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AKNEYE aims to harmonize the tangible aspects of traditional sculpture with the virtual dimensions of NFTs by creating a novel platform for artistic exploration and collaboration. Artists from Armenia and around the world have crafted original artworks on eye-shaped wood or resin sculptures. These forms serve as the raw canvas upon which the artists, typically employing traditional methods such as paint or mixed media, realize their creations.

These sculptures are then scanned in painstaking detail and rendered digitally, essentially creating a digital twin of the physical version. This virtual proxy is then displayed as an NFT artwork in AKNEYE’s digital gallery hosted on Fastexverse, a navigable, 3D metaverse platform that enables users to participate in events, engage in commerce, and interact with other users in an immersive digital environment.

In Venice, the AKNEYE Phygital Space installation brings the relationship between tangible and digital art full circle by creating a real-life environment for viewers to interact with the art. The Venice site, established in partnership with Fastex’s NFT marketplace ftNFT, joins a growing roster of ftNFT Phygital Spaces in Dubai and Yerevan, Armenia, which also serve as outlets to purchase artworks.

“The Phygital Space is not just any digital space; it is a vision of the future of art, where boundaries are blurred and new connections are formed between the artist, the observer, and the medium,” says Vigen Badalyan, founder of AKNEYE.

The exhibition, curated by Anastasia Dawson, features digital representations of the AKNEYE sculptures on LED screens alongside their tactile counterparts, symbolizing the fusion of conventional art methodologies and contemporary technological advancements. Throughout the duration of the Biennale, visitors will have the opportunity to observe both Armenian and international artists create physical pieces of art on-site, which will subsequently be transformed into NFTs.

“AKNEYE by ftNFT is a testament to the power of collaboration across cultures and disciplines,” Dawson notes. “It embodies our mission to innovate within the art world while respecting traditional idioms.”

In devising a medium that both embraces and transcends physical space, AKNEYE has created a vehicle for artists from diverse backgrounds to create experiences that engage, educate, and inspire and share them with an international audience. The featured artists at the AKNEYE Phygital Space are:

● Raffi Yedalian
● Elene Metreveli
● Sarko Menee
● Natalia Gudovich
● Stephany Sanossian
● Mako Lomadze
● Anahit Margaryan
● Roman Reznitsky
● Alpha Odh
● Satenik Ghulijanyan
● Larry Amponsah
● Lusine Ginosyan
● Anna Chekh
● Ashot Yan
● Miroslava Romanova
● Ellen Demirian
● Lokher
● Edmon Harikyan
● Gareggin Harutyunyan
● Rafayel Nersesyan

Visitors to the Venice Biennale are invited to the AKNEYE Phygital Space to engage with a new realm of creativity, and in doing so, engage with a community of artists crossing the boundaries of the cultural divide and artistic medium. For more information, visit AKNEYE’s website and follow AKNEYE on Instagram.

ftNFT Phygital Space
Ramo de la Tana, 2124a, Venice, Italy
April 20–Sept. 30 (11 a.m.–8 p.m.)
Oct. 1–Nov. 24 (10 a.m.–6 p.m.)

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Artist Robert Zhao Renhui wants to challenge that perception. His exhibition Seeing Forest, which represents Singapore at this year’s Venice Biennale (April 20–November 24), explores the city-state’s secondary forests—once-developed land which has been since reclaimed by nature. Secondary forests make up approximately 4% of Singapore’s land mass; unlike primary forests, however, they don’t enjoy governmental protections and are often recleared for building projects.

The flora and fauna that have flourished in these ecosystems, many of them not native to Singapore, become protagonists in Zhao’s multimedia works. The Owl, The Travellers and The Cement Drain (2024), the two-channel video installation at the heart of the Biennale exhibition, teems with owls, eagles, wild boars, and lizards. Two humans explore the wilderness together but more often, it’s human detritus that dots this liminal terrain: abandoned tents, century-old booze bottles, old tapping cups from when much of Singapore was a rubber plantation, and more.      

