Conversation: Francis Alÿs and Lynne Cooke

Artist Francis Alÿs and curator Lynne Cooke in conversation. They discuss Alÿs's installation in the Byzantine Fresco Chapel. Since the early 1990s, the influential Mexico City–based artist Francis Alÿs (born 1959, Belgium) has been collecting depictions of Saint Fabiola, a 4th-century Roman Christian who, after a divorce, devoted herself to good deeds. All the copies that Alÿs has acquired over the years—now numbering over 450 but varying widely in quality—are based on a lost 1885 original by the French academic painter Jean-Jacques Henner (1829–1905). Working with curator Lynne Cooke, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, to present these works in a variety of nontraditional spaces, Alÿs has viewed the installation not as his own project but as an ongoing investigation of devotion, representation, anonymity, reproduction, and value. Public Program of the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas