MORE Richard Prince Posters

a screenshot of richard prince's instagram grid circa 2017 includes several photos of tape collages of cut up magazine ads for anti-war posters, interspersed with prince's blurred headshot of a shifty eyed trump, which he put on a building, drove over on the ground, etc.,
2017 screenshot of New Posters on Richard Prince’s IG grid [via]

Early in 2017 I wrote about how Richard Prince was using the Instagram grid to gang images and to stage temporary exhibitions. One I screenshot was of a set of photos he called New Posters; it was made of vintage ads for Marboro Posters, alongside his own blurred Trump poster.

a screenprinted poster by richard prince reproduces a photo of a collaged group of Vietnam War-era posters and their descriptions, from a full-page ad in the back of playboy magazine. Two posters about the conflagration of war, one of a child's drawing about war, and a fourth about targeting and shooting student protestors surround a poster of a nude white guy huddled up with his head buried between his knees. via more publishers dot be
Richard Prince, Untitled (Poster), 2016-17, 98 x 68 cm, ed 25+5AP, via MOREpublishers

Somehow, even though I considered the possibility of IRL posters at the time, I only just now realized Prince did make a New Poster. Untitled (Poster), 2016-17, was published as a small screenprinted edition by MOREpublishers of Belgium.

Richard Prince, Untitled (Poster), 2016-17, ed. 25, sold out [morepublishers.be]
Previously, related: Marboro Man: New Posters by Richard Prince

Repeat After Venice: Open Group @ 601Artspace

two people stand in front of a wall-sized projection of a ukrainian woman with trees behind her making the sounds of the drones and weapons she's been subjected to since the russians invaded, an artwork by open group, photo from the 2024 venice biennale, polish pavilion, by jacopo salvi
an installation view of Open Group’s Repeat After Me II (2022, 2024), from the Polish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, 2024, photo: Jacopo Salvi via 601Artspace

Somehow the Ukrainian art collective OPEN GROUP’s powerful installation from the Polish Pavilion at Venice last year is being restaged in New York City, starting tomorrow, Thursday May 8th. The somehow is impresaria Magda Sawon, who has arranged with 601Artspace’s David Howe to show Repeat After Me II (2022, 2024), and Untitled (2015 — ongoing), two works that relate to the ongoing impact on Ukrainians of the fight against the Russian invasion.

OPEN GROUP was a last minute addition to the Biennale, after Poland’s rightwing government was ousted, the Polish Pavilion’s rightwing curator and artists followed. Curator Marta Czyż rapidly invited OPEN GROUP instead.

After the opening Thursday, Czyż and Sawon will give a public walkthrough of the show, in two adjacent 601Artspace spaces, on Friday evening. There is also a talk planned for Saturday the 10th, with Czyż, OPEN GROUP, and Columbia professor Mark Lila. [Obviously it will not be at Columbia.]

OPEN GROUP (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga), 9 May – 22 June 2025 at 601Artspace [601artspace]

The Monochrome Billboard Book Project

a book made of a cut up and bound billboard sits open on a red table in the foreground of an installation photo of three star books' paris gallery space, where the main object in the photo is the same billboard mounted as a billboard on a wall floating between concrete columns, smooth plywood panels, and glazed exterior walls. the floor is pale pink or flesh colored terazzo. jonathan monk's 2010 The Billboard Book Project.
Jonathan Monk X Vier5, The Billboard Book Project (Paris), 2010, ed. 40, installation view at Three Star Books

Jonathan Monk’s Billboard Book Project with Three Star Books has at least four iterations. It is a billboard entirely about the making of itself, both as a billboard and as a book. The first iteration’s billboard appeared in “Week 47 of Year 2009” in Paris, while the limited edition book, made of cut down billboards—and documentation of an installed billboard—is dated January 2010. Which makes the subthemes project management and the hermeneutics of verb tenses.

