The stage is thus set for Hilma, a triptych of an opera about the eponymous Swedish artist and mystic, who was arguably the most famous member of The Five. This year marks the 80th anniversary of af Klint’s death, and Hilma, a coproduction of the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia and New Georges theater company in New York that opened in June, pays tribute to the visionary whose haecceity, whose essence, drew on both spiritual and scientific sources.

Af Klint’s monumental, instantly recognizable canvases, some as large as 13 feet, were the subject of a 2018 survey at the Guggenheim Museum. Famously, that exhibition drew more visitors than any other in the institution’s history. But before that show, her work, with spiritualistic proclivities and feminine palettes, was not always taken seriously. A member of only the second generation of women to have studied at the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm, af Klint (class of 1887) was until recently an unacknowledged footbridge to modernist abstraction. Her “mediumistic” paintings, which channeled messages she received from invisible forces about the nature of the universe, is echoed in the works of more famous contemporaries like Piet Mondrian and Vasily Kandinsky. At the time of her death in 1944, she left behind 1,200 abstract paintings—many aswirl with pastels, geometric shapes, and biomorphic forms—and 26,000 pages of writings, stipulating that her art was not to be exhibited for another 20 years.

Act I of Hilma is staged as a bio-musical, with a libretto by Kate Scelsa and music by Robert M. Johanson. Delivered largely in recitative, it primarily concerns af Klint’s work on the series of paintings known as “The Ten Largest,” which she produced in just a few weeks in 1907, when the artist was in her mid-forties. She was moved by an emissary of de Höga, or the High Masters, to create works that “move beyond the simple reproduction of reality” and “communicate Spirit’s glory.” We never see full-scale reproductions of the gargantuan paintings. Instead, we catch tantalizing glimpses of soft pink and “madder lake” (or red) hues through a door in an upstage wall. Under Morgan Green’s direction, af Klint (a terrific Kristen Sieh) also physicalizes the process of thoughts taking shape and gears spinning through swirling choreography. In an interlude, characters move counterclockwise as Amaliel (Evan Spigelman), a spiritual messenger, sings about concepts to be used as a starting point: truth, dignity, humility, and mercy. The historical af Klint imposed strict requirements upon herself while working on her paintings, abstaining from meat, alcohol, and salty food, all in the service of becoming an instrument of ecstasy. In a later scene, the vestal artist reveals the costs of austerity: “the division of my personality has recently become nearly unbearable”—a line borrowed from one of her notebooks.

The closest thing Hilma has to an antagonist is Rudolf Steiner (played by Johanson), founder of the Anthroposophical Society. In a meeting about halfway into the show that owes more to hearsay than historical evidence, he predicts that even if af Klint has no intention of selling her paintings, they will be dismissed by the wider public as “oversized folk art.” “The public will call this pretentious / Reject it as precious / They don’t want open-ended feelings,” he sings, after having flung his coat to the floor. In the closing act, which breaks the fourth wall, the cast frankly acknowledges that this portrait of Steiner might not be strictly accurate. As the art critic Julia Voss has written in her indispensable biography of the artist, “af Klint never wrote about being disappointed [by Steiner’s comments on her paintings] or that Steiner had suggested her paintings would only find an audience half a century later. She did not describe the encounter at all.” Writing into the historical lacunae, then, Hilma makes use of what the scholar Saidiya Hartman has called “critical fabulation,” a practice that accounts for silences or erasures in archival records by blending factual evidence with speculative narratives.

Though formally adventurous, Hilma is far from a perfect work. The lengthy is too expository and gives the opera a biographical overbite. And the members of The Five frequently sing over one another, so that it’s not always possible to catch their words. But at its best, Hilma shares qualities with other experimental musical theater performances like Heather Christian’s ravishing Oratorio for Living Things, which debuted in 2022 and sought out the connective tissue between the quantum, human, and cosmic. The point is not to master every message, but to submit to the ordinary afflatus of many hearts beating as one.

Nicole Eisenman’s painting Seder (2010) features objects familiar to anyone who has celebrated Passover: a shank bone, lettuce leaf, and boiled egg, all assembled on a Seder plate; an open horseradish container, its contents expectantly awaiting consumption on Hillel sandwiches; and open Haggadahs, their pages wilted from years of use. In the foreground, bulbous pink hands break a piece of matzah in two, a reference to the moment when one half is set aside for the afikoman. We are invited to view this Seder through the matzah breaker’s eyes, with Eisenman channeling a specifically Jewish perspective on the scene. 

What would it mean to see not just this one painting but Eisenman’s entire oeuvre through the lens of her Jewishness? That’s a rich question posed by curator Mark Godfrey in the catalog for Eisenman’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which has arrived stateside after a run in Europe. 

