The Photographer: Talia Chetrit
Talia Chetrit set up a darkroom in her family’s Washington, DC, home when she was just 13. At first, she often found herself thinking that if only her life were more interesting, her images would be better. A few years in, though, “I realized I could kind of make up anything,” she says, and she began not just taking candid photos of friends but staging, say, murder scenes. Since then, Chetrit, who now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, has produced a wide-ranging body of work that includes nude self-portraits, aerial shots of New York streets, and a series of her having sex with her now husband.
A formal elegance characterizes her work, which often focuses on the interplay between illusion and truth. “She’s had consistent curiosities,” says Hannah Hoffman, whose eponymous L.A. gallery began representing Chetrit last spring. “Where does the power lie in an image? What is the relationship between photographer and subject?” Those same inquiries drove Chetrit’s decision to include some of her early photos of friends in her Amateur show at Rome’s Maxxi Museum in 2018. She was drawn to how those images captured a power dynamic that could no longer be achieved. “I wasn’t a 37-year-old photographing little girls,” Chetrit says. “I was also a little girl.”
Another unorthodox choice: incorporating into that same show a photograph she’d taken of a young girl for a Helmut Lang campaign that the brand nixed. “They decided that in this ‘Harvey Weinstein climate,’ they didn’t want to release pictures of her,” Chetrit says. “Which is a perfect example of #MeToo going wrong, because I’m a feminist artist, and we’re shaming this little girl for just acting like a little girl.” What Chetrit appreciates about the art world is that it offers her the opportunity “to be problematic as a way to address things that are problematic,” she says. “Otherwise there’s nowhere for that conversation.” As for the photos in which she appears, “You might know what socks I was wearing when I had sex that one time, but I don’t feel exposed,” she says. Those pieces, after all, are constructed just like the rest.
The Painter: Loie Hollowell
When Pace gallery opened its 75,000-square-foot flagship in Chelsea last September, the ground-floor exhibit space was dedicated to sculptural titan Alexander Calder, while the third floor featured new drawings by the influential British artist David Hockney. In between was Plumb Line, a show by painter Loie Hollowell, 36, one of the youngest artists on Pace’s roster. Just five years earlier, she was showing her paintings at artist-run galleries in Brooklyn and working as an art handler to pay the bills. But when it came time to decide whose work would be shown first in Pace’s new space, “We thought about who represents our future, and that’s Loie,” says Andria Hickey, the gallery’s senior director and curator.
Hollowell, sitting in her studio in Ridgewood, Queens, this past fall, a few feet from a plastic walker her toddler son sometimes uses to mosey around the space, sums up her response to learning she’d be featured in the inaugural shows as “Holy fuck.” (She gave birth nine months before the opening, and took just one month off before getting back to work.) Every piece sold before the show opened.
Hollowell learned how to paint from her father, a retired professor of art at University of California, Davis, and initially focused her efforts on self-portraits and desert landscapes composed of personal symbols. “I painted a lot of vaginal plants,” she says. But she began to shift toward more abstract forms after she had an abortion and wanted to make paintings about that experience.
Today, her work remains informed by Georgia O’Keeffe but also Italian Futurists, neotantric Indian painters, and transcendentalists. And while it engages broadly with what it means to inhabit a body, it’s always filtered through an expressly female lens. The nine pieces she hung at Pace, for example, convey different elements of her recent pregnancy and childbirth. The work also employs a mystical symbolism, and explores the relationship between depth, color, and dimensionality. What is difficult to perceive until you’re in their physical presence is that forms protrude from the canvases. What can also be missed is that the paintings have such presence, they practically hum. “I have a physical reaction when I’m around the work that makes me think about transcendence and a kind of ecstasy—the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” Hickey says. “She’s trying to open a window to that space.
The Video/Installation Artist: Mika Rottenberg
Upon entering Mika Rottenberg’s solo show Easypieces at the New Museum last summer, visitors encountered an unsettling but mesmerizing sight: an air conditioner dripping water onto a potted plant. “After experiencing one of her works, both my physical and conceptual reactions to the world are completely changed,” says Margot Norton, the New Museum’s curator. “She draws attention to the perverse and bizarre qualities of so much of what we manipulate and consume.” (Easypieces has since traveled to MCA Chicago, where it’s on view through March.)
