The work, created not long after the 1967 Six-Day War, was never exhibited during Heller’s lifetime—he died in 2018. The print, along with numerous other works, was found tucked in a drawer at his home in Kibbutz Nirim, a community along the border with Gaza, where he lived for most of his life. At the time of the work’s making, Israel had just seized control of the Palestinian territory from Egypt, before ultimately withdrawing in 2005. That piece, along with eight others, is now being exhibited for the first time in Kibbutz Sometimes, a solo exhibition open at the Mishkan Museum, an art museum in northern Israel.

“Heller returns from reserve duty and writes a text—in real time, which I think is super radical,” Avi Lubin, the museum’s chief curator, and the curator of the Israel Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, told ARTnews. “This is a work from 1968 but I’m convinced he would say the same thing today, that despite what happened and despite the horrors of October 7 and despite everything Hamas did and everything Israel is doing in Gaza—we must find the way to make peace and talk.”

The exhibition is the second in a series that Lubin has devoted to artworks from towns along the Gaza-Israel border that survived the October 7 attack by Hamas. The curator, who has been a frequent figure at protests in Israel calling for a ceasefire and hostage deal, links the series to the historic mission of the Mishkan, which began in 1937 with the goal of salvaging European Jewish art and culture at risk of destruction. In the weeks after the attack, Lubin considered what became of the works by several artists active in the kibbutzim and towns that were targeted that day, which the museum considers part of its broader goal to “preserve the works of Jewish artists from communities that no longer exist,” per the Heller show’s description.

Other Israeli museums have also addressed this question, with Jerusalem’s Israel Museum installing a shrapnel and bullet-damaged landscape painting by Be’eri-based artist, Ziva Jelin, in November. A solo exhibition of photographic still-lifes by Osnat Ben Dov was on view at the time of the attack at Be’eri Gallery, an art gallery incinerated during the Hamas attack,  and was restaged at the Janco Dada Museum in December.

Lubin waited until April, when it was permittable to go to Nirim, to select works from Heller’s estate, noting when he was there that a structure close to Heller’s storage had previously been hit by a rocket. A painter, sculptor, and printmaker who established an etching workshop in Nirim’s defunct cowshed, Heller was best known for socialist and autobiographical works, like those that explored his separation from his parents due to the Holocaust.

(Heller was born in 1937 in Bucharest; his parents emigrated to British Mandatory Palestine in 1939 and he was unable to join them until 1949).

In the Mishkan exhibition, however, Lubin felt it was critical to show another side of Heller.

“It was important to me to put his political work at the forefront,” said Lubin. “He was a man who lived until 2018 and, despite years of war and rockets and conflict, he kept working towards dialogue.”

Like many who lived in kibbutzim along the Gaza border, Heller had deep political commitments, both as a Marxist and as one devoted to peace with Palestinians. (It is a bitter irony for Israelis that the communities attacked in October were typically home to some of the country’s most devoted peace activists.)

Kibbutz Sometimes highlights Heller’s seldom-exhibited works. A 2010-2011 etching titled Rabuba, of a bird perched on the trunk of a potted tree,comes from Heller’s late Tel Gamma series. Made after Israel’s 2009 war against Hamas, it recounts the tragic story of Majda Abu Hajaj and her mother Raya Salama Abu Hajaj, two Palestinian women fatally shot in an incident with the Israel Defense Forces. (While an investigation was inconclusive, witnesses at the time said the women were shot by IDF soldiers while carrying a white flag and fleeing fighting.)

Heller often used baskets and birds as motifs for works about his own life.

“He connected his biography with their biography and his images with the images of Tel Gamma,” Lubin said, explaining how Heller intermingled his personal visual language with individual stories from Gaza to highlight their shared humanity.

Another work, a print titled The Green Line, was made in 1972, exhibited a year later, and never since. For those who don’t live near a border, it can be an abstract concept. Heller, confronted by the border every day of his life, rendered it unflinchingly real. In the work, a rough swathe of emerald green hangs beneath a wire fence, referencing the demarcation line defined in the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and its neighbors. For Heller, the line represented an omnipresent literal barrier that prevents dialogue between two peoples.

Shortly before his death, Heller met Haran Kislev, an emerging artist living in nearby Kibbutz Be’eri who was also creating images of the border. The two met at the opening for The Road to El Bureij, a 2017-2018 exhibition at Be’eri Gallery showing Kislev’s abstracted landscape paintings depicting a path between Be’eri and the El Bureij refugee camp in Gaza. For over a decade, Kislev has painted the landscape around Be’eri as, in his artist statement, “in the shadow of an armed struggle, concrete roadblocks near the border and the constant presence of armed forces.”

“Haran peers outwards and documents the blocked road, the changing light, atmosphere, and landscape, capturing the political interruption and estrangement,” artist Etti Abergel wrote in that exhibition’s catalogue. “The intense beauty erupting from his paintings stresses the horror and anxiety, the missed opportunities, the obstructed feeling of existing between the studio and reality, between the painting and the geographical location, between a utopia and its downfall.”

For Kislev, who carries on Heller’s legacy of engaging with the border, the series has taken on new meaning since October 7. Kislev was born and raised in Kibbutz Be’eri and was there with his wife and two children during the attack.

