Two paintings vie for the top spot in Western art history, earning them pride of place on countless postcards, posters, and tote bags among other forms of merchandise and mass media incarnations. One is Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, the other, Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

Each represents its respective era through the sheer force of facial expression. Mona Lisa’s famously ambiguous smile is fixed to a surface that is seamless and serene—crystalline yet conjured from smoke and mist; Munch’s protagonist has tiny coals for eyes and a maw of horror for a mouth, a vertically elongated oval echoed by frenetic lines. Leonardo’s masterpiece reflects a faith in humanism, naturalism, and classicism; Munch’s, the unraveling of same by the Industrial Revolution.

But there is more to The Scream, historically speaking, than just the context in which it arose. The Mona Lisa represents an impossible ideal—palpable, yet clearly beyond reach. The Scream, on the other hand, arguably speaks to a much more ancient, existential state, connecting to the fears—psychological and physical—that have haunted mankind from its beginnings. Its timelessness is on a whole other order than Leonardo’s masterpiece, finding truth to nature by tying it to the authentic expressions of the human condition.

The Scream, whose earliest version was painted in 1893, is arguably the first modern painting, though many would credit Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). But while Les Demoiselles signaled a radical break with the Renaissance paradigm epitomized by La Gioconda, The Scream manifested modernity through the subjective frame of feelings, making concrete the sense of alienation and anomie that would come to define life in the 20th century.

Ironically, that wasn’t Munch’s intent, even as The Scream provided the inspiration for much of the art that would follow, especially Expressionism. Instead, Munch’s work developed within the context of Symbolism, which abandoned art-for-art’s-sake formalism for dreamlike allegories. Munch followed suit up to a point. He once said, “From the moment of my birth, the angels of anxiety, worry, and death stood at my side.” His childhood was marked by chronic ailments, the untimely demise of a sibling, and a fear of falling victim to a family history of mental illness—all of which contributed to Munch’s neurotic temperament.

Accordingly, themes of mortality, melancholy, and anxiety consistently haunted his compositions, which were often distinguished by soft, ectoplasmic figures suspended in time and space. The Scream was exemplary in this respect, with its wraithlike figure standing on a bridge as he howls under an infernal sky rendered in incandescent bands of orange and crimson. His body snakes as if it were a flame at the end of a flickering candle, registering his consumption by fear physically as well as psychologically. Two indistinct figures stand in the background, oblivious to his agony.

Munch’s transformation of the emotional into the palpable also owed something to the Romanticists, who’d swept across the Continent in the early 19th century as a reaction to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason. Their aesthetic was built on passion, most conspicuously in the notion of the sublime. The sublime as a construct dates back to Greece during the first century AD, where it referred to exceptionalism. But it was the 18th-century British philosopher Edmund Burke who defined the concept the Romanticists embraced—namely, nature’s power to elicit terror and awe in the beholder.

It was exactly this experience that Munch captured. “I was walking along a path with two friends,” he wrote, when “suddenly the sky turned blood . . . [with] red tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city. . . . I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.” The Scream, then, is a document of Munch’s epiphany, with its overwhelmed character standing in for himself.

Still, it isn’t the mouth and eyes that necessarily convey The Scream’s meaning, but rather the clapping of the figure’s hands over his ears in a futile effort to block out an unbearable sound. Over time this crucial aspect of the painting has largely been supplanted by the idea that it captures a wider existential and societal breakdown.

The Scream has been the subject of countless conjectures. Some have claimed that it’s a self-portrait of Munch having a panic attack or that it may have been inspired by the proximity of a lunatic asylum to the painting’s setting overlooking Oslo. Others have focused on the cause of the blood-red sky above, with fallout from the volcanic eruptions on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa (which caused cooling temperatures and lurid sunsets across the globe) fingered as one culprit, and polar stratospheric clouds over Norway as another. Finally, the figure itself was supposedly taken from a shriveled Peruvian mummy exhibited at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, which also saw the debut of the Eiffel Tower. Though the object does bear a startling resemblance to Munch’s creation, there’s no record of his having seen it, though Paul Gaugin, a friend and mentor, apparently did.

What is known for sure is that between 1893 and 1910, Munch produced five versions of The Scream, two in oil and two in pastel along with a lithographed edition. Three in particular had notable brushes with notoriety.

There was, for instance, the blatant theft of the earliest version of the painting, an oil and tempera composition on cardboard (known as the “Waxy Scream” because Munch had spilled wax on it) from the National Gallery in Oslo in February 1994. With the country distracted by the Winter Olympics held in Norway that year, the robbers brazenly propped a ladder against a window at the museum to snatch The Scream. The piece was eventually recovered.

Ten years later, another version of The Scream was stolen at gunpoint in broad daylight from the Munch Museum in Oslo. That, too, was retrieved, thanks to a generous bounty offered for its return—along with the promise of two million M&Ms by the candy’s maker, Mars, Inc., to literally sweeten the deal.

Most famously, a pastel iteration of The Scream fetched $120 million at a Sotheby’s auction in 2012, making it the most expensive painting ever sold up to that point (it would be dethroned five years later). Another, less well-known fact about the pastel’s history was that it had been hidden in a Norwegian barn during World War II while its owners decamped to Britain for the duration.

That conflict and the one proceeding it helped to turn Munch’s neurasthenic take on the sublime into what it’s become today: a signifier of our inability to grapple with unspeakable monstrosities. That its import still broadcasts from under layers of pop-cultural accretions speaks to the enduring power of Munch’s vision.

We aren’t the first generation to be impressed by the pre-Columbian megalopolis of Teotihuacán, in central Mexico. The ruins seemed ancient even to the Aztecs, who encountered it centuries after it was abandoned. Awed, the Aztecs gave the site its name: Teotihuacán, or “the place where gods were created.”

Even by modern standards, Teotihuacán was massive. By 500 C.E. it housed some 200,000 people across its eight square miles. But, as with other pre-Columbian cities, something about city living didn’t stick for its inhabitants: They appear to have abandoned the area by 750 C.E. The mighty city they built still stands just an hour’s drive from Mexico City, making it a must-see on any visit to the Mexican capital.

Who founded Teotihuacán?

We don’t know. Evidence of human settlement there dates to about 400 B.C.E., but its largest structures were completed as late as 300 C.E.

We call the people who eventually inhabited and developed Teotihuacán Teotihuacanos, but we don’t know where they came from or even what language they spoke. The city’s growth was likely accelerated by the migration of Maya, Mixtec, and Zapotec peoples to the area. Historians believe other Teotihuacanos may have arrived as refugees from Cuicuilco, a city destroyed by volcanic eruption in the first century C.E.

