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      Jeffrey Gibson: Representing the U.S., and Critiquing It, in a Psychedelic Rainbow

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      People in Venice might hear the jingle dress dancers before they see them. On April 18, some 26 intertribal Native American dancers and singers from Oklahoma and Colorado will make their way through the winding streets and canals of the Italian city. Wearing brightly colored shawls, beaded yokes and dresses decorated with the metal cones that give the dance its distinctive cshh cshh rattling sound, they’ll make their way to the Giardini, one of the primary sites of the Venice Biennale. There, they’ll climb atop and surround a large red sculpture composed of pedestals of different heights and perform.The jingle dress dance, which originated with the Ojibwe people of North America in the early 20th century, typically takes place at powwows. In Venice, it will inaugurate the exhibition in the United States Pavilion on April 20. Titled “the space in which to place me,” the show is a mini-survey of the rapturous art of the queer Choctaw and Cherokee artist Jeffrey Gibson. Flags, paintings, sculptures and a video envelop and fill the stately building with proliferating geometric patterns, intricate beadwork, evocative text, a psychedelic overdose of color and political references to Indigenous and broader American histories.“How do I relate to the United States?” mused Gibson, 52, who in conversation slips effortlessly between earnestness and flashes of playful, dry wit. It was late December, and we were sitting in a room in his upstate New York studio whose nondescript furniture was dotted with evidence of ongoing work on Venice: a maquette here, paint samples there, a test flag folded loosely in a chair. The deadline for finishing nearly two dozen artworks was about a month away, but Gibson was calm — at least outwardly so — as he showed me images and the pieces in progress.“I have a complicated relationship with the United States,” he said. His ancestors were among the Native Americans forcibly displaced by the federal government. Both his parents came from poverty and went to boarding schools, where Native children were frequently abused. As his studio manager zoomed in on a digital image of a painting, I could see a large block of text surrounded by angular, radiating lines. Gibson read the title: “The returned male student far too frequently goes back to the reservation and falls into the old custom of letting his hair grow long.”The chilling line came from a 1902 letter written by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to a school superintendent in California about the need to assimilate Native students returning home from boarding schools. Once he found it, Gibson decided that all three busts he was working on for the Biennale should have prominent hair: a beaded mullet; long, flowing locks made from ribbon; and an elaborately-styled shawl-fringe “do.” The choice represents one of his artistic strengths: taking a point of pain and turning it into a kind of celebration, without losing its critical edge.Installation view of Gibson’s works at the U.S. Pavilion, from left: “The Returned Male Student Far Too Frequently Goes Back to the Reservation and Falls Into the Old Custom of Letting His Hair Grow Long,” which references a letter by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs; “I’m a Natural Man”: “Liberty, When It Begins to Take Root, Is a Plant of Rapid Growth,” which cites a letter from George Washington to James Madison.Brian BarlowWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Indigenous Artists Are the Heart of the Venice Biennale

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      Here are highlights of the range of work produced by Native artists in the pavilions and a central exhibition that proudly calls itself “Foreigners Everywhere.”Before visitors step into any gallery at the 2024 Venice Biennale, which opens April 20, Indigenous artists will have made their presence known.A collective of painters from the Brazilian Amazon, MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin), will cover the facade of the central exhibition hall with an intricate mural. Inuuteq Storch, the first Greenlandic and Inuk artist to represent Denmark at the international art festival, will erect a sign reading “Kalaallit Nunaat,” or “Greenland” above the pavilion’s entrance. (Greenland has been a self-governing country within the Danish Realm since 1979. )The Brazil Pavilion nearby has been renamed the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion — one of many terms that Indigenous people use to describe the territory that, after colonization, became Brazil. “There is a very political aspect to the Indigenous presence in an artistic space like the Venice Biennale,” said Denilson Baniwa, the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion’s co-curator. “Our aim is to rewrite history and add a new chapter to art history.”Beyond the United States Pavilion, which features the art of Jeffrey Gibson, the Venice Biennale offers a taste of the wide range of work produced by Indigenous, First Nations and Native artists around the globe. Here are some highlights.The Central ExhibitionMataaho Collective’s “Takapau” (2022), made of polyester tie-downs and stainless steel buckles. The first gallery at the Arsenale will host the monumental installation by a group of four Maori women known for making large fiber sculptures. Maarten Holl, via Te PapaIndigenous artists are at the heart of “Foreigners Everywhere,” the Venice Biennale’s central exhibition. As the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of this year’s Biennale, sees it, the Indigenous artist is “frequently treated as a foreigner in his or her own land.” The first gallery at the Arsenale, Venice’s former shipyard complex, will host a monumental installation by the Mataaho Collective, a group of four Maori women known for making large-scale fiber sculptures. The 331-artist lineup also includes the Native American artists Kay WalkingStick and Emmi Whitehorse; the Brazilian Yanomani artists Joseca Mokahesi and André Taniki; Indigenous Australian artists Marlene Gilson and Naminapu Maymuru-White; and Maori artists Sandy Adsett and Selwyn Wilson, considered one of the founders of Maori Modernism, who died in 2002.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Renaissance Portraits Undercover in Met’s ‘Hidden Faces’

