“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.

For Guy, Oz is a mirror. In an artist talk when the show opened at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, he compared the interrelated Oz literature and films to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as one self-perpetuating franchise. Two keystones of this franchise, The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Wiz (1978), play side by side in Guy’s silent video The City and the City, sixth cut (2022). The first effort features an Emerald City that feels at times like Chicago while the later rendition involves many New York filming locations. (Guy’s connection here: he grew up in New York and is now based in Chicago.) In its time, The Wiz suffered at the hands of white critics who questioned the need for revisiting Oz with Black actors, a new script, and new songs. Guy’s video suggests his own study of the changes. He has slowed down both films and plays them to end at precisely the same time, as if to put on equal footing Motown and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, an all-white cast and an all-Black one, and Dorothy as played by Judy Garland and by Diana Ross.

Guy’s cultural critique through juxtaposition continues in Emerald City Leperello (Featuring Pointless Rendering by Lorenzo Bueno), 2022, which stands open on a table at the center of the gallery. The pages of the giant book comprise eight vintage copies of a poster showing the Chicago skyline; the poster promoted a 1989 exhibition in which the Renaissance Society paired 24 of On Kawara’s deadpan “Date Paintings” with contemporaneous works by 24 artists, from heavyweights with minimalist and conceptual leanings, such as Jenny Holzer and Joseph Kosuth, to those associated with the Windy City, including the Hairy Who. At the time, this exhibition may have appeared far-reaching and representative for putting Kawara in dialogue with peers and local traditions, but in retrospect, the curatorial conceit appears exclusive. The artists were almost all white, and are now mainstream. Guy added a harlequin-pattern border and yellow, green, and black architectonic forms to the exhibition posters, making the cityscape look more like the Emerald City and implying that Kawara and the other artists could stand in the place of Dorothy and her famous traveling buddies—Toto, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. Whom would an artist choose to accompany them on the Yellow Brick Road as they create imagined worlds? Who is cast to walk beside them? If Guy had traveling companions, they might include the artist Lorenzo Bueno (mentioned in the book’s title), whose Pointless Rendering (2018) is part of a whimsical proposal to build an upside-down replica of New York’s Citigroup Center building right on top of the actual structure on Lexington Avenue. We can imagine that Guy likes how this ambitious-but-impossible proposition plays with monumentality and implies an alternate universe.

Another sort of inversion happens when viewers look up to see a gigantic, multicolored flag draped across the immense ceiling of the Renaissance Society. It’s called Dargerino (2022) and intends to summon and perhaps commune with Henry Darger, the legendary Chicago outsider artist who worked alone in a tiny apartment, sometimes under the influence of Oz, and was undiscovered until the last year of his life. The flag’s colors represent the regions of Oz, though the flag adds an extra point to the usual Emerald City star, making it more like the six-point stars of the Chicago flag. What if Chicago were Oz? Or, what if we made Chicago into a kind of Oz? Guy proposes that we would then have to distinguish meaningful gestures from small arrogant ones. In his artist talk, when discussing Dargerino, Guy referred to the colossal torn American flag sculpture Trinket (2008/15) by William Pope.L, who told Artforum that his sculpture refers to “our mouse nature” and “how we blot out the sky with our paw and think we’ve vanquished the sun.”

Chicagoans dye their river bright green every year on St. Patrick’s Day. Guy captured this bizarre tradition on video for Chicago (2022). In the context of this exhibition, the festivities appear so entirely out of this world that they could almost have taken place in Emerald City. In so many ways, we mortals create and re-create highly developed worlds, determine their strange rituals and exclusive memberships, and exalt them. In The Wiz, the denizens of Emerald City extol green as the height of fashion until The Great and Powerful Oz declares green dead, and endorses red. “I wouldn’t be seen green,” the chorus sings. By bringing Oz into the present, Guy’s smart show prompts the question: With the forcefulness of the collective imagination that we regularly display and sometimes shift at the drop of a hat, how can we reimagine, stand on end, and remake the careless, rough, stained, and unwelcoming parts of our world?

