Aruna D'Souza

New York Times, April 3, 2025

The dragon lady, the courtesan, the submissive beauty — these enduring stereotypes of Asian and Southeast Asian femininity circulated in Europe and America centuries before the vast majority of Westerners had ever laid eyes on a real flesh-and-blood woman from those parts of the world.

A major, and maybe surprising, source of these tropes? The Chinese porcelain dishes and figurines that first arrived in Europe by sea in the 16th century, brought by traders who originally used them as ballast for shipments of spices. People went mad for the translucent, lustrous, white material, so unlike the clunky stoneware they were accustomed to. They were equally fascinated by the cobalt-blue decorations that spoke of places, people, gods and other wonders they could only dream of. The wares kicked off a vogue for “Chinoiserie” — a decorative style seen in furniture, textiles and fine art that swept Europe until the 19th century.

4Columns, March 21, 2025

American Job: 1940–2011, organized by Makeda Best, noted photography curator and deputy director of curatorial affairs at the Oakland Museum of California, mines the International Center for Photography’s collection to present a sweeping visual history of work in this country as seen through the eyes of more than forty documentary photographers and photojournalists. The first sections of the show focus on the early decades of the postwar labor movement; the later galleries capture the effects of the slow but steady dismantling of workers’ rights and the inequities that accompanied such erosions, despite the genuinely heroic efforts, and not insignificant successes, of organizers and activists. Now, when it feels like we’ve hit rock bottom (god, I hope it’s rock bottom)—when billionaires dream of replacing us with AI bots, and Donald Trump and Elon Musk break the law to put tens of thousands of us out of jobs while simultaneously stripping away the paltry workplace protections we have left—this record of the power labor once wielded operates a bit like a time machine. Or maybe a “what could have been” machine. If I weren’t suffering such complete political exhaustion thanks to the first two months of this administration, I’d say it was also a “what could still be if we put some muscle into it” machine.

New York Times, February 28, 2025

Barking Doberman pinchers behind chain link fencing and performers who looked like they came straight from the Berlin club scene made the ultracool German performance artist Anne Imhof infamous.

But last week, at her first rehearsal for “DOOM: House of Hope” at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, there were no dogs in sight.

There were still those impossibly beautiful performers, though, many very young. They were sprawled on the floor of one of the Armory’s rehearsal spaces, sitting at the piano, testing out bits of movement, or rehearsing lines from marked up copies of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” — the new project’s starting point.

Belying her works’ fierce, sometimes aggro aesthetics, Imhof was a gentle, observing presence, not so much directing the performers but asking them how they wanted to proceed — utterly unlike the strict rigor of, say, a ballet rehearsal.

New York Times, February 27, 2025

The artistic director of the museum, Massimiliano Gioni, said in a recent interview that in the face of all this newness, it seemed fitting for the museum to tackle “ideas of the future, rebirth and new starts.” Gioni’s opening exhibition, titled “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” will unpack the question of what it means to be human in the face of sweeping, even paradigm-shifting, technological change.

New York Times, February 14, 2025

Before I met the artist Christine Sun Kim at the Whitney Museum to talk about her new survey show, “All Day All Night,” her team sent me a copy of her two-page “access rider.” It contained a list of terms to avoid: Don’t pathologize her by referring to her as a “deaf artist,” and please don’t call her “inspirational.” It also offered resources on the distinction between small-d deaf (the audiological condition of not hearing) and big-D Deaf (the community that has emerged around the language of American Sign Language, or ASL).

The access document was born of necessity. “A big-time curator from a big-time museum was seeing my work for the first time, and I had to spend 45 minutes of the hourlong studio visit educating this curator about Deaf culture, leaving only 15 minutes to talk about my work,” she told me via her sign language interpreter Beth Staehle. “When this curator left, I was so mad.” At the same time, the document reflects her pragmatism and commitment to advocacy, including at the Whitney Museum itself, where she worked from 2007 to 2014, establishing Deaf-led programs and resources.

4Columns, February 14, 2025

As wildfires ripped through Los Angeles just weeks ago—at the very moment American Artist was installing their exhibition, Shaper of God, at Pioneer Works—Teen Vogue (one of the best remaining sources of political analysis) published a story by Lex McMenamin titled “Black Sci-Fi Writer Octavia Butler Predicted the Dystopia of the LA Fires by Studying History.” Though it’s only the most recent acknowledgment of the author’s prescience, it is perhaps the most poignant. One community that went up in flames was Altadena, a historically Black area just outside the city, populated by many whose roots trace back to Black Southerners who migrated there to free themselves from racial violence, only to find new forms in California. Altadena was Butler’s home—and where Artist grew up as well. Their aunts went to John Muir High School in nearby Pasadena at the same time as Butler; Artist attended some decades later, in the early aughts.

In Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, Cincinnati Art Museum in association with The Monacelli Press, 2025

In 2005, the political commentator Thomas Friedman wrote what could be called a classic of pop neoliberalism. Titled The World Is Flat, it argued that thanks to certain technological developments—the expansion of telecommunications and the internet above all-goods and services could increasingly travel freely, new supply chains could develop, work could be outsourced from countries with higher labor costs to those with very low ones, and companies could get their workers to collaborate with those half a world away. Capital, in other words, could skate across a flat earth, unimpeded by borders or geography. With all this economic interdependence, peace and prosperity would rule the land.

But what of people? Almost two decades after the publication of The World Is Flat, we have gotten well past the turn-of-the-twenty-first-century fantasy of a globalized utopia, a border-less world —we know now (and certainly, many already did at the time) that such a delusion of enabling capital to glide across a horizontal earth unimpeded necessitated constraining workers in their place? As is abundantly clear from our moment, when migrants are tear-gassed or left to drown in the sea for trying to escape the economic privation wrought by globalization and the military interventions that support it, the borders for things are different from the borders for individuals-the former have been torn down while the latter have, increasingly, been fortified, militarized, thickened, lengthened, multiplied.

4Columns, January 17, 2025

Pippa Garner passed away on December 30 at age eighty-two. Her work—drawings, sculptures, and photographs of bizarrely reimagined consumer goods, in which both machines and bodies, especially her own, are subject to DIY hacks—has recently, some might say suddenly, been popping up in museums and galleries around the world. In 2022, the Kunstverein München organized a traveling retrospective, which came to White Columns in 2023. There was another survey at Art Omi that year and a showing in the Hammer’s Made in L.A. show. The most recent Whitney Biennial devoted their whole third-floor space to her. But unlike so many women artists who found fame only at the end of their lives after toiling in relative obscurity for decades, Garner wasn’t some unsung talent—she was a regular on the talk-show circuit (Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, the Todayshow), a best-selling author (Utopia . . . or Bust! and Better Living Catalog), and a contributor to publications like Vogue, Playboy, and Rolling Stone. Car and Driver, where her illustrations also appeared, ran an obituary.

New York Times, January 15, 2025

One of the indelible images in “Pictures of Belonging,” an exhibition of work by three female artists whose careers were impeded — but not snuffed out — by the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, is Miné Okubo’s “Wind and Dust” from 1943. In it, a family shield their faces, and each other, from a sandstorm, huddled in a tight mass of interlocking bodies. Behind them, the desert is punctuated by barracks, a landscape of depressing sameness. You get the sense that these vulnerable figures are being battered not just by the weather, but by the world itself.

The watercolor was made at Topaz, in Utah, one of the camps that Okubo was transferred to during the war. (They were referred to at the time by government officials as “concentration camps” or the more euphemistic “internment camps”; more recently, some historians have used the term “incarceration camps.”)

After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on Feb. 19, 1942, on the heels of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were removed from coastal areas, ostensibly for reasons of national security. They were forced to abandon their homes and possessions or sell them for a pittance, and to relocate to makeshift facilities in harsh conditions. About two-thirds of them were, like Okubo, American citizens.

4Columns, December 13, 2024

Osman Khan, in his delightful and whip-smart exhibition Road to Hybridabad, on view at MASS MoCA until April 2025, leans into this futurism. Instead of treating the tales as mere myth or folklore from a long-distant past, he proposes understanding them as an oracular account of what was to come—a way of explaining the present-day world, in which so many are thrown into the diaspora, willingly and unwillingly, and the obstacles that situation presents. What if the djinns that guarded entries to longed-for places foretold our current border checkpoints and constant ID checks, or the flying carpets were the antecedents to military drones? Our contemporary mythologies—many of which emerged from Silicon Valley, with its promises of a technological utopia to come, and persist even now, well past their due date, thanks to the Elon Musks and Peter Thiels of our moment—are put to the test by those of the past, in which technology is the root of not only our most wonderful dreams but also our darkest horrors.

New York Times, November 17 2024

“Nefertiti/Devonia Evangeline” and a later photo series, “Miscegenated Family Album,” based on that performance, are at the heart of a major exhibition opening Nov. 17 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Titled “Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876 — Now,” it will feature almost 200 works made largely by African American artists looking to define their cultural history after the violent legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which severed people of African origin from their roots. (That historical injustice went hand in hand with the denigration of African culture as inferior to the greatness of Europe.) For Black artists from the 19th century to today, claiming ancient Egypt as their own has been a way of asserting agency and power.

