New artist book, featuring behind-the-scenes photos of Obama’s campaign, to be published this fall. https://ift.tt/8DIyvlP

A new book on U.K. artist Nicola Green’s “In Seven Days…”, a print series chronicling Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, will publish this October from HENI.

It will be the first major publication devoted to Green’s series, offering the first in-depth examination of its full scope and publishing archival material including sketches, drawings, and previously unseen photographs Green took on the campaign trail. Between 2008 and 2009, the artist and social historian was given unprecedented access to Obama’s campaign, election, and inauguration. Green was a special guest across six trips, including the Democratic National Convention in Denver, campaign stops in Concord and Philadelphia, election night in Chicago, and two visits to Washington, D.C., including the inauguration festivities. Green’s husband, the U.K. politician David Lammy, met Obama at Harvard Law School and has remained a friend of his for more than three decades.

That access culminated in seven silkscreen prints, titled Day 1, Light through Day 7, Peace. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has called the series “an artistic and historic masterpiece.” Made with water-based enamel ink and 24-karat gold leaf on Coventry Rag cotton paper, the prints were produced in an edition of 20 at Axelle Editions in Brooklyn and an edition of seven at London Print Studio.

The forthcoming book pairs an opening statement from Obama and artist statements for each print with 10 new essays, including contributions from Serpentine Galleries artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist, former Obama national security advisor Ben Rhodes, Obama Presidential Center Museum founding director Dr. Louise Bernard, London’s National Portrait Gallery’s curatorial and collections director Dr. Flavia Frigeri, and former Library of Congress curator Katherine Blood. It also draws on Arkhe, Green's seven-part archival work, which situates the prints alongside artistic touchstones including Raphael, Claude Monet, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, Robert Rauschenberg, Kerry James Marshall, Joe Overstreet, and Rosalyn Drexler.

The series is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the U.K. Government Art Collection, the Library of Congress, and Washington’s National Portrait Gallery, and is currently on view at the newly opened Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. The book also chronicles Green's two-decade relationship with the former president, tracing photographs from the 2008 campaign trail through election night in Grant Park, the 2009 inaugural celebration, the Oval Office presentation of the finished series just before he left office, and a 2021 reunion at the Library of Congress, which acquired the series in 2019.

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Pope Leo XIV opens a new installation by JR on Vatican Library facade. https://ift.tt/iXKeGIQ

Pope Leo XIV marked his 71st birthday on September 14th by opening “AQVA. Catastrophe and Wonder,” a new exhibition at the Vatican Apostolic Library anchored by a monumental installation by the French artist JR. The work, titled Diluvium, stretches nearly 230-feet across the library’s 16th-century facade. The work depicts a towering black-and-white wave drawn from Gustave Doré’s 1866 wood engraving of the biblical flood. It is the first site-specific art installation ever commissioned for the building’s exterior.

“Catastrophe and Wonder” will explore historical threats to the written word—water, fire, light, insects, and human intervention—as allegories for humanity's fears and hopes. The water-themed inaugural show, on view to the public from September 25 through May 14, 2027, pairs JR’s massive installation with another work by the artist, Undae, an installation in the Barberini Room showing a black-and-white video of a wave recorded in Brazil, along with a typography-based series by American artist Bill Moran, gastronomic writing by Italian chef Fulvio Pierangelini, and Vatican holdings including two copies of Ippolito Salviani’s landmark 1557 study Aquatilium animalium historia, a treatise on fish. The show is curated by Don Giacomo Cardinali, Simona De Crescenzo, Francesca Giannetto, and Delio Proverbio, and organized in partnership with Fondazione Roma and Intesa Sanpaolo.

JR described the project as originating in the library’s own anxieties. “The library at the Vatican came to see me because, for them, water represents their biggest fear,” the artist told designboom. “It’s the fact that one day water comes and takes away all the memory ... all the trace of a civilization that they’ve been preserving.”

He said the wave’s meaning extends beyond that literal threat, linking it to climate change, political polarization, and “the wave of AI itself.” In a statement, the artist added: “There is something almost mystical about books. These fragile objects contain the thoughts of the world; they carry voices, stories and knowledge across centuries. Their strength is immense, and so is their vulnerability: paper resists none of the elements. By bringing a wave into the Vatican Library, Diluvium and Undae confront this paradox. What can survive, and what do we choose to preserve?”

