The wild thing is that there was possibly as much as an entire decade in which Christopher Wool might have known that Ivanka Trump had bought one of his prints, and he might have just thought, “lol weird but whatever.”
And if he just stayed silent during the first administration, when Ivanka was in the White House, but the print wasn’t in her instagram feed, he could have just clammed up and let Richard Prince do all the disavowing.
But now, with her tryna be just a pensive bookfluencer in her DWR chair, dropping her reading list, while her civilian husband cuts a side deal with Putin her dad just [gestures to all this], does Wool feel a little different about his screenprinted exploration of the meaning of abstract painting being used as a backdrop for the regime? Or is it just par for the course? [@crampell.bsky.social via @chrisrusak.com]
[one google search later: oh right, we’ve all known since 2016. I guess Wool just decided to walk the Marfa desert and collect barbed wire about it.]
Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, exhibition catalogue cover, via Artists Space
Today is World AIDS Day.
In 1989 the National Endowment for the Arts canceled a grant for an exhibition at Artists Space of artists responding to the AIDS crisis. Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing was organized by Nan Goldin, and the catalogue contained essays by Goldin, Linda Yablonsky, Cookie Mueller, and David Wojnarowicz. The Wojnarowicz essay’s political, non-artistic content, was the initial stated reason for the cancellation of the grant.
Artists Space has an extensive archive of the show, including the entire catalogue, and reporting and documentation of the NEA censorship scandal that engulfed it. David Wojnarowicz’s published statement about the grant cancellation is read here by a computer-generated voice.
Wolfgang Tillmans, The Cock (Kiss), 2002, inkjet, 205 x 135 cm, also a 24 x 20 in. edition.
Wolfgang Tillmans’ photograph, The Cock (Kiss), 2002, was vandalized during an exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in 2007, but the first mention I can find of the attack wasn’t until 2011, when Tillmans gave a lecture at the Royal Academy:
This photograph (The Cock (Kiss), 2002) of two guys kissing got slashed by a visitor at the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington. I’m always aware that one should never take things for granted, never take liberties for granted. For hundreds and hundreds of years this was not normal, not acceptable, and this term of acceptable is really what I connect beauty to. So, sometimes I’m said to be turning everyday subject matter into beautiful things, and I find that a bit uncritical, unless it is connected to that beauty is of course always political, as in it describes what is acceptable or desirable in society. That is never fixed, and always needs reaffirming and defending.
The attack on The Cock (Kiss) has become part of the picture’s lore, repeatedwell beyond Tillmans’ own mentions. The image was shared widely online as a defiant response to the 2016 Pulse nightclub murders, something Tillmans’ publisher Phaidon wrote about within days of the shootings. In 2022 writer Douglas Stuart spoke with Tillmans about the photo, and the attack:
TILLMANS: I put it in my first American museum survey exhibition that toured from Chicago to Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., where the picture was attacked, slashed by somebody with a key, ripped. It came as a shock. But I’ve always been struck by the fact that you can show two men killing each other at three in the afternoon in any country in the world on public television, but you can’t show two men kissing each other.
STUART: Certainly, it’s an image that has been a call for solidarity and defiance in the queer community. It was an image that was actually so central to the writing of my book.
Stuart took inspiration from one of the The Cock (Kiss) kissers for a character in his YA novel, Young Mungo, both as a sweaty symbol of gay liberation and as an object of homophobic attack.
When homophobia seemed resurgent this past summer, the Smithsonian was being newly threatened, and beautiful things again needed defending, Tillmans mentioned the incident on Instagram. He said it was slashed, and removed from the show. I realized that though I’d seen the show multiple times, written about it, and even partied with Tillmans and the curators after the opening, I’d heard nothing at the time about the slashing, and remembered no public reporting on it, or even on the removal of a prominent work. Indeed, it seems it was never made public until Tillmans made it public.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which co-organized the Hirshhorn’s Tillmans show with the Hammer Museum, owns an edition of The Cock (Kiss). Was it the one attacked? There’s only an edition of 3+ 1AP. Is one lost? I wanted to look more closely into the attack, and the museum’s response to it. So I went into the exhibition files in the Smithsonian Archives.
