The exhibition rewinds to Wong’s student days in Oakland at the dawn of the ’70s, as he dived headfirst into West Coast counterculture while trying not to erase his heritage. Here are his long paper scrolls covered in Beat-esque prose poetry, their unfurling format recalling Chinese calligraphy, and the jazzy Zap Comix–like prints Wong designed to advertise San Francisco drag-performance act The Cockettes, which he joined, later becoming part of their offshoot, Angels of Light Free Theater. A through line in the show is Wong’s outsider nature and gravitation to local communities, such that, after moving in 1973 to Humboldt County, he began painting local bars, crab fishermen, and compositional stews of non-Western lore and racial stereotyping like Tibetan Porky (1975–78), a watermelon-eating, many-eyed deity perched atop a crablike creature and surrounded by skulls. During his studies, he had also traveled in Afghanistan and India, and there is a sense in canvases from this era of Wong’s patching together a cosmology to make sense of the workings of chance and destiny. In Tell My Troubles to the Eight Ball (Eureka), 1978–81, a fortune-divining sphere sits amid billowing burnt-orange smoke—clay-reds, browns, and oranges had become his signature downbeat palette—against a map of constellations advertising his devotion to astrology.

In 1978 Wong moved to down-at-heel New York, working as a night porter in a waterfront hotel on South Street in exchange for lodging and painting there. From this point, his paintings addressed secrecy and things happening out of mainstream sight. Numerous canvases of this period employ the vocabulary of American Sign Language. Clones of Bruce Lee (1981), created with sign-painter fluency, features chubby hands shaped to spell out the work’s title for a Deaf audience. In My Secret World 1978–81 (1984), Wong presents his old hotel room as seen through the windows—with miniaturized versions of his own paintings and books on shelves inside—along with text identifying the site as where the “world’s first paintings for the hearing impaired came into being.”

By this point Wong had relocated to the working-class, mainly Puerto Rican neighborhood known as Loisaida in downtown New York, and was befriending (and collecting the work of) graffiti artists. His paintings, while retaining ASL elements, began focusing on tightly painted architectural facades, some with bricked-up windows. Such works pivot on precarity: The decaying area he lived in was at once prey to gentrifiers and home to immigrant communities living lives that were mostly unseen. The series of paintings of shuttered storefronts he made in the mid- to late ’80s are startlingly economical evocations of hiddenness and displacement expressed through grimy geometry. At the same time, though, Wong was walking through walls in his mind, beginning a long series of paintings set inside New York prisons—their inhabitants disproportionately POC—that soon trade melancholic images of sleeping prisoners in stacked bunks for beefcake fantasies of hunky inmates (such as Top Cat, 1990), sexualizations of corrections officers, and the power-inverting cop-taunting scenario of 1994’s Come Over Here Rockface (“and suck my dick,” the text beside a shirtless prisoner clarifies).

Whatever harsh realities surrounded him, Wong’s art asserts that, on canvas at least, he was free. There, New York’s firemen, like its policemen, couldn’t stop him from sexualizing them, and, by 1990, he’d begun folding his long-standing fascinations together in near-hallucinatory ways. Orion (1990–91) is a baroquely framed painting in which a giant phallus made of city-building bricks is framed against a night sky speckled with labeled constellations. He’d also begun what would be his art’s final movement, a series of paintings reconsidering and plasticizing his heritage, and creating a kind of pantheon-like Chinatown of the mind. See Bruce Lee in the Afterworld (1991), with the martial-arts master striking a pose amid a sea of faces suggesting stereotypical Chinese mythology, or the spectacularly phantasmagoric Chinese New Year’s Parade (1992–94), with its googly-eyed metallic dragon looming behind an intricately patterned frieze of blue and green Eastern deities.

The New York art scene in this latter period was increasingly enraptured by “slacker art,” a low-budget recession-era phenomenon with which Wong’s ambitiousness and technique had nothing in common. As for many rediscovered artists, though, his out-of-step approach has ended up paying dividends: Much of the KW show looks startlingly fresh and interesting now, especially as it resonates with present-day identitarian issues and consideration of communities of care.

Wong’s final painting, completed on the day he died, is an idiosyncratic fusion featuring a smiling, blue-skinned Patty Hearst as the Hindu goddess Kali the Destroyer. Above her is the title, Wong’s plangent and defiant final words: Did I Ever Have a Chance? Back then, given the world Wong moved through, maybe not. But the stars, since then, have realigned. 

How does an artist stand out amid that kind of action? The German painter Katharina Grosse modeled an exemplary approach in a solo outing at Gagosian with a dozen large canvases, easily the hardest-punching of any new paintings on offer in the city. Wielding her trademark spray tools, Grosse shot thin bands of overlapping paint diagonally atop white grounds. Her attack was so quick that each tight mass of acrylic appears to be blazing across the surface, smoking at its edges. The paintings deliver an almost comic dose of wall power: Morris Louis’s “Unfurled” series at warp speed, unsettled and unfixed. Conservative? Sure. Also very satisfying.

Those seeking genuine Color Field work could venture one floor below Gogo in the Pedder Building, where Pearl Lam Galleries had on view attractive, atmospheric paintings made by the New Yorker Cynthia Polsky between 1963 and 1974 using Chinese ink brushes and sponges. Informed by her travels in Asia, these drippy, speckled, and generally bright all-over abstractions suggest hazy visions of distant nebulae or rough translations of hallucinogenic visions. Many dazzle at first glance, but then betray a disconcerting formlessness as you spend time with them. They are trying to do just a bit too much.

The most potent show of painterly force came not from a gallery but from an art advisory: Art Intelligence Global marshaled a bunch of heavyweight Gerhard Richter “Abstrakte Bilder” in a single gallery within one of the towers that line Wong Chuk Hang Road on Hong Kong Island’s south side. There were a couple certifiable classics by the Meister here, the chief one being a beguiling 8½-foot-tall example from 1990 with blues and reds smoldering through a scraped field of icy gray—a koan-like exegesis on the role of chance in determining what is seen and what is obscured. Some fraction of the pleasure came from the severity of it all: black-suited security guards, dramatic lighting, the sense of walking into an anonymous vault stocked with high-value assets.