The inauguration marked Pope Leo’s first visit to the library since his election in 2025. In remarks at the opening, he described the Vatican Apostolic Library as “a heart,” explaining that “a beating heart is a symbol of life, and it results from two opposing movements, systole and diastole: a contraction and a relaxation, a movement towards the center and another towards the periphery.” Archbishop Giovanni Cesare Pagazzi, the Holy See’s librarian and archivist, told EWTN News that the exhibition’s pairing of centuries-old holdings with contemporary artists demonstrates that “generations are intertwined.”

This isn’t the first time the pontiff has positioned art as a means of communicating complex contemporary issues. In August, Pope Leo announced the Catholic Universities Art Triennial, titled “Exercises in Empathy,” as a salvo against the rise of A.I.

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What Is Gen X Art? Defining the Culture of the “Forgotten Generation” https://ift.tt/qVhPZnx

Millennials are addicted to social media and avocado toast. Gen Z is terminally online and hates parting their hair on the side.

As a society, we can’t get enough of these generational stereotypes and arguing about whether or not they’re true. The same goes for the art world, where these labels help define new trends. And yet, Gen X has slid under the radar of the generational conversation, a fact which perfectly fits their detachment and avoidance of the mainstream. In the meantime, artists born roughly between 1960 and 1980 have become some of the most powerful artists in the world, having reshaped how we view bodies, media, and irony.

This summer, the Deste Foundation in Athens opened “Gen X: Tales from the Forgotten Generation,” a survey of nearly 50 artists born between 1960 and 1980, drawn entirely from the Dakis Joannou Collection. The show explores how economic precarity, a valorization of slacker culture and rejection of ambition, and global events like the Challenger explosion and the fall of the Berlin Wall all shaped Gen X artmaking. The presentation, which is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, artistic director of New York’s New Museum, with Calvin Wang and Taeyi Kim, runs through November 26, 2026.

The artworks here focus on the generation’s defining characteristics, most notably its permanent ironic stance. A David Shrigley sign that hangs at the entrance, for example, announces “Tonight is cancelled” on one side, “Tomorrow is cancelled” on the other. Elsewhere, Urs Fischer’s surreal, hyperreal bronze sculpture of a red balloon tied to the end of a broom evokes Gen Xers’ detached humor toward everyday labor.

Wall labels, meanwhile, use evocative quotes from ’90s media—sources include Nirvana songs and Douglas Coupland’s defining 1991 novel Generation X. The exhibition unites household names—Kara Walker, Vanessa Beecroft, Matthew Barney, and Wolfgang Tillmans—to explore how the demographic made its own moment. We spoke to Massimiliano Gioni, New Museum director and a Gen Xer himself, about the defining factors of Gen X art and how this “forgotten generation” continues to shape contemporary art and culture. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Josie Thaddeus-Johns: What made you want to do an exhibition based on Gen X?

Massimiliano Gioni: The show came from a few simple considerations. First of all, we are witnessing a significant shift of power from the baby boomers to Gen X, who are getting to hold more and more influential positions, and, at the same time, media attention in the past few years has been very focused on Gen Y (Millennials) and Gen Z. Somehow, Gen X has drifted in the background, which is appropriate for an age group that in the United States came to be described as the “Forgotten Generation” because of the prevalence of double-income families, in which kids were often left alone to grow up on their own.

Secondly, we are witnessing many technological revolutions now that are perhaps comparable to the birth of the internet in the 1990s, when Gen X learned to coexist with a dramatic technological change: In times of technological upheaval—like the ones we are living through now—maybe we can learn from the experiences of the members of the Generation X, who were able to navigate a deep historical transformation.

JTJ: What themes did you find in Gen X artists’ works?

MG: Gen X was, almost by definition, a generation that was very skeptical of any generalization and refused to be easily identified and branded. It would be ironic—if not brutally cynical—to try and package them in a cohesive and uniformed identity.

Many different themes emerge from the exhibition. First of all, there is a sense of resilience in the way these artists responded to the seismic shifts of their formative years—from the fallout of 1980s economic booms and recessions to the birth of the 24-hour news cycle and the looming shadows of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. They reacted with a trademark mix of self-deprecation, lowbrow aesthetics, irony, and a healthy disregard for institutional convention.

Additionally, we wanted to highlight several parallel currents through the works. The mutated or uncanny body is a recurring presence in the show. Shaped by the anxieties around health crises and early technological shifts, many artists depicted bodies as decaying avatars, metallic cyborgs, or uncanny mutant creatures. The deconstruction of media images is another important thread in the show. Gen X artists fiercely analyzed and appropriated the tropes of the fashion and media industries, adopting a “slacker” cynicism that simultaneously mocked and exposed the machinery of consumer culture.