Glenn Ligon, Condition Report, 2000, iris prints and screenprint, each sheet 32 x 22 3/4 in., ed. 20+ 7 APs, and 2 PPs, the National Gallery of Art’s is AP5, and they have the painting
It took a lot of effort to not include it, but despite making the absolute best condition report-related artwork ever, Glenn Ligon really did not need to be dragged into a discussion of Ron Perelman’s art collection lawsuit.
The only reason I wouldn’t run into a burning house to save Condition Report (2000) is because it’s an edition of 20. But if you told me I could keep it, I would probably change.
These went almost instantly into museum collections. I am pretty sure Perelman didn’t get one. But the NGA wins, because they also have the original: the enamel painting Ligon made of the garbage workers protest sign he saw hanging in Congressman Charlie Rangel’s Harlem office as a student. He discussed all three works in 2013.
I went back to the National Gallery of Art today just to photograph the two major lighting WTF going on right now, but also to celebrate the return of Ellsworth Kelly’s Tiger, an early multi-canvas masterpiece from 1953. The work had suddenly disappeared from the 2023 Ellsworth Kelly show at Glenstone, without a word of explanation.
In completely unrelated news, I remember a few weeks ago talking with one of the conservators at the NGA who said how much Ellsworth loved the Gallery, and had even left a bunch of money to research the conservation of contemporary paintings. Which is good, because [counting Tiger as one,] they have 24 Kelly canvases.
Back to the photo, which also shows Lighting Situation #1, or 1-3: a gallery of three white hot Dan Flavin Tatlin Monuments throwing my ccd out of whack.
Which is fine. But there is a white walled gallery next to it, filled with white paintings. That is a Barnett Newman on the left, The Name II, 1950, very rarely seen. There’s also a Mary Corse, Robert Ryman, Freddy Rodriguez, and an Anne Truitt.
Truitt’s white acrylic and pencil on gessoArundel XI painting suffers the worst. My phone camera is doing a lot of work here, and the painting is still almost unseeable.
You know, to see these photos of Lighting Situation #2, Yellow Gallery, I feel like I’m being a noodge; they really do seem to color correct a lot, even presenting the range of yellows Christo, Truitt, USCO, Kusama, and Mangold used.
Even Olafur’s got two different yellows, in the door and the orb. But it truly is the orb yellow that becomes a collaborator with every other work in the room; it’s really palpable. There is a similar circular pedestal being set up on the mezzanine right now; I wonder what they’ll hang above that one?
I really feel like I can see how these installations came together; the way the curators thought through the challenging situations these light-based objects present; and the factors that brought them to this spot in the first place. And it’s good to remember we really are all going through some stuff right now, as a city, a capital, a nation, and a world.
installation view of Isa Genzken, New Works, Spring 2005 at David Zwirner Gallery, NYC
Träumendes Kind (Dreaming Baby), 2004, stood at the center of Isa Genzken’s first show with David Zwirner in New York, in the spring of 2005. Topped with a twig broom, a mighty bundle of sticks, some precariously shoved-together vases, a spraypainted baby, and a giant Halloween spider, it was the shaggiest of the nine messy, totemic sculptures that dominated the show. It’s probably where Hirshhorn curator Anne Ellegood saw it, but it’s not clear when she decided to include it and five other similar Genzkens in her 2006 survey exhibition of contemporary sculpture, The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas.
Traumendes Kind [minus the umlaut] was discussed at length in the show’s catalogue, where Ellegood celebrated “artists’ willingness to allow their work to suggest both a coming together and a falling apart.” And works whose “visible awkwardness or indeterminateness may take on structural manifestations in terms of delicacy, precariousness, and the periodic use of inherently unstable materials.” Yes, about that, actually,
In mid-October, a couple of weeks before the show, the Hirshhorn folks opened a large crate shipped from New York, and they found half the Genzken was missing. It turns out the mirror- and cherub-wrapped pedestal was in its own crate that didn’t make the trip. More importantly for this post, the half that did arrive was in pieces, rolling around on the bottom of the crate.
