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.

Shortly after the opening title card appears in Isaac Julien’s 45-minute film Looking for Langston (1989), a fuzzy voice can be heard. Set against a black screen, the voice, appropriated from a 1967 radio broadcast, promises a memoriam program for the deceased Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, who will be remembered here via “a blending of memory, tributes, and his own words.” This is a clever fib on Julien’s part: what follows is hardly about Hughes. 

More than a straightforward cinematic portrait of this monumental figure, Looking for Langston is a revisionist evocation of the queer milieu in which Hughes may have moved. In one sequence in the film’s middle section, beefy boys caress one another in bed; toward the end, Black men in ’20s garb twirl to ’80s beats at a gay club. A more conventional film would have traced Hughes’s rise as a writer and taken stock of his leftist politics. But Julien doesn’t explicitly portray any of this, because he was instead focused specifically on countering the “heteronormative aspect of how the [writer’s] estate had created Langston,” as he put it in a 2022 interview for the Museum of Modern Art. If biographies are “created,” as Julien says, then Looking for Langston presents a new spin, showing queerness as essential to Hughes’ story, and filling a gap that Julien felt was missing from the history books. 

Twenty-five years have passed since Looking for Langston, which is now on view in a gallery about the Harlem Renaissance at MoMA. In that time, Julien has continued his project of reinventing the biopic genre, flirting with its conventions while also chafing against them. You can see this in two other recent video installations now on view in New York—one also at MoMA, the other at the Whitney Museum. In all three, he takes up storied figures of Black history, resisting history lessons and clichés in the process. 

Both installations have the sheen of mid-budget Hollywood filmmaking. In the Frederick Douglass–centric Lessons of the Hour (2019), at MoMA, there are sweeping shots of picturesque landscapes and sun-splashed images of the protagonist hard at work. But Oscar bait, this is not: Julien splits his imagery across 10 screens, such that one sequence in which Douglass rides a steam locomotive is seen from many different perspectives at once, all playing simultaneously, while shots of a Black seamstress at work appear in between on select screens. 

Biopics traditionally tend toward clarity, parceling out bite-sized insights into the lives of presidents, artists, and activists. Lessons of the Hour, on the other hand, is a confounding experience that deliberately does not offer a coherent portrait of the abolitionist, who was himself imaged in countless ways as the most photographed person of the 19th century. These elegant refractions are echoed in Once Again… (Statues Never Die), a 2022 video installation included in the Whitney Biennial. That work’s reflective walls cause the piece’s five screens to tessellate across the space, confusing the eye. 

Here, the installation’s main subject is Alain Locke, a leading philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance. In black-and-white footage, Locke is shown traipsing through the open-storage facilities of museums such as the Barnes Collection, whose founder, Albert C. Barnes, engages Locke in a dialogue on African art’s influence on European modernism. Recent biopics like Napoleon and Ferrari are loaded with scenes that reconstruct unknowable conversations had behind closed doors, but in those films, such talks drive forward plot and character development. Locke and Barnes’s discourse, one of the few sequences here with on-screen dialogue, does nothing of the sort. Instead, based as it is on Barnes and Locke’s exchanges, it aids in Julien’s project of using true people and real events as starting points, then expanding upon them through fiction. The artist cites Saidiya Hartman’s idea of practicing “critical fabulation,” or using extrapolation to remedy archival omissions. 

It can often be difficult to tell where or when parts of Once Again are set, and that’s because Julien has subtly edited in sound and images from Looking for Langston. In Once Again, newly lensed images of Locke ascending a carpeted staircase collide with 25-year-old shots from Looking for Langston that show a Black man with angel wings. In fusing together these two quasi-biopics, Julien suggests that Once Again, a film about a Harlem Renaissance icon who was out to his inner circle, is thematically consistent with its 1989 forebear. Time and space implode as Locke and Hughes intermingle, forming a universe that is all their own.

“See Stop Run,” an exhibition in a century-old office tower in New York’s Financial District, primarily surveys Wool’s last decade of work, though his practice dates to the 1980s. The show features the photograph of the unmarred paintings—a chronological outlier but a fitting inclusion given the show’s installation in a gutted and unrenovated office on the 19th floor of 101 Greenwich Street. Ten years after his stenciled words, floral patterns, and spray-painted squiggles filled the Guggenheim Museum’s spiraled ramp, the artist has situated his work in a dramatically less polished setting, one that recalls the degradation of his fire-ravaged studio and rekindles the punk ethos of his earlier days.

