What’s Happening: Given the lengths the Pussy Riot founder has gone over the past decade to use her art to speak out against Vladimir Putin, it may come as a surprise that she has never been fully embraced by the museum world. That changes with a new show at OK Center for Contemporary Art in Austria, where her most powerful gestures reverberate with a piercing self-assurance.

The Download: Nadya Tolokonnikova’s father once gave her a piece of advice that stuck around: “a good artist is one who creates their own religion.” The founder of Russian feminist protest and performance art group Pussy Riot, it’s safe to say that Tolokonnikova took that nugget of wisdom and ran with it. In the years since Russian authorities imprisoned her for “hooliganism” after protesting Vladimir Putin’s regime with a guerrilla punk performance at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 2012, she has built her entire raison d’être on defiance and provocation. Her first museum solo show, “Rage,” which opened in June at OK Center for Contemporary Art in Linz, Austria, suggests that she has also spent the past decade fearlessly manifesting her father’s words.

Speaking out against Russian politics has come at a cost—the country’s Ministry of Justice added Tolokonnikova to a list of “foreign agents” in 2021. She refuses to share her location for safety reasons and brushes up on self-defense tactics before performances. Such dedication to her art shines through “Rage.” One room contains a version of Putin’s Ashes, in which she and 11 other women burnt a portrait of the Russian dictator in a desert and collected its ashes in small vials; its walls spell out the word “riot” in 13th-century Cyrillic calligraphy. In a nod to late artist Ilya Kabakov’s “total installations,” she recreates her jail cell in another room, staging a drab wooden plank bed and even replicating the “ugly poop color” of the prison’s walls. The gesture, she says, allows her to “claim this time back and not let the Russian government own two years of my life.”

While the show meditates on Pussy Riot’s early activism, it also addresses recent injustices like Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine and the loss of reproductive rights in the United States. Art-world figures like Jenny Holzer, Judy Chicago, and the Guerrilla Girls have embraced Tolokonnikova’s radical message, but museums have been slower to catch on—an exclusion that only seems to fuel her fire. One of the show’s most affecting elements is a series of gold-leafed portraits of anonymous Pussy Riot members bearing phrases like “enlightening of the darkness” and “fear no more” that read as rallying cries.

In Their Own Words: “In 2011, when we started Pussy Riot, it was really a time of hope,” Tolokonnikova tells Artnet News about the anti-Putin uprisings across Russia, Occupy Wall Street, and Arab Spring. “Since then, everything has become worse and worse, but I don’t want to give up on hope. My role in life is very simple. My goal is to always think about the future.”

Surface Says: Pussy Riot seems to finally be entering these institutions in a way that can’t be ignored.

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The shores of Greece meet the riads of Morocco at Casa Neos, the latest venture from the team behind Miami Beach hotspot MILA. The buzzy two-floor restaurant—a modern agora-inspired space attached to a four-suite hotel, members-only club, and soon-to-open rooftop lounge—is a sun-soaked escape to the Aegean Isles. Unless you have an in, scoring a table is tough. But Dorsia members have exclusive access.

Late last year, Soho House opened the doors to its first Latin American members club and hotel with its Mexico City house. Now, with the arrival of its São Paulo club and accommodations, the brand stakes its first claim in South America. Located within Cidade Matarazzo, a cloister of historic buildings in the heart of São Paulo, members and hotel guests will find 32 bedrooms, club spaces inclusive of a game room, sitting room, and courtyard, as well as a restaurant, bar, and rooftop pool within its neoclassical architecture.

With works by more than 60 artists “born, based, or trained in Brazil,” Soho House also upholds its reputation for amassing formidable contemporary art collections at each of its outposts. Take in the breadth of the collection, which includes a Surrealist bar mural by Marcelo Cipis, over a Casa Verde—a Caipirinha-inspired house cocktail custom created for the new house.

When: Until Dec. 1

Where: Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

What: The first stateside survey dedicated to German artist Beate Kuhn spans six decades of her deeply personal pottery practice, tracing her evolution from utilitarian ceramics to intricate, rhythmic sculptural works that channel brilliant assemblages of parts like seed pods, succulents, and exoskeletons, many presented on built-in shelves inspired by her former studio.

The leather goods and luggage house MCM is perhaps best known for its distinctive monogram, but its newest release is, intentionally, rendered in plastic. That’s because MCM joined forces with Jaden Smith and Sebastian Manes’s Harper Collective to reclaim ocean plastic and transform it into a three-piece suitcase collection. Whether you opt for the cabin, expandable, or checked sizes, know that each is made in Milan from at least 70 percent of the recycled material. From $1,050.

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