In Melissa Cody’s 2014 weaving Good Luck, a figure known as Rainbow Man is represented as an electrical cord, his lower half culminating in a two-pronged plug. His tubular body encircles the phrase GOOD LUCK, and beneath those words, there’s a somewhat unexpected motif, formed from four right angles that meet at a central point.

Navajo viewers will understand the symbol as a whirling log, which connotes Good Luck’s titular well wishes. But to many other viewers, the symbol will likely read as a swastika. There are differences between the two symbols: a whirling log’s four angles form a square, whereas a swastika is rotated 45 degrees, creating a diamond. But those differences are subtle and easy to miss. That’s why it’s worth spending time with Cody’s whirling logs, which figure in two current New York solo shows, at MoMA PS1 and Garth Greenan Gallery.

At PS1, Navajo Transcendent (2014) shows a lone whirling log popping against a teal background. Cody rendered the ancient symbol in a pulsating pattern derived from traditional Navajo weaving that’s known as an eye dazzler: here and elsewhere, she is emphasizing the symbol’s cultural origins. In Navajo Transcendent, she has caused the sign to appear three-dimensional, rendering it with depth, as if to suggest that there are multiple vantages from which to view this symbol, both formally and culturally. Certainly, with its dazzling colors and dizzying patterns, this work contains none of the austerity or threat associated with Nazi regalia.

I’ll admit that, as a Jew, I don’t always find Cody’s works featuring this easy to take, and it seems I’m not alone in feeling that way. When I visited PS1, I overheard two visitors debating Navajo Transcendent, noting that the work is presented without a trigger warning. The institution seemed uncomfortable in its handling of the work as well. It showed the piece alongside a wall text that does not include words like “swastika” or “Nazis,” words that feel like elephants in the room. In that wall text, viewers are directed to a label for a different piece, Navajo Whirling Log, should they seek “additional context.” The text for Navajo Whirling Log notes that “misassociations with the Nazi swastika” may occur, and reminds viewers that Navajo culture “predates Nazi atrocities by millennia.” This is a fact—but so is the continued prevalence of swastikas wielded in hateful ways. It is hard not to see a Nazi symbol here.

That’s partly why, in 1940, Navajo, Papago, Apache, and Hopi leaders signed the Whirling Log Proclamation, formally agreeing to stop using the symbol. They noted that the motif had been “desecrated recently by another nation of peoples.” That excerpt appears in an explanatory text posted at Garth Greenan Gallery’s front desk, but this necessary context is mysteriously absent within PS1’s galleries. That text also states that the leaders signed the proclamation under pressure from the US government, and points out that anyway, Navajo religious practices were banned in the US until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act passed in 1978. In the intervening decades, Cody and other contemporary Navajo artists have endeavored to revive the whirling log, asking why one connotation should supplant another. Several have been met with protests, such as when, in 2017, a Washington art space removed works by Steven Leyba that featured whirling logs after backlash.

Cody’s whirling logs do make me uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean her works that feature them should be taken down. Her tapestry Navajo Whirling Log (2019), at PS1, features four such logs that touch their tips, forming a cross at the work’s center. The cross is a symbol for the Spider Woman who, according to Navajo tradition, wove the universe into being. Anyone who views this piece as representing four swastikas, then stops there, is likely to miss out on that rich story. Art often shows us how many signs have more than one meaning, and if we keep an open mind—and, maybe, get uncomfortable—we might learn to see things anew. 

This is the subject of a new book by art historian Claire Bishop, titled Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today. Bishop posits that our phones have become a kind of “prosthesis for viewing” art, and her book is about how artists are responding to this new normal.

Today, we often treat slow contemplation of a painting as a respite from the onslaught of everyday life, the museum as a rare site of reverent attention. But in her introduction, explaining her interest in attention, Bishop shows this wasn’t always so. Citing critic and historian Jonathan Crary, she writes that the very concept of “attention” emerged in the 19th century as a means of optimizing laborers at the onset of industrial capitalism. Soon, the world witnessed new methods for displaying art meant to focus that attention. By the 1870s, single rows of paintings punctuated by blank wall space replaced crowded salon-style hangs. That same decade, theatergoers began to find their seats facing the stage head-on—no longer arranged in a horseshoe shape offering views of audience and performers alike. And whereas, historically, theatergoing had been a decidedly social experience, talking to seatmates became rude. In theater as in visual art, viewing became a disciplined cognitive experience rather than a sensorial and social one.

As Bishop makes clear in her introduction, there was a classist element to all this. Gabbing peasants, unaware of the new etiquette, were snubbed. “Distraction,” Bishop writes, became “a moral judgment.” Taking this critique into the present, she takes issue with moralizing dismissals of artworks that encourage you to whip out your phone and take a picture, or look something up. It’s elitist, she says, to classify phones and TV as objects of distraction, and set aside art and opera as worthy of reverence.

