Zohran Mamdani announces New York City mural project to celebrate the FIFA World Cup 2026. https://ift.tt/rxcYknd

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has announced a new public art initiative that will commission 12 community murals across the city’s five boroughs in celebration of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

The commissions will be created by 12 artists working alongside local residents, community organizations, and young people. The murals will be installed in neighborhoods from the Bronx to Staten Island throughout New York City, with each project reflecting the history, culture, and identity of its surrounding community. The mural project is organized by the Groundswell Community Mural Project in partnership with the city’s Departments of Parks & Recreation, Cultural Affairs, and Youth and Community Development.

Community paint days will take place throughout the summer, inviting New Yorkers to help create the permanent artworks to commemorate the millions of visitors who have arrived for the tournament.

The lead artists include Angel Garcia, VASH, Miki Mu, Yolande Delius, Viktoriya Basina, Misha Tyutyunik, Vincent Ballentine, Peach Tao, Carlos Mateu, Colleen Kong-Savage, Mimi Ditkoff, and Lina Montoya, each paired with a different neighborhood across the city’s five boroughs.

“These murals will belong to the neighborhoods that brought them to life—from Fordham Heights to Ocean Hill to Laurelton and communities across our city,” Mamdani said in a statement. “They will showcase the creativity that makes New York unlike anywhere else in the world.”

The mural program is the latest in a growing slate of arts initiatives surrounding the FIFA World Cup. Earlier this year, the city partnered with the Whitney Museum of American Art to distribute a free, artist-designed activity guide to the World Cup designed by Rich Tu.

Meanwhile, the arts non-profit ARTS 14C partnered with FIFA World Cup 2026, to install soccer-ball sculptures by artists including Katherine Bernhardt, Hank Willis Thomas, and Tomokazu Matsuyama across New York City and New Jersey. Several New York City museums, including the Guggenheim Museum and El Museo del Barrio, have been screening select World Cup games.

Together, the initiatives underscore the city's effort to position arts and culture alongside sport as a defining part of New York’s role as a host of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

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An Art Lover’s Guide to Vienna https://ift.tt/ud0exY6

In Vienna, history is everywhere. From the city’s imperial landmarks to the legacy of Viennese modernism, centuries of cultural ambition shape its architecture and art scene.

While institutions like Kunsthistorisches Museum, Belvedere, and Albertina draw crowds to marvel at the old masters and Viennese modernists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, the contemporary scene is “particularly vibrant and diverse at the moment,” according to artist Ramesch Daha, president of the institution Secession. “Many artists and cultural practitioners are moving to the city from elsewhere, creating an exciting sense of dynamism.”

As Viennese curator Fanny Hauser puts it, the mix of major institutions, a historically grown independent scene of artist-run spaces, and two highly respected art academies makes for fertile ground. The gallery scene in particular is strong, even attracting newcomers from abroad.

Much of the Viennese art scene can be discovered unhurriedly and on foot, with the culinary traditions the city holds in high esteem never more than a few blocks away. This guide offers a curated selection of galleries, museums, and spots to know. Click the links to see their Google Maps or Artsy pages.

The key neighborhoods for art lovers in Vienna

Three clusters anchor the Vienna art map. Each is walkable and worth a full afternoon.

Inner City

Centered around the medieval St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna’s first district, with its cobbled streets and horse-drawn carriages, is home to some of the city’s most established galleries, like Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Galerie Krinzinger, Charim Galerie, and Galerie Klaus & Elisabeth Thoman.

A younger cluster of newer additions has also formed in the past decade towards the Parkring thoroughfare, like Layr, Sophie Tappeiner, Shore Gallery, and Croy Nielsen. The Universitätsgalerie im Heiligenkreuzerhof, meanwhile, stages contemporary shows in the historical setting of an old abbey.