Born in Argentina, raised in Israel, and now based on Brooklyn, Rottenberg produces sculptures, installations, and videos that often employ the tactile aspects of the material world. They are always occupied with questions of commodification and labor—as the New Yorker review of Easypieces began, “Imagine Karl Marx as an ASMR star.” In a video titled Dough, from 2005–2006, uniformed women take turns kneading a yeasty mass and passing a rope of it between them via an assembly line. In Cheese, a video from 2008, women with immensely long hair milk goats, then start milking their own hair. (The piece was inspired by a hair growth tincture from the late 1800s—when Rottenberg came across it online, she thought, “That looks like my work!”)
Rottenberg’s newest video, Spaghetti Blockchain, features Tuvan throat singers in Siberia intercut with aerial shots of industrial farming and imagery that resembles melting glaciers. “I think a lot these days about the culture of extraction we’re producing, and if I even want to participate in it,” Rottenberg says. “Our environmental emergency can seem impossible to tackle. But I think if people understand it and create language around it, there’s some kind of power there.”
The Painter: Tschabalala Self
Since Tschabalala Self completed her MFA at the Yale School of Art in 2015, her career has progressed so rapidly she hasn’t even had time to relocate from New Haven. On her last day of class, she hopped a plane for Berlin, where her first solo show had recently opened. Since then, she’s been picked up by Thierry Goldberg gallery in New York and Pilar Corrias in London and has had six museum shows dedicated to her work; she has two more scheduled for 2020, one at the Baltimore Museum of Art and another at Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Last year, she was also selected for the prestigious artist-in-residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she grew up.
Meanwhile, demand for her work has risen to frenzied levels; one piece recently sold at auction for about $476,000 (600 percent above the expected price). “I honestly don’t have much of an opinion about it,” she says of the sale. “I don’t make money from auctioned works. And since the work is all figuration that depicts the black body, it’s actually surreal that it’s at auction, and that no one sees irony in the whole spectacle of it. For me to have to contend with black bodies being auctioned in 2019—it is disheartening.
Self’s paintings center on her experience as a black woman in America, but they reference ideas that are universal. Some of her figures are composed of collaged fabric, a process she employs in part because it offers a material way to upend stereotypes—“A stereotype is a flat character with two dimensions,” she says. “I can confront those stereotypical images by making round, multidimensional [figures].” But her process also reflects the fact that all people comprise multiple selves. Ultimately, what Self is after is the truth. “A lot of times, especially when I’m making work about communities that are marginalized, people expect the work to be aspirational,” she says. “I’m more interested in how things are.”
The Sculptor: Huma Bhabha
In April of 2018, two roughhewn figures created by the artist Huma Bhabha appeared in the rooftop garden of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. One was prostrate, head bowed, hands outstretched, much of its body obscured by what appeared to be black plastic. The other stood, towering over both the garden and the cityscape behind it, its four-faced head somewhere between alien and human.
We Come in Peace, the show’s title, refers to a 1990 movie in which a figure emerges from a spaceship and tells the assembled humans that the visitors mean no harm—only for the two sides to immediately begin trying to kill each other. But you didn’t need to know that to understand that Bhabha’s installation explored the connection between fear and violence, power and powerlessness, destruction and faith. “She will never tell you her politics in the work,” says Alissa Friedman, a partner at Salon 94, which has represented Bhabha since 2007. “But she is a political artist. At a recent Q&A, she was asked why she didn’t talk more about the plight of women. She said, ‘Well, I think those things are important. But to me the most important thing is war.’ ”
Raised in Karachi, Pakistan, Bhabha studied printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, then got her MFA in painting from Columbia University. It was only afterward, living in New York, that she began making sculptures. The first ones she produced, which were crafted out of pantyhose and other soft materials, then painted with enamel, were influenced by her curiosity about mutation and her love of sci-fi films: “There’s a certain paranoia in [those movies] that I can relate to,” Bhabha says. “I was interested in the visceral and the grotesque.” Today, she utilizes everything from wood to cork to dumpster-sourced Styrofoam to build her sculptures, which are then often cast in bronze. “I love the raw expressivity of her work,” Friedman says. “It is visceral and direct, almost like punk rock.”
Bhabha often describes the figures in her art as characters, and she returns to the same ones again and again. She initially produced a version of the prostrate figure in late 2001, partly in response to America’s post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan, though at the time many viewers missed the subtext. “I don’t think people wanted to address issues like that, where it had to do with the killing of many people on the other side of the world,” she says. When her work appeared on the rooftop of the Met, though, the world was more receptive. “People picked up on it,” she says. Since then, Bhabha’s had her largest solo show to date, at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, and her exhibit The Company opened at Gagosian gallery in Rome last fall. “She’s always been an artist’s artist,” Eva Respini, the chief curator at ICA Boston, told the New York Times in March 2018. “But recently, she has come into her own.”