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      Portraits go undercover in the new Metropolitan Museum show “Hidden Faces,” about the practice of concealing artworks behind sliding panels and reverse-side paintings.The Met’s delightful show “Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance” illuminates a curious trend in 15th- and 16th-century painting: the slow reveal. The works on view, originally concealed in special cases and behind sliding or reversible panels, gamify the experience of looking at portraiture; they have to be moved, before they can move us.Of course, we can’t actually handle these artworks, many of them on loan to the Met from European museums including the Courtauld in London and the Uffizi in Florence. But we can peer at them from double-sided glass cases and watch animations of faces emerging from sliding panels. The covers are marvelous works in their own right, with elaborate emblems and allegories that are themselves a form of representation.The interactions between the different components can be quite playful, with a literary and theatrical flair. A mesmerizing portrait of a Florentine lady in a flowing sheer veil, attributed to the early-16th-century Italian painter Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, is accompanied by a decorative panel with the Latin inscription “To each his own mask” and a trompe l’oeil face covering to match.Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Attributed to Giuliano di Piero di Simone Bugiardini, “Cover With a Mask, Grotteschi, and Inscription”; at right, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Giuliano di Piero di Simone Bugiardini, “Portrait of a Woman (La Monaca),” both circa 1510.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAmong the show’s many examples of Netherlandish portraiture, a clever narrative unfolds through a double-sided work by Hans Süss von Kulmbach, a protégé of Albrecht Dürer. On the front is a bust-length image of a man who seems to be looking at the upper left corner of the painting — or, perhaps, he is gazing up at the woman sitting in a window who appears when the panel is flipped.The Renaissance practice of covering paintings was rooted in earlier religious traditions and liturgical rituals, a point made in the show by a work borrowed from the Cloisters: a private devotional shrine with wings that open to display images of a female donor and her husband next to Saint Catherine.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Steadying Force for The Africa Center is Stepping Down

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      Uzodinma Iweala, chief executive of the Harlem institution, will leave at the end of 2024 after guiding it through pandemic years and securing funds.After guiding The Africa Center through rocky pandemic years and securing a huge chunk of funding for a major construction project, the leader of the Harlem institution is stepping down.Uzodinma Iweala, who is in his seventh year as chief executive of the Africa Center, will depart at the end of 2024.Iweala’s leadership helped to settle an institution with a tumultuous past of various mandates, locations and even names. It was formerly known as the Museum for African Art, which The New York Times’s co-chief art critic, Holland Cotter, called the “source of some of the most conceptually daring exhibitions of its era,” and before that, the Center for African Art. Faced with a delayed opening date during the pandemic, Iweala expanded its programming to include lectures and visits from heads of state, outdoor dance parties, films and author talks. All of it was aimed at connecting with the African diaspora and changing the way Americans interact with the African continent.Iweala, who as a writer and medical doctor has a nontraditional background for an arts institution leader, said he planned to focus on new creative projects including finishing a book. His multifaceted background and personal history — he is Nigerian-American and has lived in Nigeria — were regarded by many in the arts community as a good fit for an institution trying to transform itself into more than a museum or gallery. In an interview last year, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Thelma Golden called him “visionary.”“I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to build over the past few years, especially in a challenging environment,” Iweala said. “It’s the right time to leave for me and for the institution.”Under Iweala, the Center has partnered with the Museum of Food and Drink on an exhibition as well as independent curators to offer “States of Becoming,” a 2022-23 exhibition that featured 17 African artists from the continent and diaspora. He partnered with the University of Cape Town to help organize a media index to track how Africa is covered in the media and created the Future Africa Forum that offered discussions with presidents, philanthropists and other leaders during the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘It’s our job to change it for the better’: can artists influence the US election?

