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Luana Vitra thinks of her work as “devotional offerings.” Is it too late to show her devotion to her African roots, her native Brazil, and the earth? And who is left to receive her offerings—apart from those who already enriched themselves on the former Congo? If Marina Zurkow is right, when it comes to the earth’s material resources, people were past caring long ago—and I work this together with recent reports on trees at Wave Hill as a look at art and climate change and my latest upload.

Signs of recent life appear clearly enough with Zurkow at the Whitney, if not gods. A billboard still stands in a schematic but wonderfully detailed landscape. A picnic table has its place, too, right in the foreground, with a pond of sorts in the middle distance. Every so often, the sky teems with butterflies, lending their color to video’s artificial chill. People join them as well, in bear-fur blackface and comic yellow hazmat suits, and they better work fast. That pond is really a sinkhole, and a picnic, if any, would by now have already sunk.

The cast soon retires, leaving the blank billboard, an abandoned backyard grill, and a wintry landscapes. This is her Mesocosm—not a microcosm of devotional energy, but a middle ground where it might not be safe to kneel or to stand. Zurkow pairs it with The Earth Eaters, a second video still more dire in what it shows. An eruption every few seconds spills molten rock, roughly where the sinkhole has its dangers in Mesocosm. The real earth eaters are the humans who did the damage in extracting resources and leaving the rest to a dismal fate. Her animation has a cosmic and comic energy all the same.

It also has a sculptural counterpart just outside on the terrace, also through January 11, where Zurkow responds to the Whitney Museum site by the Hudson, much as her video responds to its source code. There The River Is a Circle, which sounds downright hopeful. A teardrop in shape, like the results of a map search, rises to a well-crafted wood bench. Naturally enough, though, no seating permitted, with or without a picnic. A sphere behind it echoes the science behind a buckyball by Buckminster Fuller, and blue tubes have their own charm and precision. The Whitney has its site-specific art, too, by David Hammons, in place of a former pier (just south of Barry Diller’s Little Island). Oh, the trade-offs in a return to earth.

For Vitra at SculptureCenter, the solution is simple. She can show her love for nature and its resources through her art, through July 28. A work titled Amulets should ward off harm, to humans or the earth, but here the curtains are light as feathers. Feathers cover the entrance wall, dyed a clear white and deep blue that should draw anyone closer to appreciate their art. The mineral dye, lapis lazuli, is from Brazil but perhaps better known from a poem named for it by William Butler Years. Its color is at once sky blue and electric.

It aims, in other words, to show both beauty and respect, like another offering to the gods. As Yeats wrote, “Every discolouration of the stone, / Every accidental crack or dent / Seems a water-course or an avalanche.” Minas Gerais, the place Vitra calls home, is rich in iron ore and other minerals, and she throws in both, in ceramics that morph into drum sets and towers into bowls for precious metals. Arrows point upward and outward as protection from further mining. White fabric wraps the whole, like bandages for a broken earth. More feathers produce a white curtain.

Sam Cottington and Alejandro Villabona have the small back room though June 9 for a slide show and performance, growing steadily in volume and determination to an anticlimactic standoff. Suffice it to say that its lovers do not get along. (It lost me.) Vitra by comparison may seem to avoid hard questions, but she takes due care to construct a proper offering. The installation winds its stately way through the gallery, as a tribute to her ancestors. To quote Yeats again, “Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.”

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Bringing trees to Wave Hill is like carrying coals to Newcastle. On second thought, call it the antidote to a darker city—an antidote that it delivers harried New Yorkers every day.

While a bit remote, the public garden and cultural center has a free shuttle van late each week from the last stop on the subway in the Bronx. Besides, the distance from midtown is part of the cure. I look forward each year to the half hour walk from Van Cortlandt Park, past Tudor houses that I could not possibly afford. I make a point of it, along with a report on summer art inside and out, and this year’s group show in the Glyndor Gallery is all about trees. “Trees, We Breathe” invites you to take a deep breath, inside and out, through September 1. If the trees are short of breath, too, such is climate change.

