It was with a heavy heart that I closed my gallery last fall. Proud of all that the gallery had accomplished over the years, I noted some highlights in a closure announcement that I sent to our mailing list. I was flooded with warm responses, yet it saddened me that no art press reported on our departure. Our shows might not always have received significant reviews, but it would feel great to be recognized for the blood and sweat we poured into the business. Is it too late now to get any farewell coverage?

Oh, downtrodden former gallerist, we see you flatfooting the earth among the unwashed masses. The art world is a fickle and merciless mistress who will never thank you for the diamonds, pearls, and quarter-page Brooklyn Rail ads you have festooned on her. No, she’ll hurl these gleaming gifts in your face before striding off with another gallerist whose star-studded roster makes yours look like a gaggle of dumpster divers behind a Dick Blick. The art world we just personified could be a “he” or a “they” too, but our point is that the love you’ve expended will never be fully reciprocated. Doesn’t that stink?

Closing shop is a bitter pill to swallow, but as you pointed out, gallery closings are the trend du jour, so at least you don’t have to feel alone. Given the paltry critical attention your shows received over the years, you already knew that the freeloading freelance art press is picky, and that publishing space is rooked up. Galleries are not so different from restaurants in that they are extremely grueling to run and most of them ultimately fail. Did you watch The Bear? Did it stress you out? Imagine a similar show about an art gallery. Would you binge it? We could reassure you that this closure is just a career bump, and encourage you not to give up, but why would you want to open another gallery in the same hostile environment?

The issue here is that you are focused on the attention that you didn’t receive rather than the accolades that friends and colleagues spent real time writing. Why not hold on instead to the warm glow you get when recalling all the amazing moments that made the gallery so personally rewarding. If you still have the energy, maybe the solution is to whip up an unforgettable Hermann Nitsch-esque blood-and-entrails farewell event. It might leave a bad taste in people’s mouths, but not enough people appreciated your cooking in the first place.

I was invited to participate in a “curatorial intensive” in Eastern Europe. It’s a financial stretch for me to attend a program like this, and I have a fear that the workshop is an express boot camp for curators like me who feel stuck in curatorial assistant purgatory. Is it worth the cost, and, more important, what happens at these intensives? How do I know it’s not a waste of time?

Sounds like you’re thinking about attending art sleepaway camp. It’s scary to be far from home in a situation where you have to share a bunk with motley independent curators and Euro-strangers. If you go, you will make new international friends who have different eye-opening perspectives to share. Unless they are psychos, the other attendees will likely be as anxious as you are about this intensive experience. The enrollment fee may be high, but you can expect plenty of arts activities, group exercises, karaoke, wine drinking, and heavy meals that will become forever memories. You will make pen pals for life and might even leave with plans for more art theory–filled sleepovers in other countries. Be sure to pack your favorite books and Powerpoint slides. Don’t forget your e-flux login or Advil for this aesthetic adventure filled with art world ghost stories and moonlit dreams about shows and QR codes you will produce one day at a remote Kunsthalle. 

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

Poh confronted the lack of safe spaces in her 2021 film Kin, a 3-minute piece wherein three individuals narrate what family means to them, each choosing terms beyond the biological and favoring chosen kinship. Poh’s most recent work, What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world (2024), follows up on these discussions by providing a glimpse into queer parenthood in Singapore. Same-sex unions are not legal in the country, and under Singaporean law, a child is seen as legitimate only if born or conceived within a “valid” marriage. This poses many challenges, including purchasing an apartment as a family unit under the public housing program.

In these two videos—both of which will feature in this year’s Venice Biennale—Poh takes a hybrid documentary approach, combining ethnography with performances she directs. In addition to recorded interviews, she constructs an environment for her subjects to perform in and express their identities and ideals in front of the camera lens.

Poh is interested in the politics of visibility and the representation of marginalized bodies as a means of asserting agency. But when we spoke over a video call, she also referenced Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity, and spoke about maintaining the right to illegibility. She captures vulnerabilities in those interviews, while also shrouding the subjects in a soft pink glow.