In 2002, Bhabha and her husband, the painter Jason Fox, moved to Poughkeepsie, New York—Bhabha initially found work in the area with a taxidermist. These days, she and Fox occupy a huge old firehouse, where, one rainy afternoon last October, Bhabha’s studio on the ground floor contained a few photographs she was in the process of painting on. Taped to the walls were pictures of wolves, a yellowed newspaper clipping showing gorillas fighting, and a photo of an iron maiden. (“I’d love to make something like that someday,” she said.) There were also some baby animal calendars, which she sometimes collages into her paintings—“I thought, ‘Why not bring out the corny side of me?’ ” she says—and a cutout from the cannabis-focused magazine High Times (she uses such images for collages, and besides, “I smoke a lot of weed,” she says with a shrug).
Only one sculpture was visible, a dark column with two yellow eyes peering out that stood in a small garden behind the building. It’s often said of Bhabha’s work that it looks like the remnants of a destroyed civilization, and it’s easy to imagine a future in which all of Poughkeepsie has been reclaimed by wilderness, with this piece the only thing left standing. “Her work is really about ruins, when you think about it,” Friedman says. “The ruins of humanity, the ruins of civilization. And she finds beauty in it.”
The Emerging Art Market
The "Aha Moment"
“Our ambition is to rebalance the world’s view of our city, our country, and our continent through culture and the visual arts,” says Tokini Peterside, founder and director of Nigeria’s ART X Lagos. Peterside’s “aha moment” occurred at the 2015 Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, the late Nigerian-born director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst museum. The exhibition featured several African artists, and the inclusivity on display fueled her own ambitions to highlight and develop the potential of African artists at home.
Building a Movement
“We’re building patronage, both private and public, for as many artists as possible,” she says. A collector herself, Peterside is especially fond of contemporary African photographers like Uche Okpa-Iroha, Abraham Oghobase, and Lakin Ogunbanwo, and painters and multimedia artists like Modupeola Fadugba, Joy Labinjo, and Ndidi Emefiele. For its fourth edition this past November, ART X Lagos had to move to a larger venue to accommodate its expanding scope. It added a modern art section and a pavilion for live music and performance art.
Looking Ahead
As the fair grows, Peterside’s main objective is for it to continue upending perceptions: “We want to move beyond the legacies of the slave trade, colonization, and racism, the impact of which is felt daily by our people as they seek to interact with the rest of the world and play their rightful role as global citizens.” —SARAH MOROZ
The New Exhibition Space: Hotels
No Bad Art in Sight
The hospitality industry has been upping the art ante in recent years. Offerings range from ongoing curatorial programs, like the one at Brooklyn’s Wythe Hotel (which places finished works in some guest rooms along with sketchbooks and in-process pieces in others to add a studio-like component) to blockbuster art exhibitions, like Rain Room, which Australia’s Jackalope Hotel helped bring to Melbourne last summer.
Artist Collaborations
Through April 2020, Andaz Scottsdale Resort & Bungalows in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert is hosting an Artist Dinner Series, which invites guests to enjoy an alfresco meal with local artists in collaboration with the Cattle Track Arts Compound. And the Ritz-Carlton, Grand Cayman, just launched an installation by a local artist that was inspired by the resort’s premier suite, Seven South.
Suite Art
Meanwhile, the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas has taken art world bravado to the next level, naturally. The glitzy tower just west of the Strip shows original pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Takashi Murakami, and KAWS, on loan from the personal collections of its owners, Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta. But its Empathy Suite is the real bonanza (and one of the world’s most expensive hotel accommodations at $200,000 for a two-night stay). The 9,000-square-foot, two-story space features original pieces by the artist Damien Hirst, including a custom curved bar filled with medical waste, a cantilevered pool overlooking the Las Vegas Strip, and butterfly and skull carvings for the salt therapy room. Hanging directly above the bar is Hirst’s piece Here for a Good Time, Not a Long Time (2018): the perfect hotel motto. —SARAH MOROZ
The Power Players Moving the Art World Forward
The Influencer: JiaJia Fei
While studying art history at Bryn Mawr College, JiaJia Fei realized that she didn’t want to be an academic or a curator. Instead, she fused her education with emerging technologies (Facebook launched her freshman year), with the goal of making art accessible to a wider audience—and more relevant in our digital era. Today, she works as the director of digital at New York’s Jewish Museum; previously, she was the Guggenheim museum’s associate director of digital marketing. (Her own Instagram presence—an archive of both stylish outfits and exhibition visits—is firmly established with a 76,500-plus following.) “Twenty years ago, the question was ‘Do we need a website?’ ” Fei says. “A decade later, it was ‘Do we need to be on social media?’ And now it’s ‘Should we start a podcast or video series?’ ”
—SARAH MOROZ
The Critic: Roberta Smith
In an era defined by vague social media likes, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith offers tough love—and meaningful insight that goes beyond surface coverage of art world hype and trends, market instability, and social pageantry. Smith, who has been a pillar at the Times since 1991, writes with unmatched intelligence, candor, and concision. She and her husband, Jerry Saltz, the art critic for New York magazine, see an average of 25 to 30 shows per week. Smith’s even-keeled appraisals avoid excessive jargon and dismiss artists’ backstories—a neutral playing field is her signature vantage point. And she doesn’t skirt around flaws. Negative reviews, when warranted, are essential to the process, she told Interview in 2013: “Part of what you’re doing is educating your readers about their own critical faculties.”