“That’s where they broke into the kibbutz from,” reflected Kislev. “There was always this fear in the paintings, of ‘what would happen if? If there was a very, very big catastrophe. And what does it mean to live there?’ This bubbling of the earth is something that preoccupied me for many, many years.” Since October 7, Kislev and his family have been displaced to a kibbutz in central Israel and he moved his work to a temporary studio in Tel Aviv; while repairs and reconstruction of Kibbutz Be’eri are underway, resettlement is currently slated for sometime in 2025.

Kislev’s work, in many ways, prompted the Mishkan’s ongoing series showing works that survived the attack. His last series produced in his Be’eri studio formed the basis of the first exhibition, Kibbutz Anxiety, which opened in December. It included nine works that the artist evacuated in a complex multi-trip process that involved military permits and the aid of a nonprofit organization—since regular movers weren’t allowed in the area—all during a period of frequent rocket attacks from Gaza. The exhibition, ironically, saved the artworks.

“A week after we removed [the paintings] a rocket or something fell in the area and the roof above where the works had been kept was completely destroyed,” Kislev said. “If we hadn’t done the exhibition, it all would have been destroyed.”

Lubin is continuing to work on the exhibition series, but at a wartime pace.

“Everything is very sensitive and I’m trying to do this very slowly together with the artists and their families, in order to understand what their needs are,” Lubin said. “I thought about one person and understood that this person is in a difficult emotional state, and that it’s better to wait at the moment.”

Returning to Heller’s Remaining Words, the artwork gracing the invitation to the opening of Kibbutz Sometimes, Lubin is unsure how audiences will respond to this print and the other artworks in the show.

“I think there are two components to our responsibility as a museum. One is to express solidarity and promote healing and extend a hand,” Lubin said, recounting how the museum immediately began hosting daily activities and workshops for the many displaced families in the area. In October alone, the museum hosted roughly 5,000 displaced Israeli children.

“In parallel, as a museum, we can’t only be a place of refuge and healing. We must also ask questions and challenge ideas. And part of our role, in this moment, is to not forget the questions: Where are we going, how do we move forward, and what is our future here?”

Vautier, who often worked under the artistic moniker Ben, was found dead in his home in Nice on Wednesday, less than a day after his wife died following a stroke. The Nice prosecutor’s office said that his body was discovered with a gunshot wound; the office said it would open an investigation to determine the cause.

Ben, along with other artists associated with the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, set out to blur all boundaries between the everyday and the hallowed field of art-making. He succeeded in doing so, creating artworks that sometimes incorporated the detritus of life itself, helping to point art in a new direction in an era when high-minded abstract painting was still preferred by the establishment.

He is remembered for one aphorism in particular: “Everything is art,” a phrase that he wrote in paint over and over, with many different variations, during the course of his six-decade career. Yet he was fond of creating paradoxes as well, and would sometimes intentionally contradict himself in other artworks and writings.

“Art is not LIFE but life communicated by X,” he wrote in 1966. “My EVERYTHING is for me an EVERYTHING of sincerity and of contradiction. It wants to be a BOUNDLESS EVERYTHING CONTAINING ALL the other’s EVERYTHING. That is, therefore, a work of pretension.”

At the 1972 edition of Documenta, the famed art festival in Kassel, Germany, Ben put it more bluntly, hanging a gigantic banner over the Fridericianum museum that read “KUNST IST ÜBERFLÜSSIG,” or “Art is superfluous.”

Among his most famous creations is Le magasin de Ben (1958–73), an installation that started out as a functional shop in Nice. What began as a store for buying records and cameras soon became something more than that: a “total art center,” in Ben’s terminology, whose walls were scrawled with the artist’s cursive phrases and hung with overflowing wheels, hats, and knickknacks.

Although the installation is now considered an important artwork, Ben last year told Forbes that it was “not for the art crowd because the art school was 100 meters away and the students were forbidden from coming to my place.” Today, it resides with Paris’s Centre Pompidou, which is currently showing the piece within its galleries.

Benjamin Vautier was born in 1935 in Naples, Italy. After his parents divorced when he was a kid, he led an itinerant childhood, moving with his mother from Egypt to Switzerland before finally putting down roots with her in Nice. He did not do well in school in that coastal French city, so his mother got him work in a local bookstore, where he aided in English translations. His first significant experience with art, he said, was not in a museum or a gallery, but in that shop, where he would excise portions of books he liked and collage them together at home.

“Then I developed a theory when I was 18 or 19: art must be new,” Ben said in the Forbes interview. “So I came to art like that.” He never attended art school.

His shop in Nice became known to members of the French avant-garde, including Yves Klein and Martial Raysse, who exposed him to the concurrent Nouveau Réalisme movement. Ben recalled showing Klein his drawings of bananas, which Ben took as his subject because he believed no other artist had ever done so. Klein, unimpressed with the bananas, said he was more interested in Ben taking up the written word and linking up with the Lettrists, who had enlisted text in visual forms. But Ben found Lettrist art to merely be “mannered graphics,” and instead sought a more truthful form of text.

Ben’s official introduction to the Fluxus movement came in 1962 through its founder, George Maciunas. Drawing on the Dada movement from a half century prior, Maciunas’s Fluxus manifesto, written the following year, called on artists to “PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art.” That spirit was already in the air, and Ben thrilled to it, heeding Maciunas’s advice to seek out works by John Cage and George Brecht.