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All About Her Mother: Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle: Remembrance of Gardner Paintings Lost

Ever since Calle asked people who were blind from birth to describe their “image of beauty,” the result has courted controversy. Her 1986 project Les Aveugles (The Blind) features stark black-and-white photographs of unnamed respondents to the question, many with disheveled hair, cracked lips, and closed or blankly staring eyes. Accompanying each portrait are phrases from the sitter’s response, which one or more images illustrate. One woman mentions the actor Alain Delon; another names a Welsh hillside. A young boy tells us that “green is beautiful. Because every time I like something, I’m told it’s green. Grass is green, trees, leaves, nature too … I like to dress in green.” Much of Calle’s selected imagery is mundane. She represents green, for instance, with a manicured lawn. Such decisions seem intended to emphasize the contrast between the sitters’ choices and what visitors with vision might be accustomed to understanding as beautiful.

One of France’s best-known conceptual artists, Calle established her reputation by inventing and photographing provocative situations. Having followed and photographed strangers or shot pictures of people asleep in other projects, she describes using the camera in this project to “see without being seen again, but without having to hide myself.” While this approach worked well for Calle in the 1980s, this Chicago exhibition now suggests a missed opportunity to more fully engage the power dynamics at play.

The Blind holds a dubious distinction in the disability community, othering its subjects by asking them to tell the artist about what they cannot see, all the while deploying a gaze that cannot be returned. The harsh and often unflattering portraits sometimes seem to catch Calle’s subjects off guard; the portraits sit jarringly alongside pictures of people, objects, and scenes they identify but will never see. A wistfulness pervades the project. Noting that the color “white” conjures purity, a young man suggests “it’s beautiful. But even if it weren’t beautiful, it would be the same thing.” Reviewers initially called The Blind poignant, even moving. Disability politics today conjure a different dynamic; in fact, even the project’s early exhibition at Luhring Augustine gallery in New York in 1991 prompted challenges that helped shape disability identity in the arts.

The more troubling aspects of Calle’s fascination with blindness were first noted by deaf artist Joseph Grigely, then teaching literature at Gallaudet University, a well-known school for the education of d/Deaf and hard of hearing students. Grigely wrote a series of 35 postcards to the artist, whom he did not know at the time, in which he posed queries and offered thought-provoking reflections while exposing the project’s uneven power dynamics. Ultimately, Grigely pointed out, the work reveals “not so much the voices of the blind as the voice of Sophie Calle.” Calle utterly controls her subjects, not only selecting the quotes and images on display but shaping the project’s very premise. In this way, the project, while presumably about or invested in the blind, has been formed by a sighted artist for a sighted audience. Shaped by such questions of othering, Grigely’s one-sided correspondence ultimately appeared in Parkett art magazine in 1993. In many ways it presaged his own exhibitions of notes and drawings that he uses to converse with hearing people in more mutual-feeling exchanges.

If this background haunts The Blind, the Chicago installation is even more provocative, since the artist asked to have it exhibited with selections from “Because” (2018–21), a smaller more recent series of works. Positioned in a hallway outside the gallery showing her earlier project, these newer photographs also play with questions of vision and narrative. A curatorial wall text notes that, “Instead of speaking through the voices of others, as in The Blind … Calle gives glimpses here of significant moments or decisions in her own life.” Pairing “Because” with The Blind seems only further to bring out the self-amplifying dimensions of both projects. In “Because,” a cloth embroidered with phrases purportedly explaining why Calle made the picture covers each of them; to see the image, visitors must lift the fabric. Thus, an account of why Calle visited the North Pole hides a tranquil twilit fjord. Are these vignettes truly autobiographical? Is this an image of the Arctic? Why should we trust that Calle actually visited the North Pole? Having once declared, “I don’t care about truth,” Calle’s “Because” seems to highlight theatricality and visual gamesmanship. It also makes us question the veracity of The Blind.