—SM
The Phenomenon: Naudline Pierre
Raised by a father who is an ordained minister, Naudline Pierre creates imagery that seems channeled as much as painted, and invokes everything from the occult to the Renaissance. Just two years out of grad school at the New York Academy of Art, Pierre has produced work that’s already caught the attention of high-profile collectors like Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, who bought a painting of hers to include in their Dean Collection. Pierre was also selected as an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, which culminates in a group show at MoMA PS1 this summer. “Naudline is putting the black body into traditional religious paintings,” says Legacy Russell, the associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum. “This is incredibly unusual—oftentimes the black figure and the female figure have appeared within traditional religious paintings, but they’re not the authors—and it raises ideas of power, representation, and authorship, not to mention brings narratives about race and gender that have often gone unspoken to the forefront. But she’s also questioning how spirituality can be reconciled, and thinking through ideas about mythology. Naudline is phenomenal.”
—MOLLY LANGMUIR
The Visionary: Helen Molesworth
Curator Helen Molesworth has made an artful impact on both coasts, from the ICA in Boston to the MOCA in Los Angeles. She abruptly parted ways with the latter in 2018, and has since settled into a new role as curator-in-residence at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado. It’s paramount for Molesworth that art institutions reflect a fair and equitable representation of modern society. “Ever since the museum has been created in the West—about a 250-year-old history—the vast, vast majority of works [shown] over the past 225 years have been by white men,” she says. “In the last 25 years, we’ve been trying to change what museums look like and what they show and what they imagine to be great work.” For someone who has tirelessly advocated for parity and diversity, it’s easy to get discouraged: “Statistically, we haven’t moved the needle at all. The undertow of white male supremacy is just so strong—we’re playing a long game,” she says, adding that “it’s a conversation not dissimilar to the one we’re trying to have about climate change. You can’t give up because of scale; you have to keep working.” Part of what gives her hope and purpose is the realization that museums are only one way to tell the history of art and culture. “We have to imagine new ways,” she says. Her latest fresh approach: podcasts. In November, she did a six-episode series for the Getty Research Institute spotlighting women artists.
—SM
The Gallerists: Monica Sprüth and Philomene Magers
Sprüth Magers gallery is not only an international powerhouse dedicated to modern and contemporary art, but also a long-standing champion of female artists. Philomene Magers, who grew up with a feminist gallerist mother, had a rude awakening in her twenties when she began working for a German art collection and “was the only female academic in the entire building,” she told Frieze magazine in 2018. Ever since, she said, “it has been my daily business to confront this issue.” She opened her namesake gallery in 1991 in Cologne, and then joined forces in 1998 with Monika Sprüth, who’d opened her own namesake gallery in 1983 in Cologne, featuring work by Rosemarie Trockel, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, and Cindy Sherman. Throughout the ’80s and early ’90s, Sprüth also spearheaded a series of all-women group exhibitions and magazines, in which she featured gallerist Ileana Sonnabend and artists Nancy Spero, Marisa Merz, and Louise Bourgeois. The merger was incredibly successful: Throughout the 2000s, Sprüth Magers opened spaces in London, Berlin, and Los Angeles. To date, the gallerists work with over 60 artists, including Sylvie Fleury, Bridget Riley, and Kara Walker. Supporting pioneering work has always been their priority, but making sure female artists are represented within that category has been essential to their approach.—SM
This article originally appeared in the January 2020 issue of ELLE.
Molly Langmuir is a freelance writer and former staff writer for ELLE.
