(Tsipi Ben-Haim is the venerable founder of CITYarts, which for more than thirty-five years has been engaging New York City's teenagers, in cooperation with professional local artists, to create inspiring works of public art, including murals, mosaics and installations. These programs empower young people to take an active and vital role in helping to transform their local communities through beauty and positive messaging.

"I am a CITYarts kid," enthuses prominent lawyer and former New York City council member Alicka Ampry-Samuel, who was a volunteer at age 16. "They provided me with a way to not only be creative, but to have a vision for something beyond the inner-city struggles that I grew up with.")

Tsipi Ben-Haim on Flora Yukhnovich's 'The Four Seasons'

at The Frick Collection, New York

[Main image, previous page, Flora Yukhnovich, 'The Four Seasons: Summer' (detail), 2025; above image, 'The Four Seasons: Summer', 2025)

"How fitting it is to reimagine the eternal cycle of the four seasons within the newly revitalized setting of The Frick Collection. This historic house, long celebrated as a sanctuary for the Old Masters, opens its doors to a fresh dialogue with contemporary art. It’s like an infusion of new life.

Flora Yukhnovich, like many artists before her, was drawn to the enduring phenomenon of the seasons, those rhythms of change that echo through both art and life. At the Frick, 18th Century French Rococo style painter François Boucher’s radiant depictions of the seasons offer a perfect counterpoint: lush, playful, and exquisitely detailed celebrations of nature’s cycles. It is easy for the viewer to move between Boucher’s vision and Yukhnovich’s - yet there is no need for direct comparison.

What emerges instead is a dialogue across centuries. While she was probably inspired [by Boucher], her imagination took off in her own style, and that way both retain their unique voice.

Yukhnovich ventures beyond the decorative charm of Rococo. Her imagination takes flight, translating those themes into a language of her own - fluid, gestural, and alive with movement. She walks a sensitive line between representation and abstraction, where forms dissolve and reassemble in a dance that feels at once familiar and utterly new.

In this interplay between old and new, the Frick reminds us that art is not static. It evolves, transforms, and reawakens with each generation of makers and viewers. Yukhnovich’s seasons do not merely echo Boucher; they expand the conversation, offering a vision where memory and invention coexist, where history and imagination entwine."

[Below images, from top François Boucher, 'The Four Seasons: Winter', 1755; Flora Yukhnovich, 'The Four Seasons: Autumn' (detail), 2025; Flora Yukhnovich: 'The Four Seasons: Winter' (detail), 2025; Flora Yukhnovich, 'The Four Seasons: Spring' and 'The Four Seasons: Summer', 2025]