Eversley’s versions, which he started making in 1970, are highly technical, yet have a simple elegance to them. An icon of the California Light & Space movement in its heyday, around the ’70s, the artist is finally receiving overdue support to realize his grandest visions. He secured gallery representation with David Kordansky in 2018, after working without it for nearly 30 years. And last fall, the Public Art Fund in New York helped create a 12-foot-tall version of a piece that he first mocked up more than 50 years ago. This renewed interest in Eversley’s work comes at a moment brimming with art and science crossovers. An early adopter of this interdisciplinary approach, Eversley has never taken an art class in his life; he was trained as an engineer. This fall, the Getty-funded PST initiative will present exhibitions all over Los Angeles under the theme “Art & Science Collide,” and Eversley’s work figures in a few of them, alongside that of younger artists who have taken up his kind of interdisciplinary approach.

When I visited the 83-year-old artist recently in the five-story cast-iron SoHo building where he lives and works, his parabolic lenses littered the living room. They refracted the winter light coming through the window, casting rainbows on the midcentury furniture. Eversley demonstrated how several of his round pieces are meant to rock side-to-side: he carefully distributes the weight so they sway gently, but never roll off their pedestals. Most museums nevertheless add grooves to the pedestals to stabilize the sculptures, distrustful of visitors and their backpacks, “and I get that,” said Eversley, ever practical.

This rocking is as calculated as the colors: he cast his earliest works in concentric circles of three hues—amber, violet, and blue—recombining them into countless configurations, with strikingly different effects. He’d have to wait until the resin was at just the right state, a gel somewhere between liquid and solid, before he added a new layer. To get it just so, he drafted equations that now fill numerous binders, or “recipe books,” as he calls them. In one of these, on a yellowed piece of paper, are the notes he made in September 1970, when he created his very first lens, detailing things like the number of droplets of pigment he added to each concentric layer, and how many minutes it took the gel to harden.

Eversley calls his technique for making sculptures “centripetal casting”: much like a potter, he spins polyester resin on a turntable, but instead of shaping the edges with his hands, he uses a mold. The mass splashes out toward the periphery, forming something concave—a parabola. His studio has elements of an engineering lab, some of them menacing reminders of the military-industrial complex. I saw one such reminder in a corner: a dark wooden apparatus with a foot-powered wheel, something Eversley picked up at a scrap metal auction in 1971, for $50. It’s the very turntable that was used to spin the castings for the nuclear bombs that the United States dropped on Japan in 1945.

During the visit, an assistant in full PPE was working on the ground floor, polishing a bright-orange lens in a makeshift booth surrounded by maquettes and lenses arranged on pedestals in an even grid. Plastic, of course, is toxic, but Eversley loves that it will never decay. Polishing, he says, “is 99 percent of the work.” This phase is labor-intensive, since the slope of the parabola changes as you go around, meaning you can’t use a machine. It’s all done by hand. The process is the same for the parabolic mirrors found in telescopes, which is what makes them so costly. A skilled worker often spends years hand-polishing such mirrors, per the design Sir Isaac Newton proposed in 1668.

EVERSLEY FIRST LEARNED of parabolas when he was a kid in the East New York neighborhood of New York City, reading a magazine article about Newton’s experiments. Intrigued, he started spinning parabolas of his own in his family’s basement, using Jell-O, a record player, and a pie pan. He explained his curiosity about the physical world by explaining his banishment from the virtual one: “I wasn’t allowed to watch TV.”

A certain flair for engineering was in Eversley’s blood. His father was a Barbados-born aerospace engineer who founded a multimillion-dollar construction company, his mother a teacher and head of the PTA. Eversley attended Brooklyn Technical High School, then went to college at Carnegie Mellon; he majored in electrical engineering, and never studied art. He described being the first Black man to live on campus, and recalled that one of his two white would-be roommates moved out the minute he learned Eversley was Black. Nevertheless, Eversley joined a fraternity, and after graduating in 1963, got a job at NASA through the father of one of his fraternity brothers.

At NASA, he was the youngest engineer working on the Apollo Mission. He was based in Los Angeles, and wound up in Venice Beach after struggling to find a landlord who’d rent something waterfront to a Black man. In the ’60s, Venice was a rare integrated neighborhood, a hippie enclave that was also full of artists.

It was a car accident in 1967 that led him to art-making. He was driving home from work at 11:30pm, and his car, as he put it, went “down a hill and over a cliff.” He crashed, but “managed to stay alive, blah blah blah”—he’s told this story a million times, because it was formative. It wasn’t that his life flashed before his eyes and made him want to search for meaning and beauty by becoming an artist, but rather that a broken femur left him on crutches for 13 months, and he had to take a medical leave from work.

Needing a way to occupy himself, he started playing around with polyester resin. At first, he thought of his concoctions not as art, but “experiments.” An artist friend, Charles Mattox, was letting Eversley crash in his loft while he was on crutches, in exchange for engineering advice. Mattox was working on intricate kinetic sculptures, and had witnessed the exciting output of the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) group, spearheaded by artist Robert Rauschenberg and engineer Billy Klüver; he wanted to cultivate more collaborations between artists and scientists. Eventually, Eversley started to think of himself as an artist too, realizing he disliked going to the office, especially the commute. “It was a long ride,” he said. (And one that had nearly killed him.)

