Friday, September 25, 2026

The 10 Best Booths at The Armory Show 2026
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The Armory Show returned to the Javits Center, opening its VIP day on Thursday, September 24th. The 2026 edition landed later on the calendar than usual, pushed from its traditional early September slot to later in the month, running through Sunday, September 27th. There was a noted sense of anticipation in the air on the morning of the VIP day, and collectors met the fair with enthusiasm and energy.

Under fair director Kyla McMillan, this year’s edition has grown to 242 exhibitors from more than 30 countries, with expanded Presents and Solo sections dedicated to emerging galleries and solo artist presentations, respectively. A Caribbean thread ran through both the Focus section, curated by María Elena Ortiz, and the Platform section for large-scale artworks, curated by Jovanna Venegas.

A particular crowd-pleaser was Bony Ramírez’s mixed-media assemblage installation La Carta (2026) featuring a doll girl resting on a four-poster bed. Presented by regular norma as part of Platform, La Carta is a consideration of how we meet bad news and will change its configuration every day of the fair. Nearby, El Museo del Barrio staged another highlight, a participatory textile installation by Lulu Varona for the fair’s Spotlight program.

Several new developments accompany this year’s fair. On Friday, the fair will kick off its inaugural Armory After Hours, hosting a carnival-inspired procession, led by a DJ and live percussionists, through the aisles. This year also marked the biggest slate of prizes in The Armory Show’s history, including a new three-way Pérez Art Museum Miami Acquisition Prize and an inaugural Bronx Museum Acquisition Prize, awarded to Zoë Pulley for a work in Superposition’s booth.

Major collectors came out for opening day, including Beth DeWoody, Pamela Joyner, Jason and Michelle Rubell, and Susan and Michael Hort, along with curators Scott Rothkopf and Klaus Biesenbach, among others. Celebrities spotted among the booths included Jodie Foster, Paul Rudd, and Karl-Anthony Towns. Sales reported by galleries on the day were led by a Joan Mitchell painting for over $2 million at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

But among the fanfare, the real action really took place within the booths. Here are Artsy’s picks for the 10 best booths from The Armory Show 2026.

Spinello Projects

Booth F1

With works by Elliot & Erick Jiménez

Identical twins Elliot & Erick Jiménez transformed Miami gallery Spinello Projects’ booth into a meditation on transformation with “What We Are Becoming,” their first major body of work since their debut solo museum show in 2025, “El Monte” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Raised in an Afro Cuban household in the U.S., the Miami-based artists debuted photographic works in reliquary-like frames, while the booth’s walls were draped in floor-length deep green drapes. In the booth’s title piece, What We Are Becoming (2026), an archival pigment print shows a shadowy figure with eyes glancing out mournfully. The image is studded with custom silk organza butterflies. Another work, Babalú-Ayé (2026), honors the orisha of healing and disease through a canvas print embedded with found antique metal ex-votos.

Of the works on view, 7 sold within the fair’s first days, each priced between $10,000 and $20,000.

Superposition

Booth P10

With works by Zoë Pulley

Elegance No. 1, 2026
Zoë Pulley
Superposition

For her first-ever fair presentation and first New York gallery show, Brooklyn-based Zoë Pulley built her installation, collectively titled “A Conversation Had on February 27th,” around the archive of her grandmother, Sandra Olivia Moon Hightower. A self-taught fashion designer who staged independent runway shows in early 1980s Philadelphia, Hightower worked entirely outside the industry’s institutional record.

At the nomadic gallery Superposition’s booth, Pulley’s works function as reconstructed garments and alternative archives, incorporating image transfer, collage, and press clippings alongside her own handwritten notes. The presentation is anchored by A Conversation Had on February 27th (Tetraptych) (2026), four lit panels on milk crates, each bearing a line in Hightower’s own words: “I just wanted to put people on the runway who never got the opportunity to be on the runway.”

Another work, Elegance No. 1 (2026), won the fair’s inaugural Bronx Museum Acquisition Prize and sold for $14,000. Other works in the 23-piece booth ranged from $3,500 to $7,500. Including personal family ephemera and adaptations of Hightower’s now-vintage garments, this installation is poignant and playful at once.

