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Oh, no, not another biennial or triennial. What could conceivably make this one any different? It is “Flow States,” La Trienal 2024 El Museo del Barrio through March 16. Will it just go with the flow?

A museum dedicated to the Americas in New York has a ready answer. It is all about cultural difference—and the borders meant to keep differences out. Not that La Trienal is a dry and affirming lecture on diversity. The artists themselves may wonder what to call home. With just thirty-three contributors, it leaves ample room to share in their dilemma. With a dozen works commissioned for the occasion, it hopes to nurture them as well, and I work this together with past reports on Amalia Mesa-Bains and “Domesticanx” at the same museum as a longer review and my latest upload.

Visitors cross more than one border just by entering. A black beaded curtain, by Cosmo Whyte, leads to rooms often reserved for a second show, but among the museum’s best for installations and big work. Whyte calls it Persona Non Grata, for not all are equally welcome in America. It leaves one face to face with a mural by Caroline Kent that takes her lively abstract shapes into a mix of painted and solid forms. It is, she explains, interdimensional. Borders, it appears, are for time travelers, too.

You may not even know that they are there. Nearby, Estaban Cabeza de Baca adopts the same mural scale for a tropical landscape. You might have settled in for vacation only to find yourself on the border between the United States and Mexico. Still other place markers are invisible, like bird calls from Mark Menjivar and scents from Chaveli Sifra. Paint for Ser Serpas (also in the 2024 Whitney Biennial) spills out from the walls and onto the floor, for an immersive experience. Trump’s wall is mostly a fiction anyway.

Artists have crossed borders personally as well, starting with their heritage. Kent has a Mexican mother and an African American father. Regardless, they surely sympathize with those who have made the crossing just to survive. Studio Lenca suspends migrant caps from pieces of a Ford F-150 truck. Liz Cohen photographs women workers, while Studio Lenca calls its paintings Journeys. Tony Cruz Pabón marks the distance from San Juan to New York with pencil marks that bring him closer to Minimalism than folk art.

They may cross borders with their materials as well. Carmen Argo constructs her beings from plastic ties and palm leaves, while Sarita Westrup applies native crafts to a good old New York traffic cone. Raw materials like tar take Karyn Olivier from carnival in Trinidad to shelter in North Philadelphia. Then too, borders are place markers. Joe Zaldivar maps where every artist has landed, in New York and behind. As curators, Rodrigo Moura, Susanna V. Temkin, and María Elena Ortiz fill the entire museum, as if mapping a continent.

These are unsettling journeys, whatever the artist’s cultural identity. This is not one big happy family. Alina Perez in charcoal remembers her family as anything but what she calls a Family Romance. Photos by Christina Fernandez remember long suburban nights in LA as a war zone. Mario Martinez uses light brushwork out of Abstract Expressionism to evoke every New Yorker’s favorite toxic Superfund site, the Gowanus Canal. Kathia St. Hilaire can pack almost anything into low relief, from banknotes and banana stickers to a painted candle piercing the darkness.

Artists here may shy away from from conflict or boosterism, but anger remains. “They stole our land and now they call us migrants,” a fisherman says in video by Alberta Whittle—and yet beauty remains in his labor and his nets. This translates into large work, and artists can easily coast on it. Smaller pieces and older media mostly fall short. Can a triennial, then, truly make a difference? Maybe so, but please do not ask for yet another.

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

Does it matter where a work of art originated? Do we need to ask about the artist, the time, or the culture, or can we just appreciate the art? And if we do not appreciate the art for itself, have we betrayed it and, just as much, ourselves? Why should art not speak for itself?

I have pursued questions like these often over the more than twenty years of this Web site, along with my role as a critic. In fact, I doubt that I can match the more philosophical attempts in the past! The questions came up again, though, not so very long ago on Facebook. When I posted a link and brief reply, a second artist was even more skeptical. Suppose I rework my further comments, as a rather longer article and my latest upload in defense of not just looking. I shall combine my address to both, in the form of a letter to an unknown artist, maybe even you.

You raised the questions as both an admirer of art and an artist, so it is doubly real for you. You have heard friends speak of what they see in the patterns that they have made. As a savvy viewer who cannot see the same, you have to wonder whether that could ever matter to you. You may wonder whether your thoughts appear fully in your work as well. If not, you may wonder whether your work has taken on a new life, apart from you, or rather failed. It is, after all, a work of your imagination.

I have argued before why art takes words. It has to take words for me as a writer, and I have to hope that my words can open art to some others as well. In my earlier piece, I looked in particular at changing attributions. The Rembrandt committee had changed its mind about a painting in the Frick that so many of us have taken for granted as his. It has even shaped our personal understanding of Rembrandt. Since then, big money has backed novel attributions to Michelangelo at (gasp) age twelve (illustrated at left here) and, more recently, Leonardo da Vinci.