JTJ: Many of the artists here have defined the contemporary art moment—they’re at the top of their game. Is there a conflict between understanding these “slacker generation” artists who thrive in the margins and seeing them as the influential figures they are?

MG: There is certainly a wonderful irony there, but it’s a productive one. The “slacker” ethos—that posture of detachment, anti-ambition, or skepticism toward traditional corporate success—was originally a coping mechanism for a generation facing economic uncertainty and a saturated media landscape. That these very artists have gone on to shape the backbone of contemporary art proves that their marginal, countercultural postures possessed an enduring critical power. They didn’t necessarily sell out; rather, the mainstream eventually had to catch up to the vernacular of skepticism and fragmentation that they helped invent.

JTJ: How can we interpret Gen X’s dislike of “selling out” in the context of Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s embrace of commercial vernacular?

MG: Gen X’s suspicion of “selling out” was rooted in an analog era where you could still theoretically imagine an outside—an authentic underground untainted by corporate logic. But then again, it was precisely during the peak years of Gen X, at the beginning of the 1990s, that many of us witnessed the end of the very notion of the underground, as most symbolically represented by the band Nirvana becoming an international phenomenon.

Maybe Gen X was less about remaining outside the system and more a premonition of a completely transformed relationship between opposition and acceptance. Irony was the tool through which Gen X could survive this paradoxical situation of being simultaneously inside and outside the mainstream.

JTJ: Final question: Is Gen X misunderstood?

MG: Because they occupy the space between the loud political and cultural footprints of the boomers and the digital natives of later generations, they are often seen as cynical or apathetic. But what this exhibition tries to show is that what looks like apathy is actually a very acute, complex survival mechanism. It’s in Greece that skepticism was invented: the members of Gen X might be the last inheritors of that tradition, which has taught us the importance of doubt and detachment.

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NBA star Karl-Anthony Towns and model Jordyn Woods to curate Sotheby’s auction. https://ift.tt/iRjrwfK

Six-time NBA All-Star Karl-Anthony Towns and entrepreneur and model Jordyn Woods will curate the latest edition of Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated auction, bringing their shared perspective as collectors to the biannual sale. The couple has assembled a selection of 10 works by postwar and contemporary artists including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, both associated with Pop Art; Helen Frankenthaler, Alma Thomas, and Sam Gilliam, all linked to the Washington Color School; and George Condo, John Chamberlain, Ed Ruscha, and Rashid Johnson. The live auction takes place at Sotheby’s New York on October 7th, with the exhibition on view from October 2nd.

“Art holds memories and tells stories,” Towns and Woods said in a joint statement. “Each work in this sale resonated with us for a different reason, and together they reflect the people, places, and experiences that continue to shape our perspective as collectors.” The pair described their approach as collecting “based on connection,” citing artists, memories, cultural influences, and moments from their travels as touchstones for the selection. The curated sale spans painting, sculpture, and works on paper and explores themes of identity, perception, and transformation.

Several works carry personal significance. Towns considers Condo’s I Want My Brain Back (2020) a reflection of “how much I was losing myself” during 2020, a particularly difficult year for the athlete. He noted that Condo has “become a great friend of ours.” Warhol’s Flowers (1964), from the collection of architect Robert A.M. Stern, reminds Woods “of family, of remembrance, and of the garden we hope to create one day.” Ruscha’s Cities of the Globe (1980) evokes Los Angeles, where the couple met. The selection also includes Johnson’s Anxious Man (1980) and Lichtenstein’s Interior with Painting of Nude (Study) (1997), which comes directly from the collection of Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein.

“Every work in this selection was chosen with intention,” said Haleigh Stoddard, Sotheby’s Head of Contemporary Curated, in a statement. “Together, Karl and Jordyn have assembled an edit that reflects their individual perspectives, shared interests, and the artists they are most passionate about.”

Since 2013, Sotheby’s Contemporary Curated auctions have invited tastemakers from music, business, fashion, film, and sports to select works reflecting their personal tastes. Past curators have included Victoria Beckham, Robert Pattinson, Kevin Love, Karlie Kloss, Kelly Rowland, Oprah Winfrey, Cynthia Erivo, and Rich Paul. Pattinson’s 2022 edit, for instance, mixed six works by established figures such as Richard Serra and Willem de Kooning, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, with rising artists including Genieve Figgis and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Towns, who joined the New York Knicks in 2024 and helped lead the franchise to its first championship since 1973 this past June, also serves as Vice President of the National Basketball Players Association. Woods, whom he married in August, is the founder of the lifestyle brand Woods by Jordyn and Chief Creative Director of Glosslab. The couple’s ties to the museum world extend beyond the auction house, too. Their friendship with Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum director Mariët Westermann began during the museum’s Rashid Johnson exhibition and deepened after the Knicks’ championship run, when the Guggenheim briefly displayed the good-luck handbag Woods designed and carried throughout the playoffs.