Perrotin

Booth 100

With works by Kathia St. Hilaire

Artist Kathia St. Hilaire’s richly textured reduction-relief paintings offer a sumptuous start to the fair in a dedicated booth at Perrotin, located right at the fair’s entrance.

St. Hilaire builds her surfaces by carving and printing linoleum blocks onto collaged panels. She then sands away layers, incorporating shredded tires, banknotes, sugarcane bagasse, and even skin-lightening cream packaging alongside more traditional paint.

One work, Saintilus Bois Caïman (2025), depicts the artist as a child witnessing the Haitian artist Jean-Claude Saintilus retell the legend of the 1791 Bois-Caïman ceremony, framed by two caimans (an alligator-like reptile) and vegetation drawn from the artist’s Florida childhood. The gallery reported six works sold on opening day, ranging in price from $5,000 to $45,000.

Carvalho

Booth 133

With works by Élise Peroi, Rosalind Tallmadge, and Anoushka Mirchandani

Brooklyn gallery Carvalho’s booth offered a serene oasis amid the hubbub of the fair, with works by artists Élise Peroi, Rosalind Tallmadge, and Anoushka Mirchandani, offering a masterclass in material sensitivity.

Newly represented artist Peroi, an alum of The Artsy Vanguard 2026, reconfigures gouache-on-silk landscapes by cutting them into ribbons and reweaving them on a tapestry loom. Her Reflet bleu (2026), a translucent panel of silk, gouache, linen, and maple, sold during the fair’s opening hours. Meanwhile, Tallmadge’s Palingenesis (2026) layers mirrored mica over hand-painted silk in a large-scale panel that functions as much as sculpture as painting. Making her debut with the gallery, Mirchandani contributed multivalent, ethereal oil, oil stick, and oil pastel figurative paintings.

JO-HS

Booth P46

With works by Morten Slettemeås

Norwegian painter Morten Slettemeås filled New York gallery JO-HS’s booth with “VEKE” (all works 2026), seven large oil-on-canvas panels—each roughly 79 by 59 inches—drawn from the landscape of Gvarv, Telemark, where the artist grew up.

The title, meaning “week” in Norwegian, nods to the seven panels and the seven days it references, while a recurring horizontal line, evoking a candle’s wick, threads through the compositions as both a visual and temporal device.

Slettemeås moves fluidly between figuration and abstraction, compressing memory, place, and perception into single images where distinct moments seem to coexist. The gallery conceived the booth as an architectural, immersive environment rather than a conventional display. The seven panels were offered at a price on request.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery

Booth 407

With works by Benny Andrews, Milton Avery, Hannelore Baron, Richmond Barthé, Mary Bauermeister, William Baziotes, Romare Bearden, Paul Cadmus, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Harold Cousins, Jay DeFeo, Beauford Delaney, Melvin Edwards, Claire Falkenstein, Jared French, Sam Gilliam, Nancy Grossman, William H. Johnson, Lee Krasner, Yayoi Kusama, Hughie Lee-Smith, Norman Lewis, Joan Mitchell, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Alfonso Ossorio, Irene Rice Pereira, Jackson Pollock, Fairfield Porter, Betye Saar, Esphyr Slobodkina, Alma Thomas, Bob Thompson, George Tooker, Charmion von Wiegand, Charles White, Jack Whitten, and William T. Williams

While many booths at this year’s fair leaned into single-artist narratives, New York’s Michael Rosenfeld Gallery went the opposite direction, filling its booth with 112 works spanning more than three decades of American art history. The New York gallery’s presentation ranged across works by Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Yayoi Kusama, Romare Bearden, Alice Neel, Louise Nevelson, Alma Thomas, and Jack Whitten, among dozens of others. A Joan Mitchell painting from the presentation sold for more than $2 million, the most expensive sale reported at the fair from its VIP day.

One particularly powerful segment of the booth was devoted to assemblage works, including works by late American artist Betye Saar, box assemblages by Holocaust survivor Hannelore Baron, and Barbara Chase-Riboud’s evocative Poet’s Letter on the Shoulder of His Mistress (1994).

