These artists don’t typically have the MFA degrees that are required for representation at blue-chip galleries. They are more likely to have members of the clergy, or to have been firefighters or houseless. But as this fair shows, these artists who are just worthy of study as the ones that pass through the nation’s top art schools.

Those who show at this fair have spent decades working to bring to light these makers, who historically have not made into museums. Their work is now paying off.

During the fair’s VIP preview day on Thursday, ARTnews spoke with several exhibitors about the artists they brought to the fair this year.

The work, titled Declaration, has become an iconic part of the Venice Beach landscape. Weighing in at 25 tons, it is composed of I-beams that are delicately balanced against one another in V-shaped arrangements.

Declaration was initially installed more than 20 years ago, in 2001, as a loan made in tandem with a Venice Family Clinic benefit, so it was never intended to be permanently sited where it is today. But because it has been located for so long near the boardwalk, between a skate park and a police station, it has been integrated into the Venice Beach landscape.

Word that the sculpture may leave Venice Beach was first heard in 2019, when di Suvero and his gallery L.A. Louver failed multiple times to get the City of Los Angeles to acquire the piece. The two were charged with raising the funds needed to keep the work there.

Local outlets in Venice Beach reported this week that Declaration was officially slated for removal, an exact date for which has not yet been determined. The sculpture, now worth $7 million, according to L.A. Louver director Kimberly Davis, is set to be returned to di Suvero himself.

“I am honored that this sculpture has been embraced by the community of Venice for more than two decades,” di Suvero said in a statement to ARTnews. “I’m grateful that it was on view for so long—longer than ever intended—and that it contributed to the identity of this special place.”

The funding for the sculpture has routinely been a sticking point. L.A. Louver paid for it to be installed in the first place, but according to a Los Angeles City Council member quoted by the New York Times in 2019, the gallery had offered the work to the city, but the terms for the donation would’ve required as much as $4 million to be spent in the process. Even after private donors were sought, the city could not afford the work.

Per Yo! Venice!, L.A. Louver had raised less than $2 million in pledges—which is less than half of the work’s value, according to Davis. Now, the work will be disassembled and sent back in pieces to di Suvero’s studio in Petaluma, California.

Peter Goulds, founding director of L.A. Louver, said in a statement, “Even though permanent status could not be achieved in its present location, we are honored to have championed this iconic work, a Los Angeles cultural landmark and the focal point of Venice Beach and its Boardwalk. Everywhere Mark goes, he builds community, and his sculptures do the same. We are immensely proud of our long association with Mark, who is one of the greatest American sculptors of our time, and our support for this key work from his career.”

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.

Palestine’s Ministry of Culture said this week that Ghaben died after appeals from his family to Israeli authorities that would have allowed Ghaben to leave the Gaza Strip to seek medical aid.

In a statement, the Palestinian Ministry of Culture said that Ghaben was suffering from chronic chest and lung illness, and had been unable to find help in Gaza’s healthcare system, which has collapsed amid repeated Israeli airstrikes in the region.

In a video uploaded to Facebook on February 19 by a relative of Ghaben, the ailing artist makes a desperate appeal for aid, saying, “I am suffocating. I want to breathe, I want to breathe.” He repeats those words until he is overcome by violent coughing.

Gaza’s health ministry reported on Thursday that the number of Palestinians killed since October 7 has exceeded 30,000. Among the dead are artist Heba Zagout and scholar and poet Refaat Alareer. ARTnews has contacted the IDF for comment on the death of Ghaben.

Ghaben was one of Palestine’s most prominent painters, having gained renown in the 1970s and ’80s for his exuberantly colored paintings that memorialized Palestinian resistance. He was also a fierce advocate for arts education in Palestine and was a founding member of the Association of Fine Artists and Artists in Gaza and established the Fathi Ghaben Center of Arts.

“Palestine was always present in all its details in Ghaben’s works,” Palestinian Minister of Culture Atef Abu Seif said. “He immortalized the life of the Palestinian village that the Nakba wanted to erase, remembering the village of Harbia, in which he was born.” 

“Ghaben’s departure constitutes a loss to Palestinian art,” a statement from the culture ministry noted.

He was born in 1947, one year before Israel forcibly expelled 750,000 Palestinians from the land they called home. That event is communally called the Nakba; its name translates to the Catastrophe. Ghaben’s family resettled in the Jabaliya camp in Gaza, where he lived for most of his life. Having left school at age 15, he supported his family by selling newspapers, all while teaching himself to paint with the supplies that he managed—often with great difficulty—to find.