At the same time, this curious show forecloses meaningful opportunities for dialogue, redress, or even access. Although the hardcover book The Blind was published in braille in 2012, no such text for blind visitors accompanied this installation. In fact, the museum provided audio descriptions for only 5 of the 23 pieces on view. This absence of materials allowing the project’s own subjects to engage with the work complicates our understanding of vision; while Calle wields her own vision as an act of artistic privilege, we begin to understand that accessing an artwork is not a game, and attending a museum involves more than just “seeing” images. Just who, we might ask, is blind? And why?

“The First Homosexuals: Global Depictions of a New Identity, 1869–1930,” an exhibition at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago, seeks to underscore that fact on a grand scale. The show was intended to be a single blockbuster survey until the pandemic forced the curators—a team of 23 scholars led by Jonathan D. Katz and Johnny Willis—to split it into two parts. The first half gathers some 100 works in various media from multiple (predominantly Western) countries; the second, larger installment, which will add more artists from the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia into the mix, opens at Wrightwood in 2025.

As its lofty title indicates, the exhibition begins with the troublesome word itself. Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny is credited with coining the term homosexual in 1869 to denote a distinct group of people rather than a behavior. The word had legal and medical implications that were more useful for bureaucrats than the general public. But by the late 19th century, when British physician Havelock Ellis and writer John Addington Symonds wrote Sexual Inversion, their landmark study of homosexuality, the term was in wider vogue. Conceptually, “The First Homosexuals” aims to examine how the nascent word and its attendant identity filtered into and influenced visual art throughout the following decades. Did such work intimate or envision a self-awareness that written language could not?

The answers offered here are mixed. In some ways, the exhibition’s incompleteness hampers its impact. The six decades charted provide a temporal constraint without narrative cohesion, a deficiency that even the overtly editorializing wall text can’t remedy. Instead of facilitating an aesthetic interplay and organic dialogue among the selected works, the curators opt for a curiously anthropological approach. This is reflected in the exhibition design: each small room, painted a distinct color and connected to others by archways that evoke Stein’s or Barney’s bohemian salons, showcases one of nine thematic categories: “Before Homosexuality,” “Archetypes,” “Desire,” “Past and Future,” “Public and Private,” “Colonizing,” “Between Genders,” “Pose,” and “Couples.” Work is hung nonchronologically, so there’s no sense of continuity or progression, just diligent eclecticism.

That’s not to say there aren’t gems on view. British painter Duncan Grant’s Bathers by the Pond (1920–21), a scene of languorous male sunbathers rendered in stippled paint and earthy tones, inspires reverie. American painter Charles Demuth’s Eight O’Clock (Early Morning), 1917, is a tender watercolor in which two men—one sitting dejectedly in pajamas, the other standing imploringly in underclothes—share a moment of ambiguous domesticity while another (nude) man washes his face at a sink in the background. Bath House Study (no date), a drawing in black chalk by Swedish artist Eugène Jansson (1862–1915), depicts an almost geometric configuration of nude men, each suspended in his own erotic lull—a tableau that wouldn’t be out of place in the late 20th-century oeuvres of Americans Patrick Angus or John Burton Harter.

Other works here allude to deeper cultural currents. A wall of archival photos documents the Elisarion, a neo-religious temple that poet and artist Elisàr von Kupffer built in Switzerland with his partner, philosopher Eduard von Mayer. These images—some of which feature men in makeshift crowns and sarongs striking poses in nature—evoke the utopian spirit that infused transatlantic queer life in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as embodied by, for example, American poet Walt Whitman and his British counterpart, Edward Carpenter. Growing Strength (1904), an imposing oil painting by the German artist Sascha Schneider, portrays a seasoned bodybuilder appraising the biceps of a young acolyte—a precursor to the physique magazines and “cult of the body” that defined gay life in midcentury and beyond.