What makes Teotihuacán so distinctive?

First is its sheer size. Because of Teotihuacán’s proximity to a valuable obsidian deposit, historians believe the city essentially held a regional monopoly on the prized material. That allowed Teotihuacán to become very wealthy very quickly, and Teotihuacanos spared no expense in building their glorious city. The Pyramid of the Sun is the tallest structure in the ruins at an astonishing 216 feet tall. The next tallest is the Pyramid of the Moon (140 feet), standing at the end of the Calle de los Muertos (“Avenue of the Dead”). The enormous road, 130 feet wide and 1.5 miles long, is lined with royal residences. In total, Teotihuacán’s ruins contain some 2,000 single-story apartment compounds.

Teotihuacán’s ruins are remarkably well organized. As a precursor to future American cities, Teotihuacán was clearly built on a grid. And the ruins are very well preserved: Visitors can even see traces of the vivid red hematite paint that once covered the Temple of Quetzalcóatl, which stands in the 38-acre Ciudadela (citadel).

In 1989 archaeologists uncovered the bodies of what appeared to be sacrificial victims near the temple. It semes the sacrificed were killed around the time of the temple’s completion and were respected individuals: Many men were in military garb, while the bodies of others indicated their high social status. More evidence of human and animal sacrifices were uncovered near the Pyramid of the Moon in 2004.

What was the Pyramid of the Sun used for?

We don’t know for sure, but archaeologists unearthed a major clue in 2013: a pit at the pyramid’s summit. Within the pit, excavation teams uncovered the statue of a god easily identifiable as Huehueteotl, the Old God of Fire, in the Mesoamerican pantheon. The discovery appears to confirm researchers’ hunch that the pyramid was used as a temple or place of worship.

Why did people stop living at Teotihuacán?

The ruins carry evidence of a catastrophic fire and targeted damage to monuments dating to the seventh century C.E. We don’t know their cause—historians suspect an internal conflict of some kind, like a coup, uprising, or civil war—but we do know that Teotihuacán’s population began to drop off dramatically thereafter.

Teotihuacán was first excavated in 1884, followed by more comprehensive archaeological projects over the ensuing century. It became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987.

In April 2011, Yinka Shonibare visited the Nigerian city of Lagos following an invitation from celebrated curator Bisi Silva, who’d invited the London-based artist for a talk about his practice and to host a show. There was no space to mount the show Silva and Shonibare had envisioned, but the trip ended up being formative in a different way.

While in Lagos, where he grew up, Shonibare realized that although the city had an abundance of artistic talent, there was no corresponding infrastructure to foster it. In 2019, in an effort to help fill that gap, Shonibare started the nonprofit Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation in Nigeria. (The foundation developed out of the Guest Projects initiative founded in 2008 by Shonibare in London.)

In 2022, after construction and delay caused in part by the Covid-19 pandemic, the local launch was held and the G.A.S. Fellowship Award, an annual initiative in collaboration with the Yinka Shonibare Foundation to support mid-career artists and curators across Africa was announced.  

Winning the award was “very affirming [and] validating… It felt like the work I was doing was recognized,” said 2024 honoree Amanda Iheme, citing the somewhat familiar experiences of artists not getting grants, awards, or residences that they apply for—especially in a climate when one’s fame and one’s artistic concerns can influence who ultimately wins out. She added that she liked that it was a local residency—she’d been wanting to participate in a program located in the place where her work is focused.

During her time in residency, Iheme gave herself “the opportunity to try something different for my career, to expand beyond what I typically do” as an architecture photographer. Though she had already worked as a scientific researcher, she said the residency allowed her to expand her research skills as an artist.

“The residency gave me a chance to expand my career beyond just photography and to see my artistic work as a practice. I think that the residency at G.A.S. has really helped me not just think of myself as a creator but also think of myself as a knowledge creator—a person who makes art but also at the same time contributes and expands the knowledge that exists around the subject of focus.”  

Describing itself as being “dedicated to facilitating international artistic exchange,” the foundation has two facilities. Its main building, G.A.S. Lagos Residency, has spaces for accommodation, events and studios, hosts residencies and programs that support research and practice developments of art and design practitioners from Africa and the world. The foundation also owns the G.A.S. Farm House residency on a 54-acre plot in Ijebu in Ogun State; the farmhouse produces crops including cassava, tomatoes, maize, pawpaw, and pepper, and supports transdisciplinary research and practice in areas including agronomy, food sustainability, and architecture.  

G.A.S. Foundation welcomed its first resident, curator and researcher Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock in 2022, and has since hosted close to 100 emerging to established artists and curators, including Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Portia Zvavahera, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Emma Prempeh, Joy Labinjo, Evan Ifekoya, and Osei Bonsu for up to three months in Nigeria.

The foundation is funded by both patrons and Shonibare himself, who directs money from the sales of his art to G.A.S. Foundation. “I always support the running of the residency,” Shonibare told ARTnews. “I give them a certain amount of money every year so we can keep the foundation going.”

His work was one of the first things visitors saw at last year’s Venice Biennale, and last year, he had an acclaimed show at London’s Serpentine Galleries. He’s been nominated for the Turner Prize, elected a Royal Academician, awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). Now, he is having an exhibition at Fondation H in Madagascar, in what is being billed as his biggest solo show to date in Africa.

Does he think of what he is doing with the G.A.S. Foundation as giving back, given his position as an established artist?

“Absolutely!” said Shonibare with the conviction of someone who finds fulfilment in being able to support artists in Nigeria, across Africa and its diaspora. “It’s about giving back to society [because] nobody’s successful on their own.”

Already, Shonibare’s foundation has significantly helped artists based in countries whose art scenes are still growing. Later this year, for example, the multidisciplinary Malagasy artist Joey Aresoa will be in residency at G.A.S. Foundation in Nigeria. It’s her first international residency, and a direct result of a partnership Shonibare established with Fondation H. Considered the first private contemporary art foundation in Madagascar, the foundation was established by French-Malagasy collector and businessman Hassanein Hiridjee.

Aresoa will be able to access the “amazing library that they have at the [G.A.S.] foundation, and will interact with the most interesting and challenging people so she will be changed forever,” Margaux Huille, director of Fondation H, told ARTnews. “And she already knows it. She already expresses the fact that she knows this experience is going to change her.”