The four chapters that follow were not originally intended as a book, but are rather four essays written over the course of 10 years; only later did Bishop realize they share the theme of attention. The first chapter, on research-based art‚ is the book’s most significant contribution to the field, and I say this leaving aside my feelings about her claim therein that “the genre has never been clearly defined—or, for that matter, critiqued.” (This magazine dedicated a whole issue to the subject last year, about which Bishop and I exchanged several emails.) Bishop argues that the genre is structured around ways that digital technology organizes information, and even thought: we might not remember the name of something, but we know where to look it up. She defines research-based works as relying “on text—printed or spoken—to support an abundance of materials, distributed spatially.” Typically, such works present viewers with more information than they can meaningfully consume.

For Bishop, Renée Green’s Import/Export Funk Office (1992–93) is a formative example: with archival material on shelves and at viewing stations, visitors could research African diasporic culture, especially the reception of hip-hop in Germany. Green deliberately offered a huge quantity of information: she didn’t want her viewers to walk away feeling they had “mastered” the topic. In 1995, though, she created a CD-ROM edition, because viewers never seemed to have enough time in the museum.

Green’s decidedly post-structuralist proposition, Bishop argues, was a necessary move away from master narratives—and one that evinces digital technology’s impact on attention. But the writer is less convinced by later works of research-based art. She notes that Wolfgang Tillmans’s Truth Study Center (2005–) similarly arranges articles and photographs in vitrines, all absent a grand narrative, or even an obvious theme. By the 2000s, she says, as internet use expanded, people began to feel overwhelmed by information all the time, and stopped needing artworks to reproduce that experience.

The trend of information overload took off, and viewers grew fatigued. The 2002 edition of Documenta featured more than 600 hours of video. Technically, it was possible to watch it all, if you devoted 6 hours per day to the task for all 100 days the show ran. Viewing art came to feel onerous. (If the research-based art trend was the shot, it’s not hard to see why today’s colorful painting became the chaser.) In lieu of information overload, Bishop finds herself “yearning for selection and synthesis,” and
here considers Walid Raad exemplary. Raad offers viewers compelling narrative threads in works that often concern Lebanese history, but he always makes clear his stories are one of several perspectives. There are multiple, but not infinite truths.

IT’S NOT JUST RESEARCH ART OR VIDEO ART presenting viewers with more than we can comfortably consume. Several recent major works of performance art have also done away with the idea of comprehensive viewing, and this is the subject of chapter 2. They might offer no seating, inhumane duration, and/or a looping structure so that viewers can come and go. Two examples Bishop cites are recent Golden Lion winners at the Venice Biennale: Germany’s Faust (2017), by Anne Imhof; and Lithuania’s Sun & Sea (Marina), 2019, by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė.

Sun & Sea (Marina) was a looping nonlinear opera about climate change; viewers could come and go, or simply stay and tune in and out, much as people both attend to and ignore the anthropogenic apocalypse every day. Faust, meanwhile, was a durational performance wherein hot “health goths” strike poses on a plexiglass platform that doubles as a framing device. If you weren’t in Venice that year, you probably saw it on Instagram. Here, Bishop rebuts simplistic critiques of that work as being “too Instagrammable,” effectively calling such dismissals snobby. She says the work instead reflects “a new form of hybrid spectatorship” that smart phones have produced.

But this begs a follow-up question: does Imhof tell us anything new or interesting about this spectatorship? Does merely indexing a condition make good art? One of Bishop’s more salacious arguments is one she makes matter-of-factly, and offhand: “In the twenty-first century,” she says, “works of art tend to be symptomatic of larger conditions, rather than anticipatory fortune telling.” Due to income inequality, she quickly argues, artists are no longer canaries in the coal mine. Even if I thought that characterization of recent art were true, I’d push (beg!) artists to do more than accept and reflect status quo.

Chapter 3 focuses on performance works that Bishop calls “interventions.” These works swap duration for disruption. Here, she makes a useful distinction between guerrilla interventions and institutional ones, Fred Wilsons’s Mining the Museum being the canonical example of the latter. In 1992 Wilson rehung rooms of the Maryland Historical Society with objects from the institution’s collection in a manner that lay bare the state’s history of slavery. It was a provocative piece—but rather than change the museum’s practices, the gesture, Bishop writes, “gave rise to a glut of compensatory invitations,” with institutions delegating critical gestures to artists rather than rethinking their own practices.