Wave Hill offers no end of green framing its plush lawn, its greenhouses, and the view to the Palisades across the Hudson. The city as a whole has its share of trees to revive the spirits and to nourish the eye as well—seven million of them, not that far short of its more than eight citizens. Sari Carel calls her painted map City of Trees—with colored dots for trees and wide-open blocks for space to breath. If it is a little spooky, like the view from a drone or a UFO, she keeps things positive, like the show as a whole. Leave politics to others with less art and fewer trees. Its best-known contributor, Yoko Ono, welcomes visitors to write down their personal hopes before tying them to actual trees outdoors.

Remember last summer’s “Perfect Trouble“? This summer’s show revels in imperfections, like most families. Sonja John photographs her next of kin perched high in the trees, in a room of floral patterns like stained glass. Not that she is part of the main show, but she lets in plenty of light. So does Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, also through July 13, who hangs her colors from the ceiling like a spiritual being or a spirit home. But they could be, like John in the sun room, for greater unity and intimacy than ever.

Same for Sara Jimenez outdoors, with black ceramic urns in the shape of women’s heads, as with Folding Field. The accompanying red curtain descends from trees, through September 21, torn but taking in the breeze. Same, too, for SuRan Song and William M. Weis III through September 1, with You’re Soaking in It. It sounds like more than their canopy bed can deliver, and it is. An actual if unlikely part of the show, Rose B. Simpson stands masked guards by the gallery entrance in steel, but then someone must stand watch over people and the earth. (Monica Duncan and Jennifer Tobas had not yet set out their work, replacing Phingbodhipakkiya and John, when I came.)

Trees take on the materials of everyday life, and they never let go, not even in the face of global warming and climate change. Andrea Bowers starts with an assemblage of mugs, pots, and pints that I can only trust has something to do with growth. And then she nestles in a tree trunk in the face of deforestation and her own Eco Grief. In the end, though, the most effective memories are the most direct. Rachel Sussman gives trees their due in something akin to portrait photos, including balboa, the tree of life. Weihui Lu in ink extends branches gathered from Wave Hill itself with all the elusive elegance of Chinese calligraphy.

These artists carry trees from nature and return them to nature, with echoes of the gallery. Trees come in gold and ink for Sarah Ahmad. They lie flat in bark and latex for Carlie Trosclair and Sam Van Aken. They come cast in white as chestnuts for Michelle Frick. Their branches become surgical tools for Ben Gould. Woe to those who do not undergo the operation.

Here hope lies in trees, but the burden falls on you. Julia Oldham on video imagines their “escape from destruction” in the electric colors of fantasy fiction, while Yeseul Song and Jesse Simpson hear a Whisper of Sunken Forest waiting to rise. Yet healing lies in you as well. The comma in “Trees, We Breathe” changes everything. People breathe air replenished by trees, and people dare to claim it as their due.

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For once, it makes sense to have started on New York’s summer sculpture with the Met roof. True, it is not public sculpture in the city’s abundant parks, but the view brings it close enough. That is especially so with the roof about to close to bring it fully into the Met, as part of a redesign of its modern and contemporary wing.

It has also been each year’s first to open (and I take you to more after their late openings, but first a quick tour of solo acts). With her interest in music, you might say that Jennie C. Jones set the tone for everything to come. In particular, it had me asking about the place of Minimalism in sculpture a mere half century after artists and critics alike pretty much moved on. Sure enough, Edra Soto and Torkwase Dyson could pass for the real thing.

Both adopt industrial materials, with the warm browns of rusted steel. Both, too, work on a scale a bit larger than life, to invite viewers into the work. You can see through Edra Soto’s gates to others out for a stroll with Central Park behind them. If, like Jones, it is not quite art in the parks, it is this year’s commission for the park’s southeast entrance, across from the Plaza Hotel, and it welcomes the view, through August 24. Torkwase Dyson, in turn, creates a pavilion, with seating. The closer you get, though, the more it opens to the sky.

