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From the Archives: Read What ARTnews Critics Said About Robert Mapplethorpe

LGBTQ+ Artists Having Institutional Shows This Pride Month

“Robert was smart with his board because he knew that appointing family members or life partners who can make emotional decisions is not always great to manage an artist’s legacy,”lawyer and Mapplethorpe Foundation president Michael Stout told ARTnews. Mapplethorpe instead assembled a board with professional specialties in both law (Stout is a copyright expert) and photography to shape the future and legacy of his impressive oeuvre.

Stout estimates that Mapplethorpe left behind approximately 14,000 prints, made from around 2,000 negatives, as well as a smaller number of sculptural objects and Polaroids. And in recent years, the management of the artist’s legacy has become an intricate feat: 15 galleries around the world manage the sales from the estate based on their respective geography. Gladstone Gallery, Morán Morán and Olga Korper Gallery are among the five in charge in North America; in Europe, Xavier Hufkins Gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, Alison Jacques Gallery, and Galerie Thomas Schulte are half of the eight galleries holding representation deals; Brazil’s Galeria Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel manages the South American demand; and the Asian market is handled by Seoul’s Kukje Gallery.

At Art Basel next week, Gladstone Gallery, Ropac, and Alison Jacques will each have a Mapplethorpe work on offer. There’s also various institutional shows each year and brand partnerships, like those with Uniqlo, Chrome Hearts, and Honey Fucking Dijon, who license Mapplethorpe’s images. In its earliest days, the foundation only licensed paper-based products, such as postcards, calendars, and posters. “There was no way we could know if Robert would like a Chrome Hearts leather jacket, but we did it, as many artists started making licensing deals,” Stout added.

“We have to make careful decisions about licensing and act meticulously about publishing because books do survive,” Stout said. “They are not as popular in terms of sales anymore with everything being online, but Robert knew it was important to have them and he did an awful lot of books with different publishers.” He also added that the foundation’s trustees have reached a consensus of being “conservative about licensing” and that they aim “to make decisions that we thought he would have made.”

In addition to its management of Mapplethorpe’s art, the foundation has a lesser-known remit, acting as a grant-giving entity invested in supporting HIV research. “We largely depend on gallery sales, and running a photographer’s estate is more challenging than a painter’s,” he said about the given vast difference in pricing for the two mediums.

Mapplethorpe’s intriguingly enigmatic visual lexicon however has perhaps been more popular than ever in recent years. The first quarter of 2024 has so far seen four solo gallery exhibitions for the photographer: at London’s Alison Jacques, Gladstone in New York, Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, and Morán Morán in Los Angeles, as well as a three-artist show, with Ann Craven and Mohammed Z. Rahman, at Phillida Reid in London. The Paris and LA shows both had high-profile curators: fashion editor Edward Enninful and artist Jacolby Satterwhite, respectively. Last month, the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire opened the exhibition Filippo de Pisis and Robert Mapplethorpe which places the photographer’s work in conversation with that of the 20th-century Italian painter. Their mutual fascination with flowers anchors the show, which features 38 photographs, all on loan from the foundation. 

The Gladstone show, which closed in April at the gallery’s Upper East Side outpost, sought to shine a light on a lesser-known part of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre, his three-dimensional assemblages and photographs in sculptural frames. The exhibition benefitted from the gallery space’s former life as a townhouse, as the installation conveyed a demure blend of theatricality and domesticity. His ca. 1972 Untitled (Coat Rack Sculpture), for example, occupied a corner with a lit lightbulb (in lieu of a coat) adjacent to a black-and-white photograph of artist Jay Johnson in which the same sculpture appears next to Johnson’s nude body. In front of a backyard-facing window was Open Book (1974), a large aluminum floor structure in which a quartet of photographs of penises sit above a sleek triangular base.

The recent Gladstone show followed the Guggenheim Museum’s year-long exhibition “Implicit Tensions” (2019), which presented a considerable group of Mapplethorpe’s mixed-media constructions for the first time. The ambitious undertaking was an extension of the foundation’s gift of 194 artworks to the Guggenheim in 1993, which also established a photography department at the museum and a gallery named in the late photographer’s honor.

“Before Mapplethorpe, photography frames were more incidental, reflecting the uneasy transition of the medium from page to wall,” Guggenheim associate curator Lauren Hinkson recently told ARTnews of the two-part show.The second part of her project invited living artists like Lyle Ashton Harris, Glenn Ligon, Zanele Muholi, and Catherine Opie to exhibit their own images about queer resilience as a response to the first part of the exhibition. “Like the work of any canonical figure, Mapplethorpe’s work and its meanings are neither stable nor static, but are continually open to reinterpretation as other artists offer alternate approaches to image-making,” Hinkson said.

New-generation queer creatives, on the other hand, still find inspiration in Mapplethorpe’s unabashed handling of carnality, whether in his allusive flowers or dramatically lit double fisted rears. Ludovic de Saint Sernin, a fast-rising French designer with cult following, unveiled his Mapplethorpe-inspired men’s collection, in collaboration with the foundation, during New York Fashion Week in February. Pop star Troye Sivan currently wears some of the pieces from the bondage-inspired collection in his ongoing word tour, Sweat. The leather-heavy garments veer away from Uniqlo’s 2015 T-shirt line which were printed with the artist’s more approachable photographs.

Inviting new perspectives has been one lucrative way for the Mapplethorpe Foundation to keep his legacy alive. A suite of gallery exhibitions curated by cultural luminaries, from Isabelle Huppert to Elton John or the recent Enninful and Satterwhite ones, activate his large oeuvre through different personal lenses. (Ropac’s Enninful-organized exhibition drew around 2,000 visitors on its opening day in March.)

For Satterwhite, the opportunity to curate a Mapplethorpe show finds resonance in his own practice, which also traverses themes of power, autonomy, and euphoria. The foundation gave the Brooklyn-based artist access to the photographer’s entire oeuvre, and the resulting show, titled “Animism, Faith, Violence, and Conquest,” included a medley of Mapplethorpe’s less-charted images about utopia, resistance, and devotion. The show’s titular themes are subjects Satterwhite explored about belief systems and survival while working towards his recent Metropolitan Museum of Art commission, A Metta Prayer (2023).

A 1982-dated photograph, for example, shows a television with a chain hanging from its bottom; an image from 1985 includes a young boy in pirate costume looking through a spyglass. “I was thinking about how to subvert video games and ideas of violence, surveillance, and conquest in my project,” Satterwhite told ARTnews. He noted that he has long dreamed of doing a project around Mapplethorpe, “but if I had the chance 10 years ago, the result would have totally been different,” he said. Organizing the show fresh off his Met commission, in which he marinated similar ideas of devotion, power, and toxicity in beauty, the artist said he felt closer to Mapplethorpe’s similar concerns at this point in his practice.  

