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.

Insurrection was first exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York as part of the 1984 exhibition “Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America,” one installment of a nationwide grassroots initiative that artist Doug Ashford, critic Lucy R. Lippard, and several others started in 1982, as the Reagan Doctrine of covert political meddling and overt military intervention was rapidly unfolding. In the following decade, “Artists Call” mobilized more than a thousand artists, writers, filmmakers, activists, and collectives—including Group Material and Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D), along with Fluxus publisher Barbara Moore and Sholette himself—who engaged in activities ranging from fundraising and media advocacy to street protest and direct action.

This history, particularly some of its forgotten chapters, served as a point of departure for the exhibition “Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities,” curated by Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky across the two venues of the Tufts University Art Galleries in Boston and Medford, Massachusetts. Along with a selection of artworks exhibited in various “Artists Call” events throughout the 1980s, “Art for the Future” brought together recent and newly commissioned pieces. Also on view was a rich collection of archival materials, many of which were on public display for the first time, including newsletters, posters, zines, correspondence, financial records, calendars, and logbooks that show the scope and organizational complexity of such a massive effort. The exhibition also contextualized other, more contemporary forms of artistic opposition to US imperialism, such as Decolonize This Place.

One of the campaign’s most iconic posters, depicting the silhouette of a toppling banana statue, was designed by Claes Oldenburg. It greeted viewers arriving at the exhibition’s Medford venue. Additionally, one of Oldenburg’s collaborative projects with Coosje van Bruggen was featured in the show via two pieces from a series of drawings and maquettes for an unrealized monument titled Blasted Pencil (That Still Writes), 1983–84. Broken near the tip, with its long graphite rod exposed, the oversize writing implement was meant to honor the victims and survivors of an armed assault on striking students at the University of El Salvador by the National Guard in 1980, which  led to the persecution of the academics during a four-year period of military presence on the campus.

Installation view of “Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities.”

Among the newly commissioned pieces in the show was 1984: Space-Time Capsule (2021) by Beatriz Cortez. A steel-framed geodesic dome covered with black and yellow feathers, 1984 welcomed museumgoers through a low opening. Under the dome, Cortez gathered different archives, displaying small-scale reproductions of press clippings and envelopes containing the “Artists Call” correspondence, papers from Oldenburg’s estate, and relevant pieces from van Bruggen’s personal archive dating back to 1984. Part shelter, part memorial, the piece epitomizes Cortez’s practice as an artist, activist, and archivist, and shared her intimate sense of historicity with the audience. Another work that provided an acute sense of connection across time and space was Muriel Hasbun’s Arte Voz (2016), a domed radio tower of average human height standing on four slender legs and equipped with a stethoscope and earphones. Linked with another radio tower in San Salvador, Arte Voz allowed visitors here and there to record their heartbeats and transmit them between the Tufts galleries and the concurrent exhibition “Artists Call NOW,” curated by Hasbun and Duganne, at the Cultural Center of Spain in El Salvador.

Despite these attempts at recollection and connection, during the discussion that followed her keynote address at the opening reception for the show, Lippard made two crucial but rather despairing points. She framed “Artists Call” as a “failure” particularly on the level of policy making, since it did not reach the actual corridors of power. Intervention in Central America and elsewhere remains a hallmark of US imperialism decades after the heyday of organized activism against it. Additionally, while reflecting on the inadequate historiographic efforts that “Artists Call” has received so far, including its uncatalogued and ill-organized archives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Lippard shrugged and simply said, “The art world forgets,” whether by default or design.

The myth glorified Europa’s noble defenselessness against the will of the gods. The implicit gender dynamic is pretty disgusting—rape is romanticized! To add an asterisk to this celebration of the painting, the Gardner invited the collaborative couple Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley to contribute a feminist reply. The duo’s works typically tell the stories of women throughout history, often creatively filling in the archive’s gaps, since few women had the chance to create art or write memoirs in prior centuries. In their response, a nine-minute video titled after Titian’s painting, the Kelleys are not content simply to point out that rape is bad—this sort of feminist criticism is obvious, and it’s depressing that it needs to be repeated. Instead, they concoct an absurdist portrait of white feminism in all its complex contradictions, showing how victimhood has at times been wielded for worse.