Bishop contrasts these interventions with guerrilla-style ones by the likes of Pussy Riot and Ai Weiwei, who seized public space and attention without permission. While such works offer important political warnings, they are also symptomatic of a changing mediascape: going viral and making headlines is an important part of the strategy for works looking to generate “provocation, disruption, attention, debate.” In 2004 a member of the Yes Men went on BBC posing as a Dow Chemical spokesman to apologize for a deadly disaster the company had caused—then watched Dow’s share price plummet. What’s key here is not site specificity, as is often true for institutional gestures, but what Cuban artist Tania Bruguera calls “political-timing-specificity.”

Interventions, according to Bishop, “tend to foreground a model of authorship that heroicizes the artist … as a daring rebellious outsider.” There’s a reason, she adds, why many of the artists she cites are men: “this kind of intrepid assertion of the self in public space … privileges those who feel secure enough to penetrate that zone and claim it.” Continuing in this vein, she rebuts critics of Bruguera’s #YoTambienExijo project. Her 2014 performance involved asking Cuba to open up not only to free markets, but to free press and free speech. Because the project involved social media, it necessarily linked to an individual’s profile, even though it was a collective endeavor. Yet some complained that the project centered the artist rather than the cause. Bishop writes that such criticism is “much less frequently levelled at [Bruguera’s] male contemporaries like Ai Weiwei, who are more likely to be heroicized as dissidents,” rather than seen as attention whores.

The final chapter takes an unexpected pivot to the many artists today making work about Modernist architecture, a trend that Bishop argues is the product of the internet placing history at one’s fingertips. Such artworks are a useful case study for laying bare the many problems that artistic research can engender. In researching—or simply searching—online, it’s all too easy to strip objects from their context, and to depoliticize or romanticize them in the process. These works “produce historicity in a register of simultaneity,” Bishop writes, and produce the feeling of “everything everywhere all at once.”

Certain motifs can come to take on myriad meanings, with the “universalism” of the so-called International Style lending extra malleability. So much so that in 2009, curator Adriano Pedrosa organized a whole show of non-Brazilian artists engaging with Brazilian modernism; meanwhile, Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–20) has been refigured by the likes of Ai Weiwei, Michael Rakowitz, and the collective Chto Delat. Stopping just short of calling Modernist invocations cheap tricks, Bishop jabs that “mid-century modern became synonymous with grown-up good taste,” and adds that countless artists venerate modernism in “an appeal to ancestral spirits”—that its invocation automatically “lend[s] significance to the contemporary object.” Modernism already holds space in our collective attention, and artists reroute those symbols to new ends.

Somewhat unexpectedly, digital art is wholly absent from Bishop’s book: she argues that “the effects of digital technology upon spectatorship are best seen in art that, at first glance, seems to reject digital technology most forcefully.” For this reason, hers is a much more interesting and less obvious argument about the internet’s effect on art than many made by the preponderance of shows and articles in the 2010s. But the wholesale sidestepping of digital and post-internet art, as well as all the scholarship around it, still seems strange. I found myself eagerly awaiting her take on phenomena like immersive experiences—the apotheosis of blending digital viewership with traditional artworks—but it never came. Her brief mention of works by so-called post-internet artists feels cherrypicked in its focus on artists who reproduce the experience of information overload: she omits the many who warned (21st-century artists do warn!) of what was coming, for our attention span, for AI, and so on.

I suspect this omission is for one of two reasons: either Bishop didn’t consider digital art a subject worthy of attention—(would that not also be elitist, I genuinely wonder?)—or because the patched-together essays that constitute her chapters were, as Bishop acknowledges, never meant to form a master argument. Either way, ironically, I have to hand it to her: the elision proves her point.  

“It was the nullification of expression,” Accardi later said of her works from that period. Her almost calligraphic scribbles—whether arranged in neat lines or garbled into a blob—look like language. And indeed, words were on her mind. Rivolta Femminile was founded on the principle that reading and writing were valuable tools for achieving self-awareness—and in turn, for helping women disentangle their own desires from internalized expectations.

When Accardi left Rivolta Femminile in 1973, she wrote a letter to a cofounder justifying her departure—a letter she never sent. Now, an excerpt appears in the catalog for her retrospective at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, on view through June 9. In that letter, Accardi explained why she needed to leave and devote herself more fully to making art again: “The most remarkable thing I found in feminism,” she wrote, “was the discovery that I am a human being, and as such, I have no desire to deprive myself of … imaginative, utopian passions.”

The early ’70s was not the first time Accardi interrogated the relationship between aesthetics and politics so intensely that she had to press pause. A vitrine in her retrospective displays a manifesto that the Italian-born artist signed in 1947, when she was in her 20s and had just joined both the Communist Youth Federation and Forma. The latter was an artist group aligning formalism and Marxism. They believed in making art as a way to improve one’s life in a material sense, through labor, and insisted that such a vital and deeply human act shouldn’t remain the purview of the bourgeoisie. Forma’s ideas galvanized the work she produced until around 1953, when she experienced a “deep crisis.” After a yearlong hiatus, she temporarily eliminated color from her work, as she would again decades later. In so doing, she hoped to avoid becoming “distracted towards pleasantness” and “to give her painting a moral certainty,” as an exhibition pamphlet from the time reads.

