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. 

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. 

Related Articles

Synthetic Surrealism

Tea on Fur, Wet Fur on Lips

Parícutin became a sensation, particularly among scientists, but also among Mexico’s artists. Many of the country’s Surrealists made pilgrimages to the site. One of those reportedly enchanted by the scene was Remedios Varo, the Spanish painter who’d emigrated to Mexico in 1941. In The Flutist (1955), Varo includes, in the background, a craggy volcano partly obscured by a tumult of clouds rendered in murky jewel tones—sapphire, jade, topaz. Her roiling sky looks almost oxidized, the effect of decalcomania, a popular Surrealist technique in which material is pressed against wet paint and then quickly pulled away to leave behind a chance texture. The volcano is but one small feature in this richly imagined canvas, but it evokes the mix of nature, science, and something like the magic of the unknown that suffuses all of Varo’s work.

In “Science Fictions,” the Art Institute of Chicago presents more than 60 of Varo’s paintings and drawings, all made between 1955 and 1963, the year she died of a heart attack at 54. Long revered in Latin America, Varo has entered the canon more slowly in the United States. This is her first exhibition here in more than two decades. Like other female Surrealists, especially her friend and fellow émigré Leonora Carrington, who shares a similar animism and mystical iconography, Varo’s achievements are still being measured. This show makes an irrefutable case for her technical mastery while also affirming her as a first-rate fabulist whose disparate influences—chivalric romance, medieval architecture, tarot, psychology, astronomy, and much more—cohere into a visionary whole.

The title of the exhibition alludes to Varo’s connoisseurship of science fiction, evinced by the volumes of Aldous Huxley and Ray Bradbury from her personal library that are on view. But the title also suggests the extent to which many of her paintings smudge the boundaries between science and the occult. In Creation of the Birds (1957), a humanoid owl paints a bird that takes flight off the page, perhaps animated by the starlight refracted through a prism in the owl’s hand. The paint is piped in via metal tubes connected to two nearby biomorphic green orbs, which are themselves fed by thin glass plumbing that zigzags through a portal in the wall. Sympathy (1955) depicts a similar transfer of life force. A figure who, like most of Varo’s characters, appears androgynous sits at a table and strokes an orange cat that’s seemingly in motion, simultaneously hypnotized and convulsed by its owner’s attention. A geometry of finely incised electrical currents crisscrosses the air, emanating from the human’s fingertips and flaming head. Both paintings conjure a moment of alchemy in which people call on wild talents or esoteric knowledge to transform their world.

Varo was twice a refugee: first from the Spanish Civil War, then again from the Nazi terror in Europe. As if dramatizing this exile, many of her paintings feature subjects in medias res, riding bicycles, as in Toward the Tower (1960), or piloting phantasmagoric wheeled-winged-finned contraptions, as in Caravan (1955), Discovery (1956), or Starship (1960). Homo Rodans (1959), a sculpture made of fish and poultry bones, purports to be the skeleton of a creature that balanced on a wheel rather than legs. Other works, such as Vagabond (1957), are portraits of rustic dandies who could have just clattered out of some fairytale’s primeval forest. Varo heightens the otherworldliness by giving her vagabond a disproportionate body—his torso is too long, his arm is too low—and by ensconcing him in a sort of wheeled cocoon that doubles as an architectural overcoat and a jury-rigged safehold. He peers out from behind wooden doors that swing open like a cupboard.

As with many Surrealists, Varo’s images evade description. They seem merely whimsical when summarized, but her technical perfection edges them toward sublimity. In person, her paintings can appear textured, corroded, or exquisitely detailed—sometimes all at once. As an adherent of chance and mysticism, Varo experimented with unconventional methods. She scratched fine lines into her canvases with quartz crystals, and she used soufflage, the Surrealist trick of blowing wet paint to create random patterns.

Yet, her work is also highly controlled and rehearsed. She began with full-scale sketches on translucent paper, called cartoons, which she then transferred to hardboard by covering the back of the paper with graphite and retracing the image. The exhibition includes several of these preparatory drawings along with their finished versions, offering revelatory before-and-after access to Varo’s artistic practice. Like Parícutin, Varo’s bewitching visions seemed to erupt from deep down—a psychic outflow that remains a wonder.

