Related Articles

Video: Pakistani American Artist Shahzia Sikander On Reimagining Painting Traditions From Around the World

How Arlene Shechet Makes Her Recalcitrant Materials Come Alive

In Houston, Witness drew the ire of Texas Right to Life, an anti-choice Christian group. Picking up on a description in the press of the coiled braids as horns and citing Sikander’s stated support for abortion rights, the organization called for a campus-wide protest “to keep the Satanic abortion idol out of Texas.” In response, the University scrapped a planned opening and artist talk, and decided not to present an accompanying video work by Sikander. There is no little irony in the situation. Witness exemplifies Sikander’s career-long effort to counter female invisibility in a world where images of female power are often seen as threatening and destabilizing. The calls to remove this proud symbol of female autonomy unintentionally underscored the reason Sikander had created it in the first place.

In between phone calls Sikander tried to put the controversy out of her mind as she donned rubber boots and an apron and proceeded with the painstaking work of spraying pigmented paper pulp over delicate stencils. Full figures, doubled figures, even closeups of the now-infamous coiled horns emerged kaleidoscopically in luminous layered compositions. During a break, Sikander mused on the complex symbolism behind Witness. Citing the visual history of Asia and Africa, she noted that similar images of braided hair can be found in early 20th-century Nigerian crest masks as well as in representations of the Buddha. And she pointed out that rams’ horns are a recurring motif in her sculptures, appearing also in NOW, a companion work that stands in front of the New York Appellate Division Courthouse. “The rams’ horns are universal symbols of strength and wisdom,” she remarked. “There is nothing Satanic about them.”

This kind of reductive misreading is nothing new for Sikander. At the time of the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 she was working on a mural for a law firm. She had been exploring a motif based on the Hindu goddess Durga, a female warrior embodying strength and courage, often represented by a woman whose multiple arms each bear a weapon. Sikander intended these as emblems of female protective power, but in the context of 9/11, the image was read as an incitement to violence. Not wanting to add to this confusion, Sikander withdrew from the commission.

Misreading extends as well to the way Sikander is perceived as an artist. In a career that spans three and a half decades, she has mastered painting, sculpture, animation, installation, and video. She works with glass, paper pulp, bronze, and mosaic. She juxtaposes imagery sourced from Indian court painting, Western Renaissance and Mannerist art, African tribal figures, Hindu and Persian legends, biblical narratives, and Western fairy tales. She melds figures drawn from the religious traditions of Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Her works deal with a multiplicity of issues, from female power to migration, trade, colonial history, and climate change. Her originality has earned her an international reputation capped by a MacArthur “genius grant,” and her retrospective is one of the official collateral events at this summer’s Venice Biennale.

Nonetheless, Sikander finds to her frustration that she is continually described as a Pakistani artist working in the neo-miniaturist tradition. “I’ve been living and working in this country for 30 years,” she said. She maintains a studio at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University, but her project-based work allows her to move around. “My work is about wanting not to be boxed in to any stereotype, whether it’s on behalf of Pakistan or any culture or religion or non-white feminism or vision of tradition versus non-tradition. There are all these constraints. My desire is to escape imprisoning representations.”

THE UNFORTUNATE PIGEONHOLING OF Sikander’s work may have to do in part with the remarkable way she emerged as an artist. Born in Lahore in 1969, Sikander grew up in a multigenerational home, surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings. She describes herself as a quiet child, constantly drawing portraits, and enthralled by her father’s knack for storytelling. “I have memories of him enacting characters,” she said. “Reading books and giving me the idea of imagination.” Despite her love of art, she initially tried to follow a more conventional path. She received a colonial high school education at Convent of Jesus and Mary and then enrolled in the Kinnaird College for Women, where she studied math and economics in what she describes as a “waiting for marriage” culture.

But these were turbulent times in Pakistan. An erosion of women’s rights followed a coup that brought a military regime to power in 1978. Like many young women, Sikander was shaken by the changes, and took an internship with the Women’s Action Forum, an organization in the forefront of resistance to the regime. The group’s founder and Sikander’s mentor there, Lala Rukh, encouraged her to enroll in the National College of Art (NCA). “In that military environment, the art school was suspect,” Sikander said. “It had historically been full of thinkers and dissent. And it was [close to] 50 [percent] … female. It was so wonderful to be able to go there.”

At the NCA, Sikander could have followed the path taken by many of her fellow students who were looking at Western models of modernist art. Instead, she chose to immerse herself in the Mughal tradition of miniature painting. It was a surprising choice: At NCA, miniature painting was considered hopelessly retrograde. The Mughal Empire had dominated South Asia from the 16th to the 18th centuries, spurring the spread of a signature art form composed of small jewel-like paintings of Mughal life and mythology. But by the 20th century, actual examples of such paintings were hard to come by in Pakistan, as the original manuscripts in which they appeared had been plundered, divided up, and sent to Western institutions. Further, works that carried on that tradition were considered tourist kitsch or dismissed as exercises in nostalgia. Even the term miniature painting was a catchall colonial construct, sweeping numerous artistic traditions under a single label. At NCA, miniature painting was seen as a dying art with little connection to the progressive agenda of an institution that was emerging as the premier art school in the country.

And that was exactly why Sikander found it interesting. She elected to work with Bashir Ahmed, a skilled miniaturist dedicated to preserving this disappearing tradition. “It was an attempt to engage with art historical visual traditions that were not the norm,” she said. “It was about looking at the pre-colonial era, looking at Safavid style, looking at Chinese history and Chinese scroll paintings, all kinds of things that were not necessarily in the books that we were studying.” Miniature painting was an outlier, and so in many ways was the teenage Sikander, a young woman driven to be an artist in a deeply patriarchal and authoritarian culture.

Sikander mixed paints from pigments, used tea stains, and learned the laborious process of painting with single-hair brushes to delineate tiny details. She spent 14 hours a day for two years completing her thesis project, imperiling her physical and mental health as she developed symptoms related to stress, prolonged sitting, and exposure to various chemicals. Although the thesis mandate was to create a series of notebook-size paintings, she employed the miniature technique to produce a single five-foot-long painting that she describes as an “epic poem.” Titled Scroll (1989–90), it unveils a panoramic view of an upperclass Pakistani home that has been opened up and spread out so that the rooms form a series of vignettes of domestic life. It is highly detailed, with a complex geometry that echoes the shifting perspectives in traditional Mughal painting. What ties it all together is the figure of a young woman in white, always seen from the back, who drifts through the house without ever actually interacting with the inhabitants as they go about their daily lives. In the very last scene, she ends up outside in the garden where she stands before an easel painting a portrait of a young woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Sikander. The figure is a bit of a cypher, guiding us through the complicated spaces, acting in part as the viewer’s eye. “It’s not necessarily a self-portrait,” Sikander said, “but at the age of 17 or 18, what else could it be?”

Scroll created a sensation, and Sikander won national attention as well as the NCA’s highest merit award. This acclaim encouraged the school to greatly expand its miniaturist program and helped spawn what is now known as the Pakistani neo-miniaturist school of art. But Sikander herself refused to see herself simply as a neo-miniaturist. “Even from the beginning I was experimenting with the miniature,” she said. “Once I had painted it, I would disrupt it, sometimes by pouring water or putting it under the tap or thinking of ways to intentionally disrupt its preciousness.” It was a traditional form that would be a continuing reference point for Sikander’s work even as she engaged in a restless, relentless experimentation with materials, and a desire to engage with a multitude of themes.

SCROLL ANTICIPATES MANY OF Sikander’s continuing concerns: It describes a female space, it highlights class and gender disparities, it is imbued with a sense of mystery, and it presents a fluid conception of time and space. But to discover her mature language, Sikander had to leave Pakistan for the United States. The spark was the unexpected perception of herself as an Other. In 1993 she enrolled in the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence. It was a moment in the American art world when multicultural differences were being simultaneously fetishized and marginalized. Sikander recalled how a professor asked, “are you here to make East meet West?”

Her frustration with this narrow conception led Sikander to experiment with radically different imagery. “Certain forms started springing out, perhaps resisting this racial straitjacket,” she said. “But they were also kind of androgynous, not necessarily fully female.” This was in part a reaction to how art from her region was depicted. “Here I am looking at these big coffee table books on Islamic art or Indian art. And in there are these shadowless representations of different native cultures. These little characters are supposedly defining what I do, or who I may be, or what my work is about. They looked like they needed to escape those pages. So I started imagining them as little monsters that are going to walk off that page. And if they were, if they had little legs, or if they were going to literally crawl off, then what would they look like?”

The answer was the beginning of a lexicon of images that recur throughout her work. There is, for instance, the headless woman whose legs have become a tangle of roots. Sikander describes her as an emblem of the erasure of the feminine from religion and history. There are the flying gopi hairpieces, small winglike objects that have become detached from the heads of the female followers of Krishna. They become agents of disintegration and re-creation as they spin off like swarms of insects or birds. There are wheels of spinning arms that expand and multiply. There are androgynous creatures, like the veiled figure who confounds gender expectations by taking on the body of a male polo player.

Sikander’s explorations were aided by her reading of feminist writers and poets like Hélène Cixous, bell hooks, and Julia Kristeva, and South Asian thinkers like Kishwar Naheed, Parveen Shakir, and Fatema Mernissi. She remarks, “I have gravitated often to the literary space, because when we think of the representation of female protagonists, we think, who gets to write the stories? How do women themselves want to be represented?”

After graduating from RISD, Sikander secured a two-year fellowship with the Glassell School of Art in Houston. Ironically, given the current controversy over Witness, she credits her time there with opening her eyes to the diversity of America and to the connections between different histories. “Houston was so different from Providence,” she said. “Houston had Arab American diaspora histories, it had the large Indonesian Vietnamese communities, and it had a large South Asian community. So there was all these multiple spaces, but they don’t necessarily come together.” She began to draw parallels between the apparently different histories of displacement and migration that characterized the American South and her native South Asia. “It was really magical,” she said. “I was thinking how it was so foreign and so familiar at the same time.”

AN INVIDATION TO THE 1997 Whitney Biennial and a show at the nonprofit Artists Space brought Sikander to New York, where she has lived ever since. In the intervening years she has created a body of work that is breathtaking in its complexity and breadth. There are jewel-like paintings like Pleasure Pillars, 2001, her first work showing rams’ horns. Here, the horned woman is quite obviously a self-portrait surrounded by female figures from various Eastern and Western traditions. In an acknowledgment of the violence of 9/11, a tiny fighter jet approaches from the distance while a winged creature shoots fire from its hands. There are works created from ink stains that bleed into translucent tracing paper to create silhouettes of headless women. There are glowing mosaics that splinter the dresses of female figures into hundreds of shards of light and color. There is a multiscreen video titled Reckoning that flashed over Times Square every night at midnight for the month of September 2023.

Among Sikander’s explorations in sculpture are large public figures like Witness and its companion work, NOW, and smaller ones like Promiscuous Intimacies, which grew from a painting with the same motif. Both Intimacies and its inspiration envision the meeting of different traditions through the sensuous entwining of a truncated temple sculpture of an Indian celestial dancer and the twisting Venus of 16th-century Mannerist painter Agnolo Bronzino.