The best colorful paintings in the show in Rome are from the 1960s. Accardi, who died in 2014 and liked to call her practice “anti-painting,” explained her attraction to contrasting colors: “Only through the notion of night do I know the day.” With abstraction, she wanted to dispense with the patriarchal baggage that haunted representational imagery, and to capture life’s complexities. “I simply paint a symbolic portrait of life as I see it,” she said, “with its struggles, its joys, its miseries and its defeats.” So in the ’60s, as advertisements and packaging were newly altering the visual landscape, Accardi ingested it all and responded with paintings of squiggles in dizzying hues. In Violarosso (1963), she scribbled in bright orange all over a magenta surface, nearly dissolving all distinction between foreground and background.

By 1965, Accardi was on to something totally new. She swapped canvas for Sicofoil—a clear plastic—in an effort, as she said, to “reveal the mysteries behind the art.” That material, designed for packaging, is inclined to curl, so she would sometimes let it roll into cylinders or cones, or else stretch it like a canvas on wooden bars. A room in the retrospective is dedicated to immersive pavilions she built with plexiglass and then painted on. On these clear plastics—newly introduced material at the time—bold, opaque brushstrokes appear to hover in space. There is a quiet revolution in the way Accardi’s paintings foreground the background: whether a clear substrate disappears entirely or a vibrating magenta surface refuses to recede, this supporting role is really also the protagonist. I imagine most women can relate.

Accardi cared deeply about political thought and action, but she didn’t want to fall into the trap of, well, black-and-white thinking that might cleave aesthetics from politics too neatly. For her, life encompasses both in a complex, contradictory swirl. She insisted that a rich range of experiences was her right, and in fact part of the reason she cared about Marxism and feminism in the first place: that richness made life worth living and defending.

Who is Jay Lynn Gomez? That question animates the artist’s current exhibition at P.P.O.W in New York, and the answer is a bit complicated, ever evolving. Titled “Under Construction” and on view through June 15, the show poignantly and earnestly depicts Gomez’s gender transition—a process encumbered by the fact that Gomez had already achieved some art-world acclaim using her former name, having exhibited in major group shows like “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Impact of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and “Day Jobs” at the Blanton Museum of Art.

In 30 some paintings and mixed-media works, many of them self-portraits, we see Gomez contending with her new life. We see her newly subject to the leering gaze of construction workers, and getting accosted by a white woman for using the women’s bathroom at Fenway Park. Elsewhere, in one of the show’s best works, a 2024 canvas titled I am a work in progress, we see Gomez as her former male self, painting a vision of a woman of her own making, as she now wants to be seen. Next to her palette and brushes, we see her gender-affirming medications. Behind him a woman, the artist’s mother, dusts off one of Gomez’s earlier works.

Earlier this year, the artist began painting scenes from her transition directly onto her hormone packaging. The earliest work from this series is titled shot day (all works 2024); it is a tender self-portrait showing the artist injecting her abdomen with hormones. The piece, measuring just over 3 by 6 inches, is painted directly onto the flattened box of Gomez’s Estradiol valerate, her legal name partially visible. This work joins about a dozen other small drawings of Gomez at various stages in her life, all painted on her hormone packaging. This use of found cardboard recalls an earlier series, begun in 2013, in which Gomez painted Latinx domestic workers—gardeners tending to manicured lawns, pool cleaners fishing for leaves—onto magazine pages displaying beautiful mansions that they keep pristine; Gomez later scaled these drawings up to David Hockney-esque paintings. Her objective then as now is to show those who have been marginalized or rendered invisible.

In “Under Construction,” she gives her own process of transitioning a rare kind of visibility, carving an ideal image of herself while also grappling with how the world sees her. But she doesn’t stop there: she also honors the enormous contributions that trans women of color have made toward civil rights for queer people. These women have often been, until recently, intentionally erased from history; Gomez pays homage to some in a monumental work titled Trans women of color that includes Sylvia Rivera, Cecilia Gentili, and Erotica Divine.

But visibility has its downsides. Gomez confronts them in Every day I walk outside is a leap of Faith (Walking with Alok), which shows the artist in a black bra, staring in the mirror as she shaves her upper lip. Behind her, a canary flies out of a gold cage, and in one corner Gomez has kissed the canvas with a pair of a bright-red lips. In the foreground is Alok, a gender non-conforming poet and comedian who has been a mentor to Gomez during her transition. The two are surrounded by leering construction workers and signs reading ROAD CLOSED and DETOUR. There’s tension in this scene: like the overlooked laborers in their high visibility orange, Gomez and Alok appear both hyper-visible, and yet invisible, too.

