Artists Working In Uncommon Media

 

[Readers of Rick On Theater will know that I have an interest in the visual arts.  I’ve posted many articles, both by me and by others, including a number from published sources, on art from one perspective or another.  I’m often fascinated by innovative and experimental art, work that’s groundbreaking and daring—even if I don’t always like the results.  Just as I am with theater, I’m taken with artists who devise new ways to express themselves with new media or new techniques.

[Recently, I read two pieces in the New York Times’ monthly style magazine, T, about artists working with materials that are, not unique, but also not mainstream.  One works with cloth and thread, though he’s not a tapestry artist or a needlepointer.  The other’s a sculptor who work with lighted tubes of neon.  I say “works with” and not “works in” because he incorporates the neon tubes in his sculptures with other elements—though the tubes and the light they emit are the most dynamic components of the sculpture.

[In both cases, I hope, you’ll see what got my attention—and piqued my imagination.  Maybe these artists and their work will intrigue you a little, too.] 

“Out of Whole Cloth”
by Siddhartha Mitter 

[The article below was published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine on 27 September 2026.  It was posted to the paper’s website as “What Happens When a Painter Abandons Paint?” on 10 September 2026.]

Eric N. Mack has created a singular style of painting by forgoing paint altogether and using fabric instead.

The artist Eric N. Mack [b. 1987], known for his abstract fabric assemblages, works in a simple studio in an office building turned creative hub in Manhattan’s financial district. When I visited in early June, I found the room packed with textiles — piles of colorful remnants, gauzy lengths unrolled on the floor and racks of clothing, some of Mack’s own design. A heavy-duty Singer sewing machine held the center of a cluttered worktable. Out the window, we could see the South Street Seaport at a distance, the ship sails echoing Mack’s fabrics.

Mack, 39, identifies as a painter — and trained as one in art school at Cooper Union, and later at Yale. Back then, he was already challenging the norms of the field, painting onto unusual surfaces like blankets and drop cloths and setting them up as sculptures; for almost a decade now, he’s used fabric and thread, not paints and brushes, to make his marks. His assemblages can stretch over metal frames or hang off lines and free-standing armatures, or cascade in bright hues across, say, a museum atrium, making the space itself a sculpture of light. When we met in the studio, he was preparing his exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea that opens today [You Red The Shirt Off My Back, 10 September-24 October 2026]. Pinned to the wall were works he was making, including some for the show: Each was a kind of collage, joining small segments of many different shapes and patterns and materials, stitched and layered into irregular forms.

[Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art on Cooper Square in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

[Chelsea is a neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan. The area’s boundaries are roughly 14th Street to the south, the Hudson River to the west, 6th Avenue to the east, and 34th Street to the north. In the 1980s, the area began to attract restaurants and nightclubs and, in the ’90s. art galleries focusing on the most contemporary artists and works.]

One of a cohort of young Black artists to appear in the early 2010s with fresh ideas and cross-disciplinary tendencies, Mack received institutional recognition almost immediately, participating in an influential group show of emerging artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2012 [Fore, 11 November 2012-10 March 2013]. His work was in the 2019 Whitney Biennial [17 May-27 October 2019], and he had his first New York City solo exhibition that same year at the Brooklyn Museum [Lemme walk across the room, 11 January-4 August 2019]. He’s shown widely ever since.

[The Studio Museum is an African-American art museum in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan. Founded in 1968, the museum collects, preserves, and interprets art created by African Americans, members of the African diaspora, and artists from the African continent.]

His fabric works join a lineage of conceptual experiments that are based on painting while also shedding the medium, in part or in full. Among his touchstones are figures like Sam Gilliam [1933-2022; see “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin” (26 June 2011) and “Sam Gilliam (1933-2022): A Personal Tribute” (2 July 2022)], the great Black abstractionist who began draping his painted, unstretched canvases in the late 1960s; Robert Rauschenberg [1925-2008], the protean assemblage figure who made textile works in the 1970s; even [Vladimirov Javacheff] Christo [1935–2020; Bulgarian] and Jeanne-Claude [Denat de Guillebon; 1935-2009; Moroccan-born French national], with their wrapped buildings and monuments. This fall, he will also appear in “Hard Art,” an intergenerational show of 44 artists at MoMA PS1 [Long Island City, Queens; 5 November 2026-8 March 2027] that traces the legacy of Black abstract painters, including Gilliam, Mary Lovelace O’Neal [American; 1942-2026], Joe Overstreet [American; 1933-2019] and more, across many media. (And a large-scale installation by Mack is on view at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky. [Rare Essence, 27 May-29 November 2026], responding to the building’s architecture, through Nov. 29.)

But Mack finds equal inspiration in street and high fashion, and in the histories of quilting and the domestic arts. How fabric is made and traded, and with whose labor; how it is worn on the body; how it is kept or reused: All this, for him, infuses the material down to the snippet. This concentrated potential keeps Mack trawling fabric and remnant shops, visiting markets and artisans on his travels and accepting the miscellaneous batches of fabric that friends think he might want to use. It has led him to focus his practice. Where he once employed different methods — readymades, ornamentation, photo transfer, magazine-page collage — he has pared his priorities to fabric, space and form. The result is a distinctive visual language, sensitive to fabric’s social and emotional life, how a remnant can marshal a memory; how a pattern comes with a story embedded in it. Unlike paint, Mack told me, fabric can “also talk about time and fragility.” He added: “I like that about textile. It’s something that I’ve wanted painting to be able to do, which is why I’ve conceptually fused them.”

At the studio, I asked Mack to guide me through one of his works in progress. Pinned to the wall (and still untitled), the piece involved several dozen elements: a dynamic assembly of strips and squares of many colors, patterns and textures. The total work possessed the rough proportions of a dress — albeit one bizarrely confected, and then deconstructed by some centrifugal energy. Mack pointed out a rectangular section near the work’s top. It had bands of narrow stripes in shades of red, blue and green. He got it, he said, on Chongming Island, an outer district of Shanghai in China’s Yangtze River Delta, where women have woven homespun cotton for centuries.

As we continued to look over the piece, alighting on other fabric segments, it became a map of the artist’s sources. A lace section, for example: “I got this in Turin in a secondhand shop,” Mack said. An Indian-style, paisleylike print was purchased at a market in Rome, a bit of burlap at an ordinary home and garden store. A swath of linen came from Emblem Weavers, one of the surviving traditional suppliers in Ireland. “They gave me a lot of remnants that I’m still working with,” he said. And the larger rectangle, slightly frayed with loose threads hanging, in a tartan pattern anchoring the bottom of the work? “There’s a punk shop I go to in the East Village,” Mack said. “If it has a grid on it, I’ll get it. It felt like it kind of balanced everything out.”

[The East Village is a neighborhood on the East Side of Lower Manhattan. It’s roughly defined as the area east of the Bowery and Third Avenue, south of 14th Street, north of Houston Street, and west of the East River. The area has undergone many changes since the early 19th century, and today it’s a center of avant-garde and experimental culture and arts, including the visual arts, theater, music, and writing.]

A grammar was emerging, one that relied on a combination of history and intuition. The work’s energy — and also its control — dwelt in its torqued internal geometry, the way Mack positioned the patterned fabric pieces slightly off kilter. The artist often leaves deliberate gaps in his compositions that he likens to oculi or breezeways — “like the work is beginning to unmake itself,” he said. In the jagged edges, he was exposing the vulnerability of the material.

At the same time, all the reference points and different histories seem to create something familiar, a kind of connection between the work and the viewer. “People ask me if the viewers can touch the work,” he said. “And my answer is always that I think the viewers already know what it feels like. Because so many of the fabrics are so ubiquitous, you already can imagine, which ends up being a kind of sensorial overlay.”

Clothing and style are fodder for experiments that have landed along the spectrum between fashion and art. He’s collaborated in the past with the London-based streetwear designer Kiko Kostadinov [Bulgarian; b. 1989] and with Grace Wales Bonner [English; b. 1990], now the creative director of Hermès men’s wear. (When we met, Mack was dressed unassumingly in jeans and a Supreme jacket.) At one point, he was making “outfit collages,” incorporating full clothing pieces — trousers, windbreakers — into his scrap-and-remnant assemblages. Though there are fewer overt explorations of fashion in his work now than earlier in his career, the possibilities lurk. While we were looking at the patchwork piece we had analyzed on the studio wall, he said, “I think it may need to be worn.”

Mack grew up just outside of Washington, D.C., and his parents both worked at the National Gallery of Art — his father in exhibition installation, with a specialty in plexiglass vitrines, and his mother in the gallery archives. The family identified so much with the museum that they chose his middle name, Nathaniel, for its alliteration with “national.”

Mack’s father also owned a clothing store, so his son would either accompany him to the museum, where he roamed the galleries and watched him clean the vitrines — “with his personal proprietary solution”— or help out at the shop. These formative experiences built his awareness of not just art and fashion but “how close they were at times,” he said. “What people were wearing on the street, how culture moved through fashion — there was this progress where I was like, ‘Oh, I’m seeing this in real time.’”