Sikander’s animations include SpiNN (2003), a critique of cable news in which an Indian ruler in a grand Mughal gathering hall is obliterated by flying gopi hair, and The Last Post (2010), which similarly disrupts the figure of a colonial-era East India company man. The monumental Parallax, created for the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, is a mesmerizing immersive panoramic video that reflects on the role of migrant labor, oil, and violence in the tortured history of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow ocean passage between Oman and Iran.

One thing that unites these works is Sikander’s tendency to circle back, to rework previous motifs and allow them to absorb new meanings. Another is her focus on the disruption of fixed polarities like male and female, East and West, past and present, order and chaos. Collective Behavior, the retrospective currently on view in Venice, showcases all these aspects of Sikander’s work; it is organized by two Ohio-based curators: Ainsley M. Cameron, curator of South Asian art, Islamic art, and antiquities at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and Emily Liebert, curator of contemporary art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Following its presentation in Venice, Collective Behavior will move to the curators’ respective institutions, where it will take a somewhat unconventional course. At Cincinnati, it will be fleshed out with other works, while simultaneously in Cleveland, related works will feature in dialogue with the museum’s storied South Asian collection.

Cameron has worked with Sikander on a number of projects, beginning in 2016 with the animation of an 18th-century North Indian manuscript at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She wants the exhibition to highlight Sikander’s ability to weave together diverse histories and traditions in ways that illuminate current dilemmas. “This is a really turbulent time,” she said. “Shahzia uses art to activate so many messages and to make it the center point for the conversations that we’re having, whether it’s gender and body politics or the histories of colonial India and South Asia. She reinforces this idea that art can be a catalyst for change.”

Liebert concurs. “Her art reflects on so many of the pressing issues of our time: gender relations, migration, climate, race. But she’s always thinking about those through the lens of history,” she said, adding that “in Shahzia’s work, there’s a suggestion that the past can inform our understanding of the present.”

For Sikander, the chance to present her work in Venice offers a remarkable synergy. She points to the history of Venice as a commercial and artistic center at the nexus of global trade. “When you’re in Venice, you can see forms that are understood as Venetian, but you can often see them as well in Islamic patterning,” she said. “There is this rich history of trade between Venice and Persia or China. It’s reverberating through the Italian Renaissance painting, the illuminated manuscripts of central South Asia, and the textiles in the Islamic world. But very rarely do you see this acknowledged, even in art history.” Once again, the notion of place—who belongs where, and how people define themselves—plays a role in her work. She added with a glimmer of mirth, “I think appearing in Venice is an amusing thing for an artist like myself. There are a lot of parallels that I can recognize. I guess what I’m trying to say is, for me, it’s a perfect location.”

A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson had garnered attention with a couple small solo shows in New York and a pair of notable group exhibitions that followed. But his status was a matter of perspective. “I felt very emerging at that point,” Gibson recalled. “But because the Native art world and the larger art world were so separate at the time, I think most of my peers who were non-Native were unaware. It was like I was at different stages in different contexts.”

Related Articles

Art in America’s Summer “Icons” Issue Features Jeffrey Gibson, A Crash Course in Impressionism, and More

Video: Venice Biennale Artist Jeffrey Gibson on Painting and Paying Tribute to Indigenous Cultural Legacies

He was reminiscing from a very different vantage this past winter, just six weeks out from unveiling his United States Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, the first time an Indigenous artist has represented America with a solo show at the illustrious affair. He was not holed up in a New York City studio but splayed out in an enormous converted schoolhouse in Hudson, an Upstate outpost that has been his home since 2012. His art for the Venice show had already shipped, but his team of some 20 studio assistants was occupied with works in various stages of creation: radiant paintings, dynamic sculptures, glamorous costumes, and dazzling ornamentation based in beads.

However far removed from his early years, it had not been all that long since a younger Gibson wandered around the Biennale wondering what might lie ahead of him. “As a struggling young artist in New York City, you don’t know how to know if anyone even cares. I had been to the Biennale when I was in grad school, but this was my first time there with any access to anything, and it was really important to feel included,” he recalled of that 2007 trip.

Kathleen Ash-Milby, a Navajo curator who was also then on the rise, had invited Gibson to Venice to see an event she organized via the NMAI for Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho), an artist 17 years Gibson’s senior. “I remember Edgar naming the Indigenous people who had died while traveling in Europe on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show,” Gibson said of the cowboys-and-Indians spectacle that toured overseas around the turn of the 20th century. “That was very significant for me.”

He also remembered meeting other Indigenous artists who would become allies and, especially, forging an important bond with Ash-Milby, who would play an important role in his being awarded the US Pavilion close to two decades later. Ash-Milby said she recalled some wild speculative dreaming about such a fate, “which at the time seemed like an insane idea.”

Gibson, for his part, remembered appreciating the provocation inherent in Edgar Heap of Birds’s presentation, and feeling curious about what might happen if even more change ever came: “I think we both kind of felt like, Is this the beginning of something—something that hasn’t happened?”

GIBSON WAS BORN IN 1972 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but grew up as a citizen of the world. With extended family in Mississippi and Oklahoma, he moved around while his father worked different jobs as a civil engineer for the US Department of Defense. He lived in Germany before elementary school and then spent time in New Jersey before relocating in his early teens to South Korea in 1985.

“Korea was impactful for me, partially because I was paying attention more independently to popular culture as it was being funneled abroad,” Gibson said. “This is when MTV was big, and there was street culture and an art scene in New York City that was being shown through music and fashion. There was one hour of MTV at midnight, and we would all talk about it, because we were jonesing.”

Formative discoveries at the time included Culture Club and Wham!, two pop acts that signaled an interest in music and identification with queer culture that figure in his art decades later. Other discoveries helped develop a capacity for cultural versatility, then and now. “When I was a kid, I romantically identified as a nomad,” Gibson said. “Living abroad and being American was an empowered and privileged place to be. But when I would come back to the US, I would be reminded that I was a person of color, and that we didn’t have as much money as it felt like we had when we were abroad. What I would bring back with me was a sense that I had traveled and seen other things. It made me feel like I knew there was a huge world. Being aware of other cultures certainly helped inform my general aesthetic and understanding of difference.”

While living overseas, Gibson returned to the US regularly, around once or twice a year, to visit relatives—and commune with histories and heritages that figured in his Indigenous identity. “My experience is a 20th-century Native American experience, and the idea that there’s any line between what is or isn’t a ‘Native American experience’ is blurry,” he said. “It’s problematic when we think about Native American heritages, especially in the 20th century, because they’re all so unique.”

Poverty and racism were issues for both the Choctaw and Cherokee sides of his family, but their circumstances differed significantly—and developed differently over time. In Mississippi, the longtime chief of the Choctaw tribe during Gibson’s childhood devised an economic plan that brought factory work and financial stability to the area. “By the ’90s, the tribe was one of the largest employers in the state, and it had a surplus of employment beyond our tribal population,” Gibson said. “So that’s the story of the Choctaw people, in addition to what we could talk about in terms of tribal dances, ribbon shirts, basket weaving, and the symbolism that exists there.”

In Oklahoma, where the Cherokee part of his family resided, Christianity played a role in Native American culture that clashed in certain ways with traditions that had been handed down over centuries. “Within both sides of my family—in Oklahoma and Mississippi—there were people who identified as Christian and others who continued traditional spiritual practices. I had uncles who continued doing traditional dancing and a grandmother and grandfather who established Southern Baptist churches.”

During visits to America, Gibson’s relationship with the various facets of his family complicated any easy answer to the question of how closely he identified as Indigenous. “It’s always been difficult for me to distinguish how much I am a part of a community,” he said. “I was always embraced, and because I would leave and go to Korea didn’t make me any less Choctaw. Wherever that line is, comes more from an external perspective. We never stopped being Choctaw or Cherokee. If anything, I think the subject is more how we quantify how those communities were shifting, decade by decade, throughout the entire 20th century. And that’s just for those two tribes—there are other tribes who have different narratives.”

In any case, Gibson said his relationship with Indigeneity owes to what he grew up with and what he has honed on his own over time. “I have never lived among a Native community where everyone around me was Native all the time, seven days a week,” he said. “But I also refuse to let anyone make me feel that my leaving the reservation makes me less Choctaw. It’s just not that simple.”

GIBSON WAS TRAINED AS A PAINTER, but his canvases—vibrant and geometric, with mesmerizingly colored patterns and bits of text he borrows from sources including pop songs, poems, and historical records—have increasingly become just one component of his shows. His work for the US Pavilion in Venice includes 11 paintings, nine sculptures, eight flags, two murals, and one video installation. A key feature of much of his art, including the paintings, is beadwork that glistens and gleams by way of handicraft as fine as that in haute couture.

Gibson’s facility with materials traces back to his university years in Chicago, where he moved in 1992 to study at the Art Institute. The next year, he took a side job at the Field Museum of Natural History as a research assistant working with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which since 1990 has provided for the protection and return of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. His work related to the legislation, which has grown in significance in recent years, involved processing items in the museum’s collection and showing them to tribal delegations that came through.

“Sometimes we had protocols to follow, but we didn’t always even know exactly what an object was, which brought up a lot of questions,” Gibson said. “Even though something may have had a record that said it was voluntarily sold, we would look back and see that it was sold under duress, or that the person who sold it was not necessarily in a position to do so. There were many things that were ‘collected’—or stolen—and there were things that should not be shared about what an object was or what it was used for.”

One such object was a prayer bundle, a parcel filled with spiritually significant contents that had been secreted away and wrapped in cloth or other material. “The only person who knows how to use what’s inside a prayer bundle is someone who’s been raised within ceremony to understand what it is and what to do with it,” Gibson said. “Many prayer bundles had been disassembled, and this was horrific to people who think they are never meant to be seen.” Another example was a stick that had seemed to some museum staffers to be part of a game but turned out to be imbued with other qualities. “Somebody came in and said, ‘No, you must cover that up immediately!’ It literally went from being one thing to another.”

Gibson’s work at the museum taught him about what he did and did not know, and he was energized by both. “NAGPRA is an amazing and hard-won law,” he said, “but what it really taught me was the problems of intercultural translation, language, perception, even entire worldviews. We could look at any object and there are going to be differences in how we view it. That became really interesting to me.”

It also opened his eyes to materials other than paint, and roles for art that ventured beyond simple states of objecthood. He learned to sew in Chicago from a fellow Native American friend who vowed to make her own clothes, and he made a doll that wound up scrambling his value system. “It was a ragdoll figure of a blonde woman wearing a buckskin dress. The fabric I used for her body was a Southwest print,” he said, adding that inspiration had been provided by white-presenting women he’d seen at powwows wearing clothes that had clearly been bought for the occasion.

A professor at the Art Institute liked the doll and “wanted to introduce me to people who could write about it or show it, but I just shut down so quickly,” Gibson said. “For me, at the time, it felt like much less of a responsibility to make an abstract painting about paint and put it out into the world. To make something that was actually a statement with a kind of critical perspective—I wasn’t ready for that.”