The work opens with a scene depicting the protagonist shortly after her rape. Her clothes are ripped to shreds, and she’s distracted by fear that she might be pregnant. As in all the Kelleys’ videos, the actress and her costume appear in white with harsh black outlines, and she inhabits a grayscale, computer-generated world—in this case, a room that resembles the Gardner’s Venetian courtyard, post-plunder. The video recalls the political cartoons of Revolutionary France, tackling real-world events with a heavy dose of caricature. The black-and-white palette lends a somber, historical veneer, but the DIY effects make it all outlandish.

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, The Rape of Europa, 2021, HD Video with sound, 9 minutes 7 seconds.

While acknowledging the validity of Europa’s hurt, the Kelleys remind us that victim mentalities can be toxic. In their far-from-simplistic delve into Europa’s psyche, the mythic character delivers whiny lines that makes clear she hasn’t processed her trauma in a healthy way. In the scene where the otherwise obnoxious lady is most sympathetically portrayed, she’s trying to practice affirmations in the mirror but winds up yelling, heartbreakingly, “This is all your fault.” She doubles down on this self-hatred and relishes her newfound proximity to power, adopting Zeus’s misogyny by dismissing the societal contributions of women. Her outbursts are childish responses to history lesson vignettes, in which Reid Kelley speaks in limericks to tell stories of ancient women’s foundational inventions in and beyond Europe—including beer and needles. But the Kelleys’ protagonist brings everything back to herself, and she pooh-poohs most of these accomplishments. Upon being told that a Mosul woman invented yogurt, for instance, she says, effectively, so what? She retorts, in a very Karen kind of way, that she’s lactose intolerant (she doesn’t eat gluten, carbs, or mollusks either). In another clip, Europa passionately paints the phrase “I am a victem [sic]” on a canvas, giving the museum the take they probably expected, but with a misspelling that lends a wink and a nod. The Kelleys mock her self-centered wallowing with one limerick line about history’s first white lady, who “turned very brittle when not in the middle.”

The duo succeeds in countering history’s biases, showing that ancient women were not only victims, but innovators too. At the same time, they caricature the girl boss attitude that would have us believe entrepreneurial endeavors are enough to tip power imbalances. Humor is their primary weapon. The buffoonery common in limericks—which prioritize rhythm and rhyme over meaning—perfectly and playfully captures the contradictions of white feminism. The Kelleys’ video is a necessary update to the genre of “feminist response.”

The exhibition “Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—scheduled to be on view through September 14, though the museum is currently closed—explores how this uneven relationship between artist and model was structured by differences of race, class, age, and possibly sexuality. (Many scholars have suggested that Sargent, a lifelong bachelor, was gay. McKeller eventually married, in 1934.) In addition to Sargent’s painted portrait of McKeller, the show includes a previously unexhibited portfolio of the artist’s preparatory drawings for the MFA rotunda murals, which he gave to Isabella Stewart Gardner, his friend and benefactor, in 1921. These charcoal studies, discovered by the exhibition’s curator, Nathaniel Silver, in 2017, show McKeller in a number of poses, emulating figures ranging from the bowman Achilles to the singing personification of Romantic Art. Unlike the final murals, these drawings sensuously portray McKeller’s body without concealing his racial identity.

John Singer Sargent: Classic and Romantic Art, 1921, oil on canvas, 100 3/8 by 167 inches; at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The drawings and portrait are accompanied by archival correspondence and a detailed timeline charting details of Gardner’s, Sargent’s, and McKeller’s biographies alongside concurrent social and cultural shifts in Boston, from the Jim Crow era until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, two years after McKeller’s death. Mapping out the worlds in which McKeller, Sargent, and Gardner lived, these supplemental materials effectively make the case that narratives of modern American art cannot be segregated from black history. In an introductory video by the show’s entrance, McKeller’s last living descendent, formerly unaware of her ancestor’s modeling, is acquainted with this remarkable history. Although the video, with its tinge of melodrama, recalls an episode of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “Finding Your Roots,” it grounds the exhibition in a lived reality, fleshing out McKeller as a real person with a family and community rather than simply an anonymous model.

