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Titian Made Visual Poetry of Eroticism and Power

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.

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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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 gallery is now the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Thomas (T.) Jean Lax in collaboration with Goode Bryant, that gathers more than 120 works of art and ephemera from JAM’s 12 feverish years of existence. In that period, the gallery moved three times, mostly due to evictions—but the exhibition demonstrates that, despite its structural precarity, JAM offered resistant space for artists to play at the edges of the art world’s established mores.

One of the first works on display is Wendy Ward’s Untitled (Three Inches Equals One Week of Laundry),a sculpture from around 1974 in which differently hued clumps of lint are compressed in a sterile Plexiglas box—material evidence of oft-invisible labor and a rehabilitation of detritus into aesthetic wonder. Nearby is a work by Randy Williams featuring the 1971 art-historical text L’Art Abstrait and a Malevechian black square fastened to unfinished wooden shiplap—Modernist symbols superimposed onto Black southern vernacular architecture. At once riotous and discreet, these works introduce a profound interest in everyday material and playful social critique.

Works by now-celebrated JAM regulars such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, and Howardena Pindell hang alongside works by those less familiar to the mainstream art press. Susan Fitzsimmons’s Hang Ups: Hair (1979) preserves the artist’s own brown tresses in clear Lucite. Jorge Luis Rodriguez’s 1978/2022 Circulo con cuatro esquinas (Circle With Four Corners)—an elegant readymade of a metal hoop recovered from a dumpster—leans in the corner. It’s the presentation of these latter works that brings new and illuminating context for the former, such as Hammons’s virtuosic experiments with barber-shop hair and grease, or Nengudi’s distorted, anthropomorphic pantyhose. The better-known works are recast as part of an impressive artistic constellation, and art history’s affinity for individuation is undone in favor of collective thought.

In a room that explores the gallery’s Tribeca years, works mingle like eclectic friends: an anthropomorphized earthenware chair by Camille Billops, decorated lunch bags by Seneca artist G. Peter Jemison, vibratory metalwork by Maren Hassinger, a diorama by Janet O. Henry, and a lightbox displaying hundreds of slides submitted for review to the gallery, each pulsing with future potential. So much in such proximity could threaten to overwhelm the senses, but the impression instead is a sense that JAM found energy in its radical embrace of difference.  

With a tendency toward organic materials and an emphasis on process over product, much of the predominantly abstract work on display might sit comfortably under the term postminimalist—but Goode Bryant had another name: “Contexturalist.” “The artists of this movement,” Goode Bryant wrote with art historian Marcy S. Phillips in 1978, “after determining and clarifying the inherent properties of art, go outside its margin in order to incorporate it within the context of external phenomena.” An excerpt of this text is reproduced digitally in the exhibition, evidence of Bryant’s early wisdom: transforming the art world required not only the display and sale of work by artists of color, but a totally new language for emergent forms. It feels like no coincidence, then, that JAM’s third iteration in Soho would also provide the breeding ground for a new arts criticism: Broadsheets from B-Culture, a Black arts periodical published by JAM and edited by the late Greg Tate and Craig Dennis Street, line a wall in the show.

One corridor displays eviction notices and overdue debts that beleaguered the space, casting the gallery in contrast to its former neighbor and current host: the moneyed, geographically stable, and slow-to-transform MoMA. JAM was a space committed always to evolution—so much so that it calls into question the use of the past tense. The exhibition adopts JAM’s founding spirit, extending beyond MoMA’s walls and throughout New York during its run with artist commissions in Brownsville, Williamsburg, the East Village, and a performance festival worthy of its own review. Fifty years later, JAM still doesn’t play by the rules. JAM lives.

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How Brett Goodroad’s Paintings Became a Surprise Hit with the Art World

In 2021, writer and public intellectual Hilton Als covered Goodroad’s solo show at the San Francisco gallery Cushion Works for the New Yorker. Taken with Goodroad’s work, Als curated this first New York solo exhibition for the artist,at Greene Naftali. It features 15 unabashedly painterly—encrusted, scumbled, atmospheric, gorgeous—oil paintings. Conjuring craggy coastlines, patchy farmland, pooling water, and green-brown wilds punctuated by the occasional sunset, Goodroad’s frequently murky pictures hover between landscape and abstraction; linger a moment, and they dissolve into tracts of color, patches of texture, fields of forms, evocations of feelings. Untitled (lips part), 2022, for example, depicts reclining lovers as they embrace in quasi-abstract yellow forms that could equally be stretches of sand, over a strip of blue strokes. The image feels unmoored: representation becomes abstraction, figure becomes landscape, earth becomes water. All the canvases on view capture the beauty of shifting—the flux of our environments, our perspectives, our memories, ourselves. We are never quite sure what we see, and the kneejerk impulse to seek certainty seems beside the point.