He was acquainting himself with different ways to work within and around tradition, however, and ways to question what exactly constitutes tradition in Indigenous cultures that are ever-changing. “I’ve always worked intuitively with different materials, based on my experience of working with historic collections and realizing all the innovations that stepped away from what I had been taught about ‘traditional’ materials,” he said. “Even things we think of as traditional, like beads, replaced other traditions. We are innovators—this is what we do. We look around and try to think about how we can make materials into something that serves our culture or serves our community. I started to see that way of thinking as a tradition in and of itself.”

“JEFFREY SHOWS THAT ONE of the most important things about contemporary Indigenous culture is that it has a specific cultural and material inheritance, but its cultural inheritance is expressed through its materials,” said Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), a curator who first showed Gibson’s work in a show about Indigenous futurism in 2011 and, two years later, in “Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art,” an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada that has been credited with reshaping studies of contemporary Indigenous art. For the latter show, Gibson made two paintings on elk hide that had been treated via a process that has been largely lost to history: brain tanning.

“A lot of commercial hide production is just that—very commercialized,” Gibson said. “The animals aren’t treated with a great life. They’re not killed in a humane way. In the belief system, there are histories that are inherent to hides, and I knew I wanted a hide with a different narrative.”

After some searching, he found a hunter in Montana who still practices the craft, which involves massaging the fatty matter of an animal’s brain into a hide to soften and preserve it. The hunter had killed an elk of the kind that Gibson wanted, but winter set in before he was able to tan it, so he buried the skin in the ground to freeze for the season with a plan to exhume it in the spring. As time ticked on, though, Gibson started to get anxious. “I had a deadline coming up and I was like, ‘I really need this hide!’ I felt like such a consumer,” he remembered. “Consumer thinking trains us that we can have things when we want them. But it was all part of the narrative, and I had to give in to it.”

When he finally received the brain-tanned hides, he painted them with boldly colored diagonals that suggest a sort of abstract topography and titled them This Place I Know and Someone Great Is Gone (both 2013). “That taught me a lot about the material roots of Jeffrey’s practice and the honesty to materials that he brings forward,” Hopkins said. “Everything has a story to tell.” For his part, Gibson remembered discovering a sort of poetry in the process. “The idea behind brain tanning,” he said, “is to take the memory of the animal and put it back into the skin.”

For a 2019 residency at the New Museum in New York, Gibson learned a battery of new skills, and made his education part of the premise of an exhibition that evolved as his knowledge grew. “He talked about this thing that happens when he’s asked to do a project that is supposed to represent Indigeneity, even though it’s super-differentiated, as a generalist idea,” said Johanna Burton, who curated “The Anthropophagic Effect” as part of the New Museum’s department of education and public engagement (she is now director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). “He was excited about the fact that he had to learn some of the skills he wanted to use the same way that anybody else would.”

With the idea of an Indigenous atelier in mind, Gibson brought artist Kelly Church (Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe) from Michigan to New York to teach him and his studio staff crafts that had been practiced by Indigenous people long before the arrival of European settlers. One such craft, birchbark biting (what the Northwestern Ontario Ojibwe call mazinashkwemaganjigan), involves making patterns in tree coverings by biting into them and exposing layers and fissures within. “It’s all in the way you fold the bark and then bite it, and birchbark pieces would become patterns for embroidery and, eventually, beadwork,” Gibson said. “That came at a time when I was thinking about how Native people think about abstraction differently. It’s in many ways abstract, but it’s also so specific to the person who did the biting.”

Other newly acquired skills included porcupine quillwork and river cane basket weaving, which were useful in creating garments that voguing dancers wore in performances that activated the artworks. Gibson also made helmets with the basket weaving process, transforming it to his own ends. “It’s not Choctaw tradition to make helmets, but it is Choctaw tradition to make river cane baskets,” he said. “My goal was never to recreate what was made previously. I didn’t want to learn how to make baskets—I wanted to learn the technology of making a basket, so that I could then make sculpture.”

GIBSON’S RESOURCEFUL, RESILIENT WORK for the US Pavilion in Venice draws on his many modes of art-making that commune with traditions while also revising and redefining them in his own terms. Color is in high supply, as are allusions to struggle and perseverance. “He has been addressing the same kind of problems in different ways while looking at, respecting, and honoring the Native experience,” said Ash-Milby, the curator who has worked with Gibson from the start of his career. “Part of that is acknowledging that there have been challenges and pain. That’s part of what we carry and who we are today.”

When the idea arose to submit a proposal for the Venice Biennale, Gibson turned to a trio of supporters for help: Ash-Milby, currently the curator of Native American art at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon; Louis Grachos, who presented a wide-ranging survey titled “The Body Electric” at SITE Sante Fe in 2022; and Abigail Winograd, an independent curator who worked with Gibson on a 2021 exhibition related to the MacArthur Fellowship Program (Gibson won a prestigious “genius grant” in 2019).

For the show with Winograd, titled “Sweet Bitter Love,” Gibson made paintings in response to stereotypical late 19th- and early 20th-century portraits of Indigenous people in the collection of Chicago’s Newberry Library, and exhibited accession cards from the Field Museum, where he had worked while a student. In his paintings, Gibson aimed to open up the historical portraits by riffing and remixing them in a manner that made them personal to him and his place in time. Part of that included attaching vintage objects—beaded barrettes, found pins, decorated belts—that he collects in part as a tribute to unnamed artists who contribute to culture in a multitude of ways.

“We know the names of the sitters in paintings, but with vintage objects, oftentimes we don’t know the names of the people who made them,” Gibson said. “Those objects are also not valued, and we don’t know how they were acquired. The collective Native American experience in the US is shaped by the unnamed and the unknown, by all of these gaps and exclusions and erasures. That’s what I wanted those pieces to speak to.”

Such vintage finds figure in many of his Venice works. A sculptural bust titled Be Some Body (2024) is affixed with a button that bears the message IF WE SETTLE FOR WHAT THEY’RE GIVING US, WE DESERVE WHAT WE GET. A painting in which diamond-shaped patterns seem to recede and pulse out into open space, WE WILL BE KNOWN FOREVER BY THE TRACKS WE LEAVE (2024) flaunts a belt buckle and bolo tie, as well as a bag embellished with lane-stitch beadwork.

Some of the work winds back to familiar forms. The hanging sculpture WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT (2024)—elaborately beaded and adorned with fringe that spills onto the floor in the black, white, yellow, and red colors of the medicine wheel—revisits a series of punching bag pieces that Gibson started working on in 2010, when he found a form that evoked the anger he felt around matters of race, class, and bodily disconnection. An interactive sculpture that shares its title with that of Gibson’s pavilion as a whole—the space in which to place me (2024)—echoes a 2022 project for which he invited Indigenous people to populate empty monument pedestals in front of the Portland Art Museum.

Activation is a key component of Gibson’s practice, in which performance and pedagogy play pivotal roles. In June the Pavilion will host the Venice Indigenous Arts School, a series of public programs focused on key terminology and concepts in Indigenous arts, arranged by the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. “An example would be various terms for weather that take into consideration how weather affects the whole process of making art and putting it out there,” said Mario A. Caro, director of the Institute’s studio arts MFA program, who organized the event. “Weather informs the ways in which traditional materials would be gathered and processed. And by ‘weather,’ we don’t just mean ecology or environmental issues—weather really talks about a relation between the people and the land.” Another part of the program, in October, will explore connections between Indigenous cultures in North America and around the world, in partnership with Bard College, where Gibson teaches.

With a global audience set to engage his work at the Venice Biennale, Gibson said he had charged himself with continuing to position his own past, present, and future in relation to a prism of Indigenous histories and ideas. The task has been daunting, he said. But it is also catalyzing in ways he hopes will carry over. “I don’t identify as a frontline activist,” Gibson said. “But we are all politicized for how we are seen. We are also advocating for our political selves, and those political selves are rooted in our ancestry and our heritages.”

When looking over images of his Venice works in his schoolhouse studio a few months back, Gibson paused at a large bird sculpture with rainbow-colored plumage rendered in a riotous mix of materials including glass beads, rose quartz, and metallic sequins. Its title is if there is no struggle there is no progress (2024), a quotation from a speech by Frederick Douglass, and it is one of two such birds in the Pavilion.

“They’re based in the Tuscarora tradition of beaded whimsies,” Gibson said. “The bird was one of the primary forms they used to try to appeal to Victorian tastes, but they were seen as neither Native enough nor not-Native enough. I encountered them at the Field Museum and felt very much akin to them because they’re somewhere in between all these different kinds of cultural traditions. That’s how the birds work.”  

This article appears under the title “Hide and Seek” in the Summer 2024 “Icons” issue, pp. 56–63.

Related Articles

In Radiant Paintings and Beaded Extravaganzas, Jeffrey Gibson Remixes Native American Histories

Pierre Huyghe Takes on AI and Nonhuman Evolution in Venice

All the Icon artists in this issue, to a greater or lesser degree, have had to wait for the world to be truly ready for their work—in essence, to catch up with them. For Fred Eversley, it took half a century for discrimination against Black artists to fade, to enable him to produce his parabolic sculptures on a large scale. The art world had to evolve to acclaim ceramics, a medium that was often associated more with craft, before Arlene Shechet saw her artworks positioned on a global stage. Joan Snyder practiced patience until ambitious painting by women began to earn appreciation the same way that men’s did before she started to draw the attention she deserves. And Shahzia Sikander’s miniature painting awaited recognition as an avant-garde approach before she could begin to expand her practice.

In the meantime, these artists didn’t wait at all, of course: they made work, got it shown, and, slowly but surely, produced the change they hoped to see. The profiles of these artists all showcase one essential trait for iconic artists: a profound perseverance.

As we celebrate these towering figures, we mourn another: the sculptor Richard Serra, who died in March. Serra’s works were the most aggressive, imposing, and deeply memorable of the Post-Minimalists. In an Appreciation of the artist, Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, a curator at Dia Art Foundation, writes that the scale of Serra’s famous Torqued Ellipses “is more than can be fully comprehended, and their materiality attracts a kind of bodily engagement that is entirely their own.”

Finally, to mark the 150th anniversary of Impressionism, art historian Kelly Presutti offers readers a Syllabus of lively and informative books—including recent volumes that expand the scope of the movement that changed painting forever and launched a thousand blockbusters. Study up, and you might just be ready for the latest one: “Paris 1874: Inventing Impressionism,” which runs through July 14 at the Musée d’Orsay.

FEATURES

Hide and Seek
Jeffrey Gibson puts Native American culture on poignant display in the Venice Biennale’s US Pavilion.
by Andy Battaglia

Don’t Box Her In
On the eve of a career retrospective, Shahzia Sikander continues to elude categorization.
by Eleanor Heartney

Full Circle
In 1967, Fred Eversley left a job with NASA to become an artist. Now, he’s finally realizing ideas 50 years in the making.
by Emily Watlington

Work Hard Play Hard
Eccentric sculptor Arlene Shechet makes her recalcitrant materials feel fresh and alive.
by Glenn Adamson

Painting the Roses Red
Joan Snyder’s searching canvases cast her as an uncompromising creator both in and out of control.
by Barry Schwabsky

DEPARTMENTS

Datebook
A highly discerning list of things to experience over the next three months.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Hard Truths
An artist rues downsizing his studio, and another wanders into unwanted political territory. Plus, an interactive quiz.
by Chen & Lampert

Sightlines
Multidisciplinary creator Miranda July tells us what she likes.
by Francesca Aton

Inquiry
A Q&A with Joyce J. Scott about her pointed and playful provocations.
by Andy Battaglia

Object Lesson
An annotation of Tomashi Jackson’s Here at the Western World (Professor Windham’s Early 1970’s Classroom & the 1972 Second Baptist Church Choir).
by Francesca Aton

Battle Royale
Italy vs. Greece—two summer vacation art destinations face off.
by the Editors of A.i.A.