New York Times, December 16, 2025

Lorraine O’Grady, the conceptual and performance artist who died on Dec. 13 at age 90, was an inveterate correspondent — you never got a short note from Lorraine, you got the full intensity of her warmth, intellect and inquisitiveness in long missives often sent in the middle of the night, her favored time to work.

But still I was surprised a few years ago, arms deep in her archives, to find that she had made carbon copies of what seemed like every letter she had ever sent from her early 20s until the advent of email — whether to professional contacts, recalcitrant vendors, potential collectors, her relatives, her friends. There were even carbon copies of her breakup notes to old lovers.

Though she didn’t become an artist until age 45, she was confident from a young age that she would one day be considered a genius, no matter what the field. And she knew, too, that her importance would likely be recognized only belatedly, given the way Black women’s contributions were so often overlooked. If she didn’t save all of this stuff, no one else was going to.

New York Times, December 3, 2024

A new exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum aims to show how “gold has served as a powerful form of communication and self-expression for millennia.” Big ambitions deserve a big show: The 500 objects in “Solid Gold,” around half drawn from across the museum’s collections, include ancient Greek jewelry, Egyptian funerary objects, amulets made by Indigenous artisans in pre-conquest Latin America, 14th-century Italian altarpieces, gold-toned photography, illuminated manuscripts, Japanese folding screens, Hollywood film, a Peruvian gilded bed frame, technology and industrial design, and gold and diamond grills (or grillz).

But this is ultimately a show about fashion. Curated by a team led by Matthew Yokobosky, “Solid Gold” tells a story about the way couturiers have used gold in their designs as the ultimate expression of luxury, one that connotes royalty, power, outrageous wealth and conspicuous consumption. It’s a multisensory extravaganza with a soundscape and light show, and — as is often the case with Brooklyn Museum exhibitions lately — celebrity is front and center.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, 2024

IT'S ALL TOO EASY to get lost in the gorgeous elegance of Andrea Chung's work, whether it's the limpid blues of her mural-sized cyanotypes of lionfish, an invasive species that has destroyed the Caribbean's aquatic ecosystems, much like the colonizing Europeans did; or the delicate, transparent ambers of the hanging cast-sugar bottles, each filled with cast-sugar nuts and bolts, that make up Sink or Swim (2013), a piece which emerges from the history and aftermath of plantation economies and enslavement in Mauritius, a sugar-producing colony in the Indian Ocean; or the delicacy of beadwork and embellishment in her recent collages centered around ethnographic photographs of Black women.?

This beauty is strategic: it seduces the viewer to face what are often horrifying realities of the histories of colonization and imperialism, especially as it has shaped the lives of women of African and Asian descent in the Caribbean, the American South, and other parts of the world. But this close viewing opens up another aspect of Chung's practice, one that is as integral to its conceptual import as its subject matter and its material inventiveness, and that is the sheer labor that goes into every one of her projects. That effort is a necessary interpretive lens for understanding the work, given that so much of it revolves around the exploitation of people through the European institutions of slavery and indentured labor, as well as the often-overlooked work of Black women in their own communities.

4Columns, November 15 2024

The title of the three-part exhibition cycle Cantando Bajito (Singing Softly)—whose final iteration is on view at the Ford Foundation Gallery until December 7—is drawn from the story of Dora María Téllez Argüello, a Nicaraguan political activist. During the two years she was imprisoned in solitary confinement, she quietly sang to herself to both preserve her voice and sustain her spirit. Inspired by this gesture of defiance, the curators of the shows counterpose the physical and political violence to which feminized bodies around the world are subject with the work of artists, activists, and collectives who find power in vulnerability. To focus on vulnerability, paradoxically, moves the feminist conversation away from “women as victims” (a strategy often keyed to inspiring empathy in the viewer) and toward something much more bracing: “When bodies protesting together in the streets show the power of their vulnerability before state violence,” the curators write in the exhibition brochure, “we see that it is in vulnerability itself that resistance is found.”

New York Times, November 2 2024

But perhaps more significant than the official recognition has been its meaning for First Nations people, who are still waiting for a full reckoning with Australia’s colonial history. That history began with the arrival of British fleets in 1788 and has included the displacement of Indigenous peoples from their land, suppression of their languages, forced removal of children from their families, indentured labor, and, in recent decades, a disproportionate degree of incarceration.

4Columns, October 25 2024

Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, curated by Stephanie Sparling Williams and a team of her colleagues, is an ambitious and, indeed, inventive attempt to deal with the collection as it stands, not merely by augmenting it but by shifting the frameworks through which it can be seen, and by speaking frankly about how and why it developed in the way it did. This is a pretty rigorous form of institutional critique, in fact. Organized into eight sections, each motivated by ideas largely derived from Black feminist thought, the more than four hundred works on view, including 120 that have been brought out of the storeroom for the first time, are put into conversation about topics especially critical now. These include, as an introductory panel explains, “settler colonialism, global imperialism, genocide, enslavement, and environmental degradation.”

Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver

But there is an irony here that cannot be escaped. Because even within this seemingly meaningless icon, otherness is present. That little Super Mario castle harkens back to a moment when a wave of migration of coders and engineers from Asia, especially South Asia, came to North America to settle in Silicon Valley and Seattle, where Mehra now lives. It is part of a game whose structure — an endless horizontal scroll, in which the protagonists conquer yet more and more territory, until there is no more territory to conquer — replicates the unfettered expansionist drives of both colonialism and capitalism. And it is built of none other than yoga blocks — an accessory to one of the most thoroughly co-opted facets of Indian culture, but one that nevertheless has come to represent a kind of bougie white femininity. As Mehra shows us, whiteness can never really hide behind walls, because so often those walls are composed of the rubble of empire itself.

in Elevated: Art on the High Line, ed. Cecilia Alemani, Monacelli Press, 2024.

4Columns, September 27 2024

Martin’s choice of materials throughout the show are not particularly archival. Like other modes of Northwest Coast Indian art—the totem poles that were weathered by their exposure to the elements, say, or the objects created for ceremonial rites that were made to be burned in the potlatch—her drawings have a lifespan, a fact she embraces. The image, despite its breaks with convention, isn’t so much anarchic as loving. There is a system here, an inherited vocabulary that makes possible Martin’s new articulations of contemporary Tlingít life, one that deepens as her knowledge of the languages, both verbal and visual, grows.

In Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations, ed. Anna Katherine Brodbeck and Simonetta Fraquelli, Yale University Press with Dallas Museum of Art and Barnes Foundation, 2024.

In Suchitra Mattai: Myth from Matter, National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2024.

New York Times, September 16 2024

In her welcoming remarks, Campos-Pons told the crowd that, rather than a protest, “this is a walk of love, a walk for hope, a walk for the future, a walk for people who precede us and for people who are not yet here.” Billed as a “Procession of Angels for Radical Love and Unity,” the event spans two mornings in September. Last Saturday’s route started at the Harlem Art Park, a cobblestone site on East 120th Street in the heart of a neighborhood home to African Americans and people from Puerto Rican, Mexican, Caribbean, and African diasporas. The second procession is on Sept. 20 and will begin in Central Park and end in Madison Square Park, in the wealthy Flatiron district.

New York Times, August 10 2024

When I sat down to interview the artist vanessa german in her bright, airy temporary studio at the University of Chicago, she was the one who asked the first question. And the second, and the third. She wanted to know who I was and what motivated me in my work and life. She listened to my answers so intently that I was momentarily unnerved.

When I finally asked her how she became an artist, she said, “I might cry, but I’ll just keep going.”

The exchange with german (who styles her full name in lowercase letters) distilled much about her self-taught approach. Her beaded totemic sculptures, some modeled on African power figures, along with an installation on the National Mall, her community-based activism and her collaborative performances have lately been garnering art world attention and major awards.

One of the threads that connects her varied interests is a belief that art can restore our capacities to love ourselves and our communities — but only after we confront traumas and injustices, past and present, that stand in the way of such care. Another is her preternatural capacity for empathy.

New York Times, July 20 2024

f you think a filmed opera sung entirely in classical Arabic that tells, in detail, the complex story of a relatively obscure, failed 19th-century uprising in Egypt might be something less than compelling, do I have news for you.

Since the Venice Biennale opened in April, “Drama 1882,” a 45-minute video at the heart of an installation by the Alexandria-based artist Wael Shawky, has been mesmerizing visitors to the Egyptian Pavilion. When I went in mid-June, long after the art world insiders had left, I watched as tourists wandered into the dark space and after a moment or two parked themselves on the floor and on benches, seduced by the candy-colored, almost cartoonish stage sets, a richly melodious score, slow-motion, stylized choreography and even a real donkey.