The G.A.S. Foundation is related to Shonibare’s sculptures and installations, which explore history from the viewpoint of Africa.  He’s known for artworks adorned with Dutch wax print fabric such as The African Library (2018), the large installation of 6, 000 books wrapped up in the material. The work highlights individuals including those who helped shape postcolonial Africa like Dr Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Nelson Mandela (South Africa), Patrice Lumumba (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Thomas Sankara (Burkina Faso.) Now part of Fondation H’s permanent collection and featured in Shonibare’s exhibition, on view through February 28, 2026, at the foundation’s revamped colonial era building in Antananarivo, the work is supplemented by a digital interface with biography of these personalities in languages including Malagasy.  

“What he’s done in relation to narrative has been enormously important. In terms of actually helping us to craft a detailed understanding of our past and who was there to try to shape it and defend it,” Gus Casely-Hayford OBE, director of London’s V&A East and the former director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, told ARTnews. “But additionally, accumulatively, his body of work is an incredibly cathartic thing. To have work that speaks so powerfully to a past that was so denied that they actually constructed whole philosophical approaches to try to negate is just so uplifting and deeply inspiring. And then of course, there’s its sheer lyrical beauty, which just adds to it.”

Shonibare’s art is the most public-facing part of his work, but according to Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, an art historian and a curator in the Museum of Modern Art’s painting and sculpture department, it’s only one portion of his practice.

Nzewi called Shonibare “one of the most perceptive artists” of the 21st Century and said that he has done “quite a lot as an artist. But even more so, I think his legacy will be that of giving back through the G.A.S. Foundation where he’s trying to help stimulate the ecosystem on the continent by being able to create this cultural dialogue that connects the context of Nigeria and Africa with the rest of the world,” Nzewi told ARTnews. “And he’s doing that in a very robust way. Doing it in ways that can parallel any institution elsewhere. And I think that is really important. We need this critical infrastructure on the continent, working at a very international standard.”

Since it was established, G.A.S. Foundation has conducted initiatives such as Re: assemblages, a multiyear cultural development program focused on the preservation and creative potential of African art libraries in collaboration with archivists, librarians, artists, curators and cultural institutions. Programming for this year’s edition includes the launch of the African Arts Libraries Lab, an initiative to foster intra-African and global collaboration on African and Afro-diasporic library collections, and a two-day symposium on November 4 and 5 during Lagos Art Week.

In partnership with the Yinka Shonibare Fondation, G.A.S. Foundation collaborated on Art Exchange: Moving Image with LUX, a UK arts foundation supporting and promoting visual artists working with moving image. The collaborative, cross-cultural initiative was launched in 2023 to support the professional development of early to mid-career curators from the continent working in the medium.  

Shonibare’s G.A.S. Foundation is one of many independent art spaces that have sprung up in West Africa in the past couple decades, building on ones such as Bisi Silva’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, Lagos, Koyo Kouoh’s RAW Material Company in Dakar, Senegal and Ibrahim Mahama’s Red Clay Studio and the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Arts in Tamale, Ghana.

All of these spaces have helped to expand their respective art scenes, and now, G.A.S. looks to do something similar and beyond. It has already inked partnerships with Goodman Gallery, South London Gallery, Tiwani Contemporary, University of the Arts London and ART X Lagos on various projects and initiatives. And though G.A.S. is relatively new, some said its activities had already been key. Huille, the Fondation H director, said Shonibare’s contributions, both through his art and the G.A.S. Foundation, are “gigantic.”

A view of weekend day-trippers at a popular Parisian park overlooking the Seine, Georges Seurat’s Post-Impressionist masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86), is a study in contradictions: a painting of modern life that doesn’t capture a moment so much as stops it dead in its tracks, and a depiction of subjects as solid (if not stolid) volumes that dissolve into an aerosol of colors upon close examination.

Viewed from a 19th-century perspective, La Grande Jatte is both contemporary and ancient, imbuing its scene of evanescent bourgeois leisure with the gravitas of a decorated tomb. Like many such murals, La Grande Jatte is mostly a procession of profiles facing one direction. “I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those friezes,” Seurat once wrote, though by “move” he actually meant fixing them within a sort of chromatic eternity—making the sepulchral, as it were, bloom in brilliant hues.

La Grande Jatte was the first composition in which Seurat employed the cutting-edge technique we know as pointillism, but which he called divisionism or peinture optique. That he applied this methodology to recall the art of antiquity, however, owes to two major influences on the evolution of his style. The first grew out of his time at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under the tutelage of painter Henri Lehmann, who specialized in history painting and portraits. A former student of that titan of 19th-century academic art, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, he transmitted Ingres’s crystalline, if languid, neoclassicism to a young Seurat, who maintained it as a template for the rest of his career.

The other inspiration for Seurat’s style came from his readings on color theory and perception—most notably The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors, written in 1839 by noted French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul. One of the first volumes of its type, the book laid out Chevreul’s notion of the “simultaneous contrast of colors,” a phenomenon in which two hues placed close together will seem to mix as if they were complements of each other. This describes precisely how Seurat’s dots relied on the viewer’s eye, rather than the artist’s brush, to merge colors. Indeed, Seurat thought of his approach as an empirical expression. “Some say they see poetry in my paintings,” he remarked. “I see only science.”

The painting’s setting, the Île de la Grande Jatte, is a narrow sliver of land in the middle of the Seine near where the river makes the southwesterly turn that divides the city into the Left and Right Banks. Its name, translated as “Island of the Big Bowl,” derives from a topographical depression that constitutes its central feature.

The park was created in 1818 from land owned by the Duke of Orléans (later King Louis-Philippe I). Between the 1850s and 1870s, it was expanded as part of the massive urban renewal project run by Baron Haussmann under the direction of Emperor Napoleon III. It soon became a favored destination for plein air painters, including the Impressionists, Seurat himself making frequent excursions there.

Seurat’s first major composition, Bathers at Asnières (1884), immediately preceded La Grande Jatte, and while pointillism didn’t factor into the former, the painting became a test for the technique. Presenting a group of working-class men on the Seine’s riverbank, the artist rendered Bathers in brush marks that more or less blended together, often as choppy crosshatches that foreshadowed his signature dots. As with the crowd in La Grande Jatte, Seurat endowed his bathers with the solemnity of a Grecian entablature.

Basically, La Grande Jatte is an extension of Bathers both pictorially and thematically, depicting the same landscape and sharing some of its details. In real life, Asnières is directly opposite La Grande Jatte. Together, the paintings portray both sides of the river; they even share the same railway bridge in the background. The two mirror each other physically, the subjects in the former facing left and the figures in the latter looking right, but also sociologically, as the proletarian loungers in Bathers form a distinctive contrast with the predominantly middle-class promenaders in La Grande Jatte.

