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. 

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.

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.

Herding cats is notoriously difficult, but how about making them harmonize? That is a hypothetical taken up long ago in a curious 17th-century musical text—and again more recently by the British sound artist Oliver Beer. His latest gallery show in New York, “Resonance Paintings – Cat Orchestra” at Almine Rech, involves a probably apocryphal contraption (one hopes!) called the Cat Piano devised by Athanasius Kircher. In Musurgia Universalis, a book published in 1650, Kircher described the instrument as a collection of cats in cages that would shriek, in different voices, each time one of its tails was struck by a spike triggered by fingers playing a keyboard.

Beer brought Kircher’s vision to life—albeit in a much gentler version. The centerpiece of his show is an arrangement of 37 cat-shaped vessels and figurines, including a feline absinthe pitcher from early 20th-century France, a 19th-century ceramic cat “pillow” used as a headrest by opium smokers in China, and a recent replica of a fierce guardian lion from Thailand. All of the found objects are connected to microphones situated to pick up different frequencies that resonate inside of each hollow form. A custom keyboard sits in front of the orchestra, as it were, and conducts it in an automated fashion, with sliders moving up and down to show which cats’ voices are “singing” at any given moment. (Gallery-goers can sit at the keyboard and play it by hand too, but during all my visits everyone kept a curious distance.)

The mood of the music the orchestra plays is transporting, ambient in a manner similar to latter-day Brian Eno compositions for his 77 Million Paintings installation project started in 2006. And the variety of the vessels and figurines enlisted—ranging from campy tchotchkes to elegant historical finery—helps direct attention away from the technological makeup of the work to its more playful, experiential effects. This is not severe, austere sound art by any stretch.

The show also includes Reanimation (Everybody Wants to Be a Cat), a 2024 film made with school kids’ drawings of a scene in the movie The Aristocats (1970), and a pair of “Recomposition” wall works (both 2024) that feature broken bits of cat sculptures and other objects (feathers, guitar strings, parts of an old clock) preserved in resin. But most notable visually is a series of nine “Resonance Paintings” (2024) that Beer made by casting powdered pigment on canvases laid over amplifiers playing sounds from the cats in the orchestra. The results are all abstract modulations of blue on white, and knowing that they were made in part by sound gives them a sort of synesthetic presence. They’re silent, of course, but also audible in their way.

At the start of the 1970s, Jonas, who was born in New York, had been exposed to the downtown avant-garde scene populated by the likes of Young—a minimalist composer and Fluxus member whose influences included Japanese classical music—but had not yet discovered a formal language that resonated with her. As subtly argued throughout “Good Night Good Morning,” Noh is the skeleton key to Jonas’s oeuvre. In the artist’s first New York retrospective, MoMA’s sixth-floor galleries demonstrate how Jonas effectively deconstructed and assimilated the basic formal elements of Noh—woodblock acoustics; slow, simple gestures; and the use of masks—into five decades of performances, videos, and installations.

Following her first trip to Japan with the late Richard Serra, Jonas performed Jones Beach Dance (1971) on the Long Island shore. Commandeering a tidal flat, she placed a ladder in the sand and stood on it while holding a large rectangular mirror, which beamed sunlight toward an audience more than a thousand feet away. In Richard Landry’s photographs of the performance displayed in the first gallery of the exhibition, one sees Jonas on the ladder, as well as the wooden blocks she struck to create the piece’s sonic atmosphere. In the same gallery, crisp, resonant clacks issue from Songdelay (1973), a black-and-white video projection transferred from 16mm film. In one sequence, a performer stands in front of a passing boat in Lower Manhattan striking two blocks overhead. The figure, centered in the frame but filmed at a distance, appears small and remote, like a ceremonial functionary.

In Japan, Jonas purchased a Sony Portapak, a newly released handheld camera that proved crucial to her practice. In her SoHo loft, Jonas used it to film her well-known work Vertical Roll (1972),a 20-minute closed-circuit video performance that alternatingly exposes and occludes parts of her body by way of an ongoing televisual glitch. The richly saturated photographs of Béatrice Heyligers show Jonas executing a performance adaptation of Vertical Roll at the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 1973. In one of these images, Jonas wears a crown of peacock feathers, her face covered by a plastic mask, its pearly surface flushed with rouge. The doll-face mask, procured from a sex shop in New York’s Times Square, transforms her into her alter ego, Organic Honey, whom she calls “an erotic electronic seductress.” It is remarkable how intuitively Jonas’s early video performances embody and extend the possibilities of masked choreography.

