My pieces begin as titles. Titles come to me when I’m washing dishes, or running, or showering. A recent example is Aloha Sadness (2023): I thought, That’s so dumb, but also so real. Aloha means goodbye, but also hello. I asked what would Aloha Sadness look like? I did a little research—looked up tiki culture, watched Lilo & Stitch, played that song “Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride” in the studio.

I’m driven by curiosity, and I can get interested in literally anything. I’m less interested in judging whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, than I am in asking, What is this thing? Why is this thing? Exhibitions are a helpful way of focusing my curiosity. I can point to one and say, “That’s my oceanography era,” or that’s my how-TVs-work era.

For me, “artist” is kind of like a catchall term. Takashi Murakami’s 2008 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum drew me to art. He was making mugs, pins, paintings… I thought, Maybe I could do one of those. I’m also a writer, but there’s something about the authority of language that feels daunting, whereas in art there’s more wiggle room.

The title of my recent show at Tara Downs gallery in New York was “Live,” and I left it deliberately unclear as to whether I meant the noun or the verb. I wanted to permit the viewer/reader to take it however they want. There’s something beautiful about the state of not-knowing, and I want my viewers to feel curious. I never want it to be, “I’m the artist, listen to me.”

I started making my quilt works in 2013, hoping to combine my love for making with my interest in painting. I wanted to be able to physically pick up colors and move them around. I also love learning how things work, down to the molecular level. If you’re dyeing something, you have to ask, Is this a cellulose fiber or is it a protein fiber? Some pieces incorporate resist dyes using wax. Since wax is nonpolar and water is a polar molecule, the two materials don’t interact.

Recently I was Duolingo-ing Norwegian, and decided to make a Norwegian-language web drama called Svak. I wanted to write a script in Norwegian to explore the materiality of weakness; I’m weak in that language. The project was about carving space for curiosity without utility, learning just for the sake of it.  

After training those artisans, Adams began working as he does to this day, unraveling Islamic prayer rugs and meticulously reweaving them with beads that evoke the zikr or Tasbih strand that Muslims use for prayer. It’s “a symbolic gesture,” he said, a way to make his own space within Islam as a queer mixed-race Muslim, and to consider “the aspects of my identity that were in conflict with each other.” Today Adams employs a team of 16, including his former painting students and their relatives, as well as his own family members, to help him finish sprawling tapestries that have the scale and wall-power of paintings. Several works incorporate worn-out linoleum flooring ripped up from friends’ and neighbors’ houses, a building material associated with working-class homes. His 2022 solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, “Desire Lines,” included the 10-foot-long, earth-toned Langa (2021), made from wood, plastic, glass, stone, nylon rope, wire, and cotton. The beige X across its center is based on an aerial Google Maps image of the footpaths grooved into the land between the Cape Town community of Bonteheuwel, where Adams grew up—designated for “Coloured” people during the apartheid era—and Langa, an adjacent Black suburb.

Recently, many early-career artists trained in fine art have been following a path similar to Adams’s, turning away from painting—along with the art historical baggage and limitations that come with it—and toward fiber. They’re using the materials of craft in ways that look a lot like painting. But these artists take the material as an invitation to center personal and social histories, often from historically marginalized perspectives. Queens, New York–based Natalia Nakazawa, an artist of Japanese and Uruguayan heritage, first trained as a figurative painter at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). In critiques and studio visits, she experienced what she called “terrifying” conversations, rife with exoticizing tokenism, about the brown female bodies in her paintings. After exhibiting figurative work at the Queens International in 2006, she “close[d] … that chapter.” Today, she uses textiles to address cultural heritage, diaspora, digital circulation, and institutional power. “One reason why I gravitated toward textiles was to escape obsessive conversations about the body’s particulars,” she said, during a visit to her studio in Long Island City, New York. “I wanted to talk about ancestry, history, past, present, future. I wanted to talk about globalization and markets—how images are translated from one medium to the next and are sold.” A recent textile, Demons and Protectors: Say their names #GuiYingMa #ChristinaYunaLee #MichelleAlyssaGo (2022), features images of three Asian American women who were murdered in New York during the pandemic, alongside images of beasts and fragmented sculptural hands. There is a “fragile quality to how much we can honor and protect our own community members,” Nakazawa said.

Brazilian-born, Los Angeles–based artist Lila de Magalhaes initially studied painting, but turned to embroidery after being introduced to the technique while working as an assistant in a painter’s studio. After graduating from the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Southern California (where she focused on video art), she worked as a studio assistant for Ivan Morley, and came across his “rickety Japanese analog hand-guided embroidery machine.” The tool took her back to her childhood making crafts as a Waldorf school student in Switzerland, where she was raised. She now makes tapestries that, from a distance, are dead ringers for paintings. Only when you get close enough can you see their otherworldly imagery is embroidered onto dyed bedsheets or silks, and embellished with layers of chalk pastel. Her visual vocabulary— kittens, worms, insects, abstract body parts, and often, a woman riding naked astride a horse—plumbs the unconscious. A self-professed Jungian, she refers to the dyed thrift-store bedlinens she embroiders as “the place of the unconscious and dreams.”

This new generation of artists freely mixes fiber and painting, addressing formal and political concerns in works that are dyed, woven, embroidered, and sewn rather than rendered in oil or acrylic. Indeed, on a trip to galleries in downtown New York this past winter, tapestries often dominated the wall space typically given to painting. One standout show was an intergenerational exhibition at Kaufmann Repetto, “Re-Materialized: The Stuff That Matters.” Millennial artists working in figuration—like LJ Roberts, who makes embroidered portraits of queer and trans individuals; and Erin M. Riley, whose tapestries often depict her own tattooed body, captured in iPhone selfies—were included, along with veterans like 80-year-old knotted-rope artist Françoise Grossen.

