St. Félix, a staff writer at the New Yorker, and Giovanni, an acclaimed poet, were set to appear at the museum following a screening of Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, a recent documentary about that writer that won an award when it debuted last year at the Sundance Film Festival. The event is co-hosted by PEN America, an advocacy organization that aims to support freedom of expression in the US and elsewhere.

In their statement, posted to Instagram on Friday, St. Félix and Giovanni said they had “withdrawn from the program in response to the refusal of both PEN America and Brooklyn Museum to stand in solidarity with people of Palestine and against genocide.”

A spokesperson for the Brooklyn Museum did not respond to requests for comment.

“We very much regret that the event with the Brooklyn Museum was cancelled,” PEN America said in a statement to ARTnews. “As a free expression organization of course we respect every individual’s right to voice their own perspective on the conflict and to respond as their conscience dictates. We mourn the immense loss of Palestinian lives, and the destruction of museums, libraries, and mosques that contribute to a vibrant cultural community.  We have also voiced our shared anguish for the Israelis whose families were killed or taken hostage.”

Both the Brooklyn Museum and PEN America have been criticized for a perceived lack of response to the conflict in Gaza, where Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 30,000 people since the October 7 Hamas attack, according to the Gazan health ministry.

When the Brooklyn Museum was protested by pro-Palestine activists last December, a spokesperson said, “we support any group’s right to peacefully assemble.”

PEN America has been denounced by many prominent writers for its position on the conflict in Gaza. On February 3, more than 500 signed an open letter that accused PEN America of being “silent” on the issue, calling on the organization to “wake up from its own silent, tepid, neither-here-nor-there, self-congratulatory middle of the road and take an actual stand against an actual genocide.”

On February 7, PEN America issued a statement that called for a “mutually agreed upon ceasefire” in Gaza while also noting the October 7 attack by Hamas, which killed more than 200 Israelis and took more than 1,200 hostages. Of the attack, the organization wrote that it was “devastated by and mourn these grave and ongoing losses.”

The Brooklyn Museum talk is the latest example of an arts event in the US that has been impacted by Israel’s war in Gaza. An Indiana University exhibition by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby was canceled earlier this year, and several artists exhibiting at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco altered their work in support of Palestine, leading the museum to close certain galleries.

“This is a new era for museums and at the Brooklyn Museum we have been working really hard to meet the moment,” said museum director Anne Pasternak during a media briefing Thursday at the museum’s restaurant, The Norm.

That will include two landmark exhibits opening Oct. 4, and kicking off the museum’s yearlong anniversary celebration: “The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition,” a major group show highlighting the borough’s artists and curated by a committee that includes artists Jeffrey Gibson, Vik Muniz, Mickalene Thomas, and Fred Tomaselli; and a major reinstallation of the museum’s American Art galleries that foregrounds a rethinking of the American collection’s presentation. Led by Stephanie Sparling Williams, the museum’s Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art, the new installation specifically centers Black feminist and BIPOC perspectives.

The museum, which first opened its doors in October 1824, will roll out numerous additional exhibits and initiatives throughout its anniversary year: “Museum on Wheels” (July) is a tricked-out Airstream trailer that will travel to local communities offering experiential art programs; “Solid Gold” (November) explores the role of the most precious metal in art history, fashion and global culture from 1st-century funerary masks to the metallic hued couture of Dior, Schiaparelli, Ferré, and more; “Brooklyn Made” (February 2025) features art and design made in Brooklyn from the 19th century to today.

There also will be an exhibit unveiling recent acquisitions given in honor of the museum’s anniversary. Those works are still under wraps, said Pasternak, but she characterized some of them as “transformative.”

The museum also will present “Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch,” the first major retrospective of the sculptor who, in 1918, became the first person of color to graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design, and went on to work in Paris during the interwar years. The exhibit, which will debut at the RISD Museum, opens at the Brooklyn Museum in March 2025.

The museum—which has mounted blockbuster fashion exhibits—including Christian Dior, Thierry Mugler and, most recently, Africa Fashion—has doubled its attendance and endowment in recent years, Pasternak said. And it has very intentionally used data to chart a course for the future. “Who is coming and why? What do they like? What do they not like?” added Pasternak. “What does it mean to truly serve the viewer?”

It has also used the anniversary to mine its own collection for overlooked pieces; the reinstallation of the American Art galleries, for instance, will include more than 450 works of art and material culture of the Western Hemisphere from 4000 BCE through today, nearly a third of which have never before been installed.

Pasternak also detailed the many less sexy and behind-the-scenes improvements that the museum has undertaken recently including a pollinator garden and honeybee houses on the museum’s roof, a new boiler system, more and actually comfortable seating in galleries (spurred by feedback from visitors), a revamped 9,500-square-foot education center (which opened in January), a redesigned website (coming in July) and a sorely needed new phone system because, as she noted, the old phone system was unsustainable since “the two guys who know how to fix it are now in their late 90s.”