Prior surveys similar to this one have shown that Eisenman’s queerness and gender are inseparable from her art—something that can be seen in Seder, where, on the Seder plate, one can spot an orange, an untraditional symbol for women and members of the queer community who have historically been sidelined within the Jewish community. But her Judaism has largely been unconsidered, and that makes this show important. I came out of it thinking that Eisenman is one of the great Jewish artists working today. 

Eisenman’s Jewish perspective is most obvious in her work of the ’90s, which approaches religious material in a way that can only be called sacrilegious. Take her 1999 drawing Jesus Will You Shut Up, which depicts a guy at the wheel of a car being hounded by another driver trying to speed by. The titular phrase, commonly uttered in the face of a person who won’t stop honking, is here made literal, with a mopey-looking, crucified Jesus nearby. “OH SORRY,” Christ says in the drawing, to which the driver responds, “NOT YOU, YA IDIOT”—a dismissive remark that barely acknowledges Jesus’s presence. (Sadly not included in the MCA exhibition is Eisenman’s 1996 drawing Jesus Fucking Christ, which depicts exactly what its title implies.) 

Paintings of Jesus Christ over the centuries are generally meant to inspire deference and piousness, whereas Eisenman sees the subject in decidedly profane ways. In Lemonade Stand(1994), clusters of figures come together to piss into jugs and sell their urine to unsuspecting passersby. Mannerist painters like Tintoretto painted similar masses assembled to witness crucifixions and baptisms. Were he alive to stand before Eisenman’s Lemonade Stand, Tintoretto would probably be scandalized. 

In subverting the Christian-centric Western canon, Eisenman offers a Jewish point of view that would never have made it into the artistic record of, say, Tintoretto’s 16th-century Italy. And though the canon has been opened to people who may have once been seen as outsiders, Eisenman remains closely attuned to art history as an exclusionary force. 

The Chicago show marks the debut of The Visitors (2024), a painting in which a group of gallery-goers admires art that vaguely recalls Eisenman’s, including a canvas showing a woman masturbating. Everyone seems oblivious to the trench-coated men at the gallery’s door, who were lifted by Eisenman from a photograph of “Degenerate Art,” the Nazi-organized 1937 exhibition that sought to strike down modernist art that evinced a “perverse Jewish spirit.” Eisenman’s ancestors departed Vienna during the ’30s as the Nazis rose to power, and the artist has said, in an interview quoted in the catalog, that she considers it her “job” to “process the sadness of my family.” 

In The Visitors Eisenman shows that oppression still exists and that there are people out there who seek to deny queer and Jewish perspectives like her own. But the painting is hardly intended to inspire terror. At the bottom of the canvas, a figure in a maroon sweater—someone who looks like Eisenman herself—reaches a hand into the pocket of a man who appears to be a patron and pulls out his wallet, getting ready to take the money and run. As usual, she gets the last laugh. 

Since the early 2000s, Frazier has enlisted photography to transform everyday people and community organizers into statuesque figures. Her tender portraits evoke a dedication to world-building that centers around a love ethic. Most importantly, seeing Frazier’s expansive artworks in the near collapse of an empire calls attention to the fallacies of American hubris: that our country may never tremble, or more arrogantly put, that a single leader might keep us afloat.

It’s bittersweet to acknowledge that the best art comes from moments of indelible pain. That is how we are introduced to Frazier’s work: at the start of the exhibition, we meet a teenage Frazier who trains the camera on herself, and on the matriarchs in her family. She orients our gaze towards three generations of women all experiencing the repercussions of poverty and ecological contamination in the industrial town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Images and videos from her illustrious series, “The Notion of Family”—which she worked on for more than a decade between 2001 and 2014—are suspended in the air or glittered along the lavender walls that frame the predictable gentleness of feminine youth against the harsh realities of social, economic, and environmental dispositions. The black-and-white gelatin silver prints are presented on a modest scale that strikes the perfect balance between intimacy and immediacy. In Momme (2008), a petite double portrait of Frazier and her mother, Cynthia, their faces eclipse one another, aligning in such a way that they appear as one person. Self Portrait (United States Steel), 2010, pairs a color video diptych of Frazier nude from the waist up with reels of smoke from a Braddock factory looming in the air. Here, we witness the symbiotic relationship between her vulnerable body and our sickly landscape, both suffering from the chemical ills of capitalism. “The Notion of Family” is grounded in metaphors of decay, mirrors, and lineage, weaving autobiography with public investigation, a combination that remains consistent throughout her practice.

Seeing Frazier’s magnum opus of a series unfold throughout these first galleries helps solidify the importance of her legacy right away. It’s always a pleasure revisiting the catalyst that bore the beloved artist-activist, as it is an honor to glide throughout the exhibition and see how her work grew more refined in the series that follow.