Seurat began work on La Grande Jatte during the summer of 1884 and took two years to finish it. He completed some 70 studies for the piece, many of which were painted (mostly on board, with three on canvas); visible within them is the evolution of pointillism from the cross-hatching used in Bathers.

As to its symbolism, La Grande Jatte is somewhat ambiguous. The park was a well-known pickup spot for sex workers, hinted at by the inclusion of a woman fishing (a metaphor for solicitation) and the oddity of a monkey on a leash held by a woman strolling arm-in-arm with a man; the French word singesse (female monkey) is slang for prostitute, suggesting her occupation.

The painting met with derision when it appeared in the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886. Joris-Karl Huysmans, author of À rebours (Against Nature, 1884) and renowned art critic, wrote: “Strip his figures of the colored fleas with which they are covered, and underneath there is nothing, no soul, no thought, nothing.”

Notwithstanding Huysmans’s gibe, Seurat continue to push pointillism in subsequent works, doubling down on his approach by surrounding them with bands of dots that suggest their migration into the realm of the viewer. Seurat even added the same to La Grande Jatte when he re-stretched the canvas three years after its completion.

Seurat’s career was cut short by his death at 31 from an unknown infection, surmised to be meningitis, diphtheria, or pneumonia. Yet in that brief time, he produced an icon of art history in La Grande Jatte—a painting that relies on the viewer as much as the artist for its visual effects.

Just over a year ago, some 100 high-profile contemporary artists—from Jeff Koons and Paul McCarthy to Julie Mehretu and Camille Henrot to Claire Tabouret and Julien Creuzet—were invited to copy masterpieces from the Louvre’s collection. Their imitations now form the basis of “Copyists” at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, a satellite of the Pompidou in northeastern France. “It’s an exhibition by copyists more than a presentation of copies per se,” cocurator Donatien Grau, said at a press preview in June.

Among the imitated works are Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830), Giovanni Bellini’s Portrait of a Man (ca. 1475–1500), Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of Medusa (1818–19), and Thomas Gainsborough’s Conversation in a Park (1746–48). Some of these new copies were complete shortly before the show opened, arriving just days before the preview. This contemporaneous relationship with artistic heritage has opened up new ways of viewing centuries-old art, according to Grau, who is head of contemporary programs at the Louvre.

“This reinterpretation of history is not at odds with innovation; on the contrary, it fuels it,” he said. “The exhibition is like a metaverse brought into the real world—a physical project, featuring physical works, displayed in a physical space. Each piece created for this exhibition is in dialogue with artists from all times.”

The first room serves as a manifesto of sorts, featuring artists from various generations and with different practices. Koons’s contribution faces off with one by octogenarian Japanese artist Takesada Matsutani. Both have copied Bernini’s Sleeping Hermaphrodite (1619); Koons via sculpture and Matsutani in painting. “The Western perspective, literal and reverent, is counterbalanced by a more conceptual approach” by Matsutani, Centre Pompidou-Metz director and exhibition cocurator Chiara Parisi told ARTnews.  

While most of the artists are represented by one copy, Giulia Andreani had trouble choosing just one masterpiece. So, she is presenting three works in “Copyists”: one based on Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (c. 1669–1670); another after an undated female head, attributed to the school of Leonardo da Vinci; and a third after Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of Madeleine (1800), whose model was only identified in 2019. For Andreani, the primary focus for her mostly faithful copies was a technical one. “Acrylic, which is not a noble material, is absent from the Louvre—using this technique over oil is a statement in itself,” she said of her rendition of Portrait of Madeleine. For her version of The Lacemaker, Andreani has sized up the painting from 9.6 by 8.3 inches to 63 by 55 inches and translated it into watercolor.   

Beginning in the Renaissance, copying masterpieces was a core of artists’ training, though that began to wane in the late 19th century. While copying is still part of some art school training, like it was for Andreani, who studied at the School of Fine Arts in Venice, Yan Pei-Ming, who graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Dijon in 1986, said he wishes he had received this education.

“Today, that practice has become rare; making a faithful copy of a painting is almost a lost art,” he said. A section of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath Holding King David’s Letter (1654) captivated Pei-Ming’s attention for this project. “I was struck by the anonymous servant in the shadows, a figure without a name,” he said of his contribution to “Copyists,” which is almost a faithful reproduction, measuring to the exact dimensions of his excerpt from the painting, but with one key change: “rather than a color replica, I painted in dark grey.”

Other artists in the exhibition chose to reinterpret the original works. Xinyi Cheng’s painting Symphony of Chance, for example, references Georges de La Tour’s The Card Sharp with the Ace of Diamonds (ca. 1636–38). Long fascinated by the theme of card players in art, the Paris-based Cheng came across it during one of her frequent visits to the Louvre, struck by its composition of three seated characters and one standing figure. She partially re-enacted the tableau in her studio, having some sitters pose in person, while others sent pictures of themselves playing cards.

“To copy per se feels impossible to do. I tried to keep the original in the back of my mind, to make room for myself,” Cheng told ARTnews. “In de Latour’s painting, the exchange of gazes gives away who the cheater is. I tried not to be as obvious, namely by blurring the eyes.”

Like Manet’s Olympia (1863) responding to Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1534), some of the artists have made key adjustments to the composition. In her transposition of Anne-Louis Girodet’s Sleep of Endymion (1791), Los Angeles–based artist Ariana Papademetropoulos has replaced the work’s two male figures—the namesake shepherd, who was also the lover of moon goddess Selene, and Zephyr, the god of the west wind—with a floating pink crescent moon, moving Selene to the foreground and “inviting the viewer to daydream,” she said. In the original work, the goddess is represented only as a beam of moonlight.

French artist Paul Mignard drew inspiration from an Egyptian shroud, dated to 50–150 CE, in which a recently deceased figure meets Anubis and Osiris, the gods of death and the afterlife, respectively. Mignard’s diptych, Retroaction, includes a portrait of the artist by Anne Laure Sacriste, done in the style of the Fayoum region, where ancient Roman and Egyptian cultures interacted. Here, Mignard has inserted himself into the work.

But visitors may not be able to spot the differences in these compositions as the museum has chosen not to include reproductions of the copied masterpieces in the wall text, opting to just include their titles and dates. The curators were “aiming to avoid any layer of meta-commentary,” said Parisi. “The exhibition was designed to embrace the unexpected—a deliberately agile approach.”