In 1969, after his friend, the painter John Altoon, died, Eversley took over his studio that Frank Gehry had transformed for him from a laundromat. At first, Eversley tried inserting photographs into polyester resin before he explored dyeing them with pigments Mattox had lying around—amber, violet, and blue. He found that light passed through the translucent resin, mixing the colors to striking effect. Soon, he borrowed a potter’s wheel from his downstairs neighbor—Kiana, the wife of artist De Wain Valentine—and started throwing the resin. He’s been experimenting ever since: shape and materials remained his constants; size, color, and opacity would become his variables.

In 1970 he devised a maquette of a cylinder truncated so that it formed a vertical, rather than a lenticular, parabola. At the encouragement of his friend Rauschenberg, Eversley came to New York, bringing his maquette, cast in polyester resin, with him. He showed it to Marcia Tucker, a childhood friend—the two had met as teenagers, working in the West Village guitar shop Izzy Young’s Folklore Center—who’d become a daring young curator working at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Tucker was impressed by Eversley’s colorful resin forms, and gave him his very first solo show, before he’d ever even shown in a gallery. She also acquired the maquette for the Whitney’s collection. But it would take more than five decades before Eversley saw his maquette blossom into the full-scale sculpture he envisioned.

Back in LA, Eversley wound up giving lots of engineering advice to the artists he encountered in Venice. “I was the only one with a technical background,” he explained. He consulted Larry Bell while the artist designed his vacuum chambers, and even aided Judy Chicago before she left the Finish Fetish school, discovering it was unwelcoming toward women. Clearly, the Venice artist community was formative, and the atmosphere was equally influential. “There are very few fights on the beach,” he said. “People are too busy absorbing the energy—the wind, the waves.”

IN LA, EVERSLEY worked alongside artists like Robert Irwin and James Turrell in the heyday of Light & Space, California’s colorful and experiential (which for some meant “unserious”) version of the Minimalist movement taking place in New York. Although Eversley is often lumped in with the other Light & Space artists, he took little interest in their lofty ideas about phenomenology, and maintained ambitions fundamentally different from theirs: instead of sculpting pure abstractions, he was making representational homages to the parabola, a practical form beloved by engineers of many stripes. He often leaves his works untitled, or titles them literally, letting viewers find whatever meaning they want.

I asked Eversley about the numerous critics who have described having spiritual, transcendent encounters with his sculptures. He shrugged, and said, “spiritual is a funny word. I don’t really talk that way.” But he acknowledged that his works’ mesmerizing effect might have some value: one of his collectors, a psychiatrist, displays Eversley’s round parabolic lenses in his office, asking patients to stare into them while they speak. When Eversley found out about this, he said, “At first, I was pissed. Then I thought about it. And I said, ‘sure, that makes sense.’”

In addition to Eversley’s practicality, his race too sets him apart from other Light & Space artists. He descends directly from a woman enslaved at Mount Vernon, who was raped and impregnated by Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage (i.e., the first president’s stepson). One of Eversley’s grandmothers is a German Jew, the other, of the Shinnecock tribe. This led the late critic Barbara Rose—one of Eversley’s former girlfriends, as it happens—to write, in 2003, that “the complexity of Eversley’s heritage perhaps explains why he has sought to base his art on universal forms, which are found in all cultures.” Reading this quote in his living room two decades after it was written, Eversley scrunched his face skeptically. But he does have “universal” aspirations, he allowed: he has said “I don’t like art that you have to know art history to appreciate.”

And unlike most of his Light & Space cohort, Eversley got pushback too, for making geometric work instead of work engaged overtly with politics and race. One day in 1972, he had a Black artist group visit his studio after a symposium, and they “didn’t have many positive things to say about my work,” he told writer Allie Biswas. He was frustrated by their feedback, and complained to his Finish-Fetish artist-neighbor John McCracken. McCracken responded by handing him a can of black pigment as a joke, as if to say, “well, make some Black art then.” The can sat around for a year before Eversley took up McCracken’s dare. The results surprised him: the parabola was no longer a lens, but at full opacity, a mirror. Then, a white studio assistant joked he should make one for white folks too—soon, he made a milky disc. Then a gray one, because, as he told Boston public radio station WBUR, “I’m half black and half white.”

More recently, some important people have applauded his geometric forms as indifference to the pigeonholing that artists of color too often experience. In his 2016 book, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, art historian Darby English praised Eversley for resisting—alongside Black contemporaries like Alma Thomas and Alvin “Al” Loving—the demand to represent or be represented. These artists, English argues, importantly destabilized pressure to form some cohesive “Black aesthetic.” In 2017 the acclaimed painter Kerry James Marshall invited Eversley to speak at a “Creative Convening” accompanying his major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and told the Wall Street Journal he did so because “Fred was the only Black artist I knew of who was doing the same things they were doing.”

EVERSLEY WAS PART of that influential first wave of artists who, on the heels of E.A.T., began taking up residencies in science and engineering institutions, like the famous Bell Labs residency, or the one at NASA Ames. In 1977 he snagged a three-year artist residency at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. “The museum had just opened, and Carter was president,” Eversley said. “I was very good friends with him.” Working in a studio in the museum’s basement, he couldn’t cast resin; that requires fumigation. So he started crafting abstractions from thin slats of cut acrylic for two series called “Geometries” and “Prisms.” And he started dating Smithsonian curator Peggy Loar.