Even when a title seems to name Goodroad’s subject, this sense of perpetual unfolding persists. Approaching the assertive scale of history paintings, two works titled At the Depot appear to commemorate Goodroad’s regular visits to storehouses. In the earlier At the Depot (2021–22), measuring roughly 6 by 5 feet, a cartoonish, faceless figure beside a red block—a tractor, perhaps—extends a gloved hand toward blue and green mounds; the sky is a medley of blue, brown, and sunflower yellow strokes, while russet clumps along the bottom edge of the frame sprout greenery. Executed in a kindred palette, the later At the Depot (2022) interprets the same event in a nonrepresentational manner: abutting a rectangular expanse of yellow and blue, a stippled navy cascade cuts through scratched brown passages situated among a wet walnut splotch, a green crescent, and a zone of red exactingly detailed with black tildes.

These larger paintings are interspersed with intimately scaled pieces such as an untitled work from 2022, featuring a patchwork of sgraffito and scumble in predominantly earthen hues (greens, yellows, browns), and Untitled (After Dael), 2021–22, a portrayal of what appears to be a deciduous tree in rural surroundings. Rendered gesturally in a damp green-brown palette, the latter scene is difficult to discern, a quality heightened by Goodroad’s decision to paint on copper panel, a support popular in Italy and the Netherlands in the early 17th century, to a flickering effect. Describing himself as an “intuition-absorbed practitioner,” Goodroad often experiments with materials: While the majority of the works here are painted on linen or canvas, a number were executed on copper, silk, and even flannel, a trucker staple that pills under layers of pigment. The designation Untitled (After Dael) may nod to Flemish old master Jan Frans van Dael, but in visual terms, John Constable’s Romantic oil sketches of the English countryside, Barbizon School painter Jules Dupré’s moody renderings of the Normandy coast, and Hudson River School painter George Inness’s Tonalist woodlands seem the more obvious influences. Goodroad yokes landscape’s grand aesthetic traditions (a Romantic stroke, a Dutch Golden Age palette) to his personal experience of his environment, which is inextricably linked to his position as a produce truck driver.

References to the Western history of landscape painting are not purely visual but also political; the genre has long been tied to imperialist, capitalist, and nationalist projects, as W.J.T. Mitchell and other scholars have outlined. In the United States, landscape painting emerged in dialogue with Manifest Destiny, as expansionists readily co-opted the Hudson River School painters’ omniscient, panoramic views of sublime landscapes. (Some artists, like Inness and Thomas Moran, were even employed by transcontinental railroad surveyors to participate in expeditions westward.) Goodroad eschews such magisterial visions, which imply that the job of representation is to depict the land as clear, knowable, and mappable, that painting is an act of possession. Contrary to and countering those settled or sure historical images, Goodroad’s pictures of the American West fog and flicker, congeal and dissolve, advance and retreat. They resist a sense of ready access, or easy comprehension, suggesting that the landscape painter’s task may be instead to unsteady the viewer’s footing.

But to that last point, the remainder of the exhibition, titled “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400–2000 B.C.,” makes a crucial intervention, reframing narratives concerning the persistence of patriarchy. In addition to works by Enheduanna, the show includes objects—primarily small stone sculptures and cylinder seals, most not attributed to individual makers—depicting the lives of Mesopotamian women: Working with their long hair tied back, they milk cows or make pottery and textiles. Some are shown seated and wearing long robes, suggesting they are of high status, often, priestesses. This is the society in which agriculture was invented, freeing people from the need to hunt and gather, or to farm for subsistence, allowing them to take on other kinds of jobs. Here, where the society-wide division of labor likely began, women held positions of power outside the home.