Also:

the colophon of jonathan monk's 2010 artist book, The Billboard Book Project (Paris) - The Green Book is open on a table, with a green endpaper on the left side, and a signed photo of a monochrome green billboard, framed, from a platform of the paris metro, on the right. via three star books
Jonathan Monk X Vier5, The Billboard Book Project (Paris) – The Green Book, 2010, ed. 15, the colophon with signed photodocumentation, via Three Star Books

Three Star Books announces an immediate and surprising sequel to “The Billboard Book Project (Paris)”…During Monk’s recent sojourn for the launch of this project, the artist noticed that posters in the Paris Métro were occasionally covered with green printed paper during the interval between commercial advertisements.

a book with all blue pages made of billboard paper, printed on one side with monochrome green, open on a table with the blue verso side on the left, and the green recto side on the right of the spread. via three star books
Jonathan Monk X Vier5, The Billboard Book Project (Paris) — The Green Book, 2010, 26.5 x 43 cm, ed. 15, via Three Star Books

The Billboard Book Project (Paris) — The Green Book is a companion book—though in a much smaller edition, so a companion to only a fraction—of offset printed monochrome green billboards.

There were The Billboard Book Projects in London and New York after this, and I’m happy for all involved. But it’s no disrespect to say—and I’m sure the fifteen people or institutions who own both Paris volumes will back me up on this—The Green Book is the project’s greatest aesthetic success.

Jonathan Monk at Three Star Books [threestarbooks]
Previously, related: Jonathan Monk Brooklyn Heights Streetview
Previously, unexpectedly related: Krisjan Gudmundsson, 200 Pages on Barnett Newman, 2001

14,906 – 14,910 Days

an instagram post by __artbooks__ of a yellowing photocopy of a biographical chronology and list of places, handwritten by on kawara, from the artist's birth in 1933 through 1969, on the letterhead of the holiday inn in saint louis
__artbooks__ ig post of a photocopy of an on kawara chronology

In the instagram post at __artbooks__ it says On Kawara wrote this “personal chronology” on stationery from the Downtown St Louis Holiday Inn, “some time between October 16 and 20, 1973.” The timing is based on the assumption that he didn’t just grab the stationery for later use, but instead wrote out this list while he was staying in St. Louis. It’s also possible that another sheet stapled under this one—these are photocopies, and were not known to the One Million Years Foundation that handles Kawara’s estate—continues with all the places he’d been, ending with Pittsburgh and Indianapolis, the places he’d visited before arriving in St. Louis.

a photo of a page in on kawara's 2008 multi-volume edition, I GOT UP, showing both sides of the postcard he sent to sol lewitt on october 18 1973, letting him know he got up at 9:56 AM. It was sent from the holiday in st louis, and on the front is a photo of a skeletal geodesic dome with a lily pool in the foreground, a greenhouse at the missouri botanical garden known as the climatron. via tama art university
A postcard of the Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden, sent by On Kawara to Sol Lewitt on Oct 18, 1973, published in I GOT UP, 2008 by mfc-michèle didier, digitized at TamaBi

In mid-October Kawara and his wife Hiroko Hiraoka were barely a week into a three-month road trip across the United States, making art along the way: Date Paintings, I Am Still Alive telegrams, I Got Up postcards, and I Went maps. The postcards for the four mornings he woke up in the St Louis Holiday Inn were all sent to Sol Lewitt. Between the postcards and maps in the On Kawara Database at Tama Art University and Duncan MacLaren’s extraordinary reverse-engineered narrative, it’s possible to reconstruct the form of Kawara’s life, if not the substance.

