In October, Poland announced the choice of Ignacy Czwartos, who had planned to exhibit paintings that envision the country as having been oppressed by Germany and Russia throughout the 20th century. Instead, Open Group, a collective that includes Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga, will now represent the country.

The Polish Ministry of Culture issued a statement this past Friday saying the decision had come after “analyzing the competition procedures for the exhibition design as part of the 60th International Art Exhibition in Venice in 2024 and after getting acquainted with the opinions and voices of the communities.” Warsaw’s Zachęta – National Gallery of Art remains the institution in charge of organizing the show.

Czwartos’s pavilion was to include more than 35 works, one of which was to show German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin near a swastika, according to the project’s initial outline.

Many had criticized the project for echoing the nationalist-populist politics of the Law and Justice party (PiS for short) that, from 2015 until earlier this month, had reigned in Poland. Party members had taken control of the media and museums, and severely curtailed the rights of women and queer people.

After a general election held in October went in favor of the opposition party, many expected that PiS would leave power before the Venice Biennale opens in April. But it was not always clear whether Czwartos’s pavilion would be installed. Joanna Warsza, a curator of the 2022 Polish Pavilion, told the Guardian in November that the planned Czwartos presentation was the “end game of eight years of rightwing rule.” In that same report, Karolina Plinta, an editor at the art magazine Szum, called the exhibition “an anti-European manifesto.”

In an unusual development, the issue so severely split the jury that three members, including Warsza, were moved to issue a dissenting opinion on the matter.

Few details were announced on Friday about the new pavilion by Open Group, other than that it will be titled “Repeat after me” and curated by Marta Czyż.

Along the way, Chile also lost the space from its past editions, a structure near the water in the Arsenale, and was forced to relocate elsewhere.

A public call for proposals for the Chilean Pavilion launched on June 5, but its deadline was delayed to July 28 when its organizers found out the space they had long rented for €150,000 was no longer available. On October 5, the pavilion’s organizers announced that they were selected seven projects for an exhibition that was described as being located on “the first floor of the assigned space,” implying that the show would contain more than one floor.

That same day, the commissioner of the Chilean Pavilion, Florencia Loewenthal, issued a second communiqué stating that the show would still take place in the Arsenale and would have two floors, one of which would be dedicated to an exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Chilean coup d’état.

In that missive, Loewenthal said that the Venice Biennale had announced a restoration of areas of the Arsenale in June, forcing Chile to seek a new location. The Biennale di Venezia Press Office disputed this, telling ARTnews that the Chilean Pavilion’s organizers first inquired about the Arsenale space in May, even though plans for the restoration had been known since 2022, and that they had not sent an official request to participate until July.

Given the delays and the change of location, curator Gabriela Rangel and artist Patrick Hamilton, who had been in charge of one of the preselected projects for the pavilion, contacted the organizing committee to find out how to access the new location. Loewenthal told them that the new space was not managed by the Biennale, but by the Italian Navy, and that they were “negotiating the possibility of crossing from the Italian pavilion by boat with the Navy [so that the pavilion would] have two entrances and a greater flow of public.”

Hamilton and Rangel then issued an open letter in which they wrote of “organizational problems, unforeseen changes and a lack of transparency in the selection process of the Chilean Pavilion.” The artists León & Cociña, who were behind another considered project, also pulled out of the pavilion.

Once both resignations became publicly known, Alessandra Burotto, executive secretary of Visual Arts, the entity in charge of organizing the pavilion, issued a letter that sought to clarify matters. The new pavilion, she wrote, was located “in front of the Italian Pavilion,” when in reality it is almost more than a mile away from it, across a canal. She said it was the same space where Lithuania’s pavilion was held in 2019, the year it “had won the Golden Globe [sic].”

But, with controversy mounting in the Chilean art scene, Burotto resigned a week later.

In an interview with ARTnews, Hamilton said that Burotto’s statement was an attempt to “cover up problems with zero self-criticism, a demonstration of a complete lack of professionalism, and absolutely childish.” For Hamilton, the loss of Chile’s space “leaves the country’s visual arts without its single publicly funded international showcase.”