He transitioned to painting full-time, transmuting the suffering of his neighbors and nation into symbolic, defiant portraits. In some, swelling crowds flood the street while horses, painted as large as the sky, rear and fight against their shackles.

“My paintings are not filled with smiles; they are not loud, flashy or without a deep thought. I draw the national Palestinian issues and the reality of the Palestinian struggle,” the artist once said.

He taught art at the Al Naser Islamic school for 13 years and expressed with frustration with how the struggle to meet basic needs impeded artistic ambitions in Palestine. “I cannot afford paint and tools, so I cannot fully engage in my art, and the children need food on the table daily—it’s a big dilemma,” he said.

Ghaben also served as an adviser in the Ministry of Culture, during which time he gifted the building multiple beloved murals. In 2015, the Palestinian government awarded him the Order of Culture, Science, and Arts on the Creativity Level, and later, he received the Medal of Sword of Canaan from Yasser Arafat and the Annual Media Freedom Awards Appreciation Award from the Palestinian Press House. His international accolades included the Order of Hiroshima and the Order of the World Federation of Societies of Tokyo.

Speaking to ARTnews, prominent Palestinian painter Samia Halaby recounted her decades-long friendship with Ghaben: “His best work and professionalism depended on the revolutionary optimism of the Intifada,” she said. “His best work had a combination of symbolist attitudes and Cubist form. Like all the artists of the First Intifada, Fathi was proud to have a cause and was loyal to it.”

Halaby continued: “My last visit with him was in a tent in Gaza, probably during the 2000s. I could see from the test that a sniper tower was nearby as he told me of the continuous sniping and the absence of any defense against it living in a tent. In that tent, he received me with traditional Arabic hospitality offering gracious welcome, coffee, his cigarette smoking, and conversation.”

Ghaben was arrested by Israeli authorities on several occasions, sometimes because of his art, which was deemed to be “inciting violence.” These events were described in the catalogue for a joint exhibition of Israeli and Palestinian artists held in 1984 in Tel Aviv titled “Israeli and Palestinian Artists Against Occupation.” That show was closed abruptly by the Israeli Military, and multiple paintings were confiscated.

During one such imprisonment, one of Ghaben’s sons, Hossam, succumbed to intestinal cancer after failing to receive medical treatment. Hossam died at the age of 18.

Recalling the realities of life in Gaza, Ghaben once said: “Being a sensitive artist soul, I believe the colors appropriate for our life in Jabalia and the individual perception of them are the warm, dark and earthly colors – with a grasp of hope, maybe half of that dark brown, dark blue, but with orange, yellow and a mixture of white and yellow, these light colors reflect glimpses of hope in this hell on earth.”

It starts with a blow job. Schnabel, playing a repairperson named Rick, comes to Capote’s place to fix a garbage disposal. A dejected Capote, feeling as though he has aged out of relevancy in New York, strikes up a conversation, finding himself fascinated by this younger, less wealthy man from Illinois who rides a Harley-Davidson to work.

“I wonder if you’d be at all interested in having your cock sucked,” Capote suggests. Rick, who typically goes for women, accepts the offer, and later admits that it was the best fellatio he received. The two embark on a month-long relationship that eventually comes to an end when Rick admits he is engaged to a woman.

Schnabel has acted before, but only rarely, and never in such a mainstream role as this one. He’s better known for his self-titled gallery, which has spaces in New York and St. Moritz, Switzerland, and represents trendy artists such as Trey Abdella and Robert Nava. His gallery has also shown paintings by Gus Van Sant, the director of famed films such as Good Will Hunting and Milk. Van Sant helmed the majority of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, including this week’s episode.

That Schnabel had been cast in Feud had been previously reported in the tabloids, which fixated on him performing alongside Warren Beatty’s daughter, Ella Beatty, who plays a young protégée of Capote in this episode.

As this episode progresses, Rick becomes increasingly bored with Capote, who forces him to join him in venues where a repairman stands out. During a lunch at La Cote Basque, the Midtown eatery where Capote and his friends often dined, Rick talks about hacksaws and handiwork while socialites such as C. Z. Guest discuss Gore Vidal, the author who sued Capote over libel. (Capote countersued; Capote lost.) “Who’s Gore Vidal?” Rick asks, with Schnabel inflecting his voice as though he were genuinely confused.

