“I wanted to live this New York fantasy,” Charles Porch recalls of moving into his West Village brownstone, a historic property he acquired in 2020 after the VP of Global Partnerships for Instagram moved from Venice Beach in Los Angeles to lower Manhattan. Jed Lind, the sculptor-turned-designer he enlisted to help renovate the property, had over several years been guiding Porch away from his youthful IKEA era and toward a fine mix of old and new furnishings complemented by works collected from a network of emerging artists. 

“His West Village brownstone was historically intact with soaring ceilings,” says Lind. “The previous owner [architect Gil Schafer] made some bold moves to make it appear more grandiose, so we pared it back for an understated, traditional feel.” That included a Pierre Augustin Rose sofa, ebonized coffee tables, and a custom bleached teak dining table by Michael O’Connell, “an incredible maker in Los Angeles,” Lind notes. These pieces share space with a selection of treasures (a painting by Whitney Bedford that Porch describes as “a modern take on a traditional horse painting,” vintage candlesticks, and an 18th-century mirror among them) that create a sense of dimension. “Jed has a real knack for objects—smalls, as he calls them—and did an excellent job bringing those through,” Porch effuses. “You get the organic pieces with this nod to vintage and traditional styles.”

“You should never cut corners on anything,” Lind explains of his penchant for the particulars. “The beauty of a project is in the details.” Indeed, everything seems to have come together in Porch’s West Village home, where he lived for a year before meeting his now-husband, Robert Denning, a philanthropist on the Met’s Board of Trustees. “This place was meant to be my New York pied-à-terre—the perfect one-bedroom with a fireplace. Then I got into a relationship, and it didn’t work like that anymore,” Porch laughs. The recently married couple has since relocated to an “in-between,” pre-baby space in Chelsea, which is now housing their combined collection of custom furniture and contemporary artworks—including the few pieces they’ve acquired together under a strict system that accounts for their contrasting tastes (“I love more traditional things, like Impressionism—he’s like, ‘That’s too safe,’” Porch quips). 

Before the pair take on their next address, Porch gave CULTURED a look inside that first home—the one that sharpened his taste, honed his eye, and provided the early kindling for relationships with artists that the couple continues to foster in exciting new ways today.

Describe your journey into collecting.

I would describe myself as a budding collector. Now it’s really ramping up, but when I first moved to Los Angeles and met Jed, he was an artist—it was before he did interiors. We had a ton of artist friends, so I started collecting their work here and there. That’s one of the first things I ever invested in. I had IKEA furniture and these paintings in my 20s. Jed started to push me toward buying vintage, things that I would keep forever. The West Village brownstone had custom pieces that I’ll always have. The chaise he designed for this beautiful corner now sits in my new living room. The perfect dining room table might be a desk in a future place. He also helped me start to collect lighting—that’s been a really fun adventure.

My husband’s on the board of the Met, and we have started collecting contemporary art from, as I like to say, “baby artists” that are just coming up. In fact, we just hosted a cool artist dinner with about 12 artists that we’ve either collected from or are interested in—so we’re trying to create community around that. It’s really fun to find people when they’re just starting out and watch their work and careers evolve. I feel like we really have a rapport with them, and every time I see the piece [I’ve collected], it feels so much more personal because I know where it came from.

Where do you look for new talent?

I have an art advisor, Sophia Penske, who’s amazing. I also have a few friends who are kind of mega collectors, and I watch what they’re collecting as a filter. I was at Frieze this year with Sophia Cohen. I bought a really interesting Japanese piece from a Tokyo gallery we never heard of, but I just loved the piece so much. Now I follow the artist on Instagram, and we have this Instagram DM relationship. That one was just serendipity.

So many contemporary collectors say that they slide into artists’s Instagram DMs.

We hear from artists all the time that Instagram helps them develop relationships and sell work—and get galleries. They’re like, “I got this Berlin show through my Instagram,” It’s very cool that it helps them build their business. 

What I also like is that you have this channel to the artist even after you’ve collected them, just to keep in touch. You get to see the work evolve there when they post their process. I just bought this piece from an artist named Jo Messer. She posts stories from her studio every morning, and there’s tons of work in there. It’s fun to see snippets of her life, and then see the piece in my house, and correlate the two.

Do you and your husband have similar tastes?

I think we’re pretty close. We have a system where we have to handshake agree before we get something, but sometimes I’ll get teeny tiny pieces without asking and slip them in.  I love more traditional things, like Impressionism. I think he’s like, “That’s too safe.” But it takes me back to my childhood—I’m half French, and feel like I grew up in the Musée d’Orsay. On the contemporary side, we’ve started to align on what works for us. But again, we have the handshake. 

Do you get a certain number of vetoes?

That’s such a good idea. I tend to do a bit of a marketing campaign on him, but we align pretty well. For our next foray, we want to start looking at older stuff. We’re gonna go to Maastricht for the first time this year. We’re really interested in Flemish work. That’s going to be a new lane for us. I like the idea of these contemporary and older things living together, eventually. 

Who are the artists that you’re most excited about now? 

Jo is obviously one of them. I love her. Phoebe Helander, she’s at PPOW. Elizabeth Glaessner—we just got a piece of hers. Asher Liftin. I love Yuan Fang, she’s a Chinese artist based in New York. Lorenzo Amos, I really like his work.  Malù dalla Piccola. 

Are you hosting these dinners regularly?

We’re going to make it a series. I was like This is an experiment. Let’s try. There’s no agenda. Some of these artists know each other already, and some don’t. It’s just a community-building experience for these young artists, and the first one went great. 

Is it all artists, or do you invite curators?

No curators yet. We really don’t want it to be about business, but we have a couple of ideas. Robert’s on the task force for the new Tang Wing at the Met, so there are Met curators who could be really interesting. But we were actually thinking about inviting an established artist to attend, to share advice and wisdom. We’re experimenting.

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For economic theorist and NYU economics professor Debraj Ray, any acquisition should be weighed between one’s faith and decisive calculations. When the two align, it can appear almost cinematic—like when a Picasso etching he had long admired appeared at auction. (He won it on a lark.) Joan Miró’s “Lapidario” sheets arrived as a series of loose, separate prints, but Ray grouped them, constructing a dynamic centerpiece for his home. His collection—anchored in pieces by early- and mid-20th-century masters, from Picasso’s rare harlequin etchings to Egon Schiele’s intimate portraits—reflects both the analytical mind and passions of its owner. Here, he shares his best advice for contending with the two (with an assist from his daughter, the photographer who brought his New York home to our pages).

Where does the story of your collection begin?

It began with Zayira, my daughter. She’s a wonderful artist, beyond being a photographer. When she was a kid, we used to draw together. We’d look up images online to copy, just scrolling through Google, and one day she came across this beautiful Picasso image. As it turned out, it was for sale. I contacted the owner—he was an art gallerist in Berkeley, California—and I took the plunge and bought it. There’s also a tradition on my mother’s side of the family. There are artists, people who painted and collected. Once I bought that first piece, the [collecting] bug really came alive. I never looked back.

Tell us about more about that Picasso—the first work you acquired.

It was a Picasso etching from 1954. It’s an interesting piece. Early Picassos often explored these acrobatic themes—figures balancing on balls, performers, that whole world—and then those motifs more or less disappeared. The harlequin theme vanishes after about 1905 or 1907. What’s fascinating is that in 1954, the harlequin makes a rare reappearance. I’m not an expert on this, but that’s part of what makes the piece so compelling.

How would you characterize your collection, and which throughlines have you found?

What really unites the collection are two things: a chronological thread and an aesthetic one. Chronologically, I’m generally drawn to early and mid-20th-century art. There are several Picasso lithographs here, for instance, but also a Joan Miró and an Egon Schiele. I did also have a Salvador Dalí, which I’ve just sold.