Outside was the Black D.C. of the 1990s, rhythmed by go-go music, the stubbornly regional dance genre epitomized by bands like Rare Essence, Trouble Funk and other hyperlocal acts. “It was an interesting kind of cultural specificity, and it had its own resistance,” he said. “It just had such a flavor and feeling — really Black, but also just complex.”

He’s titled works and shows after D.C. locations or bands. How these memories filter into his art is abstract. “Just as I’m preserving an old piece of fabric in the middle of these newer materials, or thinking about simultaneous contrast, there’re these moments of culture that I want to compress into the work.”

Equally in the air for Mack, who attended an arts program in high school, was the local fine-art legacy — notably the Washington Color School [see “The Washington School of Color” (21 September 2014)] painters of the 1950s and ’60s, who sought a language of color on canvas using acrylic and methods like shaping and soaking. This group, plus offshoots, included Kenneth Noland [1924-2010; see “Morris Louis” (15 February 2010) and “Picasso, Bearden, Gilliam, and Gauguin” (26 June 2011)], who cut canvases into sculpted shapes; Morris Louis [see “Morris Louis”], who poured color on large unstretched canvases; and Gilliam, as well as the great Black painter Alma Thomas [American; 1891-1978], known for the bold rhythms and patterns of her abstract paintings. All were influences on Mack, he said.

Shortly after high school, he visited a Gilliam retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art [Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective (15 October 2005-22 January 2006); see “Awake and Sing!, et al.” (3 April 2017) and “Sam Gilliam (1933-2022): A Personal Tribute” (2 July 2022)], followed by one of Louis in 2007 at the Hirshhorn Museum [Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited (20 September 2007-6 January 2008)]. Later, he said, he realized that “these were bookends — these are saying so much, and they’re local artists who, unlike go-go, were really able to penetrate. They’re in museums all over the world.”

[The Corcoran Gallery of Art was an art museum in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1869, the Gallery closed on 28 September 2014 due to a prolonged economic shortfall. Its art school and building transferred to George Washington University and its collection was distributed to other public museums and institutions in Washington, primarily the National Gallery and the American University Museum.

[The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum in Washington. Opened to the public in 1974, it’s part of the Smithsonian Institution and focuses on contemporary and modern art, mainly on the post-World War II period.]

Mack has “an almost encyclopedic knowledge of all these artists and movements,” said the artist Abigail DeVille [American; b. 1981], whom he befriended at Yale. “I’ll show him a picture of a work in progress and he’ll have immediate references.” The artist Tomashi Jackson [American; b. 1980], a friend since Cooper Union who showed alongside him in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, said that anywhere Mack went, he always looked for the library. “He is a good-faith participant in art-historical lineage,” Jackson said. “As a maker, and then inside of our inherent responsibility to give it back.”

In the late winter of 2019, while Mack was preparing for the Biennial and had installations up at the Brooklyn Museum and the Serpentine gallery in London, he participated in a fourth show that is perhaps the one that most impacted him as an artist, even though its material trace has been lost. For the Desert X outdoor biennial in California, he draped billowing lengths of cloth over the plaza of an abandoned gas station just outside the town of Mecca [California], by the Salton Sea. The fashion house Missoni donated fabric. He titled the work “Halter.”

[Desert X is a site-specific, contemporary art exhibition that is held in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. The inaugural Desert X was held in 2017, and subsequent exhibitions have been held every two years. Desert X 2027 will take place from 30 October 2027 through 7 May 2028 and will mark 10 years since the inaugural exhibition.

[The Salton Sea is a shallow, landlocked, highly saline endorheic lake in Riverside and Imperial counties in Southern California. An endorheic or terminal lake is a body of water that doesn’t flow into an ocean or a sea and maintains its water level only by evaporation.]

One month into the exhibition, the work disappeared, leaving only bits of fabric and rope, apparently burned, in circumstances that have never been resolved. Speaking at the time to ArtNews, Neville Wakefield [English curator, b. 1963], the exhibition’s artistic director, said there was little to be done: “The beauty of the piece was that it was extremely fragile, ephemeral, diaphanous work. The fact that it has succumbed to its own fragility might add to the narrative.” The loss strengthened Mack’s resolve. All his pieces since then, he told me, “come in a continuum where they’re answering for the absence of that work.”

From this perspective, the outdoor work Mack showed last year at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Upper Manhattan was cathartic for the artist. The piece, titled “Cartouche” [2025], part of “Fishers of Men,” Mack’s solo exhibition at the academy [27 September 2025-8 February 2026], addressed the peculiar architectural setting: The mannered Beaux-Arts complex of Audubon Terrace — the grand dream of an early 20th-century philanthropist — dead-ends at the rear facades of two prewar apartment buildings more typical of Washington Heights [neighborhood in the northern part of the borough of Manhattan], with their fire escapes and water towers. Against this backdrop, Mack strung two parallel ropes and attached between them a billowing textile collage that stayed up through most of the winter. “This exposure to the elements — and being braced by the architecture — was ideal,” Mack said. From earlier New York artists, he added, he’s come around to the idea that “the city is a collaborator.”

[Audubon Terrace is a cultural complex comprising eight buildings in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. Developed for several cultural institutions between 1904 and 1930, Audubon Terrace was commissioned by Archer Milton Huntington (1870-1955; philanthropist and scholar). The complex is designated a New York City landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

[The site was originally part of the estate of John James Audubon (1785-1851; French-American artist, entrepreneur, naturalist, explorer, and ornithologist), which was later developed into the Audubon Park district. The first buildings were completed in 1907 for the Hispanic Society of America and the American Numismatic Society. Additional buildings were designed for the American Academy of Arts and Letters (AAAL), the American Geographical Society (AGS), the Heye Foundation's Museum of the American Indian (MAI), and Our Lady of Esperanza Church.

[In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the AGS, ANS, and MAI moved out. (The Museum of the American Indian, now a New York satellite of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, is located downtown at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House at 1 Bowling Green.) Boricua College, the Hispanic Society, and AAAL took over the other three institutions’ buildings; Boricua College itself moved out during 2026.]

When I asked Mack’s old school friend DeVille about him, she’d replied with a poetic note. “I think of Eric’s work not only as an extension of the body but as an ancient technology of place making,” it read in part. “It’s carving out a space of memory, loss, whimsy, dreaming as a poem or song.”

In the studio, Mack put his aspirations differently: “I think the way that I break through is with this kind of public address. This relationship to freedom. Taking these knowable formats and introducing these worlds that I don’t see as disparate at all.”

[Siddhartha Mitter writes about art and creative communities in the United States, Africa, and elsewhere.  Previously he wrote regularly for the Village Voice and the Boston Globe and he was a reporter for WNYC Public Radio.]

*  *  *  *
“Afterglow”
by M. H. Miller

[This report was also from T: The New York Times Style Magazine of 27 September 2026.  It was posted on the website on 21 September 2026 under the title “He Grew Up Without Electricity. Then He Became Obsessed With Neon Lights.”]

In the 1960s, the artist Stephen Antonakos developed a spiritual relationship with neon. Today, his preserved SoHo home and studio is a testament to the material's mysteries.

One evening in the late 1950s in New York City, the artist Stephen Antonakos [Greek-born; 1926-2013] left his West 29th Street studio and began to walk downtown toward his apartment. As the story goes, at some point during this walk he had a near-religious epiphany after seeing a restaurant’s neon sign. Neon wouldn’t have been an unfamiliar sight for Antonakos, who worked in advertising by day and at night made exuberant sculptures out of found materials like pillows or empty sardine tins. Back then, it was still a part of the urban landscape, though by the early ’70s it would begin to be replaced by more affordable and practical LED lighting. Having lived in New York since the 1930s — except for two years in the Army during World War II, when he was stationed in the Philippines — Antonakos grew up around neon icons like Radio City Music Hall and Katz’s Delicatessen. But it was as if he were seeing neon for the first time: the intensity of its color, the way its glow called attention to itself. He’d later describe the moment as finding “what I didn’t know I was looking for.”

[Katz’s Delicatessen is a Jewish deli (but not kosher) at the corner of Houston and Ludlow Streets on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Since its founding in 1888, it has been popular among locals and tourists alike for its pastrami on rye, which is considered among New York’s best. In 2016, Zagat gave Katz’s a food rating of 4.5 out of 5, and ranked it as the number one deli in New York City.]

Neon is a natural element (number 10 on the periodic table) that was discovered by British chemists at the end of the 19th century. In 1910, the French engineer Georges Claude [1870-1960] patented sealed glass tubes that combined neon with an electric current. Claude planned to sell his invention as lamps, but their intensity proved more useful in advertising; in 1925, a Packard car dealership in Los Angeles was one of the first businesses to install a neon sign. In the 1960s, neon had a powerful influence over American contemporary art. In addition to Antonakos, artists who worked with the material included Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali (another Greek American, who went by the mononym Chryssa [1933-2013]), Dan Flavin [American; 1933-96] and Bruce Nauman [American; b. 1941].