The turn from paint to textiles is a trend that has been brewing for a while. The ground was laid by a series of exhibitions that celebrated both craft and the tendency toward ornamentation and decoration, both of which have long been associated with women and non-Western cultures. Nakazawa pointed to recent surveys like “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972–1985,” which opened in 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as influential for celebrating ornament in contemporary art. “A lot of people relegate women and people of color to a decorative realm,” she said; for this reason, she considers the medium of textiles a tool for formerly marginalized people to reclaim full humanity

Other landmark shows foregrounding textiles and craft include “Fiber: Sculpture 1960–present” (2014) at the ICA Boston; “Outliers and American Vanguard Art” (2018) at the National Gallery of Art; “Quilts and Color” (2014) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and “Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019” (2019–22) at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Many of these exhibitions build on the legacy of feminist art history by reclaiming contributions to formal innovation created in domestic settings, celebrating collective practices, and leveling the hierarchy between fine art and folk art. In the process, they revealed how gender, race, and class underpin aesthetic biases.

Over two decades, major museum exhibitions have reframed works made in fiber as capital-A Art by showing how formal evolutions in painting developed alongside—and indeed borrowed from—patterns and compositions found in textiles. One touchstone is the groundbreaking survey “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” which traveled to 11 museums between 2002 and 2006. The show’s inventive geometric compositions, made from castoff fabric by a community of Black quilters in Alabama, were eagerly received as a particularly American style of abstraction. As Michael Kimmelman extolled in the New York Times, “Imagine Matisse and Klee … arising not from rarefied Europe, but from the caramel soil of the rural South in the form of women, descendants of slaves.”

A new generation of artists’ work testifies to the Gee’s Bend quilters’ enduring influence. The 32-year-old artist Bhasha Chakrabarti, whose work was included in the group show “Fiber of My Being” last summer at Hales gallery in New York, studied textiles both in India and with the Gee’s Bend quilters in Alabama; her figurative portraits bring together textile and painterly techniques. Also in 2022, Legacy Russell organized “The New Bend,” a group show at Hauser & Wirth gallery that drew connections between the Gee’s Bend quilters and 12 risingstar artists, including Tomashi Jackson, Eric N. Mack, and Basil Kincaid. Russell described the Gee’s Bend makers as “artists and technologists,” positioning younger artists as their inheritors exploring the many links between textiles and digital tools. The warps and wefts of fabric, for instance, work like a grid of pixels, while their collage techniques recall the disjointed experience of browsing the internet.

The digital plays a significant role in much of the new textile work. Nakazawa turns digitally collaged images of artworks, often by non- Western makers, into jacquard-woven textiles made in North Carolina on recycled cotton. She then embellishes the fabric with hand-stitched elements like shisha mirrors and sequins. “Jacquard is the original computer,” she said, pointing out that women dominated computer programming before the field became lucrative. Digital imagery is also a source for New York–based Pauline Shaw, who studied sculpture at RISD before teaching herself felting through online tutorials. She now mines online museum collections, along with her personal history, to create textile works exploring cultural memory. A first-generation Taiwanese American, Shaw’s tapestries often rework motifs found in East Asian decorative arts. Taw (2022), made from felted wool and cotton scrim, features stylized forms representing a marble, a peony, a chrysanthemum—an emblem of good luck—as well as a poppy, symbolizing extraction and global trade. Small blown-glass objects, resembling flora, dangle from the tapestry’s bottom edge. “In the absence of heirlooms, familial stories and memories became folktales,” Shaw said during a walk-through of a two-artist show at Chapter NY gallery this past February.

For Shaw, the technique of felting—one of the oldest known to humankind—evokes “spaces of the home, care and nurture,” as well as the large-scale textiles that illustrated cultural origin myths in medieval and dynastic China. For Knight Knight (2022), she reinterpreted a Chinese tapestry from the late 16th–early 17th century that depicts the world through land, sea, and sky. Panel with a Phoenix and Birds in a Rock Garden, from the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is barely recognizable in Shaw’s flipped, vertical interpretation, where stylized birds circle a reddish center, surrounded by magmalike whorls of beiges, blues, and oranges. A similar tension between legibility and abstraction animated Shaw’s 2021 work The Tomb-Sweeper’s Mosquito Bite, commissioned by the New York venue The Shed. In that monumental installation, a 24-foot-long felted tapestry was suspended from the ceiling by a metal armature and cables, its weight counterbalanced by multiple blown-glass orbs. The delicate glass vessels contained objects based on Taoist altar objects and Chinese zodiac signs, while the felted textile’s abstract design, resembling a tangle of branches, was based on an MRI scan of the artist’s brain. “I liked that this large, seemingly abstract work actually held a lot of specific information,” she said.

These artists haven’t entirely abandoned painting; instead, they are recombining it into an expanded visual vocabulary. Nakazawa still makes paintings, but usually as part of a broader mixed-media work: Her 2019 piece History has failed us … but no matter, includes jacquard-print found fabrics and collaged images of the Japanese internment site Camp Minidoka, where her grandmother and other family members were held during World War II. Here, found fabrics attest to the international digital distribution of patterns and the cannibalization of cultures in contemporary textiles. Nakazawa said these contemporary textile patterns, such as flowers and pleasant abstractions, derive from specific decorative arts traditions. Today, however, they are digitally shared and reprinted around the world, with slight tweaks to color or scale. “Even things that do have deeper cultural meanings also exist in a weird ether of diasporic longing,” she said.