Both works do the unexpected for Minimalism, in accord with the eclectic “neo-Minimalism” common enough today. For such large, heavy sculpture, Soto’s could pass for painting. It divides neatly into four panels, each a geometric abstraction. Slim metal rods radiate outward, forming a surface at their center that reflects sunlight. And their radiance tells a story, about crossing borders. They recall for Soto the wrought-iron screens outside homes in her native Puerto Rico, and they rest on terrazzo within the picture plane, as if decorative tiling had taken flight.

Where Soto calls her work Graft, grafted onto her adopted city, this is Dyson’s Akua, meaning born on Wednesday, although I hesitate to ask why. Fresh off the 2024 Whitney Biennial, she has a lawn in Brooklyn Bridge Park, set back just far enough to make Brooklyn Heights, Dumbo, and the East River already distant memories. One can, though, see a shifting role for the work and its surroundings, through next March 8. What at first looks broad and solid, tapering in and out like the cooling tower of a nuclear reactor, reaches easily overhead. It also breaks up that much more clearly into metal beams with a circular opening above. A metal sheet on the ground could be the royal carpet inside.

Not that others can let go of Minimalism either, so long as they can run wild. Steve Tobin has his industrial roots, too, in more ways than one. His New York Roots, through February 28, began as piping before taking off in all directions exactly as the title would suggest. The half dozen works might have grown out of the ground here and there in the Garment District entirely on their own. Carl D’Alvia brings much the same party colors to the Upper West Side—and only a bit more restraint. His new work, on the Broadway median strip through November 1, plays on its compact shapes and single colors. It keeps threatening to settle down into geometric or alphabetic form, mostly near subway stops, only to refuse the offer.

But enough of abstract art, whatever the story line. How about the real New York, where pigeons are ready to prey on whatever you can offer? The spur of the High Line, near West 30th Street, has a history now of single works, through November with Iván Argote. Like a white drone by Sam Durant not long ago, Argote is thinking in terms of motion, although he titles his work Dinosaur, as if it were well past its prime. Like a bare tree by Pamela Rosenkranz just last year, he is thinking, too, in terms of natural life. His oversize pigeon, while beautifully detailed, looks a trifle obvious all the same.

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Ever tempted to dismiss Minimalism as a little too quiet and a little too apart? Jennie C. Jones is listening. She takes her silent music to 2025 New York summer sculpture, as Ensemble, on the the Met roof through October 19. As the rubes in Shakespeare’s The Tempest say to one another, in hope of reassurance, “this isle is full of noises.”

Rather than approach her from scratch, I invite you to read my review of her at the Guggenheim Museum in 2022, some of which follows but her command of music, geometry, and silence has only grown. But let me introduce her with the details of her latest. Tall slabs, a trapezoid, and a V-shape seem to change in proportions as one circulates. Their colors run to a deep red that could pass for Minimalism’s dark steel, but with accents white concrete and blood red that evoke soundproofing, the museum’s travertine tone, and a scream. Pins and wires allude to the bridge of a violin or the single string of Mississippi blues. If one part of her trilogy makes her think of an Aeolian harp, its melodies celebrated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in poetry in 1796 and driven by the wind, this is Minimalism as poetry waiting to be heard.

Jones prefers quiet noises, just as her mixed media nurture the quiet. At the Guggenheim, she worked not with paint on canvas, but rather the materials to eliminate unwanted noises, felt and acoustic panels. You may never have noticed before their contrasting texture or their similarity to Minimalism itself. Jones titles one work for Agnes Martin, and her influence is unmistakable in the simple divisions of a work between panels or along horizontals—and the gradations of dark and gray. When a red panel or gray diagonal intrudes, it is all the more resonant. When a red slice tops a panel, where you can barely see it, its “aura,” as she puts it, is the visual equivalent of the hum.