But few artists explored neon with a deeper affection than Antonakos, who treated it less as a material than a medium unto itself. He was the subject of numerous gallery and museum shows and made more than 55 large-scale public neon works in places ranging from the facade of a Tel Aviv power plant to a terminal at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Yet the greatest showcase of his art is at his home and studio on West Broadway in SoHo, where he lived and worked from 1967 until his death, at age 86, in 2013. The loft, which can be visited by appointment, has since been preserved by the artist’s second wife, Naomi Spector Antonakos [b. 1938 or ’39], now 87, who was born in Massachusetts and worked for several of the New York galleries that represented her husband. The two married in 1972, and the couple raised their daughter, Evangelia [b. 1975], now the head of the department of math and computer science at Bronx Community College, there. (Antonakos had a son from his first marriage, also named Stephen, who died in 2020.) The family slept in bedrooms scattered around the space, none of which had walls that reached the ceiling in order to maintain a continuous flow. Antonakos worked in the northwest corner of the loft, using a utilitarian drafting table and a metal desk, a section of its surface covered by a blue neon rectangle under frosted glass.

[SoHo, short for “South of Houston Street,” is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan. Formerly home to small factories, since the 1970s, the neighborhood has been the location of many artists’ lofts and art galleries and has also been known for its variety of shops ranging from trendy upscale boutiques to national and international chain store locations. Designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and declared a National Historic Landmark because many of the buildings incorporate cast-iron architectural elements.]

When he moved in, the 5,000-square-foot space was raw and virtually uninhabitable. There was no kitchen or even refrigerator. The bathroom was little more than a closet with a trough. SoHo, which had only recently acquired that name, was largely undeveloped, full of abandoned manufacturing spaces with high ceilings and large windows. Antonakos’s studio evolved alongside the neighborhood, where he and his wife became social fixtures, befriending other artists, including Robert Ryman [American; 1930-2019], Sol LeWitt [American; 1928-2007] and Richard Artschwager [American; 1923-2013]. The place came together, Naomi told me during a recent visit to the studio, based on “Stephen’s instinct. It’s very subtle and it’s just him.”

Antonakos was born in a village in southern Greece with no electricity, where natural light was taken seriously. “We can’t imagine the darkness,” Naomi said of her husband’s upbringing. “If there’s no moonlight, you cannot see your hand, much less your feet.” In interviews, Antonakos recalled how he’d sometimes lie awake in the early hours before dawn, waiting for the sun to arrive.

The center of his universe was the Greek Orthodox Church. “To enter the chapel was to enter another world,” he once wrote in an artist statement. “Being inside it was like being plunged deep inside my own feelings and finding a paradise at the same time.” When he was 4, his family (he was the youngest of four sons) moved to Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Later, they lived in a Greek enclave in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, near another Orthodox church that became vital to him. He remained very religious throughout his life: Near his worktable, he covered a small section of the wall with religious items.

Some of this iconography appeared explicitly in his work, most famously in 1965’s “The Blue Neon Cross,” a modified crucifix bisecting four differently colored neon squares. But more often his pieces display an almost primordial sense of minimalism. In one area of the studio is a scalene triangle in green neon; in another is a board painted solid white and backlit by blue neon. These suggest a rare confidence that the [art] critic David Ebony [American; b. ca. 1954] has described as a “what you see is what you get approach.” The art historian Irving Sandler [American; 1925-2018] called Antonakos “essentially a classicist in the Constructivist tradition” — his forms have no symbolism or meaning outside of themselves. Antonakos himself once explained his working method as “I place things in space.”

In the 1970s, he began designing free-standing rooms that incorporated neon pieces, but his process was always simple and straightforward, even as his neon works grew very large. He’d draw detailed, to-scale renderings of neon installations in colored pencil on brown paper. These plans would be sent to Spectrum on Broadway, a neon sign maker in Woodside, Queens, that was his chosen fabricator.

As an artist, Antonakos seemed to have little interest in the answers to big questions. What fascinated him more were the questions themselves — and materials, like neon, that sometimes seemed to elude interpretation altogether. In 1971, when he was teaching briefly in California, he wrote to friends in New York, asking them to each send him a package. He didn’t know what he’d been sent and never intended to open the packages, preserving the mystery. “I do not want to tell people how to experience art, mine or anyone else’s,” he once said. “I simply want to try to find for myself ways of putting things together visually so that the possibility for a kind of higher consciousness may occur.”

[M. H. Miller is the features director for T Magazine.  He’s a prominent journalist and editor who writes extensively on contemporary art, culture, and the historical evolution of New York City’s art scenes.

[Before joining the New York Times, Miller built a robust career as a culture journalist and editor.  His writing has appeared across several major literary, news, and art publications such as the New York Observer, where he served as a reporter and senior editor; ARTnews, where he worked as an editor; the Guardian; the London Review of Books; Bookforum; the Village Voice; and NPR.]

Woke Art Labeled "Aesthetically Terrifying"

 

[I don’t often post about politics on Rick On Theater, with the exception of my advocacy for freedom of speech and expression, my support for funding the arts, and my belief in the importance of including the arts in the curricula of our elementary and secondary schools and our colleges and universities.  But now and then, something comes to my attention that offends my commitment to those positions. 

[This occurred just this week, as reported in the articles I’m reposting below.  I’m pretty sure readers will see what’s exercised me in this case.

[There are two grounds on which these reports, both covering the same event, have raised my hackles.  The first, I think is obvious in the context of my introductory comments above.  This is related to the suppression of the freedom of expression in the context of art.  I’ll circle back to this in a bit.

[The second reason this particular incident has gotten to me is probably less obvious to those who haven’t read my posts on ROT that recount my teen years when my father was a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Information Agency in the Federal Republic of Germany (1962-67).

[USIA wasn’t very well known at home, so a little explanation is necessary.  Established in 1953 by President Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969; 34th President of the United States: 1953-61), USIA was the agency responsible for what was called “public diplomacy” (read “cultural propaganda”). 

[The agency brought art and cultural events, lectures, and political and historical information about the United States to countries all over the globe through libraries and other facilities and tours by performers and speakers.  The mission was to show the U.S. in the best possible light and emphasize our founding principles and it was part of my dad’s job to display the breadth of America’s artistic achievements—visual art, music, theater, and dance in all their forms—to the Germans in his area of responsibility. 

[Though the new Art in Embassies wasn’t a program of USIA, it was nevertheless a project that engaged my dad (who had been active with a prominent art gallery in Washington, D.C., in the years just before he arrived in Germany).

[Now, that connection to my feelings about freedom of expression. 

[I’ve said numerous times on this blog that I’m pretty much a First Amendment absolutist.  There are a few exceptions to my belief in total adherence to the principle of free speech and free expression—incitement to violence, slander or libel, falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater, true national security—but not liking someone’s words, having one’s feelings hurt, or politically opposing what someone says is not among these exceptions.

[Now, I also have to acknowledge that the person or agency that owns the hall, so to speak, has some right to regulate what’s said in it.  It’s different for a public space, and that covers embassies and consulates.  But it’s obvious, I think, that the government has some legitimate entitlement to regulate what is said or displayed in its facilities.  Obscenity or vulgarity probably would fall into this category—but not political opposition, no matter what label one puts on it.

[And that’s what woke is. 

[What woke actually means in 2026 is probably irrelevant in this discussion.  The word has many connotations, depending on who’s using it, who’s hearing it, and what the topic under discussion is, but fundamentally it means being aware of and actively attentive to issues of racial, gender, and social justice.

[When used pejoratively by political conservatives, woke generally functions as a catch-all term criticizing progressive or left-wing policies, culture, and ideology.  And that’s where the problem dealt with here arises.

[Basically, it’s a label for anything the MAGA people don’t like.  That pretty much is the definition of “political opposition.”  And that’s exactly what our democratic government is not supposed to suppress.  Even if you label the ideas socialism—or, worse, communism—Americans are supposed to be allowed to speak them.

[Or draw them, sculpt them, or project them.  The First Amendment declares so.  It’s a founding principle of our Democracy.  Our powerful government isn’t supposed to erase, obliterate, cover up, suppress, censor, or delete what it doesn’t like or opposes.  The Constitution says not.  That’s the 237-year-old document whose semiquincentennial is coming up next.]

“BIG PICTURE ON POLITICS OF ‘WOKE’”
by Jason Farago 

[The report on the Trump State Department’s removal of a painting from the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, was published in the New York Times on 29 August 2026 in Section C (“Arts”).  It was posted as “When Kehinde Wiley’s Painting Was Removed, It Wasn’t About Art” on the paper’s website on 27 August 2026.]