Silver invited local scholars and artists to write responses to the works. While these responses, which are displayed as wall labels, sometimes impose contemporary ideas about race, class, and sexuality on material from the early twentieth century, they are the most compelling part of the exhibition. Some contributors offer interpretations of the drawings, while others speculate about the charged relationship between artist and muse. In one text, artist Steve Locke, a gay black portrait painter who lived in Boston for many years, casts figurative painting as a collaboration between artist and model.

Exhibitions rarely give models their proper due, particularly black models, whose contributions to art history have regularly been overlooked. A notable exception is “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today”—a landmark 2018–19 show at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery that traveled, in modified form, to the Musée d’Orsay and explored the significance of Laure, the model for the black maid in Manet’s Olympia (1863). “Boston’s Apollo,” with its nuanced analysis of power and race, rigorously contextualizes the relationship between McKeller and Sargent, ultimately positing that McKeller was not simply a model but a cocreator of the works for which he posed.

Bhabha’s sculptural bodies collapse the political and imaginary, the historical and futuristic, the mortal and iconic. The exhibition’s earliest works were six masks from the mid-1990s channeling aliens and monsters from popular culture (“Star Trek” and the Mortal Kombat video game were cited in the wall text). The masks were displayed in a row on the wall like terrifying trophies: in one, red tubes penetrate the mouth, nose, and eyes of a faux bear head; in another, skin hangs loosely from a humanoid head, the orifices bloody and gaping. These works speak to social realities as much as fiction: Bhabha noticed that aliens and monsters depicted in Hollywood movies and beyond appropriate features from the masks of colonized cultures.

In the next gallery, standing figures referenced Archaic Greek kouroi: rigid, idealized memorials for male youths. From the front, Tupac Amaru (2010) is an assemblage of polystyrene foam blocks, with ribs and facial features crudely scrawled and sprayed on the surface. The rear is a tangle of chicken wire, clay, wood, and seedpods, with a phallic, daggerlike horn as a tail. The sculpture is named after the last Indigenous monarch of the Inca empire, who resisted the Spanish invaders. Bhabha’s impoverished materials themselves become a form of refusal: we are given polystyrene foam, a marked contrast to the gold that drove Spanish conquest.

Such explorations of power exercised through brute force and cultural appropriation set the stage for the exhibition’s poetic center, the colossal Benaam (2018), whose title means “nameless” in Urdu. This sculpture, which was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its series of rooftop presentations, portrays a kneeling supplicant with huge, elongated hands stretching forth from a body shrouded in black material and with a tail protruding at the back. The hands and tail appear to be made of crumbling clay, but the entire piece is cast bronze, painted to imitate fragile, quotidian materials. Bhabha, who compares the black shroud to a body bag, says that the work is at once a “monument to unnamed victims of war” and a “cocoon with the potential of rebirth.”

Nine monumental totems populated the final gallery, all but one of them carved from a combination of cork and foam. Garish fluorescent colors are applied to the totems’ masklike faces and bodies. Some of the works, like Castle of the Daughter (2016), have gaping-mouthed visages that conjure Basquiat’s horror-stricken skulls, while others, such as Waiting for Another Game (2018), resemble Tiki bar decor. The cork and foam are grafted together to create strange hybrids of the organic and the artificial; both materials are buoyant and impermeable and will crumble with age, leaving no lasting form. A single totem, Constantium (2014), is rendered in bronze. It will endure, like the trauma that haunts Bhabha’s figures.