After Burotto’s resignation, Carolina Arredondo, the Chilean culture minister, held a meeting with the artists and curators of the five remaining projects. According to El Mostrador, the people behind four of the five projects requested that the show commemorating the 1973 coup d’état be eliminated, given that they were unaware of it when they applied. Nicolás Grum, another preselected artist, told ARTnews that his project would be “certainly unpresentable” alongside the coup d’état presentation, since he had no knowledge of it.

ARTnews has learned that the coup d’état presentation was ultimately scrapped. But even without it, the pavilion continued to face turbulence. Iván Flores, a jury member, was dismissed without justification. (He declined to comment for this article.) Flores filed a complaint, and an open internal disciplinary investigation is ongoing.

The selection of Valeria Montti’s project, curated by Andrea Pacheco and produced by Carola Chacón, has raised not a few eyebrows in the Chilean art scene, since she only had two solo shows on her career. Also, as certain Chilean publications have pointed out, Montti was born in Stockholm to exiled Chilean parents and is based in the Swedish capital. That means she is the first Chilean artist not born in the country to represent it at the Biennale.

Some have accused her project of conflicts of interest. Chacón works at the Chilean Museum of Contemporary Art, whose director, Daniel Cruz, is part of the Chilean Pavilion jury. Pacheco runs a Madrid residency program where another juror, Amanda de la Garza, was previously a guest curator. Some also noted that Montti was a resident at a space managed by Juan Castillo, another jury member.

The Secretariat of Visual Arts told ARTnews that both Castillo and Cruz disqualified themselves from voting. But de la Garza appears to have continued to remained in the decision-making process. Pacheco said de la Garza’s connection to Montti dates back to 2017 and that “it is quite possible that you will find coincidences, not professional ties, between juries and participants.”

Artists behind projects that were ultimately not chosen for the pavilion expressed dismay over the situation. “It does not seem to me that Chile’s official participation in an event like this should be done quickly,” said artist Nicolás Grum. “I believe that the competition process for the next biennial should be opened and awarded in 2024, so that the winning project has at least 15 months to develop.”

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A Guide to the 2024 Venice Biennale National Pavilions

Venice Biennale’s 2024 Edition to Celebrate Diasporas Under the Title ‘Foreigners Everywhere’

Titled “Nigeria Imaginary,” the exhibition will feature an intergenerational group of nine Nigerian and Nigerian diasporic artists. Iit will be sited in a historical palazzo in Dorsoduro, near the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

Those artists are Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Ndidi Dike, Onyeka Igwe, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Abraham Oghobase, Yinka Shonibare, Fatimah Tuggar, and Precious Okoyomon, whose contribution to the main exhibition at the 2022 Venice Bienanle made her a breakout star.

The pavilion’s commissioner is Godwin Obaseki, Governor of Nigeria’s Edo State, on behalf of Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Culture and Information, with the forthcoming Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Edo (formerly called EMOWAA) serving as its official organizer. (The pavilion’s exhibition will travel to MOWAA in an expanded form in 2025.)

Nigerian-British curator and art historian Aindrea Emelife, curator of contemporary and modern art at MOWAA, was selected as the pavilion’s curator. She proposed the artist list and exhibition theme, which she said will provide “a way of looking forward to the future while also looking back—their modernity is very much rooted still in this embrace of tradition.”

“This exhibition, envisioned by Ms. Emelife with a diverse roster of accomplished artists, encourages us to revisit the past in order to create a bright future for Nigeria,” Obaseki said in a statement.

“I sat down and started to think about what I feel the world needs to know about Nigeria now,” Emelife told ARTnews in an interview. “Being a Nigerian who is also in diaspora, I started to think about the ways that I’ve seen Nigeria and the way that I feel other people have been looking at Nigeria. In many ways, the imagination can be such a fertile and powerful tool of liberation. In the imaginary, we can dream but we can also reckon with ideas of utopia.”

One way she wanted to go about this was to present “different perspectives of Nigeria—cross-generationally, cross-disciplinary—so the exhibition can allow the viewer to forge many different relationships with Nigeria through different minds. But also, the many different artists can reckon with their own heritage and views of Nigeria in their own special way.”

The pavilion’s two youngest artists are Adeniyi-Jones and Okoyomon, born in 1992 and 1993, respectively, while Dike and Shonibare, born in 1960 and 1962, respectively, represent the exhibition’s more senior participants. Of the nine artists, only Dike is based in Nigeria, while Igwe, Okoyomon, and Shonibare are based in London; Ojih Odutola, Adeniyi-Jones, and Tuggar are based in the US; and Oghobase is based in Toronto.