After inhabiting such hypoxia-inducing environs, a little warmth, some evidence of human presence, is called for. Mercifully, the South Korean artist Kimsooja is an expert in such matters, and had an airy solo show a few blocks away at Axel Vervoordt, “Topography of Body.” It had just eight pieces, created through simple movements, like tiny clay spheres arrayed in a circle on a pedestal, and Korean rice paper that had been crumbled and then smoothed, its surface covered with craggy lines from the pressure. The main attraction was an 18-minute video, Thread Routes–Chapter III (2012), that intercuts sequences of intricate architecture in India, like the Sun Temple of Modhera, with artisans doing meticulous work: sewing, weaving, block printing, and more. In a neighboring room, Kimsooja displayed an installation from 2012–15, comprising cotton sheets used by block printers to cover their tables thin, slightly tattered, and stained with indigo—hanging from twine. What saved all this from becoming too precious (or Pottery Barn bland) was the reverence with which the artist treated her raw materials. Presenting these work surfaces just as they are, unaltered, she mounted a tender paean to the possibilities that result from joining skill and repetition.

Over at De Sarthe, the art stared back. Beijing-based Wang Jiajia printed tall glowing, glowering pairs of eyes on canvas and surrounded them with swirling waves of paint. A news release for the solo show (titled “A/S/L,” after the archaic chatroom introduction meaning “age, sex, location”) cleverly compared these menacing cartoon eyes to those of the final bosses that loom at the conclusion of video games. They are goofy, mildly endearing pictures, teasing fears about the identities and agendas that loom behind screens—and contemporary artworks. If they are also repetitive and one-note, well, so are most online (and art) experiences.

Over in nearby Aberdeen, at one of Kiang Malingue’s spaces, Guangzhou’s Liu Yin exhibited paintings that give Shōjo manga–like faces to pink roses, juicy pears, and (why not?) a gargantuan skull that sits on grass and winks at the viewer as butterfly-fairy hybrids flutter about. (The show’s title: “Spring.”) The cuteness level is off the charts in these charismatic pictures, which range from watercolors smaller than a sheet of paper to canvases almost 7 feet across. In one, a group of flowers has tears in their eyes; another has a pair sharing a passionate kiss. Liu hijacks kawaii tropes and lays bare how easily they can manipulate, even though (or because) these characters are generic and impossible to differentiate. Seductive artworks about seduction, they have their cake as they eat it. Liu also has a talent for slipping bizarre notes into otherwise benign scenes: one work contains a bunch of cyclopic bananas; cute for a minute, they’re likely to reappear in nightmares.

More discomfort was in store at Empty Gallery’s Aberdeen branch where new wall works by Tishan Hsu smashed bodies into digital space. Their inkjet-printed patterned surfaces teem with additional sculptural elements, such as unplaceable orifices and the odd body part, including at least one glaring eye. A rare sculpture from the New York–based artist took the form of a futuristic life-size hospital bed on top of which silicone molds resembling hunks of a person—a pale blue face, expanses of sticky looking tan skin—appear to be awaiting implantation. Surveillance-style images are embedded in some of Hsu’s pieces, like the 2023 pareidolia-conjuring screen-body-data, which sports a black-and-white still of footage from CCTV. It shows a man in a balaclava standing in an empty room and doing something on his phone—a slice of raw reality intruding into the artist’s harsh, unreal world.

While Liu toys with the coercive power of popular culture, Wang and Hsu channel the dark truth that someone or something is always watching these days, whether on social media or within a bureaucracy, and threatening to act. In Hong Kong the week of the fair, a theatrical run of the slasher flick Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) was canceled under hazy circumstances (the adorable bear has been used as a caricature of Chinese president Xi Jinping, and censored in the mainland in the past), and the Sogo department store removed a video by Angeleno Patrick Amadon from a digital-art program running on its LED billboard after the artist revealed that it included information about pro-democracy activists jailed in Hong Kong.

It can be risky for dealers and artists to address anything remotely controversial when a fair is on—it is a time for selling, not activism—and a brutal political crackdown hardly helps matters, yet there were a handful of exhibitions engaging the difficult present.

In the tony H Queen’s tower, at David Zwirner, Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija installed the kind of well-outfitted umbrella repair store that was once common in Hong Kong. Visitors walked through it to enter the rest of his exhibition (titled “The Shop”), which housed 3D printers manufacturing red sculptures of broken umbrellas and robot vacuum cleaners that cruised wall-to-wall black carpeting, tracing Chinese characters. An accompanying text explained that these various components referred to novelist Liu Cixin’s sci-fi trilogy “Three-Body Problem,” but it was also tempting to read the show in the context of Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement, when protesters fighting for universal suffrage used umbrellas as shields against pepper spray and surveillance. In Tiravanija’s realm, nonfunctional umbrellas are being memorialized as machines try to maintain order and cleanliness; every single person walking through thwarts their efforts.

Meanwhile, at Blindspot Gallery, on the 15th floor of a Wong Chuk Hang Road warehouse, the Beijing filmmaker Wang Tuowas showing The Second Interrogation (also the name of his one-man exhibition), an elegant and incisive two-part video production that pits an artist and a censor against each other in a public forum and a private tête-à-tête. The two debate how artists should operate amid authoritarianism and why democracy has never taken hold in China. As their talks progress, they appear to switch positions. Wang trained as a painter, and he also hung vivid portraits of artists, musicians, and writers in China—a network operating outside or underneath the system. Some read books, one sings into a microphone. He titled the series “Weapons,” implying that the way one chooses to live can be a means of fomenting change or defending oneself.

A similar punk commitment was evident in scattered places around town all week. The magic of viewing art here is that marginal spaces still somehow endure amid extreme wealth. “Hong Kong is very small, isn’t it?” as Kitty Fane tells her about-to-be-ex-lover (with a dash of menace) in Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil (1925). And so you can be at the latest luxury mall one moment, and after a brief MTR ride, find yourself at the alternative space Current Plans, above a café in Sham Shui Po, where wig artist Tomihiro Kono and photographer Sayaka Maruyama, both Japanese, teamed up for a multifarious show centered on Kono’s outrageous avant-garde wigs, which suggest alien life-forms. Or you might stroll to the commercial Property Holdings Development Group, in a disused rooftop clubhouse high in the sky, and find Hong Konger Michele Chu’s “You, Trickling,” an experiential show about the traces that people leave behind, with heaters at the entrance, an invitation to hold incense, and emotionally loaded sculptures. One that would make Joseph Cornell proud involved a wooden drawer from the home of Chu’s family filled with salt, her fingernails, and cigarette butts, like the remains of an occult ritual.