4Columns, June 28 2024

This is the most radical aspect of Pedrosa’s biennale: the refusal to center what we used to call the West. His rejection of art-historical hierarchies like art/craft and insider/outsider/trained/untrained artists, and his choice to avoid, for the most part (and surely relative to the show’s last few iterations), artists represented by blue-chip galleries or too familiar on the art-fair circuit, constitutes a rejection of traditional, Euromerican-driven gatekeeping mechanisms. The Global North is everywhere, no question: in the colonialisms, settler colonialisms, and extractivisms that so many of these artists actively resist; in its seeding of wars; in its building of exclusionary and violent borders, walls, and bureaucracies; in the way it has turned the whole world into grist for capitalism. But while the Global North is present, it does not speak—in Foreigners Everywhere, it’s been put on mute, so we can finally hear the rest of the world instead.

New York Times, June 13 2024

Joyce J. Scott is not an easy woman to interview. It’s not that she is reticent. It’s just hard to get a word in edgewise because practically every person we passed during our day together in Baltimore stopped to talk to her, shouting out “The Queen!” or “Mama Joyce!” whenever we entered one of her local haunts.

She responded with enthusiasm, warmth and a comedic gift for working the crowd, slipping into different characters (a spoiled child, a haughty intellectual, a tough guy), bantering, wisecracking and generally making people laugh.

These interactions speak volumes about Scott, 75, who uses humor, every bit as much as art — weaving and quilted textile work; elaborate beaded jewelry; sculptures that combine beads, glass and found objects; intricately constructed clothing; printmaking, installation and performance art — to open up difficult conversations about race and inequality and to build community in her hometown.

4Columns, May 24 2024

Amy Sillman’s show of new work at Gladstone Gallery, To Be Other-Wise, is a virtuosic lesson in how silly and unimaginative the binary understanding of abstraction versus figuration really is. This has long been a theme in her work, as has the question of how one relates to the Modernist history that insisted on the split in the first place. In one of my all-time favorite pieces of art writing, “Ab-Ex and Disco Balls” (Artforum, Summer 2011), Sillman talks about the way Abstract Expressionism was available—ripe, even—for recuperation and reinvigoration by queer artists who absorbed it through the lenses of camp, vulgarity, and a politics of the body, even if those old white guys in the Cedar Tavern would never have seen it that way.

New York Times, May 17 2024

When pro-Palestinian student protesters took over Hamilton Hall at Columbia University last month and renamed it “Hind’s Hall,” the banner they unfurled contained images of a cartoon character created over 50 years ago that symbolizes the resilience of Palestinians.

On either side of the text were two images of a barefoot boy with tattered clothes and spiky hair, his back turned to us.

The character is called Handala (variously transliterated as Hanzala or Handzala), a name derived from a native plant that is deep-rooted, persistent and bears bitter fruit, and has become a potent symbol of the Palestinian struggle. The image was created by the Palestinian political cartoonist Naji Al-Ali in 1969, one of the most widely read cartoonists in the Arab world, who was murdered in London in 1987. (The case remains unsolved.)

Handala is 10 years old, the same age that Ali was when he became a refugee in 1948.

4Columns, May 3 2024

In a 1960 interview, the abstract painter Mark Tobey, after years of living in Paris, where he achieved acclaim from the otherwise relatively chauvinist French critical establishment, nevertheless demurred that he was “an American painter, whatever [that] means.” After securing her position as a major figure in American abstract painting, Joan Mitchell, who spent long periods in France before eventually moving there permanently in 1959, said she hated “to be called an exile or an expatriate”; she was, in the words of poet John Ashbery, an “apatriate”—stateless, more or less. The ambivalence expressed in these comments about what being an American artist actually signified in a post–World War II world, a world of ascending US power on the global stage and of a simultaneous cultural internationalism made increasingly possible by the accessibility of air travel and other forms of congress and communication, is just one of the many threads woven through Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962, a show that inaugurates the new home of New York University’s Grey Art Museum (formerly the Grey Art Gallery). Comprising nearly seventy artists—both canonical and woefully under-known—and 130 individual paintings, sculptures, photographs, textiles, and other objects, the exhibition serves to complicate a period in which all eyes were on New York as it transformed, thanks to the advent of Abstract Expressionism, into the capital of modern art in the West.

New York Times April 5 2024

His newest film, which goes on view Thursday at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, has a provocative conceit: Jafa has remade the shockingly violent climax of a classic of American cinema — Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976) — in which the main character Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, storms into a seedy East Village brothel and kills everyone in sight in order to save Iris, a child prostitute played by Jodie Foster, then 12 years old.

In the original movie — what Jafa calls the “redacted version” — these characters, including Iris’s pimp Sport (played by Harvey Keitel), were white. That never felt right to Jafa. When he discovered that the film’s celebrated screenwriter, Paul Schrader, had intended Sport to be African American, he decided to “restore” the movie by introducing Black actors, except for De Niro and Foster. In the 73-minute-long film, titled “******” — or as the artist pronounces it, “Redacted” — we see this recut version of the bloody climax over and over, each time slightly but crucially different. The result is extraordinary — both technically and conceptually — and brings to the surface the racist animus long accepted as underpinning Bickle’s barely contained rage. (Quentin Tarantino also criticized the decision to change the character to white in his 2022 book, “Cinema Speculation.”)

New York Times, March 28 2024

“The largest print, “Charge,” focuses on the figure of “Black Anna,” reputed to be a catalyst of the violence, urging a mob of peasants to action. She is no “Liberty Leading the People.” Unlike Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 image of a beautiful and bare-breasted personification of French freedom, Kollwitz’s crone is shown from the back, her sinewy arms raised and hands clenched urgently, practically launching herself into the crowd.

It makes you want to jump on the barricades. The feminist art historian Linda Nochlin said of the series that where other artists of the time focused on addressing social issues and were intent on persuading the bourgeoisie to sympathize with the plight of the poor, Kollwitz was generating class consciousness. Her audience was, first and foremost, her working-class neighbors. It’s why she focused on making prints, which could be widely circulated, and stuck to realism even as her peers turned to more avant-garde styles (Expressionism, Dada, Neue Sachlichkeit). She wanted her message to be as accessible as possible.”

RA Magazine, no. 162 Spring 2024

Read here

“‘The prompt was to be playful with the story of how these complex dishes arrived at our dinner tables all across the diaspora,’ he explains. ‘There’s a soup called pea soup and dough that we make in the Bahamas, and there are similar dishes in East Africa. And if you were to blindfold someone and ask them to taste both, they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. And the question is, how does something so complex and layered survive the movement of people over a 600-year period?’

The Leonardo print still hangs above his grandmother’s table, but Strachan says he looks at it through many more lenses than he did as a child. ‘A lot has happened since the time I was five to now: my interest in evolution, in science, in thinking about the human experience and family life, and thinking about the simplicity and elegance and complexity of a group of people sitting around a table.’

This supper is anything but ordinary, Strachan insists – rather, it’s a way of looking at ourselves and each other differently. ‘I think within the mundane is the human. And once you can find the mundane, you can find the human, and all of a sudden you’re forced to humanise the characters that you’re looking at, regardless of their histories.’”

In Luncheons on the Grass: Reimagining Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Rizzoli/Electa, 2024

[Manet's] world—theatrical, constructed, citational—is an Instagram world. All those lifestyle videos, the makeup tutorials, the travel photos just as aspirational as Le Déjeuner and also devoid of real sociability—they only give us the impression or spectacle of it. (It's like an endless stream of 'women laughing alone with salad' stock photos.) The difference between what all those Instagram influencers create and what Manet did was that Manet proposed modern life as a form of pastiche, and they proffer in the form of the meme. Pastiche requires endless reorganization of the elements that go into its making, where a meme requires endless replication. He may have to learn a few new tricks, but I suspect Manet would be quite at home in our new world.

In Raven Chacon, A Worm's Eye View from a Bird's Beak, Sternberg Press, Swiss Institute, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, 2024.

At the heart of Chacon's practice is the score: both in its conventional sense (the documentation of a piece of music in written format showing how different parts of a composition work together) and in the sense of the metaphorical possibilities opened up by its visual and conceptual form. If the traditional Western score is a set of instructions for musicians, telling them what to do and when, Chacon's scores are propositions for togetherness--an ethics of how we can interact with each other and the world. They are ways of putting people into relationships and allowing them to form and reform those relationships as long as the score lasts—in which each interpreter of the score retains a sense of responsibility to the other.

4Columns, March 8 2024

“Like much of Jemison’s earlier work, Bound (both the video and the exhibition as a whole) explores the ways that Black folks have survived by transforming the limitations placed on them into extraordinary and creative physical feats—or, perhaps, it plays with the idea that such extraordinary and creative physical feats might have their origins in Black survival. (Her 2010–11 Escaped Lunatic, for example, is structured as a chase scene, with the role of the fugitive enacted by members of a parkour team, suggesting that the gravity-defying art form may have emerged from a history of Black men being pursued by police, or at least insistently aligning the two phenomena.) The teenagers in Jemison’s new video—mostly, as the Chicago Boyz website points out, “inner city youth,” living in Black neighborhoods drained of educational and other resources, and strangled of opportunity as a result—are bound, held in place. But thanks to their athletic skills, their imaginations, and the artist’s canny formal strategies, we can see them reclaim their ancestral legacy—they are allowed, at least momentarily, to escape, to take flight, to find freedom.”