Schleifmühlgasse and Eschenbachgasse

Two neighboring streets flanking the market criers of Naschmarkt, easily toured together. Schleifmühlgasse is the lifeline of a laid-back neighborhood where galleries mingle with boutiques, vintage shops, and small restaurants. See Christine König Galerie, Lombardi—Kargl, Galerie3, or detour to the Margarethe Schütte-Lihotsky-Zentrum, the pioneering architect’s living studio.

Eschenbachgasse runs closer to Museumsquartier and holds, among others, MEYER*KAINER, Galerie Crone, and E X I L E.

Museumsquartier

Three of Vienna’s biggest institutions and many smaller venues surround the courtyard of the former imperial stables, which doubles as a buzzing open-air hangout on summer evenings.

The four anchors—mumok, Albertina, Kunsthalle Wien, and Leopold Museum—are profiled below.

And two galleries worth a detour…

• Gianni Manhattan, off the beaten track in the 3rd district, pairs younger positions like work by sculptor Laurence Sturla with archival pieces from estates such as that of sculptor Anu Põder.
• Galerie Hubert Winter, tucked behind Museumsquartier, was established in 1971 with a focus on Surrealism. The program has since shifted toward overlooked female artists and the administration of Birgit Jürgenssen’s estate, alongside works by younger artists like Jojo Gronostay.

The museums and institutions to know in Vienna

Vienna’s institutional depth stretches from imperial-era foundations to sharply programmed contemporary museums, joined by foundations, artist-run networks, and a handful of commercial galleries that reward a detour.

Albertina. Home to one of the world’s most important graphic art collections, housed in a Habsburg palace on the Ringstraße. Highlights include Albrecht Dürer’s Young Hare (1508) and Praying Hands (1502) as well as a modern collection featuring works by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol. Its contemporary sister site, Albertina Modern at Karlsplatz, is housed in the former Künstlerhaus and focuses on Austrian and international art from 1945 to the present.

Belvedere Palace. The baroque palace complex holds the world’s largest Gustav Klimt collection—including The Kiss (1907–08) alongside a sweep of Austrian art from the Middle Ages to the present, framed by formal gardens between the two palaces. Its contemporary programming lives at Belvedere 21 (formerly the 21er Haus), Karl Schwanzer’s modernist pavilion originally built for the 1958 Brussels Expo.

mumok. With one of Europe’s largest collections of modern and contemporary art, mumok towers over the Museumsquartier like a black monolith. For director Fatima Hellberg, the notion of “opening” the museum is central: “mumok is a place where art is not only viewed but actively experienced—where people leave with a changed perspective.”

Kunsthalle Wien. Hidden behind a baroque façade next door, Kunsthalle Wien shows contemporary art through solo exhibitions of artists like Ibrahim Mahama and Richard Hawkins, alongside sprawling thematic group shows, most recently “Lives and works in Vienna,” a survey of the local art scene.

Leopold Museum. The white-stone counterpart to mumok, the Leopold is a good place to learn about Austrian Expressionism, home to the world's largest Egon Schiele collection. Programming includes special exhibitions of works by Gustave Courbet, Ferdinand Hodler, and Oskar Kokoschka, focused on 19th- and 20th-century painting, with the occasional foray into contemporary work in the basement galleries.

Secession. An architectural landmark in itself, the artist-run institution “sees itself as an open space within this artistic landscape: a place for presenting new artistic ideas and engaging with the pressing questions of our time,” according to its president, Ramesch Daha. Alongside solo shows of contemporary artists, don’t miss the Klimt frieze in the basement.

MAK, Museum of Applied Arts. Home to all things design, from Wiener Werkstätte to Helmut Lang, alongside shows of contemporary artists like Hito Steyerl. Its fashion-focused outpost sits at the historic villa Geymüllerschlössel.

FRANZ JOSEFS KAI 3, Contemporary Art Space. A non-profit contemporary art space in a stylishly renovated turn-of-the-century tile business. With just three shows per year, its no-frills program focuses on new productions and education around artists like Oscar Tuazon, Jeremy Deller, and Lucie McKenzie.