But the most heartening and vertiginously exciting material I saw while traversing the Special Administrative Region was actually in the heart of officialdom, at Tai Kwun Contemporary, the former police station renovated in 2018 by the Hong Kong Jockey Club and the local government. “Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III,”curated by Inti Guerrero and Chantal Wong, articulated a vast universe of LGBTQ art from Asia and its diasporas, via more than 60 artists spanning almost a century, some of it coming from collector Patrick Sun’s Sunpride Foundation. Among the highlights were a luscious 1941 drawing by the Filipino American Alfonso Ossorio of a nearly nude Job, resplendent and attractive despite the sores consuming his body, and alluring 2018 prints by siren eun young jung that collage images she acquired while researching yeoseong gukgeuk, a theatrical form in her native South Korea that emerged in the mid-1940s as a protest against the patriarchy of the country’s theater world. The show has already made stops in Bangkok and Taipei, and if no one brings it Stateside, it will be a shame.

Again and again, with humor, and mischief, and invention, the artists in “Myth Makers” make and remake history, cultural tropes, and even the Bible (who knew Job could be hot?). In an unforgettable little painting from 1962, Self-Portrait with Friends, Patrick Ng Kah Onn depicts a rollicking party in Kuala Lumpur. It is a kaleidoscope of colors and patterns, as five people in ultra-chic outfits dance. The scene is—returning to the poet Huang—“embroiled in a sea of music and song.”

Taken together, the cast of characters in these paintings is incredibly varied: lovers, healers, heroes, villains, and mystical creatures engage in worship and dancing; running and fighting; reading, lounging, sleeping, and reflecting. On the whole, the show’s framework suggests a sense of positivity attained through pride and self-recognition. Large swaths of the show focus specifically on Black joy: there’s Moke’s 1983 Kin oyé ou Coulier Madiokoko à Matonga, which depicts a group of men and women dancing in a club radiating with dim, rainbow lights, and Joy Labinjo’s Gisting in the Kitchen (2018), in which three women appear to gossip in a cheerful orange room.

Another significant portion of the show highlights contemporary works featuring figures with exaggeratedly black, even jet-black skin, like Kwesi Botchway’s Green Earflip Cap (2020), Zandile Tshabalala’s Conversation (2020), Amoako Boafo’s Teju (2019), and Cinga Samson’s Ibhungane 16 (2020). Tshabalala’s Two Reclining Women is a striking standout: bright-red lipstick and leopard print nightgowns leap off the canvas, showing two women with shaved heads lounging luxuriously on a sofa.

Both the overbearing optimism and focus on skin tone pose problems. One cannot help but wonder about the limits of the show’s optimistic spin in the face of continued anti-Blackness worldwide. In her catalogue essay, Dhlakama quotes writer Kevin Quashie, who laments that “nearly all of what has been written about Blackness assumes that Black culture is, or should be, identified by resistant expressiveness—a response to racial oppression.” Still, she writes that the exhibition was formulated to counter that prevailing sentiment of exploitation and persecution. It’s an understandable impulse, but at times, it feels forced, as if stemming from a need to prove something about Blackness or Africanness.

The exaggeratedly black skin tone can be traced back to artists like Kerry James Marshall and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye—but it’s unclear what the new generation is doing to advance or complicate the technique. And it’s important to do so, since its prevalence can play into tropes of easy visibility and representation without always challenging how the Black body is seen. When artists draw such a tight connection between Black life and Black skin, they risk positioning the Black body as a gimmick.

The paintings in the show that depict groups rather than individual figures, especially those by older and historical artists like Gerard Sekoto, George Pemba, Meleko Mokgosi, Fred Oduya, Beauford Delaney, Helen Sebidi, and Maria da Silva, deal more pointedly with social and political issues. Mokgosi’s Pax Kaffraria:Graase-Mans (2014) is a 30-foot-wide triptych that, in combining several scenes, reflects the richness and plurality of Black life. In one scene, a helper cares for a small child as a man cleans his stoop with a bucket and cloth; in another, a man leans back in a chair in what looks like a classroom. The work forms part of Mokgosi’s exploration of transnationality and “Africanness,” paying close attention to Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe as case studies. It reflects on quieter and ordinary moments that make up daily life outside grand narratives about colonialism
and its afterlives.

Uneven as it necessarily is, given its size, “When We See Us” unambiguously succeeds in one respect; it brings lesser-known artists to new audiences: an artwork by self-taught Louisiana painter Clementine Hunter—among the earliest pieces in the show—introduces the artist to viewers on the continent. The task of “When We See Us” is urgent and timely, and it reflects the need to expand the language of Black art and to reassess the limits of figurative painting. It has become too easy to think the art world has transformed and become more diverse simply because we’re seeing more Black faces on the walls at art fairs and in museum and gallery exhibitions. But seeing is not enough, and eye-catching images of Black bodies can shift attention away from pressing social and political issues. Nevertheless, these failures, tensions, and contradictions open the door for generative questioning that will fuel the way forward.  

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Prior to this exhibition, Pareja (1608–1670) may have been known to many not as an artist, but as the subject of a stunning painting by Diego Velázquez, which was acquired by the Met in 1971. Velázquez was not only Pareja’s portraitist but also his artistic master and erstwhile enslaver. This bond is mentioned in early biographies, which also inform us of how the old master brought Pareja with him to Rome in 1650 when he was sent to purchase artworks on behalf of the Spanish king. The Met’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja was executed during this journey and, if we are to believe his biographer, Velázquez had Pareja carry his own likeness through the streets so spectators could marvel at his master’s artistic skills.