Then there’s the aesthetic side, which is a bit more idiosyncratic. Aside from the occasional splash of color, I’m really drawn to monochrome work. I like etchings and lithographs, and I tend to prefer them without color. An example is Annemarie Petri. There’s something about monochrome that allows me to really concentrate on the image itself. For a long time, color felt more like a distraction to me. Only very recently have I started to return to color in a more serious way.

Your professional background is rooted in theory, structure, and deep mathematical analysis. How does that mindset show up in the way you look at and acquire art?

I’m what you’d call an economic theorist. I’m interested in the connections between economics and mathematics, other social sciences, economics, and even biology. There’s a strong analytical component to this work. The connection to art or music is almost immediate for me. I don’t have to take an extra step—it’s the same mode of thinking. It’s like that old Douglas Hofstadter book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, where everything is interconnected. I respond to aesthetically beautiful things—whether it’s good music, good mathematics, or good art—in exactly the same way.

What is the strangest negotiation you’ve ever had with an artist or dealer?

There’s a Picasso etching here that was a “click” moment for me. It’s called Portrait of Marie-Thérèse. I’ll tell you why. At one point in my life, I acquired a copy—it exists in multiple impressions, all etchings. Then, a few years later, when another copy came up at auction, I had it playing in the background out of idle curiosity—like how people look up what their house might be worth.

At the moment the bidding passed the price I had originally paid, I suddenly became very interested. I thought, Let me see what’s happening here. I switched to the auction window and, without really realizing it, I clicked the bid button.

Oh my gosh, by accident?

Completely by accident. Suddenly, the auctioneer says, “We have a new live online bid from New York.” Everything was happening very fast. It’s not like there’s a big confirmation screen—you just click. Boom, boom, boom. I’d been lusting after Portrait of Marie-Thérèse for decades, and now I was about to have two of them. The auctioneer looked around the room and said, “Well, I have X [dollars]—does anyone want to bid?” No one does. And then she says, “Sold.”

The story gets funnier afterward, though it wasn’t funny at the time. I called Sotheby’s and asked to speak to whoever was in charge of the auction. I said, “I accidentally bid. I already own another impression—I was just comparing prices.” They wouldn’t let me off the hook. I called an old friend who’s probably the biggest Picasso and [Edvard] Munch dealer in the world, when it comes to etchings. I told him what had happened. Because he’s such a big figure, he called Sotheby’s himself and was able to get me off the hook.

How do you discover new artists and work?

I’d say—especially for any aspiring collector—going to the New York fairs is a wonderful place to start. I’m not particularly drawn to very contemporary work, but I still go. You never know what you’ll find. For instance, that’s where I discovered an astonishing artist named Teodora Axente. She’s Romanian. She’s been exhibiting recently in Siena, and she’s also been selected for a very special honor there for the Palio. It’s one of Italy’s highest cultural distinctions, to be chosen to paint the banner that’s awarded to the winning team.

Which work of yours provokes the most conversation from visitors?

I’d say it’s the Salman Toor oil painting I have, from long before the Whitney show. That painting provokes an incredible amount of conversation. The other work that really draws people in is Joan Miró’s last piece, called “Lapidario.” The word refers to stones, and each of the forms corresponds to a particular stone. I just love them, especially as a group. They originally came as loose sheets, and together they generate a lot of conversation as well.

Has there been a work that got away—or one you still find yourself thinking about?

Oh yes. The one I miss most is a drawing by Abanindranath Tagore. I bid on it quite ferociously in London, but it got away. It was a beautiful piece. [The work] was a woman in profile—just incredibly beautiful. It reminded me of where I grew up: India, Calcutta, Bengal. Tagore was a Bengali artist, and something about that connection made it feel like home. The girl’s face was very wistful, very tender. It stayed with me. I can still see it perfectly in my mind, so in that sense it truly got away.

Another was by Remedios Varo, an extraordinary Surrealist artist. She was Spanish, but lived in Mexico. I saw it at Mary-Anne Martin’s gallery uptown. It was a preparatory sketch for an oil painting, and honestly, I found the sketch more beautiful than the finished work. That’s another one I wish I’d held on to.

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Many of Cayetano Ferrer’s projects begin in archives—an apt breeding ground for work that worries itself with time and how it is annotated, warped, and reinterpreted.

The 44-year-old artist was born in Honolulu; when he was around 14, his parents, originally from Argentina, moved the family to Las Vegas. It’s notable that one of Ferrer’s earliest pieces, a farrago of casino carpeting exhibited at the first “Made in L.A.” biennial in 2012, was inspired by the experience of pulling at the seam of one such specimen in Vegas, and revealing the cement underneath. (His first institutional solo show, at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 2015–16, paired a version of this work, Remnant Recomposition, with rarely exhibited artifacts and architectural remains dating from the 1st century C.E.)

His inquiry into the life cycle of objects both ancient and contemporary continued when Ferrer salvaged fragments of the original William Pereira-designed LACMA buildings, repurposing them in a suite of different projects, including his latest show, “Object Prosthetics,” on view Jan. 31 through March 14 at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles.

Ahead of the opening, the artist, who is embarking on a PhD in Historic Preservation at Columbia University, gave CULTURED a studio visit.

What’s on your studio playlist?

Lately, I have Yasuaki Shimizu’s album Kiren on heavy rotation. It has a perfect balance of mechanical rhythm and tonal experimentation, equally perfect for generating ideas and physical labor.

If you could have a studio visit with one artist, dead or alive, who would it be?

The painters of the caves of Lascaux.

What’s the weirdest instrument you can’t live without?

The Kool Glide Pro. It’s a hot iron seaming machine that allows me to construct works from odd-shaped remnants in a way that wouldn’t be possible with a traditional iron. It’s basically a handheld microwave with a ’90s design that looks like it could be a prop from Star Trek.

Do you work with any assistants or do you work alone?

It tends to be project by project because the demands shift constantly. For my upcoming show Object Prosthetics, I had a lot of support from Max Cleary, who is a fantastic artist in his own right.

Have you ever destroyed a work to make something new?

In a way, yes, I work with a lot of fragments, and that includes components of prior works, but I don’t always think of it as destruction. There are always traces that travel with a fragment, so in a way, it’s more of a transformation. 

When do you do your best work?

Walking through a new city for the first time or looking out of a train window.

On a scale of hoarder to Marie Kondo, where do you fall?

When I relocated to New York recently, any hoarder tendencies were mediated by necessity. I still never got rid of any books.

What book changed the way you think about art?

Caetano Veloso’s Tropical Truth is a powerful memoir of making art and music amid Brazil’s right-wing dictatorship. The concept that stuck with me is antropofagia, translated as “cultural cannibalism,” which describes a subversive strategy of ingesting and transforming dominant cultural forms.

What’s your studio uniform?

A blue-collar uniform shirt and a white T-shirt. 

Tell us about the best studio visit you’ve ever had.

A memorable visit happened before I had a dedicated studio in Los Angeles. In 2011, I met with curators from the Hammer Museum at California Donuts on 3rd and Vermont. We had a great conversation about casino architecture that developed into a project at the first “Made in L.A.,” the following summer.

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Whether she is staging a flip-flop opera or turning a heliport into the setting for a museum gala, Meriem Bennani relies on the power of fantasy to transport her audiences into mind-bending realms where both timely and timeless questions surface. This ethos earned the Moroccan-born, New York–based artist the inaugural Boss Award for Outstanding Achievement at Art Basel Miami Beach last December, honoring work with cultural resonance that extends beyond the market.

Over the past decade, Bennani has made her mark with a multimedia practice that skewers and softens contemporary life in equal measure, from her 2018–22 “Life on the CAPS” film series, a dystopian meditation on diaspora, to her kinetic exploration of public sculpture on the High Line with Windy, 2022.

Here, Bennani reflects on artistic responsibility and how she plans to allocate the $50,000 grant that is part of the award with Boss Creative Director Marco Falcioni. 

Marco Falcioni: What is this award’s significance to you? 