Frazier has long designed intricate apparatuses for her photographs, with a keen eye for spatial design that mimics the way her pictures explore both people and their environments. The exhibition design comes through strongly in this survey, assigning each series a specific Pantone wall color to match its temperament. Gray walls affirm Frazier’s sophisticated critique, framing her performance piece LaToya Ruby Frazier Takes On Levi’s (2010). In that 6-minute video she echoes Pope.L’s performative street crawls to grate her Levi’s Canadian Tuxedo against pavement, a gesture dissecting various Levi’s ads that glorify working-class communities despite being a big corporation that depletes resources from workers to funnel wealth to the top. A soothing shade of sage surrounds “Flint Is Family in Three Acts” (2016–2019), in which two bedroom mirrors in Self-Portrait with Shea and Her Daughter Zion in the Bedroom Mirror, Newton, Mississippi (2017–19) thread together a trio of Black women affected by systematic and ecological disasters. The earth tone charts pathways between Braddock and Flint, Michigan, regions bound too by the Monongahela River. Frazier embeds Flint residents in a withering green, recalling a verdant environment turned feeble due to the effects of environmental racism. A muted ochre converts rooms dedicated to Baltimore-based community workers and labor activist Dolores Huerta into devotional chapels. And a deep violet orbits artworks from “On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford” (1985–2017), which pairs photographs by Frazier and fellow artist Ford, marking yet another example of her inclusive practice. Gradients of celestial colors from lapis to ruby illuminate Frazier’s cyanotypes and Ford’s archival inkjet prints while a voiceover—Ford’s voice—encompasses the room. By immersing her viewers in color and sound, Frazier foregrounds feeling to alchemize empathy for everyone caught in the center of America-manufactured destruction.

“Monuments of Solidarity” lovingly commemorates everyday people and community leaders, most notably Black women, who have labored at the heart of liberation fronts while harboring the aches of deconstruction, as seen in artworks like “More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland” (2021–22). Here, Frazier displays images of health care workers alongside their stories of working during Covid-19 on IV poles, converting photographs into sculptures with placards. Yes, stamina is required to indulge in every person’s story, but reading thoroughly ensures we aren’t macro-dosing amnesia when it comes to acknowledging the real crusaders of our times. In The Last Cruze (2019), Frazier imposes a similar format on a fiery floating hexagonal structure that undulates along its length, recalling an assembly line. Here, the conceptual documentarian catalogs the stories of former auto factory workers, including a field of diverse faces: her photos and testimonials include white people, looking beyond race to emphasize class solidarity.

Though Frazier is a rigorous chronicler of American landscapes, her work extends beyond photography to craft emotive environments that engulf her subjects—people and places that bear the risk of erasure and neglect. Together, these series form grammars of cultural identity emphasizes collectivity: not only wistful notions of familial togetherness, but also the power of organizing, with labor unions a frequent subject. Thankfully, Frazier’s is a necessary update to the iconography of America.

While oil culture is generally thought of as a distinctly modern phenomenon, Sawatzky’s research reveals human engagements with the material dating to the Neolithic era. Showing illustrative, colorful scenes of Neanderthals fashioning tools with sticky tar, bitumen mortar in Mesopotamian structures, Chinese naphtha stoves, and eventually the US automotive industry, the work reveals the ways oil has permeated human production across cultures. Dinosaurs dancing along the edge of Sawatzky’s tapestry remind us of the 65-million-year-old source of the fossil fuels we are so rapidly burning.

Sawatzky was inspired by the iconic Bayeux Tapestry, and her work borrows a number of conceits from that 11th-century account of a Norman conquest, including its linear narrative and the playful dialogue between the scrolling, horizontal storyline and the border of the image. In the Bayeux Tapestry, the arrival of Hayley’s Comet causes a break in the frame. But Sawatzky’s story offers no such moment of rupture pinpointing the moment when it all went wrong, marking the dawn of the Anthropocene. Instead, it emphasizes a continually unfolding story in which everyone has a role to play.

The slowness of Sawatzky’s embroidery recalls writer Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, a way of describing the cumulative, incremental effects of climate change. Environmental change is often insidious and unseen. “Displacement” finds ways to help us visualize that violence regardless, focusing on human migration, adaptation, and extinction. In Akea Brionne’s Begin Again: Land of Enchantment (2024), an embellished tapestry based on a photograph, the artist references her own family’s migration from Belize to Honduras to New Orleans, moves often driven by shifting waterways that induced both flooding and drought. Three women wait with stuffed suitcases in a desert landscape. Their sequined garments, incongruous with the outdoor scene, suggest both a resilient dreamscape and an alienation from the landscape that results from constant displacement.

In his book Slow Violence and The Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Nixon emphasizes the particular injustice of environmental crises precipitated by the actions of the wealthy but felt most acutely by the poor for whom migration is a means of survival. At MAAM, the universal history proposed by Sawatzky’s tapestry is counterbalanced by artists who tell specific stories about the uneven realities of climate change. Nguyen Smith’s Bundle House Borderlines No. 3 (Isle de Tribamartica), from 2017, disaggregates the idea of a singular Caribbean by way of a fantastical hand drawn and collaged map that combines the shorelines of Trinidad, Cuba, Martinique, Haiti, and Jamaica. Referencing the antiquated style of colonial cartography and the attendant misunderstandings of local geographies, Smith asks viewers to think about what they really know about the Caribbean—a region he terms “ground zero” of climate disaster—in a work laced with Trinidadian and Zambian soil. Sculptures on view nearby model “bundle houses” made of found objects, small evocations of the scavenger existence required in the wake of disaster.