This chronology, sort of an I’VE BEEN, is only loosely related to the I WENT project. Every day from June 1, 1968 through September 17, 1979, Kawara traced the path he traveled on a photocopy of a local map. It hints at broader documentation of his life alongside his work, if not for it. But it also shows Kawara looking back, a perspective that rarely surfaces in an art practice so thoroughly grounded in the moment of its making.

a black and white 1966 photo of on kawara's loft studio with two rows of date paintings along the wall: the smaller ones are hung in a line, and the medium sized ones are lined up along the floor. a giant date painting, perhaps 6 by 9 feet, of sept. 20, 1966 rests on blocks on the floor in front of the rows of smaller paintings. [spoiler] it was later destroyed, presumably because it had taken longer than a day to finish it.
On Kawara’s 13th St studio, c. 1966, via onkawara.co.uk

It reminds me of a glimpse into the evolution of Kawara’s project that I read recently on MacLaren’s page reconstructing the first year of the Date Paintings, 1966. Among the photos of Kawara’s 13th St studio I’d seen many times before, is this image of the largest date painting to-date, Sept. 20, 1966. McLaren points out, though, that Kawara does not record making a painting on the 20th, nor on the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, or 24th. Yet there one is.

This giant painting, then, was perhaps the first one Kawara could not finish in a day. And so it was almost nine months into his project, and only after completing and photographing his biggest painting ever, that Kawara decided a Today Series painting must be made on the day, or it had to be destroyed.

__artbooks__ [ig]

It’s Juddtown

The September 2020 zoom panel for Judd, MoMA’s mononymous Donald Judd retrospective is already a fascinating document of its moment. For a show that was closed for four months by COVID restrictions, there was much discussion of the people, and the physical experience of Judd’s work. Spatial qualities, social distancing, the reflectivity of its surfaces, the subjectivity of seeing one’s masked self seeing.

Rachel Harrison’s mesmerizing photos of details of the work and Leslie Hewitt’s discussion of how photogenic it is drew insights from curator Ann Temkin about how much she’s learned from watching visitors photograph the show, and how they’d debated whether it was safe to allow photos at all, and how much our relationship to photography has changed since even the last major Judd retrospective at Tate Modern in 2004. Harrison pointed out the historical shift in Judd photography, citing James Meyer’s catalogue essay, about Judd’s first show is documented by just two black & white installation photos by Rudy Burckhardt.

the cover of artforum, summer 2004, with the logo down the left side, and the rest of the cover filled by john waters' commercially designed and printed poster edition, visit marfa, which treats marfa like the minimalist circus coming to town, with callouts about winning a date with john chamberlain, eating food all the same color, pretending to see the marfa lights, and scaring the locals. found on ebay in 2025
John Waters’ Visit Marfa, 2003, six-color screenprint by Globe Poster Co., 30 x 22 in., ed. 100, on the cover of the Summer 2004 issue of Artforum, as sold on eBay

Jeffrey Weiss’s last comment was to suggest Judd saw people–and museums— as things to be avoided, not courted, though, which is why he kind of withdrew to Marfa and set up his own spaces. When Temkin said we’ll end thinking of Marfa, Harrison piped up to say, how about John Waters instead? And his great poster, which she paraphrased fondly as, “Welcome to Marfa, the Disneyland of Minimalism,” inviting everyone at home to Google it.

It is actually, The Jonestown of Minimalism,” of course, but the misquote was a clue, probably, of what Harrison was reading up on for her Judd panel. Waters’ 2003 poster was on the cover of the Summer 2004 issue of Artforum, which was largely dedicated to the first major museum exhibitions historicizing Judd and Minimalism. It included articles by Temkin [on Judd conservation], Weiss [on artists’ writing], and Meyer [on scale]. Waters’ poster is the lede for a spectacularly grumpy review by Yve-Alain Bois of three museum shows—including Judd at Tate:

“Take the Whole Family to Marfa, Texas,” exhorts the broadside, beneath a Li’l Abner–style middle-class family, grinning like they’ve just won a vacation to Disney World. A bubble on the poster advertises “The Jonestown of Minimalism,” mocking the tenacious cliché of the movement’s “spirituality” by likening it to a senseless sect.

Bois’ review, the whole issue really, including the lengthy back & forths in the letters, reads very much as of its moment, when the entire art world was talking to itself in the magazine of record [sic * 3 obv]. When I’d go back and read my blog posts from the early 2000s, I used to think my self-referentiality and -importance was insufferable, but now I realize I was soaking in it. It really did be like that sometimes.