Maria Lassnig Foundation. Located in the painter’s former studio, the foundation opens for visits on Tuesdays by appointment; it’s a rare chance to see Lassnig’s practice in the space where it was made.

The Independent Space Index. Since 2017, Vienna’s exceptional density of artist-run and project spaces has organized itself as the Independent Space Index, a self-managed network of small venues dotted across every district. Programming tends to be more experimental, with newly commissioned work and research-driven exhibitions the norm. Laurenz Space, Prosopopeia, Pech, and Kunstverein Gartenhaus are among the most ambitious. The Index’s annual festival in May is the easiest way to encounter the full network.

Where the art world in Vienna eats, drinks, and shops

The places where Vienna’s art world gathers reflect the city’s habit of blending centuries, from grand cafés to modernist bar rooms and family Gasthäuser.

For dinner

Salzamt, with its chic interior by Austrian architect Hermann Czech, is one of the art-world mainstays; mumok director Fatima Hellberg brings international guests here for Austrian cuisine, and served “a delicious vegetarian goulash, along with other wonderful treats” at her inaugural opening dinner. Skopik & Lohn puts a twist on the classics with a sharing-plate format, and turns out the best schnitzel in town, according to Hauser, who also highlights the Otto Zitko interior painting, the wine list, and the cozy garden in the heart of the Jewish quarter.

For a more affordable Viennese classic, Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman director Eva Oberhofer recommends Gasthaus Steindl, a recently revitalized family-owned Gasthaus (a traditional tavern) popular with the theatre crowd.

For drinks

After openings, the Viennese scene gathers in bars and coffeehouses; as Fanny Hauser puts it, “Expect long nights, but no dancing.” The tiny Art Deco Loos American Bar—Adolf Loos’s 1908 American Bar—remains her top late-night pick. Curator Monika Georgieva picks Café Savoy: “A Vienna classic since 1897 and a queer institution. Inside for glamour, outside for flirting and people-watching.” Café Engländer is another traditional coffeehouse where the scene lingers once shows have wound down. Lepschi, newly opened, serves tinned-fish snacks alongside creative drinks (Oberhofer’s recommendation), while the New Bar—the closest thing Vienna has to a dive—hangs a changing mix of emerging local paintings on the walls. Above the city, Das Loft in the Jean Nouvel–designed SO/ hotel is worth a visit for the Pipilotti Rist ceiling installation alone.

For shopping

For fashion, artist Kristina Deska Nikolić recommends the concept store Song, praising owner Myung Saba-Song’s “authenticity and care.” For textiles and scents, Oberhofer sends clients to Duft und Kultur for its selection of avant-garde fragrances.

Where to stay

The recently restored 1930 modernist Villa Beer can be booked for overnight stays, a rare chance to experience early modernist living first-hand, down to the sound of the light switch.

Top tips for art lovers visiting Vienna

● When to go: Mid-September for Curated By, the gallery festival that fills the city with international curators and artists. For a deeper look at the emerging scene, come in May for the Independent Space Index Festival. Some galleries also go on extended summer breaks from the end of June to the beginning of July.

● How to navigate: Nothing is ever truly far away in Vienna. The city is highly walkable, and public transport is affordable and often the quickest option. Weather permitting, the most scenic way to enjoy exhibition hopping is by cycling on a Wienmobil bike, taking in the architecture along the way.

● What locals know: Make appointments for project spaces, and note that galleries have shorter Saturday hours and are typically closed Mondays (as are most museums). Weekends are sacred in Catholic Austria: reserve Sundays for a jaunt into nature, or for architectural pilgrimages to Wotruba Church, the Ernst Fuchs Museum, or Otto Wagner’s Church, followed by local wines at one of the Heurigen in the vineyards.