In presenting this diverse group of Nigerian and Nigerian diasporic artists, Emelife said she wants to “reconfigure what a national pavilion means to a global audience,” adding that “it was also very important that the list resisted expectations. The way West African art has been seen historically has been quite a singular and perhaps disjointed.”

While the pavilion includes established artists like Shonibare and Ojih Odutola and closely watched rising stars like Okoyomon and Adeniyi-Jones, their work will be juxtaposed alongside the work of artists, like Oghobase, Tuggar, Igwe, and Dike, who are less known internationally. Similarly, she wanted to select artists working in a range of mediums, from painters like Ojih Odutola and Adeniyi-Jones to artists like Okoyomon, whose work she said posits “future possibilities of Land art,” and Tuggar, whose interdisciplinary work “looks at new relationships with the digital world.”

She continued, “West African art isn’t just about colorful paintings and figuration. That’s very much developed and seen in the artists that I’ve chosen. There are incredible artists doing that work, but I wanted to ensure that the variety of practices that artists are working in in Nigeria and the diaspora are reflected.”

African countries are still vastly underrepresented at the Venice Biennale. At the 2022 Biennale, out of the 54 African countries, only nine—Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe—organized national pavilions. (Namibia’s faced controversy due to the way it was organized.) At least 25 countries have announced the details of their national pavilions for the 2024 Venice Biennale; so far, Benin, which will make its Venice debut, is the only other African country to do so.

Nigeria has only ever organized a national pavilion once before, for the 2017 edition, which featured the work of Peju Alatise, Victor Ehikhamenor, and Quddus Onikeku, and was curated by Adenrele Sonariwo, the founder of Lagos-based Rele Gallery. But, Nigeria’s art scene has only continued to flourish in the years since; the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated the 2023 edition of its “New Photography” series to the work of seven Nigerian photographers, including Oghobase, and their distinct approaches to capturing Lagos.

Emelife was hired by MOWAA earlier this year, and she said that in both her work for the museum and with the pavilion she wants “to create like a more harmonic or cohesive line of thought when it comes to Nigerian art. The way that people see Nigerian art now is as being deeply rooted in the market. I thought that it would be my critical obligation to resist and disrupt that by choosing artists that aren’t just populated in the idea of commodity.”

Clarification, July 21, 2023: The forthcoming Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Edo has recently changed its name from the Edo Museum of West African Art, often abbreviated to EMOWAA. This article has been updated to reflect that name change.

Its curator, Museu de Arte de São Paulo artistic director Adriano Pedrosa, revealed the biennial’s theme at a press conference held Thursday morning. With that announcement, there are fewer than 10 months to go before the Venice Biennale opens in Italy on April 20, 2024.

Pedrosa has named the show “Foreigners Everywhere,” a reference to a 2004 Claire Fontaine piece featuring that phrase spelled out in many different colors and languages. That work is itself an allusion to a Turin-based anarchist collective of the same name in Italian, Stranieri Ovunque.

At MASP, Pedrosa has gained a reputation for game-changing exhibitions that find innovative ways of slicing art history, often with a stated focus on race, gender, and sexuality. He’s best known for an exhibition series known as “Histórias,” the best-known show of which, focused on Afro-Atlantic histories, traveled to the US in an abridged form.

Pedrosa, who was born in Rio de Janeiro, is the first Latin American ever to organize the Venice Biennale, an exhibition that has historically been curated by European men.

“Foreigners Everywhere” builds on the work Pedrosa has done at MASP with a show that he said would emphasize a multiplicity of races, genders, and nationalities, all in service of what he called “a celebration of the foreign, the distant, the outsider, the queer, as well as the indigenous.”

“Artists have always travelled under the most diverse circumstances, moving through cities, countries and continents, a phenomenon that has only grown since the late 20th century—ironically, a period marked by increasing restrictions on dislocation or displacement of people,” Pedrosa said in a statement. “The Biennale Arte 2024 will focus on artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, and refugees—especially those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North.”

