This overwhelming sense of immediacy is a little misleading, as Simms has been working in assemblage for a very long time, steadily incorporating the flotsam of everyday life into his sculpture. Born in Jamaica in 1961, he immigrated to New York at the age of seven. (His mother preceded him there by three years, working as a nanny to earn money before the rest of the family arrived.) For as long as he can remember, he’s made things out of whatever he finds: toys out of corks, slingshots out of sticks and rubber. This obsessive creativity led him to study art at Brooklyn College in the mid-1980s, under the mentorship of William T. Williams. After stints as an art handler at Paula Cooper Gallery and the Brooklyn Museum, Simms went on to lead the art program at La Guardia Community College, one of the campuses of the CUNY system, where he has taught for sixteen years. He’s a veteran, then, who—like so many Black artists of his generation—is only now getting the widespread recognition he is due. His work has been shown steadily in the USA, the Caribbean and in Europe since the 1990s, and he even organized a Jamaican Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2001, but it wasn’t until a well-received retrospective exhibition at Martos Gallery in New York in 2021 that his exhibition schedule began keeping pace with his prolific output. This year, he has a major solo show at Karma Gallery in Los Angeles, again including work from the past thirty years, as well as a powerful installation of new work at San Carlo Cremona, a deconsecrated seventeenth-century church outside of Milan. The deteriorated but still transcendent house of worship is the perfect setting for Simms, who has a longstanding fascination with that period of Italian art. (The paintings of Caravaggio, with their dramatic scenes illuminated by heavenly light, are a particular interest.) The ecclesiastical surroundings put into the ritualistic aspects of his sculpture into high relief, illuminating their strong implication of the sacred.

Like a baroque allegory, Simms’s works are densely populated with emblems. The exhibition in Cremona is called “I am the Bush Doctor, One Halo,” which is also the name of a large-scale drawing hanging vertically in the space. The title is taken from a song by Peter Tosh, and pays tribute to vernacular healers in Jamaica, among them the artist’s own father, who treated his neighbors’ everyday ailments with homemade concoctions. Here and there, the show does acknowledge conventional Christian iconography; some of Simms’s sculptures suggest arks holding unknown covenants, for example. But the signals are reliably mixed. The proliferation of feathers in the installation could be taken from angels’ wings, but they also refer to Native American and African spiritual traditions, as well as expressing the fundamental idea of vulnerability: “you could reach out and just snap them off,” Simms notes.  A bicycle wheel aslant the tip of a slender rod in Il Santo del Mare (2023) does indeed look like a pageant-costume halo, but also conjures the spirit of Marcel Duchamp, high priest of the avant garde. In another work, a motorcycle helmet emblazoned with the word SHARK is propped on top of a guitar, the instrument perhaps a nod to Cremona’s most famous son, the luthier Antonio Stradivari (born in 1644), who could well have prayed at this very chapel.

These layered storylines criss-cross Simms’s work, just like the twine and wire he so often uses. Normally disconnected cultural narratives are tied together into a tight knot of signification. To some extent, this is just what assemblage art does. He is participating in a grand tradition that extends back to the Surrealists, via Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines and the wrapped sculptures of Jackie Winsor. Equally relevant are visionary artists like the Philadelphia Wire Man and Judith Scott, as well as African nkisi spirit containers and warding objects (aale), and vernacular forms like the “bottle trees” of Black communities in the American South, dedicated to the principle that “where light is, evil shall not pass.” Simms acknowledges all of these precedents and peers, but in his case there is a special quality of inclusivity. In his work, as the art historian Robert Storr put it in a 2005 essay, “opposites attract, difference accents difference, and multiplicity is the predicate for mutuality.”

Doubtless, this connective energy has much to do with Simms’s own life story. Diasporic migration, both brutally enforced (like the voyages that brought his ancestors to Jamaica) and freely chosen (like the move that his own family undertook when he was a child), is ever present as subject matter in his oeuvre. He has made several symbolic portraits of his mother that incorporate handwritten letters she has sent him over the years, thinking of the time they spent apart when he was young. Some of his sculptures actually can be rolled around—a practical feature, given their scale, as well as a symbolic one—and non-functional wheels, toy cars, and vehicle components make frequent appearances. He cites the improvised carts used by street sellers in Jamaica as an influence on these works, but they also clearly embody movement as an abstract principle. At the most fundamental level, his practice is all about getting from here to there, without leaving any part of himself behind.

One of Simms’s most affecting, and oft-repeated, gestures speaks to another, even more personal connection: his marriage to the painter Lucy Fradkin. The two artists (who share the studio in Staten Island) are an interracial couple. As a kind of signature, Simms represents their union with a little rectangular patch of their hair, his black, hers red, glued to the surface of many of his works, side-by-side. But even at his most autobiographical, Simms is an improviser at heart, and never sets out to control the narrative of his work. Its storyline remains perpetually open, to the extent that he treats his own past work as a quarry, disassembling pieces and reincorporating them continually into new creations.

This helps to account, perhaps, for the extraordinary animacy of Simms’s work. He chooses every scrap and stone, every bit of detritus, often for personal reasons. Yet in his studio, surrounded by the things he has made over the years, he commented that it is “important to make something outside of yourself,” something that can lead a life of its own. Even as Simms lashes his objects together, bundling them tightly, and places them into choreographies, instantly and insistently memorable, he grants them a kind of ultimate freedom. When he does send them out into the world, it’s in the spirit of pushing a bird out of its nest, certain that it knows how to fly.

The artist in question was Nina Yankowitz, and the show was her second solo at Kornblee Gallery in New York. This past autumn, some of the same paintings were back on public view in “Can Women Have One-Man Shows?” at Eric Firestone’s two-floor space on Great Jones Street. By alluding to Nemser’s letter so directly, the exhibition not only positioned Yankowitz as a significant figure in feminist art, but also raised the issue of her early work’s reception—or lack thereof.

Made between 1967 and 1972, these breakthrough paintings were sprayed in gorgeous veils of acrylic, here and there disrupted by vigorous splashes, and in some cases relieved by stark geometric figures, created by masking the raw canvas. The unstretched paintings, averaging roughly 10 by 5 feet, were then variously draped, pleated, and hung on the wall, where they looked—as if by some sleight of hand—positively monumental.

The Firestone show included 15 of these signature works, all of them lent by the artist herself. We’ve become accustomed of late to women practitioners and artists of color being belatedly retrieved from obscurity. But Yankowitz’s case is extreme. In just one glance, you can see that these draped paintings match the caliber of contemporaneous works by Sam Gilliam and Lynda Benglis. Learn a bit more, and you realize that they are powerful icons of feminist art, made when Yankowitz was bridging Post-Minimalism and the subsequent Pattern and Decoration movement. These paintings ought to be in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and other major institutions. Instead, they have been in storage for 50 years. How did this happen?

Gender has a lot to do with it. In a recent Archives of American Art interview, Yankowitz commented, “no matter what strides women were making as I entered into my art practice, you were lucky to be considered, but it was very rare…. Exposure was limited and choppy, to say the least.” Keenly alive to this reality, she became a founding member of Heresies, the most significant feminist art collective on the East Coast. But there were also other factors at play. First of all, she’d started young. Yankowitz was just 21 when she made the first of the draped works, as a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she earned her undergraduate degree in 1969.

Second, far from being a self-promoting sort, Yankowitz was an outlier, attracted to the radical fringes of the counterculture. That journey began when she was growing up in New Jersey; she’d hop a bus to Manhattan and get herself to Greenwich Village. By 1968 she was spending time upstate in Woodstock, hanging her new paintings from trees and sometimes performing with experimental musicians associated with Group 212.

In collaboration with Phil Harmonic (born Ken Werner), she developed audio for the painting Oh Say Can You See (1968). This work, bearing a musical staff with the first few notes of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” was accompanied by a sound piece that Harmonic made by manipulating the melody on an early Moog synthesizer. It was a cross-disciplinary experiment, the notes filling the canvas while being electronically stretched in the audio component. At the same time, it was an insouciant metaphor for America’s unstable, shifting identity, anticipating Jimi Hendrix’s famous distortion-filled rendition of the national anthem at the Woodstock festival the following year.

There are touches of political satire in the draped paintings too: one work is called Sagging Spiro (1969), a mocking allusion to Richard Nixon’s notoriously conservative (and jowly) vice president. But primarily, Yankowitz was working in diametric opposition to Hard-Edge Abstraction, then at the height of its currency. Her idea was to “emasculate” this genre, answering it with an alternative soft power, conjuring the body in motion. In 1968–69, she created a series of set designs for choreographer Pearl Lang, a disciple of Martha Graham. Yankowitz developed shapes in folded cardboard and then had them fabricated in sheet steel, giving them (along with duct-like metal tubes) to the dancers to interact with. In a related experiment, in 1969, she dropped a canvas from a 10-foot ledge, using a stop-motion camera to capture the shapes it assumed as it fell. The best moment, she thought, was when it first crumpled against the ground.