Mapplethorpe’s gallery representation itself has been important in the shifting perspectives of the artist’s work. “The dominant aesthetic of Robert’s estate, with calla lilies and nudes, was established by the foundation and Robert Miller Gallery, which initially had an exclusive representation,” Stout, the foundation president, said. The foundation changing its representation to New York’s Sean Kelly gallery in the early 2000s, helped bring forth a more multivalent approach to Mapplethorpe. In 2003, with the help of Sean Kelly, Cindy Sherman organized the first of these artist-driven curatorial projects that are now done multiple times a year.

“The public reaction and a Roberta Smith review in the New York Times convinced us that we should let other people make decisions for exhibitions,” Stout said. “Even we still see works this way that we never saw or forgot about.”

The challenge for the Mapplethorpe Foundation these days is to run an endeavor with funding from a finite repertoire. In an effort to monitor sales in various price points and avoid exhibiting the same work concurrently in separate shows, the foundation has established what they internally call “a core system.” The layout helps the board and staff break down and control the types of images sold across the globe and maintain a balanced inventory in terms of value and future demand. The works with exceptionally iconic subjects such as Patti Smith, Mapplethorpe himself, or Andy Warhol, as well as calla lilies are “for more special moments,” Stout said. This system also helps the foundation shuffle works between different gallery inventories for an even distribution.

“When we started the foundation with Robert, we weren’t sure if we would go on for over 20 years,” Stout recalled. “We don’t have trustees making emotional decisions and holding onto sentimental pieces on our board—we just want to place everything well.”

But back in the country’s capital city, at the historic 798 Art District, it was business as usual with the launch of the eighth edition of Gallery Weekend Beijing. Running from May 28 to June 2, 2024, with a VIP preview in the days before the event’s opening, Gallery Weekend Beijing this year included 27 participating galleries and nonprofit institutions in the main sector, and 8 galleries from locales beyond the city in the visiting sector, plus “The inner side of the wind,” a show curated by Yuan Jiawei.

This year, Gallery Weekend Beijing, as well as the city’s two major art fairs, Beijing Dangdai and Jingart, all held their openings at the same time, drawing a larger crowd to the city in the hopes of reigniting flagging excitement surrounding Beijing’s art scene, according to industry insiders.

The main theme for this year’s Gallery Weekend Beijing, or GWBJ as it’s known for short, was “Drift to Re-Turn.” It encapsulated the international artistic connections that participating galleries, institutions, and curated projects aimed to create through the annual showcase.  

Speaking to ARTnews, GWBJ program director Yang Jialin said, “On a deeper level, GWBJ, as a platform for contemporary art exchange, hopes to help the outstanding artists and their work ‘drift’ out to the world, allowing the voices from Beijing to reach the international stage; and to let excellent international art content ‘return’ to the local art scene, presenting it to the Chinese audience.”

Victor Wang, chief curator and artistic director of M Woods, a private museum at 798 Art District, said, “Unlike Hong Kong and Shanghai, Beijing’s art ecology operates uniquely through a mix of connections and disconnections with the outside world.”

The city’s scale, legacy, and structure provide the opportunity for some galleries and institutions to thrive in isolation, building frameworks that benefit from this separateness. Meanwhile, others continue to actively seek connections with the global art scene, striving to create bridges and establish networks beyond Beijing.

“I’m personally uplifted whenever I see marginalized voices and radical thinkers presented in Beijing, in dialogue with this local cultural context, especially those perspectives we might not be able to showcase or engage with often locally,” Wang added.

One such exhibition was tucked away in a small private room at Magician Space. The quietly provocative show is paradoxically titled “Room of Boundlessness” and is curated by Liu Ding, one of the artistic directors of Yokohama Triennale 2023. Upon first look, there seemed to be nothing contentious: viewers were greeted by nothing much at all, with the artworks left facedown on the floor or propped against the wall. That, it turned out, was just the beginning of the show. Visitors were invited to pick up the works, by the likes of Hu Shangzong and Feng Guodong, and hang the pieces themselves.

“Our objective is to offer both local and international audiences the opportunity to engage with diverse forms of art and contribute to the overall artistic ecosystem,” said Pojan Huang, researcher at Magician Space. By way of example, Huang cited the dedicated project called the Antechamber, which was designed specifically for experimental art.

Magician Space also presented a solo exhibition running till July by New York–based artist Timur Si-Qin. The show, which explores the relationship between humans and nature from different perspectives, including a spiritual one, proved particularly popular.

Some quality exhibitions, stunning artist studios, and frenetic programming aside, there were still concerns regarding the volatile climate of geopolitics and fiscal uncertainties in China and beyond.

“In the current global landscape, the first layer of meaning of the theme of GWBJ is its literal sense: we are always in an unstable state, with an uncertain future,” said Jialin.

Just a few months ago, Bloomberg reported that China faced a series of challenges from shrinking population to record property downturn to rising trade tensions. Amid conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, and with trade wars ongoing, the global economy looks precarious, and China is not an exception. In fact, as tensions with the US ratchet up, Chinese businesses are reportedly looking toward countries such as Mexico and Vietnam.

“The art market is not optimistic in light of the ongoing deterioration of geopolitics and the decline of the global economic situation,” Huang said. “A cold wave is approaching not only China, but also the global gallery industry, making future prospects for the art business increasingly challenging.”

“Certainly, the days of quick sales and waiting lists are waning,” said Mathieu Borysevicz, founder and director of BANK, a Shanghai gallery that participated in GWBJ. “Right now, everybody has sobered up and is working a lot harder to make each sale. China is still the second-largest art market in the world, and the economy is resilient, but it has created a widespread sense of precarity. In fact, I must say that in my 20-plus years of coming to China, this is the first time I have witnessed widespread pessimism.”

Yet there remains cause for some optimism—or at least artistic resilience.

“Usually, when the economy isn’t so great, art tends to get more interesting,” Borysevicz added. “For too long, the emphasis was disproportionately on the market at the expense of criticality. I hope the shift away from the market will help vitalize the work.”

Huang agreed, saying, “When Magician Space was established in 2008, it coincided with the economic crisis, and the exhibition was not conceived for commercial purposes, thus our objectives extend beyond business. It has been a source of great satisfaction to continue delving deeply into the work of our favourite artists and to persevere.”

Meanwhile, other industry leaders are paying more attention to their regional counterparts.