Other Japanese elements that appear in Jonas’s work—kimonos, ink art, shoji screens, and kites—serve as conspicuous markers of cultural difference that render the resulting works more complex and poignant. Jonas’s 1976 interpretation of a Brothers Grimm tale, The Juniper Tree, features a spare wooden house, a dried branch, an apple, a mask, drip-painted silk banners, and a pale blue kimono. Embroidered with red and gold blossoms, silver branches, green leaves, and opalescent birds, the garment hangs from a ladder, evoking a scene in the fairy tale in which a dead child beneath a juniper is resurrected as a songbird. Unlike the sound of woodblocks, which derive from Noh but could just as easily conjure the notion of a Western orchestra, the kimono is too specific in its material and design to shed its associations as a cultural signifier. This is perhaps why it catches the eye: it appears simultaneously melancholy and radiant, exalted and displaced, refusing to blend into its surroundings.

Ink features prominently in Jonas’s multimedia installation Double Lunar Rabbits (2010). In Japan, where the installation was first exhibited, the lunar rabbit is a figure in a myth from the Buddhist Jataka tales, where a rabbit sacrifices itself in a fire so that an old man may eat and, as a reward, has its image carved on the moon. Accordingly, seven works on paper arranged on a black wall depict a lean hare from various angles. Jonas’s blunt linework evokes the tactile sensation of someone scratching a faraway surface. Two shoji screens—room dividers used in domestic settings—displaying videos in which the performer Ayano Momoda wears a white bunny mask around the city of Kitakyushu complete the installation. Altogether, the component parts of Double Lunar Rabbits present an ambiguous and fragmentary reenactment of the myth, and generate a productive tension between the anonymizing powers of the mask and the specificity of the surrounding cultural cues that give it meaning. Over the years, Jonas’s commitment to cultural eclecticism has been premised on this sort of necessary tension, as well as a degree of distance and spontaneity. As if to illustrate this point, “Good Night Good Morning” concludes with By a Thread in the Wind (2014/2024), a work comprising three rows of hanging bamboo kites. With red, yellow, orange, and green surfaces that reprise the palette of The Juniper Tree’s wistful kimono, the kites evoke images of birds, gourds, houses, leaves, and fruit. Conceptually, they call back to Jonas’s early studies of how light, sound, and other signals travel through air and extend perception into space, connecting distant entities without subsuming one into the other.

Scribbled numbers, wiped-away letters, word-like scrawls: all of these recur in Kikuo Saito’s paintings of the early 1990s, a selection of which form a wonderfully mystifying solo show on view now at James Fuentes gallery in New York. The cryptic markings are cast against vast fields of color that, in the hands of an Abstract Expressionist like Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman, might inspire transcendence. But Saito’s color fields are thinly painted, purposefully left rough-hewn and off-kilter, and the illegible messages on their surfaces evoke something more like the intriguing thrill of communicating with a person channeling an alien tongue. 

These canvases may in some way reflect Saito’s own experience as an immigrant absorbing a new culture. He was born in 1939 in Tokyo and came to artistic maturity in the wake of the Gutai movement of postwar Japan. Lured by the Abstract Expressionist art pouring out of the US, he departed his homeland for New York in 1966, eventually working as an assistant to artists Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Larry Poons. His art has affinities with theirs—for works from other eras not included in the James Fuentes show, Saito created Poons-like torrents of brushstrokes and Frankenthaler-like blooms of color. 

But the abstractions in this exhibition are more inscrutable—and tantalizing too. I thought I spotted the word “agony” in Mock Orange (1992) and considered whether the work’s blazing hue was meant as an expression of turmoil. Then I realized that certain characters were blurred beyond recognition—I’d misread that word, and perhaps the painting altogether. Maybe the would-be text bore no relation at all to the fiery field behind it, or maybe it connected in ways I can never fully know. 

Saito labeled these ’90s works “Monochromes,” which is itself a clever linguistic sleight of hand, since the large canvases are covered with more than one color. The title of Mock Orange reads like a reference to the fact that this vermilion canvas actually contains smears of yellow. If some of his painterly peers found respite in pared-down abstraction—recall Ad Reinhardt’s obsession with “purity” as the finest form of aesthetics—Saito was interested in intentionally muddying his expansive planes of color. 