Yankowitz was one of many artists exploring gravitational effects at the time, among them Sam Gilliam (whose draped paintings Yankowitz had not seen prior to developing her own), Robert Morris (whose felt works she admired), and Eva Hesse (whose arrangements of string and cloth she knew through their mutual friend, Sol LeWitt). All investigated how a composition could seemingly make itself when dropped into space—a formal link that was recognized at the time. Yankowitz and Hesse were the only women included in the 12-person survey “Hanging/Leaning,” at the Emily Lowe Gallery at Hofstra University in 1970. Robert Pincus-Witten, in an Artforum review of Yankowitz’s 1971 Kornblee show, compared her directly to Gilliam, who was having a concurrent exhibition at MoMA. Like Mellow, Pincus-Witten used patronizingly patriarchal language: “the essential loveliness of the work is beyond contest, although the devices of her art seem to be outmoded.… [H]er lack of aggressiveness indicates that she remains on a sill which, once crossed, will bring her beyond mere stylistic hold.”

There’s a lot to disagree with there, but Pincus-Witten was right to compare Yankowitz to Gilliam. Both were after an expressive coloristic sublimity, an effect that Yankowitz described to me as we walked through her Firestone show, as a “gestalt.” She used this term neither in the psychological sense nor as an allusion to Morris’s Notes on Sculpture, she explained, but rather to describe her immersive aesthetic: “it’s like everything I do. There’s no beginning, no end. You’re just in it, the whole surround.”

Another reason Yankowitz’s draped paintings have not become canonical—yet—is that she was too creatively restless to consolidate her achievement. Moving quickly through ideas, she first incorporated new features to her draped paintings that enhanced their affinity to structured garments, adding narrow pleats by running the canvases through a machine press, and subsequently introducing stitched lines, which cause the fabric to alternately pucker in and balloon out. (The stitching was done for her by professional sailmakers. “I don’t know how to sew,” she said wryly. “Let’s put that way.”) One work, Opened Flat (1971), has webbing straps crossing it horizontally, as if pinioning it to the wall. This makes explicit Yankowitz’s idea of “flattening an enclosure”—an inversion of the dynamics of representational painting, in which a flat surface is used to evoke 3D space.

With these initial moves, Yankowitz broadened the effect of her draped paintings without abandoning their essential features. But then, in 1972, she made a dramatic change. The downstairs space at Firestone displayed several examples from her next series, “Dilated Grain Readings.” Though also unstretched, these paintings are cool instead of lush, system-based rather than gestural. Yankowitz had the linen canvases custom made in a very open weave, almost like netting.

To this richly textured ground she added regular marks that suggest a musical score or pulsing sound waves. (The paints she mixed herself, in a combination of acrylic and Flashe paint, to get the color adjacencies and viscosity she wanted.) Finally, picking up where she’d left off with Oh Say Can You See, she paired the paintings with a soundscape, this time creating it herself from field recordings she made in Little Italy and Chinatown. “When I hear sound, I see color; and when I see color, I hear sounds,” she has said, and these works do effectively conjure that synesthetic experience.

For the last five decades, Yankowitz has continued to explore the fusion of music, technology, and visual art. She mastered the vocoder, the voice distortion device. She explored the possibilities of ceramic tile—notably in Tunnel Vision (1989), an illusory “wall damage” installation at the Lexington Avenue and 51st Street subway station—and showed avant-garde furniture at the legendary design gallery Art et Industrie. She made sensitive, surrealistic drawings on vellum. Since the late 1980s she has been exploring interactive gaming and, more recently, social media. There are definitely through lines in all this work, above all, an interest in activating a relationship with the viewer’s body. But Yankowitz’s oeuvre is also impressively, even confoundingly diverse—and by no means a linear development from her early paintings.

Given the value we place on variety and inventiveness, Yankowitz’s refusal to tidily arrange her career might well make her a positive role model. That said, however, it is high time for her early draped paintings to be recognized as a precocious achievement. In a statement for the Brooklyn Museum’s feminist art center, Yankowitz has called for the “righting of history” and an end to “important contributions disappearing … into the trash—Poof.”

So can women have “one-man” shows, as solo offerings were reflexively designated in the ’70s? The answer ought to be more than clear by now. No they can’t, but they can damn well be accorded the art historical stature they deserve.

Works by Nina Yankowitz will appear in the group show “Artists Choose Parrish” at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y., Apr. 16, 2023-Feb. 18, 2024.

Benjamin likened this gradual erasure of communal narrative to the concomitant disappearance of handcraft from the productive sphere. Storytelling is an “artisan form of communication,” he wrote. “And this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained.… It is becoming unraveled at all its ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the ambience of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.”

Benjamin’s eulogy for storytelling also helps explain some of the key patterns in art history over the past century. It’s no coincidence that abstraction emerged concurrently with modern communications, signaling a similarly lofty detachment from the social fabric. Craft itself by no means disappeared during this period—in fact, it played a crucial role in the formation of modernist art, in ways that have only recently been recognized. (Hence the renewed interest in such material-conscious artists as Anni Albers, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Toshiko Takaezu, Ruth Asawa, and Lenore Tawney.) Even so, craft’s rootedness in vernacular tradition has inspired many contemporary artists to seek it out as a powerful alternative to depersonalization and alienation.

When Martin Puryear was selected to represent the United States at the 2019 Venice Biennale, for example, he responded with a suite of works that Washington Post writer Philip Kennicott characterized as “resolutely meaningful, without specifying which meaning was intended.” In other words, Puryear’s sculptures were somewhat like folktales: the ones filled with implication, without a trace of didacticism.

“Liberty/Libertà,” the title of the exhibition at the US Pavilion, announced a forthright engagement with the grand national narrative. Puryear made sculptures in obdurate materials like wood and metal that resemble historic headwear at greatly enlarged size, implying active thought about the past. The show featured sculptural versions of both the Phrygian cap, adopted during the Revolutionary era, and a military cap from the Civil War. Aso Oke (2019), a bronze cast of a 7-foot-high wooden lattice, took its title from a style of Yoruba weaving and its shape from a traditional West African men’s hat, similar to the Phrygian cap, perhaps referencing individuals who were brought to America against their will. Dead center in the space stood an elegiac worked called A Column for Sally Hemings (2019), a graceful dress-like form in fluted timber, with a large shackle hanging from its scrolled top like a bowed head.

Although Puryear has always commanded widespread respect, Venice provided a ratification of sorts. This veteran artist, committed to craft in times when it had been firmly out of favor, has long occupied an unusual position among leading sculptors. The prevailing tendency in the discipline, particularly since the conceptual turn of the late 1960s, has been to rely on found objects or outsourced fabrication, which both effectively elude the manual skill challenges of independent, studio-based making.

This is not to say that outsourcing is incompatible with craft at the highest level, as the recent four-venue Charles Ray survey—marked by a wryly sophisticated play with materials, themes, and scale—made clear. Nevertheless, the notion that a sculptor might spend years mastering a traditional technique, much less position it at the center of an art practice, has long been regarded as eccentric, parochial, even reactionary.

Benjamin’s essay encourages us to look at things differently. Up until the early 20th century, sculpture was primarily a storytelling medium, with a firm basis in craft. It typically required the support of official institutions, due to its sheer expense, and so tended to reflect vested interests. Yet each work—whether Pharaonic colossus, Greek temple frieze, Gothic crucifix, or Renaissance equestrian monument—also occupied a crucial role in the collective imagination, providing the material expression (and often the literal depiction) of commonly held mythologies.

With the advent of modernism, however, sculpture—like oral tradition—became ever less confident in its civic role. No longer did progressive artists presume to represent a single, shared symbolic order. This aversion only intensified when repressive regimes in Russia, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere adopted heroic sculpture as part of their ideological arsenal. In the postwar era, the avant-garde parted company with public monument-making almost entirely. When the two did reconverge, most famously in Maya Lin’s austerely abstract Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982), controversy often ensued.

These dynamics have now changed. Puryear’s successor at the US Pavilion, Simone Leigh, is equally invested in superlative craft, grand scale, and fable-like iconography. And in a development that parallels the recent rise of figuration in painting, and perhaps stems from similar motivations—a growing dissatisfaction with critique as an end in itself, and a hunger for more positive, inclusive narratives—numerous sculptors have returned to an affirmative role. Using time-honored craft methods, they are making monuments for the moment, works in which a diverse public can see itself.