At the end of their Italian tour, Velázquez granted Pareja his freedom. In fact, one of the most moving objects in the exhibition is neither a painting nor a sculpture but the manumission document, first discovered quite by accident in a Roman archive in 1983 by Jennifer Montagu. The circumstances of Pareja’s original enslavement remain unknown, but one thing we learn from an essay by Luis Méndez Rodríguez in the exhibition catalogue is just how common such uneven relationships were in the 17th century: Caravaggio and Murillo are implicated in such exploitative practices, as are numerous lesser-known painters, sculptors, tile makers, glaziers, and other artisans who similarly kept enslaved people in their workshops and households.

The exhibition takes care to contextualize Pareja’s art. The first of four sections is devoted to a précis of the scholarly activities of the Black Puerto Rican intellectual and polymath Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874–1938) whose essays “The Negro Digs Up His Past” (1925) and “In Search of Juan de Pareja” (1927) were among the first to explore the painter’s background. The second locates Pareja in the multiracial communities of enslaved and freed Africans in early modern Seville. At one end, the section is haunted by three lavish silver vessels from the Met’s collection that were produced by enslaved artisans; at the other end are three near-identical paintings by Velázquez of an African kitchen maid, indicating an interest in such images. With this generous introduction in place, Velázquez’s portrait of Pareja and a portrait attributed to Pareja appear in the third section alongside his “donation of freedom,” while the final section assembles a grouping of large-scale religious paintings by Pareja and his Spanish contemporaries.

The artist’s 18th-century biographer Antonio Palomino described how Pareja fashioned himself “a new self and another second nature” after he was freed, and the curators take care to underline that his liberation from Velázquez had both personal and stylistic consequences. Three of Pareja’s large-scale religious works—The Flight into Egypt (1658), The Calling of Saint Matthew (1661),and The Baptism of Christ (1667)—as well as a portrait of the architect José Ratés Dalmau (ca. 1660s), make evident just how far he went beyond his master’s house. Gone is the lugubrious chiaroscuro of Velázquez’s late style, replaced now with clear lighting and a jubilant chromatic palette inspired by artists such Claudio Coello, whose shimmering Saint Catherine of Alexandria Dominating the Emperor Maxentius (ca. 1664) hangs on the opposite wall. At the left edge of The Calling of Saint Matthew, Pareja inserts an image himself holding a cartellino that bears his name and the date. The elegant subject looks out from the composition, waiting for the spectator of the future to come and acknowledge him.

If his relationship with Velázquez marks one end of a historical timeline in Pareja’s life, the other end connects him to Schomburg, the political activist, engaged essayist, radical bibliophile, Black Freemason, expert archivist, institution builder, and world traveler whose dedicated research helped recover Pareja’s identity as an Afro-Hispanic painter. Told as a child by a teacher that the “Negro had no history,” Schomburg devoted his life to proving otherwise. In the process he amassed two great collections of books, documents, and other artifacts attesting to the presence of Black excellence throughout history. The show includes personal photographs Schomburg took during a journey throughout Europe, including Spain, where he went in search of Pareja’s Calling of Saint Matthew. He wrote of his emotional encounter with the painting in the back rooms of the Prado Museum: “I had journeyed thousands of miles to look upon the work of this colored slave who had succeeded by courageous persistence in the face of every discouragement.” While Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja holds pride of place at the physical center of this exhibition, it is ultimately Schomburg’s portrait of Pareja that shines as the true heart of the story told here.

“Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago conveys these complexities with rigor, beauty, and aplomb. The exhibition (curated by MCA’s Carla Acevedo-Yates) includes works by 37 artists who are from, or born or based in, the Caribbean, along with a few “provocations,” or inclusion of artists not strictly from the region, that allude to shared histories and methods of movement, dislocation, and displacement. With this, the show aims to question the notion of the regional exhibition by responding to the history of Caribbean exhibitions, from the 1990s to the present, that have been characterized by multiculturalism and globalization. The show’s title nods to weather as a metaphor for changing forms in artistic practice, and to the Caribbean as a bellwether of our times.

The exhibition deftly claims space by incorporating every bit of it available. Organized by interconnected themes such as territories, formal rhythms, exchanges, and traces, the show provides enough points of reference while also letting the viewer free-associate and consider what Acevedo-Yates calls the “mechanics of diaspora,” with some of the works emphasizing formal and geographical movement as metaphor for transformation.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (1995), a black-and-white photograph of a lone bird flying in a cloudy sky, is featured right outside the exhibition’s galleries, as well as in various sites across Chicago. From the MCA’s own loading dock to several stations along the city’s elevated rail system, the piece entices viewers to imagine themselves as the bird: perhaps free, alone, or migrating. Similarly exhibited as a prelude to the show in a space unto itself is a masterful seven-channel video installation by Deborah Jack titled the fecund, the lush and the salted land waits for a harvest…her people…ripe with promise, wait until the next blowing season (2022). The immersive installation features colorful shots filmed around Jack’s mother’s home in St. Maarten overlapping black-and-white segments from a 1948 Dutch documentary about the island. The videos show colonial archival footage of salt-mining along with the personal archive of the sky, pomegranate trees, sea foam, and the ocean along the shoreline. The images highlight the shore as a place of identity-formation and a signifier of in-betweenness for people who exist within the diasporas. To someone from an island, the shore can be a place of connection as well as a boundary, and the dichotomy is echoed by the emphasis on salt-mining as an extractive economy symbolic of both corrosion and preservation.

The shore is also a protagonist in one of the most evocative symbolic images in the exhibition, of Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez performing by the north shore of Puerto Rico, repeatedly throwing her painting Soy isla (I Am an Island) into the Atlantic Ocean. The resulting video, encuentrismo – ofrenda o retorno (encounter –offering or return) is displayed alongside the warped painting at the beginning of the exhibition, and the artist’s action evokes the ritual offerings to Yemayá, the Yoruba goddess of the sea. The shore is where Sánchez finds herself.