Jones had the lower floors of the Guggenheim ramp, just after another woman with a feel for quiet, Etel Adnan. A musical score, the form of her works on paper, is for her what landscape is for Adnan. Music has long had a place in Minimalism as well—an entire genre of music with such composers as John Adams and Philip Glass, also the subject of portraits by Chuck Close. While most definitely not a Minimalist, John Cage recognized the visual potential of a score, and he will always be famous for less than five minutes of silence. Cage also embraced chance, while Jones leaves nothing to chance, and she is not one to count off the seconds. Still, the staff lines in her scores are compositions in themselves.

Is the parallel between art and music only a metaphor? It may be only figurative language, but it has entered English. One does speak of a quiet composition or go to a museum in search of quiet. Jones finds the parallels in technical and informal language alike—most often in digital music and analog art. Titles speak of Soft, Pitchless Oxide Edge and Toward the Pedal Point, while a bright red painting is a Tone Burst. The show’s title, “Dynamics,” refers to music’s gradations in volume, but dynamics in physics (as opposed to statics) is the study of forces and motion. And she does think of her paintings as “active surfaces” and the “physical residue” of sound.

Panels like these are also elements of architecture, and their interdisciplinary art extends there as well. The view down from the ramp onto the two-level High Gallery offers a glimpse of red accents on the top of paintings that one might otherwise have missed. When (rarely) curves enter a drawing, they pick up on Frank Lloyd Wright and the Guggenheim. Quiet being what it is, one might find oneself talking around another point of reference, too. Jones is black, and past shows have been eager to find markers of African American identity in her art. They have also featured objects that this small show takes pains to omit.

She contributed a SONY Walkman to a show of “conceptual art and identity politics” and looped audio cables to a tribute to Romare Bearden, both at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She appeared there among the emerging artists in “Freestyle” as well. One of her scores turned up just last year in “Grief and Grievance” at the New Museum, a show about white grievances and black grief. Is Jones out to leave all that behind, in favor of recent work and an homage to Martin? The Guggenheim quotes her dismissal of black abstraction as bombast. Her visual and sonic aura is anything but.

Still, she seems like the last person to indulge in apologies or evasions. If she minimizes the references, it is to maximize what she finds in music and an installation. They exist both in the moment and in an extended time, the “sustain” of a pedal point, and that alters how one perceives her painting as well. Like Adnan before her and Cecilia Vicuña to follow, the walk up the ramp leads to another abstract painter, Wassily Kandinsky. His late work seems busy and bombastic by comparison, but again Jones is listening. Adds Shakespeare’s Caliban, “When I waked, I cried to dream again.”

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At El Museo del Barrio, the dancing never stops. Put it down to a museum with a taste for local color in New York and the Americas, wherever its exhibitions care to go.

Put it down, too, to the technological magic of video, which still captures dance in Brazil in 1980. It need never quit the length of a museum wall or the entirety of museum hours in remembering Salvador da Bahia, where Mestre Didi dedicated his life to “Spiritual Form.” Put it down most of all to a country where none can escape the carnival and few would dream of trying. A retrospective reaches out to embrace all manner of dancing, in life and in art, through July 13.

Depending on which way you enter, the dance may precede him. Didi, born Deoscóredes Maximiliano dos Santos, was still just hitting his stride when Arlete Soares gathered her fellow dancers to put on a show. They may press singly toward the picture plane in black and white or weave in a tightly choreographed mass. Their white dresses only emphasize their body weight. The mestre was lighter in weight in more ways than one. His sculpture stands tall, lean, and just as active at the center of each room.

Just thirty works hold the floor, sharing the museum with a larger retrospective of Candida Alvarez. Leather-bound sheaves form decorative patterns touched by flowers in photos the size of the wall. Beneath it lie still more patterns in reproduction with much the same motifs. A step inside the show has it coming actively into being. In another photo, you can see him binding the tapestry in palm ribs. Again the dance and the layering keep coming.