Members of this heterogeneous group—among them Diedrick Brackens, Tania Pérez Córdova, Woody De Othello, Simone Fattal, Hugh Hayden, Kapwani Kiwanga, Mai-Thu Perret, and Marie Watt—have one important thing in common: Each prizes craft not just as a practical way to get things done, but as a source of cultural resonance. For these artists, making-by-hand is a way to express a sense of belonging. It tells a story about their extended community and demonstrates ways to give appropriate form to identity, both personal and collective. In their works, we often see two modes of narrative coincide: culturally specific visual references intertwine with the implicit chronicle of a piece’s own physical creation.

Within this broad pattern, we can discern various formal affinities, beginning with certain functional typologies (such as containers, bedcovers, and furniture) that artists adopt for their sociohistorical charge. Quilts are a striking example. Following the powerful precedent of Faith Ringgold, figures like Sanford Biggers and Bisa Butler have laid claim to this textile tradition—sometimes seen in retrospect as an important precedent for modernist collage—because it affords a capacious means of representing Black identity.

Another striking instance is the humble pot, which, after decades of art world neglect, has become one of the dominant sculptural formats of our era. Pottery is among Leigh’s primary references, much as it is for artist-activist Theaster Gates, both practitioners originally trained as ceramists. But many other sculptors are also making vessels the protagonists of their artistic narratives.

Ebitenyefa Baralaye, a Nigerian-born artist based in Detroit, shapes stately quasi-abstract ceramic heads that allude to the African American tradition of the face jug. Features are rendered in sinuous coils, a sort of drawing in clay, and lightly applied over the pronounced throwing rings of the vessel-like forms. In an interview for Art Journal, the artist told me that he is exploring “the way that facial features represent not just one person but a community, a society, and a culture.”

Baralaye emphasizes materiality too, choosing iron-rich strains of earthenware that index Black skin tones. “Clay is not a neutral substance,” he said. “It is a membrane that has specific characteristics and properties as well as a memory of the forces that acted upon it…. Its physical memory is like the experiences and trauma that we carry in our bodies, not always in visible marks and impressions but in a deeply physiological sense, in our shifting ability to cope, to be happy, to feel fulfilled, to be healthy.” Shot through with vulnerability and violence, the story of African Americans’ heritage is, at one level, all too familiar. But in his richly conceived and executed artifacts, Baralaye takes ownership of that narrative, remaking it into something empowering.

Similarly, New York–based artists Clementine Keith-Roach and Julia Kunin address fraught issues of gender. Keith-Roach’s vessels often seem to tell the story of their own becoming, with surrealistically disembodied hands applying light touches to the surface. The terra-cotta jars are found objects, sourced from Turkey and Greece—recent examples of the kind of trade items that have crisscrossed the Mediterranean since ancient times—while the added elements are jesmonite casts from the artist’s own body. This juxtaposition is modulated by the trompe l’oeil surfaces of the bodily elements, which Keith-Roach paints in imitation of the original ceramics’ patina, suggesting historical interchange and reciprocity.

In her newest works, Keith-Roach has further extended this vocabulary by working with large-scale basins and urns attached to casts of her own naked legs kneeling, reclining, or standing upright. Here, she is clearly responding to the sculptural nude, as well as the venerable analogy between the female body and a vessel, one destined to carry and nurture human life. Both of these conventions have served the interests of a sexist patriarchy, but instead of parodying that sort of objectification, Keith-Roach offers a feminine figuration that is explicitly celebratory.

The same is true of Julia Kunin’s multipart ceramic sculptures, in which lesbian erotic imagery is sheathed in iridescent splendor. Since 2009, Kunin has traveled annually to Hungary to work with technicians at Zsolnay, a large ceramics factory famed since the 19th century for its luster glazes. The only American to have recently worked in this context, Kunin has done so at a time when LGBTQ+ rights in Hungary are under concerted assault by the right-wing populist government of Victor Orbán.

In these seemingly inhospitable circumstances, Kunin has managed to create works of visionary jouissance. She draws equal inspiration from utopian feminist fiction—Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) and Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (1969)—and from Zsolnay’s Art Nouveau period, a heyday for allegorical figures of nymphs and femmes fatales. Kunin adopts these stereotypes only to liberate them, breaking her figures apart into free-floating motifs that encode female identity: lips, vaginas, keyholes. There is clearly a rapport between her iconography and that of Portrait of a German Officer (1914), Marsden Hartley’s emblematic portrait of his gay lover, painted at a time when it was not safe to tell stories of queerness in public.

In the works of Baralaye, Keith-Roach, and Kunin, we see an inversion of the strategies of the postwar studio craft movement, in which craftspeople sought to transcend tradition in the hope of attaining fine art status. Today, many artists, free of old hang-ups about disciplinary classification, are boldly exploring craft’s multiple histories. Consider, for example, Beatriz Cortez, a Salvadoran artist based in Los Angeles. As part of “Futures” (a recent exhibition at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building in Washington, D.C., for which I served on the curatorial team), Cortez created Chultún El Semillero (2021), a futuristic pod the size of a one-person space capsule, hand-built in steel, and illuminated from within. Though it could almost be a science-fiction film prop, the piece is actually based on an ancient model. The chultunes made by the Maya of the Yucatán regionare stone cavities, laboriously carved out by hand and then used for long-term storage: time capsules of a sort, dedicated to the survival of the community. Cortez’s reimagination of this archaic practice—her sculpture was filled with tools and living plants and seeds—suggests that, at a time when ecological peril makes cross-generational care so vital, we would do well to attend to older mentalities.

This sort of temporal layering, in which materiality serves as the bearer of cultural inheritance, is arguably the most important thing that craft brings to art today. Artists of striking diversity, who otherwise might seem to have little in common, are linked by this common strategy. Earlier this year, the Brooklyn Museum presented a monographic exhibition on Baseera Khan, a queer artist of Indian, Afghani, and East African heritage, who conveys complex ideas about identity through process.

For Snake Skin (2019), Khan first built a majestic fluted column of insulation foam, six feet in diameter and fourteen feet high. They then wrapped the column in a patchwork of handwoven silk rugs from Kashmir, and finally, sliced the work into cross sections, exposing its cheap industrial core. These pieces are installed as if they had fallen onto one another, suggesting an architectural ruin. With its extreme material contrast and abrupt disjunctions, as well as its titular reminder that a snake regularly sheds its skin, this is a representation of selfhood as anything but fixed.

In the video Braidrage (2017), Khan is seen scaling a wall studded with partial casts of their own body fabricated in resin. These lumps are further ornamented with gold chains, bits of hypothermia blankets, and “commodified Indian hair” from the wig industry. As Khan navigates this cliff, constantly laboring to get just a little bit higher, one is invited to reflect on the sheer endurance required of the least empowered individuals.

Given these heterogeneous materials and unorthodox methods, Khan is clearly operating outside craft’s traditional domain. Yet, just as evidently, they engage the generative dynamics of materiality that have always animated artisanship. An assessment of craft in contemporary sculpture should take such practice into account, looking well beyond the familiar disciplinary catechism of clay, glass, fiber, metal, and wood.

That expansive approach should also consider the many interrelated storylines and timescales that inhere in craft: the story of materials and their past use; the artist’s background and development, including their acquisition of manual skills; and the story of process itself, a dramatic arc from undefined potential to cathartic resolution. These aspects of narrative are evocative, rather than illustrative, flowing as they do from sculpture’s very substance. As Puryear told me, “I don’t feel I’m working with a narrative intent that arises from the making process, at least not consciously. More like the reverse. The making process itself can be its own story, a record that remains active in the finished work, and the way it’s perceived. Making also bears the evidence of the maker’s own physical encounter with the material: the dance, or the struggle for mastery, or the surprise discovery—which is the best!”

In his celebration of the art of storytelling, Walter Benjamin was no nostalgist, and his mourning for artisanal traditions was not an expression of conservativism. Benjamin directed attention to past customs not in hopes that they could be reinstated, but rather to keep them in view, as an archive of scattered remnants. Craft, like folklore, has had constantly to adapt to new conditions. But it can still help us get our bearings, simply by telling us where we’ve been.

 Diana’s uncanny quality is not what Perret finds surprising. It is, rather, the idea of creating a traditional statue at all. During her more than twenty years of making sculpture—with mannequins, clay, neon, and other materials—the Swiss artist has studiously avoided conventional figurative modes, preferring instead the messier arena of found objects and contingent art-making, aslant conventional models of artistic authorship.

Diana, detail of a bronze hand.

To understand how Perret got to this fecund image, it’s helpful to go back to the beginning of her career. Born in Geneva to French and Vietnamese parents, she studied literature as an undergraduate at Cambridge, where she fell under the sway of modernist writing and criticism. She was especially impressed by T.S. Eliot’s contention (put forward in his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”) that “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” The young Perret even considered going on to write a postgraduate thesis on Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory. But noticing that her many artist friends enjoyed a freedom unknown in academia, she abruptly shifted to making art.