But for all their enigmas, Varo’s paintings have an internal logic and narrative potency. Her storytelling prowess is most ambitiously realized in a suite of three canvases from 1960–61. In Toward the Tower, a brood of doppelgänger blondes in tunics bicycle behind a mother superior figure. The central blonde doesn’t have the chloroformed expression of her sisters, and her coif is unkempt, suggesting she’s not completely brainwashed like the others. In Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle (1961), thesame women occupy a partly open belfry, embroidering vast bolts of cloth that tumble forth from the tower and become the outlying landscape, pictured here in a skewed aerial view of spindly trees, Italianate towers, and seas that defy any horizon. In the last panel, The Escape (1961), our rogue blonde has fled and appears with another figure, perhaps a lover, cruising through a realm of brackish fog and jagged cliffs in a vehicle that resembles a bristly clamshell. The series, hung on the exhibition’s back wall, is a showstopping sequence, whether read as a feminist fantasy or a parable of artistic creation.

“Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago conveys these complexities with rigor, beauty, and aplomb. The exhibition (curated by MCA’s Carla Acevedo-Yates) includes works by 37 artists who are from, or born or based in, the Caribbean, along with a few “provocations,” or inclusion of artists not strictly from the region, that allude to shared histories and methods of movement, dislocation, and displacement. With this, the show aims to question the notion of the regional exhibition by responding to the history of Caribbean exhibitions, from the 1990s to the present, that have been characterized by multiculturalism and globalization. The show’s title nods to weather as a metaphor for changing forms in artistic practice, and to the Caribbean as a bellwether of our times.

The exhibition deftly claims space by incorporating every bit of it available. Organized by interconnected themes such as territories, formal rhythms, exchanges, and traces, the show provides enough points of reference while also letting the viewer free-associate and consider what Acevedo-Yates calls the “mechanics of diaspora,” with some of the works emphasizing formal and geographical movement as metaphor for transformation.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (1995), a black-and-white photograph of a lone bird flying in a cloudy sky, is featured right outside the exhibition’s galleries, as well as in various sites across Chicago. From the MCA’s own loading dock to several stations along the city’s elevated rail system, the piece entices viewers to imagine themselves as the bird: perhaps free, alone, or migrating. Similarly exhibited as a prelude to the show in a space unto itself is a masterful seven-channel video installation by Deborah Jack titled the fecund, the lush and the salted land waits for a harvest…her people…ripe with promise, wait until the next blowing season (2022). The immersive installation features colorful shots filmed around Jack’s mother’s home in St. Maarten overlapping black-and-white segments from a 1948 Dutch documentary about the island. The videos show colonial archival footage of salt-mining along with the personal archive of the sky, pomegranate trees, sea foam, and the ocean along the shoreline. The images highlight the shore as a place of identity-formation and a signifier of in-betweenness for people who exist within the diasporas. To someone from an island, the shore can be a place of connection as well as a boundary, and the dichotomy is echoed by the emphasis on salt-mining as an extractive economy symbolic of both corrosion and preservation.

The shore is also a protagonist in one of the most evocative symbolic images in the exhibition, of Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez performing by the north shore of Puerto Rico, repeatedly throwing her painting Soy isla (I Am an Island) into the Atlantic Ocean. The resulting video, encuentrismo – ofrenda o retorno (encounter –offering or return) is displayed alongside the warped painting at the beginning of the exhibition, and the artist’s action evokes the ritual offerings to Yemayá, the Yoruba goddess of the sea. The shore is where Sánchez finds herself.

Some of the most accomplished works in the exhibition are newly commissioned pieces by Alia Farid, Marton Robinson, and Sandra Brewster that take full advantage of the barrel vault architecture of MCA Chicago’s halls, which seem to enshrine the pieces. In Blur – Wilson Harris (2022), Brewster presents a blurred portrait of the Guyana-born writer that was rubbed into the museum’s walls, suggesting connections between Harris’s own nonlinear writing as a vehicle for unknowability and Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity.” Meanwhile, Farid’s Mezquitas de Puerto Rico (2022) is a depiction of an imagined landscape of mosques and Islamic centers in Puerto Rico, as interpreted by textile artists from Iran in the form of a gigantic prayer rug. This work shares space with Christopher Cozier’s Gas Men (2014), a video installation featuring two men in business suits who perform cowboy-like poses and tricks by spinning gas nozzles above their heads or pointing menacingly at each other in a B-movie version of corporate masculinity. These works accentuate underrepresented realities of the Caribbean: while Kuwait-born Farid’s points out that the area is home to a significant number of Arab peoples, Trinidad-born Cozier centers his country’s oil production at the intersection of global industry, as yet another example of an extractive economy that permeates post-independence life.