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For This Couple, Falling in Love Sparked a Lifelong Journey of Art Collecting https://ift.tt/I0r3wBs

In some ways, Johanna and Friedrich Gräfling have grown up together while collecting.

Today, the Frankfurt-based collectors, now in their thirties, hold nearly 650 works in their collection, including pieces by major names such as Alicja Kwade, Michael Sailstorfer, and Laure Prouvost.

But when their collecting journey began more than 15 years ago, they were still university students, newly dating. The couple met at a party hosted by a mutual friend in London. Friedrich was living in London, where he was a student at the Architectural Association. Johanna was visiting, then an art history student studying abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris. “At that time, I wanted to work in the art market, which I always found super fascinating,” she told Artsy. “I spent all my time at museums.”

Friedrich had become involved in the street art scene as a teenager in North Bavaria. By the time he met Johanna, he was spending his free time going to studio visits, exhibitions, and hanging out with artists in his circle.

Soon, the young couple was traveling back and forth between Paris and London.

“We clicked through this interest in art,” said Johanna. “Art was always something that connected us from the very beginning. From the moment our relationship began, Friedrich asked me about art and showed me what he was interested in. We began to discover artists together.”

For the Gräflings, collecting has never been simply a matter of acquisition. It has become a way of building long-term relationships with artists, living closely with their work, and inviting others into that experience. What began as a shared curiosity between two young students has since grown into a broader ethos of art as something to be lived with, shared, and supported over time.

A communal collection

In 2013, the couple founded Salon Kennedy, an impromptu apartment salon staged in one room of their home.

“We’ve always liked to entertain in a way, to have people over, cook for them, to bring people together. Historically speaking, we liked the idea of the salon culture,” said Johanna. “We shoved all the furniture away, invited the artists to hang their works, and invited people over who we thought could be relevant for them to get to know the artists’ works.”

Salon Kennedy still exists, in a more formalized way, as a permanent exhibition space in the couple’s Frankfurt apartment. Today, Johanna and Friedrich also run Gräfling, a Frankfurt-based design studio that works across architecture and design, as well as Kunstverein Wiesen, a nonprofit art institution in rural Germany, focused on a slower rhythm of making and connecting with art.

“You actively have to decide to come to drive out to Wiesen, in the countryside, to visit the exhibitions,” said Friedrich, “It’s a different way of looking at art when you don’t have anything else to distract you.”

Collecting with consideration

Despite busy schedules and two children, the couple never rushes to collect. Instead, they’ve cultivated a rigorous process of purchasing art that prizes deep connection over fleeting thrills. Purchasing a first work by a new artist can take the Gräflings years to decide upon.

“We don’t buy works in a moment of passion,” said Friedrich. “There’s a long journey until we are committed, and we know we are 100 percent sure we want to follow this artist as long as we can financially.”

The aim is never to own just a single work but to grow alongside an artist, collecting their oeuvre in depth. Today, the Gräflings hold deep collections of works by artists including Sailstorfer, Paul Czerlitzki, Kwade, Jorinde Voigt, Prouvost, Grace Weaver, Christian Jankowski, Gregor Hildebrandt, and Sung Tieu. They continue to discover new artists through exhibitions, fairs, and other artists, some of whom have become friends.

But while the couple espouses an intellectual approach to building their collection, art has found its way into the most intimate moments of their lives.

“In the dining room, we have a huge painting by Grace Weaver, which is very colorful and very personal because this was our wedding gift,” said Johanna. “She painted the scenery of our wedding in her way. This is the most dominant piece in the dining area.”

Meanwhile, in their bedroom, among works by Prouvost, Andreas Gursky, Taryn Simon, and Kwade, are two paintings by Hildebrandt, made as presents for the births of their children.

The couple doesn’t limit themselves to a single medium or aesthetic when collecting, but focus on works by contemporary artists that they believe will be of historical significance well into the future.