This trade-off—between representation and opacity—comes from Poh’s experience as a child actor in a Singaporean TV series of the early 2000s, titled We Are R.E.M. This experience is the subject of works such as “THE YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE,” a series she began in 2021 that appropriates footage from that show. In the video GOOD MORNING YOUNG BODY (2023), recently on view in “Proof of Personhood: Identity and Authenticity in the Face of AI” at the Singapore Art Museum, Poh employs AI on found footage of her own prepubescent body to create a deepfake avatar of her past self as a response to the public gaze and scrutiny that befell her in 2002. Accompanied by a narration that references paparazzi treatment of a 16-year-old Britney Spears, Singapore’s introduction of the Protection from Harassment Act (POHA) in 2014, and Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, an animated Poh revisits her own experiences as a young girl, touched by all that she’s learned since.

In a time when our image, whether created by us or by others, often spirals outside our control, Poh reclaims the agency that is hers, and insists on both the right to conceal and the right to be recognized. “To all the little girls,” she says at the end of the performance lecture, “may we all win.”  

The cantina’s regulars had strong reactions to the way Segovia glammed up the local watering hole. Segovia sat in the bar and “got to listen to people who hated it, who loved it,” he told me during a visit to his studio in a Porfiriato-era building in Mexico City, describing this and other works as “site-specific.”

The bull fighter is one of several toxic tropes of hyper-masculinity that Segovia, who works across painting, video, and performance, deconstructs in his work. Another frequent trope is the charro, or Mexican cowboy. For a 2020 solo exhibition at Galería Karen Huber in Mexico City, a 26-foot mural, Paisaje (2022), served as the backdrop for a performance, choreographed by Diego Vega Solorza, in which dancers, hidden behind a curtain, moved their cowboy boots in unison, before ultimately devolving into a nude dog pile.

Segovia, who will feature in the main exhibition of this year’s Venice Biennale and have a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles this fall, is best known for his paintings that translate black-and-white film stills, both from Hollywood and Mexico’s Golden Ages, into canvases he described during our visit as “poppy, kitschy, campy, bubblegum colors.” Many feature all-male gatherings; others show a man trying to woo a woman; while still others display men in moments of supposed heroism, rescuing damsels in distress. He says the colors “gave me permission to sort of fetishize the masculinity without being too serious about it.”

Segovia’s obsession with film comes from being a “frustrated filmmaker and a cinephile,”but also from his own familial connection to the industry. His great-grandfather, Fernando de Fuentes of the Revolution Trilogy (1933–36), is considered one of Mexico’s most important early filmmakers, and his grandfather, Fernando de Fuentes Reyes, was a producer who married the actress Yolanda Varela—one of the country’s biggest stars during Mexico’s Golden Age of Cinema. These early films were aimed at creating a new national identity based in convenient and often sanitized versions of history—“it’s that sort of artificiality about how we tell stories” that Segovia wants to dissect in his paintings.

In Venice, Segovia has adapted his 2021 solo show, at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, that featured paintings alongside his first video work. In the Biennale, that video, Aunque Me Espine la Mano, is projected onto a screen at the center of the room—painted a neon pink to transform it into a “burlesque, draggy, campy space.” In this colorful six-minute video, two charro figures, dressed in corresponding electric pink and blue embroidered suits, take center stage. You never get a clear look at their faces, and their genders are intentionally ambiguous. The figures dress each other, then slap one another’s hands and then faces, then one violently shakes the other. There’s a growing violence in the latent eroticism, buoyed by their grunting, in each exchange.  Segovia embraces the ambiguity of their gestures: “I’m not proposing new masculinities or utopias,” he said. “It’s not prescriptive. It’s not getting at any answers.”