New York Times February 18 2024

Murrell expects this type of conservation work will continue long after the exhibition. “We have the new wing,” she said, referring to the Met’s planned galleries for modern and contemporary art, the Tang Wing, due in 2029, at an estimated cost of $500 million.

“We want to have a very major Harlem Renaissance presence when that reopens,” she said. “We’re going to have acquisitions, and it’ll be an ongoing project.”

It’s hard not to share Murrell’s excitement for the upcoming show, and for its potential to reorient the view of an era scholars thought they knew. “It’s both a celebration of the period, a reintroduction of the period, a new introduction for people of a certain generation and from a certain art historical point of view,” the curator said.

If she’s right, students of succeeding generations will never take survey courses of art history that fail to include the Harlem Renaissance. And Murrell said she is optimistic, as well, that showcasing works from H.B.C.U. collections will “attract new support that goes directly to those museums, so they can build out their infrastructure and show more of what they have.

“There’s no reason a Fisk or a Hampton, with their impressive museums, couldn’t do a show of this scale,” she said, “if they only had the resources.”

New York Times February 18 2024

A century later, the first African American modernist movement continues to inspire and challenge.

4Columns, February 9 2024

“These formal strategies are also political strategies—a refusal to heroize or demonize; an insistence on witnessing everything, including those sights too often overlooked; a call to sit with the contradictions of Los Angeles, and perhaps of the whole complicated, infuriatingly vital world we live in. “LA is a shy one, a real one, and a terrible beauty,” Smith writes in the liner notes. “You can’t really see how gorgeous it is in a drive-by, you have to sit with the banality, the horrors, the wildness of the city until it begins to become legible.” With The Wanda Coleman Songbook, she’s created the perfect space for us to do just that.”

4Columns January 26 2024

“Religion, state violence and its agents and bureaucracies, capitalist greed, political power, and arrogance, but also the salvation offered by friendship and philosophy and a close study of the world: The Peacock’s Graveyard speaks to all of these with a complicated temporality. Its parable-like form evokes ancient wisdom, as if the problems that we’re facing are as old as time itself—but when a plane flies through the sky over a canopy of trees, or a politician wants to write an obituary, or a man speaks on a cell phone, we are pulled back into the present. The lesson of these stories, which all speak so clearly to the contemporary, seems not to be that we haven’t learned anything after so many millennia—that we’re just living these same scenarios over and over—or even that the past can guide us in facing the future. Rather, they appear designed to help us understand a now that we aren’t yet able to grasp, a fact Kanwar alludes to in the film’s dedication “to your nausea, amnesia, aphasia and insomnia, your trembling fingers and sliding speech,” a list of what is standing in the way of our clarity. By slowing us down, by offering us knowledge beyond that claimed by reportage or analysis or theorizing, by reminding us of the world’s persistent beauty, Kanwar gives us the gift of being able to see through the present in our search for a peace that is, as he puts it, “mutual, parallel and together.” I can’t think of anything more galvanizing than that.”

New York Times, December 27 2023

A lot happened in the early 1990s: In about four years, the world saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, a bombing of the World Trade Center, the beating of Rodney King and the riots that roiled Los Angeles, a peak in the AIDS crisis, a market crash, and the withdrawal of funding of controversial artists by the National Endowment of the Arts as part of a larger culture war.

In the wake of these events — just a partial list — two exhibitions on opposite coasts seemed to metabolize the tumultuous moment. One was the controversial, even infamous, 1993 Whitney Biennial, curated by Elisabeth Sussman along with Thelma Golden, John G. Hanhardt and Lisa Phillips. Often labeled the “multicultural” or “identity politics” biennial, it was excoriated by critics for seeming to privilege diversity over “artistic merit.”

The other exhibition was “The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism” at the Fine Arts Gallery (now the University Art Gallery) of the University of California, Irvine. Organized by the artist Charles Gaines and the artist and writer Catherine Lord, it looked at the way art world structures — including art criticism — relegated artists of color to the margins.

4Columns, December 22 2023

Last year, I was at a dinner with a group of rich art collectors, including an economist. Someone asked him where the markets were heading, and he repeated the old saw that the US is living through the longest sustained period of peace and prosperity in modern history. I kind of lost my mind—name a decade, I growled, even a year, in which this country hasn’t been actively participating in invasions, “conflicts,” military operations, or proxy wars. I wish I had had Lê’s work at my fingertips in that moment, to push back on the idea that, just because bombs aren’t falling on our heads, we are living in peace. War is the very condition of life in the US, Lê clearly demonstrates—so normalized that the decision to enter into the next one gets easier and easier to make.

New York Times November 17 2023

The focus of her art is on realities that Black dancers face in the world of ballet. First she sculpted real dancers; then she brought in a familiar face to help bring them to life.

4Columns, November 10 2023

I went to the show with an old grad-school pal. At the end of the tour, we jokingly asked each other, “So, who won?” I was surprised, given how long I had revered Manet for both his painterly gifts and the politics I saw buried within his work, that my answer this time was Degas. Everything that Degas seemed to most admire his opposite for—his assuredness, his confidence in both brushwork and attitude toward the world, his embodiment of cool—somehow rankles me today. Instead, I want Degas’s acerbic eye, his ability to see the darkness under what is being sold to us as pleasure, his sense of alienation from the world, of not living up to the past nor having the wherewithal to contend with the present. It feels more suited to our apocalyptic now.

In Track Changes: a handbook for art criticism, ed. Mira Dayal and Josephine Heston, Paper Monument, 2023.

New York Times, October 26 2023

Your first encounter in the Guggenheim Museum’s ambitious new show, “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility,” is likely to be with four looming figures draped in voluminous garments. It’s hard to see if anyone (or anything) is underneath the slightly futuristic hoodies. Acid-green projected light — known as chroma green, used by film studios for “green screen” effects — bathes the big gallery off the rotunda. The result is paradoxical — the figures are so huge they should be unmissable, but with this intense illumination you may have trouble making them out.

Watch this installation, by the artist Sandra Mujinga, long enough, and when you turn toward the rotunda, something remarkable happens: The stark-white museum turns entirely pink. (The effect subsides as your eyes readjust.)

Mujinga’s work is a fitting introduction to a show that asks what it means to be seen, and to see each other, especially when seeing takes place across racial and other forms of difference. What does it mean, especially for people of color, to be hyper-visible and subject to increased surveillance, while at the same time erased from the field of vision, forgotten in the social and political landscape? How does looking at each other through these layers of stereotyping and misunderstanding distort our perception of the world? If being visible is a trap, is there solace to be found in near-invisibility?

New York Times, October 20 2023

In 2013, after years trying to get permission from layer upon layer of authorities in India to put up an outdoor light work, the artist Shilpa Gupta finally got the OK — with the caveat that she take down the piece within 24 hours. That would have been impossible, but she signed the papers anyway, knowing that once the piece was up, it would take some time before anyone would come around to make her remove it.

“You just have to do your thing,” Gupta said in a video interview from her home in Bandra, a suburb of Mumbai. “You’re at the mercy of people’s whims and fancies, that’s just how the system is designed.”

Gupta, the subject of two new shows in New York this fall — including her biggest exhibition in the United States — describes this way of working using a common Indian word, “jugaad.” Adopted over the past decade in the West by productivity gurus and business schools, the practice of jugaad means finding innovative solutions with limited resources, bending senseless rules and skirting rigid bureaucracies — getting things done without setting off alarms.

4Columns, October 20 2023

When the New York Times profiled Ashoona last year, it published as its hero image a photo of Kinngait that, not unexpectedly, emphasized its remoteness, vast skyline, eerie, constant twilight, and forbidding climate. When the artist turns to that same landscape in her drawings, the effect is entirely different. Images like Moving with our campsites (traditional movers) and Eggs and Rocks (both 2023) show a place that is not barren but replete. The first portrays a group of people dressed in traditional animal-skin clothing walking over ice floes and rowing kayaks loaded with their belongings. (The coexistence of long-standing cultural traditions and the trappings of modern life is indicated, subtly, by the sail of the leading boat, which is printed with a Canada Post postal code.) The second depicts a snowless expanse of irregular boulders separated by rivulets of pebbles and a pond, with birds swimming, sunbathing, or tucking themselves under and between the stones. In both cases, the horizonless composition confounds the eye. We look down on the scene without exactly having a bird’s-eye view: the landscape seems to project toward us, almost cradling us at some points, destabilizing us at others; it’s not still and frozen but active and roiling. When Ashoona trains her gaze on particularities—as she does, for example, in Eggs and Rocks, where she delineates the pebbles one by one in almost impossible detail—she paradoxically pushes the image toward abstraction. For those of us who have only experienced the Arctic through photographs—and that includes almost all of us, I would think—her eccentric subjects and complex spatial gambits result in images that challenge settler-colonial terms of representation. In these pictures, the North is not empty and therefore free for the taking, but is on the contrary teeming with life, human and otherwise.