I still think that attributions matter, which is why arguments about millions of dollars for a supposed Leonardo get so heated. Allow me now, though, a fuller context for much the same questions—beyond attributions. I can start with your recent experience, on the way to that of others. Now, no question that an artist’s intentions cannot tell the whole story. Hard as it is to admit, an artist may even get it wrong. I am still attached enough to Modernism, New Criticism, and the like to think so.

Yet if the “intentional fallacy” means that it never matters how, where, and when a work of art began, then it is wrong. As Nelson Goodman, a philosopher of art, has said, he will believe that a painting speaks for itself when people start to admire poetry without reading the words. If you think that ugly painting is by Leonardo, you have to look for and indeed to see things that are simply not there. You have to see Leonardo and his other works differently, too, to their detriment. And then your questions may help you think freshly about those once again, to their betterment.

Think that you could not agree less with Goodman? I could understand that, but you may agree much more than you think, so let me tell you why. To me, it is just common sense. My answer will take several parts, so bear with me, but I shall try to stay more practical at the cost of serious theory than my previous effort. It involves the work and how the work comes to affect others. Pardon me, though, if it starts with you.

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

There is not a lot of shaking going on at the American Folk Art Museum, unless it is deep inside one’s soul. In fact it can be hard for an outsider to imagine the shaking and quaking that animated prayer meetings of the Shakers and Quakers, giving them their name.

One remembers instead the clarity and simplicity of Shaker furniture. One remembers, too, the removal from modern life in the Quakers, a lifestyle that most today would find confining. Yet a show makes the case for the Shaker esthetic as “Anything but Simple,” through January 26.

There had to have been more than the obvious to that esthetic, for the Shakers lived with it and let it shape their lives. Photos at the museum show objects in their place in homes from which people have long vanished, and one can feel the furniture and people alike close at hand. They did not need to go far in pursuit of a revelation. At the same time, they embraced simplicity as one of the prime virtues along with celibacy, pacifism, and egalitarianism. The combination of esthetic, practical, and spiritual virtues has long become an emblem of an older New England for the Shakers and rural Pennsylvania for the Quakers. It seems as essentially American as Washington crossing the Delaware.

Nor is it entirely passed. Shaker craft opens the exhibition along with the photographs, with all its richness in simplicity, like the wood grain and dark stain of nested oval boxes. Everything fits. Much the same paradox animated Minimalism in the 1960s, for all its industrial esthetic. Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Agnes Martin wanted to keep their hands dirty and their vision clear. That decade also looked to Quaker pacifism in response to the Vietnam War.

Like a viewer today, the Shakers lived in more than one time at once. They began shaking loose in England before taking their millenarian project to the United States in 1774, where they revered a founding figure in Mother Ann, or Ann Lee. There had to be something more, they felt, than the Enlightenment march of time or the hairsplitting of organized religions—and they found it in a perceived act of restoration. Much the same thoughts motivated Hassidic Jews in Eastern Europe in those same years. Like the Quakers, they, too, dress for those years while claiming the very first millenium. The Shakers just happened to turn out art and merchandise worth something today.

They knew it, too, and they meant their “gift drawings” of the mid-1800s for a larger public, for sale as a means of financial support. Yet their images of wreaths, hearts, fruit, and the tree of life also encode the gifts of heaven. They really did know beauty as soul shaking. They can close in on a single leaf or multiply their fruit, in bright, flat colors distinct from both “outsider art” and the brilliant illusion of Baroque still life and Romantic images of nature. Text at times helps to explain the code, barely breaking the symmetry, but you may not need it. Call it the calm after the quaking and shaking.

If the 1960s found something to admire, it may have rendered their austerity all but superfluous. Not that a movement devoted to celibacy had long to live. The movies and metaphors aside, there was no apocalypse now. Their dying off may explain so small a show—alongside selections from AFAM curated with an eye to Thornton Dial, the artist, and a packed display of game boards. It could serve as a preamble to the Met’s rehanging of its American wing on its hundredth anniversary, but also a rejoinder. Something here still brings stillness and bears fruit.

I could not make it to the Whitney at dawn, and I could not have entered if I had. Still, on a screen by the window, sunlight crossed the horizon and reflected on the water.

What could be more impressive than sunrise at noon—and more representative of landscape art? I should have read the title or, at the very least, noticed that I was facing west toward the Hudson. This is Artie Verkant’s Exposure Adjustment on a Sunset, and the sun’s hazy yellow sphere and broad band of white are equally an illusion. Give him a little time, and they will dissolve in pixels anyway.

