The mighty Oculus turned ten this weekend, and if you want proof that a building can have main character energy, spend a Saturday afternoon watching tourists forget how to walk while staring up at Santiago Calatrava’s rib cage of a roof.

The Oculus in its first decade delights

Ten years ago the Port Authority handed lower Manhattan an $8-billion stegosaurus with delusions of dove-hood — Calatrava has always insisted the wing-like arches evoke a bird released from a child’s hand, working within Daniel Libeskind’s original master plan for the site — and somehow it earned the sentiment.

Art On The Ave artists were tasked with interpreting The Oculus through a live painting exhibition.

It’s a grave thrill to walk in there, that particular Oculus cocktail of soaring light and a cold hand around your solar plexus. We’ll sit with the cold hand next month, when the roof does the thing it was actually built to do: every September 11th, from 8:46 to 10:28 in the morning, the sun tracks the building’s deliberately skewed axis and lays two blades of light straight down the center of the floor — the “Way of Light,” timed to the exact minutes the towers fell. It is, quite possibly, the only piece of transit infrastructure on Earth engineered to break your heart on schedule.

Embracing art at The Oculus

But Saturday was not for solemnity. Saturday belonged to a fifteen-foot floral “10” doing brisk business as the most photographed object in Lower Manhattan, and to Art On The Ave, who threw the Oculus a party it deserved. Full credit to Westfield Mall for the good sense to keep partnering with Barbara Anderson and her traveling circus of talent — this round decamped to the south wing, where painters pulled in from Art On The Ave studios across the boroughs to enliven storefronts that are otherwise just waiting rooms for retail.

Gustavo Fernández

Gustavo Fernández went full circular abstraction on the architecture, all curves answering curves.

JJ Gonzalez Acosta

 

JJ Gonzalez Acosta

JJ Gonzalez Acosta threw color at the transit-hub chaos like he was personally offended by beige.

Barry Blends

Barry Blends kept the vibe at a tasteful simmer while the crowd —

Elvia Iannaccone observes Art On The Ave artists at work.

including photographer Elvia Iannaccone, clocking it all with tween Sonny, drifted through like they’d wandered into a good kind of ambush.

Here’s my one gripe, and it’s a bold one: gather the live painters center-stage next time, Portrait-of-the-Year style, so the whole atrium can watch the paint hit canvas in real time instead of hunting for the action along the perimeter. Visitors and locals alike deserve a grand moment of creation as they bound through their business among the arches.

Art On The Ave is drawing positive attention to unleased storefronts.

But what gets me, watching all this unfold, is the contrast. This is FiDi — the same FiDi that spent decades as a canyon of shuttered storefronts and unlovely towers, the long hangover from Robert Moses’s particular brand of blood-money urban renewal, where art was something that happened uptown because downtown just processed paperwork.

Gustavo Fernandez

Now the neighborhood is having a moment everybody needed: creators colonizing the empty ground floors. Just across the street from the Oculus itself stands a structure of vibrant, unapologetically multicultural murals that wouldn’t look out of place in Kreuzberg — a genuine slice of modern Berlin Wall energy dropped into the shadow of a $4-billion transit cathedral.

It’s striking against the glass and steel in the best possible way. But it lands harder when you remember who actually shows up to fill the Oculus with life on days like this and who helps fund the memorials that matter most: immigrants, first- and second-generation New Yorkers, the exact population Moses’s bulldozers were never particularly interested in consulting. Ten years on, the building is finally getting the neighborhood it was always symbolically promising — a consciously optimistic, simultaneous experience of both structure and freedom.

It’s Lammas weekend — the old harvest sabbat, when the wheel turns toward the dark half of the year and the reaping begins — and there’s nowhere more fitting to spend a Tuesday morning than the Morgan Library’s marbled halls, now hung wall to wall with 500 years of divinatory art. “Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions” runs through October 4, and it is, whether the institution fully clocks it or not, one of the most feminist shows in New York this season.

Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions

I arrived expecting a scholar’s peace and got a crowd instead. New York’s business always shocks me, hermit that I am. But the crowd was my crowd — the crones out in force, a good smattering of the young, the dramatic, the tattooed. All of us thrilled to be haunting the same gilded halls that once housed a plutocrat’s private manuscripts. Something has shifted when a Renaissance rare-book library needs crowd control for a tarot show.