4Columns, September 29 2023

A number of works tie the refugee crisis of Partition to those happening today. One such example is Sreshta Rit Premnath’s Catch and Release (2023), an ethereal drawing made by sandwiching cotton rope, handwoven to resemble a chain-link fence, between two pieces of white paper. Another is Bangladeshi photographer Munem Wasif’s three photographs from a larger series titled Spring Song (2017–19). In the latter, humble objects, studio-lit to create crisp detail, are shot against vivid backgrounds: we see a beat-up bottle of skin lotion, a small toy house made of thin wood lath and string, a bundle of dried fish. The pictures wouldn’t be out of place in a magazine or on a billboard, though their status as commodities is iffy at best. Rather, they portray the possessions of a few of the millions of Rohingya people fleeing genocide in Myanmar who ended up in what is now the world’s largest refugee camp, in Bangladesh. Wasif’s choice to focus on signs of people’s determination to carve out a comforting ordinariness of daily life in the worst circumstances, rather than trotting out the usual pathetic images of people in distress, is gutting. The result is a quietly insistent reminder, one proffered by so many works in this exhibition, that we have not fully learned the lessons of 1947.

Dancing Foxes Press, July 2023

Burns proposes thinking otherwise about time, matter, and our imbrication in both. Each of the four works stands alone yet links in myriad ways to its companions. Together, they trace a world in which normative hierarchies are fully jettisoned, a world that seems to hover in the future at the same time as being fully enfolded in the present and drawing upon the past. They are strange enough to be science fiction and familiar enough to be its sibling, speculative fiction—they take place in a future present, a present that could be. “My vision for an alternative future is created through this space, of what I call ‘the speculative present,’” says Burns, “in which we perceive, create, perform, and are completely different.”

New York Times, July 19, 2023

“Guston’s Klan paintings kneecapped supremacists through humor. But while the racist stereotypes that make their way into “Poor Richard” may serve to condemn Nixon, they also drag down his victims as collateral damage. When an artist like Kara Walker traffics in sometimes shockingly debased anti-Black imagery, she does so in order to transform it and challenge her viewers, not merely reproduce its violence.

The question here is not one of censorship. Nor is it the relatively uninteresting or narrow one of whether the artist was racist; Guston was certainly not a closet white supremacist.

But the series rankles, especially because Guston, only a year or so before “Poor Richard,” in his Klan paintings at Marlborough Gallery, found a much more effective and infinitely more courageous way to take on the pernicious anti-Blackness he saw around him. Perhaps he realized that himself: Though he gathered his chosen “Poor Richard” drawings in a binder ready to send to publishers, he never quite got around to actually putting it in the mail.”

*Wallpaper, July 9, 2023

“For McDowell, face jugs are vessels for the things that move him – ‘whatever shows the connectedness between humans’ – and for expressing the pain of slavery. Some of his jugs are dedicated to those he admires – Rosa Parks, Benjamin Banneker, even Ruth Bader Ginsburg – while others commemorate victims of racist violence, including Tyre Nichols, the 27-year-old skateboarder killed by police officers in Memphis in January 2023: ‘I kind of lost myself when I was making it. It looks like I took the anger I felt and channelled it into the jug. I can’t cuss people out; I can’t burn things down. It looks like a gargoyle because I have to use the anger,’ he said. “

New York Times, June 21, 2023

“Tam and Zhang chose the name “Home-O-stasis” as a nod to the delicate process of finding balance when you are trying to make a new home. For all the ways the show points to the precarity and disorientation experienced by many Flushing residents, it also demonstrates the sense of belonging offered by the community.

“It’s a love letter,” Tam said.

“Home-O-Stasis” is open during mall hours, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week. Go on a Friday afternoon and you’ll find the curators interacting with visitors. And, if you’re lucky, Zhang may give you a copy of a small, limited-edition zine that shows some of her favorite local spots for bubble tea, snacks, and dinner — “things you won’t find on Google,” she said with a laugh. Just don’t be surprised if you must cut through a supermarket, and then a parking lot, to get there.”

New York Times, June 30, 2023

“The 94-year-old British-Ghanaian photographer James Barnor calls himself “Lucky Jim” — he’s been “at the right place at the right time and met the right people” during a career spanning more than six decades and two continents, he said in a recent telephone interview from his London home.

It’s easy to believe him looking at “James Barnor: Accra/London,” a major retrospective of his work across genres — studio and street photography, photojournalism and fashion, images that range from the quietly intimate to the historical and iconic. Shown at the Serpentine Galleries in London in 2021, the exhibition is on view in an expanded form at the Detroit Institute of Arts, through Oct. 15.”

4Columns, June 16, 2023

“The past two years have seen a rising tide of book-banning by right-wing politicians and activists across the country, as well as the rewriting of school textbooks to exclude histories pertaining to slavery and civil rights, sexual orientation, and gender, all in the name of “protecting children” (which children?) and “parental rights” (which parents?). In the face of this, Jones’s acts of destruction are, perhaps counterintuitively, cathartic. Forget the free-speech arguments and pearl-clutching at book-banning and burning: Jones’s work reminds us that the archive has always been ideologically suspect, has always been a mechanism of anti-Blackness and other forms of racism. Might as well puree the contents and make something better from the mush.”

4Columns, June 2, 2023

“The concurrence of a group of exhibitions in New York City this spring has been a gift: Wangechi Mutu’s retrospective at the New Museum, Sarah Sze’s installations at the Guggenheim, Shahzia Sikander’s public-art project at Madison Square Park, and, though perhaps with less fanfare, Rina Banerjee’s debut at Perrotin. All four women came to prominence in the 1990s, when “globalism” was the curatorial word of the day and art fairs were proliferating around the world, and all built their practices on approaches to assemblage and collage that crossed borders and histories. They are diasporic bricoleurs whose art is not about cultural origins or destinations so much as the idea of movement itself.”

4Columns, May 12, 2023

“[Jasper] Johns’s goal was to suggest an opacity of meaning—to blur the line between image and object, to emphasize the thingness of the painting, to refuse reading in. Smith pointedly moves in the opposite direction: she uses text to incorporate political commentary, humor, and poetry, offering up a picture of the intersection of environmental devastation, capitalism, the silencing of Indigenous voices, and other factors that have led us to this moment of crisis. Among the flag’s stars are printed quotations from Pablo Neruda (“Give me silence, water, hope / Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes”) and Ronald Reagan (“A tree is a tree—how many more do you need to look at?”). The stripes, meanwhile, are overlaid with newspaper headlines and ad copy (“Money,” “Moneyline,” “Drums of oil & drum talk,” “Migrants’ long, hard road,” “Dollar reigns supreme in the marketplace,” “Does aid hurt the poor?” “The Indian AIDS hotline,” and so on). The urgency and level of political analysis Smith achieves here makes Johns’s work—the subject of a major two-museum retrospective at the Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2021–22—look tepid, puny, and minor in comparison. Smith refuses the aloofness of the white avant-garde in favor of something fierce and necessary—and, tragic to say, endlessly relevant for our time.”

4Columns, April 14 2023

In her nomination of Senga Nengudi for a show at Artist’s Space in 1993, Lorraine O’Grady wrote that her friend “can fit into a suitcase an art installation more important than others can erect with earth-moving machines.” This proposition is put to the test in a new long-term exhibition of Nengudi’s work at Dia Beacon—an institution filled with pieces of art that, if not literally made with bulldozers and dump trucks, share a certain DNA with (and are part of the same collection as) those Robert Smithsons, Michael Heizers, Walter de Marias, and Nancy Holts that must have been on O’Grady’s mind. Centering on six Water Compositions—some of Nengudi’s earliest exhibited works, from around 1970—and two room-size mixed-media pieces—Wet Night–Early Dawn–Scat Chant–Pilgrim’s Song, from 1996, and Sandmining B, from 2020—the show demonstrates that, as usual, O’Grady was right….

In Aziz + Cucher: XXX, La Fabrica/Gazelli Art House, 2023

I am not the first to describe this temporal quality of Aziz + Cucher's work as Beckettian: 'You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.' These words from the Irish writer's The Unnameable hang over Some People. It captures something profound about what it is to live now, when everything old is new again, no matter how tragic, no matter how violent, no matter how unjust. Another instance of violent occupation, another war, another surge of immigrants, another Black man killed by police, another variant, another, another, another. And in the face of this, we flail about, wanting to act but thwarted in our actions by forces that lock us into place, that are themselves so large as to be immovable. There is a poignancy, and not simply a pathos, in seeing those dancers in the desert--a sliver of hope that, whatever the futility, at least the will remains.

