Dec 182025
 

Portraits by Carrie Ann Baade

Reclaim | Reframe: Datasets and Cultural Visibility, is one of three exhibitions that make up The Delaware Contemporary’s 2025 Biennial- Art + AI. The timely show features work by Carrie Ann Baade, Tyanna Buie, Blažo Kovačević, and Tara Youngborg.

From the museum–

Through AI and computational technologies, artists Carrie Ann Baade, Tyanna Buie, Blažo Kovačević, and Tara Youngborg construct layered narratives that reclaim overlooked and marginalized histories. In doing so, these artists unsettle dominant cultural and media frameworks that have long erased, distorted, or commodified lived experience. Exploring themes of identity, ancestry, and displacement, they use generative tools as critical instruments to question, expose, and reconfigure the archival and institutional biases embedded in history, culture, and the environment. From ancestral reclamation and speculative futures to immersive storytelling and data-driven environmental translations, their work advances a reimagining of social justice through the lens of artificial intelligence.

Together, these artists offer a complex portrait of making in the age of AI, revealing how tools shaped by those in power can both perpetuate bias and enable resistance. Their work asks: Who shapes the cultural record? When an AI model “remembers,” whose truth is it repeating? How can we reclaim agency within these systems (built on our collective labor)?

The images at the beginning of this post are from Carrie Anne Baade’s series, Birthplace. Her mixed media portraits of her ancestors, created with the help of AI, present a fascinating look at the stories of several women from early in American history.

From Baade’s statement about the work-

Birthplace is a visual exploration of personal ancestry, delving into the lives of women from colonial Louisiana between 1690 and 1750. Through oil painting, collage, and Al-generated imagery, I reconstruct the presence of these women-figures shaped by French colonial rule, Indigenous displacement, and Romani migration-whose stories have been largely absent from recorded history. Employing a methodology that blends archival research with imaginative storytelling, I create portraits that serve as visual hypotheses-acts of artistic and ancestral repair. The compositions incorporate antique lace, colonial maps, domestic fabrics, and found objects, mirroring the intertwined textures of lineage, migration, and identity. Al-generated image blending aids in synthesizing historically plausible references, speculating on the appearance and presence of women who were never visually recorded.

This project is not about one family, but a shared American inheritance. It reveals the complexity of identity in a land shaped by colonization, migration, and erasure. In rematriating these women to history, Birthplace offers viewers a visual counter-history-one rooted in survival, interconnection, and the enduring power of maternal lineage.

Pictured below are works from the other artists in the exhibition along with information provided by the museum.

Tara Youngborg examines how institutional data and machine learning shape our understanding of land and environment. Using field research, environmental archives, and US Geological Survey datasets, her datastream translates waterflow data and topographic maps into immersive video installations that highlight the limitations of digital representation. By transforming statistics into layered, shifting media, Youngborg portrays landscapes as dynamic terrains of knowledge. Glitches and ruptures in the work expose gaps between digital abstraction and lived experience, prompting questions about algorithmic authority and what is lost when place is reduced to data.

Tara Youngborg’s installation

Tara Youngborg’s installation (detail)

In AR (Argumentative Reality) and Truck for Three Illegal Passengers, Blažo Kovačević uses augmented reality, 3D modeling, and game engine software to confront invasive state surveillance and the dehumanization of migrants. Using digitally enhanced X-ray images from European Border Patrol inspections, he reconstructs a 2015 tragedy in Serbia where 54 undocumented passengers died in a van crash. His works shift between detached aerial views and intimate interior scans, altering typical media frames into ethical engagement. Kovačević warns how AI-driven technologies can perpetuate oppression through automated surveillance, data collection, and erasure, urging reflection on the politics of visibility and mediated violence.

A still from Blažo Kovačević’s video

Tyanna Buie reconstructs erased family histories and reimagines Black identity through speculative Afro-Futurist frameworks. Using ChatGPT and DeepFake technology, she remixes images, sound, and text to create narratives where absence becomes presence. In The Guardians of Nyala, Buie overlays her own likeness onto eighteenth-century Dutch dignitary portraits, then collaborates with AI to imagine a family history untouched by colonization. Rooted in personal narrative and Black popular culture, her counter-archive elevates erased lives and transforms AI from a tool of replication into one of radical self-authorship.

Two of the portraits from Tyanna Buie’s “The Guardians of Nyala”

This exhibition closes 12/28/25.

Dec 112025
 

Alex Da Corte‘s Soft Power was on view from the High Line until June of last year.

His latest exhibition, Parade, is currently on view at Matthew Marks in NYC, on view until 12/20/25. The Pink Panther appears in this show as well- Da Corte depicts himself as the character painting the gallery pink.

From the High Line website about the billboard-

Known for his immersive installations, sculptures, and films, Alex Da Corte’s work explores themes of identity, consumerism, and taste, challenging societal norms and reimagining the familiar in unexpected ways. The artist draws from myriad sources, including popular and consumer culture, art history, classical literature, and modern design, seamlessly weaving together disparate elements into cohesive narratives. His adept use of vibrant color and surreal imagery lends a dreamlike quality to his work that captivates viewers and blurs the lines between fantasy and reality.