While looking for something else in the Hirshhorn archives I stumbled across the documentation of the resolution of Träumendes Kind‘s trauma: a thick folder of unredacted back & forth with the lender—gallerist Tim Nye, actually almost all of it was with his assistant—and Hirshhorn conservators, registrars, and curators, with occasional reply all’d interjections from the David Zwirner team and the Christian Scheidemann, contemporary art’s go-to conservator. It’s the kind of thing that happens all the time, but even for a show about sculptural uncertainty, it almost never gets mentioned or discussed in public. In this case, though, it’s all preserved for the nation by the Smithsonian.
tl;dr the sculpture’s fine ($35,000) and Nye’s fine ($30,000), but here’s what happened:
I still remember standing in front of Wolfgang Tillmans’ Concorde Grid as Andrea Rosen sold the last complete set to some art adviser from Paris who’d started talking to her before I did, and I was offered a few loosies, at unbundled prices. I got the book instead. But now I wonder if I should just YOLO it and make some.
While researching something else in the Hirshhorn’s archives recently, I stumbled across the museum staff’s correspondence with Tillmans and his gallerists about their acquisition of a Concorde Grid edition in 2006.
Actually, it was about designing the lighting for the Hirshhorn’s 2007 Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition, because conservators stipulated a lower light level than the artist wanted, in order to protect the museum’s new acquisition. But no worries, it turns out Tillmans had also provided an exhibition copy in addition to the “original,” 10-year-old C-prints, so just go ahead and turn up the lights, blast those suckers!
“[Tillmans] feels that implicit in the terms of the acquisition was the idea that the exhibition copy could be shown at light levels that he prefers to show his work,” wrote a curator to a conservator.
Which reminds me of something I’d heard Tillmans say before, that collectors of his unframed prints get the media file and a certificate of authenticity, and are able to reprint it as needed. He was talking about his large-scale prints, but I wonder if that applies for his smaller unframed works, too? Or maybe just to Concorde Grid, because it’s at once both large and small? Actually, re-reading this now, reprinting requires the destruction and return of the original print, so this is actually handled differently from an exhibition print. Also, MoMA stipulates two identical color prints whenever a work enters their collection, so maybe it’s nbd after all. nvm
The title is a reference to the working title of Lips’ own multiyear research project, begun while he was a promising, young anthropologist in Cologne who was made director of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in 1928: “How The Black Man Looks At The White Man.” Lips had collected depictions of European colonizers by indigenous people across Africa, North America, and Oceania, the source material for a counter-narrative of the civilizing myths of white supremacy.
In 1933 Lips was forced out by nazis who worked for months with complicit colleagues of his to seize control of his research. He smuggled it and his wife out of Germany, through France, and to the US, where his book was published in 1938 with the title, The Savage Hits Back. Though happy to dunk on nazis, the US anthropology world didn’t seem to receptive to his anti-racist take, and ignored or took issue with discrepancies in his interpretations. Still, Harper & Scher make a case for Lips as an important progenitor of anti-colonialist theory.
The Savage Hits Back is on the Internet Archive in a nearly illegible scan. His former museum in Cologne did an exhibition revisiting Lips work in 2018, which might be the same show that turned up at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2019 as Spectral-White. Wait, no, this is not right. Harper & Scher’s first footnote is a big vague/wrong about this sequence of events.Anna Brus staged a symposium, “The Savage Hits Back Revisited,” in Cologne, at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, in February 2016. Brus also co-curated the show, Spektral-Weiss, at HKW in 2019. The publication Brus edited, which accompanied the show, was The Savage Hits Back Revisited: Art and Alterity in the Colonial Encounter, and I assume it was the proceedings of the 2016 symposium.