4Columns, February 17 2023

In a film installation about which there is much to critique, this is most egregious to me: all the “rioters” are Black and brown. Neshat, not satisfied with her usual schtick of stereotyping Iranian men and women, uses Black people and other people of color to act out the violence felt by her abused main character. Her fury, the aftereffect of her trauma, is expressed through these instrumentalized bodies. It is a perverse message—not just because of the righteous anger of Iranian women spilling out into public space in the bravest and most dramatic ways lately (they don’t need anyone to act on their behalves), but because we are living in an era, and in a country, where other minoritized folks have their own shit to be angry about. This is Black Lives Matter put into service of the victims of Iran’s brutal regime: Neshat is not declaring solidarity with that cause, but mining stereotypes of Blackness in the most cynical way and using them to enact the rage her character cannot. And to that, I say: no way.

New York Times, February 8 2023

“It’s the difference between a plant with one root and one with a network of roots,” the artist Wangechi Mutu said. She was speaking in the clear light of her expansive, white-walled and wood-beamed studio, on the outskirts of Nairobi, about her decision in 2015 to begin dividing her time between New York — where she had been living and working since the mid-1990s — and Kenya, the country of her birth.

“If a plant has just one root,” she added, “that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to stand straight and strong. The idea of having many roots, of having your feet really grounded in different places, is extremely empowering for me.”

This idea finds its form in “In Two Canoe” (2022), a cast bronze sculpture installed on the grounds of Storm King Art Center. Two strange figures — part human, part botanical — undertake a journey in a shallow boat. Their branchlike limbs dangle over its edges, anchoring them to the earth. When she imagined these futuristic entities, Mutu was thinking of mangrove trees — plants that have traveled the globe, carried by people who have migrated willingly or by force for millennia, adapting themselves to every new habitat.

In Elsa Gramcko: The Invisible Plot of Things, ed. Gabriela Rangel, James Cohan Gallery and Sicardi|Ayers|Bacino 2023

4Columns, January 20 2023

I cannot think of a white American artist, male or female, who has wrestled with the individual and collective guilt adhering to the US history of slavery or its aftermaths in the same unstinting way as Kentridge does with European colonialism and apartheid—Philip Guston is the only person who comes close, I suppose. I laughed at first when I read the director’s note in the exhibition catalog touting the fact that this was Kentridge’s first US retrospective in over ten years—how often should an artist be the subject of a retrospective, really?—but on second thought, perhaps this is exactly the work that white and white-adjacent America needs to see, over and over again, until it finally makes the connections between its present—mass incarceration, police brutality, gerrymandering and redlining, the January 6 riots, and so much more—and a past that it too often refuses to claim as its own.

New York Times, December 22 2022

Courtney J. Martin, the director of the Yale Center for British Art, remembers seeing a striking painting by Jack Whitten at a family friend’s house when she was a child. It wasn’t until she began studying art history in her 20s that she realized that the painting, with its stark palette, striated surface and geometric composition floating in a strange optical space, was part of a series Whitten had made in the mid-1970s.

And it wasn’t until she began to think about doing a show of the work at Dia Art Foundation, where she was the chief curator and deputy director from 2017 to 2019, that she came to understand just how many of these works there actually were, and the significant role they played in the modernist giant’s career.

The suite, called the Greek Alphabet paintings because he used the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet as his organizing principle, number around 60 or so, and were the painter’s sole focus from 1975 to 1978. They represent a crucial turning point in his approach to his medium — a hinge between his colorful atmospheric abstractions of the 1960s and early 1970s and his more sculptural tesserae paintings of the 1980s — but they have never been shown together in any significant number.

4Columns, December 9 2022

“The invited artists were encouraged to think about the historical event in terms of their own family chronicles and movements, a maneuver that makes the show feel deeply intimate. The curatorial focus on the personal has another important consequence: there is only occasional reference to the white-perpetrated violence and injustices that triggered such an exodus—the focus of the exhibition is foremost on the agency of those who left and those who stayed in place. White supremacy is a given, but it’s not the story.”

In Studies into Darkness: The Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech. Edited by Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich. Co-published by Amherst College Press and Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, 2022.

Ebook (free) available.

New York Times, November 10 2022

Spread over three floors of the museum, comprising around 100 objects, and surveying the past decade of Gates’s career, with an emphasis on new work, “Young Lords and Their Traces” makes sense of what has sometimes seemed to be a contradiction between the pragmatism of Gates’s social practice — as much about the nuts and bolts of fund-raising and red tape as anything — and the poetic idealism of his other art.

4Columns, November 4 2022

“Majeed’s invitation to visit via digital technology defies the corporation’s attempt to limit and control mobility into and within its development. Despite the geopolitical turmoil that might prevent travel to Pakistan (and now, after the floods that recently devastated the country, environmental disaster brought on by unimpeded industrialization), we can go to Pioneer Works to visit a replication of a replication in an augmented reality facilitated by a travel agency that is an imagined revival of a lost original. In Majeed’s hands, the continual degradation of the original through the copy does not result in a lamentable distance from experience, but another modality of it—a pirated experience, one could say, snatched from the clutches of global capitalism.”

In Chakaia Booker: The Observance, ICA Miami and Hirmer Publishers, 2022

Works like these represent what is most remarkable about Booker's work: her fusion of the technical ability required to make an inert material seem lifelike--full of energy and movement and the texture of the human and natural world--with conceptual playfulness. By forcing us to recognize the potential beauty in those urban spaces and materials that are normally coded as ugly, as waste, as decrepit and decayed, as inhuman (and thus, in the white supremacist coding of language, as Black), Booker's work offers up the possibility of the survival, renewal, and persistence of life itself-for African Americans, who have too often been treated as detritus in this country, but also for the species as a whole, as we face down an environmental disaster of our own making. This deeply human work allows us to imagine, that is, a human future- a not insignificant gift for our moment in time.

New York Times, November 3 2022

For many museums, the idea of advancing social justice and combating inequality takes the form of diversifying programming: bringing more people into the fold, first and foremost by displaying more work by Black artists. Surely that’s a net good for audiences, who have been treated to an array of excellent shows over the past few years as a result. The problem arises when that’s all museums think is required of them. Simmons’s intervention makes clear that you can’t curate your way out of racism — or read your way out of it, for that matter.

4Columns, October 14 2022

The title of Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s first solo show in New York City, I have withheld much more than I have written, comes from a 2018 cycle of prose poems by Dionne Brand, The Blue Clerk. In it, we hear of a writer whose verso pages of her notebook—those left blank—are being carefully baled and cataloged, becoming a burdensome archive of the unsaid. The installation and nine paintings on view at Galerie Lelong (all 2022) are dense with citations from literature, art history, geology, ethnography, landscape painting, music, film, and theater, and are composed of intricate layers of marks and images. Sunstrum’s borrowing from Brand is curious, for what could possibly be left out of this thicket of meaning? The move suggests that in the artist’s quest to address how the subject is formed within families, in diasporic movements, and in relation to colonial histories, even this surfeit of references is not sufficient to convey the complexity of experience.

New York Times, September 13 2002

Some of David Hammons’s most important early shows took place here. So did the first appearance of Lorraine O’Grady’s celebrated performance piece, “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire.” It was where Senga Nengudi debuted her sculptures of stretched-out pantyhose weighted with sand, and where Howardena Pindell first showed her abstract “dot” paintings, composed of paper chads. Musicians like Greg Tate, Lawrence (Butch) Morris and Vernon Reid jammed here. Stevie Wonder showed up at the opening. And Miles Davis, whose tailor was also in the building, would pop in from time to time.

“The energy was just oozing out the door,” Nengudi recalled of Just Above Midtown Gallery, known as JAM. “It was like a magnet would pull people in because there was always something going on.”

JAM was founded by the artist and social activist Linda Goode Bryant in 1974 at 50 West 57th Street. Over the next 12 years and in three locations, it would become an incubator for some of the most important Black avant-garde artists of the 20th century. More than just an art gallery, the artist Lorraine O’Grady has written, it was “a place as much as a world, a place where people ate together, discussed and argued, drank and smoked together, collaborated on work, slept together, pushed each other to go further, and partied ’til the cows came home.”

4Columns, September 16 2022

In a 1992 interview, Simpson talked about her interest in writers like James Baldwin, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Houston: “For them language became a slippery object,” she observed. “I was really amazed at how much they said in silence.” Simpson’s conceptual photography from this era is likewise all slippages and silences. In Waterbearer, the woman’s pose recalls, if obliquely, art historical models—Greek caryatids, comely maids, neoclassical nymphs—at the same time as it acknowledges the burden of real-life labor (look at the way the model’s back and neck muscles flex). How to understand this figure? She is a woman; she is a Black woman; she is perhaps an enslaved Black woman—she is, that is to say, overdetermined within our culture’s scopic regime. She uses an old-fashioned silver vessel, as did so many who labored against their will in plantation houses or, with only slightly more agency, as paid domestic servants in the houses of the rich; or, perhaps, she is not a laborer at all but is simply going about the business of living in her own, well-appointed house. She empties a plastic jug, as so many of us do every day without heed for the environment; or as those living in Flint, Michigan, and now Jackson, Mississippi, are forced to do because of what we might call infrastructural and environmental racism.