She didn’t leave literature behind, however; she repurposed it instead as a generative armature for visual works. This strategy yielded a career-defining body of texts and objects, created, beginning in 1999, in relation to an invented realm called “The Crystal Frontier” (a double allusion to texts by artist Robert Smithson and novelist J.G. Ballard, two notably dystopian thinkers). Set in the American Southwest about a century ago, the written account—comprising letters, diaries, lists, reports, and even song lyrics, all composed by the artist in various fictional guises—centers on a feminist commune with “psychedelic-pastoral tendencies.” There, Perret’s women support themselves through various arts and crafts enterprises, much like members of historical utopian communities such as the Shakers and Oneida Perfectionists.

“The Crystal Frontier” also provided the artist with a pretext to make artifacts. Or to have them made: a Mescaline Tea Service (2002), based on a Bauhaus design, was fabricated for her by a professional potter. The tabletop ceramics in “25 Sculptures of Pure Self-Expression” (2003), a series conceived as the work of several different characters, were sculpted mostly by Perret but with contributions by a number of friends, some of them artists.

As curator Hamza Walker has noted, the “Crystal Frontier” scenario is “in no way, shape or form a finished document”—it’s a mélange of fragments with no continuous story line. Some of the texts exist in uneasy, Rashomon-like contradiction to one another. For example, the commune’s leader, Beatrice Mandell, writes that “our greatest freedom lies in the absolute unity of the hand and the aim that drives it,” yet an anonymous community member claims that Mandell “has nothing but contempt for our potential customers.” The multivoiced structure also allowed Perret to try on aphorisms for size, such as “the woman as object fabricated by the capitalist West will be its downfall” (a line lifted from Alexander Rodchenko).

A viewer with The hundred flowers that come with the spring, for whom do they bloom? I, 2022, ceramic, 40 1/2 by 35 1/2 by 55 inches.

For all its sly misdirection, “The Crystal Frontier” served Perret very pragmatically, providing her a framework for creating works of remarkable diversity. The Pyramid of Love (2003), for example, is a rabbit hutch, complete with actual live bunnies, alluding to modular architecture, a key means by which utopian modernism was propagated across space. Little Planetary Harmony (2006) is a walk-in teapot, clad in aluminum, that nods in the direction of the Bauhaus metal shop. Perret used the structure as a miniature art gallery, presenting in its curved interior a set of paintings purportedly by the women of the commune. “These people had an inner life, culture, and imagination,” she told me in an interview, “so I needed to make their art, their symbolic culture, as well as their utilitarian design. What you see is ‘their’ production, not mine.”

EVENTUALLY THE “CRYSTAL FRONTIER” conceit began to pall on Perret. “It started feeling narrow. I got worried about making art for curators,” she said, concerned that she had been prompting a sort of anecdotal fascination in audiences and critics. In 2007 she achieved escape velocity with An Evening of the Book, her contribution to the Lyon Biennial. Appropriating the title of a 1924 stage performance conceived by Russian Constructivist Varvara Stepanova, Perret worked with documentary photographs and the still extant set and costume designs to imagine her own version of the event, which she filmed and then projected onto walls papered with a Stepanova pattern. Her presentation draws on both Constructivist imagery and the everyday-movement choreography of Yvonne Rainer and others involved with the Judson Church Theater in the early 1960s. The closing soundtrack was taken from a composition that Perret created with artist Steven Parrino.

View of the multi-channel video installation “An Evening of the Book,” 2007.

In An Evening of the Book, Perret once again channels a utopian past, this time a real one. Stepanova’s original concept was to dramatize the clash between traditional and revolutionary literature, with the latter triumphant—a starkly ideological theme, well within shouting distance of a book burning. Perret’s re-creation, though, is the opposite of strident. She portrays the radical impulse to reshape the world as a poignant, fragile, and perhaps somewhat comical urge, handed down from one generation to the next. History is treated nonjudgmentally, as a theatrical overlay.

The same attitude extends to the way Perret procured costumes for the project, having them made up by a seamstress in Vietnam. That nation’s Communist economy is obviously far from the Constructivist dream of worker self-actualization. By stitching that disparity into the fabric of her project, Perret introduced a subtle yet insistent note of doubt. “I wish I had the certainty of a [William] Morris or Rodchenko,” she told me. “I am not completely sure what is right and wrong in terms of production. Even the back-to-the-land, hands-on approach, making rural pottery with self-dug clay, is riddled with political problems. So I don’t believe in the mystique of the maker. I respect that people believe in it, but personally I don’t. We’re not in the same line of work, somehow.”

Perret has accorded clay—without the mystique—a central place in her oeuvre. A turning point for her was the 2006 exhibition “Country Life” by German artist Rosemarie Trockel at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York. (Trockel was also included in “Makers and Modelers,” a group show at Gladstone the following year that was a milestone in the art world’s reevaluation of ceramics.) Impressed by the possibilities of the medium, Perret set about realizing her own large-scale clay reliefs.

A ceramic wall plaque from the series “Heart and Soul,” 2007.

The first of these, a series ironically titled “Heart and Soul” (2007), comprises monochrome slabs bearing strange signs: a circle of rats, a row of dolls, an enigmatic diagram. They are like a rebus without a key; Perret has described them as “a cut-up inventory, a list of shapes and symbols with an infinite number of permutations and meanings.” This sense of indeterminacy was unexpectedly amplified when the slabs cracked in the firing. Lacking time to remake the pieces, Perret simply gilded the fractures, an obvious allusion to the Japanese practice of kintsugi, though perhaps even more akin to Marcel Duchamp’s acceptance of the shattering of his Large Glass.

 While Perret rather enjoyed this last-minute adjustment, she was glad when Trockel connected her about fifteen years ago to top-flight ceramic fabricator Niels Dietrich in Cologne. She has worked with him ever since, making an ongoing series of monochrome wall sculptures that often bear titles attesting to her writerly turn of mind, among them the Zen sayings If you are unclear about 3, 8, and 9, then about the world you will have many thoughts (2008) and From the start it is naturally so, it does not need any sculpting (2011).

Perret has also extended the iconography she explored in “The Crystal Frontier,” conjuring such extraordinary works as Flow My Tears (2011), a figure with a head in silver-gilt glass, clad in a reproduction of Elsa Schiaparelli’s Surrealist skeleton dress, and Les Guérillères (2016), a group of mannequins named in honor of Monique Wittig’s feminist revenge-fantasy novel and dressed in military fatigues, some with John Baldessari-like polka dots on blank faces. These works raise Perret’s long-standing interest in female agency to a fevered pitch. Armed with automatic rifles, striking confident poses, her feminist archetypes are obviously topical, though they seem to occupy a world other than our own.

A figure from the the group Les Guérillères, 2016, mixed mediums with steel base, 72 by 25 1/2 by 29 inches.

Perret’s powerful guerrillas lead us back to her new fertility goddess, which will be accompanied at Frieze by a ceramic rendition of a corpse flower—that gargantuan, foul-smelling, ludicrously phallic plant that blooms every decade or so, to the disgusted delight of onlookers at botanical gardens worldwide. Together, the figure and the flower (with its colors long said to resemble those of a rotting cadaver) evoke a Freudian dreamscape, or possibly a nightmare—at any rate, a primal collision of life and death. Yes, Perret has a highly theoretical, somewhat esoteric approach to art-making. But one way or another, she always manages to make extremely potent images. There’s “craft” here in abundance, meaning not just skilled labor but also hints of a more arcane practice, preserved in the English word “witchcraft,” another gendered history implicit in Perret’s work.

Long before conceptual art, we had the esotericism of the occult. Could this tradition offer yet another alternative model of authorship? Perret is suspicious of the notion that true artists help the world by revealing mystic truths. On the other hand, as she nicely puts it, “maybe if the idea of a visionary is to be traversed by forces that are not yourself, it’s very beautiful.”

Works by Mai-Thu Perret appear at the Frieze Art Fair, New York, May 18-22, while her solo show “Real Estate” continues at the Istituto Svizzero, Rome, through June 26.

But there was nothing in that collection like Mary Frank’s Horse and Rider (1982). Made of terra-cotta, mostly in thin slabs, it unfolds in a horizontal rush, like Renaissance drapery whipped by the wind. The figures themselves are sensitively modeled, but their rippling musculature is offset by little wrinkles and rips in the clay, while the eyeless horse and its emaciated rider seem to strain—perhaps toward apocalypse.