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      “I think what we’ve learned is that one man’s hope is another man’s fear,” broadcaster Alex Wagner observed in the final episode of the Showtime channel’s The Circus. “Barack Obama was the embodiment of hope for a lot of people and the embodiment of fear for a sizable portion of this country. And the same is true for Donald Trump. They are twinned emotions and we as a country cannot reconcile that.”Street artist and social activist Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster was a defining image of Obama’s winning 2008 election campaign. Sixteen years on, with another presidential poll looming, it can often feel like fear has the upper hand in American politics. But Fairey is again at work to show that art can make a difference.The 54-year-old is co-chair of Artists For Democracy 2024, a campaign launched this month by the progressive advocacy organisation People for the American Way. It aims to create art that will motivate citizens to vote against the authoritarian Trump and reclaim concepts such as “freedom”, “patriotism” and “the American way”.The lineup of more than 20 artists includes co-chair Carrie Mae Weems along with Beverly McIver, Titus Kaphar, Hank Willis Thomas, Victoria Cassinova, Christine Sun Kim, Alyson Shotz, Amalia Mesa-Baines, Angelica Muro and Cleon Peterson. Together they are setting out to cut through the political noise to surprise, entertain and shock voters out of apathy.Fairey, who has contributed four images stressing the importance of democratic participation, says by phone from Los Angeles: “The amazing thing about art is that it can get to someone’s emotions around empathy, compassion, seeing that the country should work for everyone, not just for the super rich and powerful. Some of these goals with outreach are just to stimulate that moral centre of people.“All humans are capable of making good choices, bad choices, having moments of joy, moments of pain, moments of hope, moments of fear. If we’re following the wrong story, the wrong narrative, making a more compelling alternative narrative can shift the wind back in the other direction, so that’s what I try to do all the time.”View image in fullscreenArtists for Democracy 2024 also includes a Kickstarter campaign to fund the production of billboards in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and an effort that will include peer-to-peer texting, radio PSAs, on-the-ground organisers, targeted digital ads and art activations with potential expansion into more battleground states such as North Carolina and Georgia. Activities include the release of visual prints, custom-made merchandise, radio ads, digital ads, celebrity videos, bus wraps and billboards.People for the American Way was founded in 1980 by the TV producer Norman Lear as an advocacy group aimed at countering the rising power of the evangelical right. One of the pieces included in the campaign is a portrait of Lear – who died last December aged 101 – by Fairey that was inspired by the photographer Peter Yang.The organisation has long engaged artists, from an advert narrated by the actor Gregory Peck urging Americans to reject the nomination of Judge Bork to the supreme court to board members including Seth MacFarlane, Alec Baldwin, Josh Sapan and Kathleen Turner.During the 2020 election it ran an Enough of Trump campaign in swing states featuring billboards, street teams, art installations, digital content, organising and a six-figure crowdfunding campaign. Trump was indeed defeated, only to roar back with a 2024 White House run that is even more radical, extreme and driven by vengeance.Fairey admits: “I never thought that Trump would be viable after January 6. He made many efforts to undermine all the institutions that preserve a functioning democracy while he was president the first time and he failed to completely undo all the safeguards.“But he has more people who will be complicit with his malfeasance this time and so, if he’s elected, it will be a lot more destructive. I actually really care about democracy and care that people will have a say in all of the things that government does that affect their lives, so it’s pretty fucking important.”Warning of Trump’s dictatorial tendencies, he continues: “I’m not someone who is prone to hysteria but this is an existential threat for a lot of the things that Americans have taken for granted and the success of this country has been built upon.”But the notion of artists diving into politics might set off alarm bells. The perception that Hillary Clinton was palling around with Hollywood stars in 2016 fed an “us v them” narrative, dividing America between coastal elites and Trump-loving “deplorables” in the heartland. Could artistic interventions be seen as patronising, preachy and counterproductive?Fairey insists that that some issues cut across partisan lines. “The idea that your freedom to vote might be limited can appeal to some people who normally don’t like liberal ‘woke’ talking points.