Lyndsey Ingram

Booth 138

With works by Stephen Chambers, Kate Friend, Florence Houston, Fumi Imamura, Suzy Murphy, Heidrun Rathgeb, Liselotte Watkins, and Anne-Laure Zevi

London gallery Lyndsey Ingram brought eight artists together around themes of the natural world, identity, and small moments of daily beauty.

Artist Fumi Imamura makes her New York debut with large-scale floral collage and watercolor works, their intricate paper gardens rendered in rich earth tones. Kate Friend released new photographic outtakes from her “As Chosen By…” portrait series alongside a large-scale image from “There Are Always Flowers for Those That Want to See Them,” a series shot at Vatican-approved Marian apparition sites.

Florence Houston’s hyper-detailed paintings of an ornate Victorian jelly, a bar of soap, and a light switch imbued the everyday with unexpected sensuality, while Liselotte Watkins contributed six aerial-perspective compositions balancing decorative beauty with conceptual tension.

Hannah Traore

Booth P20

With works by Kesewa Aboah

New York gallery Hannah Traore gave over its booth to Ghanaian British artist Kesewa Aboah, who uses her own body as a printmaking tool. Aboah presses her fingerprints and limbs into magnesium plates originally designed for 20th-century letterpress printing, then frames the cold metal in warm, grained tulipwood, turning a commercial reproduction tool into a singular record of her body.

The presentation’s most ambitious work, Self Portrait: KA-18.07.26, 1-3 (2026), consists of 15 magnesium plates stamped over and over with her limbs, left deliberately unpolished so the reactive metal could tarnish unpredictably, “like a person,” as the artist put it. The booth sold out entirely within the fair’s opening hours, with works priced between $2,500 and $27,000.

P420

Booth 120

With works by Irma Blank, Adelaide Cioni, Victor Fotso Nyie, Xian Kim, Shafei Xia, Pieter Vermeersch, Riccardo Baruzzi, and Laura Grisi

P420, from Bologna, Italy, mixed generations and media across eight artists. These included works by the late Irma Blank, whose Radical Writings, Abecedarium, 7-2-91, 1991 (1991) trace the rhythm of her own breath across paper and canvas in a private, wordless script, alongside Untitled (1965–66) by Laura Grisi, an Italian pioneer whose 1960s abstractions bridged Pop, Conceptual, and kinetic art.

But the real draw of the booth is the delightful creations of rising contemporary artist Shafei Xia. Born in Shaoxing, China, and now based in Bologna, Xia paints and sculpts, creating playful works that take inspiration from Japanese shunga woodblock prints and 19th-century Chinese erotic painting.

In these works, Xia often casts herself as a tiger, a symbol of instinctual power in Chinese alchemy. Among the works on view were Summer time (2026), a large watercolor on sandalwood paper mounted on canvas, and Little girl (2026), a painted and glazed ceramic sculpture of a girl holding a tiger in her arms like a lap cat.

EBONY/CURATED

Booth 309

With works by Hugh Byrne, Wole Lagunju, Kimathi Mafafo, Senzeni Mtwakazi Marasela, and Lisa Ringwood

Cape Town and Franschhoek, South Africa, gallery EBONY/CURATED made its Armory debut with a five-artist presentation spanning painting, textile, and ceramic work from across the African continent.

Wole Lagunju’s Homage to Eshumare (2026), a large oil painting steeped in Yoruba iconography, anchored the booth and was offered at $38,500. Kimathi Mafafo’s hand- and machine-stitched embroideries drew attention, as did Senzeni Mtwakazi Marasela’s red-thread-on-cotton Waiting for Gebane 1 (year), part of an ongoing series that follows a fictional alter ego through South African history. Lisa Ringwood’s hand-built, delicate, sgraffito-decorated ceramic vessels, meanwhile, were the breakout of the booth. Six of her works sold within the fair’s opening hours, priced between $6,000 and $9,000 each.