The earliest piece in the exhibition is David Medalla’s Cloud Canyons (1963–2014), consisting of plastic tubes that emit soap bubbles in ways that constantly change the work’s form and offer a hypnotizing break in the middle of the show. The Philippines-born artist’s ever-changing diasporic identity, which encompasses his multiple experiences of migration, resonates with the kinetic quality of the sculpture.

Cosmo Whyte’s beaded curtain piece Beyond the Boundary (2022) recreates an archival image of a man holding a sign that reads “Black Wash”—a play on the cricket term “white wash”—in a celebratory audience scene from a historic win streak of the West Indies’s team over the English in 1984. This piece invites viewers to enter the second half of the exhibition, beginning with a gallery of works that reflect on the archive, including Robinson’s La Coronación de La Negrita (2022). The mostly black-and-white mural critiques representations of Blackness and racial violence in Costa Rica, both historical and contemporary, by mixing religious imagery from Catholic and African traditions in a reinterpretation of the cover of Carlos Meléndez and Quince Duncan’s history book El negro en Costa Rica.

Another notable work is Suchitra Mattai’s An Ocean Cradle, a large-scale textile piece made of vintage saris given to the artist and bells that reflect on her Indo-Caribbean heritage, migration, and matrilineal knowledge. Though not strictly archivistic, the collecting nature of the work builds an interwoven archive of the histories of women in Mattai’s life. This oceanic landscape connects them in multiple ways by bringing people together across oceans, reminiscent of the migration of Indian populations to the Caribbean during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Toward the end of the exhibition, in Teresita Fernández’s 2020 work Rising (Lynched Land), a monumental sculpture of a palm tree hovers over the gallery floor and confronting viewers with conflicting ideas that merge in this plant. As a sign of tropical leisure and a metaphor for colonial exploitation, the palm tree symbolizes the oppressed bodies of Caribbean peoples in the wake of violent histories and environmental disasters. Its roots, covered in burlap and rope, seem ready to be replanted.

After that, an unforgettable ending to “Forecast Form” is provided by María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s Sugar/Bittersweet (2010), an installation consisting of Yoruba spears, African and Chinese stools, and disks of sugar in various states of production, from dark molasses to refined white sugar, as metaphors of racial categories. The work evokes the violent landscape of the plantation or people assembled in a rigid grid of power—the latter, one hopes, with weapons that will be picked up to fight back.

For Guy, Oz is a mirror. In an artist talk when the show opened at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, he compared the interrelated Oz literature and films to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as one self-perpetuating franchise. Two keystones of this franchise, The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Wiz (1978), play side by side in Guy’s silent video The City and the City, sixth cut (2022). The first effort features an Emerald City that feels at times like Chicago while the later rendition involves many New York filming locations. (Guy’s connection here: he grew up in New York and is now based in Chicago.) In its time, The Wiz suffered at the hands of white critics who questioned the need for revisiting Oz with Black actors, a new script, and new songs. Guy’s video suggests his own study of the changes. He has slowed down both films and plays them to end at precisely the same time, as if to put on equal footing Motown and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, an all-white cast and an all-Black one, and Dorothy as played by Judy Garland and by Diana Ross.