In Zhao’s Trash Stratum (2024), a partner piece to The Owl, The Travellers and The Cement Drain, twelve screens are embedded within a deconstructed curiosity cabinet. They display footage of the animal visitors to a dustbin Zhao found abandoned in a secondary forest. In one scene, frogs float placidly in the bin, filled with rainwater—an ecosystem within an ecosystem, a treasure from one man’s trash.

That image eloquently sums up Zhao’s practice. For more than a decade, Zhao, 41, has tried to escape simplistic dichotomies between “wild” and “developed” land—a binary that exists mainly in the human imagination and nowhere else.

“Where I live exists at this boundary line between city and nature, between urbanized cities and wild secondary forests,” Zhao says. “I’m interested in the collapsing of such categories because they tend to espouse a kind of conservative—and misguided—thinking that prioritizes ‘wildness,’ ‘virgin’ and ‘untouched’ as somehow superior to, say, an abandoned village where a forest of unremarkable and common tree species has taken over.”

Zhao says secondary forests are the “longest and most persistent” of his ecological interests: he’s been filming and photographing secondary forests in Singapore for seven years now. But the roots of Seeing Forest stretch back to 2008, when Zhao started the Institute for Critical Zoologists. Though its title parodies lofty research think-tanks, Zhao says the ongoing one-man project is as serious as they come. Under the banner of the semi-fictional Institute, he’s studied the last wild cow in Singapore, which died in 2016; the migration patterns of bird species near the border between China and North Korea; and the effects of human settlement on Christmas Island, under Singaporean control until 1958.

“I could explore the interactions between humans and nature while focusing on everything that tends to be ignored in zoological research,” Zhao says.

Singapore, Very Old Tree (2015)—Zhao’s permanent exhibition at the National Museum of Singapore—is another work which builds on this fascination. Zhao photographed 17 trees in Singapore, paired with oral histories about them by residents. Trying to Remember A River (2022), recently presented at the 2023 Gwangju Biennale, is a still-closer precursor to the work in Seeing Forest: motion-sensor cameras captured the wildlife surrounding a “forgotten” river in Gillman Forest in Singapore, near the institution where Zhao undertook a research residency.    

“While [Singapore is] often described as a Garden City, I felt that there was an impersonal, anonymous image of nature,” Zhao says. “Exploring the city’s history through a zoological lens seemed a fascinating and multilayered way to connect Singaporeans with their own stories.”

In addition to Trash Stratum and The Owl, The Travellers and The Cement Drain, the pavilion exhibition will also feature Buffy (2024), a digital print of a buffy fish owl native to Southeast Asia, and a printed map of an unnamed, fictional forest, in which visitors are invited to imagine themselves as they progress through Zhao’s works.

“My Venice presentation aims to capture that sense of being in the forest—of being enveloped by images, pulses, energies, and other beings—without trying to rationally reduce these sensations into statements of fact or opinion,” Zhao says.

Commissioned by National Arts Council, Singapore and organised by Singapore Art Museum, Seeing Forest by Robert Zhao Renhui in collaboration with curator Haeju Kim, will be presented at the Singapore Pavilion on the second floor of the Arsenale’s Sale d’Armi building from 20 April to 24 November 2024.

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“I certainly didn’t see myself at that time as being suited for it,” she admits, calling from her home studio in McDonough, Ga. “But over a series of months, whenever I would talk on the phone with a friend from undergrad, she would remind me: ‘Okay, have you applied?’”

Good thing she did. Out of ten talented finalists selected from nearly 700 applicants, Ross walked away with the $50,000 prize, the largest of its kind offered solely to women figurative painters. (Her win was preceded by Aneka Ingold’s, who received the inaugural Bennett Prize in 2019, and succeeded by Shiqing Deng’s, who won the third Bennett Prize in 2023.) The prize also includes a touring solo exhibition, which Ross titled “The Lessons I Leave You”; still making its way across the country after opening last May, the show is currently on view at the Customs House Museum in Clarksville, Tenn.