The Gräflings acknowledge that the way they live with art is continuing to evolve. The couple once lived with a Petersburg-style hanging, the apartment’s walls covered in art. After redoing the space, they pared back, putting some work in storage. Now, the work has begun to accumulate again. “The works keep coming,” Johanna said, with a laugh.

This deep pleasure is what has inspired, and continues to inspire, the Gräflings to welcome potential collectors into their home. “It is always nice if we can encourage or transmit the spark we have for art and for buying art and for living with art to people who haven’t had that so far,” said Friedrich.

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London ranked best city in the world for art, according to Time Out survey. https://ift.tt/MCnxUvX

London has been named the best city in the world for art galleries in Time Out’s latest global survey of cultural destinations, ahead of Paris and New York.

The ranking was based on responses from more than 24,000 people worldwide about culture in their cities. Some 81.1 percent of surveyed Londoners said art galleries were what their city did best, compared with 67.9 percent of respondents in Paris and 67.7 percent in New York.

London also placed third for museums, with 88.4 percent of residents praising the city’s offerings, behind Paris and Madrid. Many of London’s leading public institutions, such as the British Museum and Tate Modern, offer free access to their permanent collections, broadening public access to art across periods and media

The ranking comes during a significant year for London’s cultural landscape. The city has welcomed new institutions including V&A East and V&A East Storehouse, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, and the Museum of Youth Culture.The London Museum is also scheduled to open its new location this November in Smithfield, East London.

London’s current exhibition calendar also includes several major presentations. Tate Modern is staging “Frida: The Making of an Icon” an exhibition examining how Frida Kahlo shaped her public identity and became a globally recognizable cultural figure. The Hayward Gallery is hosting a major Anish Kapoor exhibition, while Kew Gardens has installed more than 30 works for “Henry Moore: Monumental Nature.”

Other highlights include “Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait” at the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts’ 258th Summer Exhibition, and “Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art” at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Tate Modern is also presenting “Tracey Emin: A Second Life,” billed as the largest survey yet of the British artist’s four-decade career.

The art ranking forms part of Time Out’s 2026 guide to the world’s best cities. London placed fourth in the publication’s overall city ranking but took the top position when the results were narrowed to cultural offerings.

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Why Artists Can’t Stop Reinventing the Tarot Deck https://ift.tt/yB8q4oK

Tarot has worn many guises over the centuries. Today, the tarot card deck is considered a divinatory tool, associated with mysticism and the occult. But its origins were anything but witchy; it was born as a courtly game played in the halls of Renaissance Italy.

“Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions,” a new exhibition on view at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, traces the fascinating transformations and visual evolutions of the tarot. It covers everything from its earliest origins as expanded sets of standard playing cards to its mystical use as a divinatory system to today, when contemporary artists are endlessly reimagining the possibilities of the tarot’s visual archetypes.

The Morgan Library & Museum is a particularly fitting venue for the exhibition. J. Pierpont Morgan, the founder and financier of the library, was a devotee of the occult who frequently consulted astrologers to read his charts. He was an inveterate card player, to boot. In 1911, Morgan acquired 35 lavishly decorated 15th-century playing cards, known as the Visconti-Sforza cards. From that early acquisition, the Morgan Library has continued a tradition of collecting tarot-related materials, much of which is included in the exhibition.

“Tarot!” is divided into two parts, “Renaissance Visions” curated by Joshua O’Driscoll and “Modern Visions” curated by Claire Gilman. “Modern Visions” brings together works by Surrealist artists such as Leonora Carrington and Salvador Dalí, alongside recent creations by Alison Saar, Marcel Dzama, and new commissions by Chris Ofili. Unlike their Renaissance counterparts, modern and contemporary tarot decks have become a popular medium for expressing spirituality, politics, and identity.

How Surrealist artists reinvented tarot

By the mid-20th century, the tarot had become the sphere of predicting occultists. The famous Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, created in 1909, was conceived as a collaboration between artist Pamela Colman Smith and British poet Arthur Edward Waite, both of whom were members of the Golden Dawn, a British mystical organization.