By now, the blow jobs are beside the point. In bed together, Capote seeks one while they are watching an episode of The Love Boat, and a disaffected Rick says to wait. Maybe he’ll do it during commercial break, he explains.

Andy Warhol, who really did star in an episode The Love Boat, playing himself, flashes by on screen. (Warhol appeared on the show in 1985, a full seven years after this episode takes place.) “Look, your friend Andy’s on Love Boat,” Rick says.

“My God, it’s a horror show!” Capote responds. “They put embalming fluid in his foundation, didn’t they.”

Schnabel’s appearance on Feud is the latest art-world connection that has emerged on the series, which streams on Hulu, although the others have been set more within the world of the show rather than outside it. Babe Paley, a major art collector, is one of the show’s protagonists, and last week’s installment featured a musing on a Diego Rivera painting of a nude C. Z. Guest. Meanwhile, in this episode, the Ella Beatty character, a young version of the actress Kate Harrington, visits artist Richard Avedon’s studio, where she is photographed dancing.

Resembling armor without a body underneath, shell is made from felt etching blankets from the shop, and, amid a writer’s strike in Los Angeles, she collaborated with a film industry designer in need of work, who was enlisted through Felsen’s connections. The work came to be almost serendipitously “because this is Hollywood, and because of Sidney Felsen,” Hamilton told writer Joan Simon in a 2008 interview.

Enlisting established artists, like Hamilton, to create new work is perhaps what Felsen, now 99, is most widely known for. Having founded Gemini in 1966 with his fraternity brother and art collector Stanley Grinstein, Felsen is now the subject of a monographic exhibition, on view through July 7 at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, that mines 50-years-worth of his photographic archive. The exhibition’s title puts it more succinctly: “First Came a Friendship: Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini G.E.L.” The exhibition’s curator Naoko Takahatake selected images that Felsen took over more than five decades, culled from more than 70,000 images, donated to the GRI in 2019 by Jack Shear, the partner of Ellsworth Kelly, another frequent Gemini collaborator.

Alongside Tamarind Lithography Workshop and Cirrus Editions (both in Los Angeles) and Universal Limited Art Editions (in New York), Gemini G.E.L. was a part of a budding wave of art printers established in the 1960s and ’70s that attracted top artists as collaborators. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, David Hockney, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein who could work through some of their most heady ideas in a different medium than they became famous for. In 1999, Claudine Ise wrote for the Los Angeles Times, that Felsen molded Gemini into “an arterial channel between the Los Angeles and New York art worlds.”

“When he really started getting serious about photography, he switched to a Leica and he preferred the rangefinder because of the quiet shutter,” Takahatake told ARTnews in a recent interview.

Felsen, according to Takahatake, wanted to be a fly on the wall, preferring to be unseen and unheard to avoid disrupting their artistic processes. “He said the two words he felt he needed to live by were silent and invisible. One of the greatest compliments he felt someone could pay him was, when they would say: I didn’t even realize that you were there,” Takahatake said.

In the mid-’60s, Felsen brought in artists primarily on his own instinct, mailing postcards that acted as cold invitations to collaborate. That process would lead him to that building out a personal network with some of the mid-20th century’s biggest creative forces. Critics and historians who have analyzed Gemini’s peak years have emphasized how Felsen and Grinstein, who died in 2014, gave artists unusual amount of freedom to work, seemingly without any financial or material restrictions. A 2010 Artforum review of a Robert Rauschenberg show detailed how critical the shop was to the artist and his peers, providing an atmosphere that gave them “free rein and seemingly unlimited resources.”

There were few other artists who produced as much under Felsen’s tutelage as Rauschenberg. In a 2013 interview, Felsen recalled first meeting the artist, who was looking to make a full-body print using a medical X-Ray, at an airport in 1967. “He wanted one plate—6 feet—of his whole body. We found out there is no such thing in the United States—except that Eastman Kodak in Rochester had a six-foot machine,” Felsen said in the 2013 interview. For another project Felsen took Rauschenberg to a Los Angeles Times printing facility to scour through metal type barrels for material; it was one of some 50 times Rauschenberg came to the shop over the next three decades. Felsen balanced being a close friend, while giving Rauschenberg the space to ideate, often watching in awe at the speed of Rauschenberg’s creative spurts. “He never looked back at his work,” Felsen said.