In 1963, Ben organized a Fluxus festival in Nice, bringing over artists like Nam June Paik and Benjamin Patterson to perform there live. Ben would continue creating similar events with his own concept of total theatre, which was designed to bring performances off the stage, into life itself. A pesky prankishness pervaded Ben’s total theatre: he once convinced a theater that he was going to stage a production of a Molière play, then proceeded to smash pianos and fill a room with paper.

Though Ben’s paintings and related ephemera remain his most famous works, he also gained renown during the 1960s and ’70s for his performance art, which was deliberately crass. One piece consisted of urinating in a jar, then exhibiting the vessel as an artwork; another involved Ben repeatedly ramming his head against a wall. Anyone could’ve done these quotidian actions, but Ben performed them as art, so onlookers were forced to accept them as such.

Critics did not always respond kindly to Ben’s provocations, especially the ones produced during the ’80s and onward. “Tout est art? Maybe, but not all of it belongs on display,” quipped Quinn Latimer in Frieze in 2010, writing on the occasion of a massive Ben retrospective staged at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon, France.

Others were more charmed by Ben’s humor. In 1998, the New York Times devoted an entire review to Ben’s photography, addressing works such as Polaroids that were entirely blank. “‘I am not a good photographer,’ he confidently announced. That’s fair. No one will ever confuse Ben with Ansel Adams,” critic Vicki Goldberg wrote. “But whether in English or French, he poses more philosophical questions about the medium than Adams had time for, in a dry and even ridiculously naive manner, as if he were explaining Roland Barthes on ‘Sesame Street.'”

Whatever criticisms followed Ben throughout his career, they seemed to fade away on Wednesday as French officials mourned him. Rachida Dati, France’s culture minister, called him a “legend,” writing in a post on social media, “We will miss his free spirit terribly, but his art will continue to make France shine throughout the world.”

Ben may have been accused periodically of egotism—allegations that were no doubt aided by the fact that he created a persona called Mister EGO. But he generally approached his art in a plainspoken way that befitted his project of reaching the general public.

He once told curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, “My definition of art is: astound, scandalize, provoke or be yourself, be new, create.”

“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.”

And so just a few years after Breton defined Surrealism, staking his claim in conceptual ground that it was “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought,” women actively participated. They showed their paintings, photographs, collages, assemblages, garments, and sculptures in group Surrealist exhibitions and had their own solo shows, with catalog introductions written by Surrealists in their circle.

Between 1924, when Breton released the first Surrealist Manifesto, and 1947, when a major exhibition at Galerie Maeght celebrated the postwar return of Surrealism to Paris, the “first generation” of Surrealists included numerous women, many more than the 15 included here. Each had her own complex relationship with the movement.

“The diversity of experience and attitude on the part of women artists active in Surrealism has proved both an obstacle and a challenge,” wrote art historian Whitney Chadwick in her groundbreaking 1985 text Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. “In the end, I came to view such diversity as a tribute to these women, an affirmation of their strength as individuals and a mark of their commitment to a form of creative expression in which personal reality dominates.”

Some of the artists profiled below proudly carried the label, and others emphatically denied being Surrealists. But in a sense, isn’t it a Surrealist trait par excellence to defy being squeezed neatly into a box?

In his university days, he played trumpet, performing music by Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington in a school band led by an American music director. The band’s leader, Anatsui once said, introduced him to the music of Fela Kuti, founder of the Afrobeat genre. The band would later meet the Nigerian musician when he toured Ghana, Anatsui’s homeland—and even ended up opening for him when he was on tour.

“Just like Fela, with his bravery, courage, and audacity to break rules and set new benchmarks, I believe that my career has proven to me that the audiences are present and will always look to the artist to lead, to expand their experience with new presentations, or renewals of old fare,” Anatsui told ARTnews.

Anatsui’s music career recently came to the fore with a show at Dubai’s Efie Gallery. The focus here was not Anatsui’s bottle-cap tapestries but his record collection, which includes music by Kuti, Gladys Knight, Manu Dibango, King Sunny Ade, Tony Allen, Aretha Franklin, and many others. The collection, unveiled here to the public for the first time, offered a rare glimpse into the largely unseen musical side of Anatsui’s career. Alongside these vinyl records are some of Anatsui’s early sketches, which include song lyrics, music titles, and poetry, providing an understanding of his musical and cultural influences.

Anatsui spoke to ARTnews about his musical influences and how they inform his work.

ARTnews: How would you describe your relationship with music?

El Anatsui: Music and art have been the two areas in the creative disciplines close to my heart. I have tried to practice one, full-time now, the other sporadically but yearning more to be given attention. After decades of art practice in which the abstract has predominated, looking back I see the similarity between the areas.

To me, music is the most abstract of the arts, using pure elements of sound to create just like as a sculptor I attempt to draw on the innate potentials or properties of my media to create. In hindsight still, one other feature strikes me. I’ve mostly worked with ordinary commonplace media so far, and I have a feeling this was triggered unconsciously by my exposure to South African music in my formative years. Recalling what the likes of Little Lemmy Mabaso, Big Joe, Spokes Mashiyane, and other musicians did using the common, cheap pennywhistle in their infectious kwela music that I heard in Radio Ghana’s Saturday “Way Down South” programs of the 1960s probably paved the way for me to, after art school, turn to cheap, available local media to start my career and remain with.