Mapping is likewise central to the critical charge of Imani Jacqueline Brown’s work, What remains at the ends of the earth? (2022). She begins, like Sawatzky, with the long history of oil, but here she traces the geographic overlap of oil fields with colonial plantations in coastal Louisiana. Some of the most polluting petrochemical refineries in the US, Brown’s research reveals, occupy former sugarcane fields. Tracking the spatial intersections between plantation slavery and extractive capitalism demonstrates the systemic and ongoing exploitation of both people and place in a region so polluted that it is colloquially known as “Cancer Alley.” Brown’s video installation moves between the cold precision of aerial photography, the swirling iridescence of oily waters, and a graphic plotting of oil and gas networks that resembles the constellations that guided enslaved peoples out of these very sites. The shining stars evoke resistance in the face of disaster, a resistance Brown also finds in the roots of magnolia and willow trees planted by enslaved peoples. Such roots are what hold the fragile, constantly eroding soil in place. Brown, like many artists in “Displacement,” promotes attention to the human realities and resiliencies that accompany living through a time of constant change.

Ramberg’s preoccupation with psychosexual content was clear from the beginning. Six small paintings from her undergraduate years in the exhibition (which runs through August 11 before traveling to the Hammer Museum in October and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2025) show a figure cut off at the head and waist shyly disrobing. The series conveys the emotional vulnerability of a young woman revealing a secret self in art. Revelations abound in the exhibition, above all, the daunting force of Ramberg’s imagination as she transforms images gleaned from comics and catalogs into artworks where stylized coifs become urns and then corsets, bodies read as broken furniture, shiny hair doubles as wood, and muscle tissue provides material for tailored suits and jackets. She portrays the female body in ways tantalizing, rebellious, and problematic: encased in fetishistic lingerie, seductive, submissive.

Shame is a subtext in the early work, thematized in “Skin Pix” (1969), a series of heads in which each figure attempts to hide her rash-ridden face. In one painting, Rose’s Woe, rosacea afflicts a weeping figure veiled by a handkerchief, red roses decorate the wallpaper behind her, and real sugar roses adorn the painting’s faux woodgrain frame. The embarrassing inflammation is a metaphor: “Skin Pix” puns on “skin flicks,” pornographic films trafficking in illicit desire, while the redundant roses suggest female sexuality—here conceived as ailment. Elsewhere, Ramberg associates the flower with lacy undergarments and swollen high-heeled pumps, for example in Belle Rêve (1969), which also depicts a cloche-hatted head seen from the rear. A black-gloved hand reaches up to pat the luxuriant hairdo.

Disembodied hands become a recurring motif in paintings and drawings of the 1970s, inspired by gestures the artist studied in Japanese prints and recorded in her notebooks. Hands in Ramberg’s work clutch white kerchiefs or are bound by black satin straps. Polished red nails, an anachronism at a time when the “natural” look was in style, hark back to women’s fashion during the artist’s childhood. Eroticization of the hands may relate to memories of a mother’s touch, early sensuous experiences of being cleaned, cradled, caressed. The retro garments that mold and constrict the bodies in Ramberg’s provocative paintings—pointy brassieres, girdles, and underarm shields—date to her mother’s generation, and in an interview in 1990, she remembered her conflicted wonderment when as a girl she watched her mother put them on: “I thought it was fascinating … I thought it was awful.” Brilliantly, she reproduces this ambivalence for the viewer, delivering a potent frisson with pictures like Waiting Lady (1972), with its scantily clad figure doubled over, apparently awaiting punishment. The image is riveting yet unnerving because it suggests woman’s humiliation and abuse. Female masochism recalls the passive condition of infancy—having things done to one’s body, like it or not—and on another account, stems from social conditioning: women must repress aggressive impulses, which then morph into masochistic fantasies turned inward toward the self.

The plethora of social demands on women became Ramberg’s subject in the early 1980s. Haunted by the perennial tension for female artists between motherhood and career, she created a series of imposing, heterogeneous figures whose jumbled parts symbolize multiple female roles and split allegiances. In Hearing (1981), the assemblage consists of half a short-sleeved blazer, black nylons, and one sexy and one hugely cumbersome thigh-high boot; she expels a tiny, fully dressed adult from between her legs, while a miniature jacket (read: baby) clings to her side and a pair of trousers (husband?) hangs around her neck. In real life, Ramberg juggled work and family, domestic activities and artmaking. Sewing straddled both realms; she made clothes for herself and her husband and son, as well as quilts for her own aesthetic pleasure. For a time in the mid-’80s, quilting replaced painting in her studio practice.