So some art world things and faces are the same, but what’s changed? For one, you actually can fly to Marfa now—and some of us [sic] did. In April 2020, the early freakout days of the COVID shutdown, Nate Freeman reported that a private jet flew from Teterboro to Marfa with three passengers. Who quarantined at addresses of the Chinati Foundation, and a studio compound owned by Christopher Wool & Charline von Heyl.

But I think the most salient—and terrifying—development is revealed in Harrison’s prescient malapropism. Does anything capture our dire cultural moment more clearly than the conflation of Disney World and Jonestown?

Henry Persche’s Tiny Kelly

an ellsworth kelly painting on a 4 inch scrap of canvas, a fat yellow square, plus another yellow brushstroke next to it for some reason, sandwiched between thinner brushstrokes of blue on top and red on the bottom, a gift fo the artist's longtime studio assistant henry perche, now called a study and for sale at phillips in may 2025
Ellsworth Kelly, Study for Blue Yellow Red V, 1987, 4 1/2 x 4 in., oil on canvas, selling at Phillips 14 May 2025 [update: or not]

You get a taste of that Ellsworth Kelly brushstroke, and suddenly it’s all you want and all you look for, and you’re desperate for another fix, even if it’s a literal scrap of canvas.

ellsworth kelly painting in three horizontal canvases, stacked: narrow blue, square yellow, and slightly less narrow red, from 1987, some day going to the nga, but not yet, apparently
Ellsworth Kelly, Blue Yellow Red V, 1954/1987, 246 x 190 cm, oil on three canvases, the Meyerhoff Collection, promised to the National Gallery as recently as 2020, but they 404’d the slideshow, which feels ominous. but it could be nothing.

This extraordinary 4.5 x 4 inch work is being sold as Study for Blue Yellow Red V, presumably after the number of brushstrokes it contains. The way it has pencil marks along the edge where it was cut off. The way that patch of yellow feels extraneous but is obviously not a dealbreaker, because the work is signed an assigned a spot in the artist’s catalogue raisonné (EK 761B). The way it references a monumental, triple canvas, double-dated painting which the Meyerhoffs are hanging onto for dear life. The way it was acquired directly from the artist by Henry Persche; 1987 was the 20th year since he began working as his studio assistant—was this an anniversary gift? Or just a little something to match the rug?

an ellsworth kelly drawing of a 26 yo white guy with short dark hair and deep charcoal eyes, a lightly sketched torso in a v-neck sweater, a more heavily sketched out crotch in tight pants, legs spread, combat boot top exposed on his left foot, reading a book in an otherwise blank page. the subject henry persche would soon be kelly's studio assistant around the time of this 1967 drawing, which is now in the brooklyn museum
Ellsworth Kelly, Henry Persche, graphite on paper, Feb. 7, 1967, 23 x 29 in., a gift from Persche to the Brooklyn Museum

Persche was 26 in February 1967 when he lounged for Kelly for this sketched portrait. He donated it, along with three other drawings, to the Brooklyn Museum in 2010. The rug, from a declared edition of 20, of which only four were ever realized, he also got in 1967-68. He only sold it in 2019.

Whither The Gem Relics of Piprahwa?

three framed arrangements of very small objects photographed against a black background. the left rectangular frame has several rows of carved or embossed gold fragments or sheets. the right rectangular frame has several rows of tiny beads, gems or precious stones. the center, square frame has a circular array of gems and stones, with a tripartite globular stone at the center. all these items were extracted from a reliquary containing what is believed to be part of the ashes of the buddha, excavated by a white british colonialist in the late 19th century, whose descendants are now, in may 2025, auctioning these most sacred buddhist relics at sothebys hk
the relics of Piprahwa Stupa, extracted, framed and consigned to Sotheby’s HK for sale 7 May 2025

I’m trying to modulate the moral, ethical, and spiritual effrontery associated with the upcoming auction at Sotheby’s Hong Kong of a collection of around 300 sacred Buddhist relics which were extracted from the bones and ashes of a person believed to be Siddhartha Gautama. They are being sold by the descendants of the British colonist who excavated the Piprahwa Stupa in Uttar Pradesh in 1898, an Ashokan-era gravesite that some scholars argue was created to hold the eighth portion of the Buddha’s remains given to his Shakya clan after his cremation.