Since winning the prize in 2021, Ross’s career has taken off. She recently opened yet another solo show, “Whence We Came,” at the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania, and is currently a Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow at Yale University. One is hard-pressed to find paintings in her portfolio not marked as “sold.”

Now, the Bennett Prize is moving into its fourth year, with the call for entries open from April 15 to October 4. As with previous years, a jury will select ten finalists, with a winner and runner up to be announced at the opening reception for the finalists’ exhibition at the Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan on May 15, 2025. Unlike previous years, the 2024 Bennett Prize’s jurors are all women: artists Angela Fraleigh and Margaret Bowland; Gloria Groom, curator at the Art Institute of Chicago; and Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt, Bennett Prize co-founder.

Steven Alan Bennett, Schmidt’s husband and fellow prize co-founder, says Ross’s success “has ratified everything we’d hoped for when we conceptualized the Bennett Prize.”

“She’s selling her art. She’s traveling. She’s a fellow. She’s making a lot of paintings and experimenting with the bookends,” he says. “Everything we could possibly have conceptualized at the beginning is being realized in her.”

Though Ross is now based in McDonough, about 30 miles southeast of Atlanta, she grew up at the opposite end of the state, in smalltown Baxley (population 5,000). With a degree in apparel design and merchandising from Georgia Southern University, she started her career in the fashion industry, in New York City.

Then, 9/11 happened. For months, she heard sirens from her downtown office every time another body was recovered at Ground Zero. “It was difficult to focus on sleepwear and intimate apparel design in the aftermath of that,” she says.

Ross moved back home to teach art, working with students from pre-K up to college. At first, she experimented with textiles, hoping to build on her experience in the fashion industry. But she recognized the introverted, solitary side of herself in the abridged painter biographies she taught in class: Henry Tanner, Norman Rockwell, Amy Sherrell, Kehinde Wiley, Bo Bartlett. One day, a frustrating shopping trip cemented her path forward.

“I would get so frustrated going to Hancock and JoAnn’s [two fabric stores] and not finding exactly what I wanted. And then, it hit me: I’m a painter. I can literally paint the color I want,” she recalls.

Teaching full-time meant Ross, in those early days, had to make compromises. A mother, she could only find time to paint at four o’clock in the morning, before her long days in the classroom. At the time, she had to limit herself to small-scale work, in the interest of churning out more canvases. “It was something I could get done pretty quickly,” she says.

The Bennett Prize’s $50,000 award changed all of that practically overnight. It gave Ross permission to, in her words, “fail fabulously.”

“I had that two-year period to produce work for the solo exhibition, and just to produce work in general. The Bennett Prize allowed me the space and time to really produce in the way that I wanted to,” she says.

It even changed the work itself. Ross doesn’t find that the themes and concerns of her work are any different: her figurative work still probes family histories—with a special focus on dignified portrayals of youths and elders—and “finding revelations in small moments.” But its scale has absolutely changed.

“I believe that the size of the figure changes how you relate to that figure, and I really wanted to create life-size images that were in direct conversation with the viewer. [The Bennett Prize] gave me an opportunity to do that… Just having the opportunity to be a part of it put me on a different playing field.”

And that friend who pushed her to take the leap and apply? “She was there to celebrate with me,” Ross says, smiling at the memory.

For full details on how to apply for The Bennett Prize, please visit: thebennettprize.org.

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Knight Foundation’s Catalyst Forum brought together leaders in the arts from various cities and disciplines to Miami Beach, Fla., on Dec. 4, 2023. This inaugural event, titled Catalyst: Digital Transformation in the Arts, convened hundreds of participants at the New World Center, a forward-thinking venue home to the innovative New World Symphony. The forum, hosted by Knight Foundation, aimed to explore how the integration of technology and art offers both opportunities and challenges for building stronger, better informed, and more engaged communities, all of which are critical for a more effective democracy.