The Millennial gaze: Tarot at the Morgan

The Bones of It

The exhibition splits cleanly into two acts. “Renaissance Symbols” opens with the Morgan’s own Visconti-Sforza cards — gilded, hand-painted, commissioned in the 1440s for a Milanese ducal wedding, reunited here for the first time in North America with sister cards from Italy’s Accademia Carrara. These were, the curators insist, a courtly game of skill. Full stop. No mysticism, no fate-weaving, just aristocrats at play.

The Chariot- Lady Frieda Harris

Then the show leaps — as these institutional histories always do — three centuries forward, into “Modern Visions”: the French occultists of the 1780s who first draped tarot in supernatural mystique, the British Occult Revival, Pamela Colman Smith’s 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck, Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris’s luminous, unsettling Thoth cards from the 1930s. A video installation splices together decades of tarot-in-film — not, I think, to educate, but to prove how completely occult philosophy has soaked into the culture’s bloodstream. Card game indeed.

Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions

The Gap in the Middle

Here’s where I have to put my Hierophant hat on for a moment, because the Morgan’s timeline has a Kabbalah-sized hole in it, and it’s worth naming out loud.

Sky Diving- Betye Saar

The official story is… tidy. Courtly game, then three centuries of silence, then French occultists in the 1780s invent The Mystical Reading. It is also not the only story serious scholars are telling.  A few threads worth pulling: The Sola-Busca deck (1491) — the earliest complete surviving tarot deck — has been the subject of real academic argument that it was never a parlor game at all. Independent researcher Peter Mark Adams’s The Game of Saturn reads the deck’s genuinely strange imagery as an encoded Hellenistic-astrological, Neoplatonic ritual system built for an elite Renaissance magical cult — hiding casually behind a card game.

The Hermitess- Rithika Merchant

Cartomancy fragments predate the “official” 18th-century birth of divination. Historian Ross Caldwell has traced a 1480 sermon by a Dominican friar condemning cards specifically because they were being used to divine the future — three centuries before the French occultists the Morgan credits with the innovation. A 1540 book by Francesco Marcolini goes further, laying out how ordinary playing-card suits could answer specific fortune-telling questions.

The Star- Remedios Varo

Also look to Frances Yates’s Art of Memory, which gave later scholars the framework to read the twenty-two trumps as a Hermetic memory palace — a way of storing cosmic and psychological knowledge behind the harmless face of a card game, precisely so the Inquisition would look right past it.

Memo To Stevie Wonder- Bettye Saar

None of this proves tarot was “always” divinatory — the Morgan’s caution is scholarly, not dishonest. But “originally just a game” and “an elite magical technology hidden in plain sight as a game” are not mutually exclusive claims, and a library built on a robber baron’s manuscript collection might have entertained the second possibility with a little more curiosity. The kabbalistic and Hermetic undercurrents that later occultists layered onto the cards didn’t spring from nowhere in 1780s Paris — they landed on symbolic soil that had been tilled for that purpose for three hundred years.

Knight Of Wands- Lady Frieda Harris

Where the Show Reveals Itself

Put the historiography down, because the art is the point, and the art is glorious.

Death- Lady Frieda Harris

Lady Frieda Harris’s original gouaches for Crowley’s Thoth deck are on view, and they’re staggering in person — jewel-toned, mathematically obsessive, decades ahead of anything else being painted in Britain at the time.

The Surrealists get their due: Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, women who built entire cosmologies out of tarot’s symbolic grammar while their male peers got the gallery walls and the reviews. The show’s contemporary wing brings it home with Kim Krans and Sola Saar— both post-‘80s babies, both leading a genuinely millennial reinvention of the form — alongside Bea Nettles’s photographic decks and Dorothy Iannone’s 60’s psychedelic, unapologetically erotic interpretations.

And then there’s Alison Saar and Betye Saar, whose work here is some of the most textural, most symbolically loaded in the entire exhibition — a Black feminist mysticism running its own current through cards that Europe likes to claim as entirely its own invention.

Dorothy Iannone’s “far out” deck is just getting started.

Tally it up and the show is feminist practically by accident: women creators and metaphysicians outnumber the men roughly four to one across the modern galleries. The Morgan may have undersold its own history, but it did not undersell its women.

The Magician, surrealist status

The Invitation

So here’s Lammas, the harvest turning toward the dark, and here’s a room full of witches, femmes and one unfortunate five-year-old kicking the shared gallery couch while his mother decided I was the problem — no children were eaten, for the record, the crones and I showed remarkable restraint.