The records in this exhibition are described as “offering a unique glimpse into the cultural aspirations” that have shaped your career. Can you share an example when a song or album played a major role in creating a body of work?

Well, not necessarily creating a body of work, but rather the trigger for an idea. This can be seen in a few of my drawings where I make reference to lyrics of Fela Kuti’s songs. This is the starting point, as one cannot illustrate music, but rather draw elements from it as a guide. An example is my sketch, currently also on display with the vinyl records, that references Fela’s “Question Jam Answer.” On this occasion, listening to the lyrics, I found the two questions to be very valid. They refer to situations that lead to stalemates. It’s a scenario where one is expected to answer a query, but he had the audacity and freedom to respond with a query.

There are also triggers from music or the instruments themselves, such as my work Keyboard of Life [a 2021 tapestry that looks like piano keys]. A keyboard is like a field on which fingers move linearly (in melodies), or in groups, as in harmonies. This can be likened to a solo studio voice in art or massed voices which support the artist—they kind of lift you up. There’s the sensation one gets listening to “Amazing Grace,” which Aretha Franklin returned to record with the choir she started with after many years in the limelight. One could almost feel a kind of audacity that the many voices gave her as she floated above their powerful sound wave. Scenarios like this abound in my work, with my many assistants.

What draws you to Fela Kuti’s music and how does that show up in your work?

Fela’s career began with highlife, a genre that has been around since before my childhood days. He took this music as a starting point and introduced several elements, creating the peculiar genre dubbed Afrobeat. At the beginning of Fela’s musical journey when he was playing highlife, one could feel his unease with the status quo and his struggles to move it to a new level. He was searching for something else with a jazzy orientation, so when he eventually came up with Afrobeat, those of us who followed his trajectory were not at all surprised.

Commonly, highlife music is based on a 4/4 or a 2/4 beat. Fela’s Afrobeat remained with the 4/4 beat, but with the bass drum beats irregularly clustered instead of in equal time intervals, with occasional builds to a crescendo followed by a drop, then picking up again. So, spatially, he enlivened the bass drum lines of highlife. This is something that has continued and is now commonplace in the music scene. It has given musicians the courage to also experiment with the bass drum and other percussion instruments, which, hitherto, were given very conservative roles.

I share in the same spirit of exploration that led to Fela introducing a new genre. In my practice, I have always been inspired to question the way things have been done. In school, we started with carving wood, using gouges and mallets, which were the traditional tools for shaping wood. I always asked the question, “Why can’t wood be shaped by other means as well?” In the process, I began working with tools such as the chainsaw and eventually other power tools which revealed more about the wood medium to me and possibly my audience.

The process of carving is very slow and evolutionary. Thus, in using the chainsaw to carve, a machine that in contrast does things really fast, I was forced to find new meanings, which I think are in sync with the rat race of our times, whereby we want to achieve things at a revolutionary pace. While it may not be particular works by Fela that have influenced my practice, the attitude of questioning or trying to experiment and finding new meanings in old ideas has been of great influence.

Some early sketches of your works are also on view in this exhibition. When it comes to your career, what are you sure of now that you wish you knew at that time?

I am now certain that there are always new or undiscovered ways of doing things. For example, in the case of chainsaws, their main use had been felling or sawing wood into logs. I thought that it could be used in a more expressive and meaningful way, and it didn’t fail, as it resonated with audiences who were previously used to seeing carved wooden artworks. They were now experiencing wooden artworks that have been crafted at a pace commensurate with our times.  Just like Fela, I believe that my career has proven that the audiences will always look to the artist to lead, to expand their experience with new presentations or renewals of old fare. When encountering objects, I think of what they can do and what has not been explored yet, and try to explore it. Freedom has a lot to do with it. As a young person, you live in a regulated society where you are instructed to do things a certain way, but when I became freer as an adult, I realized that so many things were possible and that the right thing for me to do, if I was to remain relevant, was to take advantage of freedom to renew the world.

Loosely, the pair has been brought together the shed light on the darkness of their oeuvres. But KAWS and Warhol share commonalities beyond that: works by both have infiltrated the public consciousness, and collaboration with big brands is also responsible for some of their art.

ARTnews recently spoke with KAWS about the exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum, his thoughts on selling out, and his favorite pieces by Warhol. This interview has been edited and condensed.

ARTnews: The new show at the Warhol Museum features works from his “Death and Disaster” series, silkscreened paintings from the 1960s that feature appropriated pictures of car crashes and other violent imagery that Warhol repeated many times over. What relation does your work have to those paintings?

KAWS: The “darker themes” angle was something that [outgoing Warhol Museum director] Patrick Moore really wanted to explore. It’s funny how putting pieces in proximity to each other can really kind of shift the context. Companion (2020) was a sculpture I created thinking that it was just really representative of that year and exhaustion. But when placed under the Warhol’s Ambulance Disaster (1963–64), it suddenly feels much more tragic.

Could you expand on that a little bit in terms of how it feels tragic?

