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Has anything changed in forty-five years on Daufuskie Island? Will anything ever change? One can only wonder on coming to photographs of black Americans by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe at the Whitney, through April 27. She must be wondering herself.

Daufuskie was never an enchanted island, no more than the Deep South. For Moutoussamy-Ashe, though, it has become a heritage and a hidden treasure. Born in 1951, she published her series in 1981. Yet surely wedding parties still gather in their Sunday best in front of Union Baptist Church. Surely the bride still dresses in white, as does the bridesmaid walking discretely behind. Surely the men still fish in the warm air and turgid waters of the American South and still share their catch by boiling crabs. And surely Lavinia still smiles.

Or maybe not. Lavinia, known to anyone who cared as Blossum Robinson, was already getting on in years in 1979 when Moutoussamy-Ashe took her picture leaning so close to the camera that one could reach out and touch, and the community must have looked to her often for warmth and wisdom. The photographer began her visits to the island two years earlier and could hardly tear herself away. Still, everything comes to an end, and these are “The Last Gullah Islands.” They became a book, displayed along with thirteen photographs in the floor for the Whitney’s collection. It has a room to itself where Wanda Gág went on view last year, like an enclave from the fury and melancholy of America’s cities and early modern art.

African Americans came early to the Gullah Islands, and they, too, came for freedom and comfort. Former slaves acquired property off the coast of South Carolina after the Civil War, and they could fairly be proud of it. Moutoussamy-Ashe has a fondness for creature comforts herself and did much of her work for mass magazines. One can recognize the pyramid of wedding guests from any number of photos of weddings, graduation ceremonies, and extended families. It suits a place where family and community must easily blend together. She could not resist shooting another wedding, in Central Park, on her return to New York City—and, speaking of weddings, she married Arthur Ashe.

Much else, too, looks a tad conventional even in its modesty and misery. A ramshackle house and its windows barely hold onto a shutter or the wash on a line. “Aunt Tootsie” tends to her own wash while eying her children. A car with an impatient rider has blown out its windows, and a young woman leans up against a screen door that plunges her into near darkness. She becomes a study in introspection. Do I belong here, she might as well ask? Does anyone?

Still, not everything is magazine ready, and the questions keep coming. Moutoussamy-Ashe studied with Garry Winogrand, who knows the strangeness of people as much as anyone, and she became an AIDS activist when it counted most. Sometimes, too, convention does its job of keeping the past familiar. The Geechee islanders would have liked it that way. A boy carries the American flag at the head of a procession for graduation. Pride and patriotism belong to them, too.

Graduations, weddings, homes, and people—these are not portraits or events, but a way of life. It is not street photography where there are not all that many paved streets, and not documentary photography when nothing really changes. Is it trying too hard for human dignity? One could ask that about a lot of art right now, with its due celebration of diversity. Still, I can almost hear that smiling older woman, the folds in her clothes seeming to continue of their own accord in her wrinkles. Dignity is fine, but it’s me, Lavinia.

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To pick up from last time on Alvin Ailey, an island for art right off the elevator points to his influence. The Whitney has commissioned portraits of dance by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Jennifer Packer, each a study in movement and color.

Also in 2024, Karon Davis renders a dancer in profile in plaster. Its tribute to freedom of motion takes on a spooky fixity in white. Here and elsewhere, the show exceeds Ailey’s lifetime. And it dares one to pick out what else does and what does not.

The Whitney sees the same themes as applying to Ailey and to twentieth-century art. Growing up fatherless in rural Texas, he would have seen what Thornton Dial called Shadows of the Field in 2008, and listened to spirituals, like those playing softly at the Whitney. He would have seen makeshift homes like the cabin in the cotton in a painting by Horace Pippin—or constructions in wood scraps like those of Beverly Buchanan well after Ailey’s death. The Great Migration took him to Harlem for its tombstone houses, its preachers, and its street life—just as it took others in works by Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, and William H. Johnson. All date to well before Ailey’s maturity.

He loved music, like the song of a choir boy in a photo by James van der Zee. He knew jazz musicians, like Elvin Jones in a photo by Roy DeCarava. He admired black women and black liberation. And he reveled in dance, much like a dancing elder in wood, fabric, and beads by John Outterbridge. The exhibition has room for an entire suite by Romare Bearden, Bayou Fever, full of life but far from Harlem. You will just have to take the Whitney’s word for it that abstraction from Sam Gilliam reflects the same rhythms.

If Modernism and contemporary art were not enough, the show throws in a landscape from 1851, a view of Cincinnati by Robert Duncanson. It brings Hudson River School light to a community for black Americans. But then history has a way of getting out of hand, even for Ailey. Who can claim it all, and who would want to try? Where to end and where to begin? Everything about the show rings false, but even its falsity has its rewards in discovery.

