picks October 21, 2016

Aki Sasamoto

Lodged in the cavity of a commercial-grade washing machine in Aki Sasamoto’s installation Washer (all works cited, 2016) is a copy of the Book of Insects (1921) by nineteenth-century entomologist John-Henri Fabre. The volume is open to a passage on the life and labors of the dung beetle, which is recited off-camera by the artist in the single-channel video Birds, Dung Beetles, the Washer looping overhead. “The peasant of Ancient Egypt,” it reads, “as he watered his patch of onions in the spring, would see from time to time a fat black insect pass close by, hurriedly trundling a ball backwards.”

picks September 16, 2016

Marianne Vitale

Handcrafted wooden torpedoes, suspended from the ceiling by wires, and souped up with American kitsch—a cow, a car, and camo—mark an intriguing detour, if not a new direction, in Marianne Vitale’s art. If the big, handsome sculptures made from salvaged lumber for which she is best known are strong, silent types, How’m-I-Doin’, 2016, her new installation of ten hand-painted projectiles, is comic, even a little snarky. Here, the splintery romance that characterized Vitale’s countrified totems of postindustrial wreckage is jettisoned for colorful, willfully naive Pop and playful satire. A bovine

picks August 05, 2016

Alma Thomas

Among her kaleidoscopic abstractions of botanical and celestial phenomena, a statement by Alma Thomas is stenciled on the museum wall: “Through color, I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man.” Taken axiomatically, this might read as Pollyanna denial or cool aestheticism. But in their claim to universal subjectivity and transcendent beauty, there’s an indisputable if paradoxical politics in the paintings of the late Washington, DC, abstractionist, who—at the age of eighty, in 1972—became the first African American woman to have a solo show at

Chloe Wyma