And KP Trueblood, the museum’s president and chief operating officer, hired in 2021 after a stint in the Obama White House, stressed that the museum’s fundraising efforts also have gone toward prioritized hiring (the museum’s staff is comparatively small with 300 full-time employees) and paying competitive salaries, “so you don’t have to have a trust fund to come work at a museum.”

Images and videos posted on Instagram show several banners unfurled inside MoMA’s atrium. The banners said “Free Palestine, From the River to the Sea”, “Ceasefire Now”, “Cultural Workers Stand with Gaza” and accusing members of the institution’s board of trustees of funding “genocide, apartheid” and “settler colonialism”.

Around 3:30 p.m., protestors at MoMA handed out over 1,000 custom-printed mock museum guides calling out the museum’s board of trustees—Leon Black, Larry Fink, Paula Crown, Marie-Josée Kravis, and Ronald S. Lauder. The printed statement said “While MoMA purports ideologies of ‘change’ and ‘creativity,’ the Board of Trustees directly fund Zionist occupation via arms manufacturing, lobbying, and corporate investment. At the same time, the museum derives its legitimacy from artists and cultural workers, including those actively engaged in anti-colonial struggle”.

Fink is the CEO of multinational investment corporation BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, with $9.42 billion in assets. It has been criticized in the past for its investments in arms and defense. Black, meanwhile, is the founder of private equity firm Apollo Global Management, which owns a defense and security company.

After activist protests in 2021, Black stepped down as chairman and chief executive of Apollo Global Management after a review of his donations to Jeffrey Epstein. The ARTnews Top 200 Collector also stepped down as chairman of MoMA’s board that year.

Journalist Afeef Nassouli, a producer for the Wall Street Journal, spoke to a woman named Ariel, who identified themselves as a member of the grassroots political group ACT UP New York—originally formed in response to the AIDS crisis— about how she personally led an affinity group of anti-Zionist Jews, artists, and ACT UP members to the protest at MoMA “because we are all here to take a stand against genocide.”

According to an Instagram post by Alexa Blair Wilkinson, a photojournalist and graphic designer who attended the protest, no arrests were made and the sit-in dispersed around 6pm.

The protest at MoMA was organized by the Writers Against the War on Gaza and the New York chapter of the Palestinian Youth Movement. A statement read out loud by protestors said “This action builds on the work of Strike MoMA, Gulf Labor, Art Workers Coalition, and more broadly, on resistance movements including the undying fight for Black Liberation, prison abolition, and Indigenous sovereignty.”

Estimates of the crowd of protestors at the Museum of Modern Art ranged from “more than 500” to “more than 800” people.

Earlier on Saturday, Within Our Lifetime, a grassroots Palestinian-led community organization, held a preotest at the Brooklyn Museum.

Photographer Stephanie Keith posted on Instagram that “NYPD made about 10 arrests while the protest was in front of the Museum including @protestnsurvive who is a credentialed member of New York City media.”

MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum did not respond to ARTnews‘ requests for comment. Writers Against The War on Gaza said in an email statement, “WAWOG does not give comment to publications owned by Penske Media.”

This concludes negotiations that began in January 2022 between the staff’s union, Local 2110 UAW, and museum administration, and shows that a labor movement that is sweeping other sectors is continuing to impact art institutions.

“We’re thrilled to have finally reached this agreement with the Museum,” Elizabeth St. George, an assistant curator of decorative arts, said in a statement. “I will now have the opportunity to do the work I love at a Museum I love in a workplace with union rights.”

Per union spokesperson Maida Rosenstein, the agreement guarantees a 23 percent wage boost over the life of the contract, raising the minimum wage and promising annual raises. The cost of health care benefits will also drop, while expanding its coverage to part-time staff averaging 20 hours per week. Some $50,000 has also been set aside for professional training.

A spokesperson fo the Brooklyn Museum told ARTnews: “We’re so pleased to have reached an agreement with our UAW-represented staff. We believe this agreement reflects the Museum’s ongoing commitment to important wage equity investments across the organization, and is the right decision for our staff and the economic sustainability of the Museum. We thank the UAW Local 2110 and staff representatives for their collaboration in the collective bargaining process and look forward to continuing our important work together.”

In August 2021, some 130 employees of the Brooklyn Museum, including curators, conservators, editors, fundraisers, educators, and members of the visitor services department, voted overwhelmingly to unionize. They affiliated with the Technical, Office, and Professional Union, Local 2110, part of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union, which also represents workers at the Museum of Modern Art, the Bronx Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among other cultural institutions across the US.

Contract negotiations with Brooklyn Museum leadership had stalled on issues of healthcare benefits, job security, and wages. According to the union, employees had not received a wage increase since 2020. Throughout negotiations, the union and their supporters became familiar presences at the museum’s luxe events, including the Thierry Mugler VIP gala and the Artists Ball, in a bid to bring attention to their cause. 

“The hard work of Museum staff is behind the Museum’s incredible exhibitions and programs,” said Samantha Cortez, a senior registrar. “Having a contract that raises our pay rates and spells out legally enforceable rights is an acknowledgment of the important contribution we make as a staff.”