Victoria Rogers, Vice President of Arts at Knight Foundation, emphasized during the event that while technology is not a cure-all, its thoughtful use can expand access, redefine boundaries, and address various issues facing the arts.

Throughout the day, attendees engaged in exhibitions, collaborations, and panel discussions examining the digital impact on the arts. The focus was on understanding how artists, curators, administrators, and innovation leaders navigate the implications of technology through the lenses of sustainability, ethics, and exploration, identifying opportunities to enhance the creation, application, and dissemination of art.

“We are living in a rapidly evolving digital landscape,” said Jennifer Farah, Director of Arts at Knight, “It’s time to collectively envision new paths forward, that’s why we convened leading innovators to identify challenges, share information, and build on each others’ ideas.”

Nato Thompson, founder of the Alternative Art School, highlighted the importance of adapting to a future where technology plays a central role in how people experience the world. He described how his online institution reaches students from over 26 countries each semester by leveraging digital arts classrooms, which have significantly reduced startup costs and expanded global reach.

Similarly, John Jarboe, founder of Bearded Ladies Cabaret, discussed how incorporating interactive digital streaming and mail-delivered cabaret boxes has extended the reach of the Philadelphia-based company far beyond its physical community.

While digital tools can enhance existing programs and facilitate the creation of new ones, the forum also addressed concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the arts. Participants debated whether AI represents a revolutionary tool or a potential threat to artistic expression and creativity.

Kelani Nichole, founder of TRANSFER, an experimental media space, underscored the importance of artists envisioning new futures enabled by technology, countering mainstream narratives promoted by technology companies.

Safiya Noble, co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, emphasized the need for artists to reflect on what is gained and lost in the evolving digital landscape, emphasizing that the answers lie within the artistic community itself.

Art enriches our lives by encouraging participation and critical reflection. It has the extraordinary ability to make us aware, impact our perceptions, challenge our opinions and bring us together. Today, artists and the organizations that present their work are leveraging new and emerging digital technologies in their practices to reach a broader audience and create greater impact. Ultimately, Catalyst highlighted the crucial role of artists and arts organizations in building connections with communities in the digital age. 

ABOUT KNIGHT FOUNDATION

We are social investors who support a more effective democracy by funding free expression and journalism, arts and culture in community, research in areas of media and democracy, and American cities and towns where the Knight brothers once published newspapers. Find more information at KF.org

A figure with exaggerated hands and feet saunters against a Dalí-esque landscape. A woman donning an afterthought of a dress cradles a goldfish bowl, her eyes expressive but the bags under them more so. People with ears the size of their face. Women, perpetually unimpressed.

The figurative style of Jess Valice, a fast-rising Los Angeles–based artist making her Almine Rech solo debut (March 7–Apr. 20), has drifted in the five years she’s been working professionally. Sometimes her subjects’ exaggerated features swing toward Surrealism, only to swing back again toward more conventional Mannerist portraiture. What hasn’t changed are their expressions: stoic, impenetrable, flat.

“I think the exaggerated features I made in the past [explored] my interest in abstraction whilst being consistently focused on the figure. However, I still refuse to include facial expression,” Valice told ARTnews.

Contradictorily, the emotionless expressions of Valice’s figures heightens the emotional freight of her work. Viewers tend to project their own narratives onto their vacant stares—and it’s precisely that projection that fascinates the artist. After her parents forbade her from pursuing art in college, Valice studied neuroscience at Santa Barbara City College instead, influenced by her grandmother’s battle with Parkinson’s and her own labyrinthine convoluted dreams.

“My interest in the mind correlates to the interest I have in how people perceive images,” Valice says.

Valice was born in the San Fernando Valley, near Los Angeles, to a Jewish mother and Catholic father. She was raised Jewish but sometimes accompanied her father to mass, where she was haunted by iconography of Jesus’s crucifixion. The way that moment was depicted—Jesus fixing worshipers with a searing yet inscrutable gaze—shook Valice to her core.