Simone’s plaintive song accompanied Suara Welitoff’s black-and-white looping video projection Be the Boy (2001), in which the artist’s friend, a young man in a pageboy wig, performs tentatively for the camera in a manner impossible to dissociate from a Warhol screen test. Nearby was Luther Price’s slide projection Light Fractures When Dreaming (2017–18), for which he buried, bleached, and otherwise manipulated found 35mm images, many of them showing people: strangers to Price who grew only more distanced through his alterations. This was an outlier—the works typically focused on the artists’ friends, asserting social groups as rich and complex subjects, as in Goldin’s photograph Ivy in the Boston Garden: back, Boston (1973), which shows a drag queen striding through the stately Boston Common. Two photographs Gail Thacker took in 1980 portray Museum School classmates in a vulnerable, grotesque manner: Pat Hearn, who went on to become a pioneering New York gallerist, appears to be coated in sweat, dirt, and confetti, while Steve Stain, a Boston punk performer, bears gashes on his face from a recent car accident.

Images by and of Morrisroe—whom the curators described as “the social anchor of the Boston School”—cropped up throughout the show. Photographs he produced using his usual technique of printing from sandwiched negatives depict gritty, 1970s-era Boston in a soft-focus, pictorialist style, while his double portrait Blow Both of Us, Gail Thacker and Me, Summer (1978/86) poetically sets youthful exuberance against a dreary urban backdrop. A monitor screened an interview that artist Bonnie Donohue conducted in the early 1980s with Morrisroe as part of her “Survivors” series. He recounts his experience of getting shot in the spine by an intruder to his home, embroidering the traumatic narrative with reference to his past as a teenage hustler. Doug and Mike Starn’s monumental, shadowy portrait Mark Morrisroe (1985–86) is a mosaic of gelatin silver prints that have been crumpled, smoothed, and crudely taped together. Morrisroe tested positive for HIV in 1986, and the salvaged-looking photographs and his darkened silhouette register a sense of the fragility of existence.

Fresh as the exhibited works felt, the show seemed, in part, like a requiem to an era in American life and art, and not only because many of the artists and subjects have died. Melanie Bernier’s room-size installation Thank You for Your Service (2014–16) responds to the toll of gentrification on the underground music scene in which many Boston School artists participated. Stitched banners memorializing shuttered clubs, like Uncle Crummy’s, are lovingly crafted from old jeans, leather pants, and other garments. But while gentrification has radically shifted the city’s social geography, the ethos of the Boston School long ago took hold, here and beyond, particularly in art schools, where Goldin’s influence is hard to overstate. A display of red-and-black uniforms and pom-poms belonging to the feminist Art School Cheerleaders, who were active in 1996 and 1997 at the Museum School, perhaps most directly conveyed the show’s main takeaway: the championing of anti-conformist values lies at the heart of Boston’s most compelling work.

A curator curating artists who curate other artists. It doesn’t get any more meta than that. The artworks collected in “The Artist’s Museum,” a nesting box of an exhibition organized by Dan Byers, are, in essence, collections themselves. Visitors encounter one idiosyncratic assortment after another, each installation exemplifying its own curatorial logic and complicating the dominant conventions for displaying art. 

Goshka Macuga’s gorgeous Kabinett der Abstrakten (after El Lissitzky), 2003, reminds us that artists have long acted as experimental curators. The elaborate wooden cabinet was inspired by a modular gallery that Constructivist artist El Lissitzky designed in the 1920s to house a patron’s collection of abstract paintings. Macuga’s work is a self-contained gallery in itself. When closed, the blonde-wood case is a large cube, with each face embellished with a square of darker inlaid wood. The cabinet folds open at various angles to reveal miniature exhibitions in four interior chambers. The contents of these exhibitions change whenever Kabinett is on view. This iteration features a selection of postwar avant-garde multiples (mostly prints), all borrowed from a British collection. These works include pieces by canonical figures like Joseph Beuys and Jenny Holzer, but could easily be considered ephemera rather than artworks. In contrast to the luxurious form of the cabinet itself, the contents eschew preciousness, suggesting that anyone can take ownership of the histories they represent.

