This was back in 2000, on the occasion of Valdés’s first return to Cuba since she had emigrated to the United States at the age of 7. Given that personal context, the gesture had an obvious element of self-portraiture—a connotation extended by the mirroring of the artist’s last name and that of the novel’s protagonist. It was also a clear allusion to the mass exodus of Cubans under the regime of Fidel Castro, and to the millions of other refugees who daily risk their lives on the seas.

The idea of flow, across spaces both literal and cultural, is the subject of Valdés’s art. Elsewhere in the exhibition, transit is materialized through found objects, artifacts treated as the flotsam of demographic movement. The room-size installation Terrestrial Bodies (2020) presents hundreds of porcelains, metalwork, glassware, African tourist goods, and other bric-a-brac, all arranged according to geographic categories that align with the artist’s maternal ancestry (verified by a 23andMe DNA test that revealed heritage from Africa, Asia, and the Americas). This is portraiture by quite another means, with souvenirs tracing the process of globalized identity formation. Here and there, large cyanotypes punctuate the display: they show the undersides of the collected objects, emphasizing their status as evidence; they also introduce a deep blue, the color of the oceans across which these commodities have moved.

If this work is somewhat didactic—more museological than sculptural—the show also has moments of terse understatement and fragile beauty. Redbone Color China Rags (2017) at first appears to be a series of cleaning cloths hung on the wall, as if from a clothesline. On closer inspection, they prove to be sensitively crafted ceramic skeins, tinted across a spectrum of skin tones from pale pink to deep brown. The intersection of racial coloration and abstraction is familiar from Byron Kim’s ongoing project Synecdoche (1991–present), but the tacit reference to domestic labor grounds the work in the lived experience of immigrant communities, particularly that of women, who so often bear the greatest burden of maintaining their families.

Another work in bone china, Hanging By (2017), shows Valdés at her most poetic. It comprises nine thin white ceramic sheets, looking very much like paper, on which words are printed in black. The first bears a verse both elusive and desperate: “It’s about hanging by a nail by a thread by the skin of your teeth.” Successively rearranged in the subsequent panels, the expression cycles through a series of confusing realignments—starting with “It’s about hanging the skin by a thread a nail your teeth”—and gradually diminishing into the single, baleful phrase, “It’s about your skin.” Aesthetically elegant and linguistically compressed, the work captures the dreadful calculus of racism in all its enormity, the reduction of meaning to a single arbitrary signifier.

Valdés is not willing to accept that reckoning, of course, and in the exhibition’s most complex and satisfying work, she makes a sensational mockery of it. Sweet Honesty-Tender Pink (1997) occupies a whole room, the walls blocked out in standard decorator’s paints with ethnically charged names like “Angel Peach,” “Café Noir,” and “War Dance.” Against this backdrop, Valdés prints fragments from 18th-century etchings of exoticized odalisques, the bare-breasted women taking on different coloration depending on where they happen to fall on the tinted walls. Finally, on the far wall is a large video projection of Valdés taking a shower, perpetually sudsing herself. Another precedent springs to mind: Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather (1993), in which the artist cast herself in busts of chocolate and soap, licking the former all over and taking the latter into the bath with her. While it occupies the same lineage of feminist art, Valdés’s work is more capacious, taking in the long ugly history of stereotype, her own desire to rid herself of it, and the impossibility of fully doing so. Most important, as is always the case with Valdés’s best work, she orchestrates all this into a rich emotional tapestry, shot through with threads of bitterness and humor. Amazingly, this is Valdés’s first solo show at a museum, and Sarasota is a great place for it: the recently renovated building has beautiful galleries, and, of course, Florida is the epicenter of the Cuban-American community. (The artist herself lives in Amherst, where she is associate professor at the University of Massachusetts.) All the same, this is a show that deserves to be seen more widely, and Valdés deserves far greater recognition. What she has to say is relevant to anyone whose life has been touched by migration—and who among us can say otherwise? Global displacement is often considered a problem, something to manage or police. Through her work, we can see more clearly: motion, in time and tide, is the only real universal.

A sort of retrospective in the form of a colorful multimedia show that originated at Kling & Bang in Reykjavik before traveling to the Louisiana Museum of Art, followed by overlapping iterations in Montreal and at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Polygon Gallery in Vancouver, “Velvet Terrorism” doesn’t put much stock in subtlety or nuance either. More in the group’s style is a video installed near the exhibition’s entrance, showing a ski-masked Pussy Riot member pissing on a portrait of the Russian president; if that doesn’t make things clear enough, the title of one of the group’s early actions, Fuck You, Fucking Sexists and Fucking Putinists (2011), involved “musical occupations of glamorous venues in the capital” including “areas where wealthy Putinists gather: in Moscow boutiques, at fashion shows, in elite cars, and on the rooftops of Kremlin-affiliated bars.”

Whether or not you’re prepared to enjoy Pussy Riot’s songs as music or their actions and videos as art, though, you’d be hard put to contest their right to the third category into which their work has always been slotted: activism. And yet, after immersing myself in “Velvet Terrorism,” I had to wonder whether even that is quite the right description of what they do. Activism, as I understand it, is not action for its own sake, but is undertaken to achieve some determinate social or political goal, to change the world, or at least one’s country or community.