Guy’s cultural critique through juxtaposition continues in Emerald City Leperello (Featuring Pointless Rendering by Lorenzo Bueno), 2022, which stands open on a table at the center of the gallery. The pages of the giant book comprise eight vintage copies of a poster showing the Chicago skyline; the poster promoted a 1989 exhibition in which the Renaissance Society paired 24 of On Kawara’s deadpan “Date Paintings” with contemporaneous works by 24 artists, from heavyweights with minimalist and conceptual leanings, such as Jenny Holzer and Joseph Kosuth, to those associated with the Windy City, including the Hairy Who. At the time, this exhibition may have appeared far-reaching and representative for putting Kawara in dialogue with peers and local traditions, but in retrospect, the curatorial conceit appears exclusive. The artists were almost all white, and are now mainstream. Guy added a harlequin-pattern border and yellow, green, and black architectonic forms to the exhibition posters, making the cityscape look more like the Emerald City and implying that Kawara and the other artists could stand in the place of Dorothy and her famous traveling buddies—Toto, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. Whom would an artist choose to accompany them on the Yellow Brick Road as they create imagined worlds? Who is cast to walk beside them? If Guy had traveling companions, they might include the artist Lorenzo Bueno (mentioned in the book’s title), whose Pointless Rendering (2018) is part of a whimsical proposal to build an upside-down replica of New York’s Citigroup Center building right on top of the actual structure on Lexington Avenue. We can imagine that Guy likes how this ambitious-but-impossible proposition plays with monumentality and implies an alternate universe.

Another sort of inversion happens when viewers look up to see a gigantic, multicolored flag draped across the immense ceiling of the Renaissance Society. It’s called Dargerino (2022) and intends to summon and perhaps commune with Henry Darger, the legendary Chicago outsider artist who worked alone in a tiny apartment, sometimes under the influence of Oz, and was undiscovered until the last year of his life. The flag’s colors represent the regions of Oz, though the flag adds an extra point to the usual Emerald City star, making it more like the six-point stars of the Chicago flag. What if Chicago were Oz? Or, what if we made Chicago into a kind of Oz? Guy proposes that we would then have to distinguish meaningful gestures from small arrogant ones. In his artist talk, when discussing Dargerino, Guy referred to the colossal torn American flag sculpture Trinket (2008/15) by William Pope.L, who told Artforum that his sculpture refers to “our mouse nature” and “how we blot out the sky with our paw and think we’ve vanquished the sun.”

Chicagoans dye their river bright green every year on St. Patrick’s Day. Guy captured this bizarre tradition on video for Chicago (2022). In the context of this exhibition, the festivities appear so entirely out of this world that they could almost have taken place in Emerald City. In so many ways, we mortals create and re-create highly developed worlds, determine their strange rituals and exclusive memberships, and exalt them. In The Wiz, the denizens of Emerald City extol green as the height of fashion until The Great and Powerful Oz declares green dead, and endorses red. “I wouldn’t be seen green,” the chorus sings. By bringing Oz into the present, Guy’s smart show prompts the question: With the forcefulness of the collective imagination that we regularly display and sometimes shift at the drop of a hat, how can we reimagine, stand on end, and remake the careless, rough, stained, and unwelcoming parts of our world?

Related Articles

All About Her Mother: Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle: Remembrance of Gardner Paintings Lost

Ever since Calle asked people who were blind from birth to describe their “image of beauty,” the result has courted controversy. Her 1986 project Les Aveugles (The Blind) features stark black-and-white photographs of unnamed respondents to the question, many with disheveled hair, cracked lips, and closed or blankly staring eyes. Accompanying each portrait are phrases from the sitter’s response, which one or more images illustrate. One woman mentions the actor Alain Delon; another names a Welsh hillside. A young boy tells us that “green is beautiful. Because every time I like something, I’m told it’s green. Grass is green, trees, leaves, nature too … I like to dress in green.” Much of Calle’s selected imagery is mundane. She represents green, for instance, with a manicured lawn. Such decisions seem intended to emphasize the contrast between the sitters’ choices and what visitors with vision might be accustomed to understanding as beautiful.

One of France’s best-known conceptual artists, Calle established her reputation by inventing and photographing provocative situations. Having followed and photographed strangers or shot pictures of people asleep in other projects, she describes using the camera in this project to “see without being seen again, but without having to hide myself.” While this approach worked well for Calle in the 1980s, this Chicago exhibition now suggests a missed opportunity to more fully engage the power dynamics at play.