Several of the twelve artists in the show explicitly overturn cultural hierarchies by blending histories of fine art with those of popular culture. Pierre Leguillon’s La grande évasion (The Great Escape), 2012, includes dozens of archival boxes lying open on the floor. The interior and exteriors of the cardboard cases are adorned with photographs of dancers. These range from film stills of Fred Astaire to photographs of Degas’s sculptures of ballerinas to stills from Disney’s Fantasia showing a hippo whirling with an alligator. The installation occupies its own gallery, in which Amy Winehouse’s bluesy 2006 ballad “Back to Black” plays over speakers. Theatrical lighting that intensifies in sync with the song gives the impression that the images are somehow alive.

André Malraux and Aby Warburg, two art historians who pioneered the use of photographic reproductions in the field, are cited frequently in the catalogue. Warburg in particular is a touchstone. For his idiosyncratic “Mnemosyne Atlas” Warburg assembled hundreds of photographs of art in an attempt to trace the “survival” of certain motifs and images throughout world history. He also wrote about depictions of movement as having a primal, totemic power. Mark Leckey’s Cinema-in-the-Round (2006–08) picks up this thread. The video documents a gripping lecture the artist delivered on the circulation of images in the digital era. In a Warburgian spirit, Leckey makes huge associative leaps, discussing everything from Felix the Cat to Garfield to Homer Simpson to James Cameron’s Titanic to artificial intelligence. Yet Leckey forms a surprisingly tight argument about the fluidity, and even secular spiritualism, of animated forms.

Much of the work in “The Artist’s Museum” insists on the fluidity of art history, emphasizing narratives built on personal reflection rather than authoritative interpretation. Carol Bove’s La traversée difficile (The Difficult Crossing, 2008), for example, incorporates reproductions of two eponymous seascapes by René Magritte, one from 1926 and one from 1963. These images are displayed on a plinth among an array of objects—driftwood, shells, coral—that suggests a poetic response to the Surrealist compositions. Anna Craycroft’s project for the exhibition is the most ambitious attempt to examine how collecting and display can be vehicles for self-expression. She devised a two-part exhibition for the show, one a fairly straightforward presentation about the twentieth-century photographer Berenice Abbott, and the other featuring a selection of work by Craycroft’s contemporaries.

 Abbott wore many hats, from photographer to inventor to Eugène Atget’s champion and protector, but she was determined to keep her private life very separate from her artist persona. Yet the photographs and artifacts assembled here, drawn from Abbott’s archive, bring this complex person to life. One vitrine features a 1985 epistolary exchange between Abbott and historian Kaucyila Brooke that captures the tension running through Craycroft’s display. Brooke wrote to the photographer seeking her permission to make the argument that a series of portraits Abbott took of lesbians in Paris in the ’20s was a way of affirming her own queer sexual orientation. But Abbott wanted no part of Brooke’s revisionist history. In her response presented here, Abbott writes, “I am a photographer, not a lesbian.” 

Craycroft’s companion exhibition suggests an intertwining of artistic practice and social life. She has assembled what feels like a personal tribute to her friends that includes Jill Magid’s display of photographic slides featuring a diamond containing the ashes of Mexican architect Luis Barragán and Matt Keegan’s artist’s book of photocopied images that he considers a “history of New York.” If Brooke tried to assert that Abbott’s portraits of lesbians in Paris show a social circle to which she belonged and that contributed to her worldview, then Craycroft’s exhibition is an explicit embrace of such an idea of influence, serving as a tribute to the work of her own peers and the way that they shape her opinions. 

The potential downside to developing our peer groups is that sometimes we get caught up in our own silos or bubbles, unaware of or disinterested in views that don’t conform to our narrow understanding of the world. Photos by Xaviera Simmons depicting assemblages of various items, including palm fronds and images of fashion models, are the only works, unfortunately, by an artist of color. This has other ramifications for the exhibition as a whole, which, in bringing together a selection of artists that is overwhelmingly white, quietly reinforces the very hierarchies it purports to demolish.