That painting is untethered to any real space: instead, the figures float in a purple void. Gomez uses purples often, perhaps referencing the swirling together of the colors of the trans flag (pink, cyan, and white), or even the spectrum of hues in a bruise: a bruise at the site of hormone injection; a bruise from hemophilia, a condition Gomez has; a bruise that refers to the violence that trans women of color often face, whether from lovers, from johns, or even from catcalling construction workers.

At the back of the exhibition, there is a sculptural intervention. There, Gomez has installed a chain-link fence covered by a green tarp, with diagrams of her facial feminization and breast augmentation surgeries painted onto the surface. Surrounding these diagrams are outlines of butterflies: the ultimate symbol of transformation. A sign on the floor warns: “WERK ZONE.” Nearby, Gomez has dedicated a poem to her friend Winter Camilla Rose—also depicted in a leisurely odalisque portrait—about “a journey with no guide / with no end.”

Anyone who has been affected by the protests roiling college campuses in recent weeks—which is to say everyone, given the range of emotions they elicit and their magnitude in terms of reverberation and reach—would be advised to visit David Huffman’s current show at Casey Kaplan gallery in New York. A short walk away from the Fashion Institute of Technology, where a student encampment was broken up by the NYPD just last week, a selection of paintings that the artist calls “social abstractions” affirms the ways that protests from decades ago can resonate today.

Deeply personal but powerful beyond the bounds of his own experience, Huffman’s densely layered paintings draw on aspects of his childhood during the Black Power Movement in the 1960s and ’70s. Growing up in Berkeley, California, he was steeped in the activism of the Black Panthers; his mother, Dolores Davis, marched with the group and designed a slinking panther logo and a “Free Huey [Newton]” flag for them in 1968.

Allusions to those early years abound in paintings that can be read as diaristic. Eucalyptus (2024) includes part of a photograph (cut out and affixed to the canvas) of a very young Huffman and his brother standing alongside Black Panthers cofounder Bobby Seale. Other paintings are marked with stenciled repetitions of words like “mental health,” “homeless,” and “payday loans”—socioeconomic causes relevant both then and now. In its upper right corner, amid swirls and scrapings of paint, Mintaka (2023) features 13 iterations of the black panther logo that the artist’s mother designed.

Other references are just as personal but more open-ended. Many of the works include collaged swaths of African fabric that Huffman has collected over the years, with a mix of amorphous and geometric patterns that he sometimes adorns with additional squiggles and lines from his own hand. An especially dynamic part of Tasmanian Ghetto (2023), with electric orange set against a deep blue, was created by spray-painting a basketball net set against the canvas. A flurry of stenciled sphinx heads in Calypso (2023) signals the ancient Egyptian origins of so much culture. And then there are several Afrofuturist allusions to outer space: cut-outs of planets float within a few of the works, and part of Eucalyptus (the painting with the photo of Bobby Seale) is marked with the letters “ZR,” a reference to the Zeta Reticuli star system that figures in numerous tales of UFOs and alien abduction.

Familiarity with Huffman’s biography and personal inclinations helps bear out the activist allegiances in his work, but the paintings themselves communicate it in no uncertain terms too. All of them roil and teem, created in what seem to have been thrilling bursts of energy and animated by a frenetic spirit that informs a mix of determination and purpose, messiness and garishness. The look of them evokes the mind-expanding legacies of both the psychedelic counterculture and the activist uprisings that marked Huffman’s youth. The paintings’ backstories resonate with the unrest of the present, but their lingering effects make the current political climate feel less fleeting and more like an ever-present condition always in need of attention.

One of the most memorable sections of this year’s Venice Biennale is a vast room hung floor to ceiling with abstract works, many of them by dead artists. The star of this room—the pieces I can’t stop thinking about—appear not on the overcrowded walls, but in the space’s center, suspended from the ceiling.

That series, titled “Bambus,” is by Ione Saldanha (1919–2001). The late Brazilian artist painted the works on pieces of bamboo that she’d let dry over the course of six months, and in some cases even longer, before priming them with white paint and then adding bands of glorious color. These sculptures, which Saldanha started making in 1960, resemble a phantasmagorical forest in which each tree is a painting. If only it were possible to walk among them and see them from all sides.

A few select “Bambu” sculptures are on view in New York, at Salon 94, where Saldanha is being given her first-ever US solo show more than 20 years after her death. In this exhibition, one can get up close to a “Bambu” from 1980: the lithe, cadmium-colored object is ringed with white stripes, pastel blue checks, and other such markings.

