Joe Scanlan

CAITLYN AU: WINTER GARDEN
February 8–April 5, 2026

The Broodthaers Society of America is pleased to present Winter Garden, an ambitious new site-specific installation by Caitlyn Min-ji Au. This will be Au’s first solo show in New York.
Au’s inspiration for Winter Garden has grown out of her knowledge of Un Jardin d’Hiver (1974)—an installation by Marcel Broodthaers—and the peculiar way that Broodthaers’ artwork jibes with Au’s childhood memory of her uncle’s Seattle-based Chinese restaurant, its lobby replete with hanging lanterns, animal sculptures, and a waterfall. Au is interested in the fraught relationship between décor and criticality and how, when combined, the two aspects can operate as a kind of trap if one realm can’t be discerned from the other.
Au’s Winter Garden (2026) will consist of two asymmetrical environments designed for Atlas, the Broodthaers Society’s resident turtle. On a site visit to the Broodthaers Society last summer, Au observed Atlas outdoors for long stretches of time at different angles of sunlight. Now that Atlas has moved inside for the winter—and thanks to Au—the turtle will have full reign of the Broodthaers Society’s parlor floor through an array of spiral ramps, enclosed walkways, tiered structures, and 50-gallon tanks. The installation will feature the sound of circulating water in consort with meticulously tracked paths of the sun. The sun streams directly into the gallery through its south-facing windows and reflects into the space through its north-facing ones.
For the past five years, Au has been concerned with the delineation of space as an unequal power relationship between exterior and interior, real and virtual, revealed and masked. Her elemental forms have portals and video feeds that offer oblique views into their otherworldly interiors. The sinister uncertainty of what you’re able to see inside any of Au’s structures makes you aware that you might be trapped inside something too. Not only the gallery and its surveillance system but also the very skin that covers your body, just like the Moonlight Jade™ polyester fleece sewn snugly onto Au’s previous forms.
        Winter Garden ups the ante of Au’s a posteriori aesthetics by introducing a live inhabitant to her sculptures. Where Au’s previous work compelled viewers to delve into her forms and discern what they were up to, now just as much (if not more) scrutiny will be aimed back at us by Atlas the turtle, the show’s demonstrably wise and wary protagonist. It’s as if the installation is proposing, by way of Schrödinger’s Cat, that artworks have a skeptical view of us, too.
The Broodthaers Society will host an opening reception for the artist on Sunday, February 8, from 2–5pm . February 8 is also the last day you can see four excellent shows by Sam Contis, Rhea Dillon, Eric Mack, and Diane Simpson at the American Academy of Arts & Letters, so plan your uptown visit now. The Broodthaers Society will also host a conversation between Caitlyn Au and  media scholar Toby Wu on Saturday, March 14th at 1pm. The conversation will take place over zoom, feel free to bookmark the event here. We look forward to seeing you at either event.
Caitlyn Min-ji Au earned a BFA from the Glass Department at the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. From 2020-22 and 2023-24 she was a teaching assistant and fellow at the University of Chicago. She has recently shown work at Shanghai Seminary and W.I.H.S.H. projects, Chicago. She currently lives and works in Chicago.
Toby Wu is a writer, curator, and PhD student in the department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He researches Modern and Contemporary Art in the Transpacific through elemental media theory, specifically Southeast Asia towards East Asia and North America. His interests lie in the notion of substrates across mediums (paper, lacquer, celluloid and sculpture) or, rather, volumetric forms that call into question an object’s environmental makeup. Toby holds degrees from the University of Chicago and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

FREE ASSEMBLY
September 21 – December 7, 2025

Richard Anuszkiewicz
Willem de Kooning
Grace Hartigan
Hans Hofmann
Jasper Johns
Wassily Kandinsky
František Kupka
Henri Matisse
Joan Mitchell
Piet Mondrian
Jackson Pollock
Joseph Stella

