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Palm Springs Art Museum is pleased to announce its signature fundraising gala, Art Party, will be held virtually in your home on Friday, December 4. This online event will feature the world premiere of a new performance art piece by internationally acclaimed artist Jeffrey Gibson, as well as a behind-the-scenes studio tour showcasing highlights of his creative process. The evening will be capped off with a celebrity MC and performances by guest entertainers.

By Katrice Dustin for The Travel Almanac

Betye Saar’s 1972 work The Liberation of Aunt Jemima was once credited by activist Angela Davis with marking the beginning of the Black Women’s Movement. The piece—arguably Saar’s most widely known—depicts the mammy caricature of Aunt Jemima reimagined as a freedom fighter: a broom in one hand, a rifle in the other. Fast forward almost fifty years later to the second American Civil Rights Movement, and that same Jim Crow era symbol of systemic racism has finally been set free from the legacy of slavery, with Quaker agreeing in Spring 2020 to discontinue the infamous Aunt Jemima branding on their maple syrup bottles.

Kehinde Wiley is participating in 30 Americans, an exhibition showcasing many of the most important contemporary artists from across the United States. Created from the 1970s to present, the artworks, including paintings, installations, sculptures, and videos, are aesthetically and thematically diverse. This provocative exhibition explores how artists shed light on issues of racial, sexual, and historical identity.

By Thessaly La Force, Zoë Lescaze, Nancy Hass, and M.H. Miller for The New York Times

On a recent afternoon, the artists Dread Scott, Catherine Opie and Shirin Neshat, as well as T contributor Nikil Saval and Whitney Museum of American Art assistant curator Rujeko Hockley, joined me on Zoom for a conversation about protest art. I had asked each to nominate five to seven works of what they considered the most powerful or influential American protest art (that is, by an American artist or by an artist who has lived or exhibited their work in America) made anytime after World War II.

Zhao Zhao’s take on the Louis Vuitton Capucines is a puzzle of over three hundred laser-cut parts elegantly sewn together into a sophisticated composition. Treading the balance between tradition and innovation, numerous exclusive techniques, such as silkscreen printing, high-frequency embossing and 3D embroidery, have been utilized to transform over hundreds of pieces of leather comprised of five different types. Zhao Zhao's collaboration with Louis Vuitton draws on the fashion house’s rich history of collaborating with artists, including high profile projects by Takeshi Murakami, Richard Prince, Stephen Sprouse, and Yayoi Kusama.

Kehinde Wiley is participating in Memling Now: Hans Memling in Contemporary Art, with paintings inspired by Hans Memling, one of the most significant painters of the Burgundian Bruges genre. The exhibition brings together five contemporary artists whose work has and continues to find inspiration in Memling’s enduring masterpieces, including his world-renowned Ursula Shrine. Works both old and new by the invited artists are being integrated into the existing display of Memling works at the Sint-Janshospitaal, a centuries’ old hospital that has been recently completely restored and serves as a museum for the works of Hans Memling.

Betye Saar: Call and Response looks at the relationship between Betye Saar’s finished works and the preliminary annotated sketches she has made in small notebooks throughout her career. In addition, the show will include approximately a dozen of Saar’s travel sketchbooks with more finished drawings and collages—often relating to leitmotifs seen across her oeuvre—which she has made over a lifetime of journeys worldwide. Selections will cover the span of her career, from the late 1960s up through a sculptural installation made specifically for this exhibition.

In 2017, Wiley made his first ever film installation. Narrenschiff (German for Ship of Fools) is a three-channel digital projection with direct reference to the 15th-century book of the same title by the German theologian, Sebastian Brant. The book satirised politicians, clerics and other well-known or influential people and was a huge success of the time, narrating the story of a crew of fools lost at sea.