Is that what Pussy Riot have been up to? Note that the catalog descriptions of their actions are organized into three rubrics: Location, Context, and Reaction—and that the most common entry under Reaction is “nothing serious happened.” But when something serious does happen, it has to do with legal penalties: “Everyone was detained 3 times. Beatings, harassments, surveillance, slashed tires” or “Detention, day in police station.” And note that the actions include ones imposed on the group’s members, rather than organized by them: “140 Hours of Community Service 2018-19,” “Pyotr’s Poisoning 2018,” and so on.

As MAC director John Zeppetelli writes, Pussy Riot has “used the police state’s apparatus of repression and authoritarianism as a creative partner, engaging in an uneasy ‘dance with the devil.’” This is risky stuff. Prison time adds up, not to mention fines and extrajudicial violence. It takes incredible courage to keep exposing oneself to the wrath of a brutal regime without conscience. But while Pussy Riot’s interventions may be, as the catalog says, “desperate, sudden and joyous,” that joy seems very far away from hope. Does Pussy Riot really imagine that they can change Russia? Or even just change some minds? It doesn’t look that way. These sisters are doing it for themselves: trolling the government, the church, the oligarchs, and so on is its own reward.

Is it worth the beatings, imprisonment, and exile just to get under the skin of Russia’s rulers? The answer appears to be yes. It turns out to be a way of keeping the spirit free. And that’s why Pussy Riot’s work really does belong in an art museum. It is not performance art as activism; it is, rather, something like the performance of activism in a situation where true activist intervention has been rendered impossible. For the group’s members to have persisted in their efforts over more than a decade despite their having no realistic prospect of making a measurable impact on the reality of Russia in itself constitutes a vivid emblem of the unquenchable desire for change even in the absence of any means to satisfy such a desire. That’s the artistic core of Pussy Riot’s work. They make rebelliousness an aesthetic quality in itself—one that can move us, and that is serious in its implications.

How will this rebelliousness manifest itself now that many of Pussy Riot’s members are living outside Russia? Will they rebel against their new hosts? I hope so. One action documented here is the hanging of a banner at Trump Tower in New York in 2017 in support of Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian film director who was arrested in Crimea when Russia invaded that territory in 2014. It caused a stir, but, of course, Pussy Riot’s pro-Ukrainian anti-Putin stance is music to the ears of most of us in the West. It’s consumable at no risk. Rebelliousness is hard to maintain as it devolves into entertainment. Perhaps this problem was already inherent in Pussy Riot’s strategy of divertingly high-spirited confrontation. In a way, it mirrored too well the topsy-turvy image-world of Putin’s Russia, which maintains itself through the mere performance of law, of elections, and even (in its propaganda against Ukraine) of antifascism. Now the task should be to cultivate more deeply the inner freedom without which Pussy Riot’s opposition to Putin could not have happened, and which may be even more desperately needed in a West that is increasingly listing toward its own forms of authoritarianism.

“I was walking on the street. A car stopped, a few men stepped out, and pushed into my mouth, a liquid. The mouth froze.”

Those haunting words open two New York shows devoted to Shilpa Gupta, a Mumbai-based artist who has taken over Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea as well as Amant, a non-profit space in Brooklyn. The text is etched into a brass plate hung next to a small sculpture—a cast of an open mouth made with gunmetal—suspended from the wall. The intriguing form lends the words more impact, especially the final three: “The mouth froze.” “The mouth froze!” “THE MOUTH FROZE!”

I felt estranged from my own mouth as I read that phrase, puzzled over the enigma of a first-person reference to “the mouth” (rather than “my mouth”). But I found the phrasing perfect for a pair of shows focused on literal and figurative voices and the many ways they can be both erased and amplified. In Listening Air (2019–2023), the central work in the Tanya Bonakdar show, a sound installation features microphones dangling and slowly spinning in a darkened room while broadcasting recordings of work songs and different kinds of folk and protest music from around the world. Voices resound from India, China, North Korea, Lebanon, Italy, and the American South (the last one recognizable from the refrain “we shall overcome”). The artist reverse-wired the microphones, transforming them into speakers for playback rather than receivers of sounds.

Upstairs, an array of wooden shelves is lined with glass bottles that might appear empty but are filled, in a sense, with Gupta’s voice: the artist says she recited poetry into these vessels, selecting works by writers who have been imprisoned for their words. The work is silent, but the voices conjured within it are palpable—and accompanied by a kind of catalytic clamor courtesy of Song of the Ground (2017), a nearby work that features two rocks banging into one another by way of a mechanical contraption. The stones are from a porous borderland area between India and Bangladesh, where conceptions of boundaries break down.

A standout at Amant—a mini-retrospective of sorts, with works dating as far back as 2012—is an untitled installation from this year in which Gupta revisits the reverse-wired-microphone apparatus, with a mic-speaker intoning the names of detained and incarcerated poets. Meanwhile, For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2023) fills a room with vitrines displaying sculptural casts (in gunmetal, again) of books by those same poets bearing titles such as We Can’t Hear Ourselves, No One Hears Us and Two Silences Made a Voice.