The Julius Lips pullquote for the HKW exhibition, “All that is needed to caricature an oppressor is to portray him exactly as he is.” sounds like the kind of thing that could drive nazis berserk all over again, even today.
Bookforum recently emailed some links to read up on in advance of its Fall 2025 issue. On the list: Gene Seymour’s Summer 2017 review of James Baldwin: The FBI File, William J. Maxwell’s deep dive into the declassified records of the FBI’s most extensive surveillance of a Black writer. Maxwell would know, after publishing a survey of the US government’s investigations of Black literary figures in 2015, F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature.
What stuck out from Maxwell’s second book is Baldwin’s response to discovering in 1963 that he and the Civil Rights Movement leaders in Selma, Alabama were all being monitored by the FBI, surveilled by agents of their own country’s government, but not protected when other agents of the state attacked them. Baldwin announced, publicly and repeatedly, that his bestselling novel, Another Country (1962), his next book was going to be about Hoover and the FBI, and their central role in America’s “race problem.”
There’s evidence throughout the book that Baldwin gave back to the FBI as good as he got, baiting the easily baitable Hoover by declaring in a 1963 television interview that the director “was part of the problem in the civil rights movement.”
The book obviously didn’t happen, but it’s not clear whether Baldwin ever meant for it to, either. Was he actually was working on the book, titled The Blood Counters, or did he use the looming possibility of such an exposé as a taunt and a feint for his FBI adversaries? Maxwell traces the documentation of the FBI’s frantic efforts to find out, and to, if possible, prevent its publication.
Maxwell seems to make as much effort to present The Blood Counters as a conceptual vaporware meant to bait Hoover personally as he does on the idea that this far-reaching surveillance, involving dozens of agents and even more informants reporting from wherever Baldwin traveled or spoke, was actually a personal contest of wills between these two men. It might, in retrospect, be more useful to look at how many eager collaborators the FBI found in New York’s publishing industry, and what actual books they successfully spiked, or writers they successfully silenced.
Maxwell notes a diminished output for Baldwin in 1964, which may have represented lost work on The Blood Counters. Or maybe it was just the stress of living under government surveillance. The Blood Counters was the story Baldwin had to tell in order to live, but it’s not clear if he was telling it to himself, or just to his official menacers.
And now this all feels remarkably quaint and humane in the face of an unresrained digital dragnet that logs your DMs and knows exactly how far you haven’t gotten in your Google Docs draft.
correspondents have heard Bowie, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Andrea Bocelli, and “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables. The music is still playing.
While the National Museum of the American Latino is in development, a dense exhibition tracing the Latino history of America is being presented in the Molina Family Latino Gallery on the ground floor of the National Museum of American History. The largest object in the show is a tiny boat the size of a cold plunge, made of pitch-covered styrofoam scraps. In July 1992 the US Coast Guard rescued two Cuban men in this boat on the open sea. In Summer 1994 tens of thousands of Cubans fled for the U.S. on homemade balsa wood rafts, and “Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Traveling” opened at the Hirshhorn Museum. In September, as politicians debated the fate of 20,000 Cuban balseros intercepted at sea and detained at Guantanamo, this boat went on view at the Anacostia Community Museum in a show titled, “Black Mosaic: Community, Race and Ethnicity among Black Immigrants in Washington, DC.” It then entered the Smithsonian’s collection. The current administration is also demanding the cancellation of the National Museum of the American Latino.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled”, 1991, offset print on paper, endless copies, collection: Walker Art Center
[I checked, and Gonzalez-Torres’s paper stack, “Untitled” (1991) with an image of the open sea that looked uncannily similar to the installation of this raft at the Smithsonian, was not included in the Hirshhorn’s 1994 exhibition. It was on view in 1994 at the Walker, though, and in Felix’s 1995 Guggenheim retrospective. It has never been exhibited in Washington, D.C.]