In the large, U-shaped venue, coiled cables droop from the ceiling. Uneven, partially demolished floors reveal decorative pink and black tiling, and workers have marked the walls with sooty handprints, spray-painted notes, scribbled math equations, and profane doodles. Abundant windows afford visitors impressive views of lower Manhattan and fill the space with daylight, but continuous wall space is lacking. So as a result, Wool has hung works sporadically on pockmarked columns and between windows on narrow, unpainted and unfinished walls. One framed work on paper, Untitled (2018), hangs atop a smattering of permits and other official documents, presumably left in place as authenticating evidence, if not out of legal requirement.

This property only became available to Wool in a post-COVID market that dampened demand for office rentals. Hardly the typical tenant, the artist still spent considerable capital to rent the space and bring it up to code; he even had to incorporate himself in order to “loan” his own artworks to the show. Historically, emerging artists and burgeoning institutions have capitalized on depressed economies to exhibit in unconventional locations. But financial concerns were not a motivating factor for Wool, an artist of considerable means and privilege, one with dealers likely competing to show (and sell) his work. The goal, according to an accompanying essay by the curator Anne Pontégnie, was to “escape the neutrality of contemporary art spaces.”

This strategy might seem contrived—an artist exploiting the aesthetics of ruin to enhance the grittiness of his own work—if it wasn’t so consistent with his process. Wool has long sought to challenge the integrity of his pictures, whether through degraded reproductions or by subjecting them to constant reprocessing. By presenting his paintings, sculptures, and photographs in a setting that refutes clarity and orderliness, he is once again testing his art’s resilience and adaptability.

Since the late 1990s, Wool has used erasure, obfuscation, shifts in scale, distortion, and collage to generate new imagery from preexisting works, circling back while tumbling forward. This is not immediately evident in the exhibition, where related works are not always hung together, though certain forms and patterns do echo throughout. Numerous paintings derive from a pair of folded “Rorschach” blots Wool made with enamel in 1986 (not on view). Between 2020–23, Wool painted atop digitally altered inkjet prints of these silhouette-like splotches. A group of ten hangs in a grid on one of the few walls added by the artist, but one senses that he has generated endless variations from the chance-based images. In turn, one early painting from the series, Untitled (2020), formed the basis for a pair of large silkscreens, both Untitled (2023). Nearly identical, the supersized blobs greet visitors as they exit the elevator, immediately establishing Wool’s aptitude for producing difference through repetition.

A highlight of the show is the series of knotty sculptures Wool has been fashioning over the last decade out of rancher’s wire and fencing salvaged around his home in Marfa, Texas—even though they too often disappear into the chaotic background. The jumbled scrap metal evokes tumbleweeds, but Wool achieves an impressive diversity of forms.His earliest, Untitled (2013), is a surprisingly graceful tangle of rusted barbed wire suspended at eye level like a low-slung chandelier. Untitled (2019) is an unruly, twisted cluster of wire, mesh, and metal slats. Others are more compact like densely woven nests. One of several that Wool enlarged and cast in a rosy, copper-plated bronze, Untitled (2021) perches precariously on a pedestal—a dancer in mid-pirouette. For Bad Rabbit (2022), Wool photocopied images of his wire formations to heighten the contrast and flatten the sculptures, enhancing their relationship to his painted line.

Wool’s painted and sculpted lines converge in a new mosaic, Untitled (2023). Translated from a 2021 oil painting on paper, itself a re-working of an earlier screenprint, the squared-off stones and glass mimic the pixelated distortion of the digitized source. At eleven-feet tall, it spans from floor to ceiling and looks custom-made for the site (it wasn’t). Farther uptown, in another office building—Two Manhattan West—is Wool’s first mosaic. The similar but much larger Crosstown Traffic (2023) towers over visitors in the gleaming new development’s cavernous lobby, demonstrating that the artist can also play nice with the moneyed elite. The version jammed into this exhibition is far humbler: The cloud of black, white, and dirty pink swirls better aligns with the tumult of this transitional space. Matching the hues of the venue’s exposed tiles, the mosaic appears as if it was unearthed during construction.

Wool could have easily mounted this exhibition in one of New York’s ever-expanding blue-chip galleries (two years ago, he showed many of these works in Xavier Hufken’s pristine new gallery in Brussels). But the site’s ready-made rawness befits his work’s willfully gritty energy. Ultimately, the architecture’s exposed innards draw our attention to the many layers of Wool’s recursive process, the deteriorated images buried beneath layers of scribbled paint and digital manipulation—an accumulated history of images.