That very first island for art has its discoveries. It includes sculpture from Richmond Barthé as far back as 1913. Its video record includes Lorna Simpson in 2011, with pale orange dancers might have come from another dimension. Who knew a woman from Barkley Hendricks in unmoving profile as a dancer—or nylon stockings weighted with sand from Senga Nengudi as a dance? Now, perhaps but only perhaps, you will.

The surprises keep coming. A silhouette by Kara Walker hangs over the iconic Black Woman by Elizabeth Catlett. Manacles by Melvin Edwards speaks of black liberation. And then comes a River of steel chains and rope by Maren Hassinger. Lonnie Holley binds rocking chairs like electric chairs, with fire hoses. This will be one long emergency and one long struggle.

You may still reject the show’s premises, or you may see in it what set Ailey apart. The ABT was not half as confrontational as black experience might lead you to expect, for all the “edges” of Ailey. Jerome Robbins in West Side Story and George Balanchine in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, both white, choreographed violence. For Ailey, the African American struggle is a struggle for beauty. A black woman, so often at its center, is still looking for love. And the wide-open floor for dance and for art has its beauty, too.

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The largest gallery at the Whitney just got bigger. It has knocked down nearly every wall, leaving a dance theater that Alvin Ailey himself could never have experienced. For a more impressive stage, he would have had to turn to New York itself.

It is also an exhibition space—as capacious, the museum hopes, as African American art. It sees Ailey as a guide to the story of that art, including art that he may never have known. It must sound ridiculous. Who would attempt to tell that story in an exhibition or even two, no more than the story of Western or global art? It risks condescending to black artists by pretending that it can. And yet it succeeds, for theater becomes art and art becomes theater, as “Edges of Ailey,” through February 9, while an Ailey veteran, Ralph Lemon, at MoMA PS1 reaches for the stars.

This is epic theater. Works from more than eighty artists, many as large as a human performer, take the spotlight before disappearing into a greater darkness. Some occupy islands within “Edges of Ailey,” and you can circulate around and between them. Right off, that knocks out any hope for a chronological exhibition or even a story, but do not despair. The rest line the walls, as you would expect, and articulate the show’s themes. Smaller spaces at each end of the floor tell Ailey’s own interdisciplinary story.

Born in 1931, he studied with Stella Adler—not a choreographer, but a renowned acting teacher. He acknowledged the influence of Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Duke Ellington, and the show returns often to the Harlem Renaissance, painting and dance, black experience, and music, particularly jazz. He credited Geoffrey Holder as well, a friend who moved easily between the stage and art. Ailey founded the American Dance Theater in 1958, with thirty-two dancers and two directors. There, too, he was thinking of influence, collaboration, and community. He died in 1989 of AIDS.

The show includes publicity posters, playbills, and film clips culled from thousands of hours, and scheduled performance continues downstairs in the museum’s theater and on its roof as well. It has color photos of Ailey himself dancing, lingering on not just his movements, but his expressive face. Ailey made the scene in all sorts of ways. The ABT performed at the opening of Studio 54, the epitome of a club scene that would never admit you. And the show’s only window overlooks a Hudson River pier that served as a gay pick-up spot. The AIDS quilt bars the view.

Overhead on the show’s fantastic stage, choreography, too, lines the walls, in one long video collage spanning eighteen screens. It adds color, like the yellow robes of dancers. It provides a constant background of music, even if you look instead at the art. Mahalia Jackson introduces a work with music by Ellington, barely mentioning Ailey. This is his achievement all the same. It just happens to come down to two distinct exhibitions, for dance and for art.

The show is itself a collaboration, between the Whitney and the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation. Neither is willing to let Ailey’s work die with him. Nor are the curators, Adrienne Edwards with Joshua Lubin-Levy. They could have included only art that the choreographer admired or influenced, and perhaps they do. If so, he knew and influenced a lot. And that still leaves open just how present he is in the art—and I wrap this up next time with the art itself.

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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.

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Every self-portrait is a boast—a double boast. Yes, says the artist, I am a worthy subject, and yes I can pull it off with my art.

With “What It Becomes” at the Whitney, make that a triple boast, through January 12. Yes, its adds, I am worth hiding as well. There was more to me than you saw all along, and it is up to you, the viewer, to find it. As David Hammons has it, Close Your Eyes and See. .

Self-portraiture’s dual or triple nature goes back to its origins, in the Renaissance. An artist like Albrecht Dürer could boast not just of his skill, but of a new-found status relative to his patron as well. For Dürer in silverpoint at age thirteen, he had not yet even earned a patron. With “Hidden Faces,” covered portraits of the Renaissance at the Met last spring, every portrait was also a mask. Its sitter, after all, had an image to convey, too. By the end of 1960s, though, when the Whitney begins, the mask itself became a place to hide.