“The image of Jesus, with his still expression singling you out of the congregation, would place this tightness in my stomach,” she remembers. “[It] dictates the work I make today.”

An irrepressible doodler, Valice homed in on figurative art early. She eventually dropped out of Santa Barbara City College, unhappy with the lack of painting time left over between her studies. On a whim, she messaged the painter Canyon Castator on Instagram and asked to be his assistant.

“At the time, he was the only artist I knew in Los Angeles who seemed accessible. He posted a photo of an overflowing trash bin in his studio, and I told him I would help clean up his space if he taught me a few things about painting,” Valice says, laughing.

Within a few short years, Valice went from knocking at the door of Castator’s now-fabled Mohilef Studios in “really ugly overalls” (her words) to claiming her own studio in the same building.

“He’s an annoying older brother that won’t stop bugging me now,” Valice says of Castator.

But as a self-taught artist, Valice says she still prefers to “take the technicality out of” confronting a blank canvas, instead following her intuition. When she was just starting out, she read voraciously, her interests ranging from Caravaggio to Lucien Freud to Dana Schutz. She wanted to tell her story the way those artists had.

“I approach the canvas with the knowledge that anything could happen. Nothing is premeditated aside from where my head is and what my interests are at that time,” Valice says.

For example, her Almine Rech solo debut catches Valice nodding to Buddhism: “Mara,” the show title, references a demon who tries to tempt the Buddha—and by extension all humanity—away from enlightenment.

“I realized that Mara and everything it symbolizes is a part of the human experience that I not only attempt to portray in my work, but also attempt to avoid within myself,” Valice says.

The exhibition showcases 19 new works in total—11 paintings and eight drawings. All were created from June 2023 onward, the most recent completed this past February.

Valice’s show at Almine Rech’s Upper East Side exhibition space will be followed by another at the gallery’s Paris Matignon location next year.

Besides that, Valice is finally finding something hard to come by in the last five years: a bit of down time. “I would love to rope-swing into a lake,” she says.

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Keep your valuables protected  

Art can be insured under valuable articles policies. Chubb’s valuable articles policy provides all-risk, worldwide coverage for losses including breakage, fire, flood, theft, or even mysterious disappearance, with no deductible. Existing Chubb policyholders have automatic coverage for newly-acquired art for up to 90 days, providing peace of mind until items are added to the policy. For those without a policy, an independent agent or broker can help provide a quote.  

Dangers in transportation 

Most losses occur in transit, making professional art handlers essential for packing and crating. Consider, for example, a collector who was told by the general carrier he used that the sculpture he purchased overseas and was shipping to his home was lost and could not be located. Or the collector who used a general contents moving company to transport a high-value painting only to see the work arrive with bubble wrap stuck to the acrylic paint and surface scratches from not being properly packed and secured within the truck. Chubb’s specialists can advise on packing best practices and can connect clients with best-in-class transporters. If the artwork needs to travel a long distance, it’s important to confirm whether the shipper will use a subcontractor – and if so, ensure all trucks follow the same protective measures such as air-ride suspension, climate controls, GPS tracking, and alarms, with two drivers so trucks are not unattended. 

Insurance coverage should be in place for artwork before transit as shippers usually don’t insure artwork that is in their custody. If the item is particularly high value, consider hiring an art conservator to complete a condition report before and after delivery. 

Displaying your collection  

Once the artwork is delivered, allow the art storage crate 24 hours to acclimatize before opening, especially if the work is moving from a hot and humid place, like Miami, to a cooler climate. The elements can impact artwork, so special care is needed.  

Work with a professional art handler to install the work and provide guidance on ideal display conditions. Here are some of the factors to consider: 

Critical climate controls 

If the artwork is to be displayed at home, take steps to ensure a stable climate in the home. Rapid changes in temperature and humidity can damage works, and this type of damage may not be covered by insurance. 