Yet catalogue essays argue that these records of ancient women have long been interpreted through the lens of scholars’ misogyny, or else their understandable inability to fathom that more equal (though still imperfect) worlds had already existed. As Columbia PhD student Kutay Şen points out in his contribution, scholarly articles and museum presentations about a group of four small but significant stone sculptures of seated women in the exhibition have repeatedly overlooked or downplayed the significance of the tablets the women hold in their lap. Instead, scholars have focused debates concerning these objects on whether their seated positions and long robes denote “goddess” or “high priestess,” emphasizing their role in the heavens over their impact here on Earth. These tablets testify to their vital roles as poets, administrators, and scribes.

Nowhere is ancient feminine power more evident than in depictions of Ishtar herself, on view in nine cylinder seals, large rounded stones carved with figurative narratives and meant to be rolled onto wet clay to produce a relief. Small and sturdy, they are often the most reliably preserved records of Mesopotamian civilization. The Queen of Heaven, as she came to be called, who is also the subject of Mesopotamia’s best-known work—the Ishtar Gate, leading into Babylon—is typically shown with a frontal gaze, slaying lions and lovers. Here, as in other depictions, worshippers bow at her feet; she bears maces and sickle axes. Rehabilitations of Ishtar and other early goddesses often emphasize her powers in the realm of fertility, but this can be misleading: Ishtar was the goddess of love and of war. Showing Enheduanna’s hymns alongside such cylinder seals, the curators suggest that the author’s descriptions of Ishtar as powerful and threatening helped establish the goddess’s preeminence and laid the groundwork for these divine visual depictions, which flourished centuries after Enheduanna penned her hymn.

We are often taught to believe that we cerebral moderns are still working to overcome various animalistic impulses and gendered roles determined by our bodies. But “She Who Wrote” emphasizes that our path has been far from linear. The exhibition also resonates with histories being written today: The curators could not have predicted that these treasures would be mounted amid a feminist revolution taking place in the same fertile crescent where Enheduanna wrote. The boldness and bravery of the Iranian women leading that rebellion feels as galvanizing as Enheduanna’s first use of “I.” Women’s resistance persists.

While the installation may seem comforting, humorous, or playful, these sonic choices indicate it is also a critical gesture. Black Power Naps addresses the “sleep gap,” a deficit of rest that Black and Latinx folks often experience in a culture of relentless productivity; burnout is a constant existential threat, further sharpened by pandemic shortages (people of color make up a significant portion of essential workers). The artists frame lying down as protest against those conditions, inviting viewers to do something for the piece, and perhaps for themselves, by doing nothing. One might wake up with a more embodied understanding of the sonic and historical links among labor, rest, and protest.

The exhibition has three parts. The first features work by David Drake, an enslaved ceramicist known for carving poetic couplets and epigrams into stoneware storage jars. The second section comprises several dozen ceramic objects—churns, water coolers, bottles, pitchers, merchant jugs—produced in and around South Carolina’s Old Edgefield District in the 19th century, especially those produced by industrial manufacturers dependent on slave labor. The third section gathers contemporary works inspired by and referring to those older objects, including pieces by Simone Leigh, Theaster Gates, Woody De Othello, and Adebunmi Gbadebo.

Drake’s vessels are often quite hefty: The exhibition’s centerpiece, produced in 1858, is a stoneware jar inscribed A VERY LARGE JAR WHICH HAS 4 HANDLES / PACK IT FULL OF FRESH MEATS – THEN LIGHT CANDLES. The piece’s exceptional dimensions (measuring more than two feet tall and almost two feet in diameter, likely involving collaboration with other ceramicists), as well as its four handles and witty couplet, suggest it was made for practical purposes—namely, to store beef or pork later distributed as rations to plantation slaves—but the epitaphic text also suggests it could serve as a monument to those who used it. That Drake crafted his pieces to exceed their workaday function is evident not only in his poetic inscriptions, but also in his abundant use of alkaline glaze (a regional technique producing a thick, lustrous coating). For all its literal and figurative gravity, Drake’s work demonstrates a sense of play and embellishment evident in other Old Edgefield objects of the period.