That notion of a voice made by silence is one that Gupta seems to both appreciate and abhor, and her work is all the better for the tension between the political stakes it engages and the personal resilience it memorializes. Gupta refuses the idea of silence as an absolute state, and shows how voices persist in defiance of forces that might suppress them.

You would be forgiven for overlooking the works’ brushlessness—Liu conceals and controls his experimental methods—and you could appreciate the simple elegance of his compositions and his mesmerizing color combinations all the same. But the magic is enhanced when you come to appreciate how he directs the swirling ink he uses when marbling—a technique that involves adding droplets of pigment to a vat of water, then dragging the paper across its surface. Whereas most artists turn to marbling to invite an element of chance, Liu approaches it as a challenge to prove his control.

Firmly committed to his brushless bit, Liu developed his own kind of cotton paper that leaves visible, linear fibers. When you see a white line in a composition of his, you can bet that he first stained the entire page and then removed a cotton strand, revealing fresh, unstained paper beneath. In fact, once you focus on the brushlessness, you might find yourself looking at each of Liu’s impressive paintings and asking: how’d he do that without a brush?

Liu is dedicated to painting nature, and his moon paintings—colorful orbs hovering majestically in commanding compositions—count among his finest works. He first started painting the moon and other celestial bodies after watching the 1969 Apollo landing and experiencing a decidedly modern strand of the sublime that landscape painters have tried to evoke for centuries. He returned to the lunar motif again in the 2000s, with works whose crinkled, then flattened paper came to represent the moon’s craggy surface.

But all this is more than just a cool trick: Liu rewards curious, meticulous viewers of both his work and the world. One benefits from looking at his work as he looks at the moon, for wondering: how does this work? He shows how the moon can be more magical when you know some of the math behind the mystery—when you appreciate, for instance, that the moon is both 400 times smaller than the sun and 400 times closer to the Earth. When his painting Midnight Sun III (1970) shows the trajectory of a fiery astronomical presence moving across a dark sky, it isn’t didactic and it doesn’t demystify; it invites more marveling.

Liu’s celestial paintings merge geometric abstraction with a glimpse into the infinite, expansive cosmos. In this way, the works speak across time and culture. But they also respond to and update traditions specific to Chinese ink painting. In the 1970s, Liu established a modern ink art curriculum during his tenure as chair of the fine arts department of Chinese University Hong Kong. Art historians such as Wu Hung credit Liu’s work as a teacher—in addition to a 1983 exhibition of his art that eventually toured 18 Chinese cities—with showing a generation of artists how to modernize Chinese ink painting. And when, in the 2000s, contemporary Chinese art had its global explosion, experiments in ink were central to the narrative—as seen in major shows like “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2013.

Gazing at the moon can sometimes make the world and its attendant problems feel small. But looking at Liu’s lunar works—none of which I’d known before seeing his impressive retrospective in Singapore—I was instead reminded that the world is big and brimming with artists oceans away whose work I have yet to encounter.

The children playing by the 1920s-era carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park had no idea what was about to fill their ears when guitar tones and drones from a violin started surrounding Nicholas Galanin’s imposing public sculpture nearby. Raven Chacon and Laura Ortman—two friends of Galanin who had been commissioned by the Public Art Fund to perform this past Sunday afternoon—were positioned with the iconic bridge as a backdrop, but the structure most integral to the proceedings was In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra, a 30-foot-tall sculpture made with the same kind of steel used for border walls between the US and Mexico. The work, with the word “LAND” rendered in the style of Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture, has a commanding sort of beauty about it. But there is a darkness—a disquieting acknowledgement of the violence and forced separation perpetrated in conflicts related to land—in it too.

Chacon and Ortman improvised a set of music that came just two days after Galanin and fellow artist Merritt Johnson asked the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to remove their work from “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans,” a survey that counts as the first show of contemporary Native art at the institution in 70 years. Offered as a protest against America’s plans to provide funding to Israel for its military actions in Gaza, the move was a way to show how, as Galanin (Lingít/Unangax) and Johnson wrote, “the work we do as artists does not end in the studio or with our artist statements, it extends into the world.”

Chacon (Diné) and Ortman (White Mountain Apache), for their part, played noisy, spikey, discordant music that was impressively uninterested in the kind of uplifting style you might imagine at a daytime performance in a public park. They had just a few speakers at their disposal, but their sound was loud—and very much in line with the mood of a day that was both triumphant (it was the same day as the New York City Marathon, always an incontrovertible celebration of humanity) and distressing (it was yet another day when what seemed to be protest-provoked shouts in the distance signaled increasing unrest).

At one point, between spells of distorted static and shrieking lead lines that wouldn’t have been out of place at a heavy-metal concert, Chacon was hunched over his bank of guitar pedals when he looked up and spied a helicopter in the sky. He kept on looking, craning his head and twiddling the knobs at his feet while waiting for the chopper to follow its flight pattern and circle back. When it rounded a bend and crept closer, he locked his sound into a digital delay—whoomp, whoomp, whoomp, whoomp—that he timed almost perfectly with the slashing of the blades. Through these sounds, it was as if the earth and the sky had become one, with machinery brokering an accord that it also managed to mangle beyond recognition.

“Indigenous care for Land and community is rooted in connection based on mutual sustainability,” Galanin said in a statement around the unveiling of his sculpture, which went up in May and will remain in place into March of next year. “Rather than nationalism or capital, this perspective always embodies a deep respect for life beyond any single generation.”