“I grew up in South Carolina which always votes for Republicans and yet I had and still have tons of progressive friends. Sometimes the outreach in those places makes people who might feel apathetic or like they don’t have allies feel a little bit more courageous. I don’t think it’s a wasted effort at all.”There is another challenge this time. Opinion polls show that Biden’s staunch support for Israel as it wages war in Gaza is alienating young people, progressives and Arab Americans. More than 100,000 Michigan voters in the Democrats’ presidential primary election cast “uncommitted” ballots in a massive protest against the president.View image in fullscreenFairey understands the concerns but makes a case for pragmatism. “I do think that’s a problem but what I would say to any of those people is, regardless of how you feel about Joe Biden, if you can understand that your idealism has to be married to the pragmatic side of having a functional democracy, your next round of opportunity to place someone you like more than Joe Biden in the White House or any other political office is going to depend on democracy working.“So don’t be shortsighted. Consider that, whatever you don’t like about Joe Biden, Trump will be much worse. Anybody who’s young who has listened to Trump talk about Israel should know that Israel is going to get more unconditional support from Donald Trump. If you care about a ceasefire and human rights in Gaza, Trump will not be the person to perform better on that.”Fairey will vote for Biden, albeit not with the same enthusiasm that he felt for Obama. “I’m an idealist but I also understand that there is never going to be someone who’s running a perfect party, a perfect president or perfect Congress. This is where I get very frustrated with people who decide that it just doesn’t make any sense to participate at all if they don’t get precisely what they want, because all they do is ensure that they’re going to get even less of what they want.”McIver is another veteran of the Enough of Trump initiative four years ago. This time she has produced Black Beauty II, an image of a woman patterned with flowers beneath the word “VOTE” – in which the “T” is stylised as a woman’s fallopian tubes and uterus.The 61-year-old year old was “horrified” when the rightwing supreme court ended the constitutional right to abortion. “As a woman, I’m past the age where I would ever have an abortion but I still think it’s extremely important that all women fight for women’s rights,” she says by phone from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.McIver, who is African American, is clear-eyed about what a second Trump presidency would mean. “To even fathom that could happen makes me incredibly uncomfortable and very worried for humanity at large. I just think that we have to beat them. We have to get out there and vote.“I’m gonna take people to the polls, I’m gonna make phone calls, whatever it takes to get people out to vote is extremely important because I can’t imagine that the humanity of the world has gone that low that it would be acceptable for Trump to be president again. That’s a hopeless thought.”View image in fullscreenMcIver is convinced that art can make a difference and rejects the charge of liberal elitism. “That’s funny as a Black woman who grew up in the projects in Greensboro, North Carolina, whose family was raised on welfare, who wasn’t expected to amount to anything and art saved me, if you will.”Living with “roaches and rats” in the projects, she recalls watching Lear’s sitcom Good Times, about a family living in a public housing project in inner-city Chicago. “They were in the projects and the character JJ was an artist and he made paintings –that gave me hope about what my future could be, so the last thing I think about myself is an elitist. My family tells me I’m not all the time.“I’ll definitely own being a humanitarian and wanting good for everyone – guilty of that for sure. ‘We can’t trust the artist because they are elitist. Their work sells for X dollars.’ All that’s about fear, which is how Trump is running this campaign and has run it in the past. We just gotta realise that, before fear, we’re all human.”For Peterson, the political wake-up call came in 2017. A brawl erupted outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence in Washington when President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s diplomatic escort beat up protesters, leaving nine people injured and two under arrest.