Throughout the ’90s, Campos-Pons worked on an installation-based trilogy titled “History of a People Who Were Not Heroes,” and the second entry in this series, Spoken Softly with Mama (1998)—a work she made in collaboration with composer and jazz musician Neil Leonard—opens the show. Against a black wall rest four blown-up archival photographs of Campos-Pons’s family, and three video screens that show various dreamlike shots of the artist; these seven upright elements are, in fact, ironing boards. Carefully arranged on the floor before them are dozens of glass irons and mirrors. The work pays homage to Campos-Pons’s women ancestors who have sustained the family by doing domestic work. “Their caretaking seems to have helped guide her on a path toward social justice,” art historian Selene Wendt writes in the exhibition catalogue.

But Spoken Softly with Mama is also undergirded by a more sinister history: the legacy of chattel slavery, which ebbs and flows through much of Campos-Pons’s work. Slavery made Black women’s role as domestic laborers distinct from other women’s—they were often forced to work in the homes of others, not just for their own families. A critical gaze gives the ironing boards the contour of slave ships that would have brought kidnapped Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas.

A 1994 photograph from the series “When I Am Not Here / Estoy Allá,”one of the artist’s first works using large-format Polaroids, similarly considers the impact of slavery on Black motherhood. In this image, we see Campos-Pons’s torso painted blue, adorned with curving white lines that mimic waves. The blue nods to Yemayá, the orisha of the sea and motherhood in Santería. Two baby bottles that drip breast milk hang from her neck, connected by a tube. (At the time, Campos-Pons had recently given birth to her son Arcadio.) Cradled in her hands is a carved wooden ship. The photo cuts off her head and legs; this mother’s body has been fragmented by forced migration, severed from her roots.

Forced migration recurs in TRA (1991), for which Campos-Pons pairs 60 black-and-white portraits of generations of Afro-Cubans from Matanzas, once the heart of Cuba’s sugar plantation economy, with five boards shaped like boats. This time, upright wooden planks are painted to resemble the infamous diagram of a slave ship, numerous Black bodies shown cramped together in the hull. The work is powerful to behold.

The Brooklyn Museum exhibition, which will travel to three venues across the country, leans heavily on Campos-Pons’s use of multipart, 20-by-24 Polaroids. Her technical prowess in staging these scenes—mini-performances in themselves—is in full effect in works like Finding Balance (2015). In 28 Polaroids that together comprise one scene, Campos-Pons stands before the camera, her face painted white. A birdcage rests atop her head, and she wears an antique Chinese robe, a nod to her Chinese ancestors who were brought to Cuba as indentured servants to work on the sugar plantations.

Another Polaroid knockout is the nine-part grid Classic Creole (2003). In the center, a yellow flower rises from a tall fabric-wrapped form that close inspection reveals to be a human body. On either side, strings of beads rise up like trees in a clever play with scale. The work evokes cultural, bodily, and natural roots all at once. “I am from many places,” Campos-Pons has said. “I live with that duality and multiplicity in my mind, and in my soul, and in my body. My roots are a bunch of dispersed fragments in the planet, in the universe, in this incredible miasma that is the world.”

Those metaphorical and literal roots run throughout the exhibition. Replenishing (2001) is a work that references retracing her lineage: it depicts the artist and her mother when they were finally able to reunite in Cuba. In the h-shape composition (for hogar, or home), her mother appears at left in a blue floral dress, the artist, at right in a white dress. The dresses represent the colors of orishas Oshun and Yemayá. Both women hold strings of beads that knot together and meet in the central Polaroid.

Umbilical Cord (1991) similarly traces the artist’s matrilineal side. In a linear grid, we see 12 black-and-white photos, 6 of them torsos with white crosses painted on them, alternating with 6 photos of arms with the left hand outstretched; a thread projecting from each work connects them all. These images show the women in the artist’s family. In Cuba, it is through the left hand, called “the hand of the heart,” that bloodlines are extended from woman to woman. In her work, Campos-Pons makes monumental the various histories and cultures that flow through her family’s veins.

The legacy of slavery came to feel even more present to the artist after she moved South in 2018 to Nashville, relocating from Boston, per the wall text. In Tennessee, she became fascinated by the magnolia trees that grow all around the city. As she walks about Nashville, she photographs them; by now, she’s accumulated hundreds of images of these trees. She digitally printed one of those images on a mixed-media triptych, Secrets of the Magnolia Tree (2021), framing a self-portrait. As cocurator Carmen Hermo writes in the catalogue, “What have these trees themselves seen, their lives extending far longer than ours? Irrigated by the actions and inactions of humans as much as the water cycle, these trees hold memories, too.” Campos-Pons is still attending to the trees, hoping to learn more of the histories they hold. In all her work, time collapses as history and the present intertwine. Soon, the trees’ stories will reveal themselves to her.

Correction, October 11, 2023: An earlier version of this review identified Neil Leonard as Campos-Pons’s husband; he is her former husband.