Da Corte presents a new artwork for the High Line’s 18th Street Billboard, inspired by the Pink Panther, a Friz Freleng creation designed for the animated opening sequence of a 1963 Hollywood comedy that came to embody the film and has evolved, through 60 years of spin-offs and reinventions, into cultural ubiquity. Pink’s durability across many generations has allowed it to sell countless products, from fiberglass insulation foam to artificial sweetener, yet the creature’s essence remains out of reach. With neither master nor peer—and seemingly eternally unbound by the rules of others—Pink represents a certain queer freedom. Da Corte revives Pink as an icon of resistance, supine but poised, wielding a sign of universal protest, brandishing a clear pink purpose. “There is a difference between falling down and laying down,” Da Corte explains. “I call that soft power.” This billboard is an advertisement for the value of such power.

Dec 052025
 

In addition to his numerous street art pieces, Alexandre Farto, aka Vhils, has shown his unique creations in various galleries around the world. The works above are from his 2018 exhibition Annihilation at Over the Influence gallery’s temporary location in Los Angeles.

From the gallery about the show-

Presenting a reflection on the current model of globalized development and the forces shaping and affecting local identities around the world today, Annihilation emphasizes the global impact of Los Angeles culture and the subsequent breakdown of unique global identities across continents. For his first solo exhibition in the United States since 2011, Vhils has taken the opportunity to set up a dialogue between the United States, Europe, and China to address the growing struggle for hegemonic supremacy between global powers and the ensuing social and economic impact on the world at large. Annihilation shares the stories of the citizens who breathe vitality into densely populated urban epicenters. Based on a variety of source material, from advertisements collected in cities worldwide to salvaged wooden doors, the new patchwork-like series intentionally dilutes the readability of each individual portrayed, a reflection on how identity is both formed and affected by the city’s visual discourse. This intentional juxtaposition of contrasts mirrors the interplay between elements from various cultures which we observe at work today in large urban contexts.

Vhils-Strata, which presents a selection of his work from the past twenty years, is currently on view at the Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art (MUCA) in Munich, Germany until 3/1/26.

He also recently created the site-specific installation, Doors of Cairo, located near the Pyramids in Giza in Egypt. It is part of  Forever is Now 05 and is on view until 12/7/25.

Dec 052025
 

Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto, aka Vhils, created this mural of TJ Mizell (Jam Master Jay‘s son) in 2018.

It is one of many street art projects organized by LISA Project NYC.

Dec 032025
 

Robert Therrien‘s larger than life sculpture of a table and chairs for Under The Table (1994) has been delighting visitors to The Broad in Los Angeles for years. Robert Therrien: This is a Story, recently opened at the museum is the largest exhibition of the late artist’s work to date.

From The Broad about the exhibition-

Therrien’s meditations on scale and material are a deeply influential and well-known approach within the field of contemporary sculpture, significant to The Broad’s own identity as a museum, and long admired by visitors of all ages. The installation showcases Therrien’s personal vocabulary of images and symbols—from enormous tables, chairs, and dishes, to intimate drawings of snowmen, birds, and chapels—as they become a language of continuous creation and transformation for the artist over time. Featuring more than 120 works spanning five decades, the exhibition offers unprecedented access to the artist’s exploration of scale, memory, and perception, just miles from the downtown Los Angeles home and studio space he operated out of for close to thirty years beginning in 1990. Many of the works on view, including those created just before Therrien’s untimely death in 2019, have never been featured in museum exhibitions and will offer new avenues of understanding his practice.

The exhibition is on view until 5/5/2026.

Nov 262025
 

Robert Gober‘s Untitled, 1993-1994 was on view at Columbus Museum of Art last year, on loan from Art Bridges.

About the sculpture from Art Bridges–

Robert Gober’s Untitled assumes an entirely familiar form that triggers a multi-sensory response. By representing a stick of Breakstone butter, the artist conjures up memories of the food’s texture, aroma, and taste. Gober manipulates these senses with Untitled, leaving the viewer mildly disoriented. Although the object is immediately recognizable, it has no odor, and its glistening beeswax sheen varies slightly from the creamy tactility of actual butter. Significantly, the artist has expanded his representation of butter to roughly the size of a human torso.

The artist’s work often functions with a corporeality that relates to the body, and as Untitled lies unwrapped with its impressionable surface exposed, a commensurate feeling of naked vulnerability is evoked. Because butter can be transformed and clarified, it has associations with spiritual awakening and purity. These notions are echoed in the near-monastic rigor of Gober’s craftsmanship, elevating the familiar object to a profound level.

Nov 212025
 

In The Recap this month- music, art, art shows, murals, spooky season posts and more. Check it out here and subscribe!