By 1980 he was bicoastal: mostly back in LA, but he also bought the New York building that I visited for $350,000, hoping to “cut a 3,000 mile relationship [with Peggy] down to a 200 mile relationship.” He didn’t want to stay in New York, where “most young artists spend a larger proportion of their time trying to keep body and soul together.” He wanted to be on the beach, with the happy people absorbing the energy of the wind and the waves. A public art commission for the Miami Dade Airport, Parabolic Flight (1980), helped pay for this new real estate.

In the ’80s and ’90s, Eversley supported himself largely through residencies and some major public art commissions. At the Hyatt Hotel in Dallas, he constructed a transparent spherical fountain filled with and covered in clear mineral oil. For a shopping center in Atlanta, he made an 8-foot piece that, regrettably, has gone missing.

He also sold some works straight from his studio to collectors, including the Lewinsky family (“I’ve known Monica forever,”), and Michael Dell (Eversley had given Dell a ride to a computer conference before he became a founder and CEO). “With my connections from when I was an engineer—and even when I was a kid—somehow, I made it work,” he said. The year he finally signed with a major gallery, David Kordansky in 2018, was also the year that marked his departure from Los Angeles: rising rents pushed him out of his Venice Beach studio, so he moved into the New York building full-time.

Reception and support for Eversley’s work has come in “crests and waves,” as curator Allison Glenn put it recently when we were discussing his new public sculpture, an installation that Glenn oversaw, working with Public Art Fund. Eversley himself, in an interview last year with critic Linda Yablonsky, explained those fluctuations, especially his struggle to find consistent gallery representation, in a single word: discrimination. For decades, he did it all without a regular dealer. He’d had close brushes with legendary ones: Leo Castelli had saved him from drowning after Rauschenberg threw him and his crutches into a Pasadena swimming pool, and Betty Parsons bought an early sculpture, but neither took him on.

THIS PAST SUMMER, Eversley opened his first solo New York gallery show since 1975. “Cylindrical Lenses,” at David Kordansky, comprised several full-scale, freestanding versions of that truncated cylinder he first modeled in 1970; they were cast in jewel tones and in the same polyester resin he’s been using since 1967. In the white-cube gallery, the works’ reflections were still and sparse, their effect contemplative, the mood austere. Also this fall, he finally installed the monumental outdoor version of his dreams: Parabolic Light will greet visitors to Central Park at the southeast entrance, in the Doris Freedman Plaza, until August. When I visited on a brisk afternoon in February, tourists in puffer coats appeared transfixed by how the tall purple tower—at once futuristic and timeless, recalling ancient obelisks—reflected and distorted the bustling cityscape.

Eversley’s studio, meanwhile, is brimming with prototypes for new works made of metal: “My future is stainless steel,” he declared with a grin. That’s the material he’s using to make his next big commission, a fountain in West Palm Beach titled Portals. In Florida, polyester resin would surely melt. So this new commission features eight shiny, reflective 17-foot-tall truncated cylinders—vertically fluted parabolic arcs. This time around, he’s working with a fabricator. The fountain’s eight vertical forms echo the eight columns on a building nearby, built in 1929 and designed by the influential African American architect Julian Abele, who also designed the Philadelphia Museum of Art and much of Duke University. The neoclassical building appears decidedly historical, whereas Eversley’s forms feel futuristic. Together, they testify to an enduring human desire for ascendency, literally or otherwise.

Eversley has plenty of other unrealized ideas kicking around too, like solar-powered fountains that make practical use of his favorite form: parabolas that concentrate rays from the sun to generate power. Tinkering for decades now, time and again, he is chasing magic the way scientists do: figuring out how something works, then conveying the idea the way artists do: turning it into a transfixing object.  

Hayden’s sculptures are meticulously handcrafted. He enlists a wide range of materials—rattan, brass, wood—and pairs moments of humor with heaviness. By tucking his new sculptures away into stalls (all works 2024), he manages to fit a surprising amount of them into a gallery—this many would have otherwise felt crowded and overwhelming. Below, the architect-cum-artist opens doors on a few favorites.

For me, the 17 stalls are like a book. You can’t see all the sculptures at once—you have to open the door, or turn the page. While all the works can stand alone, I wanted the show to be an experience. Sometimes, doors get left open so you can get a glimpse. I tried to create both public and intimate moments with each work.

The show brings together all these different materials and different concepts. People often ask if the show is a survey, because there are so many different works. But the thing that unites them all is a certain attention to craftsmanship and detail.

The show is called “Hugmans” with an “S.” It’s like the sequel to the show that I did last fall, at Lisson in LA. It had similar works the bathroom stalls, but that show had more of Hollywood lean: guns and silicone and prosthetics, even a movie director chair.  I’m always exploring the material and the cultural significance of objects.

Some of the works have humor to them, but that’s just one way of looking at it. Another person might see something very different. Sometimes, the lives of other people can seem so extreme and surreal that they become funny and humorous. For another viewer, that same work might be more of a mirror. Someone told me American Gothic (2024) [two skeletons with tools for extremities] reminded them of their grandmother, who was always working and, never being able to rest, was always busy trying to put food on the table for her family. I liked hearing that someone could see themselves inhabit this work’s world. I’m thinking about the American Dream, about capitalism, and about how the idea of usefulness can permeate someone’s existence, in a very manual-labor type of way.