At my impressionable age back then, Frank’s work had a tremendous impact. It was the first time that I perceived how much an artist could do with so little—just a few pounds of clay, folded and formed. Unlike the masterful Robineau and Grotell, or even the strident Voulkos, Frank showed that you could completely sidestep conventional technique with a matador’s dexterity, and produce something wondrous.

I recently reacquainted myself with Horse and Rider in a Frank retrospective curated by artist David Hornung, “The Observing Heart,” on view through July 17 at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. Located on the campus of SUNY New Paltz, the Dorsky is now under the dynamic leadership of Anna C. Conlan. Across a hallway from Frank’s show is “Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere,” an exhibition organized by independent curator nico wheadon that explores “the Black radical imagination.” Conlan herself recently curated a show about a little-known women’s art colony led by pioneering feminist Kate Millett. In this progressive context, the eighty-nine-year-old Frank presides as an elder stateswoman. No stranger to activism herself—she has been making political posters since the Vietnam War—the artist has always had the courage of her convictions.

Frank’s best-known works are the ceramic sculptures that she started making in the early 1970s, despite having had no previous experience in the medium. (She also worked at home and had no kiln, she told me in a recent phone interview, and so had to carry her fragile pieces down the hall of her apartment building, “past the baby carriages and kids on skates, down the elevator and get [them] in the truck” and off to be fired.) In addition to the Everson’s work, there are several other wonderful examples at the Dorsky, including the poignant Arching Woman (ca. 1972), a mere drape of clay that somehow manages to summon Bernini’s Saint Teresa in Ecstasy, and Three Dancers (1981), which finds an ideal midpoint between the serene choreography of Tang Dynasty tomb figures and the muscular figuration of Auguste Rodin.

Woman with Winged Arms, 1975, ceramic, 17 1/2 by 94 by 41 inches.

Particularly impressive is Woman with Winged Arms (1975), a disaggregated figure, flat on its back, fully eight feet long. It feels like an archaeological find, perhaps from a funerary context. The face has the placidity of eternal rest, and Frank has painted shin and thigh bones onto the legs. One hand holds a miniature mask, and fossil-like imprints of ferns congregate around the feet, like an offering. Yet the tomblike atmosphere is offset by a palpable sensuality. Frank makes brilliant use of clay’s pliancy to render hair, breasts, ribcage, hipbones. The work is Freud’s dialectical opposition between eros and thanatos, the life and death drives, in sculptural form.

This said, Frank explores her mythic subject matter—“the primal themes of human existence,” according to Hornung in the exhibition catalogue—with disarming sincerity. She’s like that in person too, refreshingly free of dependence on theoretical armature. When I mentioned the Everson sculpture to her, she replied, “everyone knows it’s a symbol that means different things, life and death, and all that. But a horse is a horse.” Keeping this focus on the fact of the matter, observational drawing is the engine of all her work. She’s an artist who never goes anywhere without a sketchbook. Her studio (which itself has quite an archaeological stratigraphy) is filled with them: “one might disappear for a while, and then I find it under a pillow.”

Images from this iconographical quarry circulate constantly through Frank’s work. Her great strength is the fleeting aperçu, the insight caught on the fly. Much of what she makes—paintings, monotype prints, papier-mâché sculptures, in addition to ceramics—looks collaged, even when it isn’t, and her touch is invariably feather-light. Her “shadow papers,” for example, produced concurrently with her ceramics in the 1970s, are essentially drawings made with scissors. Created with the paper held up to the sky, the images of animals and faces become visible only when backlit. With marvelous aptness, Frank once used them to illustrate a book of verse by Emily Dickinson, that most incisive of poets.

What Color Lament?, 1991-93, oil and oil stick on paper and composition board, 69 7/8 by 166 1/4 inches.

Even Frank’s most ambitious paintings, like a large-scale triptych bearing the Gauguin-esque title What Color Lament? (1991–93), on loan to the Dorsky show from the Whitney Museum of American Art, feel somewhat provisional, with vignettes of shrouded figures on separate canvases inset like stray thoughts. She alights on new ideas constantly but non-systematically, as insects do on flowers. Lately she has been painting on stones, using their natural contours as the parameters for her compositions. In 2006 she began photographing her own older works, transforming them through odd angles and juxtapositions. Downy feathers spill across a drawing. A silhouette in handcut metal is photographed atop a leaf that in turn lies atop a puddle of water. The exhibition even includes one work, For the Time-Being (2017), which incorporates an enormous tree fungus, on which she has painted the image of an owl in flight.

Couple, ca. 1961, wood, 31 by 12 1/2 by 14 inches.

Frank comes by her intuitive approach quite naturally, for she never had any sustained artistic training. The closest she came was as a teenager, when she spent five years studying with dance legend Martha Graham. As Hornung observes in the exhibition catalogue, “the stylized movement and grave, elemental postures” of Graham’s choreography had an obvious influence on Frank’s early aesthetic. Frank also had the opportunity to study drawing with Max Beckmann in 1950, in the last year of the great German artist’s life. That same year she married the soon-to-be-prominent photographer Robert Frank—they would separate in 1969—and also took up woodcarving. Among the earliest works in the Dorsky show is Couple (ca. 1961), made at the time of Frank’s first gallery exhibition. It’s a direct carving that is anything but direct in its composition. At first it looks completely abstract, until you notice the bumps of a well-formed backside. Only gradually and never explicitly—the title helps—do you begin to make out two figures locked in an embrace. There’s no telling where one begins and the other ends.

Right from the start, then, Frank was tapping into something archaic. That interest was certainly in the air at the time. The 1959 exhibition “New Images of Man” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example, explored, in the words of curator Peter Selz, “the unconscious and the primitive mass-man from which man comes and to which civilized mass-man may return.” Yet for Frank, the primordial was the personal, and that has remained true throughout her long, restlessly creative career. When I spoke to her, she had just gone to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the first time since the onset of the pandemic. She made her way directly to the ancient art galleries, and there stood for a time in front of the museum’s famed Cycladic harpist, carved from marble about 4,700 years ago. She marveled at its strange immediacy—the little chair the figure sits on, just like our own.

Messenger, 1991-92, bronze, 68 inches high.

There’s a bronze sculpture in the Dorsky show called Messenger (1991–92) that feels similarly poised at the vertex of the ancient and the familiar. It depicts a young woman, a scored texture coursing over her limbs and body. Her arms are upraised, and she leaps over a castoff metal wheel—a found object, maybe giving just the slightest nod to Duchamp’s bicycle wheel, but also an image of ruination, and of time’s turning. The sculpture calls ancient depictions of the god Mercury to mind, but this girl has no wings on her feet. She’s one of us.

A kindred figure forms the exclusive subject of Lift (2021), one of the most recent paintings in the Dorsky show, and one of Frank’s most instantly iconic. She could be the Messenger girl all grown up. The striations of the bronze reappear here, rendered in black and white, delineating the body’s contours like a topographical map. The background is vivid, by Frank’s standards. “Color is an agony and a joy, a deep mystery for me and it always will be,” she says. “I can’t use the word ‘understand’ anywhere near color.” Lift has just that ineffable quality. Are we looking, here, at a spiritual apotheosis, an ascension into the heavenly firmament? An allegory of Everywoman triumphant? A self-portrait of the artist? The answer, as ever with Frank, is beguilingly straightforward. Yes, yes, yes.

Mary Frank’s retrospective, “The Observing Heart,” is on view at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, through July 17.

That perspective is willfully archaic, as if the artist were an inhabitant of another, more mythic age, transported to our own. When I spoke to Fattal in October, she said that she thinks of her figures as “beyond reach, as kings or gods are.” Sometimes she sees them as warriors in procession, in service only to the most fundamental of messages: “that we existed, and that we gave a good fight.” They are heroic, at a time when heroes are hard to come by.

The Whitechapel exhibition (on view through May 15) follows a larger retrospective, presented at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2019, which sampled the full range of Fattal’s work: sculptures from different periods of her career, as well as paintings, collages, prints, and ink drawings. That show borrowed its title from Hesiod’s poem Works and Days (ca. 700 BC), one of the oldest texts in the European canon. By Fattal’s standards, that counts as recent history. Born in Damascus in 1942, she has remained grounded in that part of the world, with its unfathomably deep past. As a young artist, she frequented the excavated ruins of Sumer and read the Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2150–1400 BC). She went to Paris, to study archaeology at the École du Louvre. Still today, she navigates by the stars of the pre-classical world: “Greece is so perfect. You cannot go from Greece. You go towards it.”

Au bord du Barada I (Along the Barada I), 2020, etching, approx. 15 by 44 inches.