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At MoMA's sculpture garden, Carmen Herrera and Alexander Calder inspire Michael Kors's Spring 2027 show. https://ift.tt/FbKCQfB

Designer Michael Kors staged his spring/summer 2027 collection Friday morning in the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden, building the show around what he called “the fine art of fashion.”

Kors told Reuters he was drawn to "the tension of something sculptural with something very crisp," citing Carmen Herrera, Alexander Calder, and Ellsworth Kelly as touchstones for the collection.

The collection nodded to these artists through blocks of saturated color, graphic contrasts, and sculptural silhouettes. Asymmetric dresses in primary red, yellow, and black appeared throughout, along with mod,1960s-inflected silhouettes such as a micro skirt suit with a Peter Pan collar in bright green. Kors also embraced thin black-and-white stripes, offering an Op Art . Accessories leaned sculptural, with bags suspended from silver hoops, leather coin purses doubling as layered necklaces, oversize bauble rings, and beehive-style sunglasses.

The palette stayed predominantly black and white, punctuated by moments of red, green, and yellow. "It's New York," Kors said of the Piet Mondrian-like palette. As the show closed, Harry Nilsson's “I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City” played through the garden. Guests included Gabrielle Union-Wade, Grace Van Patten, and Lea Michele.

In a review for The Impression, critic Mackenzie Richard Zuckerman framed the collection as "not reinvention so much as recomposition," describing how Kors took his most familiar garments—coat, trouser, and blazer—and subjected them to “a subtle but meaningful disturbance” drawn from Herrera, Calder, and Kelly.

Kors has previously staged runway shows at cultural institutions. For instance, his spring 2026 show took place at the Metropolitan Opera House, and marked his brand's 45th anniversary. The designer has also cited early visits to Andy Warhol's Studio 54 as a formative influence.

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Brooklyn Gallerist Tanya Weddemire Brings a Bold New Vision to The Armory Show https://ift.tt/S4J8I0h

After Tanya Weddemire Gallery sold two paintings by Nigerian-born artist Austin Uzor to the esteemed Clark Collection at EXPO Chicago this year, one of the first things the founder Weddemire did was call the artist.

The works, HIBISCUS and LAND DEVOTION V (both 2026), were entering a U.S.-based collection that also owns works by artists including El Anatsui, Zanele Muholi, Amy Sherald, and Kerry James Marshall. For Weddemire, telling Uzor what had sold, for how much, and to whom was fundamental to her view of how a gallery should operate. That meant a lot to Uzor.

“Transparency is something that I stand 10 toes down on,” Weddemire told Artsy. “One of the reasons why I started this gallery was that I heard from many artists that they were never being paid by their galleries. And I said, ‘How could someone take someone else’s work and not pay them for it?’” For her, that transparency is “an extension of stewardship.”

That philosophy—part stewardship, part market strategy—has shaped how Weddemire has built the gallery since opening it four years ago. Her approach combines transparency with a close attention to the cultural contexts of the artists she works with, many of whom explore questions of migration, identity, and the African diaspora.

Next week, the gallery will make its debut at The Armory Show, where this year’s Caribbean focus offers a particularly fitting context. Its booth will feature a duo presentation of Nigerian-born Uzor and Jamaican-born O’Neil Scott, whose works approach migration, identity, and memory from different points within the Black diaspora. For Weddemire, the presentation brings together many of the ideas that have guided the gallery from the beginning: cultural fluency, careful career-building, and an effort to connect artists’ individual histories with broader audiences and collectors.

Building a different gallery model

REVIVAL , 2026
Kaylyn Webster
Tanya Weddemire Gallery

Weddemire founded the gallery in 2022 after spending around 25 years working in luxury retail and wholesale. She had studied art and design at the University of Pennsylvania and remained interested in art throughout her career. But she was increasingly struck by what she saw as the underrepresentation and misunderstanding of artists of color, as well as stories from artists about opaque gallery practices.

“Art has always been something I’m curious about,” she said. “I wanted to make sure that I did something that I knew I had enough knowledge on [and] I could have a solution [for].”

