. In one untitled painting from 1978, a parabola made of deep red as it changes to orange is set against various contrasting blocks of blue with a red dot at its center. The overall effect is mesmerizing. Surrounding that work, several works on papers, framed in light wood, lean against custom-built shelves, in the same light wood.

A second smaller gallery acts as a transition from those colorful abstractions to the moodier ones he made later, displaying here Inukai’s initial experiment with sumi-e ink calligraphy. In Spiro Flower 2 (1978), Inukai pairs a shape of swirling circles formed into a triangle with what appear to be two characters written in calligraphy. They are not, however, any characters legible in Japanese.

“There’s actually no language written there that’s legible,” Lambert said. “From what we know, Inukai didn’t speak any Japanese.” She added that the swirling shapes could be interpreted as a family crest or even “conjure the knots on packaging and the obi belts of the kimono.”

Inukai had once explained the work’s meaning to his stepdaughter Maggie Hannan but the exact details have now been lost to memory. But even more than their exact meaning, the pieces represent Inukai’s overall approach to his art-making, which over the decades was still indebted to seeing the landscapes of Japan for the first time during that fateful visit in 1954. “Kyohei just loved the juxtaposition of the old and new,” she said. “When my friends used to visit, all of them were floored by his limitless abilities to express himself through art.”

The exhibition then takes a dramatic change in tone upon entering the third and final gallery, where Inukai’s sumi-e ink paintings are shown in a dimmed Zen “rock garden” that mirror the stone-shaped patterns he expressed in ink on handmade paper. Inukai’s longing to connect with his cultural roots through his art is further underscored through the symbolism of stones like this, called suiseki, in Japanese culture, which has been appreciated for their aesthetics since the 7th century.

“The sumi-e works in the final gallery made us think of something grounded and eternal, so we transformed the space into a ‘rock garden’ where visitors can sit on the benches, slow down, and contemplate what they see,” Udagawa and Moeslinger, the exhibition designers, said.

The importance of his Japanese ancestry extended beyond Inukai’s art-making, too. Though his father was professionally ostracized after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Inukai instilled in his children a sense of pride in their Japanese heritage; he would often wear a kimono at home and was an expert cook in Japanese cuisine.

In addition to being a prolific artist, Inukai was also an empathetic author, penning several children’s books, like The Peevish Penguin (1955) or The Owl Who Hated the Dark (1969), all of which tell of how the titular character learned to accept their differences as strengths. Inukai’s daughter Ariane Tallman recalled, “I was made fun of due to my looks when I was in school, and daddy reassured me that I need to be proud of the fact that I was different.”

New York–based Japanese artist Natsuki Takauji said that in Inukai’s art, she sees the tendrils of generational trauma that the Inukai family experienced during World War II as Japanese Americans. 

“I think the Japanese haven’t talked enough about what happened to them after Pearl Harbor and how it changed their lives and perspectives,” said Takauji. “This damage exists subtly in Inukai’s work. I felt his strong intention to commit to his roots as an artist despite an unpromising career. I was moved by his sincerity to seek and recuperate; the result seems so striking after decades.”

In 2008, they formalized the project as a residency program, Denniston Hill (DH), which became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. In Mehretu’s words, the artists “began thinking about what it means to have access to a space, with a particular history, as queer folks of color.” She also framed the project as one that could potentially contribute to the “history of the decolonial project” of land stewardship.

The program has slowly scaled up, and in 2021 hired its first full-time executive director, Megan Steinman, who said DH is “an organization that doesn’t rely on individual people, but on a collection of relationships that are formed by how people work together.”

DH is one of several artist-led residency programs in the Northeast that have been formed in the past decade. Seeking cheaper, bigger spaces, their founders have ventured beyond New York City, and have in the process formed these initiatives in an effort to stave off the isolation of traditional studio practices. Some of these programs have even evolved into institutions in their own right. 

Among the more well-known is the Church, formed by the artist couple Eric Fischl and April Gornik in Sag Harbor, on Long Island. Their program includes residencies and an exhibition space, and was opened in 2021 in a deconsecrated 19th-century Methodist church they purchased in 2017.

Fischl and Gornik have lived in the town since 2004, and wanted to establish a hub for both engaging locals and bringing in outside artists to make new work. To achieve this, they appointed a board and staff early on.

“Our biggest problem in terms of financing is that people think that April and I are the ones funding it, and think it’s a vanity project,” Fischl said in an interview. “Part of what we’re doing, and what Sheri [Pasquarella, the Church’s director] is doing, is trying to dissuade people from thinking that. We’re going to help support the Church as long as it’s viable, but the public needs to want it to be there.”  