Pedrosa’s Biennale theme suggests a continuation of what was started in 2022 by Cecilia Alemani, whose edition was titled “The Milk of Dreams” and centered around female and nonbinary artists, with men accounting for fewer than a tenth of the 200-plus artists she included. That exhibition also made waves by including a grouping of “capsule” shows composed mainly of art from decades ago that provided her focus on Surrealism’s reemergence with a historical grounding.

The 2024 edition will include what Pedrosa is calling a “Nucleo Contemporaneo” and a “Nucleo Storico,” sections dedicated to new and old works, respectively. That latter portion aspires to expand the history of modernism beyond Europe and North America.

“We are all too familiar with the history of modernism in Euroamerica, yet the modernisms in the Global South remain largely unknown and thus they assume a truly contemporary relevance—we urgently need to learn more about and from them,” Pedrosa said. “European modernism itself travelled far beyond Europe throughout the 20th century, often intertwined with colonialism, and many artists in the Global South travelled to Europe to be exposed to it. Yet modernism was appropriated, devoured and cannibalized in the Global South, repeatedly taking on radically new shapes and forms in dialogue with local and indigenous references.”

A part of the “Nucleo Storico” will be devoted to what Pedrosa called “the worldwide Italian artistic diaspora in the 20th century,” with artists from the country who traveled and moved to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere.

Pedrosa’s theme will apply only to the main exhibition of the Biennale, which also includes dozens of national pavilions that are facilitated by their respective host countries.

Some of those countries have already begun announcing their representatives, with Julien Creuzet doing the French Pavilion, John Akomfrah doing the British Pavilion, Kapwani Kiwanga doing the Canadian Pavilion, and more.

Robert Cicutto, president of the Venice Biennale, praised Pedrosa’s concept as one that could potentially prove innovative for the 128-year-old art exhibition.

“I am certain that the 60th International Art Exhibition and its curator will be able to move us and, as the curator of the 18th Biennale Architettura Lesley Lokko said, fill in those gaps in art history with many heretofore neglected artists,” Cicutto said in a statement.

Creuzet’s exhibitions typically carry paragraph-length titles that point to the show’s underlying themes, as did this one that recently traveled from LUMA Arles in France to LUMA Westbau in Zurich: “Orpheus was musing upon braised words, under the light rain of a blazing fog, snakes are deaf and dumb anyway, oblivion buried in the depths of insomnia.”

Not unlike the mythical Orpheus, who descended into Hades to retrieve his love Eurydice only to lose her at the last moment, we too travel into Creuzet’s world, set somewhere below the surface of wakeful consciousness. There, in his reimagined version of an immersive opera, we’re invited to experience forgotten memories told in song accompanied by hanging skeletal sculptures of landscapes, spirit creatures, panel paintings, and holograms of artifacts come to new life from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. If we peer and listen closely, pieced together narratives surface, overlapping before they too fade away, transformed into something else with every new turn.

Creuzet’s work is a hard-to-pin sensory exploration that sparks the imagination. It’s this friction between the strange and unknown that makes us question the familiar, an exercise at the heart of Creuzet’s practice. He wants us to question everything.

That is increasingly possible through Creuzet’s work, as it becomes more visible internationally, with the latest feather in his cap being the French Pavilion; he will be the first Black man to take it over. Other major exhibitions include solos at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2019) and Camden Arts Center in London (2022), as well as appearances in Manifesta 13 in 2020, the 2018 Gwangju Biennale, and the 2017 Lyon Biennale. In 2021, he was nominated for the esteemed Prix Marcel Duchamp, administered by the Centre Pompidou.

Yet, the prestigious platform of Venice seems to have no bearing on Creuzet. “For me, it’s just a title. One step. One exhibition,” he told ARTnews in a video interview earlier this year from his Paris studio. “It’s about continuing with my work, which is to share various imaginations with others. And in a sense, to question the world, our context, our history, our present. … Nothing has changed.”

In essence, he’s interested in reaching the widest audience possible—“art only exists when we give it to others to see”—because that is the way to “generate areas of space for movements of emancipation and movements of the imagination,” he added.

Within those spaces, Creuzet challenges preconceived categorizations, particularly ones that relate to his own lived experience, such as the African and Caribbean diasporas, the significance of artistic and literary voices from those diasporas, the legacy of colonialism, and the struggle to share our planet’s resources. For Creuzet, these subjects are personal and inescapable.