Before making paintings that command three-dimensional space, Saldanha made paintings of voluminous spaces—albeit with similar planes of flat color. The earliest works on view in New York, dating from 1950, are urban scenes, views of Brazil’s Bahia state. She focused on clusters of buildings, but stripped their rectangular planes of detail, flattening them with that same eclectic mix of vibrant shades found in the “Bambus.” In both, hues range wildly, from bubblegum pink to hunter green, from pumpkin orange to butter yellow.

But buildings gradually disappeared from Saldanha’s work, and by the start of the ’60s, she was focused on abstraction. Still, the gridded windows and repeating doors from these paintings linger on as the structure undergirding an untitled painting from 1963. On this canvas, gridded elements form a drippy patchwork. The checkered, stripey patterns look just like the ones that ring the “Bambus” she started making around that time.

Bringing these forms beyond the canvas, Saldanha’s work was in direct dialogue with that of other Brazilian artists of her generation, most notably those involved in the Neo-Concrete movement, such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, who tried to infuse sensuality into abstract painting by having their works fold up or jut out off the wall, into the gallery. But Saldanha never left the wall behind entirely. Even as she created her “Bambus,” she continued to paint on canvas, ping-ponging back and forth between abstract painting and physical space.

A 1966 canvas included in the Salon 94 show, for example, features a “Bambu”-like stack of colored rectangles, one of them striped. To the pile’s left, Saldanha painted a swatch of gray, leaving it rough in a way that recalls the surfaces of her sanded, dried bamboos. To its right, she painted a brown monochrome with a cream-colored orb at its center, alluding to the circular top of a “Bambu.”

Which is to say, Saldanha seems to have started with three-dimensional space—urban buildings—then abstracted it into flattened planes, only to bring it back into the sculptural realm in the form of towering tubes. Then she flattened those forms all over again, in a generative cycle that lasted decades.

Russell’s book is not really about the internet, and it’s not really about appropriation. Black Meme is about virality, dispossession, and the complexities of being visible while Black. Russell asks what it is about Blackness that travels so far and wide. And why is it that images and videos of Black people dominate the visual field in such a way that white content creators feint at being Black to promote audience engagement? To answer these questions, Russell constructs a history that spans 19th-century postcards that commemorate lynchings to the first viral GIF.

Animating each of Russell’s case studies is her multifaceted definition of the “Black meme” as “the mediation, copying, and carrying of Blackness itself as a viral agent” predicated on the “promise of violence” and perpetual performance. The Black meme, she writes, is “as much about the transmission of Blackness as it is about the sight and viewership of Whiteness.” The Black meme shows us “that being seen and consumed does not correlate with being compensated.”

Russell’s Black meme does a lot of work to survey the point at which two major phenomena converge: debates about appropriation and the circulation of images and videos of Black people, often in moments of death or trauma. In Russell’s conception, to be perceived while Black is to be seen in pain, a pain that often acts as a trigger for justice. (She writes about well-known social crises surrounding figures such as Emmett Till, Rodney King, and Philando Castile.) What is agonizing about this is that images of Black pain continue to perform long after their political or social inflection point, in the sense that they continue to circulate and cannot reenter the communities from which they came and become private again.

The controversy over Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016) at the 2017 Whitney Biennial is a prime example (and, like nearly all of Russell’s case studies, has been extensively picked over already). Who was Schutz, as a white painter, to claim the image of Till, and to recirculate such a moment of pain and mourning? Referring to the context in which Till’s image was first published in 1955 in Jet, a magazine that had a majority Black readership, Russell writes, “the circulation of Till’s image within a site intended to be engaged for and by Black readers established a radical enclosure of collective intimacy.” But that isn’t necessarily a definitive view. In White Negroes, Jackson argues that, after the white press refused to publish Till’s image, Jet took on the charge “to force America to witness the gruesomeness it had wrought.” In Jackson’s telling, Jet was not an intimate enclosure but a launchpad for intentional virality.

It will always be terrible that suffering has to be put on display to prompt even a modicum of care. So, the question becomes: can images of the kind Russell writes about ever be taken back?

IT IS EVIDENT THAT RUSSELL longs for a controlled space of circulation to emerge within the media ecosystem. Black Meme is most exciting when she suggests paths that might change the way we circulate content, especially in online environments, and analyzes the factors that have led the internet to allow for unbounded transmission. Following the legal scholar K.J. Greene, who wrote extensively on reparations for Black musicians in the context of the illegal downloading mania of the early 2000s, Russell makes the connection between existing legal conceptions of intellectual property law, the public domain, and open-source culture.