“What It Becomes” does not speak of masking. It calls art a way “to reveal the unseen” and to “make the familiar unrecognizable.” In other words, it is about self-creation. The curator, Scout Hutchinson, also speaks of art’s material presence, even in a space largely dedicated to works on paper from the museum’s collection, just outside the education department. It is about “inscription, erasure, and tactility.” It is a vanishing act all the same.

Presence is as presence does, starting with David Hammons. His body prints put himself into the act, but not to show his face. A famously reclusive artist, he reveals nothing, least of all his skill in drawing. They might as well be tire treads. He confronts, too, a black man’s invisibility to white eyes or, worse, violent removal. Body prints by Yves Klein in blue, not in the show, seem an empty boast by comparison.

The small show could be a catalog of strategies for vanishing. Some play the part of others, like Darrel Ellis in black wash, posing after a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe. Wendy Red Star leaves herself out entirely in favor of a leading Native American around 1880. The same red outlines in ink-jet prints frame her text and a hatchet in his hands, both as weapons. Toyin Ojih Odutola gives black skin to “famous whites.” Jim Hodges works with his own saliva, but the results look more like pond scum than a portrait.

Naotaka Hiro promises to Map His Body, with pretty enough colors but not much else. Others appear explicitly, but masked. Rick Bartow takes on the teeth and smile of a wild animal, in pastel and pencil. Maren Hassinger takes pains to apply her mask, like a woman applying makeup, but as blackface. I cannot say for sure whether her video celebrates, defies, or condescends to gender and race, but it resonates. Blythe Bohnen acquires her mask simply by time-exposure, so that the blur of her features serves as a beard.

Catherine Opie hides behind nothing more than her back and its blood-red incisions. And Ana Mendieta, never one to hide, brings one last strategy for vanishing. She sets an effigy on fire, leaving her very body image in flames. Self-portraits have become all but a ritual these days, as an affirmation of personal and cultural identity. These eleven artists look back to a time after Modernism when such things came with irony and pain. For all their flaws, they could still mean more than what it all became.

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It would be terrible to leave you this week’s review of Robert Frank at MoMA, in collaboration and alone, without the context of his greatest work. Let me, then, offer a taste of my review from 2010 of The Americans at the Met, with a link to more. I have also written about something closer to his present show, the mayhem of Frank’s contact sheets.

In 1955 a Swiss immigrant set out to discover America. He almost found it all on a streetcar in New Orleans.

Robert Frank chose it for the cover of The Americans, his eighty-three photographs published in this country in 1958. Trolley–New Orleans alone holds a cross-section—male and female, black and white, young and old. Its windows run parallel to the picture plane, like the cells of a contact sheet. Frank in fact winnowed the book from hundreds of rolls of film and twenty-eight thousand shots. It is an emblem of life on the road, a portrait of the artist as an American.

It is also an image of perplexity. The horizontal of that streetcar runs askew. None of the eyes or social strata make contact, with each other with or the photographer. Still others lurk in the fog of its upper windows. Within the book, the image directly follows one of a Fourth of July picnic, dominated by an American flag worn almost to transparency. For blacks on or off the streetcar, so had the American dream.

They are Americans in motion, just as the streetcar is moving past. They love cars, and they love the movies. The Met describes Hollywood here as an elite—Marx’s opium of the people. Frank will not condescend to the masses even to that extent. One really can identify the photograph of the streetcar with his art form and his art form with motion pictures. Andy Warhol, Warhol’s influence on Pop Art, and sly takes on commercial photography by Alfred Gescheidt were erupting at around the same time, and they were tracking the same upheavals.

One can see the entire book as a movie, with an enigmatic beginning and a happy ending. As it opens, two women watch a parade from separate windows. An American flag hides one woman’s face, and Frank’s point of view masks the other in darkness. Frank’s final scenes include sunbathers or drifters in a public park, and a wedding at City Hall. By the end, too, blacks get more screen time, as well as the book’s sole exchange with the photographer. A black couple turns to glare back, and young blacks in a car grin broadly.

All along, the same devices that create a distance between people also create ambiguity and humor. A black nurse holds a round-faced white infant, like a Renaissance prince. A man’s tuba obscures his face and makes a mockery of his celebration, but it also gives him a smiley. A photo booth invites people to remember their loved ones for sixty-nine cents, and maybe they will. Jack Kerouac, the beat writer, loved the free associations, like the turn from decorative stars to a starlet—as he termed it, “potry.”

Frank promised the Guggenheim that his project would be “sociological, historic, and esthetic.” He belongs at once to documentary realism and the Beats, but also to postwar formalism, escapism, and the triumph of a very American esthetic. Does that leave him in a strange middle ground, with unanswered questions about art and America? In the very last photograph, Frank steps out onto the road to shoot his wife, in the confined space of the car and at a perilous angle. Is an American journey a gesture of abandonment or of love?

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