The museum is out to alter the very idea of landscape in art, just as Verkant has taken it from painting to video. It sees contemporary art from its collection as “Shifting Landscapes” through January—and I work this in with earlier reports on two other landscape painters, Paul Paiement and Hilary Pecis, as a longer review and my latest upload. The Whitney’s seventy-five artists also dissolve the distinction between human and animal, artifice and nature. It is oddly insular all the same. Maria Berrio could be speaking for them all when she calls a painting Universe of One. Still, if it seems arbitrary and downright incoherent, there will always be another dawn.

You have seen this often enough before. A museum rolls out a genre from art’s history and modernizes it in the interest of contemporary art and diversity. It could be self-portraiture, the female body, art’s materials, or blackness. It risks becoming not so much a theme, since a show’s rooms will have their own themes, as a tic. Jennie Goldstein, Marcela Guerrero, and Roxanne Smith as curators take that model from the body into landscape painting. If neither landscape nor painting is all that evident, you will not be surprised.

That may be the Hudson out the west window, but this is not the Hudson River School. The very first room takes things off the canvas once and for all. Its theme of “Borderlands” makes sense when elections turn on immigration, but is art still crossing borders? Leslie Martinez applies pumice, paint chips, and rags, and you will just have to take her word for it that they reflect the accumulation of objects and cultures in a human life. Huge mossy creatures lie on a bed of turf for Amalia Mesa-Bains, while flames spread at night on a grid of ceramic chips by Teresita Fernández. She didn’t start the fire.

The flames may refer as much to climate change as to borderlands, and the next section speaks to the altered landscape. Robert Adams photographs industrial sites in Colorado. Dance for Nicole Soto Rodríguez alludes to sites and customs in Puerto Rico, but as performed on video and on a luxuriant staircase at home. What, then, could show the land’s transformation better than New York? Cityscapes here just may not have much to do with the urban landscape. They make room for Keith Haring, of all people, and (New York New Wave) Jean-Michel Basquiat.

See a pattern here? On the one hand, seemingly anything fits. On the other hand, pretty much anything that you might expect does not. That includes the entirety of history. This is not about mixing old work and new for fresh perspectives on both. Painters and photographers from the Ashcan School and the Harlem Renaissance to William Klein and Ming Smith have immersed themselves in the city, but not here. Just a floor below, a show for Alvin Ailey has ample space for the African American South. All “Shifting Landscapes” can show is a lone Gees Bend quilt and some cluttered assemblage.

The recent past does enter a room for earthworks—and just as quickly withdraws. Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria are nowhere to be seen, but Nancy Holt is, with the field locator that showed her the way. So is Agnes Denes, with photos of her wheat field in Battery Park City, seen from an angle that leaves their setting and subject a mystery. Maya Lin has her Ghost Forest of cedar stumps, but one would never know her concern for climate change. One would never know, too, how much she has reshaped urban spaces, from the Vietnam Memorial in Washington to museum architecture in New York. While hardly earth art, Gordon Matta-Clark does get to climb a tree and to call it a dance.

A final section, the curators argue, makes explicit the humanity of nature. If this, though, is “Another World,” can it show humanity or nature? The title may sound like Surrealism or science fiction, but it also looks suspiciously like self-portraiture. It does, though, allow Firelei Báez to float amid flowers. And is that a furry black bear beside her? A living landscape need never be a universe of one.

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

Elizabeth Catlett found her subject early and never let her go. It allowed her art to span a tumultuous century and then some. It made her “A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,” at the Brooklyn Museum through January 19. Late in a groundbreaking career, Jacob Lawrence and his Builders poured a comparable empathy and energy into the black male—and I work this together with my recent report on him as a longer review and my latest upload.

Catlett was warm in her feelings but relentless. Her work on The Negro Woman, later renamed The Black Woman, takes up the entirety of an awkward but impressive gallery. She hammers it home to her own heart in cedar and in oil, starting in 1942, before releasing it as fifteen prints the next year. Side galleries show her as a student at Howard University at just seventeen and a teacher in New Orleans, but her style and her command are in place. Portrait heads to each side range to leading figures in black history, men and women, but they seem like an extension of the same capacious series. She lived until 2012, but one might easily think that her career lasted just five years.

So when did she find herself? It could have been as a student, already skilled in drawing. In her training, as in her subject matter, Catlett left nothing to chance. It could have been as jobs and education took her to so much of North and South—including New York, where she exhibited in a 1943 show of “Young Negro Art” at MoMA along with Charles White, just in time for the Harlem Renaissance. It could have been in exposure to other artists as well. Barbara Hepworth and William Zorach showed her the blunt impact of sculpture as little more than a block of wood. Käthe Kollwitz, Grant Wood, and Pablo Picasso showed her painting as personal, populist, and “the primitive.”