“Connecting local artists and the Beijing art scene with international communities is crucial—especially now, given the growing skepticism toward globalization and the current economic and geopolitical climate,” Wang said. “It’s awesome to see our colleagues and communities from South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and other countries perambulating 798, experiencing firsthand our institutions and galleries, and seeing what Beijing has to offer.”

It is this ethos that the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston carries in its veins. Established in 1948, the CAMH recently celebrated its 75th anniversary with the exhibition “Six Scenes From Our Future” (October 2023–March 2024). Senior curator Rebecca Matalon and curator Patricia Restrepo invited six artists to respond to CAMH’s first-ever exhibition “This is Contemporary Art,” which aimed how people could live with contemporary, boldly placing artworks alongside furniture, design, and architectural elements. Those artists—Jill Magid, Leslie Martinez, Mel Chin, Leslie Hewitt, Lisa Lapinski, and JooYoung Choi—all have a relationship to Houston or CAM Houston, and the work on view continued the inaugural presentation’s legacy of dissolving artistic categories. 

Founded as the Contemporary Arts Association by six local artists and architects as a sort of artist cooperative, the organization aimed to bring the contemporary arts to Houston and imbricate the city with a richer, more sophisticated art community. Because CAA didn’t have a space back then, “This is Contemporary Art”was actually staged at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

“Shortly after it was founded there were 200 plus members,” Matalon said of CAMH’s early days. “You paid [dues] and you exhibited your work through your membership and, of course, as the institution evolved, and the understanding that Houston really needed a space for contemporary art, its mission also shifted.”

The museum soon moved a semi-permanent location near downtown Houston and later to its current home, the iconic, stainless-steel parallelogram designed by Latvian architect Gunnar Birkerts, in the Museum District. And soon, it will likely grow once more as the museum eyes a potential expansion. Through it all, CAMH has long been served as a visionary agent in defining Houston’s cultural landscape.

“It’s always been a kind of really radical and experimental institution in its support for women artists and artists of color early on, its support of artists working across disciplines and media,” Matalon said. “CAMH has really been a site of radical experimentation and play.”

Indeed, the CAMH’s inauguration situated itself on the precipice of an art historical tectonic shift: post–World War II America. While situated firmly during the height of Abstract Expressionism, both the curation of “This is Contemporary Art” and the tenor of its exhibition catalogue felt very proto-Pop in how the exhibition could show Houstonians how the art on view might also fit within their daily lives.

To accomplish this, the exhibition exhibited modern art alongside other genres, such as graphic design, interior design, craft, and even household objects in a way that, for its time, was innovative. Among the artists and designers included were Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Mary Callery, Stuart Davis, Charles Eames, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Knoll, Jacob Lawrence, Fernand Léger, John Marin, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Edward Weston, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

“The strategies used in the inaugural exhibition were happening elsewhere,” Matalon said. “The ways that there was this kind of synergy between commercial and museological design in terms of how objects were being shown. There wasn’t anything like that happening here [in Houston].”

As the decades passed and CAMH grew in scope, ideas around what constituted the notion of “contemporary art” evolved as well, changing its policy in the 1990s to exhibit work made within the last 40 years. In recent years, the museum has also mounted a number of landmark exhibitions, including “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art,” which opened in 2012 and then traveled the country, and “Stonewall 50.”

January 2020 brought a new executive director, Hesse McGraw, who understood “the way that CAMH needed to shift in relationship to our current moment in relationship to [the] manifold crises of the pandemic including the death of George Floyd and the urgency with which we needed to respond to different kinds of social, political crises,” Matalon said.

In “Six Scenes,” two artists, JooYoung Choi and Leslie Hewitt, look back at the history of the CAMH within the larger sociological climate of the late ’40s. In Choi’s research for the show, she discovered troubling revelations about the inaugural exhibition’s racist past: “I wanted to know about that first show and who was allowed to be at that first show, she said. “And so, that’s where my research came in about the fact that the first show for the CAMH was segregated, and Jacob Lawrence, who’s one of my favorite artists, had work in that show, and would have not been able to go to the opening.” 

In a puppetry installation and video work, Choi thinks through these painful aspects of CAMH’s racial history. Her 2023 video, Pleasure Vision and VFC Intergalactic Presents—Great Moments in Cosmic Womb, re-creates “the eight-year-old version of me,” she said. “That’s the ‘pure being’ version of me…completely in flow and just loves what she’s doing—the little girl who’s sitting and doing watercolors ’til the sun goes down, and they have to tell her to come inside.” The childlike wonder in the work acts as a way to disarm the viewer and enable them to confront the more difficult realities of racism and other forms of bigotry she discusses in the work, as radically diverse characters coexist, thrive, and fight for freedom in Choi’s paracosmic world.

Hewitt’s research led her to John S. Chase, the first African American licensed architect in Texas. “Thinking of this collapse in design and architecture and ‘fine art,’ there was already a vested interest in that art can promise something that wasn’t already being delivered to society,” she said. That led her to a series of questions: “How can I connect the dots? What other view can I bring? What does it mean for this institution to look back at its past?”

Hewitt, who collaborated with artist Iman Raad in the graphic design piece Forty Four Fifty Fifty Four Sixty Eight (2023), conjoined the text of seminal civil rights court cases of the time—particularly Sweatt vs. Painter, which granted Chase admittance to the University of Texas School of Architecture—with the residential floor plan Chase used to design his own home to create an abstracted architectural layout. The work culminated as a stack of posters on the floor that visitors could take home, à la Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Architecture also features in another of Hewitt’s contributions to the exhibition, two untitled works that re-create the original measurements of the walls at the MFA Houston that hosted “This is Contemporary Art.” Hewitt sees this architecture as part of the institution’s metadata. “It’s a haunting—the past has a resonance,” she said.

So, what comes next for the CAMH? “We’re at the beginning stages of a potential future expansion that will position the museum to have a greater impact in our city and within our community,” McGraw, CAMH’s director, said in a recent phone interview. “We’re at the beginning of planning for what the most impactful design of our campus would be in the future.”

As part of this expansion, the museum has acquired several adjacent properties along Bayard Street, which, McGraw said, “was an effort that really was 40 years in the making—it happened very quickly, within the last nine months.”

As of now, how this expansion will manifest remains unclear, although CAMH “will engage a Community Advisory Committee to ensure the project’s vision and goals are informed by the representatives’ expertise and values—and aligned with the shared aspirations of the community,” according to a press release.

Will the CAMH’s ideas around contemporary art—especially with its imminent expansion—shift within the next 25 or 50 years? Matalon postulated: “The contemporary is contextual.”