“I thought, well, this is strange, this is something different with all this divisive language and hatred and everything going on in the public dialogue, getting people riled up with fear,” the 50-year-old says from Los Angeles. “It looked very similar to stuff I’d seen in history and that’s when I started getting scared.”Peterson, too, regards Trump as a fundamental threat to democracy. “He’s trying to destroy institutions and we’re becoming like a culture of grift. I’ve found within myself that I can be all right with a certain amount of grift in the world but, when it become all-encompassing, I just can’t deal with it any more.“In terms of what’s going on, you can’t take this stuff seriously. This guy’s selling Bibles and NFTs – it’s just gotten crazy. We’re listening to super-technical arguments in the courts that that are just meant to be disruptive. Nothing is productive any more. It’s just a battle of fake ideas all day long.”Peterson has faith in the power of the artist to effect change. “I see it as our job – not just visual artists but writers, musicians, painters – to tell some form of truth in the world and also express some form of ideals and also have some kind of vision reminding people of the past and also a hopeful image of the future.“People feel disengaged and alienated, like they’re powerless nowadays, and maybe our role as artists is to say look, you guys actually do have some power here. In a world like where we can become overwhelmed with crisis, it’s our job to change it for the better if we want a better life.” More

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      Can Adriano Pedrosa Save the Venice Biennale? No Pressure.

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      Only workaholics and delusional optimists should organize a Venice Biennale, as the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa discovered during the countless flights and midnight meetings that have crammed his calendar for the past two years.“This would probably have taken five years and a team of intense researchers,” Pedrosa said in a video interview, if he hadn’t spent more than a decade mulling the possibilities, most recently as the influential artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art.On April 16, when the press previews begin for the 60th international exposition, others will judge whether the 58-year-old curator has captured the zeitgeist of contemporary art with his two-pronged show, “Foreigners Everywhere,” in the sprawling spaces of the Giardini and the Arsenale.The title is a provocation, weighted by the anti-immigrant agendas of Italy, Hungary and other countries in the last few years. Pedrosa, however, speaks about celebrating the foreigner and the historic waves of migration across the planet, offering a catalog of synonyms — “Immigrant, émigré, expatriate” — even as he expands the concept. “I take this image of the foreigner and unfold it into the queer, the outsider, the Indigenous,” he said.Those themes are embodied by 331 artists, most of whom will be unfamiliar to even seasoned art snobs. They are divided here between two major sections, one focusing on contemporary art and another dedicated to work made in the 20th century. Most have arrived from the Global South without major gallery representation or a foothold in the museum circuit. For many visitors, it will be the first time experiencing the splintered abstractions of Zubeida Agha (1922-1997) from Pakistan, the expressive portraiture of Hatem El Mekki (1918-2003) from Tunisia and the colorful fantasies of Emiliano di Cavalcanti (1897-1976) from Brazil, among others.From the beginning, critics noticed that “Foreigners Everywhere” would serve as a somber — some say morose — tipping point: It’s the first Venice Biennale in recent years to showcase more dead artists than living ones.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Heartland Godmother of Installation Art, No Longer in the Shadows

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      She is a trailblazer of the architectural sculpture movement, and her diaries rival Frida Kahlo’s. Are we ready for the unsettling clarity of Donna Dennis?One of Donna Dennis’s architectural installations — a false tunnel entrance installed on the Mad River — so confounded local Ohioans that one morning in August 1981, someone pipe-bombed it. New York’s bomb squad confiscated part of another structure, a cabin occupying City Hall Park, in 1986. The works by Dennis are so faithful to existing vocabularies of infrastructure that they defy classification as art objects.In 1970s New York, as painting and sculpture gave way to a gold rush of conceptualism, environments, performance and politics, the Ohio-born Dennis, fresh from art school in Minnesota and Paris, tuned into consciousness-raising women’s groups and devoted her craft to unsettlingly frank resemblances of buildings.First came hotel and subway facades, then houses in the round — each a combination of construction and artist materials, and slightly too small to pretend functionality. (For lights she uses appliance bulbs, and her doors terminate at her eye level.) Since the ’80s she has gone industrial: room-size lift bridges, stairways, rail platforms, pump houses and roller coaster girdings that have increased in complexity as they lessen in number.Dennis in 1981 with half of “Mad River Tunnel: Entrance and Exit,” in Dayton, Ohio.Donna DennisThis month, the gates crack on this scarce and challenging oeuvre. The bellwether art gallery O’Flaherty’s has darkened its space on Avenue A to a dramatic degree, and filled it with five Dennis works from the 1970s and ’90s, for a show called “Houses and Hotels.” Whatever else they do, these shrines to vernacular architecture, humane, seductive and commanding, make clear that a godmother of installation art has been unwisely overlooked.