Sometimes, temperature changes can be hard to detect. Exterior walls with missing insulation, hot water pipes, fireplace flues, or HVAC vents can all cause small temperature fluctuations that can lead to damage over time. Chubb’s team can use infrared cameras to help identify locations away from these potentially harmful exposures.  

Damage through sunlight and water 

Works on paper, photographs, and textiles are particularly susceptible to UV exposure and should not be displayed in direct sunlight. Fading due to sun exposure is considered “gradual deterioration” and would not be a covered loss. For extra protection, works should be framed behind UV glass or plexiglass. Chubb’s team can consult on the placement of artwork, so as to avoid direct sun exposure, and can also advise on how to protect artwork against water damage, such as installing a water leak detection system. 

Keeping art safe 

Other precautions to consider: Installing alarm systems with motion detection plus contacts and glass-break sensors on perimeter doors and windows, including those on the second floor, as well as smoke detectors for early detection of a fire. Having extra security through centrally monitored alarms could help lower insurance costs. 

In some locations, such as California, seismic hardware is advisable. If you plan to store your new purchase rather than to display it, use a dedicated fine art storage facility with experienced art handlers on staff and enhanced environmental and security controls. 

Regular upkeep  

Preserving artwork requires regular upkeep. Hire a conservator to do regular condition checks. Work with a professional art installer to check and replace the installation hardware, including picture hooks and wires, which can deteriorate and loosen over time. Also, implement security measures to prevent accidental damage, including educating household staff on proper care for the items. 

Keep an inventory of all artwork with the accompanying documentation, such as invoices, certificates, artist fact sheets, and appraisals. These documents are part of an artwork’s provenance and are important in case of a loss, future appraisals, or a prospective sale. 

Have the works appraised regularly so the values listed on the insurance policy are in line with the market. Chubb generally recommends obtaining updated appraisals every three to five years. For newer works, such as those by postwar or contemporary artists, it might be more appropriate to have appraisals every one to three years. In more dynamic markets, prices can move fast. 

Securing and maintaining artwork takes a comprehensive approach. As the leading insurer of successful families in the US, Chubb offers tailored insurance coverage and claims handling and was independently selected as a top art insurer by ARTnews in the Top 75 Professionals edition.

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García was born in Mexico City in 1960. He grew up in Guadalajara before settling in Puebla City, where he is still based. His work has garnered a rush of press in Mexico, where he is recognized as one of the most important avant-garde expressionist painters of recent years.

His recent oil paintings incorporate patterns and phenomena that recall supernovas, churning waves, and sun flares. Recent works—like Miserere, Reborn, andGaia—portray his figures curled, showing off their delicate musculature. Others, like In the Light of Awakening and Blossom, depict his subjects’ faces emerging from cosmic dust. With the boldness of his palette and the audacity of his forms, he catapults us into a realm where strength and poetry collide.

“We are all artists—those of us who wield the brush, the pencil, gouge, or chisel, and those who contemplate works and see themselves reflected in them in some sense. Because without the spectator, the works have not yet been born,” García says.

García’s work has been recognized all over the Americas, and his accomplishments were formally recognized in 2004 by Pueblas’ then governor, Melquíades Morales Flores, when he hosted the inauguration of García’s own gallery. His work has been shown at the Wyland Galleries of Florida (Orlando), Miranda Galleries (Laguna Beach, Calif.), Madison Gallery (Solana Beach, Calif.), and the Javits Center (New York City). The municipal president of Puebla also honored García when his work was shown at the Galería del Palacio Nacional in 2023. From 2005 to 2015, he was represented by MasterPieces, Inc.

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Compare them to the work Aranda created fifty years ago, and one would think they’re looking at the work of an entirely different artist. Aranda’s work in the 1960s and 1970s was set in desolate grays and earth tones, defined by visceral linework and rugged impasto. Color gradually began to creep back into Aranda’s art in the 1980s, after the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza family dictatorship, which, for decades, ruled his native Nicaragua with an iron fist. It is as though Aranda has not only found paradise but is painting it. 