It had been a while since I last felt attacked in an exhibition, but the serpent made a move and the situation could’ve ended up a lot messier than it did.

It helped that the serpent was animatronic and super stylized—but it took a moment to remember this while my body recoiled. The exhibition was Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s at Canal Projects in New York, which features a cast of robotic contraptions on view through July 27. A lone corn stalk greets visitors at the entryway, its weathered husks suggesting this corn, like other stalks throughout the show, have seen some things. Walk up a few stairs and you stare down at a large pile of dirt on the floor, above which hovers a snake with mechanized wings that flap on occasion. This is the Cincoatl snake, and it’s the star of the show.  

The snake, it turns out, is the corn’s protector. In Mesoamerican traditions, the Cincoatl snake (which is often translated as “snake-friend of maize corn,” per the wall text) defends the crop from forces that might keep it from growing. Surrounding the snake are four Chinantles, barriers made of corn stalks that are said to be an avatar of the Aztec Quetzalcoatl, a feathered-serpent deity “related to wind, Venus, the Sun, arts, knowledge, and learning.” With fangs and disquieting marble eyes, the serpents jut and lurch around the exhibition in the four cardinal directions, marking a sacred space. (One of those was the artwork that tried to attack me, but I had come in peace and survived the ordeal. The corn stayed safe, too.)

This installation—commissioned by Canal Projects, a nonprofit space in Lower Manhattan since 2022—tells of corn’s origins while meditating on Indigenous technologies. The wall text refers to the work of Chilean sociologist Luis Razeto Migliaro, who defines Indigenous technologies as tools with the capacity to cultivate life. Indeed, Rodríguez’s sculptures all come to life: Vasijas de barro con cucharas (Clay Pots with Spoon), from 2024, is an arrangement of motorized wooden utensils that clack together, like castanets. Tezcatlipoca (2017) is a tower rising above a cardboard coyote skull and topped with an old CD/cassette/MP3 boombox; from time to time, it swivels on a wheel that rolls below. Cincoatl snake (2024), the centerpiece, goes up and down, seeming to fly, albeit in a very rudimentary fashion.

Using decidedly DIY aesthetics—lots of unkempt nests of wires and circuit boards—Rodríguez makes a show of his contraptions’ elementary qualities in a way that seems to be part of the premise. In a time when technology has started to feel like an inescapable force hell-bent on destroying life, his creations serve as a reminder that it can be a tool for both destruction and creation. The hand-wrought nature of Rodríguez’s intervention offers signs of hope: the made-ness of his robotic forms suggest that some things can be taken apart—and perhaps reassembled anew.

In Melissa Cody’s 2014 weaving Good Luck, a figure known as Rainbow Man is represented as an electrical cord, his lower half culminating in a two-pronged plug. His tubular body encircles the phrase GOOD LUCK, and beneath those words, there’s a somewhat unexpected motif, formed from four right angles that meet at a central point.

Navajo viewers will understand the symbol as a whirling log, which connotes Good Luck’s titular well wishes. But to many other viewers, the symbol will likely read as a swastika. There are differences between the two symbols: a whirling log’s four angles form a square, whereas a swastika is rotated 45 degrees, creating a diamond. But those differences are subtle and easy to miss. That’s why it’s worth spending time with Cody’s whirling logs, which figure in two current New York solo shows, at MoMA PS1 and Garth Greenan Gallery.

At PS1, Navajo Transcendent (2014) shows a lone whirling log popping against a teal background. Cody rendered the ancient symbol in a pulsating pattern derived from traditional Navajo weaving that’s known as an eye dazzler: here and elsewhere, she is emphasizing the symbol’s cultural origins. In Navajo Transcendent, she has caused the sign to appear three-dimensional, rendering it with depth, as if to suggest that there are multiple vantages from which to view this symbol, both formally and culturally. Certainly, with its dazzling colors and dizzying patterns, this work contains none of the austerity or threat associated with Nazi regalia.

I’ll admit that, as a Jew, I don’t always find Cody’s works featuring this easy to take, and it seems I’m not alone in feeling that way. When I visited PS1, I overheard two visitors debating Navajo Transcendent, noting that the work is presented without a trigger warning. The institution seemed uncomfortable in its handling of the work as well. It showed the piece alongside a wall text that does not include words like “swastika” or “Nazis,” words that feel like elephants in the room. In that wall text, viewers are directed to a label for a different piece, Navajo Whirling Log, should they seek “additional context.” The text for Navajo Whirling Log notes that “misassociations with the Nazi swastika” may occur, and reminds viewers that Navajo culture “predates Nazi atrocities by millennia.” This is a fact—but so is the continued prevalence of swastikas wielded in hateful ways. It is hard not to see a Nazi symbol here.