The Headlines

A SPIKE LEE JOINT. In October, the Brooklyn Museum will open an exhibition devoted to filmmaker, actor, and all-around living legend Spike Lee, the Hollywood Reporter reports. “Spike Lee: Creative Sources” will track the inspirations of the beloved 66-year-old director, and feature “an immersive installation of objects drawn from Lee’s personal collection,” according to the museum, and will include “photographs, album covers, movie posters, letters, books, costumes, and film memorabilia,” as well as art by Kehinde Wiley, Elizabeth Catlett, and more, Abbey White writes. Kimberli Gant, curator of modern and contemporary art at the museum, is organizing the affair with curatorial assistant Indira A. Abiskaroon. It runs through February 4, 2024.

NEW INSTITUTIONS. Educator Romi Crawford and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago are creating a one-semester “program that focuses on pairing instruction by artists of color with hands-on learning by students working alongside them,” Zachary Small reports in the New York Times. It is called the New Art School Modality, is backed by a $250,000 Terra Foundation for American Art grant, and opens in September. Over in Philadelphia, an effort to turn the First Bank of the United States into a museum has lined up $22.2 million in federal funds, Bloomberg reports. It aims to open in 2026. And the New York Times has a deep dive on the Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet, which opened in 2020 in Le Brassus, Switzerland. It was created by the eponymous high-end watchmaker, was designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, and looks pretty wild.

The Digest

The 2025 Front International Triennial in Cleveland will be curated by artist Asad Raza, who took part in its 2022 edition. “The people in Cleveland who maybe don’t even know they’re interested in contemporary art are the people I’m thinking about,” he said in an interview with Alex Greenberger. [ARTnews]

Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art dismissed an employee, researcher Sandip K. Luis, for criticizing the institution’s chairperson on Facebook for supporting a pro-government show at the National Gallery of Modern Art. Artists and academics have slammed the dismissal as a violation of free speech. [Frontline]

Italy has begun charging people €5 (about $5.50) to visit the Pantheon in Rome, a move that has led to confusion among tourists and allegations of ticket scalping. Ticketing at the Colosseum has created similar issues; the state of affairs there “is indecent,” an advocate for tour guides said. [The New York Times]

Art collector Peter Brant (who once owned ARTnews) and his wife, model Stephanie Seymour, have listed a Delano & Aldrich–designed residence that they own on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for $23 million. [Page Six]

A Moroccan man was hit with federal charges in the U.S. for allegedly using a lookalike website for the NFT marketplace OpenSea to steal cryptocurrency and NFTs, including a Bored Ape Yacht Club token. He is being held in Morocco. [CoinDesk]

The San Francisco art dealer who was charged with battery after being caught on video spraying water on a homeless woman will be required to complete 35 hours of community service as part of a pretrial diversion program. [The San Francisco Standard]

The Kicker

ISLAND LIFE. In Cultured magazine, Art Production Fund director Casey Fremontinterviewed her father, Vincent Fremont, the former vice president of Andy Warhol Enterprises, about life at Eothen, the storied compound that Warhol and Paul Morrissey bought in the early 1970s in Montauk, on Long Island. He uncorked some great stories, including one about TV host Dick Cavett. As Fremont tells it, Warhol business manager “Fred Hughes came back from the beach, and Andy and I were in Boomhauer Cottage, and Fred said, ‘Oh, Andy, Dick Cavett is naked on the beach’ . . . So we went down to the beach toward the bluff where his house is. And there’s Dick Cavett wearing only a hat and a scarf and sandals. Totally naked.” They all chatted. Warhol’s reaction? “Andy turned red,” Fremont said. [Cultured]

Kress is currently a curator at High Line Art, where she has organized and commissioned more than 100 projects with artists including Maria Thereza Alves, Firelei Báez, Duane Linklater, Okwui Okpokwasili, Sable Elyse Smith, Lubaina Himid, and Zoe Leonard. She is also a visiting critic at the Yale School of Art in its painting and printmaking program.

“I’ve admired Public Art Fund for years—the organization’s remarkable history laid the groundwork for the thriving landscape of public art we see in New York City today,” Kress said in a statement. “I am dedicated to the belief that great art belongs in public spaces, and feel lucky to live in a city that values access to the arts for all.”

At the Public Art Fund, Kress will work closely with Nicholas Baume, the organization’s artistic and executive director, to shape PAF’s programming. In a statement, Baume said, “A champion of diverse artists at various stages of their careers, Kress will contribute significantly to not only Public Art Fund’s artistic programming, but also the field of public art at large.”

The New York–based Independent Curators International will give its 2023 Leo Award to Uzodinma Iweala, the CEO of the Africa Center in East Harlem since 2018. Iweala will be honored at the organization’s fall benefit in October. The Leo Award, named after art dealer Leo Castelli, has been awarded annually since 1990 with recent recipients including Candice Hopkins, Adriano Pedrosa, and Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.