The design is closely guarded until 2016. Then, renderings are released. The grand reveal: this designer is planning to make … a tower of stairs—154 flights, to be exact, all arrayed in a kind of upside-down cone, like shawarma on a spit, stretching 16 stories (some 150 feet) into the sky. In 2018 the designer offers a wan explanation: “What I like about stairs—as soon as you start using your body, it breaks down potential artistic bullshit, because there’s just an immediacy to straining your leg,” he tells the New Yorker’s Ian Parker.

Then, early 2019, Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel opens to the public in Hudson Yards, the crowning jewel of a complex of towering corporate offices, luxury apartments, luxury stores, and a luxury hotel developed by a luxury gym chain. Its pristine copper-colored cladding gleams in the sun. It looks alien and a little menacing, like a digital creation clicked and dragged from a computer screen into real life. It is vacuous in its celebration of vertigo-inducing capital and private ambition, and even though it closes to visitors not long thereafter, in May 2021, it has to rank as one of the defining architectural projects—one of the defining artworks—of the era.

Miraculously, this managed not to derail the 53-year-old Englishman’s career. Gargantuan, eye-catching Heatherwick schemes continue to crop up around the world. Boris Johnson has compared him to Michelangelo. Diane von Furstenberg has termed him a “genius.” For engineer Tony Fadell, the “father of the iPod,” he is “a creative genius.” Billionaire Stephen Ross, the man behind Hudson Yards, is said to view him as “the ultimate genius.”

It is no crime for artists and designers to be adored by the wealthy and powerful, of course. It’s essential. (Michelangelo certainly knew this.) But Heatherwick has become the go-to artist of the ultra-rich. Why?

ONE ANSWER IS THAT Heatherwick really can make punchy spectacles—edifices that become landmarks that patrons tout with easy pride. An early success was the Rolling Bridge, conceived for a London office and retail development where it was installed in 2004. More a kinetic sculpture than a bridge, it unfolds grandly from an octagon into a now-nonfunctional 36-foot-long footbridge over a canal in Paddington Basin. (Comprising thousands of complex moving parts that stopped working in 2021, it may never be repaired.) A few years later, his UK Pavilion for Expo 2010 in Shanghai, covered with 60,000 thin acrylic rods, was a shimmering Op art tour de force. And his similar starburst of a sculpture for Manchester, England, the nearly 200-foot-tall B of the Bang (2005), emanated the thrill of a vision brought improbably to life. Sadly, it was removed because parts of its 180 spikes kept falling off. Even the lobbying of Antony Gormley, another lover of bombast, could not save it.

But these are essentially razzle-dazzle, one-note pleasures, perfect examples of Ed Ruscha’s old line about the reaction that bad art elicits: “Wow! Huh?” Whereas good art draws those same words in reverse. Heatherwick’s 2007 Spun Chair, rendered in polished copper and stainless steel, could be a mascot for his methods: a sleek chair (picture a thread spool pinched at the center) that sitters can tilt at an angle and spin in a complete circle. It’s fun for a few spins.

Heatherwick’s competitor (and collaborator on a 2022 Google building in California), Bjarke Ingels, nailed it when he told the New Yorker: “There’s a Harry Potter-esque, Victorian quirkiness in the work. An element of steampunk, almost.” He comes bearing showy designs that aim to be icons for a development, a neighborhood, a city. A prime example is his 2017 plot with Mayor Johnson to build a $260 million Garden Bridge—a tree-filled pedestrian walkway—across the River Thames in London, scrapped after having sucked up $48 million in public funds.

The Heatherwick phenomenon is not a tale of gentrification. That work has usually been done by the time he gets the call. Long ago, white-cube galleries in West Chelsea and the rent-spiking High Line paved the way for Hudson Yards, which was helped along by almost $6 billion in tax breaks enacted by dubious rezoning that made Harlem, Central Park, and Hudson Yards all one low-employment district (never mind that only one of these had people living in it: the latter is a former train yard). He is, instead, an exemplary architect for a time when cities have become unbearably expensive and the wealthiest do not believe they should have to pay taxes.