Several of these monumental textiles feature in the exhibition, which concludes with a group of loosely painted abstractions, a dramatic stylistic departure from what had come before. Whereas the figurative paintings had been on Masonite, with ultrasmooth surfaces and crisp forms, here Ramberg adopted a canvas support, more yielding to the touch. In these linear, symmetrical, diagrammatic pictures, in a grisaille palette reminiscent of X-rays, she schematized the torsos that she subjected in her sketchbooks to untold formal variations: bustier, vase, armor, chairback. Over several pages, Ramberg drew and inventively redrew the thoracic cavity of the agonized body in Italian crucifixions, making the depression framed by the ribcage into a positive, phallic form.

Moreover, she had played in paintings of the ’70s with penile totems she called “Tall Ticklers,” sheathed in lace and tufted with fur, and with uterine forms anthropomorphized as confrontational figures where fallopian tubes become arms and the birth canal, a pair of legs. With the sketchbooks now on view for the first time along with the late paintings, one can see how Ramberg envisioned in the abstractions an internal bodily space either penetrated by or, better, having incorporated the phallus. Hers was a coherent project: to explore female experience and desire and, ultimately, to conflate feminine creativity and masculinist power. 

What Pedrosa offers is a cultural cacophony: proof that we can no longer pretend to live in a monoculture. The show includes three “Nucleo Storico” sections focused on 20th-century works from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. One section is titled “Abstractions,” another “Portraits”: these two genres have often feuded, especially over political efficacy, but here, no aesthetic category is hierarchically favored over another, and no artist is given prominence. Looking at so much art hung salon-style in gray rooms, the viewer is overwhelmed and unsure where to focus, as if attending an art fair. Hierarchy is abolished.

As a result, the underappreciated artists championed here are difficult to adequately appreciate. While the show welcomes overlooked perspectives from under-recognized artists, for the most part, Pedrosa stops short of allowing those perspectives to transform any norms. The “Abstractions” and “Portraits” sections are themed unimaginatively, even conservatively.

The third “Nucleo Storico” section, however, has more teeth. Titled “Italians Everywhere,” it features works as seemingly innocuous as a painting of a shoe by Domenico Gnoli. But taken together, the works are a sly retort to Italy’s current anti-immigration right-wing government, showing that Italians have been foreigners too. The section enlists a radical if historical rethinking of the exhibition format: paintings are hung on transparent easels designed in 1968 by the Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, herself an expat. She originally designed them for the Museum of Art São Paulo, where Pedrosa is director, to eradicate hierarchy. Taking paintings off the walls, she did away with the chronological and geographic structures that tend to dictate museological narratives, enabling heterogeneous canvases to meld into a single view.

But outside of the “Italians Everywhere” section, there is considerably less melding in Pedrosa’s art salad—which seems to be the point. The artists he has included hardly share a conversation: many work(ed) in contexts that are indifferent to or lack access to academic art training, such as Indigenous communities (André Taniki), psychiatric institutions (Aloïse Corbaz), or regions of the world less invested in the distinction between high and vernacular art (Esther Mahlangu).

One such artist, Santiago Yahuarcani, worked for decades before he began exhibiting outside the Uitoto Nation in Northern Amazonia. His surrealist renderings of humanoid figures, done on tree bark, are some of the best works in the show.

Yet looking at Yahuarcani’s work and at others clearly not envisioned for a viewer like myself, I began to wonder: who benefits most from all this inclusion, and at what expense? Many of the artists in the show are no longer alive, and many have spent much of their careers indifferent to exhibitions like the Venice Biennale, working in other contexts instead. Some addressed sacred knowledge never meant to be shared. In cases like those, are artists—or their communities or heirs—the foremost beneficiaries? Or might it be art dealers and/or well-meaning liberals looking to learn about diverse experiences who stand to gain?

The answer, of course, is that it depends. But throughout, representation and inclusion are positioned as a de facto positive for artists. It’s a notable counterpoint to this year’s Whitney Biennial, a show with its own diverse roster wherein curators showcased artists who have opted for opacity over representation in works that question the ethics of legibility and of being on display.

Throughout “Foreigners Everywhere,” the viewer is asked to learn about perspectives unlike their own, rather than offer aesthetic judgments. With over 300 very different artists, each visitor is bound to encounter work for which they are not the target audience—and for which they lack the adequate context to assess.

Learning, of course, is generally considered a constructive pastime, so long as it does not entail the kind of extractive relations that anthropological exhibitions and World Fairs too often risk. Pedrosa largely shies away from addressing this risk. Instead, he posits inclusion in such an esteemed exhibition as inherently good—never mind the lengthy history of exhibiting institutions conquering the world and then showing off the spoils.

