“It was really just a vision that dropped in my head: Let’s make a herd of 100 elephants and migrate them across America,” says Ruth Ganesh, a UK-born animal rights activist, conservationist, and arts advocate. After moving to the United States, her new home had her musing about the Route 66 cross-country road trip. But she also had another idea: “Could these elephants be made out of something that was entirely good for the environment?”
It wasn’t until Ganesh connected with Tarsh Thekaekara—an animal researcher and conservationist based in India who had long studied elephant behaviors—that her phantasm morphed into a joyous, roving art installation, with New York as the next stop in its national tour. “The Great Elephant Migration” will be on view around the Meatpacking District through October 20.
The elephant sculptures are life-size, modeled after real-life cows (female elephants), bulls (male elephants), tuskers (male elephants with tusks), and lovable little calves, all made from dried lantana plants—an invasive species that crowds out native plant life, reduces biodiversity, and encroaches on wildlife habitats. (This was at Thekaekara’s suggestion: He has been working with indigenous populations in India to craft furniture out of the plant.)
For most of her life, Teresita Fernández had encountered in person as many artworks by Land Art trailblazer Robert Smithson as most people had—which is to say, zero.
“For most of us, the little we know of Robert Smithson is that bad picture in art-history books of Spiral Jetty, which is really little and in grainy black and white,” says the Brooklyn-based artist of Smithson’s seminal site-specific 1970 earthwork in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which came to epitomize Land Art. “We don’t know how the artwork was made. We don’t know what it looks like from any other angle. And that was my experience too. It wasn’t until I was much older that I saw a piece of his.”
That’s in part because Smithson’s most important works are site-specific earthworks, designed to be consumed by time and nature, in places far from art-world hubs, such as Kent, Ohio, and the northeastern Netherlands—and because his life was cut short at age 35 by a light-aircraft crash while inspecting a site for another piece in 1973.
Now, as co-curator of a groundbreaking exhibition that brings his historic work in dialogue with hers, Fernández has seen more of his work than ever before—and so too can visitors to “Teresita Fernández/Robert Smithson,” on view at Site Santa Fe through October 28.
Conceived as an intergenerational conversation between two artists, the show considers themes of place, site, and agency. Along with co-curator Lisa Le Feuvre, executive director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation (dedicated to the legacies of Smithson and fellow Land Art artist Nancy Holt, his wife), Fernández not only surfaces formal, material, and conceptual resonances but also, at times, challenges Smithson’s work and complicates his legacy.
In Someone Spectacular, a new play by Domenica Feraud, something unnerving happens when six people convene for their weekly grief-counseling session: Beth, their therapist, just doesn’t show up. As 10 idle, nervy minutes turn into 20 and 30, the group—made up of Nelle (Alison Cimmet), who’s lost a sister; Jude (Delia Cunningham), who’s lost a baby; Thom (Damian Young), who’s lost his wife; Julian (Shakur Tolliver), who’s lost his aunt; Lily (Ana Cruz Kayne), who’s lost a mother she loved; and Evelyn, (Gamze Ceylan) who’s lost a mother she hated—begins to come undone. They panic, draw lines, judge each other, judge themselves. But as more time goes on, a change takes place. They start to open up and protect each other, to split off and rearrange themselves into a shape that feels more stable, almost safe. What every person is figuring out, sotto voce or at full volume, is how they are meant to carry on without their person.
Feraud has often wrought rewarding and incisive work from intimate experiences—her essays “The 26=Year-Old Virgin” (2020), “The Movie Star and Me” (2022), and her 2019 play Rinse, Repeat being, until now, the best examples. Yet while Rinse, Repeat centered a subject, disordered eating, with personal relevance to Feraud, it was ultimately an invention. Someone Spectacular, on the other hand, sits much closer to autobiography, emerging from the blinding shock of her own mother’s death in 2022.
With four weeks left in the show’s off-Broadway run, at The Pershing Square Signature Center on 42nd Street, Feraud talks to Vogue about her profoundly joyful opening night, being one of the understudies (She’s on this weekend!), and how mainlining The Real Housewives helped shape the work. The conversation has been edited and condensed for length.
Vogue: I’d love to hear about your opening night. Someone Spectacular is a very personal show, it’s an emotional show, though it’s also very funny. How did you celebrate it?
Doménica Feraud
Photo: Getty Images
Doménica Feraud: It was a bit overwhelming, in the best way. My brother came in from Austin to be there, and it was his first time seeing the play, so that was really special. A lot of my family and my mom’s closest people were there, and then I had friends who were able to be there. And then, also, just to celebrate with the cast and my director, Tatiana Pandiani, and to meet her partner and her friends…and to have Paige [Evans], who’s my co-producer on this, and also my dramaturg, who’s been a mentor to me for a very long time and now is a peer—even though we’ve been so close for seven years, we got to take a picture for the first time. Also, each of these characters is inspired by real people, to some degree; they’re sort of the Inside Out emotion versions of people that I know. So we got a really cool moment of getting a picture of each actor with their inspiration.