Ambulance Disaster is a much more horrific image. For me, doing this show was a great way to explore even further an artist that I’ve always appreciated. And I felt like there were so many things that Warhol had done that kind of opened doorways for my thinking. So, I wouldn’t pass it up the opportunity to do this show.

Warhol expanded the way people thought about the business of art and the the notion of selling out. But he also faced a negativity about that during his lifetime, especially because he did so with the explicit goal of making money. What do you make of the allegations that Warhol unashamedly sold out?

I mean, I don’t really think about the term “selling out.” I focus on what I want or don’t want to make, and what outlets I can explore. There’s tons of opportunities these days to get the work out in ways that just aren’t possible in a traditional gallery setting, if you were just doing painting and sculpture. I’ve always been inclined to make products. I’ve always thought about the stuff that came to me through objects, through products, when I was younger, whether learning about artists through skate graphics, through magazines, or through T-shirt graphics. It all felt very natural to me. I don’t see any reason to deprive myself from having opportunities to make the stuff that I want to make.

You’ve previously said you’ve turned down a lot of opportunities.

I don’t want to do anything that I’m not going to be able to stand by. Yeah, there are a lot of projects that we’re presented with, but it’s just not interesting, often. If I feel like it’s not additive, I’ve just tried to stay away from it.

Warhol was making a lot of art in response to ads, TV shows, and news photography, all at a time when this was somewhat taboo in the art world. Nowadays, it’s far less the case. What is your relationship to mass media? What do you think about that shift among artists about making work in response to mass media?

My interested in this started in the ’90s, when I was doing graffiti. Then I transitioned to painting over billboards. I started to think a lot about the parallels between graffiti and advertising, and that need for communication.

I don’t see these things as taboo. I feel like things have shifted a lot. And I think it’s because a lot of artists are just more open-minded these days to working with corporations and even institutions. The landscape has changed so much, and artists are looking to collaborate with different corporations. whether it’s Dior sponsoring a show or something of that sort. Those opportunities are out there, and they can be done in good ways. And if you can find that right balance, I think it’s worth exploring.

When it comes to remixing pop culture, what aspects of Warhol’s process do you draw on?

I think I benefited from his openness to different mediums, whether it’s film or fashion. The Warhol Museum had a show years ago [in 1997] called “The Warhol Look.” It focused on all the collaborative dresses that he printed and the different sort of works in that realm. I feel like I’m in a very different time, in 2024, with social media and everything. I tried to be aware of: how I can create work that could disseminate in the right ways for today?

Are there specific pieces of Warhol’s that really stand out to you?

The first pairing we did for the exhibition was Ambulance Disaster and Companion [2020]. Then we kind of built the show out from around that. I’ve always been interested are the toy package paintings that he did—just the scale and intimacy of them. Cming off of all his previous work, to stop and focus on a series like that: I just thought it was very clever.

There’s a series of paintings I did, which are close-ups of SpongeBob faces. And we paired it with the film Blow Job [1964]. I thought it was important have this humor in the exhibition, and also to bring his movie work into the show.

If there was one work of Warhol’s that you could have on loan from the Warhol Museum to your home, which one would it be?

There’s a painting of a volcano on canvas [Vesuvius, from 1985]. It’s just black ink on white canvas—it’s a startling image that I love. I didn’t put it in the show, but I do always love seeing when I visit.

ARTnews: How did you approach the show?

Ophelia Arc: The curator of the show, Nakai Falcón, and I played around with some ideas, but kept coming back to this idea of home. It really got me questioning what constitutes a home. Home can be a physical structure, which always exists in my work, but it can also be a feeling. I’ve referenced this dollhouse I had as a kid as the original home off of which I like to base things. I moved out really young, so I also associate the concept with this feeling of homesickness as well. Home is something to be embodied through experience and the skin.

Home can be something that you carry with you. The materiality and tactility of your work also lends itself to that. Who, then, is the “we” referenced in the title of the show?

I have these states where I dissociate from myself, as if I’m a collective amalgamation of things that are existing. So, all of me is glad that this is a space in which one can kind of feel and prod a bit. There is a lot of myself in the show. And I think that I’m letting people in, in a way that is puts myself on display in a really intimate way. When you let someone in your home there’s an amount of trust that’s given. And so, I’m letting you in and inviting you to see what belies behind the facade.

But, within this framework, it’s your choice what to show and how much of yourself you want to share with the public.

For sure. And I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because as more stuff happens and more people start to see, I get a little worried about letting too many people inside or that too many people will take notice. But I found it really therapeutic, too. It’s almost this slow burn release. A lot of my work is not blatant, but I like the idea of rewarding the patient viewer. If somebody wants to piece together my life story, they could make out a good part of it, but it would take a lot to notice the small details, which I believe function as a barrier of entrance or a protective layer.

What are some of the more personal moments in the show for you?

There are a lot. I have legible bits of my diary from when I was was like 11. I carry a journal with me everywhere, and I scan it and annotate it. I do it in parts because it’s hard for me to read through it. I’ve also put medical documents in other pieces, as well as a lot of family photos.