The notion of a collective “deep respect for life” has felt cruelly elusive of late, as has the idea of any kind of collectivity that could continue for generations. But there both were, in a sculpture that seemed to suggest that the land on which we live is land we should share.

For an exhibition at moCa Cleveland, Brooklyn-based artist Finnegan Shannon has taken matters into their own hands, with a show that requires no walking and offers ample seating. After arriving via elevator, visitors are invited to sit on couches and chairs while a conveyor belt parades by them a rolling display of artworks by Shannon’s artist peers. The setup’s closest proxy is conveyor belt sushi—but this is a feast for the eyes, rather than the taste buds.

The soft seating feels decidedly more domestic than institutional; Shannon sourced the chairs and couches from local thrift stores. (They even found a small stool with a puzzle spelling out the first name of the show’s curator, Lauren Leving.) And Shannon tied it all together with some of their own homey touches, like embroidered pillows bearing fluorescent conveyor belts and cut-out cardboard letters on the wall spelling out phrases like _{^{DON’T MIND IF WE DO}} and _{^{WE BEING SILLY AND SERIOUS}}. Shannon further tends to their viewers’ bodies with DIY air purifiers made of duct tape and box fans that help alleviate Covid’s ongoing risk.

The show encouraged visitors to slow down. On the wall, custom clocks told the day of the week rather than the hour of the day, as if asking, what’s the rush? It’s a show about promoting rest and alleviating museum fatigue, but more specifically, it is born of the disability justice movement. It’s aimed explicitly at questioning the ableist valuing of bodily exertion, as well as at the exclusionary assumptions museums make about bodies. Shannon considers the exhibition a fulfillment of their long-held “access fantasy.”

Among the most charming pieces making the rounds are Emilie L. Gossiaux’s 3D-printed sculptures depicting various body parts of her guide dog, London—including a paw and a tongue. Also from Gossiaux is a journal full of hand-drawn illustrations of the color-identification system she created for herself after going blind, in which she associates colors with memories and feelings: a crayon that Crayola calls “purple mountains’ majesty,” for instance, is renamed “homecoming dress purple 2003.” Other pieces on the belt are interactive: visitors can lift them off and return them at their leisure. A card game by Jeffrey Kasper offers prompts for two players to engage in exercises promoting risk and intimacy. A Selection of Snapshots Taken by Felix Felix Gonzalez-Torres reproduces endearing correspondences, cat photos, and figurines that the late artist arranged lovingly on his pillows.

For some photographs in the Gonzalez-Torres book, we see not the picture, but the description he wrote on the back: like _^HOME or _{^{MIAMI LANDSCAPE, 1995, SUMMER OF LOVE}}. These image descriptions are echoed in the audio description track Finnegan made for the show, accommodating blind and low-vision visitors. For Shannon, the access itself is often the artwork, and items like tissues and ear plugs (for those seeking a low-stimulus environment) both circulate on the conveyor belt and appear on the show’s checklist. As ever, Shannon takes great care with the details: the tissue box is in a fabric cozy in the shape of a house, the artist having removed the stairs that made its entrance inaccessible, and lovingly added lavender to the bushes. Here as elsewhere, Shannon approaches access, to quote organizer Kevin Gotkin, as “radical hospitality.”

Implied in all this is the unseen effort that disabled artists often exert when working on an exhibition to make it accessible to our communities. Instead of keeping that work behind the scenes, Shannon compellingly makes it the subject of their debut museum solo.

Shannon is best known for their benches and cushions that appear in group exhibitions, bearing statements like _{^{THIS EXHIBITION HAS ASKED ME TO STAND FOR TOO LONG. SIT IF YOU AGREE}}., written out in the artist’s signature script. The bold capital letters are polished off with soft edges and a lighthearted informality that mirrors their twinned playfulness and criticality. Shannon’s work is always participatory: their “Anti-Stairs Club Lounge” comprised a series of interventions, including a protest at the opening of architect Thomas Heatherwick’s gargantuan Vessel in New York, a 150-foot-tall structure made of interlocking staircases. Before it closed, it glorified 154 flights while promising a premier view.

My own most memorable encounter with a Shannon intervention was at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt, where I lay back in a cushioned chaise lounge to watch a gut-wrenching Nan Goldin slideshow, in which she relates how her sister’s institutionalization—and later, suicide—altered the course of her life. I became utterly engulfed, and started to wonder how many other treasures I’d skipped over because I hadn’t wanted to stand around, or squat on the floor, or sit on a hard, backless bench.

That work induced in me a longing to lounge in museums. It also underscored a key contribution of Shannon’s work: the artist doesn’t just point out the absences and assumptions normalized in museums, they also dream up solutions. Rather than institutional critique, you might call it institutional repair.

—Emily Watlington

This article appears in the Winter 2023 issue.

That story came to mind while soaking in the Chang Ucchin retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Deoksugung Palace branch in Seoul during the last days of summer. Its four galleries are jam-packed with some 300 pieces by the 20th-century painter, who “became almost a mythic figure in Korea,” as art historian Hong Sunpyo writes in the show’s robust catalogue. Depicting tranquil, harmonious, sometimes dreamy scenes of rural Korea with an economy of marks on a flat plane, almost all the pieces charm. Birds fly in a row through the sky. Trees stand proud. People peer from tiny houses. At first glance, they could be the work of a very good illustrator of books for young children.