In spite of this, a couple of living artists who are invested in the fraught category that is “art” contributed work expressing skepticism toward this kind of conquering. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger greets visitors to the Arsenale with a giant polyptych. To make the work, the Mexican artist hired her Indigenous family members to embroider scenes onto her painted canvases, calling the act a kind of “semiological vandalism”—poking literal holes in the perceived preciousness of painting as reified by Europeans and contorted to justify white supremacy, as if other cultures lacking painting-filled museums are somehow inferior. Her work is filled with exuberance and rage by way of embroidered lesbian orgies, menacing machinery emitting blood-red clouds, and watermelons showing solidarity with Palestine. Jaeger is too smart and savvy simply to express gratitude for inclusion on the terms of the colonial institution offering it: her work advocates a shift in values instead.

IF PLURALITY IS PEDROSA’S POINT, one palpable side effect is the sense of curatorial box-checking, especially where mediums are concerned. While the exhibition includes some real discoveries in the mediums of painting and fiber—I liked Anna Zemánková, Huguette Caland, and Ahmed Morsi—selections in photography and video feel simply uninspired. Long videos were tucked away at the end of the lengthy Arsenale, where viewers are bound to arrive depleted of time and attention.

Still, the something-for-everyone approach is an understandable reaction to the bad rap that judgment has been given of late. As in so many fields, white Euro-American men have largely controlled the rules of what constitutes good art, and these rules conveniently reified their own superiority, much as the wine-classifying system developed in France continues to proffer that French wine is the best. In response, we are witnessing backlash to the very notion of judgment itself: all biases are problematic, all favoritism passé.

Which is tricky, as historically, discernment has been the curator’s job. Curators are supposed to be aesthetes with finely tuned sensibilities, though this has predictably proven elitist, with the role long reserved for those with access to things like art history degrees and art collections. To avoid this privileged privileging, Pedrosa offers something for everyone: if all aesthetic decisions need to be understood from a particular vantage, then all are valid. In turn, the viewer is asked to play the role of learner, save for the few cases where they feel “seen.” (Art history nerds will recognize this proposition as Warburgian.)

Turning to relativism when dismantling canons or any master narrative is understandable. But it is also less convincing—and more disappointing—than proposing new, more nuanced narratives. The critic Becca Rothfeld describes this kind of cultural egalitarianism as “misplaced” in her new book, All Things Are Too Small, calling it a distraction from the left’s long-held mission of economic equality. In the absence of globally redistributed wealth, she writes, “the democratization of culture is a consolation prize” that “not only fails to make anything happen, but confirms our impotence, our deep recognition that nothing is happening.” That is certainly how I felt while taking in the democratized culture of the Venice Biennale, pounding cappuccinos and looking at art with Trump on trial and a genocide underway.

More than a distraction, cultural egalitarianism is also “wretched,” per Rothfeld. She writes that “the kinds of creatures for whom love and art mean anything at all are the kind with biases and aversions.” To love something passionately, she adds, is to love something else less—or not at all.

There are advantages to certain prejudices. In fact, I thought the best parts of the Venice Biennale relate to the one bias the exhibition reveals: Pedrosa gives outsize attention to fiber art in the works he selected from the 20th century. Works by Susanne Wenger, Olga de Amaral, and Pacita Abad are some of the best in the show. These and other inclusions make a strong case for the formal brilliance of women who were excluded from the canon in their day. Unfortunately, Pedrosa does not carry this thread through to this century, as astonishingly few young fiber artists are included, given the lineage he charts—artists who like Jaeger, might have something to say about the power dynamics at play.

“FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE” HAS RECEIVED few positive reviews. Though I think much of the criticism leans frighteningly conservative, I also find the show hard to defend—and there are worse consequences than a merely OK exhibition. In the New York Times, Jason Farago framed the show as fodder for his repeated claim that culture has somehow ended, now that the internet has enabled us to have many simultaneous conversations that collapse time and space into a cacophony. (That this post-monocultural era also occurs at a time when the art world is more diverse than ever before remains the elephant ever looming in Farago’s room.) Though I think his doomsaying is wrong, I also fear that “Foreigners Everywhere,” with its something-for-everyone, anything-goes approach disguised as democratizing culture, can be contorted to feed agendas like his.

A show featuring artists with a wide range of cultural backgrounds doesn’t have to be a relativistic cacophony: it can be both biased and inclusive. Sohrab Mohebbi achieved this balance when he curated the most recent edition of the Carnegie International, which made a beautiful and inspiring case for political abstraction. The show advocated for ingenious things abstract artists do: adapt to forms of oppression with clandestine messages, respond to vernacurlar patterns and their cultural histories, and give form to essential human emotions. Pedrosa’s breed of inclusion instrumentalizes artists to make a political point, at times undermining art itself; Mohebbi’s made a case instead for the power of artwork—and all the imperfect, slow ways art might engage the political sphere. By contextualizing these engaged abstractionists among coconspirators, he enhanced their impact.