Traditionally, decorative art has been considered less valuable than painting. For these artists, however, textiles, and craft in general, are liberating. De Magalhaes described her turn to craft—she also works in ceramics, inspired by time spent in her mother’s pottery studio—as a “desire to unlearn” the “heavy cerebral” way of working that she studied in art school. Nonetheless, her evocative dreamy works often draw comparisons to painterly pieces. Writer Gaby Cepeda has likened de Magalhaes’s imagery to Old Testament figures, while Andrew Berardini has noted her work’s relationship to the Symbolism of Odilon Redon. Her own goal, she said, is to “find joy and pleasure and meaning within the chaos that is the human condition.”

In my journey as a sommelier, I’ve worked in fine dining in New York City for over a decade. I began dating an artist last year and now regularly attend gallery openings and even museum galas.  Exploring this new scene reminds me of the rarified culinary world in many ways. One thing that drives me crazy is that you can have multi-million-dollar art on the wall and billionaire guests, but the wine they serve at events is the equivalent to grape-flavored toilet water—a very poor pairing indeed.  It hurts my taste buds and does not enhance my appreciation of the art. Why doesn’t the art world care about something so important and beautiful as wine?

We are sorry to hear about your corked experience with art wine. Though the selection might come off as an afterthought at these events, the ubiquity of bunk cheap vino you have encountered has everything to do with the arid, inhospitable, and disease-prone terroir of the art world. Instead of elegantly balanced libations with floral notes, you have been served ashy “Two-Buck Chuck” decanted in an old Converse sneaker by a scowling bartender. Truthfully, nobody really drinks the wine unless you are a young guzzler prowling for a free buzz. Most are just sipping away the pain of being at an awkward art event by donning a pair of rosé-colored glasses. Next time, rather than fretting about spitting or swallowing museum shart-donnay, consider drinking the art Kool-Aid at these celebrations instead.

I’m a preservationist who took a job at a major archive last year. I was thrilled to work with my boss, who is prominent in the field, but it only took a month to realize that he’s a raging egomaniac. He talks to colleagues in our department as if he is an unimpeachable expert, even though we are all highly trained technicians doing the detailed work that he credits himself for at conferences and public talks. In those situations, he boasts so much about himself and his process that it actually diminishes the artists whose work we preserve. He needs to be reproached by his superior, and I plan to call him out to our director because his attitude and demeanor reflect poorly on our institution. How should I approach this?

Back in the day, it paid off to tell your teacher when the class bully was flicking boogers or calling you names having to do with pee-pee parts. Children are nature’s fiercest narcs, and it is only through social ostracization and playground beatdowns that they learn how not to be baby bitches or whiney snitches. The last thing you expected as an accomplished professional is to find yourself going through pre-K again. Instead of leaning into your crayon-colored playbook, you must handle this situation with all the college knowledge and wellness podcasts in your adult arsenal.

If your boss is as much of a prominent prick as you suggest, then there is no doubt that his boss already knows it. We’re guessing you might be in an old boys club where the shine that your megalomaniac boss brings to the institution nullifies the director’s need to reign him in. Institutions prop up braggarts and big personalities because they desperately need to attract attention, funding, and audiences, and it’s necessary to have a public face who promotes the good work that your institution is doing. The trouble comes when the mouth on that face needs to be punched in the lips.

Before taking any next steps, find out if other team members feel the same as you do about this reprehensible restorationist. If so, form a coalition—otherwise it could come off like you’re pursuing a personal vendetta. Gather evidence that corroborates your point. Document the stupid things this creep says. If you are making specific accusations, support them with hardcore proof. How glorious would it be if you happened to capture your boss talking smack about the director to visiting archivists from Argentina? If the higher-ups try to shoo away your complaint, then your next best option might be quitting. Losing a high-profile position in a field that’s hard to crack sucks, but preserving your inner peace is more important than a bunch of old stuff rotting in a vault.

Your queries for Chen & Lampert can be sent to hardtruths@artinamericamag.com

Fascinated by dolls from a young age, Harper began making his own as a child and developed his hobby into an intricate practice. After a brief stint at Glasgow School of Art, he began to sell work online, and received commissions from people including R&B star Elah Hale and movie director Lee Daniels that encouraged him to quit art school to put all his focus into his work. He makes his busts and full figures from polymer clay, presenting them in contexts ranging from rethought myths to sex scenes, addressing race and power through a lens that elevates Black strength and beauty to godlike status. “This is all about an appreciation of the feminine,” he said. “I don’t do drag. I communicate through making, and this is my way of communicating my appreciation.”

Part of Harper’s inspiration comes from his desire to move Black figures from supporting roles to stardom. He grew up watching his late grandfather, the two-time Mr. Universe Paul Wynter, in sword-and-sandal films. But while he admired his success, he would have loved to see him as a main character rather than in the “helper” roles in which he was usually cast. In Harper’s artistic world, all characters are the main attraction, as super-beings evoking both ancient Greek myths and 1970s Blaxploitation films.

On Instagram, where Harper’s handle is Pig.malion, a nod to the Greek myth, Harper has racked up nearly 100,000 followers, and his online success has recently converted to the real world: This past December he had a solo exhibition at Good Black Art in New York. The power in his work, he said, “comes from [certain] influences initially. Then, once I work on a piece, the way it has been created takes on a whole new power of its own.” 

Born in Baghdad in 1984, Sami was a teenager when he got a job painting propagandistic murals of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. After the United States–led invasion, Sami briefly worked for the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, helping recover looted artworks, before migrating to Sweden in 2007, and then to London, where he completed an MFA at Goldsmiths in 2018. Since showing at Luhring Augustine in New York and in the most recent Carnegie International, he has become known for his quietly haunting paintings. The small windows and skewed perspective of the domestic spaces in many of his works are a nod to his childhood interest in Islamic miniatures. Even in these intimate spaces, the presence of Saddam can be felt. In Infection II (2021), an image of Saddam hangs in a home. Once again, his face is cast in shadow; a spidery houseplant likewise imparts a creepy profile. It’s an unsettling image in which the prospect of violence seems to infiltrate the family home.