Last year, the two organizations collaborated to present the exhibition “States of Becoming,” which brought together the work of 17 artists from 13 African countries made over the past 30 years. In a statement, ICI executive director Renaud Proch said, “We are grateful for our meaningful partnership with The Africa Center, which will continue to play an important part in shaping our programs for years to come. Uzo’s vision and the values manifested in the Center—collaboration, empowerment, global solidarity, generative thinking—resonate in so many ways with ICI’s own mission.”

Earlier this month, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) appointed LA-based independent curator Selene Preciado as its curator and director of programs, beginning August 1. She will organize the first exhibition at LACE’s renovated space when it reopens.  

She has also worked in various roles at the Getty Foundation, both on its Pacific Standard Time initiative and its Getty Marrow Undergraduate Internship program; Preciado has also held curatorial posts at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Museum of Latin American Art.

Preciado’s relationship with LACE dates back to 2016 when she was the institution’s inaugural emerging curator, through which she co-curated the exhibition “Customizing Language.” Since then, she has organized two additional shows at LACE, “Destino Elei via Tiyei” in 2019 and “Ser Todo Es Se Parte” in 2020. Her most recent curatorial credit is “Collidoscope: de la Torre Brothers Retro-Perspective” at the Cheech Marin Center in Riverside, which is currently on a national tour.

“I deeply admire and celebrate the dedication of the current team in elevating LACE’s history through the investment in our own professional community with initiatives such as the Emerging Curator Program and Apprenticeships,” Preciado said in a statement. “These programs are a testament of the institutional values of mentorship and professional development that also motivate me on a personal and professional level.” 

The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis also recently appointed Dean Daderko as its chief curator, beginning this summer. They were previously a curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston for around a decade, between 2010 and 2020, and organized exhibitions with artists like Haegue Yang, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, and Wu Tsang and Fred Moten. They also have held posts at Visual AIDS, Art in General, Artists Space, and the Kitchen in New York.

“Dean brings an extraordinary depth of experience, knowledge, and empathy to this position,” CAM executive director Lisa Melandri said in a statement. “We’re excited to have such a dedicated and artist-centric leader on our team who is deeply committed to amplifying the voices of emerging and renowned creatives in the contemporary art world.”

Two museums recently announced positions specializing in Indigenous art. The Brooklyn Museum has named Darienne Turner, an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe of California, as curator of Indigenous art, beginning in August. She is currently assistant curator of Indigenous art of the Americas at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

In a statement, Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak said, “The Brooklyn Museum is committed to addressing the exclusion and erasure of Indigenous peoples. Drawing on her considerable expertise, Turner will help us think critically about our engagement with Indigenous communities and our important collection of Indigenous art.”

Turner will grow and research the museum’s extensive collection of Native American art, which consists of over 13,600 items and spans 1100 BCE to the 20th century, as well as mount exhibitions. In a statement, she said, “The Brooklyn Museum’s collection is simply remarkable, and I am thrilled to work alongside brilliant colleagues and Native community members to share it with the public. The opportunity to re-present a historic collection at an institution dedicated to rethinking representation was one I couldn’t pass up. The artworks in the Museum’s care offer the keys to understanding who we are as living Native communities, and they highlight the ways in which Native people have thrived on this continent since time immemorial.”

At the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, Johanna Minich will serve as consulting curator of Native American art, where she will help grow the museum’s collection and assist in its presentations of Indigenous art. She was previously the assistant curator for Native American art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where she organized exhibitions including “American Land, American People” (2020) and “Hear My Voice: Native American Art of the Past and Present” (2017).

“The dismantling of centuries of a one-sided narrative regarding the history of Native peoples is a project both daunting and fraught with the potential of criticism from numerous viewpoints. Yet, it also offers the opportunity to explore questions never even conceived of in the past,” Minich said in a statement. “Creating lasting partnerships and reciprocity with Native communities is vital, and that is my primary initiative for the Toledo Museum of Art as I help the Museum highlight the importance of Indigenous people and their art to the North American narrative.

In April, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art named Gamynne Guillotte as its Chief Education and Community Engagement Officer, beginning June 26. She was most recently chief education officer at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she had worked since 2012. She follows SFMOMA’s recently appointed director Christopher Bedford from the BMA.

“Our work at SFMOMA is guided by a focus on hospitality, establishing a true sense of welcome from the inside out,” Bedford said in a statement. “Gamynne’s extensive experience and long history of developing projects that center a wide range of communities will be invaluable as we chart this new trajectory.”

Other recent institutional appointments include Daniel Merritt as director of curatorial affairs at the Aspen Museum of Art in Colorado, Kristen Gaylord as curator of photography and media arts at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Anke Van Wagenberg as senior curator of American and European Art at the Norton Museum of Art in Florida, Malaika Langa as associate director of the Swiss Institute in New York, Lindsay Catherine Harris as co-director (with artist Shaun Leonardo) of Recess Art in Brooklyn, Lu Zhang as executive director of the New York–based nonprofit A Blade of Grass, and Pablo José Ramírez as a curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where he is currently co-organizing the institution’s upcoming Made in L.A. biennial.