During the Cold War [1947-91], the State Department maintained a robust program of American cultural diplomacy, sending the New York Philharmonic to the Soviet Union and Duke Ellington’s orchestra to the Middle East. There is not much left of this policy, but the program [launched officially by President John F. Kennedy (1917-63); 35th President of the United States: 1961-63) in 1963; still operational], established during the Kennedy administration, manages a collection of paintings, sculptures and photographs and helps organize art displays in 190-odd embassies and consulates abroad. It is led by Erin Scavino [b. 1978; attorney, former model, reality show contestant, and political activist; Director of Art in Embassies: 2025-present], a contestant fired in Week 9 of Season 3 [2005] of “The Apprentice.” [The Apprentice ran on NBC from 2004 to 2017; Donald Trump (b. 1946; politician, media personality, and businessman; 45th President of the United States: 2017-21 and 47th President of the United States: 2025-present) was co-producer and host from 2003 to 2015.]

This month, at the American embassy in the Dominican Republic, one painting from the program was taken down with the help of a cherry picker [see following article]. It was made by the artist Kehinde Wiley [b. 1977], who painted the official presidential portrait of Barack Obama [2018; National Portrait Gallery], but who shares with President Trump a taste for gilded ornament. Scavino explained in a podcast interview that her office intervened to remove the picture.

“It was very woke,” Scavino explained. “It was by the gentleman who did Obama’s portrait. And it was aesthetically terrifying.”

Strong words for a group portrait of four fully dressed, largely expressionless sitters in front of a background adorned with flowers. But aesthetic terror is a good place to start. Whether you find the work terrifying or otherwise, the meaning of this removal lies in psychology, rather than in painting.

[A section of this article that’s included in the online edition but not included in the print version is as follows:

The removed painting is called “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960” [2015], and the sitters are four Dominican artists that Mr. Wiley met in the Caribbean country, floating as usual against a highly decorative background.

Two women are standing; they look out from the picture with authority, and their skin has a waxen photorealism.

Two men are sitting; one wears a T-shirt with the logo of an evangelical children’s camp.

Against the teal background is a repeated pattern of sunflowers, peonies and tulips, which is as flat as wallpaper in most areas . . .

[I touch on “photorealism” in visual art in my post “Hyperreal Theater” (16 January 2021).]

For 25 years, Wiley has painted in this consistent format: young figures, mostly but not always Black, posed flatly in positions nodding to western European history painting (with large portions churned out by studio assistants in China and elsewhere). This was enough for a lot of people before November 2016. As the critic Rachel Hunter Himes persuasively argued last year, Wiley’s art became “a kind of court style for the Obama era,” and his one-by-one insertions of Black sitters in royal or imperial frames, not to mention his gift for business and taste for luxury, perfectly fulfilled that era’s individualist mandate.

Wiley’s rise from queer downtown New York to the State Department, Himes went on, “dovetailed with the emergence of a political culture that saw the presence of black faces in the halls of power as inherently progressive and black economic advancement under capitalism as anti-racist.”

Wiley’s formulaic glorifications were emblematic of the lapsed age now called “Woke 1,” though I do not think that Scavino — the wife of Dan Scavino [b. 1976], the president’s deputy chief of staff — is objecting on quite those grounds. But that is the bitter irony here: If she could look past the Black president whose administration commissioned the painting (and accept the Black models in the picture, too), Ms. Scavino might see that Wiley’s “aesthetically terrifying” painting could hang more naturally in the current Oval Office or the future White House ballroom.

The artist and the commander in chief have quite a bit in common, after all. Both love ostentation, glitter and flamboyance, and Wiley’s use of ornate, even vulgar, gold frames jibes rather well with Trump’s Mar-a-Lagofication of the West Wing. Both employ a populist rhetoric that in fact serves their own celebrity, access to elite institutions and personal enrichment.

Wiley and the president have also both faced multiple accusations of sexual misconduct; both have denied wrongdoing and claimed their accusers are motivated by money and fame. (Trump was found liable in federal court for sexual abuse in 2023; Wiley has not been found liable for any sexual assault, but at least three museums, in Florida, Minnesota, and Nebraska, decided not to go ahead with exhibitions of the artist after the accusations emerged.)

Look: There’s nothing inherently sinister about swapping the art in an official building. Administrations come and go, their ambassadors arrive in Canberra or Copenhagen, and they redecorate. No doubt when Obama and Joe Biden were in office, their foreign plenipotentiaries unhooked a few pictures by their Bush- or Trump-appointed predecessors and shipped them back to Foggy Bottom.

What is different with this administration, in art as in life, is the vengeance. Before, a difference in cultural politics would play out with some Bubble Wrap and spackling paste. Under this administration, culture war is waged publicly, optimized for the short-form vertical video. Our ambassador in the Dominican Republic decided to showcase the removal of Wiley’s picture with Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” playing in the background and punctuated the caption with an American flag emoji.

It is not enough to dislike Wiley’s painting; one must shame Wiley the painter. He is the second of the Obama portraitists to come under direct fire from the Trump administration; Amy Sherald [b. 1973], who painted Michelle Obama [2018; National Portrait Gallery], canceled her own exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington [Amy Sherald: American Sublime was scheduled from 19 September 2025-22 February 2026; Sherald canceled it on 24 July 2025] rather than accede to demands to censor (or “contextualize”) a supposedly objectionable work [Trans Forming Liberty (2024); depiction of a Black transgender woman as the Statue of Liberty]. In both cases, the matter at hand is not the painters’ quality or even their political stances, but the need — the pleasure — of functionaries as low down on the organization chart as the Santo Domingo political division to demonstrate loyalty to the president through carnivalesque acts of censorship and humiliation.

But what if your enemy resembles you in ways you cannot admit? That is the real aesthetic terror that this Obamaist kitsch triggers in the halls of the administration: that what you say you want to eradicate (if you ever looked at it at all) is the equal and opposite thing that defines you.

[Jason Farago, a critic at large for the New York Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad.  He began writing for the Times in 2015, reviewing exhibitions and reporting features across the United States and in more than a dozen foreign countries.

[Previously, Farago wrote for The Guardian, and was a regular contributor to The New Yorker, the BBC, NPR, the New York Review of Books and Artforum.  He edited a global culture magazine called Even, whose four-year run is collected in the anthology “Out of Practice.”

[In 2017, Farago was named one of the inaugural laureates of the Rabkin Prize for arts writing.  In 2022, he was awarded one of the inaugural Silvers-Dudley Prizes for criticism and journalism, and in 2023 he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism.]

*  *  *  *
“OFFICIALS CALL PAINTING ‘WOKE’ AND WANT TO GET RID OF IT”
by Zachary Small 

[Just before the publication of the above article, the report below ran in the New York Times of 26 August 2026 (Section C: “Arts”).  It was also posted on the website as “Trump Officials Propose Sale of ‘Woke’ Painting by Kehinde Wiley” on 24 August 2026.]

The State Department wants to sell a painting by the celebrated artist Kehinde Wiley that the director of its Art in Embassies program called “very woke” and “aesthetically terrifying.” It was removed from the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic last week.

The painting by Wiley, who rose to fame after being selected to create President Barack Obama’s official portrait, features four Dominican models against a floral backdrop. It was commissioned by the federal government in 2013 and paid for with taxpayer dollars.

State Department officials removed the painting from the embassy last week, after first hiding it behind a tarp designed with an image of the American flag.

Erin Scavino, the director of Art in Embassies, criticized Wiley’s painting in a recent podcast interview and pointed out the artist’s connection to Obama. Leah Campos [b. 1977; former intelligence officer serving in the Central Intelligence Agency, 2001-12], the U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic [2025-present], celebrated its removal on social media with a video playing the rock anthem “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” writing that the painting was an example of “globalist and woke ideologies.”

Neither elaborated on what she found objectionable.

In a statement on Monday about the removal of the painting, a State Department spokeswoman did not directly address the artwork. The statement instead criticized comments Wiley had made in 2023 about his “Judith and Holofernes” painting, which he described as “a play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing.” It also cited accusations of sexual assault that Wiley has denied.

[Judith and Holofernes (2012) is Wiley’s modern take on a 17th-century painting (Judith and the Head of Holofernes, 1608) by Giovanni Baglione (Italian; 1566-1643). The biblical story of the beheading of Holofernes by Judith (Book of Judith, Chapter 13, verses 1-10) has been depicted in paintings and sculptures throughout history.]

“The work of an individual with such violent and racist words and depictions has no place in the America First State Department,” the spokeswoman said.

The statement said the State Department is determining whether it can legally sell the painting of Dominicans, which is titled “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960.”

“If that is feasible,” the spokeswoman said, “it would be the goal of Art in Embassies to proudly do so.”

A smaller painting by the artist sold at a Phillips auction in 2024 for nearly $845,000. Wiley and his gallerist, Sean Kelly, did not respond to requests for comment.

Virginia Shore, who commissioned the Wiley painting, established many of the embassy art collections as director of acquisitions and chief curator for the Art in Embassies program between 2000 and 2017. She described the work as nonpartisan and said there was no precedent for selling embassy artworks.