In Sami’s work, latent images tinted by time and trauma represent history. “The things I articulate in my artwork are memories hidden in the brain cells that are waiting for a trigger,” he told the Guardian this past March. Domestic scenes and roiling landscapes, which may nod subtly to war or sectarian strife, hover on the edge of abstraction. In A barricade against bombs … 23 Years of Night (2022), for instance, a crosshatching technique redolent of Jasper Johns materializes at a distance into two pieces of plywood protecting windows from a blast. Painted mostly on linen, these works often feel stained or rubbed raw.

The seamless transitions from abstraction to figuration in Sami’s paintings, along with various shifts in scale in their interiors, recall the unsettling and enduring imprints politics leave on everyday life. Over the painted plywood in 23 Years of Night, Sami rendered a gauzy curtain dotted with stars—the protected portal seen from inside. Bearing witness to totalitarianism and war, he seems to say, requires more than just courage. Trapped in darkness, he dreams of the sky.

But in a major decision last week involving Andy Warhol, the Supreme Court pushed this pillar of copyright law to the background. Instead, the Court shifted the consideration away from the artistic contribution of the new work, and focused instead on commercial concerns. By doing so, the Court’s Warhol decision will significantly limit the amount of borrowing from and building on previous works that artists can engage in.

The case involved 16 works Andy Warhol had created based on a copyrighted photograph taken in 1981 by celebrated rock and roll photographer Lynn Goldsmith of the musician Prince. While Goldsmith had disputed Warhol’s right to create these works, and by implication the rights of museums and collectors to display or sell them, the Supreme Court decided the case on a much narrower issue.

When Prince died in 2016, the Warhol Foundation (now standing in the artist’s shoes) had licensed one of Warhol’s silkscreens for the cover of a special Condé Nast magazine commemorating the musician. Explicitly expressing no opinion on the question of whether Warhol had been entitled to create the works in the first place, the Court ruled 7-2 that this specific licensing of the image was unlikely to be “fair use” under copyright law.

This is not necessarily a problematic result, given that Goldsmith also had a licensing market. Yet despite the Court’s attempt to limit itself to the narrow licensing issue instead of deciding whether Warhol’s creation of the original canvases was permissible, the reasoning of the decision has far broader and more troubling implications.

To know what’s at stake, it’s important to understand the fraught doctrine of “fair use,” which balances the rights of creators to control their works against the rights of the public and other creators to access and build on them.

What’s sometimes lost is in this discussion is that copyright law’s purpose (perhaps surprisingly) is to benefit the public—benefit to an individual artist is only incidental. The theory behind the law is that if we want a rich and vibrant culture, we must give artists copyright in their work to ensure they have economic incentives to create. But by the same logic, fair use recognizes that a vital culture also requires giving room to other artists to copy and transform copyrighted works, even if the original creator of those works objects. Otherwise, in the Supreme Court’s words, copyright law “would stifle the very creativity” it is meant to foster. Thus, to win a fair use claim, a new creator must show that her use of someone else’s copyrighted work advances the goals of copyright itself: to promote creativity.

Unfortunately, the Warhol decision took this already complex area of law and made it even more complicated. Lower courts and legal scholars will be fighting for years about its applications. But one thing is clear: it is now far riskier for an artist to borrow from previous work.

Not only did the Court downgrade the importance of whether a new work is transformative, whether it “adds something new and important” (to use the Supreme Court’s words from a previous case). The Court also painted a bizarre picture of Warhol as an inconsequential artist. Surely the Justices of the Supreme Court know that Warhol changed the course of art history. But the Warhol who emerges in the majority opinion is a tame portraitist whose work is just not that different from the photographs on which it is based.

In the Justices’ formulation, Warhol is a “style,” an artist whose “modest alterations” of the underlying photograph brought out a meaning that was already inherent in it, whose work portrayed Prince “somewhat differently” from Goldsmith’s image. Justice Elena Kagan, in a scathing dissent, charged that the majority had reduced Warhol to an Instagram filter.

Nowhere in the majority opinion would you recognize Warhol as a once-radical artist, the one de Kooning drunkenly approached at a cocktail party to utter, “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty.” Nowhere does one see the Warhol whom philosopher Arthur Danto called “the nearest thing to aphilosophical genius the history of art has produced.” That Warhol is the paradigm of an artist who brings new “meaning and message” to the work he copies, the very kind of artist that the now-diminished emphasis on transformative use was meant to protect.

Of course, this decision is not just about Warhol. For that matter, it’s not just about other Pop artists, or about appropriation artists.

Any artist who works with existing imagery should now reconsider her practice. Hire a lawyer, maybe try to negotiate a license and be ready to move on if you get turned away or can’t afford the fee. The safest and cheapest route—a consideration particularly relevant to younger artists and those who are not rich and famous—is to just steer clear of referencing existing work. Maybe that’s the right direction for art; maybe copying and relying on past work should be discouraged. But given the centrality of allusion, emulation, and copying to the history of art, it’s hard to imagine that’s a good thing. This is particularly so in contemporary digital culture, where, as I have argued, copying has taken on even greater urgency in creativity. But like it or not, these are not questions that artists, critics, and art audiences get to decide. The Supreme Court just changed the future of art.

