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A string of lightbulbs. A stack of paper lying on the floor. A photograph of flowers. A rainbow-colored pile of wrapped candy. A jigsaw puzzle.
These objects might seem mundane or random. Yet when encountering them in the work of artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, viewers are encouraged to bring their personal histories to the artwork—rewriting or remaking these objects as their own. Those who see this art in person are free to even take a piece of paper or candy home.
Gonzalez-Torres is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He was born in Cuba and lived in Puerto Rico, Spain and across America, but became well-known for his artistic work in New York City in the 1980s and ’90s. His methodology blurred the lines between photography, video, portraiture, sculpture and site-specific works. Gonzalez-Torres adopted some of the language of artists like Donald Judd, naming many of his works “Untitled.” Yet the artist also critiqued and transcended his Modernist contemporaries by layering into his works a queer sensibility, an engagement with the AIDS pandemic, and even a joyful sense of play. Although the artist himself died at the age of 38 in 1996 due to AIDS-related illnesses, his work continues to be appreciated, with new generations engaging with his pieces and creating exhibitions of his work across the world.
Now, the artist is the subject of “Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return,” an exhibition running through July 6, 2025, and co-presented by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and the Archives of American Art. The exhibition features a wide range of his artwork, from photography to word portraits to his object-based pieces. The exhibition’s title comes from Gonzalez-Torres’ work “Untitled” (A Portrait), in which phrases such as “a rise in unemployment” and “always to return” appear on a video screen.
Similar to Gonzalez-Torres’ practice, “Always to Return” expands viewers’ assumptions about what should be in a traditional art exhibition. The Portrait Gallery sections intersperse his work with portraits of the celebrities he was referencing, such as Ronald Reagan and Walt Whitman. Artwork is shown in the Archive of American Art’s Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery, which rarely shows non-archival pieces. And some of Gonzalez-Torres’ works are also exhibited outside of Smithsonian spaces, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library and on the streets of Washington, D.C.
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“Always to Return” is co-curated by Josh T. Franco (head of collecting at the Archives of American Art) and Charlotte Ickes (curator of time-based media art and special projects at the National Portrait Gallery). Ickes saw an exhibition of Gonzalez-Torres’ work at New York City’s now-closed Andrea Rosen Gallery in the summer of 2016 and was inspired by his word portraits, also called “dateline” pieces. These works create a non-chronological timeline stretching around the walls of a room near its ceiling. Words and dates, painted in bold and italicized, reference both historical events (“President Clinton 1992”) and intriguing imagery (“Red Canoe 1987”). Gonzalez-Torres created many iterations of this work within his lifetime, and also encouraged future curators to update and change words in subsequent showings. For example, exhibitions within the past decade have included the phrases “Barack Obama 2009,” “Pulse 2016” and “Ground Zero 2001.”
For curators Franco and Ickes, creating the list for the multiple Smithsonian versions of the word portraits was a highly collaborative process, one that came from experimentation.
“At one point we both wrote down our birthdays and for some reason that just felt super wrong,” Franco says. “So we took them out. But then Charlotte wrote down one of her daughter’s birthdays, because it happens to be the same date on the calendar—different years, of course—that Felix died. So that stayed, and that’s in the final version that we have in the show.”
Other phrases now in the Smithsonian version of word portraits include “Black Lives Matter Plaza 2020,” “Supreme Court 2022” and “Rage Against the Machine 1992.”
The Gonzalez-Torres works within this exhibition are interactive for the viewers, as well. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) consists of “Candies in variously colored wrappers, endless supply.” The “Ross” in reference was his partner Ross Laycock who died of complications from AIDS in 1991. In the Portrait Gallery, Franco and Ickes display this artwork with red, green and yellow peppermints in a rectangular strip across the floor.
Adam Milner is an artist who’s been inspired by Gonzalez-Torres’ work, especially the “Untitled” pieces featuring candy. Milner’s artistic practice engages with similar themes as Gonzalez-Torres, restaging everyday objects in new contexts. The artist remembers taking a solo trip to New York City as a college student, seeing a Gonzalez-Torres piece featuring multicolored candy at the MoMA and being intrigued by the museum’s relationship to the work.
“I knew you were allowed to take candy, but there was no signage to that effect and there was no one else interacting with the work,” Milner says. “I remember it pretty viscerally because I had this kind of complication, or push and pull, as to how I was meant to respond. It was my first time encountering the work and feeling slightly on the inside, in the in-group … I read the label like three times because I thought, ‘Surely it would encourage me to take a piece, right?’ But it didn’t. And I really loved that presentation and that kind of insider knowledge that one might have, or the experience of this small conflict.”
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Franco encourages these kinds of decisions when encountering the artwork—in fact, the work required to engage with the art is part of the art itself.
“Some museums should not be places of leisure and tourism,” Franco says. “They should be places where you think about, especially in the Smithsonian and the Portrait Gallery, what’s a citizenship? What is nationhood? What are my responsibilities? People having to make choices is a throughline of all of Felix’s work. Are you going to choose to pull out your phone and look things up, or just try to enjoy the poetry of the words as you see them? There’s not a right way. Either way, it’s your choice.”
Ickes echoes this statement, calling attention to the large institutional apparatus required to create and present this exhibition.