“Calling this woke is difficult for me to understand,” she said. “This is a program validated and financially backed under Bush. There is a science of building trust and empathy across borders.”

Wiley received an award from the State Department in 2015 [Department of State Medal of Arts by Secretary of State John Kerry (b. 1943; 68th U. S. Secretary of State: 2013-17)] because of his contributions to cultural diplomacy. He often takes inspiration from historic paintings, asking contemporary Black models to pose inside his version of the compositions. For “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960,” he spent two years studying paintings by the Dominican artists Celeste Woss y Gil [1890-1985] and Gilberto Hernández Ortega [1923-79; renowned Dominican modern artist on whose poses and composition in the 1960 painting Siamesas Wiley based this work], working with art students in the country to finish the scene.

The artwork’s removal was the latest attempt to politicize the State Department’s art program, which became part of the government during the Kennedy administration in 1963 to foster cultural diplomacy. The program was strengthened in 1999 under the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act, which led to embassies developing their own permanent art collections.

This year, Scavino claimed to have gotten an ambassador in Bucharest, Romania, fired over “satanic baby art,” though the diplomat’s departure was reported as a planned retirement. She also selected a friend with no curatorial experience [Jenni Parido, a woman whose most recent job was owning a luxury pet food store in Tampa, Florida] to serve as the commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, bypassing normal procedures. In July, Scavino organized an exhibition in Washington that aimed to “Make Art Great Again” with nearly 70 versions of the American flag on display.

In a statement about the removed Wiley painting, Campos, the U.S. ambassador, said, “It is my intention that everything we project from U.S. Embassy Santo Domingo, including the art and décor, reflect the beauty, strength and commitment to liberty of the United States of America and its people.”

Online, she had a stronger perspective: “Under the Trump administration and my leadership, we are leaving behind globalist, ‘woke’ ideologies to embrace, instead, American patriotism and the beauty of our great country.”

She ended the sentence with an emoji of the American flag.

[Zachary Small is a New York Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics, and technology.  He started contributing to the Times in 2019 and was hired in 2023.

[Small has worked as a journalist for nearly a decade, after previously working in museums and theaters.  He spent years writing criticism for art publications until becoming an investigative reporter on stories about sexual misconduct, fraud, forgeries, and violence in cultural institutions.

[His first book, Token Supremacy (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024), details the frenzied collision of art and cryptocurrency.]

Michael Heizer: Land Art Pioneer

 

[I wasn’t familiar with the term ‘land art’ until I was working on my report on “Sphere” (Part 1, 24 December 2023), when I read the review of the Las Vegas entertainment venue by Jackson Arn in the New Yorker.  Arn balanced his appraisal of the high-tech Sphere with one of a nearby artwork, City, by Michael Heizer.

[Heizer’s City is a monumental installation in the Nevada desert which I leaned was land art, constructed of elements of the natural environment.  The art is made directly in the landscape by sculpting the land itself into earthworks or making structures in the landscape using natural materials found on site, such as sand, earth, rocks, twigs, and water.

[I introduce Arn’s review in Sphere, Part 2” (27 December 2023), but I didn’t repost it at that time; it is, however, republished below, following the piece on Heizer.  I subsequently learned more about land art, also known as earth art, in an article in the New York Times about a site-specific environmental sculpture by Mary Miss (b. 1944), posted on Rick On Theater as “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” (22 February 2024).]

“OUT THERE”
by M. H. Miller

[The profile of land artist Michael Heizer below was originally published in T: The New York Times Style Magazine of 8 March 2026; it’s posted on the Times website as “Michael Heizer Measures His Art in Miles and Tons” (18 February 2026; updated 27 February).  Though the headline above is from the print edition, note that the text below is emended to reflect corrections inserted in the online version after the print version went to press.]

It took the artist Michael Heizer a half-century in the most remote parts of Nevada to build what may be the most extreme contemporary artwork ever made. Now what?

“There’s a lot of things about the modern world that I don’t like,” the artist Michael Heizer [b. 1944] said. We were sitting at the kitchen table of his apartment near the southern edge of Central Park in New York City, which is not where his admirers might expect to find him. Heizer is one of the central figures of the land art movement, which began in the late 1960s when artists, in some strange mix of ego and humility, threw themselves before the elements to create work out of the natural landscape. He spent much of the past 50 years way off the grid in the American Southwest, especially the deserts of Nevada. His preferred materials are multi-ton rocks and dirt, and he uses heavy machinery — cranes, excavators, bulldozers — the way other artists use paintbrushes. Now 81 and in poor health, he finds himself much more at the mercy of society. He shares this apartment, which has a view of the park and Columbus Circle, with his fourth wife, Kara Vander Weg, 54, whom he married in 2022 and who is a managing director at Gagosian, the gallery Heizer joined in 2013. (They split their time between the city — “Kara has to work in town,” Heizer said — and a house on Shelter Island, at the eastern edge of Long Island [in Suffolk County], because, as Vander Weg told me, “he wanted to be near water.”) As we talked, she prepared snacks from a half-wheel of Parmesan. There was a Jasper Johns [b. 1930; American painter, sculptor, and printmaker] print on the wall and a small shrine to Tomato Rose, Heizer’s beloved Border collie, that included a wooden box with the dog’s ashes. There were also clues to his life in the desert: a golden key to the Las Vegas Strip given to him by the mayor; 3-D printed models of rocks; maquettes [prototypes for unfinished or planned sculptures] for various works in progress at his ranch in Nevada. His hair was thinning and he wore an oxygen mask. In a plaid shirt and jeans, he was still handsome but depleted, his face weathered from the last half-century of exposure to harsh winters and 120-degree summers. I asked him if, after all those years out West, New York is ever a culture shock. “I’m an American,” he said. “I don’t make New York art and I don’t make Nevada art. I’m transnational. I’m not trying to brag. I’m just trying to give you an accurate description.”

“Difficult” is an overused word in contemporary art, though if there has ever been an artist to earn the label, it’s Heizer. (“Unpredictable” and “grumpy” were other words those in his orbit offered up to describe his personality.) He’s rarely granted interviews, and he doesn’t allow reporters to tape him. “Let me put it this way,” he told me in his gravelly voice: “I don’t like being recorded.” Heizer’s art can be difficult too — difficult to make, to see, to categorize. For 1967’s “South,” part of a larger work titled “North, East, South, West,” he dug into the Sierra Nevada mountains in California and installed a metal cone in the earth, creating a hole. The following year, he made “Nine Nevada Depressions,” a series of large-scale trenches dug out of dry lakes and the desert across Nevada, using a shovel to carve Cy Twombly-esque markings — a zigzag, a big loop — with dimensions so enormous they were best viewed from an airplane.

[Cy Twombly (1928-2011) was an American painter, sculptor, and photographer. His works are typically freely-scribbled, calligraphic, and graffiti-like.]

Along with moving contemporary art from the constraints of the white cube exhibition space to the outdoors, he also brought the desert inside; in the 1980s, he began framing large rocks — in some cases more than 40 tons worth — with steel slabs and installing them in galleries and, later, museums. (“Earth,” he once said, “is the material with the most potential because it is the original source material.”) Though Heizer’s work can be found in such museums as Dia Beacon in upstate New York and Glenstone, outside of Washington, D.C., some of his most important contributions should not be experienced firsthand without at least a day’s supply of water, food, a 4 x 4 vehicle and maybe a prayer or two.

He’s most famous for “City,” which he began conceptualizing in 1970 and took a half-century to build. It’s possibly the most artwork to ever exist: the most ambitious, the most logistically complicated, the most remote, the largest. For the piece, Heizer bought more than 2,000 acres of land over the course of decades in Garden Valley, Nev., about 100 miles north of the Nevada Test Site, where the government detonated nuclear weapons during the Cold War. It’s around 160 miles north of Las Vegas in Lincoln County, which is roughly the size of Massachusetts but with fewer than 5,000 residents, “one of the emptiest spaces in a state famous for its emptiness,” in the words of The Las Vegas Review-Journal. At first, Heizer lived there in an 8-by-40-foot trailer. Over time, he built a ranch (named Sleep Late Ranch because the artist, unlike most ranchers, wasn’t much of a morning person) and, in the vast expanse of what counted as his front yard, created his masterpiece, a sculptural installation that borrows techniques from pre-Columbian architecture and stretches nearly a mile and a half end to end.

It took a toll. He has respiratory problems from years of smoking and physical labor at high elevation (“City” is more than 5,000 feet above sea level). Garden Valley was harsh, but it had all the raw materials he’d need: sand and gravel that he could make into concrete, running water and, most of all, space and quiet. “I make decisions off the cuff,” Heizer told me. He’d gone in with no set plan, only an ambition to build something more than “some show in an art gallery.” He would work on an architectural scale. “City” wasn’t designed or engineered but “built directly one to one,” he continued. “I didn’t know what I was making, so I had to try things, and if they didn’t work, I had to change. I changed a lot of stuff. I kept the project loose.”