Syllabus
A reading list for a crash course on Impressionism.
by Kelly Presutti

Appreciation
A tribute to Richard Serra, a sculptor without peer.
by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi

New Talent
Singaporean photographer and filmmaker Charmaine Poh confronts trade-offs between visibility and protection.
by Clara Che Wei Peh

Issues & Commentary
AI imagery is inciting widespread paranoia. Can art historians help?
by Sonja Drimmer

Spotlight
Mexican painter María Izquierdo is finally getting the attention she deserves.
by Edward J. Sullivan

Book Review
A reading of Claire Bishop’s Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today.
by Emily Watlington

Cover Artist
Jeffrey Gibson talks about her artwork featured on the front of A.i.A.

REVIEWS

Lagos
Lagos Diary
by Emmanuel Iduma

New York
The 2024 Whitney Biennial
by Emily Watlington

“Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning”
by Jenny Wu

Metz
“Lacan, the exhibition. When art meets psychoanalysis”
by Brian Ng

Venice
“Pierre Huyghe: Liminal”
by Eleanor Heartney

Cape Town
“Esther Mahlangu: Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting”
by Nkgopoleng Moloi

As told to A.i.A. I was listening to music hunting for words to use in my work and came across this disco song, “Born to Be Alive,” by Patrick Hernandez from 1978. As a mix of different kinds of musics—and a place for LGBTQIA2S+ histories—disco was so divisive at the time. People were burning disco records with the same kind of agenda behind books being banned now. The lyrics to this song are explicitly about not only demanding to be able to be alive but also total self-affirmation that says, “I am supposed to exist.” This was a time when Latino, Black, and white people, primarily, were coming together to make a new sound and a new environment that allowed LGBTQIA2S+ communities to come together. This one-hit wonder that some people might dismiss was actually politically provocative in a way that things from a queer aesthetic—like kitsch or camp—are sometimes criticized or invalidated for having too much color.

Related Articles

Joan Semmel Details Her Painting on A.i.A.’s Latest Cover

Henry Taylor, Art in America’s Winter 2023 Cover Artist, on Painting His 65th Birthday

Beaded faces in my work started a while ago. I was thinking about when we look at prehistoric drawings, like petroglyphs, and how, when we see faces, we try to understand what they were drawing. Some people think they are gods, or spirits. Some think they are aliens. We don’t always entirely know what the images are. I was thinking about that and wondered, What does this offer me?

When I started making garments of my own, I was looking at ceremonial garments, and oftentimes there would be paintings of faces or different kinds of iconography on them. I started wondering, How do I create my own personal iconography, or my own personal symbolism? That’s when I realized it would be my own work. Us not knowing specifically what these faces were gave me license to invent a face that I didn’t really know.

By the time I came to Born to Be Alive, I got over thinking I had to work with any one particular kind of bead. The blue bead in the pupils of the eyes is a Czech bead. Those are freshwater pearls around the outside of the eyes. The teeth are all amethyst, and the nose is an arrowhead. And then the frame is made with crow beads from India. Everything else is glass beads: seed beads and pony beads. They all carry their own kind of indulgences.

The language that Native people have worked with has always been anything that is available to us. I can access that now from anywhere. 

There has, however, been one thing missing: color. Walk around the grounds and you’ll see sculptures in many materials—wood, stone, bronze, plenty of Corten steel—but hardly anything painted. If there’s paint, it’s bound to be bright red, the most aggressive possible choice against so much green. Where are all the other colors? Arlene Shechet asked herself this question when she was commissioned to make an exhibition for Storm King, where, as she said in her studio in January, “there are so many works I love, which I’ve learned from, and works I don’t love, which I’ve also learned from.”

The result, unveiled just this May, is a suite of six monumental sculptures called “Girl Group.” The title announces, in no uncertain terms, the arrival of a feminist sensibility in a historically male-dominated site. Though made of steel and aluminum, the works unfurl like fabric in a stiff wind. One sculpture, titled Maiden May, is executed in emerald greens and raw aluminum. Another, As April, has lemon yellow as its dominant tone, with accents in chartreuse. A third, Midnight, stretches billboard-size across a hilltop, a lavish composition in orange and rosy pink. It’s a palette more often encountered on the fashion runway, or in Mannerist painting, than in modern sculpture.

These knockout works are only the latest, if possibly the greatest, evidence of Shechet’s insatiable curiosity. She has a way of continually noticing her own blind spots—and those of the prevailing art world—and illuminating the unseen possibilities they hold. Though well known for mixed-media sculptures that assert themselves powerfully in space, never before has she worked at the scale of “Girl Group.” To achieve it, Shechet collaborated with five specialized fabricators near her studio in Upstate New York, the collaborations requiring a leap of faith. She is always looking to solve new problems: “To be an artist,” she says, “means to be alive with learning.”

THIS KIND OF CURIOSITY has rendered Shechet’s career anything but predictable. She was born in 1951, in Forest Hills, a leafy middle-class enclave in the Queens borough of New York City. Her father was an accountant, her mother, a former librarian and an artist in her own right—a frustrated one. She had studied at Hunter College and maintained a studio in the basement of their family home, but was discouraged from pursuing a career by the gender norms of the time. Nevertheless, she exposed her daughter to art at a young age. They made drawings together, and took regular trips to the Museum of Modern Art. On one occasion, Shechet stood in awe before Robert Motherwell’s 11-foot-wide painting Elegy to the Spanish Republic (1965–67) as her mother wondered what her child might be seeing in that gigantic, Rorschach-like abstraction.

The answer, it turned out, was the future. “That experience turned me on to the possibility that you could exist on a level that’s not concrete,” she told the magazine Upstate Diary in 2017. “More ethereal, more unexplainable, more mysterious, stranger worlds which were far from the bourgeois world I was brought up in.” As a teenager in the 1960s, she considered a career in political activism—such a thing seemed possible in those days—after bouncing from one college campus to another: Skidmore, Sarah Lawrence, a semester in Paris, Stanford, and then NYU. Finally, at RISD, she committed to being an artist, this being the one profession that could contain her boundless curiosity, and allow her to continue exploring multiple lines of inquiry.

After graduating in 1978, Shechet stayed on to teach at RISD; seven years later, she took up a position at the Parsons School of Design. Meanwhile, she met and married Mark Epstein, a man of gentle wisdom who is a prominent writer on the interconnected subjects of Buddhist meditation and psychoanalysis. They have two children, Will (a successful musician) and Sonia (a curator at the Museum of the Moving Image). Up until 1995, when she left Parsons, Shechet had to balance studio time with teaching and child-rearing. She was constantly making work but had little opportunity to show it.

Her first breakout moment came when she was in her 40s: a series of plaster Buddhas, modest in scale but potent in affect, with surfaces expressively embellished with skins of paint, somewhat reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s early Pop still lifes. In lieu of conventional plinths, she would set them on furniture she found on the street, “the Western, funky version of the lotus the Buddha sits upon.” In parallel, she was making vessel forms and square mandalas. Their blue-and-white palette referenced blueprints, and they could pass for Chinese porcelain or Dutch delftware from 50 feet away, though they were actually cast in pigmented abaca paper, a process she developed at Dieu Donné Papermill in Brooklyn.

In the ’90s, Shechet’s work clearly reflected the intellectual and spiritual interests she shared with her husband. (The title of his 1998 book, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart, could be an apt description of her artistic practice, both then and since.) These weren’t, however, interests shared by the art world at the time. Commodity-based conceptualism—alternately bone-chilling and extravagantly self-regarding—was the order of the day: think of Cady Noland, Rosemarie Trockel, and Jason Rhoades, whose versions of sculpture made frequent use of found objects. In this environment, Shechet’s commitment to craftsmanship and her otherworldly iconography could not have been less in step. (About the only positive feedback she got, at first, was from fellow artist Kiki Smith, who liked how unfashionable the work was.) With the passage of time, this early work of Shechet’s has come to seem increasingly prescient as other spiritual women artists, like Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton, have finally gotten their due.

SHECHET’S INTEREST IN Buddhism may seem surprising to those who know her. Prolific, social, and hyper-verbal, she hardly comes across as a stereotypical Zen personality. But as anyone who has looked into the matter will know, Buddhist teachings are entirely compatible with explosive, ambitious creativity. The true path need be neither straight nor narrow. “What I really came to understand was that the radically non-judgmental Buddhist idea was an essential insight for how to behave in the studio,” Shechet told the Brooklyn Rail in 2015. “I just don’t fall into a place where I’m so comfortable that I start making what I already know too well.”

It was only in the aughts, when she began working in clay, that Shechet fully realized the possibilities of this principle of “non-attachment.” She had encountered ceramics in art school, but felt no attraction to it, partly because, at the time, she saw the department at RISD as mired in its own parochial issues. She had, however, explored the typology of the vessel form in her cast paper works, recognizing its metaphorical connection to both life and death—“the domestic equivalent of the stupa, the sacred space,” as she says.

Shechet began thinking too about how we use vessels to sustain ourselves, and ultimately place our remains in them. These latent associations came to the fore after she, horrifyingly, witnessed the first plane slam into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. She happened to be walking across the Brooklyn Bridge just as it took place. In the months that followed, living in Tribeca, she felt as if she were inhabiting a crematorium. Her ultimate response was a powerful work called Building, shown at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle in 2003; it comprised numerous cast porcelain vessels with smudged, ashy surfaces. “I invented an idea of painting into the plaster molds with grey and black glazes and stains,” Shechet explained, “and then the porcelain was cast in those molds over and over until they turned white.” The works hauntingly capture presence and disappearance in a kind of anti-monument to the events of 9/11.

This initial foray into clay was done in collaboration with the ceramics program at the University of Washington, led by Japanese American artist Akio Takamori; the forms in Building were wheel-thrown by the students. It was only in 2006 that Shechet began working sculpturally with the medium on her own: ever exploring, she found this generative technique fairly late in her career. In art world terms, though, she was once again an early adopter. Despite the achievements of such figures as Lucio Fontana and Peter Voulkos, whom she greatly admires, clay was still widely devalued. “Very little had been explored,” she has said. “I could look at it almost as if no one had thought about it before.”

Shechet began teaching herself to build complex forms by hand, and investigating the vast alchemy of ceramic glazing. A solo exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, in 2007, served as the coming-out party for this new body of work—and, in retrospect, a whole new era in American ceramic sculpture. As Roberta Smith noted in a review for the New York Times, Shechet’s works seemed all but “debt-free” in their relationship to previous sculpture: “sexy, devout, ugly and beautiful all at the same time.” She might have added “alien,” for they came across as previously unknown life-forms, bladders with distended limbs and tentacular appendages. They seemed to reach out, to breathe in, to quietly digest. Some had cloudlike forms atop them, like cartoon thought bubbles. The sensitively modeled surfaces, sheathed in black and gold glazes, enhanced the impression of emergent sentience.

