Hollis Taggart

In the early 1970s, the artist Audrey Flack traveled to the Basílica de la Macarena in Seville, Spain, to see a carved-wood statue called Macarena Esperanza, a polychrome depiction of a weeping Virgin Mary adorned with jewels, crystal tears, and false eyelashes. Flack is Jewish, but she was no less overcome by the Macarena’s sorrowful splendor: Here was a mother shedding tears for her child—Flack could relate—but she was also regal, grand, beautiful. Flack photographed the statue and, once back home in New York, made several paintings based on her pictures, capturing each resplendent detail in high definition.

Only in the darkest moments of our lives do the brightest stars appear. An artist, mother, teacher, and rebel, Audrey Flack is counted among the most important American artists of the twentieth century. In With Darkness Came Stars, she recounts and reflects upon a life fully lived.

In his Brooklyn studio under the Gowanus Expressway, painter Osamu Kobayashi fills notebooks with approximately two-square-inch sketches of abstract shapes. These small graphite doodles, lined up in grids in his sketchbook, are the blueprints for the color-drenched canvases that fill his studio, including Inner, Outer (2023), an expansive abstract painting resembling a figure eight. He closely references these drawings, placing checkmarks next to those he wants to paint. Then, Kobayashi uses huge brushes—some created by affixing almost 30 utility brushes to a single piece of molding—to translate these forms onto the canvas.