In practice, her vocation has taken Fattal elsewhere. After her stint in Paris—where she stayed on to study philosophy at the Sorbonne—she relocated to Beirut in 1967, there meeting her partner, the poet and artist Etel Adnan. They remained in Lebanon until 1980, weathering five long years of civil war. Finally, she says, “I realized that this war was never going to end. And that I had better find a way not to lose my life waiting.” She and Adnan moved to California, where Fattal founded an independent publishing house for poetry and experimental fiction. It is called Post-Apollo Press, an allusion to the moon landing achieved in 1969 by her newly adopted land: “I thought at the time, the same way I think today, that for mankind to leave gravity and head for the universe, was the beginning of a new era. Therefore, we could count the years with the Apollo mission, the way we did with BC and AD.” (Even when thinking about recent events, you see, she takes the longest possible view.)

In comparison to her PS1 retrospective, the Whitechapel show is a focused affair. It takes its bearings from the immediate surroundings, which for Fattal means bricks and books. The former because this neighborhood was once devoted to ceramic manufacture, introduced by Flemish immigrants in the fifteenth century. The area subsequently became a center for the Jewish community; today its residents are principally Bangladeshi. But the Whitechapel building still sits on a corner of Brick Lane, and the gallery currently given over to “Finding a Way” is lined with bricks made of yellow London clay. The space was also once a library, in Victorian times, so Fattal naturally let her literary side come out in planning the show. A single ceramic flower is planted in the mortar of a wall, an allusion (according to an interview with the artist in the Whitechapel catalogue) to Gilgamesh’s search for ever-blooming immortality; and the exhibition follows a mythological script, with its embattled warriors embarked on their own odyssey.

Exhibition view of “Finding a Way,” showing Fattal’s cloud and ziggurat sculptures with five etchings on the rear wall.

The exhibition includes other works too, almost all made since 2018. There are standing stelae and a small clay ziggurat on a boxlike pedestal, which contribute to the sense that one has come upon the remnants of some long-ago civilization. The walls are hung with wide-format etchings (“elongated papers,” in Fattal’s nice phrase) whose deft, semi-abstract marks are inspired by historic maps or her recollections of Barada River views. Another group of tabletop clay sculptures, the “Clouds,” mirror these horizontal compositions, coming across as the material traces of Fattal’s stray thoughts.

The figures, though, occupy center stage; and it’s on their sturdy frames that Fattal’s reputation rests. At a time when ceramics have extraordinary currency in the art world, her use of the medium stands apart for its intensity of purpose. She first came to ceramics in the late 1980s, when she revived her dormant visual art practice by taking a course at the San Francisco Art Institute. Clay immediately attracted her for multiple reasons: its emotive characteristics; its combination of strength and vulnerability; the care it requires when worked; the sense of risk when it is fired; the breathless discovery at the kiln’s opening, each time a sort of resurrection. There is a reason we have the phrase “clay body.” The material is both pliable and resistant, as people are, and to get your way with it requires both force and gentle coaxing. As clay dries, it seems to lose its vitality. “You can lose a lot of it on the way to the kiln,” Fattal comments. “It dies in your hands.”

Installation view of The Master, 1998, bronze, approx. 40 inches tall.

Though Fattal’s warriors are smaller than human scale, they seem like titans. They are both monumental and archetypal (in the Jungian sense of the term), emblems not of a private symbology but a vast collective memory. To spend time among them is to gain perspective on the events of the day—including the tragedy that continues to unfold in Syria.

Fattal often says that she does not feel like an artist at all, in the modern, professional sense of the term; nor does she feel much affinity with such practitioners (with a few exceptions, notably Henry Moore, who she thinks was equally in communion with the ancients). Personal expression, in her view, is overrated: “I’m not so interested in my little life.” She is looking toward a more distant horizon, one that her figures seem impelled to reach. We all have different origins and different destinations; only in our shared transit through time and space do we experience the universal.

On November 14, 2021, roughly three weeks after the opening of Fattal’s Whitechapel show, Etel Adnan died at the age of 96. The artistic journeys of the two women had been inextricably intertwined. Adnan’s paintings and illuminated handwritten poems (examples of which are on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York through January 10) remain the best possible companions to Fattal’s art, for they have a similar quality of compressed, talismanic power. Nowhere is that more evident, or more poignant, than in the first and last stanzas of one of Adnan’s poems from The Spring Flowers Own & The Manifestations of the Voyage, published by Post-Apollo Press in 1990:

Simone Fattal, 2021.

The morning after

my death

we will sit in cafés

but I will not

be there

I will not be

[…]

Flowers end in frozen patterns

artificial gardens cover

the floors

we get up close to midnight

search with powerful lights

the tiniest shrubs on the

meadows

A stream desperately is running to

the ocean

That approach isn’t unusual for an artist of Amaral’s generation. She started out in the late 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism was still a dominant style, and intuition—what happens “in the moment”—was prized above all else. But Amaral is, principally, a weaver. Her medium tends to a slow and structured progression. It rewards considerable forethought and patient execution. This contrast—between feeling and premeditation, impulse and handiwork—is a central animating dialectic of her work. As she has developed discrete but overlapping idioms, Amaral has consistently achieved what seems impossible: a luxuriantly expansive immediacy. Working at large scale with as many as seven assistants, she somehow manages to create textile art that appears instinctive, direct, and deeply personal.

These qualities shine forth in “To Weave a Rock,” a survey of Amaral’s work now at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, through March 20, 2022, and previously shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. (Another exhibition is currently on view at Lisson Gallery in New York through December 18.) The retrospective’s title, drawn from an assignment that Amaral set her students at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in rural Maine in 1967, nicely captures the ambience of her works. They feel not so much made as summoned into being. This is especially true when she uses gold leaf, a signature material she adopted in the 1980s, which turns her fiber works into shimmering apparitions. Amaral emphasized the otherworldly transmutation by calling the series “Alquimias” (Alchemies). The magic has continued in her subsequent “Bosques” (Forests) and “Brumas” (Mists), in which geometric forms appear to hover within diaphanous free falls of threads, as well as her “Nudos” (Knots), bundles of painted threads that stand upright on the ground, as decisive as any painted brushstroke.

Alquimia 42B, 1986, linen, gesso, and gold leaf, 64 7/8 by 27 1/2 in.

Amaral’s technology of enchantment (to borrow a phrase from anthropologist Alfred Gell) has developed over the course of an unusually cosmopolitan career. Though the artist has lived and worked principally in Bogotá, Colombia, where she was born in 1932, her professional pathway has been continually shaped by experiences in both the United States and Europe. After initially training in architectural drafting, she went to New York City in 1954 to study English. That fall, she enrolled at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, encouraged by a friend from Colombia, architect Hans Drews. As she recalls in the “To Weave a Rock” catalogue, he told her it was “more than a place to study design and crafts. . . . It was a place that valued freedom.”

Cranbrook’s textile department at the time was led by Marianne Strengell, one of the Nordic talents recruited to the Academy by her fellow Finnish designers, Eliel and Loja Saarinen. Strengell’s approach was definitely applied art: textiles in the service of architecture and industry. When Amaral returned to Colombia after just a year at Cranbrook, she set up a studio operating in that instrumental spirit, producing upholstery and furnishing fabrics as well as a fashion line. It was a full decade before she began creating “fiber art”—a term that hadn’t quite been invented yet.

That moment came in 1964, when Amaral traveled to San Francisco, to visit the family of her American husband. There she met up with fellow Cranbrook graduate, Lillian Elliott, at an unusually exciting time to be a weaver in America. The previous year the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York had presented “Woven Forms,” curated by Paul J. Smith as a showcase for Lenore Tawney, along with four other progressive weavers: Alice Adams, Sheila Hicks, Dorian Zachai, and Claire Zeisler. Tawney’s works, in particular, demonstrated a wholly new approach to textiles. They hung freely in space, with warps that traveled in graceful diagonals rather than straight up and down, and passages of openwork to let the light through.

Following Elliott’s initial prompting, Amaral soon formulated her own unique response to these currents. In 1965 she began creating hangings with interlaced forms. These were made on a vertical loom with a split warp. Amaral manipulated the resulting strips laterally, dividing and rejoining them, passing them under and over one another into plaits (done off the loom), sometimes integrating individual wrapped cords. The complex results offer a contrapuntal play against the typical textile grid—a weaving of weavings. Though this was a different technique from the one Tawney had used in her “woven forms,” it resulted in a comparable effect: a complex, rhythmic cascade.

Olga de Amaral, 1968, in an exhibition of her work at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Planetario Distrital de Bogotá.