The Blind holds a dubious distinction in the disability community, othering its subjects by asking them to tell the artist about what they cannot see, all the while deploying a gaze that cannot be returned. The harsh and often unflattering portraits sometimes seem to catch Calle’s subjects off guard; the portraits sit jarringly alongside pictures of people, objects, and scenes they identify but will never see. A wistfulness pervades the project. Noting that the color “white” conjures purity, a young man suggests “it’s beautiful. But even if it weren’t beautiful, it would be the same thing.” Reviewers initially called The Blind poignant, even moving. Disability politics today conjure a different dynamic; in fact, even the project’s early exhibition at Luhring Augustine gallery in New York in 1991 prompted challenges that helped shape disability identity in the arts.

The more troubling aspects of Calle’s fascination with blindness were first noted by deaf artist Joseph Grigely, then teaching literature at Gallaudet University, a well-known school for the education of d/Deaf and hard of hearing students. Grigely wrote a series of 35 postcards to the artist, whom he did not know at the time, in which he posed queries and offered thought-provoking reflections while exposing the project’s uneven power dynamics. Ultimately, Grigely pointed out, the work reveals “not so much the voices of the blind as the voice of Sophie Calle.” Calle utterly controls her subjects, not only selecting the quotes and images on display but shaping the project’s very premise. In this way, the project, while presumably about or invested in the blind, has been formed by a sighted artist for a sighted audience. Shaped by such questions of othering, Grigely’s one-sided correspondence ultimately appeared in Parkett art magazine in 1993. In many ways it presaged his own exhibitions of notes and drawings that he uses to converse with hearing people in more mutual-feeling exchanges.

If this background haunts The Blind, the Chicago installation is even more provocative, since the artist asked to have it exhibited with selections from “Because” (2018–21), a smaller more recent series of works. Positioned in a hallway outside the gallery showing her earlier project, these newer photographs also play with questions of vision and narrative. A curatorial wall text notes that, “Instead of speaking through the voices of others, as in The Blind … Calle gives glimpses here of significant moments or decisions in her own life.” Pairing “Because” with The Blind seems only further to bring out the self-amplifying dimensions of both projects. In “Because,” a cloth embroidered with phrases purportedly explaining why Calle made the picture covers each of them; to see the image, visitors must lift the fabric. Thus, an account of why Calle visited the North Pole hides a tranquil twilit fjord. Are these vignettes truly autobiographical? Is this an image of the Arctic? Why should we trust that Calle actually visited the North Pole? Having once declared, “I don’t care about truth,” Calle’s “Because” seems to highlight theatricality and visual gamesmanship. It also makes us question the veracity of The Blind.

At the same time, this curious show forecloses meaningful opportunities for dialogue, redress, or even access. Although the hardcover book The Blind was published in braille in 2012, no such text for blind visitors accompanied this installation. In fact, the museum provided audio descriptions for only 5 of the 23 pieces on view. This absence of materials allowing the project’s own subjects to engage with the work complicates our understanding of vision; while Calle wields her own vision as an act of artistic privilege, we begin to understand that accessing an artwork is not a game, and attending a museum involves more than just “seeing” images. Just who, we might ask, is blind? And why?

“The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869–1930,” an exhibition at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, seeks to underscore that fact on a grand scale. The show was intended to be a single blockbuster survey until the pandemic forced the curators—a team of 23 scholars led by Jonathan D. Katz and Johnny Willis—to split it into two parts. The first half gathers some 100 works in various media from multiple (predominantly Western) countries; the second, larger installment, which will add more artists from the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia into the mix, opens at Wrightwood in 2025.

As its lofty title indicates, the exhibition begins with the troublesome word itself. Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny is credited with coining the term homosexual in 1869 to denote a distinct group of people rather than a behavior. The word had legal and medical implications that were more useful for bureaucrats than the general public. But by the late 19th century, when British physician Havelock Ellis and writer John Addington Symonds wrote Sexual Inversion, their landmark study of homosexuality, the term was in wider vogue. Conceptually, “The First Homosexuals” aims to examine how the nascent word and its attendant identity filtered into and influenced visual art throughout the following decades. Did such work intimate or envision a self-awareness that written language could not?