“Two Stories with Porch (for Robert Cobuzio)” (1977-79) is a 10-foot-tall rowhouse in the style of suburban New Jersey. From a darkened first-story window, a VACANCY sign glows greenly. (A tribute to the late friend of the title.) A wallpapered room lit by ceiling bulb is just visible upstairs. As your eyes adjust in the dark, unlit details fade in: a coat of aluminum paint on the cornice, a staircase through the curtain, a tracing of mortar among stones in the foundation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Betye Saar Is Making Some of the Best Work of Her Life.

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      Being raised during the Depression, we all learned to be creative with what we had on hand. At Christmas or on my birthday, I always got art supplies, and I was jealous that my siblings got bikes and stuff. I realize now that my parents were fostering my creativity.An early influence on my becoming an artist was Simon Rodia. My grandmother lived in Watts, and we would walk by the Watts Towers when they were being built. I was fascinated by how he used bottle caps and corn cobs and broken plates — trash, essentially — to make art, to make something beautiful. Then, much later, in the 1960s, I saw the work of Joseph Cornell. He refined the use of found objects and materials and boxes, and I thought, “Wow, I’ve kind of been doing that, too.” I didn’t know it was called assemblage, but it made sense to me and set me in that direction as an artist.A young Betye Saar in 1965 at the entrance to Simon Rodia’s monumental towers in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.via Betye Saar and Roberts ProjectsThe main challenge, I guess, to being an artist is how to make a living. But being a creative person means you have to find ways to do this. I studied design at U.C.L.A., and after I graduated, I made greeting cards, I made jewelry, I got into printmaking and then sold my prints. I taught art classes in colleges all over the states. My creativity kept evolving with my needs as I got married and bought a house, had my daughters and put them through college. Through it all, I loved making art. It kept me going.I still want to make art. Sometimes in the morning when I wake up, it’s hard to get out of bed, hard to get back into my body and get it to move. But I do it. Not everyone has a reason to get out of bed, something they love to do and that gives their life meaning. I am so lucky that I have that as part of my life. I don’t really think about my age, unless someone mentions it, though I guess I feel middle-aged — which for me is, like, 50 to 70. It would be kind of neat to live to 100, to have 100 revolutions around the sun. I’m pretty close.Greeting Card #8Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonThe inside of Greeting Card #8Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonGreeting Card #1Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonThe inside of Greeting Card #1Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonMemories Lost at Sea, 2024Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonThe exterior of Memories Lost at Sea, 2024.Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonA Different Destiny, 2024Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonThe exterior A Different Destiny, 2024.Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonDark Passage 2024Betye Saar, via Roberts Projects; Photo by Paul SalvesonThe exterior of Dark Passage 2024.Drifting Toward Twilight, 2023 (installation view)Betye Saar, via The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens; Photo by Joshua WhiteCurrent and upcoming projects: Completed “Drifting Toward Twilight,” an installation at the Huntington Library in the Bronx; “Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer” exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; “Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight” at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne, Switzerland; and completed a newly commissioned artwork for “Paraventi; Folding Screens from the 17th to the 21st Century” at the Fondazione Prada in Milan.This interview has been edited and condensed. More