In both shows, it was the artists who did the most inspiring work to grapple with the inherently fraught task of trying to bring non-Western and anti-colonial perspectives into the imperialist inventions that are the museum and the Biennale. A standout in Venice is Lauren Halsey, whose concrete columns tower outside the Arsenale , impressed with reliefs that borrow from the vernacular funk of her neighborhood, South Central Los Angeles. Handmade signs from local businesses, vivacious and full of character, form the trunks; the capitals are sculptural portraits of local friends made monumental. The columns are decidedly Egyptian in style, asserting the foundational contributions of Black culture and forming a continuum between the vernacular contributions of both the ancient society and the artist’s own community.

Halsey does not make Pedrosa’s mistake of trying to uplift vernacular aesthetics for a fine art context which, while endeavoring to flatten certain kinds of hierarchies, can ultimately reinforce them instead. Halsey is clear-eyed about how approaches that may seem egalitarian can also be extractive, neoliberal rather than democratic. She plays the game her way, using proceeds from her work to fund food-justice initiatives in her community and to redistribute wealth. She refuses to allow the powers that be to pat themselves on the back while distracting from the world’s real problems.   

Imperfect Solidarities, an essay-length book by writer and art critic Aruna D’Souza, puts forth an argument interrogating why we are moved to act in solidarity with others. Sparked by the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the surrounding social media commentary on all sides, D’Souza identifies the persistent—and misguided—belief in  empathy as key to political action in our neoliberal era. Empathy, she argues, values the emotional, atomized response of the individual witness over the systemic violence faced by the oppressed.

Empathy is a beguiling, buzzy term. Generally, and as D’Souza uses it here, it refers to this idea that we might understand the feelings of others—and perhaps even feel their emotions as our own. As embraced by pop-psychology and corporations alike, empathy is thought to promise a multitude of rewards: workplace advantages, strengthened relationships, and perhaps most enticingly, unity across difference. Moving the hearts of a compassionate public—the hearts of the hegemony, in other words—empathy, like its close correlate, love, is often positioned as the foremost force of revolutions.

D’Souza is wary of empathy as a political tool: too close to the ego, too satisfied by our own satisfaction, it prevents us from doing the difficult work of appreciating difference and challenge. In Imperfect Solidarities, D’Souza argues instead for a politics based in care. (One might also use the unglamorous term “duty,” though it does not appear in her book.) She writes: “I dream of a world in which we act not from a love of our fellow humans (and, for that matter, nonhumans), but from something much more difficult: an obligation to care for each other whether or not we empathize with them.” What would a political solidarity uninformed by understanding or agreement, and instead framed around a bare minimum of respect for life and dignity, look like?

D’Souza is first and foremost a critic, a writer deeply engaged with the visual arts. Her practice observes how contemporary art’s viewership, curation, and institutional housing—or lack thereof—intersect to provide a portrait of our times. Her book Whitewalling, published in 2018 by Badlands Unlimited, explored the relationship between art, race, and protest through three “acts,” or case studies: Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till in the 2017 Whitney Biennial; a 1979 show at The Artist’s Space titled with a racial slur; and a 1969 show at the Met titled “Harlem on My Mind,” which featured no Black artists.

Imperfect Solidarities offers new modes of thinking—and methods for solidarity—through the lens of contemporary art. The work of engaging with art, particularly that which does not cater to easy narratives, with its lack of straightforward metaphor, its glancing, sideways purview, can ask us to think in more slippery, radical, connective ways. The book’s premise prepares the reader for the author’s excellent, incisive commentary, which—sardonic at times, earnest at others—encourages us to think wider, allusively, imaginatively, over borders and boundaries.

D’Souza divides the book into four chapters, each hinging on a key concept. Amitav Ghosh’s novel Sea of Poppies (2008) is enlisted to discuss the merits of mis- and un-translation. Candice Breitz’s 2016 installation Love Story, which sets the performances of Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore opposite the real-life stories from six asylum seekers from which the actors’ monologues are drawn, invites an exploration of how empathy is often angled toward white viewers. And in a useful turn toward the curatorial, the 1980 A.I.R. show, “Dialectics of Isolation,” curated by Ana Mendieta, Kazuko Miyamoto, and Zarina Hashmi, evokes, along with its critical reception, a discussion of intersectionality and organizing across difference.

The book’s third chapter, “Connecting through Opacity,” is perhaps its most compelling: drawing upon the theorist Edouard Glissant’s writing on the sovereign subject’s “right to opacity,” D’Souza argues for the need to respect what in the other cannot be translated, spoken, or understood. What would it be like to not understand—and extend our hands in solidarity regardless? What would it be like to think of knowledge as no longer an extractive act, but a mutually respectful exchange, minimal as that exchange might be? Here, D’Souza references the artists Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Stephanie Syjuco as examples of artists interested in opacity. Syjuco’s photographic intervention upon archival photographs of Filipino “villagers” relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, to be exhibited in the 1904 World’s Fair, is particularly poignant. Syjuco’s hands, alive against the black and white archive, protect the faces of the photographed subjects, restoring their dignity, their private selves; the gesture reads simultaneously as a shield and a caress.