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Brown—whose retrospective closed in San Francisco in March and moved to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where it opens May 27—made her name as a budding Bay Area artist whose thick impasto style turned abstraction toward embodiment, sometimes with the air of a wry aside. The earliest works in the SFMOMA show gleamed at the top of layered oil surfaces that suggest a lot of searching underneath (the catalogue describes formative paintings by Brown “so thick they could weigh 100 pounds and take decades to dry”). But as soon as she scaled certain heights that would thrill so many artists making their way, Brown took a bow—and moved on.

Thanksgiving Turkey (1959) is emblematic of her early work for its mix of mystery and a sort of mastery that can be deceiving. The depiction of a carcass hanging in the air nods toward classicism—wall text describing it included an image of Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox as inspiration—but its strange coloring makes it an evocative oddity while its deadpan matter-of-factness makes it somehow funny in a way that’s hard to pin down. The same goes for Green Bowl (1964), an austerely geometric still life that marked an audacious turn for Brown away from early success (Thanksgiving Turkey had already been acquired by MoMA in New York, and she was secure with a dealer with whom she would soon part ways after her stylistic twists left him bemused) toward a more idiosyncratic calling that took its own cues.

“Brown’s aim was not to undermine the art world in a way that was consciously subversive; she simply did not care, and part of what makes her so interesting is this disregard for acceptance,” Nancy Lim writes in the catalogue. (Lim, an associate curator, worked under SFMOMA chief curator Janet Bishop in organizing the show, which after its stop at the Carnegie Museum travels to the Orange County Museum of Art next year.)

Following Brown’s circuitous trains of thought thereafter leads to different way stations and destinations for indelible visions that never stayed fixed for long. Even more indicative of her more mature years than Thanksgiving Turkey and Green Bowl are works like Noel in the Kitchen (1963), an early instance of Brown painting her son with a mix of motherly wonder and fascination with the dreamier dimensions of domesticity. The work tells a heartwarming story, with a bare-bottomed toddler reaching mischievously toward a too-tall counter while a pair of dogs stand sentry. But it also flies off into aesthetic revelry, with a checkered floor that shakes up the pictorial space and a curious patch of wall on the side rendered with enough acuity and care to make it class as a painting in its own right.

Brown painted her family a lot, and with enough earnestness and sincerity to suggest Norman Rockwell as filtered through a sense of post-Beat Generation San Francisco sass. She loved holidays (enough to name her son Noel), and the exhibition took care to pair certain family tableaux with the sepia-toned snapshots that inspired them. Brown became even more interesting, however, when she started painting herself.

Of the many things that figuration in deft-enough hands can do, revealing a sense of both inner and outer selves has to rank near the top. For Brown, the prospects of that compounded when she turned to self-portraiture in which she seems to have painted in service of her own and others’ gazes, all at the same time. A forthright, almost confrontational look projects from many of her paintings of the sort, but the stare-downs seem to have been staged first and foremost between the artist and herself.

Then there are signal-scrambling highlights like Self-Portrait with Fish and Cat (1970) and Woman Wearing Mask (1972), the latter featuring Brown standing, hand-on-hip, in red heels, black lingerie, and a cartoonish plastic cat mask. It’s simultaneously sexy and sexless, and a whole spectrum of degrees between—with the lingering result for a viewer (or some viewers, at least) of having been seen by Brown while in the act of looking at her look at her own figure figuratively rendered.

As later paintings chronicle the years that followed—with age, Brown falls in thrall to swimming the forbidding waters of San Francisco Bay, focuses on the joys of dancing with one of the four husbands she courted, and ventures into realms of New Age spirituality that surrounded her at the end of her life, when she died in an accident at the age of 52 while installing an obelisk in the ashram of her guru in India—the exhibition offered an unusually intimate vision of Brown, as an artist but also as a person who lived and loved and painted in a way that suggests a private practice would have suited her just fine.

If that reaction is right, consider it a testament to Brown’s approach to the art she made and art as a whole. If it’s not, more power to her.

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The Painter of Modern Life: Kerry James Marshall Aims to Get More Images of Black Figures into Museums

When Marshall graced the cover of Artforum in 2017, inside, artist Carroll Dunham called him “one of the most consequential painters among us.” Around then, his goal was to make seeing Black figures in museums no longer exceptional. By and large, his plan worked: around the 2010s, as critic Julian Lucas put it in the New Yorker, matters related to the representation of Blackness became “a national conversation,” led by artists like Marshall, Kehinde Wiley, and Charles White. Now, the conversation is shifting beyond representation, and as ever, Marshall is two steps ahead. His new commission for this spring’s Sharjah Biennial is not a painting at all. Instead, the artist created an installation resembling an excavation site that engages histories and fantasies of slave trade and colonialism in the Arab world.

It’s rare—and risky—for an artist to depart so dramatically from an approach that’s brought considerable critical and commercial success. But Marshall’s departure is less surprising when you look closely at what he’s doing: his paintings have always incorporated critiques of painting, and even as figures dominate his canvases, they’re also emphatically elusive and opaque. A.i.A. spoke to Marshall about his big pivot.

Why did you decide not to include a press release or any text for “Exquisite Corpse: This Is Not the Game?”

I didn’t want to give anybody a crutch for figuring out the show. I wanted them to really look. It’s become common for people to lean too hard on the press release to try and figure out what the artist is saying. I wanted to break that chain of behavior. I put a lot of energy into doing the work, and it’s not that opaque. The title is a clue to let you know that it’s not random choices being made.

What are some of those choices?

Each exquisite corpse has four segments, and each segment has a different version of my signature. They all represent me at different stages of my development. There are Black figures that look a lot like the images I do all the time, but there’s also some cross-hatching—I don’t use that technique much now, but I used to.