And at the center of the BKC is the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), opened last year by art patron Nita Mukesh Ambani, whose husband, Mukesh, sits at number 9 on the Forbes “World Billionaires List.” After a debut show dedicated to TOILETPAPER, the magazine and creative studio founded by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, and a second show on American Pop art, the NMACC has shifted its focus closer to home, with its third exhibition “Liminal Gaps” (through June 9), focusing on four contemporary Indian artists and collectives as a way to reshape “perspectives on India’s evolving cultural identity,” according to the catalog.

In explaining the exhibition’s approach to liminality, Mafalda Millies, one of the show’s curators and a cofounder of TRIADIC, a self-described “creative house and cultural engine,” said, “we aren’t from here and wanted to understand India in today’s time and space. We noticed that art in India has always had a historical element while shedding light on the present. India seems to thrive in this liminality between the past and the future and that is how the theme came to us.”

The exhibition takes over the four floors of NMACC’s Art House venue, with each artist getting their own floor: Ayesha Singh, Raqs Media Collective, Asim Waqif, and Afrah Shafiq (from the ground floor up). With the works on view, the show insists on sensorial and cognitive participation from its audience, asking them to occupy the museum’s many lines and nooks—to touch, click, scroll, play, listen, read, think, scribble, walk, stop, chuckle, rest, and most important, take pictures.

Roya Sachs, a cofounder of TRIADIC and its artistic director, said the group wanted to approach this exhibition in an untraditional format, as it had with the TOILETPAPER show and with its editions of the Format Festival in Bentonville, Arkansas. “We come from different worlds—art, performance, production—and our ethos has been to mix mediums and people,” she told ARTnews. “The contemporary art world is a disruptive space where we increasingly witness interdisciplinarity: choreographers working with visual artists, fashion designers creating sculptures, or sound engineers collaborating with painters. We are always trying to make bridges, take risks, and find magic in the unexpected.”

“Liminal Gaps” begins with visitors physically entering Delhi-based Ayesha Singh’s Hybrid Drawings (2024), a white-box room housing a wireframe installation of a two-point perspective. As you move around the space, architectural elements from different cultures and eras—Mughal, Indo-Saracenic, Sikh, Hindu, and modern—come into view. While the lines are a technical abstraction of Delhi’s architecture, they could be representative of any ancient city in the Indian subcontinent where imprints of past civilizations continue to transcend time and space. Even so, there is a clear erasure of the complexity, chaos, disarray, and entropy that resides in Delhi, or any Indian city for that matter. Singh’s work purges and reduces the city into sanitized lines of black against the spotless white of the walls, ceiling, and floor.

Established in 1992 by three artists (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), Raqs Media Collective presents several works that are meditations on time. The first, titled Nerves (2018), starts in a stairwell that leads from the floor where Singh’s work is installed to the other Raqs pieces. Set against a deep cobalt blue background are line drawings of neurons as they were represented in the early 20th century; running alongside them are expressions like “hit a raw nerve,” “nerves of steel,” or “you have some nerve.”

This passageway leads to Chromacron (2023), where stripes of Pantone’s Color of the Year from 2000 to 2024 line up in chronological order, leading to the installation called Escapement (2018). As the name suggests, its liminality derives from the mechanism in clocks (escapement) that governs consistent and uninterrupted motion of its arms. The work’s 27 seemingly identical clocks are set to different time zones. However, there are two aberrations: the hours are denoted by moods and emotions—remorse, awe, fear, epiphany—instead of numbers, and three clocks, running counterclockwise, are tagged to fictional cities (Babel, Shangri La, and Macondo). Nearby, a giant 24-hour clock sits by itself toward the end of this space; its digits are replaced by words in the Devanagari script that take on literal and symbolic meanings associated with time, such as shran (second), pran (life), atithi (guest), ritu (season), and kaal (era).

The center of the room looks deceptively empty wherein sits Betaal, an augmented reality work of abstract geometric figures that can be seen using iPads. Raqs has said they see this work as an entity that moves in the liminal gap between time and consciousness. There is a comfortable rhythm to Raqs’ work, the repetition and symmetry of clocks for instance lull you into reading it as an obvious rendition of time, until you are faced with the giant clock that compels you to dwell on the immense volatility of time and how it shapes our lives, language, and consciousness.

On the third floor is Asim Waqif’s Chaal (2024), an elaborate bamboo structure that is brought to life as you walk around or into it. While the work, and the exhibition as a whole, could perhaps be interpreted as an escape from the world, Waqif sees it differently. “I am nauseated by celebration right now, especially in the arts which has become a medium of celebrating redevelopment projects, real estate, new infrastructure, or just about anything. So Chaal while being playful is intended to have a dark mood, an element of unsettlement owing to its unpredictability.”

That unsettling feeling can come in the form of sudden sounds and lights activated by stepping on the bending bamboo structure or getting lost in its crevices—like entering a maze that has no exit. The experience can often vacillate between a childlike curiosity or a melancholic sense of doom.

In thinking about Waqif’s work within this context, BKC, the real estate development where this work is now sited, itself become a negation and denial of the realities of Mumbai, especially its poor. BKC and the NMACC within it are technically open to everyone are traversed by few, and comfortably so by even fewer. The looming glass facades, luxury brands, and absence of public transport or affordably priced food all ensure that the barrier of class and caste stands inviolable. The show itself is priced at INR 299 ($3.60 USD), an amount that could buy three dinners in Mumbai; it is, however, free for art students, if previously booked online.

For Sultana’s Reality (2017), Afra Shafiq takes the liminal gaps of the exhibition’s title more literally, presenting a mini library of books written by South Asian women, which visitors can annotate using sticky notes and graphite pencils, and a black box displaying a fantastical interactive experience (it can also be accessed online). This multimedia story, which borrows part of its name from Begum Rokeya’s 1905 feminist utopian story Sultana’s Dream, explores the relationship between women and colonial education movement in India using archival imagery, humor, contemporary culture, and historical nuggets.

“Most conversation around women’s education in India has been in the lines of ‘beti bachao… beti padhao’ (translation: save the daughter by educating the daughter) devoid of women’s autonomy or even voice,” Shafiq said. “Even the early reformers—colonial and Brahmanical alike—never thought of women’s education as a way to make them equal partners, or to imagine a world where they’d be educated and hence emancipated. She sees this reform movement “as a software update” that is “full of bugs.” Indeed, a thinking, liberated woman would be disastrous to their world order, especially when taking into account that Indian women were to be taught “to read but not to write,” according to one primary source in the video, and “only literature on devotion, gardening, child rearing, perhaps poetry” but never mathematics, chemistry, philosophy, or political science.

