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Not all the artists in “Asian-American Abstraction” are Asian-American, but no matter. Who can tell the difference anyway?

Think I’m joking? The gallery, Hollis Taggart, asks just that. Wall text roughly midway through poses the question, and not even a checklist of works stops to answer. Take as long as you like with a challenging summer group show, through September 7. It is not the only summer group show to take American abstraction overseas and back, and I work this together with a recent report on “Americans in Paris” as a longer review and my latest upload.

Nearly fifty artists, past and present, fill both floors of the gallery for “Asian-American Abstraction” and who are they anyway? They show the influence of East Asian tradition, but also Abstract Expressionism—and there, too, you may have trouble untangling the threads. Don Ahn, for one, works with an eye to calligraphy, but with ink spatters as well. He may have you marveling at the sheer control of Chinese “Companions in Solitude” before him and, in a very different way, drip painting from Jackson Pollock. And then a second work adds a glowing yellow that not even Pollock could know. Ming Wang has her own descending black brush, but also an accordion book of pages twice “letter” size, to accommodate so much more.

Influence here runs every which way—all the more so in a room that includes Abstract Expressionists, too. It also bears text with that stubborn question. Franz Kline has his seeming calligraphy, but then so does Robert Rauschenberg in characters of his own invention. Black for Sheila Isham spirals down a red canvas as Song of the Palace, while Michael West is Drunk with Turpentine. Vivian Springford, like West (surprise!) a long-neglected woman artist, applies acrylic stains in near concentric circles. You may think of Georgia O’Keeffe or Morris Louis, but she had her first solo show in Tokyo, and she credits the influence of Walasse Ting, from Shanghai on his way to America.

If those artists looked to Chinese art, Chinese Americans had their versions of modern art as well. Ivy Wu brings almost Pop Art colors and well-defined geometry to her calligraphy, while Oonju Chan paints on open fields out of Joan Mitchell. Think, then, that you really cannot know the difference? Think again. Just to describe them is to see them as individuals. Those without a signature style can get lost along the way.

Abstract Expressionists relied heavily on their signature, like Kline’s monumental characters. Adolph Gottlieb has one of his characteristic explosions, of one symbol atop another. Sam Francis has his splotches of red, yellow, and black. They are easy enough to recognize even in relatively small works on paper. Chinese Americans, by comparison, can be more intricate or more fluid. You may pass that test after all.

Nor does it really come down to Asia and America. Postwar American artists had many influences and many that they influenced. Were they formal or gestural? Were they the heirs to Cubism, Surrealism, or something else again? Where they as American as the Hudson River School, which they admired as well? More and more, too, curators are looking beyond Abstract Expressionist New York to a global movement. Asians, say, had their share starting around 1954, in Gutai.

The question still matters, and it sets this show apart. It asks one to look beyond major works and heavy hitters. It asks, too, to well-known artists as infinitely changeable. Who would have thought of Rauschenberg as an abstract painter? He rejected all that, right? You might have to read his indecipherable letters to find out.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Yto Barrada photographed Gibraltar, near her African home town, as a touch point for North Africans in the treacherous passage to safety. She embraced it, too, for the sun and sea.

YThat was 1999, but even now she is traditional enough to work not digitally, but in the darkroom. At the International Center of Photography, you may wonder if she ever leaves its confines, even with a camera. She prefers photograms, of candy wrappers and child’s toys, as a cavalcade of overlapping colors and blocks of light. Sweet.

You may not think of Barrada as a photographer, but she began as one. She graduated from the one-year programs at ICP in 1996—then in a Fifth Avenue mansion that could have converted anyone to the medium. Now she returns home several times over. She was back in the darkroom ten years ago, on her return to New York, and she has a solo show at her old school of the results, while recent graduates of those programs share their work a floor above. It may not define her once and for all, but it helps broaden the museum’s self-definition. She may never become a full-time photographer, but she is, as the show has it, “Part-Time Abstractionist,” through September 2.

Actually Barrada has had several homes and successive media. Born in Paris to Moroccan parents in 1971, she spend much of her childhood in Tangier, studied at the Sorbonne, and co-founded a cinema art house in Tangier as well. She exhibited at the LMCC Art Center on Governors Island in 2020, with Bettina Grossman (or simply Bettina) as her guest. Her work there included sculpture, installation, and abstract art (and I leave you to my review then for more). Now she brings a long overdue touch of color to the barren, pebbled courtyard of MoMA PS1. The piled cubes of Le Grand Soir look like attempts at grand pyramids that never quite made it—or just long overdue seating.

ICP displays sculpture and video, too, in a small show curated by Elisabeth Sherman. A makeshift vase holds cardboard flowers, while the video takes her from the darkroom to an arid but tempting suburban landscape. Cars with what might be a hearse at its front pass homes whose only face rotates open and shut, like an oversize garage door. The procession reaches a traffic circle without heeding the temptation to turn, on its way to what must remain unseen and unknown. As the cars pass, red and white striped curbs swell into red along the pavement, and palm trees sink into the ground and rise once more. They, too, are part-time abstraction.

Are they playful in tone, formal exercises, or deeply allusive—much as the houses might pass for toys, Minimalist sculpture, or the American southwest? Do they belong at all at ICP? Whatever your answer, do not be too sure. The year’s celebration of “ICP at 50” recalled its founding mission, to promote photojournalism and a concern for humanity. Barrada earned her certificate in documentary photography as well. Yet ICP’s anniversary show also saw a broadening as far as abstraction, and so does she.

Barrada does not need a camera to approach the heights of abstraction. She relishes darkroom tools, like dodge and burn, and rescues paper from the trash. A sewing machine without thread punches its way through more paper, leaving first vertical and horizontal axes, then parallel lines between them. By the time she is done, she has a near textbook reproduction of a black painting by Frank Stella. In the one series with a camera, plumbing supplies from Tangier look like actors in a silent comedy. Take it seriously, but keep smiling.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.