It could have been as a child in Washington, D.C., born in Freedman’s hospital to a family that had known slavery. She observed women in all their strength, but the restrictions that they faced as well. Her 1943 series includes a sharecropper and a woman scrubbing floors, as I Have Always Worked Hard in America. Yet it also includes a woman behind a barbed-wire fence, as My Reward Has Been Bars. Mostly, though, she depicts anonymous women, facing ahead or looking upward for something more. They are portraits not of individuals, but of determination. Catlett is always accusing, but never short of hope.

Or maybe she found herself as a young woman just by looking in a mirror. She decided she had what it took, and that was that. Still, she approached her students as collaborators, hanging salon style the portraits from history. She embraced the cause of black women, but also of worker’s rights. No wonder she headed in 1946 for Mexico, where the revolution promised socialism and the Taller de Gráfica Popular (or Graphics Workshop for the People) did its best to deliver. She stayed until a comparable activism and popular spirit in the 1960s came to the United States.

At least she thought so, and her career took a new turn at last. Those first rooms surround The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago and have often hosted art by black women, including Beverly Buchanan and Lorraine O’Grady. Yet the show continues past twin doors with an artist in her fifties in support of civil rights and the Black Panthers alike. Catlett’s prints adapt easily to posters and her carvings to standing figures or a fist. She adopted linocuts long before for the jagged outlines of woodcuts and the ease of freehand drawing. As curators, Dalila Scruggs, Catherine Morris, and Mary Lee Corlett place them around a large platform for sculpture.

In truth, “all that it implies” may not be very much, but it could well be enough. The Black Woman gives the show its drive and its place in the history books. The coda loosens things up. When another sculpture, a family, floats overhead, Catlett might almost be having fun. Still, some things never change. With a self-portrait on paper in 1999, she is still facing front.

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

To wrap up from last time on early Renaissance Siena, an altarpiece by Pietro in Pieve has its own Gothic architecture, with the main panel supporting a seeming church tower, and the gold background could almost pass for sky. Ambrogio takes one inside, his three-tiered household as three acts in a domestic drama. He gives people the run of the streets.

With Martini’s Orsini Polyptich, the cast moves every which way in the shallow space below the cross. They spill out from the city’s gates. Their gestures and props create a near chaos of competing pagans and worshippers.

The protagonists have a greater freedom and responsibility as well. Mary can draw back or look up from the angel of the Annunciation, her prayer book fallen aside. Martini’s Saint John has unkempt blond hair and clasped hands, at once youthful and reserved. His Pontius Pilate may be winning the argument with Jesus. More often, his bust-length saints glower, much as for Cimabue decades before in Florence. Miracles have becomes matters of fact.

Technique has a greater variety as well. Ambrogio sketches on plaster in sinopia, the earth pigment often used for the preliminary layer that a fresco will efface. Its faint outlines have survived, though, like the first thoughts of an artist today. He also plays with gold leaf as at once background, a tooled halo, and jewelry for Mary herself. So much for the Virgin’s modesty. The red of simulated marble for Pietro could pass for blood.

By 1350, all four artists and their rivals were dead. Still, the black plague was about to set in, taking perhaps a third of the population. Historians have long seen it as bringing a premature end to the Renaissance’s cautious or daring beginning. Art after Giotto in Florence will look dour and disheartened as well. It can only look back. Whether Siena ever could look ahead must remain up for debate.

The curators have a lot to reconstruct and far to travel. It shows in their affiliations alone—Stephan Wolohojian of the Met, Laura Llewellyn of London’s National Gallery, and Caroline Campbell of Ireland’s National Gallery, with Joanna Cannon of the Courtauld Institute in London. They were bound to open with the Met’s Stoclet Madonna, and they were bound to describe it in glowing terms. Mostly, though, they supply a convincing back and forth between context and the four leading artists. They also pause for large works and works in series. One need never get lost in the maze of dark walls.

They do not, though, include contact with Florence or classicism. Nicola Pisano, who worked between Florence and Pisa shortly before, was closer than those here to ancient Rome and its influence. His sculpture looks ahead to Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea del Verrocchio, Donatello, and Michelangelo in the next century. The show does stop in Assisi, but with no indication that Giotto may have worked there, and in Arezzo, but with no mention of Piero della Francesca and his frescoes there yet to come. A comparison could have added context, just as in paired slides in a lecture. The Met, though, has a case to make, a case for Siena.

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