In the mid-1960s, when Marcel Broodthaers began devising the blobs, foliage, and puffs of smoke featured in his Industrial Poems plaques, an American company called Springbok Editions had a similar ambition: to make abstraction both compelling and accessible. But where Broodthaers made his ambiguous visual gambit by turning commercial sign technology into artworks, Springbok Editions made theirs by turning artworks into jigsaw puzzles. The company’s motto was, “Elevating minds, one piece at a time.” Free Assembly will feature twelve such puzzles from the permanent collection of the Broodthaers Society of America. The puzzles will be carefully presented in their original boxes and wholly unassembled at the outset. Visitors to the exhibition will be free to assemble as little or as much of the puzzles as they like.
Founded in 1963, Springbok Editions eschewed such typical puzzle imagery as anodyne landscapes, kittens, and cluttered shelves for abstract paintings by some of the 20th Century’s most revolutionary artists. In five short years, Springbok Editions made jigsaw puzzles out of Františcek Kupka’s Discs of Newton (1912), Piet Mondrian’s Victory Boogie Woogie (1944), Joan Mitchell’s George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole but it Got too Cold (1954), Willem de Kooning’s Gotham News, (1955-56), and Grace Hartigan’s Billboard (1957), to name a few.
For his part, Marcel Broodthaers was proactive with the idea of free assembly throughout his career, sometimes from opposing political points of view. To cite two examples:
When artists occupied the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, as part of the Mai ’68 uprisings, they elected Broodthaers as one of their spokespersons. Rather than argue for exhibition space dedicated to contemporary art—which is what many of the occupiers wanted—Broodthaers petitioned for social space where artists could assemble and share ideas. He was ultimately unsuccessful and went off to start a museum of his own. The rest is history. Six years later, Broodthaers had somewhat soured on art’s ability to effect meaningful social change and, figuratively at least, posed the idea of free assembly as a performative prop and means of disengagement. In Décor: A Conquest by Marcel Broodthaers, his 1975 installation at the ICA London, the centerpiece of the 20th Century period room was a patio table, umbrella, and four chairs accompanied by shelves loaded with automatic weapons. On the patio table, a nearly completed jigsaw puzzle of the Battle of Waterloo was displayed, a stark symbol of the distance between the human carnage evoked by one set of objects and the detached leisure evoked by the other.
Where are we now on this hypothetical spectrum between occupation and ennui? Have you checked in, or checked out? What role does abstraction—or distraction—play in all this? Is there a difference? Free Assembly offers an opportunity to find out. Gallery hours are Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays noon–6:00pm and by appointment.
Springbok Editions was founded by Robert and Katie Lewin in Kansas City. Inspired by circular puzzles manufactured by Waddingtons that Robert encountered in the United Kingdom, the Lewins began manufacturing die-cut puzzles in the United States and quickly revolutionized the industry. Springbok Editions became known for the “heft” of their puzzle pieces, their high-quality fit, and their state-of-the-art color printing. Throughout the 1960s, Springbok Editions licensed paintings from the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Museum, the Minneapolis Art Institute, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Museum, among others.

FREE ASSEMBLY: A group show inspired by the machine writings of Françoise Mairey
March 30–May 4, 2025

Claudia Alarcón & Silät
Anonymous
Susan Cianciolo
Mary Clarke
Abigail Hack
Sylvie Hayes-Wallace
Christine Kelly
Ellen Lesperance
Françoise Mairey
Hendl Helen Mirra
Lizzie Scott
Oriane Stender
Maggie Thompson