Support has been strong in its inaugural year, and programming has flourished. “We started with Martha Graham Dance Company before we officially even opened because it fell into our laps,” Gornik recalled.

‘I Pick Them Up in My Vehicle’

Jeremy Dennis, who sits on the board of the Church, is the founder of his own residency program. An artist and a member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, he began Ma’s House in 2021 in his family’s historic home, where he and his partner live and work alongside the residents. The program is open to Indigenous artists and artists of color, who can send their interest via the organization’s website.

“I pick them up in my vehicle, and then they are set to do whatever they want for two weeks,” Dennis said. There are few requirements—residents must only give a public talk—and any artists who participate get a small stipend, thanks to funds from Creatives Rebuild New York. “The only difficulty is that with Shinnecock rules, you can only have guests if you’re physically here,” Dennis explained. That means he must balance having visiting artists with his own residency schedule. He’s managed it well, having hosted 19 residents and overseeing regular programs, including a weekly beadwork workshop led by his mother.

Ma’s House is one example of a smaller and scrappier residency and exhibition space. Others of this scale have popped up as a result of artists seeking affordable studios outside the city.  

Cheryl Donegan recalled the ease of showing her paintings at Freddy, a project run by painter Joshua Abelow in an old Methodist chapel in Monticello, New York. “It was a luxury,” she said. “I packed a rental car with everything I had made during the pandemic, didn’t worry about shipping costs, and we kicked around ideas.”

Abelow began Freddy in a Baltimore storefront and moved the project upstate when he bought the chapel in 2016. He paints in the nave, and the gallery space is a room connected to his bedroom. For Donegan’s show, he temporarily installed works over his bed and on the paint-chipped exterior.

Except for the occasional sale of artwork, Freddy’s is self-funded. “It’s not a good fit for a lot of artists because many want to have that monetary exchange be one of the primary goals,” he said in an interview. “It’s for folks who are going to be excited about the context that Freddy can provide.” That includes the change of pace. “When you come up here, it’s not like when you go to a gallery downtown, where you walk in, and you look at stuff, and then you leave. You come here and spend an afternoon, and you’re also in my house. Sometimes we all get a meal after.” 

Walter’s, the contemporary wing of the Walter Elwood Museum, is the brainchild of Brent Birnbaum. After finding his dream studio space in an old carpet factory in Amsterdam, New York, Birnbaum was brought to a quirky local museum to sign the lease. He recalled thinking: “It is 18 rooms. All have different carpet. Everything is crooked and dusty. I was in heaven.”

Birnbaum proposed curating a contemporary program to the museum’s one staff member, and he was given 1,200 square feet free of charge. He built out a gallery space and a zine store. The exhibition program merges works by artists from the greater Albany region with those from the city. “Moving forward,” he said, “the museum is going to let artists pull objects from the collection and bring them into the gallery or otherwise respond to them.”

Cavernous, subterranean architecture is the draw of lower_cavity, a residency in western Massachusetts run by multimedia artist Anthony Discenza. In 2020, he began inviting friends to work in the 3,000-square-foot basement of an old papermill, where he rents the above-ground levels as commercial space. “I leave it up to the artists how they want to use the residency,” Discenza told ARTnews.

The artist Supermrin spent two months at lower_cavity making and installing a malleable, plant-based material she has developed from lawn clippings. Sourcing brush from local orchards, she sculpted the material into the basement’s arches and hallways, “I think the most useful thing was having an environment that is not your typical gallery space,” she said in an interview. “Because my work is so experimental and biological, it’s been useful to utilize a large space without too many conditions for sanitizing.” 

Another former resident, Jak Ritger, shared that lower_cavity is unique in how difficult it was to maneuver. “It’s massive, so I was exhausted just walking back and forth while I was making my light installation. It’s also really dirty, all of my equipment got dusty.” Still, Ritger cited it as an exciting challenge. He made photos, installations, and research-based work in response to the building’s industrial history. 

Ritger put lower_cavity on the radar of Joshua Citarella and the online collective Do Not Research. DNR, as it’s known for short, formed when artists began making works and blog posts in response to readings Citarella made public on Discord, from courses he taught at RISD and SVA. By last spring, DNR had over 1,600 users and was seeking a venue for its first de-virtualized exhibition. lower_cavity’s decentralized floor plan was appealing. “We were the first show to be in this sunken room that looks a little bit like a catacomb or a doomsday bunker,” Citarella said. “The space played into a lot of the radical internet politics vibes that were very present in the show.” The exhibition featured 46 artworks by 41 artists. Over 150 people came for the opening; many had never met in person. 

Citarella says he couldn’t have imagined a better venue for DNR’s inaugural show, and that was largely due to it being artist-run. “Tony was like our guiding angel through this whole process of a rigorous install. It was a profound experience.”