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$2 million Joan Mitchell painting leads opening sales at The Armory Show 2026.
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The Armory Show 2026 opened its VIP preview on Thursday, September 24th, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York. Galleries across the fair’s 242 international exhibitors reported swift sales in the early hours, with momentum building throughout the day. Notable attendees included actors Jodie Foster, Paul Rudd, and Piper Perabo, alongside collectors Beth DeWoody, Pamela Joyner, and Jason and Michelle Rubell.

The headline transaction reported by galleries at the fair came from Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, which sold a painting by Joan Mitchell for over $2 million to a private collection. The gallery also placed a bronze by Richmond Barthé and a collage by Louise Nevelson, each in the range of $100,000–$250,000, and two works by Benny Andrews at $50,000–$100,000 each.

The Armory Show 2026 runs until September 28th and is organized across four sections: Galleries, Focus, Presents, and Platform.

Check back for our full sales report after the fair closes. In the meantime, these are the leading sales reported from opening day of The Armory Show 2026.

Matisse's Window, 2026
Inka Essenhigh
Miles McEnery Gallery



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Thursday, September 24, 2026

French Artist Prune Nourry to Stage Major Exhibition at Paris’s Petit Palais in October.
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Paris museum Petit Palais has invited French artist Prune Nourry to take over its galleries for “Visionaries,” an exhibition opening October 20th and running through January 24, 2027. The show will unfold across the Petit Palais’s permanent collection galleries, its outer esplanade, and its gardens, creating a dialogue between Nourry’s new work and the museum’s holdings.

The exhibition grows out of a year-long research project in which three art historians compiled the writings and photographic portraits of 18 women sculptors from the late 19th and early 20th centuries who have been overlooked by official art history. Among them are Käthe Kollwitz, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Hélène Bertaux, Jane Poupelet, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Selma Hortense Burke, Daria Gamsaragan, and Sarah Bernhardt.

Inspired by their work and the strength of their commitment, Nourry sculpted a portrait of each—some 18 new busts ranging from around two to 11 feet in height—working primarily in plaster. The material resonates with the Petit Palais collection, in which nearly 70 percent of sculptures are studio plasters: casts that were never intended for museums, yet have outlasted the bronze versions they document.

The show begins on the museum’s forecourt with Mothership, a hybrid figure suspended between a pregnant woman and the rusted hull of a ship. Inside the sculpture gallery of the North Pavilion, the eighteen portraits animate the memory of the sculptors they represent. Presented throughout the display are some twenty earlier works from Nourry’s “Holy Daughters” and “Venus” series, in scales running from around eight inches to 90 feet, alongside a recurring motif: white marble eyes with black pupils embedded in Nourry’s plaster busts and in the pedestals of the museum’s own works alike, prompting a visual comparison across the eras the collection spans.

Mini Atys, 2023
Prune Nourry
Templon

The exhibition addresses a structural gap in the Petit Palais’s own holdings: of all the works in its collection, barely four percent were made by women, and only four female sculptors are represented.

Born in Paris in 1985, Nourry lives and works between Paris and New York. A graduate in wood sculpture from the École Boulle, she works across sculpture, installation, and performance, combining fieldwork with specialists in genetics, sociology, anthropology and archaeology to develop projects that raise ethical questions about the body, demographic imbalance, and the interdependence of living species.

Clay is the core of Nourry’s practice, though she regularly collaborates with craftspeople to explore new materials and techniques. She is perhaps best known for “Terracotta Daughters,” an army of sculpted adolescent girls, directly referencing the buried warriors of Xi’an. The works toured Shanghai, Paris, New York, and Mexico City between 2013 and 2015, before being buried in an undisclosed location in China where they await excavation in 2030.

In 2016, Nourry was diagnosed with breast cancer, an experience that redirected her practice inward; her 2019 documentary Serendipity, executive produced by Angelina Jolie and Darren Aronofsky, premiered at the Berlinale and opened MoMA’s Doc Fortnight festival. She is represented by Galerie Templon.



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Rapper Yung Lean Tells Us About His Major New Art Exhibition
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From Barnhusbron in central Stockholm, Jonatan Leandoer Håstad’s name is currently difficult to miss. A building-sized green wrap covers much of the former Stockholm Gasworks at Torsgatan 22, tiled with fragments of his paintings above the words “Collected Works 2016–2026.” The early 20th-century Art Nouveau complex, originally built for the city’s gas and water works, is now the site of the first major exhibition devoted entirely to the visual art of Håstad, better known as the rapper Yung Lean.