The Star- Bea Nettles

The muggles at large have accepted a tidy story: tarot as parlor amusement that only later, almost by accident, picked up mystical baggage. Flip that switch. Sit with the Sola-Busca cards a while longer. Ask why a 15th-century friar was already worried about people using cards to see the future, decades before anyone was supposedly doing that. The cards have always known more than the official record credits them for — much like the women who kept them alive in the shadows of the mundane art world, generation after generation, until a pirate’s library finally made room.

“Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions” is on view at the Morgan Library & Museum through October 4, 2026.

There are luxury events, and then there is Rand Luxury’s annual Hamptons Concours d’Elegance—an invitation so coveted that even in the Hamptons, where exclusivity is practically a dress code, it remains one of the summer’s hardest tickets to secure.

Held on a spectacular private Bridgehampton estate, this year’s sold-out gathering once again proved why it has become the East End’s premier celebration of automotive artistry, craftsmanship, philanthropy and lifestyle. Benefiting both the Southampton Animal Shelter Foundation and the South Fork Natural History Museum and Nature Center (SOFO), guests were immersed in an extraordinary world where more than $100 million worth of collector automobiles, museum-quality timepieces, estate jewelry, fine art and bespoke luxury converged beneath brilliant blue skies.

If there was a theme to the afternoon, it was indulgence without excess. Nothing felt manufactured. Instead, the Concours unfolded with the effortless elegance that has become the signature of Branford Rand, whose events continue to bring together collectors, tastemakers, celebrities and industry leaders with remarkable ease.

The stars of the afternoon were, naturally, the automobiles. More than 100 extraordinary collector cars stretched across the manicured lawns, each one a rolling work of art. Ferrari, Porsche, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, McLaren, Bentley, Rolls-Royce, Maserati and Mercedes-Benz represented decades of engineering excellence, while passionate owners eagerly shared the stories behind their prized machines. From impeccably restored classics to breathtaking modern supercars, every vehicle represented both mechanical innovation and personal passion.

Guests cast ballots for the coveted People’s Choice Award, while celebrity judges presented a series of distinctive honors. Candace Bushnell, whose Sex and the City forever changed New York’s cultural landscape, awarded the appropriately named Sexiest Car Award. Celebrity chef and restaurateur Todd English presented the English Award, while television personality Ramona Singer, now appearing on E!’s The Golden Life, handed out the Forever Fabulous Award, proving that style isn’t reserved solely for the people—it belongs to the automobiles as well. Socialite Jean Shafiroff was also on hand.

Kenneth and Maria Fishel, Bradford Rand

Beyond the concours field, the experience expanded into a luxurious marketplace celebrating nearly every aspect of elevated living.

Collectors browsed exceptional watches from Gotham Trading Luxury Timepieces and JD Watches, admired fine jewelry, explored contemporary artwork, and discovered exclusive fashion, luxury real estate and bespoke lifestyle brands. High-end automotive partners including Ferrari of Long Island, Aston Martin Long Island, McLaren Long Island, Manhattan Motorcars, Mercedes-Benz of Southampton, Lexus Southampton, Ryan Friedman Motorcars, Grand Elite Motors, Collectors Autohaus and Long Island Sports Cars showcased some of the world’s most desirable marques.

The culinary offerings matched the surroundings. Guests enjoyed an elegant catered brunch accompanied by premium wines and spirits, tastings from Louis XIII, Crystal Head Vodka, Palm Bay International, Telmont Champagne, Saint Jo, Mezcalum, Peroni, San Benedetto, LaCroix and Nixie, while aficionados gathered for curated Scotch tastings and hand-rolled Cohiba cigars. Fresh oysters from East Hampton Shucker, artisanal treats from Kira’s Cookies, Popup Bagels, Hampton Ice and an impressive array of gourmet offerings ensured the afternoon was as satisfying for the palate as it was for the eyes.

Luxury extended well beyond automobiles. Guests explored elegant home design from Garage Living, fashion from Pinko, bespoke accessories, fine artwork through Art Hampton, luxury travel with Apollo Jets and Barnes Yachting, wellness partners including Pincus Plastic Surgery, and lifestyle brands ranging from Bang & Olufsen to Rose Forever, Boast, MAS by Morgan Shara, Bespoke Mahjong, Stock Collection, Motor Club, Rendezvous, Focal Point Coaching by Annie Brennan, and dozens more, creating an atmosphere where every corner revealed another carefully curated discovery.