HEATHERWICK, HOWEVER, positions himself as a man of the people. In his new manifesto of a book, running nearly 500 pages, he goes on the attack against the past century of design. “Some architects see themselves as artists,” he writes in Humanize: A Maker’s Guide to Designing Our Cities. “The problem is, the rest of us are forced to live with this ‘art.’” He inveighs against buildings that are “boring”—too flat, plain, straight, shiny, monotonous, anonymous, serious. Some 50 pages are devoted to a diatribe against Le Corbusier, “the god of boring,” whose theories “gave permission for repetitive order to utterly overpower complexity,” which Heatherwick prizes.

“Modernist architects think boring buildings are beautiful,” Heatherwick grouses. Their minimal, theoretically loaded work has lent cover for the cheap, knockoff stuff that sits alongside it. Against these elites and their “emotional austerity,” their buildings that “make us stressed, sick, lonely, and scared,” he adopts the language of the populist politician. “I am going to make a promise to you,” he writes in a lightly condescending letter to the “passerby” that closes Humanize. “I will dedicate the rest of my life to this war. But I need you … to join us. Our aim is modest: we just want buildings that are not boring!” And if boringness sounds difficult to measure, do not worry: Heatherwick Studio has made a “Boringometer” to determine how interesting a structure’s shapes and textures are, on a scale of 1 to 10.

The obvious irony is that many Heatherwick structures read like desperate, failing attempts not to be boring, via some whiz-bang trick. They illustrate Sianne Ngai’s theory of the gimmick—a device induced by late capitalism that falls flat for appearing to work both too little and too hard. Bulbous, grenade-shaped windows monotonously line his 2021 Lantern House apartment building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, while his newly opened 1,000 Trees mall in Shanghai features, yes, 1,000 trees, each sitting on its own mushroomlike column high in the air around the stepped building. It suggests a videogame environment, as do renderings for his overwrought multifarious proposal for an island in Seoul’s Han River.

While purporting to speak on behalf of everyday people, Heatherwick is careful to do nothing that could actually offend the ultra-rich. In a revealing passage in Humanize, he praises Antoni Gaudí’s curvaceous Casa Milà in Barcelona for “wanting to fill us up with awe and break us out in smiles.” Says Heatherwick: “Even though this building was made to provide high-end apartments for wealthy people, I believe it is a gift.” We should be grateful.

Heatherwick’s pitch sounds precisely attuned to the ears of politicians who are disinclined to pursue projects that might actually benefit the public at a time of government austerity (forget about the emotional strain). Self-styled technocrat Michael Bloomberg blurbed Humanize, praising it as “a powerful prescription for buildings that put the public first.”

“Our most vulnerable people live in the most boring buildings,” Heatherwick writes on a page that is illustrated, bizarrely, by the burned-out Grenfell Tower, where 74 people died in 2017. “Why should absence of boredom be a luxury good?” Heatherwick, it should be noted, has not pursued any large-scale, or affordable, housing projects that I am aware of.

Making buildings and cities that are more hospitable, livable, and generous is a noble pursuit, but the designer of a cold and imposing nine-figure stairway to nowhere does not feel like the right man for the job—not least because he and his developer-patron declined to install safety features after a series of suicides there. (Following the fourth, they finally closed it; nets are reportedly being tested.) Standing below it, I do not feel that I am receiving a gift.

STILL, IT IS EASY to share a common enemy with Heatherwick: boring buildings that exhibit little regard for those who use them. We all spend time in places made with little imagination and even less care. We deserve more. As he writes, “we’re richer than we’ve ever been at any point in history.” Heatherwick, making that pitch to deep-pocketed developers, has not often been able to deliver satisfying structures, but his brio should inspire everyone, whether commissioned architects or apartment renters or voters, to ask for more.

In any case, some ideas that Heatherwick floats in his tome for creating better buildings are sensible mainstream ones that practitioners and activists do advocate, like reducing regulations and simplifying planning processes. (Such moves could also assist wealthy developers, to be sure.) But my favorite Heatherwick prescription is an eccentric one, and absolutely peak Heatherwick: “Sign buildings.” Instead of “staying in the shadows,” he says, a building’s creators should “be proudly named at eye level on the outsides of their projects.”