All of the works in the show work in conversation with one another. Every month, I made a mind map and it bridges off into a number of different connections that kind of circle back. I like to be like my own archivist, so everything is logged. And I’m just constantly making as much stuff as possible. Since the work is crocheted, it all has to be done by hand. I started teaching myself how to crochet when I was very young. I’ve very fidgety and it became a way to project my nervous energy into something. It also becomes a kind of proof of existence or a time log. If I’m worried about something and I start crocheting as I’m experiencing or working through that feeling, it becomes a tangible way of marking what occurred.

Your work is very autobiographical in that regard.

I think of my work functioning as a memoir since it is my perspective and there’s no truly authentic memoir. I’m talking about myself and my relationship with other people like my family or my experiences growing up. There’s this idea of the object that I create being only a memory of the last time I remembered the original event.

The concept of memory is so interesting because every time you recall a memory, it becomes distorted.

Every time you recall a memory! That’s been tripping me up and I think of that all the time. My brain is collaged.

It’s funny how our minds trick us or play on these moments. And, obviously, it’s colored by our own personal experiences as well. Beyond the crocheting, there a number of drawings in the exhibition as well. How did that come into play?

I’ve never shown drawings before until this point. I’m one of those people that always has their sketchbook on them, but I had this permeating fear that I wasn’t good enough at it. But a lot of my professors at RISD [where she is studying for her MFA] encouraged me to turn my sketches into drawings. Once I had that permission, I started going big. And once I got into it I started seeing them more as collages. Because I go back in and I rip and I sew and mend. The paper functions like a skin that I work into. I see these works functioning with more immediacy than crochet, and certain ideas just need to come out in this way.

I know you drew inspiration from a concept coined by author Leslie Jamison called “wound dwelling” in her 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams. How do you see that manifesting in your work?

There’s a quote in which her boyfriend calls her a “wound dweller.” As in, she dwells in her wounds. And I liked that idea as a kind of reclamation. I like going in and peeling at things that feel like they’ve scabbed over and then watching this regrowth again. There’s this repetition compulsion in this mindset and the work that I’ve made. It’s this masochistic tendency in wanting to make sure it happened, checking it happened, and going back in there again. It’s like this constant loop.

There is definitely a cyclical nature in both the trauma and memory of reliving something again and again, as well as in the physical action of crocheting with the same movement over and again on itself.

Yes, it becomes muscle memory. It’s really weird, but I can crochet now with my eyes closed. I can do the motion without the yarn and hook there. Even without the source, one can keep reliving or experiencing. This is one piece estranged and pathetic [2023] considers this idea of being able to untrap yourself, but staying anyway.

People often question why those abusive situations, for example, stay. Technically, while many can physically leave, it becomes engrained their neural pathways. The trauma quite literally becomes part of them and how they think.

Another piece rumination loop [2024] considers this idea of consuming, ingesting, digesting, and then regurgitating. I do a lot of medical research in scientific journals and I came across rumination syndrome, wherein those affected cannot keep what they put into their body. It got me thinking about the idea of a rumination loop that exists in the mind, like when you’re stuck in a thought pattern. A lot of my work applies this form of soft logic to a hard fact, and considers the paradox that happens there. It creates a really interesting tension.

Like everything with this “enfant terrible,” it’s never clear how much, if any, of this is ironic or a troll. The overwhelming feeling I was left with upon leaving Elsewhere last month, however, was boredom. 

When I read last September that there was a wave of walkouts from the film’s premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, I had assumed it was because the material was objectionable. After all, Korine has delighted in shocking and disturbing audiences since his earliest films, regularly offering graphic—and in some cases unsimulated—sex, typically with a side of distasteful violence. Now, having seen Aggro Dr1ft, which tomorrow finishes out a theatrical run, I can assure you that isn’t the case. There is nothing that might inspire that reaction, or frankly any reaction at all, besides irritation.

The film follows the story of Bo (Jordi Mollà), the self-described “world’s greatest assassin” as he takes on a job to kill a demon-horned crime lord in Miami. Bo is also a family man, balancing his violent work with time with his kids and wife (Chanya Middleton), who goes unnamed. Most of the time, Bo’s spouse is depicted either writhing on their bed or twerking for the camera.

To the extent there is a plot, that is it, aside from a meeting with the man who hires (and pays him) for the job and a short interlude on a boat with his protégé Zion (Travis Scott). The film is filled with underwritten monologue by Bo, who speaks endlessly about being the world’s greatest assassin, and repetitive dialogue from each character, as if they each contained just one trait.

There is possibly a kernel of a good idea here. If one were to read the filmmaker’s intentions generously, I might say that Korine, known for exploring America’s id, has made a power fantasy staged using the language of video games. His film contains the same stilted dialogue, the same emphasis on sex and violence, and the same flat female characters as, say, the Grand Theft Auto series. Plus, Aggro Dr1ft has its own stylized aesthetic, with everything shot using thermal imaging. 

A less generous reading (and one that, in my opinion, would be more accurate) would suggest that Korine hasn’t even thought through his intentions. That much is made clear by the fact that the same half-formed ideas repeat over and over, making the film’s 80-minute runtime feel like three hours. The film consists primarily of loops of swinging machetes, a Ferrari driving down highways, and close-ups of the characters’ faces. Bo, and the other characters repeat their underwritten dialogue over and over in a robotic monotone. The repetition might be the point, but it’s also pretty dull.