A Residency’s Lifespan

Running a program is taxing for an artist to balance on top of their own practice. In an interview, Titus Kaphar, who cofounded NXTHVN, a residency and fellowship organization for artists of color in New Haven, Connecticut, stressed this: “I want artists who feel like this is something that they’re being called to do. And not to feel like it’s an obligation or a burden. I hope that this doesn’t become a necessary part of one’s existence, as artists of color in the world, that to be successful you have to create your own institution. Because that’s a lot of work.” 

Some endeavors, like Denniston Hill, the Church, and NXTHVN, have staff and structures in place for posterity, while others may have shorter runs. “I don’t know what I would do with a staff, ” Discenza admitted. “At some point, I will not be in Western Massachusetts, and at some point, I will not have access to this kind of space. lower_cavity will have its natural end.” 

Artists are perhaps best positioned to understand the needs of other artists, and experiment with new ways of meeting these needs, especially when challenges arise. An underlying motivation for all of these pursuits is that this work can be generative for the instigators, too. “I’m doing this because it feels consistent with what my work, in general, is about” Kaphar said. “It feels revelatory in my continued experience as an artist.”

Earlier this year, Avrum Gray, a Chicago businessman, donated a major gift of 74 Edgar Degas bronzes to Purdue University in Indiana. The market value of the collection, which includes the famed Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen, is said to be around $52 million.

This gift, ARTnews wrote at the time, “transformed the university into one of the top stewards of artworks by the famed French Impressionist in the country.” Further details about the donation, however, suggest that stewardship may be more challenging than the university initially anticipated.

The bronzes gifted to Purdue were created by the Valsuani Foundry in France, which began marketing Little Dancer casts in the late 1990s and sets of 73 Degas bronzes several years later. One set of bronzes acquired by the M.T. Abraham Center For the Visual Arts in Paris has been shown in several venues outside the U.S., including museums in Athens, Israel, and Russia.

Across the years, experts have raised concerns about the authenticity of these works, and now, those allegations need to be considered anew in light of the Purdue gift, the announcement of which did not mention the controversy over the sculptures.

Valsuani casts in the U.S. were acquired primarily through art dealer Walter Maibaum, who sold the bronzes to the Purdue donor, and Gregory Hedberg, a senior consultant for European art at New York’s Hirschl & Adler Galleries. Maibaum markets Valsuani casts under the rubric “The Degas Sculpture Project,” a private company owned by Maibaum and his wife. For more than a decade, these dealers and the Valsuani Foundry’s owner, the late Leonardo Benatov, have been protagonists in international disputes about the history, merits, and monetary value of these Valsuani casts. With this gift, apparently the first of its kind in the US, Purdue now becomes a new venue for the ethical issues Maibaum and Benatov’s work entailed.

Beginning in 1919, the Hébrard Foundry in Paris produced the familiar Degas bronzes of dancers and horses on view in major museums in Europe and the US. Degas created wax and clay sculptures for more than 40 years, and the Hébrard bronzes were cast from 73 of the 150 sculptures found in the artist’s studio after his death in 1917. The Valsuani bronzes, in contrast, originate from a previously unknown cache of plaster replicas of Degas sculptures Benatov discovered after he purchased the Valsuani Foundry properties in 1981. Many of these plasters depart in various degrees from the well-known Hébrard bronzes, especially Valsuani’s plaster Little Dancer. In 1997 and 1998, Benatov began creating bronze copies of his plaster Little Dancer, marketing them as high-quality copies. On sale for $60,000 each, these replicas were commercially quite successful. 

In the early 2000s, by coincidence, Maibaum and Hedberg each encountered a Benatov Little Dancer bronze in Paris. Both decided the figures were superior in demeanor and anatomy to the well-known Hébrard casts. Maibaum concluded that “only Degas himself could have created something so masterful,” and agreed to buy several Benatov Dancer bronzes. 

In 2004 Maibaum arranged to purchase Benatov’s entire ensemble of plasters, except the Little Dancer, and negotiated exclusive rights to sell complete sets of the plasters that would be cast in bronze at Valsuani. Hedberg, who was especially enchanted by the Valsuani Little Dancer, bought the plaster version for Hirschl & Adler and sold it to a Los Angeles collector for $400,000, with the condition that it could not be re-sold and must be donated to a museum.

Hedberg had already begun to convince himself that the Valsuani plasters were made during Degas’s lifetime, with his approval. Certain facts complicated his supposition: the provenance and history of the Valsuani plasters is unknown, except for one possibly unreliable reference to their presence at the foundry in 1955.