 The Buddhist practice of relic, or śarīra, worship holds that visiting relics of the Buddha gives merit, but also that offerings of carved and natural gems, beads, gold, and other precious objects become “contact relics” by being mixed in with the Buddha’s remains. The Sotheby’s lot essay reads like a legal brief arguing for these objects’ unparalleled religious and historic significance, while also laying out the case against the extractive colonialism that stripped them from their religious context:

The first contact relic to be revered was the clay pot retained by Brahmin Drona after the subdivisions. Gem relics donated as relic offerings by Buddhists seeking merit, became contact relics after being mixed in with the bone relics of Shakyamuni Buddha. For Buddhist pilgrims, to visit the sacred landscape of places where the Historical Buddha had passed through and lived was also as much a part of this cult of relic worship as the veneration of relics themselves.

Continue reading “Whither The Gem Relics of Piprahwa?”

We The People Are Really In It Now

an 11-ft long section of the cheek, right eye, brow, and hairline of the statue of liberty sits on a concrete floor, one of 260 or so segments made of hammered copper for danh vo. this one is selling at sothebys in may 2025
Danh Vo, We The People (Detail), 2011-16, hammered copper [and?], 110 x 338 x 229 cm, selling 16 May 2025 at Sotheby’s

We’ve all been reading the condition report every day, and We, The People are in rough shape at the moment. But if I were bidding, I’d ask for a condition report for this fragment of We The People (detail), too. Because in one of the Sotheby’s photos, the Statue of Liberty’s face looks fine, and in the other it looks like there’s some delamination going on under the copper sheeting.

As far as these things go, this is a really great fragment, but ngl, Danh Vo’s project felt a lot better when it was more conceptual and less documentary.

16 May 2025 Lot 567, Danh Vo, We The People (Detail), 2011-16 [update: sold for $508,000 vs an estimate of $180-250,000, so I guess the condition wasn’t a dealbreaker] [sothebys]

Green and Red

a vertically oriented painting on paper by ellsworth kelly titled green and red is a green bulbous form like a water tower, surrounded by a rectangle of red. brushstrokes are evident all over, showing a give and take between the two areas of color, and a couple of tiny gaps of blank paper as well, selling at sothebys in may 2025
Ellsworth Kelly, Green and Red, 1964, oil on Arches, 30×22 in. or so, selling [UPDATE: or not] 16 May 2025 at Sotheby’s

I liked it well enough for itself, but after arguing with the Sotheby’s essay in my head over what’s actually going on in this Ellsworth Kelly oil on paper, I love it even more.

It mentions “a single, vibrant and amorphous green form set against a flat, saturated red ground,” and says “The green shape, defined by sweeping, confident brushstrokes, floats within the field of red with a quiet, commanding presence.” Yet it feels like there is neither a ground or a field to float on. These two colors and the forms they make are side by side on a sheet of paper.

The visible brushstrokes absolutely do reveal how Kelly made the picture, how there might be a bit over overlap of green on red paint along the right side, but also how the vertical strip where the slightly angular green neck goes was narrowed with red. Rather than surrounding a form, or coloring in a void, it feels like Kelly made the picture as a whole.

It’s got borders like a print, too, which echoes the series of lithographs he was making for Galerie Maeght at the time. It also seems Kelly held onto this until 2007.