That’s partly why, in 1940, Navajo, Papago, Apache, and Hopi leaders signed the Whirling Log Proclamation, formally agreeing to stop using the symbol. They noted that the motif had been “desecrated recently by another nation of peoples.” That excerpt appears in an explanatory text posted at Garth Greenan Gallery’s front desk, but this necessary context is mysteriously absent within PS1’s galleries. That text also states that the leaders signed the proclamation under pressure from the US government, and points out that anyway, Navajo religious practices were banned in the US until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act passed in 1978. In the intervening decades, Cody and other contemporary Navajo artists have endeavored to revive the whirling log, asking why one connotation should supplant another. Several have been met with protests, such as when, in 2017, a Washington art space removed works by Steven Leyba that featured whirling logs after backlash.

Cody’s whirling logs do make me uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean her works that feature them should be taken down. Her tapestry Navajo Whirling Log (2019), at PS1, features four such logs that touch their tips, forming a cross at the work’s center. The cross is a symbol for the Spider Woman who, according to Navajo tradition, wove the universe into being. Anyone who views this piece as representing four swastikas, then stops there, is likely to miss out on that rich story. Art often shows us how many signs have more than one meaning, and if we keep an open mind—and, maybe, get uncomfortable—we might learn to see things anew. 

Who is Jay Lynn Gomez? That question animates the artist’s current exhibition at P.P.O.W in New York, and the answer is a bit complicated, ever evolving. Titled “Under Construction” and on view through June 15, the show poignantly and earnestly depicts Gomez’s gender transition—a process encumbered by the fact that Gomez had already achieved some art-world acclaim using her former name, having exhibited in major group shows like “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and “Day Jobs” at the Blanton Museum of Art.

In 30 some paintings and mixed-media works, many of them self-portraits, we see Gomez contending with her new life. We see her newly subject to the leering gaze of construction workers, and getting accosted by a white woman for using the women’s bathroom at Fenway Park. Elsewhere, in one of the show’s best works, a 2024 canvas titled I am a work in progress, we see Gomez as her former male self, painting a vision of a woman of her own making, as she now wants to be seen. Next to her palette and brushes, we see her gender-affirming medications. Behind him a woman, the artist’s mother, dusts off one of Gomez’s earlier works.

Earlier this year, the artist began painting scenes from her transition directly onto her hormone packaging. The earliest work from this series is titled shot day (all works 2024); it is a tender self-portrait showing the artist injecting her abdomen with hormones. The piece, measuring just over 3 by 6 inches, is painted directly onto the flattened box of Gomez’s Estradiol valerate, her legal name partially visible. This work joins about a dozen other small drawings of Gomez at various stages in her life, all painted on her hormone packaging. This use of found cardboard recalls an earlier series, begun in 2013, in which Gomez painted Latinx domestic workers—gardeners tending to manicured lawns, pool cleaners fishing for leaves—onto magazine pages displaying beautiful mansions that they keep pristine; Gomez later scaled these drawings up to David Hockney-esque paintings. Her objective then as now is to show those who have been marginalized or rendered invisible.

In “Under Construction,” she gives her own process of transitioning a rare kind of visibility, carving an ideal image of herself while also grappling with how the world sees her. But she doesn’t stop there: she also honors the enormous contributions that trans women of color have made toward civil rights for queer people. These women have often been, until recently, intentionally erased from history; Gomez pays homage to some in a monumental work titled Trans women of color that includes Sylvia Rivera, Cecilia Gentili, and Erotica Divine.

But visibility has its downsides. Gomez confronts them in Every day I walk outside is a leap of Faith (Walking with Alok), which shows the artist in a black bra, staring in the mirror as she shaves her upper lip. Behind her, a canary flies out of a gold cage, and in one corner Gomez has kissed the canvas with a pair of a bright-red lips. In the foreground is Alok, a gender non-conforming poet and comedian who has been a mentor to Gomez during her transition. The two are surrounded by leering construction workers and signs reading ROAD CLOSED and DETOUR. There’s tension in this scene: like the overlooked laborers in their high visibility orange, Gomez and Alok appear both hyper-visible, and yet invisible, too.