Håstad emerged as a teenager in the early 2010s with the Stockholm collective Sad Boys, developing an internet-native strain of rap whose hazy sound and melancholic, hyper-digital imagery would become closely associated with cloud rap and influence a generation of artists who followed. But music was never his only medium. For years, Håstad has painted, drawn, and made objects alongside his recording career, largely outside public view. “Collected Works 2016–2026” brings that parallel practice together on this scale for the first time.

Two days before the official press preview, Artsy was given the building largely to itself for an hour as Håstad’s crew made last-minute preparations. Lean then sat down for a rare interview focused on his visual art. Inside are paintings, drawings, collages, ceramics, dioramas, installations, and the new short film Slåtter (Haymaking), which Håstad executive-produced and stars in. Spread across the building, the works create something closer to a temporary, darkly dreamt habitat than a conventional white-cube exhibition.

Most have never been exhibited. Håstad mounted a small, four-work presentation at Carl Kostyál in Stockholm in 2016, the year that gives this decade-long survey its starting point.

By the time Håstad arrives and we sit down in the backyard, the building is beginning to fill for a friends-and-family evening. His father, the poet and literary critic Kristoffer Leandoer, has just arrived. Håstad knows people are waiting for him, but the conversation is focused. He drinks water from a champagne glass. He has spoken publicly in recent years about sobriety, and there is little sense here of hiding behind the Yung Lean persona. We are speaking primarily to Jonatan, though, as he points out, he does not find the distinction especially useful.

“I’m Jonatan. I created Yung Lean, and I also made all of these artworks,” Håstad told Artsy. “So I think it all belongs together.”

He does, however, see one important difference. His visual work remains less trained and therefore less professionalized. “I like the rawness,” he said. Years of touring taught him exactly where to stand and how a show should sound. “Sometimes you become too pro.”

In fact, the visual side came first. Håstad calls graffiti his “first big love,” an obsession from around the age of 11 or 12. As a child, he would also spend hours drawing and carving small figures from wood. Music never displaced that instinct. Even while producers were still finishing tracks, he recalls, his mind would already be moving toward the music video: the clothes, the lighting, the image around the song.

That visual practice has since expanded into film and acting, including a role in the forthcoming Netflix film Sacrifice, the recent “STORM” video, and a contribution to the soundtrack for the upcoming video game Grand Theft Auto VI.

“The visual side has always been very important to me,” he said. “Visual art came first, and then music came afterward.”

The rawness Håstad describes permeates the exhibition. Figures emerge from blunt fields of color; alien-eyed faces and checkerboards recur from work to work. The large paintings can feel provisional even when densely populated, with passages of drawing, paint, pattern, and empty ground allowed to coexist. A glazed ceramic such as El Jefe (2022) turns the same vocabulary into a lumpy, comic body. In Perfekt Dejt (Perfect Date) (2025), two figures recline amid a dark, highly saturated forest.

That uncanny, slightly unreal atmosphere extends through the building. Music, low light, and daylight slip through half-open windows and move across its exposed industrial walls. A miniature diorama and a separate TV room deepen the sense that Håstad has temporarily occupied the space rather than simply hung work inside it.

Håstad says he became more willing to take risks around 2016, moving among acrylic, oils, oil sticks, ceramics, and video and beginning to work at larger scales. Asked what changed, he is succinct: “I worry less. I care less about what other people think.”

He has never attended art school. His formal training amounts to a two-week clay course at Folkuniversitetet, a Swedish adult-education organization. This is not a deficit he is eager to correct.

“I think there’s something really beautiful about someone who has a job, like, if you’re a plumber, and on the side you make little wooden sculptures,” he said. His music developed through years of practice until it became his profession. “But this isn’t my job, and I want to keep it pure.”