The show, co-organized by Gadsby and Brooklyn Museum senior curators Catherine Morris and Lisa Small, features more than 100 works. Alongside many Picassos, there are contemporary works by Cecily Brown, Judy Chicago, Renee Cox, Käthe Kollwitz, Dindga McCannon, Ana Mendieta, Marilyn Minter, Joan Semmel, and Faith Ringgold.

“The Pablo-ms begin before you even enter the first gallery,” wrote Alex Greenberger in ARTnews. “Above the show’s loud, red signage on the museum’s ground floor, there’s a 26-foot-long painting by Cecily Brown, Triumph of the Vanities II (2018), featuring an orgy of brushy forms set against a fiery background. The painting looks back to the bacchanalia of Rococo painting and the intensity of Eugène Delacroix’s hues. It has little to say about Picasso, an artist whom Brown has spoken of admiringly.”

New York Times critic Jason Farago was even more scathing in his review of the show. “The ambitions here are at GIF level, though perhaps that is the point,” he wrote.

Adlan Jackson’s review for Hell Gate put a finer point on it. Its headline was “Don’t Go to ‘It’s Pablo-matic.’”

In response to the reviews, Small posted a photo of her with Morris and Gadsby on her Instagram story with the caption “that feeling when it’s Pablo-Matic gets (male) art critics’ knickers in a twist.” Morris reposted the image to her Instagram stories, adding, “A @nytimes critic got very emotional about our show,” along with a GIF of the words “sorry not sorry.”

The museum’s director of digital communications, Brooke Baldeschwiler, posted an Instagram story featuring a video about the exhibition starring Gadsby with the caption “Come @ us haters.”

The collaboration with Gadsby came out of the 2018 hit Netflix special Nanette, which included heavy criticism of Picasso and his influence. Picasso “just put a kaleidoscope filter” on his penis when he helped start the Cubist movement, Gadsby claimed.

“It’s Pablo-matic” is one of many exhibitions being staged this year to mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death. On the podcast This Week in Art, produced by the Art Newspaper, Small called the 50th anniversary invitation from the Musée Picasso the “perfect opportunity to partner” with Gadsby.

Morris told This Week in Art that the show was conceived around the themes of power in the art market and feminist art history, especially in the years since Picasso died.

After the publication of the negative reviews, the museum also sent out an email blast from Morris and Small, explaining why they mounted the show.

Perhaps no artist enjoys as much global name recognition as Pablo Picasso. In the fifty years since his death in 1973, culture—and art history—have undergone sweeping changes. The way we look at Picasso has changed, too. Let’s talk about how. The past fifty years have encompassed, among many other social movements, the rise of feminism. And so, to mark this anniversary, we are exploring questions about his legacy by displaying Picasso’s art alongside works by a range of women artists.

We think it’s time to add another layer to our understanding of this towering figure of modernism. Museums are, after all, a place where the past and present meet. As curators, we believe our exhibitions should encourage and hold space for nuanced dialogues, even if they are uncomfortable.

And what better way to wade into these waters than with a bit of humor? Comedy is such a powerful tool for sparking conversation and revealing unexpected ideas. That is why we have collaborated with comedian (and, yes, famously outspoken Picasso critic) Hannah Gadsby on this exhibition. With their pointed wit and background in art history, they challenge us to look again. And look differently.

Anne Pasternak, the Brooklyn Museum’s director, wrote an op-ed for the Art Newspaper in which she further explained the show’s genesis. Noting that the point of the exhibition was not to cancel Picasso, she seemed to allude to reviews that extensively quoted—and critiqued—words from Gadsby present throughout the show.

“To those who question whether Gadsby’s voice belongs in this exhibit, I would simply ask: Whose interests are threatened by including it? Or, who benefits from excluding it?” Pasternak wrote.

Farago declined to comment to ARTnews.

The shift owes something to feminists like Linda Nochlin, who, in a well-known 1971 ARTnews essay, asked if Picasso would have been called a genius if he were born a girl. But most people don’t know Nochlin. They know Hannah Gadsby, a comedian who took up Picasso in their 2018 Netflix special Nanette, going so far as to say he “just put a kaleidoscope filter” on his penis when he helped think up Cubism, a movement that prized a multiplicity of perspectives.

Gadsby is even more unsparing than that in the audio guide for their new Brooklyn Museum show, “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” which opens to the public on Friday.

Gadsby notes that Picasso was a “monumentally misogynistic and abusive domestic authoritarian dictator,” and that he “takes up too much space.” To further underscore the point, perhaps in homage to Hughes, Gadsby lends Picasso the nickname “PP.” You can do the work figuring out that very unsubtle pun.

“Picasso is not my muse of choice,” Gadsby later says of organizing the show. “I regret this.” They should.

Organized with Brooklyn Museum curators Catherine Morris and Lisa Small, “It’s Pablo-matic” aspires toward a new kind of Picasso scholarship that better accounts for his misogyny, his bad behavior, and his colonialist impulses. Gadsby and the curators intend to accomplish this by weaving in more recent works by pillars of feminist art, a noble gesture meant to “unearth and champion voices and perspectives that are missing from our collective understanding of ourselves,” per Gadsby.