To its credit, the show also looks beyond a strictly male or Anglophone conception of homosexuality. Carte de visite photographs by the Norwegian couple Marie Høeg and Bolette Berg show the women dressed as men, or in more androgynous garb. Likewise, photos by Alice Austen, one of the first American women to shoot pictures outside the studio, capture playful, if covert, moments of lesbian sociality. Paintings and scrolls by Japanese and Chinese artists, several of whom are unknown, offer the show’s most explicitly erotic interludes, as in one print illustrating a sinuous mixed-sex orgy. Elsewhere, an unknown photographer depicts two Black actors, one in drag, dancing the cakewalk in Paris at the turn of the century. Louis Lumière’s silent film clip Le Cake-Walk au Nouveau Cirque (1903), the oldest known recording of a drag performance, plays on a nearby monitor. Even more than a century later, the footage of entertainers enacting a dance that originated among enslaved people radiates a haunting jubilance that is both carefree and tainted by the bigotries of its time.

A handful of pieces feel adrift. American painter Romaine Brooks’s 1912 portrait of the Italian nationalist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, a sober likeness in Brooks’s characteristic gray palette, is a puzzling choice. (D’Annunzio, an infamous womanizer, was not homosexual, and he looms in joyless hauteur over the room.) A Brooks self-portrait—or one of her many portraits of female contemporaries—would have been a stronger choice. With three paintings on view, the Canadian artist Florence Carlyle is allotted more wall space than her elegant but otherwise dull portraits of women merit. And the show’s “Colonizing” section, which tries to explore how Western attitudes toward homosexuality diverged from those of Indigenous and Eastern populations, is undercooked. Wilhelm von Gloeden, the German photographer who decamped to Italy to stage pastoral fantasies with nude Sicilian boys, is included here, although his role as a colonizer is debatable.

Ultimately, the exhibition has the tone of a sociology textbook: serious, pedantic, often more stately than intoxicating. The very premise feels misconceived. It is not as if 1869 were a eureka moment that launched queer artists, en masse, into careers of self-representation. Increasing secularism, urbanization, and mass media did more to define homosexual identity than did the invention of the word itself, yet those realities remain either unexplored or oblique here. Instead of tracing a back channel story of modernism, the curators deliver a jumbled Wunderkammer. For a show that takes pains to frame homosexuality as fluid, the thematic layout comes off as rigid and delimiting. Here’s hoping the second installment loosens up.

“Psychopathia Sexualis,” recently on view at Iceberg Projects in Chicago, was Spare’s first solo exhibition in North America. It was an especially pungent debut amid the trigger warnings and pandemic-induced body horror of our moment. Named after German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 study of sexual pathology, the show presented a folio of forty-four untitled pencil drawings that illustrate a cornucopia of perversions—bestiality, coprophagia, urolagnia, name your pleasure—along with stock-in-trade like fellatio. The Kinsey Institute at Indiana University acquired the folio in 1963, under somewhat murky circumstances, and it remained unheralded until now.

There’s speculation that a kinkster couple commissioned the work in the early 1920s. The result features a cast of phantasmagoric characters: satyrs, horned men, figures caught between genders or species, nightmarish penis-shaped creatures. The human bodies in Spare’s work are overripe and unmanicured. They occupy vacant space that’s indistinguishable as interior or landscape, although vestiges of erased lines are sometimes visible. A vague air of pestilence dominates, underscored by the cankered faces and copious runoff of semen, vomit, feces, and urine. If Spare’s erotic vignettes recall those of precursors such as Belgian Symbolist Félicien Rops, Hungarian painter Mihály Zichy, and French illustrator Martin van Maële, his fixation on excretion and physical degradation is singular in its extremism.

Austin Osman Spare, Untitled, ca. 1921-22,
pencil on paper, 17 by 14 inches.