Similar decorative flourishes are found in the bluish-bronze iron slip swirls painted on the rim of a ca. 1845 storage jar made by an unrecorded potter at the factory Trapp & Chandler, or a portrait of a couple dancing painted on a ca. 1840 water cooler by another unrecorded potter at Phoenix Stone Ware Factory. These designs point to the tension in “Hear Me Now” between the enslaved ceramicists’ clearly nonutilitarian display of artistic skill and the slavery industry’s commercialization of Black artistry: the potters’ flourishes and inventions were a selling point for the goods they were coerced to produce, whose profits they would never reap, and for whose making they went uncredited and often uncompensated. Drake’s inscription on an 1857 vessel, I MADE THIS JAR FOR CASH – / THOUGH ITS CALLED LUCRE TRASH, encapsulates this dynamic, whereby the commercial value of Black art belies the systemic denigration of its makers.

In conveying this tension, the exhibition treads a fine line. While it emphasizes that the work of Old Edgefield potters cannot be reduced to artifacts of the conditions of enslavement and should be evaluated for its aesthetic or technical accomplishment, the show at times misstates the work’s significance. A wall text about Drake’s writing suggests that it “echo[es] the prose of abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs.” The comparison is incongruous with both Drake’s literary personality and the exhibition’s emphasis on artistic community, collaboration, and coproduction over the historical and critical privileging of singular, exceptional artists. 

It remains unclear how viewers are meant to interpret the connections among the Old Edgefield vessels and contemporary works. From one perspective, “Hear Me Now” productively engages in what Drake’s first known signed jug of 1834 calls CONCATINATION: the linking of ideas, things, or events into a series to produce a desired effect. The show illuminates the communal networks of skill and artistry that made the works of Drake and his contemporaries possible. From another view, it risks reducing historical differentiation across time and space to a static Africanist sameness, as when, for example, a wood and iron “Power figure” statue from Kongo (ca. 1850) is set alongside American-made vessels of quite distinct material and appearance. Read either way, the works of Drake and his contemporaries are far too inventive to be subsumed by such perspectives.

Morgan’s current exhibition, on view through November 30 at the Scully Tomasko Foundation in Chelsea, offers examples of two chronologically disparate bodies of work: sparse, stylized drawings from 1967 and hard-edged abstract paintings from 2010 through 2021. Eliding other aspects of his career, the selection invites a comparison of Morgan’s two principal modes of 2D composition, his chief artistic endeavor over the years.

The 1967 series “Living Smoke and Clear Water Drawings,” installed as a grid of 33 small framed works, points to the artist’s lifelong interest in Asian arts and philosophies. (Morgan has studied with the Japanese artist Kongo Abe in the US, traveled frequently to East Asia and Indonesia, and written extensively about many Eastern artists, most recently in a forthcoming book on contemporary Chinese ink painters.) Rendered in Chinese ink, graphite, and Conté crayon on paper, each image in the suite is deftly drawn, marked by a combination of restraint, finesse, and emotional response in the moment, the gesture translated into a subdued calligraphic flourish or pictorial haiku. The gray-scale circles, vertical bars, curves, and zigzags, each spontaneous yet nuanced, were generated through a traditional all-at-once compositional process, typically lasting only seconds or minutes, that permits no second thoughts and no corrections. Morgan—who had just discovered the Tao Te Ching (The Book of the Way), the fundamental Daoist text espousing “effortless action”—completed the series in three days while living in his native California.

Almost all the canvases produced from 2010 onward, far more deliberative and strictly rectilinear treatments of rectangles, squares, triangles, and circles, feature dark grounds of burnt umber mixed with ultramarine and squares painted in iron oxide. Other forms, in contrast, utilize acrylic and metallic paint, the latter adding a reflective element that, like the sheen of gold foil in medieval and Renaissance works, conveys a hint of the spiritual. Thus absorption and reflection can occur in the same instant. When light strikes the painting’s surface, colors and shapes immediately react, subtly activating the composition in a dialogue between stasis and movement, stability and flux.