The Broodthaers Society of America is pleased to present Text :: Textile, the seventh exhibition and grand finale to our season-long investigation into the materiality of language. The show opens at 12:00 noon on Sunday, March 30, with a reception for the artists from 3:00-5:00pm.
The Broodthaers Society is also pleased about the coincidence of its show with Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, an exhibition organized by Lynne Cooke that opens at MoMA on April 20. In fact, Anni Albers, one of the cornerstones of Cooke’s show, often used a typewriter as a kind of sketchpad for making studies of pattern density and repetition, a creative process she had in common with the French concrete poet Françoise Mairey.
        Text :: Textile is inspired by Substitution (1977), Françoise Mairey’s portfolio of concrete poems made on a Remington J2016997 manual typewriter. Originally conceived as forty-three “exercises” similar to those one might do on a piano, Mairey’s poems also evoke a sense of weaving and textiles. To explore this association, Text :: Textile will present thirty-six artworks by twelve artists from across the United States, South America, and Central Asia that expand on the political and aesthetic relationships between the two—between the mechanics of text and the structure of textiles.
As a bonus—and in keeping with Mairey’s wish for her typewriter to be thought of as a piano—Text :: Textile will be further accompanied by a selection of landmark keyboard music from the era. Vinyl records by John Cage, Julius Eastman, Billy Preston, Herbie Hancock, Isao Tomita, Horace Tapscott, and Cecil Taylor, among others, will be on hand for the synesthetic listening pleasure of our viewers.
Following are brief bios for the exhibition’s visual artists:
Claudia Alarcón is an indigenous textile artist based in Argentina, where she leads Silät, an indigenous collective of multigenerational female weavers.
Anonymous is the standard designation given to objects that were not identified by their maker, are the result of community-based production, or are from cultures that do not recognize the concept of individual authorship. In this case it refers to the Suzani textile artists of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
Susan Cianciolo identifies as a designer who makes art and a conceptual artist who designs clothes, often at the same time. She lives and works in Brooklyn. Last summer, RUN, her multi-faceted handmade fashion enterprise, held RUN 15, a small animal making workshop at Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York.
Sylvie Hayes-Wallace is a sculptor whose work interweaves artifacts of memory, self, and family history. She lives and works in Brooklyn. She mounted her first one-person show at Silke Lindner, New York, last fall.
Mary Clarke is Executive Editor at Bridal Guide magazine and an accomplished editorial professional, having worked as Beauty Director for Modern Bride and Beauty Editor and Creative Director at Sassy. She most recently participated in Karma Bookstore’s 2024 Holiday Market.
Abigail Hack s a fiber artist living and working in Brooklyn. She is interested in connection, tension, lifelines, and love. She earned a BA from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in 2020.

UN DESSERT POUR CONSTANCE by SARAH MALDOROR
Sunday, March 31, 2:00PM

The Broodthaers Society of America and the Maysles Documentary Center are pleased to continue our nuanced look at the films of Sarah Maldoror (1929-2020), particularly their relationship to the concept of “words as objects.” Where our previous screening looked at three Maldoror films about poetry, Un dessert pour Constance hinges on a more lighthearted relationship to language: whether two immigrant street sweepers employed by the city of Paris can win a television game show about French cooking and pay for a colleague’s trip back home. The film is based on Maurice Pons’ adaptation of a short story by French writer Daniel Boulanger and was co-produced by Antenne 2 and Top Films.
        Un dessert pour Constance is rooted in the camaraderie of African civil servants and the dignity they bring to their work. Even under the withering supervision of their boss, Monsieur Broccart—played to petit bourgeois perfection by Jean Bouise—no one has ever swept the gutters of Montmartre with the enthusiasm of Bokolo and Mamadou. On their lunch breaks they prepare for their fateful day by cramming their heads with the minutiae of la cuisine française.
        Un dessert pour Constance is exceptional in Sarah Maldoror’s oeuvre not only in that it is a comedy, but also in that it was made for television. Rather than shy away from TV work as demeaning, Maldoror saw it as a well-funded chance to express her politics through different means. We might even say that, with Un dessert pour Constance, Maldoror pays her respects to the genre by scripting a breezy story, all the while flashing the sharp edges of a wry and rapier wit.
This co-presentation of Un dessert pour Constance is part of Words as Objects, a year-long series of exhibitions and events in honor of Marcel Broodthaers’ centenary and his commitment to the materiality of language.
Annouchka de Andrade and her sister Henda Ducados have developed the Association of Friends of Sarah & Mario to preserve and share the work of their parents Sarah Maldoror and Mario de Andrade, two individuals who fought for African independence and cultural emancipation. Crucial to their work is the restoration of films and the archiving of all documents, correspondences, manuscripts, and unrealized screenplays left behind by their parents. Previously, Annouchka has been the Artistic Director of International Film Festival of Amiens, a festival focused on auteurs’ cinema and African and South American films. With over thirty years of experience, Annouchka has worked in international cultural cooperation with a strong focus on audiovisuals, cultural heritage, and production in France, Spain, Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador. She provided technical assistance to Sarah Maldoror for twenty years.