How this exhibit will “reshape India’s cultural identity” remains an unanswered and forgotten assertion when actually visiting “Liminal Gaps.” The insistence on these artists’ Indian-ness, on the part of the curators and NMACC’s billionaire founders, fails to register.

“I used to work all day and bead all night. Now, I get to bead full-time. And this way is better,” Melancon told ARTnews, with a laugh, during a studio visit last fall. “I can’t live without my beads. I can’t wait to get up in the morning to do this work.”

Big Chief Melancon—as he is known in his community, the Young Seminole Hunters—began making Mardi Gras Indian suits 30 years ago in a laborious process requiring thousands of hours and innumerable beads, glass rhinestones, and feathers. When crafting a suit, Melancon aims to summon ancestral forebearers to realize what he describes as a-koo-chi-mali—Black masking energy embodied when the suit is made, adorned, and activated in performance.

“Making the suits is spiritual practice. There’s an elder presence in this work,” Melancon said.

On Mardi Gras day, dozens of masking Indian tribes meet each other in the streets of the Lower Ninth Ward in competitive battles of performance and percussion, singing to honor the history and culture of Indigenous peoples who welcomed those escaping enslavement into Native communities outside of New Orleans before and after emancipation.

Though now referred to as “Mardi Gras Indians,” Black participants were originally forbidden from participating in Mardi Gras celebrations. In refusal and rebellion of this restriction, Black revelers and the descendants of these hybrid communities came together as Masking Indians to create their own Carnival. On his suits, Melancon features Nyabinghi warriors from Central Africa, Emperor Haile Selassie and Empress Menen of Ethiopia, Shaka Zulu warriors, the Louisiana enslaved dancer Bras-Coupé, and other under-studied figures of African and African diaspora histories. “I’m big on studying—there’s a lot of research before I start to bead,” Melancon said.

For “Ten Thousand Suns,” the 2024 edition of the Biennale of Sydney in Australia, Melancon has on display two beaded aprons deconstructed from Mardi Gras suits he wore in 2011 and 2013. One features large profiles of Lakota leaders Sitting Bull and Red Cloud overlooking layers of the state of Louisiana, the Egyptian Khufu Valley Temple pyramid, and First Nations peoples dancing, drumming, and praying amid land, sky, and water.

“If I break a suit down, the work is transformed into art objects, into contemporary art pieces,” he said. “In the gallery, that work catches the viewer, it gets the viewer, just like if I was wearing the whole suit. The spirit is still in them. The gallery doesn’t transform the suit pieces—the a-koo-chi-mali transforms the space.”

In addition to the patches, aprons, headpieces, fans, and other components that comprise one of these suits, Melancon makes work not ever intended for wearing but exclusively for the wall. In the context of the gallery, Melancon often shows patch-like beaded portraits that feature icons of history, music, and art: Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, Barkley L. Hendricks, Big Freedia, Harriet Tubman, and more. These familiar faces, their adornments, surroundings, and borders, are all composed and textured with impossibly small glass beads.

“I want to wow people with my beads. You gotta show people what you can do,” he said.

To create these designs, like those on his suits, Melancon drafts the outline of the images in pencil on stretched canvas before solidifying the line with pen. He often sketches in collaboration with friends and colleagues and is accompanied in the creative process each day by his wife and collaborator of 19 years, Alicia Melancon, who has a hand in the majority of his work.

Melancon and his wife start every morning with a walk together before turning their hands to beadwork. “She’s my right hand,” he explained. “She’s a maker, a critic, and everything in one. Without my wife, I wouldn’t be making this work. She’s a Big Queen.”

After selecting the most symmetrical beads, Melancon painstakingly affixes every piece of glass individually with a needle and nylon-cotton thread in a tacking lockstitch. Beeswax rubbed into the thread with nimble fingers ensures the strength and flexibility of the chord. In his studio, Melancon has hundreds of pounds of beads—opaque, transparent, matte, and metallic, as small as 2 millimeters, and sourced from around the world. When completed, his suits, too, can weigh upwards of a hundred pounds. When asked about the physical tolls of this work, Melancon simply shrugged, admitting to some pain in his back and wrists. But his fingers, he said, beginning to smile, “are like bricks.”

Melancon sees his work, which at first may seem to have more in common with sculpture, as a kind of painting in the vein of Michelangelo, Caravaggio, or Kerry James Marshall—figurative artists whose paintings Melancon describes as coming off the wall or off the canvas “like magic.” His practice, highly resonant with portraiture and history painting, also shares great affinities with draftsmanship, collage, embroidery, performance, worldbuilding, song, rebellion, community activism, and memory preservation.

Last fall, his studio was packed with various historical and fantastical scenes, in-progress Victorian portraits, and one or two large patches for an upcoming Mardi Gras suit. Those patches were covered by a large cloth for my visit—they are private and secret until Melancon adorns them on his suit for Mardi Gras day. His practice, like the Black Masking tradition itself, holds various levels of representation and opacity, depending on how active the viewer is in these communities. 

Glass beads themselves are, in their most basic material form, grains of sand. As anthropologist Vanessa Agard-Jones explores in the article, “What the Sands Remember,” sand is both a bridge and a boundary territory between water and earth, providing shifting ground and geological legacy in both worlds. That’s especially true in Melancon’s hometown of New Orleans, a place built below sea level that continues to lose land to rising and warming waters. What does it mean to adorn the body, to adorn art spaces, in this glassy substance that is of both land and sea? Melancon’s work dances in the streets on Mardi Gras day and then, in formidable stillness, holds space in galleries and museums. His finished objects, like his materials, move through multiple worlds. 

“Who are the Indians? We walk on water and can’t get wet,” Melancon said. “I love to bead water. I know when I bead, I walk on water. The elders taught me that.”

Largely championed by Howard University professor and philosopher Alain Locke via his seminal anthology of the same name, the New Negro Movement put Harlem on the map for its influence on Black art and culture. But it has long been historicized as predominantly a writer’s movement, with some of its preeminent members including Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston.

The visual arts of the Harlem Renaissance are generally lesser known to the public primarily because Black artists at the time were not exhibited in mainstream museums and galleries. Often, they were shown at high schools, homes, libraries, YMCAs, and art schools and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. But a shift happened when Locke encouraged real estate tycoon William H. Harmon to philanthropically support the artwork of Black artists. Though there were opportunities and awards for Black artists that predate Harmon’s largesse, the Harmon Foundation, through its exhibitions and awards, notably made a profound, if still underknown, impact on Black visual art.