“This is a site of work and labor, and there will be some work required to think through this exhibition,” Ickes says. She also draws attention to Gonzalez-Torres’ own writing about his work. “In the statement that he wrote about “Untitled” (America), he says ‘democracy is a constant job, a collective dedication.’ To which I say to him, your work is a constant job, a collective dedication. It is a constant job for the people installing it and curating it. But I also think for the visitors, too.”
In any Gonzalez-Torres exhibition, the installation process might be an equally relevant part of the art, even if viewers don’t necessarily see it. Because his word portraits are required to be painted, the Portrait Gallery enlisted the help of Sean Danaher, a sign painter based in Baltimore.
The installation was a multi-step process. First, all the words were printed to scale. Danaher would put the words on the wall using an electro pounce machine, a sign painting technology with an electric current running through a pen tip. As he traced a grounded metal sheet of the words with a paper between the tip and the sheet, the tip would perforate small holes by burning the paper. From there, Danaher used scaffolding and lifts to transfer the lettering onto the wall using charcoal powder, which was then pressed through the perforated paper. At the end, Danaher would have a “dotted template” or “color page,” which he would then fill in with acrylic paint afterward and wipe away the charcoal.
Danaher says he doesn’t have the exact same ownership over the portraits the way Franco and Ickes do, but he does appreciate being a part of the process.
“I helped deliver this thing into the world,” Danaher says. “I didn’t necessarily birth it or anything like that, but I was someone who had a role in manifesting the work. So in that way, I feel like I have something to claim. Whether it’s authorship or not, what I picked up in the experience of familiarizing myself with the work is that these word portraits are living documents that get to change over time. They weren’t set and canonized in one way. I like that I get to be part of a living document, that I contributed to something that will continue to morph and change.”
Danaher says he tends to downplay his involvement in creative works—there’s a common saying among sign painters, “IOAFS” (“It’s only a f–king sign”). But Franco and Ickes slowly encouraged him to readjust his thinking.
“I just kept being like, ‘Yeah, it’s just letters, you know?’” he says. “But at one point they were like, ‘No, it’s more than letters.’ And I was like, you know what? It is more than letters. It’s not just the sign. But I had to kind of catch myself.”
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Even though the portraits and work deal with intense histories and even violence, interacting with them can be as cheery as getting candy or recognizing something warm and familiar. Ickes stresses that pleasure is also an important element of the artist’s practice.
“Work and fun are not mutually exclusive,” Ickes says. “There’s a lot of humor in the work. There’s humor in the correspondence that we’ve seen. I don’t want to forget that it’s deadly serious, but it’s also very funny. Some of the word portrait stuff is hilarious, the combination, if you think of all the terms together.”
Gonzalez-Torres’ abstraction provides an opportunity for viewers to reckon with topics that remain politically salient today. Milner brings up the artist’s 1988 work “Forbidden Colors” featuring four rectangular panels of green, red, black and white.
“They’re a set of colors that, because they were tied to Palestine, were not legally presentable in certain places,” Milner says. “Yet because his work can be open to interpretation or be minimal, it can be a kind of Trojan horse. A lot of his work, I think, might look beautiful or simple or even empty. Then, depending on who you are or from which direction you approach it, or how much information you have, you can find a lot of content hidden inside.”
Gonzalez-Torres himself expressed a desire for his artwork to present challenging ideas within previously accepted artistic forms. The title of one of this exhibition’s related publications, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Final Revenge (A Workbook), comes from a quote by the artist about using the art forms of Minimalism. “In our case, we should not be afraid of using such formal references, since they represent authority and history,” Gonzalez-Torres says. “Why not take them? When we insert our own discourse into these forms, we soil them. We make them dark. We make them our own and that is our final revenge.”
For Franco, the idea of “revenge” is also tied to another Gonzalez-Torres quote delivered in conversation with artist Joseph Kosuth: “I want to be like a virus that belongs to the institution.”
The curators’ process of creating “Always to Return” has been “testing their limits at every turn,” Franco says. “We’re not trying to break this process. We’re trying to do our jobs as curators. Buying candy is weird, and planning the amount of candy is weird, but that’s the work. As a museum, we have to honor the work.”
Franco also believes that perhaps “revenge” can be about accountability within institutions.
The artwork can “show an institution or country, these are the stated ideals you have,” Franco says. “This work shows you all the ways you’re getting in the way of that. So it’s putting the institution’s mission—it’s calling it to task on its own mission.”
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Milner recognizes that many artists get to know Gonzalez-Torres’ work at a young age. Milner is also a visiting instructor for the Pratt Institute and other colleges, and hopes students will continue to study Gonzalez-Torres.
“One of the most powerful things that art does is teach us how to see in a new way,” Milner says. Gonzalez-Torres’ art “can be really eye-opening or elucidating to a young artist or student, which I think is why so many artists feel a kinship with his work. We all found it at the same time in our lives, more or less. It’s a time in our lives when we’re really making a lot of decisions about who we are, and how we move through the world.”
Still, Gonzalez-Torres’ works aren’t only for young viewers. Ickes notes that all of the artist’s pieces will continue to shift in meaning, not just across time but also across the range of people’s opinions.
“Maybe if you come back, you’ll have one thought or experience one day, and then several months later, as the world changes, as you change, you’ll have a different kind of experience,” Ickes says. “It’s not even static from person to person.”
Ickes also holds herself up as evidence that a deep study of Gonzalez-Torres’ work can shift the ways people see the world.
“We’ve learned a lot from this process that will shape the way we write, we think about art beyond the life of this exhibition,” she says. “So it’s a final revenge that’s not really final.”