All of this grotesquerie is exuberant. Spare’s figures are soiled revelers, captive gluttons, and dead-eyed hedonists, daring the viewer to condemn their bacchanal. In one drawing, three misshapen, golem-like creatures urinate on a voluptuous woman lounging below. Her eyes are closed in relish, and the sinuous streams of urine form a kind of pedestal around her. She seems imported from a Rubens canvas, as if Spare were taking the piss out of art historical beauty standards. Similarly, in another drawing, a figure who resembles Spare—his tousled hair a trademark—is bent over, defecating onto two figures preoccupied with their own masturbatory idyll.

Spare’s line has a calligraphic subtlety and a lithe vigor that troubles distinctions between clothing, bodies, and bodily fluids. Forms dissolve and coalesce, as in another drawing in which a mass of ruined faces that bring to mind Honoré Daumier’s caricatures swells toward a winged vagina cruising overhead. This outcrop of men is rendered with such gestural intensity that it could well be an example of Spare’s automatic drawing, in which lines roil in feverish elaboration.

The sequence of depravity was momentarily calmed in a grid of nine drawings that depict either couples or solo models. These images feel starkly modern, even as they hint, however vulgarly, at romantic idealism. In one scene, a man poses with his arm behind his head, miming ancient statuary, while a curvaceous woman clings to him. The man’s oversize penis penetrates her, although the mood isn’t sexual. It’s as if the couple’s genitals are engaged in their own mindless tasks. Throughout these drawings, there’s a sense of instinct taking over, of figures relieving themselves in every way imaginable, sometimes experiencing pleasure, at other times only fulfilling a dull commitment to physical necessity. This wild, startling show was as much an illustration of carnal satisfaction as an exercise in arousal: of desire, disgust, pity, and fascination.

A particularly potent example of Thompson’s approach is his 1965 painting The Carriage, currently on view in “This House is Mine,” the first major exhibition of the artist’s work in twenty years, at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art. The canvas references Nicolas Poussin’s Autumn: The Spies with the Grapes of the Promised Land (1660–64), a depiction of an Old Testament story in which two scouts sent by Moses return from Canaan carrying a load of oversize grapes, figs, and pomegranates. Since other scouts had returned empty-handed, convinced that the land would prove impossible to conquer, this fruit symbolized for Moses the dependability of God’s word; in later interpretations, the grapes, hung from a wooden bar, came to signify the body of Christ and coming salvation.

Thompson’s otherwise idyllic landscape twists this Biblical scene by replacing the fruit with the legs of a human slung over the pole that the men support between their shoulders, perhaps hinting at the violence tied to conquering another land. While the three living figures—the scouts, with their exaggerated stride forward, and a woman in the background balancing a pot on her head—are all rendered reddish orange, the hanging body is bluish; whether this is to emphasize its status as a corpse or to designate race seems intentionally ambiguous. The body hangs like a side of meat, its backside exposed, far less pure than the plump grapes standing in for the body of Christ. The death and treatment of this unnamed person as bounty brought back from a hunt makes Poussin’s landscape seem not harmonious, but ominous. Its apparent abundance, Thompson’s iteration suggests, rests on mundane acts of violence. 

View of “Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You,” 2021, at the Art Institute of Chicago, showing Untitled (No Comment), 2020.

Several such works are architectural in scale: Untitled (Griffin Court), 2020; Untitled (Forever), 2017; Advertisements for myself (project for the New York Times), 2014/2020; and Untitled (Cast of Characters), 2016/2020, occupy entire walls and floors singly or in tandem with each other, an installation strategy Kruger has employed for many years. Many of the texts are reprised from other venues, and they have been edited and redesigned for their new sites at the Art Institute. With the spatial dimensions and subject matter of the texts all but fixed, most of the flexibility comes from typography. The texts are kerned and stretched horizontally and vertically, filling out or squeezing into their respective spaces, using Kruger’s signature Futura Bold font along with what looks like a version of English Gothic. One is fat; the other, thin. Both are sans serif fonts whose unadorned forms seek to carry the message through the power of the words, not the style of the letters.