Meriem Bennani: I’ve been working for a while and have received a lot of support from fashion, which I really value, especially since my work isn’t very commercial. I tend to make a few large installations and films each year, and my real hope is simply to keep doing that. Support like this gives me time to go deep. That kind of space is rare in a market that pushes artists to constantly stay visible. 

Falcioni: Which cause do you wish to personally support with the award?

Bennani: I’m planning to support an organization founded by Palestinian artists, Bilna’es. They directly fund artists and cultural projects in Gaza and the West Bank, particularly where resources are scarce. The focus is on getting money straight to artists. 

Falcioni: What advice would you give to emerging creatives looking to make their own path in this industry? 

Bennani: Resist the pressure to constantly produce. Saying yes at first is exciting, but slowing down—giving yourself years instead of months to make work—can be a real luxury, and a powerful one. 

Falcioni: Finally, Meriem, I wanted to ask you—what makes someone a real boss? 

Bennani: I’m too many things to be a boss. 

Falcioni: To me, being a boss is about standing by your own decisions. And for us, that’s exactly what you represent. I’ve always tried to break apart the social constraints of suiting and instead offer a sense of empowerment. When you wear a well-cut suit, you feel good—you feel stronger. 

Bennani: I’ll admit it—I have way too many suits.

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Every industry needs its chaos agent, and thank God the art world has Pat Oleszko. The 78-year-old artist, who has lived in a Tribeca loft stuffed to the brim with her creations since the ’70s, reflects the issues of our time back at us with wit and gravitas through performances that pull from burlesque, commedia dell’arte, and protest movements. Her rich archive of inflatables and costumes is the subject of her first New York solo show in 35 years at SculptureCenter, on view through April.

You have a lot going on these days, Pat. What are you sitting with? What’s on your mind?

It’s so very thrilling to have this [SculptureCenter] show. Then the [Whitney] Biennial… stuff’s out, people see it. But all I really want to do is make work about our descent into fascism and the massive climate problem. I really thought that I was going to be able to make some new work for the SculptureCenter show, but I simply didn’t have enough time. The only way that I can deal with iniquity and the awfulness of the situation is to create work. It’s very frustrating that I’m not able to channel my great sadness and fury into something that’s palpable. I hope once the show is up I’ll have time to start making stuff [again]. 

You’re not making new work right now, but I can imagine the past few months have had you looking at a lot of your old work—with SculptureCenter, the Whitney Biennial, and your presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach last December. Have you re-encountered any of them in ways that challenge or complicate how you first saw them?

There’s so much work, and in all of that there is the fact that I am the vessel, the armature, the motivation of the stuff… I put myself in so many different situations, and a lot of them were quite brutal.

I’m looking [back] and I’m sort of in awe that I did those things—placing myself in the middle of society where [I] might be welcomed, laughed at, or challenged by any number of people that were viewing it. I don’t have any fear about putting myself out as a fool, but it’s different as a person with experience. I know how to handle the crowd; I know essentially what’s going to happen in a lot of circumstances. But I’m still fearful of what might happen to me in different situations, whether it’s on the stage or in the street. I know much more, but it’s still terrifying. It’s always hard and it’s always easy because that’s what I have to do.

I wanted to ask you about how your experience of vulnerability and labor have evolved over the years. As you said, you’re the instigator for the work. It doesn’t exist without you activating it—whether that’s pressing a button and inflating it or wearing and literally embodying it. 

I have journals, and I have kept a record of all my exercise, what time I get up, and how much I weigh for years. The energy has changed, so I’m more watchful of how much energy I can spend in pursuit of this stuff. I still don’t recognize the fact that I’m 78 years old. Inside, I’m just the same. I’m a Taurus, so I’ve had a massive amount of strength to pummel myself to do these things.

The other thing is I’m doing exactly what I want to do. My whole life I’ve been living the exploration of this gift that I discovered. I’m never happier than when I’m working, and the thrill of putting the piece out in public is better than any drug I’ve ever had. If I fail, oh my God. 

Failure can be so fruitful, though.

Absolutely. There’s nothing, nothing like failure to propel you. I give my whole self to a project, so if I fail, it’s going to be a magnificent failure. You never make that mistake again. It forces you to grow.

When did you know that this was what you wanted to do—that this was a gift you wanted to claim?

I knew I was going to be an artist in kindergarten because we had to do a self-portrait, and mine was so clearly the best in the class. I always had millions of projects. When I got to college—and going to the University of Michigan at that time, I believe, was like going to the Bauhaus or Black Mountain—there was just a pervasive brilliance with the students and teachers. I had two teachers, Milton Cohen and George Manupelli, and one of them said a few things to the class that made me realize that what I was thinking about could be expressed on my body. I couldn’t learn how to weld—my things kept falling down—so I was working at home and sewing. Then I realized I was six feet tall, so I could hang the work on myself. That was my eureka moment: engaging with the public, with ideas, and putting them out, not in a hallowed white cube.

Who do you think have been the most important conversation or thought partners over the course of your career?

There have been many… Rose La Rose, who was the mentor who ran the strip house in Toledo. Burlesque was a huge influence on my career, and she was the smartest woman I’d ever met. She was an enormous influence—as important as going to art school. I certainly spent a good part of my life in the movies, and Buster Keaton was an example of an undaunting humor and being resolute in the face of adversity, which kind of characterizes what the fool is about. I don’t know how many film festivals I’ve sat through happily in the dark watching him and wishing I could be him.

The use of language has been very important, and a lot of that came from my dad, who spoke many languages and always inserted them in conversation, completely flummoxing us children. I always loved language. The use of language is no different than the use of the body. I can manipulate the body into anything, but still underneath it’s a body that has to walk down the street, take the subway, ride the bike to do the gig… I like writing about the work almost as much as I like making it. And oftentimes an idea will appear in language, like, “Bingo, I have to go do that.” Then I have the greatest time in the world, even though I may not know what the fuck I’m doing with the piece. I’m getting to know it as I’m making it; we all grow together. Then I put it on, and there has to be some language to speak about it. And that language is usually unique to that character. 

Have you given up anything to be and to stay an artist?

I haven’t given up on anything. I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s the best expression of my talents. Everything that I’ve ever done that has been more pedestrian, I have manipulated into my work. When I was a waitress, every night, it was a different kind of waitress. When I was stripping, I wasn’t stripping like they were…  

I mean, I wish I had some more money, but I’m not interested in that. I’m only interested in making a kind of a world that is taking on these different challenges and dealing with that in my own way, so that I can point out absurdity or the tragedy of the moment. 

How has your idea of what art can and can’t do evolved?

You try your best, and you do it with as much rigor and thoughtfulness and invention to try to direct attention to something, to speak to people, to motivate them, to make them recognize stuff that they might be hiding from or that might be hidden from them. I don’t have any false expectations about what art can do, but I do believe that art is memorable in a way that reaches many more senses than didactic stuff from governments or organizations, particularly in my field, which is working through humor. You make people laugh, and one, you give them enjoyment. Two, then they have to think about what they were laughing at and why. 

I’m not putting myself in the same echelon, but the great humorists have always had a problem being taken seriously. Even though Chaplin and Keaton and Jacques Tati were doing incredible work, it took the world a long time to recognize the fact that it was true brilliance. If you’re good you get a lot of mileage. I have something that will keep me occupied into eternity. I’m happy I went to college and got an education about how to be an artist at all times. Money well spent. 

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This week, we welcome another artist-critic to the Critics’ Table, painter Sam McKinniss, who sings the praises of an undersung Finnish painter of the 20th century. He writes about Helene Schjerfbeck‘s first major institutional survey in the U.S., at the Met. Also on Museum Mile is Joan Semmel‘s career-spanning show at the Jewish Museum, which proves that her recent icon status is well-deserved, our critic Johanna Fateman argues—as well as some 50 years overdue. And artist Ajay Kurian, who has written for TCT before, looks at the work of Marguerite Humeau, creator of mythic ecosystems, on view at White Cube, just a few blocks away. Tip: to map our picks and plan your route, enter the Critic’s Table hashtag #TCT in the search bar of the See Saw app.