I made Plywood using a process of bent wood lamination: very thin plies of wood get glued together and then stripped, so that they can become bendable. I created these rib cages using a lot of different types of wood. I was thinking about plywood being a whole made of many parts, like the melting pot that is New York: these upper bodies are packed together and intertwined. All the rib cages are made of different woods in different colors: white oak, padauk, cherry, ebony, black walnut, ash, and so on. It’s like a salad of wood, all treated the same way.

The rib cages hang on the kind of stainless-steel structure you’d find framing a subway seat: I wanted it to appear as if we just bought these racks from the MTA, though actually, we made them. As an artist, I’m always recreating my vision of reality.

Sleepover is the only work that’s about a bathroom. It’s a two-person urinal, and these sort of melting pots (Black Don’t Crack 1 and 2) are mounted on the wall and reflected in the mirror.

Walden is a skewed desk made of black walnut with a book on it. The spine of the book says The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, but the actual interior of the book is Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854). The pages inside are also skewed 40 degrees. Douglass and Thoreau were born [in 1818 and 1817, respectively]. Both were self-made men, but with very different life experiences.

For Harlem, I hung these gold cooking pot forms from another subway rack. It’s part of a body of work I’m making about America as this melting pot, invoking America’s African origins by way of a physical pots. Some of these gold-plated cast iron skillets have African masks that were cast into them. There are also gold-plated copper pots with brass instruments braised into them. Together, there are seven pairs of musicians with instruments. I was thinking about the Harlem Renaissance and the creation of jazz, but also just visual pleasure of like gold reflecting. The closer the pieces are to each other, the deeper the gold reflections get.

At some point, I realized that Pinocchio is called Pinocchio because he’s made of pine. “Pino” is pine in Italian. So, if you change the type of wood he’s made of, his name changes, too. This one is made of black walnut, so he’s Nocecchio. I wanted to make him look alive; his fingers are grasping the pedestal. He’s wearing a sailor suit. I think he’s very cute.

You can see part of Idol with the door closed, from above and below. I have an ongoing body of work involving basketball goals that morph in different materials; often they are woven out of wicker, so they’re truly baskets, this ancient form made by many cultures. Typically, they are woven from materials indigenous to a given area. This net morphs into a body: two legs with this corseted waist. I wove this piece entirely myself—it took almost 5 months. I find most people refer to it using feminine pronouns. The LA show was much more about masculinity. A gay club had been the previous tenant of the space, so I folded that into the narrative. But this is “Hughmans” plural, so it’s more expansive, in terms of things like gender, perhaps.

This is the subject of a new book by art historian Claire Bishop, titled Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today. Bishop posits that our phones have become a kind of “prosthesis for viewing” art, and her book is about how artists are responding to this new normal.

Today, we often treat slow contemplation of a painting as a respite from the onslaught of everyday life, the museum as a rare site of reverent attention. But in her introduction, explaining her interest in attention, Bishop shows this wasn’t always so. Citing critic and historian Jonathan Crary, she writes that the very concept of “attention” emerged in the 19th century as a means of optimizing laborers at the onset of industrial capitalism. Soon, the world witnessed new methods for displaying art meant to focus that attention. By the 1870s, single rows of paintings punctuated by blank wall space replaced crowded salon-style hangs. That same decade, theatergoers began to find their seats facing the stage head-on—no longer arranged in a horseshoe shape offering views of audience and performers alike. And whereas, historically, theatergoing had been a decidedly social experience, talking to seatmates became rude. In theater as in visual art, viewing became a disciplined cognitive experience rather than a sensorial and social one.

As Bishop makes clear in her introduction, there was a classist element to all this. Gabbing peasants, unaware of the new etiquette, were snubbed. “Distraction,” Bishop writes, became “a moral judgment.” Taking this critique into the present, she takes issue with moralizing dismissals of artworks that encourage you to whip out your phone and take a picture, or look something up. It’s elitist, she says, to classify phones and TV as objects of distraction, and set aside art and opera as worthy of reverence.

The four chapters that follow were not originally intended as a book, but are rather four essays written over the course of 10 years; only later did Bishop realize they share the theme of attention. The first chapter, on research-based art‚ is the book’s most significant contribution to the field, and I say this leaving aside my feelings about her claim therein that “the genre has never been clearly defined—or, for that matter, critiqued.” (This magazine dedicated a whole issue to the subject last year, about which Bishop and I exchanged several emails.) Bishop argues that the genre is structured around ways that digital technology organizes information, and even thought: we might not remember the name of something, but we know where to look it up. She defines research-based works as relying “on text—printed or spoken—to support an abundance of materials, distributed spatially.” Typically, such works present viewers with more information than they can meaningfully consume.

For Bishop, Renée Green’s Import/Export Funk Office (1992–93) is a formative example: with archival material on shelves and at viewing stations, visitors could research African diasporic culture, especially the reception of hip-hop in Germany. Green deliberately offered a huge quantity of information: she didn’t want her viewers to walk away feeling they had “mastered” the topic. In 1995, though, she created a CD-ROM edition, because viewers never seemed to have enough time in the museum.

Green’s decidedly post-structuralist proposition, Bishop argues, was a necessary move away from master narratives—and one that evinces digital technology’s impact on attention. But the writer is less convinced by later works of research-based art. She notes that Wolfgang Tillmans’s Truth Study Center (2005–) similarly arranges articles and photographs in vitrines, all absent a grand narrative, or even an obvious theme. By the 2000s, she says, as internet use expanded, people began to feel overwhelmed by information all the time, and stopped needing artworks to reproduce that experience.