Toward this end and to her credit, Kruger has always insisted on generic-looking typefaces that match the no-nonsense tone of her messages. In many of the walls, the tight leading is relieved by the separation of lines of text into alternating bands of black on white or white on black. The text works have been described as site-specific, but it might be more accurate to describe some of them as site-adaptable. The athleticism and plasticity of Kruger’s type also means that copious amounts of vinyl will be used again when this exhibition is remade for MoMA PS1 in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art next year. Given the role plastic plays in our precarious environmental situation, I am happy to see Kruger present text works as digital projections, as in the three-channel video installation Untitled (No Comment), 2020, which cuts streams of words with memes and maps. Unless the vinyl is recyclable, I would love to see her work continue in this direction.

Within the museum space, each work is thoughtfully installed along viewing paths that create organic connections and fulfill a spatial logic. The humorous collections of adjectives and nouns in Untitled (Cast of Characters) and Advertisements for myself (project for the New York Times) appear down the hall from each other: LOSERS, JERKS, HATERS, PLAYERS… in one gallery and A MAJOR ARTIST, A MINOR FIGURE, A TIRED HACK…. in the other. These two installations form reverberating bookends, bringing an element of comic timing to the viewer’s movement through the show.

View of “Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You,” 2021, at the Art Institute of Chicago, showing Untitled (Cast of Characters), 2016/2020.

Other works take advantage of the building’s and exhibition’s layout. Untitled (Forever), a room-size installation that wraps around four walls and the floor, greets viewers at the entrance to Regenstein Hall, addressing them with two huge YOU’s that warn them to take notice; they are implicated in what follows. The gallery space itself is generic, but this work’s position at the front makes it psychologically potent. Untitled (Griffin Court), an enormous text on the floor of the atrium that reads BLIND IDEALISM IS REACTIONARY SCARY DEADLY (with REACTIONARY and SCARY crossed out with huge green X’s) incorporates both levels of the museum, as it should be read from the second-floor balconies. At ground level, it’s illegible, a stunning black, white, and green abstraction of the slender letterforms’ elegant curves and angles.

As vinyl skins on architectural structures, the texts are imposing in scale and varied in their relationship to the viewer: Untitled (Forever) immerses the viewer in text on five sides, Untitled (Griffin Court) suspends the viewer above the text, and Untitled (Cast of Characters) and Advertisement for Myself confront the viewer face to face. This made me think about what Kruger’s works mean when they are installed in public versus when they are presented on a more intimate scale. As a 2014 project for the New York Times, Advertisement for Myself was once small. But Kruger doesn’t scale up gratuitously for the sake of spectacle. Through their large scale, her graphics become loud speech, pumped out visually as if spoken through a bullhorn. Kruger cranks up the volume to command public attention and enhance the reach of her message to entire communities. Through scale, the artist signals the authority of her voice and the urgency of her message.

Jim Nutt, a fellow Chicago artist, and one of many influenced by his predecessor’s enigmatic oeuvre, once categorized Yoakum’s work as “exciting to ponder [but] difficult to describe.” That difficulty is two-pronged. The first issue is Yoakum’s disorienting style. His landscapes (named after real places, sometimes misspelled) typically occupy one visual plane, in which mountains, a ribbon of empty highway, and stands of conifers might coexist in woozy harmony. Cliffs drift and sway, more flamelike than earthlike, even as their striations draw attention to geologic time. In the undated Mt Colbart of Nome Alaska, for example, the mountains resemble veiny ziggurats with apertures in which improbable layers of alpine forests jostle. In Weeping Pebble of Sirrea Range in Virginia Park Nevada (1967), a prairie dog or other desert creature is almost as tall as a nearby cactus; a flower is as big as a tree. In Yoakum’s world, scale is more poetic than spatial.