As “City” grew, so did its mythology: To some, Heizer was a contemporary Western legend, the art world’s Buffalo Bill, drawn to the endless possibilities of a harsh but fecund horizon; to others he was a colonialist on the ancestral lands of the Southern Paiute and Shoshone peoples. Either way, he was a man outside of time, an old buckaroo who stumbled out of the Great Basin and somehow found himself, against all odds, alive in modernity. And “City” was, quite simply, the greatest artwork that no one would ever see. Within certain corners of the art business, Heizer was discussed in the same hushed tones that U.F.O. conspiracy theorists use to talk about the classified military installation Area 51, which is, incidentally and unofficially, one of his neighbors in Nevada. The ranch is so isolated that Heizer described nearby Rachel, Nev., as not so much a town as “just a name given to a couple of trailers south of my valley. A kid was born there and they named her Rachel, and then they called the place Rachel.” He was obsessive about keeping out trespassers seeking a glimpse of his vision.

But then in 2022, to the surprise of everyone who’d been paying attention over the years, Heizer announced that “City” was finished, or at least finished enough to start welcoming visitors. It was like Captain Ahab returning to New Bedford holding aloft the bloody tail fin of Moby Dick. After spending much of the pandemic at the ranch, he and Vander Weg returned to New York, and moved into their current apartment in 2023. Heizer hasn’t been back to “City” since. He spent decades tending horses and cattle in a lonely valley in Nevada, and he now lives in one of the more populated ZIP codes in America, in a nice apartment paid for at least in part through his association with the world’s largest commercial gallery. “I was in a network of nobody back when I built it,” Heizer said. “This is a different time.” Now at his ranch there are drivers and caretakers and a team of workers to deal with repairs and maintenance. Recently, he let Vogue do a photo shoot at “City” with the actor Timothée Chalamet [December 2025] in, among other looks, Tom Ford-designed glamping [a portmanteau of ‘glamorous’ + ‘camping’; a style of outdoor living that combines the immersive nature experience of traditional camping with hotel-style luxuries and amenities] gear. “It’s becoming a different thing,” Heizer continued. “I’m divesting myself of my ownership, of my property, of my artwork, of my equipment. I’m giving it over to the public trust. I keep nothing. I have nothing. I don’t want anything. It’s great to divest. I can’t get rid of stuff fast enough.”

He continues to operate on an ostentatious scale. His “Covid project,” as Vander Weg described it, was a series of sculptures called “Rock/Steel” that appeared at Gagosian in 2022: He extracted rocks, the heaviest weighing 23 tons, from a quarry near the San Andreas Fault and bolted them to angular steel plates. His new show, now up at Gagosian, features two steel-framed trenches, “Convoluted Line A” and “Convoluted Line B” — a flashback to “Nine Nevada Depressions” — that were constructed at Heizer’s ranch and transported across the country; the aim was to make the concrete floors of the gallery’s location on West 21st Street in Manhattan look like they’d been carved into. The size of his art, the sheer anticommercialism of its unceremonious installation and his general refusal to discuss it are, on one level, largely incompatible with the art world’s inherent idolatry. Heizer’s work has more in common with cave drawings and Mesoamerican culture than it does with anything contemporary. In the art world, Heizer told me, “you’re subject to the winds of the economy. If you do what I do, you’re really exposed, because I have a lot of overhead. I build things and I have to have a lot of equipment, materials and help. Expensive business. Nobody wants it.”

But as with a lot of cowboys, there’s something calculated about his stance too: The artist who says “I don’t give a [expletive] about money” has also had powerful supporters throughout his career, including Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Nevada senator Harry Reid; the New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman and the gallerist Larry Gagosian, who’ve all bolstered the idea that something important was happening on Heizer’s ranch that the world would one day be lucky enough to see. Govan, who over the last couple of decades helped Heizer raise the funds to finish “City,” the total cost of which has been estimated at $40 million, told NPR in 2023 that “there’s no duplicate” for the project. “After working here with Mike, it really is hard to go back to a museum with paintings and frames. It just doesn’t sometimes satisfy.”

Heizer was raised in the Bay Area, but he always had close ties to the desert. His maternal grandfather was the state geologist of California, and his father, Robert Heizer, was an anthropologist and archaeologist who studied, among other things, ancient techniques of large-stone transport. Heizer was a lousy student who never finished high school and considers himself proudly uneducated in the traditional sense. When I asked him how much high school he’d completed, he said, “The better question is ‘Why didn’t you ever show up at all?’” For a while, he worked as a carpenter and took classes at the San Francisco Art Institute before realizing that what he wanted to know couldn’t be taught. Mostly, his father took him on the job to digs in California and Nevada, as he also did with Heizer’s brother and sister. When he was 19, they traveled with the geologist Howel Williams [1898-1980; British and American geologist and volcanologist] (whose specialty was volcanic rock formations) to Bolivia and Peru, where Heizer made sketches and took pictures of the dig sites. He described this trip to me as “the origins of the work I do.”

From an early age, he was “determined to be a contributor to the development of American art,” as he said in a 1983 conversation with the curator Julia Brow [b. 1951]. His formative years as an artist were in the era of the space race and the 747 jumbo jet, and he knew that he wanted to make art on an expansive scale. In the mid-1960s, around age 21, he moved to New York and soon started working with the dealers Virginia Dwan Dwan [1931-2022; Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1959-67) and Dwan Gallery New York (1965-71)], whose grandfather was a co-founder of the industrial conglomerate 3M, and Richard Bellamy [1927-98; ran New York’s Hansa Gallery (1955-59), Green Gallery (1960-65), and Noah Goldowsky Gallery (1965-74)], who was funded by Robert Scull (1915-86), another high school dropout, who’d made a fortune off the taxi business and whom Heizer described as “one of three people in New York who collected art and had a couple bucks.” Heizer wasn’t making a lot of money — back then, no one really was — but he still thought New York was fun. “Downtown Manhattan was pretty neat back in the old days, before any of these artists even met each other,” Heizer told me. “Then there was a mass influx and it kept getting bigger, like a waterfall.” He began to think of living there as being a part of “the absolute city system.” New York was a larger ecosystem over which an individual had no control. “You may help develop it, but that’s arbitrary,” he said. Ultimately, “there was no give in the absolute city system. It was cut and dried. Take it or leave it. Conclusion: Leave it.”

His impulse to make monumental art was driven in part by a sense of precariousness, against the backdrop of the atomic bomb and the Vietnam War. “Living in the postnuclear age informed everything,” as he told Brown. “The clock was ticking.” (Heizer was drafted multiple times but eventually rejected by the Army because of spinal issues.) The progress of the modern world had gone so far that it might kill everyone, putting the culture on the precipice of having to return to something much more primitive. “We’re living in a world that’s technological and primordial simultaneously,” Heizer told Brown, and he wanted to create something that reflected that. In the late ’60s, he began making regular trips to California and Nevada, effectively retracing his father’s footsteps. He made a series of works in the desert, most of which have eroded back into dirt. He’d paint directly onto a dry lake bed, or create a hole that looked like a window or dig a pit and place a rock inside of it. With the help of Bellamy and Dwan, he began accumulating more heavy machinery, and his ambitions grew.

Most of the sculptors who emerged after World War II owe some debt to Heizer. The size of his work would influence Richard Serra’s [1938-2024; American sculptor] steel contortions, and it was Heizer who brought the other major land artists of the time — Walter De Maria [1935-2013; American sculptor, illustrator, and composer] and Robert Smithson [1938-73; American sculptor and land artist] — to the desert in the first place. And yet he was also a singular figure in contemporary art. What he was doing was a kind of protest art, but it was unlike much of the art of that era, which tended to be more overtly topical. He was protesting against nothing less than the very conditions of modern life, against having to get up in the morning and go to a job and interact with other people. “I don’t make political art,” he told me. “I believe in the very simple, primitive definition of art: You’re a cave man sitting on a rock in front of your cave with nothing to do, so you might pick up a rock and shave it and grind it on a piece of another rock. You get in your cave and eventually get a piece of ash out of the fire and draw a water buffalo on the wall.”

He liked violent contrasts: a giant object and the absence of an object; a trench in the desert next to a pile of rocks; positive and negative. “If you’re making sculptures, those are positives,” he said. “Space-filling, intersecting positives. It’s conceivable you could project an alternative to that: the negative.” It was Dwan who funded Heizer’s most important effort up to that point, “Double Negative,” which he completed over a couple of months in 1969 in Nevada. With a small team of workers and engineers, he used dynamite and construction equipment to create two trenches, each about 30 feet wide and 50 feet deep, in the side of a bluff known as Mormon Mesa, which overlooks the Virgin River near Moapa Valley, about 70 miles from Las Vegas. The sculpture looks like two enormous doorways facing each other across the desert, the distance between them roughly the length of the Empire State Building lying flat on its side. Heizer was 25 years old and resembled Marlon Brando in “A Streetcar Named Desire” [1950]. When it was finished, he and Dwan celebrated by seeing Elvis Presley perform at the International Hotel on the Strip [1969-71; renamed Las Vegas Hilton, 1971; then Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino, 2014].