The trend of information overload took off, and viewers grew fatigued. The 2002 edition of Documenta featured more than 600 hours of video. Technically, it was possible to watch it all, if you devoted 6 hours per day to the task for all 100 days the show ran. Viewing art came to feel onerous. (If the research-based art trend was the shot, it’s not hard to see why today’s colorful painting became the chaser.) In lieu of information overload, Bishop finds herself “yearning for selection and synthesis,” and
here considers Walid Raad exemplary. Raad offers viewers compelling narrative threads in works that often concern Lebanese history, but he always makes clear his stories are one of several perspectives. There are multiple, but not infinite truths.

IT’S NOT JUST RESEARCH ART OR VIDEO ART presenting viewers with more than we can comfortably consume. Several recent major works of performance art have also done away with the idea of comprehensive viewing, and this is the subject of chapter 2. They might offer no seating, inhumane duration, and/or a looping structure so that viewers can come and go. Two examples Bishop cites are recent Golden Lion winners at the Venice Biennale: Germany’s Faust (2017), by Anne Imhof; and Lithuania’s Sun & Sea (Marina), 2019, by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė.

Sun & Sea (Marina) was a looping nonlinear opera about climate change; viewers could come and go, or simply stay and tune in and out, much as people both attend to and ignore the anthropogenic apocalypse every day. Faust, meanwhile, was a durational performance wherein hot “health goths” strike poses on a plexiglass platform that doubles as a framing device. If you weren’t in Venice that year, you probably saw it on Instagram. Here, Bishop rebuts simplistic critiques of that work as being “too Instagrammable,” effectively calling such dismissals snobby. She says the work instead reflects “a new form of hybrid spectatorship” that smart phones have produced.

But this begs a follow-up question: does Imhof tell us anything new or interesting about this spectatorship? Does merely indexing a condition make good art? One of Bishop’s more salacious arguments is one she makes matter-of-factly, and offhand: “In the twenty-first century,” she says, “works of art tend to be symptomatic of larger conditions, rather than anticipatory fortune telling.” Due to income inequality, she quickly argues, artists are no longer canaries in the coal mine. Even if I thought that characterization of recent art were true, I’d push (beg!) artists to do more than accept and reflect status quo.

Chapter 3 focuses on performance works that Bishop calls “interventions.” These works swap duration for disruption. Here, she makes a useful distinction between guerrilla interventions and institutional ones, Fred Wilsons’s Mining the Museum being the canonical example of the latter. In 1992 Wilson rehung rooms of the Maryland Historical Society with objects from the institution’s collection in a manner that lay bare the state’s history of slavery. It was a provocative piece—but rather than change the museum’s practices, the gesture, Bishop writes, “gave rise to a glut of compensatory invitations,” with institutions delegating critical gestures to artists rather than rethinking their own practices.

Bishop contrasts these interventions with guerrilla-style ones by the likes of Pussy Riot and Ai Weiwei, who seized public space and attention without permission. While such works offer important political warnings, they are also symptomatic of a changing mediascape: going viral and making headlines is an important part of the strategy for works looking to generate “provocation, disruption, attention, debate.” In 2004 a member of the Yes Men went on BBC posing as a Dow Chemical spokesman to apologize for a deadly disaster the company had caused—then watched Dow’s share price plummet. What’s key here is not site specificity, as is often true for institutional gestures, but what Cuban artist Tania Bruguera calls “political-timing-specificity.”

Interventions, according to Bishop, “tend to foreground a model of authorship that heroicizes the artist … as a daring rebellious outsider.” There’s a reason, she adds, why many of the artists she cites are men: “this kind of intrepid assertion of the self in public space … privileges those who feel secure enough to penetrate that zone and claim it.” Continuing in this vein, she rebuts critics of Bruguera’s #YoTambienExijo project. Her 2014 performance involved asking Cuba to open up not only to free markets, but to free press and free speech. Because the project involved social media, it necessarily linked to an individual’s profile, even though it was a collective endeavor. Yet some complained that the project centered the artist rather than the cause. Bishop writes that such criticism is “much less frequently levelled at [Bruguera’s] male contemporaries like Ai Weiwei, who are more likely to be heroicized as dissidents,” rather than seen as attention whores.

The final chapter takes an unexpected pivot to the many artists today making work about Modernist architecture, a trend that Bishop argues is the product of the internet placing history at one’s fingertips. Such artworks are a useful case study for laying bare the many problems that artistic research can engender. In researching—or simply searching—online, it’s all too easy to strip objects from their context, and to depoliticize or romanticize them in the process. These works “produce historicity in a register of simultaneity,” Bishop writes, and produce the feeling of “everything everywhere all at once.”

Certain motifs can come to take on myriad meanings, with the “universalism” of the so-called International Style lending extra malleability. So much so that in 2009, curator Adriano Pedrosa organized a whole show of non-Brazilian artists engaging with Brazilian modernism; meanwhile, Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–20) has been refigured by the likes of Ai Weiwei, Michael Rakowitz, and the collective Chto Delat. Stopping just short of calling Modernist invocations cheap tricks, Bishop jabs that “mid-century modern became synonymous with grown-up good taste,” and adds that countless artists venerate modernism in “an appeal to ancestral spirits”—that its invocation automatically “lend[s] significance to the contemporary object.” Modernism already holds space in our collective attention, and artists reroute those symbols to new ends.