The Surrealists changed that, adapting the motifs and symbols of the tarot deck to express their own interests in the unconscious, magic, and a sense of imagination unchained from the strictures of rationality. “The Surrealists associated rational masculinist thinking with the traumas of the war and they turned to the occult—and tarot specifically—as an alternative way of understanding the universe, one that embraced hidden, enigmatic meanings rather than straightforward, unidirectional thinking,” explained Gilman.

Famously, in 1940 and 1941, while André Breton and other Surrealists were stranded in Marseille awaiting exit visas during the war, these artists came together to create Le Jeu de Marseille, a tarot deck that replaced the traditional suits. Flames, wheels, stars, and locks symbolized love, revolution, dreams, and knowledge, respectively—and they recast court cards as geniuses, sirens, and mages associated with figures they admired, like Sigmund Freud and famed French psychic Hélène Smith. The exhibition includes Le Jeu de Marseille, as well as preparatory drawings.

Other Surrealist examples in the show highlight how artists adapted the tarot to create personal mythologies. In Victor Brauner’s painting The Surrealist (1947), the artist pictures himself as the magician from the Tarot de Marseille, an iconic deck that developed in France during the 17th and 18th centuries. Artists like Carrington and Remedios Varo, meanwhile, utilized archetypes from the tarot within their unique symbolic worlds to represent occultism, alchemy, and spiritual transformation. “The tarot Arcana are open-ended, their meaning dependent on who is reading them, who is receiving them, and in what context. This kind of openness appealed to the Surrealists,” Gilman added.

These works expanded the meaning of the tarot into a more widely recognized cultural language: a series of symbols.

Tarot in contemporary art

Today, contemporary artists have stretched tarot’s expressive possibilities even beyond the Surrealist imagination. Many of those in the exhibition have adapted the tarot deck to tell stories of people, histories, and spiritualities previously unseen in the canonical decks.

Among these is Indianapolis-based artist Courtney Alexander’s Dust II Onyx: A Melanated Tarot (2017). Alexander admired the way tarot managed to combine symbolism from across spiritual traditions, but was acutely aware that, as an African American woman, she did not see herself represented in the cards. With Dust II Onyx: A Melanated Tarot, Alexander created a deck that incorporates a wide range of figures from the African diaspora, from popular-culture icons such as Grace Jones and Willow Smith, along with images of the Mursi and Maasai peoples of East Africa and the Asante of West Africa.

French Martinican artist Elizabeth Colomba, meanwhile, first encountered tarot through a reading on Los Angeles’s Venice Beach boardwalk, where she was moved by the way the woman was “channeling an entire lineage of myth, psychology, and intuition.” The artist has recently started a series that focuses on the “positive outcome cards” from the Major Arcana, depicting Black women in regal settings.

Also included in these reimaginings of the tarot’s representation are Alison Saar’s drawings for Skowhegan Tarot Swords cards (2016), which similarly draw on the archetypes of the Rider-Waite-Smith while incorporating divine Yoruba orishas and figures from African American history.

Tarot in political art

While tarot has long been associated with otherworldly realms, some contemporary artists are using the language of tarot to address the social and political realities here on Earth. Artist Cristy C. Road’s The Next World Tarot (2020), for instance, reenvisions the tarot deck through contemporary social issues and social change, picturing protests and scenes of anti-colonialism.

Meanwhile, American artist and trans-rights advocate Edie Fake’s diptych Two of Wands (2025) explores a single card. Associated with forward motion, the card inspired Fake as a way to address anti-trans politics in the leadup to the 2024 election.