The exhibition nevertheless marks an unmistakable new stage in Håstad’s relationship with the art world. A selection of works, primarily sculptures, will later be sold through the auction house Bukowskis. He sees no contradiction. Håstad has no gallerist and no external curator, and much of the exhibition has been assembled with people he has known since school. His longtime friend Kaj Lindhé Gimdal has helped with both Håstad’s process and the show’s curation; Håstad also shared a painting studio for roughly three years with Benjamin Reichwald, better known as the rapper Bladee.

“If I went to Bukowskis and saw that Robert De Niro had painted a picture, I’d still want to buy it because Robert De Niro painted it,” Håstad said. “In my case it’s always going to be, ‘Yung Lean made this.’ There’s no getting around that. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that at all.”

For Håstad, the model echoes the way his music career began.

“I entered the music world without a record label or management,” he said. “We just uploaded things online, and it was a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to the music industry.”

Some 15 years later, he wants to approach art in much the same way: rent the space, finance it himself, build it himself, then work with an established institution such as Bukowskis where it serves a purpose.

That willingness to engage with the art market does not extend to how Håstad wants the exhibition itself to function. Almost none of the works have been shown publicly before, and admission is free.

“One thing I find boring about the art world is that everything is so gatekept,” he said. “It’s only for rich people, or only for people who are already inside the scene.”

His own celebrity, he argues, makes openness more important, not less. “I’m a fucking famous musician. So, of course this should be open to everyone. It should be free to enter and open for a long time.”

Even visitors who cannot afford an artwork should be able to leave with something small, he said, whether a calendar or a key. “Everyone should be able to take something away with them.”

That independence also informs Slåtter. Håstad traces the film to a soldier’s cottage his mother inherited in Småland, and to childhood encounters with the strange, sometimes frightening imaginative world of Swedish nature. He cites the work of illustrators John Bauer and Elsa Beskow, as well as folklore around mythological trolls Näcken and the invisible spirit Vittra.

“That whole Swedish troll forest becomes very real when you’re a child,” he said. “Then you get older, and you understand what reality is. Somewhere in there, I think I just wanted to get that feeling back in a film.”

As Håstad talks about Bauer’s troll forests and Nordic figures, I mention that Slåtter made me think of Ali Abbasi’s Border (2018). It is, unsurprisingly, a film Håstad admires. He praises the way it places the bureaucratic realities of border control and policing alongside something magical.

Stockholm itself becomes another subject of our conversation. Having lived abroad for many years, I tell Håstad that the city can feel strangely inert despite its beauty, unless you have access to the right social or creative contexts. He partly agrees. The team had discussed staging the exhibition in London or Paris before deciding against it.

“But fuck it. I’m from Stockholm,” he said. “Stockholm made me, and Stockholm is where I want to give something like this back.”

If the exhibition encourages younger artists to find a room of their own, put on shows or concerts, and remain “a little naïve” rather than immediately seeking entry into an established market, he said, “that would be fucking amazing.”

It is a fitting ambition for an exhibition that, viewed from Barnhusbron, looks anything but tentative. Håstad may want to preserve the amateur freedom of making art, but after a decade of doing so largely outside public view, he is no longer keeping it hidden.



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Wednesday, September 23, 2026

How Madonna Became an Art World Icon
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Madonna, 1990
Patrick Demarchelier
Staley-Wise Gallery

The legend is a classic one: A 20-year-old Michigan college dropout lands in New York with $35 in her pocket and gets into a taxi for the first time in her life, telling the driver to drop her off at “the center of it all.”

Soon, the ambitious young Midwesterner would dye her hair blond and find herself at the center of the city’s creative scene. She would date Jean-Michel Basquiat, become close friends with Keith Haring, hang out with Larry Gagosian, collect Frida Kahlo works, and pose for Maripol. Somewhere along the way, she would also become the most famous singer in the world, known simply by her first name: Madonna.

On the eve of the 43rd Video Music Awards, where Madonna leads this year’s field with 11 nominations, Artsy looks back at the Queen of Pop’s unusually deep ties to the art world—and the artists, images, and ideas that have shaped her career.