It was immediately clear that Shechet was on to something big. Her new body of work helped inspire—and played a starring role in—the genre-shifting 2009 exhibition “Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay,” curated by Jenelle Porter and Ingrid Schaffner at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. (I served as an external adviser for the project; Porter would later curate Shechet’s first museum retrospective, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.) At the same time, Shechet was expanding her productive capacity. She and Mark bought a place in Woodstock, a modernist building, unusual in that neck of the woods, designed by architect James Mayer in 1964. Shechet established a studio there, and also set about transforming the surrounding landscape: wild thyme and moss instead of lawn, a green roof atop the house.

These new arrangements had a decisive impact on Shechet’s work. She now had the space to create (and fire) larger ceramic elements, and neighborhood access to chunks of raw timber, which became a key part of her vocabulary. These days, she also operates an even larger studio in nearby Kingston, shuttling back and forth between the two. This literal division of labor might drive some artists to distraction, but she finds it helpful. It allows her a constantly refreshed, un-precious, and “non-attached” view of her own practice.

Generative discontinuity does seem to be the one given for Shechet—it is, quite literally, her working method. She always has multiple sculptures going at once, and often cannibalizes her own work, incorporating remnants from past compositions in a perpetual chain of association. In some works, like All in All (2016), she stacks up components cast from one another in different materials. Normally, her scale approximates that of the human body, lending the works an anthropomorphic effect, and encouraging what Shechet calls a “body to body” relationship. Her titles, which are fantastic, often emphasize the idea of sculpture as a verb: Ripple and Ruffle (2020), Deep Dive (2020), Day In Day Out (2020), With Wet (2022), Teasing and Squeezing (2022).

Shechet’s forms, meanwhile, tend toward the totemic, with purposeful confusions between the sculpture proper and the base that holds it off the floor. Metal, wood, and ceramic elements, usually in a combination of raw and brightly colored surface treatments, are choreographed into elegantly disjunctive arrangements, as if they’d slip-slided into felicitous alignment. The sculptures feel fast, fresh. Given that she is dealing with such recalcitrant materials, it takes a huge effort to keep them that way.

SHECHET’S WORK HARD/PLAY HARD AESTHETIC is also evident in her curatorial work, which began in the 2010s as a sideline, but has grown into a major aspect of her practice. As with her plinths, it can be hard to say just where her curating stops, and her art starts. It began with a two-year residency (from 2012–14) at Meissen, the fabled porcelain manufactory near Dresden. Here, in the 18th century, an alchemist finally cracked the porcelain code, and Europeans at last had direct access to the coveted material, previously imported from China at fabulous expense. Granted access to the Meissen archive—including its impressive repository of casting molds—Shechet plunged in and eventually emerged with a whole new artistic vocabulary, in which the manufactory’s refined, traditional wares seemed caught in flagrante delicto, a veritable orgy of figurines and functional forms in slapstick, sometimes mutually penetrating, positions. She made molds of molds, slip-casted plaster in porcelain, and manipulated their. conventions even as she studied them rigorously.

This hilarious virtuosic body of work has taken on a life of its own over the past decade, partly because decorative art curators have seen in it an opportunity to reanimate their dormant collections. In a series of exhibitions at the RISD Museum, the Frick Collection, and most recently, the Harvard Art Museums, Shechet has playfully installed her associative configurations alongside historic porcelains, making antiques seem strange and new again. Shechet has also curated other artists’ work—notably in “From Here On Now” at the Phillips Collection (2016–17), “Ways of Seeing” at the Drawing Center (2021–22), and “STUFF at Pace Gallery” (2022)—but her most significant acts of arrangement are of her own sculpture.

In 2018 Shechet made another jump in her career and expanded her reputation as an artist’s artist when she joined the gallery giant Pace. “My artists have always talked about her,” Pace CEO Marc Glimcher told ARTnews at the time. “Hers are the kind of shows where artists come back with their minds expanded.” Since then, she has been getting more and more opportunities to place her work where it will be encountered by what she calls “random humanity.” Here again, the friction of chance encounters proves generative. For her project at Madison Square Park in New York, Full Steam Ahead (2018–19), she emptied a central fountain, turning it into a sort of playground for art works and visitors alike. Nearby, a sculpture in carved wood called Forward lounged on a short flight of steps, like a Henry Moore having a cigarette break. When kids climbed up on to its lap, it somehow seemed complete.

The Storm King setting is much less chaotic. In order to encourage a restful interactivity suited to the site, Shechet provided custom seating of her own design. This gracious gesture recognizes visitors as people out for a relaxing day, rather than hardened souls on an art pilgrimage. But to be sure, the real invitation comes from “Girl Group”itself. Shechet describes the six sculptures as “grappling energy,” which accurately captures the way they inhabit space. The scale and materiality are different from her previous sculpture, but her trademark thrilling, vertiginous instability remains. Above all, this is an installation to enjoy—to post on Instagram, yes, but more important, to travel around, under, and around again, in a landscape now punctuated with joyful, sophisticated colors.

True to her conviction that the most important part of making art is what you learn from it, the making of “Girl Group”has involved just this sort of active search, an iterative back-and-forth of digital and analog techniques: on-screen renderings and paper studies, technical drawings, and industrial-scale metalwork. Linear elements, threading through and whipping round the volumes, feel drawn in midair. All told, Shechet has had ample opportunity to be inside the work, in both mind and body. At a certain point she was at one of her fabricators’ shops, surrounded by the sublime complexity of what she herself had created. “I know every inch of these things,” she thought to herself, “and yet I felt like I didn’t know anything. The sculptures were so large they had become unfamiliar to me.” In Shechet’s view, that was a mark of success. For how could she, or anyone else, learn something from sculpture, if it were not more than meets the eye?  

The way these pieces are displayed, however, changed vastly. The history of modernism and postwar art has long been peopled almost entirely by white men, from Henri Matisse to Jackson Pollock, and the small sampling of the AKG collection formerly presented to the public reflected that slant. The rehang following the four-year closure runs counter to the notion.

The Pop gallery featured the requisite Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist paintings, but at its center was a sculpture by Marisol, a Venezuelan American woman artist whose estate the museum acquired in 2016. The gallery devoted to perceptual abstraction contained dizzying paintings by Burgoyne Diller and Max Bill, but it also had a smattering of pieces by women, including Swiss painter Verena Loewensberg. The acknowledged greats of contemporary art—Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer—were given pride of place, but so were Indigenous artists whose art historical status is less cemented, like Seneca painter G. Peter Jemison and Kalaaleq and Danish artist Pia Arke.

The Marisol sculpture and the Loewensberg painting are the kind of unexpected objects viewers have learned to expect in US museums these days, which have begun dramatically reshaping their permanent collection galleries, drawing out new conceptions of recent art history in the process. Gone are the days when such galleries remained static, with masterpieces rarely ever leaving the walls. Now, it is more common for those masterpieces to share space with lesser-known works by women and artists of color. A leveling is taking place in the permanent collection galleries of museums like the AKG that, in the 20th century, helped write the history of modern and contemporary art, which they are now engaged in dismantling.

In 2019, AS THE BUFFALO AKG was closing its doors for construction, the Museum of Modern Art in New York embarked on a landmark permanent collection rehang that would set the tone for museums going forward. Inaugurating a new set of galleries, MoMA’s remit was to dramatically diversify its presentations and regularly switch them out, so that nearly all the works that appeared in 2019 would be changed within the coming years. Thus, MoMA curators wanted to spotlight areas of art history that had rarely been shown before in New York. New York Times critic Holland Cotter devised a term for the newly enlarged canon that MoMA had envisioned: “Modernism Plus.”

Masterpieces of modernism, like Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, went back on the walls. But alongside them were new faces. Les Demoiselles was paired with Faith Ringgold’s American People Series #20: Die (1967), depicting a confrontation between Black and white people in which they all become entangled amid spatters of blood. Prior to 2019, MoMA visitors had become accustomed to a rigid chronological structure that roughly conformed to museum founder Alfred H. Barr’s modernist trajectory. The inclusion of the Ringgold work, painted 60 years after the Picasso, was a tear in the fabric of the very history MoMA had written.

Art historian Michael Lobel told the Times ahead of the reinstallation’s opening that MoMA was “moving away from ideas like ‘masterpieces’ and ‘breakthroughs,’ to a kind of art history of dispersion.” And to judge by the changed installations since the pandemic, those words continue to hold true. Last year, a gallery of Surrealist art held beloved works by René Magritte and Joan Miró alongside Bitches Brew, a 2010 painting by German artist Jutta Koether that features swirls of pink acrylic, plus a red mesh and cutesy keychains. In a gallery focused on Pop, Warhol paintings shared walls with Untitled (Ears), a 1964 piece by Japanese artist Tomio Miki, who cast his ear in aluminum and set some two dozen copies of the resulting object in a grid. In a gallery loosely themed around feminist art, the protagonists were not well-known white feminists like Louise Bourgeois and Carolee Schneemann, but two recent entrants to MoMA’s collection, Lebanese painter Huguette Caland and Sudanese painter Kamala Ibrahim Ishag.

FOR MOMA TO DO SUCH a game-changing rehang was influential precisely because the museum had authored the history of European modernism in the first place. That history provided a template for museums the world over: Post-Impressionism gives way to Fauvism, Cubism leads to Constructivism, and so on. Barr, the museum’s first director, devised a collection that reflected that progression, which he later mapped via an influential diagram that plotted how artists arrived at the accomplishment of total abstraction. Barr called MoMA’s holdings “a torpedo moving through time, its nose the ever advancing present, its tail the ever receding past of 50 to 100 years ago.” (The torpedo, as it were, actually gained its momentum in Buffalo in 1926, when the AKG, then known as the Albright Art Gallery, acquired Picasso’s La Toilette. The board of trustees objected so strongly to the piece that they blasted director A. Conger Goodyear, who’d agreed to the purchase. Goodyear, tarred by “one or two of the Trustees, who were opposed to modern art,” as he later put it in a letter to a colleague, was not chosen for reelection, and hightailed it to a more progressive institution: he was board president of MoMA from its founding in 1929 until 1939.)

Barr’s “torpedo” was not merely a metaphor. Because he was obsessed with charts, it was a diagram too. His crudely drawn underwater weapon was placed on an art historical continuum, with its small tail containing Francisco Goya and John Constable and its big head engulfing the School of Paris, plus amorphous entities that he labeled “Rest of Europe” and “Mexicans.” The torpedo notably did not include Latin Americans, Asians, Africans, or Indigenous artists. Nor, for the most part, did the 1936 map of modernism that Barr produced for “Cubism and Abstract Art,” a MoMA show mounted that same year.

By his own admission, Barr strove to impose order during what he perceived as a chaotic artistic moment. “Since the war,” he wrote in 1934, “art has become an affair of immense and confusing variety, of obscurities and contradictions, of the emergence of new principles and the renascence of old ones.” His goal, in constructing his diagrams, was to cut through the noise and generate some authority for the museum. And he did so by adding to the collection pieces like Monet’s Water Lilies, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Dalí’s Persistence of Memory, half of Jacob Lawrence’s “Migration Series,” Diego Rivera’s murals. That meant leaving out a lot of art by women and artists of color that didn’t fit within the confines of his maps.