Can these paintings’ mysteries be unraveled at all? Most works are titled in cryptic ways, but one seems to offer a means for understanding. Moon Tree (1993), a blackboard-scaled field of lush magenta, can be read as an allusion to tree seeds that were flown around the moon by Apollo 14 astronauts in 1971, then planted in sites around the US. The painting has no obvious relationship to those seeds, but Saito evokes a foray into outer space, a realm that remains only partially understood. A phrase that looks like “Amoxina inoi sn x20” also appears in the painting. Its meaning is elusive to me, but Saito might have intended it for other kinds of beings who can decipher it.

This year’s edition is brimming with fragile materiality: soft materials are at odds with firm frames. Dala Nasser drapes fabric, dyed with iron-rich clay from the banks of the Abraham River, over a wooden armature. Suzanne Jackson dangles delicate sheets of acrylic paint from rods. Lotus L. Kang hangs unfixed filmfrom an aluminum apparatus; the sheets take in light slowly over the show’s duration. Jes Fan droops molten glass over an intricate lattice, where it hardens into blobs. And Carolyn Lazard fills a neo-Minimalist menagerie of mirrored medicine cabinets with Vaseline.

What explains this trend? The answer seems obvious: today more than ever, fleshy realities are at odds with the strictures of daily life. This fact is made overt in an installation by Carmen Winant titled The Last Safe Abortion (2023), a grid of photographs documenting daily tasks of laborers in abortion clinics in the Midwest. The photographs, many shot when Roe was still the victor over Wade, now feel like a tragic time capsule. Bodily inhospitality is made explicit too, in Demian DinéYazhi’s neon sign that reads “we must stop imagining destruction … displacement + surveillance + genocide!” and so on. And two works—by Tourmaline and Kiyan Williams—commemorate Marsha P. Johnson (1945–92), an activist who spoke out against assaults on Black and trans bodies.

But for the most part, you’ll likely feel more called in than called out. Have a seat in a folding chair in front of Sharon Hayes’s 80-minute video of LGBTQ elders, and you feel like you’ve joined the group session onscreen—a discussion of aging and sexuality, of how things have and have not changed. Prepare to be dazzled by Isaac Julien’s installation, Once Again… (Statues Never Die), 2022, about Albert C. Barnes’s African art: the white, Philadelphia-based patron assembled one of the first US collections of works from the Continent. Julien’s enchanting video sidesteps hot-button conversations about repatriation and cultural appropriation, instead capturing the collection’s crucial influence on the artists of the Harlem Renaissance.These works aren’t trying to be divisive. And these artists, it seems clear, are exhausted by the heroicism and polemicism that so often plague today’s discourse, made partisan and corrosive by the argument machine that is social media.

It is in that sphere of controversy and clicks that you’ll find the bulk of the show’s critics, who have bemoaned the absence of assertiveness. Various white men whose names happen to start with the letter J have called the show “tepid” (Jerry), “bland” (Jackson), and “low-risk, visually polite” (Jason). Meanwhile, two of the three jab Winant’s work—ironically, the show’s most confrontational contribution.

The strongest voice in favor of a softer approach comes from within the exhibition: in the Hayes video, a queer elder—speaking shortly a woman who came out as lesbian at age 68—is asked how her relationship to activism has changed as she has aged. She replies: “I don’t want to get arrested anymore,” then tells the story of having been pushed to the bottom of a riot pile while protesting with ACT UP. In hindsight, she says, “it was a privilege” to stick her neck out like that; now, she’s more fragile. And yet, as the video itself attests, her voice is still potent in this new form.

In a wall text that opens the Biennial, cocurators Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli write that they are “committed … to providing a space where difficult ideas can be engaged and considered.” There’s not one figurative painting (unless you count Maja Ruznic’s), and you won’t get much art here that’s digestible on Instagram. Nor will you see artists from marginalized groups asked to make their trauma legible, so that others might learn.