Harmon, who was white, was the son of a lieutenant in the 10th Colored Cavalry, a segregated African American unit of the US Army formed after the Civil War. Harmon fils spent a considerable amount of time with the regiment’s Black soldiers, which impacted him greatly, and he eventually developed the belief that African Americans could succeed through personal accomplishments. In 1922, Harmon established the Harmon Foundation with the purpose of encouraging and stimulating self-help.

Though Harmon died in 1928, the Harmon Foundation continued under the direction of Mary Beattie Brady, who would oversee it until its end in 1967. Miss Brady, as she was known to those close to her, was fond of seeing art as a tool for propaganda to promote social change by commissioning positive images of Black people, like its 1944 exhibition “Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin” of figures like George Washington Carver, Mary McLeod Bethune, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson.

Scholars like Locke have criticized this viewpoint held by people like Brady. In a 1928 essay titled, “Art or Propaganda?,” Locke wrote, “My chief objection to propaganda, apart from its besetting sin of monotony and disproportion, is that it perpetuates the position of group inferiority even in crying out against it.”

Artist, scholar, and curator, David C. Driskell, who had a somewhat close relationship with Brady, wrote in the introduction for Breaking Racial Barriers: African Americans in the Harmon Foundation Collection, that she would often write him extensive letters with unsolicited advice on matters like running an art department or how artists could improve their public image. He wrote that for Brady, “it was through art that [she] considered herself to be an enlightened crusader for social justice.”

The William E. Harmon Awards for Distinguished Achievement Among Negroes and the annual Harmon Foundation exhibitions were pivotal in establishing the careers of artists, including William H. Johnson, Archibald Motley, and Laura Wheeler Waring, who are all featured in the Met exhibition including via works commissioned by the Harmon Foundation. By 1939, the Foundation has supported the work of some 400 Black artists.  

In 1929, the first of the annual Harmon exhibitions was held at International House in New York’s Morningside Heights neighborhood, away from Harlem but at a site that housed international students as a built-in audience. Around 6,500 people visited the exhibition in a matter of the first three weeks. After the exhibition closed that year, the Foundation toured “An Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by American Negro Artists,” which traveled to arts institutions and universities campus in 11 cities across the country; over 8,000 people visited the show’s stop at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Jacqueline Francis, an art historian and dean at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, said Harmon Foundation exhibitions were “an opportunity for artists who didn’t have other opportunities to exhibit in venues that were mainstream, mostly white-owned and white-curated, spaces.” One such artist is Sargent Claude Johnson, who won the exhibition prize in 1928; Johnson is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, which Francis co-curated. For artists like Johnson, who was based in the Bay Area, support from the Harmon Foundation gave his art national acclaim and allowed it to tour the country. (The Met’s current exhibition features one work by Johnson, 1934’s Mask, on loan from the MFA Boston.)

In addition to exhibiting the work of Black artists, the foundation’s awards came with a cash prize of $400 ($6,969.88 today) for gold and $100 ($1,742.47 today) for bronze. And several of the winners often used the funds to travel to Europe to see the works of Old Masters in person and interact with their contemporaries across the pond. Palmer Hayden, who won the gold prize in 1926, traveled to Paris to pursue his studies as a private student of Clivette Le Fevre at the École des Beaux-Arts, while Hale Woodruff, who won the bronze that same year, was able to spend four years at Académie Scandinave and the Académie Moderne in Paris.

At the time though, the Harmon Foundation wasn’t the only philanthropic endeavor aimed at supporting the Black community. Philanthropists like George Foster Peabody, John D. Rockefeller, and Julius Rosenwald donated funds directly to communities for efforts to build YMCAs or other hubs of Black life in places like Brooklyn, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. And historian and bibliophile Arthur Schomburg also mounted exhibitions at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library between 1921 and 1923 that exhibited 261 paintings by 65 Black artists from across the country.

Though the Harmon Foundation was relatively well-respected, it did receive criticism from Black artists, including Romare Bearden who felt the organization focused on Black artists’ distinctive personalities and biographies rather than their artistic merit. As a young artist in 1943, Bearden published an article, titled “The Negro Artist and Modern Art,” in Opportunity magazine about the Harmon Foundation, which he viewed as “from the beginning [having] a coddling and patronizing nature.” Bearden would later change his views of the Harmon Foundation, writing in the 1993 book he wrote with Harry Henderson, A History of African American Artists 1792 to the Present, that the foundation was instrumental to the development of Black artists. “Yet whatever its faults,” they wrote, “aesthetically and from an African-American viewpoint, the Harmon Foundation brought encouraging public attention to the development of African-American artists in a critical period.”

Francis added, “Famously, Bearden took it back, because he said, I was young, and I had my strong ideas and my strong opinions. But I think by the time Bearden and Harry Henderson started to write A History of African American Artists, he was like, at the very least, it helps some artists maintain their visibility.”

Curator Adrienne Childs, who served as an adviser to the Met’s Harlem Renaissance exhibition, said that the institutional support Black artists received from the Harmon Foundation was critical, “certainly, in the early 20th century, when Black people were increasingly engaged in the visual arts,” she said. “So, the Harmon Foundation is sort of accelerating this by focusing one part of their agenda on Black art and Black artists, supporting them by sending them overseas.”

Because its annual exhibitions and awards occurred decades before the civil rights movement, the Foundation was in many ways ahead of its time, giving Black artists much-needed recognition for their talents. Artists like Augusta Savage, who won a prize in the 1928 exhibition, opened two galleries, directed the Harlem Community Art Center, and encouraged younger artists like Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis to continue pursuing their art.

The Harmon Foundation began to wind down its activities in the mid-1950s following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, with the belief that the ending of segregation in schools no longer necessitated its mission. The Foundation ended the tour of “Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin,” which had been traveling the country for a decade.

The board donated the entire collection to the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum as well as to HBCUs, like Fisk University and Hampton University, after the organization’s termination in 1967.

When thinking about the impact that the organization had at that time, Francis said, “We know a lot about the good, the bad, and in between about the Harmon Foundation, and maybe things [without it] would have moved along in some way, or they would have not moved along. But you know, it just would have been a different and not entirely predictable narrative.”

Correction, May 24, 2024: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the Met Museum’s “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” did not include a work by Sargent Claude Johnson. It, in fact, includes one sculpture by him.

Helphenstein, who regularly critiques the art market, received criticism this week for a video she made as she was live-streaming Sotheby’s “Now” evening sale on Monday. In a clip that has been circulating on social media, Helphenstein jokes about the name of a Sotheby’s auctioneer bidding on behalf of a client.

“Who would name their child ‘Ashcan’?” Helphenstein says, laughing offscreen. “Asking for a friend. Who would name your child Ashcan? Maybe they are not American, and it means something in a different language.”