[This pairing of “positive” and “negative” as described by Miller is reminiscent of a concept applied by Abstract Expressionist painter and art teacher Hans Hofmann (1880-1966). He described “positive” and “negative” space in terms of the presence or absence of “visible matter.”

[As I discuss in “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater” (9 May 2012), playwright Tennessee Williams (1911-83), who was an amateur painter, knew Hofmann and credits him by name with the concept of “plastic space” in the novella Moise and the World of Reason (1975). “Plastic space” is defined by the relationship of “positive” and “negative” space, as Williams explains in his 1969 short play Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis? (premièred 1980; first published 1997).]

People will go to great lengths to see “Double Negative.” The fashion designer Rick Owens once rented a helicopter to get as close as he could after failing to make it by car. There’s no sign announcing the existence of “Double Negative,” and no easy route to get there. I had a very knowledgeable driver in Brent Holmes [b. 1978], an artist who works for Heizer’s foundation, and it still felt dicey at times, both of us wincing as another rock scraped the transmission of Holmes’s Subaru hatchback. In a way, “Double Negative” is of its era, reflecting the waning days of the ’60s counterculture and the burgeoning environmentalist movement. By dynamiting the land, he’d somehow drawn even more attention to its beauty. “It’s got a lot to do with a return to the earth,” Heizer said. “The return to the hippie. Smoking weed, going camping, hiking.” He paused before conceding, “I was a hippie.” The work has the mathematical precision of minimalist contemporaries like Serra and Carl Andre [1935-2024; American minimalist sculptor]. Heizer was treating the desert as a kind of readymade, much like what Pop artists were doing with commercial advertising, like the Brillo Box sculptures Andy Warhol [1928-87; American artist and filmmaker] showed at Dwan’s gallery in Los Angeles in 1964. (Heizer scoffed at the comparison. “There’s nothing readymade about what I do,” he said. “The amount of work that goes into handling a rock is phenomenal.”)

[Homes is an African-American multidisciplinary fine artist, curator, writer, and activist who organizes local events, curates community art spaces, and writes about Black history in the American West to actively reshape Nevada’s culture.

[‘Readymade’ (or ‘ready-made’) is an English term used for the first time in the field of art by French painter Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). An artist appropriates a manufactured object as is, depriving it of its utilitarian function. French poet and writer André Breton (1896-1966) defined the ready-made as an “an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.”]

There were few real precedents for what Heizer accomplished, though he named Tony Smith [1912-80], the architect and sculptor who made large-scale abstract forms out of steel, as a contemporary influence. There was also little understanding of how to preserve such art once it was made. Heizer described “Double Negative” as being in a state of “deterioration,” gradually collapsing in on itself. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles acquired “Double Negative” from Dwan in 1985 for its collection, “but they do nothing about it,” he said. He wants to get an engineer to help stabilize the piece, “to put it back in the state it was in when it was built,” to clear the excess debris from the trenches that have compromised “the crystalline morphology of the inside of that sculpture,” as Heizer called it. (A representative from the museum responded in an email, “When the work was acquired by MOCA in 1985, it was our understanding that it would continue to be subject to natural erosion. In recent years, the artist and his foundation have reached out to MOCA about conservation of the work, and we will continue to have these conversations with them.”)

[The conservation of environmental and land art works is the subject of the article in my post “Greenwood Pond: Double Site,” referenced above.]

“It’s not hard to do,” Heizer went on. At the same time, his feeling was: “I have other things to do. I can’t do it all.” He’d fought hard to make it, but “if the work doesn’t command enough respect for someone else to take care of it, then it’s not that respectable. It’ll suffer the fate of being ignored.”

It wasn’t unusual for him to be self-pitying, but he also understood that “Double Negative” was the turning point in his career. He was no longer in a league with other artists. He was competing with Stonehenge and the Brooklyn Bridge. Soon after, he started buying up land in Garden Valley.

Las Vegas turns into barren desert abruptly. Up Interstate 15 and Route 93, past the Apex Regional Landfill (the largest in the world by area), there’s not much else to see until, after about 100 miles, you reach the community of Alamo, population roughly 800, and the office of the Triple Aught Foundation, which Heizer started in 1998 with help from benefactors including the financier Patrick Lannan and later the [Las Vegas] hotel billionaire Elaine Wynn [1942-2025]. The foundation owns and oversees “City” and manages the complicated logistics of getting people to and from the outer reaches of what might still be considered civilization. In Alamo, Triple Aught is directly next door to the Christian Bible Fellowship Church. To visit “City,” guests have to sign a waiver warning of various potential causes of harm or death, including “attacks or bites by insects, spiders, snakes, cattle, horses or other forms of wildlife . . . and the remoteness to cities and medical care.” The foundation is run jointly by Heizer’s third wife, Mary Shanahan, who’s worked for his studio for decades, and Heather Harmon, a curator and the executive director of the future Las Vegas Museum of Art, which is scheduled to open in 2029. It was here that I met my driver, Ed Higbee, 71, a rancher who’s spent most of his life in Nevada. After another 30 miles, through which the only landmark is a fork in the road with a sign reading “Extraterrestrial Highway,” is the turnoff for the long dirt road into Garden Valley that leads to Heizer’s ranch. Sleep Late Ranch currently has 28 cows, four goats, four cats and, in Higbee’s words, “five very spoiled dogs.” At the front of the property, which is powered by solar panels, was a huge gantry that was holding a large rock upright. There was an adobe bunkhouse where employees slept. Heizer’s own residence was small and understated, full of railroad tie furniture that he’d made himself. In an office, Heizer had hung a copy of “Gene Autry’s Code of Honor,” something like the house rules, which included “A cowboy never takes unfair advantage — even of an enemy” and “A cowboy never betrays a trust. He never goes back on his word.”

[For those who aren’t up on American, and especially UFO—pardon me, unidentified aerial phenomenon or UAP—pop-culture (or have been living under a rock for 70 years), Area 51, because of the intense level of government secrecy surrounding the base, has continually been the subject of myths, UFO rumors, and conspiracy theories regarding captured extraterrestrial technology and even captive aliens or their corpses. Among ufologists, Area 51 shares prominence with Roswell, New Mexico, the general vicinity of the crash in 1947 of an allegedly extraterrestrial spacecraft and its alien occupants.

[The base was established by the CIA in 1955 for Project AQUATONE, the development of the U-2 spy plane (does anyone remember Francis Gary Powers [1929-77]?). It wasn't even officially acknowledged by the CIA until 2013. The remote base has spent decades serving as the nation's premier installation for testing experimental, cutting-edge aviation and stealth weapon systems.]

The distance between the gate of the ranch and the gate of “City” is 354 feet. Heizer started building the eastern end first, with a trapezoidal structure made of concrete and dirt known as “Complex One” that looks like something his father might have dug up in Guatemala or Luxor. Heizer has described it as “surprisingly primitive” and compared the sculpture to a blast shield; it was designed to withstand “seismic conditions.” “Complex One” is about a mile away from the other major installation at the western edge, “45°, 90°, 180°.” Throughout, the site alternates between dirt mounds and depressions, each outlined by concrete curbs that emphasize the geometry of Heizer’s creation and curve around “City” like line drawings. He’d transformed the flatness of the desert into rolling hills. “45°, 90°, 180°” is a bafflingly enormous structure that is 241 feet long, 72 feet wide and 27 feet tall at its highest point. Heizer told me that the ball court at the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá in Mexico was a point of reference; at times, visiting “City” felt like stumbling upon the remnants of an ancient culture, long extinct, its mysteries never fully attainable. It was clear to me on my visit that he has no artistic heirs, no one who’s taking up this kind of absurdly ambitious work and carrying it forward. An artist mad enough to make something like this comes along only once in a lifetime.

Silence is a big part of the experience of “City,” a silence so complete that occasionally the sound of my boots against the dirt startled me into thinking that someone was coming up behind me, though no one was. You can almost hear the shadows shift as the sun moves across the sky. But the biggest surprise was just how much generosity was built into “City,” that to reach such intense isolation requires the kindness of many well-meaning strangers: the drivers, the workers at the ranch, the employees of the Triple Aught Foundation. And in this way, Heizer, never much of a social person, had created a kind of community. For all his supposed difficulties, people (including even his ex-wife) remain intensely loyal to him. With “City,” he’s manufactured a quasi-religious experience, and to see it is to have been converted to his strange and outlandish dogma. He’s made a great American monument as well, not to a particular place or person (not even to Heizer) but merely to the idea that something like “City” can exist at all — that if you work hard enough, a dream can be fulfilled, despite every impulse of nature, both human and elemental.