Because Felsen sought to capture the print shop’s private moments, he never intended to publish his archive of images, which lined the studio’s walls. Until 2003, they went uncatalogued. And that approach allowed him to get a level of candid access that most journalists would dream of. “I can’t work in front of people,” Tacita Dean, a Turner Prize–winning artist who works primarily in photography and film, told the Getty for an essay accompanying the show. “It’s another eye in the room and the sense that somebody’s watching you. But Sidney’s photographs don’t have that.”

There’s a sense of a palpable joy in Felsen’s photographs, in which now famous artists resemble students at play, their expressions mostly candid and unserious. In one, David Hockney tacks drawings of his inner circle to Gemini’s walls, while in another, Richard Serra keeps his heads down, pouring black paint on the floor. “I think something that is quite notable about Gemini is the fact that they had to foster these long-term relationships with artists—it was by invitation,” Takahatake said.

“A lot of my friend were artists or just collectors,” Felsen said in the 2013 interview, describing how he’d put aside his career as an accountant to work with artists. Initially, he focused on LA artists, but he soon found himself nearly at the center of the global art world. In 1966, through chance, Man Ray, ever an enigma of an artist, came to Gemini when he had a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Surrealist had recently relocated from Paris to LA, focusing on commissioned photographs for fashion magazines; the museum arranged for him to stay at Grinstein’s house, bringing him into Gemini’s circle.

Decades later, with a close-knit yet expansive network, Felsen continued to run the shop until 2018, at the age of 93, always with the guiding principle, as Takahatake put it, of “how to be a good friend.”

THE HEADLINES

ABROMAVIĆ RESPONDS TO RESURFACED CONTROVERSY. As her curated performance opens today in Australia, the iconic artist Marina Abramović talks to The Guardian about past accusations of racism for her description of Indigenous Australians as “really strange and different” people who “look like dinosaurs,” in an unedited copy of a memoir that went public around 2016. The question came up as the artist’s four-day performance called “Marina Abramović Institute: Takeover” opens at the Adelaide Festival. Though she can’t attend, Abramović selected the eight participating artists, including Mike Parr, Collective Absentia, Li Binyuan, and First Nation artist Christian Thomspon. “I have apologized. It’s a complete misunderstanding,” Abramović said of the memoir excerpt. “Aborigines are the oldest race on the planet [and] they should be treated as living treasures.”

STOLEN KISS. The artist Julia Sinelnikova is suing New York’s Museum of Sex for plastering posters of her kissing her then-girlfriend on the city’s subways and bus stops without her consent. The ads promoted the museum’s “Superfunland” exhibition, including a “bouncy castle of breasts,” and the image was taken in a professional shooting at the museum in 2019, for which the artist wasn’t paid, reports The New York Times. When the institution refused to financially compensate Sinelnikova, she filed a lawsuit in the New York State Supreme Court seeking $250,000 in damages. “It was so egregious, and this was personal,” Sinelnikova said.

THE DIGEST

The Louvre has raised enough funds to acquire a coveted still life of a brimming basket of strawberries by 18^th-century painter Jean Siméon Chardin, following a public fundraising campaign that raised over $1.73 million. Basket of Wild Strawberries (1761) was sold to a US dealer in 2022 for a record $26.29 million (24.3 million euros) at Artcurial, but the Louvre blocked its export in the hopes of purchasing it instead. [Le Figaro and AFP]

A drawing by Adolph Menzel (1815-1905) must be restituted to the heirs of the Jewish painter Max Liebermann, ruled the German Advisory Commission on Nazi-Looted Art Thursday. The Liebermann’s large art collection was liquidated in the context of Nazi persecution. [Monopol]

A cherished Banksy mural in New York’s South Bronxon was shipped to Bridgeport, Connecticut as part of the structure’s demolition to make space for a charter school. But its removal left locals in tears, and some wondering if Banksy is none other than Kate Middleton. [ARTnews]

The numbers are in: Elton John’s collection of 900 items sold at Christie’s for a total of $20.5 million, surpassing its low estimate by more than double. [ARTnews]

British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen won the Volta Lifetime Achievement Award at the Dublin International Film Festival yesterday. The Turner Prize-winning artist is known for his politically charged dramatic works, including 12 years a Slave, which became the first film by a Black director to win an Academy Award for best picture. [Artforum]

Art historian and The Great Women Artists podcaster Katy Hessel is launching a new series of audio guides this month at museums around the US and the UK, called “Museums Without Men.” The guides, which debut at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and then move to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will spotlight underrepresented women artists. [The Guardian]

THE KICKER

GREATEST UNSOLVED ART HEIST. Richard Abath, the night guard who let two thieves into the Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, where they pulled off what is considered the largest and still unsolved art heist in history, has died at age 57, reports The New York Times. Abath always maintained he made the fateful mistake of opening the museum door to two men dressed as Boston police officers at 1am on March 18, 1990, because he truly believed they were cops. That assessment soon proved all very wrong, when the men handcuffed, blindfolded and tied up Abath, along with a colleague, while they helped themselves to over a dozen artworks. The Degas, Rembrandt, Manet, Rubens, and other works were worth an estimated $500 million at the time, or $1.2 billion today.

