Aruna D'Souza

New York Times, June 21, 2023

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

“It’s a love letter,” Tam said.

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

New York Times, June 30, 2023

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

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

4Columns, June 16, 2023

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

4Columns, June 2, 2023

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

4Columns, May 12, 2023

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

4Columns, April 14 2023

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

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

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

4Columns, February 17 2023

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

New York Times, February 8 2023

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

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

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

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

4Columns, January 20 2023

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

New York Times, December 22 2022

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

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

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

4Columns, December 9 2022

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

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

Ebook (free) available.

New York Times, November 10 2022

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

4Columns, November 4 2022

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

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

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

New York Times, November 3 2022

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

4Columns, October 14 2022

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

New York Times, September 13 2002

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

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

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

4Columns, September 16 2022

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

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

New York Times, July 21 2022

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

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

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

New York Times, June 15 2022

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

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

4Columns, June 3 2022

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

4Columns, May 27 2022

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

Frieze, May 04 2022

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

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

4Columns, April 15 2022

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

4Columns, March 18 2022

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

4Columns, February 25 2022

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

The New York Times, February 24 2022

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

“Baseera Khan Uses Her Body as a Weapon”

Frieze, February 7 2022

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

4Columns, January 21 2022

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

New York Times, December 7 2021

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

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

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

New York Times, December 6 2021

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

4Columns, December 3 2021

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

4Columns, November 19 2021

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

New York Times, November 18 2021

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

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

4Columns, October 15 2021

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

The New York Times, October 8, 2021

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

New York Times, October 1 2021

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

4Columns, September 17 2021

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

New York Times, August 19 2021

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

New York Times, August 17 2021

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

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

Galleries West, July 24 2021

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

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

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

New York Times, July 30 2021

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

New York Times, July 15 2021

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

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

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

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

4Columns, June 4 2021

“The decision to forefront these photographs functions as a subtle reminder to exhibition-goers not to get lost in nostalgia for the past, in a too-easy identification with or celebration of the power and beauty of those pictured inside the galleries. In starting with these images, the curators ask us to consider the ways that racism and economics have robbed some of their own history, and to recognize the Black life that Bey records through this lens of survival. We are asked—not only by this work, but by all the work in the show—to see ourselves in others, but in doing so, to also confront our responsibility to them, to their pasts, and to their futures.”

New York Times, May 27 2021

“Nina Katchadourian is a sculptor, a printmaker, a photographer, a performance artist, a video artist, a sound artist — but more than any of those things she is an artist with a voracious curiosity and a marathoner’s stamina when it comes to running with an idea. In her first show at Pace Gallery, “Cumulus,” she offers up seven projects that are witty, sometimes even guffaw-inducing. But don’t let that fool you: Underneath the playfulness lurk some pretty fundamental questions about how we organize knowledge to make sense of our past and present.”

4Columns, May 21 2021

“Brand New Heavies, an exhibition at Pioneer Works organized by artworld power couple Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont, working under the moniker “Deux Femmes Noires,” is not so much a curatorial statement as a proposition. What if, instead of choosing work that responds to or elaborates a preconceived idea, one simply invites artists who are on the verge of something big to make whatever work they want, giving them the time, space, and resources to take risks and push themselves in new directions? (The experimental approach seems well suited to Pioneer Works, an artist-run cultural center that houses residency studios as well as a variety of technology labs in addition to its 5,500-square-foot exhibition space.) The resulting show, consisting of large-scale installations by Abigail DeVille, Xaviera Simmons, and Rosa-Johan Uddoh, is a pretty convincing argument that the experiment has worked.

New York Times, May 13 2021

Two shows that recently opened at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art are keyed to our new normal: One came into being during the most restrictive moments of the pandemic; the other, though long planned, shifted its focus as these past, momentous months unfolded. Conceptually, both address the questions — personal and political — that are on many minds at the moment.