Some of the most accomplished works in the exhibition are newly commissioned pieces by Alia Farid, Marton Robinson, and Sandra Brewster that take full advantage of the barrel vault architecture of MCA Chicago’s halls, which seem to enshrine the pieces. In Blur – Wilson Harris (2022), Brewster presents a blurred portrait of the Guyana-born writer that was rubbed into the museum’s walls, suggesting connections between Harris’s own nonlinear writing as a vehicle for unknowability and Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity.” Meanwhile, Farid’s Mezquitas de Puerto Rico (2022) is a depiction of an imagined landscape of mosques and Islamic centers in Puerto Rico, as interpreted by textile artists from Iran in the form of a gigantic prayer rug. This work shares space with Christopher Cozier’s Gas Men (2014), a video installation featuring two men in business suits who perform cowboy-like poses and tricks by spinning gas nozzles above their heads or pointing menacingly at each other in a B-movie version of corporate masculinity. These works accentuate underrepresented realities of the Caribbean: while Kuwait-born Farid’s points out that the area is home to a significant number of Arab peoples, Trinidad-born Cozier centers his country’s oil production at the intersection of global industry, as yet another example of an extractive economy that permeates post-independence life.

The earliest piece in the exhibition is David Medalla’s Cloud Canyons (1963–2014), consisting of plastic tubes that emit soap bubbles in ways that constantly change the work’s form and offer a hypnotizing break in the middle of the show. The Philippines-born artist’s ever-changing diasporic identity, which encompasses his multiple experiences of migration, resonates with the kinetic quality of the sculpture.

Cosmo Whyte’s beaded curtain piece Beyond the Boundary (2022) recreates an archival image of a man holding a sign that reads “Black Wash”—a play on the cricket term “white wash”—in a celebratory audience scene from a historic win streak of the West Indies’s team over the English in 1984. This piece invites viewers to enter the second half of the exhibition, beginning with a gallery of works that reflect on the archive, including Robinson’s La Coronación de La Negrita (2022). The mostly black-and-white mural critiques representations of Blackness and racial violence in Costa Rica, both historical and contemporary, by mixing religious imagery from Catholic and African traditions in a reinterpretation of the cover of Carlos Meléndez and Quince Duncan’s history book El negro en Costa Rica.

Another notable work is Suchitra Mattai’s An Ocean Cradle, a large-scale textile piece made of vintage saris given to the artist and bells that reflect on her Indo-Caribbean heritage, migration, and matrilineal knowledge. Though not strictly archivistic, the collecting nature of the work builds an interwoven archive of the histories of women in Mattai’s life. This oceanic landscape connects them in multiple ways by bringing people together across oceans, reminiscent of the migration of Indian populations to the Caribbean during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Toward the end of the exhibition, in Teresita Fernández’s 2020 work Rising (Lynched Land), a monumental sculpture of a palm tree hovers over the gallery floor and confronting viewers with conflicting ideas that merge in this plant. As a sign of tropical leisure and a metaphor for colonial exploitation, the palm tree symbolizes the oppressed bodies of Caribbean peoples in the wake of violent histories and environmental disasters. Its roots, covered in burlap and rope, seem ready to be replanted.

After that, an unforgettable ending to “Forecast Form” is provided by María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s Sugar/Bittersweet (2010), an installation consisting of Yoruba spears, African and Chinese stools, and disks of sugar in various states of production, from dark molasses to refined white sugar, as metaphors of racial categories. The work evokes the violent landscape of the plantation or people assembled in a rigid grid of power—the latter, one hopes, with weapons that will be picked up to fight back.

In the new year, Bispo entered the Colônia Juliano Moreira, an asylum just outside the city, where he spent the better part of 50 years. He soon oriented his life around answering auditory hallucinations that compelled him to create compulsively. He worked with every material available to him: he’d unravel hospital uniforms, then use the thread to embroider bedsheets, or gather scrap wood and other detritus for small constructions. He even made wagons to transport the refuse he collected, and the new creations he made from it. Bispo received what he believed to be a second divine mandate in 1967, while in solitary confinement. He began furiously preparing to represent the world on Judgment Day. By the time of his death in 1989, Bispo had filled 11 rooms with hundreds of garments, banners, miniatures, constructions, and other uncategorizable things, none of which he dated or signed. He lived and died on the margins of society.

Not long after, in the 1990s, Bispo was reborn at the center of the Brazilian art world. His posthumous debut at Rio’s Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in 1993 broke attendance records, and two years later, his work represented Brazil at the Venice Biennale. “Bispo do Rosario: All Existing Materials on Earth,” on view at the Americas Society in New York through May 20, marks his first solo exhibition in the United States. The show sidesteps old debates over the ethics of framing his output as contemporary art, which Bispo himself resisted during his lifetime. That debate, as art historian Kaira Cabañas addressed in her 2018 book, is inflected by a history unique to Brazil, where key ideas about modern art emerged through deep engagement with the creativity of psychiatric patients. In New York, the curatorial texts treat Bispo’s status as an artist and his life’s work as artwork as a fait accompli. This move participates in broader art world efforts to deconstruct the category of “outsider art,” towards a more inclusive art history. However, it also overrides the way Bispo understood himself and his own work.    

The show opens with Bispo’s most important possession: his Annunciation Garment, an ornate cloak he intended to wear on Judgment Day, and in which he intended to be buried. On the cloak’s exterior, Bispo embroidered small pictographs of the world’s contents as well as reference numbers corresponding to the system he devised to keep track of his production. On the inside, he embroidered the names of women who would accompany his ascension in neat concentric rows. Festooned with tasseled cords and epaulets, this and other garments on view are influenced by carnival regalia and Bispo’s stint as a signalman in the Brazilian navy. It makes sense that the Annunciation Garment is hismost richly decorated: it is a synthesis of his life’s project.

Bispo’s fifteen estandartes, or banners, line the walls of the second gallery, hanging vertically from wooden poles. They are made from yellowed asylum linens and embroidered with pictures, diagrams, words, maps, national and semaphore flags—a variety of sign systems that work as shortcuts in his quest to represent totality. Certain biographical details surface through needlepoint text: on Untitled [I need these words written] Bispo narrates his 1938 vision. On Untitled [Dictionary of Names that Begin with the Letter A], he listed the names of people he knew personally and of people he learned of in the media.

The third gallery contains Bispo’s objects, including groups of like items mounted on rectangular boards; one gathers tin cups, another flip flops, and so on. Charming miniatures— fantastic reconstructions of a carousel and a ship—share a table at the center of the gallery with an assortment of small items wrapped in the faded blue thread of unraveled hospital uniforms. Though these mummified objects remain identifiable, Bispo labeled and numbered them in contrasting thread to secure against misrecognition.