Keep looking. These seemingly simple, modest size paintings (generally only a little larger than a sheet of paper) are potent—and yes, radical—born of tough, self-imposed restraints. As his native South Korea went through seismic political and economic changes, and as peers like Kim Whanki and Yoo Youngkuk ventured into thrilling abstract terrain, Chang honed his language to absolute essentials. He rendered eyes with just two dots or circles, and people frequently as just stick figures or a precise stain of paint. For decades, he stuck largely to the same few subjects: humans (many of them children) and animals outside in the world, together, at peace.

Chang was singular, uncompromising. “When people talk about my paintings, they often comment that they’re too small,” he once wrote. But as he saw it, “as the scale increases, the painting starts to get diluted.” In 1951, as he was entering his mid-30s, he painted an indelible self-portrait on paper (the Korean War had made canvas scarce) about the size of a postcard. It seems to announce both the style that he would pursue for the next 40 years and himself as a major but idiosyncratic talent. He is in the foreground, debonair in a suit and tie (his wedding attire), on a road that stretches far behind him into hills that vibrate with minute gold and green strokes. A black dog follows him, and four blue birds fly overhead. With a top hat and an umbrella in his hands, he suggests a man ready for a leisurely stroll or, perhaps, to open a variety show. Either way, you can hear him calling for you to join him.

Who was he? Chang was born on January 8, 1918, in what is now the South Korean municipality of Sejong, then Yeongi County in Japanese-occupied Korea. (The artist’s birth date is widely cited as November 26, 1917—correct in the lunar calendar, which he preferred.) Like many ambitious Korean artists of the time, he studied in Tokyo and picked up on the latest international art currents via publications.

In the newly independent Korea of 1945, Chang found work at the National Museum, where he was involved in restoration projects and observed the excavation of ancient tombs, according to Bae Wonjung, the MMCA curator who organized this richly researched exhibition. The country was rediscovering itself after foreign domination, and Chang’s works are filled with tributes to its deep heritage—ceramics, folk paintings, and enduring iconography. A 1949 oil painting depicts a sturdy clay jar that might be used to ferment kimchi, and many hold both the sun and the moon, as they appear in traditional Joseon Dynasty paintings. In an impressive bit of scholarship, art historian Kang Byoungjik notes that 440 of Chang’s roughly 730 oil paintings (around 61 percent!) contain magpies, a bird with auspicious connotations in Korea.

These plainspoken paintings were produced through tremendous labor, the artist repeatedly applying paint, then wiping it away. (For a stretch of the 1960s and ’70s, this occurred in a remote studio without electricity.) The results have a rare solidity, some with the rough-hewn firmness of Buncheong stoneware, a sensation heightened by Chang’s restraint with his brush. “According to his family, the technique of wiping off or scratching paint was also a way for Chang to empty his mind,” art historian Choi Yeob writes in a lucid catalogue essay on the Buddhist nature of his art. Chang did not identify as a Buddhist, but his wife, Lee Soonkyung, did, and one of his masterpieces is a spare 1970 portrait of her in a serene state of contemplation: Zinzinmyo: My Wife’s Buddhist Name (the name means “absolutely stunning beauty”).

This may all sound nostalgic or backward-looking. It is not. What saves Chang’s art from those traps of kitsch is his unrelenting invention. He was modernist in the line of Elie Nadelman and Bob Thompson, plumbing history and transfiguring it in an inimitable style. He built powerful symmetries and patterns in his compositions, and Bae connects him with Paul Klee, a similarly superb colorist. Reveling in everyday life, he was aligned with visions like those of Grandma Moses, Florine Stettheimer, and of course, Park Soo Keun, and like, say, Bill Traylor’s paintings, his evince an astute understanding of the inner beings of animals, with personalities and emotions like us. (His bulls seem prepared to crack jokes.)

Nothing is extraneous or wasted in these worlds, where day and night overlap. Signs of contemporaneity are absent. (A military jeep intrudes in a 1953 picture, though it seems oddly jaunty.) All is well here, and families and nature are in accord; Hong astutely terms them “self-sufficient spaces.” Real life can fall short of that. But Chang’s art is not after utopia. It distills the nobility of quotidian, fleeing moments, which is a project tinged with melancholy. The MMCA show is titled “The Most Honest Confession,” riffing on an intriguing claim from the artist: “My paintings are my true self. I confess myself in my paintings, I reveal and release myself entirely.”

In his last 15 years, Chang developed a method of cutting his oil paint with turpentine so that he could work more rapidly, almost as if he were painting with ink (another one of his talents, as examples here attest). That allowed him to be more prolific—80 percent of his oils come from this period—yet for me, these lack some of the fulsome symbolic mystery of his prior work. But they are still delightful, and they see him embracing a more surreal stance, as notions of space become even more topsy-turvy. In a 1990 piece, Night and an Old Man, made just a few months before his death, there is a road curving over a hill and the titular elder floating in the sky above it. Only the moon is visible, a hemisphere of white. This man’s journey may be done, but the road below him is alluring, a golden orange, and quite bizarrely, there is a young child scampering down it.