The interlaces positioned Amaral at the forefront of her medium, and she was soon exhibiting internationally. She was included in the 1967 Lausanne Biennial, Europe’s premier event for experimental tapestry, as well as the landmark 1969 exhibition “Wall Hangings,” organized at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, by curator Mildred Constantine and textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen. Smith gave Amaral a show at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts the following year, focusing on her “Woven Walls,” a series of densely crisscrossed works, some of which are curvaceous and embracing in their overall form. At the time, Amaral was also experimenting with plastic—a readily available material that she used to pack her work in the studio—rendering it ethereally translucent by layering it atop itself, as in works like Luz Blanca (White Light), 1969.

The late 1960s were the peak years for fiber art on the international stage, and Amaral was a singular figure in that context. Though many weavers of the era—Tawney, Hicks, and Anni Albers among them—drew inspiration from historic Latin American textiles, Amaral was the only contemporary fiber artist from that part of the world who was of comparable stature. The geographically dispersed practitioners of the emergent field were her creative community; she did not have strong connections to other artists in the region, even those who were exploring abstraction in textiles. (Via email, she explained that she knew the work of the Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto, but had no relationship with him. Meanwhile, she was unaware of what Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape were doing in Brazil.) Her affinities were elsewhere, some elemental and some highly sophisticated. On the one hand, she noted, “I was inspired by women in the countryside preparing the wool. And I loved rocks covered with moss.” On the other, she befriended the great Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz (subject of a current exhibition at Tate Modern), whose supremely powerful, heavily textured, often figurative works doubtlessly influenced Amaral in the early 1970s, when the latter executed her pieces mainly in wool and horsehair, and even ventured briefly into freestanding totemic forms.

“Estela” (Wake) grouping, 2018, linen, gesso, acrylic, and gold leaf; each element 61-76 inches high.

Knot 28, 2016, linen, gesso and acrylic, 118 by 11 3/4 inches.

By the 1980s, the lights dimmed on fiber art. Organic handwrought abstraction, notably macramé, had been a perfect fit for the countercultural era, but it did not suit the media-obsessed, conceptually inclined period that followed. Fortunately, Amaral had light of her own to bring. Her “Alquimias,” particularly, won wide acclaim despite the general malaise afflicting her discipline. She arrived at them gradually, first adding gesso to her weavings (bringing them closer to the material state of paintings) and only later realizing that this move yielded an ideal surface for adding gold leaf. While her use of this precious metal has often been associated with pre-Columbian artifacts, Amaral stresses that she found its attraction primarily formal—a new color in her palette, introducing a play of reflectivity. Her repertoire became more refined in other ways too: she shifted principally to fine linen as a substrate rather than fibrous wool, and embellished threads with acrylic paint and pigmented clays. She also strove to create internal illumination, in ways that again recall Tawney’s works—this time the suspended “Clouds,” with their long, dangling fibers, which marked the culmination of the older artist’s career. Like those ethereal pieces, Amaral’s “Bosques” and “Brumas” are essentially unwoven textiles—warp threads without corresponding wefts, hung vertically to create a color-space.

The “Nudos,” which are among Amaral’s most recent works, are also her most concise. They bring to fruition her long-standing interest in “scaling up of the discrete components of the textile elements,” she remarked in another email. “The beginning of a fabric, the kernel of a textile, is a knot. I wanted to monumentalize this incredible technology.” The comment makes me wonder whether these works might be self-portraits of a kind. Vertically oriented and rising to a hairstyle-like topknot, they certainly could be read as figural. But Amaral says no—she was not thinking about the body when she made them, but about the intrinsic logic of the medium. Rather than self-portraits, then, perhaps it would be better to see them as statements of purpose, materialized manifestos, the exclamation marks of a long and amazingly generative career. When it comes to summarizing all she has achieved, it would be hard to put the case better than Amaral does herself: “I wanted to make the thread and the knot more visible, giving them the weight, the importance they deserve.”

On one wall of the studio was a wide banner-like hanging, still in progress, that read “Turtle Island,” a term variously used by her own people, the Seneca (historically, one of the woodland nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy), to designate the earth, North America, or the idea of homeland. Another recent work reads “our teeth make refuge for our tongues,” another quotation from Harjo. Actual song lyrics get into the work too, notably from Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” Written half a century ago, during the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the American Indian occupation of Alcatraz, its lyrics nonetheless feel all too relevant now. Watt has stitched its phrases into her work—”mother, mother”; “brother, brother”; “we don’t need to escalate”; “right on, baby”—as if the song were already playing, and she were just joining in.

Watt describes her use of existing text as “a call back in time and a call forward, a twinning of language.” Difference within repetition. That formula is also intrinsic to craft—the slight irregularities imparted by the human hand—and it lies at the heart of Watt’s practice. Hers is an art of accumulation, bead by bead, stitch by stitch, neon tube by neon tube, taking its life from the variations that happen within recurrence. Two or three times a year, she stages public events to initiate a new artwork, turning the making process into a sort of social gathering. (The artist will host a sewing circle at Marc Straus gallery in New York on December 8.) To some extent this is simple pragmatism, the contemporary art version of a barn-raising, many hands making the work light. But Watt also cherishes the instant community brought about by this collective effort, the creation of a shared, intergenerational, multicultural endeavor. Crowdsourcing complicates her own authorship, and brings what she describes as a cadence to the work, “what’s present around the whole table, not just what is in front of each maker.”

Blanket Stories: Great Grandmother, Pandemic, Daybreak (detail), 2021, reclaimed blankets, cedar base, 108 by 38 1/4 by 40 inches.

Watt also employs diversity and repetition in her choice of motifs, traversing time and culture, connecting disparate experiences. Blankets are the most important of these; she has worked with them for some twenty-five years, after earning her MFA in painting and printmaking at Yale University. (As a student she had used corn husks, which were “not met with much warmth or encouragement.”) She has stacked blankets high, arranged them in concentric arcs, cut them apart and sewed them together again, cast them in clear resin and obdurate iron. For years, she imposed a strict limit on herself, spending at most five dollars on each secondhand blanket, buying them in large quantities, just as a painter might buy new tubes of oil or acrylic. But these objects came with stories. “I quickly learned from their tags that they migrate,” she says. ”Some blankets have people’s names in them; others have nibbled bits, and mended parts.”

These incidental microhistories attest to the latent cultural capital of these apparently low-value commodities. For many children, a blanket is the first object of attachment. Even as adults, we remain on intimate terms with them. And in Native American culture, blankets are symbolically potent. Watt’s own family observes a custom of giving them as gifts to mark major life events. More broadly in Native communities, blankets have been associated with both trade and tradition, to the point that whites intent on forcibly assimilating Indigenous people disparagingly referred to those who retained their customs intact as “blanket Indians.” Her use of the material reflects that history, while also indicating an openness to other perspectives: in her hands blankets are a common fabric, both literally and figuratively.

Companion Species (A Distant Song), 2021, reclaimed satin bindings, industrial felt, thread, 32 1/2 by 168 inches.

Watt’s inclusive approach is a knowing riposte to modernist abstraction, which was often claimed as a new universal language, despite its obvious Euro-centricity (which entailed ignoring precedents such as tilework and textiles throughout the world). She counters this dominant narrative with another, based not on transcendent form but commonplace experiences, like being tucked in at night. Another new work, underway in her studio when we spoke, contains nothing more than seam bindings—the strips of satin that run along blanket edges—in various states of wear. Horizontally arranged in a spectrum running from pink to gold to blue, the composition suggests a sunset. It prompts the thought that a blanket under the chin is a sort of psychological horizon, with a dreamscape on the far side. There’s an unmissable reference here to postwar American paintings by the likes of Mark Rothko, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland. Watt domesticates the idiom of these canonical artists without retreating an inch from their ambition to capture the sublime. The work is so wide that when you stand at its center, you cannot see its edges. “It envelops you,” Watt says, “just like an actual sunset does.”

Skywalker/Skyscraper (Sunrise), 2021, reclaimed blankets, steel I-beam, cedar blocks, 88 by 30 by 30 inches.

The sky is the conceptual backdrop for another series that Watt is currently developing, which stages a material juxtaposition between blankets and steel I-beams, the latter painted in bands. Vertical in orientation, they somewhat suggest the totem poles of Indigenous peoples of the Northwest, like the Coast Salish and the Tlingit. The I-beams also allude, once again, to modernism—the sculpture of Anthony Caro and Mark di Suvero—and to architecture. Watt has had in her mind the celebrated “Skywalkers” of the Mohawk nation (another woodland people of the Haudenosaunee), who have worked far above the streets of Manhattan, fitting and riveting together the armature for high-rise buildings. “They’re up there,” Watt comments, “in conversation with the sky, a mythic and magical space, where man has always aspired to hang out—a space of wonder.”