In the spirit of contributing something unexcepted, Thomas Levy-Lasne brought his commissioned painting into the 21st century. Instead of just presenting a copy of Ingres’s Portrait of Monsieur Bertin (1832), his Chiraz and Bertin presents a mise-en-scène featuring a young woman facing the Ingres painting, to which the French artist has added the Louvre’s CCTV camera and wall text. Here, copying is more than a stylistic exercise, it’s both a tribute to Ingres and a reflection on the contemporary gaze. “It’s the anti-Mona Lisa,” Levy Layne said. “We don’t really know what the French writer and art collector Bertin is looking at, nor if the visitor is truly gazing at him. They don’t seem to connect.”

He continued, “I was more interested in portraying the painting as an object in its everyday context. Ingres designed the frame after the one made for Raphael’s Portrait of Balthasar Castiglione—another painting from the Louvre—which points to Ingres’s desire to become part of history.”

Modern Carthage is a residential suburb (population 26,000) of Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. But in its heyday, the seaside town was the seat of the Carthaginians, whose North African empire gave ancient Greece and Rome a run for their money. Established in the ninth century B.C.E. on a promontory overlooking the Gulf of Tunis, Carthage was overtaken by its Roman rivals once and for all in 146 B.C.E., during the Third (and final) Punic War. From that point on, it became a Roman colony. Ancient Carthage’s ruins were added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1979.

Who founded Carthage?

The city’s creation is shrouded in legend, with the most famous version recounted in Virgil’s Aeneid. An exiled princess named Dido fled with her allies from Tyre—today southern Lebanon—to escape her murderous, power-hungry brother Pygmalion. According to Carthaginian oral history, Dido became the first queen of the new city in 814 B.C.E. Indeed, Carthage’s name in Phoenician, Qart-ḥadašt, means “new city.” (The city of Cartagena, in Spain, shares the same etymology because it was founded by a Carthaginian general.)

It is unclear whether this account is accurate, however. The earliest archaeological evidence can be traced to about a century after 814 B.C.E. We don’t know if remnants of an earlier settlement simply don’t survive, or if the Carthaginians exaggerated the age of their city.

How did Carthage become so influential?

Thanks to its location—at the center of the Mediterranean, at the point where Europe comes closest to Africa (other than the Strait of Gibraltar)—Carthage became a wealthy trade port specializing in rare purple dye and precious metals. By the third century B.C.E., Carthage was the second-largest metropolis in the Mediterranean after Alexandria, and the empire stretched throughout much of North Africa, Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula. At its peak, it had more than 200 docks. For all its wealth, however, historians have found less evidence of a vibrant cultural life in Carthage than in other wealthy Mediterranean imperial capitals, though this may be the result of Roman looting.

Why was Carthage looted?

For more than a century, the Roman and Carthaginian Empires grappled for dominion of the Mediterranean in a series of conflicts called the Punic Wars (264–146 B.C.E.). Initially the Carthaginians and Romans enjoyed an uneasy coexistence as both expanded their reach around the Mediterranean. However, as the Roman Empire took over the entire Italian peninsula, its leaders set their sights on Sicily, where the Carthaginians had a stronghold, thus triggering the First Punic War. Eventually Rome prevailed.

The subsequent Punic Wars continued to chip away at the Carthaginian Empire’s territory. The Second was instigated by the bellicose yet brilliant Carthaginian general Hannibal; ultimately the Carthaginians were beaten by Roman forces led by the equally gifted Scipio Africanus. In the Third Punic War, the Roman Empire closed in on Carthage with a goal of defeating the Carthaginian Empire at its roots. The capital was under siege for three bloody years, culminating in a gruesome final assault in which most of its inhabitants were slaughtered. The city was looted, and those who weren’t killed—about 50,000 Carthaginians—were taken into slavery.

What vestiges of the ancient city survive today?

Not much, that’s for sure. The Romans’ destruction of the city was near total. They did initiate their own construction projects on the site a few decades after Carthage’s fall, such as the Baths of Antoninus and Circus of Carthage. But much of that Roman development was, in turn, overwritten by subsequent invaders of the area: Vandals, Byzantines, and Arabs. Some of the best-preserved ruins can be found on Byrsa Hill, the heart of the ancient city where Dido allegedly first settled. There one can find the shells of several residences and the Tophet of Salammbo, a cemetery. It may be the resting place of children used as ritual sacrifices—though that could be an especially persistent bit of Roman propaganda.

Earlier this month, Offline, a new, brick-and-mortar gallery created by digital marketplace SuperRare, opened the evocatively titled group exhibition, “Mythologies for a Spiritually Void Time.”

While Offline did a soft launch in April, the current exhibition is the first open to the public, and it has been accompanied by a week of performances and talks to celebrate. It’s all part of what gallery director Mika Bar-On Nesher hopes becomes an ongoing IRL community space for digital artists, their collectors, and the wider community of digital art enthusiasts..

“People are almost shy to say ‘digital art movement,’ but I’m proud of it because there are real pioneers,” Bar-On Nesher told ARTnews in a recent interview. “There are many artists who are proudly working with digital tools, and they deserve to be, first of all, honored—because this is not something that was invented in 2020.”

“Mythologies,” which runs through July 25 at 245 Bowery in New York, marks something of a turning point for Offline, as it features 15 artists whose work encompasses painting, animation, sculpture, bio-art, and networked media, rather than solely work that lives on a screen. For Bar-On Nesher, Offline is about expanding the boundaries of what is considered digital art.

“There are a lot of misconceptions about digital art—that it doesn’t involve the artist’s hand. But the artist must have a vision or something to express. All this technology, from what I’ve seen, is just a set of tools,” she said. “When people come in and see these digital practices embodied through sculpture, dance, painting—it honestly feels like there’s so much to explore.”

ARTnews spoke with Bar-On Nesher by video conference to talk about the development of digital art after the post-Covid NFT boom, why digital art feels “honest” in an increasingly online world, and how Offline can point audiences toward a new relationship with technology.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.

ARTnews: You’ve described Offline as an “interdisciplinary art space.” Why did you feel it was important to stake out that identity, and how does it diverge from SuperRare’s origins as primarily a platform for NFTs?