New York Times, April 19, 2021, Section C, page 1

The rise of racist attacks, some of them horrifyingly lethal, has galvanized Asian-American artists around the country. They are leveraging social media to raise awareness, gathering to protest despite the pandemic precautions, making new work, and — perhaps above all — finding new grounds for solidarity with one another and with other affected communities to figure out how to respond to the current climate.

Performa Magazine, April 2021

“Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America is many things at once. It is, first and foremost, the last curatorial project of the deeply influential curator Okwui Enwezor, conceived before his death in March 2019. The show was meant to demonstrate “the crystallization of Black grief in the face of a politically orchestrated white grievance”—in other words, against a backdrop of Donald Trump’s propensity to leverage a long history of sometimes simmering and other times raging resentment by white people, and to fan the flames of an endlessly enduring white supremacy, Grief and Grievance would pose the phenomenon of mourning, an experience both emotional and deeply political. How many revolutions have started with a death or a funeral? From Emmett Till to George Floyd, our history would suggest quite a few.”

4Columns, April 02 2021

“I loled when I saw Qualeasha Wood’s brilliant fore the day you die, you gon’ touch the sky (2021), an artwork that worships at the altar of the World Wide Web. The image consists of a selfie of the artist with finger touching chin in fearful recognition and eyes rolled upward to gaze at a white hand bestowing a blessing upon her. She sports a thin gold halo rendered in glass beads, bears stigmata on her hand, and is framed by carved arches, hordes of apostles, and putti. At the same time, a trio of computer cursors arcs toward her and the cloud-speckled blue sky appears glitched, as if a computer-generated image has failed to load properly. This is an Annunciation for the digital age, and the fact that it takes the form of a Jacquard tapestry doubles down on the absurdity: it references both earlier forms of elite Western art and the pixelation of screen-based images. The ambivalence of being a Black femme Chosen One in our current digital landscape, Wood seems to say, is as double-edged as it was in the Virgin Mary’s case: yes, you get the glory, but only at a price.”

4Columns, March 26 2021

“While seeing deep resonances between their practices, the Malaysian-born, London-based artist Mandy El-Sayegh (born in 1985) observes, in an interview done on the occasion of this show, that where Lee Bul is interested in the body politic, and the body’s place within that societal formation, her own work grapples with questions of biopolitics—how bodies (and therefore political, social, and psychoanalytic subjects) are constituted and regulated through systems including surveillance and police identification techniques, medical imaging, political and economic structures, and language itself. It is both the similarities between Lee Bul’s and El-Sayegh’s work—the fascination with the body as fragment, the slippage between organic and inorganic—and the extreme formal differences that make the juxtaposition intriguing.”

Read the full essay at KarmaKarma.org

“It seems no coincidence that Night Stand (2021) is titled after the red table whose drawer juts out and whose lamp seems ready to tip over—the wild shifts in perspective and instability of form tell us all we need to know about the figure gripped with anxiety who sits beside it. He is all of us, as we try to survive alone—literally or emotionally—in our rooms, confronting our loneliness, our fear, our sleeplessness, our isolation, reaching for the things around us that might help us make the irrationality of existence make sense. The wondrous thing, in Othello’s world, is that those things, in a sense, reach back—not precisely easing our loneliness, but perhaps showing that we are not, in fact, entirely alone.”

Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts
Edited by Christopher K. Ho and Daisy Nam
Paper Monument, 2021

This collection of seventy-three letters written in 2020 captures an unprecedented moment in politics and society through the experiences of Asian-American artists, curators, educators, art historians, editors, writers, and designers. The form of the letter offers readers intimate insights into the complexities of Asian American experiences, moving beyond the model-minority myth. Chronicling everyday lives, dreams, rage, family histories, and cultural politics, these letters ignite new ways of being, and modes of creating, at a moment of racial reckoning.