Many of the Valsuani plasters differ in structure or detail from the Hébrard bronzes cast from Degas’s original wax and clay sculptures shortly after the artist’s death. All but four of the original sculptures cast by Hébrard still exist. Most are in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington D.C. and can be aligned with corresponding Hébrard bronzes.

In his dedicated quest to validate the Valsuani “lifetime” plasters, Hedberg has approached scholarship inconsistent with his convictions as impediments to be ignored or re-managed. For instance, Hedberg points to Degas’s long friendship with the artist Albert Bartholomé. Bartholomé was a painter who, with Degas’s encouragement, turned his attention to sculpture in the mid-1880s. Hedberg asserts, as if it were a matter of historical record, that plasters found at Valsuani were made by Bartholomé during Degas’s lifetime. The inconsistencies between the Valsuani plasters and Degas’s extant wax and clay sculptures and the Hébrard bronzes, Hedberg maintains, are evidence that Bartholomé’s plasters record Degas’s original versions of his sculptures before later or posthumous changes were made. The face depicted in the Valsuani Head, Study the Portrait of Mme. Salle, for example, is an almost unrecognizable variant of the original wax study accurately represented in the Hébrard casts. This kind of deviation, in Hedberg’s view, illustrates Bartholomé’s role in documenting the progression of Degas’s creative practice.          

Advised of Hedberg’s claims, French scholar Thérèse Burollet, the leading authority on Bartholomé who has studied his life and work for more than 50 years, replied to ARTnews, “Nothing in the documents consulted, letters, archives, press articles or family traditions allows one to think that Bartholomé cast in plaster a single work by Degas in his lifetime.” Dismissing Burollet’s statement as “categorically false,” Hedberg remains undeterred in his matter-of-fact statements about Bartholomé’s lifetime production of Degas plasters and the history of corresponding Valsuani casts.

Hedberg’s plaster Little Dancer narrative is especially creative. Degas exhibited his wax Little Dancer at the Impressionist Exhibition in 1881, the only time a sculpture by him ever appeared in public during the artist’s lifetime. His Dancer is now in the National Gallery’s collection and differs conspicuously from the Valsuani plaster version in its body type, pose, face, and hair.

Hedberg insists that the Valsuani plaster represents the wax Dancer as it actually appeared in the 1881 exhibition. After 1903, he says, Degas radically revised his 1881 wax sculpture, converting the figure into what he describes as the “inferior” wax version now in the National Gallery and replicated in the Hébrard bronzes. The National Gallery’s extensive scientific testing and structural analysis of the wax Dancer do not confirm the conversion, but Hedberg and Maibaum continue to take exception to this analysis.

In his 2016 book, Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen: The Earlier Version That Helped Spark the Birth of Modern Art, Hedberg makes other astonishing claims. The lower-class identity and iconic frontal pose of the wax version of the Valsuani plaster shown in 1881, he argues, impacted the aesthetic of pioneering modernists such as Whistler, Manet, and Seurat, and initiated a formal and conceptual legacy echoed, for example, in Frank Stella’s late 1950s “black paintings” and Warhol’s frontal soup cans.

The cumulative effects of Maibaum’s marketing strategies and Hedberg’s campaign to establish a history for the Valsuani plasters have already encircled Purdue University’s reception and planning for their gift. In an announcement of the donation, for example, the university reports that the late Alex Rosenberg provided the appraisal of their collection, “valuing the donation at just over $21 million with a market value of as much as $53 million.” What the release did not mention was that Rosenberg had organized exhibitions of the Valsuani bronzes titled “All the Sculptures of Edgar Degas” in Tel Aviv and Havana. He was clearly not a neutral arbiter. The $53 million “market value” he assigned to the university’s gift is a speculative figure derived from the value of Hébrard casts on the open art market, not private sales of the Valsuani casts.

Optimism about meeting the challenges of responsible stewardship of the collection prevails at Purdue, nevertheless. University spokesperson Dr. Arne Flaten, a professor of art history and head of the Patti and Rusty Rueff School of Design, Art and Performance, acknowledges that “the university is aware of the debate surrounding the collection. Beyond the beauty of the objects themselves, we look forward to the exceptional educational opportunities the gift provides for engaging with complicated questions regarding the art world, the art market, and notions of originality and reproduction.”

The “alternative facts” in play around the Valsuani casts will increase the complexity of these objectives, as will Hedberg’s new book on the Valsuani plasters, to be released in July. As conversations around the Valsuani casts continue, perhaps other educational institutions will be encouraged to consider with great care the acquisition or exhibition of these contested sculptures.  