A muse in the downtown scene

Madonna, NYC, 1980, 1980
Mick Rock
Avant Gallery

The center of it all during Madonna’s meteoric rise in the 1980s was her small but tightly knit downtown community. Living in a fifth-floor walk-up in Alphabet City, she quickly absorbed the neighborhood’s feverish creative output and became a fixture at now-legendary venues including Danceteria and the Roxy.

A Panel of Experts, 1982
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)

It was within this milieu that perhaps the most valuable artwork featuring Madonna emerged, painted by her then-boyfriend Jean-Michel Basquiat. A Panel of Experts (1982), a largely black-and-white work in acrylic and oil pastel, bears Madonna’s name in its upper-left corner alongside that of Basquiat’s ex-girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk. At its center, two chunky figures appear to be fighting—an apparent reference to an altercation between the two women over Basquiat.

Now in the permanent collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the painting was reunited with its muse decades later when Madonna posed in front of it during its inclusion in the Barbican’s 2017 exhibition “Basquiat: Boom for Real.”

Making the Madonna image

Madonna (True Blue), 1986
Herb Ritts
CAMERA WORK

"Madonna at Window, NYC 1986", 1986
Herb Ritts
Izzy Gallery

If Madonna became one of the defining faces of 1980s pop culture, photographers and stylists helped fix that face in the collective imagination: ripped fishnets, heaps of bracelets, bleached hair, thick eyebrows, and a gaze that could turn provocation into a dare.

Her largely DIY style fascinated photographers including Herb Ritts and Patrick Demarchelier, but some of the era’s most intimate images came through the lens of Maripol, the French-born photographer, stylist, and downtown fixture who also helped construct the bridal-inflected look of Madonna’s Like a Virgin era.

Madonna (First Single), 1983
Maripol
Exploring the Arts Benefit Auction

A 2017 solo exhibition of Maripol’s work at Dundee Contemporary Arts captured Madonna on the brink of global takeover. The disarming Polaroids show an icon before the mythology had fully hardened: Madonna in bed in 1983; Madonna trying on a pink wig backstage in 1984. They are images of a superstar in formation.

The downtown language of street art

Eric Kroll - Madonna at Danceteria, NYC 1983 Memorial for Michael Stewart, 1983
Eric Kroll
Alpha 137 Gallery

Madonna also had unusually early access to graffiti and street art through her relationships with Basquiat and Haring. During the years when Haring was painting murals at era-defining nightclubs such as the Palladium and Danceteria, Madonna was performing at many of the same venues, trying to make early hits such as “Holiday” and “Everybody” heard.

When her first major nationwide concert run, the Virgin Tour, wrapped in 1985, she held its after-party at the Palladium, with her friend’s work looming in the background.

That friendship was inseparable from activism. As HIV/AIDS was met with intense stigma and governmental neglect, Madonna became an outspoken supporter of AIDS research and fundraising. She frequently appeared at benefit events alongside Haring and other members of their downtown circle, including Kenny Scharf.

Madonna, 2009
Mr. Brainwash
Rago/Wright/LAMA/Toomey & Co.

Keith Haring Andy Warhol record cover art (after Keith Haring Andy Warhol Madonna), ca. 1986
Keith Haring, Andy Warhol
Lot 180 Gallery

Decades later, she returned to the visual language of street art for the cover of her 2009 greatest-hits album Celebration, for which Mr. Brainwash transformed her image into a brightly colored, stencil-like portrait. The Pop palette inevitably evokes Andy Warhol, another figure in Madonna’s orbit and a guest at her 1985 wedding to Sean Penn.

Warhol and Haring even collaborated on a wedding gift for the couple: four works that transformed New York Post covers about the publication of Madonna’s nude photographs into playful Pop art artifacts. The tabloid image, already central to Madonna’s career, became an art object.


The collector behind the pop star

Madonna’s relationship with art was not confined to the people around her. Long before she could afford to collect it, she was looking.

As a teenager, she encountered Frida Kahlo through black-and-white photographs at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She later recalled walking past the museum’s Diego Rivera murals to look at images of Kahlo in her studio, captivated by the Mexican artist’s “self-possession and unique beauty.”

During her first month in New York, with money still scarce, Madonna spent part of her budget on a postcard of Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey (1940), which she came to regard as a kind of “guardian angel.”