As the 20th century wore on, steps were taken to undo some of Barr’s closed-mindedness. Kirk Varnedoe, who served as chief curator of painting and sculpture during the ’90s, attempted to expand how MoMA showed European modernism by looking beyond France and the US, adding works to the collection by Russians, Germans, and Italians who had not previously made the cut. He also enlarged MoMA’s holdings from the ’60s and ’70s, acquiring James Rosenquist’s epic painting F-111 (1964–65), which is still afforded a gallery of its own.

While lauded by critics, Varnedoe’s reshaped collection galleries did not go far enough for some. In 1997 the Guerrilla Girls, a feminist artist collective, surveyed MoMA’s painting and sculpture galleries, and determined that a paltry 9 percent of the offerings were by white women; the survey found that not a single work on view was by a woman of color. Later on, the picture looked even worse. When art historian Maura Reilly surveyed the permanent galleries after a 2004 reinstallation, she found that just 4 percent of the art displayed was by women, and even less than that by women of color.

To some degree, the exclusionist sensibility was encoded in MoMA’s DNA. Art historians Charlotte Barat and Darby English put it this way in 2019, in their vital book Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, published by MoMA: “Long touted as a global center of modernism, MoMA, in its elected isolation within (white) Euro-American cultural traditions, contributed mightily to the impression that figures and practices linked to other traditions—regardless of their deep ties to its own—fell outside its scope of concern.”

Take the case of sculptor William Edmondson, the first Black artist to have a solo show at MoMA, in 1937. The museum bought none of the works in the exhibition, though most were available for sale. The museum even displayed one of his works on long-term loan from a collector during the ’40s, but did not acquire one until 2017. So, for those 80 years, MoMA’s permanent collection galleries did not reflect Edmondson’s contribution to the history of modern art that Barr himself had written.

IF MOMA’S HISTORY of European modernism was the blueprint for museums in the past, its rehang is a model for the present, and the future. MoMA’s “Modernism Plus” approach has informed permanent collection rehangs at museums well beyond the AKG. This past September, when the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) in Washington, D.C., opened its doors after a renovation, a 2002 Nam June Paik video installation resembling a map of the United States—a crowd-pleaser, labeled an “electronic masterpiece” by SAAM itself two years ago—cohabited with a 1969 sculpture of a burning man by Luis Jiménez, a pioneer of the Chicano art movement and a far lesser-known artist.

The Jiménez works in the SAAM hang are not that dissimilar to the Pia Arke and Martin Wong paintings at the AKG, or even those by Tomio Miki and Huguette Caland at MoMA. All these artists share belated invitations to a party previously open only to those who had been canonized. And that trend is gathering steam.

In an interview, Henriette Huldisch, a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis who is now rehanging that collection, proposed a word for it, polyvocalism. Consider these rehangs a chorus of artists speaking together: before, soloists had the stage, transfixing rapt audiences while the chorus was occasionally allowed to chime in.

But what happens when that chorus grows too loud, making it hard to hear individual voices? This was the question critics across the pond posed last year, when London’s Tate Britain unveiled a rehang unlike any other in its history.

Many who come to Tate Britain still expect to see gems of British art history: J.M.W. Turner’s fog-swept seascapes, Constable’s quaint images of the English countryside, Henry Moore’s sculptures of lithe bodies abstracted to a point of near unrecognition. Those works have almost always been readily available at Tate Britain, where they have long occupied a central position. But when Tate Britain announced a rehang in 2022, billing it as the first time the institution had significantly revamped its collection galleries in a decade, it was immediately evident that big changes were afoot.

Turner’s paintings still had their own room, but now, 17th-century portraitist Joan Carlile, who some scholars believe to be the first professional female artist in England, was accorded a similar space. Constable, too, enjoyed an individual gallery, but so would Guyanese-born painter Aubrey Williams, a key figure of the postwar era. Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson called this rehang “a new way of seeing British art history,” telling the Art Newspaper “we wanted to include all of the Tate’s great favourites, but also offer a whole host of new discoveries.”

When the rehang opened last spring, however, British critics were far less enthusiastic, and some responded with vitriol, accusing the museum of having placed politics before art. Jackie Wullschläger, writing for the Financial Times, singled out a 2013 Sonia E Barrett sculpture composed of a smashed-up chair, a reference to mahogany furniture made by enslaved people in the Caribbean and then sent eastward. She deemed the work’s presence at the center of a gallery containing paintings by William Hogarth and Canaletto “nonsense insulting to pioneering, democratic painters and to audiences.” For ArtReview critic J.J. Charlesworth, the problem was not the inclusion of works like Barrett’s, but that the curators found nothing to say with them. He accused Tate Britain of constructing a “zombie social art history.”

Not everyone took the same tack as Wullschläger and Charlesworth—“You can’t please everyone all of the time and there’s no pleasing some people,” wrote Laura Freeman in the Times of London—but it was notable that their reactions, and those of other critics, focused so heavily on the historical greats of Tate Britain’s collection. There was a sense that, in making way for artists like Carlile and Williams, Turner and Constable had been effectively sidelined. If the stars of art history no longer mattered, was it even necessary to have a canon? Had the age of the radical rehang gone too far?

By the time Tate Britain opened its new presentation, Charles Saumarez Smith, former director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, had sounded an alarm. In a 2021 book documenting the evolution of art museums since MoMA’s founding, he included the reorganization of permanent collections in a list of four ways museums were “under attack,” writing of an “assault on the canon: the acceptance that all forms of selection and hierarchy are temporary and ephemeral, the product of cultural choice rather than of universal values, and that certain types and categories of artists have been excluded. Belief in an overarching master narrative, a coherent way of structuring and ordering the history of art through a belief in greatness, has gone.”

Curators, especially at American institutions, are undeterred by such warnings, and prefer to listen to their audiences. “We are beholden, as an institution, to tell the story as we know it, but also to poke holes in that story or interject some footnotes,” Holly E. Hughes, senior curator for the collection at the AKG, said in an interview. “We can keep telling the same story over and over again, and that’s fine. But I don’t think that’s what people want.”

Call it an “assault,” as Saumarez Smith does, or term it headway, as Hughes might. The fact remains that permanent collections are changing, as are the ways they are being shown. That will only continue this year at MoMA. Say farewell to a gallery filled with Ellsworth Kelly’s sketchbooks; in August a mini-survey of work by Romare Bearden will replace it. Elsewhere in the building, a gallery devoted to works about labor by Charles Sheeler, August Sander, and Aleksandr Rodchenko, will give way, after two years on view, to a show themed around the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The central work in that new gallery will be Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), an essayistic feature film about Langston Hughes and his circle that is regarded as a landmark in the history of queer cinema.

No doubt, Barr’s modernist torpedo will continue to shoot through the oceans of art history, now more often navigating depths previously uncharted. Originally designed to move only forward, its new settings have it swerving every which way in an effort to account for all the non-Western, non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual artists who didn’t make the original cut. What becomes of modernism, pulled by so many currents at once, is anyone’s guess, but MoMA’s permanent collection presentations should continue to provide clues.  

This article appears under the title “Perpetual motion” in the Spring 2024 issue, pp. 82–87.

Izquierdo features in the 2024 Venice Biennale’s “Foreigners Everywhere” exhibition curated by Adriano Pedrosa, and she was the subject of the first monographic exhibition by a Mexican woman artist in New York. Near the end of 1930, Frances Flynn Paine, an entrepreneur and enthusiastic promoter of Mexican art, organized a show at The Art Center in Manhattan, where she was director. At the same time, Izquierdo and her then partner Rufino Tamayo were included in “Mexican Arts,” a traveling exhibition (organized by future Museum of Modern Art director René d’Harnoncourt) that began at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and later traveled to 13 other venues in the United States. Izquierdo’s work was also seen in the 1939 MoMA exhibition “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art.”

Many of Izquierdo’s subjects paralleled those of Kahlo, and both artists helped strengthen the influence of Mexican popular arts. But while Izquierdo has been treated to a number of academic books, essays, and solo shows over the past two decades, there have been no blockbuster exhibitions, no “immersive experience” spectacles, and certainly no feature films starring Salma Hayek. So why is María not as familiar as Frida?

The answer is both simple and complex. At age 14 Izquierdo entered an arranged marriage to a military officer, and soon had three children. A strong-willed individual, she left the marriage and moved to Mexico City, where she began studies at the National Academy of Fine Arts with some of the stars of the contemporary post-Revolutionary art scene, including Diego Rivera—who called Izquierdo “my favorite pupil.”

As a single mother following her four-year relationship with Tamayo, she did not have the archetype of a “strong man” like Rivera (Kahlo’s husband, and the quintessence of Mexican machismo) behind her to burnish her reputation. More than that, Rivera played a notably destructive role in Izquierdo’s career: in the mid-1940s, he and David Alfaro Siqueiros conspired to block her from executing a commission the municipality of Mexico City had awarded her for a city hall mural. Only a few watercolors and pencil drawings of this unexecuted project remain.

After the Mexican Revolution ended in 1920, a complex new phase of culture, with all its messy contours, began. Gone was the almost slavish admiration for French styles in literature, music, art, and fashion that characterized the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (who effectively ruled Mexico from 1877 to 1911, with a short hiatus between 1880 and 1884). The heritage of pre-Hispanic arts and the incorporation of popular subject matter, derived in part from studies of both Indigenous and self-trained artists, were among the stimuli to which Izquierdo and others of her generation responded. Izquierdo worked for the most part on a modest scale, unlike the best-known muralists of the late 1920s through the 1950s: Rivera, Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, and numerous others whose art quickly garnered attention well beyond Mexico.

An interest in scenes of smalltown Mexican life and, especially, views of circus performers, defined Izquierdo’s early phase. In these images, mostly small watercolors painted in the 1930s (of which about 45 remain), she concentrates on female horse trainers and tightrope walkers, in tribute to her earliest childhood memories. San Juan de los Lagos, her birthplace, was a center for trade, with a popular annual fair that provided the occasion for itinerant circuses to visit. The appearance of the Virgin Mary now venerated in the Basilica is even said to have occurred after a circus performance in the 1610s, when a young girl with knife wounds was healed by the miraculous apparition.

Izquierdo’s modest artworks might be the antithesis of male artists’ “heroic” historicizing murals and grand figural compositions for the way they depicted female agency and physical feats. One of Izquierdo’s few works in a US collection—White Horsewoman, also known as Circus Bareback Rider (1932), belonging to the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas at Austin—is a fine example of these themes in its depiction of a woman in a white tutu balancing barefoot on the back of a pony, holding a flexible red baton. It also demonstrates the artist’s characteristic use of subdued color, in this case brown, earthy reds, and grayish whites. These were the years when Izquierdo and Tamayo were close both personally and stylistically; Tamayo employed a similar color scheme in many of his ’30s-era paintings, demonstrating the synergy of back-and-forth inspiration (and also belying the clichéd notion of Mexican painting in this period relying on pinks, fuchsias, greens, reds, and other stereotypical “local” colors).