Ogunji created her new works using thread, graphite, and ink on tracing paper, the majority of them in Paris, where the Lagos-based artist is doing a residency. The program has afforded her the opportunity to learn, explore, and experiment, and to research textiles, couture, lace, and embroidery, all of which have informed her newest body of work dealing with ancestral stories and the nature of memory.

Ogunji’s work has previously been shown at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Palais de Tokyo, and the Brooklyn Museum. She has participated in the Biennale of Sydney, the Stellenbosch Triennale, the Bienal de São Paulo, and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.

ARTnews spoke to Ogunji ahead of the ‘Cake’ opening at the Fridman Gallery on May 12 about her practice and her New York solo debut.

ARTnews: Can you talk about where you created this body of work and how that has affected the drawings?

Wura-Natasha Ogunji: I have been in residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris since November of last year. Almost all the work in the exhibition was created there. Being in Paris has shifted my process in many ways. Coming from Lagos, [the most populous city] in Nigeria, a tropical country, and arriving in winter was amazing. In a sense, the cold allowed me to hibernate, to go into the drawing cave. I spent a lot of time drawing, sewing, and marking with ink after several years of thinking I would leave my drawing practice behind.

Going to museums, performances, the theater was, of course, deeply inspiring, but I found myself most moved by the history of textiles and haute couture in France. I took a few classes with Rebecca Devaney, who founded Textile Tours of Paris, which allowed me to dive deeply into the history, materials, and process. And lace, so many incredible examples of lacemaking. 

I also learned how to do free machine embroidery, which allows for drawing with a sewing machine. Though my drawings are all hand-stitched, I love the feel of stitches made on the sewing machine, those single lines. Some of those experiments (and mistakes) appear in this exhibition.   

How did your background in photography and film help in putting together this body of work?

I draw on tracing paper, the kind architects use for preliminary sketches and renderings. The paper has always felt filmic to me in its translucency. It even moves a bit like film in my hands; it has a specific curve and structure. 

And the color—canary or buff—gives it a presence even before I begin drawing, so the space of the paper is important. Its language, a character, place. I often think of it as water—sea or river, perhaps. The images repeat from drawing to drawing, and there is a lot of motion through the frame. It feels quite similar to creating a photograph.

You mentioned in a previous interview that new work starts with an image, a line of text, or a title that comes to you, and then you follow that through and see how it goes. Was it the same with this latest body of work?

Yes, for sure. There are repeating images including runners, and characters from films (Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki, for example), as well as composite figures. I’m also fascinated with how a line of text becomes the architecture of a drawing. A phrase may come to me which then determines the shape of the drawing. It’s not necessarily a literal structure, more vibrational or sensorial, but also specific to the language of the phrase. For example, the drawing A Normal Day of Love and Brutality.

What’s the story behind the title of this exhibition, “Cake?”

The title came from a drawing. There’s figure running and another figure emerging from their body. They’re holding something that reminds me of cake.

There’s a drawing by artist Youmna Chlala that I’ve been enamored of for years. It’s titled This is a cake, not a city. I love the interplay between the literal cake and the map of a city, which I believe is Beirut. I think about the limits of knowledge, especially when it comes to a specific place, a country, or a people, for example. There is cake, and there is deep knowledge. Deep knowledge can’t be described in a few sentences or paragraphs, or even in an artist statement. I can pretend to tell you what the drawing is about, but what’s even more important is your own experience and connection.

In what ways would you say your practice has evolved over the years?

It’s definitely a spiral—exploration and expansion of new images and materials, and a constant return to earlier forms of making. Sometimes I feel that I’m making the same drawing over and over again.

What can you share about the site-specific thread installation?

I wanted to make a drawing you could enter or lines that suggest a space, something encompassing. I’m more and more interested in the thread itself, in how much I can say or evoke with these simple lines in space.

Do you find it liberating to be able to create the work you want, not necessarily what the market supposedly wants?

Always. But isn’t this the nature of being an artist? Art is infinite; the market comes and goes.

Can you talk about the early video works to be presented in the gallery and the decision to include them in this exhibition?

The videos are an elemental part of my creative practice. They speak about my ongoing interests in land and the body, what we carry, the marks we leave, presence and liminality, crossings, and arrival. I like how they speak with this body of drawings.

But the selection of artworks—which included pieces by figures known well beyond the art world like Ai Weiwei and Forensic Architecture—risked undermining the show’s democratic ambitions by indulging in ghoulish, conspiracy-adjacent suggestions about who holds power and why. “States of Violence” is then a product and embodiment of the complexities of political art today.

It’s only possible to make and display works that condemn the inner corruption of liberal democracies by using the very freedoms codified in those same liberal democracies, even if they fail to live up to their own standards in so many other ways.