But in a week that frequently encourages extreme psychic compartmentalization, feeling pulled in multiple directions is nothing new. Evenings: openings, dinners, late parties, bonhomie, party dress, the usual social minefield. (My bad karma bit me when, on the night I skipped a dinner organized for Paul McCarthy after remembering that one of my reviews, according to his gallery liaison, had “left him depressed for a fortnight,” I imitated a pompous French artist … who happened to be right behind me.) Days: scrambling from show to show, and stepping from unnervingly unseasonal linen-shirt weather into displays darkly suffused with real-world violence.

“The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time: Artistic Testimonies of War and Repression,”for example, is a transhistorical exhibition focused on state brutality; it is a collaboration between the Schinkel Pavillon and the Brücke-Museum, which is devoted to artists ostracized by the Nazis. Several such figures’ works stud a show rooted in Germany’s worst hours: Käthe Kollwitz’s 1920s woodcuts and lithos of post-WWI starvelings; Leo Breuer’s deceptively tranquil (if exhausted) watercolors of WWII internment-camp life; Hannah Höch’s unbowed 1941 canvas Berglandschaft, in which unnamable lunar flora burst through a ruined concrete landscape. But from there, “The Assault…” rumbles grimly forward through space and time, from Sung Tieu’s Subtext (2023), a jittery gathering of Cold War–era surveillance reports and vintage domestic accoutrements like a TV, radio, and typewriter, to Parastou Forouhar’s Documentation (1998–), a collection of documents relating to the artist’s ongoing inquiry into the murder of her parents for opposing the political regime in Iran. Also included: Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Diary of a Sky (2023), a video detailing how the presence of drones and fighter jets above Beirut has, as a booklet text neatly puts it, “weaponized the air itself.”

There is no place in this show free, at the very least, from ambient incoming threat, and, as the inclusion of several Ukrainian artists makes clear, our wartime present chimes with and reilluminates the past. In a tiled basement antechamber in the Schinkel Pavillon, Kateryna Lysovenko’s Waiting Room (2023) presents paintings of four deceased artists—Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Charlotte Salomon, Felix Nussbaum, and Vyacheslav Mashnitsky—as if at 70, an age they never reached. Lysovenko’s work is at once a lament for the killed, an evocation of forced deportation, and an acidic critique of how looking to the future, and ignoring the unhappy present, is mobilized within totalitarian ideologies.

KW Institute for Contemporary Art, for its part, offers something equally if differently in-your-face: an overdue first major retrospective for the fearless Cuban American artist/writer Coco Fusco, whose work of the last three decades, presented mostly as videos, photographs, and documentation, is marked by a wide-screen sense of—and determination to expose—humanity’s inhumanity. Consistent across her work is Fusco’s hewing to uncontrolled real-world situations, not metaphor. An examination of colonial and postcolonial exoticization, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–94) was a series of collaborative performances in which Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña sardonically rebooted the centuries-old colonialist tradition of exhibiting “exotic” peoples in cages (and caught revealingly ignorant responses on video). For Sudaca Enterprises, an intervention at the 1997 ARCOmadrid contemporary art fair, Fusco and several others sold T-shirts comparing the fair prices of Latin American art, European art, and the cost of living in Spain as an undocumented Latin American.

The all-too-realistic video Operation Atropos (2006) is one of several developed from Fusco’s investigations into the weaponizing of female sexuality in the military interrogation of Muslim men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay; it follows a workshop that Fusco took on surviving the experience of interrogation as a female prisoner of war. More recently, while many artists shied away from direct engagement with the Covid-19 pandemic, Fusco took the opportunity to make Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word (2021),filming herself in a rowboat circling Hart Island, New York City’s potter’s field and America’s largest mass grave, as it filled with pandemic victims. The work addresses collective anxieties in a voiceover, as Fusco casts flowers on the water.

Some commercial galleries, in choosing artists to parade before visiting collectors, haven’t pulled their punches either (or leaned on tried-and-true names). A season highlight is Melvin Edwards’s astringently inventive “B WIRE, BEWARE, ALL WAYS ART”at Galerie Buchholz, which draws from the African American sculptor’s practice from 1970 to the present and—as the title hints—focuses on barbed wire (and chain) while commingling minimalist and readymade aesthetics with strong suggestions of containment and pain. Now’s the Time (1970–2023), predating a similar David Hammons work referencing Charlie Parker, dangles an old saxophone from a chain, segregating it behind a V-shaped barrier of barbwire lines. Set on pedestals at the artist’s height, several pieces from this year remake the signature hats from the looted Benin Bronzes in coiled chains. They sit alongside a framed series of mid-’70s semiabstractions on paper, in watercolor, ink, and spray that use more chains as stencils, needling the apolitical niceties of post-painterly abstraction popular at the time.

In her debut at Capitain Petzel, Ragen Moss projects anxiety into the immediate future in a show titled “C O N S P I R E.” Here, seven dangling steel and glass canisters hold flickering flames that collectively bump up the room temperature a fair bit; each of them accompanies one of a constellation of seven hanging polyethylene sculptures, bulbous lightweight obelisks variously decorated with patterns and figurative imagery. One image, a possible clue to the work’s latent sociopolitical intent, is a copy of a Käthe Kollwitz drawing. The show, then, feels like both an abstract campfire gathering—a conspiring, indeed, on the part of figures desiring or fearing change—and an unstable situation that might combust, for good or ill, at any moment. Its lack of specificity, and abundance of theatrical nudges, makes the viewer seeking meaning a coconspirator.