With each piece, I started with a head, then created a body. Together, those segments constitute relationships and meanings. I’ve described myself as a history painter, and that’s relevant here too. I’m looking at history and trying to draw out connections that people don’t automatically make.

What’s an example?

In Untitled (Exquisite Corpse Iceberg), 2022, there’s a man’s head at the top, connected to an iceberg. The iceberg becomes a pair of pants, and his feet are in sneakers on a basketball court. The portrait is of a man named Tippu Tip. He was one of the wealthiest African slave traders. He’s from Zanzibar; some people also describe him as Arab. There are viewers who might recognize him.

All kinds of people have profited from imperialist, colonialist, and commercial transactions, and all the exquisite corpses speak to those complicated histories. Today, you have the NBA and all those basketball players flying around and slam-dunking—this is happening in the wake of that history. History isn’t always tragic, but it is always complicated. My paintings tackle history in its most complex form. Nobody is getting off the hook.

Still, I really tried to avoid making any parts look grotesque, as the Surrealists often did. You can demonstrate how much you care about the representation of Black people by not treating Black people like silly putty that you can make into any kind of form you want. If “exquisite” means anything, it means do the thing well, make it elegant. I will not make monsters; that’s just too easy.

Doing the thing well has always been essential to your work, but at first glance, some of these paintings might look less finished. Have you experienced pressure to keep making art in your signature style?

Yes. Artists are professionals. There’s nobody who goes to art school who doesn’t mean to come out of there and be a professional. No matter what they say, all the things we do are aimed at a certain kind of mission. Part of that mission is to achieve recognition, and to establish the kind of singularity that sets your work apart from everybody else’s—and, in doing that, to try and produce something that might be meaningful. Some artists might call that a careerist position. But I think the moment you sign up to go to art school, you sign up for a profession.

Your project for the latest Sharjah Biennial, Untitled: Excavation, was certainly not recognizably Kerry James Marshall.

But it is consistent with the way I think about everything. The Sharjah Art Foundation asked me if I’d make a permanent installation. The title of the biennial is “Thinking Historically in the Present,” which is what I do. I developed a proposal for land they acquired in Al Hamriyah. In that square, the Foundation is building a café and doing some landscaping, expanding their footprint. I thought I’d do something to interrupt that development.

What disrupts development in that region? Hitting an archaeological site! Suddenly, you have to pause and figure out how to build around it. So I decided to create an excavation site. First I asked if there were an archaeological site in that particular place in Sharjah, what would it be? I had never been to the Middle East, but I did know 1001 Arabian Nights, that set of fairy tales from the Middle Ages based in the Islamic world. I wanted to confront how history is part fact, part fiction, and part fairytale, because people tell stories that sound nice and exciting to them.

The biennial also dealt with the impact of colonialism. Well, the Arab world participated in colonialism too. Egypt was a colonial empire, and today, people speak Arabic in a whole lot of places where Arabic didn’t originate. Egypt has been occupied by the Sudanese, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Arabs—like an exquisite corpse, broken up into four parts. The installation includes a mosaic with four segments. The top segment says “head” in hieroglyphics; then “torso” in Arabic; “pelvis” in Roman; and “feet” in Greek. That mosaic is in an empty pool, part of the small villa I created.

What else is in the villa?

It has three rooms and a small courtyard. You view it from a footbridge that hovers above the site. It’s all connected to the 1001 Nights tales, and to the Arab slave trade out of Africa. Maybe the villa belonged to a merchant. In all the 1001 Nights tales, there are genies, or jinni, as they’re called in the Quran—mischievous or evil spirits. In fairytales, you rub a lamp, and the genie comes out, then gives you three wishes; they’re servants. In the 1001 Nights, they are always Black.

I read an early translation by Richard Burton. In that version, the whole narrative starts when two sultans discover that their wives have been cheating on them with a Black man. Then they decide women can’t be trusted. You marry them one night and kill them the next morning!

It sounds like for you, combining exquisite corpses with history painting is a way to get at the idea of history as a combination of fact, fiction, and fairy tales.

Exactly. I want to undermine that tendency to project a certain kind of image of who we are into the world, and to interrogate our relationship to the struggle, and to the history of slavery. None of it is as simple as it seems.

You were making figurative paintings before the big boom, and now, you’re onto something new.

I’ve always gone against the grain. In 1966 Ad Reinhardt declared he was “making the last painting which anyone can make,” referring to his monochromatic black abstractions. Well, that was just a few years after I was born.

You told an interviewer that when you were applying to school, someone said your portfolio was too varied, that they wanted to see more consistency.

That comment has haunted me for most of my career. I make works because I want to see what they look like. I make works because I want to understand how images operate, so that I can best use those operations to do the kinds of things that I think need to be done. I’m not limited to doing one thing, because one thing never covers all the bases. When Jackson Pollock hit the end of the road—when he couldn’t see himself doing any more of those drip paintings—he crashed his car. Mark Rothko, too [he took his own life]. You can only make ephemeral rectangles for so long.

Some younger artists have expressed skepticism toward the rise of figuration. It’s less a critique of a work itself, more an uneasiness toward the tokenism institutions bring to it. They’re also wary of the way representation gets conflated with material change. Such criticism is only possible because of the work that artists of your generation have done: now, it’s no longer so exceptional to see Black figures in museums. But do you share any of that skepticism?

You can’t be all that worried about what other people might do with things that you produce and also reap the benefits of making them. It’s all about finding a formal solution to whatever problem of representation you’re trying to address. The market forces people to look for a gimmick, but those things won’t last long. Novelty is not that interesting, but for a moment.