If there are two types of artists—stones, who simply roll ahead, gathering no moss, and snowballs, who gather meaning gradually as they create—Watt is definitely the latter. She tends to work around a topic, touching upon it in suggestive, overlapping ways. Thus her explorations of the celestial also invoke the Haudenosaunee legend of the Sky Woman. The idea of mothering led Watt not only to Marvin Gaye, but also to a common symbol of ancient Rome showing Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf in the wilderness. The artist is appreciative of ancient representations of this scene—“this non-biological mother, with her emaciated ribcage, nourishing these founding demigods, offering her body as a shelter, though you feel too that she could be ferocious.” In Native American belief wolves can be strong protective figures, too, so this is yet another example of Watt looking for connection, soaring right past conventional boundaries and classifications. She points out that most Indigenous languages do not even have a word for art. Aesthetics are not divorced from bare necessity. Similarly, we human beings are understood to exist in a relationship (hopefully harmonious) with animals, plants, the environment, and not in our own separate realm.

Forerunner, 2020, vintage Italian glass beads, industrial felt, thread, 39 by 102 inches.

This is what it means to have a song for everything: It’s a matter of belonging, which Watt continually offers in her work. When she inscribes pieces with terms like “Turtle Island” or “Sky Woman,” for example, some viewers may not know the reference. But they may wonder, and that opens up a space of potential connection. “It’s a prompt to say it out loud,” she says, ”and that can be attached to a way of seeing that is experiential. I am walking on Turtle Island, it is the sound beneath my feet, it is what I return to.” There is an extraordinary generosity here, which takes its full meaning only against a tragic backdrop, the displacement of Native people from their ancestral lands. Watt holds this history in view, while also making signs that mark a conceptual territory, one that we can all inhabit, in a spirit of mutuality. Gordon Bettles, a Klamath elder, once told her: “My story changes when I know your story.” And so with Watt, and all of us, together.

Self Talk, 2020, ceramic and glaze, 45 by 15 1/2 by 18 inches.

Are such sculptures a response to the traumas of the past few years—culminating in a period of obligatory isolation, political upheaval, and reckoning with racism? Yes. But to confine their meaning in this way would be a mistake. Pablo Picasso had a blue period too, filled with morose and haunted imagery. Many commentators have offered a biographical explanation of these works, seeing them as a response to the suicide of Picasso’s friend, painter Carles Casagemas. Art historian Rosalind Krauss, in her 1981 essay “In the Name of Picasso,” vociferously dissented from this idea. To see Picasso’s Blue paintings simply as a response to personal tragedy, she argued, “dissociates the work from all those other aspects, equally present, which have nothing to do with Casagemas.” Krauss objected to any interpretive strategy that implies “we have (or so we think) cracked the code of the painting, and it has no more secrets to withhold.”

The same goes for Othello’s heartbreaking sculptures. They were indeed made at a heartbreaking time, but they also have a lot more going on: other aspects, equally present. We can begin with the blues, surely the most important creative context for these works. This music is the wellspring for so much in American culture—critic Stanley Crouch once described it, perfectly, as “the sound and the repository [of] the nation’s sense of tragic recognition.” The way that great blues singers dismantle themselves in public, and are all the stronger for it; their improvisational methodology, at once supremely skilled and hanging out there, loose; their ability to work through a painful subject, rather than around it: all these traits are found Othello’s work. He’s found a way to deal with sorrow, letting it in without giving in. (As Crouch has also observed, “you play the blues to rid yourself of the blues.” To which we might add: and when you’re done, you play the blues again.)

The blues had a correlate in ceramics long before Othello came along, in the form of African American–made face jugs. These vessels, expressively embellished with eyes, noses, and toothy mouths all rendered in coiled clay, were first made in the early 1860s by enslaved Black potters in and around Edgefield, South Carolina. They may well represent ideas transplanted from Central Africa. (Scholars have pointed to nkisi—ritual figures and containers made among Kongo peoples—as probable antecedents.) Really, we can only guess at the intentions that lie behind these powerful ceramics, and the significance they may have had in their communities. But it seems safe to say that, like the blues, they were a way for makers to work through the reality of their surroundings: acknowledging, transforming, and transcending all at once.

Othello’s figures refer explicitly to face-jug typology. They are always part pot,with an overall squat shape. Often, they feature spouts and handle-like appendages. In a few cases, the reference is more head- on, as in Blank Faced (2020) and the earlier Faceless Face Jug (2016). Facial features are conspicuous by their absence in these works, but they are “jug-eared,” clearly signifying a personage. The effect is to suggest some form of erasure—a persistent theme in African American culture, from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man to Simone Leigh’s Brick House, a commanding figure with conspicuously absent eyes (installed on the High Line in Manhattan in 2019, and now on permanent view in Philadelphia, on the University of Pennsylvania campus).

Works by Othello on view at Jessica Silverman’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach, 2019.

THERE’S ANOTHER, MORE RECENT ceramic backdrop to Othello’s work: the Funk movement, a down-and-dirty, sad-sack counterpart to East Coast Pop. (It took its name from Black jazz musicians’ slang, so Othello’s involvement in it is a knowing reappropriation.) Funk flourished in Northern California during the 1960s and ’70s, and Othello inherited the legacy after moving from his home state of Florida to Oakland (he received his MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017). He has since become enamored of California art history. When I spoke to him this past April, he reeled off a roll call of local greats who’d made an impact on him, including the Bay Area figurative painters, ceramists like Viola Frey and Arthur Gonzales, as well as Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, and other practitioners of the street art–inflected Mission School style.

But Funk is the most obvious influence. Like the artists of the original movement—Robert Arneson preeminent among them—Othello gives pride of place to humdrum artifacts, finding in them a way to expose the “psychopathy” (his word) of the everyday. Oration (2018) recalls one of Arneson’s best-known sculptures, a typewriter with red-tipped fingers for keys; in Othello’s version, the keys are normal but a bright-red page lolls out of the machine like a tongue. He’s also made twisted-up faucets, caved-in air conditioners, a little TV with a permanently blank screen. Often, as with the typewriter, his chosen objects are technologically obsolete. It’s like they’ve been sitting around for a long time, and in the meantime, gravity has had its way with them. They slump as only something made of clay can do. He’s even fashioned clockfaces with the numerals all slipped down to the bottom.

In short, Othello is all in on the attribution of human emotions to inanimate things—what John Ruskin, in the middle of the nineteenth century, called the “pathetic fallacy.” Pathos is very much the point, but the effect is anything but delusional: one object, one figure at a time, Othello is making a world that’s almost too true to bear. His exhibition “Breathing Room,” held at the San José Museum of Art in 2019, was especially intense, with midnight blue walls, platforms, and floor, several contorted figures, and a few paintings with invariably claustrophobic compositions. The project’s title was an obvious allusion to the protest cry “I can’t breathe” (which originated as a tribute to Eric Garner, who suffocated at the hands of New York City police officers in 2014). Yet Othello’s term also suggests freedom, albeit of a provisional kind.

Cool Composition, 2019, on view at Jessica Silverman’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach, 2019.

That sort of ambiguity runs through Othello’s work like fresh air, and it blows both ways. In 2019, he created a display in the Jessica Silverman Gallery booth at Art Basel Miami (the art fair held in his hometown). Breezily titled Cool Composition, the installation featured an enormous box fan in bronze, standing taller than its visitors, looking as if it had partially melted in the heat, and painted sunflower yellow. Live plants and narrow stools, like those he often uses as plinths for his figural sculptures, also stood around the space. It was an unusually cheerful installation. But wasn’t there was an ominous subtext to the giant, bladed, circulation-machine? The gallery certainly suggested as much, parsing the fan-sculpture’s meaning thus in its press release: “In an age of global warming, a towering fan may provide solace and escape, but this one also breathes and sighs. It is keen to divulge a secret, share its wisdom, perhaps even proselytize or prophesize.” Maybe so. But—as Krauss might say—it didn’t actually do any of those things. It just stood there, huge and obdurate, a deadpan monument to a confused time, about to get even more confusing.

During our conversation in mid-April, Othello implied that he (perhaps like America?) might be moving out of his blue period, “actively trying to make space for other colors to exist.” He was excited about the new work he was making. He’d been painting a lot, often in the middle of the night, using the relative speed of that medium to generate new ideas for his sculpture. Formal possibilities were opening up for him left, right, and center. He’d been looking into source material—French Surrealism, African ceramics—and finding inspiration. I asked about subject matter, and he replied, “I don’t want to preach. I’m not trying to tell you nothing. Nothing at all.” It sounded to me like a lyric from some old song. And it rang true: the less Othello tells, the more we see.

Solo shows by Woody De Othello are slated for the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wis., Sept. 26, 2021–Sept. 18, 2022, and the Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, Oct. 2–Nov. 13, 2021.

This article appears in the September/October 2021 issue, pp. 22–26.