Helphenstein was referring to was Ashkan Baghestani, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art day sales in New York. “I’m Ashkan, do you feel good about yourself posting xenophobia, intensive and hate speech on your social media account?” Baghestani wrote on his Instagram Story. “Maybe travel more and educate yourself on the beauty of Persian culture.”

The post was reshared by several people from the auction house, with some tagging Helphenstein and saying the comments were inappropriate.

Following the negative response, Helphenstein issued a statement apologizing for the comment. “I take full responsibility for making an offhand comment about a name I was unfamiliar with, and made a joke in poor taste,” she wrote in an Instagram Story. “I have apologized directly to the person, and I have also been in dialogue with every single person who has posted today that I am a xenophobic, bitter Karen who posts hate speech.”

“I acknowledge your apology,” Baghestani said in an Instagram Story of his own. “I’m proud of my name and my culture. I am a second generation immigrant born and raised in Switzerland and you are often mocked for my ethnicity. Without my background I wouldn’t be where I am today. I was disappointed that someone with a platform like yours would make these kinds of comments. I appreciate your commitment to mindfulness and respect for others going forward… we live and learn, no ill feelings and apologies accepted, love and light.”

Baghestani did not respond to a request for comment. Sotheby’s declined to comment.

Helphenstein’s Jerry Gogosian account currently has 138,000 followers. She also runs a podcast and a newsletter, and has in the past collaborated with auction houses such as Sotheby’s. For Sotheby’s, in 2022, she curated a show titled “Jerry Gogosian’s Suggested Followers: How the Algorithm Is Always Right.” Helphenstein recently returned to school as an MBA student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. But in February, she announced that she would put school on hold because she had signed with the LA-based talent agency UTA.

Last May, the Cannes Film Festival debuted the newly restored 4K versions of the films to honor the centennial of Man Ray’s entry into filmmaking. Following the North American premiere at the New York Film Festival last fall, a wider release by distributor Janus Films begins this month, just as Surrealism celebrates its 100th anniversary.

Le Retour à la Raison (1923), Emak-Bakia (1926), L’Étoile de Mer (1928), and Les Mystères du Château du Dé (1929) comprise these wondrous 70 minutes that are now accompanied by a hypnotic avant-garde score, replete with guitar riffs, percussion, and droning synthesizers, by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan of SQÜRL.

Created two years after his move to Paris, Le Retour à la Raison (Return to Reason) was produced with the encouragement of poet Tristan Tzara for a Dada evening of performance. Man Ray, adapting his process for creating cameraless photographs (photograms he eponymously dubbed “rayographs”), placed objects directly onto celluloid strips and briefly exposed them to light. He fudged the editing by gluing strips together. In his 1963 autobiography, Self Portrait, Man Ray wrote of his early films, “My curiosity was aroused by the idea of putting into motion some of the results I had obtained in still photography.”

For Le Retour’s opening image, he sprinkled salt and pepper on film “like a cook preparing a roast,” as he once put it. Seasonings, dress pins, and thumbtacks pulsate on screen, sometimes reversed as film negatives. These compositions are interspersed with footage such as a revolving carousel’s lights and a woman’s nude torso turning in front of a window. Despite his attempt to adhere to a credo of randomness, Man Ray’s unrelated shots belie his aesthetic attention to line, pattern, and movement.

At its 1923 premiere, his inexpertly mounted film broke twice, causing an uproar. By the principles of Dada: a success.

Emak-Bakia (Leave Me Alone) similarly is the result of playful experimentation with professional camera equipment, a turntable, crystals, lighting, and distorting mirrors. According to Man Ray’s remarks at the screening, the film was “purely optical, made to appeal only to the eyes.”

A vibrating pattern of white on black is followed by a shot of daisies, alternating between the real and the abstract. The legs of model and artist Kiki de Montparnasse, Man Ray’s lover and muse who posed for many of his iconic works such as Le Violon d’Ingres (1924) and Noire et Blanche (1926), appear in t-strap shoes dancing the Charleston while a Black man’s hand strums a banjo. A crossdresser finishes grooming and looks out at the ocean’s lapping waves. Soon, the camera rotates to invert sea and sky, an unusual move for Ray, who more often used a static camera to capture motion, akin to enlivening still pictures. A bit of trickery ends the film as Kiki awakens to reveal that her closed lids had been painted to look like eyes, echoing the film’s opening of Man Ray’s eye looking through a camera lens.

The most cohesive film, L’Etoile de Mer (The Star of the Sea), features a starfish with undulating appendages, providing an erotic motif amid dream-like sequences. An interpretation of Surrealist writings by Robert Desnos, it also stars Kiki.

Early on, through what appears to be smeared glass, a man and a woman climb a staircase to a bedroom. The woman undresses seductively and lies down. Surprisingly, the man departs. In his autobiography, Ray described his process of obscuring the scene to avoid censorship by using soaked gelatin sheets as a filter, “obtaining a mottled or cathedral-glass effect through which the photography would look like sketchy drawing or painting.”

What follows is typical Surrealist delight: scenes of trains and steamships in motion, newspapers flying in the wind, a woman holding a dagger—later a double exposure with a starfish in a jar, and a second man who leads the woman away from the first, to his dismay.

And finally, there is Man Ray’s most elaborate short, Les Mystères du Chateâu du Dé (The Mysteries of the Castle of the Dice), commissioned by Charles de Noailles, one of the day’s leading patrons of avant-garde film, to record his mansion in the South of France and his patrician guests. With the payment, Ray bought the fastest film and newest lenses available to realize his vision for the project. The blocky exterior of the château informed the theme of the film, which drew inspiration from Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem, “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance.”

The film opens with two men in a Parisian café rolling a pair of dice to determine their actions. Over a bumpy road, they drive to a gray cement estate. Using a dolly, Man Ray provides sweeping shots that examine the various angles of the building, the garden’s outdoor sculptures by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, and the rest of de Noailles’s extensive art collection.

Back inside the château, guests arrive and cast the die to determine their recreational activities in and around the well-equipped pool and gymnasium. Everyone wears face obscuring silk-stocking masks “for mystery and anonymity,” according to Man Ray. In striped swimsuits, the guests dive, juggle underwater, and flip into headstands as sunlight casts pleasing shadows around the pool. When night falls, a couple tussle in the garden and then freeze into place, posed like statues in a tableau, as the suspenseful soundtrack builds. A wooden hand holds a large pair of dice in the final closeup shot.

What connects these four films, other than their maker? Serendipity and the interdisciplinary art world of Paris in the 1920s. Through mesmerizing images and unexpected drama, Ray created magic in his filmmaking—another successful medium for the prolific and influential artist.