Actor and comedian Will Ferrell was front and center at the fair with wife Viveca Paulin, who is a known collector and a trustee at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The couple attended a breakfast hosted by the fair before checking out the art.

Actors and brothers Owen and Luke Wilson were also spotted laughing as they strolled together through the fair. Actress Sara Gilbert, who currently stars in the TV series The Conners, was seen clutching a map as she roamed the aisles.

Sources tell us a number of actors were in attendance, including the Oscar-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who was listed on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list in 2016 and 2017. Additionally in attendance were Robert Downey Jr. (nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Oppenheimer), Rob Lowe (currently staring in 9-1-1: Lone Star), Tobey Maguire (known for portraying Spider-Man), and Jeremy Pope. We also hear that writer and director Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story, Glee) and tennis player Aryna Sabalenka made appearances at the fair.

Prominent art collectors in attendance at Frieze this time include ARTnews Top 200 Collectors Komal Shah, Pamela Joyner, Ric Whitney and Tina Perry-Whitney, and Steve and Jamie Tisch.

This post will be updated as more celebrity sightings are made.

The 19th century domed, decorated shield was Lot 903 in Anderson & Garland’s sale “The Collector’s Auction”, scheduled to take place Thursday morning at its head office in the English city of Newcastle. The metal and animal hide artifact had been inscribed with the location and date of the conflict “Magdala 13th April 1868”, (now known as Maqdala) and given a modest price estimate of £800-£1,200.

News of the sale’s cancellation was first reported by The Art Newspaper.

The shield was part of large trove of royal, religious, and military artifacts that were looted after British forces seized a compound of the Coptic Christian Emperor Tewodros II, in what was then known as Abyssinia. Sites in the northern village where Tewodros was based were looted by released British hostages and British forces, and the objects were taken back to the UK.

The withdrawal of Lot 903 took place after Abebaw Ayalew, director general of Ethiopia’s Heritage Authority, wrote to the auction house on February 23. Ayalew’s letter said that the shield had been “wrongfully acquired”, asked for the sale to be cancelled and for it to be repatriated back to the Ethiopian government.

The Telegraph also reported that a restitution committee overseen by Ethiopia’s National Heritage agency, a branch of the country’s tourism board, had labeled the sale as “inappropriate and immoral.”

The lot description for the shield on Anderson & Garland’s website did note the historical event behind the shield’s acquisition by describing how British commander General Robert Napier (later Lord Napier of Magdala) had ordered “the destruction of Tewodros’ artillery and the burning of Madgala as retribution” as well as troops “looting many local artifacts which they took back to Britain”.

However, The Art Newspaper reported that the auction house did not provide details on the shield’s provenance after 1868.

Anderson & Garland did not respond to a request for comment from ARTnews.

Collectors snapped up paintings, photographs, custom-designed clothes, fine jewelry, and other items. Other highlights from the several-day sale, which began on February 22, included Banksy’s Thrower Triptych (2017), which sold on opening night for nearly $2 million; an untitled Keith Haring from 1982 that fetched $756,000; and a pair of silver leather platform boots adorned on either side with John’s initials in a vivacious red, which realized $94,500—about 19 times its low estimate of $5,000.

Bonnie Brennan, president of Christie’s Americas, said in a statement:  “It was a great honor for Christie’s to have been entrusted with the auction of the contents of Elton John’s Atlanta home. The collection was assembled over 30 years in an American city that meant so much to Elton John and his family.”

John’s photography collection represented over 350 of the lots—about one third of the whole collection—and included works by seminal fashion photographers Richard Avedon, Steven Meisel, and Irving Penn. One Avedon silver print, depicting a serpent coiling around a naked Nastassja Kinski, went for $201,600.

“Beyond including artistic and personal treasures the sale cemented the cultural legacy of one of the world’s most iconic figures,” Darius Himes, Christie’s international head of photographs, said in a statement.