Now Hyperallergic reports that on July 20th, a couple of weeks after I filed my piece, and barely a week after the Regents meeting where Chancellor Lonnie Bunch acceded to JD Vance’s demands for an improper ideology review of the Smithsonian’s shows, and four months before it was scheduled for reinstallation, the Molina gallery was closed.
Hispanic conservatives in 2023 had already used fundraising threats to force the Latino Museum to change the 2025 exhibit from a history of Latino civil rights to a celebration of salsa music. With nine months to install it, I expect it’ll be one helluva show.
Luis Jiménez, Man on Fire, 1969, fiberglass in acrylic urethane resin, like 9 ft tall, installed in “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum”
In June I did a whirlwind survey of almost all the museums, art and otherwise, in Washington, D.C., and wrote about it for ARTnews. It’s in their latest print issue, and it just dropped online.
For a series of museums I’ve been visiting for years, it was a repeatedly revelatory experience. Luis Jiménez’s Man on Fire is a case in point, a stunning sculpture that stands between the columns of the Smithsonian’s Old Patent Building at the flaming center of “The Shape of Power,” the first exhibition singled out for criticism in a presidential executive order.
And I felt the urgency of the decades and centuries of work, both in art and history, and in the museums’ presentation, study, and care of these objects. We’ll get a more perfect union yet, but let’s not destroy the imperfect one we have on the way.
Jasper Johns, Untitled (from the Artists for Obama portfolio), 2008, etching and aquatint, 8 x 20 cm image, 21 x 30 cm sheet, ed. 13/150, selling as a loosie on 3 Sept 2025 at LA Modern [kinda wild that such a low edition number was broken up for parts]
Whoops, missed another one. I might have to check all the benefit print portfolios Johns contributed to in the last 30 years, to see if there are any more little guys out there.
Meanwhile, these little guys are in a little print—just 8 x 20 cm, smaller, even than the Ellsworth Kelly print in the same Artists for Obama portfolio.
Jasper Johns, detail, Untitled (from the Artists for Obama portfolio), this little scene is like 5 x 5 cm
And they’re pretty lyrically drawn, too. No stamps here. I assume those are pens in their hands, encouraging people to register to vote.
Louise Bourgeois, I do, 2010, digital print and embroidery on textile, 16 x 12 in.,ed. 199/300+35 AP, unframed, sold at Phillips in 2022 [h/t to @thelegendaryhitchhiker]
On May 11, 2010, Freedom To Marry announced the release of I do, an edition by Louise Bourgeois, which the artist donated to raise $300,000 for the campaign to recognize gay marriage in the United States.
The kid of MOCAT painting Free Palestine on her mural at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, image: Bruce Guthrie via NPR
The Museum of the Contemporary American Teenager (MOCAT) is an art and culture program initiated by a teacher in Montgomery County, MD, which operates at American University, the Kennedy Center, and the Smithsonian.
For this year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall, MOCAT artists painted a mural of teen life and teen issues. It included protest signs that mentioned the climate crisis, the immigrant crisis, the gun crisis, and Free Palestine. One of these was anti-Semitic hate speech, a Smithsonian official told the teen artist, who is Jewish, and who disagreed.
MOCAT Mural with Smithsonian Tarp, Folklife Festival 2025, image: Léda Pelton via NPR
The next day, the MOCAT crew arrived on the Mall and found their entire mural covered with tarps by the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian said they were doing it to protect the kids from angry mobs, which the kids said, “maybe we are not the problem in that situation.” The Smithsonian said the mural violated the no politics policy MOCAT had agreed to, though the document they cited was only distributed two days after the festival began. The MOCAT folks want the mural for educational purposes, but the Smithsonian claims ownership of it, so I guess it was a work-for-hire situation. Or work-for-exposure.
This all happened at the beginning of July, but only hit NPR the other day. So I feel like we should have a lot more clarity over what happened and why. What we do know is that in the three weeks since, Israel has continued starving and killing Palestinians in Gaza while governments in the West throw a tarp over it and walk away.