If only the exhibition offered some examples from outside of the Western hemisphere to bolster or round out this notion of how we create our own art histories to make better sense of ourselves—the Arab Art Archive comes easily to mind. (The excellent catalogue refers to artist-curated shows by Glenn Ligon and Kara Walker that successfully disrupted the usual, limited focus of museums.) But even in its somewhat imperfect realization, “The Artist’s Museum” suggests horizons as yet undiscovered, and offers hope for the further unpacking of pasts that may enrich our development as citizens of the world.

The archive has been the inspiration and the raw material for many artists and curators, but few approach it with the dedication and whimsy of the Vancouver-based artist Geoffrey Farmer. Farmer, who will represent Canada at the 2017 Venice Biennale, is known for his labor-intensive installations and mixed-medium pieces. Among the three projects on view in his exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, for instance, was Boneyard (2013–14), an installation comprising more than twelve hundred images that he cut out of a 1970s book on the history of Italian sculpture. The nudes, saints, Davids, angels, Madonnas, and other figures and forms are arranged like paper dolls on a circular platform, positioned so they face outward. A slang term for a cemetery, Farmer’s title hints at the death, or at least outmoded-ness, of the Western sculptural canon, but the installation breathes new life into it. The sculptures are decontextualized and (in image form) thrown together cheek by jowl, allowing viewers to invent their own associations and narratives. Embodying ideas that Hal Foster discusses in his 2004 essay “An Archival Impulse,” Farmer’s work makes historical information physically present and creates space for new connections to be made. 

Farmer also rummages through archives of images to invent his own worlds, and his meticulous, one might even say obsessive, approach brings to mind outsider artists like Henry Darger and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein. Farmer’s inventiveness is most apparent in The Surgeon and the Photographer (2009–), which consists of 365 handmade, three-dimensional puppetlike figures he assembled using photographs cut out of books; bits and pieces of fabric; and objects (a small American flag, say, or a paper flower). The figures, each of which is placed on its own plinth, combine different scales and species: an oversize hand juts out from a red robe; a bird’s head emerges out of a creature with human arms. There’s something both childlike and menacing about Farmer’s idiosyncratic cast of characters, who are as likely to be carrying a pistol as a basketful of ducks. Walking among them is a little like falling through the looking glass. 

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell (2013)—whose title comes from a poem by the nineteenth-century English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti—is a slideshow combining found photographs and sounds. Farmer has made different versions of the piece, drawing on various clippings libraries and archives. The imagery in the ICA version spans the past 150 years—roughly the history of photography—and ranges in subject from politics to people at play to agriculture and industry, while the sounds include wind chimes, choral music, and snippets of dialogue from old movies. Tagged according to various categories, the images and sounds are combined in different sequences using a computer algorithm, the resultant work resembling an ethnographic film gone pleasantly off the rails. Look in my face is about the elasticity of time, but also about the elasticity of photography, and its unreliability as a truth-telling mechanism. Whatever narrative unfolds in the work, it’s a mutable, subjective one, as much fiction as fact.

It’s a genre appropriate to the theme: composed of urban artifacts, the works weave fragments into complex wholes, mirroring the city itself. Defamiliarizing the material culture of rapid urbanization, operating at the scale of architecture, they evoke the dynamic assemblage of urban development. The effect is amplified in the museum’s labyrinthine permanent-collection galleries, where a handful of works are scattered. Navigating the building’s twists and turns, passing through the graceful Korean collection only to abruptly stumble into Choi Jeong Hwa’s dizzying, mirrored Chaosmos Mandala (2016)—this experience feels urban. Crucially, the juxtaposition and disorientation reframes the larger collection: a way of seeing native to the street is smuggled into the white cube, and the museum performs amiably as a city in miniature.