Women, when they do appear in this film, are often shown supine or twerking. Bo’s wife repeats how lonely she is; in the climax, as the demon crime lord prepares to fight Bo and humps the air, a woman cries while tied to a bed in what appears to be rope bondage. It’s all so tedious. 

One might say that Korine reduces filmmaking in Aggro Dr1ft to its violent core: we watch Scarface because, on some level, we want to be Al Pacino, if only for a moment. But, even in that generous reading, who in the American filmgoing public doesn’t know that? It’s an idea that’s been explored so much that, to do so in 2024, is just a roundabout way of letting your audience have their cake and eat it too. Ironic misogyny, like ironic racism, is still misogyny, as if that hadn’t been made clear over the last decade of the internet. 

The thermal imaging filter, which has been colored over with animation and digital paint, can at times create striking visuals. There are rare moments of beauty, as when Bo looks out over a sunset from his balcony and the colors briefly flip to reveal a towering demon. At times, an overlay of wires or tattoos seem to crawl up characters’ skin as they move. But more often, the hues muddy and stick together, and the neons quickly lose their shine. One is left with the unmistakable impression that, were Korine to remove the gimmicky filter, we’d be left with some of the ugliest, most try-hard footage ever put to film.

Aggro Dr1ft’s long and much-hyped tour feels like pageantry built up to disguise this film’s vacuousness. And that pageantry continued on well after the Elsewhere screening ended, too. Rows of chairs were cleared from the dancefloor, and AraabMuzik began his set, surrounded by his entourage and several bikini-clad women pole-dancing. In the back, EDGLRD employees sold merchandise for the collective—skateboard decks, T-shirts, hoodies, wearable masks, and so on. The audience swayed laconically, barely dancing, or ignored the set entirely to talk with friends. 

I can’t speak for the Los Angeles screening, or the EDGLRD Boiler Room set during Art Basel Miami Beach in December, which seemed to have a who’s who of attendees. But the crowd at Elsewhere was almost comically dead for the tenor and volume of dance music being played.  This did not seem like some new form of entertainment, bringing the Miamified aesthetic of Korine’s more recent feature films into the real world. Or if it was, the new world of entertainment is decidedly manufactured and safe in addition to being incredibly lame.

The entire night felt simultaneously like a 50-year-old and a 12-year-old’s idea of cool, which makes sense given that the 51-year-old told Art in America last year that his sensibility is that of “12-year-old moron.” Korine said at the time,  “I’m just like a child. It’s arrested development.” I guessed as much.

Barney was talking about a new series of artworks related to Secondary (2023), a video installation he premiered last summer in dramatic fashion and is revisiting in a new array of exhibitions that opened Thursday night at Gladstone Gallery in New York. The show last year served as a sort of send-off for a storied destination, his massive studio on the East River—just across from the United Nations and all the rest of Manhattan—where Barney staged outlandish happenings and filmed scenes for Secondary and other works. (Barney also used the studio to film sections of River of Fundament , his six-hour 2014 film derived from a Norman Mailer novel about ancient Egypt.)

The inspiration for Secondary is football, the cultural juggernaut known as “America’s game” and a subject familiar to Barney as a sport he once played. But as with all things related to Barney, an artist who makes work in grand cycles, the premise is just one small part of a much more expansive whole.

“It’s usually true that I make a film first and then step back from it a bit and develop work out of the narrative,” he said of a process that he also enlisted for his most renowned work, The Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002), and the more recent Redoubt (2019). In the wake of Secondary, an abstract tone poem of a film about a tragic professional football accident from decades ago, he made a new series of works that include surreal reimaginings of sewage pipes, brittlely transfigured weightlifting equipment, and cryptic forms wearing NFL jerseys, as well as drawings and paintings focused on the impact of a fabled play that left Darryl Stingily—a wide-receiver for the New England Patriots—paralyzed after a violent hit by Oakland Raiders safety Jack Tatum in 1978.

The Gladstone exhibition in New York features sculptures, drawings, and a painting, whereas four other shows opening over the next several weeks—at Sadie Coles HQ in London, Regen Projects in Los Angeles, and, in Paris, Galerie Max Hetzler and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain—will include the film along with other new related works. Many of those works involve ceramic, a material that Barney was surprised to find when he dug a hole in the floor of his old studio and reached a pipe buried below the concrete. In Secondary, that organic piece of city infrastructure appears as a sort of living/breathing entity whose rupture allows water from the nearby river to fill the hole as it rises and falls with the tides.

“I didn’t know this, but New York is a ceramic city,” Barney said of clay pipes he was surprised to learn still figure in Gotham’s drainage and sewage system. “We learned more about ceramic sewer pipes than we certainly knew.”

Barney had worked with clay in the past while constructing molds but never as an artistic material, and he was intrigued by its mix of earthiness and ethereality. “I like the liquid state of it, a sort of soft, formless state along the lines of materials I’ve used over the years—things like petroleum jelly that can be cast under certain conditions but won’t hold up to other conditions,” he said. “Ceramic is mysterious in that way. It has its own set of rules.”