16 May 2025, lot 323, Ellsworth Kelly, Green and Red, 1964 [update: did not sell] [sothebys]

The Clip-On Method, p. 186

a photograph of a cady noland catalogue on a wooden table. the book is open to page 186, which is filled by a single 1991 work, SLA Group Photo with Floating Head, a distorted image of a group of white people in black posed with the seven headed snake logo of the symbionese liberation army behind them like a princess amidala headdress, only the face of the person whose head is lined up with the logo has been crudely cut out, leaving a void, and the face is stuck into the upper left corner. this whole messy composition was screenprinted onto a sheet of aluminum, which is now, in may 2025, for sale at sothebys
SLA Group Photo with Floating Head, 1991, paint and silkscreen on aluminum, 75 1/2 x 60 5/8 in., formerly of the Sammlung Goetz, yet another private museum which started offloading stuff, illustrated in what is now being used as Cady Noland’s de facto catalogue raisonné

Instead of posting an artist disclaimer on a work for sale, Sotheby’s just cites its appearance in the artist’s book, and the four three museums, public and private—and whatever Peter Brant is doing—which hold other variations on the work. Whatever else is going on in the world, we do live in a Golden Age of Cady Noland Marketing.

16 May 2025, lot 529: Cady Noland, SLA Group Shot With Floating Head, 1991 [sothebys]

For Your Jasper Johns Tablescape

a dinner plate printed with a round jasper johns pastel drawing from 2001 of two stylized heads hanging from stems of a leafy green treebranch. the left head is light purple with a central blush of orange, a distorted picasso head. the right is a yellow/orange optical illusion of a young and old woman's faces. 150 of these plates will be sold in two weeks in may 2025, most at an art fair, to raise money for the coalition for the homeless
Jasper Johns, Artist Plate Project, 2025, via Artware

I gotta say, I did not expect to see Jasper Johns in the Artist Plate Project. But as Benjamin Godsill was telling APP organizer Michelle Hellman in the latest episode of Nota Bene, this year is full of bangers.

This is the fifth year that Hellman has put together a collection of artist-designed plates whose sale benefits the Coalition for the Homeless in NYC, and it is remarkable. Once the APP began debuting the plates at art fairs, they’ve taken on a wild, competitive philanthropic eshopping energy.

This year there are fifty plates, each in an edition of 150, with the first 100 reserved for the opening day of Frieze NY. The rest will go on sale the following week at Artware Editions. The plates are just $250 each, about the price of a lunch at an art fair. [Artware also has some previous years’ plates, including individually signed plates, and a couple of complete sets, no waiting.]

a round jasper johns pastel drawing from 2001 comprises two stylized heads hanging from stems of a leafy green treebranch. the left head is light pinkish purple, a distorted picasso head. the right is a yellow/orange optical illusion of a young and old woman's faces. via matthew marks gallery
Jasper Johns, Untitled, 2001, pastel on paper, 25 1/2 inches diameter, via Matthew Marks Gallery

What’s wild about Johns is not that he did it, but that he had a tondo drawing ready for instant plate adaptation. Johns had used both the Picassoid head and wife/mother-in-law optical illusion in many works for years; having them sprout surreally from a tree branch, in a round pastel? Not so much. But he showed this picture in the 10th anniversary drawings show at Matthew Marks at the end of 2001.

Oh wait, actually he did not. That is an entirely different work—same motif, different object. When the Marks drawing turned up at auction in 2015, it had an uncharacteristically full essay, especially for a day sale, with a surprisingly full discussion of Johns’ references.

Édouard Manet Ring Light

an albumin print of a photo of manet's olympia depicts the painting of a nude white model lounging on a divan with her left hand over her crotch, and a black model dressed as a maid standing behind her with a large bouquet of flowers
albumin print of Anatole Godet’s photo of Manet’s Olympia, c. 1865-68, 20×30 cm, mounted in an album dated 1872 in the Bibliotheque national de France

In the latest Irving Sandler Essay in The Brooklyn Rail, artist Alexi Worth lays out a fascinating theory about the revulsion contemporary critics expressed about Manet’s Olympia when they first saw it at the Salon in 1865: they were confounded by Manet’s depiction of full frontal lighting. Worth extends his observation from a 1971 essay about the “lantern gaze,” in which Michel Foucault reads Manet’s paintings as lit from where the viewer—and before that, the painter—stood:

Why was frontal light invisible—or uninteresting—to scholars? One reason is simple: Manet himself never “authorized” the topic. A secretive artist, Manet left few records, and never said a word about his reliance on frontal light. But Manet’s silence is only half the explanation. Perhaps more important, frontal lighting just seems unremarkable. Familiar. Normal. All of us, scholars and non-scholars alike, are habituated to bright frontal light. We see it all around us: in the faces of fashion models and TV anchors, in images by Andy Warhol or Nan Goldin, or for that matter in any flash-lit photograph.

“You could say,” Worth goes on, “to put it too simply, that frontal lighting looks like early Manet.” I’ll try to remember this the next million times I can’t unsee the ring lights reflected in the eyes of every youtuber and influencer.

Olympia‘s Wrongness, by Alexi Worth [brooklynrail.org]
Previously, related: On the first photographs of Manet’s Olympia
Previous Sandler Essay, unfortunately relevant: On Art & Autocracy

James Lee Byars AMA

a lacquered bronze sculpture the size of a medium melon and the shape of a junior mint sits on a white pedestal against a white featureless background, an auction photo of a james lee byars sculpture sold in 2013 by Wright, of Chicago
James Lee Byars, no title, no date, lacquered bronze, 5 x 10 1/2 x 9 1/2 in., image via Wright20

As I was thinking of ephemerality, handmade paper, and Japan, and artists who should have been asked to make an Art Kite for Lufthansa in the 1980s, who should drift into view but James Lee Byars.

And as I was looking to see if Byars ever made a kite, I stumbled upon this sculpture of lacquered bronze. It’s melon-sized, 10 x 9 inches, but only half that high, flattened, like a giant Junior Mint. In a sculptural oeuvre full of marble, gold leaf, handblown glass and giant spheres, it is not the most remarkable object.

But what a history. It has been around. It was in the collection of Robert Mapplethorpe. Then in 1989, while the AIDS crisis and rightwing attacks on the arts—and on Mapplethorpe—raged, it was sold at Christie’s by the artist’s estate. And it was acquired by the American Medical Association. What its existence was like at the AMA is a mystery. Was it in the president’s office? On a pedestal? In a nook? In a closet? What we can know, presumably, is that after a couple of decades, someone looked at this giant, bronze Junior Mint and decided the organization would rather have $10,000. So they sold it at Wright, the local auction house in Chicago—where it actually brought in $31,250. Which probably left them feeling pretty good about their decision. No word on it since.

RTFM: FG-T @NPG/AAA BTS

a white hand holds a small white hardcover book with a silver foil mirror-like cover to take its picture, the dude's other hand, black iphone case, and tie dye bandaid on one finger tip all reflecting in the cover. along with a light string, not turned on. behind the book, is an array of reflective facsimiles of manet paintings, and one bagged facsimile of a felix gonzalez torres puzzle. the book is felix gonzalez-torres: final revenge (a workbook), published by the national portrait gallery and the archives of american art in 2025. the hands are mine.

There is a book. I did not know there is a book. I’ve visited the Felix Gonzalez-Torres show at the National Portrait Gallery & Archives of American Art multiple times and have written about it even more, and I did not know there was a book. I fixated on Felix’s “Untitled” text portrait in both its installed versions, and wondered how the Smithsonian’s curators made them, and I picked through the history of this and other text portraits, and wrote a whole-ass blog post about it, and I didn’t know there was a book.

Reader, there is a book, and it is literally about all of that. In Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Final Revenge (A Workbook), co-curators Josh T. Franco and Charlotte Ickes wrote a whole essay on their experience and process of creating the versions of “Untitled” they’ve showed. Along the way, they fill out many key aspects of Felix’s work, from its changing history to its changing present.

Continue reading “RTFM: FG-T @NPG/AAA BTS”