She also wanted to make the strength of the strong collector base within the African diaspora more visible and help preserve stories she believed were culturally significant. She believed her experiences would be useful in the art world, so she left to start her gallery in 2022. Today, the gallery represents Scott, Lamar Bailey, Moses Salihou, Candice Tavares, and Kaylyn Webster, and has a working agreement with Uzor. Across their practices, questions of identity, heritage, and Black narratives recur.

SHOWER ME WITH YOUR LOVE, 2026
Candice Tavares
Tanya Weddemire Gallery

Weddemire’s years in luxury also inform the gallery’s behind-the-scenes mechanics. She and her team study pricing, collector behavior, sales data, research, and budgets to understand who is responding to an artist’s work and to make decisions about how that work is positioned in the market.

At the same time, she develops longer-term strategies around each artist’s trajectory, considering their goals, themes, and ambitions when deciding which fairs and other contexts might best serve their work.

Cultural fluency as strategy

Cultural fluency is equally central to that approach. Weddemire was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, where she lived until moving to New York at age 11. She believes her experience as a Jamaican immigrant gives her another point of connection with artists whose work emerges from migration, diaspora, and Black identity.

This familiarity often crosses boundaries. At EXPO Chicago, Uzor presented CONFLICTING SPACES: LETTERS WITHOUT RETURN ADDRESSES (2026), an installation incorporating a corner of a house with a zinc roof. Although the work emerged from a Nigerian experience, Weddemire recognized something familiar in it: She had grown up seeing the same kind of roofing in Jamaica.

For her, those points of recognition matter when speaking with collectors about an artist’s materials, imagery, and cultural references. “I can translate the information on where their work is coming from to the collector [on] material, composition, color, style, [and] narrative, which is where I feel that I have made that connection,” she said.

Those overlaps between individual histories and broader diasporic experiences are central to the gallery’s Armory Show presentation. Scott explores memory and migration through his experiences of Jamaican and American culture in artworks such as SUNDAY TO SUNDAY (2026). Uzor, meanwhile, approaches migration and displacement through a Nigerian lens, exploring the psychological and physical experience of occupying spaces that may no longer feel like home.

A broader sense of stewardship

I'LL BE ALWAYS WITH YOU, 2025
Moses Salihou
Tanya Weddemire Gallery

TAKE THE SHOT, 2026
Lamar Bailey
Tanya Weddemire Gallery

For Weddemire, these themes are also personal. When Hurricane Melissa brought catastrophic destruction to Jamaica in October 2025, she organized a donation drive and an exhibition in Los Angeles, with proceeds benefiting people affected by the storm.

“I grew up with a grandmother who I saw do everything in the community and share with the people we lived amongst. And so that’s ingrained in my DNA, and also my mom and my family,” she said. “It’s a very high responsibility for not only my personal cultural roots but the cultural roots of every single person within the gallery.”

OUT HERE , 2026
Brooke Fierce Bronner
Tanya Weddemire Gallery

Four years after opening the gallery, Weddemire wants its growth to remain as deliberate as its beginnings. She hopes younger people considering careers in the arts might see in it another model for what a gallery can be.

“What I would like people to pay attention to with the gallery is how intentional we are and where we’re going,” she said. “[I want] young people who are thinking about a career in the art space [to] look at my gallery and say, ‘You know what? This truly inspired me to take art in a different direction [from the norm].’”

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4 Contemporary Artists Inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry https://ift.tt/ctCBm9a

In one of the most anticipated cultural moments of the year, the Bayeux Tapestry went on view at the British Museum this week. The event marks the first time the roughly 950-year-old embroidered linen cloth has been displayed in England. The work will hang at the museum through July 2027.

The tapestry, which was likely commissioned for display at Bayeux Cathedral in Normandy, France, is one of the most significant objects in English visual history; the nearly 230-foot-long work depicts the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. It encompasses 58 detailed and emotive scenes, including galloping horses, burning ships, and the death of King Harold II at Hastings. The tapestry is believed to have been stitched by women embroiderers in Canterbury, England, before heading to France. It typically hangs at the Bayeux Museum in Normandy, and the artwork’s historic loan to England was a years-long collaboration that entailed an over £1.2 million ($1.6 million) transport bill. The public response to the loan has been overwhelming, with the rush for ticket sales even crashing the British Museum’s website.

While the Bayeux Tapestry is inspiring a new generation, artists have long treated it less as a relic to admire than a structure to borrow from and reimagine. Contemporary artists, from David Hockney to Hélène Delprat, have been drawn to the saga, the structure, and the craftsmanship of the tapestry.