The answers offered here are mixed. In some ways, the exhibition’s incompleteness hampers its impact. The six decades charted provide a temporal constraint without narrative cohesion, a deficiency that even the overtly editorializing wall text can’t remedy. Instead of facilitating an aesthetic interplay and organic dialogue among the selected works, the curators opt for a curiously anthropological approach. This is reflected in the exhibition design: each small room, painted a distinct color and connected to others by archways that evoke Stein’s or Barney’s bohemian salons, showcases one of nine thematic categories: “Before Homosexuality,” “Archetypes,” “Desire,” “Past and Future,” “Public and Private,” “Colonizing,” “Between Genders,” “Pose,” and “Couples.” Work is hung nonchronologically, so there’s no sense of continuity or progression, just diligent eclecticism.

That’s not to say there aren’t gems on view. British painter Duncan Grant’s Bathers by the Pond (1920–21), a scene of languorous male sunbathers rendered in stippled paint and earthy tones, inspires reverie. American painter Charles Demuth’s Eight O’Clock (Early Morning), 1917, is a tender watercolor in which two men—one sitting dejectedly in pajamas, the other standing imploringly in underclothes—share a moment of ambiguous domesticity while another (nude) man washes his face at a sink in the background. Bath House Study (no date), a drawing in black chalk by Swedish artist Eugène Jansson (1862–1915), depicts an almost geometric configuration of nude men, each suspended in his own erotic lull—a tableau that wouldn’t be out of place in the late 20th-century oeuvres of Americans Patrick Angus or John Burton Harter.

Other works here allude to deeper cultural currents. A wall of archival photos documents the Elisarion, a neo-religious temple that poet and artist Elisàr von Kupffer built in Switzerland with his partner, philosopher Eduard von Mayer. These images—some of which feature men in makeshift crowns and sarongs striking poses in nature—evoke the utopian spirit that infused transatlantic queer life in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as embodied by, for example, American poet Walt Whitman and his British counterpart, Edward Carpenter. Growing Strength (1904), an imposing oil painting by the German artist Sascha Schneider, portrays a seasoned bodybuilder appraising the biceps of a young acolyte—a precursor to the physique magazines and “cult of the body” that defined gay life in midcentury and beyond.

To its credit, the show also looks beyond a strictly male or Anglophone conception of homosexuality. Carte de visite photographs by the Norwegian couple Marie Høeg and Bolette Berg show the women dressed as men, or in more androgynous garb. Likewise, photos by Alice Austen, one of the first American women to shoot pictures outside the studio, capture playful, if covert, moments of lesbian sociality. Paintings and scrolls by Japanese and Chinese artists, several of whom are unknown, offer the show’s most explicitly erotic interludes, as in one print illustrating a sinuous mixed-sex orgy. Elsewhere, an unknown photographer depicts two Black actors, one in drag, dancing the cakewalk in Paris at the turn of the century. Louis Lumière’s silent film clip Le Cake-Walk au Nouveau Cirque (1903), the oldest known recording of a drag performance, plays on a nearby monitor. Even more than a century later, the footage of entertainers enacting a dance that originated among enslaved people radiates a haunting jubilance that is both carefree and tainted by the bigotries of its time.

A handful of pieces feel adrift. American painter Romaine Brooks’s 1912 portrait of the Italian nationalist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, a sober likeness in Brooks’s characteristic gray palette, is a puzzling choice. (D’Annunzio, an infamous womanizer, was not homosexual, and he looms in joyless hauteur over the room.) A Brooks self-portrait—or one of her many portraits of female contemporaries—would have been a stronger choice. With three paintings on view, the Canadian artist Florence Carlyle is allotted more wall space than her elegant but otherwise dull portraits of women merit. And the show’s “Colonizing” section, which tries to explore how Western attitudes toward homosexuality diverged from those of Indigenous and Eastern populations, is undercooked. Wilhelm von Gloeden, the German photographer who decamped to Italy to stage pastoral fantasies with nude Sicilian boys, is included here, although his role as a colonizer is debatable.

Ultimately, the exhibition has the tone of a sociology textbook: serious, pedantic, often more stately than intoxicating. The very premise feels misconceived. It is not as if 1869 were a eureka moment that launched queer artists, en masse, into careers of self-representation. Increasing secularism, urbanization, and mass media did more to define homosexual identity than did the invention of the word itself, yet those realities remain either unexplored or oblique here. Instead of tracing a back channel story of modernism, the curators deliver a jumbled Wunderkammer. For a show that takes pains to frame homosexuality as fluid, the thematic layout comes off as rigid and delimiting. Here’s hoping the second installment loosens up.