Born 1986 in a working-class Paris suburb, Creuzet was raised in Martinique, where he was introduced early on to artists from the Caribbean, thanks to his family’s love for culture. “Being surrounded by that [artistic] nourishment fascinated me—it made me dream,” he said. He still remembers the blue enamel ceramics by local artist Victor Anicet that are evocative of local pre-Columbian ceramics and the music of Eugene Mona. The “enigma” of his childhood is the source of Creuzet’s “imaginary reservoir,” with Martinique its “emotional heart,” said Creuzet who returned to France in 2006 when he was 20 years-old to pursue a standard educational track at French art schools; he is now a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

“I’m always left trapped, because the Other … endlessly boxes me into this one identity,” Creuzet said. “I try to be what I have to be. But in one way or another, I’m constantly reminded of my condition as a Black man. … It makes me realize there is still a lot to do in terms movements to emancipate and decolonize the body, knowledge, culture, and arts.”

Throughout our hour-long conversation, Creuzet often responded in open-to-interpretation metaphoric French prose (certain nuances, of course, have been lost to translation), which should come as no surprise given that he is also a prolific poet. “I answer this way, because I don’t want to reduce everything to one thing,” he said, pointing his finger into the air in front of him.

“Julien’s vision is needed right now,” said Sibylle Friche, a partner at Chicago’s Document Gallery, one of three that represents him. “The decolonial turn in recent art is not just a trend. It is part and parcel of former imperial nations like France coming to terms with the less savory aspects of their history—work that has only begun. Julien addresses colonialism poetically, which draws attention to its affective consequences as much as its material traces.”

At his LUMA exhibitions, Creuzet’s human-scale, drawing-sculptures, made of bent poles smothered in a colorful, gummy paste, at first appear abstract, but slowly reveal themselves to be spirit-like beings. In one, a fairy emerges from a dark blue ooze, as painted-over, pre-Columbian demons mock us. Elsewhere are mesmerizing holograms of African artifacts dancing bélé, a genre associated with slavery’s abolition in Martinique.

In his practice, Creuzet orchestrates self-described operatic installations using a range of mediums and collaborations with other artists, including musicians and dancers. Through those collaborations, as well as drawing from the writings of Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, and André Breton, among others, Creuzet wants to “complexify … the way different African and Creole cultures have actually played an important role in the current manifestations of contemporary France, and by extension, the contemporary world,” said Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, director of exhibitions and programs at LUMA.

There’s also a sense of hope, even joy, imbued in these works, a nod to Creuzet’s own feelings about this “moment of crystallization” and “emancipation” that we are witnessing.

“We are living through a changing context,” Creuzet said, pointing to issues as wide ranging as Covid, the energy crises, and efforts in France and elsewhere to restitute looted artworks from Africa. Society is “asking individuals to try to situate themselves in terms of who they are, where they come from, how they feel in their skin and in their bodies, and heads,” he said.

In his art, Creuzet aims to discuss socio-political issues like these in a language he hopes can reach beyond the art world’s institutional boundaries. “Julien’s work feels so urgent because of the many references and transnational connections he makes, that go beyond the bubble of contemporary art discourses,” said independent curator Cindy Sissokho, who with Céline Kopp will curate the French Pavilion. “It’s a practice that is liberating, opening up imaginaries and therefore possibilities that expand discourses about the African diaspora.”

And Creuzet’s international acclaim will likely only continue to increase in the near future. In addition to the Venice exhibition, Sissokho and Kopp will also organize a solo exhibition of Creuzet’s work later this year at the Magasin in Grenoble, where Kopp is director. Co-produced with Brown Arts Institute and David Winton Bell Gallery, the show will travel to the US starting in 2024, marking Creuzet’s first major solo institutional exhibition there. Beginning this month, he will participate in the 2023 Liverpool Biennial, and in November, he will present a new commission as part of the Performa biennial in New York. His work is also featured in the traveling exhibition, “Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today,” which debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and will open at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in October.

With a method reliant on archival and on-the-ground research, Creuzet sticks to a constant, daily work ethic. “Art is deeply about daily research. I never stop nourishing and cultivating myself. I never stop learning,” he said.