Despite his repeated efforts at absolute clarity, certain objects still tempt multiple interpretations. Wheel of Fortune, a working miniature carnival game, is constructed out of a bicycle wheel affixed to an upturned crate. Many commentators have remarked on the object’s resemblance to Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913), as though this confirms the work’s rightful place in a gallery. Frederico Morais, the Brazilian critic and curator who organized his posthumous museum debut, and who “invented Bispo the artist,” as he puts it, was first to recognize this. While it was clear to Morais that any relationship between Bicycle Wheel and Wheel of Fortune is coincidental, as Bispo was not familiar with Duchamp’s readymades, the curator was enthusiastic about the dialogue it generated. In fact, Morais’s influence permeates the Americas Society exhibition. Works are distributed across the three galleries according to the taxonomies Morais helped establish, and the texts use nomenclature his team developed while inventorying Bispo’s estate.

Other curatorial choices prevent a visitor from forgetting the specific, brutal context in which Bispo lived and created. The walls are half white cube, half painted in the same purplish hue of the hospital uniforms he repurposed. A miniature wall is isolated to poignant effect in the sill of a barred window overlooking East 68th Street. The aspirational tense of its graphite inscription—“How I Shall Build a Wall in the Back of my House”—alludes to the privacy Bispo was denied, both in his life and, arguably, by the posthumous exhibition of his output. Bispo has the last word, too: the show concludes with an extended video interview he gave around 1982, while dressed in his Annunciation Garment. When someone off-camera compliments his creative capacity, Bispo set the record straight, insisting, “I do it because I am obliged.”

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Microbes and Mushrooms Take a Star Turn in Bio Art Show at MIT

Symbiotic Art

With the rise of new materialism, the notion that nonhuman matter has its own meaningful agency has seeped into a number of disciplines. In the past several years, many artists hoping to think “with” their materials have turned to organic and living matter. Amid this surging interest in bio art, 15 Orient, in Brooklyn, mounted a miniature retrospective of German-born, Port Townsend, Washington–based artist Nöle Giulini, who has been working in this mode for the past three decades with little institutional recognition.

A number of the sculptures on view were made from brittle brown kombucha leather, a biomaterial that Giulini started using prior to its recent adoption by sustainable fashion advocates. Some works, like Vestige #2 (2004), from her “Incisions” series, are stringy cutups that resemble collapsing ribcages. Others, like the tubular sluglike Wurm (2005), are barnacled with bunched extrusions. The short video Kombucha Process (Culture), 1996, and accompanying photographic documentation offer a window into Giulini’s labor-intensive process. She adds a kombucha starter and feeding solution of sugar and black tea to a mold made from sand and plastic in a massive incubator in her backyard, gradually coaxing the kombucha to form a thick, fleshy membrane. She then uses a fishing net to lift the squelching sheet onto a drying rack, knotting the material with rubber bands, slicing it up, or sewing pieces together before treating it with frankincense and myrrh.

Under Giulini’s guidance, the kombucha cultures adopt forms that flirt with representation yet are ultimately unplaceable; for example, Hrdaya (2006), a wall relief titled after a Sutra that equates form with emptiness, features a smashed carob-colored mass that simultaneously evokes a painterly impasto and a strange fossil. In a world of matter in flux, all forms are provisional, which feels especially palpable in these sculptures because they could easily change shape and state if reanimated with tea, the substance traditionally fermented to make kombucha. The works’ conservation is thus riddled with problems and possibilities. When Borrowed Monk (2006), a kombucha leather cone abjectly sagging over a small wooden bench, needed repairs, Giulini applied wet strips of kombucha culture that grew into the existing leather.

Untitled (2003), a nub of this tough textile covered in gold leaf, suggests that the material is precious—even magical—to Giulini, and puts her in dialogue with other German artists interested in alchemy, like Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer. Beuys and Kiefer have employed the language of alchemy to represent possibilities of spiritual metamorphosis: Beuys’s shamanistic transmogrification of profane materials like fat and felt into artworks, and Kiefer’s use of lead in heavy canvases grappling with Nazi history, express hope for transformation in German society. In contrast, Giulini’s exploration of fermentation, the alchemy by which a symbiotic culture turns tea into kombucha, is primarily concerned with transformation on a material level. The ideological project to which her work is loosely tied is that of acknowledging the complexity and dynamism of nonhuman life, which might erode the anthropocentric worldview that has ravaged the environment, though that connection is not made explicit. (Other thinkers have more overtly yoked fermentation to social transformation: for example, Lauren Fournier’s 2017 curatorial and book project “Fermenting Feminism” strove to “approach feminisms through the metaphor and material practice of fermentation,” a process described as embodying both preservation and transformation.)

Organic processes of transformation likewise drive Giulini’s Emperor’s New Clothes (1992), an orderly arrangement of decomposing fruits and vegetables sheathed in hard gelatin so that they resemble chrysalises. At once a memento mori—a reminder of our inevitable rot—and a celebration of the generative potential of that rot, the pedestal-mounted installation makes the chemical byproducts of the decomposition process visible: off-gas from the decaying produce has inflated the gelatin over time, causing units of the installation to subtly shapeshift.

Artist Statement (1991/2022) conveys, with playful concision, the depth of Giulini’s commitment to her materials. The work comprises sequences of colorful rubber bands of various sizes—the same bands she uses to shape the kombucha leather—draped on pins so that they resemble a written language, a secret dialect informed by years of intimate relation between human and nonhuman matter. The writing may be asemic, but it is anything but meaningless.

The work is a lodestar for the 15th Sharjah Biennial, curated by Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi. The theme of this biennial, “Thinking Historically in the Present,” was proposed by the influential curator Okwui Enwezor before his untimely death in 2019. Enwezor’s 2002 Documenta and 2015 Venice Biennale opened up important pathways for artists from the Global South, and started conversations about decolonizing canons and museums.

The artists in this show draw attention to stories from and perspectives on history that remain obscured (in some cases) or overlooked (in others), in works that range from essay films to figurative paintings to monumental sculptures. Spread across 16 sites in the Emirate of Sharjah, the biennial’s greatest strength is that it is emphatically pluralistic and multicultural, but it also demonstrates the side effect of such an approach: namely, the pitfalls of placing artists in the awkward role of cultural ambassadors asked to contextualize references they can’t reasonably expect a “global” audience to get.