At his apartment in New York, I asked if he felt a sense of relief that “City” was finally done. “It’s not done,” he shot back, to my surprise. “It’s still active. I’m working on that place and issues there every day.” Heizer seemed to be anxious that he wasn’t in Nevada, but also coming to terms with the fact that he probably didn’t have many more trips left. (“I think this might be my last go-round,” he said at one point.) Now he had to supervise from afar. There were several perimeter curbs that needed to be finished, and some mounds that required maintenance and plans to build a small utility building with a kitchen, a bathroom and a septic tank. “An outpost to stay alive at,” he called it. For a while, Heizer’s ranch manager, Shane McVey, a former analyst for HSBC [British universal bank and financial services group; founded in 1865 as the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation] who changed his life path after meeting Heizer, was keeping the site meticulously maintained after each visit, going so far as to rake away evidence of visitors’ footprints along the paths. “I told Shane to knock it off,” Heizer said. “I don’t know if it needs to be that perfect. It needs to be real.”

What Heizer described as “detailing” and “refining” would continue for years and might not stop at all. Even though he was 2,500 miles away, he seemed to have left so much of himself out there in the desert. He could never truly divest, not as long as he was alive. “It’s my home,” Heizer said. “That’s where I live.”

[M. H. Miller is the features director for T Magazine.  He’s widely known for covering the art world, frequently profiling major artists and exploring the cultural history of New York City's gallery and studio scenes.  Miller’s writing often blends investigative journalism with deep art historical context.]

*  *  *  *
“MADE YOU LOOK”
(excerpt)
by Jackson Arn

[This is an excerpt from Arn’s review of the Las Vegas Sphere and Heizer’s City; I’m reposting the second part of the review that dealt with the land art work which M. H. Miller discusses at length above.  Arn’s review appeared in the New Yorker of 20 November 2023 and was posted as “The Sphere and Our ‘Immersion’ Complex” on 13 November.]

The concept has become ubiquitous in art and entertainment. But is it about capturing our attention—or deceiving it? 

Put on some sunscreen and drive north [from Las Vegas], first on the I-15 and then, watching out for deer, the 93. With no traffic or construction, it should take about ninety minutes to reach the offices of the Triple Aught Foundation, in Alamo, Nevada, population 1,154. From here, a foundation employee will drive you another ninety minutes or so, past purple mountains and a flat, yellowish expanse that used to be a lake, into an arid land where no cell phone can find purchase, until you reach “City,” a mile-and-a-half-long, fifty-years-in-the-making, forty-million-dollar sculpture by Michael Heizer, who turned seventy-nine this month. You have three hours to explore. There are no benches. Enjoy, but please don’t take pictures.

This last rule is a smart move on the foundation’s part—it says, Accept no substitutes. “City” wouldn’t photograph particularly well anyway. It’s vast and sometimes overwhelming, and there’s no convenient place to stand and drink it all in; the only way to see everything is to keep moving or to find a helicopter. The bulk of the sculpture consists of deep, gently sloping trenches and tall, wide mounds of gravel, marked off with concrete curbs. From the trenches, the purple mountains look like they’re yards away instead of miles. “City” pulls quite a few of these perceptual tricks, scrambling near and far and old and new. This is, simultaneously, the quietest place I’ve ever been and one of the loudest—every breath and pebble-crunching step is deafening, in the same way as someone wrestling with a sweet wrapper at the movies. The slanted sides of the trenches suggest ancient ruins, but also the I-15. It’s not always obvious where the art ends and the desert begins. Toward either side of “City,” however, you’ll find big, straight-edged structures: to the west, a flock of concrete fins; to the east, a trapezoidal slab with concrete beams poking out. These objects look plainly more man-made than natural—“man-made” being the strange, polished stuff that refuses to admit that it’s natural, too.

If “City” is land art, the usual term for remote, monumental, durable sculpture in this part of the world, it is an especially fussy, rule-oriented kind. Unlike, say, “Spiral Jetty” [1970], the defining creation of Heizer’s rival, Robert Smithson, it cannot be explored at the visitor’s leisure; you can’t climb on the gravel mounds, you have to reserve a slot in advance, and no more than six guests are allowed at once. (The day I went, I was the only one.) As with Smithson’s sculpture, though, the sheer inconvenience of “City” can seem part of the point. It’s difficult to separate Heizer’s work from the experience of getting to and around it—burned calories are crucial ingredients, no less than sand or granite.

Insofar as it demands a reshaping of attention, and takes that process as one of its subjects, “City,” like the Sphere, is an immersive experience. You have to do more of the immersing yourself, but, partly for that reason, it ends up making a more successful attack on your senses. For three hours, your perceptions dilate and time slows down. The mere fact that “City” is an outdoor sculpture gives it a flicker of unpredictability that’s rare in immersive art. The usual sense of artifice is balanced, or at least tempered, by the entropy of the surroundings—I have a hard time believing, for instance, that Heizer planned the endless spiderwebs covering his mounds and trenches. It occurred to me, while I was staring at some of these strands, that I couldn’t recall how long I’d been standing there. As I snapped out of my trance, the sculpture felt not large but infinite.

The differences between “City” and the Sphere are deep, true, yet narrower than you might suppose—the works are trying for the same things but in opposite ways. Both are big, expensive, geometric structures in the desert that offer visitors a vivid encounter with the natural world—one with exquisite footage of jellyfish and the like, the other with deftly roughened rock and concrete. Both were funded by the same sort of people (“City,” for example, got money from Elaine P. Wynn, the ex-wife of [casino and real estate billionaire] Steve Wynn [b. 1942], whose casino sits across the street from the Sphere), and both have been craftily peddled to the world, one with a deluge of images and the other with a tantalizing lack of them. Heizer has described his sculpture as “a masterpiece” and “art for the ages”—these being, to the best of my knowledge, the two most Vegasy claims that anybody involved with the Sphere or “City” has made about either.

What’s the price of art for the ages? In dollars, 1.2 million in annual maintenance costs. In another currency, one pale cloud of dust per day. This cloud was the first sign of “City” that I saw when the foundation’s designated guide, Mark, drove me the last few miles there, and, if I had to guess, it will be what I’ll most remember years from now. “You’re early,” a voice coming from Mark’s walkie-talkie said. The voice was correct, and possibly a little irritable. Before visitors arrive, Mark told me, “City” is purged of footprints and litter, and its mounds are carefully raked. He called the process “dragging.” I didn’t ask about the mechanics of dragging (something involving a desert Zamboni?) or why it launches so much dust into the sky. Even now, I don’t especially want to know: that concept, somehow mystical and mundane at the same time, may be the best thing about Heizer’s sculpture. It’s easily the most poignant.

Walking through the semi-dragged terrain, I saw footprints that I’m fairly sure weren’t mine, and a tattered price tag, for a hammer from Vaughan & Bushnell [Manufacturing, also known as Vaughan Manufacturing and branded as simply Vaughan, is an Illinois company specializing in the manufacture of hammers, axes, prybars, and hand saws], camouflaged by pebbles. Millions of dollars and hundreds of Sisyphean man-hours were required to preserve the illusion of calm, untouched beauty in harmony with nature. This entire place, I thought, is a simulation, and the tag is a glitch. But glitching is one of the most interesting things that immersive art can do—it’s when the work ceases to be one size fits all, and yields, finally, to interpretation. I’d been on the road for hours that day, I was in a place dry enough to kill me, but it wasn’t until I squatted down and read “VAUGHAN” that I appreciated how far I was from my normal life. The bar code was what got me: this single, useless sign of civilization, designed for talking with machines that weren’t there, made me feel the absence of everything else. It spoiled the illusion of the sculpture, and the more it did the more the illusion persuaded me.

It’s odd that, even when almost everything is presumed to exist on a spectrum, we still talk about deception as though it’s binary. You’re indoctrinated by fake news or you see through it; you have an immersive experience of art or you don’t. Las Vegas—a place whose economy depends on people who realize that gambling is for suckers but who strut into the casino all the same—knows better. Illusion mixed with disillusion can be more intoxicating than either. So it goes with Heizer’s desert magic trick, and perhaps with the Sphere, too. You watch “Postcard from Earth” [2023 4D science fiction and documentary film directed by Darren Aronofsky, created specifically to be screened on Sphere’s 160, square-foot video screen] to marvel at the tonnage of this thing built to deceive you, to feel yourself half-suckered, and to gasp at the same giant bug, not for surprise so much as for the joy of doing anything in perfect harmony with thousands of strangers. Why settle for immersion when you can be waist-deep? 

[Jackson Arn was the New Yorker’s art critic from August 2023 until March 2025.  Previously, he wrote about books, paintings, and tiki bars for Art in America, The Drift, Artforum, The Nation, and various other publications.  He’s returned to freelance cultural criticism, contributing to several prominent literary and art journals like Harper’s Magazine, The Threepenny Review, Art in America, Liberties, New York Review of Architecture.]