There’s a strange, backhanded generosity at work here: unless self-espoused radicals openly seek to commit acts of terrorism or violence, the liberal state doesn’t crush people motivated by insurrectionary energies that might want to get rid of the state; rather, it disempowers them, allowing them to exist in and only in art, a space of social and political detachment that can’t really do much.

The life-size marble statue of Silencio (Royal Courts of Justice) (2023) by Spanish collective Democracia, for example, is a very literal take on the idea that conformity is ensured by ferocious threats from law enforcement officers. This statue presents a steely-gazed police officer in riot gear bearing guns, with ammunition belts tied to his waist, pressing his finger to his lips.

The idea that any government, with its monopoly on violence, would or could employ other tactics seems, at best, overly optimistic about what a future society might be like and, at worst, credulous about the nature of the power it wants to criticise. Perhaps this forgets Michel Foucault’s amusing twist on Carl von Clausewitz’s famous, but often misquoted, statement: “Politics is the continuation of war by other means.”

Now 59, Xiyadie is gaining international recognition for his cut-paper art, which has come to look immensely different from traditional forms intended to adorn windows. His works record his experiences as a gay man in China, often showing intimate, candid encounters with lovers that are set within vivid environments teeming with plants and animals. Occupying delicate sheets as large as nearly 5-feet-square, the dense but harmonious scenes demonstrate how Xiyadie has harnessed traditional skills to his own purposes. Many are brightened with water-based dyes and Chinese pigments that are enticingly flamboyant as cake icing.

“He has this incredible technical dexterity,” Rosario Güiraldes, associate curator at New York’s Drawing Center, said. “And also this incredible way of subverting and estranging this ancient art form.” 

The Drawing Center is currently hosting Xiyadie’s first institutional exhibition in the US, which functions as a kind of mini-survey. Titled “Queer Cut Utopias”—a nod to the scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of queer utopias—it examines four decades of Xiyadie’s practice, featuring works from 1982 to 2021 spread across two floors of the gallery. The show, along with a documentary about Xiyadie by Anna Sophie Loewenberg and catalogue essays by Güiraldes, Hera Chan, and Alvin Li, distances Xiyadie from the trope of the inscrutable and isolated outsider artist.

Xiyadie’s biography might otherwise be easily fetishized, as is the case of many artists who have no formal art-school training. The artist, who is based in Shandong province, has rarely exhibited his works, in part because showing images of queer love in his home country risks government censorship. But he also made art covertly for years, for his eyes only, to express himself while hiding his identity from his wife and children.

The large-scale work Gate (1992) alludes to his double life and its tensions. It shows the cross-section of a house, where, inside, beneath a blanket of flowers, a woman nuzzles a child; just beyond a door that appears to be ajar, a man performs oral sex on another man, their bodies sprouting plants whose vines climb toward the roof. In Sewn (1999), a man confined by walls sits on a sword’s edge, sewing up his penis while gazing at a portrait of another man. Such works convey the artist’s “fractured sense of self, or even the guilt that I think Xiyadie had for many years,” Güiraldes said. “He really did feel like something was wrong with him.”

Xiyadie is open about this past, sharing how his misery and helplessness led him to undergo evaluation at a hospital. “This confirmed that I am gay,” he said. “Everything I went through proves that homosexuality is a natural phenomenon that cannot be changed. After this, I know who I am and became confident.” 

Creating his art is a liberating experience. “With scissors in my hand,” Xiyadie added, “I immersed myself freely in my ideal world. I feel free and in harmony, expressing the highest sentiment in my heart.”

Born in 1963 into a large farming family, Xiyadie has “beautiful memories of the spring” from time spent in his grandfather’s garden—which was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, due to the Communist regime’s forced redistribution of rural land. He knew he liked men from a young age, but it was only in the 1980s, when he moved to Xi’an for work, that he began making art about his desires. He married a woman, and they had two children. 

In 2005, seeking better opportunities to support his family, he relocated to Beijing, joining the swelling class of migrant workers moving to cities. In the capital, he discovered a new freedom as he began frequenting cruising spots like parks and bathhouses. He also gave himself a new pseudonym to protect his identity that means “Siberian Butterfly”—embodying his hope for surviving and living without restraint amid harsh conditions. 

Beijing is also where Xiyadie first exhibited his works. He met the independent curator Yang Zi and the editor of Gayspot magazine, Zhao Ke, who convinced Xiyadie to show his cuttings at the Beijing LGBT Center in 2010. “For the first time,” Xiyadie said, “I felt very lucky to be in Beijing.” 

But the exhibition, which included works by other queer artists, was censored by law enforcement. “Many artists’ works were taken away by the police, but mine remained,” he said. With a “haha,” he added, “The police mentioned that the paper cutting was very good. In fact, I don’t think they fully understood my work.”