In its concision and power—nearly every sentence is a banger; whole swathes of the introduction in particular are eminently quotable—Imperfect Solidarities is reminiscent of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, which deals with similar questions, and was itself a response to Virginia Woolf’s anti-war pamphlet Three Guineas. Where D’Souza’s text provides a valuable addition to this canon is her specific perspective: critical of the white hegemony, and writing toward a different—and more diverse—audience than Woolf or Sontag were. D’Souza’s politics, rather than argue for what ought to be commonly held rights, take the dismantling of white supremacy and systems of oppression as their baseline.

The argument D’Souza proposes is stubbornly tautological: We must care for living beings because they are alive; we must care for this planet because it is our home. This care is stolid, unsexy, and unrewarding. Imperfect Solidarities does not necessarily imagine what is to come, but instead advocates for a means of relating that might prove flexible enough to withstand all events and consequences. Perhaps one way forward is to reject the calls from our egos, the parts of us that are most swayed and moved by ease and familiarity, in order to reject any system, however temporarily comfortably it may keep us, that does not allow for the flourishing of every living being.

When Realism was born in the mid 19th century, everyday scenes elbowed their way into the Western canon. Before that, religious and history painting had largely reigned supreme. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Gustave Courbet and his ilk, galvanized by a successful proletariat struggle, began focusing instead on “real” life, painting the quotidian experiences of workers and peasants with a kind of gritty naturalism.

In “Day for Night: New American Realism” at the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica in Rome, curator Massimiliano Gioni redefines Realism for the present, with all the contemporary works on view from the extensive collection of Tony and Elham Salamé of Beirut’s Aishti Foundation. Featuring some 100 artists, the show is a blockbuster survey of American figurative painting made over the last 20 years. Brimming with masterpieces, it also includes a few abstract canvases and works in other mediums scattered about. In the exhibition’s most conventionally Realist painting, Kids with Slime (2019), Jill Mulleady portrays the hard work of motherhood. The woman pictured has twice as many children who require attention as she does arms: one is about to topple out of the stroller, another is covered in green slime, and a third has decided to have a seat on a street corner. Toys are strewn everywhere, and the fourth kid, the one she holds in a loose grip, is fidgeting, clearly plotting an escape.

Elsewhere, the definition of “Realism” begins to stretch, with the show factoring in countless spinoffs of the genre introduced long after the mid 19th century. Lorna Simpson and David Salle reference Italian neorealist cinema (the show’s title refers to a camera technique that is a classic of the genre). Nicole Eisenman’s figures have blocky limbs recalling Socialist Realism. And Josh Kline extrapolates current climate-change conditions in a work of hysterical realism, with a wax sculpture of a house that slowly melts over the course of the show. Louise Bonnet’s grotesque cartoons, smooth-skinned with protruding veins, fit the hysterical realist bill, too.

Sometimes, the definition of “Realism” stretches even further—perhaps too far. It is difficult to see how abstract painters like Charline von Heyl or Jacqueline Humphries are Realist in any form, even as their canvases delight. And maybe stretched definitions are appropriate, given that, in American life and art, we are struggling to share any sense of collective reality. Truth is social, and news is fake. Gioni’s narrative rightly suggests that Courbet’s Realism has been refracted: once a mirror, now a disco ball. And necessarily so: now, photography is easily accessible, and it is a better medium for portraying proletariat life since photographs are both more “real” and less burdened by bourgeois trappings.

Rolling with this elastic expansion of Realism, Cameron Rowland’s 49-51 Chambers Street – Basement, New York, NY 10007 (2014) is the most “real” work in the show: a table that was produced by incarcerated laborers in New York, who were paid around $1 per hour, perhaps less. Rowland has not altered the table at all, save for pairing it with an informative handout. The table is displayed in the building’s top floor, an opulent apartment from the Rococo era—the “let them eat cake” period that preceded the French Revolution that birthed Realism. There, it is joined by decadent wallpapers and chandeliers. The stark juxtaposition belies inequality in a move that powerfully retains the class politics of Courbet’s Realism, and the jarring contrast makes it easy to see why Rowland tends to rent works rather than sell them to museums or collectors.

The Rococo apartment, like one other mostly segregated gallery on the museum’s ground floor, focuses on work by Black artists. Many of the works are abstractions that address social issues, like Rick Lowe’s paintings of maps of red-lined neighborhoods and Mark Bradford’s Rat Catcher of Hamelin I (2011), an abstraction that, on close inspection, reveals itself to be a collage made of posters and other materials culled from his urban environs. These works are Realist not in style but in content: importantly, they retain the important class politics of the original Realists. Because if the show is about America now … well, the class struggle is real. The Rococo framing astutely captures our moment of an empire seemingly on the brink of collapse—and going down decadently.

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