Yale School of Architecture Gallery, New Haven, January 12 to May 22, 2023
Francois Dallegret “Beyond the Bubble”
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A Hidden Oasis in the Bronx
Tucked away on the ground floor of the Walsh Family Library at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, the Fordham Museum of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Art is one of New York City’s best-kept secrets. For anyone in the Bronx, it offers a startlingly intimate encounter with the ancient world, particularly the enigmatic Etruscan civilization that predated and influenced the rise of Rome.
The museum’s location (literally inside a library) creates a quiet atmosphere. Unlike the sprawling halls of the Met, where you might feel like one of many thousands, here you are often the only person in the room with artifacts that are 2,500 years old. Windows look out onto the campus, grounding the ancient objects in a modern academic setting.
Etruscan Highlights
While the collection spans the Mediterranean, its Etruscan holdings are particularly evocative of a culture that blended elegance with a deep focus on the afterlife and ritual.
- Bucchero Ware: The collection’s standout is its array of Bucchero pottery. This is the signature “black-on-black” ceramic of the Etruscans, designed to mimic more expensive hammered metal. The deep, lustrous black finish and sharp, angular shapes provide a striking contrast to the more common red-and-black figure Greek vases nearby.
- Votive Offerings: You’ll find a fascinating collection of terracotta votive heads and feet. These were left at temples as “thank you” notes or prayers for healing. They are surprisingly human and individualistic, offering a direct emotional link to the people from the Italian peninsula long before the Caesars.
- The Burial Amphora: A centerpiece of the renovated gallery is a large Etruscan Amphora (ca. 650 B.C.E.). It serves as a focal point for understanding Etruscan burial ceremonies, surrounded by smaller implements like bronze spearheads and cosmetic applicators.
Ghada Amer: Disobedient Thought
Marianne Boesky, New York, May 1 to June 14, 2025
Ghada Amer’s exhibition Disobedient Thoughts at Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea, presented in spring 2025, offered a lucid and forceful summation of her long-standing project: to unsettle the hierarchies that separate abstraction from figuration, craft from high modernism, and private desire from public form. Installed across the gallery’s West 24th Street space, the show combined large-scale embroidered paintings with a suite of compact sculptures.
The paintings announce Amer’s method through contradiction. From a distance, several canvases read as exercises in modernist discipline, such as grids, nested squares, vertical bands. These recall canonical figures such as Mondrian or Albers. Up close, however, these structures are disrupted by cascades of hand-embroidered thread that slip, knot, and pool across the surface. The thread, often attached with gel medium, refuses the crisp authority of paint. It sags and tangles, asserting gravity and the unmistakable presence of the artist’s hand. Amer’s signature strategy, overlaying abstract order with unruly materiality, here feels less oppositional than accumulative.
[…]Richard Serra: Running Arcs (For John Cage)
Gagosian, New York, September 12 to December 20 2025.
At Gagosian’s West 21st Street space, Running Arcs (For John Cage) returned to public view after more than three decades, its first presentation in the United States. The three monumental, conical steel plates are arranged in a staggered rhythm that bends the room into corridors of weight. Each plate is roughly 52 feet long, 13 feet high, and 2 inches thick. The title nods to Serra’s friendship with Cage and to the way the piece scores movement, tempo, and chance as you pass along its curve. (Gagosian)
The plates do not tower for effect. They lean in and run, turning peripheral vision into an event and making the floor feel like a material in the piece. It is Serra at his most austere. And most cinematic. (Gagosian)
Richard Serra (1938–2024) reshaped late 20th-century sculpture with site-scaled steel works that use mass, balance, and procession to produce experience. Trained in painting before moving to industrial materials, he developed a vocabulary of rolled or forged steel plates and torqued forms, along with a major body of drawings. His long relationship with Gagosian includes landmark installations across the gallery’s New York spaces. (Gagosian)