One wonders, however, what was lost by passing over video, performance, and other approaches to this geography. The showcased genre emphasizes only certain aspects of hyperurbanism. Trading in texture and feel, these works are not particularly effective at revealing specific histories, politics, and policies driving the explosion of Asian cities—or the communities negotiating them. The show depends on the displayed works to represent its titular megacities, and the image produced seems incomplete, if not sanitized. While each artist responds to urgent social issues, without more explicit works to create juxtapositions and bring out these underlying concerns, the installations’ whimsical, experiential aspects mutually reinforce one another. An atmosphere of amusement prevails, threatening to drown out dissonant political notes.

There is also an irony to the exhibition’s design. While the pieces individually communicate a spirit of messy assemblage, those in the main gallery are installed with austere seriality, assigned large tracts of floor and segregated by ample white space in a layout with only a few obvious routes. The audience is also often guided around the edges of works rather than into them. Yin Xiuzhen’s Temperature (2009–10), a rubble field that spectators have had to traverse in other iterations, is presented on a platform. Song Dong’s Wisdom of the Poor: Living with Pigeons (2005–06)—a memorial approximation of the informal architecture of old Beijing neighborhoods, built from their remains—has inhabitable nooks that are open only during limited hours. In such instances, environments are reduced to sculptures, immersion to panorama. 

The most intriguing works are by artists less familiar to American audiences. The Korean group flyingCity spent six years embedded in a district of electronics chop-shops threatened by the development of Seoul’s celebrated Cheonggyecheon waterway, collaborating with an informal network of machinists to research and resist displacement. The resulting “Drifting Producer” sculptures (2003–09)—whirring, clicking, temperamental things that could pass for Tinguelys or outsider art—are just one set of artifacts from this project, which also includes maps, protests, and an industrial fair. The sculptures suffer in the gallery, isolated from this wider body of work and action, but wall texts breathe just enough contextual life into them to capture the imagination. Chinese artist Hu Xiangcheng’s Doors Away from Home—Doors Back Home (2016), a houselike installation constructed with materials from dismantled Ming- and Qing-dynasty homes, invites exploration, offering small chambers to move through, subtly threaded with fragile domestic objects—children’s stickers, worn comics—amid the more substantial architectural elements.

Any survey of Asian art today de facto involves megacities—that’s where the art centers are, after all. “Megacities Asia” highlights work that cannibalizes and mimes this ineluctable context, and the choice both lends the show consistency and limits it. It is, however, an important experiment for the MFA, a test of how encyclopedic museums might mobilize contemporary art within their collections and address pressing global conditions.

Performed in the Black Mountain College dining hall one evening in August 1952, John Cage’s Theater Piece No. 1 heralded participatory art practice, from Happenings to relational aesthetics. Its mythic status is just that: there exists no historical record beyond fragments of memories. Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, the pianist David Tudor, poets M.C. Richards and Charles Olson, and possibly others (Cage himself couldn’t remember) performed uncoordinated simultaneous actions within time signatures. Rauschenberg’s “White Paintings,” blank panels that turned focus onto their environment, were suspended from the ceiling. (By some accounts, a Franz Kline painting was also.) Cage lectured on music and Zen Buddhism, babies cried, Tudor performed on a “prepared piano,” Edith Piaf records played at double speed, Cunningham danced and was chased by a barking dog, four boys dressed in white served coffee. Cage’s event embraced ambient sound and the reactions of the audience. Everyone was a participant. This was the way of Black Mountain College: experimental to the marrow, committed to radical pedagogies and democratic action.

The deeply researched exhibition “Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, co-organized by Helen Molesworth (her final exhibition for the museum) and Ruth Erickson, gives a measure of clarity to a cultural force long felt if never quite in focus. The show’s objects span from humble studies made for class to canonical oil paintings, tapestries, ceramics and jewelry. Poetry, dance and music also abound. Collectively, these works reveal the school’s ethos, in which experience was the basis of knowledge, and objects were not fixed things, but mirrors of their environment, the result of action and experimentation.