“Why would anyone involved in the process of building buildings be against this?” he asks. “Why wouldn’t you be proud? Why wouldn’t you want to sign your canvas?”  

I remember sidling up to Pope.L in between folks wishing him congratulations to ask him how he felt about having received the award, which also comes with a check for $100,000. Without hesitation he told me “this was not real”—am I falsely remembering him pointing a finger in the air and gesturing to the hubbub around him in the starchitect room situated in the gentrifying Meatpacking District?—but, he said, his child is real.

I don’t know if he intended this to be a lesson, but I’ve held on to those words as if they were. That lesson came at the right time, though he wouldn’t have known it, as my daughter would come into the world the following year. Quickly, I understood how the world can reorient itself to center around one’s child. Certainly, this was one of many things I learned from Pope.L.

I also took his words as a warning. What isn’t real is the hype, spectacle, and attention that the art world can bestow on an artist. For Pope.L, the recognition was certainly deserved. He created incredible, urgent work for decades—when people were paying attention, and when they weren’t. I gleaned from his lesson the importance of accepting the fleeting nature of recognition, which comes and goes in a fickle way. To get caught up in it is a kind of fantasy. It is not real.

Pope.L was real, though. Alongside the wit, absurdity, and irreverence that imbued his practice, there was the rigor, and a grounding that enabled him to get things done. Without all that, how else could he—in 2019 and with a skeletal studio staff—create three simultaneous exhibitions at MoMA, the Whitney, and the Public Art Fund? The title of the triple-venue show says it all: “Instigation, Aspiration, Perspiration.” I organized his Whitney installation, and that project alone, with its monumental scale, synchronized elements, unknown unknowns, and plumbing (!)would have overwhelmed most artists. Featuring an inverted drinking fountain that harkened to segregation-era America while gushing nearly 1,000 gallons of water into a large holding tank as sounds from field recordings and other sources filled the darkened room, the installation, Choir, was an enigmatic “experiment” with outcomes that Pope.L himself couldn’t anticipate. When the sound of the rushing water was not as powerful as he’d hoped, Pope.L asked his audio engineer, Matthew Sage, to record and overdub more water sounds. Rather than insist that the sound be as he imagined it, he began to improvise, stringing circular weights from the ceiling, adding blue tape to the walls and water tank, and leaving the debris—sheetrock dust, screws, and wood scraps—lying on the floor. He said with a sly smile, “people will be looking for these things” as he turned the gallery into a kind of theater set to play with, all the while seemingly misdirecting viewers with clues in the dark.  

“El Playon” of the work’s title refers to a black scar that a volcanic eruption left in the earth more than a hundred years ago, just outside El Salvador’s capital city. The same area was used as a dumping ground for the bodies of the disappeared during the country’s 1980–92 civil war. Matching the shape of El Playon, 601ft² comprises some 1,500 pounds of molten amber that mimics flowing lava as it’s poured over a collection of various objects: volcanic stones, specially fabricated ceramic bones, and various items found in MacArthur Park, a main hub for the Salvadorean community in LA. It also includes letters and newspaper clippings related to the civil war that are difficult to read through the amber shell. After the show opened, Aparicio learned that the body of his half-sister had been discovered in El Playon by their father, artist Juan Edgar Aparicio, who fled El Salvador shortly afterward.

Now, Aparicio is working on a new amber work for this year’s Whitney Biennial. He is drawn to amber that trees secrete as a healing mechanism. But he also plans eventually to reiterate 601ft². Each new version will be, literally, darker: the artist plans to add a new layer of poured amber, further obscuring the documents and objects. “This is the most visible it’ll ever be,” Aparicio said. “That’s how memory works, how time works: you forget about it, archives are erased or destroyed.”