In China, paper cutting is highly esteemed and widely seen. The medium, which has been named a form of Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO, is “such a legible vernacular art form in China, there’s this sort of instant recognition of it,” according to Güiraldes.

The nature of the medium, where cuts through one sheet of paper result in interconnected lines, also tends toward complex positive and negative shapes that can take time to parse. In Xiyadie’s paper cuts, dynamic human figures are wholly entwined with plant life and ornate architectural motifs: tendrils sprout from toes, extending into blossom-filled trees; hair doubles as fecund soil from which flowers grow, their contours becoming those of fruit, birds, goats, roofs, the moon.

This living environment indicates “a harmony that is ecological,” Hera Chan writes in her catalog essay. “It naturalizes queer love into built structures and further encapsulates all that into nature. These are images that show the unity of all lifeforms flourishing, deeply embedded with each other, an antidote to environmental extraction.”

Many of Xiyadie’s earlier works, in particular, exist in their own blissful, verdant worlds. In Flowerpot (1991), two men have sex at the center of a flowerpot, their limbs evoking roots and their heads, seeming to radiate with light, amid flowers and birds. The image is of seclusion and freedom.  

“I am trying to search for a free and harmonious way to live,” Xiyadie told me. “In my dream world, there is a simple house at the foot of a large mountain with endless pine trees. In front of the house, there is a tiny stream with flowing water that you can see through to the bottom, where little fish swim languidly and freely.”

Every scene is based on Xiyadie’s own real experiences. As he started showing his art, he seemed to increasingly situate acts of love in more specific locations. Gate (Tiananmen), 2016, is an unabashed depiction of two men openly embracing at Tiananmen Square, the site where a government massacre had taken place 27 years earlier. 

There’s a voyeuristic aspect to it all—a fact underlined by a 2018 domestic scene in which a man appears to lust after his electrician under the indifferent eye of a cat. Xiyadie put it simply: “It is a record of nature and man.”

The Drawing Center exhibition’s largest and most recent work—measuring 4 ½ by nearly 10 feet—demonstrates this sentiment with full force. Titled Kaiyang (2021), it brims with dozens of figures of all scales performing sexual acts in gardens, outside temples, in a bathhouse. The panorama stands out for how it acknowledges Xiyadie’s own desires while situating himself within a broader community he is gradually coming to know.

Near the end of our conversation, he told me about an unforgettable experience he had while exhibiting in Sweden a decade ago. A man and his boyfriend were looking at his art and holding each other, weeping. “Seeing that brought tears to my eyes,” Xiyadie says. “I am moved and feel alive by this response. Through my work they have come to understand nature, including understanding and accepting my natural state!

“I am liberated, and I finally live to understand what and where I want to belong in my life. Truly, this is my motivation.”

Fifty years later, Washington, D.C., gallery von ammon co. presents Sujeto Cuantificado: Quantified Subject, Chilean artist Ignacio Gatica’s solo show, imbued with symbolism of the unbridled capitalism and consumerism propagated by a neoliberal system experimented on in Chile in the post-coup years, further developed in Washington, D.C., and emulated in corporate-run New York City, where Gatica now resides.

“The real tragedy of Pinochet’s reign took place 5,000 miles from Washington, but so much of the narrative was orchestrated in the gallery’s own backyard,” gallery owner Todd von Ammon told ARTnews. Von Ammon said that choosing to exhibit Gatica’s work “was one of the easiest and most definitive decisions I’ve made since opening the gallery … For me, this felt like the highest expression of the personal intersecting with the political.”

Born in 1988, Gatica was raised in a Chile remade by the so-called “Chicago boys,” a group of Latin American economists who studied under University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The Chicago Boys were known for initiating a series of neoliberal reforms around deregulation, privatization, and free-trade liberalization.

Activist Naomi Klein famously characterized these policies, instituted during concurrent catastrophic events, such as the coup, as a “shock doctrine,” replicated around the world, and, in the case of Chile, resulting in the dismantling of its public sector and social safety net. In his work, Gatica speaks to the austerity behind the excess imposed by a neoliberalized economy, providing a critical commentary on what he calls the “mall-ification” of Latin America.

The 3,500-square-foot gallery at first appears sparse, a purposeful curation to create an atmosphere of absence in opposition to materialism. In the show’s accompanying publication, curator Isabella Achenbach describes the work as an “… automated format and sleek aesthetic [that] is an example of technology and architecture combining to create desirable, alluring forms.” The aesthetic of balance and order is meant to evoke Pinochet and the Chicago Boys’ tactics of austerity and control that produced an inhumane system dictated by economic production.