A particularly effective example of the threads she weaves together is in her approach to the legal case Lanier v. President & Fellows of Harvard College. In 1850 Swiss zoologist and Harvard professor Louis Agassiz embarked on a research trip to the slave plantations of South Carolina, in search of what he called racially “pure” Africans to support the pseudoscientific theory of polygenism that claims different racial groups do not share common ancestry. Among the enslaved people that Agassiz visited were a man named Renty and his daughter Delia, both of whom Agassiz photographed. Agassiz used the resulting daguerreotypes in his report about polygenism, and they were later transferred to Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology; they were used to decorate brochures and other promotional and educational materials. More than 170 years later, in 2019, Renty’s descendant Tamara Lanier sued Harvard for unlawful possession of the daguerreotypes, claiming they had been taken without consent in the context of enslavement. Her demand was that the photos, thought to be the earliest known photographs of American slaves, be returned to Renty’s surviving family.

In 2021, after a county court granted Harvard’s motion to dismiss Lanier’s claims, she appealed, and the case was brought to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. As Renty and Delia were subjects and not authors, the court ruled that they had no property interest in the photo that Lanier could inherit. As it now stands, the physical daguerreotypes remain in the hands of Harvard, which has thus far made the images, both in physical and copied manifestations, available to the public.

The Harvard Law Review (HLR) suggested that the aim of the court was to allow the images of Renty and Delia to continue circulating, even as the judges recognized the context of slavery and expressed a wish for redress. As was stated in an HLR essay on the case, “what likely made the court wary to recognize some sort of property interest in Lanier was its fear that privatization of the daguerreotypes will result in lack of public access to all sorts of historical images.” But public access as a standard of fairness is something that Russell pushes back on, writing, “this exercise of ‘collective ownership,’ made possible by Harvard placing Renty and Delia’s images into the public domain, echoes the model of ‘open source’ that doubles down as a tactic of dispossession.”

Some internet history: In the early aughts, open-source movements popularized the norm of making code available for public use, and much of the development of Web 1.0 was credited to the free sharing of important knowledge. At the time, it was easy to position the open-source ethos as inherently radical, such that thinkers could write all moon-eyed about a budding high-tech gift economy founded on free labor, and free content as well. But this belief ignored the fact that preexisting power structures dictate who ultimately gets to profit from what is freely shared.

Greene wrote about this issue in the context of how innovations in music by Black musicians went unprotected and uncompensated while white musicians made financial killings. This was possible because Black musicians created wholly new styles, a category that is not covered by copyright law. In his 2008 legal article “‘Copynorms,’ Black Cultural Production, and the Debate Over African-American Reparations,” Greene wrote, “the work of Black artists was so extensively appropriated as to essentially dedicate Black innovation in cultural production into the public domain.”

In Black Meme, Russell applies this thinking beyond cultural production to Blackness in all its viral and visible manifestations. “When we engage Blackness as mythology,” the author writes, “it becomes open-source material, meaning that it can be hacked, circulated, gamified, memed, and reproduced. It is this open-source model that drives what social scientist Kwame Holmes expands on as a form of ‘necrocapitalism’—an extension of political theorist Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics—that makes ‘the value of Black death’ a fungible commodity, worthy of exchange.”

In a country where rights follow property relations, to claim distress without such relations is to be without recourse, grasping at what is “owned” but never recognized. The project of Black scholarship has often been to create a sense of boundedness around Black cultural production such that it might be recognized as something that can be not just compensated but claimed and protected beyond commercial ends. Factor in the internet, and the complexity of the situation soars.

As Russell writes, “To adequately address the economy of unpaid labor triggered by these transmissions on loop necessitates a breaking and remaking of digitality, one predicated on new definitions of authorship. The internet now is the largest institution of visual culture on earth. If this is the case, our very definitions of provenance must be better stipulated and restructured to encompass the study of Black movement and sound as they travel digitally.”

Russell’s plea is powerful, but she more or less stops there, at the point where such work could really begin. Black Meme mentions potential solutions, but mostly in passing. The book references but does not really explain writer Harmony Holiday’s concept of “mimetic emancipation.” And artist Rashaad Newsome’s FUBU (for us, by us) model of viral voguing, meant to renegotiate what Russell describes as “the exposure of queer and Black space as an encrypted third place,” isn’t developed in relation to the idea of the Black meme.

Instead, Russell mentions some of the obstacles to compensation for Black memes, among them the fact that experiences online are valued less than ones offline, even as the potential audience online is far greater. Moreover, certain creators like TikTok dance choreographers argue that they help popularize the music they use, such that these creators are “doubly overlooked” in terms of compensation.

NFTs are dismissed as a potential solution, for they represent “the master’s tools of capitalist monetization in minting their virality.” Because blockchain technologies merely reward attention and are not rooted in “Black, Brown, and queer movement or language,” they merely replicate the existing issue of white creators profiting from Black contributions to the meme pool.