This impulse to capture something before it’s gone also appears in another ongoing series, “Caucho (Rubber).” In 2016 Aparicio started casting the bottom portions of Ficus trees, a non-native genus ubiquitous across LA, where, for decades, it has been subject to removal efforts. He applies a layer of rubber made from the Indigenous Salvadorean Castilla elastica, or Panama rubber tree. Aparicio leaves the rubber on the tree for several weeks before slowly pulling it off, creating a realistic impression of the tree’s bark: the knots and whorls, man-made carvings and graffiti, the discoloration from car exhaust and other pollution. At first, the “Caucho” works were faithful reproductions of the trees that hung from the wall like unstretched paintings. More recently, they are becoming more sculptural, as he’s started to incorporate new elements in them, like shards of glass or ceramic thorns. Now, he’s painting on their surfaces and stuffing some with the cotton fibers from ceiba (kapok) tree seeds.

These works powerfully evoke the unique Los Angeles cityscape. Aparicio was “interested in levels of human interaction that are recorded on the surface,” he said. Most of the trees he cast have since been cut down, and these works now serve as the only record of their existence, their previous lives, the marks imprinted on them. Ficus trees still abound across Los Angeles. There’s a municipal waiting list for the trimming of Ficus trees; the wait is upward of 10 years. The wait for tree removal is much longer. Aparicio added, “All to say, they can’t get rid of us even if they wanted to.”  

How does an important artist become an artist we know and love? It often starts at an early age, from a relentless energy to create. That energy is the focus of Sam Nakahira’s forthcoming graphic novel Ruth Asawa: An Artist Takes Shape (due out in March from Getty Publications). This tenderly illustrated new book opens with a scene of a teenage Ruth Asawa playing with wire in a cabbage field in Norwalk, California, just southeast of downtown Los Angeles. Already, she is transforming unexpected material into something new while maintaining its essence—a process core to her practice, as we later learn.

This idyllic scene, however, is paired with some foreboding text: “Sunday, December 7, 1941, 10:30 a.m. […] Before Everything Changed.” As we take in the scene around Asawa—known as Aiko to her parents but Ruth (her “American name”) to everyone else—her sister Chiyo comes out ringing a bell and yelling, “Come quick! Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor.” Things quickly change for Asawa: when she goes to school the next day, Nakahira imagines her thinking to herself, “Suddenly I knew who my friends were. Not many.”

By March 1942, the family begins to burn anything and everything that might denote their Japanese heritage, from kimonos and family photos to books on flower arranging and even the addresses of relatives in Japan. It doesn’t help: her father is taken in by the FBI for questioning and the rest of family is soon forcibly removed from their home, first to the Santa Anita Park racetrack, about 20 miles north of their home, and then to an internment camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, not far from the Mississippi River.

Nakahira poignantly illustrates this harrowing experience, which thousands of Japanese Americans faced during World War II. But she also balances the darkness with moments of joy that those who have faced such atrocities are lucky to find in order to keep going. At Santa Anita, where detainees are forced to sleep in horse stables and to make camouflage nets as part of the war effort, Asawa meets a few Japanese Americans who were animators at Walt Disney Studios. They teach her how to draw, notice her talents, and encourage her commitment to wanting to be an artist. “Everything was gray until I met the cartoonists,” Asawa says. “Truly, art has saved me.”

Asawa continues to face discrimination throughout her life. She can’t complete her art-teaching degree because she can’t get a teaching post in 1946 due to continued anti-Japanese racism. She recalls her mother saying, “Bend, don’t break.” That leads her to study at the iconic experimental art school Black Mountain College, with the likes of Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller.

Nakahira goes on to detail the early stages of Asawa’s career, how she arrived upon her signature wire-bent sculptural style, and her relocation to San Francisco. The short graphic novel, just under 100 pages, ends while Asawa, whose star has only continued to rise in the decade since her death in 2013, is still young, with so much life left. Perhaps there will be a sequel. In any case, An Artist Takes Shape is a significant new publication—similar in a way to Faith Ringgold’s 1991 book Tar Beach—in that it allows children, especially Asian girls, to dream big about the power of art, even in the most ghastly of times.