Somewhat unexpectedly, digital art is wholly absent from Bishop’s book: she argues that “the effects of digital technology upon spectatorship are best seen in art that, at first glance, seems to reject digital technology most forcefully.” For this reason, hers is a much more interesting and less obvious argument about the internet’s effect on art than many made by the preponderance of shows and articles in the 2010s. But the wholesale sidestepping of digital and post-internet art, as well as all the scholarship around it, still seems strange. I found myself eagerly awaiting her take on phenomena like immersive experiences—the apotheosis of blending digital viewership with traditional artworks—but it never came. Her brief mention of works by so-called post-internet artists feels cherrypicked in its focus on artists who reproduce the experience of information overload: she omits the many who warned (21st-century artists do warn!) of what was coming, for our attention span, for AI, and so on.

I suspect this omission is for one of two reasons: either Bishop didn’t consider digital art a subject worthy of attention—(would that not also be elitist, I genuinely wonder?)—or because the patched-together essays that constitute her chapters were, as Bishop acknowledges, never meant to form a master argument. Either way, ironically, I have to hand it to her: the elision proves her point.  

“It was the nullification of expression,” Accardi later said of her works from that period. Her almost calligraphic scribbles—whether arranged in neat lines or garbled into a blob—look like language. And indeed, words were on her mind. Rivolta Femminile was founded on the principle that reading and writing were valuable tools for achieving self-awareness—and in turn, for helping women disentangle their own desires from internalized expectations.

When Accardi left Rivolta Femminile in 1973, she wrote a letter to a cofounder justifying her departure—a letter she never sent. Now, an excerpt appears in the catalog for her retrospective at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, on view through June 9. In that letter, Accardi explained why she needed to leave and devote herself more fully to making art again: “The most remarkable thing I found in feminism,” she wrote, “was the discovery that I am a human being, and as such, I have no desire to deprive myself of … imaginative, utopian passions.”

The early ’70s was not the first time Accardi interrogated the relationship between aesthetics and politics so intensely that she had to press pause. A vitrine in her retrospective displays a manifesto that the Italian-born artist signed in 1947, when she was in her 20s and had just joined both the Communist Youth Federation and Forma. The latter was an artist group aligning formalism and Marxism. They believed in making art as a way to improve one’s life in a material sense, through labor, and insisted that such a vital and deeply human act shouldn’t remain the purview of the bourgeoisie. Forma’s ideas galvanized the work she produced until around 1953, when she experienced a “deep crisis.” After a yearlong hiatus, she temporarily eliminated color from her work, as she would again decades later. In so doing, she hoped to avoid becoming “distracted towards pleasantness” and “to give her painting a moral certainty,” as an exhibition pamphlet from the time reads.

The best colorful paintings in the show in Rome are from the 1960s. Accardi, who died in 2014 and liked to call her practice “anti-painting,” explained her attraction to contrasting colors: “Only through the notion of night do I know the day.” With abstraction, she wanted to dispense with the patriarchal baggage that haunted representational imagery, and to capture life’s complexities. “I simply paint a symbolic portrait of life as I see it,” she said, “with its struggles, its joys, its miseries and its defeats.” So in the ’60s, as advertisements and packaging were newly altering the visual landscape, Accardi ingested it all and responded with paintings of squiggles in dizzying hues. In Violarosso (1963), she scribbled in bright orange all over a magenta surface, nearly dissolving all distinction between foreground and background.

By 1965, Accardi was on to something totally new. She swapped canvas for Sicofoil—a clear plastic—in an effort, as she said, to “reveal the mysteries behind the art.” That material, designed for packaging, is inclined to curl, so she would sometimes let it roll into cylinders or cones, or else stretch it like a canvas on wooden bars. A room in the retrospective is dedicated to immersive pavilions she built with plexiglass and then painted on. On these clear plastics—newly introduced material at the time—bold, opaque brushstrokes appear to hover in space. There is a quiet revolution in the way Accardi’s paintings foreground the background: whether a clear substrate disappears entirely or a vibrating magenta surface refuses to recede, this supporting role is really also the protagonist. I imagine most women can relate.

Accardi cared deeply about political thought and action, but she didn’t want to fall into the trap of, well, black-and-white thinking that might cleave aesthetics from politics too neatly. For her, life encompasses both in a complex, contradictory swirl. She insisted that a rich range of experiences was her right, and in fact part of the reason she cared about Marxism and feminism in the first place: that richness made life worth living and defending.

Cattelan’s bet that art viewers are a bunch of masochists has paid off: the press release claims that he is “the most famous Italian artist since Caravaggio.” I rolled my eyes when reading this at first, before conceding that it’s also probably true. And annoy me as he does, I still eagerly await Cattelan’s next move. I just hope it’s funnier.


Image: View of Maurizio Cattelan’s 2024 exhibition “Sunday” at Gagosian, New York.

Never mind—I can’t get the Austria pavilion out of my head. There, in the Giardini, the Ukrainian ballet dancer Oksana Serheieva rehearses at the barre. I watched for a while, mesmerized, before my biennial brain kicked in and asked Why? and What does it mean? I turned, as one does, to the wall text, which informed me that, during times of political upheaval, the Soviet Union state television station would play Swan Lake on a loop, in lieu of regular programming. The gesture was clear: Serheieva, in collaboration with artist Anna Jermolaewa, was rehearsing—for a Russian regime change.