The strongest pieces involve artists consciously grappling with their ambassadorial position. The result is a kind of institutional critique taking up the inequities that come with making work for international audiences, skewed toward people with the means (and passports) to jet around the world. In a standout video by Zimbabwean artist mandla, the artist tells stories about having changed their name more than once—in one case, because “how colonized do you have to be to see a baby in Africa and call it Bridgit?” and then again because, after moving to the UK, they grew tired of having to teach Anglophones to pronounce the “nk” syllable. Expressing a twinned desire for opacity and legibility, the story exemplifies the catch-22 that international art festivals ask most participating artists to navigate.

The conundrum is not the artists’ fault, but some solutions are better than others. Some works fell victim to a kind of didacticism in the forms of explanatory voiceovers, wordy works, and lengthy handouts. Sammy Baloji’s installation Shinkolobwe’s Abstraction (2022) responds to a fascinating story set in the Belgian Congo in the 1940s, where the Soviet Union and the United States compete for access to uranium. But it’s too easy to get lost trying to navigate the gulf between the abstractions he shows on the wall—red and yellow geometric gradients laid over grayscale clouds—and the vitrines filled with pertinent archival documents in several languages.

Hangama Amiri tells a story more impactfully in Threshold (2022): displayed next to Fermentation of the Brain, it also comprises a grid of desks. Amiri sewed uniforms worn by Afghani schoolgirls, then hung them in a large black rectangle that approximates a chalkboard. In 1996, when Amiri was six, the Taliban took over her native Kabul and banned the education of girls and women; in 2021, the Taliban did this again. A recent Yale MFA graduate, the artist displayed her new uniforms with torn and frayed hems that connect one garment to another. The gesture is both mournful and defiant.

Other strong examples address the complexities of cultural exchange and cross-cultural solidarity, like Isaac Julien’s enchanting 2022 video installation Once Again… (Statues Never Die). The 30-minute, 5-channel work traces the impact that Albert Barnes’s collection of African art—among the first comprehensive examples in the US—had on the art and thought of the Harlem Renaissance. There’s also the sound installation Hum II (2023) by Hajra Waheed, a deserving winner of the Sharjah Biennial Prize. The artist recorded people humming various songs associated with popular uprisings around the world—Kurdish folk songs, K-pop hits—then played the audio in a cone-shaped space. The simple structure effects a kind of amplification that is surprisingly stunning: when a singer draws a breath, it feels almost immersive.

In the UAE, where just over 10 percent of residents are citizens, cross-cultural exchanges constantly occur. As a major economic hub in the Global South, it is home to a significant population of migrants who come to find work, and is notorious for inequality. The royal-run biennial doesn’t entirely shy away from addressing these conditions. At the Sheikh Khalid bin Mohammed Palace (now an art space in the desert town of Al Dhaid), Dubai-based artist Asma Belhamar replaced dilapidated decorative segments of the building’s surrounding wall with warped versions. The eye-catching interventions draw the gaze upward, toward the rooftop railing: the artist seeks to highlight the balustrade’s South Asian origins, and honor the impact that migrant labor has had on Emirati culture. Implicitly, the work asks what it means to celebrate a culture while mistreating its people, and chafes at the distinction between tolerance and equity.

None of this is particularly new. One of the few threads in the show that did feel new involves artists finding traces of human history in nature. The effect humans are having on the environment is not presented as a subject or as news, but as a precondition affecting everything artists explore. In his new film Arcadia (2023), John Akomfrah outdoes National Geographic with sublime landscape shots spanning five channels. A meandering meditation juxtaposing natural scenes with industrial ones, the film shows a sinuous river, a vast panorama of hundreds of airplanes parked in a grid, and a stunning pyramid. Meanwhile, Palestinian duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme present a striking installation, Until we became fire and fire us (2023), that dwells on Palestinian histories that have been literally buried. Beaches that used to be villages and parking lots that used to be graveyards figure in a poem that is repeated and fractured across videos, sounds, and images tucked into various crevices throughout overgrown ruins in Sharjah’s Al Mureijah square. The work’s fragmented nature is meant to evoke the discontinuous relationship between Palestinians and their land.

That Sharjah’s 15th edition honored Okwui Enwezor’s legacy—a goal expressly set out by Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi—was both a blessing and a curse. Enwezor’s influence is keenly felt in the world of curating, and deserves to be honored, but revisiting his concerns makes the show feel overly familiar in its argument and artist list. The exhibition even recapitulates the underrepresentation of Latin American artists seemingly endemic to decolonial biennials. By contrast, last year’s Documenta and Carnegie International both built on Enwezor’s legacy to radically rethink the global exhibition format, expose the frictions inherent in importing art from the Global South into Western frameworks like biennials. They asked questions that left the art world wondering, where do we go from here? On these heels, “Thinking Historically in the Present” feels more like a recap of the important work of institution building and canon expansion that Enwezor and Al Qasimi have done in the last few decades than it does a way forward. But while we figure out what’s next, the show reminds us that we have plenty of world history to catch up on.

The first of two rooms in the exhibition placed Dash’s dynamic crowd scenes in conversation with historical works. This was the realm of the Bacchanal, the Commedia dell’arte, the medieval carnival in the Bakhtinian sense: anarchic moments in which hierarchies and social norms were temporarily suspended and subverted. Brueghel brilliantly captures this hedonism in the details of his festive scene, such as a drunken man vomiting, a couple snatching an embrace, villagers joining hands in a lively circle dance.

Dash’s pen-and-ink drawings also encapsulated this sense of liberation in collective abandon, with figures at times dissolving into a blur of pure movement through his use of intricate crosshatching and collage, as seen in Dancing Through the Night (2022). From close up, the work could appear abstract, but, stepping back, the lines form into swaying, whirling, dancing figures that almost seem to float free of the paper. Dash’s distinctive technique contrasted with Dürer’s crosshatching in his 16th century woodcut The Torch Dance at Augsburg, but where Dash evokes motion, Dürer creates shadow and depth.