Nov 202025
 

In Welcome to Li’l Wolf, 2022-3 Fellow Amy Ritter‘s solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery, she explores the mobile home park where she grew up and her parents continue to live. Throughout her career she has documented several mobile home parks around the U.S. and considers how they reflect on the American Dream. For this exhibition the work is more personal and includes depictions of her father, his life, and his feelings of nostalgia.

From the press release-

In 2015, Ritter created the MH Archive to document the forgotten and marginalized mobile home communities across the United States. Through meticulous documentation consisting of interviews, photography, recordings, and video, Ritter has gained a deeper understanding of the diverse world of manufactured housing. This ongoing process of visiting mobile home parks now brings her back to where her interests originated, Li’l Wolf, her parents’ mobile home community in eastern Pennsylvania. Using her father’s camcorder from the ’90s, she turns her focus inside her childhood home for the first time. She offers the audience a glimpse into her father’s life by investigating the spaces he inhabits.

When the visitor first steps into the gallery, they are confronted by Li’l Wolf 6, part of the artist’s ongoing MH Window Series. In this life-sized photograph, taken of a window at her parents’ home, Ritter captures the exterior of a world often guarded and hidden from society. Installed opposite the photograph is the video “Happy Birthday Dean.” Here, Ritter gives the viewer an intimate tour of the inside of her father’s home, culminating with footage from a recent birthday party. The celebration evokes feelings of nostalgia in her father and a yearning for his childhood—a time when things were easier for him. As his age has increased, so too have his fears and resistance to change, encapsulated by the fifteen-minute video Fear | Comfort, projected on the central wall.

The insecurities that haunt Ritter’s father flicker across the projector and TV screen. But, unlike the details of his home’s exterior, they remain partly hidden from view. The viewer is asked to project onto Ritter’s father their own baggage about the American Dream. Seen through his daughter’s lens, he becomes a window into the psyche of an entire generation, leaving us with the question: “How do we restore the dignity of those who get left behind?”

Ritter more recently created work in a similar vein for the 2025 installation What Does it Feel Like To Be You at Ortega y Gasset Projects.

Nov 122025
 

Auguste Rodin‘s The Thinker was originally conceived to be a part of The Gates of Hell, his sculptural group depicting a scene from Dante Alighieri‘s Inferno, but several larger bronze versions were created later. This version was installed outside the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1917. It is one of less than ten created under Rodin’s supervision.

This particular version of The Thinker also has an interesting history. In 1970, a pipe bomb was planted at the base of the statue and the resulting explosion damaged the work. The perpetrators remain a mystery to this day.

Nov 052025
 

Iván Argote created Dinosaur (2024) for the fourth High Line Plinth commission. The giant sculpture was cast in aluminum and celebrates one of NYC’s most common sights- the pigeon.

From the High Line’s website about the work-

Dinosaur was first submitted as a proposal for the High Line Plinth in 2020, among 80 proposals that included the third High Line Plinth commission, Pamela Rosenkranz’s Old Tree (2023). The meticulously hand-painted, humorous sculpture challenges the grandeur of traditional monuments celebrating significant historical figures, instead choosing to canonize the familiar New York City street bird. Posed on a concrete plinth that resembles the sidewalks and buildings that New York’s pigeons call home, Dinosaur reverses the typical power dynamic between bird and human, towering 21 feet above the Spur, over the countless pedestrians and car drivers that travel down 10th Avenue.

Reflecting on the work’s title, Argote notes, “The name Dinosaur makes reference to the sculpture’s scale and to the pigeon’s ancestors who millions of years ago dominated the globe, as we humans do today… the name also serves as a reference to the dinosaur’s extinction. Like them, one day we won’t be around anymore, but perhaps a remnant of humanity will live on—as pigeons do—in the dark corners and gaps of future worlds. I feel this sculpture could generate an uncanny feeling of attraction, seduction, and fear among the inhabitants of New York.”

Dinosaur, like the pigeons that inspired it, bears witness to the city’s evolution and confronts us with our ever-changing relationship with the natural world and its inhabitants. The oft-overlooked and derided creatures that seem to over-populate the city first arrived in the US via Europe, likely in the 1800s. They were kept as domesticated animals and were most notably used as reliable message carriers. Pigeons have an internal GPS, known as “homing,” that allows them to always find their way back home. This skill once made the bird indispensable in war—they served as military messengers in both World War I and World War II, saving hundreds of soldiers’ lives by transporting messages quickly to both the trenches and front lines. Many of these pigeons received gallantry awards and were celebrated as war heroes, before technology eventually rendered them obsolete.

Dinosaur recognizes this seemingly prosaic figure and celebrates its anonymity amongst the urban landscape, while also taking aim at classic monuments erected in honor of great men, who all too often are neither honorable nor great. Argote humorously suggests that, in fact, the not-wild—but no longer domesticated—birds are likely more deserving of being placed on a pedestal and celebrated for their contributions to society than most. Further, by highlighting their origins, Argote reminds viewers that, to some degree, everyone is an immigrant. Even the pigeon, a New York fixture, initially migrated here and made the city their home, like millions of other “native” New Yorkers.