The piece, titled Rehearsal for Swan Lake (2024), captured the absurdity of seeing art—namely, a biennial—while waiting for war and genocide to end. It spoke as well to the ways that art can feel like a frivolous distraction from it all, while also defraying utter helplessness and despair, for those privileged enough. And it evoked, searingly, the absurd ways that grand events rub up against daily life. A number of other works in the pavilion did the same: Research for Sleeping Positions (2006) is a video of Jermolaewa in a Viennese train station, trying to find a comfortable way to sleep on a bench—the same bench she slept on every night for a week in 1989, when she first arrived in Austria before winding up in a refugee camp. Revisiting the bench years later, she struggles to get comfortable: armrests have since been installed to deter sleepers. In another room, we are confronted by The Penultimate (2017), boasting plants that were used as symbols of protest during various struggles. There’s Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution of 2010; Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004; and Myanmar’s Saffron Revolution of 2007, among others. Here, poetic gestures are political, but what is most felt is the gulf between the two. If you like this one, you’ll probably like Poland too.

Walking around, wondering if we were going to war with Iran and how former President Donald Trump’s trial was going in New York (I hear he fell asleep), this Kathy Acker quote, from an essay on Goya, got stuck in my head: “The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense,” she once said. Lots of pavilions felt maximalist, chaotic, absurd—on the lesser end of the spectrum, a handful, especially France and Greece, felt unnecessarily immersive or over-produced. (So many soundtracks. Why?!) I didn’t get the hype surrounding the German pavilion in the Giardini, with its asbestos and its fog machine—but the trek to its second location, on Certosa Island, is worth it; just trust me. In the Arsenale, Lebanon and Ireland are the best, though the latter was too violent for me.

My two other favorites are consensus-approved: Japan and the Czech Republic. In the first, an installation by sculptor Yuko Mohri feels like a Rube Goldberg stop-gap for a crumbling infrastructure, as if someone had asked Rachel Harrison to fix a leak. An elaborate, tube-and-bucket apparatus is punctuated with fruits, light bulbs, and musical instruments; the whole thing channels the kinetic energy of a drip, and harnesses power from unsellable produce in order to produce light and sounds.

In the Czech pavilion, Eva Koťátková approximates the neck of Lenka, a giraffe captured in Kenya in 1954, then taken to the Prague Zoo, where she died two years later. Koťátková’s version is hollow, bisected, and supine; you can have a seat inside. It’s at once adorable and grotesque—which is often how I feel at a zoo (Hi, incarcerated giraffe; It’s awful you’re here, yet I’m so happy to meet you.) But no one could answer the question gnawing at me: is her sculpture made of real leather?

If so, that might be more nonsense than I can bear. (Update: the pavilion’s curator, Hana Janecková, told me that “both the exhibition and the artist… are vegetarian.”) This weekend, I’m off to see Croatia and Nigeria, two pavilions abuzz. Check back—maybe I’ll have something to add, and maybe someone will answer my question about the giraffe.

The Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement were announced last November, ahead of the artist list being released in January. Those went to Italian-born Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino and the Paris-based Turkish artist Nil Yalter, who are the only two artists to be included in both sections of the exhibition, the “Nucleo Contemporeano” and the “Nucleo Storico.” 

The remaining prizes to be awarded are the Golden Lion for Best National Participation, the Golden Lion for Best Participant in the International Exhibition, and the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant in the International Exhibition, which this year carries the title of  “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere” and is curated by Adriano Pedrosa. (Additionally, the jury can name a limited number of special mentions, one for a national pavilion and two for participants in the main exhibition, if they so choose.) 

This year’s five-person jury, selected by the board of the Biennale’s foundation but recommended by Pedrosa, is chaired Julia Bryan-Wilson, an art historian and professor at Columbia University who has collaborated with Pedrosa on several exhibitions as an adjunct curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, where he is artistic director. The other four members are curators Alia Swastika, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Elena Crippa, and María Inés Rodríguez.

While it may be the jury who ultimately decides the winners, ARTnews senior editors Maximilíano Durón and Alex Greenberger and Art in America senior editor Emily Watlington are weighing in as to which artists they feel should win—though with the sheer amount of artists in the main exhibition (331) and the number of national pavilions (88), it’s like trying to get a bullseye on a dart board, blindfolded and using your non-dominant hand. 

Golden Lion for Best National Participation 

Alex Greenberger: The German Pavilion floored me, as it seems to have done for many others. Spreading half the offerings to the island of La Certosa risks becoming a gimmick, but in this case, I do think it successfully undoes the very model of the national pavilion itself. Whether the jury members will agree with me will depend on whether they trekked beyond the Giardini portion, which was mobbed on all the preview days. Let’s hope they did.

Maximilíano Durón: The buzz around Venice for the German Pavilion is inescapable this year that’s for sure. I, however, found the Australian Pavilion by Archie Moore to be the most affecting. Not only does it perfectly tie in with the themes of Pedrosa’s exhibition (never a requirement), it would stand on its own in any given year. Moore has transformed the pavilion, painting the walls chalkboard black and scrawling 65,000 thousand years of First Nations Australian history onto the walls, adding in smudged sections that honor those whose names have been forgotten but whose life force still runs through Moore’s being. 