Helene Schjerfbeck

Metropolitan Museum of Art | 1000 Fifth Avenue
Through April 5, 2026

Helene Schjerfbeck is born in 1862 in Russian-controlled Helsinki, a sickly child in occupied territory. Her genius is evident from the start. She is recognized as a prodigy at around age 11. The Finns pay for her study and travel to Paris. She goes also to Florence, St. Ives, and elsewhere in Europe. She returns to Helsinki a sensation, basically. But in midlife she is duty-bound to care for her aging mother in lonely Hyvinkää, north of the capital. There, in relative isolation, she invents her singular, confounding style. Then World War I, the Finnish Civil War, independence from Russia, World War II. She evacuates Finland to a hotel in Sweden. She dies there, next to her easel, in 1946. Almost no one in this country knows anything about her work. Go know.

Schjerfbeck is Finland’s best modern painter. She is more fascinating, more troubling, and certainly more elusive than Norway’s best modernist, Edvard Munch, with whom she is sometimes compared. Same goes for the Dane, Vilhelm Hammershøi, whose oeuvre has attracted considerable appreciation on our shores for at least the last decade. Schjerfbeck is likewise more interesting than James McNeill Whistler, her American contemporary, with whom she is also sometimes compared. It shouldn’t be a contest, and yet these are the stakes of “Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck” at the Met.

This quiet revelation, curated by Dita Amory, unfolds in four chronological sections. It begins in early life and career. It concludes with the harrowing work of an enfeebled old woman: self-portraits made from a bedside mirror. Self-confident as well as self-effacing, graphic and yet subtle, pensive as well as aggressive… The mature paintings strike out at something, but what? Good grief. Or, grief made good through acts of beauty. What we recognize is the elegant mystery of a private life softly embroiled in total, global upheaval. —Sam McKinniss

Joan Semmel

Jewish Museum | 1109 Fifth Avenue
Through May 31, 2026

To the left, upon entering the gallery, three paintings from the 1970s show Joan Semmel holding the sexual revolution to its word. As the women’s movement sought to level the playing field, she rotated the picture plane to deal with the horizontal space of sex and self-observation, presenting the POV of the reclining nude. The canvas that takes pride of place on the first wall in Semmel’s abbreviated survey “In the Flesh” at the Jewish Museum, demonstrates her breakthrough gesture—the reversal or collapse of the patriarchal art-historical artist-model divide—very directly. Through the Object’s Eye, 1975, as it’s titled, is a radically foreshortened view of Semmel’s own body, cropped, from the collar bone down. The composition can be seen as a lush and nervy turning-of-the-tables, with something like Courbet’s Origin of the World, 1866, in mind. Not quite as nervy, perhaps, as the pair of electrifying “fuck paintings” (the artist’s other term for her “Erotic Series”) that completes the trio: each of these floats an entangled couple, viewed as though standing at the foot of the bed, in an etheric field of color. I love the yellow one especially.

Ten of the 16 paintings on view are from this blazing early period, but the others show Semmel’s fiery rigor vis à vis the nude (her own unclothed body in various positions) undimmed throughout the subsequent decades. Her approach expands, and the emphasis of her critique—her dazzling challenge to what a woman should do, be, look at, look like—shifts over time as her body changes. The four-panel, panoramic Skin in the Game, 2019, features a layered, time lapse-effect procession of figures at the center; on either end, Semmel reprises the evergreen trick of Object’s Eye, with its receding diagonal composition, but with a much older body as her model. (The artist is now 93.)

As a bonus, we get a vest-pocket show-within-a-show that Semmel has curated from the museum’s collection—a salon-style installation of mostly small works from artists as varied as Man Ray, Alice Neel, Gordon Parks, Judith Bernstein, and Nan Goldin. It highlights Semmel’s engagement with history, from European modernism to the American women’s art movement, and functions to locate her on a kind of map, in the mix. For predictable reasons, critics and curators slept on this astonishing body of work until rather late in the game. How embarrassing for them: Joan Semmel is obviously one of the great figurative painters of our time. —Johanna Fateman

Marguerite Humeau

White Cube | 1002 Madison Avenue
Through February 21, 2026

Marguerite Humeau has long looked to other species—termites, bees, “weeds”—not as metaphors, but as collaborators in thinking outside an anthropocentric logic. At White Cube, her new show “scintille,” inspired by her travels through cave systems in West Papua, names the cave and its most mythical inhabitants—bats—as collaborators, establishing a world where perception, action, and meaning emerge collectively.

Just inside the ground-floor gallery, a sculpture (whose title is of a typically long length for these works) stands apart from two towering guardian forms. Centurience: possessing the primordial patience to outlast catastrophe by barely moving at all, knowing that sometimes the greatest revolution is simply refusing to hurry toward extinction. In darkness, there is no shame in remaining still, unfinished, and forever young. Completion is a kind of death, while eternal youth swims on for a hundred years, 2025, as it’s called, is smaller in scale and shows a tiny, frosty pink creature perched on a seemingly younger stalagmite. The piece reads as a guide to the exhibition. The delicate, blown and cast-glass being—part anemone, part axolotl—unfurls two billowing forms from its head. These feel less like organs than auguries: sensory structures without analogy, suggesting ways of knowing that cannot be mapped cleanly onto human systems. The larger stalagmite-like sculptures, standing like geo-biological sentinels, lift the eye upward to their proposed sources of origin—mirrored glass spheres ascending in size, like droplets. Matter appears to grow, pulse, and remember.

In the gallery upstairs, color-shifting glass bat-forms hang throughout the space, mercurial and alert. Inspired by the radically different social and perceptual worlds of these animals, they feel alive precisely because they resist fixity. They are symbols in motion. Where the exhibition strains is in its language. Humeau’s neologisms and portmanteau titles—inspired by the logic of John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, 2021—pin these uncertain states too neatly in place. In the artist’s shadowy world, which invokes echolocation, darkness, and untranslatable sensations, her objects become less emotionally powerful when the surrounding language is itself treated like a butterfly specimen: newly named, carefully labeled, and immobilized.

Over the two floors, 12 works on paper in arched frames want to operate as portals. But the frames read too much like signposts towards ritual in contrast to the sculptures’ capacity to initiate new ceremonies. And while “scintille” imagines a world of symbiosis, it is not one without violence. Transformation always carries some: Individuation and the carving of categories do damage. Yet the deeper tension here lies not within the exhibition’s internal logic, but between the stories we have inherited and those this exhibition proposes: stories built through patience and accretion, where change unfolds collectively and on timescales closer to geology than biography. —Ajay Kurian

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“One of the very first goals I had in mind was that nobody leave the building happy.”

Udo Kittelmann is not organizing a funeral or directing an adaptation of King Lear. The German curator is describing his experience “editing an audiovisual poem” from a sampling of early film entries (think Alice Guy-Blaché, Georges Méliès, Walt Disney) and a cross-section of contemporary video works from the repositories of Julia Stoschek, the leading collector of time-based art.

When on our Zoom in January, I repeatedly make the mistake of calling the resulting “What a Wonderful World” an exhibition, Stoschek and Kittelmann alternately and diligently correct me. Calling their project, on view at Los Angeles’s Variety Arts Theater Feb. 6 through March 20, a poem is the pair’s way of signaling their will to question how we have come to ingest art, moving images, and where they intersect. They hope the dose of re-enchantment this nomenclature convention surfaces will reach the audiences that walk through the five-story parcours, too.

Although featured works from the likes of Lu Yang, Bunny Rogers, and Paul Chan feel particularly indissociable from the technological advances of our era, Kittelmann insists on their shared lineage with Disney’s earliest animations or Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou; life, loss, love, and the persistent need to make meaning of it all, are evoked over and over again. In a peak screen-time time, Kittelmann asks viewers to reach beyond their desire for entertainment to access a more raw experience of these capsules of humanity. Here, he and Stoschek chart what the process of assembling “What a Wonderful World,” the Julia Stoschek Foundation’s first major appearance Stateside, has shown them.