Barney was attracted to ceramic’s resonances with certain scenes and themes in Secondary, and used it in works like Supine Axis (2024), a large floor sculpture that takes the form of the original pipe he found—but covered with dumbbells and supports rendered in a mix of other materials including steel, epoxy resin, and high-density polyethylene. A number of other new works are fashioned after the kind of weightlifting power racks used by football players to build strength, with ceramic, metal, and plastic trading places in remixed arrangements.

“This group of pieces is an iterative project,” the artist said. “I’m making the same parts again and again, and each piece has potential for different use and then different ways that the material is failing. That’s true throughout this body of work—ceramic is being used to exhibit stress, in much the same way that, in the casting choices for Secondary, I was interested in working with older performers, to think about the different kinds of positions that athletes put their bodies in. Ceramic, plastic, metal—each material shows stress in different ways. These pieces have a lot to do with vulnerability.”

Another new large floor sculpture is impact BOLUS (2024), an abstract rendering of the moment of football-frenzied impact that inspired Secondary and remains a sort of macabre milestone in American mythology. Anyone of a certain age who grew up with even a little bit of sports fandom in their surroundings knows the story: during a pre-season game, in a play not dissimilar to any number of others that are routine in football to this day, Darryl Stingily jumps to catch a pass and is instead blindsided in a savage tackle by Jack Tatum. The instantly paralyzed receiver slumps to the ground and lies motionless as the players all around him slowly begin to realize the gravity of the situation.

“I saw the replay, over and over again,” Barney said of his experience of the tragedy as a kid in the ’70s. “I wasn’t tuned into that game and didn’t see it happen—it was more the replay of it, which was relentless. It went on and on, both in terms of its currency as an image but also in terms of a drama that played out between two men.”

Recalling the cinematic way the tragedy was presented on TV, he added, “It was also around the same time that the broadcasting of sports was changing, depending more on close-ups that were able to bring the players closer to you as emotional characters. In my teens, I would always watch footage made by this company called NFL Films. It was great, and important in filmmaking history, even beyond sports broadcasting. Sam Peckinpah cited NFL Films as a major influence. There was something about the long lens and the use of slow motion, to gain access to something that was so emotional and so vast.”

The force of the Stingily-Tatum play and the fragility it exposed figure in Barney’s interest in clay, which he and workers at his studio twisted into unorthodox shapes that had to dry over time without breaking. In his studio, different clay forms were airing out, supported by foam blocks and other arrangements. “A really interesting part of this work for me is the way an object like this is made, with probably six people holding it,” he said while looking at twisty extensions of elastic cords and wavy gym towels rendered in hardening clay. “We rehearsed it with a rope, so we knew which loop had to be done first and which had to be done second. It’s quite choreographed in that way. That is also true of the towels—they’re rolled out flat and have to be supported by a bunch of hands. Then we lay it down and perform different moves with it in unison, rehearsing it in real time. With clay, if you if you bend it back and forth more than once, it’ll start to fall apart. It’s really an interesting extension of the choreographic nature of the project.”

By “choreographic nature of the project” he meant the ways in which Secondary is as much a dance piece as a film, with its story told less by way of words and more by way of movement that extrapolated football’s gestures and feats of footwork into an abstract form of modern dance. Describing the hand movements of a referee in a scene meant to mimic the confusion on the field right after the Stingily-Tatum play, he said, “In the film, the back judge does this choreography where she’s trying to signal an incomplete pass but also a personal foul. She can’t decide which one to land on. She’s kind of stuck.”

The moment of impact and its aftereffects also figure in a series of large paintings Barney made, with an eye toward analyzing the whole of the action as a sort of spectral happening. “These I started as a kind of color field study of the field itself, and thinking about the way the field creates a kind of narrative of its own,” he said. “In this one, yellow light on the left passes through what would be a prism, between yellow and orange, and then hits an object—a red object in the center—and then casts a shadow onto the space where the impact happens on the field. These panels are a reiteration, in different colors and different opacities, of the same structure again and again.”

Another form of looping manifests in the ways that Barney’s newest body of work calls back—in some cases very directly—to the earliest work with which he made his name, in 1991. Looking at Raider Nation (2024), an assemblage of hand weights rendered in metal and clay, he compared it to earlier weight sculptures in petroleum jelly and said, “There are a number of dumbbell pieces from 1991 that were the starting points for this project. I’ve been thinking about that era of works and then trying to approach it in a different way, using some of the same characters even. How this body of work functions compared to that work has been on my mind.”

He continued: “The way that violence lived in the work from the ’90s was kind of sublimated into a structure that was very much about interiority. Over time, I did that in different ways, in different projects, with violence—and I carried it forward as a material, in a way. As the world shifted in my perception and became more explicitly violent, I wanted to think about taking it on more directly rather than sublimating it.”

While his early work from the ’90s took historic figures and forms and ground them up into an abstract logic, he said, Secondary is different in that it looks at a specific event—an accident, a moment of trauma in a person’s life—and doesn’t abstract it in the same way. “It allows for that story to be told, and it doesn’t go through that same kind of grinder, where differences are eliminated. I was obsessed in the ’90s with dissolving and getting rid of difference, so that there wasn’t any kind of binary left in relationships that appeared very black and white. I wanted to approach some of the same subject matter with Secondary and allow it to be more in the world—for power relationships and the role that violence plays to be more legible.”