That painting is untethered to any real space: instead, the figures float in a purple void. Gomez uses purples often, perhaps referencing the swirling together of the colors of the trans flag (pink, cyan, and white), or even the spectrum of hues in a bruise: a bruise at the site of hormone injection; a bruise from hemophilia, a condition Gomez has; a bruise that refers to the violence that trans women of color often face, whether from lovers, from johns, or even from catcalling construction workers.

At the back of the exhibition, there is a sculptural intervention. There, Gomez has installed a chain-link fence covered by a green tarp, with diagrams of her facial feminization and breast augmentation surgeries painted onto the surface. Surrounding these diagrams are outlines of butterflies: the ultimate symbol of transformation. A sign on the floor warns: “WERK ZONE.” Nearby, Gomez has dedicated a poem to her friend Winter Camilla Rose—also depicted in a leisurely odalisque portrait—about “a journey with no guide / with no end.”

Anyone who has been affected by the protests roiling college campuses in recent weeks—which is to say everyone, given the range of emotions they elicit and their magnitude in terms of reverberation and reach—would be advised to visit David Huffman’s current show at Casey Kaplan gallery in New York. A short walk away from the Fashion Institute of Technology, where a student encampment was broken up by the NYPD just last week, a selection of paintings that the artist calls “social abstractions” affirms the ways that protests from decades ago can resonate today.

Deeply personal but powerful beyond the bounds of his own experience, Huffman’s densely layered paintings draw on aspects of his childhood during the Black Power Movement in the 1960s and ’70s. Growing up in Berkeley, California, he was steeped in the activism of the Black Panthers; his mother, Dolores Davis, marched with the group and designed a slinking panther logo and a “Free Huey [Newton]” flag for them in 1968.

Allusions to those early years abound in paintings that can be read as diaristic. Eucalyptus (2024) includes part of a photograph (cut out and affixed to the canvas) of a very young Huffman and his brother standing alongside Black Panthers cofounder Bobby Seale. Other paintings are marked with stenciled repetitions of words like “mental health,” “homeless,” and “payday loans”—socioeconomic causes relevant both then and now. In its upper right corner, amid swirls and scrapings of paint, Mintaka (2023) features 13 iterations of the black panther logo that the artist’s mother designed.

Other references are just as personal but more open-ended. Many of the works include collaged swaths of African fabric that Huffman has collected over the years, with a mix of amorphous and geometric patterns that he sometimes adorns with additional squiggles and lines from his own hand. An especially dynamic part of Tasmanian Ghetto (2023), with electric orange set against a deep blue, was created by spray-painting a basketball net set against the canvas. A flurry of stenciled sphinx heads in Calypso (2023) signals the ancient Egyptian origins of so much culture. And then there are several Afrofuturist allusions to outer space: cut-outs of planets float within a few of the works, and part of Eucalyptus (the painting with the photo of Bobby Seale) is marked with the letters “ZR,” a reference to the Zeta Reticuli star system that figures in numerous tales of UFOs and alien abduction.

Familiarity with Huffman’s biography and personal inclinations helps bear out the activist allegiances in his work, but the paintings themselves communicate it in no uncertain terms too. All of them roil and teem, created in what seem to have been thrilling bursts of energy and animated by a frenetic spirit that informs a mix of determination and purpose, messiness and garishness. The look of them evokes the mind-expanding legacies of both the psychedelic counterculture and the activist uprisings that marked Huffman’s youth. The paintings’ backstories resonate with the unrest of the present, but their lingering effects make the current political climate feel less fleeting and more like an ever-present condition always in need of attention.

One of the most memorable sections of this year’s Venice Biennale is a vast room hung floor to ceiling with abstract works, many of them by dead artists. The star of this room—the pieces I can’t stop thinking about—appear not on the overcrowded walls, but in the space’s center, suspended from the ceiling.

That series, titled “Bambus,” is by Ione Saldanha (1919–2001). The late Brazilian artist painted the works on pieces of bamboo that she’d let dry over the course of six months, and in some cases even longer, before priming them with white paint and then adding bands of glorious color. These sculptures, which Saldanha started making in 1960, resemble a phantasmagorical forest in which each tree is a painting. If only it were possible to walk among them and see them from all sides.

A few select “Bambu” sculptures are on view in New York, at Salon 94, where Saldanha is being given her first-ever US solo show more than 20 years after her death. In this exhibition, one can get up close to a “Bambu” from 1980: the lithe, cadmium-colored object is ringed with white stripes, pastel blue checks, and other such markings.