CULTURED: We’re going to be talking a lot about moving images, so I wanted to ask, what was the last moving image that moved each of you?

Julia Stoschek: The image that’s stayed with me most recently is Dara Birnbaum’s work, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978–79, which is part of “What a Wonderful World.” It’s my screensaver. We are living in such a challenging world, and the only way we can survive is if we transform all the time. I love the idea of becoming Wonder Woman. [Laughs]

Udo Kittelmann: Just yesterday, my oldest son’s child turned a year old. His mother took, by coincidence, [a video] of him walking on his own for the very first time. To see how proud he got, like, Wow, something is now totally different with my body. You could see him smiling. Then, of course, he fell again on the floor. It was quite touching; it’s a real artwork in a way.

CULTURED: Udo, you’ve been formally associated with the Julia Stoschek Foundation since 2021, when you joined the advisory board. Where did the conversation for “What a Wonderful World” begin?

Stoschek: I’ve known Udo for nearly 20 years. I knew how he curated. My connection to Los Angeles started when I became a member, from 2018 to 2022, of MOCA’s Board of Trustees. The idea was born to show part of the collection in LA, and we started talking about this three or four years ago. Udo, you came up with the idea to connect contemporary video works from my collection with silent movies and early cinema classics.

Kittelmann: For many years, I was working on the idea to put into dialogue not just contemporary time-based art but silent movies and so on—to bring up the idea that the topics have never changed. It’s always about how people behave with each other, how they fall in love, how they fight with each other—whether in a more private relationship or between nations. The first visionary moving images were already filmed by the beginning of the 20th century. What has changed? Only the aesthetics, and the different generations’ experiences of being in love or fighting.

“A project like this, we will do once in a lifetime.” — Julia Stoschek

CULTURED: Julia, were you familiar with silent film and early cinema before this? Did any make a particular impact on you?

Stoschek: No, not before. But let’s talk about The Skeleton Dance from 1929, one of the earliest animations. You see these skeletons emerge from their graves and start dancing. On the one hand, it seems a bit funny and ironic, but on the other, it’s also brutal and a bit shocking. We placed it at the entrance area, so it’s a welcome, but it’s also a gentle reminder of mortality.

Kittelmann: I very much want to avoid that people—after they take this journey through the building and see these many, many, many thousands of images—leave in the mood to join a party. I’d want them to go home and find a comfortable place to reflect on what all these works were about.

CULTURED: The moving image recently has become almost purely about entertainment or distraction, so that’s an interesting intention.

Kittelmann: Not to entertain, but to come up with something that’s quite provoking about where we are…

Stoschek: …today. This show is holding up a mirror to the state of the world.

Kittelmann: It’s obvious that the title quotes Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” It was first released in 1967, a time when the whole world was quite chaotic. Demonstrations were all over the planet, especially around the Vietnam War. It was a tough, if not brutal, time. And Armstrong decided to come up with this song to give you the message, “Don’t give up dreaming.” This was the thread that led me through the whole collection to find these works. Julia’s collection is very much about these essential video-based artworks. There’s a tiny minority of them that entertain you.

Stoschek: It’s not a massage. [Laughs] 

Kittelmann: But we were quite careful not to make it all in all too sad, too frustrating. There is hope, yeah?

CULTURED: Julia, this is the first time the Foundation is having a major showing in the U.S., in the capital of entertainment—Los Angeles. How did you take into account the American audience in organizing this?

Stoschek: I definitely wanted to have it in LA, not in New York, because it’s the birthplace of visual modernity. My collection has this focus on the moving image, starting from the ’60s until today, that speaks directly to this history. I’m sure that the LA visitors grew up with the film industry and with movies. We’ll also have special opening hours from 5 p.m. until midnight. We’re all doing it for the first time; I’m very excited to see how people will react.

Kittelmann: I really believe that the works we selected are quite emotional. I don’t see a big difference in where it will be presented. As long as we all have a heartbeat. People are asked to feel very free in how they walk [through the space]. There is no sign that tells you where to go or what to see. Even with the text in the magazines we’ll give away, we try to avoid interpretation. It’s very much for everybody, not just the art world elite or the discourse-dependent crowd. There is no moral behind it that we want to prove; you may take the moral out of it. [Calling it] an audiovisual poem hopefully already brings you into a different mood.

CULTURED: What has working on “What a Wonderful World” taught you about where audio-visual and time-based art is headed, or what’s missing?

Kittelmann: What we completely left out is something that was built on A.I.

Stoschek: But it’s also not really part of my collection. I never found the right work. Content-wise, there was nothing that really touched me. I’m open to everything, but what I’ve seen until now, I’ve not been too into.

Kittelmann: We really did take this challenge to experiment in times where, in the art world, fewer and fewer exhibitions are experimental. I’m personally very happy that “What a Wonderful World” will be on view at the same time as the “Monuments” show [at MOCA and the Brick]. To have those projects side by side is amazing.

Stoschek: A project like this, we will do once in a lifetime. I hope that as many visitors as possible can see and join the show. It is a pop-up for six weeks with special opening hours, and we have an incredible side program as well. I really hope people enjoy the show.

Kittelmann: We also forgot to say—it’s banal but not banal—is that everybody is asked to take popcorn for free. They can walk around with popcorn. Why not? We are not a museum.

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This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin
Genre: Fiction
When: On sale now
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Daniyal Mueenuddin follows his 2009 short story collection, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, with his debut novel set in contemporary feudal Pakistan.
Why It’s Worth a Look: This Is Where the Serpent Lives follows a dozen characters through the decades as they volley for respect, safety, power, and love between the country’s cities and farmlands. As they do, the moral choices and the advantageous ones brush against each other with delightful tension.  

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes
Genre: Autofiction
When: On sale now
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: For his 80th birthday, author Julian Barnes has released what he says will be his last novel, a work of fiction that mostly comes across as nonfiction, with an aging author who comes to terms with his work, what’s left of it, and the health problems that have begun to ail him.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Our narrator spends the book assessing a couple he’s known for decades, whose story he’s longed to pen. He watches them through the years and a few (possibly real) diary entries before finally putting his pen into action. 

Vigil by George Saunders
Genre: Fiction
When: January 27
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The Booker Prize winner returns with a novel charting the last day of an oil company CEO. Visitors—alive and dead—travel to his bedside for a final reckoning. A long passed soul comes down to Earth to guide him into the afterlife.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Saunders himself spent time on an oil exploration crew in 1980s Sumatra and received a degree in geophysical engineering, making this an interesting return to form for a writer with an eclectic career preceding the one we all know him for. 

Autobiography of Cotton by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Genre: Autofiction
When: February 3
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Pulitzer Prize winner Cristina Rivera Garza blends archival research, personal family history, and narrative fiction in this account of how cotton cultivation transformed the regions surrounding the U.S.-Mexico border.
Why It’s Worth a Look: As relationships between Mexico, the U.S., and the immigrants that travel the two are devastated in real time, Rivera Garza looks to the parallel degradation of land misused by our agricultural systems. 

Days of Love and Rage by Anand Gopal
Genre: History
When: March 3
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Anand Gopal retells the story of the Syrian Revolution with help from six individuals who sparked a movement watched around the world.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Rather than attempt to match the scale of this movement in his storytelling, Gopal instead drills into the intimate moments of the individuals involved, highlighting their ability to move nations far greater than themselves. 

Now I Surrender by Álvaro Enrigue, translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer
Genre: Historical Fiction
When: March 3
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Publishers bill this book as “part epic, part alt-Western.” It retells the colonization of the Western U.S., this time through the story of hunting down Geronimo, a legendary Apache warrior, and that of a woman fleeing an Apache raid on her late husband’s ranch.
Why It’s Worth a Look: As is often the case with these kinds of expansive retellings, our protagonists are separated only by decades, and from us only by our imagined understanding of frontier times. 