Mika Bar-On Nesher: It’s a big question because I’ve been part of the digital art movement for a long time. I curated my first digital artwork back in 2016, and I remember it was almost a hilariously existential moment where I was like, “Do I print it? Do I put it on a screen?” There were all these limitations around how to display, how to talk about digital art. That has changed since then, obviously. The post-Covid, NFT-crypto culture peak was dramatic and insane and brought together very unlikely people from all over the world who shared a sensibility of doing things differently. That was very cool. I was personally very drawn to the royalties and the provenance possibilities of blockchain. Those were things that were blatantly missing from the traditional art world, in my view. And now, we’ve come to a place where technology moves really fast. People don’t remember things. ChatGPT has only been with us a very short while, and it’s already transformed the way we do so many different things.

To have a gallery that’s dedicated to digital art without hiding the use of digital tools—there’s a lot of taboo around it—is unique. A lot of artists don’t want to be affiliated with NFTs or with the 2022 NFT boom because it was a moment of hype that has passed. Offline is really about showcasing the most cutting-edge artists and technologies, because things are changing fast. At our previous exhibition, in June, we showed holograms and animations. And for that exhibition, the work was physical. At the opening, people kept asking, “Are you going to keep doing this? Or are you going back to screens?” I remember saying, “I truly don’t know,” because things are changing so fast and we want to actually reflect what’s happening in real time.

A downside of the 2022 NFT boom was that NFTs and digital art became lumped together. But an upside, perhaps, was that many people were onboarded into seeing this kind of work for the first time—often in its native online context. What then do you see as the value of creating a physical space for it?

People are almost shy to say “digital art movement,” but I’m proud of it because there are real pioneers. [British artist and designer] Brendan Dawes just released a documentary on Brian Eno [with filmmaker Gary Hustwit] that is a new kind of generative film. There are many artists who are proudly working with digital tools, and they deserve to be, first of all, honored—because this is not something that was invented in 2020. That’s one thing. But the second is that I find the digital art movement no different from any other art movement in the sense that every movement comes in cycles of hype and dismissal. People think this is new, but it’s actually a pattern we’ve seen over and over again.

What’s so cool is that every art movement challenges what art is, and the way we define it changes through generations and decades … I think back to the Minimalists a lot—how when they fabricated their massive pieces the artist’s hand was invisible. These pieces were so big galleries had to expand to accommodate them. The white cube is fairly new. That’s not how art was always displayed. I’ve always been someone who’s not afraid to go into the new, into the cringe, into the evolving. I love that meme of artists and collectors—the two economies. A good gallery or art space is able to encompass both.

Is the goal to situate digital art within the white cube? Or are you imagining how to break out of the traditional gallery format and remake the space in a way that makes more sense for digital art?

The gallery model we know is falling apart. We see that with so many gallery closings. But there are so many systems in our world that are shutting down or rearranging. I can’t sugarcoat it—we’re living through a pretty difficult decade. We have to have spaces that show art that’s relevant to what’s happening. We live in a digital world. People have entire digital lives. Many live double lives online. Dentists use AI. Just in the last year, so many people have started using ChatGPT.

I’ve been an AI nerd for a long time, so it’s funny to see everything enter the mainstream. It’s tricky to say we’re a gallery that specializes in digital art because I would also be very open to showing painters whose work is informed by digital practices. Essentially, the way I look at it is that digital art is contemporary art because we live in a digital world.

At this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong, several galleries were showing physical works—produced by the hand of the artist—that embedded AI in some way. One of the more interesting things happening now is how artists are blurring the lines between man and machine and trying to find synthesis.

There’s this quote from Brian Eno about the relationship between art and new technology: “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.” The idea is that clever artists take a new technology, flip it, and use it to create something else.

I’ve always felt that art and technology are not very different. Reality is a matter of habit. At one point, paper was a new technology and people no longer had to memorize things or carve in stone. People are so afraid of technology. They’re always afraid of the new, which brings me back to these cycles of hype and dismissal that all art movements experience.

The reason people fear the new is that it alters their sense of time—how long something takes—and that changes their sense of reality. For example, AI can cut down production time, and then it changes the whole concept of work. It shifts our sense of time, space, and reality. Art does this too, in an amazing way. That’s why I’ve always felt the two were actually very connected. I never felt there was much dissonance between the two practices. A lot of technologists are very creative, and a lot of artists are very technical or technological. Offline is about collapsing binaries, which is something we need more of in the world right now.

After the 2022 NFT boom, a lot of museums and galleries began resurfacing the long history of digital art. I’m thinking of recent exhibitions for Vera Molnár at the Centre Pompidou in Paris or Harold Cohen’s AARON at the Whitney Museum in New York. Do you see building historical scaffolding around digital art as a core part of the gallery?

Yes. It’s very important to me to show both the pioneers and the brand-new voices. I really love honoring a tradition—the roots of it. The NFT craze was really strange in a lot of ways. It was a wild thing to ride out. The positive side is that it brought digital art to a place where people couldn’t look away from it.

There were obviously pros and cons, but one thing I found interesting was that it created a new class of collectors—specifically people who wanted to buy digital art—that hadn’t existed before. I’m not sure how many times in history we’ve seen the birth of a brand-new class of collectors. Also, a lot of artists who were buried in day jobs as designers were liberated to become full-time artists. That was new and exciting at the time.

I don’t really look at any of this as good or bad. Digital art has been around as long as we’ve had computers. We’re following a pattern of accepting our new realities as a whole.

Offline is one of very few galleries focused specifically on digital art and treating it with seriousness. The gallery in a way has the ability to help define the boundaries of what is or isn’t acceptable within this space. How do you, as a curator, determine those boundaries?

There are a lot of misconceptions about digital art—that it doesn’t involve the artist’s hand. But the artist must have a vision or something to express. All this technology, from what I’ve seen, is just a set of tools. We’ve seen artists use literal garbage on the street as tools. We focus on showing artists who’ve been around for a long time, many of whom are pioneers, and we also show those breaking away from the screen—from what people think digital art should be. We’ve also shown some performance art, which most people don’t think of as digital, but really, every living artist is living in a digital world. Where does it break apart?

What made “Mythologies for a Spiritually Void Time” the right exhibition to launch the space publicly?

This exhibition was very unique because it had two guest curators, X.S. Hou and Jack Wedge. We wanted to put on an art festival. But it is a group show, and I really recognized their vision. With SuperRare, we’ve been shepherding and supporting some of the biggest digital artists, many of whom have gone on to work with incredible people. For this inaugural show, I really wanted to open the door to the new generation of digital artists and see what’s happening in New York, what people are making. Of course, we’re a gallery, and it’s a business, and we have other kinds of drops and shows. But I wanted to start with a celebration—because we’re living in a time when a lot of digital art people have always had secret lives. You had your online crypto life, then your normal gallery life. It’s an interesting time to collapse that.