The show takes its name, “The Loggia Paintings,” from the newest series on view. A loggia is a columned, open-air gallery that is integrated into the structure of a building. It is a transitional space, a connection between inside and outside. The 13 modest squares in the eponymous group, all dated 2019 (although the series is ongoing), are likewise painted in subdued colors, and fully frontal. The heart of the show, they convey—in the interplay between large and small entities, geometric forms and joining lines—themes of transition and interrelatedness, connection and disruption. Across the series, shapes used throughout the recent paintings dance across the canvases, shifting in relation to the others but maintaining their colors and sizes, perhaps suggesting objects moved throughout a room or architectural elements recombined into different structures.

There may be a system to the variations and sequencing from painting to painting, or the repositioning may be intuitive. What matters is that each work can be savored individually, while the seriation functions as an optical chorus line, the repetitions reverberating with difference. It’s a fascinating experience, for example, to follow the iron oxide square in Loggia XII, XIII, XIV, and XX as it navigates the visual field, ending up in Loggia XX close to the same place it occupied in Loggia XII—just one instance of Morgan’s nuanced and deeply satisfying orchestration of forms and compositions.

While this body of work is grounded in historical research, the individual pieces are Chung’s imagining of what may have happened in this region, where circular earthworks (CEW) dating back to 2300–3000 BCE have undergone their own layer-by-layer excavation. DEGA-LATINIS HYPOTHETICAL INTERACTION SPHERES INDEX (2022), named after scholars Michael Dega and David Kyle Latinis, who have researched these circular earthworks, is a drawing that serves as a key for the hand-perforated patterns in Chung’s other pieces. Different marks denote earthwork settlements, specialist settlements (circular areas focused on a particular artifact type such as pottery), non-earthwork settlement, and more.

Surprisingly, this piece does not cast the others as mere data visualization. The shapes, colors, perforated patterns, and strokes have an authority of their own. Whether or not one knows all its meanings and functions, the composition carries an internal logic, and the perforations call to mind the artist’s repeated meditative actions in making them, a process of embodying the knowledge that is more phenomenological than fact-driven. TERRA ROUGE: CEW SITES, RUBBER PLANTATIONS, AND ABANDONED AIRFIELDS (2022) stood out as the most densely worked example in the show. Its title clues viewers into the region’s historical destiny: it became the site of French colonial rubber plantations at the end of the 19th century, and later, one of the fiercest battlegrounds of the 1972 Easter Offensive during the Vietnam War.

The gallery’s upper level showcased “Archaeology for Future Remembrance,” featuring formally diverse works that are also based on place—this time the Th Thiêm district of Ho Chi Minh City. Chung focuses on a 2002 government-mandated urban development project that forcefully displaced tens of thousands of people. LANDSCAPES AND TRACES OF A PEOPLE YET TO COME (2013) is a three-channel video that portrays two workers prying out a portion of a tiled cement floor, an excision that was included in the show under the title 10°45’39″N 106°43’23″E  (2013), the exact geographic coordinates of the spot. Panning to the evacuated, bulldozed environs, the video evokes the works’ physical and social context, as did multiple other components of the exhibition, such as the set of windows called ERASURE BEGINS FROM THE WILL TO KNOWLEDGE (2013). A close zoom to workers’ feet, revealing their ill-fitting open-toe sandals, invites another glance at LOCATION: CÂY BÀNG STREET – A SHOE PAVED ROAD, THÙ THIÊM (2016), an array of 10 examples of footwear, ranging from children’s slippers to adult-size shoes.

The video is impressionistic and sparse—one moment we see an empty road, another, a stack of leaning window frames. Again and again we return to the workers struggling with the cement floor, laboring in earnest silence. When the men finally succeed in lifting the section of floor at an angle, letting the soil above it slide down to reveal the tile’s floral pattern, there is a sense of discovery and relief. Such decorative work is not what one expects to find in a place surrounded by untended bushes, trees, and soil, supposedly waiting for development. Chung’s excavation therefore is an anticipatory one, gathering key fragments before they are buried and forgotten.

A tense question forms as one engages with Chung’s works: what is speculative and what is objective? Chung seems to be two artists at once: one an ethnographer and activist, intensely committed to research; the other a memoirist, deeply aware of the ephemerality of physical materials and the fallibility of human recollection. Perhaps allowing this tension to surface is what Chung is reaching toward—her motive is not to expose a lie, or uncover a lost truth, or even distinguish between aggressors and victims. It is, rather, to reclaim various stories and their methods of telling, pushing us beyond the allure of neat answers.