With Contributions By: Aily Nash and Sylvia Schedelbauer, Ajay Kurian, Alexander Lau, Anicka Yi, Anne Anlin Cheng, Anoka Faruqee, Aruna D’Souza, Asad Raza, Brendan Fernandes, Brian Kuan Wood, Byron Kim, Candice Lin, Cathy Park Hong, Celine Wong Katzman, C. Spencer Yeh ,CFGNY, Chitra Ganesh and Sung Hwan Kim, Chris Wu, Christine Y. Kim, Dawn Chan, Furen Dai, Hera Chan, Herb Tam, Holly Shen, Hồng-Ân Trương, Howie Chen, Hyperlink Press, Iftikhar Dadi, J Fan, j.p. mot, Jean Shin, Jen Liu, Jesse Chun, Jessica Hong, Jia Tolentino, John Tain, John Yau, Josh Kline, Ka-Man Tse, Ken Lum, Kenneth Tam, Kim Nguyen, Luke Luokun Cheng, Lumi Tan, Maia Chao, Marc Handelman, Marci Kwon, Margaret Lee, Martha Tuttle, Martin Wong, Mary Lum, Matthew Shen Goodman, Megha Ralapati, Mel Chin, Michelle Lopez, Mimi Wong, Mo Kong, Naeem Mohaiemen and Yara El-Sherbini, Pamela M. Lee, Patrick Jaojoco, Patty Chang, Paul Pfeiffer, Philip Poon, Prem Krishnamurthy, Ralph Pugay, Rit Premnath, Sarah McCaffery, Zheng Sheng-Tian, Shui, Tausif Noor, Vinay Hira, Yayoi Shionoiri, and Zulfikhar Bhutto.

4Columns, February 12 2021

“If one of the stories this exhibition tells is that of timeliness—the press release frames Parks’s photographs as “equally striking for their relevance as for their contemporary compositions”—there is another one to attend to as well, signaled by his use of color. Opposite the array of images dealing with police brutality is another set of photos, originally shot on Kodachrome and newly printed, that counter the grim and righteous anger of the black-and-white pictures with a joyfulness and vitality and even, at moments, humor: this is the other aspect of protest.”

In Candice Breitz: Labor, catalogue raisonné, 2011-2020 (Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2020).

Download essay here.

“In the body of work she has made since the mid-1990s, Candice Breitz has repeatedly taken on the problem of whiteness – of its constant (if subterranean) presence, its lack of self-awareness, the way it carries its privilege – in short, the problem of the white-saviour industrial complex. She does so from an especially fraught position. As a white South African woman who came of age at the moment that state-imposed apartheid was being dismantled, she has witnessed the uneasy and slow process of divestment from white supremacy in her home country, even as she benefits from the privileges afforded by whiteness. As an artist whose recent work has taken up political urgencies such as the global refugee crisis and the rights of sex workers, she could easily be accused of occupying the role of white saviour herself. She makes herself vulnerable to this charge willingly, it seems to me, in order to do something crucial: namely, to reveal the mechanisms of the West’s media-driven and typically craven myopia when it comes to regarding the lives of others, and to lay bare the mostly hidden and often violent workings of white privilege.”

4Columns, December 11 2020

“In the face of this history of forced migration, and with images of a recent road trip between the Mahicannituck and the Waaziija rolling by on screen, Ramirez can be heard proposing the idea of a “Native hub”—a way of thinking of place that takes into account the movement of people, languages, affiliations, and identities, so that community comes into being wherever people gather, and so that Indigenous solidarity can persist. As if to underline the point, the images on the screens occasionally swap places, and sometimes dim, so that the road appears where the river should be, and the river appears where the Ho-Chunk lands were, and the Ho-Chunk lands replace the road, and so on, suggesting that geography is not a stable marker of identity, but neither is it beside the point. This work, along with so much else on view in Centers of Somewhere, proposes different definitions of belonging for peoples who have survived and persisted in the face of colonial erasure, and makes space for hybridity—as opposed to “authenticity”—as a defining aspect of Indigenous experience.”