“Psychopathia Sexualis,” recently on view at Iceberg Projects in Chicago, was Spare’s first solo exhibition in North America. It was an especially pungent debut amid the trigger warnings and pandemic-induced body horror of our moment. Named after German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 study of sexual pathology, the show presented a folio of forty-four untitled pencil drawings that illustrate a cornucopia of perversions—bestiality, coprophagia, urolagnia, name your pleasure—along with stock-in-trade like fellatio. The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University acquired the folio in 1963, under somewhat murky circumstances, and it remained unheralded until now.

There’s speculation that a kinkster couple commissioned the work in the early 1920s. The result features a cast of phantasmagoric characters: satyrs, horned men, figures caught between genders or species, nightmarish penis-shaped creatures. The human bodies in Spare’s work are overripe and unmanicured. They occupy vacant space that’s indistinguishable as interior or landscape, although vestiges of erased lines are sometimes visible. A vague air of pestilence dominates, underscored by the cankered faces and copious runoff of semen, vomit, feces, and urine. If Spare’s erotic vignettes recall those of precursors such as Belgian Symbolist Félicien Rops, Hungarian painter Mihály Zichy, and French illustrator Martin van Maële, his fixation on excretion and physical degradation is singular in its extremism.

Austin Osman Spare, Untitled, ca. 1921-22,
pencil on paper, 17 by 14 inches.

All of this grotesquerie is exuberant. Spare’s figures are soiled revelers, captive gluttons, and dead-eyed hedonists, daring the viewer to condemn their bacchanal. In one drawing, three misshapen, golem-like creatures urinate on a voluptuous woman lounging below. Her eyes are closed in relish, and the sinuous streams of urine form a kind of pedestal around her. She seems imported from a Rubens canvas, as if Spare were taking the piss out of art historical beauty standards. Similarly, in another drawing, a figure who resembles Spare—his tousled hair a trademark—is bent over, defecating onto two figures preoccupied with their own masturbatory idyll.

Spare’s line has a calligraphic subtlety and a lithe vigor that troubles distinctions between clothing, bodies, and bodily fluids. Forms dissolve and coalesce, as in another drawing in which a mass of ruined faces that bring to mind Honoré Daumier’s caricatures swells toward a winged vagina cruising overhead. This outcrop of men is rendered with such gestural intensity that it could well be an example of Spare’s automatic drawing, in which lines roil in feverish elaboration.

The sequence of depravity was momentarily calmed in a grid of nine drawings that depict either couples or solo models. These images feel starkly modern, even as they hint, however vulgarly, at romantic idealism. In one scene, a man poses with his arm behind his head, miming ancient statuary, while a curvaceous woman clings to him. The man’s oversize penis penetrates her, although the mood isn’t sexual. It’s as if the couple’s genitals are engaged in their own mindless tasks. Throughout these drawings, there’s a sense of instinct taking over, of figures relieving themselves in every way imaginable, sometimes experiencing pleasure, at other times only fulfilling a dull commitment to physical necessity. This wild, startling show was as much an illustration of carnal satisfaction as an exercise in arousal: of desire, disgust, pity, and fascination.

A particularly potent example of Thompson’s approach is his 1965 painting The Carriage, currently on view in “This House is Mine,” the first major exhibition of the artist’s work in twenty years, at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art. The canvas references Nicolas Poussin’s Autumn: The Spies with the Grapes of the Promised Land (1660–64), a depiction of an Old Testament story in which two scouts sent by Moses return from Canaan carrying a load of oversize grapes, figs, and pomegranates. Since other scouts had returned empty-handed, convinced that the land would prove impossible to conquer, this fruit symbolized for Moses the dependability of God’s word; in later interpretations, the grapes, hung from a wooden bar, came to signify the body of Christ and coming salvation.