Other artists offer similar bellwethers of tipping-point disquiet. At Sprüth Magers, Nora Turato, a rising star who also has a spoken-word installation in the Brücke-Museum show, hangs a tight graphic display of enamel panels against a background of wraparound text; the panels feature Cartesian computer-designed tunnels and abysses that contrast with overlaid typographic snippets of spiraling self-talk: not yourself? what have you done to yourself?, does that make any sense?, how many layers does this onion have? At Heidi, Mimosa Echard’s vertical, neo-Funk canvases embed consumer-capitalist detritus into their mottled plastic surfaces—remote controls, kids’ toys, pills, kitchen bowls—while larger, gridded horizontal canvases, we’re told, use anti-radiation fabric as their material; they’re like fragments of a Faraday cage. The whole, titled I Think My Cells Are Fucking Behind My Back, points to attritional attempts to ward off a world full of invasive forces that bypass rationality or control.

The show that offers the most relief from all this has, perhaps inevitably, the fewest humans in it: a retrospective for Lin May Saeed at the Georg Kolbe Museum. The German-Iraqi artist, who died at 50 just a couple weeks before the show opened, engaged with interspecies communication and empathy for animals long before it became a contemporary-art staple; she also did so not by lecturing but via a seesawing mix of fairytale charm, humor, mythological learning, and underlying grit. That’s clear from this generous presentation of her signature sculptures of autonomous animals and Arab-script-dotted reliefs in carved polystyrene, a pointedly problematic, nonbiodegradable material that is both fragile and built to last. Saeed had an empath’s eye for nonhuman facial expressions. Witness the fierce, comical determination of her forward-leaning pangolins, panthers, anteaters, and goats, individual sculptures lined up here as if at the outset of a race. Or see the calm solicitousness of her conversant lionesses in the paradisial painted relief Mureen / Lion School (2016).

Where humans appear, things could go either way. In St. Jerome and the Lion (2016), one of Saeed’s series of welded metal gates depicting figurative scenes, there’s a take on the art historical subject of the saint considerately plucking a thorn from a lion’s paw; but in Toreador Gate (2019), the gored, innocent-eyed bull is crushing a cylinder-headed, near-abstract bullfighter. If you reach this point after having traversed all the shows mentioned above, humankind going down feels like something of a win. 

This article appears under the title “Berlin Diary” in the Winter 2023 issue, pp. 98–102.

Don’t get me wrong: I loved her 2018 retrospective in Germany so much that I traveled to see it twice—and it was at the MMK in Frankfurt, arguably Europe’s most boring city. But one subway ride to Manhattan for the Gagosian show, which closes October 21, left me feeling unsatisfied.

This show is mostly new work, and as ever, Noland’s red, white, and blue sculptures made of resin and refuse chafe at the contradictions between the American dream and the American reality. There is, though, an untitled walker from 1986, wrapped in a leather strap and bearing a badge that says “special police.” It’s on view alongside sculptures that, pairing bullets and badges, invoke police brutality. Badges abound, but the walker’s is the only one inscribed with the word “special,” that grating euphemism for “disabled.” I can’t tell if the choice was intentional and insensitive, or just blithe and inconsiderate. But for decades, she’s shown assistive devices alongside grenades and can collections, as if she were equating disability with fates as tragic as destitution or death.

Part of me was pleased to see mass disablement included as one of the machinations of American neoliberalism for once. Inaccessible healthcare, unaffordable nutritious foods, gun violence, and an environment rife with disabling toxins are eroding American health (and, as the theorist Lauren Berlant argued, preventing our uprisings).

But another part of me saw Noland’s walker stumbling clumsily into a paradox, one that disability theorist Jasbir K. Puar articulated in her 2017 book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Puar describes mass disablement and injury as deliberate tactics of policing, writing specifically about the Israeli Defense Force. Then she asks: how do we hold space for rage at this reality alongside our longing for disability pride?

But with Noland, instead of pride, all we get is pity.

Is that pity the artist’s or America’s? As ever, she’s just tracing the impact of the unseen forces of American neoliberalism on ordinary objects, without ever offering clear commentary. But still, she gestures at a bigger, bleaker truth: that the neoliberal state benefits from discourses of empowerment, which conveniently place responsibility on the individual rather than the government. (Remember that our hard-won, landmark legislation—the 1990’s Americans with Disabilities Act—was signed into law by George H. W. Bush, who saw granting rights as a tool for getting more disabled people off welfare.)

But I also wonder to what degree Noland included assistive devices simply because they look like her sculptures already. The walker is shown next to Polaroids of older works rife with grab bars and scaffolding that echo the walker’s aluminum tubing.  