What exactly in this image leads me in these directions? What stops me from wandering? My search for meaning is both propelled and held in check by Simpson’s canny ambiguity.

New York Times, July 21 2022

Having worked in experimental filmmaking before becoming an artist, she has often played with ideas of transparency and opacity. But for “Cloak,” the newly commissioned work, the material she chose to explore was light itself — which brings with it physical, historical, sociological and ethical dimensions.

Kiwanga’s interest in light is equally connected to her investigations into colonial American history — in particular, 18th-century “lantern laws” in New York and other parts of New England that mandated that enslaved Black, mixed-race and Indigenous people as young as age 14 carry lanterns with them at night so they could be watched, and anyone without one could be arrested. The scholar Simone Browne, whose book “Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness” was a cornerstone of Kiwanga’s research, considers the laws to be a precursor for more recent stop-and-frisk approaches to policing.

The history Browne traces allowed Kiwanga to “think about light and all the different ways that it’s used and how it can be weaponized,” she said in a recent Zoom call from Paris.

New York Times, June 15 2022

The exhibition’s title comes from a line in a poem by Khal Torabully, a Mauritian poet. “The first thing that comes to mind for me when I think of the phrase ‘everything slackens in a wreck’ is the kind of loosening that often accompanies disaster,” Gosine said. “Yes, when indentured laborers arrived, conditions were terrible. But at the same time, caste fell apart. Gender relations were vastly reorganized. People were forced to renegotiate the terms of their relationships.”

For Chung, too, there is beauty in the spaces opened up by such pain. “The trans-Atlantic slave trade ripped people away from their homes and their cultures and their traditions, and then indentureship did essentially the same thing,” she said. “And yet, through all of that messiness and trauma, cultures were formed.”

4Columns, June 3 2022

The most striking piece in Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist Nicholas Galanin’s show It Flows Through—an exhibition filled with indelible imagery—is White Flag (2022). The sculpture consists of a polar bear rug attached to a wooden pole leaning against the wall. “Attached” is not quite the right word: the hide, a trophy of an early twentieth-century white sport hunter, clings to its wooden mast, grasping it by tooth and claw as its body stretches out, as if whipped by a strong wind. The bear—what is left of it—looks either like it is desperately hanging on for dear life or determinedly seizing its prey. It is at once an image of vulnerability and precarity and of tenacity and strength—an apt description of the condition of both polar bears and Indigenous peoples whose ties to the land are central to their cultures and survival in this era of rapid and devastating climate change. Ecocide is also genocide. But even though the title of the piece refers to a battlefield symbol of surrender, the fierceness of the polar bear’s expression belies quiet capitulation.

4Columns, May 27 2022

In their refusal of realism, Smith’s anarchic anatomies manage to communicate how strange being in a body is. The inspiration for these paintings allows those who cannot see to translate optical information into something haptic; the works themselves function in the opposite manner, providing people with a visual analogue of their somatic experience. It’s not simply the use of collage elements that creates such interplays between sight and touch, between what one sees and how one feels physically: the artist explodes the figure, recombining elements in ways that are not in fact uncanny but oddly familiar. I feel supremely at home here, in this place in which I am an arm and a leg and a breast out of place (Reverence to my Glories, 2022), or where my body is a tsunami and my nipple is a beacon of light pinched between aqueous fingers (Stars in my pocket, 2022), or where I am a pimpled cylinder who spews a fountain of green goo while my tits hang from the sky (Libations for soul wares, 2022), or where gender is alluded to (there are a lot of boobies on view) but never fixed or logical.

Frieze, May 04 2022

“Aruna D’Souza: You speak about how your work makes space for an individual’s capacity for self-healing. But in your work during the COVID-19 crisis, there also seems to be a really strong sense of a collective practice.

Guadalupe Maravilla: If you really start thinking about it, a lot of indigenous traditions are always about collective healing. Obviously it’s important for us to do our individual work but ultimately the collective healing is really important as well. And that’s a big part of my practice.”

4Columns, April 15 2022

“The 2022 Whitney Biennial is the most curated edition in some time—its organizers, the museum’s own David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards, have an argument to make. Finding themselves with an extra year to prepare the show (albeit under the least amenable circumstances), the pair have created a biennial that eschews the mere presentation of a snapshot of the US art world. Laudably ambitious, this exhibition is a reflection, at a juncture that feels very much like a turning point in our history, on past, present, and future—how we got here, where we are, and where we might be (or could be) going. Grief and hope operate in equal measures.”

4Columns, March 18 2022

“Borne of her early experience of war and famine (her father, who fought for Chiang Kai-shek’s army, was imprisoned for most of her life) and then of the Cultural Revolution (when she was relocated and forced into agrarian labor along with millions of others), Liu’s painted explorations of history, memory, and trauma convey suffering, but also the capacity for survival, and even the hope, that allow people to endure the unendurable. She does this by mining the emotional resonance of photography (the medium) and the photograph (the material object).”

4Columns, February 25 2022

Quick on the heels of the invention of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, criminologists, sociologists, and ethnographers seized upon the new technology to facilitate their mission to explain the world by indexing it. Through a process of categorization, people—colonial subjects, the lower classes, deviants of all kinds, but, above all, Black-skinned people—were reduced to types, imprisoned within discourses of criminality, disposability, death, and abjectness that were all but impossible to exceed. This curtailment of Black subjectivity was achieved, in part, by the sheer repetition that photography allows, a repetition that is numbingly apparent in the American visual landscape, in the hundreds of photos of Black bodies hanging from trees that haunt our archives, in the infuriatingly endless images of people rendered lifeless by police violence, in the one-after-another monotony of mugshots. Any one of these pictures (or the events they represent) may serve to strip the humanity of an individual, but the appearance of hundreds and then thousands and then millions of them over time strip the humanity of a people as a whole.

The New York Times, February 24 2022

In 2009, sensitive to the ways that Black girls are under particular duress in American culture, the Austin-based artist Deborah Roberts began creating intricate collages of innocence and joy — “very Black Norman Rockwell,” as she described them in a recent interview. When she decided to pursue an M.F.A. in 2014 at age 48, hoping to discover ways to move her work forward, she was struck by how little research there was to draw upon to understand the lives of Black girls and the challenges they faced. “There was scholarship on Black women,” she explained, “but not on how we become Black women.”

“Baseera Khan Uses Her Body as a Weapon”

Frieze, February 7 2022

“But what’s most remarkable about Khan’s practice is that the multivalence of these materials isn’t purely conceptual or geopolitical – it’s deeply personal, even visceral. It’s not just any hair that the artist uses, it’s their own hair. It’s not just anyone doing the performances behind the two-way mirror, it’s the artist themself. Khan forces us to recognize how apparently abstract systems that seem larger than any individual in fact shape us all, turning us into both commodities and commodifiers, leveraging our bodies and identities at every turn. Referring to themself as an archive in the exhibition title is to acknowledge how they – a queer, brown, Muslim, femme child of undocumented immigrants, and the result of a complex family history that connects India, East Africa, Afghanistan, Kashmir and the US – is a product as well as a record of history and the forces that shape it.”

4Columns, January 21 2022

Manthia Diawara’s Towards the New Baroque of Voices (2021)—an eighty-minute cinematic essay composed largely of existing footage of thinkers and artists, shot over decades of the filmmaker’s career—begins with Édouard Glissant. The Martiniquais poet and philosopher makes the bold statement that democracy renders colonialism impossible. The implication, he goes on to explain, is not that what we have seen from Western powers isn’t colonialism—but rather that it isn’t democracy. The West has traded the appearance of democracy—the spectacle of it, even—for democracy itself. What’s worse, they’ve imposed that ersatz vision on formerly colonized states, who were forced to embrace it as a condition for freedom from their colonizers…

New York Times, December 7 2021

When Storm Ascher, 27, an artist and founder of the pop-up gallery Superposition, moved here from Los Angeles in 2019, she was simultaneously struck by the warmth and acceptance of the community and the fact that she was almost always the only Black person in a room.

Then she read Colson Whitehead’s autobiographical novel “Sag Harbor” and learned that the house she lived in was a mere two blocks from Eastville, one of the oldest Black communities on the South Fork of Long Island, and one that offered evidence of multicultural integration among Black, Montauk, and Shinnecock people, as well as those of European descent, since the 18th century.

And she was a mile or so from Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest, and Ninevah (a.k.a. SANS), Black beach enclaves established in the 1930s and ’40s that have been drawing prosperous professionals and cultural bright lights from New York City for generations.