Born in Managua in 1945, Aranda showed an early aptitude for art. Between 1957 and 1963, he attended Managua’s School of Fine Arts, where he was mentored by Rodrigo Peñalba, widely considered the father of plastic arts in Nicaragua. Aranda absorbed his mentor’s modernist sensibilities while honing his own distinctive style of still-life painting.

After graduating, Aranda founded the Praxis Gallery Group along with fellow artists Alejandro Aróstequi, César Izquierdo, Genaro Lugo, Leoncio Sáenz, Orlando Sobalvarro, Luis Urbina, and Leonel Vanegas. The artists were bound together by a resistance to the abstractionist and social realist strains dominating Latin American art at the time.  

In 1965, Aranda moved to Washington, D.C., receiving a Ford Scholarship to study at the Corcoran School of Art. Despite leaving Nicaragua, his art continued to confront the brutality of the Somoza regime, the family dictatorship that ruled Nicaragua from 1936 to 1979. During this time, The Washington Post praised his “delicate abstraction” and described a 1992 retrospective of his work at the Fondo del Sol Multicultural Museum as “genius… a powerful show of brooding, semi-abstract images that speak to the human trauma and terror of a nation consumed by revolution for several decades.” 

In the 1980s and 1990s, Aranda continued to incorporate the Indigenous Mesoamerican symbols that had surfaced his earlier work—particularly those of the Maya, his own heritage. He was especially drawn to Quetzalcoatl as a symbol of rebirth and spiritual syncretism, completing three series of paintings on the feathered serpent god between the 1970s and 1990s.

In 1999, Aranda left Washington, D.C., for Southern California. “I was ready for a new direction,” he told ARTnews. In recent decades, his work has moved away from political engagement and towards lush, soft-focus landscapes inspired by his time in California, Arizona, and Florida. Aranda’s work remains in the permanent collections of D.C.-area museums like the National Gallery of Art, the National Museum of American Art, and the Art Museum of the Americas.  

He is now based in Sedona, Arizona, where he lives with his wife, an immigration lawyer serving asylum seekers and families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border and sells his work at dinoarandaartist.com.  

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Together, with SFER IK’s Creative Director Marcello Dantas, Roth has launched The SFER IK Award, a new award for artists to create a work using artificial intelligence. The winning artist will receive $100,000 USD to develop their AI-integrated artwork, as well as a two-month residency with access to on-site resources at AZULIK Uh May—a sprawling creative campus with several workshops, local artisans, and a suite of new digital facilities called FabLab. Art residencies will also be offered to second- and third-prize winners.   

The award is open to international artists from all disciplines to create an AI-integrated work addressing themes of biodiversity, interspecies collaboration, ancestral knowledge, and the harmonious integration of science, technology, and nature. The purpose of the open call is to create an opportunity for artists to generate new and daring artworks that will expand the boundaries of technology and their artistic practices within the natural environment of the Mayan jungle. The winning artwork will ultimately be showcased at SFER IK’s upcoming open-air museum in Tulum, close to the Jardín de la Esperanza (Garden of Hope), an artistic natural space currently under development by artist Cristina Ochoa that will be a sanctuary of biodiversity and ancestral memory. 

ARTnews spoke with Roth to gain insight into the vision behind the award and his hopes for the winning artists.   

Tell us about the new award. Why AI specifically?  

The winning artist’s work will be presented in a new SFER IK Museum, located in the heart of Tulum on 30 acres of jungle and 200 meters from the sea. The work will use artificial intelligence and be inspired by ancient intelligence and nature. 

AI should be understood as “natural,” as the artworks are being created by human hands and minds. Through AI, we encourage artists to explore and interact with nature, considering ways to coexist symbiotically in the jungle.