Before making paintings that command three-dimensional space, Saldanha made paintings of voluminous spaces—albeit with similar planes of flat color. The earliest works on view in New York, dating from 1950, are urban scenes, views of Brazil’s Bahia state. She focused on clusters of buildings, but stripped their rectangular planes of detail, flattening them with that same eclectic mix of vibrant shades found in the “Bambus.” In both, hues range wildly, from bubblegum pink to hunter green, from pumpkin orange to butter yellow.

But buildings gradually disappeared from Saldanha’s work, and by the start of the ’60s, she was focused on abstraction. Still, the gridded windows and repeating doors from these paintings linger on as the structure undergirding an untitled painting from 1963. On this canvas, gridded elements form a drippy patchwork. The checkered, stripey patterns look just like the ones that ring the “Bambus” she started making around that time.

Bringing these forms beyond the canvas, Saldanha’s work was in direct dialogue with that of other Brazilian artists of her generation, most notably those involved in the Neo-Concrete movement, such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, who tried to infuse sensuality into abstract painting by having their works fold up or jut out off the wall, into the gallery. But Saldanha never left the wall behind entirely. Even as she created her “Bambus,” she continued to paint on canvas, ping-ponging back and forth between abstract painting and physical space.

A 1966 canvas included in the Salon 94 show, for example, features a “Bambu”-like stack of colored rectangles, one of them striped. To the pile’s left, Saldanha painted a swatch of gray, leaving it rough in a way that recalls the surfaces of her sanded, dried bamboos. To its right, she painted a brown monochrome with a cream-colored orb at its center, alluding to the circular top of a “Bambu.”

Which is to say, Saldanha seems to have started with three-dimensional space—urban buildings—then abstracted it into flattened planes, only to bring it back into the sculptural realm in the form of towering tubes. Then she flattened those forms all over again, in a generative cycle that lasted decades.

Cattelan’s bet that art viewers are a bunch of masochists has paid off: the press release claims that he is “the most famous Italian artist since Caravaggio.” I rolled my eyes when reading this at first, before conceding that it’s also probably true. And annoy me as he does, I still eagerly await Cattelan’s next move. I just hope it’s funnier.


Image: View of Maurizio Cattelan’s 2024 exhibition “Sunday” at Gagosian, New York.

Herding cats is notoriously difficult, but how about making them harmonize? That is a hypothetical taken up long ago in a curious 17th-century musical text—and again more recently by the British sound artist Oliver Beer. His latest gallery show in New York, “Resonance Paintings – Cat Orchestra” at Almine Rech, involves a probably apocryphal contraption (one hopes!) called the Cat Piano devised by Athanasius Kircher. In Musurgia Universalis, a book published in 1650, Kircher described the instrument as a collection of cats in cages that would shriek, in different voices, each time one of its tails was struck by a spike triggered by fingers playing a keyboard.

Beer brought Kircher’s vision to life—albeit in a much gentler version. The centerpiece of his show is an arrangement of 37 cat-shaped vessels and figurines, including a feline absinthe pitcher from early 20th-century France, a 19th-century ceramic cat “pillow” used as a headrest by opium smokers in China, and a recent replica of a fierce guardian lion from Thailand. All of the found objects are connected to microphones situated to pick up different frequencies that resonate inside of each hollow form. A custom keyboard sits in front of the orchestra, as it were, and conducts it in an automated fashion, with sliders moving up and down to show which cats’ voices are “singing” at any given moment. (Gallery-goers can sit at the keyboard and play it by hand too, but during all my visits everyone kept a curious distance.)

The mood of the music the orchestra plays is transporting, ambient in a manner similar to latter-day Brian Eno compositions for his 77 Million Paintings installation project started in 2006. And the variety of the vessels and figurines enlisted—ranging from campy tchotchkes to elegant historical finery—helps direct attention away from the technological makeup of the work to its more playful, experiential effects. This is not severe, austere sound art by any stretch.

The show also includes Reanimation (Everybody Wants to Be a Cat), a 2024 film made with school kids’ drawings of a scene in the movie The Aristocats (1970), and a pair of “Recomposition” wall works (both 2024) that feature broken bits of cat sculptures and other objects (feathers, guitar strings, parts of an old clock) preserved in resin. But most notable visually is a series of nine “Resonance Paintings” (2024) that Beer made by casting powdered pigment on canvases laid over amplifiers playing sounds from the cats in the orchestra. The results are all abstract modulations of blue on white, and knowing that they were made in part by sound gives them a sort of synesthetic presence. They’re silent, of course, but also audible in their way.