His art-making is one that forces him to “se debrouiller,” or manage with what he’s got. “I always thought of art as a door to survival or fresh air, an absolute, visceral necessity,” he said. For years, and because of financial and material constraints, Creuzet’s pieces were largely composed of found objects. They still maintain that aspect, though his production means have recently expanded, and he’s incorporated new, technically advanced elements, including virtual reality.

Today, Creuzet says he “gets the most pleasure from sharing” with others. “Generosity is the most beautiful thing,” even when much of the world is currently set up to make it “difficult to share essentials, like water and food. It’s hard to share the same planet. It’s hard to simply be.”

He continued, “I’m learning not to point fingers in an inquisitive way anymore, because I don’t think it helps improve the situation. I think everyone has to do the work of emancipation and decolonization, and we still have far to go. … I’m now trying to figure out how to engage in a form of activism and denunciation, but with less pain.”

The Headlines

THE COLLECTORS. Billionaire Mitchell Rales, who cofounded the Glenstone museum in Potomac, Maryland, has joined a bid to acquire the Washington Commanders football team, Axios reports. Rales, who was captain of the football team at his high school in Bethesda, Maryland, has signed on to an attempt to acquire the team that is being led by private equity titan Josh Harris (cofounder of Apollo). Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal asked superstar musician Alicia Keys if she and her husband Kasseem Daoud Dean (aka producer Swizz Beatz) would ever consider starting a museum for their vast art holdings. “Some type of traveling museum would be tremendous,” Keys said. “Everyone should have access to experiencing art and understanding how they can have it in their lives.” In 2019, Antwaun Sargent profiled the couple in ARTnews.

REMEMBERING A GIANT. The revered British artist Phyllida Barlow, who won fame for grand but never grandiloquent abstract sculptures, died on Sunday at the age of 78, as Tessa Solomon reported earlier this week in ARTnews, and Barlow’s many friends and admirers have been paying tribute to the artist. In the Guardian, the art critic Adrian Searle writes, “She played and fought with her recalcitrant materials, in an art of pleasure and complaint. What a loss this is.” Writer Katy Hessel told Artnet News that her “all-engulfing sculptures question the limitless potentials of the versatile medium.” And Harper’s Bazaar republished an interview it conducted with Barlow in 2014, when she showed her work at Tate Britain in London. “I want visitors to feel they’ve become part of the work, physically engaged,” she said.

The Digest

A recently unearthed document suggests that Leonardo da Vinci’s mother, Caterina, was kidnapped from the Caucasus region and enslaved. That paper, which concerns the emancipation of a Circassian named Caterina, was found by historian Carlo Vecce, who has written a novel based on the theory. [The New York Times]

The Kunsthaus Zurich said that it will take a more proactive approach to studying its collection for works that may have been looted by the Nazis, setting up a commission of independent experts. It said that it would also like to see a Swiss national commission created to carry out such investigations. [AFP/Times of Israel]

Greek government archaeologists staged a five-hour strike on Tuesday, in response to an assault on a colleague in the Athens area last week. Some believe that the attack was a reprisal for his efforts to regulate development on the vacation hotspot of Mykonos. They are calling for greater police protection. [The Washington Post]

The government of the Netherlands has returned the remains of nine Indigenous people to the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Eustatius. The remains had been taken by archaeologists more than three decades ago, and the island’s Culture Department had called for their return. [The Associated Press]

Benin said that it will stage a pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, its first time participating in the big show. Curating it will be Azu Nwagbogu, the founder of Lagos’s African Artists’ Foundation, who was director of Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa from 2018 to 2019. [The Art Newspaper]

Architect Christian Wassmann has designed a home for his family on a hilltop overlooking New York’s Hudson Valley that has as a key component a gargantuan boulder worthy of Michael Heizer. [Architectural Digest]

The Kicker

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY. In the New York Times, Adam Nagourney has a deep dive on the $1 billion Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which is scheduled to open in Los Angeles in 2025, and got Rahm Emanuel on the horn to talk about the play that he made for the project when he was mayor of the Windy City. “I can’t speak to the gain for L.A. but I can speak to the loss for Chicago,” Emanuel said from Japan, where he is now U.S. ambassador. “It was competitive and we wanted it.” He added, “You can see I still get emotional talking about this.” [NYT]