Hooked by Asako Yuzuki, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton
Genre: Fiction
When: March 17
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: The author of Butter here turns her attention to the consuming pull of loneliness and ever-messy nature of female friendships. Her protagonist is Eriko, a buttoned-up trader who becomes fixated on a lifestyle blogger, Shoko, before orchestrating a meeting for the pair.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Admiration of course devolves into obsession in this tightly wound piece of work. It’s a story that’s been told before, but still packs a hell of a punch under Yuzuki’s guidance. 

Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich
Genre: Short Stories
When: March 24
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Louise Erdrich here compiles stories written over two decades with characters ranging from immigrant farmers to grade-school teachers to souls in the afterlife to folk music-inclined thieves.
Why It’s Worth a Look: The book includes a commissioned work of art by Erdrich’s own daughter, Aza Erdrich Abe, marking a singular collaboration between the two. 

The Keeper by Tana French
Genre: Thriller
When: March 31
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Tana French is wrapping up her bestselling Cal Hooper trilogy with The Keeper, which sees a young woman go missing in the remote fictional Irish village of Ardnakelty.
Why It’s Worth a Look: The suspected crime tears the village apart at the seams, as old grudges and new rivalries come to light. What is our fearless, retired Chicago detective to do but step in?

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe
Genre: True Crime
When: April 7
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: One night in 2019, an MI6 surveillance camera in London caught a man pacing back and forth, before jumping into the Thames to his death. Best-selling author Patrick Radden Keefe here outlines the stranger-than-fiction series of events that brought this man to the river.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Following Zac Brettler’s death, his family became aware of the 19-year-old’s alter ego, who had become entangled with the city’s criminal underground. His suicide suddenly seemed suspect despite the Scotland Yard’s resolute reluctance to look any further. Radden Keefe reveals why. 

Transcription by Ben Lerner
Genre: Fiction
When: April 7
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Our narrator travels to Rhode Island to conduct the final interview of a renowned artist, Thomas, his 90-year-old mentor and the father of a college pal, Max. Unfortunately, our narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink before they begin, leaving him without a recording device as he heads into this seminal opportunity. He declines to confess this.
Why It’s Worth a Look: It’s every journalist’s worst nightmare, and yet, Lerner’s book still comes as a delightful exploration of mentorship, fatherhood, and a career in the arts, as well as a testament to our growing reliance on technology as a store of cultural memory.

Famesick by Lena Dunham
Genre: Memoir
When: April 14
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: Here, Millenial lightning rod Lena Dunham lets readers in on life in the spotlight while dealing with addiction and chronic health issues that leave one feeling like they’re, as she puts it, “towing a wrecked car across town at midnight.”
Why It’s Worth a Look: Dunham goes back to first selling her pilot of Girls, and up through her current projects, based on life in London with her husband. Was the success worth the discomfort it brought? By the end of this tome, Dunham has found her answer. 

Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez
Genre: Fiction
When: April 21
Where: Amazon, Barnes & Noble
What It Is: In the spring of 2007, Alicia Canales Forten is 26 and already too grown and stuffy for her liking. Then, she comes upon Fort Greene in New York, and an ecosystem of young adults living a very different lifestyle.
Why It’s Worth a Look: Bestseller Xochitl Gonzalez returns with a novel that simultaneously explores the perils of growing up and of living as a person of color on the eve of some of the country’s most culturally impactful years.

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What does it feel like to grow up inside an ever-changing sculpture? For Mariah Nielson, that living work of art was the Blunk House, built by her father JB Blunk in the 1950s from entirely salvaged materials in Northern California’s Point Reyes Station. Every wall, chair, and corner of the home was envisioned as a facet of “one big sculpture,” where art, craft, and daily life were inseparable.

Today, as the director of the JB Blunk Estate, Nielson continues that vision through Blunk Space, the estate’s gallery, pairing her father’s work with that of contemporary creatives. The current exhibition, “100 Candleholders,” showcases a network of makers connected by taste or legacy to the sprawling property and home.

These days, Nielson’s approach to collecting is still inseparable from her upbringing—and she’d like to keep it that way. Her father’s is a philosophy that guides both the objects she surrounds herself with and the exhibitions she curates. Here, she tells CULTURED exactly what those lessons are, and how she aims to keep them in practice.

Where does the story of your collection begin? 

The story begins at the Blunk House, the home my father, JB Blunk, built by hand in the 1950s using entirely salvaged materials. The house is his masterpiece—a living sculpture—where nearly everything was made by my family or by artist friends, blurring the line between art, craft, and daily life.

Growing up in the Blunk House means living inside a total work of art. When did you first understand that what surrounded you was rather unique? 

I began to fully appreciate the Blunk House as a total work of art in my early 20s, when I was studying architecture. It was then that I understood how rare it was to grow up in a home my father had built entirely by hand, and how deeply sculptural the space itself is. Around that time, I also met historian and curator Glenn Adamson, who had interviewed my father for the Smithsonian Archives. Glenn’s interest in my father’s work helped place the house within a broader historical context and deepened my understanding of its significance.

Your father described the house, garden, and studio as “one big sculpture.” How has that idea shaped the way you think about collecting and living with art? 

In a very practical, embodied way. It’s encouraged me to see things around me as functional art rather than precious objects. My father always said, “Nothing is precious”—he wanted people to truly live with his work: to sit on it, eat from it, look at it every day, move it around, and engage with it fully.

Everything in our home also had a story or a personal provenance, and that has stayed with me. The objects I live with now are tied to relationships and experiences—pieces from friends or family, things collected while traveling, or gifts from artists and companies I have personal connections with, like Nodi or Birkenstock. That sensibility even extends to my wardrobe.

How do you discover new artists or work? How is that borne out in the exhibitions you mount? 

I discover new artists primarily through my network of artist and collector friends, as well as through travel. These relationships and encounters naturally shape the exhibitions I mount. Our current exhibition (“100 Candleholders“) is a perfect example of this extended network in action. All 100 artists in the show are connected to the JB Blunk Estate in some way—through personal relationships, through their galleries, or through artists whose work I’ve encountered while out in the world.

Every collector has made a rookie mistake or two. What was your most memorable? 

Not holding on to a Morris Graves painting that was gifted to my father by Morris in the early 1980s.

Which artists are you currently most excited about and why? 

I’m currently most excited about Ian Collings, Cross Lypka, and Marina Contro. Ian’s approach to stone carving is sublime, Cross Lypka are truly pushing the boundaries of clay as a medium, and Marina is elevating weaving to the level of fine art.

Your collection spans design, craft, and artwork. What threads connect the objects you’re drawn to? 

The threads all loop back to the Blunk House and my father. Many of the artists whose work I collect come into my life through the JB Blunk Estate, and those connections often grow into friendships and, eventually, acquisitions. It’s a joy to support artists whose work I truly believe in.

Which work in your home provokes the most conversation from visitors? 

My father’s penis stools… they never fail to spark conversation. He created a series of stools inspired by the phallic form, and they are eye-catching, to say the least.

When you encounter an artwork or object, what are the qualities that never fail to draw you in?

I’m drawn first to the material itself and how it has been worked or manipulated by the artist. Sometimes it’s the way two or three materials are combined. What captures me most is what is now often called the “material intelligence” of the maker—the thoughtfulness and skill with which the material is handled.

Design discourse and collecting, in particular, is very susceptible to trends. What do you think is in vogue right now? What do you attribute that trend to? 

There’s a growing interest in collecting work that will truly last—pieces that feel destined to stay in a collection over time. People are investing in art and design that is personal and specific to their homes and larger collections, rather than chasing fleeting trends. The focus feels more intentional: acquiring work that is meaningful, enduring, and able to deepen in value—emotionally as well as aesthetically—the longer you live with it.

As director of the JB Blunk Estate, you work closely with questions of preservation. How do you balance conservation with the belief that objects—and spaces—are meant to be used? 