THREE FILMS by SARAH MALDOROR
Friday, February 9th, 7:00PM

The Broodthaers Society of America is pleased to team up with the Maysles Documentary Center to screen and discuss three films by Sarah Maldoror (1929-2020), the groundbreaking filmmaker often referred to as the mother of African cinema. Maldoror is remembered not only for her lifelong insistence that oppressed people be able to tell their own stories, but also for her nuanced handling of documentary and narrative affects.
With this in mind the Broodthaers Society and Maysles Center will screen three of Maldoror’s more threnodic, allusive, and playful films, each one representing a different aspect of her love for poetry and the power of film to convey it. For example, we might say that Les chiens se taisaient is “a film about a poem set in a museum” in the same way that Marcel Broodthaers’ A Voyage on the North Sea is “a film about a painting set in a book.” This isn’t to imply that Maldoror was somehow indebted to Broodthaers, just to notice their shared interest in the post-medium condition and their shared belief in fiction’s ability to depict reality in ways that reality itself cannot.

The Maysles Center program will be:
Et les chiens se taisaient (And the Dogs Fell Silent), 1971, 13 mins
Au bout du petit matin, Césaire un homme, une terre (A Man, A Land: Césaire), 1977, 52 mins
Un masque à Paris: Louis Aragon (A Mask in Paris: Louis Aragon), 1978,
13 mins

A panel discussion with Annouchka de Andrade and film scholar Amy Sall will accompany the screening, followed by a reception. A limited number of print journals published by the Palais de Tokyo, titled Sarah Maldoror: Tricontinental Cinema, will also be available on a first come first served basis.
Annouchka de Andrade and her sister, Henda Ducados, are dedicated to preserving and sharing the work of their parents, Sarah Maldoror and Mário de Andrade. Through the Association of Friends of Sarah Maldoror and Mario de Andrade, they promote international cultural cooperation with a strong focus on audio-visuals, cultural heritage, and artistic production in France, Spain, Columbia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru, and Equador.
Amy Sall is a writer, independent researcher, and collector-archivist based in New York City. She is the founding editor of SUNU: Journal of African Affairs, Critical Thought + Aesthetics, a pan-African, post-disciplinary platform exploring the cultural and intellectual production of Africa and its diaspora across time and space. Amy holds a master’s degree in human rights studies from Columbia University. The Sall Collection, a private initiative, is an assemblage of studio and other vernacular photography, printed matter, and ephemera with a pan-African focus.
        Three Films by Sarah Maldoror is part of Anekphrasis: Words as Objects, a year-long series of exhibitions and events in honor of Marcel Broodthaers’ centenary and his commitment to the materiality of language.

Sarah Maldoror: Tricontinental Cinema, a retrospective featuring fifty years of her films, photographs, poetry, and letters, is currently at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The exhibition was organized by Palais de Tokyo curator François Piron and CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux chief curator Cédric Fauq. The Broodthaers Society of America provides a forum in which the United States might contemplate itself through the life and work of Marcel Broodthaers. It periodically mounts exhibitions and events that expand on his ideas, houses an extensive archive of Broodthaers-related material, and maintains a growing community of scholars and enthusiasts.