Ofili’s 2026 commission for the exhibition tackles fraught histories as well. The British artist has imagined a tarot deck through the lens of Trinidad Carnival, tapping into the lineage of masquerade as a form of resistance. In Diablo (2026), Ofili recreates the tarot’s devil card to play with the racist history of Trinidad’s Carnival. The “Jab Molassie” depicted wears a blackened face, just like white masqueraders who pretended to be enslaved Black Trinidadians, who were banned from attending the 17th- and 18th-century carnivals.

“I think the impetus for the turn to tarot in the contemporary moment and among artists in particular is similar to the reason the Surrealists turned to tarot,” said Gilman. “In times of social and political uncertainty, we seek new ways of understanding our existence and alternative means of navigating the world.”

Artists using tarot for personal cosmologies

Many other contemporary artists in the exhibition had adapted tarot as a mutable symbolic system for representing inner states, dreams, ecology, and personal memories.

Several decks in the exhibition were created during the COVID-19 lockdowns, like Nicolas Bruno’s Somnia Tarot (2020), which filters tarot through his personal experiences with sleep paralysis at the time. Likewise, German artist Kerstin Brätsch’s “PARA PSYCHIC” drawings (2020–21) combine tarot with plant medicine, maps, medieval books, and esoteric knowledge systems.

These works, and many others in the exhibition, emphasize the adaptability of the tarot. “Tarot lends itself to new interpretations. Indeed, it is in its very DNA. And so it provides a framework that artists can modify and innovate, and that can accommodate multiple communities and perspectives,” said Gilman.

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Lynda Benglis inspires the Dior Haute Couture show in Paris. https://ift.tt/GpigEtr

For Dior’s fall/winter 2026–27 haute couture show in Paris, creative director Jonathan Anderson took inspiration from the materially inventive sculptures of American artist Lynda Benglis. Over more than 50 years, Benglis has redefined the boundaries between painting and sculpture, transforming industrial materials like plaster and latex into viscous, amorphous forms.

Presented during Paris Haute Couture Week, the collection—which was Anderson’s second couture collection for the French fashion house—translated many of Benglis’s signature gestures, including knotting, pleating, and draping, into sculptural garments. “I think she’s one of the most important living sculptors in America—in the world,” Anderson told the New York Times.

Many of Benglis’s sculptures begin with materials that are folded, twisted, or molded into three-dimensional forms—a process that Anderson has likened to haute couture, in which fabric is transformed into sculptural silhouettes through handwork. Dior’s ateliers echoed the artist’s practice in metallic textiles, iridescent finishes, richly embroidered surfaces, and soft silver netting designed to evoke the appearance of chicken wire.

The collection also draws on places that have shaped Benglis’s artistic practice. Bright floral embellishments and beadwork reference her “Peacock” series, inspired by time the artist spent in Ahmedabad, India, beginning in the late 1970s. The collection’s palette also evokes the desert landscape of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Benglis maintains a home and studio. Antique fragments of 18th-century Indian chintz and indienne textiles were incorporated into miniature Lady Dior and Petit Dîner handbags.

Lucky Strike, 2024
Lynda Benglis
Pace Gallery

Coinciding with the collection, Dior presented “Grammar of Forms,” a temporary installation in the sculpture garden of the Musée Rodin that explored the dialogue between Benglis’s sculpture and couture. The collaboration builds on Anderson’s longstanding admiration for Benglis. He first encountered her work at the Hepworth Wakefield in 2015 and later included her sculptures in the 2017 exhibition he curated there, “Disobedient Bodies.” During his tenure at Loewe, he featured Benglis’s work in runway presentations and collaborated with the artist on a jewelry collection in 2024.

The fashion collaboration arrives as Benglis receives renewed institutional attention. Pace Gallery will present a survey of sculptures spanning more than five decades of her career this fall, while a major 2027 retrospective organized by the Kunstmuseum Basel will travel to Tate Modern in London and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Together, the exhibitions underscore the growing recognition of Benglis as one of the most influential post-war American sculptors, whose experimental practice continues to shape conversations across both contemporary art and fashion.

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