Below, here’s a closer look at four contemporary artists who have been inspired by the tapestry.

David Hockney

David Hockney spent years contemplating the Bayeux Tapestry. The British artist settled in Normandy in 2019 and quickly became fascinated by the tapestry’s unfolding scenes. He soon resolved to build a large-scale narrative of his own. Confined to his house during the COVID lockdowns, Hockney spent months painting the arrival of spring on an iPad, eventually assembling the work into A Year in Normandie, a continuous frieze over 300 feet long, first shown at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in the fall of 2021.

Then in 2022, the Bayeux Museum staged a face-à-face, hanging half-scale reproductions of Hockney’s frieze alongside the tapestry itself. As curator Antoine Verney said in a statement, despite their very different techniques, “both freeze-frame a conquest: that of a Norman duke in England in the 11th century for one, and that of nature in Normandy and its constant renewal…for the other.”

Hélène Delprat

The Bayeux Tapestry’s final scenes were unfortunately lost long ago. Scholars believe they likely show William the Conqueror’s coronation, which took place at Westminster Abbey on December 25, 1066. To mark the millennium of William’s birth, the Normandy region ran a competition inviting a contemporary artist to imagine what came next. French artist Hélène Delprat won the commission, and her design is now being woven into a 25-square-meter panel by the Aubusson workshop Atelier Tapisserie Guillot. The French multidisciplinary artist is known for work spanning painting, video, and theater, drawing on burlesque, ancient mythology, and history.

“This is neither a restoration nor a reconstruction,” the artist told Le Figaro in 2024. “I would nevertheless use my vocabulary to maintain a link with Bayeux embroidery. What I am proposing would evoke the coronation scene of William the Conqueror. The Bayeux embroidery itself is never literal: it does not describe, it does not illustrate. It constantly invents. It speaks. It declaims.”

The tapestry will be unveiled in March 2027 before traveling to Westminster Abbey and the Château de Falaise, William the Conqueror’s birthplace.

Hurvin Anderson

In recent years, tapestry has enojoyed a moment of vogue. Last year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” showcasing nearly 150 modern and contemporary woven works that explored the limits of abstraction. Right now, the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia is hosting “You Stretched Diagonally Across It: Contemporary Tapestry,” an exhibition of tapestries by 25 contemporary artists.

But the art form has long had a home at Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios: Britain’s longest-running tapestry workshop, founded in 1912, often invites contemporary artists to collaborate on large-scale tapestries

This fall, London’s Guildhall Art Gallery will open “Beyond Bayeux: Tapestry Now,” an exhibition of more than 20 tapestries woven at Dovecot over the years. The star of the show is a new Hurvin Anderson tapestry marking the 600th anniversary of Oxford’s Lincoln College, where it will be permanently installed. The nearly 20-foot-long piece depicts the college’s famed dining hall. It took five Dovecot weavers seven months to translate the image from one of the Turner Prize nominee’s paintings. While the subject matter is unique, Anderson’s continuous narrative tapestry takes aspects of its long, processional format from the Bayeux Tapestry.

The exhibition also includes Rachel Maclean’s Goo Gaa (2024), which reworks her Rococo-inflected digital imagery into thread, and Farshid Moussavi’s Garden Carpet, made for V&A Dundee in 2025, which draws on Persian textile heritage to populate a paradise scene with Scottish wildlife.

Mia Hansson

Weaving, embroidery, and other textile traditions have often been considered women’s craft work, completed anonymously by skilled artisans. Today, in that same tradition, one of the artists most inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry is not a blue-chip name but a home embroiderer in Cambridgeshire, England. Mia Hansson, who identifies as a textile artist and illustrator, has spent nearly a decade hand-stitching a full-scale, stitch-by-stitch replica of the Bayeux Tapestry. She began the project in 2016 simply because, she told the BBC in 2025, she “needed a project [she] couldn't finish in a hurry.”

Interestingly, Hansson isn’t the first artist to take up this task. In 1879, embroiderer Elizabeth Wardle founded the Leek Embroidery Society in Staffordshire, England. After visiting Bayeux in 1885, Wardle resolved that England should have a copy of its own, and organized 35 needleworkers to stitch a full-size replica. They completed the work the following year. That Victorian version now hangs at Reading Museum in the U.K., where it’s known as Britain’s Bayeux Tapestry—a fitting testament to just how long this particular tapestry has been inspiring artists and artisans to pick up a needle and start again.

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