In terms of how Offline operates: Are these selling exhibitions? How do you define success as a gallery? And how does the relationship with SuperRare work?

Obviously, sales are very important. Sales are important for artists. Our business is its own thing, separate from SuperRare, that we’re developing. SuperRare is a marketplace, and we’re very lucky to be associated with it. For this show specifically, all proceeds go to the artists. It was really just an invitation to celebrate and bring in new voices.

Going forward, will Offline stage shows at the pace of a traditional gallery—every six weeks or so—or are you imagining something different?

We’re not going to follow the traditional timeline. Some shows will be longer, some shorter, depending on the artist and the project. In the crypto or NFT space, things move really fast. So there are times we want to slow it down, and times we can keep up that pace. We’re looking to create a new type of model that brings people together and creates experiences. I don’t want to fit into the old mold necessarily, but I’m also not here to break the rules without understanding where we’ve come from and where we want to go. For now, the goal is to let people come in and have shared experiences—because technology can be very isolating.

So, if I understand correctly: Offline is an independent business supported by SuperRare, but you still need to sell work to stay relevant.

Yeah, we’re not just a showroom. We’re operating as a gallery. I suppose it’s a little unusual because the typical gallery model is either a commercial gallery or an artist-run space. There are lots of different kinds of galleries, but since we’re linked to a marketplace, this is really an extension of our curatorial vision. It’s also about creating a community space.

The other side is putting on music shows, performances, and other gatherings that bring people together. What makes us a healthy society is having art that reflects back what we’re experiencing to a certain degree. It’s very liberating to have that.

There’s a lot of variety in the digital work being created. But do you see certain critiques of culture or technology that feel more powerful when presented in a digital context?

What I like about digital art is that a lot of it feels honest because it reflects the digital. We can’t escape the fact that we have digital experiences. We all have things that we experience in the world that are purely digital or are filtered through that.

It’s funny—we’re just now inventing the words to talk about digital art. There’s already so much language around painting and sculpture. Everyone knows what the terms mean. For digital art, writers, curators, and artists are still developing how to speak about it. It’s fresh in a way. That’s where we lean into the tradition of pioneers—artists who’ve been doing this since the 1970s and ’80s—and we look toward the future, to the kids doing insane stuff right now. The language is coming together, and museums are starting to collect and exhibit this work. But there was just so much taboo until very recently.

What do you think the institutional or contemporary art world still doesn’t understand about digital or crypto-native work?

They’re doing a good job—it’s just a slow integration. Digital moves fast, and institutions move slowly. That’s the dissonance we’re experiencing. Everyone’s doing their best to understand. Some of the concepts are very abstract. Do you remember trying to explain to someone what an NFT was? It was ridiculous. But it’s not so different from trying to explain conceptual art or Minimalism.

Artists are challenging reality as it is. They challenge how we think things should be. And thank God for artists who do that. If we didn’t have people willing to report back from places most sane people won’t go. We’re lucky to have them. They keep society healthy, and we need that right now. We need art that’s relevant, that’s truly contemporary.

You mentioned earlier that language is still being built around digital art. A lot of the critique of contemporary art is that academic language actually keeps people out—it’s alienating. Do you see this new movement as a chance to build something more accessible?

I really hope so. The art world we know isn’t very accessible. There are a lot of unwritten rules. It’s a complicated system. I often find that when a door opens for a new movement, a few artists go blue-chip and then everything closes again. There’s an opening and a closing. Even though I’ve seen a lot, I remain pretty optimistic that we can create art experiences that are accessible, profitable for artists, meaningful, and contemporary. Crazier things have happened.

You might be the only techno-optimist I’ve met in the last year.

That’s the funny thing. People are afraid of digital art. People are afraid of technology. People are afraid of AI because they feel threatened by it. But I have a lot of faith in humanity. People need people. We need artists. We need collectors. We need each other. Technology can make it feel like you don’t need to meet up—you can just text. Or you don’t need a therapist—you can talk to ChatGPT. But I’d argue it doesn’t have to be that way. You can have contemporary digital art and in-person experiences that are different. The crypto phenomenon and the digital art movement flipped a lot of things on their heads. That’s exciting.

The democratic promise of crypto.

There’s good and bad in everything. Every tool has a dark side. But there’s also a positive side to everything we do. Everything is complex. I guess I’m just on a mission to honor the pioneers, make room for new voices, and get people together around performance, music, and art. Synthesizers are technology, after all. You know what I mean? We need less fear—and more people coming together.

On a recent summer day in the Colorado resort town of Aspen, while some were hiking through the Rocky Mountains and enjoying the heat, the artist Solange Pessoa was indoors, strewing bones around the basement level of the Aspen Art Museum. She worked with purpose, careful not to disturb the layer of dirt already spread across the floor, moving among burlap sacks variously overflowing with with coffee beans, seeds with significance to Indigenous communities in Brazil, and brilliantly colored powders. Elsewhere on the basement floor, rose three tall towers formed by tiers of similar sacks; periodically ascended a stepladder to reach the uppermost tier of each tower.

The bags composing the towers were stuffed with papers printed with photographs of Spiral Jetty and Anastasi pottery, flower petals, feathers, dried peppers, sticks, and records by Brazilian musicians like Milton Nascimento, among other objects. And yet, Pessoa planned to somehow fill these sacks with even more materials.

“Seventy percent of their texts are missing,” she told me, speaking in Portuguese, with her gallerist Matthew Wood there to translate. “Usually, they’re overflowing from the bags.” Those texts would arrive in the coming days, ahead of her exhibition’s opening.

Pessoa created this piece in 1994 and exhibited it, albeit in a more modest form, in Belo Horizonte, the city where she has long been based. Over the last three decades, the artist has exhibited new iterations of the installation in locations ranging from Marfa, Texas, to Bregenz, Austria. The latest iteration, Bags – Aspen version (1994–2025), is the star of her current Aspen Art Museum show, one of her few solo museum exhibitions ever staged outside Brazil. She described Bags as “a wider anthropology of the Americas read through the tradition of the Earth.”

Bags is a work emblematic of Pessoa’s practice. It’s expansive and stately, and seeks to tether humanity back to the natural world. “I dislike the separation of culture and nature,” she said. “I have this imagination of an integrated philosophy, a natural philosophy, which incorporates culture as part of nature.”