Russell writes that creators of Black memes must “strike, rebel, refuse, mutiny.” She ends the book with powerful commands—“Reparations now! Free the Black meme!”—but these exhortations feel somewhat hollow in the absence of any action that could be connected to such phrases or any new adaptations to the fundamentally unique ways that the internet has changed how we circulate media, the kinds of pain we see, the effects of that pain, and the way we value (or fail to value) cultural production as it exists online. Russell’s contribution is to provide a clear history of how Black performance and pain have consistently molded cultural transmission and hyper-transmission. So yes, “Free the Black meme!” But how?  

Cattelan’s bet that art viewers are a bunch of masochists has paid off: the press release claims that he is “the most famous Italian artist since Caravaggio.” I rolled my eyes when reading this at first, before conceding that it’s also probably true. And annoy me as he does, I still eagerly await Cattelan’s next move. I just hope it’s funnier.


Image: View of Maurizio Cattelan’s 2024 exhibition “Sunday” at Gagosian, New York.

Decades later, critics and curators are still grappling with the politics of inserting artists from the Global South into the citadel of modernity. Mahlangu’s retrospective, “Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting” at Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town, takes a new approach to the old question. The curator, Nontobeko Ntombela, reframes Mahlangu’s practice squarely within the modernist tradition of artists who challenge entrenched processes of making through innovation. Mahlangu’s paintings, beadwork, tapestries, and found objects fully metabolize both the traditional and the contemporary, resulting in a kind of modernism that is uniquely African.

Mahlangu started painting as a young girl, using the walls of her home. Unsurprisingly, her family discouraged this. But she continued to paint in secret, overtaking the home’s outer walls. Eventually, her family noticed her progress—and congratulated her. “Then I knew I was good at painting,” she proclaimed. For her, this affirmation marked a radical shift in how she understood her activity: it was no longer simply an act of rebellion, but a productive artistic engagement.

For seven decades, Mahlangu has painted vivid geometric forms and detailed patterns that draw from a long history of Ndebele mural painting, a technique passed between generations of women. By continuing this tradition, she honors the many women who used patterns as secret codes to share personal prayers, emotional journeys, and collective values. Her work is a profound exploration of the spaces between the organic (natural pigment and materials) and the crafted (beadworks), between the traditional (Ndebele mural paintings) and the modern (abstract geometric compositions rendered in acrylic).

This historical context helps clarify the stakes involved in her retrospective exhibition: It is a moment of validation and recognition of her talent that challenges the historical marginalization of work by women. At the same time, it highlights the resilience and creativity of Black women artists. And it shows how work can at once draw from tradition and be modern.

A timeline in the exhibition reveals a crucial moment in Mahlangu’s career: from 1980 to ’91, she lived at the Botshabelo Historical Village, an open-air museum where Ndebele culture is displayed and preserved. There, she made murals that caught the eyes of the French curators organizing “Magiciens de la terre.” The retrospective runs through the early 1990s, when Mahlangu started painting on canvas and showing in museums. In that decade, she also began receiving commissions from brands like BMW and Comme des Garçons, evidence of a cultural trend toward “multiculturalism”—and attendant interest in African art—that characterized the decade. The show culminates in more recent times, as work by women artists is finally entering the canon; though prolific and beloved, Mahlangu secured her first solo exhibition in South Africa only in 2003, at the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town.

Mahlangu painted on houses, canvases, and everyday objects—including vessels, ballroom shoes, and makarapa, the hard hat worn by sports fans in South Africa. BMW commissioned her to paint a 525i (E34), part of a program that began in 1975 with Alexander Calder’s BMW 3.0 CSL, and was followed by models painted by Frank Stella in 1976, Roy Lichtenstein in 1977, and Andy Warhol in 1979. Mahlangu’s 1991 edition made her the first woman and the first African on the list; Julie Mehretu was selected for 2024. In the corporate project, as in her everyday found objects, she paints the exterior with her signature patterns; it isn’t totally clear what her commentary is, if any. Perhaps she simply painted whatever surfaces were available to her—adorning every square centimeter of the car, including its hubcaps. 

Mahlangu’s work has been widely exhibited across the globe since 1989, and yet, her work is rarely considered for its formal innovation: critics and curators tend to focus on her origin story, and her sources of inspiration; while they write about Euro-American abstract painters as making work evoking a universal human condition, they read abstractions by artists from the Global South, like Mahlangu, as culturally specific. This retrospective maintains a similar biographical and regional focus, but Mahlangu’s graceful forms make a case for themselves nevertheless: her arrangements of colors are considered and consistent, but they do not match. She contrived an apparatus—a black-and-white rectangular frame, with geometric patterns inside and out—that she retooled in seemingly infinite configurations.

The need to redress Black modernisms from the Global South remains, and is an impossible task for a single artist to shoulder. But it helps that her paintings carry with them the contributions of generations of Ndebele women.