Emily Watlington: In Anna Jermolaewa’s Austrian pavilion, a live ballet dancer is rehearsing Swan Lake—which I watched, mesmerized, before reading on the wall that on Soviet TV, during times of political upheaval, Swan Lake would play on a loop for days in lieu of regular programming. In Jermolaewa’s Rehearsal for Swan Lake, a Ukrainian ballerina named Oksana Serheieva researses—for Swan Lake, for another regime change in Russia. Viewing the Biennale this year, I often felt the absurdity and frivolity of looking at art while waiting for war and genocide to end—and also, at times, distracted or even motivated by real moments of beauty. In Rehearsal for Swan Lake, Jermolaewa beautifully captured that swirl of feelings—and the totally bizarre ways grand narratives intersect with daily life.

Golden Lion for Best Participant in the International Exhibition

MD: Given that “Foreigners Everywhere” is split into two sections, I think one of the few living artists in the “Nucleo Storico” has a very good shot at getting, at the very least, a special mention form the jury, though I wouldn’t rule out a Golden Lion either. I spent last night flipping through the catalogue to tally up the numbers. There are five living artists in the portraiture section, ten in abstraction, and five in “Italians Everywhere.” (It’s worth noting that the youngest of this cohort was born in 1954.) I think many of them have a very good shot at taking home the prize. Simone Forti (b. 1935) might have been the most obvious, but since she won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement for the Dance Biennale that seems unlikely. Zilia Sánchez (b. 1926) is one of the few artists who has participated in a previous edition of the Biennale; she was included in the 2017 iteration, which brought renewed attention to her decades-long career. Could this be her shot at the win? I could see it honestly. Her shaped canvases that protrude into our space are divine. 

Personally, I would love to see Fanny Sanín (b. 1938), a Bogotá-born, New York–based abstract artist who regrettably is new to me. I was almost immediately drawn to the deep yet muted four colors in her Oil No. 7 (1969): black, violet, magenta, and cerulean. The off-kilter tilt of the magenta rectangle that extends from the top to the bottom of the canvas is quite everything. And not for nothing, I personally think a win for her is the deserved boost and recognition her career not only needs but deserves. Her CV lists her inclusion in several recent exhibitions that are reevaluating abstraction but with an exhibition history that dates back to 1964, according to her CV, the fact that she hasn’t had a major retrospective in the US is a damn shame. 

AG: Should a dead artist be able to win a Golden Lion? My gut says no, but given that the main exhibition has more dead artists than living ones, hell, why not. My vote for that deceased winner would be Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá, a batik painter I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of before. This Nigerian artist, who died in 2021, produced visually dazzling images of pressed-together throngs of multicolored humans. His work speaks well to this Biennale’s emphasis on people whose identities contain multitudes.

EW: One pet peeve I had with the show is that the Arsenale made a great argument for the formal innovations found in works made in fiber and that respond to lineages other than European Modernism, and yet, in the section in the central pavilion on abstractions from the Global South, so little fiber was included. I wondered, why separate the two?

But there were a couple works in fiber—hung salon-style rather than given room to be the monumental painting-sculpture-hybrids they are—and the best was the knotty, weighted tapestry by an overlooked Columbian nonagenarian named Olga De Amaral. The artist has so clearly thought about how to thread the needle, if you’ll pardon the pun, between marginalized lineages and the white cube context at the same time. And she was doing it before the term “fiber art” had even been invented. Her North American contemporaries—Anni Albers, Leonore Tawney, and Sheila Hicks—have recently gotten their dues; now, it’s Amaral’s turn.

Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant in the International Exhibition

EW: One of the first things you see upon entering the arsenale is a giant polytich by Frieda Toranzo Jaeger—the work is shown on the heels of her MoMA PS1 survey, and I’m often saying she’s one of the smartest artists working today. I wrote in my diary about how her work really tied the show together for me: after she paints altarpiece-like constructions, Toranzo Jaeger hires her relatives, who are trained in traditional Mexican embroidery, to stitch scenes right on top of her canvases. When I interviewed her in 2021, she told me she does this because she wants to insert an Indigenous tradition into a Western one, and to fuck with the preciousness of painting. She also told me then that, while often and for good reason, Indigenous artists are concerned with preserving cultural heritage against all that has tried to kill it off, she thinks it’s important to imagine decolonial futures, and to carve a space to dream.

AG: The Silver Lion ought to be awarded to Dana Awartani, one of the select few artists who addressed the war in Gaza here. A Saudi artist who’s of Palestinian descent, she’s showing a jaw-dropping piece composed of hanging silks that she split in places and then darned back together. They evoke the carnage faced by Gazans daily without representing it, and double as a stoic form of protest and a powerful representation of healing. 

MD: Awartani is definitely at the top of my list for the Silver Lion win. I can’t get over how poetic, delicate, and beautiful her installation is. I’ve thought about it everyday since I’ve seen it and it’s already among the best things I’ve seen this year. And Toranzo Jaeger’s sculpture is something to behold, I must say. Before I say who my other pick is I want to give a quick shout out to the uncanny alien-humanoid sculpture by Agnes Questionmark that really defines the spirit of a promising career; however, because Questionmark’s inclusion is through the Biennale College Arte, she is technically out of competition. My other pick is Gabrielle Goliath who presents a room-size video installation that shows the moments before, after, and between her interviewees share their traumas. It’s a completely different way to present a lot of the themes that undergird this exhibition.