The second difficulty is the mismatch between a work’s title and what it represents. As a runaway teen, Yoakum worked for traveling circuses, and he said he’d set foot on every continent except Antarctica. His landscapes are a fabulist’s enjambments in which memory meets invention. Arabian Desert Near Sudi Arabia (1964) includes verdant pockets of trees and weeds not native to that region. Ground Floor of Grand Canyon Colorado River Near Arizona State Line, from the same year, features two houses and a derrick nestled inside a womb-like cavity in the canyon’s rock wall, an unreal scene that merges domesticity with craggy wilderness. Yoakum’s unpeopled geography isn’t severe, though. Its dynamism is the result of his fluid line, the hashmarks and shadings that deepen the animated quality of his compositions, and the subtle vibrancy of his palette, which, from afar, can lead the drawings to be mistaken for watercolors.

Joseph E. Yoakum, Beulah Dudley 1st Negro Woman to Win Golff Record in Year 1927, stamped 1970, felt-tip pen, ballpoint pen, pastel, and colored pencil on paper, 11 ¾ by 9 in.

Yet, for all their wonders, Yoakum’s landscapes are best appreciated in moderation. A roomful can start to feel repetitive, dulling the idiosyncrasies of individual works. “What I Saw” offers relief in the form of Yoakum’s portraits and figurative drawings. These pieces, mostly busts, also complicate Yoakum’s fraught relationship with race. His father claimed Cherokee blood while his mother was a Black woman born into slavery. Yoakum often portrayed himself as Navajo (or “Nava-joe,” his portmanteau), largely because he feared being exploited as a Black artist, even as he drew admiring portraits of Black luminaries such as Nat King Cole. In Ella Fitzgerald Moovie Star (1966), Yoakum based his depiction of the jazz singer on a white model from an illustrated Breck shampoo ad. Maybe the source material was easier for Yoakum to trace than a photograph of Fitzgerald. Or maybe he was offering his own subliminal commentary on race, as could be the case in his 1969 drawing of the Black boxer Jack Johnson, whose figure is dwarfed by the totemic profile of the white challenger Jess Willard, who beat Johnson to become the world heavyweight champion in 1915.

“What I Saw” is an invigorating exhibition of an American original. Yoakum’s art, which he called a “spiritual unfoldment,” has exemplified the visionary tradition; this show recenters his formal and stylistic ingenuity. While some artists share aspects of his style—Georgia O’Keeffe could finesse landscape into supple abstraction, Marguerite Zorach aspired to a single visual plane, and a number of folk or “outsider” artists toy with relative scale—few so energetically mediate imagination and place, and with such conviction. A Chicago professor once told Yoakum that he’d never seen mountains in Iowa that looked like those the artist drew. Yoakum replied, “Well, that was because you never looked.”

Theaster Gates has long engaged in projects that seem to ask these sorts of questions about objects and spaces, especially as they fall out of use: an abandoned Huguenot house, the archive of the bankrupt Johnson Publishing Company, empty buildings in the Grand Crossing neighborhood of Chicago, and a university’s glass lantern slide collection. In 2014 he bought the entirety of Halsted Hardware, a family-owned True Value shop that was going out of business. Since then, he has mounted three shows that redisplay selections from its inventory, including one at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. “How to Sell Hardware” at Chicago’s Gray Warehouse (all works 2021) is the largest exhibition of this material to date, and it offers a range of answers to the above queries.

One of two humbler works on view is Foot Scrubber, in which a dozen dark-gray abrasive rotary wheels meant for grinding metal are mounted low on the wall in a horizontal row. A cross between one of Donald Judd’s “specific objects,” a Marcel Duchamp readymade, and a shoe-shine machine, the work is also quite mischievous—definitely not OK for buffing footwear. History of Conveyance is a serious, maybe even pretentious work, an expandable metal conveyor belt on wheels, elegantly displayed in an enormous glass vitrine together with a 1912 edition of the Roy F. Soule book whose title Gates borrowed for this show. Keen to play on found words and objects through museum-style recontextualization, this assemblage clearly fancies itself conceptual art with the soul of an antique.