At the same time, Izquierdo was creating still lifes that combined traditional and contemporary elements: Still Life. The Photographic Camera, 1931, depicts a wooden chair of a kind found in working-class homes in Mexico, a guitar, and a ceramic vessel resting on its seat along with a very modern Kodak Brownie camera. The Telephone, another work from the same year, shows a tabletop with a book, an inkwell, and a telephone.

A number of her self-portraits from the 1940s feature Izquierdo clad in long dresses with a classically Mexican shawl (rebozo) draped around her back—a style of fashion that harked back to both Indigenous and Spanish colonial forms of self-display. Izquierdo’s self-portraits almost always present their creator in a somewhat formal, even stilted manner. They are often enigmatic, as if she were striving to present as few clues as possible to her inner life.

In 1936 Izquierdo met Antonin Artaud, the French artist, writer, and sometime member of André Breton’s Surrealist circle, who had arrived in Mexico in January and stayed less than a year. He was determined to investigate what, according to poet and diplomat Octavio Paz, he called the “real Mexico,” and spent time in the northern state of Chihuahua with the Tarahumara Indigenous peoples, with whom he experimented with hallucinogenic drugs such as peyote. Back in Mexico City, Artaud declared his new friend Izquierdo to be the most “indigenous” artist in the country. This was more or less nonsensical, as Izquierdo had no claims to indigeneity, but Artaud, in his fervor to associate anything Mexican with the “primitive,” was moved to define her that way.

Shortly after he returned to France, Artaud organized an exhibition of Izquierdo’s watercolors (most of which have disappeared) at the Galerie van den Berg, in Paris. These activities parallel interactions between Kahlo and Breton, who visited Mexico in 1938 and declared Kahlo to be a true Surrealist. Was Izquierdo a Surrealist as well?

She (like Kahlo) denied such an association, and aligned herself with the Contemporáneos, a group of writers and painters that sought to establish a “non-Mexicanist” avant-garde in arts and letters. In addition, Izquierdo’s paintings and watercolors do not generally demonstrate anything related to the oneiric experiences that characterize the art of many other painters associated with the amorphous Surrealist style. Then again, several of Izquierdo’s most ambitious pieces, including still life compositions that relate to home altars set up as “offerings” prior to Easter, feature compellingly bizarre juxtapositions of everyday objects, with clay statues of angels and the image of the Sorrowful Virgin.

The Izquierdo painting most convincingly related to Surrealism is her last major work, Dream and Premonition (1947). Here, the artist is seen emerging from a window in an adobe house situated in a dreamlike landscape. She holds her own disembodied head, its hair entangled with the branches of trees that grow from an adjacent second window. Tears drop from the head into a boat-shaped basin with a blue cross standing at its center. Headless figures walking next to the house recede into the distance, passing under heads hanging from the tree branches above them. A troubled nighttime sky and a landscape marked by small mounds that resemble graves complete the scene.

Dream and Premonition may be a cri de coeur or an experiment in the Surrealist visual vocabulary, or both. After she finished it, Izquierdo began to experience serious health problems, with the second of two strokes causing her death in 1955. While her art was by no means forgotten, it was more than three decades before it rose to the level of importance it elicited in the late 20th century, beginning with a monumental 1988–89 tribute exhibitionat the Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. The fact that her work had been declared “national patrimony” and therefore was not exportable for sale from Mexico explains, in part, its absence from the international scene. But why is there such renewed interest in Izquierdo’s art now?

Continuing attention to art by women is one obvious answer, as is the ongoing fascination with all permutations of Surrealism—as evidenced by the 2021–22 show “Surrealism Beyond Borders” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern that featured Izquierdo’s 1936 watercolor Allegory of Work. I argue, however, that the cause has more to do with contemporary curiosity about the mixing of genres, a general interest in the “unfinished” (a characteristic present in a number of her paintings), and attraction to the deliberate, self-conscious imitation of so-called primitive forms that Izquierdo favored over the academic modes in which she was trained. All of that resulted in a highly sui generis aesthetic effect.

Today, Sime is now known worldwide for gargantuan abstractions—a new series debuts today at Tanarte Castello in Venice—comprising intricately arranged e-waste that he buys, often by the truckload, in Addis Ababa’s Mercato market—the largest open-air market in Africa. When I visited in the market in March, I saw mountains of keyboards and motherboards, and spools of coated wires sorted by color.

The sheer volume of the e-waste in Sime’s work can be a shock to Western viewers, who are used to sending off trash never to be seen again. For this reason, his work is often described as a kind of commentary on recycling. But Sime was making these for 25 years before he started showing in the Western world. For him, the work is really about our addiction to technology: he wants to make you think about all the ways connectivity has changed, to question our addiction to constant upgrades.

Resourceful reclamation is not novel for Sime, but part of his everyday ethos. Sime’s approach, of tending to his surroundings, pervades everything he does. In Addis Ababa, I visited Zoma—Sime’s compound replete with a museum, a school, a restaurant, and a farm. He funds it all with sales from his artworks. The school is critical to Sime’s mission: workers at Zoma repeatedly mentioned the corruption involved in the national curriculum, and the necessity of interventions.

The seed for the complex was planted in 2002, when Sime and his collaborator Meskerem Assegued, an anthropologist and curator, bought a dilapidated house, thinking they’d convert it into a studio. Sime began adding to the structure with mud and straw, a vernacular technique, and from there, his project evolved organically. Now, it features a half-dozen mud buildings, each sculptured with their own intricate patterns. Assegued was put off by the rampant introduction of toxic building materials into Ethiopia, when vernacular architectural forms had proven perfectly durable. Driving around the city, you’ll find countless dwellings made of mud and corrugated steel, behind which uninhabited skeletons of luxury condo buildings ominously loom. Addis Ababa is developing fast—and in ways that leave locals skeptical. A Zoma worker named Teddy put it like this: “Where there is corruption, there is construction.”

And so, Sime and Asseguedare charting alternatives. Zoma employs130 people, often training skilled workers whom other people hire right away. And they educate 160 students: the school too is in high demand, and specializes in educating autistic children. When I visited, a few were playing in the grass and tinkering with computers; Zoma does home visits to train and support their families, too.

My visit to Zoma came just days after the actress Lupita Nyong’o had stopped by. And she’s far from the only high-profile person to have taken note: the current prime minister has been tapping the duo to build on such sites as a gorgeous cave called Sof Omar, where they have just started to undertake preservation efforts, make the cave accessible, and carve artworks into the rock; or Mount Entoto, a National Park they have outfitted with a waterfall, an amphitheater, a greenhouse, a workout area, and a culinary school led by James Beard award-winner Chef Yohanis. Situated at an altitude of two miles and covered in Eucalyptus trees, the community site is terraced with ramps that make it wheelchair accessible.

At Entoto, muchof the construction is cantilevered so that it floats rather than paves over the plants and animals who lived there first. As I walked on the mosaic-lined path Sime was in the process of building, I watched him pick up a small piece of trash someone had left behind. Assegued’s design features holes cut in concrete to let light shine down and trees grow through. “I hate cutting trees. I hate killing anything,” Assegued told me, as we gazed down at a Juniper tree growing through holes in not one but two stories. She shared the same sentiment when we visited an elderly, disabled milk cow in her care, who is bonded closely with one of her daughters, also living at Zoma.

Assegued is an anthropologist by training; she and Sime craft designs together, then consult an architect and then a structural engineer. The totalizing approach prompted curator Hans Ulrich Obrist to liken Sime’s practice to the Gesamkunstwerk, German for “total work of art,” and the duo’s practice begs comparison to land art and to social practice, too. But their project reminds me most of the Austrian architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, whose built works, made of reclaimed materials, share an ethos with everything he does: from his paintings (bright colors, organic shapes, fantastical landscapes), to his diet (mostly nettle salads). In ecology as in society, everything is interconnected; every decision has a ripple effect.

You can see this ecosystemic thinking—which really often looks like common sense care—in their intervention in Unity Park. All visitors to this major attraction, first built by Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II in the 19th century, now enter through their garden of native plants—rosemary, succulents, wild olive trees. Whereas in other artist gardens, plants are enlisted as symbols or metonyms—more often than not, for histories of colonialism their global migration betrays—here, they aren’t so much “conceptual” as the right thing to do. Native plants are always more friendly to local ecosystems. The turtle-shaped ice cream hut Sime intricately crafted of used metal spoons is friendly, too. As we shared a meal in one of the houses the duo designed together—enjoying tiramisu, a remnant of Italian colonialism, enhanced by fresh Ethiopian coffee beans—Assegued described how the buildings were like an ecosystem, too, pointing up to an intricately woven conical ceiling that both funnels heat and keeps out rain.

Sime’s newest works, debuting this week in Venice, at Spazio Tana, concern mineral extraction, with intricately woven, colored wires forming crystalline shapes, reminding viewers from whence certain materials derive—a nod to the Earth, and to the inhumane labor practices that incessant updates rely on. In his works, many nearing ten feet wide, you’re forced to contend with the sheer volume of materials once mined at great cost to the earth and to workers, only to soon become waste. Yet with their sheer magnitude and unmistakable beauty, they devastate delicately. The works are made of electronics, but they are hardly futuristic or shiny. They evoke, instead, what we lose as we “develop.”

And the craftsmanship is exquisite—so well made that you start to wonder where the machinic ends and the handmade begins. Instead of mixing paints, he twirls and braids together different colors of coated wires. You’ll likely find yourself taking it all in from afar, then coming up close to see how it’s made, then repeat. In one of the new works, green swaths of wire punctuated with nails echo metallic components on green motherboards. These moments of irregularity remind warmly of humanity. Showing me the works at Zoma, Sime said proudly yet humbly, “What else can do this but love?”

Sime’s big abstractions are made up of small panels, allowing him to add continually; similarly, his process of building with mud and straw allows him to keep adding to buildings as needs change. And change they do:there’s not much flat space at Zoma—he keeps saying he wants to build that dream studio, but time and again, he winds up building for his community instead. And so, he’s often laying out his arrangements in classrooms when the kids have gone home, sometimes working until he falls asleep there.

E-waste is one of countless things being tended to and given a second chance at Zoma—alongside animals, gardens, children, and community. Here, burners in the culinary school are fueled by biogas from cow manure while their slur fertilizes the plants, basically eradicating the notion of “waste.” Here, an incredibly sweet local kid in need found a home with Sime andAssegued,who adopted him as their own. Here, in many ways, modernity is the thing that feels like trash—something that alienated us from nature, and in its ways, from real community, too.

The wanderer’s bourgeois dress and evident leisure make plain that in the 19th century, at least, this contemplative posture belonged to the affluent and the masculine. But the trope’s adaptation in subsequent art and visual culture show that it resonates well beyond these initial confines.

Born 250 years ago, Friedrich lived in the dawning era of the forces that continue to shape our world: rapid technological progress, increasing globalization, and especially, an industrial capitalism that was literally remaking the surface of the earth. Museums across Germany are celebrating the artist’s birthday, with exhibitions including “Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age” at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, “Caspar David Friedrich: Infinite Landscapes” at Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie, and ongoing festivities in Greifswald, the city of his birth. Friedrich is hailed by many as the most important German artist of the Romantic period, but the exhibitions don’t just celebrate the artist himself. They also showcase Germany’s contribution to a history of modern landscape often dominated by French Impressionists. Friedrich, who lived through the Napoleonic wars and consequently despised France, would likely be pleased.