If Dürer’s sedate court dance felt a far cry from the frenzied rhythm of Carnival, Dash’s fluid movement of figures was echoed in Agostino Veneziano’s 17th-century etching Dance of Fauns and Bacchantes. But Dash’s figures were not limited to exuberant crowds: his wonderfully sinister etching Masked Stick-Lick Fighters Parade (2019), of a baton-wielding troupe in white masks, pointy hats, and Elizabethan ruffs spoke to the darker side of Carnival with its roots in European colonialism and slavery.

The second room presented Lyons and Lloyd alongside Modernist figurative and abstract works. Lyons’s work drew on popular figures from Caribbean folklore such as the Soucouyant, a bloodsucking hag, and Obeah woman, a witch-healer. His woodcuts have a primordial force and resonated with Fritz Möser’s linocut Monstrous Head Breathing and a phantasmagorical black-and-white painting by Picasso of a blind minotaur being guided by his lover Marie-Thérèse through a starry night. A highlight of the exhibition was Lyons’s vibrant 1990 painting Mama Look a Mas Passin, with three masked carnivalgoers—two crowned, one with demonic horns and red eyes—gyrating against a radiant backdrop. Lyons juxtaposed this with David Bomberg’s The Virgin of Peace in Procession through the Streets of Ronda, Holy Week (1935), a vivid expressionistic canvas composed of vertical brushstrokes.

Lloyd’s watercolors portraying London’s annual Notting Hill carnival, while accomplished, lacked some of the vitality of his peers’ works, and a few of the connections felt slight. It seemed a stretch, for example, to compare his naturalistic dancers with an abstract Frankenthaler nearby. The exhibition was also hindered by a lack of sculpture that might have further enhanced the comparisons it set up.

Despite such quibbles, “Paint Like the Swallow Sings Calypso” was a revelation. Its pairings of artworks accompanied by lyrical wall texts from Guyana-born poet Wilson Harris (1921-2018) filled in omissions in the Western canon, namely the exhilarating and important voices and stories of the formerly colonized. The question is: what took so long?

The works spread out over the MIT List Visual Arts Center’s three galleries often model forms of symbiosis: mutualism (both species benefit), commensalism (one species benefits and the other is unaffected), and parasitism (one species benefits and the other is harmed). Gilberto Esparza’s Plantas autofotosintéticas (2013–14)—a campy amalgamation of microbial fuel cell towers that contain mixtures of pondwater and sewage, and a suspended aquarium—enacts a mutualistic exchange between human and nonhuman entities. When bacteria called Geobacter, endemic in the pondwater, siphon electrons from waste particles, the sewage is slowly purified. The process also generates sparks of light, with which the tentacular plant in the aquarium performs photosynthesis. Candice Lin’s Memory (Study #2), 2016, a white mass of lion’s mane mushrooms ballooning out of a red ceramic vessel, demonstrates a similar repurposing of human waste to foster plant growth, sans vitrine: Over the course of the exhibition, staff members collect their own urine and use distilled samples of it to mist the fungus, which has been shown to improve memory when consumed. This bodily fluid, albeit purified, is a nod to the artist’s previous installations that utilize “communal piss” as a metaphor for collectivity and its potential discomforts.

Sculptures by Nour Mobarak enact a quaint but incomplete vision of commensalism, as vinyl beach balls are made into incubators for turkey tail mushrooms. Given the framework of the show, one might wonder, is symbiosis exclusive to living organisms? Perhaps humans’ treatment of the environment now requires us to think more broadly about the beneficial repurposing of objects to support organisms. Kiyan Williams presents a more conceptually developed project in which theychallenge America’s parasitic grip on Black people and their labor. In Ruins of Empire II (2022), using white mycelia, Williams replicated the face of the Statue of Freedom (1863), a bronze figure that crowns the Capitol Dome in Washington, D.C. (the Capitol was built primarily by enslaved people, and an enslaved man was key to engineering the statue). Crude oil trickles onto the pale, pitted face, hastening its decomposition and suggesting associations between chattel slavery and environmental extraction.

Other works suggest extensions or disruptions to symbiotic relations. Pamela Rosenkranz’s visually striking She Has No Mouth (2017) is a low, circular mound of pink sand baking under LED lights. The sand references cat litter, through which a parasitic infection known as toxoplasmosis is often transmitted from cats to other species. In rats, the parasite causes increased sexual arousal in response to the scent of cats. Seduced by their predators, infected rats enable the parasite’s reproduction cycle to continue. The gallery staff again play a role here, this time in extending the interspecies phenomenon to humans, as they are required to maintain the scent of Calvin Klein Obsession for Men (a perfume that includes a synthetic version of a pheromone secreted by catlike mammals called civets) in the air around the artwork, turning the gallery into a hothouse of pheromones and confused desire. Skotopoiesis (2015), a durational performance by Špela Petrič presented as a two-channel video, for which the artist repeatedly casts her shadow over a bed of herbs, asks, with a dose of humor, if states of extremity might prompt humans to develop greater empathy for nonhuman life-forms. Standing for a total of 20 hours over the vegetation, blocking light from it until a person-shaped patch begins to wither, the artist strains all parties in her experiment.

Within this dizzyingly wide-ranging show, works like Rosenkranz’s and Petrič’s stand out, highlighting the tension and desire latent in coexistence. So do those that acknowledge the all-too-human stakes of biomedical advancement: Crystal Z Campbell’s glass-entombed portraits of Henrietta Lacks and her cancer cells—her unwitting but impactful contribution to medical research—and Jes Fan’s drooping glass orbs containing crystalline silicone injected with Depo-Testosterone, Estradiol, and melanin, substances related to cultural conceptions of gender and race. Other pieces, like Pierre Huyghe’s Spider (2014), which plays on visitors’ fear of vermin by having staff release 20 daddy longlegs in the gallery at the start of the show, are memorable but conceptually less convincing.

When symbiosis manifests as a humble interaction between the organisms or elements on view and the museum staff, a theater of maintenance emerges. “Symbionts” is thus concerned less with the specific technologies or procedures of bio art than with the questions bio art can raise about labor and efficacy. This ultimately conceptual, relatively inconsequential labor appears banal when we consider the scientific work necessary for environmental reparations, bodily alterations, or agricultural modifications. But in reminding us that we’re part of the system, persistently, this art, however humble or absurd, might jolt us out of complacency and alert us to the tasks ahead.