I believe that good design gets better with use. Objects and spaces develop both a literal and energetic patina over time, which only adds to their beauty. Conservation is important, but I balance it with the understanding that these works are meant to be engaged with, lived with, and experienced.

How does the Northern California landscape influence your relationship to art and design? 

Growing up in Northern California, I developed a deep appreciation for natural materials and organic forms. The landscape—the shapes, colors, and scale of it all—has profoundly shaped the way I engage with art and design.

If you could snap your fingers and instantly own the art collection of anyone else, who would it be and why? 

I would choose Gemma Holt and Max Lamb, because they’ve created so much of the art and design they live with and have such impeccable, discerning taste.

The Blunk Space art and design gallery hosts exhibitions which combine your father’s legacy with contemporary talents. Do you ever find yourself collecting from these shows? 

I’ve purchased work from nearly all of our exhibitions, because I genuinely believe in—and want—the pieces we present!

“The brush only becomes a brush when you are using it to paint,” Leah Ke Yi Zheng tells me across her computer screen, sitting, cigarette in hand, in her Chicago studio. “I think I’m only a ‘painter’ when I’m painting.”

The artist’s first encounters with paint came as a child growing up in Wuyishan, China, where she learned calligraphy and classical techniques from a traditional painter. But it was in Chicago, where Zheng enrolled in an MFA program at SAIC after leaving the prospect of law school behind, that she found her own path to it. Since graduating in 2019, she’s made a name for herself as an artist concerned with stretching the possibilities of her medium—and the meaning we glean from it. Zheng traded in canvases for Chinese silk, and rectilinear shapes for subtly (and sometimes jarringly) asymmetric forms. “I want to think about what makes a painting and go not from the starting point, which is zero,” she says, “but a step back—to the minus-one point—and think about how to construct that.” From this antechamber, three main motifs have surfaced and been reinterpreted over the years: machine gears, haunting, absent faces often obscured by color, and hexagrams rooted in the I Ching.

The ancient Chinese text laid the groundwork for the 64 paintings Zheng has on view at the Renaissance Society through April 12, which make up her first solo institutional showing. Inside, the artist has created a parcours in dialogue with daylight and the Renaissance Society’s existing architecture. (Certain windows have been concealed, and some walls’ proportions modified.) Like the featured pieces, which embody the “recursive, returning but not repeating” practice of configuring every possible arrangement of the “six, stacked, horizontal lines, solid or broken, which form a … hexagram,” any visit to the exhibition promises to be a (re)discovery. Below, I speak with Zheng about the studio practice that underpins this reflective body of work, her relationship to her analytical brain, and protecting her space. 

CULTURED: This Renaissance Society show, your first institutional solo, is a big milestone for you. It’s also a hometown show of sorts. You moved to Chicago to get your MFA at SAIC, and you’ve been based there ever since. What’s kept you in Chicago? And what has its art ecosystem afforded you in terms of what you’ve been able to create?

Leah Ke Yi Zheng: I graduated in 2019. Chicago is kind of a quiet place. It’s really offered me time and space. I could find a studio with high ceilings and enough room to make large paintings. In terms of time, the commute is relatively easy. My son, who is 10, goes to school here, which limits the desire to move elsewhere. It’s quiet in terms of mental space too. I live a relatively reclusive life. There’s not too many openings; there is an art scene, but it’s not as active as in some other cities. My work deals with different histories, both Asian and Western painting histories. Having this kind of time and space here makes it easier to move among them.

Quieter means not [having] an immediate response. When you have a response, you need a response back, where[as] this gives an idea more time to grow. It becomes bolder and more ambitious.

CULTURED: You’ve made this monumental work for the Renaissance Society, a series of 64 paintings. Where did the I Ching paintings start, and did the progression surprise you?

Zheng: I have been making I Ching paintings since 2021. The I Ching is an almost 3000 year old book that is at the core of Chinese philosophy—a way of living, a way of understanding and being in the world. My initial desire was wanting to know about the world, ​​and I Ching is a book of world’s phenomena. The idea of the show came very quickly; it’s quite an intuitive response to the architecture of the Ren. I [wanted] to work with the architecture, but the work itself forms another space. Together they form a new experience. The paintings are not strictly site-responsive, but they are considering the site… 

Another challenge was the idea of light. In this project, the paintings embody the light. There are some that are really opaque, some that are really transparent. The two oppositions form this recursivity that keeps on generating newness or life. With this large quantity, for the first time, I could really vary the nuances or differences within the group of work for one exhibition. 

CULTURED: I’m interested in what you’re saying about this dance between opacity and transparency. It makes me think of a review by the poet John Yau about your work from a few years ago, where he speaks about this dance between legibility and illegibility. There’s something a little disconcerting about that in your work; your eye isn’t exactly sure where to land on the painting. That brings to mind the idea of refusal as something that opens something up rather than shutting something down. You’ve also spoken about aliveness in your work, and refusal can be a way to keep something alive. I see that tug of war very much at play, at least formally, in your paintings.

Zheng: It’s definitely there; it’s relating to this recursive way of thinking. When I started to make shaped canvases, it was a very straightforward rejection. I didn’t want to start my painting just accepting the regular 90-degree corners. I want to deviate from it. I want to think about what makes a painting and go not from the starting point, which is zero, but a step back—to the minus-one point—and think about how to construct that. That was at the beginning of the practice. Now it’s not a conscious rejection. If there is one, maybe it’s [a rejection of] a blind belief in rationality. 

CULTURED: The motif of the machine comes up a lot in your work. The machine is something that can be seen as very rational, versus a text like the I Ching that feels rooted in going beyond rationality. Where do the machines come in? 

Zheng: They exist in multitudes together, where one almost offers a metaphor for the other. The idea of a machine in industrial times was really [one of] linear reproduction. Now, with artificial intelligence or a robot as a house helper, that’s a different context. It’s more embedded in embracing different modes of repetition and production. It’s also a recursive way of coding and producing that allows contingency.

When I made each of these 64 paintings, it was a huge challenge but also a huge enjoyment. Imagine you have all the possibilities of size, which decides the painting’s presence. I decide on the shape and the structure, then I kind of need to slow myself down with a slow-beating heart and allow all the contingency that could happen. Each time I start a new painting it could be anything. If you think of other large painting projects like Richter’s “48 Portraits” or Warhol’s “Shadow” paintings, the system already decides it all. What made this project a challenge, and eventually rewarding, is that I made each painting as an individual work. Then it becomes a recursive spiral. That’s why the I Ching is like a philosophical companion. I’m not a master of it; I’m still learning it. Just like the show, one cannot comprehend the entire work at once. The only way is by walking [around] it. 

CULTURED: Are you reluctant to have spiritual meaning assigned to your work? Spiritual can be such a vague word. 

Zheng: It’s like when we say “surreal.” I think it is spiritual, it is mystic. I’m not reluctant, but I think it’s less of what I say, and more of how one experiences it. The feeling I have myself … is a sense of epiphany. 

CULTURED: I know that you went to law school. Is there anything about that experience that still percolates into your work today, that lawyer brain?

Zheng: I think just that moment of not being able to quite commit to saying spirituality—that is the analytic brain thinking, Is that 100% true? But I also can’t reject that. That’s why making art is really great.

CULTURED: Art doesn’t have to exist in the realm of fact. It’s about the experience first and interpretation second.

Zheng: And open to different experiences. And different explanations. The idea of translate-ability is really one of the best things we can have. I imagine how the painting is translating that unsayable thing to the viewer in a similar way as how when we are in nature, the whole of it—the temperature, the light, the breeze, what we see—becomes part of our biology, and part of us for a moment. 

CULTURED: In an interview about the I Ching paintings you showed at Mendes Wood, you mentioned they were in a way an attempt to paint the idea of time. What’s your relationship to time like in the studio? Do you lose track of time? Is there a time of day where you like to work best?