New York Times, December 6 2021

Incorporating work from throughout the artist’s four-decade-long career, “The Shape of Things” has a strong retrospective quality — confronting the past in order to understand the present — without being a retrospective exhibition. The artist traces our current national predicament, with ever-present anti-Blackness and eroding democracy foremost among many woes, while reminding us that what we’re seeing in our political landscape is nothing new. In fact, she’s been telling us about it for decades. What is less present, sometimes frustratingly so, are ways to imagine a different future.

4Columns, December 3 2021

Clocking in at more than 275 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photographs, films, and audio recordings from more than forty-five countries, spanning eight decades, and installed in fourteen galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Surrealism Beyond Borders is sprawling, no question. But this is as much a function of conception as of size. The curators of the show—a team led by Stephanie D’Alessandro of the Met and Matthew Gale of the Tate Modern, where the show will travel after its New York run—set a mammoth task for themselves: to map how the artistic movement, officially born in Paris in the 1920s, was embraced and theorized globally, offering artists a language of political resistance and defiance of convention rooted in explorations of the unconscious and the antirational.

4Columns, November 19 2021

Arthur Jafa’s new film AGHDRA (2021), on view for four weeks in the cavernous space that used to house Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, is a departure from the artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer’s previous films, including the Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016), which debuted five years ago. Love Is the Message captured the imagination of so many who were looking on in horror as the anti-Blackness that permeates this country’s histories and institutions became excruciatingly apparent. (For others, it was, depressingly, no surprise.) Jafa dug deep into his vast collection of found images and video clips to create a work that was simultaneously a celebration of Black life, a mourning of Black death, and a reminder of Black perseverance and survival in the most inhospitable environments. AGHDRA carries on those themes, but now in the realm of near-abstraction. Collaborating with BUF, a French company specializing in computer-generated images, best known for their work on The Matrix, Jafa has concocted a digitally animated, eighty-five-minute film of deceptive simplicity that is truly and genuinely sublime in the Romantic sense: terribly beautiful—beautiful despite the terror, terrible despite the beauty. A beauty so intense that it forces us to confront deat

New York Times, November 18 2021

Portraiture is everywhere at the moment, in painting and photography alike, and some of the best of it has a specific aim: to make those who have been rendered invisible — on museum walls, in public culture, in political discourse — visible. This drive to honor and dignify people through representation comes at an ethical cost that often goes unremarked, though: Does exposing your sitters to the viewer’s gaze turn them into things to be looked at, emptied of their hidden complexities? Can you paint someone’s portrait while still insisting that vision cannot — perhaps even should not — capture all there is to know?

I don’t know any artist right now who is doing as much to address these questions as Jennifer Packer, whose retrospective is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. While painting her subjects, usually those closest to her, with a deep sensitivity, she allows them to stay just beyond our visual grasp. It’s an act of protectiveness and care that is moving and still leaves the viewer with much to contemplate.

4Columns, October 15 2021

Five years later, some things are different—a new administration and a year and a half of semi-lockdown due to Covid—and some things are depressingly the same: there’s still that rot, and still the need to struggle against injustice. But Rist’s work, as evidenced by a current exhibition, her first West Coast survey—Pipilotti Rist: Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor—hits entirely differently now: as not just welcome, but in some ways necessary. Consisting of forty-one videos and installations dating from her first art video, I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986), to a number of pieces from 2021 (some of which are being presented for the first time), the show is marked by a combination of ambition and sincerity that is curiously energizing, even exciting.

The New York Times, October 8, 2021

“Stacy Lynn Waddell’s first solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper in New York mines the idea of gold for its material properties; its cultural value as a marker of veneration, including in art such as Byzantine icons or Gustav Klimt paintings; and its role in the emergence of global, racial capitalism in 17th-century Europe. The show by this North Carolina-based artist is appropriately titled “Mettle” — once a variant spelling of the word “metal” — but also an indication of resilience in the face of inhospitable situations.”

New York Times, October 1 2021

Dispense with the opaque title and description of this show and throw yourself into the work, which explores the idea that while some people claim space (physical, digital, even imaginative) on their own terms, others are claimed by it — objectified because of gender, race, or other markers of difference. The 17 artists in the show, both veterans and relative newcomers, visualize their subjects in ways that, paradoxically, allow them to remain beyond the viewer’s gaze.

4Columns, September 17 2021

The title of Council’s exhibition is Bury Me Loose—a phrase that comes from a viral tweet that circulated earlier this year. User @yedoye_ wrote “damn a coffin costs $4000??? y’all can bury me loose.” The quip is a startlingly insightful punch in the gut: in the middle of a pandemic, when living seems impossible thanks to white supremacist capitalism and its ills—when Black people have been dying in inordinate numbers thanks to disparities in health status, access to health care, wealth, employment, wages, housing, income, and poverty—not even death is a viable escape: even if you jump ship, so to speak, someone is going to get a bill. Like @yedoye_, Council responds to this horror the only way possible: with a kind of campy, acid humor that plumbs untold depths of pain, trauma, and history.

New York Times, August 19 2021

In the paintings, drawings, sculpture and animations on view in “Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities” at the Morgan Library & Museum, East and West, along with other apparently opposed terms — masculine and feminine, abstraction and figuration, traditional and contemporary, here and there — morph and bleed into each other. One comes away hyper-aware of the ways that our worlds, past, present, and even future, are inextricably linked.

New York Times, August 17 2021

The invention of the daguerreotype process in 1839 was major news at the time, and almost immediately photography studios blossomed throughout the United States, offering a novel way for ordinary people to represent themselves, at a fraction of the cost of a painted portrait. Black photographers were at the forefront of this new technology, and Black people of means flocked to their studios.

“The transition from miniature painting to the photographic portrait is really a democratization of portraiture,” Jacob said. “But in order to explore that story, a collection has to have diverse photographers and the images have to have diverse subjects — that’s the only way to tell the story of democratization. We couldn’t tell this story before; now, by bringing in Larry’s collection, this is something can do now.”

Galleries West, July 24 2021

“Hill, who is Métis and lives and works on the unceded lands of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (otherwise known as Vancouver), is, shockingly, the first Indigenous artist to receive a solo exhibition at MoMA in the almost-century since its founding – on a site a couple of miles from a former Lenape village called Sapokanikan, or “tobacco field.” The artist’s decision to focus on tobacco allows her to tie together this and other histories while still hewing to her long-standing interests in concepts of land, property and history – both in terms of the conflict of settler culture with Indigenous ideas, and the survival of those ideas despite a centuries-long genocide.”

In Alma Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful, ed. Seth Feman and Jonathan Frederick Walz (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with the Columbus Museum and the Chrysler Museum of Art, 2021)

“No matter how Thomas talked about her work in formalist and structural terms—as a search for beauty rooted in her simultaneous love of nature and her enthusiasm for human technological innovation, as a sophisticated play of color relationships, as a fascination with pattern and touch—a recurring theme in writing on the artists during her life and after her death has been the question of what parts of the world filtered through those holly leaves and into her understanding of the purpose and meaning of her painting.”

New York Times, July 30 2021

Protest — even when it floods social media and grinds cities to a halt — is ephemeral. Art allows it to endure. The work by 10 artists in “The Protest and the Recuperation,” including painting, sculpture and community performance, are at once expressions of solidarity with collective actions and attempts to articulate their significance.

New York Times, July 15 2021

The location of the house made the project both challenging and necessary, according to Emily Jacir. The Israeli security barrier cordoning off Bethlehem and the West Bank runs down the middle of the road in front of the house, with a watchtower and main checkpoint one block from its door. The Aida, Dheisheh, and Azza refugee camps are close by. The street outside Dar Jacir’s wrought-iron gates is a flash point for confrontations between Palestinian protesters and Israeli security forces. Sometimes the clashes spill past those gates, as they did in May.

But persistence in the face of this reality is the point. “Yes, it’s a difficult location, but we’re not going to go anywhere,” said Aline Khoury, the center’s managing director. “When there are times of tear gas and clashes and whatnot, OK, we have our emergency situation, we get out, we take care of ourselves, we take care of our artists, but the next day we’re back in, we clean up, and we continue.”

Projects/Processes 2019, Serendipity Arts Festival (click on Essay 16 to access this text in full)

“We had met once or twice in person before we arrived in Panjim for the Serendipity Arts Festival, and it was there that we spent time together properly—the artist (Brendan) and the art critic (Aruna), both “Canadian-by-way-of”, both having lived for some significant time in New York, with many common friends and colleagues. Our geographical trajectories couldn't have been more different, but our simultaneous thrill and uneasiness at the notion of “homecoming” was profoundly similar. Our time in Panjim was saturated with thinking through the meaning of origins, thanks to our participation in Vivek Menezes’s curatorial project Mundo Goa, which gathered the work of six artists with ties (direct and circuitous) to the former Portuguese colony. After we left Goa, we entered into a correspondence, trying to make sense of our time in this strangely familiar place—Aruna had visited a few times before, solely as a tourist; Brendan had never been in Panjim, though he had family members there—and thinking about what it might tell us about how to be in the world. Somehow, it seemed more important to talk about food and family than about art per se—but all those things are of a piece, in the end.”