The best way to sum it up comes from the avant-garde jazz musician Cecil Taylor. An interviewer asked him about how he felt watching younger artists, who seemed to be capitalizing on his innovations more than he’d been able to. The interviewer asked if he was bitter. He said [paraphrasing], “Bitter?! I am not bitter; nobody asked me to do this.”

For me, I’m just doing what I think needs to be done. I do the pictures I want to. I always have. If they have an impact on people, that’s fine. 

Squinting at my screen, I zeroed in on the photos containing sedan-like vehicles, like the one next to the instruction “select all images with cars.” But other photos made me pause: one featured a bridge that cars might be traversing, while another contained a rank of buses. Abandoning nuance, I selected the sedans and passed: I am not a robot. It’s an excellent lesson in how artificial intelligence demands that humans curtail our tolerance for ambiguity in order to accommodate the objectives of the program.

Such encounters with computer vision formed the mundane background to my reading of Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning, Amanda Wasielewski’s timely endeavor to examine how the most rapidly advancing technology affecting society touches on the domains of art history, collecting, and the art market. The book opens by asserting the existence of a conflict between art historians and computer scientists grounded in mutual misunderstandings about each other’s fields, which Wasielewski aims to reconcile through an explanation of the strengths and weaknesses of artificial intelligence as an aid in the analysis of art.

At the center of the book are two chapters: the first provides an overview and critique of computer scientists’ use of digital reproductions of artworks in their research on how to improve the capacity for computer vision to identify and designate pictorial style; the second examines how museums and collectors are using machine learning to attribute and authenticate works of art. Wasielewski then closes by offering suggestions for how to bridge disciplinary divides between art historians and computer scientists. Given the increasing integration of artificial intelligence into many areas of academia, a study that investigates this terrain is sorely needed. But there are significant discrepancies between what the book does and how it frames its subject.

Wasielewski specifies that she is addressing neither the digital humanities more broadly nor artificial intelligence at large, but looking narrowly at machine learning and computer vision. Of course, machines don’t learn. The term “machine learning” was coined by IBM in 1959 for marketing purposes, and all it describes is a mathematical formula (an algorithm) applied to a collection of inputs (a dataset), which produces an output. That same formula, after training, should then produce the same outputs when applied to a different dataset.

The “supervised” version of machine learning involves training an algorithm on thousands of labeled digital images. For instance, an algorithm whose training set includes images of apples labeled “apple” can be expected to predict accurately which images contain an apple when applied to a different assortment of images. The problem is that if the training dataset contains only red apples, the algorithm will fail to identify an image of a green one.

In the “unsupervised” version, algorithms are applied to training sets without labels, and the program determines for itself which features define a target output. If the majority of the set’s images of apples include bowls, it may conclude that this is a defining characteristic of apples.

In both cases, supervised and unsupervised, we confront what scholar Brian Christian has termed “the alignment problem,” the divergence between human norms and values, and computational models’ abstraction of those norms to categories. Whatever happens between input and output happens in a black box and, at present, there is little humans can do to make its internal working scrutable.

Scrutable or not, the process creates three conditions that constrain the promise of computer vision for art historical research. First, any application of computer vision to works of art must be carried out on digital reproductions of them as opposed to the works themselves, a necessity for making any object in the world assimilable to a computer. The second stumbling block is the reliance of algorithms in supervised learning on tagging systems—meaning the metadata attached to a digital reproduction, with all the biases of the humans who created that metadata. Finally, the utility of an algorithm depends on the nature of the dataset on which it is trained, and since, as Wasielewski points out, canonical works of Western art grossly overpopulate the landscape of digitized art (for the same reasons of imperialism and inequity that made the Western canon canonical in the first place), then computer vision will continue to wrongly categorize or discount anything outside of that.

With these constraints in mind, the first chapter of Computational Formalism offers a valuable survey of research carried out by computer scientists since 2005 with aims to automate the process of sorting works of art into stylistic categories. Wasielewski issues a trenchant critique of those applications in their return to the unreformed formalism of academic art history’s past, an era when Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History (1915) took a commanding position in the field and categories like “Archaic” and “Hellenistic,” “Gothic” and “Romanesque” were construed as if they assumed an autonomous status apart from the human minds that conceived them.

Frankly, I am in awe of Wasielewski for her patient wading through what is, from the perspective of an art historian, an abundance of stunningly inane, and in some parts morally repugnant, writing that presumes “that the core aim in the study of art is to find groups of images that look similar” or that conflates style with beauty that can be quantitatively and objectively measured. The problem, as she shows, is that this research confuses human categories with truth inhering in form, makes no distinction between the digitized image and the object it digitizes, and fails to recognize partiality in the available datasets.

After handily dispatching the failures of this research, Wasielewski addresses another, more profound, issue plaguing it: ignorance that all categories are constructed, contingent, and relational. One example is the problematic label “Primitive,” which has been applied to works of diverse appearance and which makes meaning differently depending on context, whether as a pejorative for non-Western or pre-modern works, a condescending reference to a self-taught artist, or a celebration of one who subverted the conventional academic style in which they were trained. Clear to the art historian, but obscure to the computer scientists responsible for this research, is that assigning a category is an exercise of power.

From the domain of general style Wasielewski turns to individual style, and specifically, the high-stakes world of connoisseurship and attribution. While Wölfflin served as the avatar for the formalist revival examined in the preceding chapter, the 19th-century art historian Giovanni Morelli takes the stage as the mascot for the formalist renaissance pursued here. Giving new life to Morelli’s methods—attempting to “scientifically” identify the oeuvres of painters based on symptomatic features like earlobes—tech entrepreneurs use computational connoisseurship to atomize digital reproductions of authenticated works into patterns, which they promise their algorithms can detect in digital reproductions of unattributed works by the same artist.