Her practice draws no division between humankind and ecology. Bodily fluids are commonly enlisted for her sculptures, whose abstract forms tend to recall animals undergoing metamorphosis. Hair has also shown up in her work—most notably in Catedral (Cathedral, 1990–2015), a gigantic installation composed of a winding flow of leather and fabric with tresses stuck to it. (That work is owned by the Rubell Museum in Miami, where it has at points been accorded an airy gallery of its own.) These materials have often appeared alongside feathers, fruit, dirt, and more.

“She’s sensitive to anything that is living,” said Thomas D. Trummer, director of the Kunsthaus Bregenz, where he organized a Pessoa show in 2023 that included a version of Bags. “That might be plants, that might be seeds, that might be animals, that might be individuals.” For Pessoa, “everything is connected,” Trummer said.

In 2020, art historian Cecilia Fajardo-Hill wrote that Pessoa’s work had “only been getting the recognition it deserves in recent years, and mostly beyond the confines of Brazil”—something attributable to Pessoa’s decision to base herself not in an art hub like Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo but in the state of Minas Gerais. Then there’s the bitter reaction certain pieces have elicited in her home country: In 1995, when Pessoa made an installation called Jardim (Garden) that featured leather, hair, blood, and bovine eyes, the public responded with such negativity that one Brazilian newspaper called on her to explain its meaning. “These are strong works, but they were not made to scandalize,” she said at the time. She has still never appeared in an edition of the Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil’s top biennial.

Such a reception is hard to fathom now, while Pessoa is beginning to receive international fame. She appeared in the 2022 Venice Biennale, and she has gained representation with Mendes Wood DM, one of Brazil’s most prestigious galleries. (Blum, another blue-chip gallery, also represented her before announcing the end of its operations earlier this month.) Her Aspen Art Museum show coincides with another institutional solo exhibition, at Tramway in Glasgow. “Time has helped me grow,” Pessoa said.

It has also helped her grow her art, which is approaching monumental proportions. Deliria Deveras (2021–24), one of the installations in her Aspen Art Museum show, occupies an entire gallery and contains a mass of crystals punctuated by nuggets of silver. Those crystals together weigh 20 tons.

Deliria Deveras recalls a famed Robert Smithson installation composed of glass shards, and indeed, Pessoa cited Smithson and many Americans and Europeans working in the same paradigm as him—Land artists, Minimalists, Arte Povera sculptors—as being influential for her. Like those artists of the postwar era, Pessoa is fascinated by the notion that nature can be lured into clinical gallery spaces. But her work has an explicitly spiritual dimension that absent from the practices of her Western influences. “With absolute modesty, I feel like I’m trying to achieve something like the psychology of the relationship of man with an earthly God,” she said.

The crystals in Deliria Deveras were mined in the Brazilian city of Ferros, where Pessoa was born in 1961. The mining industry was all around her—Minas Gerais has a long history of mineral extraction—and so, naturally, wound its way into her art. “There’s this psychological aspect to mining,” she said, referring to the act of digging beneath the surface. She called herself a minero, punning the Portuguese word for both “miner” and a person who comes from Minas Gerais.

Pessoa grew up on a farm in the remote town of Dores do Indaiá and was raised in the vicinity of many churches filled with many sculptures of saints (which are sometimes adorned with human hair, just as her sculpture Catedral is). Though Pessoa does not herself identify as a Catholic, she noted that she has a “spiritual intuition” and said she drew inspiration from the rich tradition of Baroque art in Brazil’s churches. Alongside Land artists and Minimalists, she also named Aleijadinho, an 18th-century sculptor whose work can be found in Minas Gerais’s churches, as one of her primary inspirations. Pointing to all the sacks in Bags, she said, “Certainly, these are all Baroque—the folding, the verticality, the excess, the emotional intensity.”

She attended art school during the ’80s and during the ’90s began making sculptures that adhered to no dominant trend in Brazil: circles of bones, masses of vegetable fiber that hung to the wall and extended onto the floor, knots of hay that dangled from rafters like a giant’s braids.

“She’s a real outlier in her generation,” said Matthew Wood, Pessoa’s dealer. “This wasn’t what people were doing, and certainly not what people valued.”

Some artists began taking note. Pessoa became friendly with Tunga, whose sculptures had emboldened her to use hair in her own art; she even became a member of the Galpão Embra collective alongside him. Through Galpão Embra, she also showed her work alongside artists such as Ione de Freitas and Nuno Ramos.

Even after being pilloried in the press for Jardim, the 1995 installation that featured bovine eyes, she showed no desire to conform to trends. She exhibited her work outdoors, in places far removed from museums and galleries, and she continued to make sculptures that were likely to disturb viewers. Lesmalongas – Desterros (1998–2002), a piece divided into five “situations” (four of which were staged on her family’s farm), featured sculptures made from plastic and a combination of lard and dirt. Some were worn by performers who screamed and wailed, as though Pessoa’s creations were hurting them or forcing them to become animal-like. Pessoa admitted that her work does offer “sensorial perturbation,” and said, “I like when works take me out of my comfort zone.”

But for Pessoa, pieces like Lesmalongas accomplished more than shocking their viewers—they established a new relationship between people and their surroundings. “Blurring the [boundary] between human and nonhuman is very important to her,” said Claude Adjil, a curator at large at the Aspen Art Museum and the organizer of Pessoa’s show there.

In the past couple decades, Pessoa has continued producing art musing on that very theme, though her work no longer seems designed to unsettle in the way that it once did. Years ago, she began making drawings that resemble animals that do not actually exist (“insects emerge from her mind and are not entomologically correct,” art historian Cecilia Fajardo-Hill once wrote); she has recently begun exhibiting them with greater frequently, in venues such as the 2022 Venice Biennale. And she has begun working in bronze, which is longer-lasting than many of the organic substances she used during the ’90s.

She’s also enlisted soapstone, a material once used for commemorative statues and fountains, for sculptures such as NIHIL NOVI SUB SOLE (2019–21), which appeared outside the Arsenale during the 2022 Biennale and is now being exhibited on the roof of the Aspen Art Museum. Into this soft stone, Pessoa has carved leaf-like forms that collect rainwater. That rain, in turn, further alters the surfaces of her sculptures, which were already mottled from exposure to the elements.

Pessoa is keenly aware that her sculptures might not last forever—and she has even embraced that quality of her art. “I feel the necessity of ephemerality, but on the other hand, I also feel the necessity of eternalization,” she said. “These contradictory philosophies are inseparable.”