Yet for all its glamour, the Concours never lost sight of its charitable mission. Supporting both the Southampton Animal Shelter Foundation and SOFO, the afternoon demonstrated that luxury and philanthropy continue to make an elegant pairing.

Rand Luxury has once again created far more than an automobile exhibition. It is a celebration of craftsmanship, design, innovation and generosity, wrapped in the effortless sophistication that defines the Hamptons at their very best.

For one unforgettable afternoon, horsepower met haute couture, collector passion met charitable purpose, and Bridgehampton once again became the epicenter of luxury living. It wasn’t simply a car show.

It was the Hamptons in high gear. Thank-you Norah Lawlor for such a great event and Celine the designer for Celine hats for the hair tie that saved me.

Executive Editor Erika Katz, Editor in Chief Lizabeth Zindel Wells and Lucy Swift Weber

There are Hamptons parties, and then there are evenings that capture exactly why the East End continues to define summer elegance. The launch of Hamptons Social’s August Summer Book, hosted by Hamptons Social and Volvo, was one of those rare gatherings where every thoughtful detail came together effortlessly. Held at the enchanting A Room at the Beach in Bridgehampton, the evening celebrated not only the publication’s newest issue, but the art of creating beautiful experiences.

Editor in Chief Lizabeth Zindel Wells, with Executive Editor Erika Katz, Hamptons Social has become one of the East End’s most stylish lifestyle publications, chronicling the people, places and personalities that define the season. The stunning August cover, photographed by the legendary Ellen von Unwerth, immediately sets the tone—playful, sophisticated and unmistakably Hamptons.

The setting itself deserved equal billing.

Nestled along Montauk Highway, A Room at the Beach feels less like a hotel and more like discovering a private summer sanctuary. Co-owners Charles Lemonides and Lucy Swift Weber transformed what was once a modest ten-room cinderblock motel into one of the Hamptons’ most charming boutique escapes. Cedar siding, lush gardens and intimate gathering spaces create an atmosphere that is equal parts coastal retreat and bohemian hideaway.

Its history only adds to its allure.

Long before its transformation, the property served as the summer home of Martha Stewart and her daughter Alexis, who planted the magnificent rows of soaring redwood trees that still define the grounds today. For a period, the property was owned by fashion designer Donna Karan and her daughter Gabby Karan de Felice, who added the now-iconic outdoor pool before the current owners completed their remarkable redesign.

As twilight settled across the gardens, guests wandered beneath the towering redwoods, surrounded by flowers, candlelight and warm summer breezes. The evening carried the dreamlike quality of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where conversations lingered effortlessly and nobody seemed eager for the night to end.

Luxury revealed itself in thoughtful moments rather than grand gestures. Guests sampled Mouton Cadet, the celebrated Bordeaux created by Baron Philippe de Rothschild, alongside cocktails featuring Tequila Rosaluz 5526.

Malfy Gin, whose beautifully designed glassware became one of the evening’s most coveted take-home gifts.

The culinary offerings were equally memorable. Rose and Peters delighted guests with exquisite high tea desserts

while FreshDirect created an abundant charcuterie presentation that disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived.

La Genovese showcased delicate jewelry that complemented the effortless elegance of the evening

while Volvo added its own celebratory touch with beautifully presented bonbons.

Beauty and wellness partners ensured guests left feeling as polished as when they arrived. RPZL provided stylish claw clips to tame summer hair

while fashion-forward press-on nails guaranteed every hand looked camera-ready throughout the evening.

Olfactory

Yet it was Tequila Rosaluz that drew the longest lines—and quickly became my personal favorite. Besides offering drinks they sponsored Olfactory, a fragrance, that invited guests to create one. Every visitor customized a scent unique to their own personality and preferences. Mine? A rich blend of coffee, mocha and cream—so wonderfully comforting that I joked I may never need another iced coffee in the morning. It wasn’t simply perfume; it became a wearable memory of the evening itself.

Lucy Swift Weber, Countess Luann de Lesseps

Among the familiar faces enjoying the celebration was Countess Luann de Lesseps, who graciously posed for photographs with guests throughout the night, adding another touch of New York glamour to an already sparkling gathering.