Founded in Asheville, N.C., during the Great Depression by John Rice, a classics professor dismissed from traditional academia, the liberal arts college was formed on John Dewey’s progressive pedagogy. The pursuit of truth through direct experience and a belief in art as fundamental to the individual’s development were Rice’s guiding principles. A global faculty coalesced, many members having fled the rise of fascism in Europe, creating a cosmopolitan bastion in the rural South. The school closed in 1957, due to financial issues.

Beyond Cage, the quiet radicalism of Josef and Anni Albers is another touchstone for the exhibition. The first galleries reveal the breadth of the couple’s work at Black Mountain, where they taught from 1933 to 1949, imparting their Bauhaus methods of material experimentation. Josef’s oil-on-masonite panels push the bounds of pictorial space within geometric abstraction; one of them, Tenayuca (1943), evokes Aztec monuments through flat, interlocking rectangles. In Anni’s weaving Black-White-Gold I (1950), yarns meander across the grid of warp and weft, resembling a freehand drawing. A precise watercolor by Ray Johnson, from around 1951, contains delicate linear sequences of colors, mimicking threads and the geometric abstraction of Anni’s weavings.

Many works in “Leap Before You Look” were conceived as studies. Undated collages by W. Pete Jennerjahn were produced in Albers’s yearlong color course. Though the Color-aid paper has been damaged by adhesive, the series still vividly demonstrates Albers’s theory of “color action,” in which colors do not exist a priori but develop in relation to each other and the spectator. In his matière class, Albers pushed students like Ruth Asawa to combine materials from their surroundings—wheat, bark, ferns, cardboard, fabric—into collages and constructions. (Rauschenberg’s Combines also grew out of this catholic approach to materials.) Scarcity was a virtue. Anni Albers and Alexander Reed converted washers, paper clips, hairpins and wine corks into necklaces that ingeniously disguise these found materials as modern jewelry.

“Leap Before You Look” is equally an archival and a living exhibition. A dance floor near the center of the show hosts periodic live performances in homage to dancer/choreographers Katherine Litz and Merce Cunningham (documentary footage of performances is projected onto a gallery wall at other times). Theatre Piece No. 1 is reanimated in newly conceived actions performed in the exhibition galleries by artist Kelly Nipper and poet Danielle Legros Georges, among others. Music, an integral part of living and learning at Black Mountain, is present in “audioscapes” that fill galleries with Schoenberg, Cage, Ellington and more.

A section devoted to modernist painting doesn’t distinguish between abstraction and figuration: Abstract Expressionist canvases by Willem de Kooning and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline are hung near social realist works by Ben Shahn and Jacob Lawrence. Willem’s 1948 Asheville was a breakthrough of his early career. Here, it looks remarkably in dialogue with paintings by Elaine, and its lyricism and intimations of landscape suggest so much else happening at Black Mountain that summer, from Cage’s and Cunningham’s performances to Buckminster Fuller’s attempt to build a geodesic dome on campus (models are included in the exhibition).

A final gallery is dedicated to pottery and poetry. The incised, patterned surfaces of Karen Karnes’s earthenware, and the primitive, sculptural heft of Peter Voulkos’s kinetic Rocking Pot (1956), complement the Abstract Expressionist canvases nearby. Museum visitors can listen to readings by Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley on headphones, and look at instances in which the word becomes pictorial, such as Stan VanDerBeek’s Book of Ours (1955-57), a ghoulish, pictographic storyboard that hints at the experimental films to come. The voids of pottery vessels contain “breath,” said M.C. Richards, who arrived at the college as a member of the literature faculty and became a student of pottery. This breath also animated poetry, understood at Black Mountain not as page-bound words but as a kind of performative action involving voice and presence.

Given the fugitive nature of much that happened at Black Mountain, it is a curatorial triumph that the show’s narrative is told through its objects, recordings and performances, despite substantial didactic and archival material. That so many artists today are committed to social and participatory practices is due in no small part to the ideals of the school. “Leap Before You Look” is a timely rejoinder to current market conditions, reminding us that objects are not always the point.