These new works, all crammed into a small space, feel formulaic, as if the artist were cleaning out stuff that’d been kicking around in her studio for decades. (After all, she uses Budweiser cans that, as my colleague Alex Greenberger points out, are no longer in circulation). But the weirdest, and maybe the best, update is that some of the resin blocks now sit on lucite tables, as if the art objects were extensions of fancy furniture. Was that choice about meaning or materials? Here, since it’d be a contradiction to offer class commentary in the form of a luxury good for sale at Gagosian anyway, I like the ambiguity.

Throughout the ’90s, Campos-Pons worked on an installation-based trilogy titled “History of a People Who Were Not Heroes,” and the second entry in this series, Spoken Softly with Mama (1998)—a work she made in collaboration with composer and jazz musician Neil Leonard—opens the show. Against a black wall rest four blown-up archival photographs of Campos-Pons’s family, and three video screens that show various dreamlike shots of the artist; these seven upright elements are, in fact, ironing boards. Carefully arranged on the floor before them are dozens of glass irons and mirrors. The work pays homage to Campos-Pons’s women ancestors who have sustained the family by doing domestic work. “Their caretaking seems to have helped guide her on a path toward social justice,” art historian Selene Wendt writes in the exhibition catalogue.

But Spoken Softly with Mama is also undergirded by a more sinister history: the legacy of chattel slavery, which ebbs and flows through much of Campos-Pons’s work. Slavery made Black women’s role as domestic laborers distinct from other women’s—they were often forced to work in the homes of others, not just for their own families. A critical gaze gives the ironing boards the contour of slave ships that would have brought kidnapped Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas.

A 1994 photograph from the series “When I Am Not Here / Estoy Allá,”one of the artist’s first works using large-format Polaroids, similarly considers the impact of slavery on Black motherhood. In this image, we see Campos-Pons’s torso painted blue, adorned with curving white lines that mimic waves. The blue nods to Yemayá, the orisha of the sea and motherhood in Santería. Two baby bottles that drip breast milk hang from her neck, connected by a tube. (At the time, Campos-Pons had recently given birth to her son Arcadio.) Cradled in her hands is a carved wooden ship. The photo cuts off her head and legs; this mother’s body has been fragmented by forced migration, severed from her roots.

Forced migration recurs in TRA (1991), for which Campos-Pons pairs 60 black-and-white portraits of generations of Afro-Cubans from Matanzas, once the heart of Cuba’s sugar plantation economy, with five boards shaped like boats. This time, upright wooden planks are painted to resemble the infamous diagram of a slave ship, numerous Black bodies shown cramped together in the hull. The work is powerful to behold.

The Brooklyn Museum exhibition, which will travel to three venues across the country, leans heavily on Campos-Pons’s use of multipart, 20-by-24 Polaroids. Her technical prowess in staging these scenes—mini-performances in themselves—is in full effect in works like Finding Balance (2015). In 28 Polaroids that together comprise one scene, Campos-Pons stands before the camera, her face painted white. A birdcage rests atop her head, and she wears an antique Chinese robe, a nod to her Chinese ancestors who were brought to Cuba as indentured servants to work on the sugar plantations.

Another Polaroid knockout is the nine-part grid Classic Creole (2003). In the center, a yellow flower rises from a tall fabric-wrapped form that close inspection reveals to be a human body. On either side, strings of beads rise up like trees in a clever play with scale. The work evokes cultural, bodily, and natural roots all at once. “I am from many places,” Campos-Pons has said. “I live with that duality and multiplicity in my mind, and in my soul, and in my body. My roots are a bunch of dispersed fragments in the planet, in the universe, in this incredible miasma that is the world.”

Those metaphorical and literal roots run throughout the exhibition. Replenishing (2001) is a work that references retracing her lineage: it depicts the artist and her mother when they were finally able to reunite in Cuba. In the h-shape composition (for hogar, or home), her mother appears at left in a blue floral dress, the artist, at right in a white dress. The dresses represent the colors of orishas Oshun and Yemayá. Both women hold strings of beads that knot together and meet in the central Polaroid.

Umbilical Cord (1991) similarly traces the artist’s matrilineal side. In a linear grid, we see 12 black-and-white photos, 6 of them torsos with white crosses painted on them, alternating with 6 photos of arms with the left hand outstretched; a thread projecting from each work connects them all. These images show the women in the artist’s family. In Cuba, it is through the left hand, called “the hand of the heart,” that bloodlines are extended from woman to woman. In her work, Campos-Pons makes monumental the various histories and cultures that flow through her family’s veins.

The legacy of slavery came to feel even more present to the artist after she moved South in 2018 to Nashville, relocating from Boston, per the wall text. In Tennessee, she became fascinated by the magnolia trees that grow all around the city. As she walks about Nashville, she photographs them; by now, she’s accumulated hundreds of images of these trees. She digitally printed one of those images on a mixed-media triptych, Secrets of the Magnolia Tree (2021), framing a self-portrait. As cocurator Carmen Hermo writes in the catalogue, “What have these trees themselves seen, their lives extending far longer than ours? Irrigated by the actions and inactions of humans as much as the water cycle, these trees hold memories, too.” Campos-Pons is still attending to the trees, hoping to learn more of the histories they hold. In all her work, time collapses as history and the present intertwine. Soon, the trees’ stories will reveal themselves to her.

Correction, October 11, 2023: An earlier version of this review identified Neil Leonard as Campos-Pons’s husband; he is her former husband.