Countess Luann de Lesseps and guests

What ultimately distinguished the evening, however, wasn’t the guest list or the luxury brands. It was the atmosphere. There was none of the exclusivity or pretense that can sometimes accompany Hamptons events. Conversations were genuine, introductions effortless, and the crowd refreshingly down-to-earth. Guests mingled beneath the redwoods as though attending a sophisticated garden party hosted by old friends.

That sense of authenticity reflects the publication itself. Hamptons Social isn’t simply documenting a summer lifestyle; it thoughtfully curates it with intelligence, style and genuine affection for the East End community.

Bravo to Lizabeth Zindel Wells and Erika Katz for creating a magazine that celebrates the Hamptons with both elegance and heart—and for hosting one of the season’s most enchanting evenings. Long after the last glass was raised and the gardens grew quiet, guests were still lingering beneath the trees, reluctant to leave a night that felt, in every sense, like summer at its very best.

Rainer Andreesen

 There is a quiet confidence to “Looking,” the newest exhibition at the Bridgehampton Museum, that refuses to shout for attention. Curated by filmmaker and collector Lana Jokel, the exhibition instead asks visitors to do something increasingly rare—slow down, observe, and truly look. Bringing together painter Rainer Andreesen, photographer Christophe von Hohenberg, and sculptor Oscar Molina, the exhibition explores three distinctly different artistic languages united by a single question: how do we interpret the world before us? On view through August 9 at the Nathaniel Rogers House, the exhibition proves that seeing is only the beginning of understanding.

Jokel’s curatorial eye is evident from the moment you enter. Rather than forcing a visual dialogue, she allows each artist’s voice to remain distinct while revealing subtle conversations between painting, photography and sculpture. The result feels less like a traditional group exhibition and more like an intimate exchange between artists who approach observation from remarkably different perspectives.

For more than fifty years, Rainer Andreesen has explored portraiture as an emotional rather than literal exercise. The Canadian-born, New York-based artist is less interested in reproducing a likeness than revealing the interior life of his subjects. His portraits possess remarkable restraint. Backgrounds disappear into darkness, unnecessary detail falls away, and what remains is the quiet intensity of a human face confronting the viewer. Whether portraying those closest to him or cultural figures who have shaped his artistic journey, Andreesen paints with extraordinary technical precision while inviting viewers to complete the emotional narrative themselves. These are not simply portraits—they are psychological studies rendered with compassion and honesty.

Where Andreesen turns inward, Christophe von Hohenberg expands outward. Best known for chronicling New York’s cultural elite and creating unforgettable portraits for Interview magazine during the Andy Warhol era, von Hohenberg has increasingly focused his lens on the beaches of the Hamptons. His photographs transform ordinary moments into meditations on solitude and perception. Bleached by brilliant sunlight, his figures appear almost ghostlike against vast expanses of sea and sky. The effect is simultaneously peaceful and haunting. His work blurs the line between landscape and portraiture, reminding viewers that the environment surrounding a subject often reveals as much as the subject itself. The photographs possess a cinematic stillness that lingers long after you leave the gallery.

The exhibition’s emotional center belongs to sculptor Oscar Molina, whose work carries the weight of personal history while speaking to universal themes of migration, resilience and identity. Born in El Salvador and shaped by the experience of civil war before immigrating to the United States, Molina creates sculptures that transcend autobiography. His celebrated Children of the World series examines displacement not simply as geographic movement but as a lasting condition of memory and belonging. His work is deeply human, asking viewers to consider the invisible emotional journeys that shape lives across borders. That perspective has earned Molina international recognition, including his selection to represent El Salvador at the 2026 Venice Biennale, a milestone that underscores both his artistic vision and growing global influence.

Together, these three artists demonstrate that observation is never passive. Every act of looking is filtered through memory, experience, emotion and identity. Andreesen searches for the soul behind the face. Von Hohenberg discovers quiet poetry in fleeting moments of light and landscape. Molina transforms lived experience into sculptural testimony. Each artist asks viewers to move beyond appearances and engage with something far deeper.

With “Looking,” Lana Jokel has assembled more than an exhibition of accomplished artists. She has created an invitation to become more attentive viewers—not only of art, but of one another. In a world increasingly driven by distraction and speed, that may be the exhibition’s greatest achievement.

“Looking” remains on view through August 9 at the Bridgehampton Museum’s Nathaniel Rogers House, 2539 Montauk Highway, Bridgehampton. Admission is free, with a suggested donation supporting the museum’s exhibitions and programming.