Thompson’s otherwise idyllic landscape twists this Biblical scene by replacing the fruit with the legs of a human slung over the pole that the men support between their shoulders, perhaps hinting at the violence tied to conquering another land. While the three living figures—the scouts, with their exaggerated stride forward, and a woman in the background balancing a pot on her head—are all rendered reddish orange, the hanging body is bluish; whether this is to emphasize its status as a corpse or to designate race seems intentionally ambiguous. The body hangs like a side of meat, its backside exposed, far less pure than the plump grapes standing in for the body of Christ. The death and treatment of this unnamed person as bounty brought back from a hunt makes Poussin’s landscape seem not harmonious, but ominous. Its apparent abundance, Thompson’s iteration suggests, rests on mundane acts of violence. 

View of “Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You,” 2021, at the Art Institute of Chicago, showing Untitled (No Comment), 2020.

Several such works are architectural in scale: Untitled (Griffin Court), 2020; Untitled (Forever), 2017; Advertisements for myself (project for the New York Times), 2014/2020; and Untitled (Cast of Characters), 2016/2020, occupy entire walls and floors singly or in tandem with each other, an installation strategy Kruger has employed for many years. Many of the texts are reprised from other venues, and they have been edited and redesigned for their new sites at the Art Institute. With the spatial dimensions and subject matter of the texts all but fixed, most of the flexibility comes from typography. The texts are kerned and stretched horizontally and vertically, filling out or squeezing into their respective spaces, using Kruger’s signature Futura Bold font along with what looks like a version of English Gothic. One is fat; the other, thin. Both are sans serif fonts whose unadorned forms seek to carry the message through the power of the words, not the style of the letters.

Toward this end and to her credit, Kruger has always insisted on generic-looking typefaces that match the no-nonsense tone of her messages. In many of the walls, the tight leading is relieved by the separation of lines of text into alternating bands of black on white or white on black. The text works have been described as site-specific, but it might be more accurate to describe some of them as site-adaptable. The athleticism and plasticity of Kruger’s type also means that copious amounts of vinyl will be used again when this exhibition is remade for MoMA PS1 in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art next year. Given the role plastic plays in our precarious environmental situation, I am happy to see Kruger present text works as digital projections, as in the three-channel video installation Untitled (No Comment), 2020, which cuts streams of words with memes and maps. Unless the vinyl is recyclable, I would love to see her work continue in this direction.

Within the museum space, each work is thoughtfully installed along viewing paths that create organic connections and fulfill a spatial logic. The humorous collections of adjectives and nouns in Untitled (Cast of Characters) and Advertisements for myself (project for the New York Times) appear down the hall from each other: LOSERS, JERKS, HATERS, PLAYERS… in one gallery and A MAJOR ARTIST, A MINOR FIGURE, A TIRED HACK…. in the other. These two installations form reverberating bookends, bringing an element of comic timing to the viewer’s movement through the show.

View of “Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You,” 2021, at the Art Institute of Chicago, showing Untitled (Cast of Characters), 2016/2020.

Other works take advantage of the building’s and exhibition’s layout. Untitled (Forever), a room-size installation that wraps around four walls and the floor, greets viewers at the entrance to Regenstein Hall, addressing them with two huge YOU’s that warn them to take notice; they are implicated in what follows. The gallery space itself is generic, but this work’s position at the front makes it psychologically potent. Untitled (Griffin Court), an enormous text on the floor of the atrium that reads BLIND IDEALISM IS REACTIONARY SCARY DEADLY (with REACTIONARY and SCARY crossed out with huge green X’s) incorporates both levels of the museum, as it should be read from the second-floor balconies. At ground level, it’s illegible, a stunning black, white, and green abstraction of the slender letterforms’ elegant curves and angles.

As vinyl skins on architectural structures, the texts are imposing in scale and varied in their relationship to the viewer: Untitled (Forever) immerses the viewer in text on five sides, Untitled (Griffin Court) suspends the viewer above the text, and Untitled (Cast of Characters) and Advertisement for Myself confront the viewer face to face. This made me think about what Kruger’s works mean when they are installed in public versus when they are presented on a more intimate scale. As a 2014 project for the New York Times, Advertisement for Myself was once small. But Kruger doesn’t scale up gratuitously for the sake of spectacle. Through their large scale, her graphics become loud speech, pumped out visually as if spoken through a bullhorn. Kruger cranks up the volume to command public attention and enhance the reach of her message to entire communities. Through scale, the artist signals the authority of her voice and the urgency of her message.