Then there are the interpretations of his work that might have pleased him less. Friedrich’s intent may have been to turn to the world around him as part of a personal inquiry, but his work positioned Germany as a land of deep spiritual potential. By the 20th century, his vision of Germany was being used to support a nationalism based in those very landscapes, making him a favorite of the Nazis. (That Friedrich was born in a region that at the time was technically ruled by Sweden, and that he was trained in Copenhagen, does not seem to figure into these narratives.) Friedrich rarely wrote directly about his work, quipping “I am not one of those talkative painters of whom there are now so many.” However, in leaving his symbolism deliberately unfixed, he inadvertently opened himself up to such contortions.

WHAT STRUCK FRIEDRICH’S CRITICS MOST—both those who liked his work and those who despised it—was that he was doing something at once new and very much of its time. Emblematizing a movement of Romantic artists, writers, and philosophers who were redefining humanity’s relationship to nature, his was an “art for a new age,” as the title of the Hamburg show underscores.

Friedrich made his ambitions for landscape clear in his breakout painting, Cross in the Mountains (1807/08). He intended it as an altarpiece, though in centering a landscape rather than divine figures, it was unlike any altarpiece that came before it. Friedrich’s painting featured the kind of carved and gilded crucifixes commonly found atop mountain summits. Backlit against a pink-hued sky, the cross is subsumed within the visual spectacle of its surroundings. Rays of sunlight cast the foreground into shadow and draw the eye heavenward, endowing the landscape itself—not just the religious icon set within it—with spiritual connotations.

This audacious revision of religious iconography immediately established Friedrich as a public figure subject to both admiration and ire. He meant the painting to be displayed atop a pedestal in a chapel, set within an elaborate frame he’d designed: a heavy gilded arch laden with Christian symbolism. But it was never shown that way: instead, it was exhibited in his studio and later hung in a countess’s bedroom, an indication that there were still limits to what landscape could do.

While the scene depicted in Cross in the Mountains wasn’t one anyone had ever seen before, it is a view that could plausibly exist. Although many of Friedrich’s landscapes are invented compositions, they are based on numerous sketches he made outdoors. He was known to hike around Saxon Switzerland with his sketchbook. A pencil drawing of a rocky peak (“Felsige Kuppe”) uses sparse but deftly placed lines to create a craggy formation limned with squiggles of hardy grass. Friedrich noted the date—June 3rd, 1813—and the position of the horizon, which extended beyond the page. With these textual annotations, he securely located the picture in space and time, only to subsequently displace that rock formation beneath the feet of his Wanderer, where, faced with the unfolding foggy expanse ahead, the same careful detail barely registers.

To link the dramatic surge of the Wanderer to the very particular sketch that preceded it is, I think, to get at something essential about Friedrich’s paintings. They are at once grand and small, provoking our most potent feelings while preventing us from getting lost within them. Art historian Joseph Koerner has similarly observed that one of the most remarkable things about a Friedrich painting is that “somehow, the painting places you.”

Friedrich gives us a world that looks like our own, but his is an undoubtedly subjective picture, a world imbued with feeling. This feeling derives from what he includes within the view, but also from what he leaves out: his works can feel still, empty, silent, and haunting. Monk by the Sea (1808–10) shows the apex of the artist’s restraint. It is mostly sky, the kind of dense, tonal atmosphere typical of a cold Nordic place. The sea itself is almost black, a dark strip of waves capped with slivers of white foam. The titular monk stands atop a dune of pale sand, seemingly undisturbed by the seagulls swooping around him. Friedrich had originally drawn three sailboats in the midground, but he painted over them in the final version, resulting in a startlingly minimal composition that is often compared to the abstractions of Mark Rothko.

Monk by the Sea was meant to be paired with a pendant painting, The Abbey in the Oakwood (1809–10). The diptych continues the spiritual exploration of Cross in the Mountains but dispenses with the apparatus of the altarpiece. The Abbey offers more narrative content than its companion: it includes a funerary procession passing beneath the Gothic ruins at its center. But both works are ultimately about an overall atmospheric effect, one achieved through subtle and precarious pictorial means.

Though Friedrich was trained principally in drawing and took up oils only in 1807, he claimed not to make preparatory studies for his paintings. Instead, acquaintances described him waiting around until an inner vision took hold. Only then would he begin, starting with an underdrawing. He added color in very thin layers, rarely building up any areas of texture or impasto; part of the strange wonder of his paintings is the absence of any evidence of their making. Subject to flaking, those thin layers of paint have been the object of serious conservation efforts in recent years. Monk by the Sea, then, represents a fragile world rendered in equally fragile pigments.

Silhouetted against the swallowing blue depths, the monk, whose contemplative posture pulls the painting back from abstraction, offers another example of a Rückenfigur, one sometimes taken to be a stand-in for Friedrich himself. The Rückenfigur may have been Friedrich’s attempt to contend with a problem his friend the artist Johan Christian Dahl described thus: “One does not or cannot paint nature itself, but only one’s own sensations.”

THE (IM)POSSIBILITY OF an objective view of nature is a scientific dilemma as much as it is an artistic one, and it’s a quandary that intellectuals across disciplines were actively engaging in Friedrich’s time. His circle in Dresden, where he was based for most of his life, included geologists, naturalists, writers, and philosophers who were together exploring Naturphilosophie, a way of understanding the world as a unified whole encompassing both external reality and inner subjectivity. Naturphilosophie was at once metaphysical and rigorously scientific, engaging with new research into the invisible forces of magnetism and electricity to find the place where mind and matter merge. The movement was closely associated with the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, who claimed that “Nature should be Mind made visible, Mind the invisible Nature.” To explore nature was to explore the self, and vice versa.

Naturphilosophie privileged a holistic understanding of subject and world that we can recognize in Friedrich’s compositions. If self and nature are one, then an oak tree could be as resonant as a monk or a wanderer. This is the argument implied by Friedrich’s 1822 canvas The Solitary Tree. The titular tree sits at the center of the composition, rising above distant peaks to bisect the image vertically. The tilt of the oak’s trunk and the animacy of its branches lend it more expressive personality than the shepherd who leans against its base. That small figure, tending his nearby flock, serves primarily to emphasize the oak’s towering presence. The tree’s age, suggested by its size and the dying branches near its top, signals that it’s nearing the end of its long life span. A portrait of this singular specimen as much as it is a landscape, the painting gives the tree a measure of individuated attention typically reserved for human subjects. The Solitary Tree associates looking with a form of care—both Friedrich’s attentive reproduction of the tree and our own admiring of it.

A Rückenfigur like the shepherd, the monk, or the wanderer is often regarded as a stand-in for the viewer—a surrogate self in the big scene—but it may also offer a kind of companion with whom to approach the uneasy vastness of the world. Friedrich himself provided a model for companionable looking in Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1819), which is thought to represent Friedrich and one of his students, August Heinrich. Ensconced beneath an old oak, the two men gaze at a sliver of moon. The painting is characteristically Friedrich, from the knotty oak to the thin wash of lavender-tinged sky. But we know that Heinrich likely saw the world differently; his own work was more intensely botanical than Friedrich’s, transforming the generic green grasses Friedrich often employed into an array of detailed and identifiable specimens. Together, the pair suggest that we each make the world our own, and that locating ourselves within it can be a gesture of shared humanity.

Making the world his own was key to Friedrich’s practice. One of his most oft-cited aphorisms is that “the painter should not only paint what he sees in front of him but also what he sees in himself.” Perception is inevitably inflected by lived experience. Here, it is tempting to read Friedrich’s life story into his works. For instance, when he was 13, his brother fell through the ice on a frozen lake, and died; knowing that makes the cold power of Sea of Ice (1823/24) all the more chilling. The painting was a commission, which explains its arctic subject matter, a sight Friedrich had never seen himself. But the drama of the ice floes was Friedrich’s own design, based on studies of a frozen river Elbe. Their sheer magnitude is so compelling that it takes a minute to notice the ship capsized in the midground, and to consider the human cost of venturing into such an extreme environment. With sheets of ice pressing up against the picture plane, and absent a Rückenfigur to provide a stable point of reference, we viewers are trapped in the unrelenting crush of the elemental, a prospect whose terror is relieved only partially by its beauty.

At times, Friedrich found himself in the landscape more literally. In a 2020 ecocritical analysis of the artist, art historian Nina Amstutz suggests that Friedrich anthropomorphized the landscape itself. She points to a human face hidden among the rocks in his drawing of Harz cave as one example of the artist’s ongoing attempt to locate the human form within the more-than-human world. The suggestion raises a crucial question and a contested aspect of the legacy of Romantic thought for environmentalists today: are we able to care only for things that look like us?

IN PLACING THE HUMAN FIGURE in the world so literally, Friedrich may have been correcting for an increasing feeling of alienation from his environment. He was not alone in this. In Friedrich’s day, a German author coined a useful term to describe ambient feelings of terror and moody despair: Weltschmerz, or world grief. That sentiment—found in works by writers of the era from Goethe to Lord Byron—was used to grapple with the quintessential Romantic struggle to make sense of the ongoing failures and hypocrisies of a supposedly Enlightened world.

“World grief” resonates differently in our era of catastrophic climate change. The German exhibitions celebrating Friedrich’s visions of nature are also asking how much that nature—and our understanding of humanity’s place within it—has changed. At the Hamburger Kunsthalle, a selection of works by international contemporary artists engages directly with Friedrich’s legacy. Many Rückenfiguren appear among these new works, recoded for the 21st century. Swaantje Güntzel injects humor into the motif with a series of photographs of a woman throwing a plastic yogurt container into a stunningly pristine fjord. American artist Kehinde Wiley, known for paintings that insert Black figures into canonical compositions from art history long occupied by white subjects, offers his own version of The Wanderer. Here, we see not a generic subject, but a Senegalese dancer named Babacar Mané. Wiley also produced a six-channel video installation exploring Romantic tropes more broadly. In the film, he makes a case for landscape as a way of connecting with other humans rather than an abstract idea of nature.

Posthumanist environmentalists might take issue with Friedrich’s anthropocentrism, his relentless insistence on a world made for human perception. But these and other contemporary artists featured in the exhibition suggest that we have far from exhausted the humanist landscape, and that it is still worth exploring how each of us sees and responds to some of the terrifying truths of our world. That today those terrors are more likely to have been caused by other humans than by natural forces is all the more reason to stand up and face them. This is the suggestion Belgian artist David Claerbout makes in his video piece Wildfire (meditation on fire), 2019–20. Claerbout’s large-format projection shifts from an idyllic forest to raging red flames and back to a verdant idyll in a 24-minute loop. Like the mountainous panorama unfolding before Friedrich’s wanderer, the view conveys equal parts fear and beauty. Within the space of the exhibition, every viewer is someone else’s Rückenfigur, modeling ways of responding to an increasingly familiar crisis; though Claerbout’s work is computer generated, it bears an uncanny resemblance to the wildfires that have become a hallmark of each summer’s news cycle. Framed as a “meditation,” Wildfire prompts us to reckon with the disaster, offering once again an art for a new, if unwelcome, age.