More than 40 years after the retired seamstress Maria Pulsone posed for a statue, she was reunited with it at an unveling at the Italian American Museum, which will reopen this summer.

Her granddaughter Jennifer Pulsone said that she always knew growing up that her grandmother had a statue that rested in the lobby of the Broadway building where she worked.  Always curious where it landed, the younger Pulsone said her husband suggested they try to track it down late last year. “I said, ‘It’s going to be nearly impossible to find this thing.’ But with a quick Google search of ‘woman’s sewing statue,’ it just popped up. It was for sale in a warehouse in Scranton, Pa.,” she said.

Six hundred dollars or so later Pulsone became its new owner. “We live in New York City; we’re not going to put it in our apartment. My grandma lives in Queens. She’s not going to put it in her backyard,” Pulsone said. “We were like, ‘Where are we putting this thing?’”

She learned of the Italian American Museum’s plans to reopen this summer and reached out. They responded immediately and said they definitely wanted to include the piece in an exhibition about the garment district, she said.

Posing for the plaster life-size statue required a sitting of several hours for Maria Pulsone, who had to wear a face mask with straws in her nose to breathe. She was known as a “master seamstress” at that time. Her employer of several decades, Saint Laurie, had commissioned the statue in 1984.

Maria Pulsone was floored to learn that the statue had been found. “She couldn’t believe it. She is a simple, humble person. She’s never thought it’s a big deal that she has a statue of herself. When she found out it was going to wind up in a museum, she was just beyond words,” her granddaughter said.

“She’s the face to a time period when [thousands of] Italian immigrants moved to this country, were working hard and trying to live out an American dream to create better lives for themselves and their families,” Jennifer Pulsone said. “Today that is still the case. People are trying to come to this country, get in here and achieve those kinds of dreams.”

Between 1880 and 1920 4 million people came to the U.S. from primarily southern Europe, and then an additional 1 million in the years that followed, according to the Italian American Museum’s founder and president Dr. Joseph Scelsa. After five years of being shuttered, the museum at 151 Mulberry Street is scheduled to reopen in late July or early August pending building permits. Its remodeling has been a $7.5 million investment, Scelsa said.

A bit surprised, but happy about the level of interest in Pulsone’s statue, Scelsa said, “This is what we want to do. We want to tell the whole story of the Italian experience in America. This is a significant part of it.”

Ivor Agyeman-Duah, the lead negotiator for Asantehene Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, the monarch of the Asante Kingdom, described the historic occasion as “very touching.”

“The emotions that came out of the Asantehene when he first saw these objects weeks ago underlined the whole history of the 19th century,” Agyeman-Duah told ARTnews, speaking after the opening of an exhibition of the returned objects at the revamped Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti Region. “It was very emotional negotiating for them, but it was even more so when we first listed the objects and identified the ones that will come here.”

Some of these objects come from two London museums, the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum, and one in Los Angeles, UCLA’s Fowler Museum. Agyeman-Duah, who is also the director of the Manhyia Palace Museum, said there are ongoing discussions with individuals, corporate organizations, and galleries in South Africa and the United Kingdom to return more regalia. He teased a meeting in England in about two months to start new negotiations.

Among the objects in the show are a 300-year-old sword of state (Mponponso), a gold peace pipe, sika mena (elephant tail whisk), royal stool ornaments, an Asante royal gold necklace, and ceremonial gold bangles. The objects have not been seen in Ghana in about 150 years.

Some of the returns will last forever while others are temporary. The Fowler Museum, for example, permanently gave back seven items in early February. The British Museum and the V&A, meanwhile, have only lent their objects for three years, with the possibility to extend the loan. (England’s National Heritage Act of 1963 prohibits British museums from permanently removing items from their collections.) Whether the objects are here to stay or not, the show is an important one because of the spiritual and ceremonial significance of the objects to the Asante Kingdom.

While repatriation has only recently received wider attention in the West, requests for the return of looted objects have been common in Ghana and other countries for the past century. The request for the return of the Asante regalia, for example, started in the 1920s during the reign of Prempeh I.

The regalia was looted by British soldiers from the Manhyia Palace of Asantehene Kofi Karikari in 1874 during the Sagrenti War, also referred to as the Third Anglo-Ashanti War. The war was fought between the Ashanti Empire and the British Empire, and during the conflict, Kumasi and the palace were burnt and plundered.

The opening of the show at the Manhyia Palace Museum on May 1 also marked the 150th anniversary of the British invasion of Kumasi; the 100th anniversary of the return of Nana Agyeman Prempeh I, an Asantehene who was sent into exile by the British to Seychelles; and the silver jubilee of His Royal Majesty, the Asantehene as the leader of the Asante Kingdom.

The Manhyia Palace Museum was initially the home of Asantehene Nana Agyeman Prempeh I following his return from decades of British-imposed exile in the Seychelles. The British built it as a replacement for the destruction of the earlier palace, but the king only moved in after the Ashanti Kingdom had fully paid for it. Prempeh lived in the palace from 1925 to 1931; the building later became a museum, opening to the public in 1995.

“We all accept that there are universal values of culture which attract people from all ethnic groups, nationalities, and beliefs,” Otumfuo Osei Tutu II said during a speech at the opening. “The reactions to these objects coming home are ample evidence of this.”

He called the returned regalia “the soul of the people of Asante,” adding that these objects “embody the soul of Asante. And I believe that during the period that they are being displayed everybody will make the effort to come and see it for themselves, to believe that these were created by our own artisans.”

The Asantehene said he has asked the Manhyia Palace Museum to design an initiative to support traditional art in Ghana in collaboration with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology art school. Partners in this project include the British Museum, the V&A, and British Airways.

Starting in 2025, he continued, the initiative will award three prizes yearly; finalists’ works will be purchased locally for upcoming contemporary art museums, the goal being to keep these works within Ghana. When he travels to London in July to deliver a public lecture at the British Museum, he also plans to meet artists and goldsmiths in the Ghanaian diaspora in the country. 

Among those on hand to witness the opening of the exhibition were V&A director Tristram Hunt, British Museum trustee Chris Gosden, and Edmond Moukala, UNESCO’s Ghana head. The international cast of onlookers is a sign that something has shifted in the UK, a country whose museums have been largely resistant to returning art to nations abroad.

“I think it’s a thickening of the relationship between Ghana and the UK, which is longstanding and deep,” remarked Hunt to ARTnews. “I think what is important here is the strength of the partnership between museums in London, the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and Manhyia Palace. And so, it’s more than the objects landing here. It’s about how we share knowledge, it’s about how we share conservation skills, how we share education, so it’s a richer partnership over time, hopefully.”