What do you hope artists will take away from participating in the residency at SFER IK? 

By inviting artists to create their work in the middle of the jungle, we hope they will be inspired and transformed by the environment and have the chance to intervene in the landscape. The artists will have access to AZULIK’s new FabLab and FabMat facilities in the middle of this natural space, where cutting-edge technologies work alongside the trees.

In the jungle, it is crystal clear that everything affects everything. We are all part of the entirety, and solutions are only found when everyone can participate. The jungle can provide great lessons for artists, as it does for all of us who live here.  

Artists can submit proposals until November 17 by visiting sferik.art/award.  

British artist Phyllida Barlow’s immense sculptures and bold drawings will be on view in “Eleven Columns,” a solo exhibition installed on the museum’s ground floor.

For more than 50 years, Barlow took inspiration from her surroundings to create imposing installations that can be at once menacing and playful. She created anti-monumental sculptures from inexpensive, low-grade materials such as cardboard, fabric, plywood, polystyrene, scrim, and cement. These constructions were often painted in industrial or vibrant colours, the seams of their construction left at times visible, revealing the means of their making.

When Barlow passed away in early 2023, she was working closely with MOCA on a site-specific installation for the show. Having visited the building some years earlier, Barlow was taken by its industrial vigor and, in particular, the impressive columns paced throughout the museum’s ground floor. Co-curated by November Paynter and Rui Mateus Amaral, “Eleven Columns” brings together a selection of works that Barlow chose in discussion with the MOCA team. Acknowledging her enthusiasm for the museum’s distinct architecture, the show includes untitled: eleven columns, standing, fallen, broken (2011) and a collection of works on paper.

Canadian artist Liz Magor has produced one of her most significant commissions to date for “The Separation,” her solo exhibition on view on MOCA’s second floor. Magor folds organic and synthetic source materials into lustrous artworks that evoke the melancholy and the absurd. Attentive to the physicality of an object, she casts and organizes found material so that intense narratives of dependency and desire can emerge. At times sarcastic and sympathetic, Magor’s sculptures spark questions about our belief and emotional investment in the material world.

Curated by Rui Mateus Amaral, “The Separation” emphasizes the tensions in Magor’s work, playing rough against refined, flimsy against sturdy, fashionable against passé, and custom-made against mass-produced. Across the museum’s second floor are varying moments of suspense: objects intercepting one another as they slip, tumble, or fall—from physical safety and public favor. Borrowing from the complexity of sculpture, the exhibition invites the viewer to look and relook at their familiar surroundings.

“Dancing in the Light,” on the museum’s third floor, animates the rich tones and textures of contemporary Black life through portraiture. Established by Kenneth Montague in 1997, The Wedge Collection is one of Canada’s largest private collections of visual art that engages with Black identity and African diasporic culture. The exhibitionis part two in MOCA’s ongoing series “The City is a Collection,” which brings some of Toronto’s most engaging private collections to the public.

Featuring the work of 41 artists including Oreka James, Carrie Mae Weems, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, “Dancing in the Light”examines portraiture across a variety of mediums as a way of entering into a more nuanced consideration of contemporary Black life. Rethinking moments of stillness and vulnerability as instances of strength, the exhibition works against the flattened and commodified image of Blackness so often experienced within art history and popular visual culture. Curated and designed by Farida Abu-Bakare and Kate Wong, “Dancing in the Light”is conceived of as a capacious place for gathering and study, offering visitors comfortable seating and an array of books and music to explore.

MOCA’s site-specific Lightbox commission, located on the museum’s northwest façade, is a work by Isabel Okoro and is part of “Dancing in the Light.”

Visitors can also enjoy artist talks, exhibition tours, Free Friday Nights powered by Scotiabank, children’s workshops on TD Community Sundays, and other public programs.

MOCA Toronto’s fall season exhibitions are on view Sept. 7, 2023, through Feb. 4, 2024. Information is available at moca.ca.