With Hardware Store Painting, other things express their own desires to merge into art history, and Gates continues to listen. The “canvas,” an enormous steel pegboard that covers the entirety of the gallery’s back wall, is covered in metal hooks from which hang the “paint,” hundreds of stock items once for sale, most still in their packaging. Scrub brushes and curtain rods, extension cords and saw wheels are sorted by hue and suspended to form large geometric shapes—among them a green leaf, a blue bowl, a red-fading-to-yellow triangle—in a riff on an Ellsworth Kelly. Though in terms of color the composition recalls those annoying bookshelves in the homes of people who think of hardcovers as decoration, the goods’ spacing—clustered together, with hundreds of empty hooks between—suggests more attention to context. Whether in a critical or compromised gesture, Gates suggests that this merchandise is worth more assembled into an explicitly ornamental art object than as individual components sold for practical purposes.

Theaster Gates, Retaining Wall, 2021, twenty-five custom steel gabions and hardware store inventory, approximate overall install 178 by 39 ¼ by 696 in.

Retaining Wall further explores this principle of accumulation and more. The fifty-eight-foot-long row of steel gabions, stacked four cages high and filled with an inestimable tonnage of medium-to-large wares—ductwork, sanding belts, piles of plumbing fixtures—brings on all sorts of end-times associations: cattle cars, prison cells, refugee smuggling, refrigerated morgue trailers, shipping breakdowns. The cages stuffed with dusty, outdated stock signal death; these are heavy-duty storage bins for never. Others reveal clever arrangements of wire spools, wallpaper rolls, and shovel handles. Some enclosures are enlivened by spotlights and even, in one particularly animated example, the breeze of a working box fan. Thoughtfulness, nay preciousness, indicates worth, nowhere more so than in the endpiece module, where Gates has arranged a trio of lawnmowers with almost the same reverence as Jeff Koons did his Hoovers.

So what, ultimately, does Gates find hardware store goods want to be? Like all aspirational sorts—who yearn to increase their aesthetic, symbolic, and monetary value, and who have no compunction against the luxury goods market or nostalgia—they want to be blue-chip contemporary art.

Darkness dominates the composition and separates the painting’s two male couples. Formally, the negative space enforces the antithesis implied by the title. Thematically, it suggests that the divide between reality and fiction is more like a deep metaphysical ditch. At left, two soldiers are softly spotlit. One holds his crotch while the other pantomimes an embrace, subverting his uniformed masculinity. (Intentionally or not, the soldiers allude to the prior year’s military coup that installed the Greek junta, though Tsarouchis often painted servicemen with homoerotic reverence.) To American eyes, they may appear punch-drunk, but they’re more likely performing the Zeibekiko, a Greek folk dance of improvised self-expression. This dance was a motif of Tsarouchis’s work from the mid-1930s, when he first witnessed it, until his death. For him, it provided an embodied link to Greek history, which he elsewhere evokes through references to the country’s rich traditions of mythology, shadow theater, and costuming.

Indeed, at the opposite end of this canvas are two other men in theatrical attire—namely, the feathered belts Tsarouchis designed for a 1962 production of Aristophanes’s The Birds, an ancient comedy in which birds establish a utopia in the sky. One man holds up a mirror—or perhaps an empty frame—to the other, underscoring the work’s paradoxes of artifice and representation. Do these two figures enjoy the freedom denied their counterparts? Perhaps the soldiers actually represent the “theatre” of the title, modeling discipline and toughness but, as Tsarouchis signals, capable of grace when no one is watching.

“Dancing in Real Life” is on view through July 31.