Royal Academy Magazine, December 2 2020

“Packer barely deploys line – usually the defining aspect of drawing – instead using the side or flat top of the crayon to carve out of negative space an image that is both joyful and ominous. The pleasure of jumping into a cool pond on a hot day and floating weightlessly on the water exists alongside the relentlessness of the dark field that defines the swimmer’s body, and the dangling rope, which, thank goodness, ends in a knot and not a noose.”

4Columns, November 13 2020

On Theaster Gates’ question of turning “a place of commerce into a sacred space”:

The question may be an intriguing one in relation to Stony Island Arts Bank, which he transformed from a capitalist institution into a site where Black culture is safeguarded and valued. But at one of the richest private art galleries in the world, an epicenter of art speculation and massive wealth hoarding, it sounds like a read: Are we supposed to imagine that Gagosian can transcend its venality under the pressure of Black spirituality? Or is he turning non-Black viewers like me into mindless consumers of Black culture, not that far different from the hordes of gawkers that take bus tours to Harlem to lay their eyes on Black gospel choirs at Sunday morning services before repairing to Sylvia’s for some chicken and waffles, and in doing so, believe they’ve gained an insight into the Black experience? There are moments when I feel like the brilliance of Gates—as an artist, as an impresario, as an activist—is that one never knows. And facing that ambiguity forces a kind of self-reflection that is both necessary and almost unbearably uncomfortable.

Ford Foundation

On arts education without saving the university: “We need to separate the value of learning, of higher education as a social and pedagogical goal, from the university and college apparatus that has been built to sustain it: an apparatus that depends on high tuition and abets a predatory industry of student loan providers; that exploits adjunct labor; that in some cases sustains the whiteness of its student body through the practice of prioritizing ‘legacy admissions’ (affirmative action for white people); that is metrics- and outcomes-driven in ways that go against pedagogy itself; that caters to the American value of endless consumer choice.”

In Memling Now: Hans Memling in Contemporary Art, exh. cat., Musea Brugge, 2020. Download essay.

“Which brings us back to this moment—this moment in which we find ourselves in the middle of things, with no clear sense of what the future will hold, a moment in which we are realizing even the most seemingly immutable aspects of our histories are not what we seemed, and don’t have to endure. We are in a moment when sculptures, in the form of monuments to racist pasts, are being toppled. What will be erected in their places? What new worlds will we build? (By the time this essay is printed, perhaps we will know. I am writing in media res.) But it is precisely in this moment that the implications of Al-Hadid’s practice—one that is so centered on her play with materials and form, her fascination with art history, her abstract poetry—offers us a model for how to proceed. We don’t have the luxury, if this is indeed a revolution, of working from a plan. The future we construct will involve taking as we need from the present, recasting the past, and responding to conditions as they emerge. It will involve translation: the quest to understand each other across chasms of incomprehension, and building provisional solidarities, precarious meanings, with people whose languages we cannot fully understand but in which we find beauty. And it will require the time and space to contemplate what we have done in order to determine where we go next—to chase the work of recreating our societies and communities. What this moment asks of us is not to plan for a future—not to be architects of that future—but to get messy, like a sculptor in her studio. To let the desires provoked by our fascination with a painting by Memling, say, teach us new ways of doing things, of making things, of being. To live and work in the middle of things, rather than waiting for what comes next.

4Columns, October 9 2020

“Guest curated by Dr. Nicole Fleetwood, and accompanied by a book of the same title published by Harvard University Press, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration is the result of Fleetwood’s long engagement with artists working in and out of prisons around the country. The exhibition goes well beyond showing us the talent that exists among those currently in correctional institutions (nearly 2.2 million, an inordinate number of whom are Black and Latinx) or demonstrating the resourcefulness of people who are living in the most debasing conditions in expressing their humanity and creativity, although it does do both. More importantly, by including currently incarcerated artists, formerly incarcerated artists, and artists who have never been incarcerated but whose work has engaged with this issue, it is designed to demonstrate that there is no inside and outside when it comes to mass incarceration.”