Still, wall labels aren’t always the best guides to help you wade through the nuance. You could easily walk away not knowing the depths of the moving story behind Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s standout installation Paloma Blanca Deja Volar / White Dove Let Us Fly (2024). Its amber resin, poured over records produced by white activists, evokes “the complex relationship between privilege and solidarity.” Speaking in broad strokes, the label refers to the amber as “a kind of archive,” omitting the more specific amber associations the artist has named in past works—including a reference to a black scar left in the earth by a volcanic eruption in El Salvador. During the Salvadoran civil war (1980–92), that scar, where the earth subsumes refuse the way Aparicio’s amber does, became a kind of dumping ground, where bodies piled up, including that of the artist’s half-sister.

But complaining about wall labels goes only so far: good narration makes a difference, and yet, words will always fail when it comes to describing artworks speaking a more material language. What’s more, the show’s main theme—that friction between corporeal experience and oppressive norms—is, in the most literal sense, a material problem. Constantina Zavitsanos’s All the Time (2019/24)shows why, at the subatomic level. In a soundtrack, the artist waxes poetic about quantum physics, explaining how our understanding of the material universe is all wrong. We often think about the material world as a zero-sum game: there are limited resources for which we must compete. But some things double when you divide them, like holograms, alongside which this work was initially shown. Let that sink in: if you cut a hologram in half, you don’t get half an image, you get two. “Love is holographic,” the track continues, the more you give away, the more you have.

Zavitsanos’s artwork itself, if you pay close attention, is loving toward its viewers in a material way too. The impetus for the project was the artist’s wanting to make a video that was accessible to their disabled community, for in disability as in holograms, “lack” is often actually a gain. There’s no image, and the bass tops 100 hertz, making the sound haptic and vibrational. The words are transcribed via closed captioning, and all this is accessed via one giant ramp. If you are sighted and hearing and ambulatory—or if you never really have to think about access—you might miss all that. If that work isn’t speaking directly to you, you’ll have to slow down in order to let it sink in.

Correction, 4/10/24: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the person who came out at age 68 in Sharon Hayes’s video is the same person as the one who said she didn’t want to get arrested anymore. 

The drawings in Marian Zazeela’s exhibition at Artists Space in New York look like words being born. Most of them are not even words, exactly, but accumulations of marks making their way through transformative stages somewhere between the embryonic and the etymological.

Zazeela’s ornate style of drawing and calligraphy has been synonymous for decades with the work of her partner, the minimalist musical composer La Monte Young. The few musically aligned drawings in “Dream Lines,” an exhibition of nearly 50 works made between 1962 and 2003, include an early poster advertising a series of performances by Young and fellow drone devotee Angus MacLise, as well as sketches for what would come to be album covers.

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But most of the drawings now on view in Tribeca look like searching gestures that fluctuate between differing states of legibility. One brain-scrambling sketch of curlicue forms from 1962 (it’s untitled, like all but a few works in the show) seems to bear the strange phrase “frow word” before rearranging itself to look more like “word” spelled both backward and forward—and then, after that, “draw word.” Another from 1963 features extremely tiny lines of blurred black flourishes suggestive of writing over top an index page from the back of a book—intimating a store of information that has been obscured and hidden well away.

Zazeela’s style is rooted in calligraphy but also grows and sprouts in different ways. And looking at her drawings—most of them in ink or pencil, and for the most part in black and white—is a curious exercise in an age when writing itself has so fundamentally changed. When is the last time you wrote something in cursive? Or had to decipher something written by hand? As it were, on my way to see “Dream Lines,” I realized I had forgotten a pen to jot down notes and wandered around looking for somewhere—anywhere—to buy one. The little drug stores and the 7-Eleven I checked no longer stock even simple Bics.

Near the end of the show are two evocations (both from 1977) of significant figures rendered solely through the letters of their names. Portrait of Helen 10/12 is a tribute to Helen Winkler Fosdick, one of the three founders of the Dia Art Foundation, which mounted a memorable Zazeela show at Dia:Beacon from 2019–22. Portrait of Philippa 1/6 pays homage to Philippa de Menil, a fellow founder who funded Dia’s activities in the early years. Dia played a formative role in Dream House, a mesmerizing sound-and-light installation that Zazeela and Young established with Dia’s help in 1979 and continue to maintain (in a different form) above their home two blocks away from Artists Space.

Collaboration will always figure prominently in Zazeela’s legacy. But drawings of the kind in “Dream Lines” tell the story of an artist who awakens different states of dreaming on her own.