He works calmly and steadily. These are his orishas, or “scepters,” and he is weaving a “sacred site” in deference. This is solid ground, populated by ziggurats and cowrie shells, but the patterns are largely planar. Didi showed his work easily back then, but Bahia is not Rio, and he has largely fallen off the map, at least in New York. He died in 2013 well into his nineties. Here, though, he can once again serve as a central place for local artists, Yoruba tradition, and the currents that fed the artist himself.

The curators, Rodrigo Moura and Ayrson Heráclitof with Chloë Courtney, treat the occasion as a group show of nearly a dozen other mischief makers, like the dancers from forty-five years ago. This is not a survey of Brazilian art, which has had no shortage of attention with its woven histories, South American architecture, and photographic “Fotoclubismo.” Shows have focused on such artists as Hélio Oiticica, Tarsila do Amaral, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape. Didi’s version of Latin American art skipped the carnival in Rio in search of the spiritual. It shares its strategies with others all the same as recently as today. It obliges one to think harder about what they have in common behind him on the wall.

They may work with bold geometric abstraction like Rubem Valentim or, like Goya Lopes, in silkscreen on red floral textiles. They may turn to craft, like Nádia Taquary in basketry and beads. They may have freestanding geometric sculpture, like Emanoel Araújo, or dark cast metal masks like Agnaldo Manoel dos Santos flat to the wall. Jorge dos Anjos tells stories in ink, while paintings by Abdias Nascimento are colorful, mythic, and playful. Antonio Oloxedê creates scepters of his own. Like Didi, they see no contradiction between the spiritual and the dance.

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To wrap up from last time on the Met’s Rockefeller wing of non-Western art, no matter how well you prepare yourself for the reach of the Met’s renovated Rockefeller wing, a single step can come as a shock.

And that is just what you face in taking an actual step halfway around the world, from Oceania to the Americas. It means leaving islands separated by wide oceans for a newfound density of human habitation. Make that a density of imagery as well in patterns and faces. They appear in tapestries with warm red tones suiting settled interiors. They appear in ceramics as burst of natural and supernatural life. Here, myth has it, the dead are destined to become ancestors.

Not that it is easy to tell the real from the unreal, but the accumulated grimaces feel like a discovery of the human. If they turn out to be far more than human, it is the divine in everyday regalia and the human in the midst of divine combat. Cats are symbols of dominance. Even in its patterning, art is taking risks. A cotton fabric embellished with features is fully abstract, with a simplicity not seen in Western art for centuries to come. It takes the form of alternating rectangles in yellow and deep, soft blue.

Art has a greater diversity within the Americas as well. Its sections mover from the agricultural planning of Colombia and Peru to Mexico City with the Avenue of the Dead. White clay permits burial jars as well. The time dimension becomes more important, too. There begins a post-classical civilization with the Incan empire—and from its loss in the face of Europeans. In due time, murals extend to city walls.

After all that, to turn at last to male and female figures of Africa is to discover a familiarity and a relief. So many Mexican images within images? So much national and cultural combat? The art of Africa, it turns out, represents an unmatched sophistication and stability. Art serves to preserve not sacrifice and war but trade across peoples and biospheres. Maybe it took the new wing’s gathering of light, but the continent is nothing like the darkness you may have thought you knew. It is a point of origin for good reason.

Here, too, art has a sense of craft and materials, here in the hands of blacksmiths. It has a favored medium, too, masks—not just face masks but helmet masks, body masks, and headdresses. It would take a diligent viewer indeed to track their style and purpose across thousands of years and emerging nations. Are they, too, ancestral beings? Are they on the side of the angels? Once again you may find yourself with questions.

Africa raises more than any. Its galleries have the greatest integration of recent art as well. They had me thinking back to everything, that I had seen, including that feathery Peruvian blue. Strips of blue fabric from Mali hang gathered and loose. I cannot swear even now that I am at home in the reopened wing. I shall be trying to find my way for years to come around a third of the earth.

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