The show’s problem—Pablo-m, if you will—is not its revisionary mindset, which justly sets it apart from all the other celebratory Picasso shows being staged this year to mark the 50th anniversary of his death. That is the appropriate lens for discussing much of Picasso’s oeuvre in 2023. It is, instead, the show’s disregard for art history, the discipline that Gadsby studied, practiced, and abandoned after becoming frustrated with its patriarchal roots.

The Pablo-ms begin before you even enter the first gallery. Above the show’s loud red signage on the museum’s ground floor, there’s a 26-foot-long painting by Cecily Brown, Triumph of the Vanities II (2018), featuring an orgy of brushy forms set against a fiery background. The painting looks back to the bacchanalia of Rococo painting and the intensity of Eugène Delacroix’s hues. It has little to say about Picasso, an artist whom Brown has spoken of admiringly.

Inside the show, there’s Jo Baker’s Birthday (1995), a Faith Ringgold print featuring a reclining Josephine Baker beside a bowl of ripe peaches. This is a direct allusion to paintings by Henri Matisse like Odalisque couchée aux magnolias (1923), not to Picasso. (A better Ringgold selection would’ve been her 1991 quilt Picasso’s Studio, which takes on the artist more directly.) Likewise, there’s Nina Chanel Abney’s Forbidden Fruit (2009), in which a group of picnickers are seated around and atop watermelons. It’s a composition that specifically recalls Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–63), not any particular Picasso painting.

There’s no question that Ringgold and Abney are highlighting the limits of modernism—they replace white figures with Black ones, whom they suture into European images. But this exhibition is not about the modernist canon as a whole, which is itself an extension of a male-dominated Western art history that spans centuries. It’s specifically about one man, per the show’s title: Picasso, whom “It’s Pablo-matic” flatly offers as the only modernist worth critiquing. He isn’t.

Ironically, one of the few Picasso-focused works comes courtesy of Gadsby themselves. It’s a ca. 1995 copy of Picasso’s Large Bather with a Book (1937), depicting a blocky, boulder-like figure crumpled over an open volume. Gadsby painted their reproduction on the wall of their parents’ basement. Looking back on it, they now call it “shitty.”

“Picasso once said it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child,” Gadsby writes in the wall text. “Well, I don’t want to call myself a genius … But it did only take me four years to be as funny as Raphael.”

“Funny” is debatable, but comedy is used as a curatorial device throughout the show. Gadsby’s quotes, which are printed above more serious art historical musings, are larded with the language of Twitter. “Weird flex,” reads one appended to a Picasso print of a nude woman caressing a sculpture of a naked, chiseled man. “Don’t you hate it when you look like you belong in a Dickens novel but end up in a mosh pit at Burning Man? #MeToo,” reads another that goes with a print showing a minotaur barging into a crowded, darkened space.

Most of the works in this show are by Picasso, strangely enough. This in itself constitutes an issue—you can’t re-center art history if you’re still centering Picasso.

But if the curators must, they have at least brought some impressive works to the US for the exhibition. There are several paintings on loan from the Musée National Picasso in Paris, some of which are enlisted in savvy ways.

One of them, Corrida: la mort de la femme torero (Bullfighting: Death of the Female Bullfighter), from 1933, shows a woman tumbling across two colliding bulls. Upon impact, her breasts spill out, lending the scene an unseemly erotic quality that courses through so many of the Picasso works in this show. It’s all the more disturbing to learn that this female toreador was based on Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was romantically involved with Picasso at the time. I agree with the curators’ assessment that this painting emblematizes Picasso’s brutal tendencies. I only wish it wasn’t paired with this quote from Gadsby: “If PETA can’t cancel Picasso … no one can.”

It’s key that the show repeatedly references Gilot and Walter, as well as other women from Picasso’s love life, like the artist Dora Maar and the dancer Olga Khokhlova. These women were previously written off as Picasso’s “muses,” and “It’s Pablo-matic” suggests that historians still have trouble talking about them. While the show is frank about the negative aspects of these women’s relationships with the artist, they are always discussed within the context of Picasso, who continues to exert a strong gravitational pull.

I detected a disingenuous sentiment amid it all. Gilot and Maar both produced art of note. Where was that in this show? It would’ve been instructive to see their work placed on equal footing with Picasso’s. Or, for that matter, pretty much any female modernists. The only ones who make the cut are Kathe Köllwitz and Maria Martins, both of whom are represented by unremarkable examples of their remarkable oeuvres.

These women didn’t make it into history books for a long time, and that’s the subtext of Kaleta Doolin’s Improved Janson: A Woman on Every Page #2 (2017), a piece included in this show. The work takes the form of a famed art history textbook that has, in every one of its pages, a vaginal oval cut out of it. An image of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) was sliced by Doolin during the work’s making, its lower left-hand corner now lopped off.