Frida Kahlo, 1931
Imogen Cunningham
Atlas Gallery

Picasso, 1932 (printed 1981)
Man Ray
L’SPACE Gallery

Years later, the actual painting became hers. Madonna acquired Self-Portrait with Monkey at auction in the late 1980s and loaned it to Tate Modern for its 2001 Kahlo survey. Around a decade later, she deepened her holdings with another of Kahlo’s most visceral works, My Birth (1932), acquired through a private sale.

It is easy to see what Madonna found in Kahlo: an artist who fashioned autobiography, physicality, sexuality, and pain into an uncompromising public image. Those same forces have run through Madonna’s own career, which has repeatedly tested the standards imposed on women’s bodies and turned sexuality into both spectacle and a means of self-authorship.

Kahlo is far from the only modernist in Madonna’s collection. Works by Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, and Tamara de Lempicka have also been reported among her holdings.


From collector to collaborator

Madonna’s engagement with art has never stopped at ownership. Over the decades, she has maintained an unusually active network of friendships, collaborations, and partnerships with living artists.

The forms of that support vary considerably. In 1997, she sponsored MoMA’s exhibition “Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills.” In 2001, she presented the Turner Prize to Martin Creed during a live broadcast. And in 2017, she joined Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak and artist Marilyn Minter for a public discussion about feminism and art.

Minter is also represented in Madonna’s collection, as is Tracey Emin. Madonna owns Emin’s 2001 mixed-media work It Just Happens, a characteristically unguarded declaration of desire and autonomy, qualities that readily rhyme with Madonna’s own creative persona.

Madonna : Time lapse photograph spiritual value, 1998
David LaChapelle
Eternity Gallery

Her relationships with artists continue to evolve. During a visit last year to Emin’s foundation in Margate, England, Madonna met with young artists in residence—and did not leave empty-handed. Works she encountered there, including sculptures by Brazilian artist Anderson Asteclines and a small painting by Ethiopian artist Kirubel Mandefro, now hang in her London townhouse.

The gesture says something about the kind of collector Madonna has become. Her interest is not restricted to trophies by canonical names. The same curiosity that once drew her toward artists in downtown New York still appears to guide her toward work being made now.


When art becomes material

For another pop star, name-checking an artist in a lyric or borrowing an artwork for a stage set might read as cultural signaling. With Madonna, the relationship is harder to separate from the work itself. She did not observe the downtown culture that produced Basquiat, Haring, Scharf, and Julian Schnabel from a distance. She emerged from inside it.

In that sense, Madonna was not simply a muse to artists. She adopted one of their fundamental strategies: treating the self as material. Her body, clothes, sexuality, religion, celebrity, and public image became things to be constructed, dismantled, quoted, and reconstructed again.

Art history consequently surfaces throughout her career almost as a second visual language. Horst P. Horst’s photographs famously informed the video for “Vogue,” while the imagery surrounding “Open Your Heart” drew heavily on the paintings of de Lempicka. Minter’s Green Pink Caviar (2009) became a video backdrop on Madonna’s Sticky & Sweet Tour, while animated versions of Haring’s radiant figures appeared elsewhere in the show.

Helen Bennett, Cape, 1936
Horst P. Horst
Robert Klein Gallery

Femme a la Mandoline, circa 1933
Tamara de Lempicka
Heritage Auctions

More recently, the references have migrated into the lyrics themselves. On 2012’s “I Fucked Up,” Madonna imagines an unrealized domestic future: “We coulda bought a house with a swimming pool / Filled it up with Warhols, it would be so cool.”

But perhaps no song makes the relationship between Madonna and the art world as explicit as her recent single “Danceteria.” Released this summer, the track looks back at the scene from which she emerged, name-checking Haring, Basquiat, Maripol, Fab Five Freddy, Scharf, and powerful downtown dealer Tony Shafrazi.

It plays almost like an oral history set to a dance beat. More than four decades after Madonna arrived in New York asking to be taken to “the center of it all,” “Danceteria” makes the case that she did not simply find that center. She was part of what made it one.



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