Zheng: I feel it’s quite like an athlete—how they’re kind of in the flow, or in the zone. Now I know when I’m in that zone or not; I will only paint when I am. I stop when I’m out of energy or lose my focus. It’s a really focused zone, where time is not relevant. 

You’re really just absorbed in the color, in the texture; it’s a world of feeling and emotions, no thoughts. If my son is around, I’ll put on noise-canceling headphones. Once, I knocked into him and it scared me, and he was like, “Now I know why sometimes you’re so late, because it takes you a long time to paint a small area.”

CULTURED: What is your relationship to showing work to people and to that sort of porosity? Is that when your analytical brain kicks in?

Zheng: I share a studio with my partner, so he sees it. But I protect my space. With my son, I tell him, “Until I finish these, until I know what it is, let’s not talk about it.” 

CULTURED: Does he respect that? 

Zheng: He grew up in the studio.

CULTURED: What’s the first thing you do when you enter the studio? Is there anything that structures your entry into that zone?

Zheng: I know when I will paint, because there’s a lot of preparation. To stretch a large canvas takes two days. Painting starts the night before really. I already know I have this new surface. I start to paint it in my head. The next day, I make tea, then I sit and look at [the canvas]. I put on headphones and don’t listen to anything a lot of the time; it just creates that space with the painting. And if I’m in the process of painting then I don’t quite leave it; I go home and the painting will still be on my mind. When you’re really in it, you don’t leave it until it’s done.

CULTURED: What’s your relationship to getting rid of work? Do you turn it into something new? Do you hide it?

Zheng: Rejects and the anomalies I keep in the studio for myself … Each painting you make, you absorb it: It becomes part of your feeling and your language. The [rejects from this series] will remind me of the whole process. But this is a special case. In the past, with individual paintings, it’s been very intuitive. I recently learned this idea of what is intuitive. Intuition is this accumulated knowledge, where you just know immediately. It does not come from nothing; this quick response comes from tons of experience and knowledge. So I know when I finish a painting. 

CULTURED: For me, intuition is instinct that’s been practiced over time.

Zheng: But then what you practice with changes because you have more of it.

CULTURED: What’s next after the Ren show? Is there anything you haven’t done that you’re excited to delve into?

Zheng: I really want to make an animation with Bach’s method of composition composing the music to it. But that sounds very time-consuming, and it’s the wrong idea because I’m attracted to the form and not a real idea. So I’ll wait until something really clicks and it can grow naturally.

I think I have a seed for the next project around my fictional portraits, the figure paintings that I do. I’ve made them sporadically, but I feel like that’s a place where I can have some fun and challenge myself to have a succinct and precise presentation.

Art fairs, with their back-to-back booths, tend to get little love from artists, admits Wael Shawky. The acclaimed Egyptian artist and his creative friends “didn’t really attend many art fairs,” he told me in a video call earlier this month. 

So it was a surprise that Shawky, who represented Egypt with a buzzed-about pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, was tapped as artistic director of the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar, located in Doha’s M7 creative hub and Design District and running from Feb. 5–7. (He is working alongside Vincenzo de Bellis, chief artistic officer and global director of fairs for Art Basel.)

As the global art market seeks new clientele following a contraction, the newest edition of the Art Basel fair—its fifth location, announced last spring—aims to spotlight the region’s fast-growing art scene. Organized in partnership with the Qatari government-operated Qatar Sports Investments and their strategic partner QC+, the fair fits within the country’s broader plans to expand its role as a global arts player and diversify its economy, akin to efforts underway in the neighboring United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. For Qatar, this push has included the creation of a new Qatar Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and the addition of the Art Mill Museum and the Lusail Museum to the existing Qatar Museums. Plus, the Gulf’s largest fine art storage and logistics freeport is now under construction in the country.  

At the same time, fair fatigue and prohibitive costs have led many to question the traditional art fair model, which is why Shawky’s unconventional role—a first of its kind for such a large fair—makes sense. The Doha-based artist’s performances, films, drawings, paintings, and music reinterpreting regional ancient history and mythology from an Arab perspective have made him one of the region’s most celebrated voices. Shawky studied at the University of Alexandria, received his MFA at the University of Pennsylvania, and then returned to Alexandria, where he created the MASS Alexandria art school. In 2024, he was appointed head of Doha’s Fire Station contemporary art space, where he launched the Arts Intensive Study Program (AISP), a free international residency and educational program. 

In response to what he called the “outdated” fair model, Shawky said he hopes to more closely align the Doha edition with the vision of artists, rather than the logic of sales. This, he added, is mirrored by changes in contemporary art, which he sees as less and less centered on sellable objects. To that end, Shawky has organized an open fair format of solo exhibitions from 87 galleries, while highlighting regional artists whose market is still budding. He also invited nine artists for site-specific presentations across Msheireb Downtown Doha. The focus “needs to go back to the power of the artist, and the narration of the artist,” Shawky said.

In a world increasingly restrictive—and sometimes outright hostile—to outsiders, Shawky is convinced Qatar is rising to the fore as a unique, welcoming haven in the region. Below, I speak to the artist about why next month’s fair offers a chance to demonstrate just that.

CULTURED: How did your collaboration with Art Basel come about?

Wael Shawky: The idea was that it was nice to have an artist for the first time from the region, and also to have a new vision for this new edition in Qatar. I was really honored and I thought it would make total sense … I was appointed the artistic director of the Fire Station, which is becoming a school of contemporary art in a different and unique way, but we still need to connect this to the professional art market and institutions. The cycle has to be completed. 

CULTURED: How is this inaugural fair distinct?

Shawky: It’s very important to try to reduce the gap between the artistic process itself and the art market, and I think that is what is happening in Doha for this edition. Each gallery is allowed to present only one artist. It looks like many solo shows, so it’s a way to make all these different galleries give a sort of narration … without reducing the original context of the artwork.

CULTURED: Does the traditional fair model need reforming?

Shawky: Yes, but this is much bigger than me … [Within the fair] the gallery needs to be working more like institutions—not only as a place that serves sales. I know this is difficult from an economic point of view, but this is what is really needed more today … I’m very optimistic and I think [this edition] will open a lot of discussions.

CULTURED: Are you seeing changes in the local scene thanks to the fair?

Shawky: Fifty percent of the galleries [in the fair] are coming from the region, which is really great. That was also part of the mission—not to focus only on the big names from European and American galleries, but to have them coming from everywhere. One challenge was that many great Arab or African artists don’t have good galleries representing them, but we know that they are really good… So we need to also focus on the artists themselves. 

CULTURED: Why is Doha well-positioned to platform the regional art scene? 

Shawky: Because here, even the idea of nationalism that I see in different Arab countries, for example, [in Qatar] is based on how the country itself can become a hub for everyone.

With Fire Station we are asking: How can we provide 16 different nationalities all these opportunities? Our idea is not only to bring people from Qatar, it’s how to make Qatar itself the place that serves all the world … We really need to work with the world. We don’t want to close in on ourselves. 

CULTURED: This ties to the fair concept: Becoming.

Shawky: It’s about the dream of humanity to develop in general. The Gulf can be only a metaphor for this dream. How can you change your system rapidly, because you have this dream to become better? I believe that everything is happening in the right moment, in the correct place.

CULTURED: Are there misunderstandings about censorship of certain subjects in the Gulf, such as nudity or homosexuality? 

Shawky: I can be censored in Germany also. This is the same. For me, this is nonsense, these types of discourses. There is a culture here, and it’s normal that we respect the culture. I’ve lived all my life in these countries and consider myself capable of creating everything I want. I talk about all the topics I want … [Some form of cultural sensitivity] is everywhere in the world. There is not 100 percent, endless freedom to say everything. There is a way to respect culture. This is normal … What I see here in Qatar, now, is much more generous than what I see in many places in the world today, and this generosity can even cover the question: How can I accept others? 

[Qatar] is inviting all these different nationalities to be part of the discourse, while there are many other places in the world now that are trying to send back all to the other voices—and now we’re still talking about censorship?

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