Looming over the sleek gallery floor is Gatica’s most ambitious work to date and the centerpiece of the show, Stones Above Diamonds (2020–23). Eight feet in diameter, the installation features a circular stock ticker with an LED display of financial data from the New York Stock Exchange; visitors can swipe artist-made credit cards through a reader in the gallery to reprogram the display to show phrases (mostly graffiti Gatica collected during protests on the streets of both Santiago and New York) that transform the focus from stock prices to a collective message that speaks back to the debt economy, rampant consumerism, and the delusion of living in late capitalism. These phrases—ORGANIZE YOUR RAGE, THE ECONOMY AS GOD, THE DAILY LIFE THAT IMPOSES ON US, SLAUGHTER ZONE, ARE YOUR DESIRES YOURS, ALL CURRENCY IS FAKE, DICTATORSHIP COLOR, I STILL WAIT FOR YOU MY FREEDOM—become found poems. Photos on the credit cards of vacant and boarded-up retail stores, taken during the 2020 Black Lives Matters protests in New York, call further attention to the disparities cultivated in this economic landscape.

At the heart of Quantified Subject are ideas of credit and transaction, which Achenbach writes are not “clean, one-to-one form[s] of exchange,” but rather ones that “exist through language, translation, and quotidian gestures.” Language and exchange become devices for Gatica to halt the mechanics of finance and bring poetic humanity into his work, which is in direct opposition to the uniform and reductive form of language that exists in capitalism. Bank of America chose the name Visa, for example, for one of its first credit cards because it sounds the same in nearly every language. Gatica’s fixation on language is in relation not only to brand logos, which litter the streets of Manhattan and his work, but also in the sense that language is the arbiter of transactions, namely, credit- and debt-bearing ones.

Gatica’s commentary on the use (and manipulation) of language to obfuscate neoliberalism’s true intentions and implications parallels the arguments of French Marxist philosopher Guy Debord in his seminal Society of the Spectacle (1967). Debord argued that, in the future, capitalism will debase humanity to the point that nothing we experience will be the actual thing, only a representation of it. Gatica sees our consumer-driven society, and the language at its center, as driving this change.

“I try to use verbal language in my work to problematize subjects that define the context and landscape I inhabit. The act of problematizing and thinking about this landscape through objects, text, and moving images helps me to understand it, and at the same time makes me an accomplice of what I’m aiming to decode,” Gatica said about his use of language.

Indeed, the manipulation of language was at the core of the Powell Memorandum, a 1971 document that is seen by many as launching and legitimizing the neoliberal project. Two years before the Chilean coup, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell warned that “the American free enterprise system was under attack” and urged the US government and corporations to respond through privatization, before “communists, new leftists, and other revolutionaries” endangered the “strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.” Like money, fear is a language we all understand and seek to avoid.

To that end, Gatica’s work asks the question, where do nuance and creativity fit in a world of one language (money) and dictated by a fear of not having enough? Ironically, the very words that populate Gatica’s work are those that neoliberals use to justify their policies. Facing housing, incarceration, and debt crises, Americans are arguably less free than they ever have been, and the images of abandoned retail stores in Gatica’s show are the closest depictions to what we have as an authentic life.

About his work, Gatica says he hopes that those who visit the exhibit engage with it physically and in the spirit of what he calls emancipación poética (poetic emancipation), his term for using poetry to free an object or a situation from its common use or understanding. The objects in the show, he says, carry that sense with them.

Indeed they do: consider Stones Above Diamonds and Preface to an Automated Stratosphere (2022), which displays the debt of the world’s middle-to-low-income countries, according to 2022 World Bank data, on a long narrow column of LED screens. Achenbach likens the piece to the National Debt Clock that stands near Times Square, displaying the trillion-dollar, and growing, public US debt. For sociologist Jean Baudrillard, the clock represented “the disappearance of the referential universe.” Gatica’s work explores similar abstractions of value, though, in this case, with a gaze turned toward the rest of the world.

Gatica derives inspiration from a multiplicity of writers, artists, and activists, including Orlando Letelier, a Chilean politician, who, in 1976, a month after writing an open letter in The Nation exposing the “awful toll” of the Chicago Boys’ policies, was assassinated only a mile away from von ammon co.

“It’s a very early, almost illuminated text about what would happen with Chile under the new economic interventions imposed by the U.S. under Pinochet’s regime,” Gatica said of the letter. Almost prophetically, Letelier’s warnings to the world about neoliberalism came true.

Gatica’s photographs and multimedia sculptures reverberate Letelier’s warnings and their aftermath. Perhaps, 50 years from now, Gatica’s commentary will resonate for another artist. Sujeto Cuantificado: Quantified Subject is on view through May 7.