Doolin’s work is about removal: she leaves parts of Janson’s book absent to make clear that women artists, for so many centuries, were kept out of the picture. This was a painful, violent elision, and Doolin makes steps toward rectifying the carnage by acknowledging all that contributed to it. If only Gadsby had done the same.

Why does this show contort art history so? There are numerous Picasso works here that portray threesomes, rapes, and bestiality. The wall text doesn’t hide the sources of these images: Ovid’s poetry, Greek mythology. When Picasso represented a minotaur kneeling over a nude, sleeping woman who can’t consent, he was glorifying sexual assault, using classical art as a limp justification. He was hardly the first male artist to do that, however: Bernini, Titian, Correggio, Poussin, and many more did it too. Yet this exhibition directs its aim only at Picasso.

Many of the women in this exhibition are responding to centuries of misogyny, not just Picasso’s. Betty Tompkins has a grand, grisaille painting showing an erect penis entering a vagina in close-up—an image that recalls a certain Gustave Courbet work—while Joan Semmel takes a lighter approach, with a painting of a post-coital couple shown from the woman’s point of view. Ghada Amer is showing a terrific embroidered work in which pools of red thread reveal pairs of splayed-open women’s legs, and Rachel Kneebone has a porcelain piece that looks like a fountain of limbs. There’s no specific reference point in these works, because the male gaze is omnipotent. It wasn’t found only in Picasso’s studio.

The final gallery, the sole one without any Picasso works in it, brings “It’s Pablo-matic” into even squishier territory. There are some great works here—Dara Birnbaum’s classic video skewering Wonder Woman, an Ana Mendieta photograph of an abstracted female form sculpted into the ground, Dindga McCannon’s painting of a multihued revolutionary with real bullets fixed to the canvas—but they have almost nothing in common, beside the fact that they are all owned by the Brooklyn Museum.

The supplement to this exhibition, available on the Bloomberg Connects app, includes an interview with one artist in this gallery, Harmony Hammond. Asked about her feelings on Picasso, she says, “Truth be told, I don’t think about Picasso and his work.”

It would’ve been nice to have more artists who were thinking about Picasso, or whose work, at least, has something to do with him. But this seems like too much to ask from the curators, especially Gadsby, who greets that line of thinking with a big, fat raspberry. “Humans are not doing great,” they say on the audio guide. “We are unsettled. I blame Picasso. That’s a little joke. Or is it? I don’t know.”

Art for Justice, however, was always intended to be a focused project, with a deadline. (Initially, it was five years and later extended to six years.) Now, as the program begins to wrap up, it has given a grant for a large, undisclosed sum to the nascent Center for Art & Advocacy, an organization dedicated to helping artists who have been incarcerated or whose lives have been affected by the criminal justice system that will in spirit serve as a successor to the Art for Justice Fund.

“Out of concern for the privacy of current and past awardees, particularly those who may be presently incarcerated, Art for Justice Fund is not disclosing award amounts for grant recipients,” the organization said in a statement.

Late last year, after US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which effectively overturned the Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade that granted the right to an abortion, Gund sold another Lichtenstein, Mirror #5 (1970), during a Christie’s evening sale for $3.18 million. The proceeds of the sale were matched by Art for Justice and donated to the Groundswell Fund, a major funder of the Reproductive Justice Movement.

The new, artist-led, Center for Art & Advocacy, which is also funded by the Mellon Foundation, will consist of three programs: the Right of Return Fellowship, the Academy, and the Residency. The Fellowship, which gives six formerly incarcerated artists and creatives funding each year, was launched in 2017 as a separate endeavor by artists Jesse Krimes and Russell Craig, both of whom spent time in the criminal justice system. Krimes has also been named serve as the Center for Art & Advocacy’s inaugural executive director.

The Academy will serve as a school for writers, filmmakers, and artists, while the Residency will give alumni of the Center’s other programs, as well as social justice advocates from across the US, both short- and long-term stays at a forthcoming space in Northeast Pennsylvania.

“The launch of the Center for Art & Advocacy marks a pivotal moment in the fight to end mass incarceration,” Gund said in a statement. “[We are] thrilled to support our partner’s evolution into a physical hub with expanded programming, all dedicated to transforming the criminal legal system through the arts.”

The Center for Art & Advocacy will open its first location this fall in Brooklyn. Its board of directors will include Craig; Dwayne Betts, a poet, lawyer, and a past Right of Return fellow; artist Kate Capshaw; Kate Fowle, curatorial senior director at Hauser & Wirth; art collector and Brooklyn Museum trustee Stephanie Ingrassia; and Daveen Trentman, cofounder of the Soze Agency, which helped launch the Right of Return Fellowship with Krimes and Craig.

In a statement, Krimes said, “I first imagined building a community of formerly incarcerated artists while I was isolated in a prison cell. In a nation with 2 million people behind bars, it’s abundantly clear how many talented artists are criminalized, incarcerated and locked out of creative opportunities. I’m profoundly grateful to the Art for Justice Fund and Agnes Gund for believing in the power of an artist-led movement and am honored to carry their legacy forward with the Center’s work.”