Where Wasielewski is unequivocal in stating that “using image-based computational techniques to answer humanistic questions in art history is … a flawed endeavor,” she is less pessimistic when it comes to matters of attribution. The distinction, she argues, is between the fallacy that a general style resides in form and the certitude that an individual’s does. But given the historical peculiarity of this notion of authorship—whether applicable to select modern artists, or to a 19th-century fantasy of old masters’ individualistic practice—its remit is narrow.

Attuned to this shortcoming and its service to the Western canon, Wasielewski shrugs, citing computational connoisseurship as just one in a box of variously unreliable tools that collectors and museums will or will not use in their pursuit of wealth. After a brief section floating the potential value of machine learning to automate the identification of iconography, Wasielewski moves on to more interesting issues relating to the epistemology of authenticity itself, which, with the advent of generative artificial intelligence and its capacity to confect and even forge images, has emerged as a pressing concern among artists and society at large.

Wasielewski sets up her study as an effort to quell a battle between art historians and researchers in computation, arguing that we are witnessing a resurgence of the “science wars” of the 1990s, when scientists and humanists brawled over the concept of objectivity. But in order to position the current situation as such, Wasielewski must paint today’s antagonists as equally invested in and inhibited by ignorance about one another’s areas of expertise: on the one side are computer scientists who fail to understand basic art historical premises (like the conditional nature of stylistic categories); on the other side are art historians who produce faulty research by failing to understand the limitations of computation.

Yet the book’s only examples of humanists using machine learning in the interpretation of images are not the work of art historians: they are all studies undertaken by a single new media scholar, Lev Manovich. For Wasielewski, “computational formalism” describes “a revival of formalist methods in art history facilitated by digital computing,” and she frames the book’s central question as an examination of this shift’s implications for the discipline. If such a shift has happened in art history as the result of image processing by means of machine learning, Wasielewski provides no evidence for it.

In the final section of her book, Wasielewski suggests that humanists’ apprehensions about collaborating with computer scientists are about policing disciplinary purity. But whether or not that is the case, one needs to qualify that allegation with the recognition that this is also about disciplinary empathy. There’s a reason why we have seen the growth of “humanities labs” and not “sciences salons.”

None of this impugns Wasielewski’s incisive commentary on machine learning— the book musters the most skillfully limned assessments of its functionalities and limitations when applied to works of art to date. But I don’t share her optimism that a rapprochement can be achieved, since the “war” isn’t between humanists and scientists but rather between humanists and the administrators and legislators defunding and legislating us into extinction. If there is any hope of nurturing critical machine learning to induce a jolt to art history, then it will need to do more than disclose the violence of its brute reliance on inherited categories, which, using traditional forms of humanistic research, Wasielewski portrays so well.

Wasielewski concludes by endorsing metaphorical language as a channel for easing communication between scientists and humanists. But it seems to me that a metaphor is the very source of our alienation: namely, the description of computer vision as vision. If, in order to “see,” a computer demands that anything in the world be homogenized and processed as data, apart from all context and embodiment, then it is not vision; it is information management. And at present such information management can only induce us to see the world as information to be managed, plunging us further into a new era of categories, with all their errors.

Art in America’s Summer 2023 New Talent issue includes a series of interviews with five New York–based artists to watch. A.i.A. senior editor Emily Watlington and photo editor Christopher Garcia-Valle visited each artist in their studio to learn more about their art-making process, inspirations, and influences. Below, in an edited version of the conversation, sculptor Catherine Telford Keogh explains how she conglomerates trash and landfill into striking sculptures.

Hardgood & Dolly (2023) is a piece of compressed landfill I extracted from Dead Horse Bay [between Brighton Beach and Fort Tilden in Brooklyn]. In the Industrial era, it was also home to fish oil factories, and garbage incinerators. In the 1950s, a series of highways decimated a number of low-income neighborhoodsin Brooklyn, and they moved all of those folks’ goods to Dead Horse Bay, then used them to extend the shoreline. The trash and their belongings were compacted, then covered with sand. Recently it’s been eroding.

Because this was the 1950s, there’s more glass than plastic. I extracted a hunk of landfill that included all these products that have been vitrified over time. It contains rubber, cement, plant matter, packaging, sand, and other miscellaneous objects. My students helped me drag this piece back, and it spawned my most recent show, “Shelf Life,” at Helena Anrather Gallery in New York.

Another piece in that show, Compost Index 3 with Volumes 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1 (2023), involves repurposed tiles I got from Marble Expo on Facebook Marketplace. The onyx tiles were originally extracted from Karachi, Pakistan, and brought to Marble Expo in the Bronx, which then sold them to corporations, a bank, and a Best Western. I purchased the leftovers. The multicolored onyx has all this depth, so you can really see the earth processes that happened over eons. I wanted to position them [on the floor] so that they signify earth or ground, but also a countertop at the same time. I waterjet-cut different advertisements in the tiles, borrowed from things like moisturizers that promise a healthier or more efficient body. I also sandblasted images of things that I found on the ground in my neighborhood: lottery tickets, gum, cigarettes, Modelo beer cans. I photographed them, turned them into stencils, and then sandblasted them into the tiles. Sandblasting is almost like a mechanized geologic process, but it also creates this ghostly or fossilized image of the waste.

I also remade plastic vessels in glass that you can carry around—like detergent bottles, milk jugs, or motor oil containers. I work with containers a lot. I’m interested in how they promise space cordoned off from temperature, climate, and decay, but are also everywhere in landfills. Positioning vessels on the onyx tiles, I wanted to point to deep geologic processes that have happened over years and years.  —As told to Emily Watlington